The Drifter (Sanguine Hearts Book 2)

8 The Mass

It had been a long time since a body beaten so badly had come through his morgue that dental records were the only way to identify it. The body he stood over was well beyond that. It would take a miracle for them to ever determine who that person might have been. He honestly wasn't even sure what he had on his table had ever been human, it was such a mangled mess of broken bone and sinew.

The body was discovered in an alleyway. Well, body was a loose term. It was a bloody mass of tangled tissue. It was something roughly the size of the average human male. So much violence was done to that poor unfortunate soul that there was no way to determine the actual cause of death. It looked as if the body had hit the ground at terminal velocity and somehow forced to implode rather than explode.

He stood scratching his head wondering where to begin and what he was expected to determine from the mass on his table. The skull, what was left of it anyhow, was in so many fragments it would be impossible for someone of his skill level to reassemble. There was no face left whatsoever. Every facial bone had been crushed, by the looks of it many to powder. From what he understood, the long bones of both arms, detached, ripped from the shoulder, and tossed a great ways from the bulk of the body, were also broken into small pieces, pulverized inside the muscle and skin. The portions of pulverized bone were roughly the size of a human hand. As if the person had been gripped there and the bone destroyed before the arm was ripped away. He tried to imagine how much force would be required to inflict that kind of damage and he shivered.

The human body, connected by muscle and tendons, simply didn't tear that easily. And yet, the arms had been ripped from the trunk of the body. He could easily see that the disarticulation of the limbs was exactly that: torn not cut. The body on his table was nothing more than a carcass. It was deplorable to know that it was once a man. He shook his head attempting to shake off the feelings he was carrying. They would not help him to do his job objectively. He needed to remain objective. It was hard to do that looking at the mutilated and beaten corpse before him.

He concluded his examination of the remains. He determined them to be human, the torso and legs were left intact, the cause of death, the first blow landed to the face or body would have been sufficient to end a human life and quickly, but he had no way of knowing which of the catastrophic injuries occurred first. It did appear that the man was still alive when the arms were removed from the body. Exsanguination would have been the cause of death if not for all the physical damage that was done to the body. Yet the body seemed to be lacking in blood volume. The most disturbing of his finds was that the damage done to the body was indeed done by a human-sized hand and foot, and likely perpetrated by just one suspect.

The detectives investigating the obvious murder were at a loss. The M.E. Brad Landon reported that the person had died of catastrophic injury and that it appeared that at least half his blood volume was missing, yet there was very little blood found at the scene of the crime and no apparent secondary crime scene. The amount of blood absent from the crime scene raised a lot more alarms than the state in which the body was found. Given the bludgeoning that the body took, there should have been blood spatter everywhere in that alleyway. There was little to no blood or evidence that any clean-up had taken place. Whatever, whoever did that to the mass was abnormally powerful and relatively discrete. Naturally, there were no witnesses, none that would come forward. Would anyone after witnessing such a horrific and brutal crime? The man’s arms had been ripped from their sockets and then torn completely off. He had been beaten and kicked to death with enough force to pulverize bone. No, no one, if anyone witnessed that crime would come forward.