by P. J. Tracy
Ten feet down into the black water, his lungs were already starting to burn and his eyes hurt from the cold. He squeezed them shut. The water was so black that you couldn't see more than a few inches anyway. He yanked hard again on the rope that tethered the case of beer he was after, but it wouldn't budge. He was going to have to go all the way down. Five, ten more feet, he figured.
He went hand over hand down the rope until he felt it veer sideways, snagged on whatever it was that was holding it down. He jerked on the rope and felt it loosen, then opened his eyes in time to see another pair of eyes floating toward him. They were blue, just like his, but wide and empty.
"WHAT'D I TELL YOU?" Deputy Bonar Carlson was leaning forward in the passenger seat of the patrol car, jabbing a chubby finger at the windshield. "Look at the top of those Norways. Yellowing already, and August is still a youngster."
Sheriff Michael Halloran kept his eyes on the twisting strip of tar so he wouldn't run into one of the Norway pines that Bonar wanted him to look at. The forest moved in on everything man-made when you got this far north in Wisconsin, and roads were no exception. He felt like he was driving through a tunnel. "We are not having a drought," he said. "You're doing that Chicken Little thing again."
"It's going to be a bad one. Maybe as bad as 'eighty-seven."
"That's such a load of crap. We nearly drowned in June. Broke every record in the book for rainfall."
Bonar snorted and flopped back, sticking a thumb under the seat belt to ease the pressure on his considerable, cherished stomach. "That was then, this is now. Just wait until we get to the lime quarry. I'll bet the water is at least a foot low, maybe two."
"No way." Halloran eased the car around an unbanked turn, watching sunlight dapple the road ahead like a strobe. He'd known since the fifth grade that only a fool questioned anything Bonar stated as fact, but he just couldn't help himself. One of these days, he was going to prove him wrong about something. The law of averages was on his side. "Did I miss the turn? Feels like we've been driving for hours."
"Fifty-seven minutes from the office to the lime quarry, and that's if you don't run into a deer or a bear. How long since you've been up there?"
Halloran thought about it for a minute, and then got sad. "Senior-class party."
Bonar sighed. "Yeah. Gives me the creeps every time I pass the place. Haven't dipped a toe in that water since."
The old lime quarry they were heading for hugged the northern county line, about as far from human habitation as you could get in this part of the state, making it an ideal party site for every teenage bash since the quarry and kiln had closed in the '40s. Fifty feet down from ground level, the lime had petered out and buried springs had bubbled up, filling the ugly machine-made hole with icy water. Halloran had always liked thinking about that-man working decades to make a piece of earth ugly, nature covering the scars in a blink, if you just left her alone to do her job.
But the water and the isolation made the place a magnet for kids and kegs, and every now and then something bad would happen. Like at the senior-class party nearly twenty years ago, when Howie Dexheimer dove into that cold black water and disappeared, as if the quarry had swallowed him whole. Every diver in the county had worked the deep water for weeks but never found the body. As far as anyone knew, Howie Dexheimer was still down there.
"You think it's him?" Bonar interrupted Halloran's thoughts as if he'd been following them.
"Lord, I hope not. I sure don't want to see Howie after twenty years in the water."
When Bonar was thinking hard, his whole face screwed up. "Might not be so bad. Water's too damn cold for anything to live in, including most bacteria. The body could be almost perfectly preserved if the alkaline content isn't too high."
Halloran winced. The idea of a perfectly preserved Howie was almost worse.
Fifteen minutes later, he found the two-lane dirt track that made a hole in the woods. Deputy Walter Simons was blocking the access with his legs spread and his arms crossed over his chest, a banty rooster with an Elvis haircut trying to look like Colossus.
Halloran pulled up alongside him and opened his window. "Tell me something I don't know, Simons."
Simons swatted ineffectually at a congregation of deerflies buzzing around his head. "Goddamn deerflies bite like a son of a bitch, did you know that?"
"I did."
"Well, it isn't poor old Howie Dexheimer, anyway. I caught a glimpse just when they were pulling him out, and Howie never had hair that long."
"Hair grows after death," Bonar told him.
"Go on."
"So some people say."
"Does it tie itself up in a pony tail with a rubber band?"
"Hardly ever."
"Well, there you go. Besides, Doc Hanson says this was an older guy, mid-twenties at least, and not in the water that long. No ID, no nothin'. Naked as a jaybird. You want to send Cleaton back out here with the squad? Another ten minutes out in these bugs and I'm going to be a pint low."
About a tenth of a mile in, the two-lane track broadened onto an open grassy area clogged by cars-Doc Hanson's old blue station wagon, three patrol cars that had responded to the call, and a brand-new Ford pickup that would have eaten up a year of Halloran's salary. Had to belong to the kid who had called it in, he decided. These days half the kids in the district got new trucks just for graduating.
Just beyond the makeshift parking lot, an earthen ramp that had once been access for heavy machinery led down to the water. They'd called it "the girlie road" in the old days, and no self-respecting, testosterone-crazed teenage boy would ever set foot on it. There was only one acceptable entrance into the water for them.
Halloran's eyes shifted to either side of the ramp, where the quarry walls rose a good fifteen feet from the black water. Mature trees leaned over the rim as if peering downward, and frayed ropes hung from many of the bigger branches. He and Bonar had hung ropes just like them when they were young and immortal, swung on them like foolish apes until they arced over the water and let go. Timing had been everything. You let go too soon, and you landed on the jagged rocks that climbed the ridge wall. That had been the thrill of it, and with the sharp and fearful eye of maturity, Halloran thought it was pretty much a miracle that they had survived their own stupidity.
He glanced over at five teenagers tangled together in a distressed knot near one of the county cars. Their expressions cycled through the spectrum of human emotion-shock, horror, fear, fascination, and back again-as they tried to make sense of their gruesome discovery. He recognized Ricky Schwann, a full head taller and a few shades grayer than the rest of them.
Halloran and Bonar ignored the kids for the moment, got out of the car, and headed down the rock-strewn slope to the little beach below, where Doc Hanson's crouched form was partially blocking the view of what Halloran dearly hoped was an intact body. Initially, all he could see of it was a head and a pair of legs so white they looked like they belonged on a plaster statue. As they drew closer, the doc got up and took a step back, giving them their first look at the torso.
"Oh, man." Halloran's cheeks went up and his mouth turned down when he saw the band of neat, pencil-sized black holes that stitched a perforated line across the white flesh of the dead man's chest. "We just figured it for a drowning."
Doc Hanson was holding his gloved hands away from his sides so he wouldn't forget and shove them in his pockets. "So did I, until they pulled him out." He stooped and moved a tangled clump of wet hair away from the open filmy eyes. "You know him?"
Halloran and Bonar both took a long look at the frozen face, then shook their heads.
"Me either. And I figure I know just about everybody in this county. Hell, I delivered half of them. But I've never laid eyes on this boy."
"Identifying marks?" Halloran asked.
Doc Hanson shook his head."No freckles, no moles, no scars, no tattoos.He might have had something on his back, but there isn't much left of it anymore. You want me to roll him?"
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br /> "Lord, no," Bonar said, already picturing what that many exit wounds might have done to the body. "It looks like somebody tried to cut the poor guy in half."
Doc nodded. "Eight full penetrations, head-on, another one that scraped his left side, see?" He pointed to a raw strip where tissue had been burned instead of blown away. "Mowed him down, is what they did. Looks like NATO rounds some fool fired on full automatic, which is flat-out overkill. That stuff fragments like crazy. One good chest hit like any one of these"-he gestured at the body-"and the job's done."
Halloran looked curiously at the kindly, time-worn face of the doctor who'd delivered him, who'd given him lollipops with every childhood vaccination and mixed india ink with the plaster so he could have a "manly-colored" cast when he'd broken his wrist in second grade-not the kind of man you'd think would know a whole lot about the end results of automatic rifle fire. "NATO rounds, Doc?" he asked softly. "You learn about those in med school?"
The softening jowls under the old doctor's jaw tightened a little. '"Nam," he said in a way that made the single syllable sound heavy and dark and final.
Halloran and Bonar shot each other a look. You could know a man for all of your life, it seemed, and still know so little.
The sound of spilling water made them all look toward the ramp, where a diver was emerging, looking strange and shiny and alien in his scuba gear. Halloran thought of old monster matinees and wished he was at home watching one now.
The diver pulled off his mask as he waded toward them. "You're going to need a couple more body bags down here."
Within the hour, there were two more bodies lying on the tiny beach-one younger, one older, but both as nude as the first, with similar chest wounds. Doc Hanson had two unhappy deputies move the corpses until they were in the order he wanted.
"There," he said, finally satisfied, gesturing Halloran and Bonar over to where he stood at the feet of the body in the center of the ghastly trio. "Now look at the wounds, left to right. Looks like the bullet holes almost sew them together, doesn't it?"
Halloran squinted, narrowing his eyes to tighten his line of vision so he saw only the wounds, not the human bodies the bullets had punctured. "This is the way they were standing when they were shot," he said quietly, and Doc nodded.
"Just so. Right-handed shooter, sweeping left to right."
Bonar's lips were pushed out, as if he'd just tasted something very bad. "Why not a left-handed shooter, sweeping right to left?"
Doc Hanson hesitated before he responded, as if he were reluctant to confess that he knew the answer. "There's a burst when you fire an automatic rifle, Bonar-the bullets come so fast when you pull the trigger that if you're not used to it, you get a heavy cluster before you start your sweep. See the man on the left, the one we pulled out first? Nine shots. He was the first in line. The one in the middle was hit five times, the one on the right only three. So this is what happened. Someone lined these men up and executed them all at once."
There was a hollow sound to Doc's voice that kept Halloran from looking at him. He looked at the bodies instead. "You've seen this kind of thing before?"
Doc Hanson shoved his hands in his pockets, then pulled them out and looked irritably at the latex gloves he'd just ruined. "Not in this country."
GRACEMACBRIDE was standing at one of the open mullioned windows on the third floor, resting her eyes on the greenery outside while several computers hummed behind her. She was finally growing used to the new office, to lush treetops outside the window instead of the Minneapolis skyline, to the relative quiet of the exclusive Summit Avenue neighborhood instead of the brash bustle of the warehouse district.
Moving the Monkeewrench office into Harley Davidson's mansion was supposed to have been temporary, but it was almost a year since they'd abandoned the bloodied loft that had been home to their company for ten years, and not one of them had even suggested looking for another space. It was comfortable here-Harley saw to that-and for a quartet of societal rejects that comprised all the family any of them had, a home seemed a proper environment.
Besides, Charlie liked it here. He was sitting perfectly upright in the ladder-hacked wooden chair next to her desk, haunches and four big feet crowded onto the small seat, what was left of his tail sticking through the back. His brown eyes followed every move she made. She laid a hand on the top of his wiry head and he closed his eyes. "Two days," she said, and the dog sighed.
Grace was dressed for travel, which meant she was wearing two guns instead of one-the Sig in the shoulder holster low under her left arm; the derringer tucked into one of the tall English riding boots she wore every time she left her house. Her jeans and T-shirt were lightweight in deference to the August heat, but they were still black. Something about the color made her feel safe and hidden and powerful, and she couldn't discard it any more than she could discard the boots and the guns. The one day in eleven years she had tried, a man with a gun of his own had come calling, reminding her that such a venture was pure folly. Life was dangerous, and facing it unarmed was simply too risky.
She turned away from the window when she heard the first muffled footfalls on the carpeted stairs two floors down, and then the strident hum of the small elevator that served this wing of the house. She knew it was Harley and Roadrunner on the stairs, and Annie on the elevator, but still, her stomach clenched and she automatically laid her hand on the Sig. She didn't lower it until she heard Harley bellow from the first landing, "Coming up, Grade!" Harley knew she had her hand on the gun. She really loved him for that.
Roadrunner was first through the door, his six-foot-seven-inch, sapling-sized frame clad in his customary one-piece Lycra biking suit. Today's selection was navy blue with a red swoosh across the back. "I don't care how rare it is or how much it cost," he threw over his shoulder at Harley. "It's still ugly."
Harley stomped in behind him, a massive, bearded man with beefy, tattooed arms wrapped lovingly around a monstrous clay pot that presumably held the item in question-some sort of cactus bristling with three-inch quills. "And that coming from a man who painted his friggin' kitchen pink."
"It's not pink, it's cerise, and the guy at the paint store said it was one of their most popular interior colors."
"It's baboon-butt pink, Roadrunner, and the guy at the paint store should be imprisoned for telling you any different." Harley tenderly placed the cactus down in the corner and backed up to admire it. "What doyou think, Grade? It looks great there, doesn't it?"
Harley was a man of great passion, and when he found something new that struck his fancy, he went after it zealously. He had amassed a world-class collection of vintage motorcycles and a wine cellar that could reduce a sommelier to tears, and Grace understood those things, because they were utilitarian and therefore worth the time and expense. But after the Monkeewrench crew's recent trip to Arizona, he'd developed an unlikely obsession with cacti and now had an entire room downstairs filled with the things, which baffled her- they simply weren't useful. "I guess we won't have to worry about watering it," was all she could muster.
Harley gave her a look of crushing disappointment. "I was expecting a little more from you, Grace. And by the way, if you hear a strange, clattering sound, ignore it-it's just my heart breaking and shattering on the floor."
Grace couldn't help but smile. "Sorry, Harley. I just don't get it."
"Neither do I." Annie Belinsky fluttered into the room in a dress made to look as if a thousand silk butterflies were feasting on her body every time she moved. She had tiny feet and a rosebud mouth, but everything else about Annie was pure, queen-sized Renaissance, and her parading around in that dress in front of Harley all morning had been like dragging a side of bacon in front of a starving dog. She stood in front of the cactus with her hands on her hips and a stern look of disapproval on her face. "I thought we agreed you'd keep your acupuncture experiments downstairs."
"I told you, this is a special cactus and it's brand-new. I want to keep an eye on it until it gets
acclimated."
Annie rolled her eyes. "You're losing your mind, Harley. Why couldn't you fixate on something pretty, like orchids?"
"Orchids arechick plants," he said in disgust. "But the cactus is tough, a take-no-prisoners kind of plant. I like to think of them as the botanical equivalent of me-all man."
"Yeah-annoying as hell."
"The kind of man who could take that dress off your big, beautiful body with his teeth, one piece of silk at a time."
"Pig-"
"Hey, I knew those little fluttery things were silk, didn't I? I just can't figure out what's holding them on. . . ." He reached for her dress, but Annie slapped his hand and turned toward Grace in exasperation.
"I'm being mauled. Can we get out of here yet?"
"Almost ready. I'm just burning the last disk."
It was their fourth month taking the Monkeewrench computerized detective software on the road, donating their time and equipment to local police departments that were coming up empty on homicides that were, or might be, serials. Over the past ten years, the software that Monkeewrench had produced-particularly the games-had made all the partners extremely wealthy. But the last game they created spawned a string of grisly murders, and the names and faces of the victims haunted them still. So they were doing penance the only way they knew how: by turning the computer genius that had sparked those killings against other killers, wherever they could find them. They'd brought down two already-one in Arizona and one in Texas.
We're batting a thousand, Grace thought, but philanthropy in this arena was an exhausting and depressing endeavor. There were too many killers out there, too many police departments ill equipped to sort through and collate the volume of information that always accompanied such investigations. Their new software was amazingly effective, making connections in seconds that would normally take months of legwork, but it was the only prototype in the world, and picking a single case to work from the hundreds of urgent requests had become an ongoing moral dilemma.