Page 56 of Twisted Lies
A naked man in his late twenties lay on his back, tied to an oblong wooden frame. His hands were stretched above his head, and his feet tied at the ankles to the bottom edge of the frame.
Her first thought was that the grotesque sight had been framed.
She walked around it, trying to take in every single detail.
The frame had been formed of four pieces of wood. At the bottom corners a hole had been drilled and metal rods hammered into the ground, keeping the lower portion of the contraption in place. The two top corners of the frame had wheels at each corner. As she looked more closely at the centre of the long pieces of wood, she could see that it was two pieces of wood, one overlaying the other.
‘Does the top half of the frame move?’ she asked Lynes, who was following her around the body.
‘Yes, there’s a rope mark here,’ he said, pointing to a jagged cut into the area right between the man’s bound wrists.
Lynes took a few steps and pointed to the ground, where the grass was flattened.
‘You think he stood there and pulled?’ she asked.
Lynes nodded.
Her gaze eventually rested on the portion she’d been avoiding: the stomach, where most of his intestines had spilled out and were hanging over the side of his torso.
She tried to capture everything in her vision.
‘What does all this mean?’
‘DS Baldwin,’ he said, calling over a female detective from his team. ‘Care to explain?’
The sergeant nodded and smiled in her direction.
‘It appears to be a makeshift rack, similar to the type used in the 1500s. This one is called the intestinal crank, where an incision is made in the abdomen to separate the duodenum, the first and shortest part of the small intestine, from the pylorus, the part that connects to the stomach. The constant pulling would extract the intestines from the gastrointestinal cavity of the victim.’
‘How do you know all—?’
‘Wait, there’s more,’ Lynes said, crossing his arms.
‘By using a rope to keep pulling a bit at a time, the murderer was stretching the victim’s body in the process. There would have been loud popping noises as his cartilage, ligaments and bones snapped under the tension. Additionally, once muscle fibres have been stretched past a certain point, they lose their elasticity and are unable to contract.’
Kim was impressed. ‘Wow, that’s erm…’
‘That’s what three years of medical school gets you before you leave to become a police officer,’ she said with a smile.
‘Thanks, Denise,’ Lynes said. ‘She knows some proper weird shit as well,’ he said as she walked away.
If Kim was into matchmaking, she would have tried to get her number for Penn.
‘She’s impressive.’
‘She’s my right-hand person,’ he said, smiling.
‘Yep, I’ve got one too,’ she said, warming to the man that reminded her of Columbo.
Bryant stepped forward.
‘Her name is Stacey,’ Kim clarified.
Bryant offered her a look, which she ignored.
‘So how long?’ Kim asked.
‘Pathologist reckons five to six days but will tell us more once she liaises with the forensic entomologist and analyses the critters.’
