The Law Of Three: A Rowan Gant Investigation Read Online Free PDF Page A

tore our attention away from the scene as a patrol officer
involuntarily launched the contents of his own stomach onto the
pavement.
    I looked back over my shoulder in response to
the sound and then glanced over at Felicity. She was clutching my
arm tightly and staring upward while absently chewing at her lower
lip. She had been to a few crime scenes before but had not been
subjected to anywhere near as much of this grisly scenery as I had.
Still, she looked stable for the moment, so I returned my stare to
the three-dimensional horror show that was playing out in front of
me. I swallowed hard, because to be honest, I was only a half step
away from heaving myself.
    “Ya’know, Doc Sanders told me once that the
average adult has about thirty feet of intestines.” Ben paused for
a moment after reciting the fact. “Man, I’ve seen a lotta crap in
autopsies, but I never really expected to see anybody’s guts
stretched out like that.”
    “Disembowelment was not uncommon during the
Inquisition.” I spoke quietly, struggling to keep my voice even.
“Actually, it was a favored form of punishment and torture.”
    “You mean he did that to ‘im while he was
still alive?” Ben asked with a thin strain of disbelief in his
voice.
    “Oh, yes,” I nodded as I spoke, then
swallowed hard again. “Probably rather slowly…”
    As I’d known it would, my headache was
starting to get worse. The stark chill of fear climbed up my
vertebrae and began clawing at the base of my neck. There was
something unseen here that was begging my attention, and I wasn’t
entirely sure I wanted to give it.
    “Jeezus…” He shook his head. “Guess I shoulda
suspected that, considering…”
    I knew full well what his unspoken words
implied. Eldon Porter made a habit of torturing his victims
mercilessly before finally bringing about their end. During his
last spree, he had even burned two of them alive.
    I allowed my gaze to fall away from the
corpse as I turned my head, but I didn’t have to let it fall far. I
was of average height, but I still had to crane my neck back to
look up at Ben’s face; average in stature he definitely was not.
His particular pencil mark on the doorjamb had hit six feet when he
was in junior high school, and he had still proceeded to grow
another six inches after that. He was no stranger to the weight
room either, and the rest of his physique made a perfect match for
his elevated height.
    Formidable was a word that came to mind at
first glance; when he had still been a uniformed officer, just
plain scary tended to be the more accurate description.
    He was looking back at me with dark,
questioning eyes that peered out of angularly defined features and
natural reddish-tanned skin—unmistakable visual evidence of his
full-blooded Native American heritage. His large hand was tucked
beneath a shank of collar length, jet-black hair, and he was slowly
massaging the back of his neck. This was a common mannerism of his,
and it told me that his mind was doing far more behind those eyes
than simply waiting for me to say something.
    I said something anyway. “Was there a
Bible?”
    While an outside observer might have found
the question somewhat odd, it was something I was certain he had
expected me to ask.
    “Yeah, that’s what they said when they
called,” he told me, giving a short nod to the affirmative as he
spoke. “Bookmarked and highlighted.”
    “Passage?”
    My friend stopped massaging his neck long
enough to thumb through a small notebook then read his shorthand
back to me, “At the mouth of two witnesses, or three witnesses,
shall he that is worthy of death be put to death; but at the mouth
of one witness he shall not be put to death. Deuteronomy seventeen,
six.”
    “He’s working from his list again…” I
muttered. “When you ID this guy, he’ll be someone that one of the
original victims knew.”
    “Yeah,” Ben agreed. “That’s kinda what we
figured.”
    The “he” I referred to was, of