Chapter Eleven
Carried by the wind, the ugly sounds of retching extended beyond the abandoned train station, wafted along the trail to those hidden burial grounds of babies, and drifted past Potter’s Field and the strewn dread roses lying on a nameless grave.
Wildflowers shook and sprang back and forth in the grass. The woods captured and returned a sense of menace, the flashing lights brushing against bark, melding with the sun. Vomit puddled in the weeds.
Car radios buzzed static and crackled barely distinguishable orders and responses: “Hey, Sheriff, what the hell’s happening up there?” The M.E. coughed through his scarf and shook his head in the direction of the deputy throwing up against a sugar maple. It could happen like that sometimes, but he hadn’t witnessed it for a long time. You could see it day in and day out, never letting it affect you, and all of a sudden it would catch you deep in the gut and make your legs weak as if you’d never been around it before; or you could be a rookie on your first assignment and handle it as if you’d been on the job twenty years. You never knew quite how it would affect you, no matter how often you grinned in the face of it.
And murder had never been like this in Summerfell before.
Feet tramped over the meadow heading for the platform while indifferent ambulance attendants parked out front looked over the rest of the hillside with impassive eyes. They knew they were on the scene strictly as a formality and hated every minute of it. Bored and cold, they would rather have been scraping the body up and bagging the little pieces. There was nothing to do now but wait for the word to go, running their heater in the shadows of the wrecked buildings of the asylum.
They hadn’t been inside.
Marty Cruthers, the rookie retching in the weeds, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, face ashen and wet as one of the other deputies tried and failed to speak words that could seem consoling.
“I knew her,” Cruthers said. “She lived only a few blocks from me, been there for years, I’m telling you. We even went on a few dates, before I met Janice.” He slid and leaned back against the side of the tree. “I’m only a couple of years older than her.” His eyes flitted, catching bits and pieces here and there. “I liked her, I really liked her. I mean, she’s young, it’s not like we ever did anything, nothing in the sack, you know, but that was okay. Like we were friendly.” He was having trouble breathing. “When, Russ, come on, come on. For Christ’s sake, Russ, come on … when are they going to take her down?”
She remained hanging in the station.
Swinging slowly, gradually spinning in the air by leisurely degrees.
Upside down.
With arms outstretched below her head, throat precisely cut in order to avoid, it seemed, any arterial spray. The carefully drained blood had flowed out in two steady streams that ran off behind her ears, a great deal of the fluid had been absorbed into her long thick hair, turning blond curls crimson and coiling them into tightly matted knots. The rest of the blood had dripped into the perfectly circular pool drying beneath.
Naked young girl with alabaster skin, belly smooth and beautiful as marble glistening with condensation, so thin and papery because it was empty. Camera flashes exposed every act inflicted upon her, from a hundred varying angles, veering position and points of view, passionately igniting the blue of her open eyes.
Her countenance glowed in the sunlight arcing through the broken windows, face untouched; no bruise, slice, no welt of any kind. They were thankful for that, and curious as well. Her tongue had been torn out and the mouth wiped clean after.
The wire used to string her up was hitched to a rafter and tied around the left ankle, cutting into her foot so deeply as she spun that it couldn’t be seen inside the wound anymore. The other leg had been shattered and bent, forced back and down so that she looked as if she’d been snapped in two like a wishbone. After she had been bled, the toes of her left foot had been jammed into her mouth and her jaw worked violently enough to bite them off herself. In the coagulating pool her toes lay atop her broken ribs, heart, and lungs; the contents of her abdominal cavity had unfurled into her chest, which hung with intestines. Until the coroner cleaned up, they wouldn’t know if anything had been taken.
White.
White, so intensely white, her stomach hadn’t been damaged at all, and you could look at that part of her and think of the days when you dated teenage girls, and how amazing it was to stroke a belly like that, soft line of blond fuzz traveling her midriff. The rookie outside kept mumbling for them to take her down, to please take her down now, please.
Her hands brushed the station floor, jagged fingernails scraping the freezing cement. Tik. The carcass, which nobody with any mercy would call Joanne Sadler any longer, continued being played upon the breezes. Tik, like a swimmer diving naked into darkness, half turning now in midair to look at you, turquoise nails still sweeping the ground, tik. Her body had been swung through the blood in a particular manner, those dripping hands used to draw out a circle and spell two words along its circumference. -
Written in her blood, with her own hands, facing to the north: YHWH.
And to the south: BAPHOMET.
As she kept scratching at the floor.
Webs cross-hatched the ceiling and spiders made their way out to the wire. More flashes from the camera drove the dead girl’s stare across the room.
“That’s enough of the fucking pictures, Benny,” Sheriff Hodges said. “I want those rolls developed and sealed. I ain’t kidding. Everything, including the negatives, all of it sent back to me by five tonight.”
“Five?”
“And no help on this one, Ben, I want you to do it all yourself. None of the kids work on it. None of them can keep their mouths shut about it.”
“Can you blame ’em?” Benny Turnball said, knowing better than to whine or argue, and not feeling strong enough to contest such demands. He unsteadily hefted his camera bag onto his shoulder, fighting to keep his breakfast from rising any farther up his throat, relieved to be getting the hell out of this place. He refused to think about how at the age of forty-eight he could conclude, without any satisfaction at all, that he’d been right his entire life for being a bitterly cynical bastard. “You’re going to piss off the press.”
“Yeah, and won’t that keep me up at night, knowing them vultures can’t eat this one up?” Hodges’s barrel chest heaved, taking it all in, letting it all out, with that one breath. “Why don’t you just let me worry about that, all right, Benny? Hey, didn’t I just tell you to do something?”
Hodges turned away then, his face never anything but caustic, glad that he’d made it without smashing the little shit of a photographer’s teeth down his throat. He could rein in the rage, sometimes; not always, but sometimes. Every vein crawled in his neck, threatening to burst. Still, he wouldn’t let this wrath pull him too far along, though he wanted to go. He hadn’t shed a tear in forty years, not even when his son died of leukemia while Hodges fought a war to make it safe for other little boys instead, and especially not when his wife had been run down by a drunk driver. Drunk—the guy had shot back only two Lite beers, but just couldn’t hold it.
Most people mistook his apparent lack of emotion for apathy; he heard it all, and noticed the glances, but didn’t care much as long as it all worked out. If you really knew him—and only one man could claim to—or had an eye for watching such men, you could see the murder eating into and out of him every damn day, like some unlucky suicide who couldn’t quite manage to kill himself off.
Hodges pivoted and called, “Don.”
“Yes, sir?”
“Where the hell is Russell?”
“Outside with Marty,” Donald O’Malley said. His gun was very light at his side, it did not feel as if it had enough power to hurt the person who’d left the girl like that. “He needed some calming down. I think he used to date the girl. They knew each other pretty good.”
“Go and get them. And while you’re out there send off those assho
les in the ambulance. They haven’t seen anything, and I don’t want them to have any part of this. None of their goddamn EMS interference, and no stupid conjectures either. Tell them to keep their mouths shut or I’ll rip their lips off and nail them to my desk. Get on it. I’m serious.”
“I know. But, Sheriff—?”
“Would you please fucking go already?”
Hodges put his fists in his pockets and waited until O’Malley did as he was told and returned a minute later with the grim-faced Russell Stockton and the bleary-eyed Marty. One crime, Hodges thought, a thing like this and my force is torn wide apart. We’re supposed to be the tough ones, and look at this. Why in the hell did I hire any of them? They milled around him, his three deputies, and the coroner and his two assistants, all staring at him now, waiting for him to speak.
The floor wasn’t firm enough under his feet, not sufficiently stable to bear up under the hate. It was like that, when the pain and anger grew too wide, and you could feel just how useless you were. As always, his voice remained flat, without any of the inflection you might expect from a man with those types of eyes and wrinkles and sneer. “No one says anything. Not to your wives, not to your friends, and for Christ’s sake, not to any reporters. Nobody.” He stressed it, and it came out “No body,” as if they couldn’t still see her swinging there. “If any of you has too much to drink and leaks what you’ve seen here today you will answer to me, on a personal level, and believe me, I will cause you great damage.”
“We ought to call in the state,” Marty Cruthers said.
“You dated her?”
“Yes, but only a couple of times. I’m only two years older than her, she lived—”
“You love her?”
It took Marty back a step, and he wiped sweat from his puzzled face. “She—”
“Did you love her?” Hodges repeated. “Deeply? You feel like you want to kill yourself now that she’s gone?”
Marty’s mouth moved for a while without sound, until he finally said, “No, I mean, I just … I thought we caught the bastard, so how… ?”
“You ever see someone you love strung up like that?”
“No, of course not.” Marty’s eyes widened and his voice slipped again like gears shifting poorly, until only a whispery hiss escaped him.
“Then be thankful, and if you ever throw up at a crime scene again I’m going to toss you in jail for corrupting an official investigation. You think I’m kidding? You think I’m exaggerating? Fuck the state and fuck the rest of the county. This is our job. If this hits our streets we’re going to cause an even more awful panic than we’re already in, and we can’t afford to have every idiot with a shotgun shooting up the town. I don’t feel like arresting any of our neighbors for killing his friend or wife or kid or even a goddamn dog. Until we can figure this out I want total silence.”
“What about her parents?” Russell Stockton asked. He brushed a hand through his thinning hair, his gaze a little far off but not glassy, wondering how he would feel if he found out his own daughter had ever come to this. With A.G. in Panecraft, this should have been over, they had capped the lunacy. But now, with her body dancing, he realized what a fool he’d been not to believe in the urgent alarm that had been gnawing within him this last half year. He actually wanted to get out of Summerfell with his family, maybe see the folks in Montana, or head up to Canada if that was far enough away, though he knew it wasn’t. “Will you tell them?”
Hodges replied without hesitation. He’d been working that question from the moment they’d walked into this corner of hell. “No, not yet. Not until we have some answers. Maybe in the morning. Tomorrow.”
“That’s not going to go over well.”
“No,” Hodges said. “It won’t.”
Marty couldn’t quite keep the pleading from his voice, his face dropping inch by inch like melting wax, thinking now that maybe he did love her, a little, maybe more, seeing her hanging up there. She’d written poems to him. “Can’t we at least take her down?”
“Everything’s going to be okay, Marty.”
Moving to the other side of the station, Hodges and Russell continued searching for evidence in the wall, on the wire, standing over the puddle as the M.E. coughed and picked about the pile of viscera, and his assistants finished their initial study of the corpse. Hodges grabbed O’Malley by shoulder. “Don, I want you to take Marty home. He lives alone, right?”
“Yes, just moved out into his first apartment. Kid’s only eighteen, nineteen.”
“Stay with him for a while. Make him a couple of drinks. Make sure he either passes out or gets some of his shit back together before you leave.”
“All right. What have we got here, Sheriff?”
“I don’t know,” Hodges said. “But I’m going to kill it.”
Richard Karragan, the medical examiner, stepped from the dangling body. He sounded nearly dead himself, coughing in the same deep wheeze that split through the police chatter coming in over the radio. When he caught his breath, he spoke softly to Hodges. “I’m not sure if I agree with your not telling the press.”
The sheriff wiped his face with both hands and said, “I don’t much give a shit if you agree or not, Rich, so just do me a favor and don’t piss me off more. Tell me what you know, is that so goddamn much to ask? How long has she been dead?”
Karragan knew how Hodges reacted in extreme situations like this, the man being pulled internally as much as externally, as much wire inside as out here. The sheriff wouldn’t give him enough time to simply provide a full report, instead interrupting and asking questions that would be answered soon enough if only Hodges didn’t keep cutting him off. But it’s the way they went about their jobs; the sheriff quizzing and thereby accepting, one step at a time, more and more personal responsibility for these death watches. Karragan knew it all, because it had been this way since they’d served together in the war, and even longer than that, since they were boys living across the street from one another, best friends. “Six hours.”
“Can’t be. This place is full of rats. They would’ve been all over her.”
“I’m telling you. Six hours.” Carefully snapping off his plastic gloves, Karragan added, “She doesn’t seem to have been malnourished. What was the exact date of her abduction?”
“July twenty-eighth.”
“And it appears that her captor kept her comfortable for all this time. From what I can see she doesn’t have any semihealed ligatures or recently acquired scars, no rope burns or handcuff welts. I’m giving you the short form, of course, it’s far too early to tell.”
“I know it. Could she have been with this guy willingly? Faked her own kidnapping for whatever reason? She tan? Maybe they headed off someplace, to the Keys. The guy got sick of her, she wouldn’t back off, so he killed her?”
Karragan shrugged. “She’s very young and attractive, there are men who would take her anywhere, wouldn’t they? She’s not tan, but all the rest is certainly possible, isn’t it?”
“No.” It had just been a shot, nothing real. “No, not if what I understand about this girl is true. If we go with the idea that she was abducted, where could she have been kept hidden for these months?”
“No apparent evidence without an extensive autopsy. Nothing under her fingernails, and we’ll have to search through the viscera to check on what she’s been eating. I don’t think we’ll find anything. I believe her abdominal cavity was emptied so that the killer could remove the stomach itself. We’ll do blood work.”
“What kind of weapon was used?”
“A number of knives, ranging, I would think, from scalpels to kitchenware. The incisions are of various sizes, types, and sharpness. This guy was packing a butcher shop under his shirt.”
“Raped?”
“Give me a fuckin’ break,” Karragan said, the cough and wheeze coming together just right to form a nice, low growl, showing exactly how he felt. “Most of her respiratory system and half her intestinal tract is on the floor.
I need to get her out of here before I can give you anything more.”
“Then go and do it, but I want to know everything.”
“Of course. What the hell is that? What, you think I’d hold back?”
Hodges ignored the remark, trying to throw his chest out more, put as much emphasis into the moment as possible. “You’re going to find out what all of this means, Rich. Why you think this maniac did what he did here, how he pulled it off … when … everything.”
Karragan actually felt a little sorry for him. “Yes.”
“And one more thing.”
“What?”
“Was she alive when it started? Did she live long while he did that to her?”
Karragan weighed his options and found them extremely limited, as usual. He considered two things, both equally out of character: He could lie to the sheriff, but instinctively knew lies wouldn’t ease Hodges’s quandary any, and that the lie would surely come back to haunt them both, no matter how large or small it might be. The second consideration was to use Hodges’s first name, which no one else on the force, possibly in the town, even realized he had anymore.
Karragan knew, though, and when the time came to put aside duty he realized he had to make his friend remember he wasn’t entirely alone in this life, and that they were the strongest they had to be, when the world was at its worst. As both of them were and always had been, even as children.
“Yes, Louis,” he said tersely, because this was the truth and there couldn’t be any other way now, struggling to beat back the pain, all of it coming closer. “She died in agony.”
In time, they took her down. As they always took the murdered down, regardless of remorse or hardness of heart, with or without prayers, because she looked so much like your daughter, your girlfriend. It made no difference how tough you believed yourself to be, in the light of this, because they could never take the dead down fast enough.
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