Primal Fear

by Boucher, Brad

  “Don’t sell yourself short, okay? No one else saw it either. Still waters run deep, that’s what they always say.”

  “Not this deep. Not by a long shot.”

  Hughes lapsed into silence for a moment, and when he spoke again, there was a strange tone of reluctance in his voice that was quite uncharacteristic of him.

  “There is one thing. I’m not sure I should even bring up . . .”

  “At this point, I’ll take whatever you can give me. What is it?”

  “It’s probably not even relevant, and I want to go through another set of tests before I put anything in writing anyway—”

  “What is it, Del? I don’t care whether it’s relevant or not, I just want to know anything I can about this one.”

  “I’d really rather not try to explain it over the phone. Is there any way you can get down here later this afternoon?”

  Harry checked his watch. “Is it something that can keep ‘til tonight?”

  “It’ll keep, but I’d rather you see this as soon as you could.”

  Chapter Seven

  By mid-afternoon, the sky had gone dead white over the streets of Glen Forest, promising snow but offering nothing. Harry had seen the local forecast, and knew heavy snow was on its way, but for now there seemed to be no relief from the arctic cold. Other than the coming storm, the weather man had made only a solemn prediction of bitter cold and strong winds straight through the end of the week.

  Such had been the story since the onset of winter, a brutally cold spell that had stretched on for weeks at a time, with no sign of relief in the coming days.

  Climbing out of his truck outside the County Coroner’s Office, Harry wondered again why he’d never moved to a warmer part of the country. It was a question that only occurred to him in the grip of a cold snap, but one which seemed to occur more and more as each winter took hold. It was also a question to which he’d never really had a good answer.

  Hughes was waiting for him in the building’s foyer, the stub of an unlit cigar nestled firmly between his teeth. He squinted against the roar of cold air that swept into the room as Harry pushed the door closed behind him.

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, it sure hasn’t warmed up any out there,” he complained, rubbing his pudgy hands together. “Too bad the cold weather hasn’t kept the State Police from barking up my tree.”

  “Trouble?”

  “Ah, they’re all hopped up about Marty’s autopsy, same as you, but not nearly as patient. They’re asking if I found any traces of unidentified tissue underneath his fingernails, any scratches or abrasions that could indicate signs of a struggle. All that sort of thing.”

  “Did you call them back yet?”

  Hughes shook his head. “I wanted to talk to you first. Wanted you to take a look at something.”

  He led Harry down a short hall, stopping halfway along its length to open the door to the main stairwell. The building’s old boards creaked beneath their feet, marking their progress like some tragic dirge.

  As they descended to the basement, where Hughes had long ago set up his coroner’s office, Harry found himself growing steadily more apprehensive. He’d never been comfortable in situations like this.

  Earlier that morning, when he’d stumbled upon Marty’s body, he’d been running on pure adrenalin, a sort of detached policeman’s instinct taking over and guiding him through the motions. There had been no room for discomfort, no time to stop and realize he’d been sharing a room with a man who’d been alive only a few minutes before.

  But now, in the stark brightness of the county morgue, Harry felt his stomach tighten, his pulse growing steadily louder between his ears.

  Hughes, of course, was a consummate professional, taking it all in stride as just another symptom of his trade. But Harry had never known him to neglect the feelings of those around him, always gauging the level of one’s squeamishness before leaping head-first into an especially gruesome description.

  There had even been an occasion when Hughes had drawn Harry aside for a soft but honest warning that the body he’d come to view had been particularly offensive. That had been a drowning victim, pulled from Cooris Pond after two weeks beneath the surface, and very early on in Harry’s career.

  They reached the basement, turning once more to make their way to the back of the building. Hughes’ office was to the right, a huge mahogany desk surrounded by bookshelves and file cabinets. They passed it by, proceeding to the sterile chill of the examination room.

  True to form, Hughes hesitated with one hand on the door handle. His eyes rose to meet Harry’s.

  “I know you already saw him this morning,” he began, his voice grave, “but I still want you to prepare yourself. All these bright lights; nothing’s hidden here. Not so much blood anymore. I’ve cleared most of that away already. But . . . well, it ain’t pretty.”

  He plucked the cigar from his mouth and, looking it over once as if considering its worth, dropped it into a waste basket beside the door. He pushed the door open, stepping casually inside and waiting for Harry to join him.

  Reluctantly, Harry followed, sucking in one last full breath of the clear hallway air before entering the septic stillness of the examination room. The smell of chemicals assaulted his nose, the sharp odor of industrial cleaner, the heavy, cloying reek of some kind of preservation fluid. Hughes ran a tight ship, insisting on a level of cleanliness that bordered on obsessive, especially when one stopped to consider the main function of this lab space. Only the dead were attended to here; the room’s condition would hardly matter to them.

  “I didn’t put him on ice yet.” Hughes crossed the wide room and stepped up to the last table in a row of four. He reached beneath the table and produced a fresh pair of latex gloves, pulling them on as he spoke. “I didn’t want the temperature change covering up what I wanted you to see.”

  One of the other tables was occupied as well, a still form lying silently beneath the crisp white sheet, just a single foot jutting out, presumably to expose the toe tag. Harry moved past with barely a glance, preferring the identity of Hughes’ second customer to remain a mystery.

  At Slater’s table, Hughes curled his fingers around the upper corner of the sheet, his gaze already taking on a scholarly gleam as he slowly peeled it back.

  Harry’s eyes dropped to what lay beneath, a nervous swallow clicking audibly in his throat.

  Hughes had indeed swabbed away most of the blood; the wounds stood out now as deep, bloodless gouges in the flesh. Most of the left half of Slater’s face was gone, the top and back of his head reduced to little more than pulp. The shotgun had done its job, cleaving such a trail of destruction that, in the unlikely event that Marty had survived the initial blast, he wouldn’t have hung on for very long.

  Slater’s right eye was still intact, open and staring, its pupil fully dilated into a sightless black orb. It beckoned Harry’s scrutiny, dragging him in, and he struggled to pull his gaze away.

  Something flashed in his mind, something too fleeting to even identify, like a voice from a dream, its presence sensed upon waking but its message lost forever to the invasion of consciousness. It was gone just as quickly but its echo remained, a distraction he fought to brush aside.

  “I almost didn’t catch it until I noticed it on both sides,” Hughes said. “Once I cleaned up all the blood, I got a much better look at it.” Leaning over Slater with a penlight, he grasped Slater’s chin with his free hand and swiveled the head on its stiff neck just enough to afford Harry a better view. “Right here, just below the ear. That’s where I noticed it first.”

  There were a series of abrasions there—four of them, in fact—running in four swollen parallel lines of red agitated flesh. They stood out plainly under close inspection, even against the dead gray pallor of Slater’s skin.

  Harry bent closer to take a look, a trace of his apprehension falling away beneath the subtle weight of this new discovery.

  “Claw marks?” he asked doubtfully.


  “I’d say so, yeah. Made by human hands—strong hands, from the look of them. And the appearance of these wounds leads me to believe they came from repeated scratching. Does that strike you as the type of thing you’d see if one of his victims got in a lucky scratch during a struggle?”

  Harry shook his head. “Not at all. Looks like they’re in and around the ear, too, not just below it. You said you noticed this on the other side, too?”

  “Yes. And something else. That’s what made me come back and examine this side again.”

  Hughes made his way around the table, reaching out and nonchalantly turning Slater’s head towards Harry.

  Harry circled quickly around the foot of the table, moving before that single dead eye could catch him in its stare again. The left side of Slater’s face, as grotesquely disfigured as it was, was still better than staring into that sightless eye.

  Again, Harry could make out the scratches, and this time they were more obvious. And below them, just beneath the jaw line, there was a single oval bruise, roughly the size of a quarter.

  Hughes pointed it out carefully. “What does that look like to you?”

  Harry studied it, his eyes narrowing, his thoughts racing. His first impression was that it was just a common hickey, nothing more, but that didn’t sit well with him. If Slater had been involved in the disappearance of those children—worse yet, if he’d molested them in any way—then the scratches could be a direct result of his actions. One of the children might have put up more of a fight than he’d anticipated, laying those scratches on him before he could back safely out of reach. But a hickey?

  The very idea of it sickened Harry. It suggested that one of the children, at least, might have been a willing partner. And in his gut, he simply wasn’t ready to accept that possibility.

  So what else?

  “A finger mark?”

  “Bingo,” Hughes said. “A thumb mark.”

  He stood up straight, motioning for Harry to follow suit. “Now, place your left thumb in that same position, on the left side of your face.”

  Harry obeyed, raising his hand and carefully laying his thumb in precisely the same spot, eyeing the bruise on Slater’s neck to accurately gage its placement.

  “Where do you fingertips end up?” Hughes prompted.

  “Right over my ears.” He paused, lowering his hand. “Are you suggesting those scratches were self-inflicted? You think Marty did that to himself?”

  “That’s exactly what I think. Given the positions of those wounds, particularly in the case of the thumb-print, there’s no other way they could have been caused.”

  He clicked on his penlight again, beckoning Harry to lean over the body. “And look at this. This is the worst of it all.” He turned Slater’s head, shining the penlight into the inner ear.

  Harry could make out a deep wound inside the ear, dried blood caked around it, but still identifiable.

  “What the hell is that?”

  It was Hughes’ turn to shrug. “Puncture wound, so far as I can tell, straight through the eardrum. From the looks of it, I’d have to say it was made by some kind of blunt object. A screwdriver maybe, or even a ballpoint pen. Nothing sharp, though. It’s much too ragged to have been made by an ice pick or anything along those lines.”

  “Do you think that’s self-inflicted as well?”

  “At first guess I would have said no, only because I can’t imagine anybody subjecting themselves to that kind of pain. Would have been excruciating. I don’t know how he would have been able to stand it without passing out. But then, add in those scratch marks, obviously made with his own hands, and you start to figure that if he did one he very well could have done the other.”

  “You’re talking about a guy puncturing his own ear here, Del. You said it yourself, the pain would have been huge. The possibility that someone else did it to him also supports the possibility that Slater’s death wasn’t suicide at all.”

  Hughes surprised him by nodding in agreement. “Yeah, I thought of that all right. And when I sampled the blood from the inner ear, I found that it was already clotted. That tells me the puncture wound was made a good eighteen to twenty-four hours before Marty’s death. If he was murdered, if someone did this to his ear and then killed him, why would that person wait another full day before finishing him off? I say he wouldn’t have. It wouldn’t have made any sense.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Crazy as it sounds, I stand by my diagnosis. Every wound you see here—from the scratches to the shotgun wound—was self-inflicted. That’s what I believe, and that’s what I’m putting in my report.”

  Harry let the words sink in, rubbing a cool hand across his dry lips. He hadn’t meant to challenge Hughes’ professional determination, at least not so directly. But to openly accept it without discussion, without allowing for other potential explanations, wasn’t in his nature. He knew Hughes understood this, that he would take Harry’s skepticism as an inherent part of his profession.

  Still, the question remained unchanged: had Marty Slater brought that damage upon himself, or had someone else had a hand in it? The former scenario raised an ugly question in Harry’s thoughts, but before he could even address it, Hughes put voice to it, as if secretly in tune with Harry’s line of thought.

  “Now, the thing we got to ask ourselves is this: why on God’s green earth would any man do that to himself?” He watched Harry closely, as if eager for him to shed some sudden light on the entire situation.

  But Harry only shook his head. “Wish I knew. We’ll probably never straighten that one out. I don’t imagine we’ll find anything to link up—”

  He lapsed into sudden silence, his mouth hanging open but his voice catching in his throat. Because a string of words had blossomed in his mind, as cold and dead as Slater’s lifeless form upon the table. A chill rippled through him as he let it seep into his thoughts.

  . . . they won’t leave me be, won’t let me alone . . .

  The words from Slater’s suicide note, words Harry hadn’t had the time to go over and pick apart. Until now he’d almost forgotten about the note, just another part of the puzzle he’d pushed aside to come back to later. But now . . .

  The two phrases collided in his thoughts. The first, spoken by Hughes only a moment before: “Why on God’s green earth would a man do that to himself?” The second, from the cryptic, bloodied note they’d found on Slater’s rapidly cooling body: “They won’t leave me be, won’t let me alone.”

  Harry had been trying to assign a physical explanation to Marty’s self-mutilation, some sort of serious inner ear infection, or even a hearing malady that could be blamed. Now, another probability occurred to him, one that was somehow worse, somehow more frightening.

  “Voices,” Harry whispered, almost to himself.

  “What’s that?”

  He blinked, feeling hot and cold all at once, his gaze dropping to Slater’s butchered ear. “Jesus, you don’t think he was hearing voices, do you?”

  Hughes eyed him cautiously. “What makes you think that?”

  “The note. The suicide note Marty left behind, it said something like ‘they won’t leave me alone’, and ‘they won’t let me be’. Until now, I didn’t really have time to consider who the hell ‘they’ were. Now I’m starting to wonder if maybe he meant he was hearing voices, that they wouldn’t leave him alone, wouldn’t give him any peace.”

  “That’s a pretty scary line of thought, Harry.”

  “Yeah, I know. But think about it. A man would have to be crazy to push a screwdriver into his ear. Crazy or desperate. But it happens, doesn’t it? You hear about some of these cases where the defendant claims to have heard voices, telling him what to do, driving him to murder.”

  “So you think Marty was trying to shut out the voices?”

  Harry shook his head. “I don’t know what to think at this point, but it’s the only thing I’ve got so far that makes any lick of sense.”

  He peered once more at Slater�
��s corpse, as if it could provide him with a wealth of much-needed information. Mercifully, Slater’s right eye was turned away, gazing blindly towards the examination room’s door. “I’ve got to check out that note again. Maybe I’m just grasping at straws.” He turned to Hughes. “Can I use your phone?”

  “Sure. Of course.”

  Harry waited while Hughes drew the sheet over Slater’s face. The coroner performed this task with infinite care, with a reverence that was almost disturbing. Whatever Slater had been in life—a pedophile, almost certainly a child molester, possibly even a murderer—Hughes still treated him with the same respect he apparently administered to all of his customers.

  Peeling off his surgical gloves with a resounding snap of latex, he led Harry out of the examination room and into the hall, pausing only once in the doorway to flick off the overhead lights before leaving the room. He gestured towards his office.

  “Help yourself,” he said, “I’m going to take a quick run upstairs to see how the blood work is coming along. Won’t be long.”

  Harry nodded and stepped into Hughes’ office, checking through his notes and dialing up Marty Slater’s home number.

  There was a framed photograph on the corner of the desk, a yellowing black and white shot of Delbert Hughes and Harry’s father, taken over twenty-five years before on a weekend fishing trip. Hughes was grinning broadly, holding up a large mouth bass that must have weighed twelve pounds. Beside him, grinning sheepishly, was Harry’s father, proudly displaying the four inch sunfish he’d caught, his only catch of the entire weekend.

  Harry smiled, remembering the stories his dad had spun about that fishing trip, tales that had grown steadily more outrageous as the years had passed. Here, though, was the proof of his father’s fishing prowess, captured forever in a touching and funny photograph.

  He closed his eyes and waited for the call to go through, hoping one of his deputies would pick up the phone and not the State Police. He needed some fast answers, not another series of questions.