Ghouls

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

a grin like a cut tightens your face, have you forgotten your dead friends this easily? you place the briefcase across your knees, open it—

—and turn, glaring, caustic glimmers in your eyes, “what’s this shit, you motherfucker? i stick my neck out a mile for you back there, and now you’re gonna shaft me?”

the briefcase contains not money but old copies of the army times, some arabic newspapers, and several recent issues of british penthouse.

now the colonel is holding his M3 chest level, pointing the dull, eight-inch barrel at your heart. “i’m sorry, sergeant,” he says. “i’m very, very sorry, but for this to work, no one can know, absolutely no one. not even you.”

and before you can plead or even move, the colonel squeezes the trigger, and ten .45 hardball rounds slam into the middle of your chest and literally blow you out of the Jeep, the impact crushes the air from your lungs, as if you’ve just been struck in the chest by a railroad tie. you hear your ribs crack, and a drone like a tuning fork, distant at first but then suddenly so loud you feel your head might split, on your back now, legs jackknifed and arms aslant, you raise your head to see the Jeep pulling off into the cool, crystal night, next, you are a tiny figure plummeting through a dozen stratas of black at hellish speed, like a nightmare of being thrown off an airplane with no chute. you feel yourself fading, fading—drifting across the blind terrain of dust and smoke and nihility. you lose consciousness

time passes, but how much you cannot know, your only measure is the hard, silent black

it occurs to you, at some point, that you have died

but then sentience sifts back in notchlike stages, and you sit up and find yourself whole and alive, your chest is a flaring plot of pain; the blunt trauma of the bullets makes it hurt just to breathe, but you smile in spite of it, grateful to have deceived death so totally, the vest— you owe your life to the vest, if you hadn’t worn it, you’d be dead.

you pick yourself up and start to walk, grindingly at first, but then with increasing confidence, eventually your stride falls into a steady rhythm; the shock of being shot and living soon recedes, and your pain shrinks to almost nothing when you begin to realize the depth of your rage.

you can only think of the colonel now.

the colonel.

he’d intended to kill you all along, and the marines too, if they’d survived, somehow you find that harder to believe than the scheme itself, the ghala were real, a myth forged by centuries, but you don’t care, you don’t care about anything now, except the colonel.

you can’t wait to see his face.

the idea of murder doesn’t set well with you. though you’ve killed many men in war, you’ve never committed murder, but you won’t kill the colonel, no matter how much he deserves it. though you may well make him wish he was dead.

heading him off at the airport should be easy, but you must hurry, you walk faster, harder—soon you are trotting along the desolate road, your senses focus only on vengeance, and you are so swept by rancor that the prospect of being followed never crosses your mind, and why is that? how could you let one man make you forget all you’ve learned?

but you are being followed.

being stalked.

and when your stalker strikes, it is with such speed that you have no time to react.

a blur flutters behind you there is no sound suddenly you are jerked backward and pinned to the ground by a figure that is only vaguely human a cold slick hand presses your face as if to flatten your skull against the road between the fingers you glimpse the features of a monstrosity features made mercifully unclear by shock and darkness your pistol is in the Jeep you recall and you draw your knife but not before the thing’s other forklike hand is ripping at you with quickness beyond that of any man then the fingers sink popping into skin and begin to separate the flesh from your face like someone tearing strips of wallpaper you scream through a well of blood one eye seeing red and bury your knife hilt-deep into the thing’s furrowed abdomen.

its blood is black and pumps out in a rill of glistening ichor, but the man-animal’s hand holds fast to your face, still tearing, you thrust the knife again, deeper, twisting, then jerk the pin of your last grenade, the spoon flies, the thing’s jaws draw open impossibly wide—it howls its pain high into the night, and with the last trickling of your strength, you stuff the grenade canister into its maw.

you run faster than you’ve ever run. four to five seconds later the grenade goes off and engulfs the thing in a splattering burst of white phosphorus.

you stagger forward, delirious now from blood loss, you pull off your fatigue shirt and press it to your face in an effort to control the bleeding, your progress grinds to an off-balanced shuffle, you sense only faint, fragmentary things, the road beneath your feet, the sputtering heat behind you, and the necessity to keep moving, the vision in your good eye begins to melt, rimmed with black dots and spangles like shavings of steel, but through this you see twin spheres of intense white light which seem to be advancing toward you, swelling in size, a deafening roar-fills your head, and you must shield your eyes.

the twin spheres stop, they stare back at you, blazing; they hover like disembodied eyes, headlights? you stand before the glare and dumbly clutch the shirt to your face.

two sharp silhouettes emerge from the blaze, curious stick-men backed by light.

voices switch back and forth.

“check this shit out. is he one of ours?”

“looks like a jarine.”

“no, his belt is black, jarheads have tan belts, this guy’s army, from the support garrison.”

“look at him. he’s hurt.”

“probably fucked over by ‘rabs.”

“’rabs? this far out? this is no-man’s-land.”

“it’s those fuckin’ bedo tribes, goddamn animals, they’re always ripping our people off and cutting them up. come on, we’ve gotta get him back to the caz.”

timid, the figures move in. are they afraid of you, or just unsettled by all the blood? they lead you forward, into the light, one is an E-2, the other a tech sergeant, both are air force security police.

“hey, this grunt’s bleeding buckets, serious.”

“holy shit, it’s sanders.”

this voice you recognize, van holtz, the fourth man.

“you know this bullet-stopper?” the E-deuce says.

“he’s a friend, a good friend,” van holtz answers, “he won DSC and a bunch of other shit in Vietnam, i owe him bigtime.”

“the guy’s obviously into some deep shit.”

“I don sizost care, we’re gonna have to stand for him.”

“I ain’t covering for this grunt, he could be a dope mule for all i know, or running guns.”

van holtz is adamant, “you’ll cover, asshole, you’ll back up every word i say to the brass, unless you want to walk a pipeline in alaska for the next six years, understand?”

“yeah, i guess i fucking do.”

they help you into the Jeep, the E-deuce pulls a mad u-turn and barrels away down the rutted road, toward the caserne, van holtz breaks out his field kit.

“van,” you say.

“be quiet, don’t talk, play dumb when we get back, tell them you can’t remember anything, i’ll take care of the rest.”

“van,” you say. “it’s all true, it’s all true.”

he tells you to shut up as he prepares a gauze, the Jeep’s rocking lulls you. you’re safe, and that seems odd. you’re home free and alive, but in the back of your mind you can still see the narrow, doglike face of the ghala…

««—»»

Sanders’s eyes snapped open.

He lay stunned in bed, sheets twisted about his waist like writhing snakes. Darkness threatened to smother him, to squash him into the mattress. He sensed people, or things, in the room, killers, madmen, VC throat-runners hidden and grinning, their black blades poised. But then reality reformed, the edges slipped back into place, and he remembered the dream.

Those SP’s had saved his life, Van Holtz and the E-2; he probably would’ve bled to death without them. Van Holtz had bailed him out with a well-devised lie, and the E·2 had corroborated. Sanders had never seen Van Holtz again, had never had the chance to even thank him.

< font size="3">He reached up and touched his face, very slowly, as if he weren’t sure it was there at all. The runneled network of scars reminded him of what the thing had done. He’d tried to blot it out, for years, but somehow the darkness of the motel room fostered a dozen suggestions of the ghala. Closing his eyes didn’t help; he could still see the stark, corded body; the jammed mouth full of protracting teeth; that hideous three-fingered hand reaching out to tear away more of his face.

The moment noosed him, hauled him back further. He remembered the two Marines who’d gone in with him. Kinnet and O’Brien—they’d been finished in seconds, jerked apart like clay dolls. At least they hadn’t suffered much.

Could’ve been me, Sanders thought. Maybe that would have been better.

It was very late, yet he felt no urge to sleep now. The dream had jolted him awake, as quickly as the touch of an electric prod. He slipped out of bed and moved through the room’s murk, toward the dim shape of the desk.

A breath froze in his throat when he turned on the lamp. Opened newspapers covered the desktop; he focused on the two articles, each circled in red, as though they were obituaries.

From the Metrosection of yesterday’s Washington Post:

BODY FOUND IN WOODS

TYLERSVILLE, MD—Prince George’s County Police officials today announced the discovery of the skeleton of an unidentified woman in a wooded area of privately owned land within Tylersville city limits. Security guard Glen Rodz, 26, told reporters that he found the skeleton near an out-of·service access lane at approximately 1 A.M. Rodz contacted authorities at once, after which the skeleton was transported to South County General Hospital for examination. Deputy medical examiner Ronald T. Greene stated that the skeleton was of a female in her early twenties. “She hadn’t been there long,” Greene said to reporters. “The condition of ligaments and bone marrow made that quite plain. Topical soil analysis of the area around the discovery site indicates that she probably died right where she was, more than likely an animal attack.” Positive identification has not yet been ascertained, though an undisclosed local source of high reliability speculates that the skeleton may be that of one Donna Fitzwater, 22, who was reported missing earlier this week. Both Greene and P.G. County homicide lieutenant D. Choate refused to comment on that possibility.

And a more recent article on page 1 of the Bowie Blade read:

BOWIE GIRLS MISSING,

VIOLENCE SUSPECTED

This morning a county police officer on routine patrol discovered an abandoned automobile in the woods just off of Governor Bridge Road, the tentative Bowie-Tylersville boundary line. At about the same time, Stuart Lazernik, of the Whitehall area in Bowie, reported that his daughter, Lisa, had not returned home last night with the family car, after an outing with a school friend. Lazernik later identified the vehicle found abandoned as the same vehicle he’d loaned his daughter. Further investigation verified that the friend who had accompanied Miss Lazernik, Catherine Bathory, also of Bowie, never returned home last night either. Both girls are 18 and seniors at Bowie High; neither has been seen or heard from since last evening at approximately 8 P.M. “Each family has been prepared for the likelihood of a tragedy,” County Lt Dennis Choate told Blade reporters this afternoon. “We have no choice but to suspect foul play. It’s the county’s presumption that at least one of the girls is dead or in need of prompt emergency medical treatment The preliminary examination of the crime scene revealed much evidence of sexually motivated violence.” Choate declined to relate details of this evidence, though P.G. County Sgt. Timothy McGinnis, the officer who originally discovered the abandoned auto, told reporters in Hyattsville that he noticed “large stains on the hood and fenders, plus torn articles of clothing to the front and right of the vehicle. There were some other things, too. Things I’m not authorized to say.” A full investigation is in progress. Anyone with information regarding either of the two missing girls is asked to phone Prince George’s County Police at 336-8800.

Sanders stared. The articles confirmed everything; they were proof. What he feared the most was already taking place. How many? he thought. He must be crazy. Or maybe he’s dead himself by now. It didn’t matter.

He switched off the light and let himself be enshrouded again by the dark. He stared pensively at nothing.

The station wagon would be reported stolen soon, if it hadn’t been already. There was nothing more to do, that much he could see. Now he was just wasting time, and increasing the risk of being caught with a hot car. He should have gone by now. Or perhaps—

He wondered if he had lost his nerve and had just not admitted it yet. He felt lashed to opposing forces, being pulled both ways. “Partly my fault,” he whispered aloud, to the wall. He thought again of the newspaper articles. “All my fault.”

But blaming himself lacked any purpose at all. His compulsion was simply this: He would not go home until he had seen the full truth. He had to know.

He had to know what the colonel had done.

Oppression seeped mistlike up into his mind, and mulled his movements like a dropped net; he felt his head grow heavy with guilt. The darkness turned to a mass of clots, the walls seemed to swell inward, to crush him. He went back to bed and soon lapsed into a mute, suffocating sleep, his mind’s visions dragged repeatedly in and out of a chasm of nightmares.

««—»»

At about the same time, Kurt Morris slipped into a similar chasm.

Again he dreamed he was sitting in the den beneath a canopy of amber lamplight. Night filled the windows like darkly stained ice, as a sprawl of wisteria ticked against the glass. He thought he heard a faint sliding sound behind him. Was someone running a hand along the wall of the next room? Opened in his lap was a book he’d never heard of. You Are What You Eat, by Albert Fish, the binding read.

Almost immediately, this time, he knew he was dreaming. He heard:

THUNK THUNK, THUNK

He pretended to ignore it. He tried to read but saw that the book contained only black and white photographs of great age. The picture on the first page showed a thin, old man leading a little girl into a cottage.

THUNK, THUNK, THUNK

Only a dream, Kurt thought in the dream, though he felt little assurance in the thought. On the second page was a picture of a vat of stew. In the third picture the same old man was serving the stew to a group of children seated around a table, but the little girl from the first picture wasn’t there.

THUNK, THUNK, THUNK

“Goddamn!” Kurt shouted. “Go away! I’m not gonna go through this shit again!” He stood and slammed the book shut, half noticing that in the last photograph the old man was strapped to a wooden electric chair, and on his face was a malignant grin.

Kurt was furious. He wished he could wake up and not have to answer the door. Impulsively, he started to call out for Melissa, but decided not to bother when he recalled the last time he’d done that.

He stepped broadly into the foyer. The pounding continued, like a roofer driving nails.

THUNK, THUNK, THUNK

Kurt flung the door open wide.

Fog swirled in the doorway, misting over the figure of a man who stood tilted at an angle, as though one leg were too short The visitor’s outline seemed to vibrate as it stood.

Kurt stepped back, stunned by a rushing stench. This was too real for a dream, details too concise. He detected a jagged twitter—breathing?—and a sharp, steady drip.

The figure remained still, its features hidden in the mist. It stood bowed slightly forward, neck crooked and shoulders hunched, as if hung from a meat hook. Something metallic flashed on its chest.

“Well?” Kurt said. “I know you’re not the paper boy, so let’s get this over with. Goddamned dreams.”

The figure shifted once, but did not come forward. Fog began to spill in through the doorway, minutely darkening the foyer. Kurt could feel the temperature drop.

“Come on, fucker,” he said. “You’re pissing me off. Who are you?”

From the fog came a wet chuckling sound.

And the figure stepped inside, into the light.

Doug Swaggert was barely recognizable as anything more than an upright corpse; decomposition sculpted him down to bones and slabs of green, perforated flesh. His uniform hung in strips, and he looked back at Kurt through a face held together by rot. One eye showed only white, the other was an empty socket. It raised its right arm, which was without a hand, and Kurt realized then that Swaggert had been knocking on the door with his stump.

“Jesus,” Kurt mouthed. “Jesus God.”

The door slid shut, as if the fog had sucked it closed. Swaggert smiled liplessly. A bubble of black fluid formed in his ear, then broke. He moved toward Kurt quickly then, but jerkily, like some hideous marionette. Through his progress crackled a sound akin to trudging through mud.

Kurt’s stomach roiled. He back-stepped a third of the way up the stairs. Disgust and horror made him forget this was a dream, and he hit his thumb-snap and withdrew his revolver. “Get out of my house, you grosser,” he said. “I’ll blow your rotten head right off your shoulders.”

Swaggert began to grovel up the staircase, teetering on each step like a palsied man.

“Oh, shit,” Kurt said. In a secure, two-handed grip, he aimed his pistol, cocking it. He took a deep breath, let half of it out, and when Swaggert’s moldering face appeared in the sight-line, he let the hammer fall—

click.

“Son of a bitch!”

Kurt flipped open the cylinder—there were no bullets in the chambers. The dump pouch for his speed-strips was empty.

He threw the gun as hard as he could. It smacked solidly into Swaggert’s head, denting the skull, then clunked down the stairs. Swaggert stopped, paused for a senseless moment, then continued to mount the steps.

Kurt spun and raced up the steps himself—only to collide with a scalped, bilge-faced Harley Fitzwater on the landing.

Kurt was trapped on the stairs.

A fat, squishy hand plopped on his head. It slid wetly down his hair, grabbed his ear, and pulled.

“Where’s my Donna?” came Fitzwater’s ruined, liquid voice. The grip tightened. Kurt’s ear was twisted half off.

“Hey, you walking shithouse! That’s my ear!”

“Where’s my Donna?” Fitzwater gurgled again, spewing dark slime. “You find my Donna.”

Swaggert converged, twitching and dripping muck. Kurt could feel the blood pulsing out of his ear. Fitzwater held him by pinned elbows, lifting him up. Swaggert prodded him with his stump, jabbed him, and clubbed him with it. He pawed Kurt’s face with a gnawed hand, smearing his chin with some vile-smelling ooze. When Kurt parted his lips to yell, Swaggert’s rotting fingers popped into his mouth and wriggled.

Life’s a bitch, Kurt thought. He wedged his foot against Swaggert’s chest, as if on a leg press. Then he shoved. The corpse thunked noisily down the steps, where it broke apart and collapsed to a pile of rot.

Next, Kurt socked a hard elbow jab behind him, and felt bones give way beneath the blow. He jerked himself free and turned, then slammed his fist into Fitzwater’s lopsided head. Something crunched, as apples might when stepped on. One of Fitzwater’s eyes burst like a blister.

“I’m kicking your ass, you dead piece of shit,” Kurt said. He beat the thing to the floor with his fists, then kicked viciously until the gas-bloated body split open and spilled a slew of maggots and putrefactive slop onto the carpet.

Kurt leaned back, exhausted. He watched Fitzwater’s body deflate where it lay. It percolated, head lolling, arms and legs draining flat. Soon it had sunken completely in on itself, like a punctured blow-up doll.

His face long with loathing, Kurt descended the stairs. He held his breath as he stepped over Swaggert’s heaped remains. He could actually see the stink wafting up from the pile, like heat waves on hot asphalt.

Only a dream, he thought in the dream. He laughed and went into the den. Blood was streaked all down his shirt, his ear barked with pain, and he could still smell the charnel stench. But he’d won, he’d beaten the things. At least until the next nightmare.

The den’s soft light comforted him, made him feel at home. He opened a window and leaned out. Fresh air at last—he breathed in deeply, gratefully. The sinister fog was gone, of course, and so was the wisteria. Quiet and sanity returned to the house. He looked out into a calm, commodious black, which didn’t seem right after all he’d been through. The obtuseness of dreams never failed to confound him. He smiled and thought of pleasant things.

The window slammed down on him, like a guillotine.

His shoulders and head were trapped outside; he was pinned to the sill. Fog rose in seconds—the window bit down harder on his back. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t free himself.

And he couldn’t escape the sight of Donna Fitzwater’s flesh-specked skeleton as it limped hastily toward him, out of the fog.

Her skeleton arm shot out. Fingers of bone hooked into his eyes, and his scream spiraled away up into the dense, windless night.

««—»»

Kurt woke on the shatter of vertigo. The couch seemed as cramped as a casket. Had all his nerves dissolved? The dream had sapped him, left him to feel as though his head had been shoveled out.

He needed light. He turned on the lamp, the same lamp in the den of his dream, and then the room was draped with unnerving shadows. His makeshift bed was a wreck, pillow squashed, sheets routed; no doubt he’d tossed and turned during the nightmare, like a blind man being flogged.

He lit a cigarette and walked about the room, hair tousled. He tugged his briefs up, as though someone might be spying on him, then he slipped on his robe. When he noticed the window standing open, he rushed to it and slammed it shut.

Had the dream meant something? Perhaps his subconscious was trying to drive something home, rub his face in an idea. It wasn’t hard to figure. Some believed that dreams functioned thematically—people, objects, and events were really symbols that served to relate something abstract and psychological. In that case, then, some hidden part of himself felt responsible for Swaggert and the Fitzwaters.

Others believed in dreams as vehicles of portent, each a train of images which forewarned the dreamer of impending danger.

Nonsense.

The cigarette tasted rancid, compounding for him the all-too-familiar acridity of smoker’s sleep. He stubbed it out and moments later lit another without being aware of it.

As the promise of further sleep became more and more a lie, he remembered what had happened at Squidd McGuffy’s earlier that evening. Glen’s behavior there had been explicitly odd, but then Kurt had to admit noticing a certain oddness about Glen lately. Nancy Willard, of course, was the girl Glen had meant—and refused to identify—in their conversation at McGuffy’s. And, of course, he hadn’t revealed to Kurt what Nancy had said, just that it was “Something crazy.” “Something impossible.” After that, Glen had withdrawn into a blank-faced haze. Perhaps it had been the alcohol—Glen had tossed back quite a few—but Kurt sensed a more complicated root. All he knew was that something had Glen worried nearly to the point of panic, and that suddenly he wished not to speak of it. Instead, Glen had finished his beer and had left, muttering the intention to go home, pass out, and start all over again tomorrow.

Kurt had waited at McGuffy’s another hour. Nancy Willard had never shown up.

He sat down and jumped back up again when he heard tapping at the door. It was going on 4:00 a.m. The door creaked open a few inches; Vicky peered in with apprehensive eyes.

“I saw your door opened a crack,” she said, “and the light on.”

Kurt sat back down, relieved. “Come on in. I need the company.”

“I couldn’t sleep,” she said, coming in. She wore a shiny lavender-tinted slipgown with a flowered pocket on the hip. “I kept having these really scary dreams, you know. The kind that make you afraid to try and go back to sleep.”

“Well, don’t feel bad,” Kurt said. “Nightmares seem to be contagious around here these days. The one I just had would make a great script for Tales from the Crypt.”

She looked down at the floor, as if sorry for something. “I dreamed that something bad happened to Lenny,” she said, fiddling with the fringe of her pocket. “At least I think it was Lenny, because Joanne was in the dream, too, and…”

“Forget about it,” Kurt cut in. He didn’t like to see her distressed; she’d had more than her share in her life. “It’s a load of crap—all this stuff about how dreams reflect our inner selves. Christ, I’d be on a nut ward if that were true.”

“I guess I just feel bad about what happened to our marriage. Sometimes I think it’s my fault, that things went the way they did because I was a crummy wife.”

“Horseshit,” Kurt said. “You’re a thousand times the wife he ever deserved, the shit—” but he cut himself off. He was meddling again.

“Oh, Kurt,” she said in a frivolous, sing-songy voice, “you’re always so supportive. Maybe I should’ve married you.”

“Well I sure as hell didn’t twist your arm to marry Lenny.”

The bite of his response seemed to amuse her. Was she playing with him? Did she know how badly he felt for her? Perhaps not; women were often stupid that way. Or perhaps she just didn’t care.

She wandered to the window, disheveled in her nightgown, groggy and kicked out of sleep by dreams as he had been. He felt magnetized by her; he always had. Her prettiness poured over him like fluid. Her hair was disarranged, her nightgown crooked and creased, but she was even pretty when she was a mess. He smiled to himself, wishing he could kiss her, and wondering what she might do if he did.

Quite abruptly, she opened the window and stuck her head out. Kurt sank in his seat, still haunted by the undertow of his dream—he wanted to push her away. Had she seen something? Shut up, he shouted at himself. Don’t be an ass. But he couldn’t help asking, “It’s not foggy out by any chance, is it?”

“No, it’s beautiful. Crystal clear and so still. You can see every single star.”

Her voice sailed away in a fading echo. Suddenly dimensions seemed to extend, the room stretching a hundred feet long, and she was tiny at the end of it. He imagined himself walking the entire length of the room, summoned by a foreign yet curiously unsurprising impulse. She would turn, sensing his approach, a soft and knowing smile on her lips. Their eyes would meet, and they would embrace in desperate happiness. His fingers would slide through her hair and down her shoulders, connecting her to him by touch. They would be carried through an interstice of timeless avowal, where feelings transcended words, and love reduced all the flaws of the world to grains of sand. / love you, he would think. “Yes,” she would say back, and they would kiss, and it would be perfect. Everything would be perfect.

“Those people are all dead, aren’t they?”

“What?” he said. The muse fell to bits, a seductive lie. Nothing was perfect.

She had turned and was facing him now. The lamplight reached out wanly, barely surfacing her from the shadows. “Doug Swaggert, that man and his daughter who lived in the trailer, those two high school girls. Are they dead?”

“Probably.”

“Murdered, in other words.”

His nod was grim, pauseless.

Silence unfurled around them, like smoke. Something solemn seemed to descend on her; the empty incomprehension of innocence filled her eyes. “When do you think the killers will be caught?”

“Maybe tomorrow, maybe next week. Maybe never. So far there’s no traceable evidence. There’s nothing we can use to maintain an investigation. All we can hope for is some luck, at least for the time being.”

“The time being? You mean until someone else gets killed.”

Kurt didn’t comment. Her words hissed cynicism, even ridicule. Was she accusing the police of inaction? Was she blaming him? No, she just didn’t understand. “Bard thinks that Glen has something to do with it,” he said.

“Glen? For God’s sake, why?”

“Every time something’s happened, he’s been around.”

“Not those two girls,” Vicky countered. “It said in the paper that their car was found in Bowie.”

“Sure, but what you’re forgetting is that Bowie is right alongside us; actually, the car was discovered less than a mile from where Glen was working that same night. And to make matters worse, he says he caught two girls in a silver sedan trespassing on Belleau Wood a couple of nights earlier. He ran them off and logged their tag number—”

“And the tags were the same?”

“Right down to the last digit. Which means that Glen came in direct contact with the missing girls just a few nights before they disappeared.”

She came forward, the angles of her face sharp from negation. “So you suspect Glen, too?”

“No, no,” he said. “Relax.” In fact, he felt good that someone else agreed with his certainty of Glen’s innocence. He yawned and went on. “Chief Bard was born with a pair of blinders on his face. No offense to the man, now, but he seems to be a little bit wrong about everything. He’s on the right track, just barking up the wrong tree. He’s got Glen pegged as the constant, but there’s one other thing that all the disappearances have in common.”

“What’s that?”

“Belleau Wood.”

— | — | —