Dead Man's Song

Chapter 12

(1)

The shades were up and the curtains pulled back to allow as much morning light as possible to wash over them. Both of them were propped up on pillows with coffee cups steaming on the bedside tables. Crow had his arm around Val and she was resting the unbruised side of her face against his chest. They had learned the routines of cuddling while avoiding bruises and stitches and sore places. Across the room the TV was on with the sound muted as a petite blond read the weather on Channel 6. Sarah had brought them coffee a few minutes ago, told them Terry was still out at the hospital, and then left them to deal with the day that lay ahead of them.

“You can still back out,” Crow said softly, stroking Val’s shoulder. “Terry and Sarah would let us stay here. Or we could just shack up at my place. The cats would love to have you visit.”

“No,” she said firmly, then smiled a bit. “Thanks, honey, but…no.”

Crow let it go. Last night, as they were climbing into bed, Val had told him that she wanted to go home, but Crow had wondered what kind of ghosts would be there. Would they be able to feel Ruger’s toxicity? Certainly they would feel the utter loss of the presence of Henry Guthrie. If it was up to Crow, he would have her sell the damn place and they could buy a town house somewhere on Corn Hill, but Val wouldn’t even listen to that kind of talk. Guthries had always lived there and by God Guthries always would. “I won’t be chased out of my own house,” she said. “I won’t be chased out of my own life. Besides, Ruger’s already taken enough away from me.”

He kissed her hair as they sat in the window bay watching geese mill around in the yard.

Val said, “Crow?”

“Yeah, baby?”

“About our getting married?” He tensed. “Are you sure?”

Crow laughed. “No, it was just a whim.”

She smacked his chest lightly. “You know what I mean.”

“I’m not sure I do,” he admitted.

“When you proposed at the hospital…you knew I needed something real to anchor myself to. It was so wonderful, so sweet of you, but I don’t want to think that you did it just to make me feel better. Like some kind of distraction therapy.”

He laughed again, harder. “Yeah, you found me out. You see, I found it pretty useful carrying around a two-carat Asscher-cut engagement ring just in case some random woman needs a little emotional pick-me-up. It’s worked dozens of times.”

Val raised her head and studied him with her dark blue eyes. “I’m not joking, Crow.”

His eyes still twinkled with humor. “You are possibly the dumbest smart woman in the world if you don’t know how much I love you. I love you more than anything else in the universe, Valerie Guthrie, and I’ve been planning to pop the ol’question for some time now but couldn’t find just the right moment. Though in retrospect proposing while I was whacked out on morphine may be a questionable interpretation of ‘the right moment,’ it seemed to work out okay.”

Val kissed him, sweetly and softly, careful of the stitches in his lips and mouth. “My God! It was so much the right time. But tell me—tell me right now, right here, looking me in the eyes—are you sure?”

Crow pulled her closer and kissed her lips and her eyes and buried his face in the fragrant softness of the side of her throat. “My sweet love, I am more sure of that than anything else in my life. I have to be with you, now and forever. I love so much that if I even think about living a second without you I think I’d go nuts. I’m babbling, I know…but I don’t know how else to say it. I want to be with you, I want to marry you, and I want to have everything with you. Life, house, two-point-five kids, dog, station wagon, PTA, crab-grass, and middle-age spread—the whole enchilada.” Her eyes closed and a single tear leaked out of her bruised eye. He didn’t see it, but when it fell on his chest, he pushed her gently back so that he could see her face. “Hey…are you crying?”

“Of course I’m crying, you idiot.”

“Val, I—”

“Crow…I have to tell you something and if you want to take back your ring, if you want to back off, I will understand, but I have to tell you.”

Crow’s heart turned to a block of ice. “You are scaring the shit out of me here.”

“God, I hope not.” Her face was serious, but there was a bright light there, sparkling in her eyes like spring sunlight on late winter snow.

“Then tell me,” he said, and braced himself.

“Crow…my love…I’m pregnant.”

Crow could actually feel his mouth drop open like a trap-door. If he was still breathing, he wasn’t aware of it, though he knew that his heart was still beating—it was right there in his throat. He saw the look of desperate hopefulness in her eyes begin to change into a look of broken-hearted fear…and he wanted to say something smart, something pithy.

Instead he just yelled. A great big whooping bellow of pure joy.

Val felt herself yanked forward and Crow crushed her to his chest. They both howled in pain and then they both laughed, and a moment later they were both crying and kissing each other. Crow kept saying: “Babybabybabybaby…” but Val didn’t know if he was using an endearment for her or just trying out the new implications of the word. Either way, she felt the knot that had been wrapped around her heart split apart and her whole chest seemed to be filled with warm helium. She wanted to leap into the air with him, and she was sure that they would both float.

Feet pounded on the steps and Val turned her head—which made Crow miss her face and land a big noisy kiss on her ear, which hurt, but who cared?—and the door burst open and Sarah Wolfe was there, looking shocked and desperate. “Oh my God,” Sarah yelled, fear in her eyes, “what’s going on, who’s hurt, did you fall…?”

Val wrapped her arms around Crow’s neck and pulled his face to her chest and spoke over his tousled hair, pitching her voice high over Crow’s constant Yee-haws. “We’re having a baby!”

Sarah stopped, mouth in a perfect O, her inability to process this registering on her face. “A…baby?” And then she was hugging them both.

(2)

Frank Ferro sat at the head of the conference table with Vince LaMastra to his right. At the far end sat Terry Wolfe and to his left was Gus Bernhardt. Filling out the rest of the big oak town council table were two FBI agents—Agent Henckhauser and Special Agent in Charge Spinlicker, from the Philadelphia Field Office—and three state troopers—Sutter, Wimmer, and Yablonski. Everyone had coffee cups in front of them except SAC Spinlicker, who had a Diet Pepsi in a can. This was the first meeting with the FBI and was intended as a preliminary assessment to see if the Bureau felt it was necessary and appropriate to take over the case. The room looked like what it now was: a war room. Maps of Pine Deep were tacked to the walls, notes and photos were taped haphazardly on every available surface, dry-erase boards stood on easels, and reams of computer printouts were stacked on the floor.

The SAC leaned forward and steepled his fingers, fixing Ferro with a steely and openly accusatory look. “You checked everywhere?”

Ferro’s reaction was to lean back in his chair and smile at Spinlicker. “Well, Agent Spinlicker, clearly if we had searched everywhere we’d have found him.”

“You implied—”

“What I said was that one hundred and sixty-three men, six teams of dogs, and two spotter airplanes have spent the last several days combing every inch of the Guthrie farm and much of the surrounding woods. We’ve broadened the search to include ninety other farms, the grounds of the Haunted Hayride, the campus of Pinelands College, a large portion of Pinelands State Forest, and the canals. My assessment, Agent Spinlicker, is that Kenneth Boyd is not in any of the areas we’re searched.”

“And found jack shit,” LaMastra summed up.

Spinlicker shared a glance with his partner, and smiled ever so faintly. To Ferro he said, “And Kenneth Boyd has managed to elude all of your efforts.” There was just the slightest emphasis on the word “your.”

In the stiff silence that followed Bernhardt cleared his throat. “In all fairness, sir, the area they searched is pretty dense.”

“It also comprises less than an eighth of the entire borough,” said Trooper Yablonski. “The village itself may be small, but the borough of Pine Deep is pretty damn big. There are a lot of places for one man to hide.”

The SAC let silence be his comment on that, and on the handling of the operation as a whole. He picked up a folder from the table, opened it, and riffled through the papers, occasionally making a small and dismissive “hmm” sound. “Quite frankly, Sergeant Ferro, it makes me wonder how well you—”

Then there was a sound like a gunshot and everyone jumped in their seats and spun toward Terry, who had just slammed his palm down hard and flat against the table. “Agent Spinlicker,” he snapped, “if you think there is a problem in the way things have been handled then come out and say it.” He glared at the SAC and at that moment Terry Wolfe seemed to fill the room.

Spinlicker hedged. “I didn’t say that, sir.”

“I know. You’re pussyfooting around it. If you have a problem with the way Sergeant Ferro’s handled things come out and say it right now.”

The air between them crackled like the charge between two poles. Spinlicker said, “No, sir.”

Terry’s face remained hard as a fist. “Then sit there and shut the fuck up.”

Henckhauser gasped audibly and the Staties exchanged startled looks. Gus was shocked at the language he was hearing from Terry; Ferro was staring at the mayor, and LaMastra was grinning. Terry saw the smile and wheeled on him. “And you can wipe that shit-eating grin off your face, Detective. I’m not saying that you guys have done such a great job either.”

That wiped LaMastra’s face clean.

Addressing the whole table, Terry said, “This is my town, gentlemen, but this is not my mess. It’s yours. Now clean it up!” Again his palm came down on the table hard enough to make everyone jump. “One of my closest friends is dead. My best friend just got out of the hospital along with his fiancée, whom I’ve known since kindergarten. One of my cops is dead, and so is an officer loaned to me from a neighboring town. I have a hospital worker in intensive care with a split skull, a woman who was nearly raped, her husband who had his face kicked in, shots fired in my hospital, two other cops down with injuries, and now a body stolen from the morgue. Every reporter in the world is here and according to the news stories I’m starting to see, this town—my town—is becoming a joke in terms of safety. I heard this town mentioned on the Daily Show last night, and on Leno. As a goddamn punchline. So, when I tell you that I am one hundred percent fed up with this bullshit you had best believe I’m serious. About the last thing I want to hear or see is you lot getting into a jurisdictional pissing contest. Am I getting through to you on this?”

“Loud and clear, sir,” Ferro said. Spinlicker and the others just nodded. Gus was staring at Terry with a look of fascinated awe.

“Then let me make something else clear. October is the biggest income month for this town. We’re already reeling from the crop blight and a lot of local farmers are likely to lose their farms. If you—” he fished for an appropriately savage word but only came up with an acid-laced version of “officers of the law, working together, cannot find one man—one injured man, mind you—then we are likely to lose the entire tourist season. That means Pine Deep is going to go into the tank.” He leaned forward, his blues eyes as hard as gunmetal. “If, on the other hand, you can manage to find this guy, then there is still a chance we can pull off enough of a season to stay afloat. That, gentlemen, is a very real concern and I want to know right now that this is going to happen.” He made eye contact, brief but penetrating, with each man at the table, one after the other. “Make me believe that this is going to happen.”

(3)

Ferro and LaMastra lingered with Gus after Terry and the others left. They stood at a window that looked down at the parking lot, watching SAC Spinlicker and Agent Henckhauser get into their car. Even through the soundproof glass the watching officers could feel the vibration as the FBI agents slammed their doors. Their car laid an eight-foot patch of burned rubber across the asphalt.

“So,” Gus said dryly, “I guess we won’t be sharing the case with the feds.”

“So it seems,” Ferro agreed. His face still wore its funeral director moroseness, but there was a drop of humor in his voice. “Nice that they said they would keep in touch and advise. Very helpful of them.”

“Funny thing is,” LaMastra said, “that if you told me that a small-town mayor could bitch-slap a couple of feds like that I’d have called you a liar.” Ferro just nodded at that.

“So we’re on our own again,” Gus said.

“Once this thing starts winding down,” LaMastra said, “I expect we’ll see those two again. Right around the time when someone gets to take credit.”

“Mmm-hm,” Ferro said, smiling faintly.

(4)

After a long and rather giggly breakfast with Sarah and Val, Crow showered and dressed and began packing the few belongings he’d brought from the hospital. In ten minutes Sarah was going to drive them out to the farm and he knew that would pretty much be the end of the incredible feeling of joy that was still bubbling inside of him.

A baby. His baby. His and Val’s, which was even better. Son of Crow—he’d already decided that it was going to be a boy for no reason more mature than hoping that the kid would like science fiction, blues, jujutsu, and gory horror flicks. He couldn’t quite see “Daughter of Val” grooving on any Rob Zombie films side-by-side with ol’ dad. On the other hand, Daughter of Val would probably be smarter and better looking than Son of Crow, so there was that. On the other other hand, the kid could be Grandson of Henry, in which case he’d be smart, good-looking, tough as nails, and a lot taller than Son of Crow.

Crow…my love…I’m going to have a baby. If there had ever been a more beautiful set of—and here Crow had to count on his fingers—nine words, he had never heard them and could not imagine them. Son of Crow. Sounded great. Very heroic, very comic book superhero. “Wait till I tell…everyone!” he said aloud. As he packed he started singing, “I am a daddy,” to the tune of “I’m in the Money.”

Crow sat down on the edge of the bed and pulled his cell phone out. There were only two bars so he got up and moved around the room until he got four of them. Getting a clear cell phone signal in Pine Deep was always a crapshoot. He had to sit in the window seat and wedge his shoulder into the corner to get enough bars to make his calls.

The first person he called was Terry Wolfe. Terry answered on the second ring with a terse, “Go.”

“Terry…it’s me.”

“Crow? What’s up, everything okay there?”

“Yeah, man. You in the middle of something?”

“Not really. I just wrapped up a meeting with the cops.”

“Are they anywhere with this?”

“No,” Terry said, and his voice sounded like all the weariness in the world. “And no one has floated a useful theory as to why Boyd would risk breaking into the morgue just to steal Ruger’s corpse.”

“Sounds like Boyd is off the rails,” Crow offered. “Maybe there’s no one in the driver’s seat anymore.”

“Who knows. There’s another wrinkle in this, too.”

“Jeez, Wolfman, I’m not sure how many more wrinkles this town can take.”

“Now you’re singing my song. Keep this between us, okay?”

“Lips are sealed, bro.”

“We think Boyd has at least one more accomplice.” Terry told him about the hospital door being opened and the alarm disabled. “He had to have inside help.”

Crow chewed on that for a minute. “I find that hard to buy. If there was an inside man, why didn’t he just dump Ruger onto a gurney and wheel his ugly ass to the back door? That way Boyd would never have been spotted at all.”

“Saul Weinstock raised the same concern, but Ferro said that the inside man may have known about the security camera. The hallway surveillance camera has been broken since the middle of September, so anyone who went into the hall to unlock the doors would not have been spotted. Only if he’d actually entered the morgue would the tape have picked him up.”

“Okay…I can see that, but that means that this inside guy had to know all of this. The broken camera, the morgue camera, everything, and he’d need access to the keys.”

“Right. They checked out everyone who was on duty last night and got nowhere. Just dead ends and no leads.”

“This doesn’t make me feel too good, Terry.”

“Me, neither, but at least you’re out of it.”

“And I’m happy as hell about that, too. So’s Val.” Then he slapped his forehead—and winced all the way down to his toes. “Geez, Terry, I am the world’s biggest idiot.”

“Not a news flash there.”

“No, I mean I forgot to tell you why I called.”

“If this is more bad news I’m going to go lay down in traffic.”

“Terry…Val and I are going to have a baby!”

There was a silence followed by a sound that Crow was absolutely sure was a sob. Just the one, and then more silence. Finally, in a strange, choked whisper Terry said, “Thank God.” And then without warning he hung up.

Crow looked at the phone in his palm. That was certainly not the kind of answer he expected to get. “Weird,” he said, and then punched in a new number.

(5)

Saul Weinstock stood in the small morgue office, watching the cleaning staff put the finishing touches on the room. The forensics teams had finally left and the last streamers of crime scene tape had been torn down and stuffed into trash cans. Ferro had given him an all clear to reopen for business, and with three autopsies still pending, it was going to be a long day. All of this should have been done ages ago, and Weinstock didn’t like how much the delay made him look like the top idiot at Dumbass Rural Hospital. His cell phone rang; he saw it was Crow and answered, “Hey, buddy.”

“You sound chipper,” Crow said,

“I’m not, but thanks for your lack of perception,” Weinstock said with a grin. “How are you doing? How’s Val?”

“That’s what I was calling about,” Crow said and went into a two-minute rant about impending fatherhood. By the time he reached the point where he was planning to coach Little League, Weinstock was laughing.

“I know already, you chucklehead. Oh, don’t act so surprised—she’s my patient, I’m her doctor, remember? Confidences become fast and loose in such circumstances. You don’t want to know the details—they’re so sordid.”

“How long have you known?”

Weinstock paused a bit before answering that one. “Since, um, last Saturday. When you guys were brought in after all that happened. She asked me not to say anything until she had a chance to tell you first, for reasons that should be obvious even to someone of limited intelligence, such as yourself.”

“Thanks, bro.”

“Got your back, man. In any case, when you guys were brought in Val told me that she’d taken an EPT that morning and came up positive. She said that she was going to tell you that night, but then Ruger showed up and everything went to hell in a handbasket. Now that she has, and having heard your plans to be the most annoying parent in history, can I assume that you’re happy about this? You didn’t ask for your ring back, did you?”

“Geez, Saul, what kind of a dork do you think I am?”

“Should I answer that or would you prefer a long awkward pause?”

“Bite me.”

“Anyway…I do want to congratulate you, Crow, and to tell you, all kidding aside, how happy I am for you and Val. With all the crap that’s been happening around here it’s sure as hell nice to have something really good happen. Mazel tov!”

“Thanks, and corny as it sounds, it’s like a fresh start. Shame Henry’s not here to see his grandkid. Or his daughter get married.”

Weinstock moved across the room to allow the cleaners to mop where he was standing, and he lowered his voice to a confidential whisper. “Remember yesterday when I said that I wanted to keep Mark and Connie here for a bit longer? Well, between you and me, I think Connie is in some deep shit. This morning I talked with the staff psychologist and the news just isn’t encouraging. Long story short, Connie is exhibiting all of the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder consistent with having been the victim of a completed rape, which we both know was not the case. If I were a superstitious man I’d say that Ruger put some kind of hex on her, but since I’m not a superstitious man, I’m going on the assumption that Connie may have had some preexisting psychological problems. Point is, she’s not responding to the treatments—and even this short-term there’s always some kind of forward movement, at least to the professional eye, but my people say no—and the meds we’re giving her to ease her stress are just making her retreat into sleep. She goes hours and hours without talking, and then she’ll break down into hysterical tears for no visible reason.”

“I tried calling Mark again today. He blew me off like he’s been doing.”

“He’s been a real bear to the nursing staff, too. Bites the head off anyone who comes in the room. He had one nurse in tears and another who wanted to strap him to a wheelchair and shove him down the fire stairs. I can hold on to them maybe—and I mean maybe—another couple of days and then I have to kick them both out of here.” He considered. “Or…I think I’ll decide that I don’t like the way the reseating of his teeth is going. I mean he does have the blue liptinting you can expect from ecchimosis, so I guess I can use that to keep him in a little longer, at least until we take the gum sutures out.”

“That’s a hell of a risk, Saul. I didn’t know you liked Connie and Mark that much.”

“I don’t. This is for Henry. For Val, too, I guess.”

“You’re the best, Saul.”

“Yeah, well don’t spread it around. Anyway, go celebrate being a responsible adult with at least an adequate sperm count. Congrats and give Val my love.” Crow clicked off and Weinstock closed his phone and dropped it in his lab coat.

The cleaners finished, packed up their mops and spray bottles, and left, both of them giving the room a spooked glance, their eyes darting toward the polished steel doors behind which lay three corpses. No—four bodies, because what was left of Tony Macchio was still behind Door #2. Three murder victims and one murderer who had been slaughtered by the Cape May Killer. He couldn’t blame the cleaners for being spooked, even with the lights on and the cold-room doors firmly shut, and he knew that it wasn’t just the fact that it was the morgue that was giving them the jitters—it was the fact that someone had broken in and stolen—actually stolen—a dead body. It was all very creepy, and Weinstock had to agree with their reactions. This whole thing was giving him an increasingly bad feeling. Not just the grief over Henry’s death and the deaths of the two cops, and not just the proprietary sense of violation he had about the violence and theft here in his hospital. It was just a general case of the heebie-jeebies. One of Crow’s words, and nothing Weinstock could think of described more aptly what he was feeling.

A really big case of the heebie-jeebies.

(6)

Newton came back to his desk with another cup of coffee, sat down, set the cup on a little electric hotplate, and frowned at the screen. All afternoon he had been busy making notes for his feature article, planning his research, surfing the Net to see what data were available, checking the Sentinel’s microfilm records of thirty years ago, and outlining his plan of attack. Most of the town’s folklore was easy enough to find—there were literally thousands of articles and over a dozen books written about Pine Deep, recent and long past. What was missing from all of this, however, were detailed and accurate records of the Pine Deep Massacre of 1976. That it had happened was certain, because there were secondary references to it, and he was able to cobble together a list of the victims by burrowing through public death notices, both in the paper’s records and at Pine Deep’s Town Hall. But there was no reliable account of the actual events, and none of the issues of the Black Marsh Sentinel for that year had been committed to microfilm. He found that really odd, since there were microfilm records of papers from 1960 through 1975; and from 1977 to 1998, when the paper began storing issues on disk and in Web site archives. But 1976 was missing. The whole calendar year.

Newton called one of his friends at the Pine Deep Evening Standard and Times, which was owned by a chain that published papers in most of Bucks County’s towns. “Toby?”

“Hey, my man Newt. They offer you the anchor of the CNN Evening Report yet?” Toby Gomm edited the op-ed page and was usually good for an info swap.

“Not yet. I’m holding out for Nightline. Hey, Toby, listen, Dick’s got me doing a feature piece on P.D.’s haunted history, you know the kind of thing.”

“Yeah, we’ve done a million of them. Bo-o-o-oring.”

“No kidding. Look, I wanted to go a little further, maybe flesh out the backstory by including some stuff from the Massacre of Seventy-six. You got anything on that?”

“Before my time, but I heard about it. Haven’t run anything on it lately, for the obvious reasons.”

Bad for tourism, Newton thought, but asked, “You got anything in the archives from September, October of that year?”

He expected Toby to have to look into it, but he said, “Nope.”

“Nothing? You mean you didn’t cover it?”

“Nope, I mean that our microfilm records from the mid-seventies through about eighty-two got melted in a fire. Some asshole maintenance guy tossed a lit cigarette into a trash can and burned half the records room down. You have to remember that—it was when we moved to the new building. Late 1990.”

“No, I was still in college.”

“Didn’t miss much. Trash fire is no news even when it’s old news that’s on fire. No biggie, though, we’re a corporate rag…we leave hardcore journalism to our colleagues in Black Marsh.”

“Very funny.”

“On the other hand…” Toby said. “I do know a guy who knows everything about what went on there. His family got caught up in it. Brother even got killed.”

“Are you talking about Malcolm Crow? The guy who shot Ruger?”

“Yep. He’s always being used as a source for haunted history stories.”

“I know. Dick told me that his family was involved, but I just haven’t seen anything about the Massacre that he’s quoted in.”

“You won’t, either, but I talked about it once with him. Kind of. Was back when he was on the cops, and he was walking a line between being a real hotshot cop and a total screwup.”

“Oh?”

“He drank,” Toby said in a way that said it all. “He was at a bar once when I was there waiting for a friend. Crow was there, totally bug-eyed. This was just about the time that Terry Wolfe was about to open the Hayride. Anyway, because of the Hayride and the tourist bucks that it would draw, the haunted history of the town came up and Crow started holding court, telling these crazy stories about ghosts and stuff. Most of the folks in the bar that night were regulars and had heard this shit and they started slipping off to take a leak but never came back, but I kind of felt sorry for the guy and hung out with him for a bit. Somewhere around the fifth or sixth round of boilermakers, Crow leans over to me and says, ‘But none of that shit is the real shit, you know?’ I didn’t know, and I asked him, and he told me some of what had happened back in seventy-six. And let me tell you—it was the shit. Total bullshit. I mean, it was clear that he believed what he was saying, but I thought it was the drink talking and pretty much let it go in one ear and out the other.”

“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.