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Every cut and bruise had its own time stamp. “They broke his hands next. Pulverized them to keep him from fighting back once they unchained him.”
    “He wouldn’t have been able to think much past the pain,” Jack said. “Thoughts of fighting back would have been replaced with thoughts of trying to survive. He wouldn’t have tried to fight back at that point.”
    I touched Jack’s back lightly but didn’t linger. The reason he’d left the S.W.A.T. team was because of the three bullets shot into his chest during a raid. More bullets had taken the lives of six others on the team. He didn’t talk about that time of his life, but I knew he was very lucky to be standing next to me today. We were both lucky.
    “The lashings would have come next?” Jack asked. “You said something metal was tied to the end of the whip.”
    “Definitely metal. I pulled some rust and small slivers from inside the wounds for analysis. I don’t know for sure it was a whip though. Could have been a belt. But from the length of the cuts across his back I’d say the weapon was a DIY project. Where the metal dug into the skin and sliced was probably six to eight inches long. Rough-edged and rusty. Your guess is as good as mine on what it could be.”
    Jack hmmed under his breath and said, “Give me a place to start looking. Where was he killed? Not at the place where we found his body.”
    “By the rate of decomp and the greenish tinge to the body, I can tell you he’s been dead around two days. It’s Friday morning so that’s going to put his death early Wednesday morning.”
    “This type of torture would’ve taken time. The planning of it. The tools. But they wouldn’t want to hold him for too long. So maybe he disappeared Monday or early morning on Tuesday.”
    I picked up John Doe’s arm and turned it over. “You can see by the bruising around the wrists and the raw scrapes that they cuffed his wrists and then tied them above his head, most likely when they whipped him. The broken hands didn’t work with the cuffs though. His hands would’ve slid right through and he’d have dropped to the ground before they could finish the lashes.”
    “Christ, people never cease to amaze me.” Jack ran his hand over the top of his head. “He was relatively clean when we brought him in. If he’d been killed outdoors there would have been a lot more debris and dirt covering his body. Especially if he’d taken a fall to the ground.”
    “Exactly,” I said. “I found tree bark along with the rust and slivers of metal in his back, and I found larvae in the open wounds giving me a decomp time consistent with a body who’d spent a few hours outside, but if he’d fallen to the ground after his hands slipped through the restraints, there’d be dirt and other debris embedded in the skin. He wasn’t killed outdoors in my opinion. But they kept him upright somewhere, similar to how we found him.”
    “What makes you say that?”
    “He’s got ligature marks around the neck, but not deep enough to cause strangulation. The splinters I found in the buttocks and backs of the legs are different than the tree bark embedded in the skin. I can tell you he died standing or in a vertical position, tied to a rough wooden beam of some kind with a natural fiber rope around the neck, torso and thighs. All of his remaining blood is pooled at his feet and lower legs, so he would’ve been standing when they removed the genitals and let him bleed out.”
    “The location of death would have to be somewhere in the county,” Jack said. “Far enough from the drop site but not too far away. It’s never good to piss in your own pool. There’s no reason to leave him where they did otherwise. So we’re looking for a place large enough to hold several men and various tools for torture. They’d need privacy and it would need to be relatively soundproofed. It also needs to be a place with exposed wooden support beams. Piece of cake.”
    “We’ve got