“The more we learn about the remains, the more questions that arise.”

“Well, I’ve never met a mystery I didn’t enjoy, and I must admit with regard to this one my curiosity has bested me.” He has a soft, scholarly-sounding voice with a hint of Kentucky. “Doctor Harris e-mailed me the images of the teeth marks in some of the large bones. I downloaded them immediately and set to work enlarging and trying to identify them.”

“I appreciate your getting to this case so quickly.” I have a whole new appreciation for science nerds. “Any luck identifying the tooth marks?”

He pauses with a smidgen too much drama. “I believe so, which I did mainly by ruling out the usual suspects, the domestic dog and the Canis latrans thamnos, a subspecies of coyote present in this part of Ohio.” Another dramatic pause. “I looked at the dental formula of these mammals and I was quickly able to rule them out.”

“So, if it wasn’t a coyote or dog, what kind of animal was it?” In the back of my mind, I’m terrified he’s going to tell me human, which would undoubtedly add another layer of creepiness to an already creepy case.

“Interestingly, I just finished writing a paper on livestock and animal predation identification. I believe those marks were made by one or more Sus scrofa domesticus,” he tells me. “Or the common domestic swine.”

“Pigs?”

“That’s correct.”

“Feral?”

“I’m afraid I don’t have the answer to that. I can, however, tell you that there are very few feral hogs in this part of Ohio, if any. If this death occurred twenty or thirty years ago, chances are extremely low that feral hogs were involved.”

I’m still trying to make sense of the information in terms of cause and manner of death, but it refuses to settle in my brain. “Doctor Harris, the coroner, believes that the hands and feet of the victim were chewed off. Is that kind of injury common to this type of attack?”

“In the course of my research, I learned that most often feral hogs aren’t even looked at as predators with regard to livestock. But they are omnivores, and they will predate young or injured livestock. Typically when feeding in the wild, unlike other predators such as cougars or even bears, they leave nothing behind.”

“So they would consume even bones?”

“It depends on how hungry they were and how much time they had. The jaw of the feral hog is certainly powerful enough to crush bone.”

An unexpected chill sweeps through me. I can’t think of a more unimaginably horrific manner of death than to be consumed alive by a large creature with jaws strong enough to crush bone.…

“In this instance, it looks like only the hands and feet were … consumed,” I say.

“Of course, we have no way of knowing, but if I were to speculate, perhaps the attack was interrupted. And domestic swine aren’t typically as aggressive as their cousins, the javelinas. That said, if domestic swine are left without food, they will certainly consume whatever food source becomes available in order to survive. In fact, there was a recent case in Oregon in which an elderly farmer went out to feed his hogs. When he didn’t return, his family went out to check on him. The only thing they found was his watch.”