Coven (8 page)

Peerce took her out, not offering to help
carry the field kits. Most of the stables were open faced. She
noticed some animals in the field, dead. Their heads all seemed to
point toward the woods. From the first stable she heard the
buzzing. Then she saw.

Peerce led her from building to building,
from bad to worse. Though the animals were token in number, they
were all dead. Lydia had seen her share of 81s in D.C.; she was
used to viewing dead men. But this was queerly different. Cows and
pigs had always struck her as harmless, even comical. Here they
were grotesque, swollen masses of meat. The buzzing, of course,
came from blankets of flies, oblivious in their feast.

Poisoned,
she concluded.
But
why?
And what did they want
her
to do? Take latent
hoof prints? She was an evidence tech, not a
toxicologist.

“
In here,” Peerce said. Was
he amused by her uneasiness? He took her into the horse stable,
where each stall housed a dead, gas bloated horse. Channels of
white foam lay in their opened mouths, and their faces moved—masks
of flies shifting grainily like an optical illusion. Lydia switched
on her Streamlight. Clots of flies filled the horses’ eye sockets.
Maggots shimmered.

“
Serious enough for ya?”
Peerce commented.

Asshole.
She gulped. “How well did you look over these
stables?”

“
Like a fine tooth
comb. Found nothin’.”

“
Nothing? There’s blood on
the floor, Peerce.”

“
What blood? I don’t see no
blood.”

“
Bend over and look down,
Sherlock.” She pointed to the darkened streaks along the run. “What
do you call that? Cherry smash?”

Peerce lost his southern snideness. “Thought
it was horsepiss.”

“
Yeah, horsepiss. Look out,
and watch where you walk!” She followed the blood line with her SL
beam. It ended at some larger splashes by a utility stall. A
spatter of “fall” dotted the wall in an arch; what she knew about
bloodfall trajectory told her the victim must’ve been moving
away
, not forward.
Drop-configuration like this was rare. The large bleed at her feet
bothered her most of all. A bleed this big in conjunction with this
fall pattern indicated an excruciating wound. At D.C. they’d once
walked into a basement where two crack taxis had been murdered.
They’d found the men in a pile of neatly stacked pieces. Axes had
been used.

Her eyes followed another
line up. The halfboard on the stall had a gouge in it, what a tech
would call strike impactation. More blood stained the gouge.
Shit,
she thought. Had
the victim been reaching for the pitchforks in the stall?
Yes. It’s too perfect.
She peered over and looked down. More blood.

The impactation looked good, a good strike.
She’d need no toolmarks workup to tell her this was an ax, and a
big one. A big blade with an unusually flat cutting edge. But there
had to be more.

Follow back,
she thought. “Look at the fall.”

“
Huh?”

“
The bloodfall. The drop
points change direction here, a 180 degree shift. They don’t
lead forward, they lead back.”

Peerce didn’t know what she was talking
about. Lydia followed the line. “Jesus,” Peerce observed. “Fucker
lost a lot of blood.”

“
Don’t walk in it!” Lydia
yelled. “Look, Peerce, this place is too small for both of us. Do
me a favor and—”

Peerce didn’t need to be told. He sputtered
and went back to the office, bitterly chewing a wad of tobacco.

Now we’re in
business.
She aimed the SL back on the
blood. It went about fifteen feet to the stable charge’s office.
The phone hung off the hook. A larger splash had coagulated on the
floor. Lydia crouched down, thinking. She closed her eyes and tried
to see the victim. Despite the wound, he’d made it back
here.

Why?
To use the phone.

What then? He hadn’t died here. Not enough
blood.

So he left.
He’d dressed his wound and he’d left.

Now where?
Where would I go if I’d just been severely cut by
an ax wielding maniac near the stable entrance?

The stable exit, dumb ass.

But what about the
attacker, the axman? He’d still be in the aisle.
Cut this bad, did the victim actually have the
balls to go back out and fight?

Weapons.

Maybe he was
strapped.
If the victim was Sladder, maybe
he had a gun. Some guards carried them, some didn’t. The security
office would know; they had sign out sheets. The suspicion
needled her.

She went back out,
imagining herself in great pain. She fixed her SL beam, and there
they were, like gold ingots at the baseboard.
Bingo!
she thought. There were six of
them. .25s, maybe .32s. He popped six caps at the axman.
Okay, okay.
What
then?

Escape.

She followed away from the
empty cartridges. Where did he go now? She pictured a frantic,
bleeding man stumbling along.
Come on,
come on. Show me.

The last swing door before
the exit.
Bingo!
she thought again, but it was a pale thought. She’d been
rooting for the bleeding man, for nothing. This was as far as he’d
gotten.

Her SL beam frozen down,
Lydia stared quietly.
Jesus.
The bloodstain lay wall to wall.
Footprints led out of it like stick on dance steps. It was
obvious. The victim had been butchered.

The blood was here, all over the place. So
where was the body?

««—»»

“
How could you miss
bloodstains on the fucking floor?” White was bellowing at Peerce
when Lydia came back in.

“
It’s dark in there, Chief.
Without no lights, it’s hard to—”

“
Shit, Peerce! She’s makin’
us look like
fools
!”

“
Well, sir, I—”

“
Shut up! What else that
stuck up priss find that you missed?”

“
Plenty,” Lydia said at the
door.
Stuck up priss?
“The weapon was probably an ax with an unusually
long, flat blade. I got several impactations that look the same.
The back fence was cut with it, and so was the entrance door and
the phone lines. One thing I’m sure of, though. Someone died in
there.”

“
How do you know someone
died?” White protested.

“
I followed the bloodfall.
No one could lose as much blood as I found at the exit and live.
Only problem is there’s no body.”

White conjectured this and scoffed. “I don’t
believe someone was murdered.”

“
You just don’t want to
believe that someone was murdered in your juris.”

White glared. “You got a lot of nerve,
girl.”

“
Just being honest, Chief.
Question. Was Sladder packing?”

“
No,” White said. “Only
supervisors carry guns. Why?”

“
I also found six spent
casings. Remington .25s.”

“
Shit!” White’s fist
slammed the desk. “What the fuck’s my campus turned
into?”

A slaughterhouse,
Lydia thought, almost with a smile. But the smile
drained when she remembered the blood. She wished for her daily
Marlboro. “I can stand here and speculate all day, Chief. But it’d
just be a waste of time.”

White’s voice lost its edge. An unsolved
murder could make the papers, smear the school, get him fired. “I
can’t stall this, Prentiss. This shit’s gotta be solved, and I mean
by us, not some outside agency. We’ll be closed out once the state
gets here.”

“
State? The agro site’s
part of the campus. It’s ours.”

“
No, it ain’t, not really.
All them animals are licensed through the state department of
agriculture. Health inspectors will be wantin’ to know if some
disease killed the animals. We’ll be up to our butts in state by
late afternoon.”

Late afternoon?
“That’s no time for me to do a workup,” Lydia
complained. “I’ll have to get started right now. I need you to get
the power back on, I need lights to sweep for prints. And I’ll need
cold storage, I’ll need lab space, I’ll need—”

“
I’ll get you everything
you need,” White interrupted. “You say you can do this kind of
shit, then get to it. I’m puttin’ my trust in you, Prentiss, but
hear this. If you fuck up and make me look like a damn fool, I’ll
make sure you’re checkin’ parking meters for the next twenty years.
You got that?”

“
I’m touched by your
confidence,” Lydia said.

—

CHAPTER
7

Jervis knew he’d fooled no one last night at
the inn. Pretending to have put Sarah behind him was an act he’d
never pull off, like a corpse pretending not to be dead. Wade had
seen right through him; Tom too, probably.

The bar was called Andre’s, a redneck hole
in the wall ten miles off campus. A Deep South chant played softly
from the juke, swamp guitar and a tale of broken promises and
broken hearts. A mob of bikers stood around a pool table throwing
back shots and making frequent use of scatological verbs.

Jervis waited in a darkened
booth. The equal darkness of his mind sedated him.
Like a corpse pretending not to be dead,
he thought again. But what would summon such an
image? He ordered three Heinekens from a chubby, lank haired
blonde whose frayed cutoffs showed the bottoms of her cheeks. “You
drinkin’ these all by yourself, cutie?” she asked.

“
Just two of them. I’m
expecting someone.”

Her belly button peeked from a fleshy gap.
“You all right?”

“
I’m fine,” he lied. He
tipped her a fin.

“
Gee, thanks,
cutie.”

“
Don’t mention it.”
Just leave me alone.

Eventually his guest arrived, a sleazy
shadow sliding into the booth. Slim fingers gripped a clean manila
envelope.

“
Good evening, Mr. Czanek,”
Jervis said.

“
Good evening, Mr. Smith.
Or is it Jones?”

Jervis slid him a beer. “It’s Tull. Jethro
Tull.”

“
Of course. My apologies.”
Czanek grinned through a con man’s visage, a constant easy smile
and long hair pushed greasily off his brow. It was the smile,
Jervis realized, that told the genuineness of the man. Czanek was a
happy go lucky denizen. He lived with the sleaze and
despair that hid behind the world, yet smiled, somehow, in honest
happiness.

“
Got a lot of poop on your
man,” he said. “It’s amazing what you can learn from a tag
number.”

Jervis cringed to damp a sudden excitement.
This was either fast work or sloppy. “At a hundred fifty a day I
figured you’d milk me for a week at least. That’s what private
dicks do, isn’t it?”

“
Only on divorce jobs where
the woman’s a looker,” Czanek said. “I don’t take clients for a
ride. It’s bad for business.”

Some business.
Jervis lit a Carlton. “Speaking of
business…”

Czanek’s voice was soft yet rough, perhaps
by design. “Your man’s full name is Wilhelm Karl von Heinrich. His
father’s a developer from West Germany, very, very rich. The
Germans are investing tons of cash in the south coast, like the
Japanese in California.”

“
Wilhelm Karl von
Heinrich,” Jervis muttered.

“
The kid’s twenty six
years old. Got a degree from University of Bamberg, business. He’s
an instant in for his pop.”

“
You got a
picture?”

Czanek lay out a
stockholder’s brochure. Dozens of neat faces smiled up from a
glossy sheet of corporate members. One face was circled in red
marker, and read “Wilhelm Karl von Heinrich,” like letters on a
gravestone.
This man is my epitaph,
Jervis thought.

He’d glimpsed Wilhelm only once, at a
distance, getting out of his white custom van. Now, though,
Wilhelm’s face smiled up in beyond belief handsomeness. Jervis
felt very sick all of a sudden. The face looked like something on a
GQ cover: square jaw, bright blue eyes, short blond, very Aryan
hair, perfect teeth.

“
Pretty boy, huh, Mr.
Tull?”

“
Don’t rub it in, Mr.
Czanek.”

“
Sorry. Here’s a Polaroid I
snapped this morning when he left for the gym.”

This was worse. Lover boy
in the parking lot. Blazing white shorts and sleeveless
T shirt with the words “Deutschland über Alles.” His legs
looked like shellacked oak pillars. Muscles gleamed in
too perfect symmetry.
Lots
of muscles.

“
He’s six-two, according to
his license, a hundred eighty five pounds, and I don’t see any
fat. In real life, he looks bigger.”

Jervis groaned.

“
He’s renting a place just
out of town, to be close to the girl.” Jervis appreciated Czanek’s
courtesy. He never referred to Sarah by name. It was always “the
girl.” Jervis supposed it was a trait of Czanek’s profession to
depersonify a lost love. It made it less embarrassing.