Authors: Jonathan Maberry
“So…how’s this helping me?”
“Because he’s off the sauce now, and he’s the hero
du jour
, so go ask him.”
“That’s great, Toby, thanks for the lead,” Newton said, though he didn’t feel any thrills of expectation dancing through him. “I owe you one.”
“Just share the scoop next time.”
“Will do,” Newton lied, and rang off. He pulled the County Yellow Pages down and looked up the number for Crow’s store but it rang through to the answering machine. Same result for the Guthrie farm. He called the Haunted Hayride but it was closed. Finally he swallowed his pride and called Mayor Wolfe’s office.
After listening patiently, the mayor asked, “Is this the same Newton who broke the Ruger story? The fellow I met at the press conference?”
“Why, yes, sir, it is, and I—”
The mayor said, “Go shit in your hat,” and hung up. Which only made Newton more determined to get the story. He was starting to get the first faint whiffs of another cover-up, and that made him tingle all over.
(7)
“How’s it going, Iron Mike?”
“Crow?” Mike’s heart jumped into his throat and he nearly dropped the phone. “Oh my God! I heard about you on the news! Did Ruger really break into the hospital? Did you really kill him? Did Miss Guthrie really shoot him, too? Did—”
“Whoa! Slow down…only forty questions at a time,” Crow said but he was laughing. “Yeah, things got pretty hairy the other night. You probably saw most of it on the news. I’ll fill you in on the rest later. By the way, it’s Val, not Miss Guthrie, and yes, she’ll be okay.”
“Jeez…it was bad enough losing her dad and all. Now this.” Mike was sitting on his bed amid a sprawl of comic books, mostly
Hellboy
and
Ghost Rider.
He shot a quick glance at the closed door—he knew Vic wasn’t home—and said, “Tell…um, ‘Val’…that I’m sorry about her dad. I know how she feels. Kinda.”
“Yeah, kid, I know you do, and I’ll tell Val. It’ll mean a lot to her.”
“Thanks.” Mike cleared his throat. “How are you?”
“Like Superman if he’d been beaten with a Kryptonite tire iron.”
“Ugh. You gonna be in the hospital long?” His tone was uncertain, but his face looked hopeful. The day after the violence at Val’s farm, when Mike had gone to visit Crow at the hospital, Crow had offered Mike a job at his store, the Crow’s Nest, and the store was the closest thing to a real safe haven Mike had ever known. He couldn’t wait to get started with his new job.
“Actually, we’re out already. We left yesterday and stayed over at a friend’s house. Val and I are heading out now to go back to her place,” Crow said. “Which is why I called. I can’t afford to have the shop closed down for too long, not this time of the year. I won’t be at the store today, but tomorrow bright and early I want to meet you there to show you how to run things. In the meantime if you can swing it today I’d like you to feed my cats. My guinea pig, too. There’s a key hidden under a flagstone in the back. It’s the second from the left-hand side of the step and there’s a chip out of one corner. Lift the opposite corner and you’ll see the key in one of those plastic thingees.”
“Okay, I can do that, but when you said ‘run things’ I—”
“I may be staying at Val’s for a couple of days.”
“Wait…you want
me
to run the store by
myself
?”
“Yeah.”
Mike sat there, too stunned to even feel pain. “Alone?”
“Yeah…good with that?” Crow paused. “Mike—I’m counting on you here.”
“Crow, I don’t know if I—”
“Yes, you can. Jeez, kid, you know the layout of that store better than I do. The register is a snap, and you can open up right after school each day. Mornings and early afternoon are never my best times anyway, so you working afternoons and evenings will keep me out of the poorhouse. Besides, let’s face it, isn’t the store a better place to spend your days than hanging around the house?”
That said it all. Mike could not talk about Vic with anyone, not even Crow, but he knew that Crow understood. He felt tears stinging in the corners of his eyes. “Crow…I…”
“Dude,” Crow cut him off, “if you are planning to make some kind of ‘I won’t let you down’ speech, then save it. Both of us hurt too much for that and besides it’s way too After-School Special for either of us. Just say, ‘Thanks, Crow, you’re one helluva guy.’”
Mike laughed. “Thanks, Crow, you’re one helluva guy.”
“This I know. Now, I called Judy from the yarn place across the street, and she’ll keep her eye on you if I’m not there. She has the same kind of register if you have questions.”
“Wow,” Mike said. “Okay…this sounds great.”
(8)
Saul Weinstock said, “Turn him over,” and watched as his nurse tugged the cold, limp body of Nels Cowan on its side. Bending close, Weinstock examined the buttocks, the backs of the thighs. He frowned and reached for a scalpel. “Hold him steady,” he said and plunged the razor sharp blade into the corpse’s white left buttock, then drew a long line down toward the top of the thigh. He removed the scalpel and stared at the black mouth of the wound. “That’s weird,” he said.
The male nurse, still supporting the ponderous weight of the corpse, peered over its shoulder. “What’s weird?”
“Well, as you know, when the heart stops pumping, all of the blood settles down to the lowest points on the body, it gathers in the buttocks, the backs of the thighs, the back, so the procedure to drain the blood is to open those areas and let the blood drain out.”
“Uh huh,” said the nurse, who did know this and wondered why he was getting a lecture.
“So, tell me, Barney,” said Weinstock, “what’s wrong with this picture?”
The nurse looked again. “Oh,” he said after a handful of seconds.
“Yes indeed,” agreed Weinstock. “Oh.”
“There’s no—”
“Not a drop.”
“None?”
“None,” said Weinstock flatly.
Barney lowered the body back onto the stainless steel table. “Well, doctor, look at all the massive trauma to the neck and chest. Surely with all that flesh torn away the blood would have drained out.”
Weinstock shook his head. “Doesn’t work that way. No matter how traumatic a wound, there is pretty much no way to completely exsanguinate a body short of hanging it upside down after decapitation. This body is completely drained. Look at the face, at the arms. The veins are collapsed, the body is shrunken.”
“He was lying out there in the mud,” Barney said. “Maybe the blood just drained into the mud.”
Weinstock thought about that, then shook his head. “Nope. I saw the crime scene photos. I read Dr. Colbert’s report. There was some blood, true enough, but not nearly enough.”
“Then…what?”
“Hell if I know,” Weinstock said, and then shrugged. “Okay, now I want to take a look at the other guy. Castle. Wheel him out here. Let’s look at him right now.”
Barney gave his own shrug and went into the cold room. While he wrestled with the body of Jimmy Castle, Weinstock glanced over at the tape recorder that he’d started running at the beginning of the autopsy. The counter was ticking along steadily, having recorded all of his remarks to Barney. Frowning, he did a few more tests to Cowan, piercing the lower back, upper back, calves, thighs: trying to find blood. His frown deepened as he examined the ragged wounds at the throat. Strange wounds, not like knife wounds, not like any kind of wounds he had ever seen outside of a textbook. He bent close, gingerly pressing the flaps of skin back into place like puzzle pieces, reconstructing the throat as accurately as possible. The loose strips of skin added up to most of the throat, though some small sections were missing. Probably lost in the mud or destroyed when Boyd did whatever it was he did to the corpse the night he broke into the morgue to steal Ruger’s body. Even so, there was enough to piece together most of the throat. Weinstock used his fingers to hold the patchwork in place, and stared at what the marks on the flesh told him.
“Oh my…
God
!” he breathed softly, and he could feel sweat popping on his forehead and spreading under his arms. He looked up quickly as the nurse came crashing through the double doors, pushing a gurney. The naked body of Jimmy Castle lay on the steel surface, his white face wiped clean of all its former easy smiles, his body robbed of animation, dignity, and humanity.
Barney barely glanced at the doctor, didn’t see the brightness of his eyes or the sweat that ran in trails down the sides of his face. “You okay, Doc?”
Weinstock grunted something and reached out to pull the second gurney closer. Together, Weinstock and the nurse hoisted him onto the second of the steel surgical tables. Weinstock said, “Help me get him on his side. Good. Hand me that scalpel. Thanks.” Weinstock repeated the same cuts he made on Cowan’s body.
Barney looked at the incisions and then at Weinstock. “No blood.”
“No blood,” Weinstock agreed slowly, his voice soft, thoughtful. He set the scalpel down and eased the body onto its back. He shifted position, standing near to Castle’s head, his body blocking the view from the nurse as he poked and probed at the dead officer’s throat.
“What’s it mean?”
Weinstock turned toward him, and now Barney could see that sweat was pouring down the doctor’s face. Weinstock folded his hairy arms and leaned a hip against Cowan’s table, looking slowly from one body to the other and back again. He was trying to look casual, but his face was hard and his eyes almost glassy. Then he reached over and punched the Off button on the tape recorder and looked up at the nurse, who was beginning to fidget. “Let me ask you something, Barney,” he said slowly, his voice as taut as violin strings. “How much do you like this job?”
“Huh?”
“Your job, being a nurse here at the hospital, how much do you like it?”
“Uh…well, I like it just fine, Doc.”
“Means a lot to you, this job?”
“Yes sir.”
“Got a wife? Kids?”
“Sure, Jenny and I have just the one. She’ll be ten months on Monday.”
“Ten months? My oh my. Babies are expensive, aren’t they?”
“You said it.”
“So, I guess it would be a safe assumption that you really need this job?”
“Sir?” Barney was frowning, beginning to feel really nervous.
“I mean, with a wife and a new baby, you need to keep this job, am I right?”
Carefully, afraid to commit himself, Barney said, “Ye-ees.”
“Uh huh.” Weinstock rubbed at the corner of his mouth with the back of his bent wrist, his eyes fixed piercingly on the nurse. “Well, let me just say this, then. Right now there are just two people who know about the condition of these two bodies. Correct?”
“Um…yeah, I guess so.”
“Just the two of us. Now, I am going to write a very confidential report on the condition of these bodies. I will only be sharing that report with Mayor Wolfe, and perhaps with the chief—and
no one else
. I can reasonably expect those two gentlemen to keep this confidential, you understand?” He paused. “You know about it as well.”
“Well sure, but I—”
“And you need to keep this job.”
Barney said nothing.
“So I can also expect that you won’t tell anyone, either.”
After a long pause, Barney said, “Yes, sir.”
Weinstock nodded. “Understand me here, Barney—I like you and we’ve known each other for a long time, so I’m not threatening you. Don’t take it that way, please, but something is very, very wrong here and I need to know with absolute confidence that you are going to maintain the confidentiality of this at all costs.”
Barney’s face was flushed with anger, but he took a couple of breaths and nodded. “Whatever you need, Dr. Weinstock.”
They looked at each other for a long moment, then Weinstock gave a single curt nod. “Okay, I am going to do the autopsies on these officers, and you are going to assist me, correct?”
“Yes, sir.”
“However, once you leave this room, you are going to forget everything that happened here, understand? Everything you see. Everything I say when I make my notes.” He paused. “Everything.”
“Yes, Dr. Weinstock. Absolutely clear. You can count on me.”
Weinstock wiped sweat from his face with a paper towel. “Good,” he said softly. “Good man.”
“Dr. Weinstock…what’s going on? What’s happening?”
Weinstock looked at him for a very long time, his dark eyes intense, bright, but also watery. “What’s happening?” he murmured. He gave a short, harsh bark of a laugh. “What’s happening is something that can’t be happening.”
Barney frowned at him and felt very afraid.
(1)
When Jim Polk’s cell phone rang he nearly pissed on his shoes. He jiggled and finished as fast as he could and was zipping up with one hand while digging his phone out of his pocket with the other. He flipped it open, saw Vic’s name on the caller ID and almost—almost—didn’t answer. Instead he flicked a glance at the police cruiser parked at an angle to the entrance to the Guthrie farm, where he could see his partner, Dixie McVey, reading a copy of
Celebrity Skin
magazine. Oblivious. Polk shifted out of sight behind a big oak and punched the
RECEIVE
button. “Yeah,” he said.
“You alone?” Vic asked.
“Yeah. Me and Dix are doing some bullshit shift, sitting on our thumbs outside of the Guthrie place. Waste of fu—”
“Are you alone?” Vic repeated, adding some edge to it. “Can McVey hear you?”
“No, I stepped out to take a whiz.”
“Well, put your pecker back in your drawers and listen up.”
“Okay, okay…go ahead,” Polk said neutrally, absolutely sure he didn’t want to hear whatever it was Vic was going to say.
“What’s the scoop on this manhunt bullshit?”
“They’re still looking for Boyd. Nobody’s found shit.”
Vic chuckled. “They will. I just made sure Boyd would be spotted far away from here.”
“You tried that shit before and the dumb son of a bitch came back.”
“Ancient history, it’s all been sorted out now. I can guarantee that he’ll do what we want from now on.”
Polk felt sick. “About that, Vic…why’d he have to let Boyd kill Nels Cowan? Nels was okay.”
“Well, life’s a bitch sometimes, but trust me when I tell you it wasn’t part of the Plan. Boyd screwed up but now he’s more or less on a leash. Either way, these things have a way of working out, so I’m looking at it less as a killing and more as a recruitment.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Exactly what you think it means, Jimmy.”
The sickness in Polk’s stomach turned to greasy slush. “Oh, Jesus…”
“That ain’t why I called, though. Your cousin Kenny still work at the quarry? Still the shift foreman?”
“Nah, he got promoted two years ago. He’s assistant manager now.”
“Even better. You tight with him?”
“Sure, why?”
“Good. ’Cause I want you to get him to buy you some dynamite. I’ll e-mail you the specs on how much I need.”
“What the hell do you need dynamite for?” Polk said, his voice jumping an octave, and he looked around as if he expected Dixie McVey to be standing right there taking notes.
Vic’s voice was chilly. “You don’t need to know that, Polk.”
“Bullshit, Vic, I—”
“Let me rephrase that, dickhead…you don’t
want
to know. Am I being real clear here? If not I can swing by your place and explain it to you in person.”
Polk closed his eyes and leaned back against the tree.
“I’m pretty sure I remember giving you a shitload of cash the other day, Polkie,” Vic said. “And I’m pretty sure you didn’t give it to charity. From what I heard you bought a bottle and a piece of ass the second you were off the clock. That means you spent my money, Polk. That means you spent
his
money. So far I ain’t asked you for much—least not anything big. Now’s the time to earn your dime.”
“Vic…I mean…dynamite? For God’s sake!”
The laugh that came through the cell phone was filled with delight. “God don’t got nothing to do with this, Jimmyboy.”
There was a silence while Vic gave Polk the time to think about his life choices. “Damn,” Polk breathed.
“That’s my boy,” Vic said. “Check your e-mail when you get home, then I’m going to give you two weeks to get what I wanted. Two weeks don’t mean two weeks and one minute. Let’s both be clear on that. Let me down on this, Polk, and I’ll send over one of my new friends to have a chat with you. Believe me when I tell you that you’d rather I kick a two-by-four up your ass than letting, say, Boyd dance you around a bit.”
“Jesus Christ, don’t even joke like that,” Polk said.
“Who’s joking?” Vic said and Polk felt his bladder tighten. If he hadn’t just taken a leak he would have pissed himself right there. “And there are worse than him working for the Man. Oh
hell
yes.”
Polk actually gagged and he pressed his eyes shut and leaned back against a tree, banging the back of his head against the gnarled bark once, twice.
“You still with me, sweet-cheeks?” Vic asked.
“Jesus…”
“You knew these days were coming. We both knew. You got a choice here. Be strong and stand with us, and you’re going to come out of this like a king—or, as rich as one, anyway—but,” and he lowered his voice to a silken whisper, “you cross us…you cross the
Man
…we’ll eat your heart, and that, Jimmy-boy, is not a joke.
We will eat your heart
. Tell me you’re hearing me loud and clear.”
“Yes,” Polk said, his own voice shocked and shamed down to a whisper. Vic was laughing when he hung up. Polk pressed his head back against the tree and kept his eyes squeezed shut, trying to squeeze Vic’s words—and all of the terrible truth in them—out of his mind.
(2)
Barney was gone now and Saul Weinstock sat in his office listening to the playback of the autopsy tape, hearing his own words as he described what he and Barney had discovered as they cut open first one corpse and then the other. The loss of blood. The shape and orientation of the wounds on their throats—wounds Boyd had broken into the morgue to try and disguise. That he had made a piss-poor job of it was no consolation. The tape reached the point where he had described the wounds, and he punched
STOP
and then rewound it to hear it again. He did that half a dozen times. The report he had to fill out lay on his desk and he had to tell the authorities something. It was already well past the point where he should have turned in his findings. To delay even five minutes would be to hinder the police operations, but to include these observations in what would become crucial documents would mean that everyone from the FBI on down to Gus Bernhardt would think that he was either a loony or a damn poor ME.
He sat back in his chair and rubbed his tired eyes. Castle and Cowan had been dead for three days now. Crime scene investigation had kept their bodies at the farm for some hours, then the flood in the morgue had delayed the autopsies for a day, and then Boyd’s break-in had delayed things even further. Why? What was the purpose of stealing Ruger’s body?
Then there was the next anomaly to consider: The bodies of both officers had been exsanguinated, the veins totally collapsed as if some kind of suction pump had been used. The same bizarre bite patterns had appeared on both men. Not just throats torn out, but throats that had clearly been punctured first before the flesh was ripped away. The punctures on Cowan were right over the jugular; Castle’s punctures were over the left carotid. What kind of pump would have a clamp or fitting that would leave such marks? Add to that the fact that premortem bruising of Castle’s wrist clearly indicated that a human hand had gripped Castle’s wrist hard enough to burst the flesh and rupture the capillaries before—impossibly—ripping the arm from the socket. Not even a man hyped up on unlimited amounts of cocaine could muster that kind of strength, Weinstock knew that much. Which left him with a number of inexplicable or downright impossible pieces of evidence. To present these findings would be a total disaster. His competence would be called into question and that would taint all of the evidence should there ever be a trial. He put the cap of his pen in his mouth and chewed it as he thought.
The questions had to be answered. Why had Boyd attacked those two cops? Why and by what means was Boyd physically strong enough to tear a grown man’s arm out of the socket? How had he then exsanguinated them?
Why
had he done that? What had he done with the blood? Why had he broken into the morgue? Why steal Ruger’s body? Why disfigure the cops? On the videotape it had clearly shown Boyd limping on what appeared to be a badly broken leg. If his leg
was
broken, how had he carried Ruger—the man weighed two hundred pounds—and if his leg was
not
broken, why fake it? Then there was the matter of the broken pipes in the morgue. It was also very odd that they had taken that moment to disconnect, just in time to prevent the autopsy of Karl Ruger and to delay the autopsies of Castle and Cowan. Was that coincidence? That had happened when Crow and Val were still there at the hospital, which meant that there were plenty of police all over the building. It seemed unlikely that anyone could have slipped past all that security and gone down to the morgue to kick loose some pipes. He’d brought the matter up to Ferro, but the detective hadn’t seemed convinced that it was anything suspicious, especially since the morgue door had been locked. Odd, though. Far too many odd things.
Weinstock was a practical physician, and in his years as a doctor he had seen very little to support a belief in coincidence. Everything was cause and effect. If you don’t know the cause, look at the effect and backtrack in the same way you look at the symptoms to diagnose the disease. He told his residents that all the time. So, if the effect of this is two corpses drained of all blood, visible bite marks on the body, and two clearly visible puncture wounds on each throat, then what is the cause?
He shook his head and sat back in his chair. “You’re a goddamned idiot,” he told himself, saying it out loud, putting as much mockery as he could into it, trying to shame himself out of that kind of fanciful stupidity. Then in a quieter voice, he said, “You’re crazy.”
(3)
Coming home to the farm was the hardest thing Val Guthrie had ever done, and Crow knew it. The place wasn’t hers anymore—Ruger had made it his that night—and now she would have to reclaim it.
When Sarah’s Humvee crunched to a slow stop on the gravel in the half-circle drive in front of the big porch, Val’s hand closed around Crow’s thigh and squeezed. It wasn’t tight at first, but by the time the engine stopped and the silence of the late October morning settled over them, it felt to him as if she had diamond-tipped drills on the end of each fingertip. He didn’t let on, though, either in expression or word; if it would help her deal with the moment, Crow would have given her a saw and let her cut the damn leg off. Sarah seemed to sense it, too, and sat there behind the wheel, door closed, hands resting quietly in her lap.
Eventually Val’s grip eased and Crow took her hand in his. “Whenever you’re ready, baby. No rush.”
The house was huge, gabled, recently painted white with dark green window trimming and shutters. Gigantic oaks stood like brooding sentinels on either corner of the house, and smaller arborvitae flanked the broad front stairs. The porch was also painted green and there was a porch swing that Henry had made by hand for his wife fifteen years ago. Crow saw that all of the crime scene tape had been removed. Score one for Diego.
“I guess I can’t sit out here forever,” Val said.
Sarah turned in her seat. “Honey, you can sit there until the cows come home and the national budget is balanced. In fact, I can turn this puppy around and you guys can come back home with me, which would make a lot more sense.” It was the third time Sarah had made the suggestion.
Val reached out and gave Sarah’s forearm a squeeze. “Thanks, sweetie,” Val said, “I’ll be fine.” She absently touched her silver cross, tracing the shape of it over her heart.
“We could do a hotel,” Crow said.
She shook her head, took a breath, jerked the handle up and, with slow care for her aches, got out. Crow got out on his side and walked around to stand beside her. Above them the house was immense and filled with ghosts.
“Damn,” she breathed, and then walked toward the front door, chin down, jaw set, as if she were wading through waist-deep water. When they got to the front door, though, Val stopped. The door was new and still smelled of fresh paint. Val reached out to touch the new door, then turned to Crow. “You?”
“Diego. I called him, asked if he would tidy things up a bit.”
Val kissed him and there was a single glittering tear in her left eye. “Thank you,” she said. Taking a long, deep breath, she reached out and opened the door, hesitated one last moment, and went inside. Crow glanced at Sarah, eyebrows raised, and followed.
That was just before noon. Now it was midafternoon, and Val was asleep on her father’s bed. She had gone in there to be among his things, not even wanting Crow’s company. He heard her crying a few minutes later and every atom in him burned to go in and hold her, but he knew that it was the wrong thing to do. Sometimes grief should be private.
The interior of the house was spotless. Diego, as usual, had been better than his word and his promise to “tidy up a bit” had resulted in a house that fairly gleamed from polish and soap. There was no trace of the violence of that night, and none of the leavings of the army of cops that had passed through since. Sarah and Crow had a quick lunch and then she left, and ten minutes later Val drifted downstairs and silently came to sit on Crow’s lap at the kitchen table. Her eyes were puffy from crying, and when he wrapped his arms around her and held her close, she started crying again. Not the heavy sobs of earlier, but softer tears. He stroked her hair and held his tongue.
(4)
The lab work from the autopsies had come back and was spread across his desk, but Saul Weinstock was staring through it as if he couldn’t see it. He held a tumbler of Glenfiddich in his hands, the level having dropped over the last half hour from six fingers to two. Weinstock’s eyes were red-rimmed and bright, as if he had a fever. The flush in his cheeks supported that look, but Weinstock was not sick, nor was he drunk. What he felt was a shock so profound that it reverberated through his chest like the echo of a gunshot.