a clear Lexan facepiece, which formed an airtight seal around the entire face, from eyebrows to chin. In place of an artificial air supply, the respirators used two disc-shaped high-efficiency filters to knock any particulates out of the air before they could reach the user’s nose or mouth.
With the coveralls on, and their respirators in place, Jake and Nick lifted the hoods to cover their hair and donned two sets of gloves-latex under heavier rubber-and approached the butcher-block table. The bitter sacrilege of examining a child’s body on a surface designed for cooking was lost on neither man.
The orange body bag lay in a heap under a bank of fluorescent lights, not nearly as bright as Nick might have liked, but certainly adequate to the task at hand. It took a half minute or so to straighten the bag out enough to access the zipper. Like peeling a banana, the orange layer opened to reveal the green bag, which Jake lifted just enough to allow Nick to pull the outer shroud away and lay it on the tile floor.
“So tell me,” Jake said, his voice muffled by his respirator. “What’s the big mystery?”
“We’ll see in a minute,” Nick said.
Jake noted the lack of eye contact. “What is it?”
Nick ignored him as he fumbled with yet another rumpled bag in search of the zipper. Finally, he got it open. In the glare of the overhead light, they saw for the first time just how fine a dust they’d been exposed to: the consistency of talcum powder. Jake examined the fine coating on his gloved fingers and fought away a wave of despair. The body’s natural filters were useless against so fine a particle size. Whatever Travis had breathed was free to travel into the deepest recesses of the boy’s lungs; free to do its maximum damage. He closed his eyes and took a deep, purified breath.
Calm down, he told himself, fighting to find a ray of hope. You’re not a doctor. Quit trying to practice medicine. Maybe it’s not as bad as you think.
The bones were all jumbled together in a heap in the bottom corner of the body bag. Nick reached in, up to his elbow, and pulled them out where he could see them. One at a time, he’d lift a piece to the light, turn it over in his gloved hands, then reach in for another one.
“What do you see?” Jake asked. It had been far too long since he’d taken anatomy and physiology.
Nick’s eyes never lifted from his work. “Everything’s pretty badly degraded from the heat of the fire,” he said. “This one appears to be part of a vertebral column. See the ridge here?” He traced it with his finger.
Jake saw it. “Okay, so what do we know?”
Again, Nick ignored his question as he reached in for another piece. “Okay,” he said. “This is the one I was looking for.” He turned it over in his fingers-sort of a long V with some unusual ridges along its edge. Nick’s shoulders sagged visibly as he dropped his hands to the table. When he looked up at Jake, his eyes had darkened, and even through the Lexan, Jake could see the creases in his brow.
“What is it?” Jake demanded, his heart suddenly racing. “What?”
Nick lifted the bone back into the light. “It’s a jawbone,” he said, his voice barely audible through the respirator.
Jake took the bone from him and held it up to his own face. “A jawbone! It doesn’t look like…” Then he saw it. He dropped the relic back into the bag and grabbed the side of the table for support.
“It’s a dog, Jake,” Nick said. “Or maybe a wolf or a fox. But it’s not human.”
Jake bit his lip and closed his eyes against the conclusion that tried to force its way through his brain. “A dog? Who’d do all of this just to cover the death of a dog?”
Nick looked away.
“Bullshit!” Jake shouted. “No! We missed it, then!”
“Jake…” Nick moved to join his friend on the other side of the table. “Listen…”
“We missed it. It’s got to be there!”
“But it’s not.” He put his hand on Jake’s shoulder.
Jake slapped it away. “Oh, God,” he wailed. A sound arose from his throat that was unlike anything Nick had heard from a human being: grief, unleashed in its rawest, most bitter form, rising as an agonized scream and reverberating off the tile walls, despite the muffling effects of his facepiece.
Jake pushed himself away from the table and stumbled toward the door. Suddenly, the huge kitchen seemed impossibly small. He needed to get out. Now.
He kicked open the door, bouncing a polished brass hurricane lamp off the wall and down onto the floor with a crash. Shards of glass skittered in every direction across the inlaid wood of the hallway. This couldn’t be happening. They’d missed something. They’d had to. This was it. This was the whole plan. That skeleton was the key piece of evidence that would lead to their acquittal; that would give them their lives back!
Now, he realized, he had nothing. He ripped the respirator off his head and heaved it across the room, where it pulverized a vase that had once been supported on an intricately carved ebony plant stand. “Fuck!”
Nick moved in behind him. “Jake, take it easy…”
Jake whirled on him, his eyes wild. “Fuck you, Nick! Fuck ‘take it easy’!” He ripped at his gloves and threw them one at a time against the wall. “Oh, God, no!” His grief lit a fire in his brain, and he pressed his hands against the top of his head as he sat heavily on the floor. “Oh, God, oh, God, no.”
Thorne’s big, chrome-plated. 45 was drawn and ready to shoot as he charged into the hallway. “What the hell is going on!”
Nick took off his respirator and nodded toward Jake. “It’s like I feared,” he said softly. “The bones weren’t human.”
Jake’s face was a mask of anguish as he looked up to face the other men. “I killed my son,” he gasped, “and I sent my wife away to prison for the rest of her life.” He took a deep, labored breath before he could finish the thought. “For a dog.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Travis had had some wild dreams before, but nothing like this. It was all about pain. He was floating somewhere, he thought, but every time he tried to move, he couldn’t. The more he tried, the more it hurt.
People were here in the darkness with him. They talked a lot, but they didn’t make any sense. Lots of voices, but no one had a face. They talked in jibberish; about things he’d never even heard of. That was okay, he supposed, but why did it have to hurt so much?
His dick hurt. Somewhere, in the wildest parts of this dream, he remembered one of the faceless people jamming something into him down there. Something big. Not right, he thought, but then lost the thread of why he should object.
Drifting… He felt himself spreading out, traveling somehow. Over there-what was that?
Someone had set his lungs on fire. The fire got bigger every time he took a breath. Just like blowing on hot coals. Take another breath, burn another hole in your lung. That didn’t make any sense at all.
Not when he could just stop breathing.
No more breaths for Travis, then. When they stopped, the pain would stop, too.
But he breathed again, anyway. He told himself to stop, but his lungs wouldn’t listen. They just sucked in another finger of fire; another dose of airborne razor blades.
The image of a snake filled his mind. He hated snakes. This one was big, too. It had slithered all the way up his body and down his throat, doing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on him, forcing him to breathe when he didn’t want to. Hissing and biting his lungs with every breath.
I’m sorry, he said silently to the snake. I’m sorry for whatever I did. Just stop hurting me, and I’ll be good.
The snake bit him again, a big chunk this time, and the pain brought tears to his eyes. Maybe he should just give up. But he didn’t know how.
Jake felt drugged, like he was living someone else’s life. The others had escorted him back to the parlor and deposited him in a chair, but he was only distantly aware of his surroundings. There’d always been hope before. There’d always been that glimmer of a plan-the one they could pursue when everything else had collapsed around them. They’d always had each other.
Family first…
