“What are you doing?” Eric said in an incredulous tone.
“Improvising.”
Back at his locker, Gary spun the combination lock and opened the door, using his back to block the locker’s contents from the students flocking to the scene of Todd’s murder. Positioning the bifurcated basketball beneath Todd’s head, he said, “Okay, stick it in.”
Eric stared at him. “You’ve got to be kidding.”
“Yeah, I always get funny when someone sticks a head in my locker. Stop screwing around and put it in!”
Eric shook his head. “No way.”
Giving Eric a hard look, Gary made an exaggerated sigh. “Then at least take this so I can do it.”
Eric took the ball and Gary’s place, which brought him face to face with Todd.
“I don’t have any gloves. Can I use yours?”
With his lips pressed together, Eric shook his head.
Grimacing, Gary set his bare hands on the head and pulled.
Nothing happened.
“What’s wrong?” Eric said.
“It’s stuck!”
Gary pulled harder, his face turning red. The head came free with a sickening rip and he staggered back. Eric gagged at the sight of the bloody chunk of scalp remaining on the coat hook. Gary stuffed the head inside the waiting ball, then plucked the chunk from the hook and threw it in with the head. Bending over, he gathered up the bloody papers at the locker’s bottom.
“Hurry up,” Eric said.
Gary took the duct tape and wrapped it around the ball once, sealing it. Then he cut it with his knife and closed his locker. The ball now resembled a mutant football more than it did a basketball.
“Let’s go.” Gary ran down the corridor, hugging the ball tight to his stomach.
Eric stood still.
“Come on!”
As he followed Gary, Eric heard Mr. Milton’s panicked voice in the distance: “All of you—get to homeroom right now! Gym is canceled. Move it!”
Gary inserted the air pump needle into the basketball’s rubber nipple and switched the pump on. As the ball inflated, he wrapped more duct tape around it. When the ball looked ready to burst, he removed the needle and stopped the pump. He bounced the lopsided ball on the floor and it rebounded at the wrong angle.
“Good enough,” he said. “Think fast!” He feigned throwing the ball at Eric, who flinched with a look of disgust on his face.
They emerged through one of the building’s side exits. Beyond the wide field, blanketed in undisturbed snow, a semitruck barreled along Route 20 and disappeared behind a stretch of pine trees. Eric gazed through the baseball diamond’s backstop fence at the wooded area. Somewhere on the other side lay the turnoff for Willow Road.
They moved through deep snow. Few windows looked out over this portion of the schoolyard, and those that did were tinted.
“Whoever did this wanted to frame me,” Gary said. “That’s why they used my knife and my locker.”
“Who would want to do that?”
“I have no idea, man.”
“Maybe your locker was a random choice and they just found your knife.”
“No way. There was nothing random about this. They wanted to frame me or send me a message. Didn’t you ever see The Godfather?” Gary held Eric back with one hand. “You stay here.”
Eric looked down. Gary had stationed him at the concrete base of a metal grate. Snow had fallen between the metal bars and accumulated on the ground below. Gary descended the incline to the deep drainage ditch facing Route 20. Looking into the wide mouth of the drainpipe, he cocked his arm and threw the ball through the opening.
“Heads up!” he said.
Through the grate, Eric saw the ball roll beneath him in a lopsided fashion and vanish. Shuddering, he closed his eyes. A moment later, Gary stood beside him and the sound of an approaching siren rose on the wind.
“We just made it,” Gary said.
Chapter 20
As Matt steered the Pathfinder into the high school parking lot, its siren wailing, Michael Milton’s frantic call lingered in his mind:
“There’s been a murder at the high school. A—a headless body is hanging upside down in the gymnasium!”
Matt did not recall a homicide in the village of Red Hill, population eight thousand, during his lifetime. Red Hill enjoyed a reputation as a friendly little town with low crime statistics and a high quality of life. Still, the Victorian village had too many bars for his taste, and between the rowdy college students and the depressed blue-collar workers he had issued his share of DWIs and had broken up dozens of brawls. Some of the wealthier families complained about vandalism around the college, and Matt had developed a thick skin for dealing with people who believed they owned the community and its services because they paid heavier taxes.
He pulled over to the curb before the main building and switched off the engine, silencing the siren. As he exited the Pathfinder, he saw Dan Heller and Ricky Donner pull up behind him in their squad car; a third car raced down the driveway. He strode across the ice to the glass front doors, vapor trailing from his mouth. Entering the lobby, he experienced an uncomfortable feeling of déjà vu: it seemed so much smaller than it had when he was a student. Dan and Ricky entered behind him, and as the three policemen marched through the main corridor, officers Sean Hennessey and Peter Novak brought up the rear.
“Put your gloves on,” Matt said, and all five policemen exchanged their winter gloves for latex. Ahead, John Wrangler and Michael Milton stood waiting outside the gym. The corridor had been evacuated, and the two men stood like sentries. The wrestling coach had been Matt’s classmate years ago, and Matt noted the man’s pasty complexion.
“Good Lord,” Matt said as he stared inside the gym at the upside-down corpse. He’d never seen anything like this, and a moment later he heard uncomfortable shuffling behind him. “Has anyone touched that body?”
“No,” Michael said. “No one’s been inside at all.”
Matt could not take his eyes off the grisly sight. “Dan, start shooting. I want multiple shots from every angle, but stay out of that blood.”
“Right, Chief.” Removing his digital camera from its leather case, Dan entered the gym and photographed the crime scene.
“Ricky, get Doc Beelock on the horn. Tell him I need him here right now. If he argues, go out to the morgue and drag him here in handcuffs.”
Ricky nodded. “You got it, Matt.”
Michael Milton said, “What are we going to do?”
“We’re going to catch whoever did this,” Matt said. Studying the gym floor, he stroked the ends of his mustache. “No footprints. The perp stabbed the victim in the chest, then strung him up, decapitated him, and cleaned up after himself.”
“The lights were off when I got here,” Wrangler said. “Except for the scoreboard.”
Matt glanced at the scoreboard, which displayed HOME: 00, VISITORS: 01. Cute. “Are these doors locked overnight?”
Wrangler nodded. “The custodian locks them after he mops up.”
“What time do extracurricular activities end?”
“By five,” Michael said. “The students and coaches are gone by six.”
“I need a list of your custodial workers and maintenance staff, anyone who might have been in the building between 6:00 p.m. yesterday and 8:00 a.m. today.”
“You’ll have it,” Michael said with authority.
“We have to turn this place inside out and upside down. I’m sorry for the disruption, but there’s no other way. We have to find that head.”
“I’m canceling classes and sending everyone home.”
“No, don’t do that. Right now, these kids are safer here with us than anywhere else. But you should isolate them. We don’t want one of them finding what we’re looking for.”
“There are nine hundred students in this school,” Michael said in a stern voice. “Most of them carry cell phones. Word will spread fast. Some of their parents will panic.”
“Let the parents take their kids home if they insist, but only after they inform one of us.”
Michael nodded. “We’ll have our attendance cards in half an hour. That will help determine this boy’s identity.”
Carol stood in the cafeteria doorway, her back to the hallway lockers. Three hundred students had been crammed in here, another three hundred had been sequestered in the auxiliary gym, and the remaining three hundred sat in the assembly hall, with the faculty divided among the locations. The decibel volume of chatter rose far above an acceptable level, but she saw no point in addressing it. By now, every student in the building knew that one of their own had been slain.
Murdered, she thought.
Who could murder a teenager?
Another teenager?
She shuddered, thoughts of Columbine and Virginia Tech creeping through her mind. Gazing past the throng of students, and through the floor-to-ceiling windows, she saw the news van for the local PBS station. Ed Holder, publisher of the Red Hill Gazette, leaned against his parked station wagon, an old-fashioned 35mm camera slung around his neck. So far, the police officers stationed out front had managed to prevent the media personnel from entering the school.
“Carol?”
She heard her husband’s soft voice behind her. Turning her head, she saw him standing in the hall, out of the students’ sight. She took a discreet step backward. “What’s happening?”
“We haven’t found it yet,” Matt said. “I don’t think we’re going to, either. But we’re going to keep this school locked down until the end of the day.”
“Do you know who it is yet?”
Matt’s expression turned grim as he nodded. “Todd Kumler’s unaccounted for.”
“Todd—?” She recalled breaking up the fight between Todd and Johnny just the week before. Now both boys were dead, one in a reckless car accident, the other in a grisly homicide. “Oh, God.”
“There’s no ID on the body, but we found Todd’s gym bag in the locker room. His parents reported him missing this morning.”
“Do they know?”
He shook his head. “Not yet. I’ll tell them soon. I have to go now.”
Carol’s hand slid down to her chest. “You know who did it, don’t you?”
“Maybe.”
“Please be careful.”
“There’s nothing to worry about.” Holding her hand out of sight, he kissed it. “I’ll call you when I can.”
She watched him stride down the hall toward a side exit. Outside, Ed Holder cornered him, and a cameraman and TV newscaster rushed out the van’s sliding door.
Chapter 21
Johnny lay in bed, tossing his switchblade into the air. He watched the illegal weapon flip end over end, just missing the ceiling, then waited while it plummeted to within inches of his face and snatched it before impact. He’d used Gary’s switchblade to kill Todd and hack off his head, but as soon as he’d come home he removed his own blade from its hiding place beneath his mattress.
Even though he now had the run of the house, he planned to remain in his room until sunset allowed him to prowl the streets unnoticed. He’d discovered his father’s body at dawn, when the man was usually in a deep, alcohol-induced slumber. Standing over Charlie’s corpse, he’d allowed himself to experience a few moments of grief. He had expected the old man to get trashed downtown, just like he did every night. How was he supposed to know Charlie would come home early for once? Before he got too choked up, he told himself that Charlie had been on this path for a long time, and it had just been a matter of time. Had his father experienced the golden light? He hoped so. Looking at the big-screen TV, he sighed. He couldn’t imagine watching the boob tube with his father’s corpse at his feet.
He heard the sirens later that morning, and from the safety of his window, had watched Red Hill’s finest racing along Main Street to the high school. Imagining the chaos that must have followed the discovery of Todd’s body, he smiled. What had Gary’s reaction been when he opened his locker?
He continued to flip the knife, pleased that he’d regained so much control over his atrophied muscles. A lot of willpower went a long way.
The switchblade had belonged to Uncle Nate, his mother’s brother. Johnny had discovered it in one day when he’d been nosing around Nate’s old army footlocker. Nate had moved away from Red Hill one year after Helen Grissom’s funeral, and must not have realized an item had disappeared from the footlocker. He’d never brought it up, either.
The blade spun higher into the air, grazing the ceiling, then dove straight at Johnny’s face. He snagged it at the last possible second, the sharp tip so close to his right eyeball that his vision turned fuzzy and out of focus.
He remembered showing the switchblade to Eric on one of their excursions to the cemetery. That had been right after Father Webb had—
Shick!
Lost in memory, Johnny had reached for the switchblade too late and the blade pierced his right eye.
“Goddamn it!”
Johnny leapt from the bed and staggered to the full-length mirror on the closet door. The knife’s hilt protruded from his lower eyelid, wedged between his eye and its socket. Grateful that he had not sliced the orb, he eased the blade from his skull and formaldehyde trickled out like teardrops running down his face. The gash below his eye did not add to his glamour.
Shaking his head, he closed the blade and slid it into his back pocket. He would have to find other ways to amuse himself until sunset, when he could go out without fear of being recognized. Wandering over to his makeshift bookcase, he ran a dead finger across the spines of his DVDs. Scanning the titles, he almost wanted to skip his plan and spend however much time he had left watching movies and playing video games. He decided to avoid anything too sexy, seeing no point in making himself horny. His penis fit into his plans, and he didn’t want to risk it coming off in his hand if he played with himself.
I’m never going to get laid again! Anger filled his rotting shell. He resisted the urge to watch the Holy Trinity: George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, and Day of the Dead. He loved the classics, and didn’t count the remakes or Land of the Dead among them. But he had no desire to watch flicks about mindless, flesh-eating zombies. He settled on two revenge classics: Deathdream and Creepshow. Opening the case for Deathdream, he removed the shiny disc and froze in midmotion. For an instant he glimpsed his discolored flesh on the disc’s reflective surface. Rotating his wrist, he exposed more of his horrific features. Then he grinned and fed the DVD into his player.
Showtime.
Chapter 22
Matt pulled over to a snowbank flanking Canary Street, in one of Red Hill’s less attractive neighborhoods. The twostory houses lacked any sense of architectural grace; concrete steps, composite shingling, and unpaved driveways added to the blue-collar splendor. Matt waited for Dan and Ricky to pull up behind him before he exited his vehicle. They met in the middle of the street, and Matt gestured to a plain white house.
“Dan, go around to the back of the house. Ricky, I want you in the driveway. Both of you keep an eye on that side door. Be ready to kick it in if necessary.”
Matt watched his men take their positions, then peeled off his gloves and mounted the concrete steps. He heard nothing after pushing the doorbell, so he rapped on the metal door with his knuckles, then rested his hand on the handle of his holstered revolver. The Red Hill Police Department had no use for Glocks.
He heard shuffling behind the door, then the tumbling of locks. The door swung open, and a gray-haired woman with pronounced cheekbones opened the door. Matt could not tell if the rumpled garment she wore was a nightgown or an old dress.
“Mrs. Bower? I’m Chief Crane. Is your son home?”
Eileen Bower peered at Matt. “Walt Butler is the chief of police around here.”
“Walt is in the hospital, Mrs. Bower. I need to see Darryl.”
“He just fell asleep. He works nights …”
“Yes, ma’am, I know. But this is important. Please get him now.”
Reading Matt’s grave expression, Eileen nodded. “All right, I’ll get him. Wait here.”
She started to close the door, but Matt held it open as she receded into the shadows. He nodded to Ricky, who in turn nodded to Dan. Darryl emerged, sleepy eyed and shirtless, his long brown hair hanging past his slender shoulders. He rubbed his arms for warmth while Eileen lurked behind him.
“Yeah?” He stared at Matt with the glassy eyes of a stoner. His droopy mustache offset his delicate lips and smooth skin.
“Darryl, I need you to get dressed and come down to the station with me to answer some questions.”
Darryl’s expression turned quizzical. “About what?”
“Something happened at the high school early this morning. We need to find out what you know about it.”
Darryl’s eyes turned alert. “What happened? I don’t know anything.”
“Get your shirt, son.”
Shaking his head, Darryl obeyed Matt.
When Matt, Dan, and Ricky escorted Darryl into the police station, Bunny Robbins looked up from the counter, her orange hair in curls. She glared at Darryl as if he were the devil.
“Anything new from the school?” Matt said.
“They haven’t found anything yet,” Bunny said. “Hennessey and Novak are still looking, though. They want to bring in dogs.”
“After school.” Matt took off his coat. “Darryl, Officer Heller will escort you to the interview room. I’ll join you there in a minute.”
As Dan guided Darryl behind the counter and through a side door, Darryl said, “I didn’t do anything, man.”
Matt filled a paper cup at the watercooler.
“The mayor’s been calling every twenty minutes,” Bunny said.
“I’m sure he has.” Matt sipped the cold water.
“So have the Kumlers.” Bunny held up a stack of phone messages. “Most of these are from news stations in Buffalo and Erie.”
Johnny Gruesome Page 13