not good.” For a second, Reed wondered if the guy was going to vomit. Shit.
“Were you the first on scene?”
“Yeah, me and Mallory. We disregarded fire. It was obvious the victim was deceased.” He leaned toward them as if sharing a secret. “That’s the first dead body I’ve ever seen.”
Reed almost told him it got easier, and that was the truth. But he hated that it was, and it didn’t exactly seem comforting so he said nothing. “Where’s Mallory now?”
“He’s with the docs who found the deceased. A couple other guys are helping man the exits while they complete a search and make sure whoever did this isn’t still in the building.”
“But the building’s full of nuts. How are they going to rule anyone out?” Ransom asked.
The cop shrugged. “I guess they’re looking for any out-of-place nuts.”
Ransom rubbed at his eye. “Christ. Okay.”
“Is Copeland working today?” Reed asked, wondering if he should expect to see Zach on scene.
“Off day.”
“Okay, thanks.”
The cop bobbed his head, glancing backward quickly, looking ill again. Ransom patted his shoulder as he walked by. “We’ll talk to you after we get a look. Get some air, man.” As they passed him, Ransom muttered, “Newbie.”
They walked around the corner and headed toward the end of the hall where two criminalists were squatted near what was obviously a dead body, half propped up on the wall.
“Lewis,” Reed greeted the criminalist they’d worked with before. Lewis turned, acknowledging Reed and Ransom and that’s when Reed got a good look at the face of the male victim.
“Holy Christ,” he muttered, leaning closer. “What the hell happened here?”
“Steven Sadowski, the former director of this facility. And by former, I mean as of several hours ago. And he’s been enucleated,” Lewis said.
Enucleated. The surgical removal of an eye. Or in this case, both eyes. Good God.
Reed squatted down next to the body, but Ransom remained standing, possibly regretting that burrito right about then. Reed stared at the victim. It was something out of a nightmare, mouth hanging open as if in a silent scream, two gaping, empty holes where his eyes had once been, black and dripping with an inky, black substance. “Have you identified what that is in the sockets?”
“We think it’s oil paint, though that will have to be confirmed,” the second criminalist said. Reed glanced at her shirt, stitched with the name Seidler. He nodded, looking back at the eyeless face, black tears streaking down his gaunt, lifeless cheeks. Reed had been doing the job for long enough—and seen practically every manner of death—that not much fazed him anymore, but he couldn’t help the chills that skittled down his spine like a thousand moving spiders under his skin.
“Do you think the eyes were removed pre- or postmortem?” Ransom asked.
“We were just discussing that,” Lewis said, glancing up at Seidler. “We think post.”
“How can you tell?” Reed asked. Usually it was lack of blood that made it immediately obvious whether a wound had occurred before or after death, but with black paint filling the gaping holes and dripping out of them, it was unclear whether there was blood present or not.
“We can’t definitively. But even with the paint, there’s no visual blood whatsoever, not even a drop, and it doesn’t appear as though the muscles contracted as the enucleation was being performed.”
That skittling again. “Cause of death?” Reed asked, standing so he could get a better overall look at the body. The man was wearing suit pants, a button-down shirt and tie, but no jacket. Ransom took a step back to make room for him.
“It looks like the cause of death was strangulation by some sort of cord or wire.” Lewis used a gloved finger to pull the man’s collar down, showing a deep red gouge in his throat. “It appears to have been done from behind.”
“So, someone snuck up on this guy, looped a wire around his neck, strangled him to death, and then cut his eyes out and filled them with black paint?”
Lewis shrugged, standing as well. “I’m just a collector, my theorizing friend. But my best educated guess? This man was not murdered here.” He pushed his glasses up on his nose. He swept his hand, indicating the area around the body. “Too neat. Even if the killer performed the enucleation here, there’d be some manner of mess. We’ve only just started collecting. We have a lot to process. But going by appearance alone, it’s far too clean.”
Reed looked around, spotting a camera near the end of