“Angela and Dodee—excuse me, Dorothy—have been badly beaten and are well into decomposition. Coggins has also been beaten—savagely, from the look—and is also into decomp, although not as far; the musculature on his face and arms has just begun to sag. Brenda—Brenda Perkins, I mean…” He trailed off and bent over her.
“Rusty?” Linda asked nervously. “Honey?”
He reached out a gloved hand, thought better of it, removed the glove, and cupped her throat. Then he lifted Brenda’s head and felt the grotesquely large knot just below the nape. He eased her head down, then rotated her body onto one hip so he could look at her back and buttocks.
“Jesus,” he said.
“Rusty? What?”
But he would remember.
He wet his lips and said, “Brenda Perkins shows livor mortis on the buttocks and thighs, indicating she’s been dead at least twelve hours, probably more like fourteen. There’s significant bruising on both cheeks. They’re handprints. There’s no doubt in my mind of that. Someone took hold of her face and snapped her head hard to the left, fracturing the atlas and axis cervical vertebrae, C1 and C2. Probably severed her spine as well.”
“Oh, Rusty,” Linda moaned.
Rusty thumbed up first one of Brenda’s eyelids, then the other. He saw what he had feared.
“Bruising to the cheeks and scleral petechiae—bloodspots in the whites of this woman’s eyes—suggest death wasn’t instantaneous. She was unable to draw breath and asphyxiated. She may or may not have been conscious. We’ll hope not. That’s all I can tell, unfortunately. The girls—Angela and Dorothy—have been dead the longest. The state of decomposition suggests they were stored in a warm place.”
He snapped off the recorder.
“In other words, I see nothing that absolutely exonerates Barbie and nothing we didn’t goddam know already.”
“What if his hands don’t match the bruises on Brenda’s face?”
“The marks are too diffuse to be sure. Lin, I feel like the stupidest man on earth.”
He rolled the two girls—who should have been cruising the Auburn Mall, pricing earrings, buying clothes at Deb, comparing boyfriends—back into darkness. Then he turned to Brenda.
“Give me a cloth. I saw some stacked beside the sink. They even looked clean, which is sort of a miracle in this pigsty.”
“What are you—”
“Just give me a cloth. Better make it two. Wet them.”
“Do we have time to—”
“We’re going to make time.”
Linda watched silently as her husband carefully washed Brenda Perkins’s buttocks and the backs of her thighs. When he was done, he flung the dirty rags into the corner, thinking that if the Bowie brothers had been here, he would have stuffed one into Stewart’s mouth and the other into fucking Fernald’s.
He kissed Brenda on her cool brow and rolled her back into the refrigerated locker. He started to do the same with Coggins, then stopped. The Reverend’s face had been given only the most cursory of cleanings; there was still blood in his ears, his nostrils, and grimed into his brow.
“Linda, wet another cloth.”
“Honey, it’s been almost ten minutes. I love you for showing respect to the dead, but we’ve got the living to—”
“We may have something here. This wasn’t the same kind of beating. I can see that even without… wet a cloth.”
She made no further argument, only wet another cloth, wrung it out, and handed it to him. Then she watched as he cleansed the remaining blood from the dead man’s face, working gently but without the love he’d shown Brenda.
She had been no fan of Lester Coggins (who had once claimed on his weekly radio broadcast that kids who went to see Miley Cyrus were risking hell), but what Rusty was uncovering still hurt her heart. “My God, he looks like a scarecrow after a bunch of kids used rocks on it for target practice.”
“I told you. Not the same kind of beating. This wasn’t done with fists, or even feet.”
Linda pointed. “What’s that on his temple?”
Rusty didn’t answer. Above his mask, his eyes were bright with amazement. Something else, too: understanding, just starting to dawn.
“What is it, Eric? It looks like… I don’t know…
“You bet.” His mask bobbed as the mouth beneath it broke into a smile. Not happiness; satisfaction. And of the grimmest kind. “On his forehead, too. See? And his jaw. That one
“What sort of weapon leaves marks like that?”
“A baseball,” Rusty said, rolling the drawer shut. “Not an ordinary one, but one that was gold-plated? Yes. If swung with enough force, I think it could. I think it
He lowered his forehead to hers. Their masks bumped. He looked into her eyes.
“Jim Rennie has one. I saw it on his desk when I went to talk to him about the missing propane. I don’t know about the others, but I think we know where Lester Coggins died. And who killed him.”
12
After the roof collapsed, Julia couldn’t bear to watch anymore. “Come home with me,” Rose said. “The guest room is yours as long as you want it.”
“Thanks, but no. I need to be by myself now, Rosie. Well, you know… with Horace. I need to think.”
“Where will you stay? Will you be all right?”
“Yes.” Not knowing if she would be or not. Her mind seemed okay, thinking processes all in order, but she felt as if someone had given her emotions a big shot of Novocaine. “Maybe I’ll come by later.”
When Rosie was gone, walking up the other side of the street (and turning to give Julia a final troubled wave), Julia went back to the Prius, ushered Horace into the front seat, then got behind the wheel. She looked for Pete Freeman and Tony Guay and didn’t see them anywhere. Maybe Tony had taken Pete up to the hospital to get some salve for his arm. It was a miracle neither of them had been hurt worse. And if she hadn’t taken Horace with her when she drove out to see Cox, her dog would have been incinerated along with everything else.
When that thought came, she realized her emotions weren’t numb after all, but only hiding. A sound—a kind of keening—began to come from her. Horace pricked up his considerable ears and looked at her anxiously. She tried to stop and couldn’t.
Her father’s paper.
Her grandfather’s paper.
Her great-grandfather’s.
Ashes.
She drove down to West Street, and when she came to the abandoned parking lot behind the Globe, she pulled in. She turned off the engine, drew Horace to her, and wept against one furry, muscular shoulder for five minutes. To his credit, Horace bore this patiently.
When she was cried out, she felt better. Calmer. Perhaps it was the calmness of shock, but at least she could think again. And what she thought of was the one remaining bundle of papers in the trunk. She leaned past Horace (who gave her neck a companionable lick) and opened the glove compartment. It was jammed with rick- rack, but she thought somewhere… just possibly…
And like a gift from God, there it was. A little plastic box filled with Push Pins, rubber bands, thumbtacks, and
