Cage of Night (15 page)

CHAPTER ELEVEN

I have no idea where I drove for the next hour and a half.

Sometimes I was in town, sometimes I was on county roads.

A couple of times, I even drove by the police station.

—I want to report a murder. I can even tell you who the murderer is.

—Oh, you can, can you?

—Yes, sir, it's one of your own officers. Garrett.

—One of our own officers, eh? Well, now, isn't that interesting? You're accusing one of my own men of murder?

That's how the cops would react about Garrett.

They wouldn't believe me, they wouldn't
want
to believe me.

But Garrett wasn't my concern. Cindy was.

Even if she'd done nothing more than watch, she would also be charged with murder.

There was no way I could go to the police.

I stopped at an all-night gas station, its white tiles and bright lights making it look like a huge alien space craft that had just landed in the middle of the rolling dark prairie.

I went in the john and tried to puke.

I couldn't.

I went back to my car and drove away.

And then I made a U-turn on the empty highway and drove right back.

This time, I didn't have any trouble puking at all.

I ate.

That was the funny thing.

After all the terror, and all the puking, I was suddenly, almost giddily hungry.

I pulled into a truck stop and sat at a counter with several grizzled drivers popping Benzedrine and eyeing the two hookers who were working this particular stop tonight. These were hookers who specialized in truck stops and truck drivers.

They were both pudgy, both barely out of their teen years, and both badly bleached blondes. One of them had a right eye that strayed and almost no breasts at all. I couldn't help it, I felt sorry for her. Being a hooker was a tough life, made even worse with a queer eye and a flat chest.

I ate six pancakes, two orders of hash browns, and a cheese omelet.

I also managed to listen to around twenty-five country western songs, which is no easy task, let me tell you.

I decided to top off my meal with a slice of apple pie and a fourth cup of coffee.

That was a mistake.

Two bites into the pie, I clamped my hand over my mouth and raced to the bathroom.

A couple of hairy truck drivers standing at the urinal watched me dive for a stall.

When I came out, and went to the sink to wash my face and hands, they were still at the urinal, passing a joint back and forth.

"You better learn to hold your liquor a little better," one of them said solemnly. "You ain't gonna get no pussy with puke all over your shirt."

"Thanks for the advice," I said.

When I got home, around two, Josh sat at the kitchen table nursing a Pepsi and eating a donut. The kitchen smelled of coffee and spices.

"How you doing?"

"Pretty good," I said. "Tired, I guess. I went to the late show out at the Cineplex and then I just drove around."

"What'd you see?'

"Oh, that new Kevin Costner movie."

"Any good?"

I shrugged. "Nothing special."

I yawned, exhausted.

"Well, I'm going to head up to bed."

"I'll be up in a little bit," Josh said.

Then I made my mistake.

I stood up from the table and took my jacket off.

I didn't think anything of it until I saw Josh's face harden, and a kind of panic come into his eyes. You didn't see Josh panic very often.

"Wow. Are you all right?"

I wore a yellow long-sleeved button-down shirt.

Blood was splotched and splattered not only all over the chest and stomach of the shirt, but also on the sleeves.

I remembered slipping in blood, and falling into the dead woman.

I had picked up a lot of blood.

"I'm fine," I said.

"Where the hell'd you get all that blood?"

"There was an accident on the highway. I stopped to help somebody."

He knew I was lying.

But what else could I do?

"She bled a lot but she didn't get hurt too bad. The woman in the accident, I mean."

He just kept staring at the blood on my chest and arms.

"I'll see you in the morning," I said.

"Yeah," he said, and then he looked at me long and hard and said, "You want to talk about it, brother?"

"There's nothing to talk about, Josh. There was an accident on the highway and this woman was hurt and bleeding and I helped her and I got some of her blood on me. No big deal."

"Right," he said. "No big deal."

I went up to bed.

Richard Mitchell, KNAX-TV:

"The prisoner has been under a suicide watch for the last month. Round the clock surveillance, including video cameras in his cell. Some of our viewers may remember that a few years ago, a prisoner in Nebraska tried to hang himself in his cell the day before the execution. He was almost dead but the warden insisted that doctors revive him. The next day, the prisoner was executed as scheduled."

Tape 34-D, October 31. Interview between Attorney Risa Wiggins and her client in the Clark County Jail

A: You say the alien made you do it. I guess you'll have to explain that to me.

C: The chant.

A: The chant?

C: In my head. Over and over. Telling me what to do. I tried everything I could to get rid of it but nothing worked. Finally, I realized the only thing I could do was do what the alien told me—and then the chanting would stop.

From a Police Report-September 24,1903

The thing was, he didn't put up any resistance at all. I found him in a deserted barn on the edge of town. Somebody had come running to the station house to tell me that something terrible was going on there.

His name is Abner. He works as a clerk over at First Bank. Very mild-mannered.

When I got there, I found him sitting there in the middle of the barn. He had a lantern nearby and a completely naked dead woman stretched across his lap. This one, it was her face he mostly mutilated. The eyes were dug out, of course.

He was skinning her.

I drew my service revolver and walked over to him and told him to put down the mule knife he was using to skin her.

He put the knife down, the naked woman with most of her skin stripped off still on his lap, and he said, "I didn't want to kill any of them, officer. I really didn't."

Then he started telling me about this well up by one of the line shacks the electric company uses. He said there was some kind of Martian or something in the well and that it was the Martian who was making him kill all these women.

All I could think of was when that meteor crashed out there several years back. Bunch of town kids started the story that there were Martians inside the meteor—like in some story by H. G. Wells, they said—and that the Martians were going to take over the entire planet.

There was a lot of fuss when that rumor started, and even some adults, who should've known better, started to believe it.

This Abner Fenton was apparently one of the adults who believed it.

When I told him it was time to put the handcuffs on him, he just nodded to the dead woman's right arm and said, "I'm almost finished with her arm. Couldn't I just have a few more minutes?"

I picked up the knife and put my gun on him and told him to set the woman on the floor and stand up.

He never gave me any more trouble the rest of the night.

CHAPTER TWELVE

By morning, Mrs. Swenson's body had been discovered, and I quickly got the feeling that our little town was never going to be the same again.

In big cities, even the most heinous of murders are quickly forgotten, unless one of the killers or victims is famous.

But a small town is like a family, and when one of your own is murdered, the death becomes very personal.

Especially given the way that Mae Swenson was butchered.

Downtown talk was of nothing else. The women looked scared, the men looked angry.

A small group of hunters over at Al's Diner talked about getting a posse together and hunting down the killer in the woods, where they were sure he was hiding.

They just couldn't believe that anybody from our town could murder somebody this way.

All kinds of rumors and theories were floated.

Because we live within fifty miles of a prison, there was talk that a multiple-murderer had escaped and killed Mrs. Swenson. According to this story, the killer was black. Of course.

Another rumor had it that a biker gang did it. The town had always hated this gang, and pretty much forced it to keep to a single tavern down by the railroad spur. I guess the Chief actually did ride out to the old quonset huts where the bikers lived—and mysteriously collected unemployment checks—and ask them a lot of hard questions.

Finally, and inevitably, there was the rumor about Mr. Proctor. He was pushing fifty now, and quieter than ever, and unmarried as ever. He wrote how-to books for a living and lived alone in a two-story frame house that he'd fixed up by himself. Everybody had long assumed he was gay, and as we all know gay people just can't wait to take a knife to straights like us, and so whenever anything notably terrible happened in town, a lot of people looked to Mr. Proctor.

I'm told that the Chief also paid Mr. Proctor a visit very soon after one of the farm hands discovered Mae Swenson's body.

The department store became another gathering place for yarn-spinners. If the clerks weren't huddling together to tell campfire tales, the clerks and the customers were huddling together. The customers told better stories, especially those who'd had a few drinks. One of them even suggested that eighty-one year old Mae had had a boyfriend—"one of them male strippers from what I hear"—who had killed her because she was breaking up with him.

The horror of the bloody murder lasted most of the morning. But just after lunch, the horror having been dulled somewhat by now, talk turned to Mae Swenson's fabled and fabulous treasure—all that loot, all those diamonds somewhere in her house.

I was wondering about the loot myself.

Josh stopped in around two-thirty that afternoon.

"You hear there's a posse combing the woods?"

"I wonder if the Chief knows."

"He's part of it."

"What're they looking for?"

"Nobody's saying."

He paused a moment and said, "You get off at five?"

"Uh-huh."

"I'll meet you at the front door."

"Where we going?"

He stared at me a long and somber time. "I think we need to talk a little bit about last night."

"The blood?"

"Yeah. The blood."

I looked around the empty shoe department. I wanted to make sure that nobody was within hearing distance.

"I didn't kill her, Josh."

"Maybe not. But I have a feeling you know something about it."

"That's different from killing her."

"Not necessarily. You ever hear of 'accessory after the fact?'"

I forced a smile. "You been watching Court TV again?"

"Yeah. I had to do a paper on it. They spent a whole half hour talking about this guy who'd been charged as 'an accessory after that fact.' He got his ass nailed."

"How bad?"

"Ten to fifteen years."

"Wow."

"Something you should think about, brother."

"I'll see you at five."

But right before five Josh called.

"Coach Beaumont's on the rag again. He doesn't think our practices have been going all that well. So he's making us stay till seven."

"We can talk tonight."

"I'm scared for you, Spence. I really am."

And the way his voice quavered when he said it, I could tell that he really was.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Dad said, "I hear there's this nephew."

Mom said, "Nephew?"

We were at the dinner table.

"A nephew who can't hold a job, and who's been in trouble with the law, and who already owed her a lot of money anyway."

"Oh," Mom said, "I heard that one, too. Except it was a niece."

"A niece?"

"Yeah. According to Mrs. Finch there was a niece who's a wet T-shirt gal over in Muscatine."

"What's a wet T-shirt gal?"

"You know, goes around to all these taverns where they have wet T-shirt nights, and always wins first prize. But she was always bumming money off Mae, and last night Mae said no, and so the niece killed her."

"The niece," said Dad, "makes a better story than the nephew."

"She sure does," Mom smiled. "Especially the part about the wet T-shirt contests." Then she looked sad. "Poor Mae. Old woman out there all alone, and somebody does something like this to her."

"I'm glad we've got the death penalty back."

To me, Mom said, "I never used to agree with your dad about the death penalty, remember?"

"Uh-huh."

"But now I do. There's some things that people do that are so terrible there's only one way to punish them." She looked sad again. "And this is one of them."

Fifteen minutes later, I was in the upstairs john, brushing my teeth and combing my hair, and getting ready to go out for the evening.

Not that I had any idea where I was going. But I was restless. I just kept seeing poor Mae there on the bed. There weren't any words for what Garrett had done to her.

I heard the phone ring but I let Mom get it. Most of the calls were for her and Josh.

I was just walking to my room when Mom called up the stairs. "For you." Beat. "Cindy Brasher."

A great joy and a great anger and a great panic came over me. I was already trying to contrive a personality for the phone.

Debonair? Not likely for somebody like me.

Glad to hear from her? No, that would sound like I'd eat up any crumbs she was willing to scatter on the ground.

Ominous—hinting that I knew about last night? No; I didn't want to sound like a blackmailer.

I picked up the receiver in my room.

"Hi, Spence."

"Hi."

"Is this a bad time? I mean, are you busy?"

"Not especially. Just getting ready to go out."

"Oh, should I call you back some other time?"

"This is fine."

My heart was threatening to tear out of my chest, like that monster in
Alien
that comes bursting out.

"I wondered if you'd talk to me."

"I thought I
was
talking to you."

"I mean in person."

"Oh."

"I'd really appreciate it."

"I don't know, Cindy."

"I'm really sorry for the way I treated you."

"Yeah, I'll bet."

"There were things going on, Spence—things I couldn't talk about till now."

I decided to have a little mean fun.

"Boy, that was terrible about Mrs. Swenson, wasn't it?" Long pause. "I really need to see you, Spence. Tonight."

"What time?" It felt great to have control of a situation that involved Cindy.

"An hour from now."

"Where?"

"Old Franklin school. The one that burned down?"

"Why there?"

"Somebody's following me, Spence. It's not too far from my house. I can slip out the back way and he won't see me go."

Some more mean fun.

"You sound like you're in trouble, Cindy."

"I don't want to talk on the phone, Spence."

"All right."

"I really appreciate this."

"I'm not going to let you use me again, Cindy."

"I don't blame you for being angry."

"What's Garrett going to think about you seeing me?"

Long pause again. "He's the one who's following me."

"Why?"

"I'll tell you when I see you."

"An hour?"

"An hour. And—thanks, Spence."

An hour from now I was going to see Cindy Brasher again. I didn't even give a damn about the murder anymore. All I could think of was Cindy.

All I could think about was what it would be like to hold her again, and have her whisper those things I carried around with me like fragments of a half-forgotten song.