Succulent Prey

The two detectives had been waiting all day for the autopsy report from the body they’d found in that old apartment building south of Market Street. They both had a bad feeling about it.

‘You think that could be our librarian?’ Volario asked.

‘No reason to assume that yet,’ Montgomery said. ‘That building was pretty far from the campus.’

‘Yeah, but did you see her shoes? Kenneth Cole. Not Prada, but not exactly Payless either. Pretty nice for a homeless woman or a streetwalker.’

‘Which still leaves a whole host of other possibilities. A lot of people get killed in this town besides prostitutes and derelicts.’

‘Yeah, but anybody with shoes like that has to have a job and that means somebody would miss her if she was gone. And the only recent missing person we have matching someone of that height and body type is the librarian.’

‘Height and body type? We don’t even know if that was a woman yet. And how could you tell if she was big or small with half her flesh missing?’

‘The leg. Some slim model type wouldn’t have a leg that thick. And she was still wearing those Kenneth Cole pumps, which would lead me to believe it was probably a woman.’

‘You know as well as I do that that’s no safe assumption in this town.’ The phone rang and they both reached for it at the same time. Montgomery got to it first.

‘Detective Montgomery here. Yeah? Finally! What did you find? And did you get a match? Damn. Okay. I’ll be by to pick up the report later. Thanks for the call.’

‘What? Was that the lab? What did they say?’

‘They matched the librarian’s dental records to the corpse.’

‘I knew it!’

‘And they also confirmed the presence of saliva in some of her wounds. Those were human teeth marks. In case there was any doubt, we’ve definitely got a serial killer on our hands.’

‘Not a serial killer. Not according to the FBI. He won’t be classified as a serial killer until he kills three more people. Right now all we have is a homicidal sexual predator with one victim.’

‘You got any doubt that there are more victims out there or that there will be?’ Montgomery sighed. ‘Nope. You’re right.’

‘I guess we need to take a trip back to the college?’

‘We need to talk to that kid they were all talking about. That Joseph Miles. Everyone we spoke to said he’d probably killed her and that was before we even knew she was dead.’

‘That’s just because they think the kid’s weird. He’s probably just one of those death metal gothic freaks that like to act dangerous and mysterious to impress girls.’

‘Yeah, that could be. But that’s probably what the cops in Columbine thought about those Trench Coat Mafia kids before they went on their murder spree. For some of those kids it’s more than just a fashion. Some of them really are disturbed.’