Ghouls (16 page)

In the meantime, at 3:00
p.m.,
Kurt Morris put on his uniform and drove directly to the city of Forestville, where he received the preliminary evidence report at the criminalistics facility. Then he returned to Tylersville to relieve Higgins of his shift.

A strange scene awaited him when he arrived at Belleau Wood. County police cars crowded both shoulders of the road. Radio noise filled the air, empty distant voices merged with static. Bruised colors lurked in the sky, an unbroken swath of very low clouds and the promise of more rain very soon. Bard was standing by the open gate, staring at a phone pole on the other side of the road. He stood perfectly still, like an artifact in a museum. Kurt was just a few feet away when Bard finally broke his gaze and noticed him.

The report drooped in Kurt’s hand when he held it out. “How’s the search? Found anything?”

“Don’t make me laugh,” Bard said. He took the report and riffled through it, frowning. “How am I supposed to understand this shit? I’m a police chief, not a medical dictionary. What did the M.E. say?”

“The M.E. hasn’t looked at anything yet; this report’s just a preliminary. But one of the evidence technicians told me that Swaggert’s hand was
bitten
off.”

“Bitten? Fuck. What about
Drucker’s
arm? Don’t tell me that was bitten off, too.”

“No, no it wasn’t. It was pulled off.”

Bard’s face seemed to stretch like rubber.

Kurt continued. “He also said that the incisor marks on Swaggert’s hand are probably the same as the bite mark on
Drucker’s
arm. But he’s got no idea what kind of animal did it.”

“Figures… What about prints? What about the coffin? There must’ve been prints on the fucking coffin.”

“Sure,” Kurt said. “Lots of prints. Pallbearers, funeral staff, the backhoe crew. It’ll take some time to sort them out and see what’s left over. The odd smudges are what get me.”

“Odd smudges?”

“It’s all in the report,” Kurt reminded him. “‘Odd smudges.’ The tech said he’s never seen anything like it on lacquered wood before. Could be a reaction to condensation and direct sunlight, but he doubts it. The coffin wasn’t there long enough.”

“Those
dickbrains
,” Bard said. “They’re probably just old
latents
.”

“Nope.”

“What do you mean nope?”

“The tech said they weren’t old
latents
; I asked him. And he doesn’t think they’re glove prints, either. We’ll just have to give them time.”

Bard uttered an unbecoming remark and scanned again through the report. Kurt looked questioningly into the woods. He caught movement in his direct line of vision—a series of gray blurs which seemed to hover between the trees; they were barely moving if at all. In a moment Kurt realized that the blurs were county police officers searching the woods.

“So I guess we can all use this report to wipe our dicks with,” Bard said with lowering disgust. “A fucking sheaf of shit. It tells us nothing.”

“Well, like I said, it’s not official till the M.E. has a look. But nine times out of ten—”

“Yeah, yeah.”

Now the blurs seemed to be congregating, their shapes merged together as a shadowed, gray mass.

A voice cracked out of the woods like a pistol shot. “Chief Bard! Over here!”

“They’ve found something,” Bard muttered. “Come on.”

Kurt followed Bard about ten yards down the access road. Then they turned and marched directly into the forest, wending a long, irregular path through the trees. Gray shirts and faces turned as they approached. The search assignment formed a rough circle around a red-haired, red-mustached officer who knelt before a bare spot on the ground. Behind him stood Lieutenant D. Choate, the county F.O.D., a lean, melancholic figure with graying short hair. His shirt was white, not gray, and he wore a hat with gold gilding on the brim, while the others wore no hats at all. He looked down as if viewing something long dead.

“What is it?” Bard asked, shouldering in.

Choate handed Bard a plastic envelope sealed with yellow evidence tape. Inside was a black plastic cylinder an inch wide, with a silver knob on it.

Bard looked at it crookedly. “A fucking speed loader.” Then, to Kurt: “Did Swaggert use speed loaders?”

Kurt answered with a dejected nod. “I’m not sure what brand, but he did use them. He was always complaining about the release. Said it’d probably get him killed someday.”

“Maybe it did.”

“And, Chief,” Choate said, pointing down. “Dead brass.”

“How many?” Kurt asked.

“Six.”

Kurt looked down. By the red-haired man’s right foot were six empty pistol cartridges. The red-haired man (R. Elliot TSD, according to his poorly aligned name tag) picked up one of the cartridges very carefully with forceps and passed it to Bard.

“Plus P’s,” Elliot said.

Then Choate: “Is that the kind of ammo Swaggert loaded?”

Both Kurt and Bard squinted at the silver casing. On the flanged end, stamped in tiny letters around the dented cap, they saw: …S&W…38SPL + P.

“Yeah,” Bard answered. “These are his loads, for sure.
Semijacketed
hollow points. We all carry them.”

The search team exchanged vapid looks and silence. Someone coughed. Elliot took the forceps from Bard, then one by one dropped each cartridge into a separate plastic envelope. He said, “It’s about fifty yards from here to the spot where the hand was found.”

“And we have to assume,” said the lieutenant, “that Officer Swaggert was moving
into
the woods.”

“Swaggert was right-handed,” Kurt said.

The lieutenant adjusted his hat. “Of course. And it was his right hand that was found in the road.”

“Then unless someone jerked it from him,” Bard edged in, “Swaggert’s piece
has
to be somewhere between here and the road. It fucking
has
to be.”

“Line up” came the lieutenant’s next order. “I want it tight, shoulder to shoulder. We’ll find this thing or else.”

Now the search had direction. The men formed a wall of gray, standing so close that the sides of their arms touched. They stooped down and advanced slowly toward the point where the hand was found, parting only to skirt trees. An inch at a time they combed the forest floor in a lateral line. Eyes held fast to the ground. Fingers pushed through wet leaves and pine needles and mulched soil. Some of the men actually crawled along on hands and knees.

In a minute, Kurt and the cop next to him shouted “Here!” at the same time. Instantly the men broke from the search line and drew together into another huddled circle.

The pistol lay half covered by leaves, and it seemed partly pushed into the ground, as if stepped on. It was a Smith & Wesson model 10, with a four-inch barrel and worn walnut grips. Swaggert’s service revolver.

Kurt stepped back to make way. Elliot squeezed through the crowd, slipping his hands into a pair of acetate gloves. He picked up the weapon carefully by the top of its frame.

“Open it,” the lieutenant said.

Elliot pushed the gridded cylinder latch with the eraser end of a pencil. The cylinder slid open with an oiled click, and out fell six more cartridges, all of which had been fired.

««—»»

“It still tells us nothing,” Bard was saying several hours later at the station. Kurt sat opposite him, in his favorite fold-down metal chair, next to the burned-out coffeepot. Shortly after they’d found Swaggert’s pistol, the county lieutenant had terminated the search. He’d concluded that Swaggert was dead, and that his body had been transported out of the vicinity. Extending the search limits, he deduced, would’ve been a waste of county time and money.

Kurt was staring out the window, only half listening to Bard. “What’s that, Chief?”

“I said, it still tells us nothing, at least nothing important. We find the motherfucker’s hand, and we find his piece, and we find some loads. What’s all that tell us? Not a goddamned thing, that’s what… We can only guess what happened.”

Kurt lounged back against the chair. “Okay, what’s your guess?

“My guess…shit. All right, here’s what I think happened. Swaggert’s driving down the Route and he spots a suspicious vehicle—probably a pickup truck full of hippies or something— and it’s got something big and bulky in the back, like maybe a coffin. Whatever it is, there’s just something not right about the vehicle, so Swaggert chases the fuckers, pedal to the metal, and he winds up losing control and dumps the cruiser in the gulch, okay? He climbs out of the car and sees the pickup turning into entrance number 2—hell, it’s only a couple hundred yards from where he crashed; he could see taillights turning at that distance, easy. Anyway, Swaggert’s a hellion, and he’s hot, so he runs into the woods, hoping to cut the truck off at the access road. He opens fire on the dudes in the truck, and they fire back and they kill him. They get scared ’cause they just smoked a cop, so they dump the coffin and scram. Later a dog or something comes along and fucks with
Drucker’s
corpse, bites Swaggert’s hand off, and drags him away. So there’s my guess.”

Kurt immediately bent over in his chair, honking laughter. “Sounds like you’ve got it all figured out, huh, Chief? Yes, sir, ‘dudes’ in a pickup truck. I’ll bet you went to school for years to think of that.”

“Well, fuck you then, smart boy. You got all the brains, you tell me what happened.”

“We’ll never know unless we find Swaggert’s body, and we’ll never find his body unless we search.”

Bard scowled. “You heard the duck. The search is over.”

“Belleau Wood has got to be searched. Not just some of it.
All
of it. Merkel’s field, too.”

Bombast lightened Bard’s eyes, his turn to laugh. “Do you know how big Belleau Wood is? Do you know how long it would take to cover it all? Hell, some of the woods back there are so thick you probably couldn’t get through them with a machete. If the county doesn’t think a second search is practical, then there ain’t gonna be a second search.”

“Fine,” Kurt said. “So I guess we can just sit back and forget it ever happened. Somebody out there means business, Chief. Digging up coffins, abducting crippled girls, and wasting veteran cops isn’t my idea of Friday night out with the boys.”

“You bitch like my fucking mother.”

Kurt was pricked by a sudden chill, the one facet of all this that bothered him most. “And you’re not even considering the scariest part. If this was some greenhorn fresh out of the academy I’d almost understand. But we’re not talking about green. We’re talking about
Swaggert.
”

“Big deal. Any cop can fuck up.”

“Swaggert was the best pistol shot I ever saw. You tell me how he managed to pop twelve caps at something and miss twelve times.”

“It was night,">“It Bard said.

“So what? Swaggert ate night-fire ranges for breakfast, and any other kind of pistol range you can name—the guy’s won enough shooting trophies to fill the back of a dump truck. Every year for as long as I’ve known him he’s outshot the best shooters in the state. No one could touch him, day or night.”

“But he was also wearing knuckle saps,” Bard countered. “That’s bound to off his aim.”

“Not Swaggert’s, not twelve times. His saps had nylon trigger fingers; they’re made so you can shoot with them on, and he practiced with them half the time, anyway. So I don’t care if he was wearing boxing gloves that night—Swaggert was an expert. I’ve seen him blow the 10x circles out of competition targets at fifty feet, groups the size of a quarter, Chief, firing double-action. You know it as well as I do. Swaggert was just too goddamned good to get blown away by punks.”