Dead Man's Song

this, Polk, and I’ll send over one of my new friends to have a chat with you. Believe me when I tell you that you’d rather I kick a two-by-four up your ass than letting, say, Boyd dance you around a bit.”

“Jesus Christ, don’t even joke like that,” Polk said.

“Who’s joking?” Vic said and Polk felt his bladder tighten. If he hadn’t just taken a leak he would have pissed himself right there. “And there are worse than him working for the Man. Oh hell yes.”

Polk actually gagged and he pressed his eyes shut and leaned back against a tree, banging the back of his head against the gnarled bark once, twice.

“You still with me, sweet-cheeks?” Vic asked.

“Jesus…”

“You knew these days were coming. We both knew. You got a choice here. Be strong and stand with us, and you’re going to come out of this like a king—or, as rich as one, anyway—but,” and he lowered his voice to a silken whisper, “you cross us…you cross the Man…we’ll eat your heart, and that, Jimmy-boy, is not a joke. We will eat your heart. Tell me you’re hearing me loud and clear.”

“Yes,” Polk said, his own voice shocked and shamed down to a whisper. Vic was laughing when he hung up. Polk pressed his head back against the tree and kept his eyes squeezed shut, trying to squeeze Vic’s words—and all of the terrible truth in them—out of his mind.

(2)

Barney was gone now and Saul Weinstock sat in his office listening to the playback of the autopsy tape, hearing his own words as he described what he and Barney had discovered as they cut open first one corpse and then the other. The loss of blood. The shape and orientation of the wounds on their throats—wounds Boyd had broken into the morgue to try and disguise. That he had made a piss-poor job of it was no consolation. The tape reached the point where he had described the wounds, and he punched STOP and then rewound it to hear it again. He did that half a dozen times. The report he had to fill out lay on his desk and he had to tell the authorities something. It was already well past the point where he should have turned in his findings. To delay even five minutes would be to hinder the police operations, but to include these observations in what would become crucial documents would mean that everyone from the FBI on down to Gus Bernhardt would think that he was either a loony or a damn poor ME.

He sat back in his chair and rubbed his tired eyes. Castle and Cowan had been dead for three days now. Crime scene investigation had kept their bodies at the farm for some hours, then the flood in the morgue had delayed the autopsies for a day, and then Boyd’s break-in had delayed things even further. Why? What was the purpose of stealing Ruger’s body?

Then there was the next anomaly to consider: The bodies of both officers had been exsanguinated, the veins totally collapsed as if some kind of suction pump had been used. The same bizarre bite patterns had appeared on both men. Not just throats torn out, but throats that had clearly been punctured first before the flesh was ripped away. The punctures on Cowan were right over the jugular; Castle’s punctures were over the left carotid. What kind of pump would have a clamp or fitting that would leave such marks? Add to that the fact that premortem bruising of Castle’s wrist clearly indicated that a human hand had gripped Castle’s wrist hard enough to burst the flesh and rupture the capillaries before—impossibly—ripping the arm from the socket. Not even a man hyped up on unlimited amounts of cocaine could muster that kind of strength, Weinstock knew that much. Which left him with a number of inexplicable or downright impossible pieces of evidence. To present these findings would be a total disaster. His competence would be called into question and that would taint all of the evidence should there ever be a trial. He put the cap of his pen in his mouth and chewed it as he thought.

The questions had to be answered. Why had Boyd attacked those two cops? Why and by what means was Boyd physically strong enough to tear a grown man’s arm out of the socket? How had he then exsanguinated them? Why had he done that? What had he done with the blood? Why had he broken into the morgue? Why steal Ruger’s body? Why disfigure the cops? On the videotape it had clearly shown Boyd limping on what appeared to be a badly broken leg. If his leg was broken, how had he carried Ruger—the man weighed two hundred pounds—and if his leg was not broken, why fake it? Then there was the matter of the broken pipes in the morgue. It was also very odd that they had taken that moment to disconnect, just in time to prevent the autopsy of Karl Ruger and to delay the autopsies of Castle and Cowan. Was that coincidence? That had happened when Crow and Val were still there at the hospital, which meant that there were plenty of police all over the building. It seemed unlikely that anyone could have slipped past all that security and gone down to the morgue to kick loose some pipes. He’d brought the matter up to Ferro, but the detective hadn’t seemed convinced that it was anything suspicious, especially since the morgue door had been locked. Odd, though. Far too many odd things.

Weinstock was a practical physician, and in his years as a doctor he had seen very little to support a belief in coincidence. Everything was cause and effect. If you don’t know the cause, look at the effect and backtrack in the same way you look at the symptoms to diagnose the disease. He told his residents that all the time. So, if the effect of this is two corpses drained of all blood, visible bite marks on the body, and two clearly visible puncture wounds on each throat, then what is the cause?

He shook his head and sat back in his chair. “You’re a goddamned idiot,” he told himself, saying it out loud, putting as much mockery as he could into it, trying to shame himself out of that kind of fanciful stupidity. Then in a quieter voice, he said, “You’re crazy.”

(3)

Coming home to the farm was the hardest thing Val Guthrie had ever done, and Crow knew it. The place wasn’t hers anymore—Ruger had made it his that night—and now she would have to reclaim it.

When Sarah’s Humvee crunched to a slow stop on the gravel in the half-circle drive in front of the big porch, Val’s hand closed around Crow’s thigh and squeezed. It wasn’t tight at first, but by the time the engine stopped and the silence of the late October morning settled over them, it felt to him as if she had diamond-tipped drills on the end of each fingertip. He didn’t let on, though, either in expression or word; if it would help her deal with the moment, Crow would have given her a saw and let her cut the damn leg off. Sarah seemed to sense it, too, and sat there behind the wheel, door closed, hands resting quietly in her lap.

Eventually Val’s grip eased and Crow took her hand in his. “Whenever you’re ready, baby. No rush.”

The house was huge, gabled, recently painted white with dark green window trimming and shutters. Gigantic oaks stood like brooding sentinels on either corner of the house, and smaller arborvitae flanked the broad front stairs. The porch was also painted green and there was a porch swing that Henry had made by hand for his wife fifteen years ago. Crow saw that all of the crime scene tape had been removed. Score one for Diego.

“I guess I can’t sit out here forever,” Val said.

Sarah turned in her seat. “Honey, you can sit there until the cows come home and the national budget is balanced. In fact, I can turn this puppy around and you guys can come back home with me, which would make a lot more sense.” It was the third time Sarah had made the suggestion.

Val reached out and gave Sarah’s forearm a squeeze. “Thanks, sweetie,” Val said, “I’ll be fine.” She absently touched her silver cross, tracing the shape of it over her heart.

“We could do a hotel,” Crow said.

She shook her head, took a breath, jerked the handle up and, with slow care for her aches, got out. Crow got out on his side and walked around to stand beside her. Above them the house was immense and filled with ghosts.

“Damn,” she breathed, and then walked toward the front door, chin down, jaw set, as if she were wading through waist-deep water. When they got to the front door, though, Val stopped. The door was new and still smelled of fresh paint. Val reached out to touch the new door, then turned to Crow. “You?”

“Diego. I called him, asked if he would tidy things up a bit.”

Val kissed him and there was a single glittering tear in her left eye. “Thank you,” she said. Taking a long, deep breath, she reached out and opened the door, hesitated one last moment, and went inside. Crow glanced at Sarah, eyebrows raised, and followed.

That was just before noon. Now it was midafternoon, and Val was asleep on her father’s bed. She had gone