Dark Places (7 page)

He took it gratefully, looked askance at me, and said, “Don't tell me. Those crazy TV people from
While You Were Out
came calling on you last night and left you a big room with lots of fancy windows on the front of your cabin?”

I sipped my coffee. Nonchalant. “Nope. Black's Christmas present. Gave it to me early.”

“I hope to hell he's got me down on his list somewhere.”

“He'll probably just give you a big boat or a Jaguar or something. He doesn't know you that well yet.”

“Maybe I'll invite him out for beer and wings.” Bud had the Bronco in four-wheel drive and backed up over my icy driveway and maneuvered a U-turn without a single skid. He was better at winter driving now than he'd been when he'd first moved up north from Atlanta. He pulled the gearshift down into drive. “Yep, wish the doc had a rich sister I could date. I've been wantin' a new house, too.”

“Have they positively identified Classon yet?”

“Nope. Said the body's hanging from a tree limb.”

That got my attention. “Suicide?”

“Dunno. Uniforms're waiting for us to show before they cut him down. Said we need to get the victim out of the tree before kids start comin' out of the dorms across the road and buildin' snowmen. Apparently, the body was left in sight of the school.”

“Great, that's all we need. A bunch of hysterical teenagers converging on the crime scene and staring up at their favorite dead teacher. The media would love a few pics like that. C'mon, let's get going. We shouldn't hit any major traffic this early and with these road conditions.”

“Snowplows are out clearin' the roads. Man, I bet there's thirteen, fourteen inches on the ground.”

“Yeah, Buckeye and his crime scene guys aren't going to like getting out in this stuff.”

“Maybe the perp left footprints that we can follow straight to his house, we nail him, then we go to IHOP for breakfast.”

“Sure, and maybe aliens will take us to Venus, too.”

Bud concentrated on driving, certainly a tricky affair for a homegrown Georgian, and when we rolled past Harve's place, gray smoke already drifted lazily from his chimney. I had a fireplace now, too. Jeez. I never thought I'd have a fireplace of my very own. Or a plasma TV. Or a hot tub. Or a man like Black wanting me to go to Paris with him. Miracles do happen, I guess, and they were hitting me like manna from heaven.

In the deep woods where the orphan boy walked behind the Angel Gabriel, it was shady and cool and quiet with lush green ferns and lots of underbrush and baby trees, all dappled and dancing with sunshine. Spiderwebs hung suspended between tree branches everywhere, and looked pretty and sparkled like great nets of silver silk. He avoided them as he trailed his new friend, their feet crackling through layers of dead, brown leaves. When they reached a wide, rushing stream, its clear water gurgling and splashing over flat brown rocks, they sat down together to rest on the bank and dipped up water in their open palms.

“There's some great big fish in this little river, kid, smallmouth bass and catfish, too. I'll teach you how to catch them if you want me to. I like to catch things, you know, trap them alive. I've gotten lots of frogs and lizards, chipmunks, too, and other stuff like that, right along here. I get 'em for my experiments.”

“What do you mean, experiments, Angel Gabriel?”

Gabriel turned to him, then he smiled and shook his head. His yellow curls shivered around his face. “Now you gotta quit calling me that, okay? I told you I ain't no angel.”

“Okay, but you sure do look like one.”

“I wish. Archangels are pretty cool, you know. Especially the one named Uriel. He's an archangel, like Gabriel. It's just that more people know about Gabriel, is all. You know there's seven archangels, but some Bible scholars think there's even more than that?”

“What's an archangel anyways?”

“They're the angels that do God's good work for him. Dad says only four of 'em are really in the Bible. Gabriel's the messenger that came down and talked to the Virgin Mary and the shepherds in the field, and all that. Michael's sort of an avenger kind of angel that cast Satan out of heaven, and let me tell you, we don't never, ever want to ever mess with the Archangel Michael or he'll smite us dead right where we stand. He's the most powerful of all of 'em and the boss over all the other archangels. He's got special people he blesses, too, and we aren't gonna ever mess with them either, you hear?”

The orphan nodded but the idea of Archangel Michael coming down and smiting him with a sword was about the scariest thing he'd ever heard. He looked up at the sky but didn't see anything on fire and headed at him, just the pretty green leaves tossing in the wind.

The Angel Gabriel said, “Uriel's my favorite angel, though, 'cause Dad says he's the “Fire of God.” He stands at the Gates of Eden and holds a fiery sword so nobody can get to the Tree of Knowledge, and he warned Noah about the Flood, and things like that. And he's in command of thunder and terror, and stuff. Best of all, he watches over hell.”

“Wow. Wish I was like Uriel.”

“Well, I can call you Uriel if you want. We can have some secret names that only we know about. You can be Uriel and I'll be Gabriel, okay?” The orphan smiled with pleasure and decided he liked having secrets. He'd never had any before, and it was fun!

Gabriel smiled. “C'mon, now, I've got some traps set down in my special fishing hole. Let's go see if I caught anything. Take off your shoes and socks, and we'll wade.”

Uriel followed obediently, and the cold water felt wonderful against his hot feet. The bottom was sandy and felt soft, and minnows darted this way and that in little silver streaks. A few yards upstream, a fallen log had dammed up the water in a big, deep pool with a little waterfall trickling over the top.

“This here's my favorite place. I keep most my traps here. I dammed it up all by myself.” Gabriel squatted down, reached up under the logs, and pulled out a glass cage. A thick brown snake coiled up on the bottom.

“Look here, kid, I caught myself a great big water moccasin. You ain't afraid of snakes, are you?”

Uriel hadn't seen a snake up close before, but he shook his head and tried not to look petrified.

“Well, they ain't gonna hurt you, if you don't hurt them first. I like snakes a lot. I got a whole collection of them in my secret hideout. I like all the creatures out here in the woods. They're my friends. They'll be your friends, too, as long as you stick by me.”

“I'll stick by you forever, Gabriel. I like snakes and other animals, too.”

Smiling, Gabriel reached down and ruffled Uriel's hair. Uriel grinned, pleased, hoping Gabriel could be like his older brother.

“He's still alive, Uriel. Let's take him home, and I'll show you some more snakes.”

They waded in the rippling water until they reached the top of the hill. Gabriel stopped and pointed down to the hollow below. Overgrown with vines and bushes, and hidden in the trees, Uriel could just make out an old, dilapidated building.

“Know what that used to be, kid?”

“Uh-uh.”

“An old hunting and fishing lodge, you know, sorta like a motel. It's been rotting out here for years. Hunters and fishermen used to drive down here outta St. Louis and Kansas City until they closed the place up. Nobody ever comes round here anymore.” Gabriel looked down at Uriel. “But me and you. It's all ours, and nobody's gonna ever know what we do back here.”

“Kind of like a secret clubhouse?”

“You're a smart kid, ain't ya? Nobody knows about this place but me. Your grandma owns it, I think, but since your daddy left home, nobody even remembers about this old lodge.”

Most of the doors in the lodge hung askew on the hinges. Rusted metal bedsprings were in rooms with broken windows and sweet-smelling honeysuckle vines twining up to the open rafters. One room had a big gray nest buzzing with hornets.

Uriel smiled, pleased to have his awesome new friend. He'd learn to find his way through the woods from his grandma's house and hang out in Gabriel's secret hideout. The bullies from the church wouldn't bother him out here in the woods, not with Gabriel around to protect him.

Once we reached State Highway W, we headed north and found the entire county buried under enormous mounds of snow. It looked to me like pictures of the Sahara Desert after a giant sandstorm. But the snowplows were out in force, scraping the roads so people could get back to maniacal Christmas shopping. But with such a heavy snowfall, public schools would probably get out for the day. Bud made good time, considering the adverse conditions, but it didn't really matter. We were too late to save Simon Classon. His killer was long gone, but that didn't mean we wouldn't get him.

The snowdrifts were awesome. Great, hulking mountains alongside the roads, mounded up tree trunks and banked against some homes nearly to the eaves. Only the lake remained uncovered and black. No boats buzzing about. Black had the water to himself today.

The Dome of the Cave Academy for the Gifted was north of Buck Creek near a little place called Rocky Mount, so we took rural gravel roads down through dense woods for about twenty minutes before we came to the school's entrance gate. It was pretty hard to miss with a great log archway branded with the academy's wordy name in scorched black letters. Through the snowy woods, we could see some school buildings off to the right, rough-hewn log buildings with dark-green metal roofs, all very rustic but with a modern twist. They formed a quadrangle, in the middle of which sat a little white church with a steeple. It didn't look to me like anyone was up and stirring, at least not outside on the grounds.

About sixty yards ahead we spotted a couple of brown sheriff patrol cars, and a big neon green wrecker emblazoned with
RUSHIN'S TOWING SERVICE
painted in white on the side. We pulled up behind the truck and were met by two deputies. I was glad to see it wasn't Connie O'Hara on call today. Traipsing around on slick ice did not go well with pregnancy. Instead, Pete Hancock and David Obion, two of our new recruits, had taken the dawn call. Both were in their early twenties, and sometimes made me feel old. They had strung yellow crime-scene tape among the trees edging the road. It stretched out into the woods a good distance from their vehicles.

I asked Hancock. “What you got so far?”

He was bundled up, a big, muscular guy who lifted weights fanatically and looked like a hulking linebacker in his bulky parka. He had intelligent dark eyes and skin, clean-shaven but for a bushy Tom Selleck/Magnum mustache. His cheeks were flushed red from exposure to the cold air, and he kept licking winter-cracked lips.

Obion was stamping his feet and rubbing his gloved hands together. He was taller and leaner and was an all-around serious kind of guy. He constantly asked questions about police procedure, by the book and all that. He carried a sheriff's department manual with him at all times. All I could see was his face and brown eyes, the same exact color of Kraft caramels, looking out from inside the tight drawstring of his black fur hood. That reminded me to pull up my own hood. Our breaths steamed in and out with each word uttered and hurt our lungs if we inhaled too deeply.

It seemed unnaturally quiet, but somewhere in that snow-muffled, silent woods, an angelologist was hanging cold and dead from a tree limb. Obion pointed a gloved finger out through the trees and said, “The body's straight through there, in that big oak tree yonder.”

I said, “Anybody else been inside the perimeter?”

“No ma'am, I taped it off myself. The scene's intact.”

Bud said, “The wrecker guy go in to see if the vic was alive?”

Hancock shook his head. “They knew he was dead the minute the headlights lit him up. Look; see for yourself.”

We followed the two officers down a slight incline, where a vehicle had slid off the road and landed on its side in the snowbank. Three of us negotiated the icy terrain successfully, but Bud immediately slipped and slid down the hill on his back. But what do you expect? He's Atlanta-born. While he cursed rather impressively and brushed himself off, I examined the wrecked vehicle. It was a brand-new, Sonic-blue Ford mustang convertible that no doubt wished it lived in Miami with other models that went topless. I made a mental note to check out who was in the car and when the accident had been called in. Could have been the perp trying to get away in a big hurry; stranger things had happened. I said as much to Hancock.

“Could be right. Belongs to some guy who works over at the academy. The guys in the tow truck said he walked back to the school and stayed the night after his car turned over on his way home. He called them this morning to pull him out. We told them to hold off until crime scene finishes with the car.”

“Good job. Tell you what, Hancock. Contact the school and request that any staff still on the premises be ready for interviews sometime this morning. We'll go over there after we secure the body and finish with the crime scene.”

“Right.”

Hancock and Obion turned and trudged with great, deep footsteps back toward their vehicles.

“There's Classon. Man alive, look at him.” Bud was pointing up into the tree limbs, and I followed his gaze to a five-foot-diameter oak tree, standing stark and black against the gray sky, its massive branches coated with about six inches of snow.

Thirty feet up, suspended from the fork of two big limbs, hung a large black trash bag. Although it was crusted with snow, we could see a human head protruding from the top, the trash bag's bright yellow drawstring handles tied around the victim's neck in a big, droopy bow. From our vantage point the face looked bluish and frozen, like a face trapped under a sheet of ice. If it was Simon Classon, he wasn't smiling like in the picture Black had pulled up on his website. It looked like the killer had tied a red ski rope around his neck to hang him and secure him to the limb. A square of silver duct tape covered his mouth.

The shiver that shot over my flesh had nothing to do with the freezing temperature. Visions of my last case stabbed my mind, lots of silver duct tape on lots of nude women, and worst of all, the deep, visceral fear I felt when a screech of duct tape was torn off to bind me to a bed. A swift, internal shake sent those ghosts back into the dark. All that was over and done with; the killer locked up tight in a hospital for the criminally insane. More comforting was the fact that Black checked with the doctor every week, just to make sure we didn't have to watch our backs. Still, we both kept guns under our pillows and awoke sweating and trembling from nightmares. No sir, this was somebody else entirely. Another monster slithering up from the dark places to wreak havoc on the innocent and unsuspecting.

“There aren't any footprints leading in, Bud. He got him up there before the snow started.”

“Yeah. Good God, look at the blood frozen to his head. He was alive and still bleedin' when the perp hung him. I reckon he was assaulted in his front hall, then transported alive out here for some sick reason.”

Simon Classon's head tilted to one side, and blood had run down from his head wound and frozen into an eight-inch blood icicle that protruded off his temple. Snow had formed a cap atop the red hair on the other side of his head and looked as if he wore a jaunty white beret.

I said, “What'd you make of the perp putting the body in a trash bag?”

“Hell if I know. So the bears don't eat him?” Bud, at his most amusing. But he wasn't smiling. Neither was I.

“Why would the perp care if the body was scattered? You think he wanted us to find Classon intact?”

Bud shrugged. He was chewing Juicy Fruit. “Maybe we'll find out when we see what's he's done to the vic inside that bag.”

“Right.” Another involuntary shudder. Not sure I wanted to know what the black plastic hid, I said, “Okay, now we've got to figure out how to get the body down without corrupting the scene. Buckeye'll be here soon with his team. You think we can get him down with the wrecker's winch?”

Bud shook his head. “Won't reach. Maybe we oughta call a fire truck out here with a rescue basket. If the perp left anything behind, it'll be under the snow cover, anyway. Let's get some pictures around the base of the tree, then the truck can back in close enough to reach him. Buckeye'll have to go up first and get his photos of the body before we bring him down.”

“Get Buck on the phone, Bud. See what his ETA is and then call the fire department. I want Classon down ASAP and out of sight of the school.”

It took us a while to search the perimeter for footprints or other evidence, of which we found nada, of course, then Bud and I huddled in his Bronco with the heater on full blast until the coroner showed up. Bud found a doughnut on the floor that had fallen out of the box a few days ago, brushed it off, and polished it off for breakfast. He was fastidious as hell in his attire and personal grooming, but when he was hungry, he overlooked things like dirt and contamination. However, it did happen to be a cake Krispy Kreme with pecans on top, so I took the petrified chunk he offered me and dunked it in my coffee to soften it up.

About twenty minutes later, Buckeye's crime-scene van pulled up, followed closely by a rumbling Canton County fire truck. When I got out into the cold to meet them, the sky was roiling and boiling with more mottled gray clouds, raring to dump another foot or two of snow on the lake.

Buckeye Boyd was our medical examiner and coroner, and pretty much looked like Captain Kangaroo on that old kiddie show, but without his buddy, Mr. Greenjeans, hanging around the house grinning. Buck liked to fish; in other words, he had fanatical bass-fishing tendencies. He had an entire room in his house devoted to tall, shiny bass-fishing trophies, and about 600 rods and reels and multicolor plastic worms. He also gave one awesome fish fry for the sheriff's department on the last day of August. He was excellent at his job and hadn't made a mistake that lost a case in the ten years he'd been in charge.

“Hell, I thought we were in for some peace and quiet after all that shit last summer,” he said. He drank some coffee out of the Minit Stop Styrofoam cup he was holding. The luscious smell of vanilla cappuccino drifted to me.

My good friend, twenty-something John Becker, a.k.a. Shaggy, Shag, or Shag Man, brought up the rear. He was hatless, gloveless, and drinking from a forty-six-ounce cup of Mello Yello in ice, which pretty much sums him up. But a criminalist extraordinaire he truly is. If there was one shred of evidence left behind at a crime scene, he'd sniff it out. He grinned.

“' S'up, Claire? This case oughta be just what you need to get yourself all warmed up and back in the saddle.”

“I'm pretty much up to speed already. Was the star of a prostitution sting last night.”

“Crap! You mean I missed you wearin' those Daisy Dukes and fishnets? Damn, why didn't Bud call me like usual? That where you got that bruise?”

I nodded, but Buckeye ignored Shaggy's levity and squinted from snow glare as he examined the snow-laden branches above them. “Well, this one should throw you headfirst back into the fray. Hell, look at that, he's got the vic hanging out here like a fresh deer carcass.”

I said, “Buckeye, I'm going up in the basket with you and Shag.”

“You got it, but it'll be a tight fit.”

It took a few hours past forever to position the truck far enough away not to disturb the ground directly underneath the tree but close enough to retrieve the victim. We climbed inside the basket and said nothing as the levered arm raised us slowly into the treetops. The basket hit a snow-covered branch and showered Bud, who yelled a few Dixie-type obscenities down below. The closer we got, the worse the victim looked. It was definitely Simon Classon. I recognized him right off, despite the blue-tinged skin and the blood-red icicle the size and shape of a unicorn's horn growing out the side of his head. Shag took pictures from every angle, and I distinctly hoped Mr. Classon really didn't have close relatives who'd have to see how the killer had left him.

I looked at Buckeye. “Got a guess on cause of death?”

“I'll know more when we get him out of that bag. Could be loss of blood, if the blow to the head didn't kill him. But my guess is he probably froze to death out here.”

“When do you plan to do him?”

“Today, I hope. This afternoon, probably.”

“Bud and I need to be there. We'll be done out here mid-afternoon at the latest, but give us a call before you start the autopsy.”

While Shaggy filmed retrieval, Buckeye examined what he could see of the body. “By the shape of the bag, I'd say his legs are bent up under him, probably in a fetal position, but it's anybody's guess what else the killer did to him. Question is, why put him in a bag and how the hell did he get him up this high? We need a goddamn truck to get him down. He'd have to've gotten him up here in daylight. No way could he have done this in the dark. Hell, somebody should've seen the perp in the act. The school's right there, for God's sake.”

I leaned around and tried to see how the perp had secured the body to the limb. “He must've somehow thrown the rope over the tree limb and hoisted him up.”

“So how'd he tie it off?”

“The rope doesn't go down to the ground. He had to have tied it off while he was up here with Classon.”

Shaggy chimed in, video camera whirring while he carefully filmed everything we said and did. “What gets me is, why would he put the body here so close to the school where somebody might see it?”

“That's the question of the day.” I turned in the basket and found a clear view of the main buildings, as well as the old white clapboard church. “If Classon ever regained consciousness, he could've seen people moving around at the school.”

Buckeye said, “Could be that's what the perp wanted all along. Maybe that was part of the torture, for him to see people over there and not be able to call out to them.”