Dead of Night

“You shot her four times, Dez. How many shots does it take to—”

Dez suddenly shoved him, and JT staggered backward into the row of filing cabinets. A vase of gardenias fell off and smashed on the edge of a secretary’s desk. Before he could recover his balance, Dez snatched her Glock out of his hands and shoved it into her holster.

“I never thought you’d turn on me, JT,” she said bitterly. She wanted to punch him, to knock him down and stomp on him. She wanted to cry, too, but she would eat her own gun before she’d do that on the job. Even after what just happened.

JT got slowly to his feet, his eyes flicking from her face to her gun hand. “You’re scaring the shit out of me, Dez. You’re acting irrational here and—”

“I’m perfectly rational. I didn’t lose it and I’m not drunk. Or hopped up on anything. You want to Breathalyze me? Fine, and when it comes up clean I’m going to shove it up your ass.”

“Calm down, Dez. I didn’t say—”

The sirens were right outside now, the wails filling the room with implications. Dez closed her eyes for a moment as she heard car doors open and feet crunch on the gravel. Voices began yelling as the front and back doors banged open and officers from Stebbins and two neighboring towns flooded into the mortuary.

“Dez,” JT said slowly, “you know what they’re going to say. They’re going to look at the body. They’re going to take her temperature and test lividity and do the science that’s going to show how long she’s been dead. And then they’re going to match that against our response time on the call logs. Then they’re going to look at those bullet wounds.”

“So what? Let them look!”

“Come on, Dez.… You shot her four times. How come none of the wounds bled?”

Dez took an involuntary step back as if JT had punched her. “What?”

JT pointed. “Corpses don’t bleed. Either you killed her on the first shot, in which case they’re going to want to know why you kept shooting — and from different angles and distances — or you killed her with the head shots and they’re going to ask you to explain why the perpetrator you shot in the chest didn’t bleed.” He shook his head, and his voice had a pleading note to it. “What do we tell them, Dez?”

There didn’t seem to be enough air to breathe, and Dez could not answer his questions. Her chest was tight with tension, her heart hammered with fear. She looked down at the dead woman, following the line of gaze of the arriving officers, seeing the extremity of the violence. Seeing the blood and pieces of human debris as if through their eyes.

Jesus Christ, she thought, this is it for me. If JT doesn’t believe me, then no one will.

Wild panic flared in her, and she looked around as if hoping to see a door marked “EXIT.” But one door led back to the charnel house of the prep room and the other was the route a killer had used to flee this insane crime scene.

Then that door suddenly opened and Chief Martin Goss waddled through the door from the prep room and into the office. He was a short, fat man with boiled red skin that was permanently coated with hypertensive sweat.

Goss’s eyes went from JT to Dez to the corpse and back again. He looked at the gore splattered on Dez’s uniform.

“Holy Jesus jumped-up Christ,” he said. “Dez — are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” she mumbled.

“You sure? We have paramedics inbound—”

She nodded. “I’m good, Chief. Just shook up.”

“JT?”

“I’m fine. I was outside when this went down.”

Goss licked his lips. “Your call-in said that there was a suspect on foot?”

JT showed him the tracks of the bloody bare feet. “Prints disappear near the edge of the lawn. Looks like the suspect was heading west, but that’s a guess.”

Goss nodded curtly, clicked his shoulder mike and relayed the information to the rest of the team, ordering a search and advising extreme caution. He also called the state police and requested their assistance. The staties had more men and they had choppers. Other officers, including Paul Scott, the county’s forensics officer, flooded into the place. Scott flicked a brief glance at JT and Dez and then went into the other room, his evidence collection bag in hand.

Then Goss turned back to JT and Dez. “Okay … now tell me everything that happened.”

Dez started to speak, but her words came out in a jumble. She could hear the panic in her own voice.

JT stepped in and took a swing at it. Despite his earlier reactions, he appeared to have reclaimed his calm, and he gave the report in quick, clinical police jargon, from the moment they parked the car, to the handprint in the utility room, to finding Doc Hartnup’s body. Goss’s eyes narrowed for a moment, but he didn’t interrupt; Dez watched his face, trying to read him.

JT said, “Believing this to be an active crime scene, we did only a cursory examination of the second victim and determined that she was dead. I went outside to do a walk-around while Dez — I mean Officer Fox — began documenting the crime scene in here with a digital camera. The, um…” he paused only a second, Dez had to give him that much, “second victim was apparently still alive and proceeded to attack Officer Fox in a very aggressive and irrational way. Officer Fox was compelled to use deadly force to protect her own life.”

The officers had all stopped to listen to this account. Their faces registered varying levels of confusion, doubt, and disgust. Paul Scott came back in and bent close to whisper something to Goss. The chief looked at him, went and peered into the other room, and then came back and studied the faces of both JT and Dez. His face was clouded with confusion and doubt.

He’s not buying it, Dez thought. I am well and truly fucked.

“That’s it?” asked Chief Goss slowly, his eyebrows arched almost to his hairline. “That’s your story?”

“That’s the way it happened, Chief,” said JT.

Dez nodded. Her clothes were splattered with blood, her hair was in disarray, and she knew that she must look like a crazy woman.

Goss pointed at the dead woman. “Did you inflict those injuries on her throat?”

“Of course not,” Dez began, but JT touched her arm.

“She appeared to have sustained some injuries when we arrived on the scene, Chief,” said JT. “As I said, we did a cursory examination and—”

“Did you also do a cursory examination on Doc Hartnup?”

JT winced at the inflection Goss put on “cursory.” “Yes, sir.”

“Did you determine that he was probably dead or apparently still alive?”

“Dead, sir,” said Dez.

“Really?” Goss said slowly. “The cleaning lady attacked you in here?”

“Yes.”

“What about Doc Hartnup?”

“Sir?”

“Did he attack you, too?”

“No,” said Dez. “JT told you, the doc was already dead when we got here.”

“Really?” Goss went and pointed into the other room. “Then where the fuck is his body?”

Dez shot JT a look and then the two of them hurried over to the entrance to the prep room. There were several officers in there and blood everywhere. Some of it was red, some was black, like the sputum the Russian woman had spat at her. Tiny worms, like maggots, writhed in it. A set of bloody footprints led from the large pool of blood on the floor to the open back door.

But there was no body.

Doc Hartnup was gone.