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small section of a human–a very naked human–body that had been arranged into a garish mosaic of the female form. “Sick little punks.”
    “Can you imagine the positions she must’ve had to get into to get all her parts on the glass?” Callahan asked, taking a moment to survey the creation, stepping back to take it in whole as one might a museum piece, noting the careful mating of all the sections of the body into a whole and how the assembled black and white image seemed to him to be of a woman cut out of mid-air, arms and legs outstretched as if falling, the picture oddly intriguing, and disturbing, and vexing for one very obvious reason. “So how come there’s no head, Jimmy?”
    Nance shook his head at his trainee’s question. “These kids are stupid, Kyle–not dumb. They’re not going to put a damn photocopy of one of their faces up there.”
    “True,” Callahan agreed, catching the logic he should never have missed. But then it was the obvious that tripped you up sometimes. It was that way with criminals, especially. Folks would do something they shouldn’t in a place they shouldn’t be, they’d wipe down the door knobs and light switches to get rid of their fingerprints, but they’d forget that they leaned against a doorjamb, or a banister, or some other thing like— oh, yes, like that! “Jimmy, we might just have a line on these little shits.”
    “How?”
    Callahan shined his light at the weird mosaic’s right hand, which was palm and finger tips down and clear as the October sky above them. “We got ourselves some prints.”
    “I’ll be...” Trooper Jimmy Nance never finished the exclamation. Not when his own light shined upon the figure’s right hand, from a sharper angle than his partner’s, and lit up what was covered by the overlapping piece of the paper above it. His free hand went to his pistol and he said, “Oh, God dammit Kyle! Dammit! Look!”
    Callahan sidestepped toward his partner and peered under the obscuring flap of paper as best he could, which was plenty good enough to see that when the copy of the hand had been made, the appendage had not been connected to any arm. The ragged cut just at the wrist made that quite indisputable.
    This was no case of vandalism. At least none like they’d ever seen.
    “Mother, mother, mother, what the hell is this?” Callahan asked himself as he stared wide-eyed at the macabre image.
    “Call it in, Kyle,” Jimmy Nance instructed, his hand wrapping tight around the grip of his holstered pistol now. Breath puffed from him like the white exhaust of an ancient locomotive at speed, fast and furious.
    “What the hell do we call in?” Callahan asked.
    “I don’t know,” Nance answered, and put his light close to the captured image of the severed hand. Close enough that it touched the glass and moved the door.
    He drew his weapon now and took a step back. “Kyle, it’s open.”
    Callahan stepped back as well, drawing his own weapon and reaching up to the mike attached near his collar. “Trooper Ten, we have an open door, Pembry Post Office. Can you roll us a backup?”
    The acknowledgment came from dispatch and Nance reached for the door.
    “Shouldn’t we wait, Jimmy,” Callahan reminded his partner.
    “I know folks that work here, Kyle. Let’s just see what we got.”
    “Yeah, but backup’ll be here in five minutes.”
    “If there’s anything that looks bad, we’ll pull back,” Nance said, and crouched low next to the right door. “Okay.”
    Callahan assumed an entry position as well next to the left door. “Okay.”
    “We go fast and cover the sides,” Nance said, and got a nod from his partner. “On me. Ready?” Another nod. And a breath. And another. And another. And... “Go.”
    They pushed each swinging door inward in sync, Nance going right and Callahan left, the aim of their weapons tracking the sweep of their flashlights over the dark inside of the Pembry Post Office’s lobby.
    “I got nothing, Kyle,”