Beast of the Field

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Book: Read Beast of the Field for Free Online
Authors: Peter Jordan Drake
Tags: thriller, Suspense, Historical, Crime, Mystery, Murder, irish
had seen at the Donnan house last night.  Tommy Donnan's cheekbones and jaw had come in by the time he died.  His shoulders had rounded out.  His attempt at a Valentino moustache had not been a bad one, and went well with his high cheekbones.  The eyes in this picture had the same glowing quality as the eyes in his boyhood pictures:  the gray they took on in the photos couldn't disguise the gemlike blue they must have been in life.
    "Quite a handsome young man," the doctor said.   “Not like many of the boys around here, not too interested in baseball and football.  Did not chase the ladies so much—though he did not have to, from what I understand.  He just seemed to be somewhere else all the time, daydreaming.  Like a poet, perhaps.  I liked him, Mr. Sterno, und I was sad to take these photos that day.  I will tell you this, he sure was good vit horses.”
    Sterno studied the image for half a minute more.  Finally, it was Dr. Rosenzweig who removed the print from his hand, replaced it with four others.
    "Good Christ," Sterno said as he took the pictures.  It was cause enough to place the photos down on the desktop, slide his last readyroll from its pack, start over with a cigarette.
    The first photograph showed a side view of a horse and buggy, with an unidentifiable object tangled up in and hanging down from under the carriage.
    "Let us see.  This is how his father found him.  This is looking from the house," said Dr. Rosenzweig, the photographer, as he lit a pipe.
    The second photo was the same angle as the first, but closer.  The object under the buggy was a body, Tommy Donnan's body.  The details of the body were clear in this image.  It was a clear picture of a black mess, like the war photos and the crime photos he had studied at the Agency.  In real life, all that black was dry brown blood.
    "He'd been dragged all the way from town under that wagon and God knows where else by the time the horse found home."  These were Mayor Greentree's words.  "Then overnight the vermin got at him.  Kigh-yoats, maybe.  But I'm adventuring it was those dogs from the woods east of Donnan's farm.  This is all congestion, of course.  Nobody really knows what happened."
    The third photograph was of the body removed from the under-parts of the buggy and laid out on the ground next to it.  His body from the hips down was pulled unnaturally long, ripped along the near side, showing chewed-at innards and bare rib bones.  One arm was splayed out over his head, a long white leather sock full of broken bones.  His face lay with both eyes sockets pointed to the sky, black and empty.  Something had taken his eyeballs.  His lips and ears had been chewed on too.  Something struck Sterno strange about the positioning of the head, or the angle of the face, maybe.  He picked up the print and brought it to his face.
    "Good Christ..." he breathed.
    There was little bone, little flesh behind the upturned face to elevate the boy's face from the ground.  The front side of his head lay on the long grass like a split melon.
    "All the way from town…" the mayor repeated.
    In the fourth photograph, someone in work gloves had what remained of Tommy Donnan up off the ground and was angling it to show just how much of his back half he had left on the roads behind him.
    There were other photographs:  blood on the road, a piece of clothing off to the side of the road, a blood splattered rock in the road.  Sterno kept his focus on the boy. 
    The doctor pulled once again from his pipe, sighed deeply as he replaced it in its cradle.  "Let us see.  The way it must have happened, I surmise, is that he fell forward over the dash rail of the buggy--
    "Drunk as all get-out," the mayor said over the doctor.
    "— This would put the back of his skull, his shoulders und his upper back on the ground.  His face up.  Let us see, then he became caught somehow on the front spring bar, or the axle rod, perhaps, und was pulled down under

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