Coven

crotch. “Haven’t I sacrificed enough?” “Your balls go to us,” the leader said. “The rest of you goes to the Mother.” Wade was lifted up and held over the pier’s edge. Behind him something rose from the water, an entity vast, black and immense. Wade could no more describe it than describe the notion of how the universe was made. It was the Mother. That’s all he knew, and all he needed to know. Now he would learn exactly what had happened to Professor Besser’s head. Wade screamed as his own head was completely encased by a huge, wet, black mouth. The girls fell to their knees in worship. “The Mother,” they chanted. “The Mother.” Wade’s head was bitten off. It was swallowed whole down a silken esophagus and eventually landed in a cavern, atop a mountain of heads. There were thousands, or even millions, of heads here, deep in the Mother’s belly. Soon the heads began to be digested in the squirming black stomach. Wade whooped as his consciousness dissolved, feminine enzymes reverting his psyche to wet pulp, then granules, then ash. The ashes of Wade St. John mixed with the ashes of the other men, and over time the ashes were spewed from some tight, miles high orifice, sifting out in a trail over sunlit fields and sweet smelling landscapes of new plowed soil. Moist, pretty things grew from that soil, the loveliest things, through the ashes of Wade’s soul. In other words, Wade was fertilizer.

—

CHAPTER 11

Lydia Prentiss was staring at the single Marlboro 100. It beckoned her, like lust. Rather symbolically, it stood on end.

“Sladder’s not the perp,” she said. “I’ve told you ten times.”

Chief White had put her up in an empty lab at the sciences center. Yesterday she’d made a breakdown of the agro site as fast as she could. Department of agriculture officers had swarmed in just as she finished. They’d sealed the site “pending investigation.”

“You know what I think?” White said. “You’re grabbin’ for shit.”

All Lydia wanted was her cigarette and some sleep. She didn’t want to argue. “Chief, just look at the plain facts.”

“The plain facts are that Sladder was packin’ an illegal gun!”

“Illegally carried, but legally owned. Wake up, Chief. Security guards are notorious for carrying pocket pieces like this.”

“And I suppose you know exactly what kind of gun it was.”

“Sure, a Raven Arms Model P25. Costs about eighty bucks. Don’t they teach your men anything in the academy? All I had to do was call State Handgun Records and ask. Sladder bought the piece, legally, in 1981 from a local gun shop. The guy’s got no rap sheet at all. He’s never even had a traffic ticket.”

“Neither did the Boston Fuckin’ Strangler. He was still a nut.”

“Sladder had forty years of steady employment; his only black marks were a few reprimands for booze. He won medals in World War II.”

“I don’t give a shit. He was a rummy who carried an illegal handgun. That’s good enough for me.”

“Fine, Chief. Think what you want.”

White rolled a King Edward cigar in his mouth. “Just give me your technical conclusions, Prentiss, not lip service.”

The cigarette would be good now, real good. “My conclusions are as follows. Two or more perpetrators entered the agro site shortly after the power failure, about midnight. The girl, Penelope, was with him; several girls on the hall said she often visited the site at odd hours, to see the horses. In the horse stalls, she and Sladder stumbled onto one of the perps, the one with the ax. Here, Sladder sustained a serious injury to his right arm. I believe his arm was completely severed, judging by the trajectory of the bloodfall.”

White was shaking his head. Lydia continued, “At this point, Sladder and the girl retreated to the stablemaster’s office. They managed to dress Sladder’s wound. He tried to call for help but the phone box had already been destroyed. Shortly thereafter, the perpetrator’s attack continued. Sladder responded by firing six shots from the .25 pistol. I recovered five bullets from the stable floor. The sixth bullet hit one of the perps at the far exit. There’s bloodfall of a different type to verify this.”

White was rubbing his brow now, still shaking his head.

“At this point Sladder and the girl attempted to escape via the front exit. Less than ten feet from the door, Sladder was murdered. The amount of blood on the floor makes this obvious.”

White could brew no longer. He…blew up. “Arms cut off! Murder! That’s the fucked uppest bunch of shit I ever heard! We don’t even know that the blood is Sladder’s! We don’t even know he was the one who fired the gun!”

“The large bleeds are all A positive, Sladder’s type according to his health insurance forms. As for who fired the gun, Sladder’s partials are all over the dead brass. I ID’d his prints from his print card from the security office, and I got comparison prints of the girl by dusting common areas of her dorm room. They both left prints on the fence that was cut down, on the utility shed door, on the flashlights. I got their prints on baseboards, Chief, and the lower edge of the stable door. These people were on the floor—they were hiding from something.”

White tapped his cigar, trying to calm down. “Okay, Prentiss. If Sladder was murdered, where’s his body?”

“The perpetrators removed it.”

“And the girl? I suppose she was murdered too.”

“Maybe, but I don’t think so. There’s none of her blood on the site. My guess is she was abducted.”

“Abducted,” White repeated. “Umm hmm.”

“It’s a setup, Chief. There’s no sign of their bodies. Their vehicles were removed from the property. The girl’s purse and Sladder’s wallet were left behind—deliberately.”

“Why? Why go to all that trouble?”

“To keep us off track. They want to convince you that Sladder was the perp instead of the victim, and it looks like they’re doing a pretty good job. Fortunately, though, the real perps were careless. They took the gun but not the empty brass. They didn’t cover their footprints very well. They left ridge smears on the wallet and purse, proving that those objects were touched, wiped down, and replaced.”

White had inadvertently snapped his King Edward. “And you say Sladder’s arm was cut off? Where’d you come up with shit like that?”

“The fall patterns in the stable are literally textbook perfect.” She laid out snapshots of Sladder’s fall, then slid an opened book across the desk. The book was titled The Investigator’s Guide to Bloodfall: Drop Spread Pattern Analysis. The picture she opened to (labeled “Ambulatory dismemberment: right arm”) was almost identical to Lydia’s Polaroids. “See? Sladder’s fall is the same. His right prints are on the pitchfork in the tool stall; that’s what he was reaching for when the perp dropped the ax. He didn’t have time to get his piece out. You can even see the point angles exactly where he changed direction. And from this point on, Sladder stops leaving right hand prints.”

“I’m supposed to believe a sixty five year old rummy tied off his own stump without going into shock?”

“Guys slap tourniquets on themselves all the time. Humans do amazing things in life threatening situations. The girl probably helped him. Besides, Sladder was a marine infantry medic in the war.”

“So where’s the arm?” White asked.

“Probably buried in the woods, with the rest of him.”

“And where’s the car?”

“Probably buried under brush twenty miles away. The girl’s ZX, too.”

White let some time pass to cool off. He picked through her latent photos. “How the hell’d you get prints this clean? Most of the stables are whitewashed or bare wood.”

“Bare wood’s easy,” she said, unenthused. “I fumed the logical areas with iodine sulfate. The tougher ones I