Flesh

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

“How you doing, fella?”

“Just fine,” Jake said into the phone. He didn’t feel fine at all, he felt depressed. As soon as he hung up, he would be taking Kimmy back to her mother. “Did Steve get in?”

“Sure did. He wants to talk to you. Hold on a sec.”

Moments later, Steve Applegate came over the line. “Jake? I finished up on Smeltzer. I want you to get over here.”

“Find something interesting?”

“Interesting? Yes, I’d say interesting. How soon can you be here?”

“Fifteen, twenty minutes.”

“Higgins should be in on this.”

The Chief? “What is it?”

“Whetted your curiosity, have I? Well, then you’d better get moving. I’ll phone Higgins.” Without another word, he hung up.

Jake put down the phone.

Kimmy was huddled in a corner of the sofa, watching television. The Three Stooges. Curly saluted his nose to block a two-fingered eye jab from Moe, then went “Nyarnyar-nyar!”

“Hon,” Jake said, “we’d better hit the road.”

“Do we have to?”

“You giving me back talk?” he snapped. “Huh?” He rushed over to Kimmy. Eyes wide, she clamped her arms to her sides. Jake pushed his fingers under them, digging into her ribs. She laughed and writhed. “I’ll teach you! Sass me, will you?” Rolling on her back, she kicked out at him. The sole of her shoe pounded his thigh. “Owww!” Clutching his leg, he staggered backward and fell to the floor.

Kimmy grinned down at him from the sofa. “That’s what you get,” she said, “when you mess with She-Ra.”

“Jeez, I guess so. You discombobulated me.”

She waved a fist at him. “Want some more?”

“No, please.” Jake stood up. “Anyway, we really do have to go.”

The joy went out of her face. “Do we have to?”

“I’m afraid so, honey. Mommy’s expecting you, and besides, I have to go to work.”

“I’ll go to work with you, okay?”

“I don’t think so.”

“I won’t make the siren go,” she assured him, looking contrite and hopeful. “Really I won’t. Can’t I go with you?”

“I’m sorry, honey. Not today. Besides, I won’t be using the siren car.”

“I want to go with you, anyway.”

“You wouldn’t want to go where I’m going. I have to see a guy who’s toes up.”

“Oh, yuck. Really?”

“Yep.”

She made the kind of face she might have made, Jake thought, if somebody stuck a plate of beets under her nose. “Well, don’t touch him,” she advised.

Stopping behind BB’s Toy, Jake got out and opened the passenger door for Kimmy. She watched him with somber eyes. When the safety harness was unsnapped, she didn’t throw the straps off her shoulders in a hurry to climb out. She just sat there.

“Let’s see a smile,” Jake said. “Come on, it’s Mommy’s birthday. She’ll want to see a smile on that mug of yours.”

“I don’t feel good.”

“Are you sick?”

“I am not happy.”

“Why not?”

“You’re making me go away.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No, you’re not.”

Jake lifted her out of the car seat. She wrapped her arms and legs around him. “You’ll have a good time today,” he said as he carried her toward the house.

“No, I won’t.”

“And I’ll be back on Friday and we’ll have two whole days together like we’re supposed to.”

Kimmy squeezed herself more tightly against him. He could feel her begin to shake, and he knew that she was crying. She didn’t bawl; she cried softly, her breath making quiet snagging sounds close to his ear.

“Aw, honey,” he whispered. And struggled not to cry, himself.

Jake swung his car into the lot beside the Applegate Mortuary. The town of Clinton wasn’t large enough to justify a city morgue, but Steve, whose brother took care of the funeral parlor side of the business, had spent twelve years as a forensic pathologist with the Office of the Medical Examiner in Los Angeles—resigned in a huff after Thomas Nogushi got canned—and had come back here to practice in his hometown.

Clinton didn’t do a booming business in autopsies, but there were evidently enough to keep Steve happy. An autopsy was required for everyone who died as the apparent result of an accident, suicide, or homicide, under any kind of circumstances in which the death was not pretty much expected by the deceased’s physician. An autopsy was also required for every corpse headed for the crematory instead of the grave. With all that, even a small, peaceful town like Clinton provided quite a few opportunities for Steve to practice his art.

Three new customers Thursday alone, Jake thought as he climbed from his car. Steve must think he’s back in LA.

Jake entered through a rear door that opened into Betty’s office. She looked away from her typing, smiled when she saw him, and swiveled her chair around. “Been a while, Jake.” Tipping back her chair, she folded her hands behind her head—a posture that seemed designed to draw Jake’s attention to her breasts. Betty’s job didn’t require her to face the public, so she was allowed to dress as she pleased. She was wearing a T-shirt with the slogan, “Make My Day.” It clung nicely to her full breasts. Her nipples pointed at Jake through the fabric.

“Looking good,” he said.

“Natch.” She stared at his groin. He didn’t look, himself, but he could feel a warm swelling down there.

“Well,” he said, “Steve’s waiting for me.”

“No hot hurry. Higgins isn’t here yet.” She looked up at his face. Her eyes widened a bit. “So what’s the story?”

“What story?”

“Got a new friend?”

Jake shook his head.

“Taken a vow of celibacy?”

“Just busy, that’s all.”

A smile tilted her mouth. “Well, if you ever happen to get unbusy, I just bought a rubber sheet for my bed and I’ve got a great big bottle of slippy-slidy oil we can rub all over each other. You oughta just see how it looks on me in candlelight.”

Jake could imagine. He pursed his dry lips and blew through them. “I’ll keep it in mind,” he said.

“Just in case you find some free time on your hands.”

“Yeah.”

She nodded. Again, her gaze lowered to his crotch. “I’d be glad to take care of that for you right now, if you’d like. Plenty of empty rooms around here. How about it?”

“You’re kidding.” He knew she wasn’t. “We’re in a morgue,” he reminded her.

“Just the place for taking care of stiffs, and I’m looking at one.” She rolled back her chair and stood up. She was wearing a short, black leather skirt. Her bare legs were slender and lightly tanned.

“This is crazy,” Jake muttered. He felt shaky inside. Was he really going along with this?

Then the rear door opened and in stepped Barney Higgins, Chief of the Clinton Police Department. Betty rolled her eyes upward. She turned to Higgins. “Hi-ya, Barn.”

“Hey, Betts.” The small, wiry man winked and snicked his tongue. “What’s that y’ got in yer shirt?”

“Your guess is good as mine, Barn.”

“Where’d you pick ’em up? I’d like to order a set for the wife.” He laughed and slapped Jake’s shoulder. “Let’s get a move on, I got a hot poker game back at the house.” He turned to Betty. “Where’s the Apple, down in his butcher shop?”

“B-1,” she said. “Have fun, boys.”

Leaving her office through a side door, they started down a flight of stairs toward the basement. “You get a good look at that gal?” Barney asked.

“Sure did.”

“Prime. Ooo! How’d y’like playing some hide-the-salami with a prime thing like that? Yeah!”

“She’s a knockout, all right.”

At the bottom of the stairs, Jake pulled open a fire door. Directly across the corridor was B-1, the autopsy room. His stomach fluttered as he walked over and opened the door. From the room came a high whining buzz like the sound of a dentist’s drill.

Steve Applegate, a cigar stub clamped in his teeth, squinted down through the smoke at what he was doing. Whatever he was doing, it involved the head of a naked woman who was stretched out on one of the tables. And it involved the small buzz saw that was making such a racket.

Jake chose to watch his shoes as he walked across the polished linoleum floor.

The saw went silent.

“Who y’got there?” Barney asked.

“Mary-Beth Harker. A probable cerebral aneurysm.”

“Joe Harker’s girl?”

“That’s right.”

“Aw, shit. Shit. When’d it happen?”

“Last night.”

“Shit. She’s not, what, eighteen, nineteen?”

“Nineteen.”

“Shit. That’s his only daughter.”

Jake felt cold spread through him like a winter gust. Kimmy. God, what if it was Kimmy? How could a man go on living if something like that happened to his kid?

He turned away and walked toward another table. The body on this one was covered with a blue cloth. “This Smeltzer?” he asked without looking around.

“That’s Smeltzer, Ronald. I’ll get to Smeltzer, Peggy, later today.”

I killed this guy, he told himself, wanting to feel the guilt, wanting it to come and take away the terror of imagining Kimmy dead. I killed this guy. He’s dead because of me.

His mind began the replay. Fine. Smeltzer raising his head, tearing a flap of skin from his wife’s belly, turning in slow motion to reach for the shotgun.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Steve said, pulling Jake out of the memory. He drew back the cover.

Smeltzer was facedown. Jake’s bullets had left five exit wounds on his back and splayed open the side of his neck.

“Good shooting,” Barney commented.

Jake was looking at the gash that ran from the nape of Smeltzer’s neck, down his spine, over his right buttock and down his right leg to the outer side of his ankle. The raw, bloodless gash was bordered by about half an inch of blue-gray skin. “What’s this?” Jake asked.

“Something of a puzzle,” Steve said. With the tip of his cigar, he pointed at the quarter-sized ankle wound. “Know anything about it?” he asked Jake.

Jake shook his head.

“When I stripped him down this morning, I found it along with the hematoma—that discoloration you see there. Frankly, I didn’t know what to make of it. A bruise is usually caused by blunt trauma that breaks capillaries in the skin. So I asked myself what could’ve hit this man in such a way as to follow the curves of his body this way.”

“Something flexible,” Jake said.

“A whip,” Barney suggested. “Maybe a hose.”

“That occurred to me. The problem is, the epidermis showed no evidence of injury, which you’d expect if the man had been struck by that kind of instrument. And the ankle wound made me suspicious. So I made an incision at the wound and followed the track of the hematoma to his neck. What I found was a two centimeter separation between the fascias and—”

“Spare me the jargon, huh?” Barney said.

“Along the entire length of the bruise, the connecting tissue between the skin and underlying muscle was no longer connected. It’s as if approximately an inch-wide area of skin had been forcibly raised from the inside.”

“What are you gettin’ at?” Barney asked.

“Something entered this man’s body via the ankle wound and burrowed its way up to his neck.”

“Y’mean like somethin’ alive?”

“That’s just what I mean.”

“Balls.”

Steve tapped some ash off the end of his cigar. It dropped into a gutter at the foot of the table. “I found considerable trauma to the brain stem. Appears that it had been chewed into.”

Jake stared at the body. “Something tunneled up his body and bit his brain?”

“That’s sure the way it looks.”

“Jesus,” Jake muttered.

“Okay,” Barney said. “So where’s it at, this thing?”

“Gone.”

“Gone where?”

“After this man was deceased, it chewed through the posterior wall of his esophagus, traveled down to his stomach, chewed through the stomach wall and made a beeline for his colon. Chewed through that, and exited through his anus.”

“You gotta be kiddin’.”

Steve punched his cigar dead in the metal gutter. Then he bent down and picked up a pair of boxer shorts that had been turned inside out. The seat was smeared with feces and blood.

Barney wrinkled his nose.

Steve picked up a pair of blue jeans, also pulled inside out. Down the right leg was a narrow trail that diminished as it neared the cuff. “Kidding?” he asked.

Barney shook his head slowly from side to side.

“What could’ve done something like this?” Jake asked.

Steve shrugged. One side of his mouth stretched upward. “An ambitious snake?”

“Yer a festival a’ laughs,” Barney said.

“I haven’t the faintest idea what did this, but it appears to have been something shaped, at least, like a snake.”

“I never hearda’ snakes doing shit like that.”

“Who has?” Steve said.

“Smeltzer was alive when this thing got in him?” Jake asked.

“Definitely.”

“How can you tell?”

“The amount of subdural bleeding and the quantity of blood on his right sock. I’d guess, from the degree of coagulation of his ankle wound, that the thing got into him only minutes prior to his death.”

“And it left his body after his death? How do you know that?”

“Again, the amount of bleeding. Very little in the areas that it chewed through on the way out.”

“Fuckin’ Twilight Zone,” Barney said.

“So what do you make of it?” Jake asked.

“I couldn’t say.”

“We’re talking, here,” Jake said, “about a guy who blew off his wife’s head and started to eat her. And you’re saying that, before he went at her, this snake-thing burrowed up his leg and bit him in the brain?”

“That’s sure the way it appears.”

“And after I shot him, it took off.”

“Didn’t see it, did ya?” Barney asked.

“I didn’t stick around long. I took a quick look through the restaurant to make sure there wasn’t a third person, then I headed back to my car to call in. I must’ve been gone close to fifteen minutes. I guess that gave it time to get out.”

“The poop-chute express,” Barney said.

“It might still be in the restaurant,” Jake said.

“I already searched around here,” Steve said, “and the van that brought him in. Didn’t want that thing sneaking up on me.”

Barney sidestepped, reached over, pinched a leg of Steve’s white trousers and lifted. “I already checked that, myself,” Steve said. He raised both cuffs above his socks.

Barney crouched for a close look, then turned to Jake. “How ’bout you?”

“I took three showers after—”

“So y’got hygiene. Lift your pants.”

Jake drew them up to his knees. Barney squatted beside him, took a long look, then slid Jake’s socks down around his ankles.

“Okay, so now we know you guys aren’t gonna start munchin’ on me.”

Jake nodded. “So I’m not the only one who thinks this snake-thing made Smeltzer go haywire.”

“It don’t make sense, but it makes sense.”

“I’m afraid I have to agree,” Steve said. “It sounds mad but the possibility is certainly there…some kind of creature that sustains itself through a symbiotic relationship with its human host. A parasite. But it doesn’t simply take its nourishment from its host, it somehow controls his eating habits.”

Barney smirked. “Less Smeltzer was in the habit a’ eatin’ his wife.”

“So we’re talking,” Jake said, “about a snakelike creature that burrows into a person, takes control of his mind, and compels him to eat human flesh. That is what we’re talking about here, right?”

“Can’t be,” Barney said. “Last time I looked I wasn’t nuts.”

“If there’s another way to interpret this situation,” Steve said, “I’d be more than eager to hear it.”

“Yeah. You guys are figments a’ my fuckin’ nightmare.”

“Neither of you, I take it, has ever heard of a similar situation.”

“You gotta be kiddin’.”

“I’ve heard of cannibalism,” Jake said, “but never anything about a snake or whatever that gets inside you and turns you into one.”

“Gentlemen, I think we’ve got a situation.” Steve slipped a fresh cigar from a pocket of his white jacket, stripped off its wrapper, and bit off its end. He spat the wad of leaf into the table gutter. He licked the whole cigar. Then he poked it into his mouth and lit up.

“I drove over to Marlowe, yesterday, at the request of a colleague, Herman Willis. Thursday afternoon, the nude body of a twenty-two-year-old female was found. It had been buried in a field just east of Marlowe. Might never have turned up, except a kid happened to be out playing in the field with his dog. The dog found the grave. The kid ran home for a shovel, apparently thinking he had stumbled onto a buried treasure. He dug for a while, then ran home yelling.”

“Musta’ gave’m a good turn.”

“Here’s the interesting part: the body had been eaten. Quite a lot of the skin had been torn off, portions of muscle devoured.” The cigar in Steve’s hand was shaking. “She had bite marks all over her body. Some were just enough to break the skin, others took out chunks of her. Her torso had been ripped open. Her heart had been torn out and partly eaten. Her head…she had been scalped. Her skull had been caved in with a blunt instrument, possibly a rock. Her brain was missing.”

“Holy fuckin’ mayonnaise,” Barney muttered.

“Willis had never seen anything like this. I think he called me in more for moral support than for my professional opinion. At any rate, the teeth marks and the saliva samples we took from the wounds indicated that her assailant was human.”

“Yer sayin’ she was a victim of this thing.”

“Of someone ‘occupied’ by this thing.”

“When was this person killed?” Jake asked.

“Wednesday, around midnight. Willis was able to pinpoint the time of death pretty accurately based on her stomach contents. She’d been seen at a local pizza joint at eight that night. The degree to which the pizza had been digested—”

Barney flicked the back of his hand against the hip of the body stretched in front of him. “So, where was Ronald Smeltzer Wednesday night?”

“I don’t think Smeltzer did it,” Jake said. His heart was beating fast. “That van, the one that tried to run down Celia Jamerson, was coming from the direction of Marlowe. Thursday afternoon. Someone, something, got out of the van alive. There was blood on the pavement behind the rear door. I followed the traces into the field, but couldn’t…” He shook his head. “Where the van crashed was only a few hundred yards from the Oakwood Inn. Suppose what I tried to follow was this snake-thing and it found its way to the restaurant, got into Smeltzer that night?” Jake turned to Steve. “You got that John Doe from the van?”

“This way.”

They followed Steve out of the autopsy room, down the corridor, and into a room, with a dozen refrigerator compartments. He checked the drawer labels, then slid one open. The body that rolled out was covered by a sheet. Jake was grateful for the aroma of Steve’s cigar, though it wasn’t enough to mask the odor of burnt flesh and hair.

“If you’d prefer not to see this,” Steve said, “I think I know what we’re looking for.”

Jake, who had seen the charred corpse hanging out the windshield of the van, wasn’t eager for a close-up view. But he didn’t want to look squeamish in front of Barney, so he kept quiet.

“Let’s see’m,” Barney said.

Steve drew back the sheet. Jake stared at the edge of the aluminum drawer. Though he didn’t focus on the body, he saw it. He saw a black thing vaguely shaped like a human.

“I’ll have to turn him over,” Steve said.

“Manage?” Barney asked, sounding reluctant to help.

“No problem.”

Jake swung his gaze over to Steve and saw that he was wearing surgical gloves. He watched Steve bend over the body. Jake heard papery crumbling sounds. He heard himself groan.

“Guy’s a real flake,” Barney muttered. “Fallin’ apart over ya.”

Steve grinned rigidly around the cigar in his teeth. Lifting and pulling, he wrestled the black lump onto its front. When he finished, the front of his white jacket looked as if someone had rubbed it with charcoal.

“Jake, you were right.”

Jake let his eyes be guided by Steve’s pointing finger to the gray knobs of spinal column laid bare from the nape of the corpse’s neck to midway down its back.

“Looks like the thing was positioned the same as in Smeltzer,” Steve said.

“Only didn’t take a sneaky way out,” Barney added.

“With all this damage, it’s hard to be sure exactly what happened, but it appears that the thing made an emergency exit by splitting open the skin all the way up.”

“Must be awfully strong,” Jake said, “to do that.”

“Yeah,” Barney said. “And to open the van’s backdoor.”

“The impact probably popped the door open,” Jake told him.

“Yeah, maybe.”

“I’ll take a mold of this man’s teeth and draw a blood sample,” Steve said, “and make a run over to Marlowe. I’ll call from there and let you know if it’s a match, but I’d be willing to bet on it.”

“Call me at home,” Barney told him. “I got a hot poker game goin’.”

“If this is the guy who killed the woman in Marlowe,” Jake said, “it pretty much clinches our theory.”

“I think we can assume it’s clinched.”

“Yeah,” Barney agreed. “So we got us a snake that gets inta guys an’ turns ’m into cannibals. Y’believe it?”

Jake stepped away from the corpse. He leaned against the wall of drawers, scooted sideways to get a handle out of his back, and folded his arms. “The thing killed on Wednesday. It tried for Celia Jamerson on Thursday afternoon, then started to go for Peggy Smeltzer on Thursday night. That looks like maybe it goes for a new victim daily.”

“Give us this day our daily broad,” Barney said.

“This is Saturday. I wonder if it got someone yesterday.”

“Can’t do it on its own,” Barney said, “or it wouldn’t be climbing inta guys.”

“We’d better check out everyone who was at the restaurant Thursday night, everybody who’s come into contact with Smeltzer’s body.”

“Y’got yourself a job. Get on it. Do whatcha can on yer own, we’ll see where it gets us. Nobody knows but us three, we’ll keep it that way. Folks hear about this thing, they’ll go apeshit. Yer our task force, Jake. Stay on this till we got it nailed. Report t’me.”

“What about Chuck?”

“I’ll reassign him till yer done. I want y’workin alone. That’s the only way we’re gonna keep this quiet.”

“Are you sure we should keep this quiet?” Steve asked. “If people are aware of the danger, they’ll take precautions.”

“They’ll go apeshit. Or they’ll say we got loose screws. Or both.”

“I’m aware of that, but—”

“Keep yer drawers on, Apple. We don’t nail this down in a day or two, we’ll let the whole suck-head world in on it. Okay? Y’can hold a press conference. But let’s take a crack at it before we start tellin’ folks they’re on the fuckin’ menu.”