Ghouls

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

“Whizz that one by me again,” Bard was requesting of the phone when Kurt came in. The chief sounded confused; he held the phone as if it were antiquated, a burden to use. “An autopsy preliminary… I still don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” he said into the phone. Now his jowls were tensed, like corded suet.

Kurt sat down to wait. He didn’t know why he’d come; boredom, he supposed, had directed him here. The station office was dazzling in the clear light of late morning; it made him feel hot, edgy. Coffee bubbled like pitch from an old burner atop the file cabinet. Its stenching aroma hovered about the office, irritating and stiff as tear gas.

“What, right now?” Bard said. “But I don’t have anyone available right n—” He shot a glance to Kurt. “Strike that. I’ll have a man there in twenty minutes,” and then he rang off.

Kurt frowned. “Who was that?”

“South County. The M.E.’s got an autopsy report for us. Your duty of the day is to go and pick it up.”

“They found the bodies of those two girls?”

“No,” Bard said.

“Then what did they do an autopsy on?”

“I don’t know, and neither did the musclehead on the phone. He just said they had an autopsy report for us. So go and get it.”

Kurt’s stomach began to remember the last visit. “Look, Chief, I hate to stand in the way of police business, but I’m on suspension, remember? I’m not getting paid—”

“That situation can be arranged permanently, if you like.”

“Come on, seriously. I don’t want to go there again. The place makes me sick. Why should I go to a place I don’t want to go for no pay?”

“Because I told you to.”

“Read my lips, Chief. I-don’t-want-to-go-to-the-goddamned-county-morgue.”

“Read my lips,” Bard said. “You-can-go-to-the-goddamn-county-morgue-for-me-or-you-can-seek-future-employment-at-goddamned-Lucky’s-Car-Wash. Your choice.”

“So that’s the game. Employer-employee blackmail.”

Bard grinned. “’Fraid so, my boy. I’m too busy with all this paperwork to go myself.” ·

“Yeah, I can see that.” Bard’s desk, of course, was clear, save for April’s Police Product News. But Kurt had been blackmailed like this many times by Bard. “All right,” he said. “I’ll go to the—wait a minute. Send Higgins.”

“I can’t send Higgins. He took Glen down to county CID in Forestville about an hour ago.”

“CID? Why?”

“They’re putting Glen on the box,” Bard said.

Christ, Kurt thought. The box meant polygraph. “They didn’t arrest him, did they?”

“No, they just asked him to come down for questioning.” Bard rose to his feet, an effort worthy of applause. He filled a spider-cracked mug with coffee that looked more like very old motor oil. “Glen requested the polygraph—hell, he’s not stupid. Poor son of a bitch looked a wreck, though. That boy must sleep in a cement mixer.”

“He was hung over.”

“Doesn’t surprise me. He didn’t even look fit to drive, so I had Higgins give him a ride.”

“Don’t bullshit me, Chief. You had Higgins take him ’cause you thought he might try to split.”

Bard’s grin turned sly. “Gotta admit, the thought crossed my mind… Coffee?”

“No thanks. I’d need a better life insurance policy before I’d drink that spew. And I really find it hard to believe—”

“Keep your shirt and dick on, Kurt. I’m friends with Glen, too, you know. But I can’t let that obstruct operating procedure.”

Christ, Kurt thought again. Next they’ll be wanting me on the box.

Bard’s face shriveled up like wrapping paper when he sipped his coffee. “Anyway,” he said. “You never know. Anything can happen in this world, right? If Glen’s got nothing to hide, then why are you so uptight, or is it just the awesome vision of my presence that’s making you look like you’re about to shit your pants? Now’s his chance to prove he’s clean.”

“This isn’t Russia,” Kurt said. “He shouldn’t have to prove anything.”

“You can’t deny he’s been acting a little weird lately.”

“I can deny that easy,” Kurt lied, thinking, He’s always been a little weird. “He’s as straight as you or me.”

“Then why is he clamming?”

“He’s not clamming. Jesus, you sound like Lew Archer.”

“Lew Archer was a great detective.” Bard sipped more coffee, seeming quite pleased with himself. “Glen’s keeping his trap shut about something. But he won’t be able to do that on the poly.”

“Oh, shit, Chief. Those things are less reliable than Ouija boards.”

“LEAA says they’re ninety-percent-plus effective with an experienced operator.”

“I don’t care if they’re a million-percent effective. The things are a goddamned injustice; they violate civil rights.”

“Sounds like you’re turning hippie on me—”

“And why would Glen volunteer for a polygraph if he knows something?”

“It’s common knowledge,” Bard said. “Lots of nuts are subconsciously guided to self-incrimination—deep down they all want to be caught. All I’m saying is that you never know. I’m not shitting on Glen—hell, I’d love to see him come out of this clean as a cat’s ass, too. But just because he’s a friend of ours doesn’t mean he can’t lose an oar. Let’s face it, we don’t know him all that well. He works at night, we hardly ever see him. He could be the screw-loose of the century for all we know. Son of Sam was a security guard once. So was Chapman—”

“Oh, come on—”

“And if it’s not Glen, then who is it?”

The finality of the question lodged in Kurt’s throat. For a moment, he felt utterly displaced, his teeth on edge. He wished he could punch Bard right in his distrusting, smart-ass belly, watch his fist gleefully sink in fat.

“Anyhow,” Bard jabbered on. “We’ll let Glen worry about himself. In the meantime, I think you’ve got a job to do.”

««—»»

Kurt walked down the cold, antiseptic hallway like a man expecting an ambush. The petrifying fumes reached him even here and set off in his stomach an explosion of acid and disgust.

The office door was open; Kurt peeked in and found the pathologist’s anteroom unoccupied. An old Fedders air conditioner hummed clamorously from the room’s only window; cold air chilled his face. The door to the autopsy room, he saw, stood ajar. A shadow passed quickly across the drab cement floor. As boldly as he could, Kurt ventured in.

A cadaver enclosed in plastic lay on the autopsy table. A liver in a pan scale swayed slightly to and fro, like a hanging flower pot. From it fluid dripped pap pap pap onto the plastic. Kurt nearly fell back into the office.

Dr. Greene was lifting a brain from a large white bucket. He looked up, features roughed by fluorescent light, and said in a mock Scottish accent, “Tep a the marnin’ to ya.”

Kurt nodded, swallowing. “I thought you had night duty.”

“We got bodies piled up till next year’s Super Bowl, and my boss decides to take a week off. Somebody’s got to open these dead guys. Might as well be me.” Greene then picked up a long, narrow knife and began cutting the brain into half-inch slices, as one might slice a loaf of pumpernickel. He deposited each slice into another bucket marked HISTO in black magic marker. “Be with you in a minute,” he said.

Kurt looked away, but each time his eyes fell onto some new horror. A Stryker orbital saw hung from a nearby peg, its fine-toothed blade smudged with blood and hair. One shelf was stacked high with boxes of Parke-Davis cadaver bags; another stored cryptic chemicals in dark bottles. The needle on the pan-scale gauge indicated precisely 1601 grams.

“Mind if I smoke?” Kurt asked.

“No, but your lungs do.”

“Don’t I know it,” he muttered. He popped a cigarette into his mouth and lit up.

“Want to quit?”

“I can’t. Believe me, I’ve tried.”

Greene pointed across the room, hand dripping. “Look in that white bucket there. The one on the end, third shelf.”

I asked for this, he thought. His fingers touched the lid, but didn’t move.

“Go on,” Greene urged. “Open the bucket. Look inside.”

Kurt raised the lid and looked in. Settled at the bottom of the bucket were two blob-shaped objects which resembled giant moldering leeches. They were brown-black and glistening, specked minutely with white.

Greene smiled, still tending to his slices. “They’re metasticized lungs.”

“Jesus.”

“Your lungs will look like that if you don’t quit smoking. Cancer’s a hard way to go. It’s like slowly rotting to death from the inside out.”

Greene washed his hands in the big sink, thumping a pink-filled soap dispenser like an inverted service bell. His lab coat bore a craggy reddish stain the shape of North America, and beneath the open coat, a clinging orange T-shirt elucidated washboard abdominals. Kurt dropped his cigarette onto the floor drain and stepped on it. Dizzily, he followed Greene into the office.

“Ah, my favorite fruit,” Greene said, and picked a Chunky up off the desk. He passed Kurt a nine by twelve manila envelope. “Here’s your lab report.”

Kurt scanned the pages, deciphering almost none of it. Hieroglyphics, he thought; most of the words were ten letters long. “We weren’t briefed by the county about any of this,” he told Greene. “In other words, we don’t even know what this is.”

“Stands to reason. This didn’t make the papers.” The pathologist spoke between bites of his Chunky. “It concerns those two high school girls—”

“The ones whose car was found on our town line.”

“Right,” Greene said. He dropped the silver candy wrapper into a pedal-operated garbage can; the lid snapped shut like a flytrap.

“But those girls haven’t turned up yet,” Kurt clarified.

“No, they haven’t. And they won’t, not alive, anyway.”

The a/c hum was beginning to irritate Kurt, along with Greene’s elusiveness. “Then what the hell did you do this lab report on?” he asked.

“Organs.”

The answer brought only silence from Kurt, a dense and pleading silence that demanded elaboration. At last Greene perched up on his desk and explained, “That’s why the county is certain the two girls are dead. What they didn’t release to the press was that, though no bodies were found, two piles of organs were discovered near the car. A couple of county techs brought the stuff in yesterday for me to identify. That’s what this lab report’s about.”

“Organs,” Kurt said vacantly.

“Stomachs, uteri, livers, some mesentery—most of the lower G.I. tract.”

“I don’t understand,” Kurt said. He was distracted, confused. The humming seemed to grow louder, pressing his eardrums like a quick pressure drop.

“They were eviscerated.”

Kurt wanted to leave. This was too much for one week. This was madness. Bard was right in his cynicism. Things just got worse and worse. The world was a slaughterhouse, a black playground for every psychopath on two legs.

“The two girls were eviscerated,” Greene said again. “Tox screen read negative for drugs. They were a little lit, though; .02 blood-alcohol content—there was beer in the car. Couldn’t find any semen in the mess. Lots of pubes, but they were all white/female, according to the core index. One of the detectives told me there was blood all over the place—”

Kurt thought of the blood in Fitzwater’s trailer. All over the place. All over—

“—all over the ground, the car, the glass. Everywhere. Doors locked, driver’s window smashed in. Purses, wallets, and money still inside; no one touched any of it. State criminalistics told me they’re having all kinds of problems with prints. Tomorrow they’re transporting the car’s hood and fenders to University of Maryland for an SEM scan. Can you imagine that, needing an SEM to get prints off of polished metal?”

Kurt didn’t know what an SEM was, and he didn’t care. There hadn’t been one good print since any of this had started. “What else do you know that I don’t?”

“Go read the county II report. They’ll release it to you, they have to. It’s your jurisdiction. They said it looked like the girls had been dragged away—some tracks and blood lines led into the woods.”

“Which way did the tracks lead?” Kurt asked.

“Across the boundary, into Tylersville.”

Greene crossed his arms, as if impatient. Like this his massive shoulders and back seemed on the verge of splitting his lab coat apart at the stitches. His hazel eyes reflected nothing even remotely receptive; Kurt guessed the base nature of his job had left him with the emotions of a cement statue. Must be itching to get back to his brains. Jesus, what a job. “Thanks for your time,” Kurt ended. “We’ll get back to you.”

“Oopie doop. Catch’ya later,” and Greene went back to the autopsy room.

Before he even crossed the threshold, Kurt stopped. He’d reached into his jacket pocket for his keys but pulled out a scrap of paper instead. On it, he recognized the scrawl of his own hand—TTX—from his eavesdrop on Willard and Nancy.

When Kurt slipped back in, Greene had already opened the top of the cadaver bag and was plugging the saw into a table-mounted outlet.

“One last thing, Dr. Greene,” Kurt said, keeping his eyes well away from the nefarious metal table and what lay on it. “You ever hear of something called TTX?”

The pathologist’s response was instant. “Sure. It stands for tetrodotoxin.”

“What is it?”

“One of the deadliest solid poisons known to man, about three hundred times more toxic than cyanide. They use it for research mainly to isolate desired cellular components by blocking undesired ones. It comes from the Japanese fugufish. Very, very nasty material… Where’d you dig that one up?”

“Just something I overheard,” Kurt said. He was trying to think. Poison. What would they want… “How does this stuff affect humans?”

“It blocks nerve-synaptic transmissions, eventually producing complete paralysis of the involuntary muscle groups. Even a minuscule amount will kill an average-sized man in about thirty minutes or so.”

“Is it easy to get?”

“No, TTX is highly controlled. Not the kind of thing you’d find in a Gilbert chemistry set, if that’s what you want to know.”

“But if a person really wanted to get some, even illegally, where would he be able to get it?”

Greene didn’t flinch at the roundhouse of questions; if anything, he enjoyed this. “Unless you wanted to go fishing in Japan, you’d have to go to the manufacturer, and most drug companies have security about like that of the White House. I don’t know about distributors. The easiest place, I guess, would be a neurotoxicology lab.”

“Are there any around here?”

“Sure, plenty. Private sector and government. I used to work as a lab tech at N.I.H. in Bethesda; I know for a fact they’ve got a neurotox unit there.”

N.I.H., Kurt thought. National Institutes of Health. Didn’t Glen say Nancy Willard worked there once? “How long ago did you work at this place?”

“Five, six years ago. Summer work while I was in school.”

“Did you know a woman named Nancy Willard?”

Greene’s eyes thinned behind his thick glasses. He held the orbital saw pistol-like toward the ceiling and revved it twice for the hell of it. The sound made Kurt’s scalp shrivel.

“Nancy…King,” Greene said, after a meditative pause. “Nancy King. Real fun to look at. She married a guy named Willard, if I remember right.”

“And you knew her?”

“I knew of her is about all. The name rings a bell only because I remember reading a couple of papers she wrote. But I didn’t really know her. I worked in microbiology, never had much chance to talk to her.”

“What department did she work in?”

Greene’s brow lifted in a very competent imitation of Mr. Spock. “Neurotoxicology,” he said.

««—»»

Bewilderment infected him now so emphatically that he could barely clear his head enough to drive. Heading back toward town, Kurt speculated that all of his recent revelations could be, and probably were, meaningless. There was no basis for the thoughts which now ate at him; he just couldn’t let it go. Information he thought of as vital dangled before him like bait on hooks, yet all the lures seemed to hang from Belleau Wood.

He left the lab report on Bard’s desk (the chief was gone, probably buying out the doughnut rack at the Jiffy-Stop) and next found himself back on 154, heading north. The radio squawked at him unintelligibly. Cars passed, but he didn’t see them. His most rudimentary impulses had taken over; he supposed he’d known all along where he was going.

Willard’s Chrysler was parked askew in the cul-de-sac, as if abandoned. The security truck sat begrudgingly off to the side of the separate garage.

Kurt’s knock was answered almost at once.

“Hope I’m not interrupting—”

“Good that you stopped by,” Willard cut in. His face was unaccountably grave. “I’ve been wanting to call you, the police, that is. But I was afraid of being premature.”

“I don’t follow,” Kurt said.

Willard let him in, leading through the darkened hall to the kitchen. “My wife seems to have vanished,” he said. “I mean, I’m not quite sure how to interpret it. She didn’t inform me that she’d be going anywhere for any length of time. I’m worried.”

“How long has she been gone?”

“She left early last evening, about six. I haven’t seen her since then.”

On her way to McGuffy’s? Kurt wondered. If so, then why hadn’t she shown?

“She’s never done anything like this before,” Willard said, opening curtains over the kitchen window. Daylight blazed in, and Willard’s face seemed to wither. “She’s been known to take in an occasional late movie by herself, since I don’t go to them. But she’s always back before midnight.”

“Maybe she went to see relatives or something.”

Willard shook his head. He filled a glass with cubes from an ice-maker built into the refrigerator. “Care for something?”

“That lemonade looks good,” Kurt remarked, spying the pitcher on the counter.

“It’s been sitting out for days,” Willard said. He smiled briefly beneath his beard, and dumped the pitcher out into the sink. “I’ll make some fresh.”

Can`t be any worse than Bard’s coffee. “Don’t bother. I’ll just have what you’re having.”

Willard iced another glass, took Kurt back through the hall into a study right of the foyer, then filled both glasses with Scotch from a lead-cut decanter recessed into one of the bookshelves. “No, she hasn’t got any relatives,” he got back to saying. “I can’t begin to guess where she’s gone.”

The paneling here looked very old, and the furniture queer and older, salvaged antique junk. Must buy his furniture from Uncle Roy, Kurt thought, trusting the shadows to conceal his grin. Either that or he’s got Captain Nemo for an interior decorator. Bookshelves of conflicting design stood tall as the ceiling, and several of the carpet tiles had begun to come loose, showing gaps. Kurt jiggled his glass to watch the pretty liquid twirl over the ice. “None of my business, but is it possible that you and your wife might be having some problems, in the domestic sense?”

Willard sat down at his desk, sighing. He pursed his lips dejectedly. “In truth, our marriage has been more awkward than harmonious. We’ve never fought, really. We’ve always treated each other with the highest respect, which I’d always deemed as vital—but perhaps it was that same respect that eventually twisted our relationship into stiffness. I fear Nancy viewed the routine of our marriage as drudgery before long; she grew bored with what I took for a very content style of life. Who was the great avant-garde musician who said ‘Variety is the spice of life, but monotony is the sauce’? If that creative hypothesis is accurate, then I must be a veritable tub of sauce.”

Tub of hard sauce, you mean, Kurt amended. He tasted his Scotch and wondered if Willard might’ve inadvertently filled the decanter with gasoline. It burned down his throat like acid, cutting a line of wild, unpleasant heat.

“I’m certain my wife’s having an affair,” Willard said.

Kurt acted as though this were news. “Sorry to hear. Maybe you’re jumping to conclusions.”

“Perhaps, but not likely. I’ve always been a man of complacency, hardly a candidate for the traditional role of husband. Originally I’d thought that our mutual scientific interests might hold us together, lay the ground for a strong foundation of compatibility, but I was really just fooling myself. What could I expect? Nancy’s twenty years younger than me, and I may have failed in fulfilling certain aspects of her needs, if you receive my meaning.” Willard grinned, unabashed. “It seems she’s romantically involved with my very own security guard—good help is hard to find, as they say. He’s an acquaintance of yours, correct?”

“Yes, but Glen’s never been one to keep me up on his private life. If this is true, though, do you think it’s possible—”

“That my wife would consider running off with him?” Willard filled in. “Yes, I think so. They may have already, in fact. I’ve been ringing Glen all day.”

“He’s been in Forestville since early this morning. Police business.”

Willard’s mouth opened, shut. He looked back nebulously. “You’re sure of this?”

“Yeah, but I doubt he’ll be there long.”

“Just what kind of police business do you mean?”

“Routine questioning.”

Willard’s hand skimmed nervously over his beard. “So. If my wife’s not with him, then where is she?”

Kurt had no answer to offer. He remained standing, nipping the potent liquor, and it was then that he noticed another door on the far wall which could barely be seen for the room’s dimness. Three identical deadbolts had been set in a straight line above the doorknob. And mounted on the ceiling, just above the door itself, was another motion detector. Kurt eyed the device, mystified.

“I guess it was all a mistake,” Willard said.

“What’s that?”

“Marrying Nancy. Marrying anyone, for that matter. I would think that I’d know myself enough to realize that this would have happened eventually. I must’ve been crazy to hope that a woman as vigorous and attractive as Nancy would be content with a slothing duffer like me.”

Willard’s bid for the blues sounded pointless, ineffective. Somehow, Kurt sensed it was more an act than anything, an affectation from Willard to seem more human than he was. Kurt cleared his throat, unsure how to begin. It bothered him, but he knew he had no choice now but to betray Nancy Willard’s confidence. “The reason I came over,” Kurt started, “is, well…won’t do me much good now, I guess. What I mean is, I came to see your wife. She called me yesterday, said she wanted to tell me something. But I never got around to catching up with her.”

The words seemed to deepen the lines in Willard’s face, though his eyes remained calm and aloof. He perched his chin on his fingertips, and asked, “What time did she call you?”

“Around six, I think.”

“Then it must’ve been just before she left.”

“Right, but do you have any idea what it was she wanted to tell me?”

“I’d think it would be obvious,” Willard declared, opening his hands as though he held something invisible. “There are many wonderful things about Nancy, she has many attributes. But character was one thing she never had much of—no guts at all. She didn’t have it in her to confront me with the truth; therefore, she meant for you to do it for her.”

“Do what?”

“Be her messenger of doom, of course. She wanted you to tell me she was abandoning our marriage, since she didn’t have the nerve to do so herself.”

He’s got a point, Kurt thought. Or hadn’t there been something more to Nancy’s implications over the phone, something more severe? “Maybe,” he said then. “Assuming that she is going to leave you, and that’s still a shaky assumption at this point.”

Willard eased back in his chair, running his fingers through the ring his glass had left. “I should take a lesson from your optimism, perhaps you’re right. Perhaps I’m viewing all this through too dark a light.” He rose abruptly to his feet, but still seemed small within his cove of bookshelves. “Whatever the case, I thank you for your concern.”

“Give her till tonight,” Kurt said, following Willard to the foyer. “Once she’s gone a full twenty-four hours, then give us a call. We’ll take it from there. In the meantime, I’ll try to get hold of Glen and see what I can dig up.”

Willard halted midway through the foyer, seemingly stopped in his tracks by the portrait of his father, which Kurt remembered from his first visit.

Willard tilted his head, stared reflectively at the canvas. “Look at him, the old fuck. I’m surprised I can’t hear him laughing this very minute, all the way from hell.”

“Why would he be laughing?”

“To put it kindly, my father was the nastiest, ugliest, most narrow-minded son of a bitch to ever walk the surface of this earth,” Willard said, his face a mystery of contempt and amusement. “You see, he was always quite sure that I would not succeed in any undertaking of my life—in fact, I daresay he hoped I would fail. He was convinced that if I did not conform to his designs, then I most certainly would never amount to anything. He bull-dogged me from the very second of my birth, treated me more as a puppet than a son. He had no conception of free will; for a son, he expected a duplicate of himself, and when I made it known to him that I would not follow his footsteps, he became infuriated. It was his ultimate wish that I become a businessman, as he himself had been. But I wanted to be a doctor. I had to bus tables to get through college, and when I graduated, of course, my father refused to loan me money for medical school.”

“Then how did you do it?” Kurt asked.

Willard shrugged, lighting a short filterless cigarette. “I had no choice but to enter the military. It was a fair deal; they paid for my medical schooling in return for time in service as a doctor. I figured I’d do my four years, then return and set up my own private practice, but believe it or not, I found I rather liked the military. It gave me a chance to see the world that my father had blinded me to, and this fascinated me. And I did quite well as a medical officer. Eventually my medical specialties became secondary, and I got into medical field administration, which isn’t uncommon for medical officers once they’ve gained some years. To my father, though, this success was the ultimate insult, the knowledge that for all that time, I was right, and he was wrong. He scarcely spoke to me the few times I took leave. He never apologized, never once shared my enthusiasm. I’m told that when he learned of my most significant promotion, he had a heart attack which eventually led to his death.” Willard paused to eye the painting, his lips tightened to a checked smile as he sucked the cigarette down. “My father left me everything when he died, not for the love of his only son, but simply to keep the property in the family name. He’d garnered quite a fortune, I’ll give him that. So there was no need for me to finish my military career through to proper retirement. I returned to civilian life as soon as I could, after seventeen years in the medical corps, and my father in the grave.”

Kurt viewed the painting through something close to a wince. The portrait grimaced back at them both, as if to test all of Willard’s derision. Kurt thought, Anyone that ugly’s got a right to grimace.

“So it looks like the old cockrobin has the last laugh after all,” Willard said.

“How?”

“At least his wife didn’t run out on him.”

“Well, don’t forget, we’re not absolutely sure your wife has gone anywhere,” Kurt reminded. He cast a final glance at the picture, then opened the door. “I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.”

“I can’t thank you enough, Officer Morris.”

Kurt trotted down the porch steps, rushing to be free of the foyer’s locked-in scents. The dark, silent abode had tried his nerves. But was it the house itself, or Willard, that disturbed him? He wasn’t sure. Perhaps it was both.

Before he got back into the Ford, something glossy caught his eye. He stopped, turned very slowly. A fine shaft of sunlight projected diagonally into the garage through one of the shoulder-high window panels. When Kurt looked in, he saw that the sun was reflecting off the hood of Nancy Willard’s black Porsche.

— | — | —