Eye Snatcher Read Free Page A

Brian said, his throat dry. “Get… get forensics down here. Right away.”
    The rest of the conversation was a blur as Brad walked up to Brian, stood beside him.
    Brian stared down at this poor kid and felt a world of pity, a world of anger.
    The kid couldn’t stare back up at him because his eyes had been torn out of their sockets.

THREE
    Brian couldn’t get the smell of the Jonnie Doe’s decomposing little body out of his nose no matter how much aftershave he sprayed.
    He stood in the coroner’s office. Forensics were investigating the scene, but it didn’t look like anything had been left behind. The coroner’s office was windowless and dark, with a sole white beam in the middle of the room lighting up the boy on the table. It made a hum—a hum that was the only sound in this room. A hum of death.
    Seeing the boy again, stomach sliced open and eyes torn out of his head, Brian worried he might be the one throwing up this time.
    “What you got?” Brian asked.
    Jeeves, who was wearing a white coat and black trousers that had a little bit of chewing gum stuck to the front of them, tapped his teeth with a pencil and peered at the boy’s body through his thick-rimmed glasses. “Male, of course. I’d estimate his age at around ten, eleven. Pre-puberty.”
    McDone gulped. Pre-puberty. Just like his son, Davey. Just an innocent kid like his son.
    “Cause of death?” Brad asked. His voice was much more stable than it was when they’d found the boy. He’d steadied himself. Had his moment of freaking out and now he was stable again. Cops had to be good at doing that—at staying as collected as possible. Sometimes doing so required a few moments of letting the emotion in, of letting the pain take over you and the drive to find the offender fill your body.
    Brian was finding it very difficult to switch back to professional mode with the state of the body in front of him.
    Jeeves took the bitten-down pencil out from his mouth. Placed it down on a metal table next to the slab where their Jonnie Doe lay, a greenish tint coming off him and making him look like some kind of waxwork model. “The boy died from blood loss. Multiple horizontal incisions were made across the abdominal area. We’ve got severe wounds all across the gastrointestinal tract—the small intestine has been sliced at with a sharp knife, and the large intestines show signs of incisions too, although not as many.”
    Brian went dizzy with the information. Felt a tightness in his gut and tried not to look at the boy on the slab, tried not to see him as the person he once was.
    Brad looked on, glassy and grey-eyed, the professional of the pair of them. Roles reversed from the discovery stage.
    Jeeves reached into the opening in the boy’s stomach and pulled some of the skin and muscle back with a metal rod. Brian looked away.
    “What you won’t have seen is that the stomach has been completely severed away too.”
    “I guess it goes without saying the boy suffered,” Brad said.
    Jeeves lifted his head. Looked at Brian and Brad with the blankest, most morose expression Brian had ever seen on his face. “I don’t like to break professional code like this, but I haven’t ever seen an act of cruelty towards any human being like this in my entire thirty-six year career.”
    Great. Just what Brian needed to hear right now.
    Jeeves stepped away from the body. Cleared his throat. “The boy’s eyes look to me like they were removed post-mortem. One of them, at least. We can tell from the age of the internal wounds compared to those in the abdomen. It looks like our killer pried them out and then sliced them away by the optic nerve—”
    “Fuck,” Brian said. He turned around. Leaned against the grey wall. His head pulsated. Skin tingled.
    “Unfortunately the victim does have signs of anal bruising and evidence of anal haemorrhage. And the bruising on his knuckles suggests he put up a fight.”
    “Semen traces?” Brian asked, still facing the