The Chimera Secret by Dean Crawford Page A

We weren’t able to recover them.’
    Ethan looked at Gavin Coltz’s corpse. The skin was a pallid white but the upper chest was stained with huge purple bruises, each the size of Ethan’s hand and surrounded by a halo of
sickly yellow skin.
    ‘What are those?’ he asked, gesturing to the marks.
    ‘Compression fractures,’ Shriver identified them. ‘Caused by blunt trauma.’
    ‘So he was attacked by another human and not an animal?’ Lopez suggested. ‘Somebody must have hit this guy with a truck to cause that much hemorrhage.’
    Shriver did not reply, simply casting a serious gaze in Lopez’s direction before she rested one gloved hand on the body.
    ‘He was not attacked by a human being, Miss Lopez.’
    ‘What happened to him?’ Ethan asked, eager to cut to the chase. ‘We have a man locked up in a cell in Riggins under suspicion of murder who swears that he didn’t do it,
and there’s still one other person missing. We need to know what we’re up against here.’
    Shriver lifted her hand from the corpse, took a deep breath and gestured to the various lesions lacing the body as she spoke.
    ‘The victim was killed by a single blow to the head that resulted in decapitation, the neck severed between the fourth and fifth cervical vertebrae. That blow was sufficient to send the
severed skull flying more than thirty feet through the air to land in the creek bed.’
    Ethan ran what she had said through his head for a moment.
    ‘But you said that the skull landed in the creek, causing the massive damage.’
    ‘The impact that blew this man’s eyeballs out of their sockets was caused by the blow that killed him,’ Shriver corrected. ‘The skull hit the water below but not with
enough force to cause this kind of damage. All of the major fractures were caused by that first, single, lethal impact.’
    ‘That’s impossible,’ Lopez said. ‘Nobody could hit a man that hard, certainly not Jesse MacCarthy.’
    ‘Correct,’ Shriver replied as though congratulating a schoolgirl. ‘The amount of force required to physically tear a man’s head from his shoulders via a single impact is
the equivalent of being hit by a thirty-pound sledgehammer traveling at sixty miles per hour. No human being can produce that kind of physical power.’
    Ethan looked down at the bruised, battered corpse.
    ‘So something hits him so hard that it kills him instantly, and then it continues striking him?’
    ‘The sign of a frenzied attack,’ Shriver acknowledged. ‘A crime of rage.’
    ‘So maybe it’s a bear attack, a mother protecting its young or something?’ Lopez suggested.
    Shriver walked across to the box beneath the blue plastic. She lifted the sheet off and picked the clear acrylic box up. The head within the box was a macabre visage, the empty eye sockets black
and lifeless, the tongue poking fat and bloated from a slack mouth. The once-clean line of the man’s jaw was crumpled and bulky, shards of shattered jawbone trying to push through white skin.
But it was the impression on one side of the skull that instantly caught Ethan’s attention as Shriver set the box down on top of the corpse’s chest.
    Gavin Coltz’s head had been stoved in on one side, the skull crushed almost flat but the skin unbroken. Shallow depressions ran from the rear of his skull across the side of the face, like
channels beneath the skin.
    ‘We made a scan of the face and skull,’ Shriver informed them, ‘to digitally preserve the details of the impact. One of my lab assistants reversed the image to try and deduce
the shape of whatever hit this man.’
    ‘What did they find?’ Lopez asked.
    Shriver turned and picked up a glossy black photograph, then pinned it to the wall nearby. Ethan felt something squirm through his guts as he looked at the image, like a primal fear seldom felt
but never forgotten.
    ‘Jesus,’ Lopez whispered.
    The image was that of the base of an enormous clenched fist, the channel-like depressions