Malice (10 page)

Crow ignored the comment. “You find anything else?”

Just as Jeff began to shake his head, they heard Alex shouting from outside.

They rushed out. Alex stopped them with outstretched arms. “Careful,” he said. Alex knelt down on the driveway. “We may have something here.”

Jeff’s voice registered annoyance. “In case you didn’t notice, Deputy Morgan, the crime scene is inside.”

“I got a shoe print here. Might lead through the house if your clumsy ass didn’t trample it to hell when you got here.”

They squatted down for a better look. By the edge of the driveway was a pile of dog shit, hard and crusted. In it was the edge of a serrated boot print. The tread looked heavy. Combat…maybe a construction boot.

“Good eye, Alex. Let’s get an impression.” Sheriff Crow turned to Jeff, whose face had become the color of raw turnips. “Goddammit,” the sheriff shouted. “The first one on the scene’s gotta protect the evidence. Even if it means pulling your head out of your ass. If this goes state, I don’t want us lookin’ like a bunch of cock-eyed monkeys. You got that, Deputy?”

Jeff looked at Alex in awe. “How’d you find it?”

“Saw a trail of shit in the house. Means that he may not have been alone.”

While Jeff was left to take an impression from the dog shit, Alex and the sheriff went back inside. The sheriff turned pensive. “I don’t want this out of the bag just yet, Alex. We’ll let the media know as soon as the wife gets home. I don’t want her coming back and being the last to find out her husband looks like a human piñata.”

“It’s gonna be a hard secret to keep,” Alex said. “Anyone who’s not standing out on their front porch is watching from a window.”

“I know,” Crow said. “Do your best. I don’t expect miracles, just your best.”

“You want me to try tracking the wife down?” Jeff offered, coming back in.

“No, I’ll do that,” Crow said. “You two finish collecting whatever you can and be thorough. If the state is called in, I don’t wanna give ‘em any room to say we haven’t done a bang-up job.” He sighed, looking at Jeff. “We’ve probably lost a ton of evidence already.”

Sheriff Crow went back to the front door, following the faint trail of dog shit. By now it didn’t really look like crap, more like a light brown stain on the ground, spaced evenly every few feet, a splotch of mud. It led back into the living room toward the body and then toward the kitchen. Crow opened the door, his gaze thoroughly fixed on the few feet of ground before him. He heard someone squeal and stopped suddenly. It was Dorothy and he had nearly knocked her over. She appeared to be on her way into the living room.

“Hey,” he said, looking up.

She averted her eyes.

“Watch where you step,” he said, trying a joke on for size. “There’s some important shit on the floor.”

She smiled faintly, trying to brush past him but he stuck an arm out to block her.

Alex called out from the living room. “Sheriff, you might want to look at this.”

Alex was kneeling over the corpse, a disturbed look on his face. Carefully he grasped the man’s head and turned it. The neck cracked and groaned as it twisted. Alex shuddered when he saw the full extent of the damage.

The man’s forehead and nasal cavities had been caved in. Bloody pink brain tissue surged up through the shattered bone. Where there had once been eyes, now there was only two hollow cavities. The man had bled from every hole in his face—and then some.

Jeff stood behind Alex, fidgeting. “Who would do this to themselves?”

“Have you found the eyes yet?” the sheriff asked them.

“No, not yet,” Alex replied.

Dorothy knelt down beside the body, put on a pair of surgical gloves and examined the dead man’s skull. “Multiple lacerations and fractures, signs of subarachnoid hemorrhaging, wouldn’t be surprised to find extensive cerebral contusions. I’ll have more information after the autopsy but for now keep your eyes open for an object, maybe five to ten pounds. Could have been anything from a baseball bat to a large hammer to a marble statuette.”

Alex noticed a cherry wood table beside them. It was covered with dust except for a circle the size of a man’s fist.

“If we’re going to even entertain the notion that this guy did it to himself,” Dorothy said, “then the object shouldn’t be far.”

She raised one of the victim’s stiff hands. Almost immediately, a large slit opened at the wrist. A mere trickle of blood bubbled out. Hume had nearly bled dry.

She looked up and spoke to Alex as though they were alone.

“These wrists have been cut right through,” she said.

Carefully Dorothy rolled up the blood-stiff sleeves of the man’s yellow cardigan.

As she did so, an image flashed in Alex’s mind. The man sawing into his own wrists with a long knife. The look on his face resembled something like pleasure. His eyes bulging from their sockets. Tears of blood tumbling down his cheeks.

Oh God, Alex, help me!

Sheriff Crow nudged Alex with his elbow. “Stay sharp.” Alex looked up into the sheriff’s stern face and he shook his head to clear away the cobwebs.

“Oh, nice,” Dorothy said looking at the fingernails. “We have what looks like flesh here.” She put a paper bag over each of the man’s hands to preserve the evidence and tied them off with a zip tie.

“So what are we looking at here, Dorothy?” Jeff asked. “Was our guy murdered or did he do this to himself?”

She looked up, first at Sheriff Crow, who pretended to be too engrossed in the body to meet her gaze, and then at Jeff. “This is no suicide, I can tell you that much ...”

Alex turned back to the man’s face and the empty eye sockets. Crusted blood caked the two gaping holes.
Jesus
. “What kind of a person would do this?”

Sheriff Crow’s eyes dimmed. He started for the door, then turned back. “Jeff, lock this place down and don’t let anyone near it. By tomorrow morning latest, I want a solid idea of what happened here and who might have done it, whether it was our friend here in the yellow sweater or .... I don’t want to start a panic. So let’s look sharp and do this right people. If you ask me what I think, this guy did himself in.”

But even as the words were spoken, Alex could see that even Sheriff Crow wasn’t convinced.

As the Sheriff turned to leave, Alex opened his mouth to say something but stopped himself. He glanced over at Dorothy. In her face he could see they were both thinking the same thing.

Whoever he is, he’s struck again.

A neurosis is a secret you don’t know you are keeping.

—Kenneth Tynan

The Bethlehem Baptist Church was hushed as Reverend Small began his sermon. Lysander peered over at Summer, sitting with her parents. He felt more animated than usual. This wasn’t so bad after all. Somehow it was even pleasant.

He regarded Summer’s mother; certainly a hot middle-aged momma if ever he’d seen one. She had the same long blonde hair as Summer, same fair complexion, but her mother’s hair was tied into a ponytail, while Summer’s was free flowing and left to dangle by her shoulders. Something prickled in his thoughts, and his attention turned to Samantha. She and her family were sitting between him and Summer. She followed his gaze to see what he had been watching and turned back, shaking her head disapprovingly.

Beside Lysander, his mother stroked the slopping edge of her belly. She was so swollen now, he wondered if she might explode.

Slowly, reluctantly, the sermon drew his attention. Reverend Small was behind the podium, dressed in a simple dark suit, his eyes blazing.

Small put a tiny hand in the air. “Man, by his very nature, is susceptible to evil,” he said. He eyed each of them in turn. “He is flanked on all sides by sin and demonic temptations. It is the darkness and not the light that men love because their deeds are evil.” The congregation grew deathly quiet. From the front row, a group of elderly women were perched forward, nodding. Lysander stole a glance at Summer again. She was still and attentive. When his gaze shifted over to Samantha, he saw her flipping mindlessly through the hymnbook. She looked up at him, smiled, then stuck a finger down her throat. He snorted laughter, and their parents turned simultaneously to scold them. Samantha’s father, his face the color of a ripe macintosh apple, searched to see who she was looking at. When his eyes found Lysander, he locked him with a glassy stare. Lysander looked away.

“If you are poor in this life and in the service of the Lord, then in the next you
will
be rich.” The reverend raised his hands palms up, looking from one hand to the other. “You cannot escape what you have set in motion by your choice to either walk with the Lord or your choice to turn your back on him.” He smiled knowingly. “This Lot’s wife learned the hard way. Disobedience was her sin. But do not think that because she lived long ago that her fate cannot be yours as well. Do not be fooled, Satan himself is among us. Within these holy walls you are safe. Beyond them, you have only your faith to guide and protect you.”

When Samantha turned to watch Lysander she was surprised to find him listening with rapt attention.
Must be the shock from so much talk of fire and brimstone
, she thought, bemused. This was Reverend Small’s favorite sermon. She had heard him perform it around the same time last year. His hands had even gone in the air at the same moment the first time around.

Then something weird happened. The podium Reverend Small was speaking from seemed to fall away. Even the great oak cross dangling from the ceiling with wires behind him vanished. And the reverend, standing there with that fire in his eyes, was no longer wearing his black blazer. Instead, perched on his head was a wide-brimmed felt hat, knotted in the center with a silver buckle, and swaying at his feet, a long black cloak. When Sam was positive that she had completely lost her mind, the reverend’s features began to melt away until they were gone completely, only to reform in the spitting image of Lysander.

Only problem was that this new Lysander was not the Lysander she knew and—she dare not say the word. This new Lysander came for her; his smiling lips cracking and blackened. His hand tucked behind his back. When he moved she could see something glitter in the light. She wanted to peer behind him, but before she had a chance his arm sprang into the air, and at the end of that arm was a long pointed knife. Samantha gasped. Lysander’s doppelganger lunged with wicked speed, swinging the shiny blade in a shallow arc. It tore through her shirt and stung her chest. Afterward, she would remember the pain above all else—how real it felt, how excruciating. Her initial reaction was to pull away and jerk her shoulder free, but the knife had her pinned in place, jammed in the open space between her collarbone and her neck. Lysander wrenched viciously, trying to tear her open, his wide empty smile gleaming like some hellish carnival clown. He pulled her close to him and whispered: “What do you fear most?” This time it wasn’t his voice anymore. It was deeper. Older. Familiar. The voice was Reverend Small’s, merged with that of her waking nightmare.

Light danced against the lids of her eyes. She opened them. Sunlight was twinkling off the ring on Small’s hand. She blinked. The reverend was saying something about the hand of God. The blood had drained from her face, and Sam jumped when a hand touched her shoulder. “Sam?” It was Erica, an expression of concern on her tiny face. Droplets of sweat had beaded on Sam’s forehead. She patted her sister’s delicate hand. “I’m fine. I’m just fine.”

She glanced over at Lysander, remembering the demonic expression of joy plastered across his face as he had swung that knife at her, wondering why he would ever want to kill her.

“Getting cold out there,” Dorothy said and slid into the booth, setting a manila folder beside her. Ted’s diner was busier than usual.

Alex glanced outside, more in response to her suggestion than anything. A few stray leaves, dried and fallen, were blowing across the small parking lot out front.

“You know, I’d feel more comfortable if we met at my office,” she said.

Alex looked at her sideways. “The morgue, you mean?”

“People come to Ted’s to eat, not to hear about stab wounds and autopsies.”

“I think I’ve seen enough stiffs to last me a lifetime.”

She fixed him with a stern gaze, the way a mother might look at a son lying about having finished his homework early. “Alex, it might not be my place, but has the thought ever crossed your mind that maybe you’re in the wrong profession?”

He shifted uncomfortably.

“Being a cop is pretty much all I’ve ever wanted. It’s all I know how to do.” He was becoming irritated. “Is this why you wanted to meet? To give me advice on alternative careers?”

She cleared the mounds of sugar and debris off the table with the back of her hand and dropped a folder in front of him. Suzie arrived a moment later, coffee in hand, flashing a mouthful of pearly whites.

She opened the folder and flicked through crime-scene photos and bits of paper with scribbled notes. “I’m about to present my findings to Sheriff Crow tomorrow morning, but I wanted you to see it beforehand. I have a feeling he might be hesitant to act on some of my conclusions.”