Ed sighed. 'Yeah, I hear you. It’s been bothering me, too. But it gets worse. I can’t figure out how it happened. There weren’t any wounds on the body, nothing but a fairly shallow cut on the palm of one hand. It probably hurt like hell, and bled a bit, but certainly not enough to kill someone.'
'Shit, Ed, this is not good.' Damon shook his head in bewilderment. It sounded like this was going to be one bitch of a headache, and he just didn’t need that right now.
Then Ed said something else, and it was so weird that Damon thought he hadn’t heard him correctly.
'Run that one by me again?'
'I said, this guy didn’t just lose enough blood to kill him, he lost all of it.'
Damon felt goose bumps suddenly rise on his arms. 'What do you mean ALL of it?'
'Just what I said. All of it. You know how it works. Once the heart stops, the blood will normally pool in the lowest portion of the corpse, giving the flesh there a dark purplish coloration. Except, in this case, that didn’t happen. I couldn’t find any evidence of post-mortem lividity anywhere on the body. If you hadn’t told me the position he had been found in, I wouldn’t have been able to figure it out. And when I cut him open, I didn’t even have to drain him. I could have done the whole procedure on my kitchen table and eaten off of it afterwards, he was that clean.'
While listening, Damon had involuntarily stiffened in his seat. Something wasn’t right here; that much was obvious. On some deeper, more primal level, Damon was suddenly certain that things were going to get a lot worse.
'Hey, Wilson, you there?'
'Yeah, yeah. I’m here. Got anything else, Ed?'
'Sorry. That’s it, I’m afraid.'
'Okay, thanks for the call. I appreciate it. And listen, keep this one from the press for awhile, will ya?'
'Sure thing, Damon. Talk to you soon.'
For the first time in his long career, Edward Strickland found that he didn’t want to be alone with a corpse.
Damon hung up the phone and leaned back in his chair, his gaze resting on the far wall but not really seeing it. His thoughts were elsewhere.
Bled to death?
How?
The whole thing was absurd. The pickaxe they found was several yards away from the corpse. There was no way he could have hurt himself. Even if he had, how do you bleed to death from a cut on the palm of the hand? It just wasn’t possible.
He thought back to the events of that morning, picturing the scene in his mind. The corpse had been sprawled in that dark, little room at the base of that ugly statue with little evidence anywhere that there had been any kind of confrontation or struggle, no wounds on the body. That was why he’d been so positive that it had been an overdose or a heart attack. All his years of police work had pointed him in that direction.
Did I miss something?
He didn’t think he had. The uniforms had used their usual diligence going over the scene once he’d called them in, and he had even stayed behind to supervise. He was positive the job had been done thoroughly and professionally.
He now had a nagging feeling that he hadn’t seen everything he should have, that he had overlooked something important.
Damon was a cop who believed in hunches. More than once during the course of a past investigation he’d gotten a feeling about a certain aspect of the case. Nothing more than that, just an impression, a blind, gut reaction completely unfounded in anything he could put into logical facts. He learned to pay attention to them, more often than not discovering that he was right. He knew this was simply his unconscious mind tying things together in a way that his conscious mind had overlooked, and his ‘hunches’ were just its way of telling him to perk up and pay attention.
Something about the mental image of the crime scene was bothering him; something he couldn’t put his finger on, and so, instead of going home as he’d been about to do before Ed had phoned, he went to his filing cabinets and pulled out the case file. He pulled out the photographs of the crime scene. He stared at each of them slowly in turn, scrutinizing them for something he might have missed.
The pictures looked the same now as they had then. The cemetery, the tomb, the corpse. Nothing more.
He picked up the few photos that were solely of the statue itself, staring at the face carved into the stone with a strange mixture of admiration and revulsion. He had to admit it really was a marvelous piece of work, if you happened to like that sort of thing, which he didn’t.
Every little detail was rendered precisely, from the scales that covered the face to the curved claws that extended from the feet. All in all, it was a stunning piece of work.
Damon just didn’t like it. Remembering how he’d felt beneath its stony gaze made him uncomfortable even now. If he hadn’t know better, he would have sworn the damn thing had been watching him the whole time he was down there. Looking into its eyes in the photographs, that feeling returned. The beast seemed to gaze back at him, the glint of an evil intelligence in its stony orbs.
Something was there in the pictures, something important that he was overlooking. He just wasn’t seeing it.
But what?
Tired and more than a bit frustrated now, he returned the photos to the file and put them away in his drawer. He’d had enough for one day; staring at the photographs for another couple of hours wasn’t going to get him anywhere tonight. It was time to call it quits.
As he crossed the parking lot to his car, Damon had the uneasy feeling he wasn’t alone.
He glanced around.
Beneath the dirty yellow light of the sodium-vapor lamps, nothing stirred.
The lot was empty.
He shrugged, dismissing the feeling. Too much work and an overactive imagination, that’s all it was.
Yet in the back of his mind an image lingered.
A pair of stone eyes, watching…
Chapter Ten: A Death in the Night
'Bring me another piece of that cake, would ya, honey?'
In the kitchen, Martha Cummings looked out through the interior window that connected to the next room. Her husband George was seated in his favorite recliner in front of the television. Her gaze was full of affection as she took in his slightly overweight body and the little round bald-spot on the top of his head. She shook her head in mock derision at his request, but happily complied with it nonetheless.
Martha was in her late sixties and quite happy with her lot in life. Time had been good to her. A large, buxom woman, not particularly pretty by today’s standards, but filled with an inordinate amount of kindness, she had married her present husband, after two unsuccessful marriages, at the age of thirty-five. She had a nice home, an affectionate husband, and enough money to keep the two of them happy for the rest of their lives. That was more than most could say, and for that she was thankful.
Of course, there were her cats, too.
Martha’s pride and joy, the cats had proven to be an acceptable substitute for her inability to have children. She lavished them with all the care and love and attention she might have given her own children. They were a constant nuisance to her husband, although he was sweetly tolerant for her sake. The felines had free roam of the house. She had lost track of how many of them there actually were, having stopped counting somewhere after sixteen. Originally there had been only five, each with a separate name, but before long she’d given up trying to keep them all straight, referring to them all now simply as Kitty. They didn’t seem to mind and it was much easier
