Blood Red

His life had become absolute hell since the phone call the day before. Piece by little piece his entire life had slipped down into a cesspool, and it didn’t look like he could do a damned thing about it until the next time the badly disguised voice on the phone called him.

“Jesus Christ, Freemont! Are you even listening to me?” He turned to see Coswell glaring at him. The man’s fat face and walrus mustache always annoyed him, but he was a sergeant, so Brian faked giving a damn.

“Sorry. I was trying to figure out what happened to the body.” It was a lie, of course. He couldn’t have cared less. Nothing much mattered right now except getting his world back in order, before everything else could crumble away.

“Come look at this shit.” He moved his flashlight over a section of the car’s front. Brian nodded as he walked around the rear of the vehicle. They hadn’t looked over there yet.

It was hard not to see the marks once they were in view; there was nothing subtle about them. There were two hand-prints imbedded deep into the metal on the front passenger’s side. The metal had crumpled around the indentations, and the paint had been lifted completely away, as if it had adhered to the hands that struck the side of the car.

“What the fuck?” He moved closer, crouching next to the door to study the deep dents. “I mean, damn. Should we get the fingerprint kit out?”

Coswell snorted his laughter. “Yeah, kid. Lemme just yank that outta my ass for ya.” He rolled his eyes and started back toward the cruiser. “I’m gonna see what’s taking the damned detectives so long.”

Freemont glared at the other officer’s back, and looked again at the car in front of him. The sheer force of the blow that would have left a mark like what he was staring at now would have been enough to shatter the bones in any person’s arms like they were cheap glass. It might explain why the car had been abandoned. No one would want to stay around to face the police if they’d smeared someone all over the side of the road. The police seldom understood about that sort of thing. They tended to suggest a few years in jail as a good method of getting over the guilt.

The longer he looked, the more puzzled he grew. He looked at the trajectory of the car and studied the ground leading to the crash site. The skid marks were obvious for only around four feet and then they left the road a good fifty feet or more from where the vehicle now rested. It was either going at an incredible speed on the back road or . . .

“No fucking way.” He scowled and walked up to the road and the deep black rubber trails that were obviously new enough to associate with the crash.

Brian Freemont was not stupid. He might not have been a rocket scientist, but he’d studied hard to get through the academy and he’d also studied on the side as well, learning all he could about accident scenes and forensic pathology along the way. One day he planned to get back to school and learn enough to get himself set up as a coroner. It was an elected position and technically you didn’t even need to have a medical degree, but he wanted to do it right. He had dreams, and they didn’t end with a little college-grade pussy on the side of the road now and again. His conquests with the girls were strictly a bonus, not a life-long ambition. The point being that, even though he was hardly the most honorable man, he knew what he was looking at with better than average knowledge.

The skid marks never even turned away from the course of the road. The vehicle had never swerved. It had been driving along nice and easy—probably at around 30 miles per hour too fast for the road conditions—and then it met something that hit it hard enough to push it off the asphalt and through the air, at least fifty feet.

And that something had hands.

Brian looked the evidence over again, ignoring Coswell as the man came back from the patrol car and stared hard at him.

“You look like you ate a bug. What’s wrong?”

Brian looked over at the sergeant and thought about giving him a straight answer. “I just can’t get this. It doesn’t add up.”

“Yeah? That’s why you’re not a detective. Leave it to the professionals, Brian.” The slob seemed to think the whole thing was a joke, but as much as he wanted to respond that it was a serious situation, he bit his tongue instead. He had enough shit going down in his day without adding anything else to his list of bad events. Coswell was exactly the sort of sorry asshole that would take any comments he made and turn them around on him later. He was a prick.

His cell phone vibrated in his pants pocket and Brian answered it without even considering that he wasn’t supposed to carry the damned thing on duty. Screw Coswell on that one, at least. He knew the man was carrying a phone of his own.

“Hello?”

The voice from the previous morning spoke into his ear. “How has your day been, Officer Freemont?”

He looked at Coswell. The man was busily scratching his nuts as he looked at the marks on the car again.