They were almost to the mortuary now. Additional police units had arrived from other towns and the road was completely blocked.
JT cleared his throat. “Chief, in light of the threats and all,” he began, keeping his tone in neutral, “don’t you think it might have been prudent to give responding officers some kind of clue? We could have been walking into a real mess if there had been cultists or…”
Goss said nothing, but his eyes shifted away.
“Ah,” said JT. His disapproval hung in the air. Like Dez’s it was unspoken. The chief’s face went red and he quickened his pace.
“Well,” said Goss, changing the subject, “at least there’s no press yet.”
“There’s blood in the water,” Dez said, “the sharks will be here.”
They reentered the mortuary, moving carefully to avoid further contamination of the evidence. Scott went straight to the overturned gurney and the others gathered around it. Now that they were focusing on it — rather than the blood and death — they didn’t need Scott to explain it. The gurney lay on a pile of stained white sheets and a black rubber body bag.
Goss turned to an officer who was using a digital camera to document the scene. “Barney, you do this stuff?”
“Yeah, Chief, go ahead.”
Scott took a pair of polyethylene gloves from his pocket, pulled them on, and then carefully lifted one corner of the sheet to expose words that were stenciled on the border in faded blue ink. STATE CORRECTIONAL INSTITUTION AT ROCKVIEW.
The same name was stenciled in white on the body bag.
“Okay,” said Dez, “so they really did bring Gibbon’s body here. That’s just fucking peachy. So … we could have a group of religious nuts, an actual mob with pitchforks and torches, or a Satanic cult willing to kill Doc Hartnup and who knows who else just to steal the body. I love this job.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
He could feel everything.
Every. Single. Thing.
Jolts in his legs with each clumsy step. The protest of muscles as they fought the onset of rigor even as they lifted his arms and flexed his hands. The stretch of jaw muscles. The shuddering snap as his teeth clamped shut around the young police officer’s throat.
And then the blood. Hot and salty and sickeningly sweet. Flooding his mouth, bathing his gums and tongue, gushing down his throat.
Lee Hartnup screamed. He screamed from the bottom of his soul as his mouth opened and closed again, and again. Biting, tearing. Chewing.
Devouring.
He screamed and screamed, but not with those lungs. Not with that voice. Those things, each physical part, no longer belonged to him. They existed around him. He existed within. Disconnected from control but still connected to every single nerve and sensory organ. He felt it all. From the scrape of teeth on jawbone and vertebrae to the sluggish movement of half-chewed meat sliding down his throat. He felt it all. He was spared nothing.
His screams echoed in the empty darkness. If anything, any part of his cries, escaped, it was only as the faintest of whispers. Merely a low and plaintive moan.
Hartnup tried to pull back. He tried to throw away the ragged red thing that he held in his hands … and even though he could feel the flex of muscles in hand, wrist, biceps, shoulders, and chest, he could control nothing. He owned nothing except a terrible awareness.
But his own voice whispered to him,
The teeth bit and tore and chewed.
No voice, inside or out, offered an answer.
He hung trapped in darkness, an unwilling passenger, unable to move so much as a finger or a nostril. Nothing.
His body dropped to its knees, shaking its head to worry a chunk of flesh from the corpse.
The body bent over its feast, biting and tearing.
In his sensate darkness, Doc Hartnup screamed and screamed.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
“So, what’s the plan?” asked Goat. “Do we just roll up on Doc Hartnup and say, ‘Dude, we hear you got a dead serial killer in the fridge. Can we take his picture?’”
Trout snorted. “Ambush journalism? Sure.”
“You serious?”
“No. We have to finesse him or he’ll clam up, throw us the hell out, and call Aunt Selma to tell her to raise the drawbridge.”
“So what’s our evil master plan?”
“We hit him with a cover story. We tell him we’re doing a story about the death business. You know, the coroner’s office, old folks’ homes, cemeteries, mortuaries, that sort of thing. We’ll tell him it’s going to be a series. Sober and compassionate stuff about the process of dying and the various stages of caregiving before and after death. Respect for life even in death, shit like that.”
“Yeah,” agreed Goat. “He’s kind of New Agey.… He might buy it.”
They drove for a few seconds.
“On any other day,” Goat said, “it’d be an okay story, too.”
“I know,” agreed Trout. “I was thinking that while I was saying it.”
“How’s that get us to Gibbon and Aunt Selma?”
“Not sure yet. If the cover story gets us in the door then we work him a bit, try to get him on our side. Maybe even cut him in on it. Feed him the Hollywood angle. The best-seller angle, too. If he can’t see the marketing advantages of that … then, well that leaves bribes and threats.”
“Count me out of that, Billy.”
Trout speeded up to pass a school bus. “I’m not talking about threatening to break his legs. If this is the same Selma Conroy from when I first landed out here, then she’s an old hooker. We could play up some kind of connection between the Doc and the hooker. Doesn’t matter if it isn’t true, because he’d have to prove a negative, and you can never do that on social media. Twitter, as you well know, is mightier than the sword, and in this economy no business owner needs bad press.”
Goat turned in his seat and stared at him. “You’re kind of a dick. You know that, right?”
Trout drove for a few seconds before he responded. “And you’re what? A saint?”
