by Dan Wells
I had seen one demon, or whatever it was, but that didn’t mean that everything was connected to them. Humans were more than capable of murder all on their own. It was stupid to try to make this a demon when I knew so little. I needed to be patient—I needed to get her in the mortuary, where I could examine the wounds in detail, and read everything they knew about her in the file from the coroner. If only I could get to Forman, find out what he knew—
“I’m all done,” said Brooke. “They said we’re free to go.”
I looked up and saw her standing above me, her arms folded tightly around her stomach, wrapping herself in her thin jacket. Her long legs were stippled with goose bumps, and she was shivering.
“That’s it?” I asked. “They don’t want to talk to us anymore?”
“It’s almost midnight,” said Brooke. “We’ve been talking to them for hours.”
“But they haven’t told us anything yet.”
“I don’t think they’re going to,” said Brooke. She picked up the fire-tending branch and poked the coals, sending up sparks and exposing the bright red heat beneath.
“Don’t put it out,” I said, stopping her. It was something Mr. Crowley had said once: “I never kill a fire, I just let them go out by themselves.” He’d killed ten people, maybe countless people in his life, but he wouldn’t kill a fire. What was he, really?
“Are you ready to go?” asked Brooke.
I stared at the blackened firepit, a bank of half-dead coals in a six-foot circle of burned-out wreckage. It had been great once, massive and hot and glorious, but it had burned itself out early, and now it would linger for hours—most of a fire’s life, maybe 80 percent, was just this: a long, slow death.
“Can we watch it a little longer?” I asked.
She stood, silent, limned with soft orange light. After a moment she set down the branch and took a seat next to me, cross-legged on the ground.
We watched for another hour, until the cops cleared the scene, put out the fire, and sent us home.
They announced the dead woman’s name on TV the next morning: Janella Willis. She’d gone missing eight months before, somewhere on the east coast, but no one had any theories about how she ended up dead in Freak Lake. My guess on time of death turned out to be pretty accurate—she’d died almost exactly 24 hours before she was found, and had spent most of that time in the lake, under the log. The police and the news came to the same conclusion I had—that the body had been left there specifically for us to find—but I began to suspect something more. It seemed increasingly likely that the body had been left specifically for me.
The first two bodies had been left in spots that were easy to find—the second was even in a spot directly connected to the previous killings. So we knew the killer wanted them to be found, and we knew he was trying to say something. Now we had found a third body, carefully placed in a location that, on that one specific night, had a greater concentration of people than anywhere else in town. It was obvious he wanted it found. But more than that, it was a place full of teenagers—a place and time where I was guaranteed to be. If the bodies were messages from one killer to another, this last one had practically been left on my doorstep.
Messages on a door. . . . I felt my skin grow cold as soon as I thought of it. I’d left Mr. Crowley a long series of messages, trying to scare him and put him off guard. To draw him out and let him know he was being hunted. These bodies were exactly the same thing: the first corpse said “Here I am;” the second corpse, found at the scene of an earlier slaying, said “I am a part of what happened here.” The third, left where I was certain to find it, said very clearly, “I know who you are.”
I was being hunted.
School was out now, so I had nowhere to go, and I spent the entire day in my room poring over what little evidence I had. If I was being hunted, I needed to know who it was, and what they wanted. I didn’t have much to go on, but you could learn a lot from even a single corpse—if you knew what to look for.
The central question of criminal profiling is: what did the killer do that he didn’t have to do? This killer had tied up the victim, before death and after death. Were the two facts related—some kind of psychological need to bind people? That would be a control issue, which pointed, at least simplistically, to a serial killer. Or were the two tyings simply pragmatic—a way to keep her imprisoned before death, and weighted down after it? She’d been missing for eight months before she died, so the imprisonment theory had merit. So why put weights on her when it would have been so much easier to just leave the body in the mud on the shore? If you want your victim to be found, why go through the pretense of hiding it in the first place?
Don’t just ask, I told myself, look for an answer. What would have happened if he’d left it out, just lying there? A couple of kids in student government would have found it when they showed up to prepare for the Bonfire, and they would have called the police, and the Bonfire would have been cancelled or moved to the football field or something. Hiding it poorly meant that it would still be found, but not until later when there were plenty of witnesses.
What else? What did the killer do to the body that he didn’t have to? He burned it. He cut it. Had he done anything else? The body might have broken bones, bruises, and who knows what other kinds of internal damage that I couldn’t discover without a close examination. Speculation wouldn’t help me—I needed real details. What was I forgetting?
Her nails! Her fingernails were chipped: did he do that, or had she chipped them herself by fighting back? Was she trying to dig her way out of something? They still had nail polish on them, after as many as eight months of imprisonment. Did nail polish last that long? If it did, it would mean nothing, but if it didn’t, it would mean that she had been imprisoned relatively recently—or that the killer had given his prisoner luxury items, like nail polish, while she was still locked up. Why? That might say something very important about the killer’s mindset, and his attitude toward his victims. I had to find out.
No one had mentioned the chipped nail polish on the news, so Mom didn’t know about it, and I could ask her without arousing suspicion—well, not the dead body kind of suspicion. She might have plenty of weird questions about why her son was asking about nail polish. It would be best to find out some other way, like looking it up online.
I opened the door to my room and heard the TV; that meant the computer would be free. I slipped into Mom’s room to use it but she was there, a manila folder spread across the desk, working. She looked up when I came in.
“Hey John, do you need something?”
“I just wanted the computer,” I said. “I thought you were watching TV?”
“That’s Margaret,” she said. “I’m just paying bills. I’ll be finished up in a bit.”
“Okay.” I wandered in to the living room, where Margaret was watching some travel show.
“Hey John,” she said, shifting on the couch to make room. I sat down and stared at the TV.
“Hey.”
“I heard you had a big night a few days ago.”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“That’s wonderful,” she said. “Took a lot of guts, but I bet you’re glad you did it.”
I looked at her. “I just looked at it—I wasn’t even the one who pulled it out of the water.”
“I’m not talking about the body,” she said, “I’m talking about the date. You finally asked Brooke out.”
The date. I’d been so excited beforehand, but now it seemed like a lifetime ago. The body felt so much more important. So much bigger.
“It’s too bad it got interrupted,” she said. “You gonna ask her out again?”
“I guess so. I haven’t really thought about it.”
“What have you been thinking about?” Margaret stared at me a moment, then shook her head. “I don’t know what kind of teenage boy would let a dead body distract him from a babe like Brooke. Haven’t we had enough death for a while?”
“Do we have t
o talk about this?” I asked. The last thing I wanted was another lecture.
“You’re sixteen,” she said. “You should be thinking about live girls, not dead ones.”
There was one quick way to turn this conversation around.
“Why didn’t you ever get married?” I asked.
“Whoa,” she said, taken aback. “Where did that come from?”
“You’re talking about how I should be dating,” I said, “but you’re single and happy. Can’t I be too?”
She raised one eyebrow. “You are a devious little bugger, aren’t you?”
“You started it.”
Margaret sighed, looked at the ceiling, then back at me. “What if you don’t like my answer?”
I nodded. “Aha. That means it was my dad.”
Margaret smiled grimly. “You’re entirely too clever for a boy your age. Yes, it was your dad. What you probably don’t realize is that I used to have a crush on him.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Why wouldn’t I? He was handsome, he was polite, and he and your mom and I were the only morticians in town. I think we both fell in love with him the day he showed up.”
Margaret looked out the window as she spoke, and I wondered what she was seeing in her head. “You father could charm the oil off a snake,” she said. “Our business was struggling until he got here, probably because no one took twenty-two-year-old twin sister morticians seriously. I don’t even take us seriously, looking back. We interned with Jack Knutsen, and when Knut died we took over his business, but it wasn’t until your father got here that things really took off.”
“How could the only mortician in town not get any business?” I asked. “Either people died or they didn’t—when they did, they’d have to come to you.”
“Embalming is hardly a requirement,” said Margaret, “and even today we only do about half the funerals here—the rest are in the local churches. No, we needed your father because he convinced Clayton County that they needed us. So he saved us, first of all, but it was more than that. He was . . . exciting. He was debonair. It was too good to believe that such a wonderful man had just dropped right into our laps, and the day I realized he loved your mother instead of me I could have died. And I would have, and gladly, if he’d looked at me the way he looked at her.”
Her mind was somewhere else now—I could see it in the way her eyes focused so intently on something invisible and lost. When her eyes refocused on me and she smiled wanly, it was almost as if I could see her consciousness flow back into her body like a ghost.
“Of course,” she said, “it didn’t take long to realize I’d dodged a bullet. The sister who got left behind quickly became the pillar of support for the sister who thought she’d gotten everything she wanted. That was the only good thing to come of it, I guess—if your dad had been as good a person as we all thought he was, I probably would have stormed off and never forgiven April for stealing him.” She looked at me a moment, mulling something over, then shook her head. “I shouldn’t talk bad about your father in front of you,” she said.
“What?” I asked. “You think I didn’t notice what a jerk he was?”
“I know you did,” she sighed. “I just wish it could have turned out differently.”
“So are you telling me to date Brooke because you believe in the dreaminess of young love, or because you want to live vicariously through the relationships of others?”
Margaret raised her eyebrows, then laughed. “This is why your mother’s going crazy,” she said. “How can she live with someone who deserves a slap and a hug at the same time?”
“I’m a precious snowflake,” I said.
“Computer’s free,” said Mom, coming into the room. “What are you guys talking about?”
“Nothing,” said Margaret, turning back to the TV. I excused myself and went into the other room.
I didn’t find anything specific, but I learned enough to know that an application of nail polish didn’t stand a chance of lasting eight months. Assuming that Janella Willis had been a prisoner ever since she disappeared eight months ago, bound at the wrists and ankles, the killer had for some reason seen fit to give her nail polish. What was going on in this guy’s head?
I needed to see that body. I cleared the Internet cache and locked myself in my room, staring at the wall and studying my memories of the body one more time. A killer was hunting me, sending me signals, but what did he want? If he knew who I was, why not just come and get me? Maybe he actually didn’t know who I was, and this was his way of testing me to see how I reacted, to draw me out. Maybe he was waiting for a response.
John would never respond, but Mr. Monster would, and that’s who this killer was really looking for. Mr. Monster is the one who’d killed the demon, and the one who dreamed about the new victims every night. He was the one who longed to send a message back to this new killer, though thus far I’d been able to stop him.
When this new killer finally did make his move, who would he find? John, or Mr. Monster?
11
I was in a dungeon, nailing someone to a thick wooden board, when the phone rang. I opened my eyes and sat up in my bedroom, listening to Mom’s footsteps as she walked to her cell phone. It was five a.m. I’d been asleep for almost two hours.
“Hello?” she said. Her voice was muffled, but there was only one plausible reason for a phone call at this hour. The coroner was bringing the body, and they needed it worked on quickly. They were probably flying it back to the family this afternoon. I got out of bed and pulled on a shirt.
“Bye.” I heard the soft snap as Mom closed her phone, and the creak of the floor as she began to move. Faint footsteps told me she was walking into the hall, and a moment later she opened my door. “Wake up, John, the . . . oh. Do you ever sleep?”
“Was that Ron?” I asked, pulling on socks.
“Yeah, they’re bringing the . . . how do you do that?”
“I’m a genius,” I said. “You probably ought to call Margaret if they’re in this much of a hurry.”
She stared at me a moment, then flipped open her phone. “Get something to eat,” she said, walking back to her room. “And stop knowing everything.”
Within half an hour Ron pulled up in the coroner’s van, along with a couple of policemen. I stayed upstairs, watching through the window, as they met Mom by the back door and carried the body in.
Margaret pulled up as the van was leaving, and we all met downstairs to pull on our masks and aprons. Mom was leafing through the papers.
“No body parts reported missing,” she said. We’d learned to check that before we got started, after a bad experience last fall. “They performed a full autopsy, bagged the organs, and sewed her back up.” She set down the papers. “I hate these.”
“Dibs on the cavity embalming,” said Margaret, pushing open the door. The cavity embalming was where we used the trocar to suck all the gunk out of the organs and replace them with embalming fluid; with an autopsy case like this, where the organs had been removed, she could do that off to the side of the room while Mom and I did an arterial embalming on the rest of the body. The trouble was, an arterial embalming for a body with no organs was like trying to carry water in a sieve—there were too many holes, and the fluid leaked everywhere. We’d have to embalm it in at least four sections, possibly more.
The body was laid on the metal table, still in the body bag. I washed my hands quickly and pulled on a pair of disposable gloves, then zipped the bag open. The coroner had wrapped her in towels for modesty, and to soak up any blood that leaked out during transit, but there wasn’t much blood left at this point. The body was white and empty, like a doll.
“Grab her head,” Mom said, putting one hand under the small of the woman’s back, and another under her legs. I supported the head and shoulders, and on three we lifted the body up while Margaret pulled the body bag out from underneath. We set the corpse back on the table and Mom started peeling away the towels. “Close your eyes,�
� she said, and I did, waiting patiently while she stowed the transport towels in a biohazard bag and draped new ones over the chest and groin. I kept my eyes closed until she said, “all done.”
The body’s chest was cut in a Y-incision: two cuts from shoulder to breastbone, and one long cut from breastbone to groin. The top half had been stitched back up, but the bottom was still loose and a bright orange bag peeked through. Margaret carefully pulled the abdomen open and extracted the heavy bag, setting it on a metal cart and then wheeling it to the side counter by the trocar. Mom handed me a warm rag and a bottle of Dis-Spray, and we went to work cleaning the outside of the corpse.
Embalming usually relaxed me, but this time little details kept jumping out and spoiling the calm. First it was her wrists—no longer red, for there was very little blood left in the tissue, but obviously worn and tattered. They’d been bound for some time, and very tightly; portions of the skin were worn away completely to expose the muscle underneath. I imagined the body alive—a living, breathing woman, struggling desperately to escape her bonds. She twisted and turned, fighting back the pain as the ropes bit into her skin and tore it away. She couldn’t escape.
I thought about the lake, calm and desolate, and pushed the thoughts of struggle away. I’m just cleaning—nothing more, nothing less. Let me spray some more on this part, and scrub it gently. Everything is quiet. Everything is fine.
The skin was smooth for the most part, but marked here and there with cuts, scabs, and blisters. Now that the body was cleaned, far more of these blemishes were evident than I’d seen at the lake—they speckled the body like bits of confetti, random and horrifying. What could do this? The blisters were obviously from burns—ominous patches where the skin had bubbled and swollen like a hot dog on a grill. I touched one softly, feeling the bumps and valleys. The center of the blistered patch was tough, like a callus, or like it had burned hotter than the rest. Someone had placed something on this person, intentionally burning it, over and over in different places.