by Ronald Malfi
“Hey, Ben. Haven’t seen you in a while,” Alvin Toops said, sliding down to Ben’s end of the bar. Toops was a big truck of a guy, with tattoos up and down his arms and a shaved head. A gold hoop hung from each earlobe. “Get you a beer?”
“I’m on the clock. Make it a cranberry and club soda. You still got those minicheeseburgers?”
“Sure do.”
“I’ll have some of those, too.”
Alvin Toops punched Ben’s order onto an LCD screen behind the bar. Then he dumped some cranberry juice into a highball glass, squirted some seltzer into it, and slid it in front of Ben. “How’d the old homestead hold up in the storm?” Toops asked.
“Got some flooding in the cellar,” Ben said, “but otherwise, all is good.”
“Good for you. I didn’t get no flooding up at the house, or here either, for that matter. The power knocking out cost me a small fortune in supplies I had to dump, and Trish chewed my ear off about it, like it was my fault. Like I did some kind of rain dance or something.”
“They’re calling for another storm by the end of the week,” Ben informed him, sipping his cran and soda.
“I heard. I need to get some fuel for the generator for this place. I can’t afford to lose another shipment.”
When the minicheeseburgers arrived, Ben shook copious amounts of ketchup on them then ate them slowly and methodically, like a cow chewing cud. When Ben drained his glass, Alvin Toops appeared to refill it.
“Thanks,” Ben said. “Can I ask you a question? It’s a police question.”
Toops laughed. “Shoot. Am I in trouble?”
“Just a witness,” Ben said, then added, “maybe.”
“Go for it.”
“Did you see Maggie Quedentock in here Friday night?”
“Sure did.” Toops pointed toward the far end of the bar. “Sat right over there.”
“Was she alone?”
“She came in alone,” Toops said, his brows knitted in recollection, “but she talked to a few people throughout the night.”
“About what time did she get here?”
“Maybe seven.”
“And what time did she leave?”
“Not sure. Maybe eight or so.”
“So she didn’t stay very long,” Ben said around a mouthful of cheeseburger.
“Nope.”
“How much did she have to drink?”
“I’m really not sure, Ben. I could pull the receipts and have a look for you.”
“Could you? Is that too much trouble?”
“It’s either that or cater to these deadbeats all night.”
“Hey,” growled one of the deadbeats within earshot.
“If you don’t mind,” Ben said.
“No sweat.” Alvin Toops swiped a dish towel across the top of the bar. “Mrs. Quedentock in some kind of trouble?”
“Just a little fender-bender Friday night,” he said. “Nobody got hurt, except maybe her pride.” He hoped he sounded somewhat disinterested about the whole matter.
“I’ll get right on it,” Toops said, slinging the dish towel over one shoulder and moving toward the bar’s back room.
When he returned with a single receipt, Ben was just finishing up his meal. He downed the rest of his cranberry and soda, dabbed the corners of his mouth with a paper napkin, then took the receipt Alvin Toops handed him.
“It took me a while to find it,” Toops said. “I was searching for her name but I’d forgot that Tom Schuler picked up her tab.”
“Oh yeah?” The receipt showed just two beers: a Heineken and a Budweiser. She hadn’t drunk much at all, assuming one of those beers was Tom’s. The time on the receipt read 8:12 p.m.
“I can make you a copy of it, if you want,” Toops offered.
Ben handed him the receipt back. “That’s okay. Just curious, I guess. No need to make a federal case.”
“Roger that,” Toops said, examining the receipt himself now, as if able to divine something from it. He stuffed it into the breast pocket of his shirt just as Ben tossed his balled-up napkin onto his plate.
4
Later, Ben arrived at the station to find things quiet. Shirley was in the dispatch office, feeding her goldfish and playing her iPod through a set of small plastic speakers on her desk. Without checking the roster, he knew Platt and Haggis had the evening shift, though he was willing to cut one of them loose since they’d gotten up early that morning to assist with the search for Matthew Crawly. Let them bang it out between the two of them which one should get to go home.
“Joe and Mel around?” he asked Shirley, leaning in the doorway.
“They’re out at Ted Minsky’s farm on a call.” She set the jar of fish food down beside the fish tank then turned around in her swivel chair. She wore a pair of bifocals halfway down her nose. “Another call about mutilated livestock.”
“Oh you’ve got to be kidding me.”
“They just left, if you wanted to catch them.”
Ben rubbed his tired eyes.
“What time did you get up this morning?”
“I don’t know. Four thirty, maybe.”
“You’re really worried about Wendy’s kid. You think something bad happened to him.”
“I do,” he said. He was aware that he hadn’t known how he felt until he spoke the words just then.
“Why don’t you go home and get some rest? Tomorrow will bring better things.”
It was a sentiment Ben’s mother used to say; hearing it now caused a chill to ripple through him.
“Ben,” Shirley said, like a schoolteacher attempting to gather his attention.
“I will,” he said. “I’ll go home, get some sleep.” He coughed into one hand. “First, I think I’ll stop by Ted Minsky’s place.”
Shirley made a barely audible sound beneath her breath and swiveled back to her fish.
5
The storm was raging by the time Ben pulled his cruiser up the long dirt drive that led to Ted Minsky’s farm. The farmhouse was at the top of the hill, a stark cutout against the storm-laden sky. Ben spied Haggis and Platt’s cruiser parked in front of the house beside the hull of an old artesian well, the cruiser’s lights dark and the car empty. Ben pulled up the driveway, which looped around to the rear of the house. From there, he could see the sloping fields and, beyond, the rambling structure that was Ted Minsky’s barn and grain silo. White fencing studded the hillside.
There wasn’t a driveway that led from the house down to the barn, but Ben could make out the muddy ruts that tractor tires created in the soil, so he spun the cruiser’s wheel and eased the car to a slow roll down to the barn. He flipped the high beams on but they did nothing but solidify the sheets of rain and a thin, smoky mist, so he switched them back off. The undercarriage shuddered as he coaxed it over the field. Just as he approached, he could see three figures wading toward him through the storm. One of them had a flashlight, the beam of which briefly blinded Ben as it glared across the windshield. He eased down on the brakes and brought the car to a stop.
Stepping out into the rain, he hit the floodlight on the driver’s door of the car. Melvin Haggis, Joseph Platt, and old Ted Minsky each lifted a hand to block out the glare of the harsh light. The choreography was almost comical.
“That you, Sarge?” Haggis said.
“Yes. Everything all right?” Ben asked, twisting the handle of the cruiser’s floodlight so that the beam shot off into space.
“Just some dead goats,” Joseph Platt said. Both Platt and Haggis wore plastic shower caps over their campaign hats and they both had their hands wedged into the pockets of their chinos like two kids trying to keep warm while waiting for the morning school bus.
“Can I have a look?” Ben asked, checking his Maglite to make sure the batteries still worked. They did.
“At goats?” Platt said. His skin looked like cheesecloth beneath the wide brim of his hat. He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “You really wanna stand out here in the rain and look at dead goats
, Ben?”
Ted Minsky, wrapped in a bright orange rain slicker, made a disapproving noise.
“I do,” said Ben, moving past the men. He followed their footprints in the mud until he arrived at the back of the barn. There was a corral here and some concrete slop troughs that were quickly filling with rainwater. As Ben approached, lightning briefly lit up the sky along the horizon. He could see several sodden clods of wet hair lying dead in the mud.
He paused just outside the corral and shone his Maglite into the pen. Dead goats, all right. Even from this distance, he could tell that they’d suffered the same fatal wounds as Porter Conroy’s cattle the night before. A nonspecific disquiet settled over him like a shroud. Stupidly—almost ironically—he thought of the ridiculous article in Eddie La Pointe’s magazine about the Mexican vampire. The goatsucker.
What the hell is going on here?
The three men came up behind Ben.
“You see this?” said Ted Minsky, his voice a low growl. When he moved, his rain slicker sounded like a plastic trash bag. “These ain’t even my goats.”
“What do you mean?” Ben asked.
“They’re sold,” Minsky said, nearly shouting. “Folks bought ’em! What am I supposed to do now? They’ve been paid for. Am I supposed to give the money back? And get what for my troubles? A heap of dead animals?”
“I don’t know what to tell you,” Ben said, moving his flashlight slowly from carcass to carcass. The beam froze on the mangled head of one of the goats. Even in the dark and from this distance, Ben could see the whitish dome of a section of its skull, the grayish hair around it looking as though it had been sheared away. And not just the hair but the flesh beneath it, too—bone gleamed in patches on the goat’s head.
His heart strumming, Ben turned the flashlight on another carcass. This one’s head had been opened up as well, but there was something else curious about it, too—the tapered horns at either side of its head appeared to have been broken. Glancing around, he couldn’t find the sheared-off pieces near the carcass.
There was a horseshoe-shaped latch affixed to a fencepost, keeping the gate shut. Ben lifted the latch and entered the corral, his heavy boots sinking a couple of inches into the soft, wet earth. Bending down, he cast a beam of light across the ground, hoping to discern any distinctive footprints in the mud. There had certainly been a lot of commotion—the ground had been churned and kicked up—but that, coupled with the driving rain, made it impossible to identify any specific prints. Anyway, they were all filled with water now.
He went over to the goat with the sheared horns. He had expected to find them crudely broken; instead, they looked as though they had been liquefied, allowed to dribble to mere nubs, then turned solid again. Melted, almost. To Minsky, who stood on the other side of the fence, Ben called, “Did you do something to the horns?”
“Not a blessed thing,” Minsky responded, his hands hanging over the railing of the corral. He exhaled a tired-sounding breath.
Ben stood. “I guess you think some bear or coyote did this,” he said flatly.
“Heck, no,” Minsky said. “I know who did this.”
“Please don’t tell me it’s Porter Conroy,” Ben said.
“Porter?” Minsky sounded incredulous. “Christ, no.”
“Then who did it?”
“Some boy,” Minsky said. “Got a face like a vampire.”
“Ben!” Mel Haggis shouted from outside the pen. He had both hands cupped about his mouth. “Hey, Ben! Let’s chitchat inside, okay? We’re freezing our tails off out here!”
Minsky sighed with great aplomb. “I’ll put some coffee on,” he said, turning and kicking up clods of mud as he sauntered back toward the house.
6
“Past week or so I been hearin’ noises just outside the house at night,” Minsky explained while Ben sat across from him in a wingback chair in the old man’s parlor. Both Haggis and Platt loitered in the hallway, half listening and dripping rainwater onto the carpet. They all held steaming cups of freshly brewed coffee. “In the mornings, I can tell someone’s been in the yard. There’s things moved around, some plants trampled, that sort of thing. Down at the barn one morning, it looked like someone tried to get in the night before. The doors were pulled outward but still locked, so ain’t no one gettin’ in or out, but someone sure as hell tried.”
“When was this?” Ben asked.
“The thing with the barn was sometime last week. Don’t recall the exact night.” Minsky leaned forward in his chair, the mug of coffee held between his knobby knees in two hands. “Other times, I’ve heard this, well, sort of scraping noise against the windows.”
Ben nodded, prompting the old man to continue.
“Then, two nights ago,” Minsky went on, “I’m sitting right here watching the tube, and I hear someone outside walking around the wraparound porch. I mean, I hear the boards a-creakin’ sure as I’m sitting here talkin’ to you fellas. I go out and check but don’t see nothing. I go down by the barn, too, because I don’t need nobody messing with my livelihood. But the barn looks fine so I come back up to the house.”
Minsky set his coffee mug on a nearby end table. The old man’s hand trembled as it retreated into his lap.
“But I’d left the door to the house open, and when I come back in, I’m suddenly sure whoever had been outside was now inside. Well, I get the Louisville from the hall closet and go through the house, knocking the Louisville against doorframes and peeking under beds and those sorts of things.” He nodded toward the kitchen. “I was in there when I heard the door slam against the frame and footsteps racing around the porch.”
“Jesus,” Haggis said from the doorway.
Minsky nodded. “I hurried back in here and that’s when I saw the face.” He pointed to a window beside an antique mahogany cabinet which housed a prehistoric Zenith. “Right outside, pressed right against the glass, lookin’ in at me.”
“Who was it?” Ben asked. “Did you recognize the person?”
“Well, see, he disappeared just as quick, and I didn’t get a real good look. But it was a young boy.”
“A boy,” Ben echoed.
“I could tell that much.”
“Could you describe him?”
“Well,” Minsky said, his eyes shifting uncomfortably about the room now. He was lost in recollection and, judging by the pained expression on his face, Ben didn’t think the old man liked what he saw. “He was white. Like, pale.” Those unsettled eyes finally settled on Ben. “He looked like a corpse, Sergeant Journell.”
No one said a word for several seconds. From out in the hall, Ben could hear a grandfather clock mocking the silence.
“I thought it might’ve been a prank, seein’ how close we are to Halloween,” Minsky went on eventually. “But after I seen my goats this evening…well…I don’t know nobody thinks somethin’ like that’s a prank. Back in my day, we strung toilet paper in people’s trees and lit bags of dog shit on fire on their front porches. You hear what I’m saying?”
“I do,” Ben said after sharing a look with his two officers in the doorway.
Minsky leaned closer to Ben in his chair. This close, Ben could see the large pores in the man’s thick nose, the network of red threads in his eyes, and the peppery tufts of hair that sprouted from the man’s ear canals like kudzu. “You tell me, Sergeant Journell,” said Minsky. “What kind of kid does somethin’ like that to goats?”
Ben could only shake his head. He had no answer for the man.
Chapter Seven
1
Monday was Ben Journell’s day off. He spent the morning jogging along Full Hill Road, crossing from shoulder to shoulder in the spot where Maggie Quedentock claimed to have struck a pedestrian with her car last Friday night. All evidence, or lack thereof, led to the fact that Maggie had most likely hit a deer which then bounded far off into the woods. It was even probable that she had hit nothing at all, that she had enjoyed a few too many drinks at Crossroads on someone else’
s tab and nothing more. The dent in the car’s hood and the broken grille, which he had observed when he showed up on scene, could have been there all along, as far as Ben knew. And to top it all off, the guys over in Cumberland probably thought he was an overreacting moron.
It was on his third pass around the bend where the supposed accident had taken place that something occurred to him. He paused beside a stand of leafless trees and checked his pulse while his breathing regulated. Overhead, predatory birds circled like tireless acrobats. Full Hill Road ran from midtown straight up into the undulating foothills, which was where Ben stood now. After looping around a few remote farmhouses up here, the road continued toward the mountains where it eventually denigrated to a muddy service road dead-ended into the trees. Though he wasn’t sure on exactly which street the Quedentocks lived, he knew they were somewhere around midtown. Crossroads—the tavern Maggie had claimed to be coming from—was only a few blocks outside midtown. What in the world had she been doing way up here?
A squirrel loped out into the middle of the roadway. It stood abruptly on its hind legs, its hands held together before it in a mockery of prayer, and surveyed its surroundings. When it spied Ben, it froze, though its tail continued to twitch spasmodically.
Was he reading too much into Maggie Quedentock’s statement? Should he swing by her place later, ask her a few more questions? He supposed he could, although that wouldn’t help alleviate the thing that was bugging him, even more than the rash of mutilated livestock. Eleven-year-old Matthew Crawly was still missing and, with each passing day, the outcome became bleaker and bleaker.