Authors: Chelsea Cain
Susan heard another bus rumble by.
She felt strangely calm now. Like she was watching herself in a movie.Like she was one of those girls who go into the spooky house alone while the audience hides their faces and screams at her not to do it. The house was empty. She had done it. She’d crawled through a fucking basement window. She’d battled a rat. It was practically heroic. She was going to dine out on this story for months.
She just had to find her way out.
Her flashlight beam threw a yellow circle on the sheet. “Hello?” she said. She listened, not expecting to hear anything, and then, slowly, pulled the sheet curtain to the side and walked into the room.
The first thing she noticed was that it was clean. Not regular clean. Weird clean.Crazy clean. Her flashlight beam reflected off the scrubbed hardwood floors. The walls and ceiling were a freshly painted white. It smelled different. Like disinfectant. Like a hospital.
Susan’s stomach somersaulted as she panned her flashlight around. No furniture. No dust. No cobwebs. Whoever had been squatting there had been a real OCD case. Her flashlight swung past the open pocket door to another room, and stopped. Someone had hung clear plastic sheeting between the two rooms. Visqueen. Her mother kept a sheet of it over the compost pile.
She forgot what she was doing. She forgot that she was looking for a way out. She moved toward the plastic, flashlight in hand, but it was so thick that the beam of light couldn’t penetrate it enough to see the other side. She tried to pull it aside but it was nailed up more securely than the sheet in the hall, and she had to duck down and squeeze through below where it was fastened.
She turned, straightened up, and lifted her flashlight to look around.
Something was in there.
The knot in Susan’s stomach tightened. “Hello?” she said.
It was under a sheet. Maybe a piece of furniture. People threw white sheets over furniture to protect it if they were going away for a while. Rich people, with second houses, in the twenties. It wasn’t furniture. Old clothes?Something a squatter left, hoping to come back for later?
It wasn’t old clothes.
Who was the guy who’d phoned her? And why?
Call the cops, her little voice said.
But instead she felt in her purse for the notebook and pen.
She traced the form on the floor with her flashlight. Surrounding it, like some sort of offering, were eight or ten big red plastic flashlights, none of them on.
Maybe it was some sort of renovation project.
It wasn’t a renovation project.
“Okay,” Susan said. She moved tentatively forward, notebook and pen clutched in one hand, flashlight in the other. “I’m going to look.” When she got to the form she knelt down, and the knees of her jeans pressed into something wet. She sat back on her heels and shone her flashlight on her legs. Blood.
She jumped to her feet. Blood was everywhere. The form was soaked in it. It pooled on the floor, a viscous jam, shiny in the flashlight beam. She opened her purse, snapped up her spray can of herbal mace, and held it out, index finger on the nozzle.
“Are you okay?” she asked in a tiny voice.
It sounded stupid even as she said it. There was no way someone could bleed that much and still be alive. Don’t look under the sheet. She couldn’t help it. She had to know. She held the flashlight overhead, an ad hoc bludgeoning instrument, and, grimacing, used the spray can of mace to ease the sheet back.
She took his face in all at once—a flash of eyebrows and acne scars, a slender nose, round face, and soft chin, all the details ordering in her brain to form a face, a young man, a guy her age. For a split second, she thought he was okay, that he’d start laughing, that it was all some stupid joke. He was wearing one of those silly hospital scrub caps, for Christ’s sake, a purple one with cartoon elephants on it, like he was in some sort of costume. And his eyes were open. She let the breath she’d been holding escape in a gasp. Then her brain caught up with her.
The eyes weren’t right. The lids were pulled back too far, his fixed stare barely visible under a cataract-like white glaze.
She jerked back, and her flashlight beam momentarily angled up, cutting a path to the opposite wall. For a second Susan thought she was seeing things. She angled the flashlight up again, the beam trembling with her hand. The yellow ball of light slid across the wall, and Susan wanted to turn it off, wanted it to be dark, because even scary pitch-black would be better than this.
The wall had been painted white. But it had been decorated. Someone had covered the surface, almost every inch of it, with hundreds and hundreds of hand-drawn red hearts.
Get out of the house, her little voice screamed. But Susan didn’t move. There was no fucking way she was going back into that basement.
She reached into her purse and felt around for her phone.
She called the paper first, and 911 second.
C H A P T E R 12
Henry stood in the rain on the hillside with Detective Martin Ngyun, staring down at the leathery head in the mud. The ferns and brush around the head were charred and the entire area was dusted with foam from a fire extinguisher. Henry could see a soot-blackened cigarette that had been stamped deeply into the dirt.
Henry peered up the hillside. The whole task force had responded. A busload of Beauty Killer tourists were standing at the top of the hill behind the crime-scene tape taking pictures. No keeping this one under wraps. They were probably tweeting as he stood there. “Who put out the fire?” Henry asked Ngyun.
Ngyun had been on the task force for seven years. The only time off he’d ever taken was when the Blazers had made the finals. That hadn’t turned out well at all.
“Some docent from the house,” Ngyun said, adjusting the bill of his Blazers cap against the rain. “Seventy-two years old. Jumped the fence and climbed down the hillside with a fire extinguisher.”
Henry extended a hand, palm up. “It’s raining,” he said.
“Hadn’t started yet,” Ngyun said.
The head had been severed from its body close to the jawbone. The rain was melting the fire-extinguisher foam and Henry could see that the skull showed through in places, and the hair had thinned and was matted with dirt. It was facedown, resting against the root of a weed. Henry looked up the hillside again. “My guess is someone tossed it over the fence,” he said, his eyes following the angle of the slope. “And it rolled down here.”
“Lucky it didn’t roll any farther,” Ngyun said. “Never would have found it.” He frowned at the tangle of blackberries below. “Probably dozens of heads down there.”
“I’ll talk to the mayor about curfew,” Henry said. This was the new mayor. He’d taken the job two months ago, after the old mayor had blown his brains out in front of Archie.
“Yeah,” Ngyun said. “Because no one gets murdered during the daytime.”
“It will appease the citizenry,” Henry said. He squatted, trying to get a better look at the head’s features, but the angle of the face in the mud made it hard. “Where’s the ME?”
“On his way,” Ngyun said. He glanced at his watch. “It’s eleven. They said eleven-fifteen.”
Henry hesitated. He knew he’d catch hell from Robbins for moving the remains. But fuck it. He pushed the thing with the toe of his shoe, until it rolled faceup.
The holes where its nose, eyes, and mouth used to be were crawling with wiggling yellow maggots. No telling if the thing had its eyes gouged out, or just lost them to worms.
Claire called his name, and Henry looked up to see her standing with her hands on her hips looking down at them. Next to her, in a white Tyvek suit, was Lorenzo Robbins, of the Medical Examiner’s department.
“Did you just kick my head?” Robbins said in disbelief.
Henry’s phone rang. He’d never been so happy to get a phone call in his life. He smiled up at Robbins, held a finger out in a “just a minute” gesture, and picked it up.