Grimm: The Chopping Block (12 page)

Nick glanced down the slope to locate Hank. His partner had taken a roundabout path up the lot’s incline, favoring open spaces with fewer potential hazards. Turning back, Nick approached Captain Renard.

“Same as before?” Nick asked.

Renard nodded. “Chopped up like the others. One set of remains. But a… metacarpal—palm bone—was separated from the rest. Killer may have dropped it before burying the rest and stepped on it, partially embedding it in the ground, without even realizing it.”

Renard nodded toward two teenage boys, each standing next to a parent, mother of the shorter boy, father of the other one.

“Kids snuck onto the lot with mountain bikes. Tires hit the bones. Metacarpal cut the blond boy’s forehead after he took a fall.”

“You interview them?” Nick asked.

Renard shook his head. “Responding uniform’s notes. I’ll leave the interview to you and Hank—where is Hank?”

Nick pointed. “On his way,” he said. “Walking wounded.”

“Of course,” Renard said. “Where are we on the other two murders?”

Nick explained that the interviews hadn’t given them any leads.

“Victims did not know each other far as we can tell,” Nick said. “They have nothing in common. Last people to see them noticed no unusual behavior. Going about their daily routines when they were snatched. Chosen at random.”

“I don’t like random,” Renard said.

“Neither do I.”

“Nick!”

Turning around, Nick saw Hank about twenty yards away, waving one of his crutches in the air.

“I’d better see what he wants,” Nick said before rushing off.

As Nick approached, Hank directed the tip of his crutch at a loose mound of dirt beside the smooth path he’d been following.

“Tell me that’s not what I think it is,” Hank said.

Nick crouched and reached out to brush aside some weeds overhanging the bits of dull white amid the dirt and rocks.

“Sorry,” Nick said. “It is.”

“Get some techs down here,” Hank called up to Renard, who had turned away from the original set of bones to see what had caught Hank’s interest. “We’ve got more bones.”

Some of the crime scene guys peeled off the first site and swooped down to photograph and catalog the newly discovered cache of bones. Hank’s roundabout approach to the first site had inadvertently exposed a second one.

Renard immediately ordered the uniforms—who had begun to mill about with continued interest but diminished purpose—to spread out and check under every clump of weeds and in every loose mound of earth for more remains. Wu coordinated the effort, splitting the officers into teams and assigning quadrants.

Renard strode up to Nick and Hank and said, “I’m ordering GPR for this site and Claremont Park. No more surprises.”

Ground-penetrating radar crews would have to wait for the crime scene guys to wrap up in the vacant lot, but Claremont Park was not an issue. If more victims had been buried there, they needed to find them and identify them. Hard to find a pattern with two murders, but the count had risen to four and could easily go higher.

“Find out what you can from our bikers,” Renard continued. “We need to identify these bodies. The Chief is already breathing down my neck. When he hears about this…”

Nick and Hank split up to question the teenagers separately. Afterward, they compared notes and discovered they had nothing new to go on. Once the boys realized they had partially unearthed human remains, they hadn’t disturbed the dismembered skeleton further. They had entered the lot on a whim, seeing the uneven terrain as an urban challenge for their mountain bikes. Dumb luck that they had stumbled upon the bones.

Hank leaned against a boulder that a construction excavator had unearthed without removing from the lot, propped his crutches against it, and massaged his underarms. Clearly, he needed a breather.

While everyone else inspected each bit of debris underfoot, anticipating the discovery of a third set of bones, Nick wandered away from the first scene and tried to see the whole location from the perspective of a killer looking for a place to dump human remains.

Isolated. Easily overlooked or ignored. Shallow graves indicated impatience or sloppiness. Or maybe the killer only needed the bones to stay hidden for a short amount of time, a few weeks or months at the outside. An itinerant killer, then. Murder several people, possibly more, then skip town and start the cycle over somewhere else. So far, the bones they had discovered had been from victims abducted weeks ago. What if the killer had already moved on? Assuming he had not, how much time remained to solve the case and capture the murderer—human or Wesen—before he skipped town?

A strong breeze buffeted him, like the harbinger of a brewing storm. He glanced upward, at a bank of dark clouds smudging the sky.

Soon the killer would be lost in the wind.

Another gust, and a flutter of movement caught his eye. A scrap of paper, trapped in a tangle of weeds, whipped free and flipped end over end. Faux parchment paper. Nick spotted some geometric shapes on one side before it rolled over again. Curious, he chased after it, pulling latex gloves from his pocket as he walked. If the paper belonged to the killer, it might offer a clue to his identity.

The scrap skipped out of reach twice when he bent to pick it up. He glanced around, hoping noone had noticed this bit of unintentional slapstick, as if a prankster had attached fishing line to a dollar bill and kept tugging it out of reach of his mark. One more step and the paper swirled upward, rising to knee height, where Nick snatched it out of the air.

On the front of the torn sheet of paper, someone had drawn a design with a thick black marker. An arc or curve with acute triangles running along the outside of the curve. Below the geometric shapes, the same hand had written a message or a line of code, but most of that line was on the missing section of the paper. Only the top remained. Four letters or numbers, with a gap between the third and fourth. The first one might have been a five or the top of a boxy S, the second an eight or the top of an O, and the third could have been a one, an uppercase I or an L. After the gap, the fourth item looked like a tiny inverted V, which seemed unlikely.

Nick looked up from the paper and noticed a man staring back at him from across the street. Wearing blue coveralls and smoking a cigarette, the man stood in front of an automotive shop that faced the north side of the vacant lot. Obviously his place of employment. But when he noticed Nick’s attention, he flicked the cigarette away, turned abruptly on his heel and hurried into the open garage bay. Mildly suspicious behavior for an innocent bystander, or an average crime scene gawker.

Nick sealed the scrap of paper in a spare evidence bag he kept in his jacket, then shoved the bag and his gloves back in his pocket and crossed to the north edge of the lot. He followed the fence until he came to a gap with only an X of strung crime scene tape to block his way. He ducked between the arms of the X to leave the tape in place, crossed the street and approached the dingy white cinderblock building. Instead of employing a mounted or freestanding sign, the owners had painted the name of their business directly on one broad expanse of wall, in red script letters that had faded to near-illegibility over time:
SWARTLEY BROS
.
AUTO REPAIR
.

Nick glanced up and down the street, taking in a series of warehouses and manufacturing facilities whose fortunes seemed to have faded. Those in the immediate vicinity ran only skeleton crews, judging by the handful of cars in too-large parking lots. A few appeared to have shuttered entirely.

If not for the open garage bay and the presence of the smoking mechanic, Nick might have assumed the auto shop had also gone out of business. Riddled with potholes and broken chunks of concrete, the front parking lot presented a clear tire and axle hazard. No better way to discourage potential customers. Grime coated the windows that looked out from the back office and reception area.

Nick walked up to the open garage bay and peered inside, giving his eyes a moment to adjust to the dim interior. A rust-pocked gold Camaro occupied the single lift. Scattered around the cluttered garage, Nick spotted a couple air compressions, hanging pneumatic lines, a rolling jack, a brake lathe, a tire changer and wheel balancer, an air conditioner recharger and a headlight aimer. Some of the heavy equipment appeared out of order. Some hand tools, including an air gun, loose wrenches and a mechanic’s lamp, had been left on the floor.

A mechanic wearing a camouflage-patterned trucker’s hat, blue denim shirt and grimy, frayed jeans stood near a large red wheeled mechanic’s tool chest stationed against the left wall, its many drawers closed—the lone exception to the prevailing rule of sloppiness in the shop.

“What can I do you for, mister?”

Nick’s hand dropped to the gold shield on his belt.

“Detective Burkhardt, Portland PD.” Nick said. “Like to ask you a few questions.”

The man came away from the wall, approaching Nick, but stopped beside the lift. An embroidered name tag on the breast pocket of his denim shirt identified him as Ron. He had deep-set brown eyes in a narrow face with a pointy chin covered with spotty stubble. Holding a grimy rag, he went through the motions of cleaning his hands and nodded toward the vacant lot.

“Regular party going on over there.”

“Wouldn’t call it a party,” Nick said. “It’s a crime scene.”

“How about that,” Ron said, nodding. “We don’t get many police patrols out here.”

“Don’t suppose you saw anyone on that lot recently?”

“Couple boys riding mountain bikes.”

“Before that,” Nick said, irritated. “In the last couple weeks.” He glanced toward the doorway leading from the garage bay into the reception area. “You’re Ron Swartley?”

“That I am, Detective.”

“Your brother here?”

“What makes you think so?”

“Saw someone standing out front, smoking a cigarette.”

“That against the law now?”

“Answer the question.”

“Could’ve been me out there,” Ron said. “Can’t seem to quit the filthy habit.”

“But it wasn’t,” Nick said. “Man I saw wore blue coveralls.”

“Sounds like Ray, all right,” Ron said. “But I must have missed him.”

Nick looked around the one-bay garage, which verged on claustrophobic with the clutter of heavy equipment in the aisles and loose tools underfoot.

“How?”

Ron shrugged. His gaze flickered up to the Camaro on the lift.

“I was cleaning up.”

Worst excuse ever
, Nick thought. His irritation and anxiety had reached a turning point. His hand moved toward his Glock 17, pulling it free.

A blur of movement flashed in the periphery of his vision before he could bring the gun to bear. Nick spun, instinctively raising his left forearm to shield himself from the blow before he fully registered what was happening.

Ray, the smoking mechanic in the blue coveralls, rushed him while swinging a crowbar.

Nick managed to deflect most of the blow, but the metal clipped his scalp, setting off a blinding flashbulb in his skull.

In the instant before the impact, Ray had woged into the form of a Reinigen.

Nick’s foot shot out for him to catch himself but his shoe came down on a loose air gun, which slid out from under him, taking his balance with it. His Glock fell from his hand, spinning away to come to rest under the tire changer.

Ray swung the crowbar overhead like an axe.

Nick caught the shaft of the crowbar and held tight, using his weight and Ray’s momentum to pull the man over him and away.

Ray slammed sideways against the air conditioner recharger. The crowbar clanged off of something metallic and skittered across the concrete floor.

As Nick scrambled to his feet, Ron charged him with a utility knife he apparently had hidden in the hip pocket of his jeans. The extended razor blade gleamed as it slashed at Nick’s face.

Bruno Farley, the barrel-chested Wesen butcher with his own human livestock pen, crossed the slaughter room and opened the walk-in cooler. Inside, only three human carcasses remained. Beheaded, disemboweled and skinned, they hung from meat hooks on a U-shaped track. He grabbed the one Chef had chosen and tagged earlier, and lifted it off its hook. Chef had already claimed the organs and sweetbreads. Slinging the gutted carcass over his shoulder, the butcher walked to his preparation table and laid it out.

With the last week upon them, he’d have to pick up the pace to meet demand. From now until the end, he should have at least six carcasses ready for butchering at all times. That should keep him busy until it was time to move on.

He opened the large drawer under the worktable and took out his twenty-five-inch meat saw, a meat hook with a welded metal handle, his solid metal meat cleaver, and a few carving knives. Before he began in earnest, he checked the edges of the blades and sharpened two of the smaller ones, which he’d need to slice every last scrap of meat from the bone. Whatever he overlooked would come off in soup pots and roasts. They never wasted anything—except the bones.

Slamming the meat hook into the flesh to hold it in place, he cut his way down the length of the carcass with the meat saw in his right hand. He then bisected both halves below the ribs to complete the quartering process. Lifting a top quarter—not quite the same as the forequarter of a beef carcass but close—he hung it from a sharp hook on a gambrel suspended from the ceiling. He fixed the other top quarter beside the first so he could focus on the hindquarters. Each arm sagged down—fingers curled as if clutching spare change—and spun independently of the other, following the movement of the separate hooks. A butcher’s mobile.

Setting the handsaw aside, Farley picked up his largest carving knife and sliced the top of the right leg clear of the hip, repeating the process for the left. Then he switched to his cleaver and, with powerful overhead swings, chopped both legs in half. Not the best cuts of meat, he pushed them to the back of the table. He cut off rump roasts, then flank steaks, before sirloin steaks and the tenderloin for filet mignon. He arranged these cuts on the back of the table, which he would wrap later and keep refrigerated until Chef came for them.