Quoth The Raven

Cutting Open

It was strange, the things you could forget when you were away from home for a long time. The biggest things would stay in your memory, of course—your fathers waltzing at least once a day, your brother sneaking into the lab space to test out his own inventions, your sister debating for hours over which arsenic ring to wear to her date, and just how deliciously vile your grandmother's cooking could be. But there were other joys that could slip your mind.

Like sneaking into a morgue.

Amity and Ghost had already worked out a routine. Ghost would sneak in through the vents and open the door from the inside, and Amity would take care of the rest. And as soon as she got word that another one of the monster's victims had been found, well... there was no harm done in being self-indulgent while you were solving a murder.

She couldn't wait to tell Nicholas about this. He'd probably give her half of his knife collection out of sheer pride.

"While I do the autopsy, you find the files of the monster's other victims and make copies," Amity instructed Ghost under her breath, scanning the freezer drawers where the bodies were kept. "And... there we are."

She pulled out the most recent one, slightly surprised to see the old tramp she and Ghost had ran into the day before. Although, given the fact that the monster was lurking around the meeting house ruins, that shouldn't have been much of a shock.

Amity fished out a tape recorder and turned it on. "Thursday, 7:23 pm. The body is that of a fifty-year-old male." She lifted up the sheet covering his body. "What remains of the chest and torso indicates a frenzied attack. Subject has been almost entirely disemboweled."

Something caught her eye as she prepared to push him back in.

"That's odd," she murmured. "Subject's left foot is missing. It appears to have been chewed off at the ankle—"

Ghost zoomed back into the autopsy room from the copy room, pupils practically eclipsing her big blue eyes.

"Have you seen a left foot anywhere?"

She let out her someone's-coming hiss. Amity immediately climbed into one of the empty freezers, ready to listen.

Sheriff Grey's voice floated into her ears, causing her to cringe. "Appreciate you coming back to the office, Doc."

"No problem!" a second voice sounded—a man who, to normal people, seemed much too cheerful for someone who cut dead bodies open for a living, but Amity's second cousin was Nicholas DuBois. "I thought you should see this before I issued my report on the latest victim. It's a real noodle-scratcher, see? The killer cut off two toes from the victim's left foot. Best guess, they used a surgical saw."

"No bear could do that," the sheriff muttered. "Better let the mayor know."

"It's been a rough couple of weeks, eh?" the doctor said. "At least I'm going out in style. Friday's my last day."

Sheriff Grey laughed. "No shit. Finally retiring?"

The doctor sounded very proud. "I'm taking my wife on a worldwide cruise. Excited to trade rib shears for Mai Tais."

Amity stayed quiet as she listened to the sheriff leave. As she heard the doctor's footsteps get closer, she realized that she hadn't closed the door to her freezer all the way.

Luckily, she was pretty good at faking dead.

..............

"Ah, we're going for a conspiracy-theorist chic, I see," Luz noted as she looked over at Amity's side of the room. "Interesting decor choice."