The Beast in the Bone

by Blair Lindsay

  The dead man looked back at her with dulled, half-open eyes. His skin was as pale and marbled as the foyer floor and there were two black gunshot wounds in his chest. Heart level.

  He was sixtyish, with sagging cheeks and thinning grey hair. Some men aged better than others, but Herzog—if this was Herzog—had not won any battles with entropy. Death never helped, of course. Death dragged you into the shit of your worst of worst days. Death was a Monday Tequila hangover and a 4:00 a.m. alarm.

  The twin gunshots would’ve killed Herzog almost immediately, sucking the life out of him like a vampire, but below the holes in Herzog’s chest, his white shirt was stained crimson and both hands were cradled in his lap, as if he’d hoped to catch the blood in his palms and drink it back up, make everything okay again.

  Except that wouldn’t have worked, either, because Herzog’s right hand had no fingers, just bloody stumps where the fingers ought to have been.

  “Jesus fucking…” Keller trailed off.

  The fingers weren’t gone.

  Or at least, not all of them.

  One of Herzog’s fingers lay on the table in front of the dead man. Pointing directly away from him as if the macabre prankster who dismembered him had placed the digit just so on the table. As if it was the first step in some ghoulish treasure hunt.

  The smell of feces grew stronger, the dead man’s bowels releasing their contents. Keller took slow, deep breaths. She still hadn’t called out to her partners. Why? She looked at the bloody message on the wall.

  This can’t be real. It can’t. I must be hallucinating.

  She tasted bile in her throat and she swallowed hard against it. Adrenalin was lighting her up, making her tremble, and she willed her knees to be steady.

  This was connected to the farm. To Staci’s death. It had to be. Was it possible Robin and Kayla were somewhere in the house?

  “Ash, you find him?” Lang’s voice echoed from elsewhere in the house.

  Get back in the game.

  Keller was horrified and ashamed. She’d reacted to all this like a startled deer, frozen by the enormity of the horror. She grabbed at her radio mic, trying to keep her voice steady. “Dispatch, One Alpha Thirty-Six, we need sixty-nine hot.”

  Sixty-nine hot would bring cops—lots of them, quickly—but as she said it, she knew that wasn’t enough. She grabbed her radio and pressed the orange panic button on its side. Then, to be sure the message got across, she thumbed the mic again and said, “Dispatch, One Alpha Thirty-Six is Code 200. I say again, One Alpha Thirty-Six is Code 200.”

  Code 200 meant “We are in sure and certain deadly danger,” the EMS equivalent of “Send in the Army.” Any unit calling it in didn’t just want police on scene—they wanted police on scene freaking yesterday. Within seconds, every cop within five miles of them would be alerted and all would respond. Traffic cops would abandon posts. Undercover cops would break cover. All of them flocking to save her skinny little ass.

  Except the northwest is emptied out.

  They’d seen it happening as they responded here. Gang shootings. MVAs. How long till help really arrived?

  “Ash?” Fright in her voice. Lang had heard her.

  “Kate. Tyler,” Ash said. “Get out. We are Code 200. Get out right now.”

  “What the hell?” Atchison voice came from halfway up the stairs.

  “Get out, Ty!” Lang’s voice, loud and firm. The subtext being Don’t ask stupid questions till we’re safe.

  “Roger that, One Alpha Thirty-Six.” Keller could tell the dispatcher was trying to keep her voice steady, bursting with questions she dared not ask. She and her partners might have a gun pointed at them, might be in a situation where they’d convinced the gunman that Code 200 was their way of calling in safe.

  But quiet or not, the dispatcher would be working her computer. Even now there’d be cops racing here. EMS too. Right now a unit was doubtless cleaving itself free of Foothills Hospital, leaving their patient with another crew and scooping up an extra stretcher so they could respond. Fire might even be coming.

  Party time.

  “Ash.” From the sound of her voice, Lang had reached the front door. On her way outside, as Keller should be.

  But Keller instead moved around the table to get a better view of Herzog’s corpse and the finger—Index finger, she thought absently—was pointed at her now like an accusation.

  “Right behind you, Kate,” she called.

  But that was clearly a lie. Her gaze rose again to the words scrawled on the wall.

  Had somebody done this for her?

  “Is she coming?” Atchison must be with Lang in the foyer, waiting for her.

  “Get outside!” Keller yelled. “I’m on my way.”

  Another lie. Philby’s words echoed in her head: I’m more worried you don’t care if you live or die.

  She turned slowly, gazing around the room. If she was honest with herself, she was at least curious as to where the other fingers had gotten to. And she definitely wasn’t leaving till she knew there were no girls imprisoned here.

  You don’t care if you live or die.

  But Keller didn’t think anyone who’d taken the trouble to write her a thank-you note, even if it was in blood, really wanted her dead.

  Yeah, right. Keep telling yourself stories, kid.

  There was another finger lying on the side table by the couch. Pinkie, by the look of it. Pointed toward the back of the house. Keller trod forward, her gaze edging from one side of the room to the other. Memories of high school geometry flitted through her head and a hunch bloomed in her mind.

  “Ash, where are you? Get out of there!” Lang’s voice was filled with fear.

  “I’m okay,” Keller was shaking and it came through in her voice.

  Get your shit together.

  She gritted her teeth and clenched her fists. “Get back to the unit. I’ll be right there.”

  “Fuck that,” Lang said. “Get out here now or I’m coming in.”

  Keller ignored her and stepped into the kitchen.

  She found the third finger in the sink.

  It had been raggedly sliced from the victim’s hand like the other two and tossed into the basin like a discarded teabag. A thin curlicue of blood trailed from the proximal phalangeal bone toward the drain.

  Ring finger. And something about the ring still being on it—the kind of big, weighty thing universities sold to graduates—was especially bothersome.

  Again, memories of high school geometry stirred in her brain.

  She moved on, careful not to touch anything, not that this caution would mean anything to the cops, who would be royally pissed she was in here at all.

  The thought didn’t stop her. She peered from the kitchen into the dining room she’d first glimpsed from the foyer. Nothing.

  A hand settled on her shoulder and she almost screamed, but it was Lang, her face taut and flushed.

  “CPS are on the way. What the hell are you doing? We have to get out of here, now.”

  Keller winced. Lang had her own issues. This was the last thing she needed.

  “I’m all right. I just—”

  “No. You saw the dead guy, right? The fingers. Whoever did that could still be here. You’re endangering yourself and us.”

  Keller shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

  “Not to mention screwing up a crime scene.”

  “Last time… at the farm,” Keller said, “there was a fire. They were never sure exactly how it started. If there’re children in here… I have to get them out.”

  Lang’s eyes blazed with realization. “Fuck.” She brought her radio up once again. “Dispatch, One Alpha Thirty-Six. Send fire as well.”

  “One Alpha Thirty-Six, roger. You got smoke there?”

  “Just send a fucking fire truck,” Lang growled into the mic.

  Keller imagined Grainger listening to this, maybe smiling. No matter what happened now, Lang was in for a reprimand for swearing on an open channel,
and Keller… well, she was probably done for good this time.

  She heard echoes of sirens. Far away.

  The northwest had been emptied. Purposefully?

  Paranoid? Maybe, or maybe somebody went to a lot of trouble over this.

  If so, Keller wasn’t going to disappoint them.

  “Get outside,” she told Lang, trying for a smile. “I’m just going to check the rest of the house quick.”

  Good sell. As long as you say “quick,” she’ll definitely agree.

  “Why? You want to find the rest of the fingers and sew them back on?”

  Keller pushed Lang away. “Go.”

  “I’m not leaving you, you asshole.” Lang reached into her thigh pocket and pulled out a miniature can of bear spray. Completely inappropriate to carry, and illegal if used on a human.

  Keller swore, but Lang wasn’t about to leave and maybe the quickest way to get her out was to let her follow Keller through this.

  “What the hell are you guys doing?” Atchison’s voiced echoed from the front foyer.

  “Go out onto the drive and flag the cops in,” Lang shouted back.

  No response. It seemed Atchison was that rarest of male partners who obeyed without asking questions, but silence wasn’t much comfort either.

  “You copy that, Ty?” Lang said into her radio.

  “Roger.”

  Lang nodded at Keller.

  “Basement first,” Keller said.

  “Our radios won’t work down there.” Lang said it through gritted teeth. EMS handhelds were notorious for poor reception unless they had line of sight.

  “I know.”

  “Good. Yeah.” Lang nodded, her mouth a thin line. “Sounds like fun.”

  Thirty-Eight

  Herzog’s security camera system had been simplicity itself for Arcand to invade, no problem at all compared to Calgary’s 9-1-1 dispatch centre, the ancillary EMS Proxima system, or police dispatch computers. So, from the comfort of his living room, he watched as Ash Keller explored Herzog’s house.

  He’d known Keller or her partners would call for backup immediately upon discovering Herzog’s body, but he’d only half hoped she would be brave enough to explore the intricate puzzle he’d left for her at the scene.

  Bravo! A remarkable woman, though he suspected it would be a challenge for her to avoid further difficulties with her employer and the Calgary Police after this, and so arranging her attendance at his next piece of performance art might prove problematic.

  “Such a pity.”

  He leaned forward and brushed back hair still wet from the shower. Murder, it turned out, was tough work. No so much the killing as the post-mortem dismemberment. The internet had sites rife with instructions on how best to accomplish such things, but having done it, he now thought most of them sub-par. It took a lot more mental fortitude than he’d anticipated to clip off Herzog’s fingers.

  Keller was descending into the basement now. So nice that Herzog had lots of cameras all over the house, though none in the very unusual room Keller would soon discover if she were as brave as she so far appeared to be.

  The thought brought a resurgence of the anger he’d felt after he popped open Herzog’s electronic front-door lock and surprised the old man in his living room. Arcand had expected to be recognized. After Sophie’s suicide, his name and face had appeared in newspapers across Canada. Hadn’t Herzog even taken notice?

  No.

  He’d almost given into the rage, and Herzog’s murder would then have been a very different thing indeed. Bludgeoning the man to death with the bolt cutters had been his initial impulse, but he’d managed to hold back. Too easy to injure himself and accidentally leave DNA behind.

  There had at least been satisfaction in forcing the outraged man to sit on the couch, his face pale as death, while Arcand explained why he was there. More satisfaction in watching Herzog beg as he came to understand he was going to die.

  Just as Sophie must have begged.

  It had been such a pleasure to shoot him, to see the light go out of his eyes. He wished he could’ve cut off just one finger while the man was still alive, but unlike Herzog, Arcand had no accomplices to hold a victim down. Writing the thank-you note to Ash was gratifying, though, as was distributing the fingers around the house, this last task allowing him to escape the smell and the irregular burbling sounds of the man’s bowels letting go.

  There was surprisingly little blood on his own clothing, which he’d newly purchased and kept in a garbage bag in his car until that morning. In a little while he would go down to the garage to cut the clothing and the oversized shoes he’d worn into minute pieces. Then he would drive west toward Banff to dump a few pieces at a time in roadside trash receptacles. The bolt cutters… Well, he’d save those. He might have occasion to use them again.

  Movement now out of the corner of his eye.

  One of Herzog’s outside security cams was showing a police cruiser sliding to a halt in the driveway. Sooner than he’d hoped, alas. Keller was only now descending into Herzog’s basement and he’d wanted to share in her exposure of another den of monsters.

  But discretion first. It would be best to get out of Herzog’s security system now. Before long, CPS’s own “hackers” would crawl into it.

  He watched until Keller disappeared into the area where Herzog had never installed security cameras, then punched at the keyboard. The screen went blank, and then the next connection he’d found to his sister’s attack flashed up.

  Dennis Hunt.

  Thirty-Nine

  Keller moved through the hallway off the kitchen, opening doors to her left and right. She found closets full of jackets and Christmas stuff, then a wider door that opened on a set of carpeted stairs leading down into blackness.

  “Anyone down there?” she shouted. Not like anyone hiding won’t know we’re here already.

  No response.

  She found the light switch and descended two stairs at a time. A popping sound behind her startled her when Lang yanked the safety tab off the bear spray.

  The wide lower floor was filled with shadows, along with the smell of old books and a hint of musty decay, the house in symbiosis with its owner. Bookshelves sidelined a fireplace at one end of the room and a sprawling pool table, its green velvet worn and stained, sat just in front of it. At the other end leather sofas surrounded a widescreen TV. Narrow beams of sunlight shone through gaps in the drapes drawn across the patio door, and Keller glimpsed the hint of a garden outside, sharp shades of life against the dark curtains.

  “There’s no one to rescue, Ash,” Lang said. “The cops will be here any minute anyway.”

  Keller ignored her and moved forward to examine the pool table, but the stain on the velvet looked old, and more like red wine than blood.

  “Ash.”

  “Not yet.”

  Three doors lay opposite the patio. The nearest was halfway ajar, the light within exposing the pale tile of a washroom. The next was wide open and Keller caught a glimpse of a water heater and electrical panel. The last door looked different somehow, like an add-on. Thicker wood, for certain.

  She elbowed the bathroom door wide and saw all the usual things: a half-filled bottle of Scope, a can of shaving cream, and a water-stained cup housing a toothbrush and razor. Rust stains crept up from the drains in the porcelain fixtures. She went to step back and saw it.

  In the shower, murky behind the half-closed curtain, something more rightly red than rust. She leaned in for a closer look.

  Herzog’s middle finger sat in the soap dish, awash in a swamp-mix of lather and water, lying sideways against a worn bar of Irish Spring.

  “Found another one.”

  Lang pushed in beside her and cursed under her breath.

  Horrid and surreal. But all Keller could think was He showered down here…

  She took deep breaths as crazy thoughts intruded on the horror, pushing it aside. There was another problem here, besides death and dismemberment. A Euclid
ean puzzle. She was sure now.

  She backed out of the bathroom, thinking about angles.

  A hypothesis about a hypotenuse.

  The idea tasted like insanity in her mind, but not wrong.

  Keller had done a BSc before stumbling into paramedicine. Obligatory stats courses had not been shining moments, but in high school she’d been a shade beyond competent in mathematics and particularly good with protractor and compass and with calculating tangents and cosines.

  One more door to go.

  Lang was standing in the centre of the room, speaking into the radio. She turned to Keller, no trace left of the good humour that had lit her face earlier in the day. “No clear signal.”

  The radio squawked. Atchison. “Ash, Kate… You okay?”

  “Roger that.” Lang’s eyes bored into Keller’s. A clear Can we go now?

  Keller brushed past her to the last door. Now that she was closer, she saw that it wasn’t just different. It was very different.

  The doorjamb was much thicker than any of the other doors she’d seen… in any house. Reinforced. And above the twist handle was a black oval that looked something like a fingerprint scanner. But none of that mattered because the door stood open, like a gaping mouth.

  Keller peered down at the blood-flecked scan pad. Thumbprint?

  “Ash, please.” Lang clapped a hand down on her arm, trying to pull her away, shaking her until their eyes met. “CPS will—”

  Keller pushed her away. “Go.”

  The other woman resisted, trying to pull Keller along. “We have to go.”

  “No.” Keller gritted her teeth and tore out of Lang’s grip. “I’m not leaving till I know there’s no one else…” She nudged the door open.

  “Fuck…” But Lang sounded resigned now. She held the bear spray up.

  The stairway beyond the door was tight and panelled, like a coffin. Farther down, ridged foam tile lined the walls and ceiling. And the door behind them.

  “Soundproofing,” Lang said. “Fucking hell, Ash.”

  “Stay here. Don’t argue, not now. Hold the door open for us.”