He knew nothing about hockey, had no interest in hockey and would never bet on the sport.

How had this happened? Who had done this?

He looked around the small empty office and found himself saying softly, “Hello?”

3

The fat man’s body lay at the bottom of the ditch, naked, bloody and unrecognizable. Hank Dillman turned away, feeling slightly nauseous. The smell alone was enough to make him gag, and while he wasn’t an expert in these things, it seemed pretty obvious that the corpse had been here for at least a couple of days. Jasper Brooks, who’d discovered the body and called it in, stood watching him with distaste, completely unaffected. Jasper had been in Vietnam, and, as he never tired of telling anyone who would listen, he’d seen horrors. He had no respect for law enforcement officers or the veterans of subsequent wars, none of whom, in his view, would have survived a week in a real war zone.

The paramedics, who’d arrived seconds after Hank, had pronounced the man dead but were waiting for the sheriff and the M.E. to arrive before transporting the body.

Where the hell were Brad and the other deputies? Hank had called for backup the instant he’d arrived on the scene, and the rest of them should have been here by now. The last killing to have happened in Montgomery was an unintentional shooting six months ago: Petey Lawson showing off his father’s Glock to his friend Chris Frietag and accidentally pulling the trigger. The last actual murder was a year before that: a domestic dispute where a wife had stabbed her drunken husband after he beat her and attacked their son.

But he had never seen anything like this before.

He hazarded another look at the body. He had no idea who it was, but the violence that had been perpetrated upon it was so brutal that he doubted if the victim’s own mother could make a positive ID. Where a face used to be there was only a black sinkhole, since the front of the skull had been bashed in and had collapsed in on itself, filling with blood that had long since congealed and was now covered with flies. The chest and abdomen were perforated in dozens of places, seemingly at random, the entire body covered in a dried coat of reddish brown.

Hank turned away. He might have been able to handle the sight if it hadn’t been accompanied by the most putrid stench he had ever experienced. It was like a dirty toilet bowl full of vomit had been blended with carburetor cleaner and then poured over a pile of shit. He walked over to the ambulance, where the two paramedics leaned against the side of the vehicle, smoking. He breathed in the secondhand smoke in an effort to erase the smell of the body.

“Who do you think killed him?” Rich, the older paramedic, asked as he exhaled.

“We don’t even know who he is yet. Either of you have any ideas?”