Primal Fear by Brad Boucher

single foot jutting out, presumably to expose the toe tag.  Harry moved past with barely a glance, preferring the identity of Hughes’ second customer to remain a mystery.
    At Slater’s table, Hughes curled his fingers around the upper corner of the sheet, his gaze already taking on a scholarly gleam as he slowly peeled it back.
    Harry’s eyes dropped to what lay beneath, a nervous swallow clicking audibly in his throat.
    Hughes had indeed swabbed away most of the blood; the wounds stood out now as deep, bloodless gouges in the flesh.  Most of the left half of Slater’s face was gone, the top and back of his head reduced to little more than pulp.  The shotgun had done its job, cleaving such a trail of destruction that, in the unlikely event that Marty had survived the initial blast, he wouldn’t have hung on for very long. 
    Slater’s right eye was still intact, open and staring, its pupil fully dilated into a sightless black orb.  It beckoned Harry’s scrutiny, dragging him in, and he struggled to pull his gaze away.
    Something flashed in his mind, something too fleeting to even identify, like a voice from a dream, its presence sensed upon waking but its message lost forever to the invasion of consciousness.  It was gone just as quickly but its echo remained, a distraction he fought to brush aside.
    “I almost didn’t catch it until I noticed it on both sides,” Hughes said.  “Once I cleaned up all the blood, I got a much better look at it.”  Leaning over Slater with a penlight, he grasped Slater’s chin with his free hand and swiveled the head on its stiff neck just enough to afford Harry a better view.  “Right here, just below the ear.  That’s where I noticed it first.”
    There were a series of abrasions there—four of them, in fact—running in four swollen parallel lines of red agitated flesh.  They stood out plainly under close inspection, even against the dead gray pallor of Slater’s skin.
    Harry bent closer to take a look, a trace of his apprehension falling away beneath the subtle weight of this new discovery.
    “Claw marks?” he asked doubtfully.
    “I’d say so, yeah.  Made by human hands—strong hands, from the look of them.  And the appearance of these wounds leads me to believe they came from repeated scratching.  Does that strike you as the type of thing you’d see if one of his victims got in a lucky scratch during a struggle?”
    Harry shook his head.  “Not at all.  Looks like they’re in and around the ear, too, not just below it.  You said you noticed this on the other side, too?”
    “Yes.  And something else.  That’s what made me come back and examine this side again.”
    Hughes made his way around the table, reaching out and nonchalantly turning Slater’s head towards Harry.
    Harry circled quickly around the foot of the table, moving before that single dead eye could catch him in its stare again.  The left side of Slater’s face, as grotesquely disfigured as it was, was still better than staring into that sightless eye.
    Again, Harry could make out the scratches, and this time they were more obvious.  And below them, just beneath the jaw line, there was a single oval bruise, roughly the size of a quarter.
    Hughes pointed it out carefully.  “What does that look like to you?”
    Harry studied it, his eyes narrowing, his thoughts racing.  His first impression was that it was just a common hickey, nothing more, but that didn’t sit well with him.  If Slater had been involved in the disappearance of those children—worse yet, if he’d molested them in any way—then the scratches could be a direct result of his actions.  One of the children might have put up more of a fight than he’d anticipated, laying those scratches on him before he could back safely out of reach.  But a hickey?
    The very idea of it sickened Harry.  It suggested that one of the children, at least, might have been a willing partner.  And in his gut, he simply wasn’t