“What threats?” demanded JT.
“They got fifty kinds of threats during the trial. People wanted to drag Gibbon’s body through the streets or string it up and use it as a piñata. A lot of people said they just wanted to piss on his grave.”
“Might have done that myself,” muttered Dez.
Goss ignored her. “And they also got letters from a couple of dark worship groups.”
“Who?” asked Scott.
“Cultists. Bunch of assholes who worship freaks like Gibbon, or Satan, or Ozzy Osbourne, I don’t know. Black Mass dickheads. They said they wanted his body as a holy relic.”
“Oh, for the love of…” Dez couldn’t finish it. It was all too absurd, and her nerves ware so raw that what she really wanted to say was “Fuck it!” and go back home, order a pizza, drink a six of Yuengling and watch Die Hard films until the day started making sense again.
They were almost to the mortuary now. Additional police units had arrived from other towns and the road was completely blocked.
JT cleared his throat. “Chief, in light of the threats and all,” he began, keeping his tone in neutral, “don’t you think it might have been prudent to give responding officers some kind of clue? We could have been walking into a real mess if there had been cultists or…”
Goss said nothing, but his eyes shifted away.
You never even thought about it, Dez thought angrily. Shithead.
“Ah,” said JT. His disapproval hung in the air. Like Dez’s it was unspoken. The chief’s face went red and he quickened his pace.
“Well,” said Goss, changing the subject, “at least there’s no press yet.”
“There’s blood in the water,” Dez said, “the sharks will be here.”
They reentered the mortuary, moving carefully to avoid further contamination of the evidence. Scott went straight to the overturned gurney and the others gathered around it. Now that they were focusing on it—rather than the blood and death—they didn’t need Scott to explain it. The gurney lay on a pile of stained white sheets and a black rubber body bag.
Goss turned to an officer who was using a digital camera to document the scene. “Barney, you do this stuff?”
“Yeah, Chief, go ahead.”
Scott took a pair of polyethylene gloves from his pocket, pulled them on, and then carefully lifted one corner of the sheet to expose words that were stenciled on the border in faded blue ink. STATE CORRECTIONAL INSTITUTION AT ROCKVIEW.
The same name was stenciled in white on the body bag.
“Okay,” said Dez, “so they really did bring Gibbon’s body here. That’s just fucking peachy. So … we could have a group of religious nuts, an actual mob with pitchforks and torches, or a Satanic cult willing to kill Doc Hartnup and who knows who else just to steal the body. I love this job.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
HARTNUP’S TRANSITION ESTATE
He could feel everything.
Every. Single. Thing.
Jolts in his legs with each clumsy step. The protest of muscles as they fought the onset of rigor even as they lifted his arms and flexed his hands. The stretch of jaw muscles. The shuddering snap as his teeth clamped shut around the young police officer’s throat.
And then the blood. Hot and salty and sickeningly sweet. Flooding his mouth, bathing his gums and tongue, gushing down his throat.
Lee Hartnup screamed. He screamed from the bottom of his soul as his mouth opened and closed again, and again. Biting, tearing. Chewing.
Devouring.
He screamed and screamed, but not with those lungs. Not with that voice. Those things, each physical part, no longer belonged to him. They existed around him. He existed within. Disconnected from control but still connected to every single nerve and sensory organ. He felt it all. From the scrape of teeth on jawbone and vertebrae to the sluggish movement of half-chewed meat sliding down his throat. He felt it all. He was spared nothing.
His screams echoed in the empty darkness. If anything, any part of his cries, escaped, it was only as the faintest of whispers. Merely a low and plaintive moan.
Hartnup tried to pull back. He tried to throw away the ragged red thing that he held in his hands … and even though he could feel the flex of muscles in hand, wrist, biceps, shoulders, and chest, he could control nothing. He owned nothing except a terrible awareness.
God, he begged, let me die.
But his own voice whispered to him, I’m already dead.
The teeth bit and tore and chewed.
This is impossible. How can my body do these dreadful, disgusting things?
No voice, inside or out, offered an answer.
He hung trapped in darkness, an unwilling passenger, unable to move so much as a finger or a nostril. Nothing.
His body dropped to its knees, shaking its head to worry a chunk of flesh from the corpse.
I am in hell.
The body bent over its feast, biting and tearing.
I am a monster.
I am a hollow man.
In his sensate darkness, Doc Hartnup screamed and screamed.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
DOLL FACTORY ROAD
STEBBINS COUNTY, PENNSYLVANIA
“So, what’s the plan?” asked Goat. “Do we just roll up on Doc Hartnup and say, ‘Dude, we hear you got a dead serial killer in the fridge. Can we take his picture?’”
Trout snorted. “Ambush journalism? Sure.”
“You serious?”
“No. We have to finesse him or he’ll clam up, throw us the hell out, and call Aunt Selma to tell her to raise the drawbridge.”
“So what’s our evil master plan?”
“We hit him with a cover story. We tell him we’re doing a story about the death business. You know, the coroner’s office, old folks’ homes, cemeteries, mortuaries, that sort of thing. We’ll tell him it’s going to be a series. Sober and compassionate stuff about the process of dying and the various stages of caregiving before and after death. Respect for life even in death, shit like that.”
“Yeah,” agreed Goat. “He’s kind of New Agey.… He might buy it.”
They drove for a few seconds.
“On any other day,” Goat said, “it’d be an okay story, too.”
“I know,” agreed Trout. “I was thinking that while I was saying it.”
“How’s that get us to Gibbon and Aunt Selma?”
“Not sure yet. If the cover story gets us in the door then we work him a bit, try to get him on our side. Maybe even cut him in on it. Feed him the Hollywood angle. The best-seller angle, too. If he can’t see the marketing advantages of that … then, well that leaves bribes and threats.”
“Count me out of that, Billy.”
Trout speeded up to pass a school bus. “I’m not talking about threatening to break his legs. If this is the same Selma Conroy from when I first landed out here, then she’s an old hooker. We could play up some kind of connection between the Doc and the hooker. Doesn’t matter if it isn’t true, because he’d have to prove a negative, and you can never do that on social media. Twitter, as you well know, is mightier than the sword, and in this economy no business owner needs bad press.”
Goat turned in his seat and stared at him. “You’re kind of a dick. You know that, right?”
Trout drove for a few seconds before he responded. “And you’re what? A saint?”
Goat sighed and shook his head. “You really know someone in Hollywood you could pitch this to?”
Trout nodded. “I have an agent, but so far I haven’t had anything this juicy to send her. Nothing remotely this juicy. She’ll know exactly where to go with this.”
“What if Hartnup stonewalls us?”
“We do an end run and go to Aunt Selma. Her past gives us a lever. And if that doesn’t work we write the story anyway and force it to break. Every story breaks, kid. Every one.”
“You should put that on your business card. It’s worlds better than ‘Fishing for News with Billy Trout.’”
“Blow me.”
Goat grinned as he fished out his iPhone and pulled up his Twitter account. “Hey, we’re doing okay. We got three hundred retweets of the coming-soon post. Nice. Give me something else so this doesn’t get cold.”
Trout thought about it. “How about … ‘Homer Gibbon: Does Witness X know where he buried the bodies?’”
“Lurid,” said Goat, and he posted the message. “I like it.”
They turned off of Doll Factory onto Transition Road. Trout immediately stamped on the brakes and the car skidded to a halt, slewing sideways and kicking up gravel.
The road was blocked with police cars and ambulances.
“What the fuck?” yelped Goat. “Oh, man … someone else found out about our story.”
“No,” murmured Trout, shaking his head slowly, “this is something else. But … it looks like we’re the first press on the scene. I think we just got even luckier, kid.”
Trout pulled the car onto the shoulder, turned off the engine and got out. As Goat unfolded himself from the passenger side, they saw two police officers staring at them. One of them, a woman, began walking toward the Explorer with the kind of determination that, in Trout’s experience, never boded well. No surprise, either, because even at that distance he could tell who it was.
Trout gripped the wheel with white-knuckled fists.
Dez. They had avoided each other for months now, but here she was. Any foolish thought he might have entertained about being over her crumbled into dust. His heart hammered suddenly in his chest but he couldn’t tell if it was excitement over seeing Dez or fear that she’d kneecap him the second he stepped out of the car.
“Brace yourself, kid,” said Trout under his breath. “We’re about to experience Hurricane Desdemona.”
“Her? Is that the chick in those pictures in your cubicle? She’s got a serious ass on her. Nice rack, too, and I—”
“Goat,” said Trout quietly, “if you would like to continue having your nuts attached to your body, do not—absolutely DO NOT—let Dez hear you say that. She is not a tolerant woman at the best of times, and when I’m around she’s a lot less tolerant than, say … Hitler at a bar mitzvah.”
