Dead Man's Song

Chapter 13

(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.

He was mortally afraid; and the thing that had really driven a wire right into Weinstock’s brain—and that had moved him from coffee to Scotch—was the lab report on the scrapings taken from beneath Nels Cowan’s fingernails. Apparently the officer had fought back pretty hard, and during that struggle he’d raked his fingernails across his attacker’s exposed skin. Weinstock had gotten good scrapings, more than enough for lab purposes. The report on them had come back with a handwritten note from Dr. Ito, the senior technician, paperclipped to it:

Saul

Not sure how these samples got contaminated, but the tissue scrapings you sent me are probably not from the crime scene, as you’ll see in my report. It’s that or someone’s playing a pretty sick joke. Personally I find this kind of joke fairly inappropriate considering the circumstances. When you find the prankster, kick his ass for me.

Don

There hadn’t been any prankster. Weinstock had taken those samples himself, and had personally dropped them off at Ito’s lab. He sipped his Scotch and picked up the lab report on the skin samples, reading and rereading the line that was already burned into his eyes. “The tissue samples are in an advanced state of necrosis consistent with decomposition of 48 to 72 hours duration.” Nineteen little words that had hammered a crack in Saul Weinstock’s version of the world. It made LaMastra’s comment about how Boyd looked on the video echo like thunder in his head.

Weinstock went back to the morgue and took a fresh set of samples from under each man’s fingernails, and walked them again to Ito’s office. Ito was out, but his assistant promised to have the new set of labs back tomorrow. Until then, Saul Weinstock could do nothing, so he walked thoughtfully back to his office. He closed the door and walked to the window. It was already dark and he felt a cold itch at the base of his spine.

“You’re being childish,” he told himself, saying it out loud in hopes it sounded better. It didn’t. He looked down at the parking lot, at the long shadows cast by cars and SUVs, calculating how long it would take him to get from the lighted entrance of the hospital to his car. How long it would take him to unlock the doors, get in, reset the locks, start up, and get the hell out of the shadowy lot. “Now that’s just silly,” he breathed. His workday was over, he should be heading home to Rachel and the kids.

Instead he drew the blinds, turned on the desk lamp as well to add more light to his already bright office, and then took the Scotch bottle from his desk drawer and poured two fingers into his coffee cup. He wondered how much Scotch he’d have to drink before he felt brave enough to simply walk out of the hospital and get into his car. He hated himself for his cowardice because none of what he was thinking about the physical evidence of the case could be right. He had to be reading it wrong. Too much work, not enough sleep, and the stress of so much violence in town. Just a stress thing, that’s all.

Weinstock sipped his Scotch and in his mind the seeds of some very dreadful thoughts were beginning to take root.

(5)

Through the window they could see the stars shimmering like embers. The fingers of an old tree scratched the attic shingles. Pale clouds drifted like faint ghosts across the sky, sometimes covering everything with darkness, sometimes invisible, always riding the easterly wind. It was October 5 and midnight was newly laid to rest. Everything looked and felt the way it should in October—blustery and mysterious. With the storm shutters thrown wide and the curtains pegged back, Crow and Val could see the night sky from her bed. She lay with her head on his chest, and he had his arms around her, and around them both was a thick patchwork quilt her mother had made years ago.

“You sure everything’s locked up?” she asked, and Crow nodded.

“Did I hear you on the phone when I was downstairs?”

“Uh-huh. I called Connie.”

“Ah. How’d that go? How is she?”

“She’s still mostly out of it, but at least she’s talking now. Just a bit. Girl stuff, mostly. And about Mark.” She sighed. “Mark’s still being so mean to her.”

“I know.”

“He’s not like Dad at all. I mean…there is a good heart there, but he’s always so afraid of things. Never takes risks, never looks outside the box. Right now he could make a hero out of himself if he just stopped trying to lay blame on Connie. Or on himself. It solves nothing. It’s stupid for him to feel bad because he couldn’t stop Ruger.”

She snuggled against him. “I wonder what makes a man like Ruger tick. What makes him so…evil.”

Crow just shook his head, not wanting to share his thoughts. Ubel Griswold sends his regards. He hadn’t told Val about that yet—neither those words nor the change he had seen come over Ruger at the hospital—and wasn’t sure he ever would. Those red eyes. Those teeth. If Val hadn’t found Shank’s pistol—if they both hadn’t managed to empty two guns into Ruger—would that change have continued? Would Ruger have become the same kind of monster as Griswold? He didn’t think so—and what he had seen in the hospital argued against it—but if not the same kind of thing, then what was Ruger becoming? What would he have become if they hadn’t killed him? Crow thought he knew; there was a word for it, but he resisted any attempt by his conscious mind to acknowledge that word. He shoved it away, terrified of its implications.

“Baby,” he said gently, “I don’t know about you, but this is not a conversation I want to have before going to bed.”

She smiled, kissing him again. “Yes, doctor.”

Outside the wind was blowing the trees and the bushes and whistling through the ironwork of the weathervane.

Twice that night Crow tried to initiate lovemaking with her, and twice he failed. Both times it started well, with tenderness and slowness and care, not just for their mutual injuries, but for the hurts inside; but each time as Crow had moved to be on top of her, as he nestled down between her warm, soft thighs, for just a moment Crow’s face had been replaced in Val’s mind by the grinning face of Karl Ruger. The first time she had yelped—nearly a scream—and Crow had moved off her, confused and hurt, instantly embarrassed by his nakedness, wondering what he had done wrong, if he had moved the wrong way. It had taken a long time for her to articulate enough of what she was feeling for him to get it, and the process had to work its way through the thicket of insecurity and rejection that such a reaction had inspired in him.

The second time was over an hour later, after they had talked about it and then lapsed into quiet they began light touching, gentle kissing, and ultimately circled back to the same moment. She didn’t yelp this time; she didn’t scream—instead Val’s entire body went tight and rigid and the sweet kisses turned to sourness on her lips. Crow’s caresses changed from sensual to harsh. It was as if she could actually feel the calluses of Ruger’s brutal hands on her thighs and breasts, and Crow could see the revulsion ripple in waves across her face.

There were a number of ways Crow could have handled it. Frustration, cajoling, anger, peevishness, but Crow understood what it felt like to be invaded by darkness, to be polluted by it. The abuse he had suffered from his own father had been comprehensive. To have done anything forceful or insistent at that moment would have been the same as doing actual harm, so instead Crow settled himself gingerly down onto his back, curled his arm around her with just the barest hint of pressure. Not a trap, but an open door. He said nothing, did nothing. When she finally settled against him, stiff as wood, he kissed her hair and stroked her arm, letting stillness settle over them. For a long time Val’s muscles were as unyielding as rock, her lips compressed in a tight line against her teeth. One of the candles guttered out and Crow made no move to relight it. When she still held rigid, he said, very softly, “It’s okay. It’s too soon.”

She could not even speak past the stricture in her throat and Crow didn’t try to urge her because he knew that to try would be to force her to rasp out something harsh. Silence was good. After a while Crow leaned his head against hers, smelling perfume and shampoo and wood smoke in her hair. Long minutes later Val found his hand in the dark and closed her fingers around it with all her strength. “I’m sorry!” she whispered desperately.

“No,” he murmured, “no, sweetheart…there’s nothing for you to ever be sorry about. This is all his fault.” He couldn’t say Ruger’s name in that sacred space. “Let’s just lie here and listen to the wind over the corn. Hear it? It sounds like the ocean.”

He held her close, not daring to make a single move except to kiss her hair and hold her hand. It took her hours to relax, to completely settle back against him. They spoke little, and only at first; after a while it was the silence between them and the wind over the stiff corn that wrapped her fears back in their box and shoved them out of sight. In the end, somewhere well after midnight, it was she who rekindled it between them. The last candle had guttered out and he was on the soft edge of sleep when her fingers relaxed their hold on his. They drifted across to his chest and he held his breath for a moment as she pressed her hand flat as if trying to feel his heartbeat through her palm. Then he heard her release a pent-up breath, which at first he thought was another sigh of sadness and frustration, then she shifted and turned more toward him in the dark, bending to kiss him. First his chest, right over his heart, then in a slow line up his chest to his throat and over his chin to his mouth. The kiss was so soft that it was like a warm vapor on his lips.

Crow did not move. He sensed that if he moved, if he did anything to exert any control over the moment, even something as simple as acknowledging it with words or a murmur, she would flee back down into her personal darkness. All he did was to respond to her kisses, letting her set the level of intensity, to decide how much or how little they kissed. After a long time she propped herself on her good hand and swung one thigh over him; he still did not move to help her. She reached down and took him in her hands and guided his hardness into her and she was wet and hot—feverishly hot—and as she sat down on him he filled her. He heard her hiss but he made no sound. Not even when a single scalding tear dropped from her cheek and burned onto his chest.

Her thighs hurt him, brushing the bandages over his injuries, but he didn’t care, didn’t dare let it show, forced himself not to flinch, and accepted what was happening with careful joy. His heart was hammering so forcefully that he thought she must hear it. Val sat astride him, her palms flat on his hard stomach, and for a while she was motionless, though he could feel her trembling; then slowly, tentatively, she began moving her hips. He wanted to cry out, to express what he was feeling, but he forced himself to be silent, to merely accept this gift, this sharing, knowing how difficult it was for her to open herself in all these different ways. She did not come quickly, and almost didn’t come at all. Crow’s mind was in such a different frame than simple physical need that he also kept on this side of that precipice for longer than he ever had before with her. Then with a gasp and a small cry the orgasm blossomed inside her like a white starburst; it flooded him with heat and need and he came with her, and at that moment he, too, cried out.

Val collapsed down on him, weeping, kissing him with a hundred quick kisses. Crow wrapped his arms around her to hold her close, and the night and the darkness went away.