Stones Unturned (6 page)

Her blouse was open as she made her way out of the club, the buttons still lying on the floor of the men's room. She gave the dancers an occasional shot of the girls as she strolled toward one of the fire exits. Eve could feel their eyes upon her as she passed, but nobody dared approach her. It was almost as if they could sense her difference now, some primordial mechanism in the brain warning them to keep their distance, which was probably a good thing.

She was no longer in the mood.

Stepping out of the club into a back alley, she reveled in the touch of the cold night air on her exposed flesh. Eve looked down at her blouse, considering whether or not it was possible to salvage, but noticed some of the delicate material had been torn where the buttons had once been.

"Shit," she muttered under her breath. She'd really liked this shirt. She was considering going back inside to the men's bathroom to scare the little puke some more, and maybe relieve him of five hundred dollars, when the feeling hit her.

It was as though a wave of unease had just passed over her. The hairs on the back of her neck rose to attention, and goosebumps rippled her cold, undead skin. An awful, high-pitched sound came to her on the wind, and she turned to stare at a dumpster at the far end of the alley, where a commotion had erupted.

Rats — what seemed to be hundreds of them — swarmed and hissed and tore at one another. The fighting vermin resembled a single, writhing entity of grayish black fur and multiple, hairless tails. They were all screeching as one, tearing and biting at each other, a puddle of expanding red collecting beneath the undulating mass they had become.

"What's this all about?" she whispered to the night, walking from the alley out onto Lansdowne Street. Eve sniffed at the air, searching for the scent of whatever it was that had just passed by. She glanced back down the alley to see that the ground was covered in blood and pieces of dead rat. The swarming had ceased, the survivors scuttling into the shadows.

A hint of something nasty lingered in the air, but before she had a chance to try to identify it, the feeling and the scent were gone.

CHAPTER THREE

Clay Smith had been to an eternity of funerals, so many that they had long since lost the ability to touch his heart or bring him to introspection. Wakes were something else entirely; they fascinated him. A great deal could be learned about people — both the deceased and their survivors — just by observing the behavior at a wake. Most often, when the deceased had died of something natural, such as that equal opportunity killer, time, or something typically stupid, like smoking, wakes were like cocktail parties held in a library, people laughing and reminiscing, but trying to do so with a certain hush to their voices.

The wake of a murder victim was different. No one laughed. There was nothing funny about murder.

Clay stood in the back of the room at Yerardi & Sons where Corey Gillard had been laid out in his casket so that people could say a prayer over his corpse and be quietly grateful that they, themselves, were still alive. As grim as a wake was, for each attendee it was also a quiet celebration of his or her continued existence. Clay could see it in their eyes.

That was the sort of wisdom imparted by immortality.

He wondered how many of them would be so grateful for life after a few thousand years without the possibility of death.

Don't be so morbid
, he thought.
You have a job to do.

Clay glanced around the room again and studied the mourners one by one. Based on the crime scene, the way the body lay, the lack of a struggle, Boston homicide figured the dead man had known his killer, so it stood to reason that the murderer might well be in this very room.

One way to find out.

He stepped past a little girl in a dark green dress that might have been more appropriate for Christmas, nodded to the girl's mother, and started toward the front of the room, where the casket stood on a low platform. Clay inhaled deeply the aroma of the hundreds of flowers arranged in a display around the dead man. But laced within that smell was the odor of chemical air fresheners used by the funeral home. No matter how fresh the body was when it was embalmed, there was apt to be a stale smell to it. The flowers were usually enough to cover it, but funeral homes always pumped in that overwhelming floral stink, like an overzealous grandmother's perfume.

As he moved past the family of the deceased — Corey Gillard had been twenty-seven and unmarried, so that meant parents, two brothers, a couple of small nieces — Clay didn't bother studying the faces of the grieving any further. The truth wasn't going to be revealed in their eyes. The killer might be struggling with guilt, but in the aftermath of a tragic death, people reacted in all sorts of ways. Emotions overflowed. Too many people in that room were troubled to make any presumptions based on their behavior.

Clay waited while a gray-haired man knelt beside the coffin and said a prayer. When the man stood, sniffling and wiping at his nose, and moved away, Clay slid in to take his place. The kneeler was warm from all of the people who had paused to pay their respects in the half an hour since the wake had begun.

The top third of the casket was open and within lay a waxy figure that had once been a man. That absence of life had always intrigued Clay, for he could not die. Perhaps he might be killed, but many had tried since the dawn of time and no one had succeeded. Death was loss, but to Clay it was not less of self. It was loss of love and warmth and comfort and fondness, and the acquisition of ache and regret. He thought of human death whenever he saw a squirrel crushed on the road, or seashells littered along a beach.

That was all that remained of Corey Gillard now, a shell.

The dead man's face was slack in some places, taut in others, where the thread used by the mortician had tugged at his flesh. His arms were crossed, hands laid over his heart. Somewhere further south, beneath the heavy maple of the lower two-thirds of the coffin lid, was the wound that had actually ended his life. But it would have been sewn up now and dwarfed by the incisions left by the medical examiner during the autopsy.

What did it matter, though. He was a shell.

The thing that had been within the shell, his soul or spirit or whatever one was inclined to call that spark of life, had vacated the premises. But life left traces behind. No one knew that better than Clay.

And
taking
life . . . that left traces, too.

Behind him, an old woman cleared her throat, impatiently awaiting her turn to pray over the corpse of Corey Gillard. Clay lowered his head as though in prayer, fingers steepled in front of him, eyes closed. He waited a few seconds for appearance's sake, and then reached out to touch the dead man's hand, just a moment of contact, his own good-bye.

At least, that was how it would appear to the people in the room.

When he stood and backed away, allowing the old woman to gingerly replace him at the kneeler, his vision had changed. There was a tint to the air in the room, at least in his eyes, as though a light mist had begun to gather. Clay took a deep breath and ran a hand through his close-cropped hair, then straightened his tie as he studied Gillard's corpse more closely.

A ghostly line traced through the room, a thick tether of ectoplasm that began at the center of the dead man's chest. It was not his entire soul, but only a fragment, a spiritual connection that linked every murder victim with his or her killer.

Clay had been forged by God. He was
the
Clay of God. There was much about his eternal life he could not recall, and his earliest memories were cloudy at best. But in addition to the malleable nature of his flesh, the Lord had given him this gift as well, this curse. In the aftermath of a murder, if he arrived in time, with the touch of his hand he could see the soul tether that connected killer and victim . . .

And he could trace it back.

The susurrus of low voices in the funeral home surrounded him. There were tears and quiet sobbing and a great many faces that were simply numb. But as he turned, his gaze following the soul tether of Corey Gillard, he felt as though he was somehow beyond the perception of those in the room, as though they had been frozen in the depths of their grief and he could wander through, unseen and untouched.

The tether snaked through the room toward the corner furthest from the door and around a massive arrangement of flowers complete with a card that read, "In Memory of Corey, From Your Family at the Arielle Gallery." Clay took up a position just beside the flowers. People were milling about, some already leaving, others just arriving, but from here he could clearly follow the trail of soulstuff that Gillard's murder had left behind.

At the back wall, near a window, stood a small cluster of men and women who were the best dressed of the mourners. The eldest was perhaps fifty, a woman of obvious sophistication, who seemed out of place mainly for the utter lack of emotion on her face. She spoke quietly to a man beside her with a goatee and a polished, elegant look who was at least ten years her junior. They did not seem like lovers. In fact, Clay judged the relationship to be employer and employee, an observation that quickly spread to include the rest of their small group. There were four other people around them, two men and two women, all in their late twenties to early thirties, of varied races but each with the same sophistication.

All but one.

Even when not speaking to her, the way they stood around her made it clear that the group all deferred to the older woman. From their appearance, and in comparison to the others in the room, he presumed they were neither family nor old friends of the dead man.

Coworkers, then, from the art gallery.

But one of the men with them seemed out of place, a broad-shouldered, square-jawed tough in an ill-fitting suit, who held the hand of a petite, attractive Asian woman. There was a protective quality to the way he held onto her . . . or so Clay thought at first glance. When he studied them again, he corrected himself. Possessive, not protective. They both wore wedding bands and Clay guessed they were husband and wife.

The Asian woman shook her head and wiped at her eyes. She smiled sadly as she looked at one of her coworkers and gave a self-deprecating shrug, perhaps mocking herself for being unable to stop crying. Her husband's jaw tightened and he cast her a sidelong glance, bitterness unmasked. She seemed to feel his disapproval, and her expression went blank. The woman took a breath and wiped a fresh tear from her left eye.

Clay wondered if she knew that her husband had murdered Corey Gillard.

The tether led right to him, not to the center of his chest, but to his right hand, which must have held the knife that he had stabbed Corey over and over with, twisting it in his gut.

The man leaned over and whispered something to his wife. Regret creased her brow, and she turned to the others, exchanging hugs as she prepared to depart. Reluctantly, she allowed her husband to lead her from the room.

Clay followed the tether, which floated in the air, a serpentine stream of wavering smoke. He pursued them out into the foyer of the funeral home. There were sitting rooms on either side of the front door. In one, two young boys sat on a loveseat, obviously uncomfortable in their suits, attention locked on the screens of their GameBoys. The other sitting room was empty, and the husband held his wife's elbow and escorted her into the room. Clay paused in the foyer, just out of their line of sight, checking his pockets as though he'd forgotten something.

"You said no one knew," the husband rasped.

"No one
does
," the wife replied.

"The way they were comforting you —"

"He was my
friend
. They all knew that much. But no one . . . no one knows —"

"No one knows you're a whore," the husband said, words like hammering nails.

Clay's contact from Boston Homicide was waiting out on the sidewalk. He should have left then, just walked out the door, but he found that he could not. Instead, he glanced into the opposite parlor to make sure the two kids were still absorbed in their GameBoys, and then he rubbed his fingers together, remembering the feeling of Corey Gillard's skin.

A ripple went through Clay's flesh. Bone popped quietly, reknitting. Muscle shifted. Pigment changed. This was what God had made him, a shapeshifter, able to take the form of any creature the Lord ever imagined, and with a touch, to duplicate the appearance of anyone, alive or dead.

When he turned and walked into the sitting room with the murderer and his wife, he wore the face of Corey Gillard.

The husband saw him first. His face went slack, all the color draining from his cheeks. He narrowed his eyes and shook his head in denial, no sound coming from his mouth. When his wife saw his expression, she turned.

Her scream echoed through the building.

"Oh, Corey," she whispered then, holding one hand up to her mouth. "Oh, my God."

Wearing the dead man's face, Clay pointed at the killer. "It was him. He cut me open. He murdered me."

Her hands fluttered, and they both covered her face as she backed away from her husband, gaze shifting quickly back and forth between him and what she thought was her dead lover.

"You . . . you can't be here," the murderer snarled.

Clay smiled with Corey's mouth. "You're right. Corey's not here. He's dead and gone. His soul's in a better place. But guess where
you're
going."

Clay raised his arms, and once again he willed his flesh and bone to shift. Bone spikes thrust up through his scalp, two rows of sharp horns. Skin tore wetly as black, leathery wings sprouted from his back. Of all the shapes he had ever taken, Clay found the form of a demon the most difficult. It left him feeling filthy, his mood dark.

But his mood was dark enough already.

Now it was the killer's turn to scream. The man fell to his knees and began to plead for mercy, from Heaven, from Hell, and from his wife. He reached for her leg, and she recoiled in disgust.