Dead of Night

Poor JT, she thought as she stood in the doorway, watching him for a few seconds. Under every other circumstance he was nominally in charge, and Dez knew it. They both knew it. He was better at most aspects of the job. They were both good with it. He’d been on the job longer, too; but her five years in the military made all the difference in how they were reacting to the horror of this moment. While JT was rolling along the back roads of Stebbins County, Dez had been playing hide-and-seek with the Taliban in the Afghan hills. She was never Special Forces, but she humped her share of battle rattle over miles of desert, working everything from Haji patrol to scouting IEDs to dodging red-on-red fire, working in the first wave of American women to go into battle side by side with the men. She’d seen every kind of carnage and mayhem modern weapons could create and carrion animals could make worse. Had it been any other guy but JT losing his shit on the job, Dez would have torn him a new one. JT was like family; different rules applied.

Her thoughts drifted from JT to the crime scene. This was big and it could easily get out of hand. If the perpetrator had gone into the Grove, then that would mean putting together a massive manhunt. Beyond the lawn and the Grove, the state forest was an easy place to get lost and stay lost; not to mention the tens of thousands of square acres of farmland in Stebbins County. Hundreds of farm roads, fire access roads, country lanes, trails crosses and game trails to follow. If the killer was even half smart, it would take a hundred men with dogs and helicopters to run him to ground; and even then it might take days to do it. Days they might not have if the coming storm was as bad as they were saying on the news.

She turned away and looked down at the corpse.

Doc Hartnup … Damn.

Dez had known plenty of soldiers who had been killed in battle or by things like land mines and suicide vests; but she had never known anyone who had been murdered. She was surprised that it felt so much worse.

“This is fucked up,” she told the dead man. JT returned a moment later with the camera. He also carried a Mossberg shotgun, which Dez would die rather than use because the weapon was loaded with beanbag rounds. She thought they were sissy rounds and once remarked that it was the lethal-force equivalent of giving the perp a blow job. JT knew different — the beanbag round would put anyone from a badass biker to a spaced-out meth head on his ass — but that wasn’t enough for Dez.

Dez took the digital Nikon. “I’ll document the scene,” she said. “Why don’t you walk the perimeter? Figure out where the perp went so we can get some boots on the ground in pursuit. I’d like to bag this dickhead before shift ends so I can spend all night beating the living shit out of him in the holding cell. Sound good?”

He laughed, and it was clear he wasn’t sure if she was joking.

“And, JT,” she added, “keep your eyes open. This asshole might be outside. He just killed two people … Don’t get into a debate with him.” She punctuated her remark with a sharp nod toward the weapon he held. JT jacked a round into the shotgun and went outside without a word.

Dez went into the adjoining office, stepping gingerly over the bloody footprints, and stood on a clean section of carpet, aiming the camera toward the doorway. She took shots that established a clear trail from the prep room into this one. Then she bent over and took close-ups of the bare footprints. She took incremental overlapping pics so that they could be lined up later to show an unbroken progression from one killing room to the other.

The flash popped everything into moments of brightness that reminded Dez of the starkness of the skies in Afghanistan.

Flash.

Dez shot the handprints on the wall. She shot the blood spatter on the lampshade and across the desk. She shot the pool of blood around the wheeled office chair. She turned and straightened to take photos of the vic.

Flash.

And the cleaning woman was standing right there.

Right.

There.

Flash.

Dez stared in absolute and uncomprehending horror at the big Russian woman standing two feet away. Eyes open to reveal nothing. There was no hint of awareness or pain or anything in those bottomless black eyes.

“I don’t—” Dez began.

And the woman snarled and lunged at her.

CHAPTER EIGHT

HARTNUP’S TRANSITION ESTATE

The woman slammed into Dez with full weight, grabbing her hair, driving Dez backward, and then they were falling. The woman snarled — a weird gargling impossibility that came from her ruined throat — and darted her head forward even as they crashed onto the coffee table, exploding it into a thousand fragments of wood and decorative inlay. The impact tore a scream from Dez as the woman’s two hundred pounds came down on her and items on her utility belt punched into spine and kidneys and ribs.

She heard the woman’s blood-streaked teeth clack together an inch from her ear. Dez jammed her forearm under the woman’s chin as the teeth snapped again and again, trying to bite her face, her ear, her windpipe. Black clotted blood dribbled from the corners of the woman’s mouth and splashed on Dez’s cheeks and shirt.

“Get off of me you crazy bitch!” Dez screamed, twisting her body to try to escape the crushing weight.

The Russian kept trying to twist her fingers into Dez’s French braid. The woman straddled Dez, massive thighs blocking her from grabbing her weapons. Yet for all of the woman’s bulk she was strangely limp, as if her muscles were half-asleep and sagging. It was a horrible dead-weight quality, and it made escape much harder.

There was no real plan to the cleaning woman’s attack except to pull Dez close enough to bite. She snarled and hissed and bit the air, squirming to get her chin around the barrier of Dez’s forearm. Fending off those teeth was immediately exhausting because it meant that Dez had to push away most of that slack, squirming mass.

The woman tried to spit at Dez, expectorating a viscous mass of dead blood at her, but Dez twisted away. The black goo splatted on the floor, and out of the corner of Dez’s eye she could see something like maggots squirming in the muck.

“Christ!”

Dez finally managed to pull her right arm free. The camera was still attached to her wrist by its lanyard; Dez grabbed it and smashed it with all her strength against the woman’s temple. The impact shot pain through Dez’s wrist; pieces of metal and plastic flew everywhere, and the force knocked the Russian woman’s head away. But that was all it did. There was absolutely no change of expression on the woman’s face, even though a flap of skin as large as a silver dollar flopped down onto her cheek. The wound did not bleed … and there was no reaction at all to the blow or the pain that it must have caused.

A growl burst from low in Dez’s chest as she swung again and again, hitting with the camera every time, mashing the woman’s ear, splitting her eyebrow, grinding into temple and eye socket and sinus. The jagged edges of the broken camera tore the woman’s face to red ribbons.

But they did not slow the woman’s attack at all. She did not even attempt to block the blows. She kept trying to bite, her cold fingers continued to scrabble and grab. The woman spat more black blood at Dez, splattering her uniform shirt.

“JT!” Dez screamed as panic surged up inside of her.

Then Dez pulled her heels close to her own buttocks, bent her knees and placed her soles flat on the ground, then she abruptly snapped her hips upward in a reverse bronco buck-off. The sudden upward thrust bounced the Russian woman’s body into the air, and Dez instantly rolled sideways, using the turn of her hips against the inside of the attacker’s thighs. Leverage won out and the woman fell sideways.

Dez immediately rolled the other way, spinning onto her side and kicking out at the woman with both feet, catching her in the chest and face and knocking her back against the sofa.

The woman was not even stunned. She flopped back from the point of impact, flopped onto her hands and knees, and began crawling toward Dez.

“Shit!” Dez rolled onto her back and drew her Glock. “Fucking freeze!”