The Wolfen Read Free

male counterparts.
    Taking a deep breath she knelt down beside the corpses while Wilson was still registering his shock. Every fiber of her body wanted to run, to get away from the unspeakable horror before her—but instead she looked closely, peering at the broken, gristle-covered bones and the dark lumps of flesh that seemed almost to glow beneath the lights that had been set up by the Forensics officers.
    “Where the hell’s the Medical Examiner?” Wilson said behind her. A voice answered. Wilson did not come any closer; she knew that he wasn’t going to because he couldn’t stomach this sort of thing. Clenching her teeth against her own disgust, she stared at the bodies, noting the most unusual thing about them —the long scrape marks on the exposed bones and the general evidence of gnawing. She stood up and looked around the desolate spot. About a quarter of a mile away the dump could be seen with huge flocks of sea gulls hovering over the mounds of garbage. Even over the hubbub of voices you could hear the gulls screaming. From here to the dump was an ocean of old cars and trucks of every imaginable description, most of them worthless, stripped hulks. A few nearby had white X’s on the windshields or hoods, evidence of the work DiFalco and Houlihan had been doing when the attack occurred.
    “They were gnawed by rats,” Becky said in as level a tone as she could manage, “but those larger marks indicate something else—dogs?”
    “The wild dogs around here are just scrawny little mutts,” the Precinct Captain said.
    “How long were these men missing before you instituted a search, Captain?” Wilson asked.
    The Captain glanced sharply at him. Neff was amazed; nobody below the rank of Inspector had the right to ask a captain a question like that, and even then not outside of a Board of Inquiry. It was a question that belonged in a dereliction of duty hearing, not at the scene of a crime.
    “We need to know,” Wilson added a little too loudly.
    “Then ask the M. E. how long they’ve been dead.
We found them two hours ago. Figure the rest out for yourself.” The Captain turned away, and Becky Neff followed his gaze out over the distant Atlantic, where a helicopter could be seen growing rapidly larger. It was a police chopper and it was soon above them, its rotor clattering as it swung around looking for a likely spot to land.
    “That’s the Commissioner and the Chief,” Wilson said. “They must have smelled newsmen.” In January a new mayor would take office, and senior city officials were all scrambling to keep their jobs. So these normally anonymous men now jumped at the possibility of getting their faces on the eleven o’clock news. But this time they would be disappointed—because of the unusually hideous nature of the crime, the press was being kept as far away as possible. No pictures allowed until the scene was cleared of the bodies.
    At the same time that the Chief of Detectives and the Commissioner were getting out of their helicopter, the Medical Examiner was hurrying across the muddy ground with a newspaper folded up and held over his head against the rain. “It’s Evans himself,” Wilson said. “I haven’t seen that man outdoors in twenty years.”
    “I’m glad he’s here.”
    Evans was the city’s Chief Medical Examiner, a man renowned for his ingenious feats of forensic detection. He rolled along, shabby, tiny, looking very old behind his thick glasses.
    He had worked with Wilson and Neff often and greeted them both with a nod. “What’s your idea?” he said even before examining the bodies. Most policemen he treated politely enough; these two he respected.
    “We’re going to have a problem finding the cause of death,” Wilson said, “because of the shape they’re in.”
    Evans nodded. “Is Forensics finished with the bodies?” The Forensics team was finished, which meant that the corpses could be touched. Dr. Evans rolled on his black rubber gloves and bent down.