Kiss The Girls and Make Them Die (7 page)

“Anyway I felt this breeze on my bare ass and Debra’s got a kind of fixated stare. Then this big hand grabs my shoulder and I’m jerked out, thrown through the door and out on the grass. And the old man’s walking toward me with his eyes looking liked boiled eggs, and he’s got his fist doubled up and it looks like a cured ham coming at me. He hit me once and I went down thinking, No no man, this can’t be, but then I thought of all the other kids that got beat to death by their loving parents, and I also thought of how the old man’s been pouring down the lush lately, and I see this kind of mad-dog look in his eye that tells me he’s like I was when I got marched out of the house, he can’t help himself any more than I could. I guess the next blow must’ve knocked me out because the next thing I’m laying there and Debra’s got my head in her lap and she tells me to go to the barn and hide in the haymow, the old man’s sleeping now and probably won’t remember anything when he wakes up. So I did, and that night she brought my supper up; she’d
told him I’d gone over to visit my cousins; she gave me my supper and then she said, Let’s do it again …

“Didja ever hear such a sordid damn story? I know it sounds like a lot of things happened to me but thinking back I guess my main problem was boredom. I just got so damn bored with the people around me, they coasted along in the same old groove and when somebody died they just grabbed a tighter hold on life. I guess it’s like that little bird, if you squeeze it too hard you squeeze all the juice out and then it’s like death. Jesus, I’m getting dry, don’tcha think the damn hospital could spring for a jug of wine to go with these interviews? The touch of your sweet lips would do as well, my love. Did you ever give head? You know what I mean. Go down on your old man? I think I’d better get back to the ward now, before they turn out the lights …”

Elizabeth glanced into the side mirror as she drove between the rose-granite columns guarding the entrance to the state hospital. A blue sedan peeled out of the traffic stream and fell in behind her. She noted the rack of lights and horns and sirens on the roof and thought:
What now, Shurf?

Her eyes felt gluey; she’d had another drink before going to bed, and the dull musty horror of a nightmare still lodged in her brain. At eight
a.m
. the air was already steamy, the sun a sickly reddish-yellow embryo floating in a globular haze. Her lungs felt stifled; she’d worn a navy dress with zippered front, the cleaners had shrunk the damn thing and she’d failed to notice it when she put it on. She pulled into her reserved parking space and opened the glove compartment, setting the controls which would activate the door locks and set the alarm system. Foolish extravagance, but she had a weakness for electronic gadgetry.

Pulling her keys from the dash, she got out, closed the door and tested the handle. She saw the sheriff’s reflection in the glass as he got out and walked toward her, his boots crunching on the limestone chat. He looked tired and snarly, with gray half-moons under his eyes. He wore a blue-steel revolver clipped to his belt and nosed down into his hip pocket. That’s against the rules, she thought—but decided not to mention it. Another
infraction was coming to her without going through the administrator. She decided to skip that too.

“You still can’t see Bollinger,” she said, turning.

“I didn’t come to see Bollinger. I thought you might ask him a couple questions for me.”

She sighed. “I’m trying to establish an atmosphere of trust. If I come on as part of a police interrogation …”

“You were just supposed to see if he was able to stand trial.”

“Yes, well, we can’t just look at his eyeballs and report on his mental condition.”

He stood looking down at her, frowning and biting his lower lip. “When do you think you’ll be finished?”

“He’s scheduled for staffing next Wednesday. If he’s ready for release, you’d have him in three days.”

“Three days after Wednesday is Saturday.”

“Then it probably won’t be until Monday.”

“Sh—!” He whirled away and walked to his car with his head down, looking in neither direction. She watched him bend over and reach through the window, noting the way his tan gabardine shirt moulded the thick strong wedge of his back. She wondered why he aroused her hostility. Possibly she was picking up the feeling of the patients. Three women sat on the steps leading to the beauty shop, looking sullenly in his direction. A man walked past on the sidewalk, glanced over his shoulder and hurried on with his head down. Didn’t the sheriff stop to think that he was the Charon of the dark waters, the man who had brought most of them here?

Now he was walking back, carrying a manila envelope, unwinding the red string which held the flap. He shook out two glossy eight-by-ten photos and held them out to her.

At first she didn’t recognize the objects pictured. One looked like a pile of dead leaves, the other like torn burlap—but then she made out a grinning jaw, a curving rib cage laid bare by tattered decaying flesh. She felt her stomach churn slowly as she handed the photos back to him.

“I’m not into necrophilia, Sheriff.”

“Necro …?”

“Necrophilia. Love of death—as you probably already knew.”

“Yeah, well—” He smiled faintly as he slid the photos into the envelope. “We dug these dead bodies up in the woods, about a quarter mile downstream from Bollinger’s cabin.”

For a few seconds her mind was a jumble, jangled chaos of separate thoughts, each canceling out the other. The sheriff was looking at her, waiting. She wanted more than anything else to walk away from him and all the problems he represented.

“The paper mentioned only one body. Found somewhere in the national forest, as I recall.”

The sheriff nodded as he rewound the string. “I gotta make these reports, you know, so people can read the papers and say, my-my, ain’t it awful? But I don’t hafta make it easy for ‘em. What I put down was ‘Unidentified human remains.’ If I’d mentioned two female bodies, I’d have had my phone tied up by women wanting me to come look under their beds.”

She looked up at him for a minute. “I don’t think I’d want your job, sheriff.”

He smiled. “I wouldn’t want yours, either.”

“Good. Then we won’t trade jobs. At least we agree on that.”

“Right. Now about Bollinger.”

“You still won’t get him until a week from Monday. Maybe not even then.”

He closed his eyes and inhaled through clenched teeth. “Look—can you take a ride with me?”

“I have several appointments—” She glanced over her shoulder and saw Thelma looking out of her second-floor office window. “Anyway, if you just want to show me where two bodies were dug up—”

“Two bodies was day before yesterday.” He spread his lips in a grin. “We got us a mass murder on our hands.”

The blacktop wound among forested hills. House trailers stood on cinder blocks in hacked-out clearings. Asphalt-shingled shacks peered out from behind junked cars. The newer homes had landscaped grounds with new grass spearing up through purple-red soil. The mailboxes carried names like Whispering Pines, Rolling Acres, Coon Creek Manor.

After several miles they passed no more houses, only trees ranked like silent armies on each side of the road. The sheriff swung down a rutted gravel track and stopped at a wooden barrier painted with orange-and-black diagonals. The trail beyond showed signs of heavy traffic; the weeds were shredded, rainbows of crank-case oil shimmered in water-filled ruts. The sheriff moved the barrier and drove on. Spiky branches screeched along the windows. The car slewed sideways across a deep gully, then scraped across a rubber-scarred outcrop of granite.

Elizabeth felt stifled, hot. Her skirt kept bunching up around her hips. Her nose caught the lush ferment of rotting crab apples, the sharp fragrance of sumac—and another odor which awakened a sharp sense of dread.

She saw the cabin from the top of the ridge: low gabled roof of moss-backed shingles, stone walls rising from a hump of land formed where two ravines met in a narrow V. Two stone arches met at the point of land, divided by a pagodalike pavillion with a roof of rust-red tile. Beyond lay a dam, now cut by a steep-sided trench. A scummy green soup stood in the center of the bowl. Slopes of cracked dried mud rose to a border of sickly yellow weeds. The stone arches spanned cataracts of dry rocks covered with flaking gray powder …

As she got out of the car, a yellow bulldozer nosed up out of the ravine behind the dam, snorting clots of black vapor which dispersed slowly in the airless clearing. The sheriff pulled off his hat and waved; the human figure directed his clanking monster up the slope and stopped twenty feet away. He killed the engine with a thrust of his arm and climbed stiffly out of the seat. He was a tall man in baggy overalls and a stained gray shirt. He nodded
to Liza, then turned and spat out a glob of brown substance, wiping his mouth on a dusty bandanna.

“How many you found, Wayne?” asked the sheriff.

“Well … two so far. I just dug down to the original fill. They’re doin’ the rest with shovels and trowels.” He turned to Elizabeth. “He already had this little bitty dirt fill across the creek, see? I told him you gotta scrape off the topsoil, otherwise your pond’ll seep, but he didn’t seem to care about that. That’s how I knowed exactly where they was. Soon’s I read in the paper that they’d found a body, I started havin’ this
queer
feelin’. Wasn’t till I talked to my cousin who’s a special deputy that it finally hit me—”

The sheriff interrupted. “Wanta go see, Miz Bodac?”

Wanting isn’t the word, she thought as she walked down the slope. She had to push her feet ahead of her, yet she felt compelled to view the horror which lay beyond the embankment. She could hear the clank and tinkle of shovels, the muffled voices of the men: “Gonna buy me a pig, by God, can’t afford them groc’ry prices.”

“How ya gonna feed the pig, Grover?”

“Turn the som-bitch loose in the woods, let him root hog or die—hey, here’s somethin!”

“A hunk of chert?”

“No, by God, it’s a skull. Hey! You men with trowels! Over here!”

An incredibly foul stench pinched her nostrils as she reached the top of the dam. One of the diggers had propped a transister radio in the loose dirt above the cut:
“It all seems wrong somehow … that you’re nobody’s sweetheart now …”

The song became an obscene joke as she looked down into the trench and watched the dirt being dug away from the greasy, discolored flesh. A body-bag of black, shiny plastic was thrown down; the men grunted and swore in the narrow fly-blown trench. She heard a slushy pop-crack as an arm came off at the shoulder. The empty socket was a writhing mass of white worms.

Gagging, she whirled away and stumbled out of the clearing. She pressed her forehead against a tree and felt her breakfast come up: orange juice, poached eggs and
coffee gushed out and left her sweating and dizzy. She groped for her handkerchief, found none, and started to use the inside of her sleeve. Something touched her shoulder. She jumped, turned to see the sheriff holding out a red checkered bandanna. “There’s running water inside, if you want to wash your face.”

The little cabin was musty and humid. She followed the trail of dried mud across the wooden floor, parted a matchstick drapery, and stepped inside the bathroom. Only the faucets, fixtures and lights had been manufactured. The sink, sunken tub and commode were hand-moulded cement, with primary colors of yellow, red and blue folded into swirling rainbow galaxies.

She bent over the stool and stared at the yellow scum until she realized that her stomach had no more to give. She turned on the faucet and wet the bandanna, ran the cool cloth over her burning cheeks. A broad antique-framed mirror stood behind her, reflecting her image in the medicine-cabinet mirror. She seemed to be standing in a vast open space, surrounded by ashen-faced women. All bore a faint resemblance to herself.

Wasn’t the dream enough?

She remembered the sudden slash, agony of cold fire, a feeling as if a silk thread had been drawn across her throat. The blood had welled up in ruby droplets, trickled down her neck, splashed warm across her breasts. In the dream she had worn a shawl, a pair of jeans, a heavy plaid shirt. It wasn’t herself who had been murdered—yet it was a very personal death she had felt …

She looked in the mirror and reminded herself that the dream had been no more than a common death fantasy. She drew her fingers across her throat and saw the satin smoothness where the skin pulled tight. Yet the terrible memory hung on, of lying there and feeling the blood drain out, knowing with absolute certainty that she was dying, putting her hand over her throat to stop the arterial gush, but realizing there was no way to restore the channel which carried the blood to her brain. The worst part of it had been realizing she would never know who
had killed her. She had felt the life of her brain dwindle slowly, like city lights in the wee morning hours …

Ah
. With decisive twists she wrung out the bandanna, flipped it a couple of times, and walked out through the drapery. The sheriff stood looking at a mural which covered the wall opposite the fireplace. A gigantic demon with skull face and wild, red-rimmed eyes waved his six arms against a background of billowing purple fire. Tiny humanoid creatures writhed in the skeletal hands; many had their heads and limbs bitten off. A pair of shapely feminine legs hung from one corner of the monster’s mouth.

“You know what that is?” asked the sheriff.

“Some kind of Tantric symbol, I think.”

“Meaning what?”

“Well … death devours all, I suppose.”

“He worshipped that, you know.”

“What makes you think so?”

He held out a small red-clay Buddha. She bent over and sniffed the fragrance of sandalwool. “Burning incense doesn’t mean worship. Not now—if it ever did.”

“Okay.” The sheriff chuckled, a sound like rattling gravel. ‘Take a look at that figure on the left, the one he’s got gripped in his fist.”

She stepped forward and saw that the girl’s face was clearly defined in acrylic enamel. For a second she thought she was seeing herself, but then realized the nose was broader than hers, the cheeks rounder. The eyes were closed, the mouth gaped wide in agony—or was it ecstasy?

“Now look at this.”

He held out a Polaroid photo. She saw a redhaired girl sitting on the railing of the bridge with one knee drawn up. She was nude, and a little too heavy in the hips and thighs to photograph well in that state. The mouth was spread in a smile of happiness—but worry-lines filled the space between the arching eyebrows. She resembled the girl in the ogre’s hand.

“Does it prove anything?” she asked.

The sheriff shrugged and tucked the photo back into
an envelope. “It will, if certain dental records match up. Not many killers make it this easy.”

“Aren’t you making a lot out of circumstantial evidence?”

“I just gather it, I don’t label it.”

“I mean—maybe it wasn’t murder at all.”

He looked down at her, his eyes squinted with amusement. “Yeah, maybe they all crawled under that pile of dirt and died of natural causes.”

She felt her cheeks grow hot. “I just meant that people
do
die, in many ways besides murder, under circumstances where there might be some reason to hide the body. Overdoses of drugs, bungled abortions … you couldn’t be sure until you found the exact cause of death, and those bodies are badly deteriorated.”

“Yeah, most of ‘em were too rotten. We got a good result on one, though. The scarf kinda protected the wound.”

“The wound?”

“Yeah. Her throat was cut.”

—Going up the slope behind the cabin, into the dappled shade where the forest began. The sheriff had wanted to talk to the men before he left, and she hadn’t wanted to wait in the car, or in the cabin.

She gasped when she saw the grave. The weathered sandstone slab looked as if it had stood there for centuries, but the chisel marks were new, not yet darkened by time and rain. She read the inscription.