Helix: Plague of Ghouls by Pat Flewwelling Page B

Buckle seemed momentarily impressed by Two-Trees’ pronunciation. Most cops called it, disparagingly, the Whiskey Bed Reserve. “That’s where you’re from?”
    “A long, long time ago, yeah.”
    Buckle nodded and looked like he was about to say something, but then decided against it. “I’ll show you what they found. We’re keeping all three for a while longer.”
    “The charge?”
    “Desecration of a corpse, interference with proper human burial, that kind of thing.”
    “Jeez. What do they do when they’re bored on the weekend?”
    “Don’t want to know,” Buckle answered. “You want to see what they party with on a school night?” He pointed toward a stairwell door.
    “Show me,” Two-Trees said. “But you don’t have to hold me in suspense. What have you got?”
    “The head,” Buckle said. He jogged down the stairs, while Two-Trees took his time and kept one hand on the railing. Stairs weren’t so much fun now that he couldn’t see his feet anymore.
    “A head makes identification easier,” Two-Trees said, his voice echoing.
    “Probably not. You haven’t seen the state of the head.”
    “Is it intact?”
    “Depending on your definition of intact, yes.” Buckle opened the basement door and held it open.
    They couldn’t get far without signing in and filling out forms to explain exactly what they were going to look at, and why. Once the paperwork was completed, the evidence technician left them standing at the waist-high gate and went over to a refrigerator. From there, the gloved technician brought out a plastic box in a re-sealable bag. Buckle signed his initials in more places, and Two-Trees kept a good, healthy distance. Once the last formalities were done, Buckle slid his hands into a new pair of latex gloves and, in the presence of the evidence custodian, he opened the box and showed Two-Trees the contents.
    Someone had taken a razor to the skull and done a poor job of scraping off the flesh. The jaw was still connected to the skull with tendons and tattered bits of muscle. The lips, nose, ears, facial hair, and all the skin had been excised. The eye sockets were empty and polished. A premolar was missing. Buckle turned the skull over and shone a light through the foramen magnum. There didn’t appear to be any brain tissue inside the skull. The rim of the spinal passage was stained purple.
    “Whatever happened to lighting up and spray-painting a wall?” Two-Trees asked. “God, and we thought we were hard core as kids. How do they say this came into their possession?”
    Buckle’s eyes were watering with the effort of suppressing a sneeze. “One of them says they bought it, fair and square. His mom’s coming over with the receipt, he says.”
    “He bought it,” Two-Trees echoed. “From where, Amazon?”
    “Ossuary Canada dot something or other, he said. I looked it up. It’s a genuine vendor. They sell animal and human skeletons, most of them acrylic, some natural bone. Perfectly legal, but usually restricted to medical students.”
    “Yeah, but this looks like it’s still got tissue on it.”
    “I know, and that’s why all three boys are still in custody.”
    “Seriously, you can buy these online?”
    “You can buy anything online, if you look hard enough for it,” Buckle said.
    “They bought a skull with half its face attached, and they didn’t think anything of it?”
    “You think he’s cute, the one you saw?” Buckle asked. “You should see the one we brought in before him. He was grinning when he told us they found it out in a field about a kilometre away from the drop site, about a ten minute walk from his friend’s backyard. Big, shit-eating grin, as if he was daring us to charge him with something. And then his lawyer came in, and that was the last we’ve heard from him. The lawyer says they had no idea that the skull was part of an ongoing murder investigation. He said they thought it was from ‘some Indian burial ground’, being so close to