Dead Man's Song

“Sure,” Mike said brightly. “I’m on it.”



“You’re sure?”



“Yeah?” Mike asked, surprised. “Why ask?”



Crow smiled and shook his head. “Just making sure I didn’t work you too hard earlier. I threw a lot of stuff at you today. Maybe we worked out too hard…?”



“No, I’m cool. It was fun.” His smile began a little lopsided. “Kind of.”



“Okay. But if you feel tired or sick or anything, give me a call.”



“Yesss, massster,” Mike said in his best Igor lisp.



(2)



When Terry left Crow’s apartment he had not gone directly back to his office. Instead he turned and headed the opposite way up Corn Hill, needing the simple mechanical exertion of walking to calm his nerves. Talking with Crow had neither calmed him down nor amused him as it often did. Crow was too deeply situated in what was going on—and what had gone on in 1976—to be of use as a diversion. Damn him.



It was late afternoon and the sky was thickening from pale blue to a darker purple and there was a promise of frost in the air. The Growers Association meeting was starting in a few minutes, and Terry had to be there, though God only knew what good it would do. What could he tell them that they didn’t already know? The blight was slackening, sure, but that was only because it had already done just about as much damage as it could. There was very little left to destroy. Why in hell they needed him to tell them that they were all going down the crapper was beyond him. Damn them, too.



Damn all of them.



He quickened his pace despite the heavy crowds of tourists and there was such a look on his face that the seas of people parted before him. Even so there were too many people for his needs, so he veered sharply to the right and went down Steadman’s Alley, which only had one store, and that only sold furniture, so the crowds were gone. Just a few stragglers looking for the main drag and a car or two looking for parking. At the first corner he turned again and was now walking behind the fenced yards of the stores and houses on Corn Hill. He passed Crow’s yard and saw that Crow had hung his heavy bag out there. Tough-guy Crow with all his jujutsu nonsense. Damn and blast him.



At the end of Crow’s yard he stopped, and turned and looked away from the line of fences up toward the fields beyond and the mountains that rose so powerfully to the southeast. Three tall tree-covered peaks—not tall enough to be snowcapped except in winter—but impressive and lovely against the darkening sky. Lovely to most, but not to him. Terry found them loathsome. Hateful. He stretched out his hand and the magicians of distance and perspective made his hand as great as the hand of God and the mountains were tiny mounds of dirt that he could just gather together in his fist and crush into dust. If only he could do that for real; if only it was within his power to take those mountains and what lay at their feet and crush it all to nothingness. With that one act he could, he was certain, wipe away thirty years of nightmares and pain. Of course, with godlike powers he could just roll back those thirty years and have kept the terror from ever coming near his family. If only. Terry lowered his arm and bowed his head and tried to fit his mind around the idea that Crow was really going to go out there in a couple of days. Out there. To where he used to live.



“Insane,” he murmured and his voice broke on the word and he had to clamp a hand to his mouth to keep from screaming. He had tried to reason with Crow, had argued, had even yelled, but the idiot wouldn’t budge from his plan.



“I need to do this,” Crow had said over and over again.



“What do you hope to accomplish by going out there? He’s dead!”



“I need to do this.”



“Damn it, Crow—Griswold’s dead!” Terry had roared and had then gasped and actually staggered as if saying that name was a punch to his own head. When had he spoken that name before? How long had it been? The name burned his throat like bile. He felt like his lips and tongue should have been blistered for having said it.



Now, half an hour later, he stood with his back to Crow’s yard and stared at the mountains that loomed up like evil djinn above the shadowy corruption of Dark Hollow, and as he stood there he said it again. Not in anger this time, but to himself, and in a pleading tone intended to convince a disbelieving jury.



“Griswold’s dead.” Thirty years dead, and damn him to hell.



“No,” she said, “he’s not dead.”



The voice came from behind him, but he didn’t turn; instead Terry buried his face in his hands, not wanting to see the blood-splattered ghost of his sister.



(3)



Weinstock had all of the information spread out in front of him. Videotapes from the morgue security cameras and from his clandestine second autopsy of Castle and Cowan, blood work and labs on both officers, photos and additional lab work on a half dozen other patients, mostly older folks who had passed on over the last few days. He still didn’t have the reports from the independent labs in New York and Philly, but they were due tomorrow and he already knew what they would say. He had reports from two attendings and one intern in his own hospital for patients who had died, and reports and some lab work from primary care physicians who had reported deaths from among their patients throughout the region. Since he was the assistant county coroner, these reports routinely passed through his office and he had started doing database searches. There were a surprising number of heart attacks, and of those there were five fatalities. A whole family was wiped out in a house fire. Seven people had died in car accidents—a high number even with the increased amount of tourist traffic. Two deaths from industrial accidents, two farm-related fatalities. The local papers even remarked on it, ascribing the deaths to carelessness due to the stress of recent events, plus tension-related heart attacks. That sort of thing. It was on the radar, but no one was seeing it for what it was.



Why would they? He could not actually tie these deaths in with Castle and Cowan, and ordinarily no connection would ever have been made, even by him. Now, however, he was looking for that connection, grouping any recent death under the umbrella of his suspicions. Since completing the autopsies on the two officers, and reading the resulting reports from the labs, Saul Weinstock had created a very strange picture of what had happened at the Guthrie farm, and with each day he was adding more information to that picture, expanding it into bizarre areas and at the same time making it more clear—but clear in a way that was patently impossible.



If ever there was a time for a second opinion, this was it—but who could he consult? Who on earth would even listen long enough to his suspicions to hear it all the way through? Terry was out of the question. He looks worse than I feel, Weinstock thought, then for no logical reason wondered: Does he know? Does Terry already know about this? Is that why he’s so stressed out lately? He thought about it, and then dismissed the idea. Terry had been showing signs of stress since long before Ruger and Boyd had come to town, and as far as he could tell that’s when all of this had started. Was it something those bastards brought to town? Who else could he tell? Crow wasn’t available until Saturday morning, but at least he would listen, so there was that to hold on to. As for the rest…well, Gus Bernhardt was a fool. Rachel? Could he tell her about this? No, probably not. Rachel would think that he was suffering from some kind of stress-related paranoia, and several times a day he wondered if maybe that was indeed the case. It would certainly be the best possible solution, because then he could just take a few weeks off and take the kids to Disney. But…no. This wasn’t something he could run away from. Not if he was even only partly right about what was happening, and he knew that he was certainly right about some of it.



So what was the solution, then? If he brought it to his medical colleagues, how would they react? Weinstock tried to put himself in the frame of mind of someone else, a doctor like Bob Colbert who was great with a scalpel but had little imagination. Would Bob believe, even after all the evidence?



“No,” he said aloud, and he knew that was true because too much of the evidence was speculation, and almost all of it could have been faked. Even the video. If they can make horror movies with special effects, then some clever kids at the film department at Pinelands could cook this up, and in Pine Deep elaborate Halloween pranks were run of the mill. Same with the tissue samples. Some jackass orderly or a nurse with a twisted sense of humor could have taken skin samples from a corpse in one of the anatomy classes and put it under the fingernails of Nels Cowan. It would be sick, but it wouldn’t be difficult.



The wounds on the officers’ throats could either be explained away as bites by a dog or other animal who happened onto the murder scene before the cops secured it. The fact that the skin bruising showed that some of the bites had been inflicted while the officers were still alive meant something, but could still be explained by animal attack. A dog or bear drawn by the scent of blood, biting the officers while they lay dying—it was a stretch, sure, but it was a hell of a lot more plausible than what Weinstock was thinking, and he knew that’s where Bob Colbert would go. As would any medical professional, and Weinstock knew that if he made the case and was not believed then his reputation, his career, and his job would be shot to hell, along with any chance he had of ever convincing anyone of the truth.



If it was the truth, and the more he played devil’s advocate with it, trying to see it from the outside, the shakier his own assumptions were becoming. “If you assume…” he murmured. So, where did that leave him? If every bit of the evidence, separately, could be disproved or cast into doubt, then what did he really have to make his case?



“Crow will be here Saturday morning,” he said aloud. “He knows this stuff…he’ll know what to do.”



(4)



“You’re here early,” she said.



Crow smiled down at her from the porch. He leaned against one of the whitewashed wooden porch columns, arms folded, posture casual and relaxed, and mouth smiling as Val trudged toward him from where her father’s Bronco was parked in the big circular driveway. “I left Mike in charge of the shop and thought I’d surprise you,” he said simply.