"Negligence, stupidity and a drug habit in a medical man, Dr. Cruise, is everyone's business, and whether I'm a possible donor to your hospital or not, ought not to enter into the picture."
"Drug habit?" he shouted.
"And negligence and stupidity."
"You have a fucking nerve, Laughing More, telling this man stories."
Stroud stepped in front of him as he approached her. She'd instinctively placed her left hand on her weapon, prepared to draw it.
"You come in from New York to a nothing place, after graduating Princeton Med?" said Stroud, who'd seen his degree on the wall in his office. "Makes a former cop suspicious, Doctor. Also makes me suspicious about the dope connection on the reservation."
"Now, look here!"
"No, you look here," said Chief More, stepping around Stroud. "One of these days, Doctor, you're going to find yourself needing medical assistance."
"I want you two out of here now! And as for you, More, the city councilmen and the tribal elders'll hear about this."
She turned and glowered at him with those black eyes. "In the meantime, Dr. Cruise, I want Perotto's and Holms' bodies held here. Do you understand, Doctor?"
"What the hell for? The families are already in enough agony over this. The sooner we can release what's left for burial, the better."
"You've got my request, Doctor, and in matters of murder, you take orders from me." She'd taken the gloves off.
Stroud left with Chief More, and they pounded down the hallway. "That man makes my skin crawl. If I ever murder someone..."
"Easy," said Stroud. "Look, can I go out to the crime scene with you?"
She stopped and looked at him queerly. "Are you one of these guys who get his rocks off looking at gore or something? Hey, I like what you said in there, and how you read Cruise--tells me a lot about you, Stroud--but every time I think I've gotten you figured out, you say something like this. I thought you wanted to visit the pen, talk to the guards and the duty people."
"The pen isn't going anywhere. I just think that maybe, just maybe, I could be of help out there."
She frowned, unsure. "You miss being a cop or something?"
"Something like that, yeah."
She considered his request a moment longer. "You stay back, out of the way ... don't touch anything ... I guess, if you're a glutton for this stuff..."
"Thanks, you won't regret it."
"Promise?"
"Promise, yes."
John ...
John was his name ... Johnny to his friends. Johnny Indian to the whites around the reserve who sent him business. John Kerac, he kept telling himself over and over as he sped down Interstate 90, trying to keep calm, trying to keep hold of his mind and personality, to identify himself to himself. At the same time, his hands--or someone else's hands--shook on the wheel, and he stared at the strands of thick, coiled, brown to black furlike hair covering much of his knuckles and the back portion--hair that'd not been there before. Or had it? He could not even recall having grown up, much less how much hair covered his legs, his body, his arms and hands. Was he a hairy man?
His head hair was long and sleek and black, an Indian's mane. It went with his past, his notions of self, his image of Johnny Indian. The tufts of hair in the crooks of his arms and behind the knees, the long strands on his forearms and thighs ... this wasn't Indian. And his face in the rearview mirror of the battered old farm pickup wasn't right. The eyes were swimming in a pool of liquid like those of an animal staring at nothing; the nose was flared and flattened like that of a Flathead Indian maybe. He was Ojibway. He fought to hold on to that fact by concentrating on the sound of the word, repeating it to the strange, whiskered face in the mirror. John Kerac had never had a facial hair in his life before; couldn't grow a goddamned beard if he'd wanted to, but now he was itching with the checkered, uneven patches that were only partially formed there. His face looked like a scruffy, old white man who'd been injured by one of their barbers' clippers. The result was a patchy growth of matted hair, filled with debris and blood.
Kerac's tongue, of its own accord, snaked out past his teeth, and then it coiled up and back, licking at the filth in the hair beneath the nose and about the chin. As it did so, he felt the sharpness of his teeth cause a laceration in the tongue. Nothing about his mouth or jaw seemed right. His jaw protruded too far out. All over his body he felt an additional weight in the muscles of his legs and arms, back and shoulders. He'd had to take some of the old farmer's clothes, because the prison garb was a dead giveaway, but it also didn't fit.
Who was he?
What had they done to him in that asylum? Had they stuck him with needles? Experimented on him with weird drugs? Who was responsible for this man that stared back at him in the mirror? Where had this person come from? Where had the hair come from? The tongue that seemed to breathe for him like a dog's tongue? Where was Johnny Indian, the guide who worked out of Grand Rapids? Maybe he wasn't John Kerac. Maybe John Kerac was some madman he'd met in the prison where they had kept him, and he, too, was just mad enough to have come full circle and had taken on the belief that he was this other man. For the sake of God--the Indian god or the white god, or both--he prayed he would find out soon, that his senses would return to him.
His trembling hands increased their agitation on the wheel when he thought about what had happened at the farmhouse. He could only recall bits and pieces, broken images that were so horrifying that they were instantly short-circuited as his conscious mind tried to focus on each. An elderly woman ... leathery-faced ... screaming ... instantly silenced, blood everywhere. Old man, near unable to get up, so sick in bed. Something leapt onto him and ripped out his throat with its teeth, its long snout pushing into the wound, tearing ... lapping at the blood there. Feeding ... a creature feeding on the flesh of the old people. He could stand no more of it, shutting it out.
He wondered how he had come by the battered old pickup. He must've stolen it, but he could not remember locating the key. He had a very bad memory. Johnny Kerac had had a good memory, he thought ... but he really couldn't remember for sure. In fact, he was having a hard time remembering Kerac.
Maybe he was a madman.
The images of fields, fences and animals grazing on hillsides rushed by on either side of the interstate as he somehow remembered how to drive. Perhaps there were some things that he must forget and others he must recall in order to survive, or just to steady his quaking hands and shaken mind; some things a man must deny even to himself, he told himself. He saw the first sign for Chicago, 113 miles to his destination, although he wasn't sure why.
The farmhouse they drove toward gave off an aura of terror long before Abraham Stroud and Chief More got to the front door. It was absolutely isolated, a perfect Edgar Allan Poe setting for death's visit, Stroud thought. The wind in the trees even now, by day, whistled a warning here as it dipped and scurried through the tall, wild grass all around. The house was delapidated, weathered gray and lifeless, looking like a large, wounded elephant; its porch was falling in, held upright at the steps by a makeshift support of masonry bricks turned green with mold. Even Chief More knew that the scene inside was going to be hell. She felt it from the start, as did Stroud, from the moment they entered the dirt driveway that meandered up to the house where two uniformed police officers awaited them, the two men smoking, one sitting in a straight-backed rocking chair on the porch.
"I know this house," More had said the moment they took the turn off Highway 11 and onto county road 1748. "I know the old people."
"Indian?"
"Yes. The old man's name is Kinewskoo-wee in his native tongue. His white name is Maclin. Maclin was once an elder, but he got tired of the politics at the longhouse--retired. You can see from his house that he was an honest man. Some say he was aware that others in the tribe were stealing from the people, and that he was threatened, along with his wife, if he did not step down and forget about what he saw at the longhouse. I've investigated some of the rumo
rs and talk, but I've gotten no proof. They have their own ways, you know. They've got their own bookkeeping, and it never sees an audit. Bingo money, business donations to the tribe ... all of it unaccounted for. This old man tried to take them on once alone. That was before I became sheriff."
The admiration she had for Maclin was evident in her tone. "I talked with him about the situation a couple of times."
"You sure you're up to this?" Stroud asked.
"It's my job."
She got out of the car and introduced her two deputies to Stroud. Both men were Caucasian and there seemed some hard edge on the three-way relationship.
"Tom Shanks," said one of the men, offering his hand to Dr. Stroud.
"Nice to meet you, Tom."
"Miller," said the other man, who didn't offer his hand. "Gavin Miller." He went instantly to business. "Got a call from the old sister, ahhhh--"
"Miss Maclin, Rae Maclin," said Chief More.
"Yeah. Said her kin weren't answering the phone, got worried and called us, asked us to check it out--like we haven't got anything better to do with a cannibal on the loose."
"We were in the area, anyway," said Shanks, cutting in, "on the lookout for that crazy Johnny Kerac. Farmhouse ... Well, it was smack in the middle of the manhunt, so we came over ... and found ... Chief, it's an awful sight inside."
"Real messy," agreed Miller, "and we did just like you said, Chief."
"We didn't touch a thing."
Miller added, "We didn't want to."
"Dr. Stroud going to help us?" asked Shanks. "Tell you, we need all the help we can get with this nut case."
More didn't hesitate at the door, pushing it open on its rusty hinges, the noise like a radio broadcast of a creep show. Inside the dark interior, she found a light switch and turned it on, causing her to instantly gasp at the sight of Mrs. Maclin, whose body had great chunks stripped from it where John Kerac had fed his inhuman lust. She almost vomited, drawing back. Stroud took hold of her, but she pulled away, seeing Miller looking in on the scene.
"Told you it was bad, Chief."
She couldn't find words, fighting back bile.
"The old guy is in the bedroom."
It was a small house, not much more than a shack. Stroud, too, fought for control, but he could see what lay on the bed in the other room, and the stench of blood and animal leavings threatened to overwhelm him as well. The old man's body, half on, half off the bed, was also brutalized, but the neck wound struck Stroud with a vengeance, the sight not only awful in itself, the head nearly severed by the wound, as was one of the man's mangled arms, but sending a horrid memory along the pathways of Stroud's mind, a memory he had successfully hidden from himself since Vietnam.
Miller said, "Sonofabitch went for the old man's throat like some kinda goddamned animal."
It mirrored Stroud's own thoughts. Wild animals go for the throat.
The woman had died of injuries to her face, torso and limbs.
"You want to get some air?" Stroud asked Chief More.
"Place smells so bad," she agreed, but she didn't take a step toward the outside.
Miller said, "That's shit."
"What?"
"Kerac ... he shit all over the place while he was here."
"Why don't we get a man in here who can take this place apart and learn something from it?" said Stroud. "I know a forensics man who--"
"We can call in the guy from Grand Rapids," said Shanks, who hung near the door, not wanting to enter again.
"Look, Dr. Louis Cage is a topflight professional in this area, and frankly, you people can't screw around with this anymore. You've got to get help, and--"
"We only have what we have," she said.
"I'll pay for Cage's trouble. I'll fly him up here. He's the best."
"Why'd he give a damn? To come to a place like this?"
"For me ... he'll do it for me."
Miller and Shanks knew to keep out of this. "I'll call for an ambulance," Miller said as he attempted to disappear.
"No," said Abe Stroud. "Hold on that. Cage will want to see everything as it is."
"We can't hold these bodies until your friend shows up," she disagreed loudly. "These people have close ties here, relatives who will want to see them properly ... properly taken care of."
"Chief More," he pleaded, "I can get Cage up here in a few hours. I can make arrangements."
She looked from him to Miller and back again, taking a handkerchief from her pocket to cover her nose. "You really think this man Cage is that good? That he can help here?"
"You'd be getting the best pathologist in the business--no hospital hacks. Do you really want Cruise to come in here on his own sweet time and put together a useless, half-assed report? All I ask is that you keep the crime scene intact, and Cage'll be here by nightfall."
She dropped her gaze, her mind still on the people lying about in various stages of disgraceful debauchery. There was the sister and other "brethren" to consider. It was obvious she cared about this family. She considered his offer, stepping out to the porch, taking in that much-needed clean air. Stroud looked once more at the bloodstained sheets and discolored gray walls where the red stuff had fired from severed veins. He, too, needed air, and he followed her out. Shanks was once more in the rocker; Miller was searching about the grounds, and he called out that he had found some tracks, but they weren't human in appearance.
Tom Shanks got up quickly and joined Miller, staring down at the footprints, proclaiming them those of a bear.
"Where's Kerac's prints?" asked Miller. "I've scoured this whole damned place, and not a single sign of his entering or going, but these come right out of the wood and up to the back porch, where they end."
Stroud studied the prints. "Don't disturb them."
"What?"
"Cage'll take casts of them, and we'll see what we can make of the prints."
"Cruise could do that."
"Cruise could also screw it up," said Chief More, staring at the prints. "Either way ... those are not Kerac's footprints. There's no shoe impression, for one thing, and look at the size of it."
"What is it, then? A bear or a cougar, maybe?" asked Miller snidely. No one said anything as they stared at the impression. "Now we're going to look to Indian superstitions for answers?" he added, tossing stones down at More's feet and walking off to his squad car where he sat in sullen silence.
She turned to Stroud and said, "All right, bring this Dr. Cage here, and the town, or the tribe ... someone will pay the bill."
"I'll foot the bill," he replied.
"Why? Why should you do all this?"
"I'm connected to this ... this slaughter somehow, as I told you, and I'll be damned if I'll take a backseat to it, at least not until I'm satisfied that I've done all in my power to end it."
Tom Shanks' eyes went wide at the first time he had ever heard Chief More compliment a white man, "You might have made a good Indian, Stroud."
"My grandmother was a quarter-blood Cherokee."
"Uh-huh..."
"But why do you say so?" he asked.
"You're stubborn."
"Stubborn, really?"
"Bone-headed, like an Indian."
If you only knew the half, he thought, but he cared not to tell her about the metal in his head.
Werewolf's Grief (Bloodscreams #2) Page 4