“Sheriff punted already?”
I shrugged. “I don’t mind. I’d rather get involved earlier rather than later.” I held out my hand, and the ME shook it. “Long night, Dr. Wilkes?”
He grunted. “You’ll notice I didn’t say good morning when I greeted you. What’s worse than getting a late evening call for a postmortem?” He put his hand on his head and succeeded only in making his hair stand up even more.
“Getting a late evening call for six of them?”
He cocked his finger like a gun and shot me with it. “Right on the money, Trooper. I can think of nights I had more fun, I’ll tell you that free of charge. They start with the night I almost burned my house down cooking dinner...”
I laughed and shook my head. “That sounds like a story you should tell me over a beer sometime.”
“Yep.” He leaned against the front of the ME’s van and crossed his arms. “It’s pretty rare to get a call for more than three.” Dr. Wilkes sighed and shook his head. “I believe this is my new all-time record high body count for a crime scene. Disasters don’t count.”
“Must be serious to get you out of that cozy office of yours.”
Dr. Wilkes cocked his finger and shot me again.
I crooked my thumb toward the tent. “Anything useful in there?”
“Come on,” said Dr. Wilkes. “It’s easier to just show you.” He turned and walked back inside the tent, and I ducked through the opening.
The first thing that hit me was the smell. It was an overwhelming odor—almost sweet and yet shockingly vile, kind of like the sweet, sick smell of compost, but about ten thousand times more intense. Active decay isn’t the easiest thing in the world to stomach, and I was glad I hadn’t eaten that big breakfast Jane had been cooking when I left.
The bodies were laid out on cheap, plastic-topped folding tables from the local box store—hardly the sterile, clinical feel of a morgue. I’d seen my fair share of bodies. I’d seen them in almost every possible form, skeletal, mummified, fresh enough that the blood still dripped. I’d seen people who had been beaten to death with hammers. I’d seen accident victims crushed between cars. Gunshots and stabbings, you name it, but these bodies were something else entirely.
“Six bodies in all,” said Wilkes. “One of them is pretty fresh, as I’m sure you’ve noticed. The other five victims have decayed quite a bit—nothing more than skeletons at this point, but that is informative in and of itself. The five older remains are more than a couple of months old, taking into account the frigid temperatures of the past winter.”
The most recent victim was in worse shape. Her hair was starting to come out, and her skin had cracked open and was starting to slough off in other places. Even so, that wasn’t the terrible part. The wounds showing on her body were horrific. There were deep gouges wherever there were big muscle groups, and there were multiple ragged wounds. Her abdomen looked strange, sunken in. She had ragged tears in her arms and legs.
“Are those bite marks?” I asked.
Wilkes nodded with a sour frown.
“Awful,” I muttered.
“The wounds are all awful. The perp didn’t just bite and release like you sometimes see. No, this guy is more like an attack dog. He bit deep and then savagely tore away chunks of flesh.”
I glanced at the other bodies and saw similar wounds in what flesh remained. I shook my head in disgust. “Bites go to the bone?”
Wilkes nodded. “I think it’s safe to assume the tooth marks on the bones will support the M.O. Trophies were taken,” he grunted.
“Genitals?”
“Surprisingly, no. Offal—the liver, the kidneys, the heart, the lungs, the stomach, the spleen, even the pancreas were taken from the recent victim. You can guess why.”
I wished I couldn’t, but it was all too clear. “Haggis, blood pudding, sausage.”
Dr. Wilkes grimaced.
My stomach rolled. “Doc, is there anything else you need me to see?”
“No,” he said. “Let’s go back outside.”
The air outside had never smelled so fresh, and I took a deep, steadying breath. “Who the fuck could do that to another human being?”
“You’d know better than I,” said Wilkes. “I deal with the dead, you have to find the guys who made them so.”
I took another deep breath. I knew we were supposed to be emotionally detached when dealing with murder victims, but it wasn’t always possible.
Seven
“As much as I loved being a cop, sometimes I wanted to be a shoe salesman. We—”
“These bodies…they were eaten from?” asked Meuhlnir.
“Yes, and they were just the start. There was a cave-in toward the rear of that small antechamber, and when we dug it out, we found more bodies. And more behind them.”
“How many more bodies?” Meuhlnir was trying to sound casual, but there was a thread of tension in his manner.
“Remains littered the floor throughout the rest of the cave, which was huge. The final count was more than fourteen hundred sets of remains, which is really unbelievable for one person to have—”
“Itla sem Yetur,” breathed the old man.
“What?”
The old man shook his head. “Itla sem Yetur means the evil that eats in the Gamla Toonkumowl.”
“The evil that eats? Hatton was just a man. An evil, cannibalistic man, yes, but still...” Suddenly, the memory of what happened in the safe house flooded into my mind, unbidden, unwelcome. Was he just a man?
The old man turned his head toward me. His expression was carefully neutral, but his eyes danced with an intense interest. “Hatton.”
“Yeah, Chris Hatton. He and his girlfriend, Elizabeth Tutor, were practicing cannibals. Everyone thought they were suffering from a folie a deux, but—”
“I don’t know that phrase,” said Meuhlnir.
“It’s a shared delusion between two people. Even I thought that in the beginning. In fact, I believed that right up until I saw Hatton change.”
Meuhlnir leaned toward me, his eyes burning. “What did you say?”
I shrugged. “No one believes me about this, but I saw it. He changed into a wolf thing right in front of me. I shot him, but it just made him mad. He batted me through half the house after he crushed my service pistol. He said he was a wendigo.”
Meuhlnir was looking down and muttering something to himself. “Wendigo?”
“It’s a cannibalism taboo myth of the native people of my land. I think it means ‘the evil that devours.’ Strange coincidence there, but I don’t believe in coincidence.”
Meuhlnir was staring into the fire, but one of his hands was curled into a fist.
“All this mean something to you?”
He tilted his head to the side. “There is a cult of sorts that call themselves the Briethralak Oolfur: the brotherhood of the wolf. They break the Ayn Loug—the One Law.”
“I’ve never heard of any brotherhood. It was just Hatton and Tutor. What is the One Law?”
“It is forbidden to eat the flesh of men.”
I shook my head again. “And you only need one law?”
“We yarls consider it the high law of our kind. All other laws are subservient to it. Breaking the law is a dark path that stains the soul of all those who follow it. It’s a short cut, a cheat, and one that twists character. The practice was taught to my people by an evil people named the Svartalfar.”
“But this Brotherhood is allowed to—”
“Here on this continent, they exist in hiding, never daring to show their true selves because they would be punished. Far to the north, across the Tempest Sea, however, they are allowed to follow their beliefs in the open.” He waved it away. “Never mind for now, we’ll come back to this later. Go on with your story.”
After a moment of silence, he made a ‘go on’ kind of gesture with his hand.
“We had the bodies, and Dr. Wilkes was doing his postmortems. There wasn’t much to go on until Hatton picked a
fight with a couple of kids.
“Hatton and Tutor were in this big black Lincoln Continental they had, just out for an afternoon drive in the spring air.”
Eight
Liz smiled at the breath of the warm spring air on her cheek. She had her hair pinned up and covered in her favorite silk scarf. It was a pink paisley pattern, and Luka said it was “hot” every time she wore it. They had the top of the Lincoln down, and the sun warmed her skin like a lover’s caress.
She glanced at Luka and smiled at the dopey-happy expression on his face. Why shouldn’t he be happy? They were gods in this place, and there was no one who could challenge their reign.
He stopped at a traffic light and turned to her. “It’s a beautiful day, my Queen, but it’s nothing compared to you.”
She laughed. “My Champion,” she said and reached across the expanse of the front seat to caress his cheek.
A small green car pulled up in the lane to her right. Inside sat two black men, laughing and looking at the Lincoln, smiling and pointing. They had their windows down and were playing that disgusting rap music.
Her lip curled as she turned toward them. She lifted a languid hand and waved it at the open window. “Turn that shit off,” she called.
The man driving scoffed at her and then looked away.
“Hey!” yelled Liz. “I said to turn that disgusting shit off!”
The man looked back at her and turned up the volume until the bass was rattling the little car to pieces. He sneered at her.
When the light changed, Liz was pushed back in her seat as Luka floored the accelerator, and the Lincoln’s big-block V8 roared to life. The back tires squealed, and the car leapt forward. As they swept away from the intersection, she lifted her hand and shot the bird at the driver of the green car.
Luka cranked the wheel to the left and slammed on the brakes, letting the big car slide to a stop blocking both lanes.
Liz glanced at him, and he gave her a little wink. “Dinner?” she asked with a small laugh.
“Meals on wheels,” Luka said and sniggered.
The old green car screeched to a stop, and the driver sprang out of the car. “What the fuck you think your doin’, man?” he yelled.
Still grinning, Luka looked over at him and flapped his hand, as if waving away an insect. “Sorry, buck, didn’t notice you over there.”
“Just let it go, Aten,” said the other man in the green car.
“You could’ve killed someone with that dumbass stunt. Move that piece of shit out of the way.” He hit the rear door of the Lincoln with the heel of his hand.
Anger snapped through Liz’s veins. She turned in her seat until she could look at the black man. “Listen, boy, I know you think you are hard—”
“Don’t you call me boy you old two-dollar whore!”
In the corner of her eye, Luka’s body tensed like he’d been hit with a cattle prod.
“—but you are like tissue paper compared to my man.” She paused and then laughed. “Did you call me a two-dollar whore? Aw, did I offend you, Little Black Sambo?”
Luka’s hand moved toward his door handle. His face was rigid, eyes squinting, mouth a fierce slash across the bottom of his face.
“Get back in ya damn cah, ya fool,” yelled an old man in the little car next to Aten’s.
The black man was tall but nowhere near as tall as Luka. Plenty of flesh on his bones, too, she thought with a carnivorous smile.
He was just standing there, fists clenched and staring down at her. His lips were quivering a little bit.
Seeing the man’s rage sent a little thrill of excitement shivering through her. “What? Nothing else to say? Well, fuck you, boy.” She sneered and turned in her seat to look out the front window as if the man was of no consequence.
“No, you goddamn motherfuckin’ back-alley crack whore, fuck you!” He leaned close to her, almost screaming in her ear. Little flecks of spittle flew with each syllable.
Liz ignored him. Luka would sort him out in due course.
When the man hawked and spat a big glob of snot into her hair, her rage-monster snapped its teeth. She jerked the scarf off and scrubbed at the side of her head. “Oh, you goddamn nigger!” she screamed. Rage bubbled through her bloodstream, and it felt glorious. Exultant.
Liz spun around on her knees in the seat. Her movements were brisk, concise—without wasted energy. She pointed up at the man’s face. Her face crinkled in an expression that was half-snarl, half-smile. “Pred—”
“No, my Queen!” shouted Luka. “Not here.”
“Is that supposed to scare me?” demanded the man.
Liz glanced sideways at Luka and squeezed her eyes into slits, irritated at the interruption. “I want to do this, Luka.”
“My Queen, it would be unwise.”
“You better listen to your man, you goddamn bitch,” snapped Aten. “I’ll slap the ugly right off you.”
“That’s it,” said Luka in an almost conversational tone. His hand had finally reached the door handle, and he pulled the door open. His other hand hit his seat belt release.
The black man jumped into the back seat of the Lincoln and bounced his way across the car.
“Aten! No!” yelled the other man from the green car. A look of dismay danced across his face.
Liz sneered at the other man and shot him the bird.
Putting one foot on the top of the door, Aten jumped out of the car. He landed on the macadam like a cat and swung his fist in a great whistling arc.
Aten’s fist collided with Luka’s cheek bone with a dry crack. Luka unfolded from behind the driver’s seat like a huge insect, showing no reaction to being sucker punched. He towered above the black man but looked sick, wasted in comparison to the other man’s bulk.
Without changing expression, Luka kicked the man in the knee, the heel of his black cowboy boot making a sound like an axe striking wet wood. He shrugged his shoulder into the haymaker the black man was in the middle of throwing and managed to look bored while he did it.
As the punch bounced off Luka’s bony shoulder, Liz couldn’t help but titter. Watching Luka work was a special treat.
“That’ll be enough of that, buck,” said Luka. Lightning quick, his hand shot out and grabbed Aten’s ear, twisting it savagely until the man, already off balance from the kick to his knee, teetered into the side of the Lincoln.
“You better leave my brother alone, string-bean!” yelled the other man. He was sprinting around the front of the Lincoln, hands curled into fists.
Luka grinned like a maniac into Aten’s face, showing his teeth. He put his hand on the black man’s cheek and pushed him roughly to the ground. He turned toward the front of the car, eyes twinkling, grin stretching until it looked more like a predator showing threat than a man’s smile.
The other man from the car rounded the front of the Lincoln and came at Luka with one hand cocked over his shoulder.
Luka laughed, stepped to the side, and swatted the man into the side of the Lincoln. He did a strange little jig, feet blurring too fast to see. He grabbed the man by the back of his neck and slammed his face into the wide black expanse of the Lincoln’s fender. He cackled and winked at Liz.
“Instruct them, my Champion.” The violent glee with which Luka was dealing with the two men appeased her. Despite her frustration at not being able to act in the way she most wanted to, she began to enjoy the show.
“Don’t you bleed on my car, you little baboon,” said Luka in a chatty, mocking voice. His foot blurred again, and there was another of those axe-on-wood sounds, and the other man was flat on his back, staring up at the sky. Luka lifted his foot and brought it down hard on the black man’s chest, grinning at the dry-twig-snapping sounds of ribs breaking.
Aten struggled to his feet, and Luka turned to face him, a small grin playing around the corners of his mouth. “Ready for more?” he asked in a sing-song voice.
Aten raised his hands. “Come on and dance, motherfucker!”
/> Luka’s laugh was bright, almost manic, but his movements were full of a lazy grace, looking for all the world like he was dancing as he stepped closer to Aten. “Oh, yes, buck. Let’s dance.” One hand arced out, and as Aten lifted his hand to block the blow, Luka cackled and slammed his other fist into the other side of his head.
It was like a butcher hitting a steer with a killing hammer. Liz cheered and laughed as Aten fell to his knees. “Told you that you weren’t hard, boy.”
Luka put his hands on his knees and leaned over the man. “Tell me, little cotton-picker. Do you drink?”
From his knees, Aten tried a right cross, but Luka batted it away, a little grin playing in the corner of his lips.
“Such spirit,” cawed Luka.
“So slow,” sang Liz. “So weak.”
“What?” asked Aten. “What?”
“I asked you a question, nigger.” The tension left Luka’s muscles, and he straightened. His manner was casual and open, almost friendly. “Do you drink?”
“What did you say?” wheezed Aten.
Luka winked at Liz. “Do. You. Drink. It’s an easy question.”
Aten shook his head, trying to clear it. “Why do you—”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake, boy. Are you retarded or something?” shrieked Liz. As the man turned to look at her, she laughed and gave him a jaunty little wave.
“I want to know if you drink alcohol. You know, because it ruins the taste.”
“Taste?” The man looked up at Luka in confusion.
“Yes, buck. Alcohol ruins the taste of your liver. Yes or no?”
The black man’s face went gray as he finally understood what Luka was asking. “Look, Mister, this—”
“Hear that, my Queen?” asked Luka in a laughing voice. “We’ve progressed from ‘motherfucker’ right on up to ‘mister’ already.”
Liz chuckled. “Not so hard, are you, boy? I tried to tell you.”
The black man looked back and forth between them, his mouth hanging open, blood trickling slowly down his chin. His eyes were open wide, his brow scrunched up in fear.
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