by Dan Wells
The other thing they knew about him was that he was very clean: the sites where the actual deaths took place were always full of plastic, including sheets and garbage bags, and even disposable rain ponchos. This was not a person who wanted to get any blood on himself, and the lack of usable exterior blood evidence showed that he was very good at keeping himself clean. That penchant for neatness, plus the use of mops and brooms as poles in his victims’ backs, had earned him the media nickname Handyman. Well, that and the fact that he cut his victims’ hands off.
I took a bite of cereal. The police and the FBI had been hunting the Handyman for years, and they’d been doing a pretty good job, I suppose, but I knew they’d never catch him because they were working from flawed assumptions: namely, that he was human. No matter what Mom said, he was most definitely a demon, and almost certainly female—I’d talked to her on the phone, for crying out loud, I think I could tell the difference. And that helped explain everything in vastly different ways.
To begin with, the strength: the demons had all demonstrated an array of bizarre supernatural powers, and it made perfect sense that the Handyman had above average strength, regardless of gender. Female serial killers were remarkably rare, but they did exist; it made sense that there could be female demons as well. Why not? Assuming they had gender at all, they probably had representatives from both.
As for the cleanliness, a strong attention to detail suggested … what? The demon was neurotic? The demon was cautious? The demon was scared of blood? If I could get on the computer, I could look up some of the criminal profiling websites I liked to read, but Mom kept the computer in her room and I didn’t dare do this kind of research with her looking over my shoulder. There was so much else this demon was telling us, if only I knew what it meant: things like why she displayed her victims outside, and why she shoved poles into their backs. These were messages directly from her to us—in fact, they might be messages directly to me, since I was the one she was here to find. But what did they say? I’d studied serial killers for years, as a hobby bordering on obsession, but most of my knowledge was trivia about who a killer was, how they did it, and so on. I knew why a killer did what he did, but only after the fact; I didn’t know the steps the police had taken to decipher all of that information in the first place. I needed to do more study, which meant I needed the Internet or the library. I couldn’t get either one until morning.
I finished my cereal and glanced at the clock: ten thirty. Morning was still hours away.
There was one other area where I had a definite leg up on the police, and I didn’t need their studies to help me: the missing body parts. Most serial killers saved souvenirs from their kills because they liked to relive them, or in some cases because they simply wanted to eat them, but demons were different. Mr. Crowley, the Clayton Killer, had stolen his victims’ body parts because he used them to regenerate his own failing limbs and organs. The Handyman—Handywoman?—might be doing the same thing, or something similarly supernatural. What could you do with hands? What about tongues? What did they represent? I stared at my own hands, looking for clues. Maybe she could absorb their fingerprints, or their identity, or something like that. It was hard enough to profile a regular killer that followed human rules—for a demon that broke those rules at will, I needed more information before I could say anything solid. I needed to see the demon in action.
Both the demons I had met so far were completely different—they did different things, in different ways, for different reasons—but they had one similarity. Forman had said that the demons, or whatever they were, were defined by what they lacked: a face, a life, an emotion, an identity. Just like serial killers, the way they acted and reacted could be traced back to the holes in their lives that made them who they were. So, what did Nobody lack?
The phone rang, loud and strident in the silence. I grabbed it off the counter and glanced at the caller ID: Jensen. I carried it down the hall and handed it to Mom, who was washing off her makeup in the bathroom. It rang again.
“Officer Jensen,” I said, setting it on the sink. “Probably something about the case.” I walked back to the living room while Mom answered.
“Hello? Oh!” She sounded surprised. “Why, hello Marci, I thought it was your father.”
Marci Jensen was calling? Marci was one of the hottest girls in school. Even my friend Max, who’d go out with a chair leg if it asked him, harbored an impossible love for her. I’d probably talked to her three times in my entire life. Why was she calling my house at 10:30 at night?
“Don’t worry,” said Mom, “we’re both still awake. He’s right here, I’ll get him.” She came out of the bathroom with one of those infuriating motherly smiles and handed me the phone. “It’s for you.”
I held it to my ear. “Hello?”
“Hey John, it’s Marci Jensen.” She sounded … argh, I had no idea how she sounded. I could read a face like an expert, but voices always threw me off.
“Yeah, I saw,” I said. Pause. What should I say?
“I’m sorry to call you so late,” she said, “I’ve kinda been … well, I’ve been meaning to call all day and I just haven’t.”
“Oh.” Why was she meaning to call?
“So anyway, I don’t know if I’m supposed to say this or not, but my dad told me about you. About what you did, I mean. Saving all those people.”
Thanks to the “protective silence,” that kept my name out of the news, her dad was one of the only people that knew the real story. Well, the parts that didn’t have demons in them. He’d been the first officer on the scene when we escaped from Forman’s torture house in the forest.
“It’s not really anything,” I said. “I mean, it is, because they’re all saved, but I didn’t really do anything. I mean I didn’t do it alone. Brooke was there too, she helped get some of the women outside.”
“Yeaaaaaah,” said Marci, holding the vowel and dragging out the word for a few extra seconds. She paused, just slightly, and then said, “I heard that you guys aren’t really going out anymore?”
“No,” I said, a little surprised. Is this what I think it is? “We haven’t really done anything for a couple of months, actually.”
“Yeah, I wish I’d known that sooner,” she said. “So anyway, I thought if you’re not dating anyone else maybe we could go out sometime.”
“I…” Was that an observation or an invitation? Had she just asked me out, or was I supposed to ask her? I had no idea what to do. After a pause I said, “Sure. That sounds fun.”
“Sweet,” she said. “I’m all tied up for the rest of this week, but how about one week from today? Monday afternoon?”
I had a brief mental image of Marci tied up, but I shoved it away. Don’t think like that. “Yeah, I … should be…”
“Sweet,” she said again. “We can go to the lake. You have a bike?”
“Yeah.”
“Sounds good. You want to meet at my place? It’s pretty close to the turnoff, and we can head out from there.”
“Sure,” I said.
“Three o’clock?”
“Sure.”
“Well, awesome,” she said. “I’m glad I finally called.”
“I … so am I.”
“All right, I’ll see you then. Bye.”
“Bye.”
She hung up, and I clicked off the phone. Mom was still standing there, watching. She always insisted that I try to be more social, and at the same time she always seemed to be terrified of what I would do.
“Did you just get asked out?”
“Apparently.”
She stared at me a moment longer, then nodded and turned back to the bathroom. “Be careful,” she called back. “And make sure to follow all your rules.”
I frowned. Why did Marci ask me out? This was not the best time; I had a demon to catch, and this was a complication I didn’t need. On the other hand, it was kind of funny: Now there were two people in town who wanted to kill me—the Handyman, and Max as soon a
s he found out I had a date with Marci. I laughed, but the sound was thin and hollow.
The game is afoot.
3
When a person is murdered, the details of the case are kept secret to aid in the investigation, and thus it was with Pastor Olsen: we knew where he died and what the body looked like, but the police kept the rest of the details to themselves. Nobody was allowed to see the crime scene except the investigators, and no one was allowed to see the body except the forensic pathologist … and the morticians. Thus it was that five days after the killing, when I’d analyzed the news coverage a hundred times, run out of leads, and was desperate for more information, the FBI delivered the corpse right to my door.
I have the best job in the world.
My mom co-owns the mortuary with her twin sister, Margaret, and I’d been helping with funerals and general maintenance since I was seven years old. It was my dad who first showed me the embalming tools, back before he left, and it had been my passion ever since. My sister helped in the office, pushing papers and answering phones; she got a little creeped out by the dead bodies, or so she claims, but I could never understand how that was even possible. Dead bodies are calm and silent—perfectly still, perfectly harmless. A corpse will never move, it will never laugh, and it will never judge. A corpse will never shout at you, hit you, or leave you. Far away from the zombies and junk that you see on TV, a corpse is actually the perfect friend. The perfect pet. I feel more comfortable with them than I do with real people.
Ron, the county coroner, brought the pastor’s body in his big government van, accompanied by a couple of police escorts. I stayed upstairs until they were gone, watching through the window as they opened the van doors, pulled out the covered stretcher, released the wheels, and rolled it in through our back door. The police escorts paced aimlessly in the parking lot; they stared at the sky, or the forest behind our house, or the cracks in the asphalt below them. It was mid August and the cracks were full of ants scuttling back and forth on urgent, mysterious errands. One of the policemen stooped down to watch them, then stood again and dragged his foot across the crawling mass. The swarm scattered, reformed, and went on with their lives. The cop wandered away, his attention caught by something else.
When Ron left, I went downstairs and joined Mom and Margaret in the embalming room. I washed my hands and pulled on a medical apron and gloves.
“Hey, John,” said Margaret. With her face mask on she was almost indistinguishable from Mom.
The room was old, with faded blue-green tiles on the walls, but it was clean and bright, and the ventilator in the ceiling was almost new. The equipment was aging but serviceable, and the wheels on our carts and tables were well-oiled and silent.
We were the only mortuary in town, and our business was the deaths of our friends and neighbors. It’s a different way to make a living, I’ll admit, but not a morbid one. A funeral is a body’s last hurrah before it is buried forever; an opportunity for the family to gather and remember all the best parts of their lives together. I was taught to respect the dead, to treat them like honored guests, and to think about death as a time to rejoice in life. I don’t know how much of that I believed, but I do know that I loved embalming more than almost anything else in the world. It was time I could share with someone, even someone I didn’t know, in a deeper and more personal way than I ever got to share it with the living. Small wonder, then, that I’d had so many dreams about embalming Brooke.
“Pastor Elijah Olsen,” said Margaret, reading from the sheaf of papers Ron had left us. The body bag sat peacefully on the table, still unopened. “Deceased six days, give or take. Full autopsy, organs bagged, hands and tongue missing. Bullet wound in the back, exit wound in the chest, stab wounds in the back. Everything else is normal, assuming Ron did his job right.” She set down the papers with a small, humorless laugh.
Nobody moved.
“I’m really getting sick of this,” said Mom, staring at the body bag. “Can someone please die of natural causes once in a while?”
“Think of it this way,” said Margaret, putting her hands on her hips. “The Clayton Killer bought us a new ventilator, and Clark Forman bought us a new computer for the office. If the Handyman hangs around long enough, we can buy a new sound system for the chapel.”
Mom laughed dryly and shook her head. “Then please let us never afford a new sound system.”
As hesitant as they were to get started, I was even more eager. “Let’s get this show rolling.”
“Let’s hope the fan doesn’t give out on us,” said Margaret. It was an old saying, from back in the days when our fan was worse and our chemicals more strident, but it had become a tradition. We couldn’t start until she said it. We nodded and got to work.
I opened the bag and peeled it back, exposing the dead man inside. In a normal case we’d get the body about a day after it died, still in its clothes and stiff with rigor mortis. But rigor mortis only lasted a day or two, and post-autopsy murder victims arrived flexible, washed, and in several pieces. This body’s chest was marked with a giant “Y” where the coroner had cut it open, taken everything out, and then loosely stitched it back together. The organs that had been removed and examined were sealed in a bag and placed back inside. The body’s arms ended in stubs where the killer had severed its hands, and the coroner had bandaged them lightly to staunch the bleeding—corpses didn’t bleed much, because the heart wasn’t putting any pressure on the circulation, but blood could still seep out and it was cleaner to transport the body this way.
Mom and I lifted the body while Margaret pulled the body bag out from underneath it. We’d done this so many times that we worked without talking, each of us knowing exactly what had to be done and what our part would be: Mom covered his groin with a sterile cloth, Margaret started loosening the stitches in his belly to pull out the organ bag, and I pulled away the bandages on his wrists.
The severed wrists were perfect cross-sections of meat and bone and tendon, and I ran my gloved fingertip across one, trying to imagine what could have done it. My first guess was a bite—Mr. Crowley had been able to distend his jaw and sprout dozens of long, needle-sharp teeth. It was entirely possible that our new demon, Nobody, could do the same. But the wrist bore no teeth marks at all—no vertical lines where teeth had scraped down across the flesh, and no horizontal line where two rows of teeth had met in the middle. The stump was simply too clean. But what else could it be?
Mr. Crowley had also been able to turn his hands into vicious claws, able to cut through almost anything, and I could see how a claw like that could have made this cut. A single slashing motion, severing flesh and bone and tendon in one swipe; it made sense. It was also further proof that the killer was strong, to swing a claw so powerfully and cut so cleanly. I filed it away in my mental folder and began helping Mom wash the corpse.
Margaret carried the bag of organs to a side table, preparing to clean each one individually and fill them with formaldehyde. That job would take Margaret a few hours on her own. Mom and I got to clean the body, set the features for the viewing, and pump preservatives through the remains of its circulatory system. A body in this condition was usually a huge hassle for a circulatory embalming because the blood vessels were so perforated in so many places that the pump couldn’t do its job. Instead of flowing through the entire corpse, the embalming fluid would seep into the chest cavity and out through the wounds. Fortunately (or not, if you asked my mom), we’d had so many mutilated corpses over the past year that we’d developed a fairly simply workaround: petroleum jelly. It took a whole jar, but if you slathered it all over wounds and then wrapped them in surgical tape, you could stop up most of the holes. When we finished washing the limbs, head, and chest, Mom pulled out a fresh jar of Vaseline and we set to work sealing the wounds.
There were a lot of wounds to seal.
First were the wrists, of course, which got a pretty good layer of the stuff. After that I went to work on the presumed death wound: a large bu
llet hole above the heart, presumably matched by a smaller one in the back. I wasn’t stingy with the jelly and packed it into the front bullet hole pretty tightly. When I finished with that, I opened the mouth and coated the tongue—or the tiny stub of what used to be a tongue—with another liberal glob. If the cut on the wrists was clean, the cut on the tongue was pristine—it had been severed about as surgically as possible, with astonishing care and attention to detail. Another, smaller claw, perhaps? Or a separate tool, like a scalpel? Whatever it was must have been as sharp as a razor, with a long blade and a fine point for precision work.
It was the very preciseness of it that got me thinking. We already knew that the demon was extremely cautious, bringing tarps and ponchos and goodness knows what else to keep herself clean of blood. That suggested a very meticulous killer, and the surgical removal of the tongue backed that up. I could see a bit of my own caution reflected in her, and that would make her very hard to trace. But there was more going on here, I guessed—something that both did and didn’t fit with the rest of the attack. I puzzled over it and continued to work.
While I was covering the exterior wounds, Mom slathered Vaseline all over the inside of the chest cavity, coating it top to bottom in a thick layer. She had to reach her whole arm inside to make sure she got it everywhere; the coroner sawed open the breastbone during an autopsy, so he could fold out the ribs and work inside, but Mom hated doing that and thus left them where they were and tried to work around them.