Vasillion flashed a look at Malin and then down again at the table. “It said OMI will only see police officers and detectives with an appointment.”
“We heard you got something new in stock and you know what they say, the early bird catches.”
“Two pilots and this one,” Vasillion said, hand stroking that one strand of red hair with a latex covered finger. It was an oddly affectionate gesture.
“Pour old sod,” Temeke muttered. “He’ll never see his state pension.”
Vasillion nodded at his assistant and began his examination. “Physical markings, small tattoo on the inside of the right wrist. Eternity symbol by the look of it. Thumb missing on his right hand, a prior injury,” he said, lifting the skin slightly near the buttock, “judging by skin grafts on the upper right thigh and back.”
“According to Officer Running Hawk’s report,” Temeke interrupted, “he reckoned the old man got into an altercation with another hunter over a kill. He was shot only a few feet from his camp. There were blood stains on a tree, that kind of thing, and they found a knife, a Buck 110. Looks like he used it too. He was then dragged back to the fire and that’s where his neck was slashed. Then Ginger was left face down to burn. What I want to know is how long he’d been dead?”
Vasillion shook his head. “Facedown means the killer wanted his face obliterated. Extreme hatred. As for an altercation, doesn’t sound like hunter etiquette to me. This wound isn’t consistent with a folding knife.”
“That’s not all they carry,” muttered Temeke.
“The field examiners found a bolt action rifle in a lean-to. 5-round magazine.” Vasillion looked up at the ceiling for a moment. “P14, I think he said.”
“Enfield?” Temeke asked, belly a churn of knots. Nobody had told him that crucial piece of news.
The doctor nodded. “I’d say he died anywhere between two and three o’clock on Wednesday afternoon.”
He continued to prod and poke with painstaking scrutiny, nose almost touching the dead man’s neck. “Second and third degree burns to left side of the face, neck and chest. Conjunctival hemorrhaging of the left eye.” He then eased the mouth open, spatula clicking on the teeth. “Age sixty-five to seventy-five. Physical condition‒”
“Dead?” Temeke offered, hoping the doc would get to the headlines and leave the boring bits for later.
“Fit. Apparent cause of death, homicide, gunshot wound to the left shoulder, one deep cut versus tear to the left front side of the neck, exposing cervical spine.”
Malin stood on tiptoe and kept her distance. “You said one deep cut, right?”
“Correct,” Vasillion muttered more to himself than to her. “Definitely a fixed blade survival knife. Serrated edge. Not the Buck 110. But that did have blood on it. Different type.”
“Do we have a name?” Temeke assumed the blood came from the assailant.
“I’ve got a rush on it.”
“He must have been strong,” Malin said. “Not saying a hunter isn’t strong. They’d have to be. But this is precise, almost meticulous.”
“Could have been a doctor,” Temeke muttered, seeing Vasillion’s eyebrows shoot up.
He wondered if he should go out for smoke, but gave his watch a pointed stare instead. He hoped they could get out before the old boy was gutted down the middle with a Striker Saw and the assistant began labeling jars of offal. He expected to ruin a perfectly good pair of underpants when he smelled the stench of burning bone.
“What’s this, doc?” Temeke said, peering at a length of material lined in a silky twill and sealed in a bag on the counter.
“It’s part of a double-breasted trench coat, Melton-style I think. The rest of it was recovered from the site, bloodstained rope in the pockets and a few hair samples. Forensics better take a look at it,” Vasillion said, gazing down Ginger’s throat. “Particles of soot in the trachea―”
“A heavy smoker then?”
“… consistent with smoke inhalation associated with the campfire. No further significant points.”
Temeke huffed out a lungful of air and looked at the pathetic remains. He hoped the dead man wouldn’t wind up in the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System. He hoped they’d get a name.
“Since we don’t have antemortem data it could take a few days.”
“Do you think he lived out there” Malin murmured, “in the woods?”
“Judging by the dirt under his fingernails, hair, teeth, I would say he did.”
Temeke felt an icy cold wind across the room, a shudder that raised the hairs on the back of his neck. Someone must have opened a cold locker. He continued to stare at the scrub sinks and tables, wondering if the dead looked down from the ceiling and felt sad at what they saw. Why was it the place always made him feel so uneasy?
One of the ward doors was barged open by a stretcher and wheeled in by an Asian orderly. His eyes seemed to smile behind a pair of black-rimmed glasses and he nodded to Malin. As far as Temeke could make out, these were the remains of Danny Michael, recognizable only by the label tied to a toe.
Temeke flinched slightly, felt the prickle of tears. He hated death, but the terror of it was greater. Danny had left behind a wife and two small children. Bloody fantastic.
“Given that this is a homicide,” Dr. Vasillion said, voice cutting through Temeke’s thoughts, “and in the same area of woods, he could be related to your case.”
Temeke watched that spatula as it hung between two fingers, saw the doctor’s reflection in one side of the aluminum table.
“He could even have been shot in self-defense,” Malin said.
Vasillion barely nodded and patted the upper right arm. “He’s fit. When we get to the gross examination I suspect rabbits and squirrels in the way of stomach contents.”
“We’ll leave before you do,” Temeke said, watching the doc toss his instrument in a steel pan and pick up a scalpel. “What are we looking for. Got any ideas, doc?”
Vasillion played the scalpel between his fingers, eyes squinting at Temeke. “The shot to the shoulder was a warning. Maybe our John Doe overstepped the line, maybe he threatened his killer. It’s the knife wound to the neck that fascinates me. There’s a faint possibility, and I hope its faint, that the killer might be ex-police or military. Some fail, some never fit in. Some join the armed forces to vent a rage against the foulest of humanity. And that cut, as Malin pointed out, is very precise. Only a high street butcher could have come close.”
TWENTY-TWO
Tree limbs crackled in the fire, soot and smoke curling upwards to the ceiling. Adam could see them ‒ his beloved braves ‒ eating and laughing before the open fire. He kept his mind empty, so he wouldn’t miss the visions that might be there.
Two days in the cave because of Ramsey’s leg, two days without hiking onward in the open country. Two days and no sign of the rangers.
Adam explored the pit houses, towers and underground kivas, each carved into natural alcoves and painted with a skillful hand. He heard the wind as it shrilled through the chinking and, when the light faded in the many passageways, he thought he saw Tarahuma, the spear-thrower, carrying an atlatl.
Ramsey wasn’t far behind pointing at this and that, and nursing that weeping wound. Sometimes he would pace and mutter, and sometimes he would chew the black stuff and doze off for a while. His eyes were circled in bruises at least that’s what Adam thought they were. Like he’d been popped with a fist. And he was up and down like a man with no way, whispering “leave no man behind… leave no man behind.”
It was late afternoon when Adam rinsed the saucepan at the mouth of the cave, set it beneath a natural runoff. He could hear the drip, drip, drip, and then a sudden downpour drumming against metal. And every now and then he would go and fetch it so they could bathe and wash their clothes.
“Close your eyes,” Ramsey whispered, dipping his fingers into a multi-colored compact. “Need to camo your face up.”
Adam closed his eyes, felt those
fingers working the colors from nose to cheekbones, jaw to neck. It tickled his throat and he flinched a little.
“They won’t see us coming out. When we come out,” Ramsey said.
Adam knew Ramsey could move through the woods like a phantom, face flattened with paint. How else could he have survived this long.
“It’s cool,” Adam said, trying to think of things to say.
“What’s cool?”
“All that stuff on your face. I’ve seen it in movies.”
“Your dad would know all about that.”
“He never talked about the military. He never told me what it was really like.”
“It’s about survival. It’s about killing.”
Adam felt a twinge in his belly, remembering something his pastor said. “Thou shalt not kill.”
Ramsey snorted. “You don’t give up do you?”
“No. Because God never gave up on me.”
Ramsey tucked his chin on his chest and stared at the fire until his eyes began to water. “I don’t believe in all that God stuff.”
“But you can,” Adam whispered. “We can pray if you like.”
Ramsey shook his head. “There are things you don’t know, things you don’t need to know. I can’t pray. It won’t take away the filth.”
“Did you kill that old man?” Adam had to ask, had to know. Ramsey frowned and looked away like he needed reminding.
“Men like that take young boys. They do things.”
Adam could still see a skeleton in the woods when he thought about it. He had been hoping they wouldn’t stumble across it any time soon. “Like the one tied to a tree?”
“Yeah, just like him.”
“Did you know the boy?”
Ramsey nodded and sniffed. Said he knew the boy. He was dark skinned, like a nut, pretty-looking too. Always stood beside his mother in the hardware store, always helping her out with a smile. Then one day he was gone. But his face wasn’t. It was all over the shop windows, bus stops, tacked to trees and posts. And when Ramsey saw that boy’s face he vowed he’d kill the man who did it. He made an anonymous call to the police department. Told them where to find young Evan Trader. Wanted to take him down off that tree, but he knew better than to tamper with evidence. Only the police never found the man who killed him because he moved like a demon through the woods.
“It’s dangerous out here.” Ramsey wiped his eyes with the heel of one hand, looked like he was crying. “And I care.”
“Is that why you took me? Because something bad was going to happen.”
Ramsey began to take jagged breaths, and his hand was wiping some of that paint off. “It would be easy to say that. The world’s not as bright as you think it is. And it gets darker by the day.”
“What then?”
“I’ll tell you when we get there.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.” Ramsey tried a smile, only it was lopsided, not really happy. “Finish your rabbit. It’s getting dark.”
He stood and kicked dust over the fire until the flames were nothing but yellow rattails curling above a bed of ash. All those tears were because he was tired, that’s all. Tired of running. Tired of waiting.
An owl hooted on a nearby tree, only Ramsey didn’t think it was an owl. They would be herded in like cattle so he said, shut in by those rangers until they were starved out. He kept droning on about the old man with the thick red beard, kept saying he probably told the rangers where they were.
Adam knew Ramsey was dreaming it. The old man was already dead. And dead men don’t speak.
They were warm and full of rabbit before the sun went down. Wrapped in their jackets, hoods up and lying on their bellies on the lookout ledge, they watched the opposite slope and listened to the grass murmur. After a while Ramsey fell asleep and that’s when Adam noticed the figure, leaning against the trunk of a tree in the deep dusk. He was alone, or so Adam thought.
Not too tall, judging by the notches on the pine tree he stood against and looking across the canyon at the cliff. His face stayed that way for a time and then he looked about, slowly approaching the narrow track of shingle at the base of the slope.
A beam of light skimmed the trees. Twice it floated up the cliff wall and down again, making circular movements as it neared the bottom. There was a coyote somewhere on the slope chuffing and howling. That’s what woke Ramsey.
Adam felt the hand against the back of his head, pushing his face lower behind the rock.
“Five,” Ramsey grunted. “Maybe more.”
Adam saw one man push up the sleeve of his jacket, wristwatch lighting up his face for an instant. He hooted to someone in the trees and another hoot came back. They all fanned out, ghostly pale in the moonlight and merging with the shadows.
Adam lowered his hood and listened, but he couldn’t hear anything. He thought he saw something a little further down the slopes, a dark shape that seemed to bleed into the gray rock it was lying on. An animal stretched out for the night, waiting like a sentinel until dawn.
“The cave’s sacred,” Ramsey said, chewing that stuff again, spat a chunk of it on the ground. “They won’t come here. So we’ll wait for an hour or two. Then we’ll make a run for it.”
TWENTY-THREE
The growling in Malin’s stomach was the alarm she didn’t need at eleven forty-five on a Sunday night. The hollow between her breasts was drenched in sweat and she threw off the quilt in a hurry.
Thoughts of Hollister churned around in her head, how he seemed to lead her further and further down that foggy path without ever giving her some tangible hope. She’d already changed her name to AvantGuard.
A shiver ran down her back as she focused hard on the open door and the pale pink glow from the kitchen. The occasional sweep of car lights on the road outside the window reminded her that the world was waking up, people returning to their early morning shifts.
She padded out of the bedroom and stared at the laptop on the kitchen counter, a glossy lid illuminated by three puck lights beneath the kitchen cabinets. If it wasn’t for that extra dose of curiosity she’d been born with she wouldn’t have bothered checking.
There were four emails. Two were store receipts, one was spam and the other was an alert from Heartfree.com. WingMan had sent her a private message… to her new account. She blinked a few times to see if it would go away and when it didn’t she signed into the website and there it was.
Wanna talk?
Two words. It was the best he could do. Maybe he was looking for women. Maybe he thought she was someone else. She looked down the right hand margin of the screen, saw only seven people on the list of chatters. His name wasn’t among them.
Sure.
But she didn’t press SEND. She wondered if it was too eager, too desperate. But she was a detective first and detectives don’t hesitate. They ask questions and she had plenty.
Talking of lonely, she needed to hear a human voice. Spasms of panic hit her when she was alone, like the time when her mother died. The time when she realized there would never be another sympathetic voice. She noticed Temeke didn’t picked up when she dialed his number. Left him a voicemail instead.
Two people came off chat and four more came on. It was like a revolving door, a pantomime of actors with false names and faces. Women with young faces, hopeful faces, faces with so many virtual nips and tucks did they really think they could ever get away with it? And men sucking in those overhangs and showing the pecs they had in their twenties.
She hit SEND.
WingMan had no idea who AvantGuard was, but he’d want to know, probably ask for her number because men like him trolled the dating sites, picking up chicks and scoring notches on their cupboard doors. Boy, was he going to be pissed when he found out it was only her.
Hollister was handsome, relaxed, confident, and women fell for him. Hard. He was never overtly lecherous or sexual, just a little suggestive. Listening was his strength and mystery was his forté. There seemed to be a never e
nding stream of relationships because on the internet you can cast your net far and wide, love a woman in Texas and another in Tokyo, or so he said.
In fact, the women on chat had no life. This was their escape from boardroom to bedroom where nothing ever changed and nothing ever would. This was the dating of the future where everyone sat in their own bubble, never feeling flesh, never getting sick.
It was surprising how intimate you could get without ever meeting, how flirtatious without ever really knowing. It was exciting and dangerous. And it was downright stupid because the risks were greater.
She wondered if he was still sore about the escort job she once had, sore she’d suddenly changed into a prude. That was the word he’d used, wasn’t it? Prude.
Malin made herself a cup of tea, ate a piece of toast and then she got to thinking. Perhaps the women on chat were all waiting to talk to Hollister, probably already met him, already kissed him . . .
She walked back to the laptop and nearly dropped her cup. It was the beep of an incoming message. WingMan was online. He was also on chat and he’d already left her a message.
Like the new name. Cute.
Malin’s heart nearly skipped a beat. How did he know? The picture was the same, a bland blue avatar that everyone used when they first signed up.
He’s a cop, stupid, that’s why.
It was true, she was always on Heartfree.com. He just didn’t need to remind her that’s all. As for the name change, she found it a little creepy he was able to find her among so many. But it was her own fault. She had fallen in the trap of what he called desperation.
She knew her way around the internet like a teenager. There were plenty of police officers trolling the same sites, basking in their easy chairs and having a good laugh. Some were just ordinary folk looking for an ordinary date, some were predators sitting on the sidelines, watching. So which one was Hollister?
Night Eyes (The Detective Temeke Crime Series Book 2) Page 12