had been the autopsy he had performed the day before on the body of Tony Macchio, one of Ruger’s accomplices. For some reason the cops had not been able to discern Ruger had first shot Macchio and then tore him apart. Literally tore him apart, apparently with his bare hands. And his teeth. Weinstock had never seen anything like it, even in medical texts, and outside of slasher films he had never even heard of anything like it. Ruger was a monster, and one that was scarier than anything that Crow had ever cooked up for the town’s famous Haunted Hayride. No fangs, no bat wings or bug-eyes, and seeing his handiwork, actually being wrist deep in the bloody leavings, had shaken Weinstock to his core. He knew it, too, hence the stage dressing to affect an air of calm before starting today’s postmortems. He closed his eyes and sighed. “You’re right, honey, Bob can do it.”
“Good. No sense putting yourself through anything more if you don’t have to.”
“Okay, sweetie, let me go make some calls. Give Abby and David a kiss for me. Tell them I’ll be home later, and, honey, I promise I’ll be there in time for synagogue. Hand to God.”
“I love you,” Rachel said, a lot of meaning in her voice.
“Me, too, sweetie. Bye.” He snapped the phone shut, took a long sip, and sat there with his eyes closed for a while listening to the music, letting the notes play over his nerves like a masseuse’s fingers. He opened his eyes and stared at the file folder that hid the croissants, pushed it aside, grabbed the bag and opened it, and stared into it with naked longing. Then he scrunched the bag up and threw it in the trash can, uttering a string of expletives that would require some heavy-duty atoning.
Abruptly he sat up, set his coffee cup down on the desk, and walked with forced calmness into the cold room where the double row of stainless-steel drawers gleamed in the bright fluorescent lights. He went to drawer #14, jerked the lever down and swung open the door, then grabbed the hard plastic handle on the slab and pulled it out along its rollers. A body lay under a white sheet, the cloth tented on nose, chest, and toe-tips, but Weinstock whipped the sheet down to reveal the corpse beneath. The killer’s skin was blue-white and waxy, the eyelids half- open showing shark-black eyes. The body had not yet been prepped for autopsy and was still clothed in shirt, jacket, and trousers that were filthy and pocked with bullet holes crusted with blood that had dried to a chocolaty thickness. Even in death Karl Ruger wore a twisted smile, his lips curled away from the jagged stumps of his broken teeth. Weinstock considered. Maybe it was a grimace of pain, he conceded, but damn if it didn’t look like a shit- eating smile.
Weinstock was alone in the morgue—his nurse, Barney, was working the three to eleven—so there wasn’t a living soul to hear Weinstock when he leaned over Ruger’s body and said, “You are a total piece of shit and I hope you burn in hell!”
He spat on Ruger’s dead face and then slid him back into his cold box with a grunt of effort that sent the slab slamming against the wall, then he swung the door shut hard enough to send echoes bouncing off all of the tiled walls. He sagged against the bank of stainless-steel doors, closed his eyes, folded his arms tightly across his chest, and concentrated on beating down the hatred in his brain, muttering, “…Shit, shit, shit…”
When the intensity finally ebbed, Weinstock rubbed his eyes with the heels of his palms and then pushed himself away from the wall of doors, walked slowly across the morgue floor, paused once in the doorway to the office and threw back a look that was half embarrassed and half venomous, then swept his hand down over the light switches and left, heading back to his coffee and jazz and his cell phone.
Inside the cold drawer, Karl Ruger lay in the silence of death, still and breathless. There were no longer any drops of spittle on his face. He’d already licked them off.
(3)
By the time Frank Ferro and Vince LaMastra got to the Guthrie farm, there were twenty officers, two full ambulance crews, four press vehicles erecting microwave towers, and a crowd of rubberneckers who were trying to get past the yellow crime scene tape. It was frosty cold and a frigid mist floated a foot above the ground. When LaMastra asked a uniform where the chief was, the officer pointed down a lane that had been trampled through the corn. Though the sun was rising, there were still thick shadows clustered around the base of the cornstalks and all along the path. Surrounding the scene Coleman camping lanterns had been placed. The shadows leaned back away from the lanterns, but they did not fully retreat.
Jerry Head hurried up to them as they walked along the path to where the bodies had been found. He looked bleary eyed with exhaustion. “Sarge, I was about to turn in when I got the call. My motel’s right up the road, so I was able to get here in a hot minute. I secured the scene best I could, but we’re ass deep in civilians around here. Okay if I run some of them off?”
“Good call, Jerry. Thanks,” Ferro said, clapping him on the shoulder, and a second later he could hear Head’s deep voice booming out behind them. He nodded to LaMastra and they moved forward through the throng of officers until they stood at the edge of the clearing and saw what lay there.
“Holy Mother of God,” LaMastra said, and actually took a half-step back as if he hoped he could step back out of any reality where what he saw was possible. He gagged and turned away, staring at the tops of the nearby corn while he worked his throat. “Jesus Christ, Frank…what the hell is
Ferro looked at his partner for a moment, finding that easier to bear while he composed his face into one he’d want the local cops to see. Now was not a time to come unglued. Breathing in and out through his nostrils, Ferro turned slowly back to the clearing and forced himself to take in every detail, trying to access that part of his mind that could be cool, detached, clinical. It was a struggle not to yell. “It’s not the town, Vince. This is our mess— Ruger and Boyd.”
LaMastra gave a single fierce shake of his head. “You’re wrong there, Frank. It is this goddamn town.”
Ferro had nothing to say to that. There was a twenty-foot square that was formed partly by the intersection of two access paths through the corn, but which had been expanded by many of the stalks being trampled down. The far side of the clearing was edged by a white slat fence that trailed away to either side into the shadowy fields. A tall post reared up above the fence and a raggedy and headless scarecrow hung in limp cruciform over the scene. On the ground at the foot of the post was the better part of a shattered jack-o’-lantern with a wicked grin. Below the scarecrow lay the first of the two bodies. Officer Nels Cowan, late of the Pine Deep Police Department, lay in a rag-doll sprawl that spoke of arms that had been wrenched nearly out of their sockets. His head was tilted back at an impossible angle on a splintered spine; the backward tilt revealing a savage tear in the throat that exposed a severed windpipe and the knobbed inner edge of the spine. His service sidearm lay on the ground inches from his hand.
Near him, with one outstretched hand reaching up to lay across Cowan’s left ankle, was what had once been Jimmy Castle, late of Crestville PD. His throat was also a raw and shredded mess, as if dogs had been at him. Castle’s eyes bulged from their sockets with a terminal and everlasting astonishment at what he had seen.
There was blood everywhere and pieces of torn red matter that could have been cloth from the uniforms of the officers or it could have been their own flesh. Scattered around Castle’s body were at least a dozen shell casings, and the faint bite of cordite still hung in the air. As he and LaMastra pulled on latex gloves, Ferro stood there and read the scene, fighting back the ache in his chest that made him want to take LaMastra’s cue and flee this insane town. He fished a pack of gum from his pocket, unwrapped a stick slowly—his trick for controlling the shaking of his hands—and then placed it on his tongue. Chewing would give his mouth something to do other than gape, and the mint fought off the nausea.
The scene was a puzzle, and he stood there, chewing, evaluating the details. Two bodies, savagely torn. Worse than what had been done to Ruger’s buddy Macchio. That killing had, at least, a sense of ritual about it, but this looked to be less…what was the word? Controlled?
It was a mystery and Frank Ferro hated mysteries. He hadn’t joined the police force to solve them, and he hadn’t welcomed the promotion to detective division to pursue them. Ferro preferred order. He had a hunter’s nature, and that was something he liked: the hunt for clear answers, not for the unexplainable. When he and LaMastra had come to Pine Deep on the trail of Karl Ruger and his accomplices, they’d both thought it was going to be a straightforward hunt. Difficult, yes, dangerous, to be sure—but in essence a hunt. Now, after two days in this
