Dead Man's Song

He kissed her hair as they sat in the window bay watching geese mill around in the yard.



Val said, “Crow?”



“Yeah, baby?”



“About our getting married?” He tensed. “Are you sure?”



Crow laughed. “No, it was just a whim.”



She smacked his chest lightly. “You know what I mean.”



“I’m not sure I do,” he admitted.



“When you proposed at the hospital…you knew I needed something real to anchor myself to. It was so wonderful, so sweet of you, but I don’t want to think that you did it just to make me feel better. Like some kind of distraction therapy.”



He laughed again, harder. “Yeah, you found me out. You see, I found it pretty useful carrying around a two-carat Asscher-cut engagement ring just in case some random woman needs a little emotional pick-me-up. It’s worked dozens of times.”



Val raised her head and studied him with her dark blue eyes. “I’m not joking, Crow.”



His eyes still twinkled with humor. “You are possibly the dumbest smart woman in the world if you don’t know how much I love you. I love you more than anything else in the universe, Valerie Guthrie, and I’ve been planning to pop the ol’question for some time now but couldn’t find just the right moment. Though in retrospect proposing while I was whacked out on morphine may be a questionable interpretation of ‘the right moment,’ it seemed to work out okay.”



Val kissed him, sweetly and softly, careful of the stitches in his lips and mouth. “My God! It was so much the right time. But tell me—tell me right now, right here, looking me in the eyes—are you sure?”



Crow pulled her closer and kissed her lips and her eyes and buried his face in the fragrant softness of the side of her throat. “My sweet love, I am more sure of that than anything else in my life. I have to be with you, now and forever. I love so much that if I even think about living a second without you I think I’d go nuts. I’m babbling, I know…but I don’t know how else to say it. I want to be with you, I want to marry you, and I want to have everything with you. Life, house, two-point-five kids, dog, station wagon, PTA, crab-grass, and middle-age spread—the whole enchilada.” Her eyes closed and a single tear leaked out of her bruised eye. He didn’t see it, but when it fell on his chest, he pushed her gently back so that he could see her face. “Hey…are you crying?”



“Of course I’m crying, you idiot.”



“Val, I—”



“Crow…I have to tell you something and if you want to take back your ring, if you want to back off, I will understand, but I have to tell you.”



Crow’s heart turned to a block of ice. “You are scaring the shit out of me here.”



“God, I hope not.” Her face was serious, but there was a bright light there, sparkling in her eyes like spring sunlight on late winter snow.



“Then tell me,” he said, and braced himself.



“Crow…my love…I’m pregnant.”



Crow could actually feel his mouth drop open like a trap-door. If he was still breathing, he wasn’t aware of it, though he knew that his heart was still beating—it was right there in his throat. He saw the look of desperate hopefulness in her eyes begin to change into a look of broken-hearted fear…and he wanted to say something smart, something pithy.



Instead he just yelled. A great big whooping bellow of pure joy.



Val felt herself yanked forward and Crow crushed her to his chest. They both howled in pain and then they both laughed, and a moment later they were both crying and kissing each other. Crow kept saying: “Babybabybabybaby…” but Val didn’t know if he was using an endearment for her or just trying out the new implications of the word. Either way, she felt the knot that had been wrapped around her heart split apart and her whole chest seemed to be filled with warm helium. She wanted to leap into the air with him, and she was sure that they would both float.



Feet pounded on the steps and Val turned her head—which made Crow miss her face and land a big noisy kiss on her ear, which hurt, but who cared?—and the door burst open and Sarah Wolfe was there, looking shocked and desperate. “Oh my God,” Sarah yelled, fear in her eyes, “what’s going on, who’s hurt, did you fall…?”



Val wrapped her arms around Crow’s neck and pulled his face to her chest and spoke over his tousled hair, pitching her voice high over Crow’s constant Yee-haws. “We’re having a baby!”



Sarah stopped, mouth in a perfect O, her inability to process this registering on her face. “A…baby?” And then she was hugging them both.



(2)



Frank Ferro sat at the head of the conference table with Vince LaMastra to his right. At the far end sat Terry Wolfe and to his left was Gus Bernhardt. Filling out the rest of the big oak town council table were two FBI agents—Agent Henckhauser and Special Agent in Charge Spinlicker, from the Philadelphia Field Office—and three state troopers—Sutter, Wimmer, and Yablonski. Everyone had coffee cups in front of them except SAC Spinlicker, who had a Diet Pepsi in a can. This was the first meeting with the FBI and was intended as a preliminary assessment to see if the Bureau felt it was necessary and appropriate to take over the case. The room looked like what it now was: a war room. Maps of Pine Deep were tacked to the walls, notes and photos were taped haphazardly on every available surface, dry-erase boards stood on easels, and reams of computer printouts were stacked on the floor.



The SAC leaned forward and steepled his fingers, fixing Ferro with a steely and openly accusatory look. “You checked everywhere?”



Ferro’s reaction was to lean back in his chair and smile at Spinlicker. “Well, Agent Spinlicker, clearly if we had searched everywhere we’d have found him.”



“You implied—”



“What I said was that one hundred and sixty-three men, six teams of dogs, and two spotter airplanes have spent the last several days combing every inch of the Guthrie farm and much of the surrounding woods. We’ve broadened the search to include ninety other farms, the grounds of the Haunted Hayride, the campus of Pinelands College, a large portion of Pinelands State Forest, and the canals. My assessment, Agent Spinlicker, is that Kenneth Boyd is not in any of the areas we’re searched.”



“And found jack shit,” LaMastra summed up.



Spinlicker shared a glance with his partner, and smiled ever so faintly. To Ferro he said, “And Kenneth Boyd has managed to elude all of your efforts.” There was just the slightest emphasis on the word “your.”



In the stiff silence that followed Bernhardt cleared his throat. “In all fairness, sir, the area they searched is pretty dense.”



“It also comprises less than an eighth of the entire borough,” said Trooper Yablonski. “The village itself may be small, but the borough of Pine Deep is pretty damn big. There are a lot of places for one man to hide.”



The SAC let silence be his comment on that, and on the handling of the operation as a whole. He picked up a folder from the table, opened it, and riffled through the papers, occasionally making a small and dismissive “hmm” sound. “Quite frankly, Sergeant Ferro, it makes me wonder how well you—”



Then there was a sound like a gunshot and everyone jumped in their seats and spun toward Terry, who had just slammed his palm down hard and flat against the table. “Agent Spinlicker,” he snapped, “if you think there is a problem in the way things have been handled then come out and say it.” He glared at the SAC and at that moment Terry Wolfe seemed to fill the room.



Spinlicker hedged. “I didn’t say that, sir.”



“I know. You’re pussyfooting around it. If you have a problem with the way Sergeant Ferro’s handled things come out and say it right now.”



The air between them crackled like the charge between two poles. Spinlicker said, “No, sir.”



Terry’s face remained hard as a fist. “Then sit there and shut the fuck up.”



Henckhauser gasped audibly and the Staties exchanged startled looks. Gus was shocked at the language he was hearing from Terry; Ferro was staring at the mayor, and LaMastra was grinning. Terry saw the smile and wheeled on him. “And you can wipe that shit-eating grin off your face, Detective. I’m not saying that you guys have done such a great job either.”



That wiped LaMastra’s face clean.



Addressing the whole table, Terry said, “This is my town, gentlemen, but this is not my mess. It’s yours. Now clean it up!” Again his palm came down on the table hard enough to make everyone jump. “One of my closest friends is dead. My best friend just got out of the hospital along with his fiancée, whom I’ve known since kindergarten. One of my cops is dead, and so is an officer loaned to me from a neighboring town. I have a hospital worker in intensive care with a split skull, a woman who was nearly raped, her husband who had his face kicked in, shots fired in my hospital, two other cops down with injuries, and now a body stolen from the morgue. Every reporter in the world is here and according to the news stories I’m starting to see, this town—my town—is becoming a joke in terms of safety. I heard this town mentioned on the Daily Show last night, and on Leno. As a goddamn punchline. So, when I tell you that I am one hundred percent fed up with this bullshit you had best believe I’m serious. About the last thing I want to hear or see is you lot getting into a jurisdictional pissing contest. Am I getting through to you on this?”



“Loud and clear, sir,” Ferro said. Spinlicker and the others just nodded. Gus was staring at Terry with a look of fascinated awe.



“Then let me make something else clear. October is the biggest income month for this town. We’re already reeling from the crop blight and a lot of local farmers are likely to lose their farms. If you—” he fished for an appropriately savage word but only came up with an acid-laced version of “officers of the law, working together, cannot find one man—one injured man, mind you—then we are likely to lose the entire tourist season. That means Pine Deep is going to go into the tank.” He leaned forward, his blues eyes as hard as gunmetal. “If, on the other hand, you can manage to find this guy, then there is still a chance we can pull off enough of a season to stay afloat. That, gentlemen, is a very real concern and I want to know right now that this is going to happen.” He made eye contact, brief but penetrating, with each man at the table, one after the other. “Make me believe that this is going to happen.”