Dead Mann Walking

I checked the news pages, hoping to jog my memory. Everyone had an article on the poor dead hakkers. An editorial suggested it should be legalized as a sport, so safety regulations could be standardized.

Nothing rang a bell, so I tried Frank Boyle. Other than today’s reports on the body, there wasn’t much about his afterlife. Never is. Even the Web, for all its porn and piano-playing cats, doesn’t care much about chakz. It wasn’t until I dug deeper, moved back a few years to when he was among the living, that I got some decent hits.

Frank Fulton-Boyle had been an architect, and pretty involved in the community. No shocker, given what I saw at Bedland. Even zombies are creatures of habit. The tall guy I’d seen next to him in the photo was Kendrick Boyle-Fulton. I guess they did the name-swap thing, like John Lennon Ono and Yoko Ono Lennon. I didn’t find anything about the marital disputes Boyle mentioned, but I’d need a police database for that. Not likely, given my loving relationship with Booth.

Kendrick’s murder made a big splash, though. There was even some national coverage. Domestic abuse among gay couples was a curiosity at the time, so the mass media, like a god with ADD, trained its eye on it until the next bleeding lead came along.

I also found a memorial Facebook page. Judging from the date, it was set up shortly after Boyle’s conviction. Funny thing: It was dedicated to Kendrick and Frank. An awful lot of their close friends would not accept that Frank could beat anyone to death.

One of the FB albums had a shot of their adopted son, Duncan, at the funeral, in black suit and tie. Gray faced with mourning, he looked even more like Ashby. A comment from a neighbor said he was to return to Russia, to live with an aunt in Kaliningrad. I thought about shooting him an e-mail, but I could always do that later, if I had a good reason. Until then, why ruin his day?

Couldn’t find a thing about Boyle’s postmortem exoneration, but that wasn’t unusual. No surprise his loving pals didn’t get back in touch, either. Chakz don’t fit back into their former neighborhoods.

I don’t know what I was looking for, but reading about the murder made me antsy. Different sexual preference, different job, and Lenore and I hadn’t had any children, but the beating death, the wrongful conviction cut close to home. Electric-syrup time. Nice and sticky.

I slapped my brain around until it worked its way back to Colin Wilson. A few nanoseconds after I typed his name, I had what we called back in homicide a son-of-a-bitch moment. The first record that popped up was an article from the Fort Hammer Ledger, December 13, 2008, detailing Colin Wilson’s conviction for the “bludgeoning death” of his wife, Cathy.

Golf club. History of domestic violence.

Like I said, son of a bitch.

I could hear Misty saying that the fact that I’d gotten all freaked out about Wilson in the first place could be part of the universe’s plan. Me, I knew my brain just gets stuck on things. I still wasn’t convinced the fact that the same choppers were used meant anything more than a freelance cleanup service. I had to back up a little before I laid one coincidence on top of another.

Could there be more?

Despite the ferals and the hakkers, there are lots of chakz. No one’s counted, probably out of embarrassment, but a big chunk are from the early days, when everyone and his uncle was giddily yanking some favorite relative back from beyond the veil, like Tommy at the morgue. So we weren’t all criminals.

Even so, take any two chakz and the odds aren’t crazy that they were both exonerated for some kind of murder, since murder is usually what gets you executed in the first place. Figuring that eighty percent of victims know their killer, pick any two murder convictions at random, and how hard would it be to draw two who’d offed their significant others?

It’s not fifty-fifty, more like getting a full house—unlikely, but not impossible.

I typed in a search string for “murder AND beating AND spouse AND executed” and got 4.8 million hits. Figured.

But that’s convictions. I had a combo here—two people exonerated for killing their spouses. Adding “exonerated” brought it down to under a million. I tried adding “brought back from dead” and “ripped” and “RAR” but got zilch. Again, for that kind of info, I’d need a police database.

Still, it had to be rare. Hiring an attorney, getting a retrial, finding someone to pay for additional DNA testing cost time and money. If the person closest to you in the world is dead, and everyone else is convinced you did it, who exactly is going to spend that time and money?

Oh, it happens. I don’t know how it worked for Wilson, but Boyle said his father paid for retesting the DNA. For me it was dumb luck, some police brutality, and a DA just starting out. I hear he was fired right after they brought me back.

Wait a minute. There weren’t two; there were three, and only one of us still had his head bone connected to his neck bone: me. What were the odds of that? Could it mean I was next on the hit parade?

Son of a bitch.

I sat there cursing like a bagman until the clock wound down and the computer disconnected. Just as well— people were starting to stare. I shoved my hat on and made for the door, rubbing my neck and wincing the whole way.

13

I was still rubbing my neck when I got back to the office, trying my damnedest to think things through without dwelling on the obvious.

“Cathy, Kendrick, Lenore. Why spouse killers? Why the head?”

Ashby kept quiet the whole time I was giving Misty the short version, but the second I mentioned Kendrick, he started in with that laugh and wouldn’t stop.

“Heh-heh-heh.”

I glared at him a second, then went back to pacing. “What do they do with them? Do they need them for something?”

“Heh-heh-heh.”

Great. I was making him nervous; he was making me nervous. What a wacky pair.

“Quiet, Ashby! Are they making fucking lamps out of them?”

Misty stood between us. Apparently I looked pretty angry. “Hess, maybe you shouldn’t talk about this in front of . . .”

“Heh-heh-heh-heh.”

I was in no shape to listen to reason. I wasn’t even interested in trying. “I know, I know! But I have to. I’ve got to figure this out. Do they collect them? Is it a cult?”

“Heh-heh-heh.”

“Kid, could you keep it down? Please? It’s my neck we’re talking about.”

“Can’t help it, can’t help it. Heh-heh-heh-heh-heh.”

“Could you please just shut the fuck . . .”

Before I realized it, I’d raised my fist, ready to punch the wall. Misty grabbed my hand and repeated, “He can’t help it.”

I shrugged off her hand. “Shut up,” I said. But I said it slowly, deliberately. “Shut up. Shut up.”

“Calm down!”

“I am calm!” I shouted. I shivered and gave her a smile. “Sorry, Mist. I’m not talking to you or the kid. I’m talking shut up in general. As in, what if they’re taking the heads as a way to shut them up?”

“Heads can’t talk by themselves, Hess. They . . . die.”

“We don’t know that. ChemBet and the government have too many reasons to lie about it. D-capping sounds quick and humane. What if it just makes the ferals less dangerous for shipping? The masses wouldn’t want to hear that crushing or roasting was the only way to really end it.”