Turn to Stone

by Brian Freeman

  “Not in the least.”

  “What about your son?” Stride asked. “Does Mike blame Percy for killing his father?”

  “Mike is nothing like Jet,” Ginnie snapped.

  “I didn’t say he was, but he’s a boy. Losing his father couldn’t have been easy, especially under those circumstances.”

  “Jet was no father to Mike, just like he was no husband to me. Mike knows exactly what kind of man Jet was. I made sure he understood that Percy was a hero for what he did. I told him that Jet turned his back on God when he went inside the Novitiate, and after that, he deserved whatever happened to him. I believe that. It was a dirty, wicked place inside those walls. I wish they would tear it down.”

  “Percy’s death must be a shock to Mike,” he said.

  “Yes, it is. I don’t want anyone bothering him.”

  “I heard that Mike liked to follow Percy around town. Is that true?”

  “I don’t know anything about that.”

  “Is he here now?” Stride asked.

  “I already told you he’s not,” she said. “Why do you want to talk to him?”

  “I’m trying to find out what was going on in Percy’s life. If Mike spent time around Percy, maybe he saw something. Maybe he knows something that would make sense of this. That’s all I want, Ms. Black. I want to help Percy’s wife make sense of this.”

  “Mike knows nothing about what happened. Percy Andrews committed suicide. It’s a tragedy. I feel bad for Kelli, but it has nothing to do with my son or with me. We’re not interested in getting involved.” Ginnie stood up. “I think it would be better if you leave now, Mr. Stride.”

  He nodded. “Of course.”

  As he got to his feet, something shifted in the small house. A window slamming. A door closing. Ginnie ignored it, as if she could pretend it hadn’t happened at all. Outside the house, he heard the whine of the moped engine firing up. Ginnie bit her lip and folded her arms tightly across her chest. She looked unabashed by her lies. Mike Black had been in the house. He’d heard everything between them, and now he was gone. Escaping again.

  “He hates death,” Ginnie murmured.

  Stride looked at her. “I’m sorry?”

  “Jet was a hunter. He hunted everything. He never even took the bodies home. He just liked killing things. He used to take Mike with him. Like a prisoner. Ever since then, Mike has hated death. He won’t kill a living thing. Nothing. Not even a mosquito or a spider. He’s scared of death, because it reminds him of Jet.”

  Stride said nothing else to Ginnie Black as he left the house.

  Outside, he saw a single tire track cutting through the snow of the driveway. The moped.

  He backed onto the two-lane highway in his truck. There was no other traffic. Before he turned toward town, he looked down the road where it headed west away from Shawano into the open lands. Two hundred yards along the arrow-straight road, he saw the red moped. Mike Black was looking over his shoulder. He was looking right at Stride, waiting for him. The teenager cocked his arm and crooked his finger to beckon Stride closer, and then he drove off, making a right turn onto a lonely rural road.

  Stride did what the boy wanted.

  He followed.

  8

  They had the back roads to themselves. The forest pushed in from both sides like dense walls. Several times, bridges passed over the bends of the same frozen creek that made a white ribbon in the gully between the trees. Stride lost track of the turns they made, but Mike Black knew where he was going. The boy seemed at home here, and Stride understood the feeling. As a teenager himself, he’d explored the northlands surrounding Duluth until every road was like an old friend.

  When the boy turned west on County Road A, Stride almost lost him. He waited for a flatbed truck to pass on its way into town, and when he finally turned, the moped had vanished. He accelerated to catch up, but a mile later, he realized that Mike had left the highway. He did a U-turn and slowly retraced his route, and that was when he spotted the moped parked in the long grass.

  Stride pulled onto the shoulder and got out of his truck. He crossed the road and found himself at a rusted gate mounted onto posts made from tree stumps. The gate marked a break in the trees, but there was no road behind it, just matted indentations in the grass that led through a small field and disappeared into the woods.

  He looked up. The late afternoon sun was gone, crowded out by dark clouds that shouldered across the sky, making the world gray. He couldn’t see into the trees. He was alone, but Mike’s footprints made a trail through the field. He walked around the fence posts and followed the path through dead thistles that were as high as his hips. The ground was uneven under his feet, and snow got inside his boots. At the fringe of the trees, he stopped, then plunged inside where the boy’s footprints continued.

  The trail had been cleared wide enough for a truck, but Stride guessed it had been a long time since a vehicle was driven here. The forest had reclaimed it, sprouting weeds across the path and toppling thick limbs when the storms hit. Low, long branches bent over the trail, making a roof that blocked the sky. At times, Stride had to duck.

  Mike Black had stopped where the trail opened into a clearing. Beyond the boy, Stride spotted the white aluminum of a large Wrangler camper that had been towed through the woods and anchored here. Mike stood at the fringe of the clearing, as if unwilling to get close to the trailer. He was smoking. He looked back at the sound of Stride’s footsteps, but he didn’t acknowledge him.

  The teenager was at least a foot shorter than Stride. His clothes hung on his skinny frame. Most of his long black hair was shoved inside the collar of his jean jacket. His eyebrows looked oddly dark over his light blue eyes, and his nose and chin were both pointed and narrow. His thick lips were parted, as if he were about to whistle. He looked up and away, frozen, as if listening to music that Stride couldn’t hear.

  “Do you feel it?” Mike murmured.

  Stride heard wind snaking through the trees. He tasted snow blown like mist off the branches. A crow screeched in the treetops. It had gotten colder. “Feel what?” he asked.

  The boy shrugged. “Nothing.”

  “My name’s Stride.”

  “I know who you are.” His voice sounded older than his age. He wasn’t a kid. “I know what you want, too.”

  The camper was twenty yards away. It was a luxury model, white and gray with black stripes, but it had obviously been parked here for several seasons. Dirt crusted over the aluminum. Weeds grew around the tires. The clearing was overgrown, but he could see the remnants of a fire pit and an old charcoal grill.

  “What is this place?” Stride asked.

  “Percy liked to come here. Sometimes I followed him.”

  “Why?”

  The boy wiped his nose, which had begun to drip. “I don’t know. I was curious about him. What he did. Why he did it.”

  “Did Percy know you followed him?”

  “Yeah, he caught me outside the camper once. He knew who I was. He wasn’t mad or anything. We talked for a long time.”

  “What did you talk about?”

  “Stuff.”

  “Your dad?” Stride asked.

  Mike shook his head. “No, we didn’t talk about him. I never talk about him.”

  “Did Percy say why he came here?”

  “He said the camper belonged to a friend of his. A friend who died. They used to come out here to hunt, but Percy said he didn’t hunt anymore. I liked that. I don’t think you should hunt anything. Anyway, he said he came out here to think about his friend and—”

  “And what?” Stride asked.

  “To pray.” Mike looked up at him. “Do you pray?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Percy said that prayer makes God stronger, but I think he was wrong. Bad usually wins, doesn’t it?”

  “Not necessarily,” Stride replied. “Not when good people try to stop it.”

  “I wish I could believe that, but I don’t.” Mike shook his
head and shivered. He crushed his cigarette in the snow. The evergreens stared down at them like giants. “You really don’t feel it, huh?”

  “Feel what?” he asked again.

  “The cold.”

  Stride shrugged. “Yeah, it’s cold.”

  “Not just that. It’s more than that. I mean, like, just a second ago, didn’t you hear someone laughing?”

  “No.”

  “I did. Clear as anything. I told Percy about it once, and he said I should listen really hard, because I could hear things other people didn’t. He said it was a gift, but it doesn’t feel like that to me.”

  Stride studied Mike’s face and saw a boy who was lost. He’s a little weird, Sophie had said. That was easy to understand. Your father does something terrible and is killed for it. The rest of the world looks at you and wonders if you sprang from the same seed and if you’re bound for the same path. Maybe you start to wonder about it yourself. Stride saw a smart kid, a sensitive kid, who was afraid of what he would become.

  “Why did you want me to follow you here, Mike?” Stride asked.

  “I needed to tell somebody,” the boy replied, rubbing his blue eyes. “I know why Percy did it.”

  “You do? Why?”

  Mike swallowed hard and glanced behind them at the empty, overgrown trail. His face twitched. “Two weeks ago, I came out here. I was looking for Percy. I walked down here, and the door to the camper was open, but he wasn’t inside. I thought about shouting his name, but—I don’t know—something made me stop. I didn’t want him to know I was here.”

  Stride waited. When a long stretch of silence passed, he said: “What happened next?”

  “I heard noises in the woods beyond the camper. There’s no trail there. I didn’t know what it was. It could have been a bear or something. I thought about ducking inside, but I didn’t. I ran back here. Right here where we are now. I squeezed down into the trees where I was invisible, and I watched.”

  “What did you see?”

  “It was Percy,” Mike said. “He looked—I don’t know how he looked. Destroyed. Empty. Like his life was over. I’ve never seen anyone look like that. I mean, that’s how you look when you put a gun to your head.”

  Stride waited. The boy continued.

  “Percy went back inside the cabin and closed the door. I don’t even know why I waited. I should have left, but I didn’t. He must have been in there for an hour, but finally, the door opened again, and he left. He walked right by me. He couldn’t have been more than six feet away, but he didn’t see me. He had a big plastic garbage bag in his arms, and his face—he was crying. Sobbing. I saw him. He was—he was—”

  “What?” Stride asked softly.

  “He was covered in blood,” Mike said.

  The camper belonged to Tom Bruin. When Stride went inside, he saw photographs of the late medical examiner taped to the windows, including one with his baby girl, Mya, obviously taken after the man’s illness had grown terminal. The fleshy, jolly doctor he’d seen in the pictures on the mantle at Anna’s house was emaciated in this photograph, but his eyes shone with love for the child in his arms.

  The paneled interior was narrow, but every square foot was used efficiently. The kitchen and eating areas were immediately next to the door on his left and included a stove, sink, and a square acrylic table attached to the camper wall. On his right, two built-in sofas faced each other, and an elevated twin bed provided guest sleeping quarters, including a curtain that could be closed for privacy. Most of the surfaces were freshly cleaned. He smelled ammonia and saw empty bottles of Lysol in the sink. Everything here was clean. Too clean.

  Sanitized.

  With gloved hands, he checked the refrigerator, which was stocked with a six-pack of Leinie and a half-eaten brick of moldy cheddar. Inside the storage cabinets, he found clothes and hunting gear, along with evidence of mice and dozens of dead flies. He saw a toolbox and flipped up the lid. The smell from the tools wasn’t dingy metal, but bleach.

  He continued down a corridor that was barely wide enough for an adult to squeeze through. The master bedroom on the far end of the camper was plush, with mirrored closets and soft lighting. The large bed itself had been stripped to the metal frame. The pillows, blankets, sheets, and mattress were all gone. On the wall behind the bed, he saw a discoloration in the wood in a distinctive shape. A cross had been hung there, but someone had removed it.

  Stride crouched near the bed casters. He saw frayed white threads buried in the shag carpet, and he knew what they were. Fragments of rope. Someone had been tied to the bed. He began to suspect what Percy had removed from the camper in the large garbage bag. Evidence.

  Evidence of a crime that had been committed here.

  He left the camper. Mike Black hadn’t moved. Darkness had begun to close around the boy. Stride gestured at the forest.

  “Which way?” he asked. “Where did Percy come from?”

  Mike pointed to Stride’s right.

  It wasn’t hard to see the path he needed to follow. The trees were as dense as matchsticks in a box, but someone had forced a rough trail, breaking off branches and trampling the saplings. Virgin snow clung to the ground, but where it hadn’t pushed through the crown of trees, the ground was wet and muddy and littered with dead leaves. Intermittently, he could see heel marks denting the earth. Percy’s boots.

  Stride forced his way deeper into the forest. Sharp twigs bit at his face. He followed Percy’s trail from two weeks earlier and could almost hear the man breathing heavily and smell his sweat. The path was haphazard and desperate. He saw threads of torn fabric where branches had grabbed the cop’s clothes. Some of the tree bark held stains of dried blood.

  He didn’t know how far he’d gone. A hundred yards. Maybe more. It was far enough into the impenetrable woods that no one ever came here, not hikers, not hunters. He stood on land that only one human being had probably ever trod upon in decades. Percy Andrews. Stride could imagine the man thinking: This was far enough. This was safe. No one would ever find this place.

  Where the ragged progress through the forest stopped, Stride discovered the body.

  It had been simply dropped there on its back. The ground, still frozen, couldn’t be dug up for a grave. Animals hadn’t found it yet. Snow had leached from the brush, but most of the corpse was visible. Naked. Cold and hard as stone.

  Stride checked the face first, and it was the face he’d expected to find, although he had no idea why. Despite the open mouth, the wild eyes, the twisted agony in his expression, he recognized the man in the newspaper photograph that had been waved in his face earlier in the day.

  The man at his feet was Greg Hamlin. The missing realtor that Percy Andrews had been trying to find.

  He’d seen awful crime scenes in his time, enough to be immune to their effects, but this was no ordinary murder. This was a crime of unbelievable savagery, of hatred and madness. Hamlin had died an excruciating death. His body had been desecrated, his skin cut and burned, his bones broken, his incisors pulled, his genitals severed. Based on the blood, most of the torture had been inflicted while the man was alive.

  Stride noted a single messy word that had been carved like a sculptor working in marble into the man’s torso. Carved, like the other wounds, while the man was awake and suffering unthinkable pain. A word thick with red blood. An accusation. A punishment.

  It was a German word he had already seen once before in a Shawano cemetery.

  TEUFEL.

  PART TWO

  9

  “Two bodies in two days,” Neal Gandy told Stride, chuckling. “Congratulations, that is definitely some kind of record around here.”

  Stride didn’t smile at the joke, because nothing was funny. He felt a heaviness weighing on his chest. In three hours, the revulsion of the crime hadn’t dimmed. No living creature deserved what had been done to Greg Hamlin. The hours the man had spent tied to the bed in Tom Bruin’s camper must have felt like eternal damnation.

  “An
yway, there’s no question about an autopsy,” the coroner went on. “The guy I usually use in Green Bay didn’t want to touch it, so we’ll get a forensic specialist in here from Milwaukee tomorrow. I thought we should leave the body where it is until then, but Weik said we had to get it out of here. Disrespectful to leave it.”

  Stride eyed the police activity across the road, and he was unimpressed. There were too many cops, too many footprints, too much contamination of the scene. He’d seen it before in small towns, where the police rarely dealt with serious crimes but didn’t ask for help. To them, this was the drama of a lifetime, and they didn’t want to pass the glory to anyone else. The result was that the crime either didn’t get solved, or a smart defense attorney was able to get much of the incriminating evidence thrown out.

  “You’re right,” Stride said. “Moving the body was a mistake.”

  Gandy shrugged in resignation, as if to say: Talk to the Sheriff. The two men stood on the asphalt of the highway, which had been closed in both directions. It was nearly dark. “Between you and me, I think Weik figures there’s not going to be a trial on this one. Percy killed Hamlin, then killed himself.”

  “Is that what you think?” Stride asked.

  The young man’s bushy eyebrows arched. “I’m sorry, don’t you? Percy’s suicide smells like a confession. And then there’s the whole Devil thing. The carving on the body. Sounds like he was messed up, you know?”

  Stride knew that Gandy and the Sheriff were probably right. If you believed Mike Black, then Percy put Hamlin’s body in the woods. Stride himself had seen the next step, when Percy placed a gun against his own head. That was what a guilty man did. A man who couldn’t live with what he’d done. The murder case felt open and shut—but it didn’t answer the question of why. Something had led to the bloody intersection of Percy Andrews and Greg Hamlin. Something had triggered the violent rage inside the camper.

  “Why German?” Stride said.

  Gandy looked at him. “Huh?”

  “Why write Teufel in German? Percy wasn’t German, was he?”