Blood Music
Page 25
I took a shot; then I lifted the back of the camera and held it at the proper angle to let the exposed slide drop down from the magazine so that the next slide would be before the lens. I do not always like my job. The simple, mechanical tasks associated with it soothe me and enable me to maintain both composure and a seeming objectivity in even the most hideous of circumstances. I moved slowly around the side of the body. The woman’s hair was loosed from its pins and flowed in a yellow cascade across the dirty ground. There was blood in it.
“The identity of the victim gives us the identity of the killer,” Capt. Bezier said. He said that every time.
There was blood on her dress, on her folded hands. I did not want to see her face. I knelt by her side and focused my lens on her neck, which had been severed. The blood there was dull and clotted, and the wound looked like nothing more than a cut of meat.
“—not a gentlewoman,” Capt. Bezier was saying. “A midinette, a shopgirl. A night of drinking, an argument with her boyfriend. It is always the same story.”
My hand trembled, but I kept my silence. Her long, curved fingers were not marred by the stings of the sewing needle or the calluses of the shopkeeper. She was not as thin as the midinettes, who have only a snack instead of a full midi lunch. She was not a member of the upper classes, that much was clear by her manner of dress and by the short lavender glove I noticed beneath her left hip and pointed out to the captain. Ladies of the upper classes wear gloves that reach to the elbow and are almost always of white kid.
I prepared myself to see her face. Her dress was neither rich nor poor; perhaps she could afford a maid, and that is why her hands were unmarred; perhaps she had children at home even now.
Capt. Bezier picked up the glove and spanked it against his thigh to dust it off.
“Very fashionable,” he said shortly. He brings his prejudices to his job. He does not approve of fashionable women unless they are of the upper classes; he will make assumptions about their morals from the cut of their gloves.
I stepped around the blood that had gathered at her neck. She had not been dead when her killer brought her here. I knelt again. I moved her hair away from her face. She had been beautiful in life; she was not beautiful in death. Her features were very fine, indicating a lively temperament; her forehead high and white, a sign of firm yet maidenly intelligence; the space between her nose and mouth was somewhat large, and the dint was so faint as to be nonexistent—the —angels had not touched her there with their fingers that she forget heaven—what —visions had she had while she was alive? She did not look as though she were seeing heaven now. Her eyes were wide with evident horror, her mouth contorted with fear. But from behind my lens I was reassured. Her agony was spurious, nothing more than the effects of rigor mortis. It was death that had contorted her pretty features into a grotesque mask. There was no way to tell what had been on her face at the moment of her death—fear, —resignation, fury? In a few more hours her hands, which lay so prayerlike now, would be trying to claw their way into her heart. And within less than thirty-six hours all of these effects would soften and disappear, leaving her once again unembattled.
The Silent Girls
Chapter 2
OCTOBER 22, 2011
THE BLOOD ON Frank Rath’s hands steamed in the cold October air as he slung one end of a rope over the barn’s crossbeam, tied the other end to the center of the tomato stake skewered through the gutted carcass’s legs, and yanked.
Pain erupted in his lower back as if he’d been struck with an axe. He dropped to his knees, the dead deer sagging back in a puddle of its own sad blood on the frozen dirt.
Rath remained still, breathing slowly through his nose, counting backward from ten. Erector spinae. He’d learned the Latin from studying the anatomy model while whiling away his autumn in Doc Rankin’s office.
Rath’s cell phone vibrated in his shirt pocket. Rachel, he hoped. For seven weeks now, she’d been away for her first semester at Johnson State, and in that time, loneliness had nested in Rath’s heart. The house felt lifeless, no hum of Rachel’s hair dryer in the morning, no insistent burble of incoming texts when she left her cell phone idle for even a second on the kitchen table.
Rath reached for his cell phone, but the skewering pain insisted he lower himself onto his back, where he performed an inept pelvic tilt. Doc Rankin had sent him to a whack-job physical therapist, who’d prescribed a contortionist’s regimen of humiliating stretches that made Rath feel as though he were about to shit himself: stretches better suited to rich housewives who performed them in steamy rooms while listening to didgeridoo music than to a man whose idea of stretching was reaching in the top cupboard for his Lagavulin 16 and chocolate Pop Tarts. Rath gained his feet with a groan.
What worried him wasn’t the pain but that the pain seemed to have no source. He’d simply awoken one morning as if someone had punched a hole in his back and ripped the erector spinae from his spine.
He looked down at the deer. He had to get it hung. First the deer. Then a beer. Or three.
Rath’s cell phone buzzed: Harland Grout.
The lone, lead detective on the anemic Canaan police force, Grout was as green as the back of a wet frog. He was also a dart player in Rath’s dart league. Most importantly, he had a strong young back good for lifting a dead deer.
Rath answered. “Grout. I’m trying to hang a deer here. Maybe you’d like to earn a six-pack and lend your—”
“There’s a car. Out on Route fifteen,” Grout said.
“That sort of specificity and twenty bucks Canadian will buy you a lap dance at The Dirty Girl over the border in Richelieu.”
“Yeah,” Grout said, and Rath noted a barb of severity in his voice that made him regret his initial glibness.
“What?” Rath said, and wandered out of the barn to lean against the fender of the ’74 International Scout it seemed he’d been restoring since Lincoln was a Whig.
“The car appears abandoned.” Grout paused to wait for the static of the weak signal to pass. Up here, near the border, there wasn’t one cell tower within five thousand miles. God bless Vermont. Or not. “The car belongs to my wife’s cousin’s daughter.”
“Shit,” Rath said, not even trying to untangle that snarl of family-tree branches.
“She’s sixteen.”
“Shit.” Rath slumped against the Scout. “You think something happened?”
Something happened. What euphemistic bullshit for the images—none pretty—that leapt into Rath’s mind the instant he heard of a girl gone missing.
“It’s hard telling,” Grout said. “I just got the call on the car. When I called her mom, she was worried. Hasn’t heard from her in days and asked me to look into it.”
“Why call me? She’s a minor, you can investigate it straightaway as an MP.”
“She’s emancipated.”
“Shit,” Rath said again. His repertoire of blue language needed work.
Unless foul play was clearly evident, seventy-two hours had to pass before an official investigation could begin on a missing adult. And, by Vermont law, an emancipated girl, sixteen or not, was an adult. It made no sense. Sixteen was a child, and any adult who looked at a girl that young and saw anything but a child was deluded or a pervert.
“I’m on my way there now,” Grout said. “For all we know, the car’s clean, and she’s just off banging a boyfriend or crashed at a girlfriend’s. Or something. I got Sonja Test headed there, on her own time, giving up her Saturday training to bumper-to-bumper it best she can in situ. That itself is against protocol without probable. But Chief Barrons is out three more days fishing the Bahamas, and—”
“That bastard,” Rath said. Barrons had been Rath’s senior the three years Rath was a state-police detective in the 1990s. Barrons was an exceptional cop and an even better fisherman. Rath wasn’t sure for which trait he resented and envied Barrons more.
“So,” Grout said, “I’m taking liberties as it is without leaving my entire
nutsack hanging out for Barrons to lop off and brine when he gets back. This girl is, technically, family; if it looks like I’m playing favorites or expending resources without due cause, and the girl just strolls in, my ass is in a sling, right when it’s looking like the budget might open up, and there’s a shot at a promotion. At the same time—”
“Fuck protocol,” Rath said. The hard consonants felt good to bite off and spit out. But, what promotion? If Grout wanted to excel in law enforcement, he should have taken Rath’s advice several years back and gone to the staties. And he shouldn’t have been calling Rath for help. Grout needed to take the helm himself, damn the repercussions: Protocol never outweighed doing what was right. Rath knew that if he wanted to help Grout and his career, he should force Grout to see this through on his own and be either tempered or turned to ash by the heat he’d feel from Barrons.
But there was a missing girl. That came before any career.
“I could use your help,” Grout said. “Even if it becomes official, it’s still just an MP, a low priority unless it becomes something else.”
Something else.
The sun glared on the skin of snow that had fallen overnight, melting fast, water dripping from the barn roof to tick on a sheet of rusted tin that had been leaning against the barn since the Pleistocene ice age.
Rath lit a cigarette and drew in the smoke. All he got from it was trembling fingertips and a numb nose. He needed to go back to dipping.
His cell-phone screen glowed with an incoming call: Stan La roche. Rath let it go.
“Where’s the car?” Rath asked Grout.
Grout told him, and Rath tossed his cigarette into a rag of snow, where it settled with a paling hiss. He ended the call and looked back at the dead deer on the barn floor.
“Not today, pal.”
He yanked shut the barn door, to keep out the coyotes that skulked around the place at night; he had a draining feeling that he’d be occupied until long after dark.
About the Author
JESSIE PRICHARD HUNTER is the author of The Green Muse, also available from Witness Impulse. She currently resides in New York’s Hudson Valley with her husband and two children.
www.witnessimpulse.com
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Also by Jessie Prichard Hunter
One Two Buckle My Shoe
The Green Muse
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
This book was originally published by Random House in 1993.
Excerpt from The Green Muse copyright © 2015 by Jessie Prichard Hunter.
Excerpt from The Silent Girls copyright © 2014 by Eric Rickstad.
BLOOD MUSIC. Copyright © 1993 by Jessie Prichard Hunter. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition FEBRUARY 2015 ISBN: 9780062389282
Print Edition ISBN: 9780062389275
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