Big Three-Thriller Bundle Box Collection (78 page)

“I thought that—we’d handle it.”

“Uh-huh.”

Parker looked away while Hill stood, pulling on her jeans. “So what the hell happened here?”

“Kind of a personal question, isn’t it, coming from a guy who’s just broken into my apartment?”

“Yeah, I’m sorry about that. The door was open and the living room all messed up. Then, the blo.…”

“Oh, Ken must have left the door open when he left.”

“Ken?”

“Yeah, Ken Hardessy. You’re not jealous are you?”

“Oh gee, Lt. Hardessy? You’ve got to be kidding. That asshole has been married four times. He’s just a womanizer. He’s using you.”

“That he may be, but he isn’t married right now. And I can’t have you.” She winked at Parker as she slipped on her white and pink Nikes. “Besides, I know he’s using me. And I’m using him. It’s just for sex.”

Parker moaned, frowning and shaking his head. Lt. Hardessy was a vice officer and a K-9 unit dog handler. Everyone that worked for the city or county knew him and his reputation as a playboy and a back stabber.

By now Hill had given her long blonde hair a couple of quick brushes, patted some powder on her face and grabbed her purse, ready to go.

“What about the blood?” Parker asked, timidly.

“Blood?” Hill followed Parker’s eyes over to the bed. “Oh that. That’s cherry-flavored body lotion. You know, the kind that gets hot when you blow on it.” She stood on her toe tips and puffed into his ear as she walked by. “I guess ol’ ‘Hard-assy’ got a little carried away.”

Parker moaned again, preceding her out the door.

“Mama will be right back, Sheik,” Hill said and closed the door behind.

The drive to the scene was quiet. Parker had little time to consider what had happened in Hill’s apartment or what it meant, if anything, between Sarah and him. If he weren’t married, there was no doubt in his mind, the two of them would be lovers, perhaps even more. Parker did feel jealous.

He drove with both hands on the wheel, looking straight ahead. He cleared his throat several times, wanting to say something but never did. He wanted to say
something
, anything, so his jealousy wouldn’t be quite so apparent. To show that his mind was clear of it. He couldn’t. The casualness of her sex life bothered him, especially when she was involved with someone as unsuitable as Lt. Hardessy, as if anyone would be suitable for her in his mind.

Evidently Hill felt the upper hand in their relationship now and wanted to punish Parker for not giving in to her many previous advances. She sat on the inside half of her bucket seat, against the console, as close as she could get without being too obvious—not blatant, but obvious enough to make him uncomfortable. She held the smile of a cat with a belly full of canaries, glancing at him sleepy-eyed. Her hand rested on Parker’s side of the console. She leaned on it, drumming her fingers ticklishly close to his right thigh.

It was working. Tony Parker, a happily married man, felt punished for not having an affair.

C
HAPTER 7

B
y the time Parker and Hill pulled up to within half a block of the little corner house

in the peaceful old neighborhood, the street was jammed with ambulances and cop cars. Police had already taped off the yard with the
Police Line, Do Not Cross
yellow crime-scene tape. One policeman stood up after being down on all fours beside a patrol car. He held a Glock pistol carefully with a pencil through its trigger guard.

Parker trotted up to the porch of the old house with Hill carrying the tranquilizer gun behind him. The tall black detective stepped out the door, wearing white plastic gloves.

“Damn, Jack, what happened?” Parker asked.

“You tell me, Tony. You tell me,” Simpson said, putting his hand on Parker’s shoulder.

Parker and Hill started to go around Simpson to the open door when Simpson stopped them, putting his arm across the doorway.

“Wait a minute, Sarah. It’s pretty gruesome in there.”

“Don’t worry about me,” she said, pushing past Parker. “I can handle gruesome.”

Simpson looked at Parker and shrugged his shoulders. He glanced back at Hill and turned sideways, allowing her to look in.

She raised her hand to her mouth, appearing nearly overwhelmed.

Parker looked in over her shoulder, eyes wide, without comment.

The bodies hadn’t been removed. The coroner, a short, obese man with a cue-ball head, was kneeling as he inspected the sergeant’s torso. A couple of uniformed officers stood nearby with their Latex-gloved hands on their hips and expressionless faces. Another man flashed pictures of the bodies from different angles in the room.

There, on top of the sergeant’s body, lay the young rookie with the monster’s mouth still stretched across his face. One of the beast’s fangs had pierced his right temple. A single trail of nearly dried blood made a line down the side of his head, in front of his right ear and down the back of his neck.

“Who?” Parker asked.

“Jim Morowsky and a rookie, John Cox’s son,” Jack answered.

Parker cringed. He knew Morowsky was a good friend of Jack’s. He didn’t know the kid, but he’d met his father.

“Great Dane,” Parker observed.

“Damn big one, too,” Hill added.

They entered the room slowly. One of the officers raised his hand to stop them, but he dropped it when Simpson followed them in.

“It’s okay guys. You know Tony Parker, Animal Control Director. And this is one of his men,” Simpson said. After the officers smirked, Simpson corrected himself with, “Uh, one of his women—ah, shit, Officer Sarah Hill.”

Parker narrowed his eyes at Jack. He knew Jack was aware there was more than just the usual working relationship between the two. This was probably a Freudian slip. Parker had known Jack Simpson since the last football game of their senior year in high school. They had been best friends ever since. They’d joined the Marines together under the buddy system and served in Vietnam at the same time, Simpson in an infantry ‘grunt’ unit, and Parker as a dog handler, sniffing out booby traps and VC. Now, once in a great while, they got to work together when bad things happened between animal and man.

“What’s his name?” Parker asked, looking down at the old man, wincing from the rank carrion.

“Alvin MacGreggor,” Simpson answered.

“The throat the only wound?”

Simpson nodded. “Apparently.”

Hill gagged. “Looks like it was enough.”

“Has anybody touched or moved anything?” Parker asked.

“We turned the CD player off,” Simpson said. “It was blasting out some kind of Irish folksy gibberish when we came in. The old man must have been nearly deaf.”

“Can we turn on some lights and raise the shades?” Parker asked.

Simpson nodded to the officers, and they responded.

Dark red blood was splattered on the walls and woodwork—blood from arteries squirting out life as if from giant squirt guns. It had struck the walls in streams and then dripped down, as in an abstract painting that the artist had really put his heart into.

“I can’t figure some people out,” Parker said, with one corner of his mouth curled. “A three thousand dollar sound system, a thousand dollars-worth of Enya, Sinead O’Connor, the Chieftains, RiverDance and….” Parker looked in surprise at the CD case. “…Slim Whitman, hmm—definitely not my mug of beer—and living in a dump like this.” He glanced around the room. “Look at the stuffing coming out of his chair and those ratty window shades.”

The three walked over to the two officers lying on the floor.

“Looks like the Dane dragged the big guy,” Parker said, noting the blood and guts trail. “That was one strong dog. What do you figure Morowsky weighs?”

“With or without his head?” the coroner questioned.

“Shit, Doctor Walker,” Simpson scolded, “I worked with these guys, this ain’t no time to joke around.”

“Sorry Simpson. In my line of work, you can’t take these things too serious—it’ll get to you. I’d say he’d go about two sixty.”

“I’d like a time of death on the old man when you have it pinpointed, Doctor,” Parker said.

“You going to take the dog’s head for rabies tests?” Walker asked.

“Might not be rabies,” Hill said, staring at the dog.

“Maybe not,” Parker said, “but we’d better do it anyway.”

“Not rabies? What the hell you mean, not rabies?” Simpson asked. “A dog does all this because of an attitude? What else could it be?”

“I don’t know,” Parker said. “A dog would need one hell of a good reason to do something like this. Could be abuse, maybe a brain tumor. I’d hate to speculate.”

He bent down and observed the bullet wound in the dog’s side. A lump blocked his throat as he stroked the dog’s flank. He blinked and exhaled long. “Good shooting, Jack,” he said blankly, “right through the heart.” He patted the dog’s shoulder, then looked up at Simpson.

Simpson smiled back proudly, then took a more serious face. “This is one damn big son-of-a-bitch, Tony,” he said. “I didn’t know they got this big.”

“Oh yeah, he’s big all right,” Parker answered, looking back at the dog. “Got a tape, Doctor Walker?”

Within a few seconds, the doctor shoved his hand in front of Parker with a small, metal tape measure in it. Parker took it and pulled out the tape. He laid it along the dog’s front leg to its hackles.

“Not all that unusual, though,” he said. “He’s probably around thirty-eight or nine inches at the shoulders. You don’t see a lot of them this big, but he’s a couple of inches shy of any kind of a record.”

Parker checked the dog’s ID tags. They were typical dog tags, telling the dog’s name, owner’s name, address, vet’s name, and rabies vaccination date. Typical, except for the separate nametag that appeared to be gold, pure twenty-four-carat gold, with a two or three-carat diamond dead center.

“Whoa, look at this,” Parker said amazed. “This thing’s worth more than all the jewelry I’ve bought Julie over the last fifteen years.”

Simpson read the nametag, “Beelzebub. Hell of a name for a dog.”

“Rabies booster just two days ago,” Parker said. “Hey, Dr. White Cloud’s the vet. Cantankerous old coot.”

“Then it really isn’t rabies?” Simpson asked.

Parker inspected the dog’s carcass in admiration. “Can’t be sure,” he said. “Sometimes the vaccination doesn’t take. But even if it doesn’t, only twenty-five percent of all rabies cases in dogs are the furious kind. Most are what’s called ‘dumb rabies.’ Usually, even with furious rabies, the dog only attacks briefly, just bites and runs. And it’ll rarely attack its master. Of course, with a dog this big, that bite is one damn big chomp.” He looked to the dead sergeant’s headless neck, then back to the Great Dane. “The dog looks in pretty good shape for rabies, too. A lot of times they’re noticeably injured from biting themselves. Not a lot of slobber, either. Usually, you would expect more than this. Still, you never know for sure about rabies.” He looked down the dark stairway. “What about down there?”

“Nobody’s been down there yet,” Simpson said. “The light’s burned out.”

Parker frowned.

“Well, shit, Tony. You know I hate dogs. There might be another one down there.”

“That’s it,” the coroner said, looking up from the bodies. “Simpson might be right.”

“What do you mean?” Parker asked.

“Well, look at the dog’s lower left canine,” the coroner said, pointing to its mouth with an ink pen. “It’s broken off. Been that way for a considerable amount of time. A year or better.” He stood up and walked over to MacGreggor’s body. “Now look at the deep grooves in the old man’s neck made by the canine teeth—all four of them.”

“Are you saying there’s another one of these monsters around here?” Simpson asked, looking over his shoulder to the dark basement.

“Well, that would explain the different bite pattern,” the coroner said.

“The pattern is different, too?” Parker asked.

“Yes. You see, it appears the animal that tore into the old man’s throat had a bigger mouth than the dog that took the head off the sergeant, the one that is lying dead at your feet,” he said, pointing back with his ink pen to the big, dead Great Dane.

“What I figure happened is: late last night around midnight, the old man was sleeping in his chair. The larger animal attacked him with little or no warning. He died quickly, almost mercifully compared to the sergeant over there. The old man couldn’t have lasted more than a few seconds according to the way the carotid artery was torn open.

“When the sergeant was killed this morning, there was a struggle. He probably lived for a full fifteen seconds after being gutted and before the dog we have here finally snapped his head off. It’d probably been hiding down in the basement. When it heard the sergeant break in, it came up quickly and attacked immediately without giving the sergeant any warning. Not even time to draw his gun, at first.

“Sergeant Morowsky, standing here,” the coroner noted, standing in the middle of the living room sideways to the basement doorway, “saw the dog coming at him and had just enough time to block its head down, like this.” He motioned with his right arm. “The dog’s large fangs caught the sergeant’s over-extended stomach and dug in. It ripped into his intestines with the sergeant still standing erect. Then, it attacked again, without pause.

“This time, the sergeant went for his gun, and the dog was free to go for his throat. Morowsky tried to push the dog off—remember the dog was standing on its hind legs, toe-to-toe and eye-to-eye with the sergeant—and couldn’t fire his revolver. He was probably nearly unconscious.

“The dog dragged him over to the doorway, here. The sergeant dropped the gun. Then, after two, maybe three bites, and with a little more pressure, his head came rolling off. The gun the younger officer has in his hand is the sergeant’s. The neighbor said he’d kicked his under the patrol car and couldn’t find it. He came in unarmed to assist his partner.

“Officer Cox came over to the sergeant’s body and got the gun. The smaller dog had gone into hiding again, down in the basement. As Cox knelt over the sergeant, the dog came up the stairs and grabbed him by the head. One of the two-inch-long fangs pierced his temple and entered his brain. He died immediately. Then, Lt. Simpson arrived.

“This is all speculation, of course. We’ll know for sure, later, after running some tests. Why the bigger dog didn’t attack the officers, and where it is now, I can’t tell you.”

All eyes in the room focused on the basement doorway.

“‘Bigger,’ you keep saying,” Simpson said. “That can’t be, can it, Tony?”

“
I guess anything’s possible,” Parker said. “If I remember right, the biggest, or should I say the tallest, dog on record was a Great Dane. I think he was supposed to be a little over forty-one inches at the shoulders.” He looked to the officer standing nearby. “Give me your flashlight.”

The officer handed it to him, and Parker stepped over the two bodies and straddled the dog, whose hind legs hung over the top step. He descended the stairway slowly. Hill came behind with the tranquilizer gun, and Simpson cautiously brought up the rear with his .357 drawn and held head-high. The dark steps creaked as they proceeded.

The basement reeked of dog, mixed with the usual damp, musty cellar smell. It was small, fifteen feet by fifteen, with an open crawlspace under the rest of the house.

Parker’s light found a wicker dog bed in the corner as he neared the foot of the steps. A brass nameplate hung three feet above the huge, silk-cushioned bed.

“Beelzebub,” he read aloud.

A shiver clawed its way up his spine as his light searched the small basement for another dog. The light caught something in the adjacent corner, twelve feet away. Another dog bed. Another nameplate, this one smeared with blood.

“Jezebel!” Parker said, stunned. “There is another one.”

He froze in place on the bottom step, still searching the darkness. A noise could be heard over the slowly creaking steps from the cautious feet behind him. It sent another shiver up Parker’s backbone.

“Shhh!” he said and held his hand behind him, touching Hill’s ankle.