Still Life With Crows (21 page)

He moved toward the bright end of the lab, scrubs rustling. The medical examiner was already there, swathed like himself in blue, and Hazen could hear the murmur of voices. There was a second figure beside the M.E., and despite the softness of the voice he recognized the southern cadence. Pendergast.

Pendergast had been right. It was a serial killer. And he was probably right that the killer was local. Hazen couldn’t believe it, hadn’t
wanted
to believe it. He’d laughed out loud when he’d heard that Pendergast was spending hours closeted with Marge Tealander, knowing the old busybody would eat up his time and have him chasing down red herrings all over town. But now, in the wake of this new killing, he was forced to admit things did point to a local killer. It was damned hard to come and go from Medicine Creek without people noticing. Especially at night, when a set of car headlights in the distance was enough to send people to the window to see who was coming. No, this wasn’t the work of some drifter who killed and moved on. It seemed it was somebody who lived here in Medicine Creek. It was incredible, but there it was. Someone in town.

That meant he knew the killer.

“Ah, Sheriff Hazen, good to see you.” McHyde nodded politely, even deferentially.

The guy had really changed his tune. No more Dr. Arrogant. The case was big now, and the M.E. could smell the publicity. This was a ticket out of western Kansas for anyone who wanted to hop aboard the train.

“Sheriff Hazen,” said Pendergast, giving a little nod of recognition.

“Morning, Pendergast.”

There was a short silence. The body lay covered on the gurney. It seemed the M.E. had not begun his work. Hazen bitterly regretted arriving so early.

The M.E. cleared his throat. “Nurse Malone?”

A voice came from offstage. “Yes, Doctor?”

“Are we ready to roll?”

“Yes, Doctor.”

“Good. Run the video.”

“Yes, Doctor.”

They went through the preliminaries, each one giving their name and title. Hazen could not take his eyes off the shrouded corpse. He had seen it lying in the field, of course, but somehow seeing it in this sterile, artificial environment was different. Worse.

The M.E. grasped the cloth and slowly, carefully, raised the sheet. And there was Stott, bloated, the flesh literally falling off the bones.

Quickly, Hazen averted his eyes. Then, feeling self-conscious, he slowly forced himself to face the gurney again.

He had seen dead bodies in his time, but they sure as hell hadn’t looked like this. The skin had split across the breastbone and drawn back from the fatty flesh, as if it had shrunk. It had also split on the hips and across the face. Melted fat had dripped out in several places and run into little pools in the gurney, where it had congealed white and hard under refrigeration. Yet there were no maggots—strange, very strange. And there seemed to be a piece missing from the body. Yes: a ragged chunk, torn away from the left thigh, the teeth marks still visible. Dog, it seemed. Man’s best friend. Hazen swallowed.

The M.E. began to speak.

“We have here the body identified as that of William LaRue Stott, a white male thirty-two years old.” He droned on for the benefit of the camera while they all stood around the corpse. Mercifully, the initial recitation was short. The M.E. turned to Pendergast and asked unctuously, “Any comments or suggestions, Special Agent Pendergast, before we proceed further?”

“Not at the moment, thank you.”

“Very well. We performed a preliminary examination of the body earlier this morning and have noted several important anomalies. I will begin with the overall condition.”

He paused, cleared his throat. Hazen saw his eyes flicker toward the videocamera positioned above the gurney.
Yeah, you look great, Doc.

“The first thing I noticed was the lack of insect activity on the body, and the fact that decomposition had barely initiated, despite the fact that the victim has been deceased for at least eighteen hours in temperatures not less than ninety-five degrees, and in full sun for no less than twelve hours.” He cleared his throat again.

“The second anomaly is more obvious. As can be seen, the flesh at the extremities has begun to separate from the bone. It is most pronounced here around the face, hands, and feet—the nose and lips almost appear to have melted. Both ears were missing; one was recovered at the scene. Here, across the hips and shoulders, the skin has ruptured, separated from, and ultimately withdrawn from the fatty tissue below. There is a preponderance of a sebaceous, tallowlike substance consistent with melting and subsequent cooling. The hair and scalp are gone—evidently removed post-mortem and post-, er, processing—and the fatty tissue appears to have partially liquefied. All these and a whole suite of other anomalous characteristics can be explained by one simple fact only.”

He paused and drew in some air.

“The body was boiled.”

Pendergast nodded. “Just so.”

For a minute Hazen couldn’t quite grasp it.
“Boiled?”

“The body was apparently immersed in water, brought to a boil, and left in that state for at least three hours, probably more. The autopsy and some biochemical workups will pin down the duration a little more precisely. Suffice to say the boiling was long enough to cause the separations you see here at the maxilla, mandible”—he touched the open mouth with a finger, moving the cheek away from the bone underneath—“and here, on the foot, you will note that most of the toenails are actually missing, having sloughed off. And on the hand, here, the fingernails are likewise all missing, and the left second and third digits missing down to the medial metacarpals. Note how the capsule of the proximal interphalangeal joint is sloughed away, here and here.”

Hazen looked on with increasing disbelief. Damned if it didn’t look just like a parboiled pig. “But, look—to boil a body like that would take days.”

“Wrong, Sheriff. Once the temperature overall reaches one hundred degrees centigrade, an elephant will cook just as fast as a chicken. Cooking, you see, is essentially a process of breaking down the quaternary structure of the protein molecule through the application of heat—”

“I get the picture,” Hazen said.

“The missing digits were not recovered at the scene of the crime,” said Pendergast. “Therefore, one must assume they became separated at the time of boiling.”

“That is a reasonable assumption. In addition, you will note what appear to be severe rope burns on the wrists and ankles. It suggests to me that the, ah,
boiling
might have started pre-mortem.”

This was too frigging much. Hazen felt his little world spinning out of control. Upstairs in the hospital lay Gasparilla, an eccentric but harmless old coot, with all the hair scalped not only from his head, but from his chin, upper lip, underarms, even groin; and here, downstairs, lay the second victim—boiled alive, no less. And he was looking at a hometown mass murderer who went around in bare feet, hacked and scalped his victims, and arranged them like a crèche.

“Where is someone going to get a pot big enough to boil a body in?” he asked. “And wouldn’t someone have smelled it cooking?”

He found Pendergast’s cool gray eyes settling on him. “Two excellent questions, Sheriff, suggesting two fruitful routes of inquiry.”

Fruitful routes of inquiry.
Here was Stott, a guy he had lifted more than a few with at the Wagon Wheel.

“Needless to say,” the M.E. went on, “I will verify this hypothesis with tissue sections and biochemical assays. I might even be able to tell you how long he was boiled. And now, I direct your attention to the eight-centimeter diagonal tear on the left thigh. It is deep, going through the vastus lateralis and into the vastus intermedius, exposing the femur.”

Very unwillingly, Hazen looked closer at the bite mark. It was very ragged; the flesh, dark brown from the boiling, had been ripped away from the bone.

“A gross examination of this spot clearly reveals teeth marks,” said the M.E. “This body has been partially eaten.”

“Dogs?” Hazen could barely get the question out.

“I don’t believe so, no. The dentition pattern, although showing remarkably advanced dental caries, is definitely human.”

Hazen looked away again. No further questions came to mind.

“We’ve taken measurements and photographs and some tissue samples. The body was eaten post-cooking.”

“Most likely, directly after cooking,” Pendergast murmured. “Note that the first bites are small, exploratory, perhaps taken while waiting for the corpse to cool sufficiently.”

“Er, yes. Well. Hopefully we snagged some DNA from the saliva of the, ah, person who did the eating. Despite the very poor condition of the teeth there is nonetheless evidence of exceptionally vigorous masticatory action.”

The sheriff found himself studying the very interesting tile pattern of the floor, allowing Hank Williams’s “Jambalaya” to drown out the M.E.’s drone.
Eaten.

The tune played in his head for quite some time. When it was finished and he finally raised his eyes, he found that Pendergast himself was now bending over the corpse, his face not three inches from the bloated, mottled skin. Hazen heard several loud sniffs.

“May I palpate?” Pendergast asked, holding out a finger.

The M.E. nodded.

Pendergast began prodding,
prodding,
the corpse with his finger, then rubbing his fingertip across the corpse’s arm, his face. He then looked at his finger, rubbed it against his thumb, smelled it.

This was too much. Hazen looked back down at the tile and mentally cued up “Lovesick Blues.” But just as the guitar intro began, he heard Pendergast’s voice. “May I make a suggestion?”

“Of course,” said the M.E.

“The skin of the body seems to have been coated in some oleaginous substance different from the liquefaction of human fat caused by the boiling. It almost seems as if the body has been coated deliberately. I’d recommend a series of chemical assays to determine the exact type of fats or fatty acids present.”

“We will take all that into consideration, Agent Pendergast.”

But Pendergast didn’t seem to hear. He was staring intently at the body. The room fell into silence. Hazen was aware that everybody, including himself, seemed to be waiting to hear what Pendergast would say next.

Pendergast looked up from the table. “In addition, I note a second substance on the skin,” he said, stepping back with an air of finality. “I would suggest testing for the presence of C
₁₂
H
₂₂
O
₁₁
.”

“You can’t possibly mean—?” The M.E. stopped abruptly.

Hazen glanced up. The M.E. looked astonished. But what in hell’s name could be more outrageous than what they’d already discovered?

“I’m afraid so,” said Pendergast. “The body, it appears, has been buttered and sugared.”

Twenty-Four

T
he Gro-Bain turkey plant squatted low and long in the great sea of corn that lapped right up to its corrugated metal walls. It was the same color as the corn, too: a dirty tan that rendered it almost invisible from a distance. Corrie Swanson pulled her Gremlin into the big parking lot. It was crowded with hot glittering cars and she had to park some distance from the entrance. Pendergast opened the passenger door, unfolded his black-clad legs, and emerged in a single, lithe movement. He looked around.

“Have you ever been inside, Miss Swanson?”

“Never. I’ve heard enough stories.”

“I confess I am curious to see how they do it.”

“How they do what?”

“How they turn a hundred thousand pounds of live turkey into frozen Butterballs each day.”

Corrie gave a snort. “I’m not.”

A large semi-trailer approached the plant’s loading dock, its air brakes squealing and squeaking as it backed up a huge load of stacked turkey cages. Beside the loading dock was an enormous bay, large black strips of rubber hanging over its mouth, like the ones Corrie had seen at the Deeper Car Wash. As she watched, the semi-trailer backed its load into the bay, the turkey cages disappearing five at a time between the rubber strips until only the cab of the semi remained in view. There was another chuff of brakes and the vehicle lurched to a halt.

“Agent Pendergast, can I ask what we’re doing here?”

“You certainly may. We are here to find out more about William LaRue Stott.”

“What’s the connection?”

Pendergast turned to her. “Miss Swanson, in my line of work I have discovered that
everything
is connected. I must come to know this town, and everything and everyone in it. Medicine Creek isn’t just a character in the drama, it is the
protagonist.
And here in front of us we have a business—a slaughterhouse, to be precise—on which the economic lifeline of the town depends. The place of employment of our second victim. This plant is the beating heart of Medicine Creek, if you will pardon the metaphor.”

“Maybe I should wait in the car. Dead turkeys are not my gig.”

“I should have thought this fit in well with your
weltanschauung.
” Pendergast gestured at the Gothic appurtenances that littered the car. “And they are not dead when they arrive. In any case, you are free to do as you wish.” And he set off cheerfully across the parking lot.

Corrie watched him for a moment. Then she yanked open the door of the Gremlin and hurried to catch up.

Pendergast was approaching a windowless steel door bearing a sign that read
EMPLOYEE ENTRANCE—PLEASE USE KEY
. He tried the handle but it was locked. Corrie watched as he began to reach into an inside pocket of his jacket. Then he withdrew his hand again, as if reconsidering.

“Follow me,” he said.

They walked along the concrete apron to a set of cement stairs. The stairs led directly onto the loading dock where the semi-trailer stood, its load of turkeys now hidden within the plant itself. Pendergast ducked between the wide rubber strips at the edge of the bay and disappeared. Corrie swallowed, drew in her breath, and followed.