Stranglehold (18 page)

And it was up to him to protect her.

Maybe he could tell her without telling her, he thought. Sort of like what he tried to do with Dr. Bromberg earlier. "Maybe," he said.

"Somebody who touches you where you don't want to be touched?"

"Maybe."

"Where is that?"

It was getting dangerous now.

"Private ... parts, maybe," he said.

"They touch your private parts?"

"Maybe."

"
Who
does, Robert?"

He wasn't saying that. No matter what. He couldn't. Even though jeez, he wanted to. If he could only just say my father does, it's my father who does it. But he kept on seeing the rabbit.

He'd wait. Sooner or later she'd leave the question alone and just go on.

The others did.

He watched her write in her book. She seemed kind of nice. She had a nice voice, anyway. He liked that. He waited and stared at the rug.

"You won't tell me?"

He shook his head.

"Why?"

He waited some more. His skin felt itchy. Like he'd been swimming at the beach and his skin was all sticky with salt from the ocean. He rubbed his butt against the rug. It helped a little but not much.

"When this happens, does it hurt you?"

He was safer now. Good.

"Yes."

"A lot?"

He nodded.

"Where does it hurt?"

"Hurts my private parts."

"Front or back? Or both?"

"Back."

"And you won't say who does this to you?"

He shook his head.

"Does it happen often?"

"Maybe."

"Does it happen in this house?"

Careful
.

Because it used to. Not anymore but it sure used to happen.
Be careful
. Miss Stone looked smart. It might be the same as saying.

Don't answer
.

She leaned forward like she needed to get closer for some reason but didn't want to actually move off the couch to the floor with him.

"Robert, I have to ask you this. It's very important. In a way it's the most important question I'll have asked you all night—and I really, really need you to answer me on this one, okay?"

He shrugged.

But inside she was scaring him. Waiting for it. Waiting for the question.

He'd lie if he had to. And that scared him too.

"Robert, is it your mother who hurts you?" she said.

"Jeez! No!"

He actually jumped.

How could she even
think
something like that? It was like she'd hit him in the head.

People were
crazy
sometimes.

She smiled. Almost laughed. Like maybe she was relieved or something or maybe he just looked funny the way she made him jump. Anyway, he could see it.

But then she got serious again and he knew it was coming. "Is it your father, Robert?"

He saw the rabbit with its leg shot off in his father's hand. He saw him pick up a knife when they were back at the house and pinch the skin and the soft brown fur on the rabbit's back and then stick the knife in and make a slit and then put his fingers into the slit and tear the skin completely around, then peel half the skin all the way down to its feet like maybe you'd take off a sock or something and then saw him cut off its feet. He saw him do the same thing to the top half, except that this time he cut off not just the feet but the rabbit's head and then made a cut in the pink naked chest and reached in and pulled out the guts.

You can do this to a human, too
, he said.

Same thing.

Did you know that?

"Is it your father, Robert?"

No. He wasn't going to cry again, god damn it! And he wasn't going to tell her.

Make him stop
, he thought.
Somehow
.

And then he did cry a little.

He wiped the tears away and said nothing.

Duggan stamped his feet against the cold leeching in through his shoes and lit himself a Newport
Lite
off Al
Whoorly's
Winston. He hated Newport
Lites
more than any other cigarette he'd ever smoked but he was trying to quit so he figured they were good for him.

Years ago there'd been a brushfire out this way. They'd stopped it just about here. You could see the newer growth off to the left, the older stands of birch and maple to the right.

The girl was nailed to maple.

The ME was just about finished with her. The photographs were taken. In a few more minutes the Crime Scene Unit could bring her down and bag her. She'd go with
Whoorly
and the other state troopers over to the lab in Concord.

"What I don't get,"
Whoorly
said, "is why he left us the IDs. Why make it easy?"

"Considerate," Duggan said. "The guy's got heart."

"You know some of these assholes actually want to be caught. Maybe he's tired of it."

"I don't think you'll prove it by this one."

Her name was Laura Banks—a student at Plymouth State. Her student ID and driver's license were in a brown leather wallet inside her cluttered handbag. The handbag was sitting on top of a stack of neatly folded clothing placed on a rock four or five feet from the tree—coat, jeans, shirt, socks, bra and panties. The girl was the practical type. The shirt was heavy corduroy and the socks were thick red wool.

He thought of how cold she must have been. Unthinkably cold.

Before he got to warming her up some.

Silence lay heavy in the still dry morning air. Six of them out here and nobody was saying hardly anything. He guessed they were all a little in awe here. The teenage kid whose big black bastard Labrador had scented her and then run away into the woods while they were out for their morning walk was down at the station for questioning. The kid had a lot to say but it was just the same thing over and over again because the kid was scared. In a way maybe it scared them too.

Lavore
walked over and Duggan shook a Newport out of his pack for him.
Lavore
was trying to quit just like Duggan but the ME's style was grubbing.

"Okay. You can have her," he said.

"Cause of death?"

"You're kidding."

"For the record."

"Sharpened tree limb. Stake through the heart.
Directly
through the heart. I mean pretty much dead center. What you're looking for here is a torture-freak vampire-killer who's pretty good with his anatomy. And you know what? He didn't just shove it into her. He pushed it in nice and slow."

"Time of death?"

"My guess now would be about four A.M. Five, six hours ago."

"Rape?"

"Plenty of rape. Looks like he got her seven ways to Sunday. Vaginal. Anal. I wouldn't be surprised if when we pry open her jaw we find semen there too."

Duggan pointed to an area by a rock about six feet over to their left.

"You see that?"

"What? The gags?"

Two cotton dishrags had been tossed to the forest floor. One was frozen, drenched with saliva. They were bagging them.

"No. Wood shavings. The guy sat there whittling. Putting a good clean point on his stick. You want to bet she was watching him?"

"Sick,"
Whoorly
said.

"What about the rest of it?"

"All happened before she died as far as I can tell. Though some of it might be postmortem. I'll be able to give you a breakdown when we get her on the table."

He looked at her.
Lavore
was telling him she'd been alive through all of that.

What the guy had done was amazing and god only knew how much time he took to do it. Maybe all night. Maybe longer.

The body was hanging there like frozen meat in a meat locker. At some point he'd thrown water on her.
To revive her? Or just to watch her shake?
There was frost and beaded ice in her long brown hair and in her pubic hair and eyebrows. Small icicles actually hung from her toes where they almost—but not quite—touched the base of the tree.

Her arms were spread three feet apart over her head. Each wrist pierced by a
tenpenny
nail.

She hung suspended.

Her body was blue-white where it was not a brownish red.

But there was plenty of red.

He'd been at her with a dry stick.

They'd already bagged it. The stick was three feet long and he hadn't peeled too many of the branches off. It was stained with blood and bits of human flesh clung to it, studding its buds and scars.

He'd been at her with matches too.

Duggan was never the type of cop who figured that by now he'd seen everything. He knew that people could always surprise you—that people could be fucked beyond his own wildest dreams. He'd seen the bloody fallout from domestic anger and drunken driving and armed robbery and all kinds of lethal stupidity but he'd never seen anything like this and hoped to god he never would again.

He stepped out his Newport, then picked up the butt and put it in his pocket.

He'd smell like an ashtray now.

Another good incentive to quit.

What he had to try to do now was to find out all he could about the woman in life and in death, and unless he got lucky, unless somebody saw her step into a car with someone he or she knew or unless somebody went strange on him under questioning, to imagine precisely her suffering at the end and then try to construct the person who could be screwed up enough to put her through it. He'd have to look at her, in the flesh and in the photos, over and over again.

How did you imagine a
tenpenny
nail through the wrist?

Flesh burned black?

Beating somebody down to raw red meat?

How did you imagine that kind of ferocity?

He talked to
Whoorly
as they left the clearing and pushed their way back through the thick spiky brush to the cars. What
Whoorly
was guessing at this point was the most depressing of all the possibilities. That it was probably somebody who was just passing through. That somebody had picked her up hitching or something and maybe pulled a gun on her and brought her out here just because it looked deserted enough.