by Chuck Hogan
"Unattended death?" said Bucky, mocking the proper terminology.
"This is a potential crime scene. We need a doctor here to certify."
"Maddox," said Eddie, more annoyed than protesting, "the witch fell down carrying a candle or something."
"Then waiting won't hurt."
Bucky was smiling and shaking his head in that happy, pissed-off way of his. "Maddox, Maddox, Maddox." He picked up the fire ax, weighing it in his hand. "We can go around you, over you, or through you. Your choice."
"Stand down, Bucky."
Bucky said, "I am going to enjoy this."
He took a step toward the door, and Maddox's hand went to his holster.
Bucky stopped short, as though he'd been flat-handed. "Are you shitting me?" he said, gleeful, then continuing forward.
"Buck," said Eddie, sharp enough to halt him.
Eddie nodded to the neighbors in their robes watching from the lawn, and to the firebugs milling in the driveway, roused by sirens and sky-smoke. Witnesses.
Bucky turned back to face Maddox. But he stayed where he was. Eddie had vented his brother's anger just like the heat of that house fire. Next time Maddox might not be so lucky.
22
DR. BOLT
DR. GARY BOLT STEPPED out of his Honda Prelude in the short driveway. The foul air reeked of things not meant to be burned, smoke detector alarms squealing out of the black-windowed house. Steam rising into the slanting light of the morning sun.
Two soot-blackened firemen sat on the front bumper of their truck. "How's the rice-burner running, doc?" they called to him.
Dr. Bolt put up a quick smile and slid his hand nervously into the pocket of his white coat. Just keep moving. Get this over with.
There was Bucky Pail, mashing a lit cigarette against a tree trunk. He came forward in his fireman's outfit, bunkers under a T-shirt. It made him look thicker than he did in his patrolman's uniform: the "camp counselor with a gun" look, as Dr. Bolt often thought of it. There was a cop here too, stepping away from the front of the house.
Dr. Bolt shoved his other trembling hand into his coat pocket. "Here I am," said Dr. Bolt to Bucky, gamely.
Dr. Bolt knew the cop's name as Maddox. Maddox looked him over and turned to Bucky. "The vet?" he said.
Bucky said, "Medical doctor, it's enough."
Dr. Bolt played at being jolly. "Now there's a ringing endorsement!"
"You can certify a death?" said Maddox.
Dr. Bolt shrugged, making wings of the flaps of his coat. "I can tell you if a man is alive or not."
"All we need," said Bucky, rushing this along. "Let's do this, doc."
They started over the spongy grass. "It's safe to enter?"
"Should be."
"Should be," said Dr. Bolt. He felt something squishy in his pocket, remembered his latex gloves. "I brought these." He distributed pairs. "Might help."
Maddox didn't take his pair right away, perhaps noticing Dr. Bolt's shaking hands.
The sedative he had taken was failing him. Get through this. Do not get caught between these two. And do not piss off Bucky Pail.
"Shall we?" said Dr. Bolt.
Bucky pushed in through the broken door. The front hallway was wet and hazy, and they stepped over puddles to a living room, its walls blistered and blackened almost to the ceiling. Morning sunlight streaming in through a smashed window created an almost churchlike atmosphere, and, in the soot-darkened room, an eerie sense of night-day. Parts of the wall and floor still offered steam, and everything reeked of carbon reversion.
Against the high wall stood a wide stone hearth licked black by flame. A few objects atop the broad mantle had survived the blaze. A pair of ornate silver candlesticks coated with melted red wax. A porcelain skull with a hollowed space as for burning incense. A chalice carved with a distorted crescent moon and star. A cracked rod of glass. A smoky crystal prism.
Dr. Bolt said, "Interesting."
Bucky led them to an open, burned-out doorway. A small office inside, a burnt lump that used to be a computer monitor set before a heat-warped ergonomic chair, now a modern-art installation. All that was once paper was now ash; all that was wood was now black; all that was metal was now melted. The room remained suffocatingly hot, the carbon odor mixing with sulfur and something like a meat smell, the air growing oppressive.
The corpse lay behind the chair, glistening black and crisp. Dr. Bolt's first instinct was to turn away, which he did, his fist covering his mouth until he regained his composure. The body's elbows and knees were drawn in almost to a fetal position, its tongue swollen between charred lips, its one visible eyelid puffed out like a venous, black egg. The contents of the midsection were exposed where they had cooked into the floor.
"Uhh," said Dr. Bolt, suppressing a sudden burp, his stomach rising into his throat. "Wellug-huhyes, I'd say he's deceased, all right." He cleared his throat again and almost lost it.
"Okay, then," said Bucky, ready to leave.
"His arms are broken," said Maddox.
Bucky squinted. Dr. Bolt didn't know how to read these two.
"Well," said Dr. Bolt, stepping wide around the body. "I do have some experience with barn fires." If only he knew what Bucky wanted from him here. "Extreme heat does dobrr-hmmsurprising things." He fumbled for the fat end of his necktie and pinched it over his nose. "The stomach eruption. Looks like a disemboweling, but the intestinal gases, when superheated, can rupture the stomach wall. Heat can also fracture bones."
"What about his eyes?" said Eddie, from the doorway.
"Well, every fluid has its boiling point," said Dr. Bolt, swallowing down more acid. "The muscles contract due to simple water evaporation. Why he appears so balled up here."
Bucky said, "Fine. You can write us up something?"
"Hold on," said Maddox. "We still have to identify the body."
"Identify?" said Bucky. "It's Frond's house. Guy lived alone." Then impatience got the better of him. "Fine, let's flip him over, see his face." Bucky fingered down the webbing of his latex gloves, kneeling at the corpse's feet. "Eddie, get the other end."
Eddie Pail came forward slowly, eyeing the job, crouching reluctantly and placing his hands near where the shoulder had burned into the floor.
"I don't know about moving him" began Dr. Bolt.
"On three," snapped Bucky. "One, twoheave."
Later, after Dr. Bolt had finished disgorging his breakfast omelet onto the front lawn, he decided it wasn't the site of the reddened flesh stuck to the floorboards like dry meat on a nonstick grill that made him run from the house. Nor was it the underside of the skull, where it was stove into the brainpan.
No. It was the cracked chunks of black bone that came rolling out of the corpse's mouth. The shattered teeth tumbling forth like rotted dice from Death's own cup.
23
HESS
TROOPER LEO HESS of the Mitchum County State Police Detective Unit yawned gustily, chewing the yawn on its way out. "This everybody?"
Pail, the local sergeant, nodded. Six men stood inside the station entrance, all in shorts and matching jerseys and black ball caps, looking more like a police softball team than working cops. The old building they were in resembled a humble chamber of commerce center more than a police station, with its screen door and porch, the unglassed front counter, two no-tech key-lock holding cells in back. Coming from the burned house in the hills, Hess had passed sagging shacks surrounded by gutted cars on cinder blocks, trailers nursing off silver tanks of propane, swayback barns and tarp-covered snowmobiles. Pockets of beauty amid acres of neglect. He rolled right through the center of town before realizing it was the center of town.
These guys just seemed confused. This was like coming out to some desert post to find the local army living off camel meat, too heat-silly to understand that the campaign had ended months ago. Hess was usually luckier than this. Murders were rare out in the sticks.
But whatever. He'd bump up his clearance rate, the
n head on back to Dodge. In and out in forty-eight hours. Leo the Lion was ready to roar.
"So, Sergeant Pail," he said. Bucky was a hayseed name. "Who did this?"
Pail's eyes were too deep-set to offer much. "How the hell would I know?"
Hess looked the others over. "I always ask," he said. "A town this size, local law usually knows what's going on. No suspects? No theories?"
The only one who moved was Maddox, the one they had waited for. The overnight patrolman whom Hess had told to come in early, so that he could address them all together. Maddox stood straighter in back, for a better look at Pail.
"Okay, then," said Hess. "Who called in the fire originally?"
"No one," said the other Pail, the taller, blond one. Brothers in the same police department: never a good thing.
"Who scrambled you, then?"
The one named Ullard said, "Bucky sent out a page."
Hess turned back to the small-eyed Pail, waiting.
"I saw black smoke in the sky," said Bucky. "They teach you that in the certification courses. Usually means a fire."
Hess crossed his big arms, keeping up his genial smile. "Looks like the fire had multiple points of origin. Anyone know what that means?"
Ullard said, "It started in different places?"
"Wow," said Hess, taking a moment to marvel. "It means the fire was set. Arson squad found these littlethey looked like smoked-down cigars to me, turns out they're flares. Road flares and good old-fashioned unleaded gasoline. No frills. Somebody tried to burn down the house in a half-assed murder scene cover-up."
Now he had their attention.
"I say half-assed because only half the house burned, giving us plenty to work withfile that under 'Good.' Being almost twenty-four hours out now, that's a daylong head start for the assailant. But we can make up some of that time once we hear from our eyewitness."
Now came confused looks back and forth.
Eddie Pail was the first to take the bait. "Eyewitness?"
"The corpse," said Hess. "The vic. The presumed Mr. Frond. Dead men make the best witnesses. Why? Because they can't lie. They got no stake in this thing other than absolute truth. Same as me."
Two officers from Crime Scene Servicesbadgeless, casual in jeans and jerseys except for their latex glovesopened the screen door to get Hess's attention. One held a small brush that looked like an archaeologist's tool, the other a rolled-up paper bag marked "Evidence" in red.
Hess gave them a hard look that only they could have construed as anger, and they backed out fast. Hess was not to be interrupted during his get-to-know-me spiel. He had to motivate these good old boys to work for him.
"Criminalists, huh?" said Hess, leaning forward as though taking them into his confidence. "Spook the shit out of me. Tiptoeing around with their brushes and lasers. Tweezing things, rolling them up in these little forensic doggy bags. Everything's an experiment with them. Guys haunt my dreams. Wouldn't amaze me in the least if the skinny one there was carrying his own shit in that paper bag. Probably huddled together in the mobile lab out there right now, happily picking through it. 'Joe, when did I eat corn?'"
Snickers from most of them. Hess twisted his thick gold wedding band as though screwing it onto his finger. He was working these yokels good. Be selling them time-shares in Puerto Rico next.
"But they're the ones making the cases these days. The kids who paid attention in chemistry class, who sat there and memorized the elements chartthey solve the crimes now. Me? I'm more like the coach. Used to be first-string quarterback, now I'm drawing up Xs and Os. If it's a promotion, I don't know. Bill Belichick. That's me now."
Two trouble spots identified. Bucky Pail, the shorter brother, wasn't lapping it up with the rest. A definite nail in the road going forward. And Maddox, the one lurking in back, almost hiding there, was another question mark. He chuckled like the others, but without sincerity. Could be he was just the black sheep of the bunch.
"Right, so, I'm a guy who likes to keep local law involved. Let's kick this thing around a little, shall we?" Hess had learned to use his eyebrows, raising them high like expectations, inviting candor, demanding truth. "A witch, huh? What do we make of that?"
Some shaken heads, no one committing to anything.
"Safe to say this is no random crime. There's no transient population here. Anybody passing through Black Fallsno offensethere's not a lot to stop for. So we can pretty much assume the witch knew his assailant. Is it a sex crime? Maybe."
"Sex crime?" said Eddie Pail, shaping up to be an easy mark.
"Why not? Looked like the guy had been in his underwear. I mean, if he's got obvious enemies, fine, we'll look at them. But I'm just as happy to start off with his friends."
He watched them process that.
"Guy'd been beaten up, and I mean severely. Busted to pieces. Just to let you know we're not playing here. House was also gone over pretty good. Our killer spent some quality time in there. And why not? No neighbors nearby, nobody to hear anything. Who here's working the note?"
Again they looked around. "What note?" said a big bag of shoulders, Mort Lees.
"The notification," said Hess. "Frond's next of kin."
Shrugs. Hadn't occurred to anyone. Eddie Pail looked at his brother, Bucky, who kept on looking straight at Hess.
"So," said Hess. "Anything else anybody wants to add?"
Bucky Pail said, "Maybe."
Hess nodded. "Go for it."
"We got a missing sex offender."
"Okay."
"You said sex crime."
"I sure did. What you got?"
"Scarecrow, we call him. Real name's Dillon Sinclair."
"Missing how long?"
"More than a week now, I guess."
Bucky Pail stepped past Hess and around the front counter to the beginning of the hallway behind. Pushpinned onto the corkboard outside a door labeled REPORTS ROOM were badly photocopied registration sheets featuring mugs and vitals of nine Level 2 and Level 3 sex offenders stacked three by three. Bucky fingered the one in the center, a small-headed guy with a firing-squad expression.
Hess skimmed the bio. "Kid-toucher," he said. "Girls or boys?"
"Boys."
"He's Level Two," said another voice. Hess was surprised to hear from Maddox now, still in back of the others. "Nonviolent."
Hess nodded, taking the opportunity to drill Maddox with a stare, then turned back to Bucky Pail. What were these two trying to tell him?
Hess pointed to the SO's picture. "What's with the eyebrows?"
"He shaves them off," said Bucky Pail. "Guy's a full-time freak."
In the photo, Sinclair had been posed against the wall opposite where Hess was now, unsmiling, borderline scared, the missing facial hair making him look alien and terminally ill. Probably was the look he was going for.
"All right, gentlemen," said Hess, looking to wind this up. "Look, maybe you don't want us here, and maybe we don't even want to be here. A blind date is what it is, and I've been on some pretty rough ones. Let me do my job, and I'll let you do yours, so long as you understand that, when the time comes to dance, I'll be the one leading. If you're good with that, then I'm good with you. We good?"
Unenthusiastic nods. A troop of sad sacks and misfits. Hess had a fun forty-eight hours ahead of him.
24
WANDA
SHE DREAMED AGAIN that she was dead and floating through town. Landing in different places, people stopping and staring as she walked up to them, awaiting her caress. She touched them over their hearts and some fell dead limp right away, as if she were one of those revival faith healers on TV. Others shivered at the contact, jolted by the release of their souls from their bodies, and then joined the small mob following her. When she came to Bucky, he was standing outside his backyard trailer, the one that stunk so bad, whose curtained windows and padlocked door glowed wild white from within. She reached for him but froze in midembrace. It was his eyes. Empty black sockets. She looked a
t her hand, and it was black now with all the death she had brought to people. Her nails were rotted and peeling off, knuckles shriveled to the bone. She pulled it back in shame, and Bucky turned away, leaving her to walk on alone.
"Wanda. Wake up. Wanda!"
Something peeled back her eyelid. Her vision was blurred. Donny Maddox called her name.