by Jim Brown
“What about the fire, Dub? What caused it?”
The change was extraordinary. The old man sat up. His slackened face tightened. His eyelids were suddenly weightless. “The spaceship, that’s what.”
Jerry looked at Leonard searching for a translation. The bartender shrugged, no explanation available.
“Spaceship?”
Dub nodded. White, frothy spittle collected at the corners of his mouth. “UFO. A unidentified freakin’ flying object. That’s what done it. I shot it down. Shot the hell out of it. But it crashed. Crashed right smack-dab in the middle of my chicken coop, burned up my babies, my poor, sweet babies.”
His spine became pliable. He slumped forward. The face slackened. Jowls hanging like saddlebags quivered as the man cried in silence.
For a moment Jerry wasn’t sure what to do. He had known Dub all his life. Knew him to be a bit peculiar, especially after his wife died, but this was way past peculiar.
“Don’t believe me,” the old man said, skewering him with his right eye. “Go up there and see for yourself.”
Something new traversed the old man’s face. His ruddy complexion turned to wax. Fear, a very real fear, burned behind bloodshot eyes. “Go see for yourself, but I’ll tell you this, I ain’t ever going up there again. Ever.”
Piper woke up alone. It was a quarter to twelve. The sun was out. The bright, warm light reflected off the snow and spewed through the garden window. She sat up and rubbed the back of her neck. The fire in the fireplace was down to embers. It was the chill that had awakened her.
Alone.
Dean had been with her when she had fallen asleep on the couch. She had been holding him. Comforting him, rocking him, as he cried in gentle silence.
It was after two A.M. when the sheriff had sent them home. “Can you put him up for the night?” the lawman had asked. “I don’t think he should be alone. You, either, for that matter. I can take your statements in the morning.”
“I’ve got a guest room.” But they never made it that far. She fixed them something to eat while he made a fire.
They had sat on the couch, sipping wine and watching the flames dance like a spastic chorus line. Embers popping, the faint curl of blue-gray smoke rising slowly up the chimney. They tried to talk but didn’t get far. Emotional burnout, she guessed. They were both completely enervated.
At some point he had started to cry, and she had taken him in her arms to comfort him. – stroking his hair, kissing his temples, holding him. And she cried, too. They had fallen asleep on the couch, locked in a spoon embrace.
Now he was gone. And she was, well, disappointed. A woman’s dead, and you’re worried because your sleep-over buddy left early. Shame on you.
Piper stood and stretched. She was still wearing the clothes from the night before and felt grimy and worn, in need of a shower.
In the kitchen she found a note:
The sheriff combed his hair with his hand, then placed his saucer hat just so on his head. He wrinkled his nose. He hated hospitals. Morgues most of all. Not the dead people. He could handle that. It was the smell. That god-awful smell that seemed to get in your clothes and hair.
He replaced the sheet over the face of Mavis Connetti, then slid the tray back into the chrome locker.
All filled up. If anyone else dies, I’ll have to start stacking ‘em like cordwood.
After processing Mavis – process, the word sounded so cold – John had spent another two hours grilling the stranger. Elijah. He gritted his teeth, his temples throbbing from a lack of sleep. The stranger had only smiled. When he did speak, it was unintelligible, idiotic babble. John had lost his temper, and his professionalism. He had beaten the guy pretty good – busted his lip, left him with a shiner.
The man was definitely insane, no doubt about it. But there was also no doubt that he could not have killed Mavis Connetti. He had the best alibi of all: He was in jail at the time.
So, what did that mean? Two killers? Tandem murderers?
“Sheriff.” The morgue door swung open so hard that it struck the doorstop and shot back, hitting Coye sternly in the nose. The deputy stumbled backward, blinking. John followed.
“You okay?”
Coye was holding his nose. “I tank I brawk my nozuh.”
John pulled his hand away. The nose was red, swelling. “You didn’t break your nose. It’s not even bleeding. But you are going to break your neck if you keep running around like this.”
“It jush flew back an’ hit me.”
“Yeah, I was here, remember? Now, what’s so damn important that you would run into a door trying to tell me?”
“It wan into me.”
“Whatever.”
The deputy’s eyes crossed as he tried to look at his nose. Over the loud speaker a nurse called an orderly to ward one.
“Cheevers,” John snapped.
That got his attention. He looked up, his eyes wide. “The stwanger has eshaped.”
“What?”
“Eshaped,” Coye repeated, wiggling his nose between his thumb and forefinger. “The stwanger.”
“The stranger? Elijah Bones?”
Coye nodded. “He eshaped. Gawn. Disappeared. Poof.”
John ran for the door.
“It wasn’t my fault, Shurrf. I bwawt him pancakes.”
The snow had stopped, John noted, as he dashed the twenty feet between the hospital and the sheriff’s department. But what was on the ground was staying. This morning the thermometer had dropped to eighteen degrees, but that wasn’t right. John had been in eighteen-degree weather before, and this – whatever it was – this was a hell of a lot colder.
The warm air of the office hit him, but he didn’t slow down.
“Phones are back up,” Maggie Dane called, one hand over the mouthpiece. “OSP’s on the line. They’ve closed the road on their side of the bridge and want to know if we’ve done the same.”
John grimaced but didn’t stop. “Tell them we’re too damn dumb to think of that. In fact, tell them we purposely left it open just to see how many folks it takes to fill up the gorge.”
“Sheriff says that’s an affirmative, Officer,” Maggie said professionally into the phone. “The road is closed.”
He almost smiled as he took the stairs. “Tell ‘em to send a choppers’, we need to get these bodies to the crime lab.” He didn’t bother looking back to see if Maggie had heard him.
The holding cells were built into the municipal building’s basement. There was only one way in and one way out, a fact that had caused multiple clashes with the state fire marshall. Regardless, it meant that even if Mr. Elijah Bones had exited his cell, he would still have to go up these stairs and out that door, then through the middle of the office, to make it outside. John, who had had less than three hours’ sleep, knew there had been someone here all night long, because more than half the time that someone had been him.
So how the hell could he escape?
Behind him came the hurried footsteps of Coye Cheevers. John opened the door and stepped into the holding area. The stranger, Elijah Bones, looked up from his bed and smiled. A bite of pancake suspended from a plastic fork. A Styrofoam plate balanced in his lap.
“Morning, Sheriff.”
Coye caught the door before it closed, and hurried in behind his boss. He came to an abrupt stop – his nose, still red from the collision, suddenly forgotten. His eyes were on the man in the cell.
“No way. No way. I swear to God, Sheriff. I swear to God, he wasn’t here two minutes ago. Nowhere.” The bed was a small, wire-framed cot. He couldn’t have hidden under it without being seen. There were no windows to crawl out of.
“Problem, Sheriff?” Elijah asked, smiling.
John didn’t answer. He grabbed the cell door and rattled it. Locked.
“Sheriff, I ain’t kiddin’
. He wasn’t here. I swear it. That cell was empty.”
“Oh, by the way, thanks for the apple pancakes, Deputy Cheevers,” Elijah said.
The start of a smile flickered on the lawman’s long, thin face, then died in mid-bloom. “Hey, I didn’t get you apple. I got you blueberry, and I dropped the – ”
He looked at the floor, his face turning a shade of white John had never seen on a living being before. On the floor lay a spilled tray of pancakes, sausage links, and poached eggs.
“See? See, that’s where I dropped it when I saw there was no one in the cell.”
“It’s true, Sheriff. He did drop the tray,” Elijah agreed.
“See,” Coye said, then frowned with mistrust. “Hey, how would you know? You weren’t even here.”
“That’s when the deputy kindly went back and got a second order. Thank you again.” He popped the wedge of pancake in his mouth and chewed on it with great satisfaction.
“Sheriff, I didn’t – ”
John held up his hand. “That’s enough. Get something and clean up this mess.”
“But, Sheriff?”
“Upstairs, now!” His voice left no room for negotiation.
The deputy slunk away, mumbling as he went. “Apple pancakes. Didn’t get no apple pancakes. Got blueberry. He wasn’t here anyway, so how would he know . . .”
Alone, John turned to face the stranger. The man who called himself Elijah Bones. The man he believed was responsible for one, if not three, murders in the past forty-eight hours. The man most likely behind all the weird shit that was going on. Elijah speared another wedge of pancake and put it in his mouth.
The phones were working. That meant the computers were back up. That meant John could e-mail Elijah’s mug to the state police. He had already completed the 189 questions that made up the fifteen-page VICAP Crime Analysis Report. That report could now be fed into the FBI’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program database, which would look for a matching MO. A man didn’t just start cutting people up. He would have had to build up to it. And that meant other murders in other states.
Elijah.
Soon John would know his real name and who or what the hell he was dealing with.
Elijah smiled and smacked on his breakfast.
“Yeah, you go ahead and enjoy yourself,” John said. “The party is about to be over. The phones are working. The Oregon State Police have a chopper on the way. Maybe I’ll let them take you back. See how you like the less accommodating conditions down at the Lane County Jail.”
He had said it just to get a reaction. Just to shake the smile off the smug bastard’s face. The effect was greater than anticipated.
Elijah jumped to his feet, the plate of pancakes tossed to the side, forgotten. He rushed the bars, grabbing them and pressing his face in the space in between. The cockiness was gone, the snide mirth completely wiped from his blue eyes.
“Listen to me, Sheriff. Listen! You’ve got to tell them to turn around and head back to Eugene. You can’t let that helicopter enter Black Valley.”
“I don’t have to do anything,” John said, his curiosity piqued by the abrupt change in the man. “Give me a reason.”
“I can’t.” He studied the floor, then looked up. “You just have to, that’s all.”
John thought for moment, watching his face. His face? That was it. That’s what had struck him as odd. The face that John had pummeled last night. It was unmarked. No busted lip. No black eye. No bruises.
How the hell?
“Sheriff, please. I’m begging you. Tell the state police to turn around. It’s almost here. Do you understand?”
“When you start giving me serious answers, I’ll start giving your request serious consideration. But right now what you’re telling me is, you’re scared shitless of the OSP, which tells me you’ve got a record, most likely a long record, and that means your ass is grass.”
Elijah Bones let go of the bars. His arms dropped; his shoulders slumped.
Defeated, John thought. I’ve got him. Smug bastard. John turned to leave. When he reached the door, he paused to look back at the man in the cell. Elijah had returned to his bunk. He was sitting on the edge with his head in his hands, fingers gripping tufts of deep brown hair.
That was when John saw it. A dizzy whirl of confusion rose from somewhere in the back of his mind. For a moment something gray and flickering like static encroached on his vision, reducing it. The room seemed to spin. Confusion and exhaustion married, and the offspring was a debilitating sense of disbelief.
Elijah. The man in the cell had fresh mud on his pants.
23
The cold was deeper and more biting than Piper could ever remember. Thick, churning clouds, gun-barrel-gray, hung over the community like a living canopy. The Ford Ranger once more shoved its way through the snow and onto the Chantilly-white roadways.
Dean had picked her up and gladly surrendered the driver’s seat to her superior skills. Although he refused to tell her why he was smiling a lot. A bit of the old confidence, that spark she had noted when he was passionately teaching physics, flared once more in his deep brown eyes.
“Got an idea,” his note had said. Had he figured it out? Could anyone? Was it even possible? If it were possible, then Dean was definitely the man who could do it. Piper found herself oddly reassured by that subtle upturn of his lips.
“Just a hint?” she pushed.
“I’ll show you when we get there. John’s meeting us at the hospital. I have to check something first.”
Piper and John waited in the hospital lounge while Dean conducted an examination of the bodies. An action that was strictly against the rules, but Piper had noted that when it came to Dean, the sheriff never hesitated to break the rules. His confidence in the scientist was unwavering.
As they waited, however, the sheriff seemed antsy, a condition that conflicted with his personality, his demeanor. Piper had never seen the sheriff antsy. Of course, there were a lot of things she had never seen before this week.
Dean returned from the morgue, removed a pair of surgical gloves, and deposited them in the white-and-orange self-sealing canister marked BIOHAZARD.
“Well?” Piper asked.
“Step in here.” Dean led them into a wet lab, a facility used for the examination of body fluids. They followed him past the chrome refrigerators, past the centrifuge, test-tube racks, and waiting beakers, past the bulletin board clutter with curled papers. They paused briefly for Dean to remove a photograph of someone in fishing bibs holding a large trout, then continued to the rear of the laboratory, back to where the microscopes sat.
Dean slid the picture of the man and fish beneath the lens of the microscope, bent over, adjusted the focus, then invited them to look. John responded with silent compliance.
“What’s this all about?” Piper wanted to know. “Why do you want me to look at a magnified photograph of a man and a fish?”
“Just do it,” Dean answered.
John stepped aside.
Piper placed her eye to the scope. Under the present magnification the photograph appeared as a series of smudged, multicolored dots. “Okay, I see it. I don’t know what it is, but I see it.”
“It’s a normal photograph – that’s what it is.”
She raised up and Dean took her place, replacing the fish photograph with something else. “Now look.”
Again Piper bent over and peered through the eyepiece. This time the effect was incredible. Instead of a flat plane of blurred, colored dots she saw a catacomb – a three-dimensional world of precise pixels, one before another in a random order in decreasing size.
“My God, it’s beautiful.”
John took his turn. “What is it?”
Dean’s smile was wide now. A definite twinkle sparked in his deep brown eyes. “Science, that’s what it is,” he said. �
��Pull it out.”
John removed the second object from the slide tray. It was another photograph, this one of a young girl and boy.
“Tina,” John said. “This is the photograph Mason had. The one he claimed to see Whitey Dobbs in.”
Dean nodded.
“Whitey? Who’s Whitey Dobbs?” Piper asked.
No one volunteered an answer.
“Now watch.” Dean took the photograph, holding it between the thumb and forefinger of each hand, then moved so they could see over his shoulders.
Piper studied the photograph of the attractive young woman with brown hair pulled back into a long ponytail, sitting next to a young, clean-cut boy with close-cropped black hair. “What am I looking for?”
“Shhh,” Dean admonished. “Just watch. Any second now.”
The picture remained unchanged – a girl and a boy, sitting on a bench somewhere. Then –
“Jesus,” John cried out.
Suddenly the boy was gone, replaced by someone else. Someone equally young but with bone-white hair. White hair? Whitey Dobbs?
Abruptly the boy in the picture came to life – moving. His slight grin bloomed into a full, teeth-baring smile. And then, to add wonder to wonder, he winked.
Both Piper and John took a step back. “How the hell?”
Piper looked at Dean, then at the sheriff. The former was smiling, but the latter looked as if he had just seen his own grave. “How – ”
“Pure and simple science,” Dean said brightly. “Well, maybe not simple, but certainly pure.”
Dean held up the picture, waving it like a flag as he talked. “It looks like a normal photograph, but it’s not. When it’s magnified, you see layers upon layers of highly defined pixels. When you expose them to a mild electrical charge, they rearrange themselves, changing the image from David Levin to Whitey Dobbs.”
“But it moved,” Piper said. “It winked at me.”