Dead Man's Song

Chapter 2

(1)

“Hi, is this Lois Wingate?”

“Yes?”

The voice on the phone was soft, cautious, and Crow could picture her pale and timid face, the eyes that always looked afraid. No wonder, he thought, being married to Vic Wingate must be a real treat. “Lois, this is Malcolm Crow. You remember me from high school? I own the—”

“Yes. That store where Mike gets his comics.”

“Right, and sorry for calling so early. I don’t know if Mike told you yet, but I offered him a job at my store starting tomorrow.”

“He has his paper route.”

“I know, but I think I can pay him a bit better than what he makes delivering papers, and he’ll get a discount at the store. Plus,” and here he was careful not to let any of his contempt for Vic into his voice, “he won’t be out as late.”

There was a pause and Crow knew she was making the connection. Crow suspected that Lois had probably felt the back of Vic’s hand more than once, and shared awareness might work in Mike’s favor.

“That would be fine,” Lois said at last. “Do I need to sign something…?”

“Work papers, yeah, and I’ll send some home with Mike.”

There was another pause. “I heard about you on the news last night. And about your friend, Val Guthrie. I was sorry to hear about your troubles.”

“Thanks. I’ll pass that along to Val.”

A final pause. “I’ll pray for you.” She hung up quietly.

Crow looked at the phone for a bit, touched by that last comment, as hurried as it was. “Right back atcha,” he said softly.

His second call was to Terry Wolfe, but all he got was voice mail. He called Terry’s office, his home, his cell, and even his wife Sarah’s cell. Nothing. He tapped the cover of his cell phone with his thumb, thinking; then he dialed the numbered for the deputy mayor, Harry LeBeau, a fussy little man who had taken the unpaid job only because no one else wanted it. LeBeau answered on the third ring. “Harry? It’s Crow.”

“Crow! Dreadfully sorry to hear about—”

Crow cut him off. “Thanks, Harry…look, I’m trying to find Terry. Any idea where he is?”

“Heavens, no. I’ve been trying to get him since last night. Gus has been calling me every fifteen minutes since—well, since what happened to you at the hospital—but no one’s seen hide nor hair.”

“Crap. Look, if he gets in touch have him call me on my cell.” He closed his phone and mulled that over. Where the hell was Terry?

(2)

Four floors below where Crow sat in bed making calls, Dr. Saul Weinstock leaned back in the creaking wood swivel chair of the morgue attendant’s office, hefted his legs to prop his sneakered heels on his desk, crossed his ankles, and stirred six packets of raw sugar into the coffee that he steadied on his thigh. Starbucks Venti dark roast, and piping hot. A bag with two chocolate croissants lay on the desk by his feet and the office CD player was tinkling with a live recording of Jim West at the Maiko II. Carefree stuff, improvised and witty. Weinstock was constructing the moment to be as casual and relaxed as the piano jazz that filled the air, consciously stage managing his own mood because the alternative was to run screaming through the halls, and he did not think that would be good for his patients.

His cell phone chirped and he pulled it from its belt clip, saw that it was his wife, and flipped it open with a smile. “Good morning, sweetie.” He looked at the wall clock. Six-fifty-four. “What are you doing up this early? The kids okay?”

“They’re fine. I just couldn’t sleep, thinking about Val and Crow.” Rachel sounded tired. “How are they?”

“Sleeping, which is a mercy.” He filled her in on Val and Crow’s injuries and the prognosis, though he didn’t tell her that Val was pregnant—something only he and Val knew—and that because of it she was having to tough out the pain with nothing stronger than Tylenol. “They’ll be okay, though. The real thing is that I have to schedule two autopsies.”

“On Yom Kippur?” Rachel said, and Weinstock winced, then flicked a glance at the calendar. He had totally forgotten.

“I’ll be done long before sunset, honey,” he said quickly. “But even so, with all that’s going on, I don’t think God is going to single me out for punishment if I don’t atone enough. I think he’s concentrating on the entire town at once.”

“Are you fasting at least?” she asked just as Weinstock reached for a chocolate croissant, and he yanked his hand back as if he’d been burned.

“Sure,” he said.

“Saul…?”

“Well, fasting-ish, anyway. Just coffee.” He reached over and folded the bag closed, considered, and then put a file folder over the bag to hide it.

“Saul, my folks are expecting us at schul this evening. Can I tell them you’ll be there?”

“Rachel, honey…with what’s going on in town…I’m just not sure I can make that promise. Like I said, I have two autopsies to do today, and both of them are important to this police thing that’s going on.”

She made a sound like she had tasted something nasty. “Henry and that Ruger character?”

“Uh huh, and I don’t mind slicing Ruger, but I have to tell you, honey, I just can’t bring myself to take a scalpel to Henry Guthrie. It’d be like cutting up my Uncle Stanley.” Weinstock set his cup down and rubbed his eyes. “It’s weird…I never thought of what I do as gruesome before, but the thought of cutting open Henry is just plain creepy.”

“Then don’t do it,” Rachel said. “Let Bob Colbert handle it. He didn’t even know Henry.”

He sipped his coffee. “This is just all too crazy, Rache. Just too frigging weird for Pine Deep.” The real kicker had been the autopsy he had performed the day before on the body of Tony Macchio, one of Ruger’s accomplices. For some reason the cops had not been able to discern Ruger had first shot Macchio and then tore him apart. Literally tore him apart, apparently with his bare hands. And his teeth. Weinstock had never seen anything like it, even in medical texts, and outside of slasher films he had never even heard of anything like it. Ruger was a monster, and one that was scarier than anything that Crow had ever cooked up for the town’s famous Haunted Hayride. No fangs, no bat wings or bug-eyes, and seeing his handiwork, actually being wrist deep in the bloody leavings, had shaken Weinstock to his core. He knew it, too, hence the stage dressing to affect an air of calm before starting today’s postmortems. He closed his eyes and sighed. “You’re right, honey, Bob can do it.”

“Good. No sense putting yourself through anything more if you don’t have to.”

“Okay, sweetie, let me go make some calls. Give Abby and David a kiss for me. Tell them I’ll be home later, and, honey, I promise I’ll be there in time for synagogue. Hand to God.”

“I love you,” Rachel said, a lot of meaning in her voice.

“Me, too, sweetie. Bye.” He snapped the phone shut, took a long sip, and sat there with his eyes closed for a while listening to the music, letting the notes play over his nerves like a masseuse’s fingers. He opened his eyes and stared at the file folder that hid the croissants, pushed it aside, grabbed the bag and opened it, and stared into it with naked longing. Then he scrunched the bag up and threw it in the trash can, uttering a string of expletives that would require some heavy-duty atoning.

Abruptly he sat up, set his coffee cup down on the desk, and walked with forced calmness into the cold room where the double row of stainless-steel drawers gleamed in the bright fluorescent lights. He went to drawer #14, jerked the lever down and swung open the door, then grabbed the hard plastic handle on the slab and pulled it out along its rollers. A body lay under a white sheet, the cloth tented on nose, chest, and toe-tips, but Weinstock whipped the sheet down to reveal the corpse beneath. The killer’s skin was blue-white and waxy, the eyelids half-open showing shark-black eyes. The body had not yet been prepped for autopsy and was still clothed in shirt, jacket, and trousers that were filthy and pocked with bullet holes crusted with blood that had dried to a chocolaty thickness. Even in death Karl Ruger wore a twisted smile, his lips curled away from the jagged stumps of his broken teeth. Weinstock considered. Maybe it was a grimace of pain, he conceded, but damn if it didn’t look like a shit-eating smile.

Weinstock was alone in the morgue—his nurse, Barney, was working the three to eleven—so there wasn’t a living soul to hear Weinstock when he leaned over Ruger’s body and said, “You are a total piece of shit and I hope you burn in hell!”

He spat on Ruger’s dead face and then slid him back into his cold box with a grunt of effort that sent the slab slamming against the wall, then he swung the door shut hard enough to send echoes bouncing off all of the tiled walls. He sagged against the bank of stainless-steel doors, closed his eyes, folded his arms tightly across his chest, and concentrated on beating down the hatred in his brain, muttering, “…Shit, shit, shit…”

When the intensity finally ebbed, Weinstock rubbed his eyes with the heels of his palms and then pushed himself away from the wall of doors, walked slowly across the morgue floor, paused once in the doorway to the office and threw back a look that was half embarrassed and half venomous, then swept his hand down over the light switches and left, heading back to his coffee and jazz and his cell phone.

Inside the cold drawer, Karl Ruger lay in the silence of death, still and breathless. There were no longer any drops of spittle on his face. He’d already licked them off.

(3)

By the time Frank Ferro and Vince LaMastra got to the Guthrie farm, there were twenty officers, two full ambulance crews, four press vehicles erecting microwave towers, and a crowd of rubberneckers who were trying to get past the yellow crime scene tape. It was frosty cold and a frigid mist floated a foot above the ground. When LaMastra asked a uniform where the chief was, the officer pointed down a lane that had been trampled through the corn. Though the sun was rising, there were still thick shadows clustered around the base of the cornstalks and all along the path. Surrounding the scene Coleman camping lanterns had been placed. The shadows leaned back away from the lanterns, but they did not fully retreat.

Jerry Head hurried up to them as they walked along the path to where the bodies had been found. He looked bleary eyed with exhaustion. “Sarge, I was about to turn in when I got the call. My motel’s right up the road, so I was able to get here in a hot minute. I secured the scene best I could, but we’re ass deep in civilians around here. Okay if I run some of them off?”

“Good call, Jerry. Thanks,” Ferro said, clapping him on the shoulder, and a second later he could hear Head’s deep voice booming out behind them. He nodded to LaMastra and they moved forward through the throng of officers until they stood at the edge of the clearing and saw what lay there.

“Holy Mother of God,” LaMastra said, and actually took a half-step back as if he hoped he could step back out of any reality where what he saw was possible. He gagged and turned away, staring at the tops of the nearby corn while he worked his throat. “Jesus Christ, Frank…what the hell is wrong with this town?”

Ferro looked at his partner for a moment, finding that easier to bear while he composed his face into one he’d want the local cops to see. Now was not a time to come unglued. Breathing in and out through his nostrils, Ferro turned slowly back to the clearing and forced himself to take in every detail, trying to access that part of his mind that could be cool, detached, clinical. It was a struggle not to yell. “It’s not the town, Vince. This is our mess—Ruger and Boyd.”

LaMastra gave a single fierce shake of his head. “You’re wrong there, Frank. It is this goddamn town.”

Ferro had nothing to say to that. There was a twenty-foot square that was formed partly by the intersection of two access paths through the corn, but which had been expanded by many of the stalks being trampled down. The far side of the clearing was edged by a white slat fence that trailed away to either side into the shadowy fields. A tall post reared up above the fence and a raggedy and headless scarecrow hung in limp cruciform over the scene. On the ground at the foot of the post was the better part of a shattered jack-o’-lantern with a wicked grin. Below the scarecrow lay the first of the two bodies. Officer Nels Cowan, late of the Pine Deep Police Department, lay in a rag-doll sprawl that spoke of arms that had been wrenched nearly out of their sockets. His head was tilted back at an impossible angle on a splintered spine; the backward tilt revealing a savage tear in the throat that exposed a severed windpipe and the knobbed inner edge of the spine. His service sidearm lay on the ground inches from his hand.

Near him, with one outstretched hand reaching up to lay across Cowan’s left ankle, was what had once been Jimmy Castle, late of Crestville PD. His throat was also a raw and shredded mess, as if dogs had been at him. Castle’s eyes bulged from their sockets with a terminal and everlasting astonishment at what he had seen.

There was blood everywhere and pieces of torn red matter that could have been cloth from the uniforms of the officers or it could have been their own flesh. Scattered around Castle’s body were at least a dozen shell casings, and the faint bite of cordite still hung in the air. As he and LaMastra pulled on latex gloves, Ferro stood there and read the scene, fighting back the ache in his chest that made him want to take LaMastra’s cue and flee this insane town. He fished a pack of gum from his pocket, unwrapped a stick slowly—his trick for controlling the shaking of his hands—and then placed it on his tongue. Chewing would give his mouth something to do other than gape, and the mint fought off the nausea.

The scene was a puzzle, and he stood there, chewing, evaluating the details. Two bodies, savagely torn. Worse than what had been done to Ruger’s buddy Macchio. That killing had, at least, a sense of ritual about it, but this looked to be less…what was the word? Controlled? Animals? It seemed unlikely. Not in this part of Pennsylvania. Shell casings everywhere. That meant that Castle had nearly emptied his magazine. Castle was ex-Pittsburgh PD—it seemed pretty unlikely he’s have fired off that many rounds without hitting something, but there was no other body around. No trail of blood, either, or at least no blood trail beyond the spatters that filled the clearing. So if Castle hit anything, there was no immediate visible evidence of it.

It was a mystery and Frank Ferro hated mysteries. He hadn’t joined the police force to solve them, and he hadn’t welcomed the promotion to detective division to pursue them. Ferro preferred order. He had a hunter’s nature, and that was something he liked: the hunt for clear answers, not for the unexplainable. When he and LaMastra had come to Pine Deep on the trail of Karl Ruger and his accomplices, they’d both thought it was going to be a straightforward hunt. Difficult, yes, dangerous, to be sure—but in essence a hunt. Now, after two days in this town he knew that the hunt had tangled itself into the weirdest set of circumstances he’d ever encountered. The most brutal murders of his career, killers who can take a chestful of bullets and still have the strength and power to lay siege to a hospital and nearly kill three people. Dead civilians, dead policemen. Ferro unwrapped a second stick of gum and chewed it as he stood there, his face giving nothing away, his dark eyes flat and apparently emotionless as he worked the scene in his head. He saw something else that puzzled him. The blood. There were smears and splashes, sprays from opened arteries that painted the corn and the slat fence…but throat wounds like that, even if the hearts of the men had stopped quickly, should have spilled a lake of blood. There wasn’t nearly enough of it. He stepped forward and took a pencil from his pocket, then knelt and probed the ground as close to Cowan’s shoulder as he could reach without risking the integrity of the crime scene. The pencil slipped easily down into the soft earth. Despite the chill, the rain of two nights ago still left the earth very muddy and yielding. He pushed the pencil down three inches and then withdrew it to examine it like a dipstick. There was a little blood and a lot of damp earth. Not enough blood, though, not enough by a long shot. It should have seeped deeper than this. He rose, looking around for other anomalies. That was the smart thing to do—to be a scientist, a criminalist, not a gawking bystander, and he could feel his detachment creeping back by slow degrees. He caught LaMastra’s eye and then jerked a chin toward the blood splashes. “You reading this?”

The younger man had seen Ferro probe the ground with his pencil and understood the implications. “The blood?”

“Uh huh.”

“Maybe the ME will figure it out.” He pointed with his Maglite to a spot in the clearing where bare earth showed through the mess. “You see that?” There were several footprints clearly pressed into the mud. He glanced at the shoes of both dead officers, then grunted. “Gotta be the perp’s.”

“Make sure the lab guys take castings. See how they match up against the ones we got from Ruger and Boyd.” Ferro rose, his knees creaking a little.

“Not going to be Ruger’s,” LaMastra said.

“No,” Ferro agreed.

“So…you make Boyd for this shit?”

Ferro gave a small half-shrug. “Who else? Macchio’s dead. Ruger’s sure as hell dead. Unless there was a fourth man in that car, the only suspect we have left is Boyd.”

“Yeah,” LaMastra said dubiously, “but I don’t like the feel of that, y’know?”

“No kidding, Vince.” With a sour-faced LaMastra in tow, Ferro walked the perimeter of the crime scene, noting everything, working the catalog into his brain, fighting the mixture of revulsion, hatred, and fear that was boiling in his gut. LaMastra tapped him on the shoulder, and jerked his head toward the far side of the clearing, where Chief Gus Bernhardt was standing next to a young man carrying an oversize medical bag. Gus waved him over and the two detectives circled back to them.

“Frank, this is Dr. Bob Colbert from Pinelands College,” Gus said, pointedly looking at Ferro rather than at what was behind him. “Bob teaches anatomy and forensics at the college and fills in for Saul Weinstock on ME work once in a while.” They were all wearing latex gloves, so they just nodded to one another as Gus introduced the detectives.

The doctor looked to be a young forty with black hair and a pronounced Gallic nose. “Saul couldn’t get out here,” he said in a thick northern Minnesota accent. “I’m, uh…kind of sorry I was available.”

“I heard that,” agreed LaMastra. “This is some of the sickest shit I ever saw.”

“I’ll pronounce them so you can get your lab team to work. I can only imagine how badly you want to get whoever did this.”

Ferro met his gaze. “You have no idea, doctor.” He ordered everyone out of the clearing except for the ME. The other cops moved back reluctantly, their faces white with shock and grim with frustrated anger. Chief Bernhardt turned a face to Ferro that was gray and sweaty. He tried to say something but it stuck in his throat. There were tears brimming in his eyes and he looked ten years old. Ferro just nodded to him and left him alone for the moment.

Ferro drifted along behind the ME, making the young doctor nervous by peering over his shoulder as he examined the wounds, palpated the flesh on the throats of each victim, and took temperature readings. As the doctor worked Ferro continued to read the scene himself, not liking what he was seeing for a hundred different reasons. “Well?” Ferro asked after the ME had finished his cursory examination.

“Well, I guess I have to officially say that they’re dead. They are. Boy are they.” The doctor’s face was as sweaty as Bernhardt’s.

“Cause of death?”

The doctor pursed his lips. “I’m going to let Saul Weinstock do the post, but I’ve lived in hunting country my whole life, and I’ve hunted bear in Potter County here in Pennsylvania and in Minnesota, where I grew up.”

Ferro frowned. “What are you saying? That a bear did this?”

“A bear? No, the bite radius doesn’t look big enough, but if I was to make a horseback guess here, Detective, I’d say that yeah, some kind of animal was involved.”

“You’re calling this an animal attack?”

“Detective, I’m not calling this anything but two dead guys. I mean, two dead officers. What I’m saying is that from a superficial analysis—lacking the specifics of a postmortem—the wounds appear to be bite marks, which suggests animal attack.”

Ferro stepped closer and dropped his voice. “Has Dr. Weinstock shared with you the nature of the wounds he identified on the victim found yesterday?”

“Tony Macchio? Yes. Among other things he was bitten.”

“It was Dr. Weinstock’s opinion that the bites were made by human teeth. He lifted impressions. No trace of animal attack, according to him.”

Colbert nodded. “Right, I know, but that’s not what I think we have here, and mind you, it is possible that an animal came upon the bodies after they’d already been killed, but what I see—what I think I see—are different kinds of bite marks. And before you ask, no, they are not human bites. No way. Human bites are nasty but the teeth are pretty blunt. The skin is bruised more because human teeth aren’t used to biting through living skin, there’s more blunt tearing and ripping than we have here. Plus, it’s generally easy to differentiate between human and animal bite patterns just from observation. Look at an apple that’s had a bite taken out of it, you can tell if it was a man, a dog, a cat, whatever.”

Ferro looked over at the clear impressions made by a set of shoes other than the pairs worn by the cops—marks that almost certainly had to have been left by the killer—and then looked down at the bodies. He looked around for animal prints and saw nothing. “So what kind of bite do we have here?”

Colbert mopped frigid sweat from his face. “I don’t know. Maybe a dog. It’s big enough for a dog, if we’re talking dog. A German shepherd or something bigger. Nothing smaller, that’s for sure.”

“And you’re sure these wounds aren’t postmortem. I mean…it seems pretty clear that there was a third man here, and there’s a good chance it’s one of the fugitives involved in the manhunt. Are you saying that this wasn’t a murder but that these two armed officers were instead attacked by an animal?”

“Detective, I’m not sure of anything. I said that this was a horseback guess—I don’t want you to hold me to it. Whatever left the bite marks could have come along postmortem, sure. The state forest is a stone’s throw away from here, something might have smelled blood and come prowling after your fugitive killed them. Bottom line is I don’t really know.”

Ferro nodded. “Fair enough. One more thing, doctor…what do you make of the amount of blood?”

Colbert looked at him for a moment, then looked around, opened his mouth to say something, then stopped and looked at the scene again. “Hunh,” he said.

“Tell me what you’re thinking.”

“Well,” Colbert said, nodding at the bodies as he stripped off his latex gloves, “there is certainly a great deal of visible blood spill and spatter…”

“But?”

“But given the severity of the injuries—to two grown men—the amount of visible blood is less than you would expect.” He cut a look at Ferro. “That’s what you’re referring to, isn’t it?”

Without directly answering, Ferro said, “I would appreciate it if you noted that in your preliminary report.” When the doctor nodded, Ferro added, “Dr. Colbert, I’d prefer you only spoke with Dr. Weinstock about this, and no one else. Are we clear on this?” His brown eyes bored into Colbert’s and the ME nodded, then moved away without another word.

As the doctor left LaMastra ushered the police photographer and the techs onto the scene. The photographer’s flash was popping wildly as Gus Bernhardt lumbered heavily up, his eyes now dry but still looking hurt. He had a cell phone in his hand and was flipping the lid closed as he approached.

“A word with you, Frank?” murmured Gus, touching his elbow and then guiding him to one side out of earshot. “Frank, we’re losing control of this situation.” Ferro gave him the kind of look a comment like that deserved, but Gus shook his head. “No, what I mean is that we really don’t have the manpower and resources to do this. Half the men we have on the force are local shopkeepers and gas station attendants dressed up like cops, and you know that as well as I do. They’re beat from working double shifts. These two poor sonsabitches—Cowan and Castle—they were local boys. No way we should have stuck them out here alone.”

“They were two well-armed and well-trained professional police officers,” Ferro said quietly.

“Yeah, okay. Maybe.” Gus wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He was a massive, sloppy fat man in a poorly tailored uniform that was all decked out with whipcord and silver buttons. No matter what the temperature his face was perpetually flushed red and shining with sweat, though at the moment he was even redder and wetter than usual. He looked like he wanted to say something, but he didn’t have the words to express what he was feeling. Ferro didn’t much like the chief, but he felt sorry for him.

“Has the mayor been informed about this?”

“No one seems to know where he is. We’ve tried everything, but his cell is turned off, he’s not in his office, and his wife said that Terry wasn’t home.”

“That seems odd, doesn’t it? Did his wife seem agitated? Was she worried?”

“Well, I didn’t think to ask,” Gus said, and saying it reinforced for both of them the difference between him and Ferro. The Philly cop would have asked, and would have done it as a matter of routine, and they both knew it. Gus changed the subject. “Could Ruger have done this before he set out for the hospital last night?”

LaMastra, who had just joined them, said, “No, sir. Jimmy Castle had called into your own office at 4:57 A.M. That’s what? Just shy of two hours ago. He’d called in a request for coffee and hot food because it was getting cold out here.”

Gus’s face was screwed up in puzzlement. “That don’t make sense. Ruger was dead by then. Macchio’s been dead for two days and Boyd was spotted in Black Marsh yesterday, apparently heading southeast. So…who’s that leave?”

“Has to be Boyd,” LaMastra said. “No one else it can be.”

“But why? From what you guys told me Ruger was the only killer. Boyd was a flunky. What’d you call him? A ‘travel agent’…he mostly just got real crooks out of the country and stuff like that. Why would a guy like that screw up his own getaway to come back here and kill two cops? It doesn’t make sense.”

“Christ, Chief, nothing about this case has made a damn bit of sense since Ruger and his buddies wrecked their car here,” LaMastra said.

“Wish I could say that I had a working theory about what’s going on,” Ferro said, “but I don’t. Perhaps the ME’s report will give us something we can use.”

A few yards behind them, hidden in the lee of an ambulance, was a small, balding man with wire-frame glasses and a handheld tape recorder. Willard Fowler Newton, who doubled on news and features for the tiny Black Marsh Sentinel, was staring at Ferro’s broad back, and like Chief Bernhardt and the coroner, he was sweating badly despite the cold. He had slipped through the police cordon in hopes of getting enough for a good news story for the morning papers, but he sure as hell didn’t expect to get this.