“Describe them for me,” I said.

“We're talking about two areas. One on his inner right thigh, you know, up high near the groin. The other's in the area of his right shoulder. Chunks of flesh are missing - cut out. And there's weird cuts and scratches around the edges of the wounds. He's at Henrico Doctor's.”

“Did you find the excised tissue?”

My mind was racing through other cases, looking for something similar.

“Not so far. We've got men out there still searching. But it's possible the assault occurred inside a car.”

“Whose car?”

“The assailant's. The grocery store parking lot where the kid was found is a good three or four miles from the convenience store where he was last seen. I'm thinking he got into somebody's car, maybe was forced to.”

“You got photographs of the injuries before the doctors started working on him?”

“Yes. But they haven't done much. Because of the amount of skin missing, they'll have to do skin grafts full grafts, is what they said, if that tells you anything.”

It told me they had debrided the wounds, had him on intravenous antibiotics, and were waiting to do a gluteal graft. If, however, that was not the case and they had undermined the tissue around the injuries and sutured them, then there wasn't going to be much left for me to see.

“They haven't sutured his wounds,” I said.

'That's what I've been told.'

“Do you want me to take a look?”

“That would be really great,” he said, relieved. “You should be able to see the wounds real well.”