The Love of the Dead (18 page)

“Could be,” he agreed. “Want the tour?”

Coleridge nodded, and Mooney pushed himself up with a grunt.

They checked out all the rooms—four bedrooms on the top floor. One of those was obviously the master bedroom. En suite with a claw foot tub and some brassy looking taps. Looked expensive. Everything in the house looked expensive.

Coleridge would have bet a month’s pay no one had wiped their feet on the way in.

But then, Coleridge got to thinking about cleaning again. How you’d start at the top, work your way down.

He was thinking about cleaning because there was a thick layer of dust over pretty much everything. It wasn’t recent. Even cops didn’t smoke that much. It’d have to be a good couple of months.

“You think he’d have a cleaner, wouldn’t you?”

“Maybe he did. But not for a while.”

“Doesn’t look like it.”

“It’s not what you think.”

“I don’t know what I think. Not yet. Don’t spoil the surprise though, eh? I like working in the dark.”

Mooney laughed, just a humorless bark. It turned into a hacking cough.

“I’m not doing it to be an ass. It’s the punchline. I don’t want to ruin the gag.”

Coleridge shook his head as they reached the stairs. The banisters didn’t have any dust on them, but he reckoned a good few cops used it on their way back and forth, even though they weren’t supposed to. You go up a flight of stairs like these, you hold the banister. Natural. You couldn’t help it. Stairs like these made you feel mortal.

The second floor was much the same. So far Coleridge had counted five bathrooms over two floors, but no sign that any room other than the master bedroom had ever been occupied. It had been the only room with clothes in the closets. Even so, it didn’t look like it’d been slept in recently.

“Come on, Coleridge. You’re killing me. Downstairs. There’s nothing to see here, OK? The house might as well as have been empty.”

“Don’t want to miss anything.”

“You think the hundreds of policemen going over this place can’t do a better job than you?”

Coleridge had to concede the point.

“Come on then. I’m tired and it’s going to be a long, bastard of a day. Show me what we’ve got.”

Mooney clapped his hands. “Ready?”

“Fuck’s sake, Mooney. It’s not a game show.”

“Nope. It’s a circus.”

Mooney led Coleridge to the ground floor, then out past a kitchen that was way too big for one man to handle. Coleridge didn’t need to ask if Sawyer had lived alone. It was obvious. He must have rattled around in it. The house was way too big for one man.

“No partners? No kids? No family of Albanian’s paying rent?” he asked.

“Nope. Alone. Had a cleaning company come in once a week. He let them go a month ago.”

“About the time the killings started?”

“Bingo.”

A knot of people were gathered around the top of a stairwell leading to what Coleridge assumed would be the cellar. Mooney had built it up pretty good. He didn’t want to go down there. He didn’t want to see it. “Charnel house” conjured up nasty images. Coleridge had seen some nasty shit over the years, but he knew this was something else.

He knew from the pale faces on the crime scene techs that came up and the reluctant faces on those going back down. Whispers in the hallway. Cops talked shit about everything. If they were quiet...if they couldn’t find something sick to say...

No one was laughing. Cops always laughed at a crime scene. Not all of them, but there’d always be a couple of wits about. Dark humors, maybe. Maybe sick. The kind of thing you wouldn’t want the bereaved to hear. God forbid the press ever get hold of it.

But there was none of that here. Just solemn faces. Scared faces. Faces of men who wouldn’t be sleeping for a while. Their wives would ask, what is it honey? Bad day?

They’d never speak about it, though. The sensible ones wouldn’t, anyway. When wives get wise to the kind of things a man sees in this line of work, that’s when things start to fall down.

That’s what the shrinks were there for. That’s what a pint after work was for. That’s what your buddies on the force are for. They know. They understand. Most of all, they don’t judge if a man drinks a little too much when his shift’s done. You do what you have to.

A tech came up from the basement, a perfect shade of green. Nobody offered him a slap-up meal. They just stepped well back, minding their feet, and waited for him to hurl. It didn’t take long. He managed to get his shoes. No one offered any shit.

Coleridge really didn’t want to go down there. But he put his left foot on the first riser, and like always, once you’d taken the first step, the rest were easy.

Chapter Fifty-Three

The smell hit Coleridge as he headed down the stairs. A stink so vile he could have quite happily thrown up right there, before he even got to the heavy work. Seeing the dead wasn’t heavy work like road construction or moving houses. It was heavy work on the heart and the soul. It wore you down after a while.

Coleridge had seen enough these last few days to see him through the next couple of months, he figured. But it wasn’t over yet. There was a way to go. This was maybe the best of it, because tonight would be worse. He knew without a doubt that Sawyer wasn’t the guy he’d spoken to on the phone, because Sawyer had been dead at the time. So some hard sick bastard was planning on visiting Beth’s house. The kind of man who’d never been caught, even though he’d chopped off people’s heads and carried them away.

Whatever Sawyer had done, it wouldn’t be over. Not until the sun went down and Coleridge saw the face of the real killer.

But for now, maybe his accomplice. Sick enough. Maybe Sawyer killed a few. Maybe the other guy killed the rest.

He wasn’t worried about Sawyer.

But then he was.

There were no windows in the basement. It should have had a pentagram on the floor, or a statue of Kali, or burning black tallow made from the fat of babies. But the only lighting was by fluorescents, and in the stark glare Coleridge saw why everyone was hushed, like at a funeral, until someone drinks enough to start a fight or laughs uncontrollably. Coleridge didn’t feel like laughing, but he did feel like starting a fight.

He didn’t want to look at the walls, so he looked at the center of the room. It was the easiest place to look at.

A double bed with off-white sheets. They’d most likely started out white, but now they were covered with bodily fluids. Looked kind of yellow in places, the odd patch of dark red, almost black, that he figured was blood. There was some shit there, and a thick spread of piss about where you’d expect someone to be if they were lying in the middle of the bed.

The bed wasn’t grand, like those upstairs. Just functional. It was pretty plain. Coleridge approached it carefully. He half expected there to be trapdoors, like some kind of storybook villain might have had. That’d make it easier to take, in a way, if he could rationalize what he was seeing in terms of make-believe.

But it was right there. All around him.

To one side of the bed was an empty bag with a tube leading from it. The tube dangled on the floor now, but Coleridge thought it was a drip and that it had been attached to whoever had been on the bed.

Mooney hung back. Coleridge had questions, but for now, he just needed to look. To take it in. To come to some kind of agreement with his mind over what he was seeing. He had to look, he had to think about it. What he saw down here might not make a difference when dark fell, but it might, and he couldn’t afford to miss it.

The people down here were already dead. Beth wasn’t.

He turned away from the bed and took a circuit of the walls. He didn’t know where to start, so he just began at the spot that was closest.

Set in alcoves, in spaces that looked to have been purposefully built, maybe by Sawyer, there were rows upon rows of heads. The heads weren’t in liquid, like some kind of preservative. They weren’t even in jars, as he’d half expected to find. They were stuck on spikes, driven with enough force in some cases for the spike to come out of the top of the skull. They weren’t in any kind of order. It was easy to tell that some were older than others, because they were decomposed.

The oldest had a few strands of hair attached. There were some in there that had dried flesh. Others were putrescent, decomposing matter running out of the alcove, dripping past the head’s beneath, pooling on the floor. Some had eyes, some had oily globules on their cheeks where the eyes had gone first.

It was obvious that this wasn’t about a few mediums in Norfolk.

Coleridge counted the alcoves. Tried to. In columns of six, right around the room. Not all were filled, but a lot. Maybe three quarters, four fifths, something like that. Someone better at math would count this up. The papers would probably run a spread, a list of all the dead. All that could be identified, anyway. Plenty were just bone and teeth. People who’d gone missing over the years. Maybe ten years. Twenty. Thirty? Coleridge just didn’t know. This was a long term thing. Freeman might be able to figure out how old the oldest skull was. It wasn’t Coleridge’s field of expertise.

Fuck. This wasn’t anyone’s field of expertise.

He tried to get some kind of figure in his head, but he couldn’t work it out. He couldn’t do it. His mind didn’t want to do it. It was more terrible than he could ever have imagined, but his cop’s mind was taking over, reasoning things out so that he didn’t have to think about it straight on. His mind sidled up to the sight, and went sideways, giving him an out. Think about reasons. Think about possibility. Find questions first then worry about finding the answers.

He had two questions straight away, and like a pair of crutches they held him up. Held him so he could keep on.

He turned to Mooney. Mooney didn’t look like he was willing to muck about anymore. You couldn’t, not here. Get the funniest guy in the world down here and he’d just make you cry.

“Where are the hearts?” he asked.

Mooney shook his head.

“My first question, too. Don’t know is the only answer we’ve got at the moment. Seeing this, I’m not sure I want to know.”

Coleridge agreed, but whether he wanted to know or not, he thought he’d have to know. It might not matter, but there was a lot riding on this. It wasn’t done. He knew it. The other cops knew it, too.

Beth knew it better than anyone.

“Second question—is this some kind of torture chamber?” he pointed at the bed, his thick finger shaking in a way he didn’t like. He put his hand back by his side. “Did he bring people here? Make them look at this lot? Then kill them?”

“There’s the punchline, Coleridge. He didn’t put anyone there. Just himself.”

“What?”

“That’s his bed. See the drip?”

“His?”

Mooney nodded. “Spot on. Know what it is?”

“No. You find out?”

Mooney nodded again. Taking a little pleasure from figuring something out, but not much. You couldn’t take much pleasure from this. Not even from a job well done. All you could take from this was nightmares.

“Sedative and a drip.”

Coleridge shook his head, he didn’t understand.

“There’s the kicker. The yellow stuff on the bed? Pus. Bed sores. An autopsy’ll give us a better idea, but the best we can figure for now is that Sawyer was sedated on this bed, in among this lot, for weeks. It takes weeks to develop bed sores like he had. He was practically decomposing. Maybe four weeks? What do you reckon?” Mooney looked at Coleridge, his heavy eyes showed he knew the answer well enough. It didn’t require any input from Coleridge.

“I don’t get it. Mooney, what the fuck is going on? Can you tell me that? Please. What the fuck?”

“Nobody gets it. Sawyer’s probably been under for weeks, probably since the killing started. But then there’s this. You looked? Looked properly?”

Coleridge stared at Mooney for a second, then forced his legs to carry him back to the walls, the alcoves. All the heads.

He walked ’round the walls. Looked at each face. Finally he got to one he recognized.

“Dean?”

“No way Sawyer could’ve killed him. He was comatose, on that bed. No doubt about it. Couldn’t fake the way his body looked. His body was eating itself. If he hadn’t died in a hospital, he probably would’ve died down here anyway. Fuck, Coleridge. I’ve seen his body. Remember we found that girl’s body? Been in an attic for a year? Looked worse than hers when he was still alive.”

“But this...this has been going on for years.”

“We had a pathologist in here. Said the way the basement is sealed, cool...he reckoned the oldest head could be thirty-odd years old. Maybe forty. Get this—the oldest heads in here? The one’s that are just bones? He said he’d have to get a specialist to look at them. He wouldn’t even guess at how old they are.”

“Sawyer’s been doing this for that long? Nobody’s ever cottoned on? Fuck. How do you get away with it?”

But Mooney was shaking his head again.

“It just keeps getting better. You’ll love this.”

“I don’t think I will.”

“No, maybe not. But still...Sawyer’s down here, got all these heads, fancy house and all...been at it a while, right? Maybe making some money out of these people he’s killed?”

“Maybe.”

“It doesn’t add up. Because we found Sawyer’s driving license. Positive ID. No doubt. We checked, double checked, fuck, we
quadruple
checked. Nobody wants to fuck this up. He was thirty-four years old.”

Coleridge stared at Mooney, waiting for a joke. A grin. Something.

But Mooney just stared right back. Nodded. “If these are all his,” he said, “then he must have been killing since he was about four years old. If the bones are older than that...”

Coleridge could feel his head swimming. He was either getting hungry, or getting ready to puke. He didn’t fancy anything on offer in the basement, and he was damned if he’d throw up like some rookie.

“Come on. Let’s get the fuck out of here. I’ve seen all I want to see.”

“You want to see the body?”

“Yeah, I do,” he said, although it wasn’t strictly true. “But for now, I’m hungry.”