Midnight Grinding (28 page)

Sam left the car, slipping the strap of the assault rifle over his shoulder and plastering a dopey, good-natured grin across his face. Then he walked across the street and up the stone steps to the library. Above the double doors were words in polished bronze relief. He remembered that it had once said READ A GOOD BOOK TODAY. It had been changed to READ THE GOOD BOOK TODAY.

The library was nearly deserted at that time of morning. An elderly woman with silver-blue hair and a golden cross on her black dress smiled as he walked up and he did his best to return the gesture with as much sincerity as possible. “May I help you find something, officer?” she asked sweetly.

“No thanks,” he told her. “Just browsing.”

The librarian gave him a strange look as he started down the aisles of books, then seemed to pay him no more attention. At first, things looked the same as they had a year ago. But as he noticed the titles on the spines, horror began to grip him. The reference books, encyclopedias…everything had been replaced. In their place was the
Encyclopedia Biblical
and
Bakker’s Guide to the Holy Scriptures.
Sam made his way to the periodical section. Religious magazines and newspapers replaced
Time, Newsweek,
and
The Wall Street Journal
. A crisp edition of a daily newspaper called
The Unified Word
lay on a reading table. It was so thick that it rivaled the
New York Times
in volume.

Secretly, Sam wondered if it might have been published on the same press that the Times had once been printed on.

Swiftly, he headed for the second floor and the fiction section. A scream of anguish almost escaped him when he found row upon row of empty shelves. They were all gone; the classics of Shakespeare, Dickens, Faulkner and Hemingway had been stripped from their rightful places and disposed of. Like a madman, he ran down the aisles, his eyes growing tearful at the absence of Poe, Lovecraft, Tolkien and Bradbury. Even with its emptiness, the place grew oppressive with the sheer magnitude of the horrible crime that had been committed there. Panicked, Sam ran for the emergency stairs and headed for the roof.

Once there, he staggered to the ledge and breathed deeply. He stared up into the sky. A Goodyear blimp hovered overhead, the word REPENT flashing across its side. He directed his eyes toward the Mississippi River and saw a parade of huge barges heading downriver from the north. He couldn’t believe his eyes, but they seemed to be heaped twenty feet high with books.

“How?” he wailed, not caring who heard him. “How could this have happened? It’s only been a year. One damned year!”

Then, suddenly, he heard the sound of footsteps behind him. He turned and saw the librarian standing there with three armed officers dressed in angelic white and carrying sub-machine guns. “There he is!” she said. “That is the man!”

“Surrender!” demanded one of the men. He cocked the bolt of his Uzi and aimed it at Sam. “Throw down your weapons and put your hands behind your head.”

At first, Sam considered slipping the AK-47 from his shoulder and resisting them. But even if he survived the inevitable firefight, would he want to? Would he want to live in a society with one frame of mind? A society that denied its citizens individualism and freedom of speech? Could he live in a country where religion ruled and those considered unworthy were packed away in concentration camps or worse?

He didn’t even need to give it a second thought.

“I give up!” he called out, tossing the rifle down and unbuckling his gunbelt. “You can take me away. You can take me back home.” All he wanted at that moment was to be with his family again.

The three officers converged on him and grabbed him roughly. One hand grabbed the front of his jumpsuit and tore it open. His bare chest was exposed…as well as the tattoo.

“He has been marked!” screamed the librarian, leveling a finger of righteous accusation. “He’s been cursed with the Mark of Cain!”

He was quickly handcuffed and shoved across the roof to the stairwell. “Mark of Cain!” chanted the three men, their faces frozen in grisly smiles. “Mark of Cain!”

Suddenly, Sam Markham knew that he wouldn’t be going back to the camp and that he would never see his wife and daughter again. He screamed long and loud as they herded him from the library and across the street to his fate.

To the book bindery.

***

Jennifer huddled in the corner of Florence Delaney’s tent. Florence was on work detail that afternoon and the girl was alone. Jennifer’s unresponsive mother was gone. Some men had come several days ago, loaded her on a stretcher, and taken her to the big building on the far side of the compound. Florence called it the barracks and said it was the place where the men who guarded the camp slept at night. Jennifer couldn’t figure out why they would take her there. She couldn’t talk or make oatmeal raisin cookies anymore. All she could do was lie there.

It had been a week since her father had left in the middle of the night without saying good-bye. Jennifer still felt hurt and confused. She couldn’t understand why her father would run away and leave them there. It just didn’t seem fair.

“Read and repent!” called a woman’s stern voice from the compound outside. “Repent, lest you be condemned to eternal damnation.”

Trembling, Jennifer crouched in the dank shadows. She stared at the open flap, until a hulking shadow blocked out the sunlight. It was the Preacher Lady, the warden of the camp. Preacher Lady was over three hundred pounds, wore horn-rimmed glasses, and carried a purse large enough for Jennifer to fit into. That afternoon she was carrying a bulky shopping bag in the crook of one flabby arm.

Preacher Lady stared at her from the door of the tent. “Read and repent, child,” she said, reaching into the shopping bag. “Read the teachings of the Good Book or be forever damned.”

The girl watched as the bag tipped, showing its contents. Inside were small copies of the Unified Testament, bound in soft leather. Each was unique in its own way. Some were pale and freckled, while some bore tiny scars or moles. Others were dark brown, caramel, or golden yellow in hue. Preacher Lady took one from the bag, tossed it at her filthy feet, and then moved on to the next tent.

Jennifer stared at the testament for a long moment, then picked it up. Its cover was as pale as her own sickly complexion. And, in the center, there was a mark that was familiar to Jennifer, one that she had marveled at many times before.

Huddling deeper into the shadows of the ragged tent, she pressed her face to the cover of the Good Book. As her tears glistened upon the faded design of a winged serpent upon a fiery cross, she imagined that she could feel the warmth of her father’s skin and hear the distant beating of his heart.

ROMICIDE

This is the second story I wrote featuring the Atlanta homicide team of Lowery and Taylor, two detectives who always seemed to find something grim and gruesome in their case files. This one explores the phenomenon of spontaneous human combustion, a subject I always found intriguing, whether it was actually true or not.

A word of warning—the computer jargon in this story may seem a bit dated after all this time, but it was written when cyberspace was under construction and the Internet was in its infancy, and eight megabytes of RAM was the norm. Can you imagine that?

They were due for a bad one.

The ’96 Olympics had come and gone, leaving everyone on the force expecting the floodgates to open. During the festivities, it seemed as though the entire city of Atlanta had been on its best behavior. With the exception of the Centennial Park bombing, crime as a whole had reached an unnerving low. Of course, vice had been busy with streetwalkers and pickpockets, but muggings and violent crime had seemingly dropped from the books. The eyes of the world had focused on Atlanta and, if only for a while, it was as if the local low-life population had kicked back in front of the TV with a cold beer, watching the show with everyone else.

But that was over now. The Atlanta PD’s homicide division had its hands full once again.

It was a night in mid-September when Lowery and Taylor got the call. They pulled their white Chrysler off Peachtree Street and into a well-to-do apartment complex called Tara Court. They drove past the main office—which resembled a miniature version of Scarlett O’Hara’s famous mansion—then cruised down the winding avenues of the complex itself. Half of the buildings were standard flat-type apartments, three stories tall, while the others consisted of townhouses, all decorated in the same
Gone With The Wind
motif.

“Pretty original, isn’t it?” said Sergeant Ed Taylor.

“Tacky is more like it,” replied Lieutenant Ken Lowery. “I mean, look at the names of the streets. Rhett Butler Avenue, Ashley Wilkes Drive, Aunt Pitty-Pat Lane. It’s a little overdone, if you ask me.”

His partner shrugged and spotted the telltale flash of blue and red emergency lights coming from Mammy Boulevard up ahead. “Maybe. But this
is
Atlanta. And it
is
better than a
Wizard of Oz
theme, you’ve got to admit that.”

“I suppose so,” agreed Lowery. He could imagine such a complex with an office that resembled the Emerald City and apartments that were patterned after Munchkinland.

They parked in a space outside a line of townhouses. Each had its own distinctive form of Southern architecture. Two patrol cars and a metro fire engine were already there, as well as Stuart White’s maroon station wagon. Four out of five times, the city coroner beat them to the scene of the crime, which was kind of funny considering that Stu Walsh was nearly seventy years old.

“That’s it over there,” said Lowery, pointing to a townhouse with white brick and immaculate Roman columns framing its doorway. “Apartment 503.”

The two homicide detectives left the car and crossed the sidewalk to the townhouse. A border of yellow police tape had been erected around 503, but there were no curious bystanders lingering beyond it, like at most crime scenes. But then this was a complex that catered mostly to young professional types who were apparently more discreet with their rubber-necking than most spectators. On further inspection, they could make out the silhouettes of the neighboring residents in the lighted windows of their apartments, wondering what type of sordid occurrence had taken place in their clean, crime-free complex.

A police officer stood beside the open door of Apartment 503, talking to a firefighter. “Officer Mangrum,” Lowery said in greeting.

The young patrolman seemed grateful that he had been remembered. “How are you doing, Lieutenant?” He nodded to the other detective. “Sergeant?”

“We’re doing fine, Mangrum,” said Lowery. “So what do we have here?”

The officer frowned. “We’re not exactly sure, sir. It’s pretty weird.”

Lowery looked at Taylor. “Then I reckon we’d better take a look at it ourselves.”

“My partner, Robinson, is upstairs with Dr. Walsh. It’s the bedroom to your right.”

“Thanks.” The two entered the cramped, but stylish foyer of the townhouse. As they passed through the doorway, they noticed that the front door had been pried open. The wood around the deadbolt was splintered. They mounted the narrow stairway. As they approached the upper floor, they immediately detected a cloying odor. An odor that was nearly sickening in nature.

“Smells like burnt barbecue,” said Taylor.

“More like a burnt body to me,” his partner said. “Remember that case over in the projects? When that woman set fire to her drunk of a husband after he’d raped their ten-year-old daughter? Smells kind of like that bastard did, after she got through with him.”

Taylor nodded. “You’re right. But this smells even
worse
.”

When they reached the head of the stairs, Lowery called out. “Stu?”

“In here, Ken,” replied the coroner’s gravelly voice.

Lowery and Taylor stepped into the bedroom, which was really no bedroom at all. It looked to have been used more as an office than anything else. Stark black-and-white Ansel Adams prints decorated the walls. Beneath them were several file cabinets and a large Ricoh copier, the type that high-volume offices use. Against one wall were a stereo system and two speakers, as well as a rack of classical CDs. At the wall directly opposite was a large computer work center, complete with an IBM system with a Pentium microprocessor and a state-of-the-art laser printer.

But the surroundings of the upstairs room paled in comparison to the central focal point, which was directly in front of the computer desk. It was a dark, scorched patch that stretched across the neutral gray carpeting. The two couldn’t see it very well at first. Stu Walsh was crouched on the floor, obscuring their view.

“What have we got here, Stu?” Lowery asked.

“The damnedest thing I’ve ever seen,” said the coroner.

When Walsh stood up and stepped aside, they saw exactly what was on the carpet. At first, their minds balked at what they were looking at. It seemed utterly impossible. Then, slowly, it began to dawn on them that what lay before them was for real.

The carpet wasn’t scorched after all. Rather, an outline of powdery black ash covered the floor. An outline that was undeniably
human
in form.

But that wasn’t all there was to it. Within the outline was a blackened pair of eyeglasses with melted plastic lenses, several human teeth, some with fillings, and a steel surgical pin where the outline of one leg was. A computer chair lay on its side next to the outline. The seat and back cushions were charred down to the foam padding, but little of the chrome framework had been scorched.

Lowery and Taylor may have thought the whole thing was some elaborate practical joke someone had pulled, except for one factor. At the end of the outline’s left arm was part of an actual human limb. The hand and forearm of a man lay there. It was clad in the sleeve of a white sweatshirt, only the upper end of which was scorched. From where they stood, they could see that the stub of arm seemed to have been burnt off, rather than severed. And the stump appeared to have been cauterized by some intense and inexplicable heat.

“Good Lord,” said Taylor. “What is it?”

“Well, it may sound crazy,” said Stu Walsh. “But I believe it’s the remains of a young man.”

Lowery looked doubtful. “You mean the one who lived here?” He turned to Officer Robinson. “What was his name?”

Robinson stepped forward, looking pale and shaken. “Phillip Bomar. He’d lived here for three years.” He handed the lieutenant a black leather wallet. “I found this on the nightstand in the master bedroom.”

Lowery opened the wallet and studied a Georgia state driver’s license. From the information there, he gathered that Phillip Bomar had been twenty-six years old and was five feet, nine inches tall. The photograph showed a lean, young man with longish brown hair and pale green eyes. He wore eyeglasses identical to the scorched frames that lay within the parameter of the outline’s ashen head.

“I don’t understand,” he said. “You’re saying that
this
is Bomar?’

“I’m saying that it’s
probably
Bomar,” said Walsh. “I can’t say for sure just yet.”

“The hand’s wearing a college ring,” said Taylor. “Looks like it’s from the University of Georgia.”

Stu Walsh pointed to a framed diploma on the wall. “Bomar attended UG. But that doesn’t prove for certain that it’s him.”

“But what the hell happened to him? Did some psycho take a flame-thrower to him?”

“That’s very unlikely,” the coroner explained. “If that were the case, there would be traces of chemicals and fuel here. There isn’t. And the entire apartment would have gone up in flames. As you can see, it didn’t.”

Lowery took a step closer to the computer desk, careful not to tread on the bizarre outline of black ashes. He suddenly noticed that some incredible heat had been generated directly where the outline lay. The gray-white plastic housing of the computer monitor and microprocessor had buckled and melted, and the monitor screen was cloudy and cracked. The keyboard had melted so badly that all the keys were practically fused together.

Taylor looked down at the mouse, which sat on a charred rubber pad beside the keyboard. Clots of gummy soot spotted the oval instrument. “What’s this black stuff?” he asked Walsh.

“Burnt flesh,” he replied grimly. “Looks like the guy was holding onto it when it happened.”

“That’s the big question,” said Lowery, shaking his head. “Exactly what
did
happen?”

The coroner looked as though he was reluctant to answer. He sighed, then went ahead. “Have either of you ever heard of spontaneous human combustion?”

Taylor laughed, but it was a nervous laugh. “Sure, but that’s just a load of bull, isn’t it? Things like that don’t really happen.”

“There have been documented cases,” Walsh told him.

“Yeah, but this isn’t the freaking
X-Files,”
Lowery said. “And we’re not Mulder and Scully.” He searched the coroner’s face. “Don’t you have any other explanation? One that’s not so unbelievable?”

“I’ll let you know after I complete my examination of the remains back at the lab.” It was obvious that no conventional autopsy could be performed. “But, as of right now, spontaneous combustion seems to be the apparent cause of death.”

Lowery and Taylor stared at the ashy outline for a long moment. “Okay,” said the lieutenant. “Let’s get all the evidence we can while the scene is secure. Get Blakely over here with a forensic team. I want him to go over everything in this room with a fine-tooth comb. And I want plenty of pictures. Call Jenny Burke and have her snap a couple rolls, of the body—if you can call it that—as well as the contents of this room. If I have to turn in a report to the chief that says this Phillip Bomar went up in flames for no reason at all, I want plenty of evidence and photos to back it up.”

Lowery left the upstairs room and called Robinson into the outer hallway. The police officer gave him a quick rundown of what had transpired. A smoke detector in Apartment 503 had gone off, alerting Bomar’s next door neighbor, who called 911. The firemen had pried the front door open—whose deadbolt had been locked from the inside—then proceeded upstairs. There was a light mist of smoke, along with the heavy scent of scorched plastic and burnt flesh. When the firefighters discovered the strange outline on the carpet they called in the Atlanta PD.

Feeling drained and more than a little confused, the two detectives left Apartment 503. They climbed into their car, but simply sat there in front of the townhouse for a while.

“I’m not even sure if this is a homicide, Ed,” said Lowery. “It seems more like an unexplained death to me.”

“I think there’s foul play involved somewhere down the line,” Taylor told him. “I don’t know why yet…”

Lowery nodded solemnly. “You and me both. It’s creepy, isn’t it?”

“I’ll say,” agreed his partner. “Even creepier than those murders Dwight Rollins pulled a few years back.”

Lowery shuddered. He vividly recalled the crazy, old blind man who had murdered several people in his apartment building—as well as his own seeing-eye dog. And for what reason? Because it was the dead of winter and he needed their warm eyes to fill empty sockets that his pawned glass eyes had left behind.