This isn’t right, Sheriff Logan thought, studying the body, this isn’t something that happens here.
But it had happened here, and there was work to do, so he composed himself and cleared his throat.
“Who found her?” he asked, draping the sheet back over what remained of her head. Someone had probably thought they were helping by bringing that sheet out from their linen closet, but all they had done was further contaminate the scene. It couldn’t be helped now.
“Joe Thompson, while delivering the morning paper,” Deputy Myers said, choking back another wave of nausea.
“Where is he?” Sheriff Logan asked, looking around for Joe’s battered station wagon. There were dozens of neighbors standing behind the yellow crime scene tape Deputy Myers had looped from the white picket fence at the edge of the Duberstein property to the trees on the other side of the street, creating a rectangle that every civilian recognized from television and respected out of custom.
“He called it in and then kept delivering the morning paper.”
“He did what?”
“He kept…”
“Paul, I heard you, I just can’t believe it.”
“Do you think he had anything to do with this?”
“Jesus, I don’t know. Joe’s a drunk but he’s always been harmless unless you count pinching the butts of the servers at Anderson’s Bar. Go find him, right now, okay?”
“Yes, sir,” Deputy Myers said, giving a salute. The expression on his face betrayed the unspoken thoughts in his head: he was grateful to be getting away from the corpse.
“Jesus Christ,” Sheriff Logan muttered as he crouched next to the body again.
This just wasn’t right. He closed his eyes and the memory of the nightmare flashed in the darkness: his town in ruin and those piles of skulls. He opened his eyes again and stared at the sheet, which had originally been white but was now wet and spreading scarlet.
He didn’t need to examine the body again to understand what had happened here. Betty Duberstein had been starting or finishing her morning walk when someone jumped the curb and slammed on the brakes just as they struck her, sending her flying. Judging from the black skid marks that stretched from the road to the sidewalk, he estimated the driver had probably been doing forty or fifty miles per hour, an unheard of speed in this neighborhood with its narrow streets.
The impact probably wouldn’t have been survivable, especially not at Betty’s age when every bone seems to be made of porcelain, just waiting for the slightest provocation to break, but the driver had made sure to finish the job.
There were burnout marks from the driver accelerating, gaining speed again before he or she ran over Betty’s head, flattening it in an instant, sending her eyeballs bursting from their sockets and her brains exploding out of her ears. Her hair was a bloody mess and broken teeth littered the ground around her crushed mouth. Bloody tire tracks led away from the body, back onto the street toward the middle of town. There was so much blood, more than a human body seemed capable of containing.
Could the driver have run Betty over the second time in a panic as he or she fled the scene? Unlikely, considering two of his tires would have been on the sidewalk and the other two would have been on the street, meaning he had to fight to keep the wheel straight and lined up with his target. It had to be intentional.
“Aw, shit,” Sheriff Logan whispered.
8.
Deputy Myers pulled into the gravel driveway leading to Joe Thompson’s shack and managed to open the patrol car’s door just in time to vomit onto the lawn instead of all over his steering wheel. It wasn’t just the image of Betty Duberstein’s squashed head that kept tripping his stomach, it was also the appalling smells still clinging to the inside of his nose. His throat burned from the flood of acid washing up and out of his mouth. His breakfast was long gone.
“My Lord,” he muttered, closing the door again and wiping his sleeve across his face.
He started the patrol car rolling down the gravel driveway toward the dilapidated shack with a rusted metal roof and plywood where the windows once were. Trees towered over the home, such as it was, and the property was littered with the dead leaves of the previous fall. Parked sideways by the front door was Joe Thompson’s station wagon, which Deputy Meyer would recognize anywhere. He was shocked it passed inspection each year and he suspected Joe’s habit of drinking late into the early hours of the morning with more than a few of the mechanics at Pepper’s Garage had something to do with that.
“Base, this is Unit Four at Joe Thompson’s house. His car is here, and I’m proceeding to question him about this morning’s incident, over,” Deputy Meyer said into the radio.
“Roger that,” replied Deputy Dayton, who was manning the office alone this morning. “Watch your ass, okay? Over.”
Deputy Meyer planned on doing exactly that. He got out of the car and listened closely for anything that might indicate where Joe was. Meyer had been on this job for nearly five years, had never drawn his weapon in the line of duty, but he popped that cherry without thought. With his Glock in hand, he approached the crooked wooden door of the shack.
“Joe Thompson, this is Deputy Meyer. We need to talk.”
No reply from inside.
Deputy Meyer stood to the side of the door, double-checking his surroundings for any sign of movement or life. There was nothing. All was quiet.
Staying out of the line of possible fire as he had been trained, he knocked heavily on the door, which was so flimsy it shuddered under his fist.
“Listen, Joe, this will be easier if you let me know where you are. I wouldn’t want there to be any kind of…misunderstanding, you know what I mean?”
Still no reply.
Silence wasn’t good. Like most of the citizens in Windbrook, Joe Thompson owned at least one hunting rifle, maybe more.
If Joe had killed Betty and was now lying in wait to take out the first person who came for him, or even to set-up a suicide by cop scenario, Deputy Meyer really didn’t want to kick open the door and be all alone for whatever followed.
He was about to back slowly to his car to radio for assistance when he heard a noise from inside the shack. At first he thought the sound might be a hungry cat crying, but then the cries turned to gurgles like someone fighting to breathe. Deputy Meyer’s first instinct was that something had happened to Joe and the man needed help. His second instinct was that Joe had someone in there and something bad was happening to that person. Either way, there was no time to waste.
“Joe, I’m coming in, get your hands where I can see them!” Deputy Meyer called. He took a deep breath and put his shoulder into the door, which exploded off the rusty hinges as if it had been hanging by a thread to begin with.
The inside of the shack was bathed in darkness and stank like a chicken roost. Meyer tried the light switch by the door, but there was no power. He flipped his Maglite on, raised it next to his Glock, and swept the room.
At first, he couldn’t see anything clearly through the piles of old, moldy newspapers. There had to be hundreds of stacks, some as tall as the ceiling, all of them leaning this way or that way as if they might collapse in the slightest of breeze.
“Jesus H. Hoarder,” Deputy Meyer whispered, sweeping the room again.
The circle of light crossed something in the narrow path between the mountains of old news and Meyer snapped the flashlight back to that spot. There was a bloody shoe print on the dirty floor, still fresh based on the way the blood reflected the light.
“Joe Thompson, this is Deputy Meyer, do you hear me? I need to know where you are and I need to see your hands right now!”
Another muffled gurgle, and this time Meyer honed in on the location of the sound. The room beyond this trash pile, most likely the kitchen. He made his way through the canyon of newspaper piles, carefully avoiding the bloody shoe print.
When his light crisscrossed the kitchen, he couldn’t believe what he saw, but he was instantly grateful his stomach
was empty because the dry heaves started again.
Joe Thompson was strung up in the middle of the room, one arm tied to the top of the cabinets on the left and the other arm tied to the top of the cabinets on the right. His hands dangled loosely, obviously broken at the wrist, and blood dripped from the fingertips. He was naked and his crotch was a gory mess of flayed flesh, ripped hair, and open wounds. His toes had been removed with something like an electric turkey knife. They were hanging on a thread around his neck.
“He was not a very nice man,” a voice said softly behind Deputy Meyer.
Meyer spun in a panic, his finger depressing the trigger of his Glock and sending two rounds into the floor as his weapon rose to find a target.
“Woah, woah, woah there son,” the owner of the voice said, his wooden and silver cane whipping around from his side and stopping the rising firearm in one smooth move.
“Who are you?” Deputy Meyer asked, his heart pounding and his eyes flicking back and forth from the old man’s face to the cane that was stopping his service weapon at a 45-degree angle to his side. It was as if the cane had somehow paralyzed his arm. He couldn’t move the gun or pull the trigger again if his life depended on it.
“I am but a foolish old man,” the stranger said, “and I came to this town looking for a few good souls to make me believe in humanity again.”
“I don’t understand.”
“That’s okay, Peter Meyer, that’s not important. What is important is you and I need to have a talk about dreams and hopes and plans for the future. Joe Thompson there had a dream about bringing a little boy here, just snatching him off the street, did you know that?”
Deputy Meyer shook his head. Joe was known as a drunk who sometimes got a little mean when deep in his cups, but he was supposed to be mostly harmless.
“Your Joe Thompson was most definitely not harmless,” the old man said as if he had read the deputy’s mind. “And there are even more dangerous people in this town of yours.”
“There are?” Deputy Meyer asked, no longer thinking about the gun frozen at the end of his hand but instead watching the way the old man’s eyes seemed to be changing color. He could have sworn they were gray at first, but the lack of light in here made seeing things difficult, and now they were more of a green.
“Oh yes, most certainly. First, though, before we continue, you need to tell me about your secret dream.”
“My secret dream…?”
“That’s right, Deputy. Everyone has one.”
And so Deputy Meyer spoke, like so many people before him had; people who had been found lacking and judged accordingly once they had served their purpose for the old man.
9.
Sheriff Logan pulled his car into a vacant parking spot in front of the Windbrook Diner, remnants of last night’s dream flitting through hi mind like a tumbleweed in a windstorm. All of his deputies were out searching for Joe Thompson now that the State Police had arrived and secured the crime scene. Ben needed a few minutes to sit and think, but he didn’t want to return to the office yet. He couldn’t shake the feeling that more was wrong in his town than just the first hit-and-run murder in nearly forty years.
Bill Smith was working the grill and singing along to an old Rolling Stones tune, and he saw Ben and waved and flipped a burger, all in the same smooth motion. Bill was born in Windbrook and would die there, like most of the older residents. At seventy-seven, he would never beat his personal best running the mile again, but he still managed to mind the store every day. Bill was a solid citizen, but more importantly to Ben, he was a friend.
“Hey old man, how’s life treating you?” Ben asked as the heavy glass door that had greeted Bill’s customers since he was a kid slid closed behind him.
“Ah, not too bad, Sheriff, and stop calling me old man before I hop over this counter and teach you some manners,” Bill said, smiling. He still possessed the same mischievous, childlike twinkle in his eyes that had been present when he had snuck free ice cream to a shy four-year-old Ben.
“What’s the news about Betty Duberstein?” Bill asked, his face turning serious.
Normally, Ben wouldn’t share information about an ongoing investigation with a civilian, but this was Bill and there was no one else in the restaurant to overhear the conversation. Ben knew the town was already abuzz with the news and the rumor mill would be running wild, but Bill was someone he could trust and count on. He always had been.
“Still no clue what happened. Joe Thompson’s the only witness and we can’t find him anywhere.”
“Joe couldn’t have done it,” Bill said. “He chases skirts and drinks too much, but he’d never hurt no one.”
“Yeah, that’s my take, too, but if it wasn’t Joe, that means we have no leads until the State Police come back with more info about the tire treads. They’re narrowing down the make and model as we speak.”
Bill stared at the sheriff for a moment, eyeing him up and down as if he had never seen him before.
“You don’t seem yourself, Ben. I heard Betty was pretty messed up. That dragging you down?”
“I don’t know,” Ben said, being more honest with Bill than he would have been with anyone else other than Jennifer. “I had a nightmare last night, a bad one, and I just can’t shake it. Then this shitty mess with Betty Duberstein happens. Something feels off in town today, but I can’t put my finger on what.”
Bill studied the sheriff for another moment. “You know, next time I see Jennifer I’m gonna tell her to take you on a vacation. I think you need one.”
Ben’s lips parted in a slight smile. “Yeah, you might be right. We’ll see how the rest of the day goes.”
“Sheriff, you there? Over,” came the muffled voice from the radio on Ben’s hip.
“I’m here, what do you have, over?”
“You’re not going to believe this. You need to meet us at Snyder’s Garage ASAP. Over.”
“Snyder’s Garage? That dump’s been closed for years. Over.”
“Roger that, but I don’t want to say more over this party line. It’s pretty awful. Over.”
10.
Jason Sinclair’s delivery truck was parked behind Snyder’s Garage, which looked every day of the ten long years it had been abandoned. The pavement was cracked and broken, bushes at the edge of the property had grown huge and ungainly with no one to trim them back each season, and every window had been broken by bored teenagers throwing rocks.
Sheriff Logan pulled around to where Deputy Jones and Deputy Wilson were carefully encircling another crime scene with yellow police tape. Both of them were pasty white going on green.
“Where’s Deputy Meyer?” Logan asked after getting out of his cruiser.
“Not sure, boss,” Wilson replied. “Deputy Dayton is manning the station alone, but he’s been putting out the call to Meyer for thirty minutes now with no reply. Thinks maybe the cruiser’s radio went bad.”
I wouldn’t bet on that, the sheriff thought, the uneasy feeling in his gut kicking into overdrive. “What have we got here?”
“A real shit show, that’s what we got. Something is ten shades of fucked up around here this morning, boss.”
“Watch the language, Steve.”
“Sorry, boss, but go see for yourself.”
Sheriff Logan walked to the open door of the delivery truck, taking care to avoid any shoe prints or other possible evidence. He peered inside and immediately understood what his deputy had meant.
He didn’t know Jason Sinclair well since the deliveryman lived in Glenton and normally never came further into town than Joe Thompson’s place, but he recognized the delivery truck and the dead man inside it.
Only dead didn’t accurately describe what had been done to him.
Jason Sinclair was slumped in the driver’s seat, his wide eyes staring blankly out the windshield. His eyelids had been removed, three of the fingers on his right hand were missing, and one of them was sticking out from between his teeth like the stub of a cigar. Hi
s shirt was stained maroon with his blood and a symbol had been drawn there in ragged lines: a peace sign.
“Somebody find me Peter Meyer ASAP,” Sheriff Logan said, making his way back outside the yellow police tape. “He was headed to Joe Thompson’s shack, right?”
“Yes, sir,” Deputy Wilson replied.
“Okay, Wilson, you go and don’t you waste a second. Radio me the minute you get there.”
“You think Joe did this, too?” Wilson asked.
“I have no idea, but we have a man out of radio contact and we need to find him, fast.”
“What should I do, boss?” Deputy Jones asked.
“Secure the scene, radio the staties for support, and don’t let anyone else behind this garage. No one sees inside that truck who isn’t a LEO, you understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
Sheriff Logan returned to his cruiser, backed up, and peeled out onto Snyder Avenue, which was named after the long dead family who had built the garage and run it for over forty years.
“Shit show,” Logan muttered as he drove away. “That’s an understatement. What the hell is going on today?”
11.
The old man was standing at the corner of Main Street and Prince Avenue, watching the door to Windbrook Realty and Titles, Jennifer Logan’s home away from home. She was at her desk writing an offer on a hunting cabin she had showed that morning, and the old man could see her through the enormous front window with the business name stenciled across it.
“Such a hard worker, Mrs. Logan,” the old man said. “I wonder if you’d like for your husband’s nightmares to disappear. I wonder what you’d be willing to trade for that to happen.”
The old man watched her work and he smiled as he contemplated what her secret wish might be and what she might be willing to do to make it happen. Off in the distance, a bell started ringing at the community school. Soon the children of Windbrook would be free to run and play and forget their educational troubles. Ah, to be young again.
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