Dead Man's Song

“You’re sure it’s Boyd?” Terry and Gus asked at the same time.



“No question. I’ve got that asshole’s face burned into my brain. Mind you, the guy looks really messed up, but it’s him. He was all filthy, covered in mud and stuff like he’s been hiding out in the woods, like we thought. Stringy hair, lot of visible cuts, and something’s wrong with his right leg. It was all twisted and if he hadn’t been carrying Ruger I’d had bet the leg was broken.”



“Ruger told Val that Boyd’s leg was broken,” Terry observed.



“Apparently Ruger was not a doctor,” Weinstock said. “You have a broken leg you don’t carry a full-grown man around over your shoulder, and before you ask, being hyped on coke wouldn’t make a difference, it’s a matter of structural integrity.”



“Point is,” said Ferro, “he has some kind of injury to his leg—which our criminalists will be able to tell us more about once they’ve had a chance to look at the footprints in the hall—but it isn’t serious enough to have prevented him from breaking in here and stealing Ruger’s body.”



“Didn’t slow him up from attacking those cops either,” Terry said bitterly.



“Or maybe it happened during that attack,” Ferro said. “Anything else, Jerry?”



“No, once we determined that Boyd was not in the morgue, I sealed the scene and made some more calls. The rest you know.”



Gus said, “What the Christ does he want with Ruger’s body? I mean…Ruger is actually dead, right?” Weinstock just gave him a look. “They why risk breaking in here to steal a corpse?”



“Gus,” Ferro said wearily, “I am so far beyond understanding what’s going on in this psycho son of a bitch’s head that I don’t know what to think. First he leaves town, gets clean away, and then comes back to kill a couple of cops and steal his accomplice’s body. If there is a logic to any of that, then it escapes me.”



“I’m with you on that,” Weinstock said.



“Jerry, I want to see the shift roster for tonight,” Ferro said. “No one goes home before I get a chance to talk to them, and that means everybody had better be able to account for every second of their shift. Somebody unlocked that door, so maybe we can pin down who it was and find out why they’d be helping a meltdown like Boyd.”



“Are you suggesting that someone in town has a connection with Ruger and Boyd?” Gus asked.



“I’m open to other suggestions if you have them, Chief.” His eyes were hard. “Okay, let’s go take a look.”



The morgue was just as Head had described it, with many of the cold-storage drawers opened and three of the tables pulled out. The sheets that had been on Castle and Cowan were hanging off, the ends trailing to the floor, and the bodies of the officers left in horrid display, their torn and bloodless flesh wretchedly exposed. The eyes of the officers were partially open, lids uneven, dead stares empty and disturbing. Ruger’s drawer was empty, the rubber sheet heaped on the floor. The two halves of the toe tag that Head had found on the sheet had been placed in plastic evidence bags, their locations noted with flagged markers. The lead criminalist, a state cop named Judy Sanchez, came over to greet Ferro and the others. She had worked the double murders at the Guthrie farm and already met everyone. She was about five-six, with kinky dark brown hair cut short and a spray of dark freckles across her nose that did nothing at all to make her look girlish. She had flat black eyes and a hard mouth and gave the men a curt nod as she stripped off a pair of latex gloves. “What do you have, Judy?” Ferro asked.



“Not a lot, Frank. The videotape is the real find. Pretty much tells us what we need to know. Brad Maynard is dubbing a copy right now. We’ll leave the dub here and take the original and dump it to digital so we can use the filters on it to clean it up for court, in case it gets that far.”



“Any doubt that it was Boyd?” Gus asked.



“Oh, hell, no,” she said. “Regardless, I’d like Dr. Weinstock to look at it. There are some anomalies.”



“I told them about the leg,” Head told her.



“I watched that tape five times, and unless I’m beginning to lose it that leg definitely looks broken, though how in hell he’s walking on it is beyond me. I’ll let you form your own opinions, though. As for this,” she jerked her chin toward the empty table. “This is kind of odd. Looks like Boyd started at one end and kept opening doors until he found Ruger, and he clearly pulled out the drawers of Castle and Cowan, pulled the sheets back, and there is some indication that he did some damage to each body.”



“What?” all of the men said it in a shocked chorus, even Head, and she held up a hand.



“From what I can see—and Dr. Weinstock will have to verify this in a postmortem—it looks like Boyd may have intentionally damaged the already torn flesh on the throats of both corpses.”



Terry blanched. “But…why?”



Sanchez shrugged. “My guess? He may have been trying to disfigure the bodies to make identification of the murder weapon more difficult.”



“You’ve lost me,” Terry said.



Weinstock was nodding. “All weapons, even very sharp knives, leave trace elements in the wounds, and by manipulation of the wounds we can often get a fairly clear picture of the type of weapon used in the murder—smooth-edged knife, serrated knife, garden trowel, what have you. Microscopic traces will tell metal from plastic from wood, and so on.”



“It helps in court,” Ferro added. “If the suspect is found in possession of a weapon and that weapon can be matched to the wounds…well, there you go.”



“Okay, I get it.” Terry looked at Sanchez. “So you’re saying that Boyd messed with the wounds to disguise the weapon he might have used? Wouldn’t he just have tossed the weapon away by now if he was concerned with that sort of thing?”



“Mr. Mayor,” Sanchez said, “I’m no forensic psychologist, but I don’t think we’re dealing with a rational mind here. There’s also some indication of ritual, and we might need a psychologist to take a look at that.”



“What do you mean by ‘ritual’?” Terry asked.



“Boyd apparently dribbled blood onto the faces and throats of both corpses. There’s no pattern I can see except that there are a few drops of blood on the lips of each and more on the throats of each.”



“Holy Mother of God,” Gus whispered and his face went gray.



Ferro grunted. “Sounds like Boyd’s really lost it. Extreme violence, apparently senseless acts such as stealing Ruger’s body, and now blood rituals.”



“I’ll back you up on that,” Weinstock said. “In purely clinical terms I think it’s safe to say that this Boyd character is a total freak-job.”



Sanchez nodded. “That part of it will be up to you to sort out, Doc. For my part, I also took some measurements of footprints and such.”



“The ones in the hall?” Head asked doubtfully.



She shook her head. “No, there was some water on the floor and he walked through it. Clear limp evidenced by the gait and spacing, and a step-scuff pattern that suggests he was partially dragging his right leg.”



“And yet he carried a two-hundred-pound man out of here over his shoulder?” Terry asked skeptically.



“If we hadn’t had that tape, sir,” Sanchez said, “I’d have argued pretty strongly for an accomplice, but the tape is the tape. You should watch it.”



They did, crowding into the small morgue office. Brad Maynard came down with a copy and they played it half a dozen times. On the sixth replay Vince LaMastra joined them, his face still puffy from sleep, his square jaw rimed with yellow fuzz. He watched the tape over Ferro’s shoulder and when Boyd, disheveled and very clearly limping on a twisted right leg, staggered out with Ruger’s body slung over his shoulder, he said, “That’s sick. He looks dead.”



“He is dead,” Terry snapped. “That’s why he was in the damn morgue.”



“No,” LaMastra said, reaching out to tap the screen. “Him. Boyd. He looks dead. It’s weird.”



They watched the tape a seventh time, and Boyd looked dead that time, too. No one said anything for a while. Finally Gus murmured, “I wish to hell he was dead, the bastard.”



Later three of them—Ferro, LaMastra, and Gus met in the doctors’ lounge. Terry left for home, and Weinstock was overseeing the post-forensic restoration of his morgue. Gus made a pot of coffee and they settled down with cups, looking over the staff rosters for that evening. “Most of the staff don’t have access to the door keys and security codes,” Gus said. “That leaves the maintenance staff, the security people, a few of the top docs, and the officers eating in the cafeteria—Head and Chremos from Crestville. And Jim Polk, who was here visiting Rhoda Thomas.” He consulted a chart. “Call it twelve people in all who were here at the time of the break-in.”



“Okay, then we need to interview each one,” Ferro said.



Each person with potential access was brought in separately and interviewed by the three of them, with Ferro taking point on most of the interrogations. No one admitted to having tampered with the codes, and when asked to turn out their pockets—a request that was met with flat hostility by almost everyone except Head, who understood the drill—no keys turned up that shouldn’t be there. Each person was made to write out a detailed list of where they were all night and who they spoke with. “So where does that leave us?” LaMastra asked in disgust as the last of the interviewees left.



“Nowhere,” Ferro said with a sigh.



“God,” murmured LaMastra, “I love police work.”



(2)



When the car passed Vic rose up out of the tall weeds and continued moving down the bank to where the iron leg of the bridge was fitted into its massive concrete boot. He paused for a moment and took set down his backpack, unzipped it, and then removed first a pair of 12-power binoculars and then a high-resolution Nikon digital camera with a telephoto lens. He sat down with the weeds above shoulder height and put the binoculars to his eyes so he could study the old bridge that linked Pine Deep to Black Marsh. The bridge was a two-lane affair with close-fitted railroad ties stuffed between steel I-beams. It was sturdy enough, and though it rattled and shook, it would probably not even need rebuilding for another decade. That thought caused Vic to smile. He set the binoculars down and picked up the digital camera. It was very expensive, with a two-gigabyte memory card that took ten-megapixel images. Vic rested his elbows on his knees to study the camera and then took over fifty ultra-close-up photos of the bridge and each of its supports. The morning sun was clear and bright, perfect for high-res photography.