Dead Man's Song

Inside the cold drawer, Karl Ruger lay in the silence of death, still and breathless. There were no longer any drops of spittle on his face. He’d already licked them off.



(3)



By the time Frank Ferro and Vince LaMastra got to the Guthrie farm, there were twenty officers, two full ambulance crews, four press vehicles erecting microwave towers, and a crowd of rubberneckers who were trying to get past the yellow crime scene tape. It was frosty cold and a frigid mist floated a foot above the ground. When LaMastra asked a uniform where the chief was, the officer pointed down a lane that had been trampled through the corn. Though the sun was rising, there were still thick shadows clustered around the base of the cornstalks and all along the path. Surrounding the scene Coleman camping lanterns had been placed. The shadows leaned back away from the lanterns, but they did not fully retreat.



Jerry Head hurried up to them as they walked along the path to where the bodies had been found. He looked bleary eyed with exhaustion. “Sarge, I was about to turn in when I got the call. My motel’s right up the road, so I was able to get here in a hot minute. I secured the scene best I could, but we’re ass deep in civilians around here. Okay if I run some of them off?”



“Good call, Jerry. Thanks,” Ferro said, clapping him on the shoulder, and a second later he could hear Head’s deep voice booming out behind them. He nodded to LaMastra and they moved forward through the throng of officers until they stood at the edge of the clearing and saw what lay there.



“Holy Mother of God,” LaMastra said, and actually took a half-step back as if he hoped he could step back out of any reality where what he saw was possible. He gagged and turned away, staring at the tops of the nearby corn while he worked his throat. “Jesus Christ, Frank…what the hell is wrong with this town?”



Ferro looked at his partner for a moment, finding that easier to bear while he composed his face into one he’d want the local cops to see. Now was not a time to come unglued. Breathing in and out through his nostrils, Ferro turned slowly back to the clearing and forced himself to take in every detail, trying to access that part of his mind that could be cool, detached, clinical. It was a struggle not to yell. “It’s not the town, Vince. This is our mess—Ruger and Boyd.”



LaMastra gave a single fierce shake of his head. “You’re wrong there, Frank. It is this goddamn town.”



Ferro had nothing to say to that. There was a twenty-foot square that was formed partly by the intersection of two access paths through the corn, but which had been expanded by many of the stalks being trampled down. The far side of the clearing was edged by a white slat fence that trailed away to either side into the shadowy fields. A tall post reared up above the fence and a raggedy and headless scarecrow hung in limp cruciform over the scene. On the ground at the foot of the post was the better part of a shattered jack-o’-lantern with a wicked grin. Below the scarecrow lay the first of the two bodies. Officer Nels Cowan, late of the Pine Deep Police Department, lay in a rag-doll sprawl that spoke of arms that had been wrenched nearly out of their sockets. His head was tilted back at an impossible angle on a splintered spine; the backward tilt revealing a savage tear in the throat that exposed a severed windpipe and the knobbed inner edge of the spine. His service sidearm lay on the ground inches from his hand.



Near him, with one outstretched hand reaching up to lay across Cowan’s left ankle, was what had once been Jimmy Castle, late of Crestville PD. His throat was also a raw and shredded mess, as if dogs had been at him. Castle’s eyes bulged from their sockets with a terminal and everlasting astonishment at what he had seen.



There was blood everywhere and pieces of torn red matter that could have been cloth from the uniforms of the officers or it could have been their own flesh. Scattered around Castle’s body were at least a dozen shell casings, and the faint bite of cordite still hung in the air. As he and LaMastra pulled on latex gloves, Ferro stood there and read the scene, fighting back the ache in his chest that made him want to take LaMastra’s cue and flee this insane town. He fished a pack of gum from his pocket, unwrapped a stick slowly—his trick for controlling the shaking of his hands—and then placed it on his tongue. Chewing would give his mouth something to do other than gape, and the mint fought off the nausea.



The scene was a puzzle, and he stood there, chewing, evaluating the details. Two bodies, savagely torn. Worse than what had been done to Ruger’s buddy Macchio. That killing had, at least, a sense of ritual about it, but this looked to be less…what was the word? Controlled? Animals? It seemed unlikely. Not in this part of Pennsylvania. Shell casings everywhere. That meant that Castle had nearly emptied his magazine. Castle was ex-Pittsburgh PD—it seemed pretty unlikely he’s have fired off that many rounds without hitting something, but there was no other body around. No trail of blood, either, or at least no blood trail beyond the spatters that filled the clearing. So if Castle hit anything, there was no immediate visible evidence of it.



It was a mystery and Frank Ferro hated mysteries. He hadn’t joined the police force to solve them, and he hadn’t welcomed the promotion to detective division to pursue them. Ferro preferred order. He had a hunter’s nature, and that was something he liked: the hunt for clear answers, not for the unexplainable. When he and LaMastra had come to Pine Deep on the trail of Karl Ruger and his accomplices, they’d both thought it was going to be a straightforward hunt. Difficult, yes, dangerous, to be sure—but in essence a hunt. Now, after two days in this town he knew that the hunt had tangled itself into the weirdest set of circumstances he’d ever encountered. The most brutal murders of his career, killers who can take a chestful of bullets and still have the strength and power to lay siege to a hospital and nearly kill three people. Dead civilians, dead policemen. Ferro unwrapped a second stick of gum and chewed it as he stood there, his face giving nothing away, his dark eyes flat and apparently emotionless as he worked the scene in his head. He saw something else that puzzled him. The blood. There were smears and splashes, sprays from opened arteries that painted the corn and the slat fence…but throat wounds like that, even if the hearts of the men had stopped quickly, should have spilled a lake of blood. There wasn’t nearly enough of it. He stepped forward and took a pencil from his pocket, then knelt and probed the ground as close to Cowan’s shoulder as he could reach without risking the integrity of the crime scene. The pencil slipped easily down into the soft earth. Despite the chill, the rain of two nights ago still left the earth very muddy and yielding. He pushed the pencil down three inches and then withdrew it to examine it like a dipstick. There was a little blood and a lot of damp earth. Not enough blood, though, not enough by a long shot. It should have seeped deeper than this. He rose, looking around for other anomalies. That was the smart thing to do—to be a scientist, a criminalist, not a gawking bystander, and he could feel his detachment creeping back by slow degrees. He caught LaMastra’s eye and then jerked a chin toward the blood splashes. “You reading this?”



The younger man had seen Ferro probe the ground with his pencil and understood the implications. “The blood?”



“Uh huh.”



“Maybe the ME will figure it out.” He pointed with his Maglite to a spot in the clearing where bare earth showed through the mess. “You see that?” There were several footprints clearly pressed into the mud. He glanced at the shoes of both dead officers, then grunted. “Gotta be the perp’s.”



“Make sure the lab guys take castings. See how they match up against the ones we got from Ruger and Boyd.” Ferro rose, his knees creaking a little.



“Not going to be Ruger’s,” LaMastra said.



“No,” Ferro agreed.



“So…you make Boyd for this shit?”



Ferro gave a small half-shrug. “Who else? Macchio’s dead. Ruger’s sure as hell dead. Unless there was a fourth man in that car, the only suspect we have left is Boyd.”



“Yeah,” LaMastra said dubiously, “but I don’t like the feel of that, y’know?”



“No kidding, Vince.” With a sour-faced LaMastra in tow, Ferro walked the perimeter of the crime scene, noting everything, working the catalog into his brain, fighting the mixture of revulsion, hatred, and fear that was boiling in his gut. LaMastra tapped him on the shoulder, and jerked his head toward the far side of the clearing, where Chief Gus Bernhardt was standing next to a young man carrying an oversize medical bag. Gus waved him over and the two detectives circled back to them.



“Frank, this is Dr. Bob Colbert from Pinelands College,” Gus said, pointedly looking at Ferro rather than at what was behind him. “Bob teaches anatomy and forensics at the college and fills in for Saul Weinstock on ME work once in a while.” They were all wearing latex gloves, so they just nodded to one another as Gus introduced the detectives.



The doctor looked to be a young forty with black hair and a pronounced Gallic nose. “Saul couldn’t get out here,” he said in a thick northern Minnesota accent. “I’m, uh…kind of sorry I was available.”



“I heard that,” agreed LaMastra. “This is some of the sickest shit I ever saw.”



“I’ll pronounce them so you can get your lab team to work. I can only imagine how badly you want to get whoever did this.”



Ferro met his gaze. “You have no idea, doctor.” He ordered everyone out of the clearing except for the ME. The other cops moved back reluctantly, their faces white with shock and grim with frustrated anger. Chief Bernhardt turned a face to Ferro that was gray and sweaty. He tried to say something but it stuck in his throat. There were tears brimming in his eyes and he looked ten years old. Ferro just nodded to him and left him alone for the moment.



Ferro drifted along behind the ME, making the young doctor nervous by peering over his shoulder as he examined the wounds, palpated the flesh on the throats of each victim, and took temperature readings. As the doctor worked Ferro continued to read the scene himself, not liking what he was seeing for a hundred different reasons. “Well?” Ferro asked after the ME had finished his cursory examination.