Dead of Night

CHAPTER ONE

This is how the world ends.

CHAPTER TWO

He was sure that he was dying. It was how he imagined death would be.

Cold.

Darkness flowed slowly into the edges of everything. As if the shadows under tables and behind cabinets were leaking out to fill the room. Soft. Not painful.

That part was odd. In his dreams — and Lee Hartnup often dreamed of death — there was pain. Broken bones. Bullet wounds. Deep knife cuts.

But this … this wasn’t painful.

Not anymore. Not after that first bite.

There had been that one flash of pain, but even that was beautiful in its way. So intensely painful that it possessed purity. It was beyond anything in his personal experience, though Hartnup had imagined it so many times. With the quiet people with whom he worked. The hollow people, empty of life.

The police and the paramedics brought him demonstrations of every kind of pain. Brutalized and beaten. Crushed in car wrecks. Suicides and murders. Even the old people from the nursing homes, the ones everyone believed died peacefully in their sleep. Hartnup knew that they had experienced pain, too. For some it was the rat-hungry gnawing of cancer; for others it was the mind pain that came with having memories carved out of their brains by the ugly scalpel of Alzheimer’s. Pain for all. Pain was the coin that paid the ferryman.

Even now Hartnup smiled at that thought. It was something his father once said, back in the days when Lee Hartnup was the assistant and his father was the funeral director and mortician. Old John Hartnup had been a poetic man. Humorless but given to metaphor and simile. It was he who had started calling the bodies in their cold room the “hollow men.” Well, hollow people, to be PC. People from whom the sacred wind of life had fled through whatever crack the pain had chipped into them.

And now Hartnup felt his own sacred wind trying to blow free. The wind — the breath — was the only heat left in him. A small ball of dying air in his lungs that had nowhere to go. There wasn’t enough left of his throat for Hartnup to exhale that breath. There would be no death rattle, which amused the professional in him. He knew that some other mortician would hear it when preparing his body.

Of course, it would not be a mortician right away. First it would be a coroner. He had, after all, been murdered.

If you could call it murder.

Hartnup watched the liquid darkness fill up the room.

Was it murder?

The man … his killer … could never be charged with murder.

Could he?

If so … how?

It was a puzzle.

Hartnup wanted to cry out for warmth, but of course he could not do that. Not with what was left of his throat.

It was a shame. He was sure that he could manage at least one really good scream. Like the ones in his dreams. Most of his dreams ended in a scream. That’s what usually woke him up in the night. It’s what finally drove his wife into leaving him. She could take the fact that he worked with the dead all day, and she was sympathetic to the fact that his work gave him nightmares. But after eight years she couldn’t take the interruptions to her sleep two or three times a week. First it was earplugs, then separate rooms, and finally separate lives.

He wondered what she would think about this.

Not just his death, but his murder.

He heard a noise and wanted to turn his head. Could not.

The muscles of his neck were torn. Teeth and nails. He couldn’t feel the wounds anymore. Even the coldness was fading. His body was a remote island, separated from his mind by a million miles.

The noise again. A clatter of metal, then the singsong of tools dropping to the tiled floor. Retractors and needles and other items. Things that he wouldn’t need any longer.

Things that would be used on him in a few days.

He wondered who would prepare his body for the box? Probably that schmuck Lester Sevoy over in Bordentown.

Another crash. Then a sound. Like footsteps, but wrong somehow. Awkward. Disjointed. Like a drunk trying to stagger slowly across a barroom floor.

Lee Hartnup knew that it wasn’t a drunk, though.

He didn’t have a name for what it was.

Well … that was not exactly true.

It was a hollow man.

The room was darker now. Shadows were closing around him like a body bag being zipped up with him inside.

A simile. Dad would have liked that one.

Hartnup felt his body shivering. He felt the vibration of it but not the actual sensation. It was hard to understand. He knew that his flesh was trembling because his vision was shaking, but he felt no puckering of goose bumps on his flesh, no actual intensification of cold as his skin tried to retreat from it. And yet the vibration was there. The shaking.

He wondered at it. It was so violent that for a moment he thought that his body was going into convulsions. But that would have affected his eyesight, and he could still see as normally as the darkness allowed.

His head lolled on his ruined throat and he marveled that there was enough structural integrity left in his neck muscles to move his head so violently.

Then all at once Lee Hartnup realized what was happening.

It wasn’t a wave of cold shivers. The cold, in fact, was nearly gone. It seemed to flee as the darkness grew. It wasn’t convulsions either. The movement was not caused by any muscular action or nervous flutter anywhere in his body. This was purely external.

He was being shaken.

No … “worried” was the word. The way a terrier worries a rat.

That’s what was happening.

And yet not … This wasn’t a hunting dog trying to break the neck of a rodent. No … This was something else. Even down there in the darkness, Hartnup realized how wrong it all was. He could not feel the teeth that clamped onto him. He was beyond the sensation of pressure or pain. All that was left to him was the savage movement of his body, and the uncontrollable lolling of his head as the hollow man bit at him and tore him to pieces.

The cold was gone now. The darkness closed over him, shutting out all light. Even the trembling vision faded into nothingness. Hartnup could feel himself die.

He knew that he was dead.

And that terrified him more than anything. More than the man on the gurney. More than when that man had opened his eyes. More than that first terrible bite. More than the cold and the darkness. More than the knowledge that he was being eaten.

He knew that he was dead.

He knew.

God almighty.

How could he be dead … and know? He should be a corpse. Just that. Empty of life, devoid of all awareness and sensation.

This was something he had never imagined, never dreamed. The wrongness of it howled in his head.

He waited in the darkness for the nothingness to come. It would be a release.

He waited.

He prayed.

He screamed in a voiceless voice.

But he did not become a corpse.

He became a hollow man instead.

CHAPTER THREE

“This is Magic Marti at the mike on a crisp, clear November morning. Coming at you live from both sides of the line, here on WNOW and streaming live from the Net. Your source for news, sports, weather, traffic, and tunes. The news is coming up at half past the hour, so let’s take a look out the window and see what Mother Nature’s cooking up … and darn if she isn’t cranky today. Looks like we can wave good-bye to the sunshine, because there’s a whopper of a storm front rolling in from Ohio. It parked itself over Pittsburgh last night and the Three Rivers got pounded by two inches of rain. Ah … getting pounded by two inches makes me think of my first husband.”

Sound of a rim shot and cymbal.

“This is a slow-moving storm, so we can expect to see the first drops later today. This storm is clocking sustained winds of thirty miles per hour with gusts up to fifty. Button up, kids, this is going to be a bad one.”

CHAPTER FOUR

Some days have that “it’s only going to get worse” feel, right from the moment you swing your feet out of bed and step flat-footed into a pile of cold vomit. Even then, feeling the viscous wrongness of that, you know that the day can get worse.

Desdemona Fox knew that it was going to be that kind of day. She was an expert on them, and this one promised to be a classic.

The vomit belonged to the long-haired, lean-bodied, totally gorgeous piece of brainless trailer trash who lay sprawled on the floor with one tanned leg hooked over the edge of the bed. Dez sat up and stared down at him. By dawn’s early and unforgiving light he still looked ripped and hunky; but the stubble, the puke, and the used condom stuck to his left thigh let the air out of last night’s image of him as Eros, god of love. The only upside was that he’d thrown up on his own discarded jeans instead of the carpet.

“Fuck it,” she said and it came out as a hoarse croak. She coughed, cleared her throat, and tried it again. It was louder the second time, a bit less phlegmy, but it carried no enthusiasm or authority.

Dez picked up her foot, fighting the urge to toss her own cookies, and looked around for something that wasn’t hers that she could wipe it on. There was nothing within reach, so she wiped it on Love God’s hip.

“Fuck it.”

Sounded better that time.

She got up and walked on one foot and one heel to keep any residual gunk off the carpet. She rented the double-wide and didn’t feel like losing her security deposit to that prick Rempel over a stained carpet. She made it to the bathroom, turned on the shower, set the temperature to something that would boil a pot full of stone crabs, and stripped off the T-shirt that she’d slept in. It was vintage Pearl Jam that had seen better decades. Dez took a breath and held it while she stepped under the spray, but her balance was blown and she barked her shin on the edge of the stall.

She was cursing while she stood under the steaming blast and kept cursing while she lathered her hair with shampoo. She was still cursing when the hot water ran out.

She cursed a lot louder and with real bile as she danced under the icy spray trying to rinse her hair. Rempel had sworn to her — sworn on his own children — that he had fixed that water tank. Dez hated him most days, but today she was pretty sure that she could put a bullet into his brainpan without a flicker of regret.

As she toweled off, Dez tried to remember the name of the beefcake sprawled on her floor.

Billy? Bart? Brad?

Something with a B.

Not Brad, though. Brad was the guitar player she’d nailed last week. Played with a cover band. Retro stuff. Green Day and Nirvana. Lousy band. Guitar player had a face like Channing Tatum and a body like—

The phone rang. Not the house phone. Her cell.

“Damn it,” she growled and wrapped the towel around her as she ran back to the bedroom. What’shisname — Burt? Brian? She was sure it started with a B—had rolled onto his side and his right cheek was in the puke. Charming. Her whole life in a single memorable picture.

Dez dove onto the bed but mistimed her momentum so that her outstretched hand hit the phone instead of grabbing it, and the cell, the clock, her badge case, and her holstered Glock fell off of the night table onto the far side of the bed.

“Shit!”

She hung over the bed and fished for the cell underneath, then punched the button with her thumbnail.

“What?” she snarled.

“And good morning to you, Miss Sunshine.”

Sergeant JT Hammond. He was her partner on the eight-to-four, her longtime friend, and a frequent addition to the list of people she was sure that right now she could shoot while laughing about it. Though, admittedly, she would feel bad about it afterward. JT was the closest thing to family she had, and the only one she didn’t seem able to scare off.

“Fuck you,” she said, but without venom.

“Rough night, Dez?”

“And the horse you rode in on.”

JT chuckled softly.

“Why the hell are you calling me so goddamn early?” grumbled Dez.

“Two reasons,” he said brightly. “Work and—”

“We’re not on until eight o’clock.”

“—and it’s not as early as you think. My watch says that it’s eight-oh-two.”

“Oh … shitballs.”

“We didn’t set out clock last night, did we? Little much to dri—”

Dez hung up.

She lay there, hanging over the edge of the bed, her ass in the air, her weight resting on one elbow.

“Oh, man!” said a slurry voice behind her. “Now that’s something to wake up to.”

Dez didn’t move, didn’t turn around.

“Here’s the morning news, dickhead,” she said very loudly and clearly. “You’re going to grab your shit and be out of here in ten seconds, or I’m going to kick your nuts up between your shoulder blades.”

“Damn … you wake up on the wrong side of—”

“Ten. Three. Two…”

“I’m out.”

There was a scuffling sound as Brandon or Blake or whoever the hell he was snatched up his stuff. Then the screen door opened and banged shut. An engine roared and the wheels of a Harley kicked gravel against the aluminum skin of the trailer.

Dez shimmied back onto the bed, turned over, and sat up. The room took a seasick sideways turn and then settled down. She looked around at her bedroom. Stark, cheerless, undecorated, and sparsely furnished. So much of it reminded her of herself. She closed her eyes. Insights like that she didn’t need on her best days. Today it was just mean.

She opened her eyes, took a breath, and stood up.

Love God had left a trail of puke droplets all the way to the front door, and she didn’t have time to clean them off the carpet. Rempel would be delighted — he hated returning a security deposit.

“Fuck it,” Dez said to the empty room. Her eyes stung with unshed tears. She got dressed in her last clean uniform, twisted her blond hair into an ugly approximation of a French braid, and buckled on the gun belt with all the junk and doodads required by the regs. She grabbed her hat and keys, locked the trailer, and stepped into the driveway.

The parking slip was empty.

She screamed “Shit!” loud enough to scare the crows from the trees.

Buck or Biff or whoever had driven her home from the bar. Her car was four miles down a dirt road and she was already late for work.

Some days only got worse.

CHAPTER FIVE

Sergeant JT Hammond’s first name was really JT. His father’s idea. JT had a sister named CJ and a younger brother named DJ. Their father thought it was hilarious. JT had not sent him a Father’s Day card in eleven years.

JT sat in his cruiser and waited for Dez to come out of Pinky’s with coffee. After he’d picked her up at her place and dropped her so she could retrieve her car, they arranged to meet at the gas station convenience store on Doll Factory Road to have some coffee and go over the patrol patterns for the day. Stebbins was a small town, but they shared patrol duties with the three other towns that made up all of Stebbins County. The county was the size of Manhattan but 95 percent of it was farmland, with only seven thousand residents. JT preferred to start each shift with a “game plan” for patrol, backup, and tasks. That way, if all that went on the duty log was parking tickets, a couple of DUIs, and accident reports, then at least all the i’s would be dotted and t’s crossed.

However, today was likely to be the kind of day when attention to detail was going to matter. If the storm was anything like the weather service was predicting, then all of the officers would be working well into the night, shepherding people to shelters, closing the schools early, coordinating with fire-rescue and other emergency services to pull people out of flooded areas, and who knew what else.

Their cruisers were parked in a V, front bumpers almost touching. JT’s unit was a seven-year-old Police Interceptor with 220,000 miles on the original engine. The vehicle was spotless, however, and was the only car in the department’s fleet of six that did not smell of stale beer, dried blood, and fresh urine. JT was fastidious about that. He had to be in the thing eight hours a day and sometimes double that, and tidiness mattered to him. His house was just as clean and had been ever since Lakisha had died. JT’s kids were grown and gone — LaVonda was saving the world with Doctors Without Borders and Trey was a state trooper over in Ohio. Living neatly was the only way that living alone was bearable.

By contrast, Dez’s cruiser was newer and uglier. Mud-spattered, dented, and tired-looking even though it was less than two years old. She drove it hard and ached for high-speed chases. If it was up to her she’d be driving a stripped-down monster truck with a front-mounted minigun and a couple of rocket pods.

At least three times a year JT offered to help Dez detail her car and also clean and decorate her trailer, but that suggestion was invariably met with the kind of enthusiastic vulgarities usually reserved for root canals and tax audits.

JT looked at his watch and tooted the horn lightly. Dez peered out of the dirty store window. He tapped his watch and she gave him the finger.

JT smiled, settled back, and opened the copy of JET he had been reading. He was halfway through an article on black superheroes in comics and wanted to finish it before Dez came out. Not that she would jab him for reading such an ethnic-specific magazine — after all, she had every one of the Blue Collar Comedy Tour DVDs, and there was nothing whiter than that stuff — it’s just that Dez tended to bust on JT for his love of comics. JT was pretty sure that Dez had never been a kid.

Donny Sampson, who owned a tractor parts store on Mason Street, came out of the store with a blueberry Slurpee in one hand and a Coke Slurpee in the other. He was laughing out loud, and JT guessed that it was one of Dez’s jokes. Donny always liked a filthy story, and Dez was a walking encyclopedia of them. Donny saw JT and saluted with a Slurpee cup; JT gave him a nod.

Dez was taking her damn time, so he settled back, but instead of reading the magazine he laid it in his lap and stared through the windshield at the closed door of Pinky’s, thinking about Dez. They were often paired for patrol and, since neither of them had family living close, they usually did Thanksgiving, Christmas, and the Super Bowl together. Nothing romantic, of course; JT was old enough to be her father, and she was very much like a niece to him. Maybe a daughter if she would pull the goddamn Democratic voting-booth lever at least once before the world went all to hell. In his way, JT loved her. Felt protective of her. She was tough, though. She laid a pretty comprehensive minefield between her and the rest of the world. The rest of the guys in the department hated and feared her in equal measures.

Dez was a very good cop, better than a small-town police department deserved, but she wasn’t a very nice person. Well, maybe that was unfair. She was damaged goods, which isn’t the same thing as being bad natured. That, and she was way too deeply entrenched in the nihilistic and often self-defeating mentality of rural small town America. She cursed like a pirate, drank like a Viking, and screwed the kind of people the two of them usually arrested — providing they were well built, well hung, and in no way interested in any species of “committed relationship,” especially since the last time she broke up with Billy Trout.

That was a damn shame, too. Billy Trout and Dez had grown up together and had been a hot item more times than JT could count. They were never able to make it work, which frustrated JT because he knew — even if they were both too damaged to see — that the two of them had real magic together. JT never liked to use a phrase like “soul mates,” but he couldn’t find a better label. Shame they were like gasoline and matches whenever they were together. All of the guys Dez dragged to her lair were clones of Billy; but saying so to Dez would be exactly the same as saying “Shoot me.”

So, instead of a lover, Dez Fox had a partner. A middle-aged black man from Pittsburgh with a college degree in criminal justice and a set of well-used manners that had been hardwired into him by his librarian mother. Dez, on the other hand, was pure backcountry Pennsylvania; a blue-eyed blonde who could have been a model for fitness equipment if not for what JT personally viewed as an overactive redneck gene.

The radio buzzed. “Unit Four, what’s your status?”

JT lifted the handset and clicked the Send key. “Dispatch, I’m code six at Pinky’s. You got something for me, Flower?”

Flower Martini, twenty-eight-year-old daughter of love generation boomers, was the dispatcher, secretary, booking photographer, and court stenographer for the Stebbins County Department of Public Safety. She looked like Taylor Swift might look if her career took a sharp downward turn past a long line of seedy country and western bars. She was still cute as a button, and JT was pretty sure she had her eye on him, age and race differences notwithstanding.

“Yeah,” said Flower, “Looks like a possible break-in at Hartnup’s Transition Estate.”

She overpronounced the name, giving it a nice blend of wry appreciation and tacit disapproval. The Hartnup family had been morticians in town for generations, but in the mideighties, during the New Age inrush, the son, Lee, had given the place a makeover. Changed the name from Hartnup’s Funeral Home to the trendier “Transition Estate.” Nondenominational services and a lot of Enya music. It actually sparked a rise in business that drew families from as far as Pittsburgh. Now, with the New Age covered in dust, the name was a local punch line. People still died, though, and the Hartnups still prettied them up and put them in the ground.

“Cleaning lady called from the mortuary office,” said Flower. “Witness is a non-English speaker. All I could get was the location and that something was wrong with the back door. No other details, sorry. You want backup?”

“Dez is with me.”

“Copy that.”

There were only two units on the road at any one time despite the size of the county. Unit One was reserved for Chief Goss and Unit Three was in reserve.

“We’ll investigate and call in if we need backup.”

“Respond Code Two. Proceed with caution … JT.” There was the slightest pause between “caution” and his name, and JT thought he heard Flower start to say “Hon—.” She called him “honey” off the radio all the time and was constantly getting yelled at by the chief. She was the mayor’s sister, and it was more than the chief’s job was worth to fire her.

“Roger that.”

JT clicked off and then tapped the dashboard button to give the siren a single “Whoop!” A moment later the door to Pinky’s banged open, and Dez Fox came out at a near run, a white paper bag between her teeth and two extra-large coffees in paper cups in her hands. She handed a cup through the open window then leaned half inside and opened her mouth to drop the bag in his lap.

“What’s the call?” she asked, looking irritated that police work was interfering with the ritual of caffeine and carbs. JT knew that it was sacred to her.

“Possible break-in at Doc Hartnup’s place.”

“Who the fuck would want to break into a mortuary?”

“Probably a drunk. Even so, I could use some backup.”

“Yeah … let’s do ’er, Hoss … But lights, no sirens though, okay? My head’s held together with duct tape right now.”

“Won’t make a sound,” he promised.

Dez reached in and took the bag back and carried it with her to her cruiser.

“Hey!” JT yelled. She gave him the finger again. When she looked back, JT stuck his tongue out at her and Dez cracked up, then winced and pressed a hand to her head.

“Owwww.”

JT leaned out the window. “Ha!” he yelled.

A few seconds later Dez blew out of the parking lot in a spray of gravel. She hit the blacktop, punched the red and blue lights, and the big engine roared as she rocketed north on Doll Factory Road. JT sighed, snugged his coffee into the holder, and followed at a discreet seventy miles per hour.

CHAPTER SIX

The old doctor sat on a hard wooden chair in the kitchen and stared at the phone. The call from the warden at Rockview Prison — where the old man worked as the chief medical officer — had been brief. Simply the warden conveying an interesting bit of information. Six words stood out from that conversation.

“We transferred his body this morning.”

Those six words, so casually spoken, were like knives in the doctor’s chest.

We transferred his body this morning.

Forcing his voice to sound calm, forcing himself not to scream, the doctor had asked for, and been given, the names and phone numbers of the mortician who had arrived to take the body and the relative of the deceased who had made the arrangements. A relative the doctor had not known existed. No one had known. There were not supposed to be any relatives. The corpse was supposed to go into the ground after the execution. It was supposed to be in the ground now.

“Oh my god,” the doctor whispered.

He got up from his chair, walked like a sleepwalker into the living room, up the stairs, into his bedroom. He opened the closet, reached up onto the shelf, removed a zipped case, opened it, and stared dazedly at the gun. A Russian Makarov PM automatic pistol. He’d bought it new in 1974. When he had defected, the CIA took the pistol away, but eventually returned it to him. A sign of trust. He sat down on the edge of the bed. There was a box of shells in the case and three empty magazines. The doctor opened the box and began feeding shells into a magazine. He did it slowly, methodically, almost totally unaware of what he was doing. His mind was elsewhere. Miles away, in a small town where a mortician would be opening a body bag.

“God,” he murmured again.

He slid the last bullet into the magazine and slid the mag into the frame. He closed his eyes, took a deep breath and held it for ten seconds, then exhaled it slowly as he pulled the slide back to feed a round into the chamber.

The gun was heavy and cold.

It would be quick, though. He knew where and how to place it so that death would be certain. All it would take was a moment’s courage. If courage was the right word. Practical cowardice, perhaps.

Two cold tears boiled out of the corners of his eyes and rolled unevenly over the lines that age, anger, and mania had etched into his cheeks.

He weighed the gun in his palm.

“May God forgive me for what I’ve done,” he whispered.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The mortuary was tucked a hundred yards down a winding dead-end road that had been officially renamed Transition Road. The road was bordered by lush evergreens and rampant wildflowers. It always cracked Dez up that there was a big yellow “No Exit” sign right at the turn.

The owner was Lee Hartnup, known as Doc — not because of any medical background, which he did not have, but because he had a PhD. It didn’t matter that his doctorate was in literature with a minor in philosophy, the fact that he had a doctorate at all put him in a very small club within the Stebbins community.

Dez liked Doc. He was a bit of a stiff at times but he was “real people.”

There were several small functional buildings tucked behind a faux mansion used for viewings. There were no lights on and no cars in the lot. The mortuary was around back, so Dez and JT looped behind a thick stand of pines to the service lot. Two cars were parked near a functional-looking rear door. The aloof gray nose of a Cadillac hearse peered out of the shadows of an open garage. A second hearse was up on blocks near it. Dez and JT pulled their cruisers side-by-side, blocking the parked cars. They opened their doors and studied the scene for a moment, then got out.

JT raised his chin at the larger of the two passenger cars, a four-year old silver Lexus. “That’s Doc Hartnup’s. Other one must be the cleaning lady’s.”

The second vehicle was a Ford that was so old and battered that it was virtually impossible to tell the model, year, or color.

The rest of the lot was empty, the morning quiet except for a light breeze that stirred the treetops. The red and blue of their dome lights slashed back and forth across every reflective surface — window glass, the polished skin of the mortician’s car, the dead headlights of the vehicle on blocks.

“Looks quiet,” said Dez.

JT keyed his shoulder mike to channel one. “Dispatch, units on scene. Can you provide location of the witness?”

“No, hon,” said Flower. “I mean, negative. I told her to wait in her car, but she hung up.”

“Copy that.” JT turned to Dez. “Flower said she told the cleaning lady to stay in her car. Maybe she went inside.”

They unsnapped their sidearms as they approached the mortuary, each of them fading to one side to be out of a direct line if someone fired through the door. They came in on good lines of approach, working it like they worked every potential crime scene. The town may have been a no-Starbucks wide spot in a farm road, but they took their jobs seriously.

The cleaning lady had been right. There was something wrong with the back door. Dez saw it first and nodded toward it. JT leaned over and saw that the door was a half inch into the jamb but not far enough for the spring lock to engage.

“How do you want to play it?” he asked quietly. They didn’t speak in whispers. The sibilant ess sounds of whispers carried farther than ordinary voices speaking low.

Dez studied the door. “No sign of force. Lock’s intact. But I don’t like it, Hoss. Boy Scout motto,” she said.

He nodded and they drew their guns. Glock 22s with a round already in the chamber and a fifteen-round high-capacity magazine in the receiver. They both lived by the “Be Prepared” wisdom.

This felt good to Dez. Just the thing to erase the memories of the Love God laying in his puke on her bedroom floor. This kind of entry — or a call to a bar fight or serving a warrant on a child molester — made her blood pump. It made her feel like crawling out of bed in the morning had some purpose. Dez knew, however, that JT hated this part of police work. He was at the opposite end of the evolutionary scale, and Dez knew it. JT actually believed that the “peace” in “peace officer” meant that the job was all about keeping things dialed down to a no-violence, no ass-kicking state.

JT keyed his shoulder mike. “Dispatch, Unit Four. Hold the air and stand by.”

“Copy.”

“I’m on point,” said Dez. “You, me, left, right.”

Dez put the toe of her shoe against the door, mouth-counted from three and pushed. The door swung inward on silent hinges. Dez and JT faded back for a moment, and then went in fast; she cut left with him covering her, and then he was inside, checking behind the door and clearing the corners. Guns were up and out in two-handed grips, eyes tracking together with the light.

They were in a large utility room, a shed that had long ago been built onto the house. There were cabinets and an industrial washing machine on one wall, shelves with cleaning supplies on the other. The far wall had another door and this also stood ajar.

“I’ve got blood,” barked JT.

“I see it.”

It was impossible to miss. A handprint, small, a woman’s, pressed flat on the wall by the door. Blood trails had run all the way to the floor. That hand would have to have been soaked with blood to leave trails that long. Dez felt a familiar shift inside her head, as if a switch had been thrown. It was something she first experienced midway through her first tour, and it happened all the way through her two tours in Afghanistan. When she tried to describe the feeling to a sergeant over a bottle of Beam in a tent in northeast Afghanistan, the scarred vet said that it was part of the warrior mind. “It’s the caveman mind, the survivor mind,” he’d told her. “It’s when you realize on a deep level that you just stepped out of the ordinary world and are walking point through the valley of the shadow.”

Dez had tried to explain this to JT once, and though he understood on an intellectual level, the bottom line was that he’d never been in the military, he hadn’t walked the Big Sand. And in thirty years on the job, he had never fired his service weapon and had never taken fire. That made a difference, even if neither of them ever said so aloud. He was smart and did everything by the book, but on some level he was a civilian and Dez could never claim that exemption ever again.

The mind shift changed her body language; weight easing onto the balls of her feet, knees bending for attack or flight, eyes blinking less often, hand readjusting on the grip of the Glock. She was aware of it on a detached level.

JT peered at the blood and then leaned back. He gave his lips a nervous lick. “I do not like this, Dez.”

“Liking it’s not part of the job, Hoss.”

Dez used two fingers to turn the knob, and this time JT kicked the door—hard. Then they were moving fast, rushing into the main preparation room, checking corners, watching each other, tracking everything … and stopping dead in their tracks. The interior lights were on, fluorescents gleaming from stainless steel tables and dozens of medical instruments.

There was no movement in the room, but everything was wrong.

A gurney lay on its side by the open cold-room door, sheets and straps were tangled and askew. Beakers and bottles had been smashed. The delicate instruments of the mortician’s trade were scattered like pickup sticks. Everything — walls, floor, debris — was covered with blood.

It was a charnel house.

“Jesus H. Christ,” breathed JT, and for a moment his professional calm drained away, leaving in its place a shocked spectator. The air was thick with disinfectant, old meat, and the sheared-copper stink of fresh blood.

“Clear the fucking room, Hoss,” snapped Dez, her voice as hard as a slap.

JT immediately shook off his shock and moved around to the far side of the room, kicking open closet doors, checking the cold room, making sure that the prep room was as empty as it looked.

Except it wasn’t.

“I got a body,” he called, and Dez cut a look his way. “Ah, geez … It’s Doc.”

Fuck.

“Gunshot?” Dez barked.

“No … Christ … I don’t know. Knives maybe … This is bad. He’s all messed up.”

Dez was not looking at the dead mortician, however. She clicked her tongue, and when JT looked up she ticked her chin toward a door on the far side that led into the mortuary offices.

“Blood trail,” she said. JT forced his emotions down and locked the cop focus back into place. He hurried to her side. He had his gun ready and his eyes open, but Dez could see fear sweat popping out all over his face.

There were two sets of footprints. Bare feet and shoes. The bare feet were male and large, easily size twelve; the other set was smaller, though still large for what was obviously a woman’s work shoe.

The marks were scuffed and swirled as if the two figures were dancing as they exited. Violent struggles make the same patterns.

“Fuck,” growled Dez and kicked open the door.

They rushed into the office, shouting at the tops of their voices.

“Police! Put your hands on your head! Police!”

Their shouts bounced off the walls and died in the still air.

As with the prep room there was only one person in there, and as with the other room the person was already dead.

JT stopped in his tracks and stared at the body. “God…”

Dez crossed to the only other exit, a front door. The barefoot blood trail went outside and vanished into the grass lawn, beyond which was a stretch of dense forest called the Grove.

“We got someone on foot.” She backed away from the door and called it in. “Dispatch, Unit Two, we have multiple victims. Suspect at large and possibly on foot in vicinity. Roll all available units and crime scene.”

Then she closed the door, flicked on the overhead lights, and crossed to where JT stood staring at the victim. The dead woman sat slumped backward in a wheeled leather desk chair that was parked in a lake of blood.

She was dressed in a blue cleaning smock that buttoned up the front. She had gray support hose and sponge-soled shoes. Her dark hair was pulled back into a tight bun; reading glasses hung around her neck on a cheap junk jewelry chain. Her name tag read OLGA ELTSINA.

Dez guessed that Olga was probably fifty. Russian. At least five foot nine, easily two hundred pounds. Arms like a shot-putter, tree-trunk legs, bowling-ball breasts. Not pretty by any standard, with thick lips and a bulbous nose.

What had been done to her was unspeakable. There was no point in checking for a pulse. There wasn’t enough left of her throat to bother. The skin below her jaw was a ragged ruin. Strips of flesh hung from her cheeks, her arms, the tops of her breasts. There were pieces of shapeless meat on the floor and stuck to her drab uniform.

Dez slid her flashlight into its belt holster, bent, and peered at the wounds. They were strange. Not one clean cut. No puckered bullet holes. No gouges like you’d see from a claw hammer. The skin looked shredded.

Dez heard a faint gagging sound and half turned to JT.

“If you’re going to hurl, do it outside.”

He looked gray but shook his head.

“Take a breath, Hoss,” Dez advised, and he did. Slow and ragged.

“God,” he gasped and mopped sweat off his face with his sleeve. “I’ve seen every kind of traffic accident. I’ve seen decapitations and … all that. But, Christ, Dez, I think those are bites.”

“I know,” said Dez softly. “Doc, too?”

JT nodded. “The door was ajar … You think a bear got in here?”

She studied his face for a moment. “C’mon, JT … this wasn’t any fucking bear. There’d be slash marks with a bear.”

“Coyote?” He sounded more hopeful than speculative.

Over the last decade several packs of coyotes had repopulated rural Pennsylvania. They were vicious, violent creatures, and they’d taken a serious toll on the house pet population. However, attacks on humans were extremely rare, and their bites looked like dog bites. Dez leaned as close as possible without stepping into the pool of blood.

“No,” she said as she straightened. “Wasn’t a bear, a coyote, or a fucking Bigfoot, and you know it.”

JT was panting like a runner. “Dez … you don’t think these are human bites, do you?”

It was clear to both of them — to anyone who’d ever seen the blunt bite signature of human teeth — what kind of bites these were. Dez kept a poker face. “Forensics will take castings,” she said.

Dez stepped back and walked into the other room to take a look at Doc Hartnup. He lay in a rag-doll twist on the bloody tile floor. JT drifted up behind her.

It hurt Dez’s heart to see him like that. Doc was one of the good guys.

“JT, look at this,” she said, pointing to the bulge in the left rear hip of Hartnup’s trousers. “Looks like his wallet’s still there.”

“Car keys are on a peg by the door,” JT said. “Perp left in his own car.”

“He was barefoot when he went outside. If those are the perp’s footprints.” Dez shook her head. “We need forensics and detectives on this. This isn’t falling together for me. There’s a lot of valuable stuff in here, and there’s a flat-screen and Blu-ray in the office. Why not take them?”

“Maybe he didn’t have time. We might have spooked him and he went out into the Grove.”

Dez nodded. That was an ugly possibility. The Grove connected to the state forest half a mile from there.

“Tell you what, Hoss,” she said, “It’s going to be a circus here soon. We have to start a log on this and I don’t want to screw anything up. Go get your camera from the cruiser.”

JT gave a distracted nod but didn’t move.

Dez straightened and snapped her fingers under JT’s face, startling him.

“Yo! You in there? If you need to bug out, then bug out. Go sit in the car, whatever; but don’t lose your shit in here.”

JT gave her a five-count stare.

“You cool?” Dez asked, her tone quiet but not soft, her blue eyes hard as metal.

He drew in a long breath through his nostrils and gave a curt nod. “Yeah. I’m cool.”

Dez grinned. “Okay — then put on your big girl panties and let’s be cops.”

JT gave a half laugh. “Okay. Sorry. It’s just that—”

“When you get the camera,” Dez interrupted, “bring the shotgun. Just in case Cannibal Lecter comes back. We don’t want to offer him a pork sandwich.”

That squeezed a fraction of smile from JT’s pinched features. He headed outside. Dez fished in a pocket for gum and popped two pieces of Eclipse from the aluminum blister pack and crunched them thoughtfully between her teeth.

Poor JT, she thought as she stood in the doorway, watching him for a few seconds. Under every other circumstance he was nominally in charge, and Dez knew it. They both knew it. He was better at most aspects of the job. They were both good with it. He’d been on the job longer, too; but her five years in the military made all the difference in how they were reacting to the horror of this moment. While JT was rolling along the back roads of Stebbins County, Dez had been playing hide-and-seek with the Taliban in the Afghan hills. She was never Special Forces, but she humped her share of battle rattle over miles of desert, working everything from Haji patrol to scouting IEDs to dodging red-on-red fire, working in the first wave of American women to go into battle side by side with the men. She’d seen every kind of carnage and mayhem modern weapons could create and carrion animals could make worse. Had it been any other guy but JT losing his shit on the job, Dez would have torn him a new one. JT was like family; different rules applied.

Her thoughts drifted from JT to the crime scene. This was big and it could easily get out of hand. If the perpetrator had gone into the Grove, then that would mean putting together a massive manhunt. Beyond the lawn and the Grove, the state forest was an easy place to get lost and stay lost; not to mention the tens of thousands of square acres of farmland in Stebbins County. Hundreds of farm roads, fire access roads, country lanes, trails crosses and game trails to follow. If the killer was even half smart, it would take a hundred men with dogs and helicopters to run him to ground; and even then it might take days to do it. Days they might not have if the coming storm was as bad as they were saying on the news.

She turned away and looked down at the corpse.

Doc Hartnup … Damn.

Dez had known plenty of soldiers who had been killed in battle or by things like land mines and suicide vests; but she had never known anyone who had been murdered. She was surprised that it felt so much worse.

“This is fucked up,” she told the dead man. JT returned a moment later with the camera. He also carried a Mossberg shotgun, which Dez would die rather than use because the weapon was loaded with beanbag rounds. She thought they were sissy rounds and once remarked that it was the lethal-force equivalent of giving the perp a blow job. JT knew different — the beanbag round would put anyone from a badass biker to a spaced-out meth head on his ass — but that wasn’t enough for Dez.

Dez took the digital Nikon. “I’ll document the scene,” she said. “Why don’t you walk the perimeter? Figure out where the perp went so we can get some boots on the ground in pursuit. I’d like to bag this dickhead before shift ends so I can spend all night beating the living shit out of him in the holding cell. Sound good?”

He laughed, and it was clear he wasn’t sure if she was joking.

“And, JT,” she added, “keep your eyes open. This asshole might be outside. He just killed two people … Don’t get into a debate with him.” She punctuated her remark with a sharp nod toward the weapon he held. JT jacked a round into the shotgun and went outside without a word.

Dez went into the adjoining office, stepping gingerly over the bloody footprints, and stood on a clean section of carpet, aiming the camera toward the doorway. She took shots that established a clear trail from the prep room into this one. Then she bent over and took close-ups of the bare footprints. She took incremental overlapping pics so that they could be lined up later to show an unbroken progression from one killing room to the other.

The flash popped everything into moments of brightness that reminded Dez of the starkness of the skies in Afghanistan.

Flash.

Dez shot the handprints on the wall. She shot the blood spatter on the lampshade and across the desk. She shot the pool of blood around the wheeled office chair. She turned and straightened to take photos of the vic.

Flash.

And the cleaning woman was standing right there.

Right.

There.

Flash.

Dez stared in absolute and uncomprehending horror at the big Russian woman standing two feet away. Eyes open to reveal nothing. There was no hint of awareness or pain or anything in those bottomless black eyes.

“I don’t—” Dez began.

And the woman snarled and lunged at her.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The woman slammed into Dez with full weight, grabbing her hair, driving Dez backward, and then they were falling. The woman snarled — a weird gargling impossibility that came from her ruined throat — and darted her head forward even as they crashed onto the coffee table, exploding it into a thousand fragments of wood and decorative inlay. The impact tore a scream from Dez as the woman’s two hundred pounds came down on her and items on her utility belt punched into spine and kidneys and ribs.

She heard the woman’s blood-streaked teeth clack together an inch from her ear. Dez jammed her forearm under the woman’s chin as the teeth snapped again and again, trying to bite her face, her ear, her windpipe. Black clotted blood dribbled from the corners of the woman’s mouth and splashed on Dez’s cheeks and shirt.

“Get off of me you crazy bitch!” Dez screamed, twisting her body to try to escape the crushing weight.

The Russian kept trying to twist her fingers into Dez’s French braid. The woman straddled Dez, massive thighs blocking her from grabbing her weapons. Yet for all of the woman’s bulk she was strangely limp, as if her muscles were half-asleep and sagging. It was a horrible dead-weight quality, and it made escape much harder.

There was no real plan to the cleaning woman’s attack except to pull Dez close enough to bite. She snarled and hissed and bit the air, squirming to get her chin around the barrier of Dez’s forearm. Fending off those teeth was immediately exhausting because it meant that Dez had to push away most of that slack, squirming mass.

The woman tried to spit at Dez, expectorating a viscous mass of dead blood at her, but Dez twisted away. The black goo splatted on the floor, and out of the corner of Dez’s eye she could see something like maggots squirming in the muck.

“Christ!”

Dez finally managed to pull her right arm free. The camera was still attached to her wrist by its lanyard; Dez grabbed it and smashed it with all her strength against the woman’s temple. The impact shot pain through Dez’s wrist; pieces of metal and plastic flew everywhere, and the force knocked the Russian woman’s head away. But that was all it did. There was absolutely no change of expression on the woman’s face, even though a flap of skin as large as a silver dollar flopped down onto her cheek. The wound did not bleed … and there was no reaction at all to the blow or the pain that it must have caused.

A growl burst from low in Dez’s chest as she swung again and again, hitting with the camera every time, mashing the woman’s ear, splitting her eyebrow, grinding into temple and eye socket and sinus. The jagged edges of the broken camera tore the woman’s face to red ribbons.

But they did not slow the woman’s attack at all. She did not even attempt to block the blows. She kept trying to bite, her cold fingers continued to scrabble and grab. The woman spat more black blood at Dez, splattering her uniform shirt.

“JT!” Dez screamed as panic surged up inside of her.

Then Dez pulled her heels close to her own buttocks, bent her knees and placed her soles flat on the ground, then she abruptly snapped her hips upward in a reverse bronco buck-off. The sudden upward thrust bounced the Russian woman’s body into the air, and Dez instantly rolled sideways, using the turn of her hips against the inside of the attacker’s thighs. Leverage won out and the woman fell sideways.

Dez immediately rolled the other way, spinning onto her side and kicking out at the woman with both feet, catching her in the chest and face and knocking her back against the sofa.

The woman was not even stunned. She flopped back from the point of impact, flopped onto her hands and knees, and began crawling toward Dez.

“Shit!” Dez rolled onto her back and drew her Glock. “Fucking freeze!”

The woman snarled and snapped her teeth together — and lunged.

Dez fired.

The bullet caught the woman in the upper chest, punching a black hole through the breastbone an inch below the clavicle. The force sent the woman reeling back on her knees, arms flailing like a supplicant in the throes of a religious mania. There was no pain on her face, no sign that she even noticed the.44 round that had punched through her body. Her lips curled back from bloody teeth and she dove once more at Dez.

Dez screamed and fired.

The second round caught the woman on the side of the chin and blew a hole out past her ear, spraying the sofa with blood and flecks of gray matter.

The woman paused, her feral expression dissolving into vacuity, her mouth losing the firmness of its snarl.

And still she did not go down.

Dez felt the world spin around her. Two shots at this range. Two shots. Chest and face. There was bone and brain tissue on the goddamn couch. This was impossible.

It could not be the truth.

With bizarre slowness, the woman came on, throwing herself at Dez’s legs, grabbing at her thighs, teeth apart to bite.

Dez bent forward and slammed the hot barrel against the woman’s forehead.

“Fucking die!”

She squeezed the trigger. Once. Twice. The woman’s head exploded. Skull fragments and strips of dura mater and brain pulp blew back against the sofa and the wall and the floor lamp.

The woman … collapsed.

All at once.

Just as JT burst through the door from the prep room with the shotgun.

CHAPTER NINE

“Dez — are you all right?” JT demanded as he rushed to her.

“I…” Dez’s voice faltered on the first word as she saw the gore that was splattered on her legs and gun hand. She saw the squirming larvae and went into a hysterical fit, slapping the stuff off her clothes. “God!”

“Are you hurt?”

“No — help me the fuck up!”

JT hooked a hand under her armpit and pulled her out from under the corpse. Dez’s heels scrabbled at the blood-soaked floor as she backpedaled into JT. He lost his grip on her ten feet from the corpse, and Dez fell hard on her ass and sat there, staring, mouth open, shaking her head. Her gun fell from her hand and she made no move to pick it up; so JT did.

“What happened?”

His question seemed to be coming from another room; it was tinny and distant and Dez wasn’t sure if he was really there. JT came around and squatted down in front of her. His face twisted into a frown of doubt and he snapped his fingers the same way she had done to him — God, was it only a few minutes ago? On some remote level Dez understood that she was in shock, just as she was aware that she was thinking about being in shock. Her mind was fragmented as it tried to crawl away from the precise reality of what just happened.

“I…” Dez began again, but didn’t know where to go with it. She shook her head.

JT rose and helped Dez carefully to her feet, took her by the elbow and guided her across the room to a niche filled with filing cabinets. He still held her Glock in his other hand.

“Dez,” he said softly, “what happened?”

“She attacked me,” gasped Dez.

“No,” he said, shaking his head. “Listen to me, Dez … the chief and the forensics people are going to be here soon. We need to have a story. We need to tell them something they’re going to believe, so I need you to tell me what really happened. Why did you discharge your weapon? Was it accidental? No,” he corrected himself, “I heard four shots. We can’t sell that as accidental. Dez — did you see the perp? Did he come back? Is that what happened — you saw him and fired?”

Dez kept shaking her head. She pushed a strand of hair from her eyes with trembling fingers.

“Give me something, Dez,” pleaded JT, his eyes clouding with the beginnings of panic. “We have to make sense of—”

“She fucking attacked me!” snarled Dez.

JT took a step backward. He looked at her, his eyes searching hers, then he turned and looked at the woman. When he turned back, his eyes kept meeting hers and darting away.

“Dez…”

“No, goddamn it. That Russian bitch attacked me.”

“Okay, okay, I hear you. She attacked you. But … how?”

“What do you mean, ‘how’?”

“Come on, Dez … She was dead. She—”

“Of course she wasn’t dead, dumb-ass!”

“Dez, her whole throat was torn open. We both saw it—”

“Then we saw it wrong.” Dez took a steadying breath. “Look, JT, I did not imagine that woman tackling me, and I sure as hell didn’t put four rounds into her for shits and giggles. She. Came. After. Me.” She spaced the words, slow and loud.

JT raised his head into an attitude of listening. Dez heard it, too. Sirens. “Look, Dez, you know I have your back, right? That’s unquestioned. I’ll tell any story you want me to tell. Screw the chief and screw everyone else … but you got to give me something to work with. We can’t spin a fairy tale.”

“JT…”

“They’re going to blood test you,” he said. He dropped the magazine and ejected the round from the chamber, then thumbed the round back into the magazine and slid it back into the receiver. He didn’t return her weapon, however. “What’s your blood alcohol—”

“Fuck you.”

“No,” he said firmly. “Don’t close me out. I’m on your side, remember? How many ways do I have to say it? But you have to tell me what happened here.”

Dez pointed a finger at the corpse.

“She could not have been dead, JT. No way. I don’t care how it looked. We made a bad call on that. You want a story, then that’s the story, and it’s the truth. She tried to fucking bite me.”

“Bite you,” JT repeated without inflection. He crossed to the corpse, squatted down and touched the backs of his fingers to her cheek, her forearm, the inside of her wrist. As he rose he flicked back toward the prep room where Doc Hartnup lay. He walked back slowly to Dez, his dark features lined with concern and doubt.

“Yes, she tried to bite me. Guess biting’s a frigging theme around here.”

“Her skin’s pretty cold, Dez.”

“I don’t care if she’s packed in ice, JT. She had me pinned down and I punched the shit out of her and told her to back down and I might as well have been pissing up a rope. She came after me and tried to tear my throat out.”

“So you shot her.”

“Yes, I fucking shot her.”

“An unarmed woman.”

“Yes,” Dez snapped.

“A seriously injured unarmed woman.”

“Ah — Christ, JT.”

The sirens were close. Turning off of the highway onto the access road.

“You shot her four times, Dez. How many shots does it take to—”

Dez suddenly shoved him, and JT staggered backward into the row of filing cabinets. A vase of gardenias fell off and smashed on the edge of a secretary’s desk. Before he could recover his balance, Dez snatched her Glock out of his hands and shoved it into her holster.

“I never thought you’d turn on me, JT,” she said bitterly. She wanted to punch him, to knock him down and stomp on him. She wanted to cry, too, but she would eat her own gun before she’d do that on the job. Even after what just happened.

JT got slowly to his feet, his eyes flicking from her face to her gun hand. “You’re scaring the shit out of me, Dez. You’re acting irrational here and—”

“I’m perfectly rational. I didn’t lose it and I’m not drunk. Or hopped up on anything. You want to Breathalyze me? Fine, and when it comes up clean I’m going to shove it up your ass.”

“Calm down, Dez. I didn’t say—”

The sirens were right outside now, the wails filling the room with implications. Dez closed her eyes for a moment as she heard car doors open and feet crunch on the gravel. Voices began yelling as the front and back doors banged open and officers from Stebbins and two neighboring towns flooded into the mortuary.

“Dez,” JT said slowly, “you know what they’re going to say. They’re going to look at the body. They’re going to take her temperature and test lividity and do the science that’s going to show how long she’s been dead. And then they’re going to match that against our response time on the call logs. Then they’re going to look at those bullet wounds.”

“So what? Let them look!”

“Come on, Dez.… You shot her four times. How come none of the wounds bled?”

Dez took an involuntary step back as if JT had punched her. “What?”

JT pointed. “Corpses don’t bleed. Either you killed her on the first shot, in which case they’re going to want to know why you kept shooting — and from different angles and distances — or you killed her with the head shots and they’re going to ask you to explain why the perpetrator you shot in the chest didn’t bleed.” He shook his head, and his voice had a pleading note to it. “What do we tell them, Dez?”

There didn’t seem to be enough air to breathe, and Dez could not answer his questions. Her chest was tight with tension, her heart hammered with fear. She looked down at the dead woman, following the line of gaze of the arriving officers, seeing the extremity of the violence. Seeing the blood and pieces of human debris as if through their eyes.

Jesus Christ, she thought, this is it for me. If JT doesn’t believe me, then no one will.

Wild panic flared in her, and she looked around as if hoping to see a door marked “EXIT.” But one door led back to the charnel house of the prep room and the other was the route a killer had used to flee this insane crime scene.

Then that door suddenly opened and Chief Martin Goss waddled through the door from the prep room and into the office. He was a short, fat man with boiled red skin that was permanently coated with hypertensive sweat.

Goss’s eyes went from JT to Dez to the corpse and back again. He looked at the gore splattered on Dez’s uniform.

“Holy Jesus jumped-up Christ,” he said. “Dez — are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” she mumbled.

“You sure? We have paramedics inbound—”

She nodded. “I’m good, Chief. Just shook up.”

“JT?”

“I’m fine. I was outside when this went down.”

Goss licked his lips. “Your call-in said that there was a suspect on foot?”

JT showed him the tracks of the bloody bare feet. “Prints disappear near the edge of the lawn. Looks like the suspect was heading west, but that’s a guess.”

Goss nodded curtly, clicked his shoulder mike and relayed the information to the rest of the team, ordering a search and advising extreme caution. He also called the state police and requested their assistance. The staties had more men and they had choppers. Other officers, including Paul Scott, the county’s forensics officer, flooded into the place. Scott flicked a brief glance at JT and Dez and then went into the other room, his evidence collection bag in hand.

Then Goss turned back to JT and Dez. “Okay … now tell me everything that happened.”

Dez started to speak, but her words came out in a jumble. She could hear the panic in her own voice.

JT stepped in and took a swing at it. Despite his earlier reactions, he appeared to have reclaimed his calm, and he gave the report in quick, clinical police jargon, from the moment they parked the car, to the handprint in the utility room, to finding Doc Hartnup’s body. Goss’s eyes narrowed for a moment, but he didn’t interrupt; Dez watched his face, trying to read him.

JT said, “Believing this to be an active crime scene, we did only a cursory examination of the second victim and determined that she was dead. I went outside to do a walk-around while Dez — I mean Officer Fox — began documenting the crime scene in here with a digital camera. The, um…” he paused only a second, Dez had to give him that much, “second victim was apparently still alive and proceeded to attack Officer Fox in a very aggressive and irrational way. Officer Fox was compelled to use deadly force to protect her own life.”

The officers had all stopped to listen to this account. Their faces registered varying levels of confusion, doubt, and disgust. Paul Scott came back in and bent close to whisper something to Goss. The chief looked at him, went and peered into the other room, and then came back and studied the faces of both JT and Dez. His face was clouded with confusion and doubt.

He’s not buying it, Dez thought. I am well and truly fucked.

“That’s it?” asked Chief Goss slowly, his eyebrows arched almost to his hairline. “That’s your story?”

“That’s the way it happened, Chief,” said JT.

Dez nodded. Her clothes were splattered with blood, her hair was in disarray, and she knew that she must look like a crazy woman.

Goss pointed at the dead woman. “Did you inflict those injuries on her throat?”

“Of course not,” Dez began, but JT touched her arm.

“She appeared to have sustained some injuries when we arrived on the scene, Chief,” said JT. “As I said, we did a cursory examination and—”

“Did you also do a cursory examination on Doc Hartnup?”

JT winced at the inflection Goss put on “cursory.” “Yes, sir.”

“Did you determine that he was probably dead or apparently still alive?”

“Dead, sir,” said Dez.

“Really?” Goss said slowly. “The cleaning lady attacked you in here?”

“Yes.”

“What about Doc Hartnup?”

“Sir?”

“Did he attack you, too?”

“No,” said Dez. “JT told you, the doc was already dead when we got here.”

“Really?” Goss went and pointed into the other room. “Then where the fuck is his body?”

Dez shot JT a look and then the two of them hurried over to the entrance to the prep room. There were several officers in there and blood everywhere. Some of it was red, some was black, like the sputum the Russian woman had spat at her. Tiny worms, like maggots, writhed in it. A set of bloody footprints led from the large pool of blood on the floor to the open back door.

But there was no body.

Doc Hartnup was gone.

CHAPTER TEN

He answered the phone with, “Fishing for news with Billy Trout.”

His voice was dead, his body slumped into an executive desk chair that he swore once belonged to the misogynistic serial murderer Gerald Stano. He called the chair “Old Sparky” after the much different seat by which Stano exited the world in a Florida prison execution room.

“This you, Billy?” The caller was a man with a Mississippi accent.

“Mmh,” grunted Trout. He was six clues away from finishing the New York Times crossword. Thirty-eight down was a six-letter word for “parasite.” He tried “lawyer,” “ex-wife,” and “editor,” but none of them would fit.

“You still doing those weird news segments?” asked the caller.

“Hence the clever way I answer the phone,” murmured Trout with disinterest.

“Still paying for the good stuff?”

“Depends. Who’s calling?”

“It’s Barney Schlunke.”

“Ah,” said Trout and filled in the clue: “I.N.S.E.C.T.” He tossed the paper onto his desk. “You still in Rockview?”

“At Rockview. Inmates are in, staff are—”

“I know. It was a joke. We saw each other yesterday.… What do you want?”

“Yeah, I tried to talk to you yesterday at the execution, but you ducked out before I could get free.”

What a shame, thought Trout. “Talk to me about what?”

“A news tip.”

Trout snorted. “The only news around here is the storm and I’m not a weatherman.”

“Not that kind of story. Look, Billy, I wanted to know if you’re still paying the same rates for tips as you used to?”

“If it’s something good I can give you seventy-five percent.”

Schlunke snorted. “You going cheap on me?”

“No,” said Trout, “the economy blows, or don’t you read the papers?”

“Who reads the fucking papers? News is free on the Internet.”

“And you wonder why I’ve cut my rates?”

“I want the same rates as before.”

“Can’t do it. As it is seventy-five percent is my kids not eating.”

“You don’t have kids.”

“I got alimony and both of my ex-wives are immature. Works out the same.”

“Believe me,” said Schlunke, “this is worth the regular rate—”

“This is the regular rate.”

“—plus another twenty-five percent on top.”

“I can’t afford to feed a drug habit.”

“I don’t do drugs.”

“Then I can’t afford to feed your Internet porn habit, Schlunke.”

“God, I can’t tell you how much I missed being your straight man, Billy. Maybe I should be doing drugs, ’cause I must be having a psychotic episode. I mean … I think I’m talking to an actual reporter who wants an actual goddamn exclusive. But … hey, maybe that’s just the magic mushrooms talking.”

“That’s sidesplitting,” yawned Trout. It occurred to him that Schlunke was one of those rare people who looked exactly like his name. He was a big, sloppy, shambling lump of a southern boy who came to Pennsylvania because Mississippi wasn’t redneck enough. Trout grudgingly conceded to himself that Schlunke had sent three or four good stories his way over the years. “Okay, okay,” he said, “you tell me what you have and I’ll tell you if it’s worth full price.”

“Full price is one hundred and twenty-five percent of your old rate.”

“Just tell me.”

“Word of honor?”

Trout smiled as he glanced around the newsroom. It looked like a Hollywood set dresser had made sure there was every possible stereotype and sight gag appropriate to a regional paper sliding down the greasy slope to the septic tank. Stacks of bundled papers. Two-thirds of the desks empty; the other one-third buried under clutter so comprehensive that it had long ago morphed into a single eyesore rather than a collection of unique and separate pieces of junk; wall clocks that were still set to the wrong hour of daylight saving time; and one other reporter asleep with his heels on his desk and a John Grisham novel open on his chest.

It depressed him. He could remember a time — not that long ago — when coming to work filled him with excitement. Of course, back then he believed that journalists were the good guys and the voice of the people — and that the truth actually mattered. Time and the economy had beaten most of that out of him. Now it was a job, and soon it might not even be that.

Regional Satellite News was one of the hybrid services that had begun to crop up during the rise of twenty-first-century Internet news and the death spiral of print. Trout and his fellow reporters fed news stories to over forty print papers in Western Pennsylvania — none of them first rate — and they fed video stories to the Internet and, on good days, to services like the AP. The had very few “good” days here in the hinterlands of Stebbins County.

“Really,” said Trout. “You’d take my word?”

“Ha! How’s it feel to be someone else’s straight man?”

“Fucking hilarious. How’s it feel to hear me hang up?”

“You won’t. Not with what I have for you.”

Billy Trout tapped the eraser of his pencil on his desk blotter for a three count. “Okay. One twenty-five. But this had better be worth—”

“Two words for you,” said the prison guard. “Homer Gibbon.”

“I got two words for you. Yesterday’s news.”

He heard Schlunke chuckle.

“You do know he’s dead?” Trout said. “Oh, wait … as I remember you were fucking there when they gave him the lethal injection and, another news flash — so was I! Gosh, how long ago was that? Yesterday? No, I lie … It’s twenty-three hours and—”

“—and there’s more to the story if you’d shut up and listen.”

“Okay,” sighed Trout. “This is me shutting up.”

“Ever since Gibbon lost his last appeal and the execution date was set there has been a neverending media shit storm. Reporters camped out in the parking lot. I don’t know how you snagged a ticket to the show—”

“I have friends in low places.”

“—but once that asshole was dead, the party broke up. Now, new chapter. The official story was that Gibbon was going to be buried in some nondescript hole on the prison grounds.”

“Fair enough.”

“But that’s not what happened.”

Trout’s interest perked up by half a degree. Homer Gibbon was the state’s most notorious serial killer. He had been convicted on eleven counts of murder and was suspected of having actually killed more than forty women and children in Pennsylvania, Ohio, New Jersey, Maryland, and Virginia over a seventeen-year period. Although he had never formally admitted to any of the murders, he was convicted on an evidentiary case so compelling that the jury’s deliberation had lasted only two hours. Appeal followed appeal, but during the last appeal forensic evidence from a cold-case murder in Scranton irrefutably tied Gibbon to the rape and murder of a diner waitress and her two-year-old daughter. The murder had been shockingly brutal, with elements of torture so repellent that even the most jaded reporter tended to generalize about the details. The appeal died, the new trial was quick, the death penalty given, and the governor approved execution by lethal injection for the first time since Gary Heidnik was put down in 1999. Even the expected protests by human rights and pro-life groups were listless. Nobody wanted Gibbon to live.

“So what did happen?” asked Trout.

“The remains were shipped to his family.”

“Uh-uh. He didn’t have any family. I did the background on Gibbon.”

“I know, right? You wanted to do one of those bullshit human interest things. ‘What’s the cost to the family of the killer?’ or ‘The victims aren’t the only victims.’ Some crap like that.”

“I’m so glad you respect my work.”

“C’mon, Trout, let’s be real here. I lock shit up and you shovel it onto the headlines. Neither of us is doing any great humanitarian good here. Best-case scenario for me is I make life hell for the baby-rapers while they’re waiting for the system to put them back into the community; and maybe you write a piece once every ten years that has more genuine heart than exploitive bullshit. Tell me I’m wrong.”

Trout was impressed. Schlunke was an insect but apparently not as stupid a creepy-crawly as previously thought. Trout filed that away.

“The family,” he prompted, swinging back to that. “The court records said he had no family.”

“Court records were wrong. Some old broad stepped up after the last appeal. Said that she was his aunt and apparently produced enough proof to convince the judge and the warden. Point is, she petitioned to claim the body for burial. All last minute, all hush-hush.”

Trout was genuinely interested now. “An aunt, huh? How old?”

“’Bout two years older than dirt. She arranged to have his body shipped back and to have a mortician tidy Gibbon up before they put him in a pine box.”

“What cemetery would allow—”

“No … She wanted to bury him on the family estate. Well … farm. Used to be an estate but there isn’t much of it left. Few dozen acres that have been left to grow wild. There’s a family cemetery behind the house, and she wants Homer Gibbon buried there.”

“Why? She trying to ruin the property value?” asked Trout, but he was already seeing it. Old lady who’s only relative is a serial murderer. Maybe she knew him as a kid and wants to honor the child he’d been rather than the man he’d become. Classic stuff. Or, maybe she really believed in the defense’s theory that Gibbon suffered from a chemical imbalance. Was that the tether she used to cling to her self-respect and the family name?

“Are you even fucking listening to me?” growled Schlunke.

“Sure, sure,” Trout lied, thinking that the story might actually have legs. Could be a feature piece. A heartbreaker. Might even be something that could be squeezed into a Lifetime movie if the aunt was a Betty White type. “You were saying … aunt, burial prep…”

“When she petitioned the judge to receive the body, she requested that the information not be released to the press. She was afraid that his grave would be desecrated by friends and family of Gibbon’s victims, or by kids. Thrill seekers and stuff.”

“Yeah, yeah,” said Trout. He was casting the rest of the movie in his head. Maybe go with Kristen Bell as the waitress who gets killed. “But I need that address. Story’s dead without it.”

“I know. So … we’re absolutely clear on the hundred-twenty-five percent?”

“You’re on the wrong side of those bars, Schlunke.”

“Yes or no?”

“Yes, yes, yes. Now where’s the fucking aunt li—”

“Stebbins.”

Trout missed a beat, then said, “What?”

“Stebbins. The aunt … She lives in Stebbins.”

“But … I live in…”

“Yeah,” said Schlunke, “the old broad lives in your town.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

“Find him!” bellowed Chief Goss. “Doc Hartnup’s injured and probably in shock.”

“Going to rain soon,” said one of the officers.

“Then hustle your ass. If he’s hurt then he can’t have gotten far.”

“He’s not injured, Chief, he’s fucking dead. Somebody stole his body,” Dez said, but her voice was small. JT looked at her and gave a small shake of his head.

Officers ran in all directions, plunging into the woods, banging open doors on the outbuildings, shining lights into corners and under parked cars. Goss called the news in for the officers already combing the woods for the killer. They were working the far side of the mortuary.

“Here!” yelled an officer from Nesbitt who had been working his way across the lawn toward the woods. Dez ran toward him. For a fat man, Goss could move fast, and he was only a step behind JT. The Nesbitt officer — a black-haired kid named Diviny who was one year out of the academy — knelt on the grass on the forest side of the property. He pointed at a scuff of blood on the pea gravel and the streaks of red on bent blades of grass. “Looks like he went into the woods.”

JT bent and peered at the blood trail and then began following it, keeping to one side to protect the evidence. Dez flanked him on the other side of the trail. The smears of blood faded from bright wetness to faint touches to nothing forty yards from the wall of trees.

“Lost it,” said Diviny, who was dogging JT and, Dez thought, clearly avoiding her. All of the cops were giving her strange looks.

Fuck ’em, she thought. Her nerves were still jangling and the skepticism of Goss and the other officers was doing nothing to take her blood pressure off the burner. If this had been a UFO sighting or if she’d seen Bigfoot poking through her garbage can, then maybe she’d give some weight to JT’s unspoken assumption that her perceptions were still being filtered through a mix of Jack Daniels and Yuengling lager. But what happened back in the mortuary office was no visual hallucination, and it wasn’t pink fucking elephants. The woman had been dead. And then she had gotten up and gone apeshit. That was fact. Dez could still feel the slack weight of the woman bearing her down to the ground and her cold fingers trying to grab Dez’s hair.

She hunkered down and peered at the grass. “No … look at the grass.”

Diviny and JT bent low and looked where she was pointing. The grass was short and springy, resistant to footfall impressions, but as the law of forensics goes, every contact leaves a trace. Some of the grass, though unbroken, was pushed down and was still in the process of standing up.

“Nice catch,” said Goss, but there was a strong reserve in his voice. “Diviny, see if you can find this asshole. If you spot him, don’t engage — call for backup.” Goss gestured to an officer from Nesbitt. “Natalie — go with him, okay? No heroes.”

They nodded and moved off toward the trees.

“Where do you want JT and me?” ask Dez.

Goss sucked his teeth for a moment. “I want you to go sit in your unit and write me up a report I can live with. No, don’t look at me like that, it’s not a request.”

“Why?” asked JT. “This is an active crime scene and—”

“—and it appears that a victim of a violent attack got up and waltzed right out of your crime scene.”

Dez cursed silently. She wanted to get away, go home.

“No way,” insisted JT. “Doc Hartnup did not get up and walk away. No sir.”

“Then pitch me another scenario, Officer Hammond.” Goss pointed to the trail they had followed from the mortuary. “We followed shoe prints coming out of the building. That trail starts right where you said Doc was killed. I’ll bet those shoe impressions are going to match those of the victim. Are you suggesting, officers, that someone entered the crime scene while you were engaged in your violent struggle with the cleaning woman, took the time to put the dead man’s shoes on his own feet, then picked up the body and carried it into the woods? Take your time; think it through before you answer.”

JT clamped his jaw shut so firmly Dez thought his teeth were going to crack.

The chief’s eyes flicked back and forth between the two of them. “We called in for a shitload of backup. If Diviny and Natalie come up dry, we’ll start a proper search of the woods, and our people are already checking the buildings.”

Dez pointed to the gables of a whitewashed Victorian barely visible beyond the Grove. “At least let us check Doc’s old house.”

“I thought it was empty,” said Goss.

“It’s up for sale, yes, but it’s not empty,” corrected Dez. “Doc’s sister, April, and her two little kids, Tommy and Gail, have been living there while her divorce is being finalized. Been there two weeks. We didn’t get a chance to check on them, so let us—”

“No,” Goss said firmly. “I’ll send someone else. You go work on that report. Give me something that doesn’t sound like science-fucking-fiction.”

Dez turned away to keep the hurt she was feeling from showing. JT sighed heavily. They watched officers Ken Gunther and Dana Howard vanish into a path that wound through the Grove to the old Hartnup house. Without turning, Dez said, “This was a righteous shooting, Chief.”

When the chief did not answer, Dez turned and locked eyes with him for several silent seconds. Gradually, the stern line of Goss’s mouth softened a little and he sighed. “Christ, I hope so, Dez.”

JT said, “Are we going to need a lawyer?”

Goss sighed. “Not with me. But the state’s going to come in on this, no question about it. Talk to the union rep, get their lawyers on standby.”

They turned suddenly as the forensic officer, Scott, came hurrying out of the mortuary, waving a clipboard at them. As he closed in on them he said, “JT, Dez … what happened to the third body?”

JT and Dez stared blankly at him.

“Which third body?” asked Goss.

“The dead one,” said Scott.

“You trying to be funny?” barked JT.

“No,” said Scott, “I mean the body from the morgue. The one that Doc Hartnup was here to work on. What happened to it?”

JT shook his head. “There were no bodies in the cold room or the prep room. Doc might have been here to do paperwork or—”

“No,” Scott cut in, “there was definitely a body.” He tapped the papers on the clipboard with a fingernail. “It was on the log. Came in a little over two hours ago. Doc signed for it himself.”

“There were footprints of a third person,” JT said slowly. “Somebody must have come in and moved the body.”

“Footprints I saw were bare feet,” said Scott. “That’s kind of weird.”

“Everything’s kind of weird today,” JT said under his breath. “Question is why someone — bare feet or not — would come in, kill Doc Hartnup, attack the cleaning lady, and then carry off a corpse.”

Scott sucked his teeth. “Maybe this was all about stealing the body. Someone breaks in to do that and didn’t know Doc was there. Might have been opportunistic.”

“Doc’s car’s parked right outside,” said Goss.

“Yeah, but Doc could have arrived after the perp was inside. Ditto for the cleaning lady.”

“Which brings us back to why someone would want to steal a corpse,” said JT. “And it might have been more than one person. Corpses are heavy as hell.”

“Yeah, dead weight,” joked Scott. No one laughed. He cleared his throat and said, “Seems like an obvious motive to me.”

“Not to me,” growled Goss.

“Are you kidding? Celebrity corpses are hot,” Scott said, gesturing with the clipboard, “especially one like this?”

The word “celebrity” hung in the air for a moment, and then Dez snatched the clipboard out of Scott’s hand. She scanned the form and gasped.

Goss and JT read over her shoulder. The top sheet was a standard mortuary receiving order for the transfer of a body from a prison to a local funeral home. However, it was attached to a signed and notarized confidentiality agreement from the warden of the State Correctional Institution at Rockview. It was couched in complex legalese that promised fines, loss of business license and criminal prosecution if Dr. Lee Hartnup broke the seal of secrecy to reveal the name of the deceased prisoner entrusted to his care.

Standing there under the harsh morning light, they read the name.

Dez was unable to speak. Goss just stared at the paper, mouthing the name silently.

JT whispered, “Holy mother of God…”

The name of the deceased was Homer Gibbon.

CHAPTER TWELVE

“This is Magic Marti at the mike with the latest on the storm. Despite heavy winds, the storm front is slowing down and looks like it’s going to park right on the Maryland-Pennsylvania border, with Stebbins County taking the brunt of it. They’re calling for torrential rains and strong winds, along with severe flooding. And here’s a twist … even though this is a November storm, warm air masses from the south are bringing significant lightning, and so far there have been several serious strikes. Air traffic is being diverted around the storm. So, let’s settle back and listen to some appropriate tunes. First up we have Bob Dylan with ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.’”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Billy Trout was totally jazzed about the story. Or stories, as it would probably turn out. There was the short-term exclusive — Homer Gibbon, the killer comes home. That was gold, particularly since the only previous hometown for the serial killer had been a series of foster homes in the Pittsburgh metropolitan area. Nobody — no-fucking-body — knew about his connection to Stebbins. Nobody knew he had an Aunt Selma.

And, Trout thought as he gathered up his field gear into his laptop case, how cool was the name “Selma”? Selma Elsbeth Conroy. Aunt Selma. It was tailor-made for a news story, and perfect for Hollywood. Which was the second story. Trout had promised himself that if there was even a scrap of meat on this bone he’d turn it into a box office feast. Fuck Lifetime … He was going to pitch this to someone huge. Scorsese. De Palma. Maybe Sam Raimi. Get Helen Mirren to play Aunt Selma. Maybe work in a hint of incest and get Kate Winslett to play Selma as a younger woman.

The thing was writing itself.

For the first time in weeks he felt like getting up and coming to work had some purpose. He was so excited that he wished he could call Dez Fox and share the news with her, but … that would be a bad move. The last time they broke up, Dez had made it abundantly clear that she would rather be eaten by rats than hear from Trout again. It didn’t matter that the breakup was her fault.

Trout understood it because he understood Dez. He understood it every time they broke up, and every time they got back together. Dez was damaged goods and probably always would be. She had a heart of gold — Trout knew that for certain — but it was surrounded by barbed wire and land mines.

He glanced at the pictures of her that were pinned to the inside walls of his cubicle. Dez in tight jeans and a halter, wildflowers in her hair, laughing at something Trout had said while he took her picture. Dez graduating from the police academy. Dez sitting along on the dock behind Trout’s house, her arms wrapped around her knees, her whole body silhouetted by the setting sun. Dez in a heart-stopping string bikini that was little more than tiny triangles of brightly colored cloth. Dez as a teenager with braces when he picked her up for the junior prom.

Dez, Dez, Dez …

The memory that burned the hottest in his mind was not their breakup, which was both a legendary clusterfuck and a seven-day wonder for the local gossip mill. Nor was it the argument that had lit a fuse to their explosive deconstruction as a couple. No, the one unshakable and unpolluted memory that Trout lived with day and night — especially nights — was their last evening together before it all went wrong. It had been perfect. They’d spent the day riding horses through the state forest, Dez on a spirited gelding and Trout lumbering beside her on a Clydesdale who was a retired Amish lumber horse. The forest had been filled with flowers and birdsong, and it seemed that all they did was laugh. Dez had a great laugh. She laughed with her whole body, her eyes squeezed shut, tears streaming down her cheeks.

Then they’d gone back to his place. On any other night Dez might have chided him for the corniness of the set-up he’d prepared. Chilled wine, candles faintly scented with lavender and lilac, pink and red roses, and new sheets on the bed. They danced in the middle of the floor to Sade and then stood there and kissed until they were both lightheaded. Then Dez and Trout slowly peeled off the layers of clothes that kept their fingers and mouths from each other’s skin.

When they were naked, there was a strange and lovely moment when they simply stood there and looked at each other. Trout touched her as gently as if she were a phantom of mist, his fingertips ghosting across her lips and throat, trailing lines of heat down her chest to each full breast and each pink nipple. She took him by the hand and led him to his bed. Sex for them was always good but often quick, with Dez wanting to brush past foreplay and get “right to it.” That night was different. They spent a long time with each other, playing games that coaxed each other to the edge and then backed off, only to start again in another way. Then he lay back and gently pulled her on top of him. They made love slowly, as if they had all the time in the world. And then they lay together afterward, their bodies pulsing with animal heat, sweat running down to soak the sheets, hearts pounding rhythms that each could feel beneath the other’s skin.

It was the last time they made love. Maybe the last time they ever would. Within a day they were at war and both knew how to fire the rockets that shattered hearts and hopes.

Trout almost dug out his cell phone to call her. Maybe she wasn’t angry anymore. Maybe she’d calmed down enough to regret what she’d done. Maybe she missed him.

He left the phone in his pocket and, through force of will, shifted his mind back to the moment. To something real and present and tangible. Something over which he had actual control.

Trout let the excitement of this new story pump through him like adrenaline. He got up and headed down the hall to the video room. A young man was slouched in a chair, tapping a message into Twitter. He looked up as Trout slid into the chair next to him.

“Goat!” said Trout brightly. “Just the man I was looking for. Grab your camera.”

Gregory “Goat” Weinman was a tall, gangly collection of loose-jointed limbs, tangled black curls, and never-seen-the-sun white skin wrapped in nouveau Bohemian mismatched clothes. “Oooo, are we having a ‘stop the presses’ moment?” he said without inflection.

“As a matter of fact,” said Trout. “Get your stuff.”

Goat finished composing his tweet and hit “Enter.” Trout read the comment, which was an scathing observation about the latest Woody Allen film. Goat was the cameraman, film editor, general engineer for the Regional Satellite News, and, Trout knew, a prima donna of legendary dimensions. Goat was a failed indie filmmaker with an MFA from Carnegie Mellon and a far too refined sense of artistic snobbery to give him a snowball’s chance in Hollywood. He might as well have “auteur” tattooed on his forehead. Trout also knew that Goat hated every second of it here in the land of regional cable news, but in this economy and with that temperament, it was the only steady work he could get. On the other hand, Goat could take footage of Little League games, Tea Party rallies, Nascar races, or gun shows and turn it into compelling viewing. It would win awards if anyone ever watched their shitty news feed, which no one did.

“C’mon,” urged Trout. “Chop-chop.”

“Not going to happen.”

“Why? Did you finally watch all of the porn on the Net?”

“Don’t I wish, but no. I was editing film all night. The frigging mayor’s speech and the soccer game. If it wasn’t for soccer moms I’d kill myself. Anyway, I’m beat, I’m out of here, man.”

“This is important—”

“What? The storm? If you think I’m going to stand out in a frigging hurricane while Gino reads the weather, then you need better drugs.”

“Screw the storm. I have a lead on something that might actually be something.”

“Something by whose scale? Town or county?”

Trout grinned. “Figure somewhere between Pulitzer and Oscar.”

Goat blinked. “You shitting me?”

“I shit thee not.” Trout dropped the story on Goat.

“Oh hell yes,” said Goat. “That’s huge.”

“I know, right?”

“This is going to give the whole Gibbon story some new legs. Let me tweet something.”

Trout nodded. Like anyone who still planned to have a future as a paid reporter, he understood the value of social networking. Twitter and Facebook moved mountains in terms of PR and buzz. Goat managed the online accounts for their division of Regional Satellite News, and he’d goosed the buzz to the point where RSN had over eighty thousand followers. Ten times the number of people who lived in the county.

“How’s this?” Goat typed in a short message: “Coming soon — RSN exclusive — Untold secrets of Homer Gibbon!”

“Perfect,” said Trout. “Short, though. I thought Twitter let you write a hundred and forty words.”

“A hundred forty characters,” corrected Goat. “Brevity is God to the ADD crowd. This is fifty-seven. Makes it easier for people to retweet it while keeping their user names. Helps with spreading it out even more.” He paused. “When we get back, I think I’ll edit a Homer Gibbon “best of” reel. News headlines, footage of the FBI pulling that body from the Dumpster in Akron, stand-ups from the trial, the perp walk, all that, then upload it to YouTube. We can post the link on Twitter, see if we can goose it to go viral. Prime the pump for when we drop the real bomb.”

“Works for me,” said Trout.

Goat shut off the computer and began stuffing equipment into a reinforced duffle. When he stood, he loomed over Trout like a giant stick bug. “Let’s roll.”

Three minutes later they were in Trout’s Ford Explorer, bucketing along Doll Factory Road toward Transition Estate.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Officer Andrew Diviny was twenty-three years old. He had graduated from the police academy one year and four days ago and planned to log another year on Nesbitt PD to establish a solid record and maybe a commendation or two, and then he was going to put in an application to the FBI and blow Small Town America so fast his résumé would have skid marks. That had been the plan since high school. No way was he going to loiter in a dead-end former coal town like Nesbitt, a town whose only claim to fame was that it was not as much of a shithole as Stebbins.

He knew he fit the FBI profile to a tee. Good GPA from school and college, with a degree in criminal justice and a minor in accounting. That had been a deliberate choice. He knew that the FBI was all about accounting. Follow the money, even now with the Bureau under the auspices of Homeland. Everything was money, and Diviny knew numbers. He even liked accounting. His dad and uncles were CPAs and his mother had a degree in economics from Pitt.

As he ran softly through the grass toward the woods, he cut covert glances at the officer sent to accompany him. Natalie Shanahan. She was north of thirty, carrying ten pounds more weight than her uniform had been cut for, and she ran with her face pointed forward as if this was a game of catch-up rather than an exercise in tracking. She wouldn’t find anything, Diviny was sure of it. He would. He’d pick up the trail once they were in the woods, and he’d find the missing victim. He would make the save, so to speak. It would go in his jacket.

He pulled a little ahead as they reached the edge of the lawn, wanting to be the first one into the Grove.

“Slow down, kid,” puffed Shanahan, but Diviny pretended not to hear her.

The forest was thick with tall, dense pines whose shaggy coats of needles meshed together so tightly they turned bright morning into dim twilight. Diviny made sure that he had his flashlight out and on before Shanahan. He’d find a way to mention that in his report, always being careful to appear to be praising his fellow officer while slanting the details in his favor.

In the poor light the grass thinned and faded to bare earth and moss. Diviny spotted the erratic line of shoe impressions almost at once, but he crossed over them and edged toward the right, knowing that Shanahan would follow. She did, and he steered her twenty yards away from the trail.

“Shit,” she said, slowing to a walk, breathing hard under the Kevlar vest. “Lost it.”

“I know,” Diviny lied. He chewed his lip as if in thought. “Look, he’s hurt, right? He’s not going to want to climb any hills. There are two trails.” He indicated two natural paths between the tree trunks. “That one goes downslope. Path of least resistance. Why don’t you take that and I’ll go uphill just in case?”

Shanahan never batted an eye. “Good call. Stay frosty, kid.”

Christ, he thought, which bad cop movie did you crib that from?

“Absolutely,” he said with a grin that showed a lot of teeth. He set off to the left, moving at an angle that was almost certain to intercept the line of footprints he saw. He cut a look to see Shanahan trundling down the slope toward a minor footnote in his after action report. When he reacquired the footprints he smiled.

He bent to study them. Man’s shoe, probably size nine or ten. Ground was soft but the impressions weren’t deep. Diviny knew that Doc Hartnup was five nine and slender. Maybe one sixty-five. A perfect fit.

The line of flight was erratic. A drunk would walk like that, or someone badly hurt. Maybe delirious with shock. That also fit.

He thought about what he had overheard back at the mortuary. JT Hammond and Desdemona Fox had reputations as cops better suited to more challenging departments, and both had a bunch of commendations. Granted, Dez Fox had also racked up as many reprimands as honors. Use of foul language on the job. Destruction of public property and excessive force — she allegedly threw a wife-beating town selectman through the front window of the county assessor’s office. Rumors of a couple of off-the-clock DUIs she was allowed to skate on because a lot of the local cops either liked her or wanted to get into her pants.

Diviny could appreciate that. Dez Fox was an überhottie. Built like Scarlett Johansson, with ice blue eyes, bee-stung lips, and a natural blonde if the rumors were true. If she hadn’t had a personality that one mutual friend had described as “Genghis Khan with boobs,” Diviny might even have considered asking her out. But her reputation might leave a stain on his record. No way, José.

He stopped. The ground was scuffed and he shone his light to read the scene. A confusion of footprints, palm prints, and knee-shaped dents. Doc Hartnup had clearly fallen down here. Diviny edged around the scene, careful to steer well clear of every trace of evidence. Then he paused. The footprints leading off from where the victim had fallen were no longer heading in the same direction. Instead of an erratic but straight line to the northeast, they curved around a thick tangle of wild rhododendron. That path would take Hartnup down toward Shanahan.

“Shit,” Diviny said, and began moving fast. He had to head off the Doc before Shanahan saw him, otherwise he’d have to split the save.

He broke into a light jog, following a trail that he barely needed a flashlight to see. He kept his head down, body bent at the waist, and he was smiling in anticipation when he rounded a thick tree and ran headfirst into a silent figure.

Diviny rebounded from the impact and looked up, smiling in instant embarrassment and surprise.

The smile died on his face.

“Doc?”

Doc Hartnup’s face was covered in blood. His eyes were dark and dead, his features slack. Except for his mouth, which opened wide as he lunged at the officer.

There was a wet crunch as white teeth closed around Officer Diviny’s windpipe, and then a hydrostatic hiss as bright blood shot with fire-hose force into the air, splattering the grasping arms of the surrounding trees.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Dez, JT, and Chief Goss stared at the name on the clipboard for a shocked three seconds, and then they all turned and began hustling back through the field toward the mortuary building.

“How the hell did the body of a sick psycho like Homer Gibbon wind up here?” Dez grumbled as she racewalked along beside Goss. “Did you know about this, Chief?”

Goss’s eyes shifted toward her and then away. “It was arranged last minute.”

“And you didn’t think that responding officers might need to know about it?”

“Keep your voice down,” Goss snapped, his face coloring. “Why should I have told you or anyone about this? He’s a stiff in a bag, and he’s scheduled to go into the ground tomorrow. Besides, there was a court order forbidding anyone involved in the transfer from talking about it.”

“Why?” Dez demanded.

Goss hedged, clearly uncertain whether the gag order was still in force under the circumstances. He walked several fast paces before he replied. “Okay, okay … Gibbon had a relative in town and she petitioned the court to be able to claim his remains and bury them on family property.”

“Wait,” said JT, holding up a hand, “Gibbon was from here?”

“No, but his aunt lives here. Selma Conroy.”

JT looked at him. “Sexy Selma?”

“Who’s ‘Sexy Selma?’” asked Dez.

“Way before your time,” said JT. “When I was still a rookie, Selma Conroy ran a hot-pillow joint on Route 381 for years. We busted the place a dozen times, though somehow Selma always skated. No major convictions. She retired years ago.”

“And she’s Homer Gibbon’s aunt? Nice family.” Dez looked at Goss. “Would have been nice to know that’s what we were stepping into when we took this call.”

“Hey,” said Goss, “just about the only two things they told me were jack and shit. Besides, the gag order was imposed because of all the threats.”

“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

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

“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.”

“Yeah? You got some real history?”

“Kind of.”

Goat shrugged. “Who’d play her in the movie?”

“The shark from Jaws,” muttered Trout.

Dez Fox stormed up to the Explorer and kicked the door shut. Trout had to do a fast sideways shuffle to keep from getting clipped by it.

“Jesus Christ, Dez,” he barked, “you dented the whole—”

“What the fuck are you doing here?” Her tone was loaded with enough frost to start an ice age.

Trout winced but tried to turn it into a smile. “Hey, is that any way to treat me after—”

Dez got up in his face, her voice low and tight. “Bring up the past, Billy, and I’ll tase you and stomp the shit out of you while you lay pissing in your khakis. Don’t think I’m joking.”

“Geez, Dez, let’s have a little perspective here. I wasn’t the one who—”

“You’re a dickbag who should have been thrown out with the afterbirth.”

Trout sighed and placed his hand over his heart. “You wound me, Desdemona.”

“I’m about to.”

“Whoa there, officer,” interjected Goat, waving his hand between them. “Let’s dial this down and—”

“Fuck off,” Dez and Trout said at the same time.

“I…”

JT had been a few steps behind Dez and stepped in now to take Goat by the arm and pull him back. “Come on, son, best to stand at a minimum safe distance when those two are in gear.”

Goat let himself be pulled to the other side of the road, watching as Dez and Trout bent toward each other, almost nose to nose, shouting at the top of their voices.

“What’s with them?” Goat asked. “They have some bad blood between than or something?”

JT wore a tolerant smile. “You figured that out, did you? Good for you.”

Goat turned to him, and he wasn’t smiling. “Don’t patronize me. I’m a freaking news cameraman, so how about a little respect?”

JT spread his hands. “Don’t have a stroke, kid. It was a joke. I got you out of there before you got hurt. Even I don’t try to get between Dez and Billy, and I’m armed.”

Goat was hardly mollified and grunted something in Yiddish. JT chuckled.

Twenty feet away, Dez and Trout were still going at it.

“I didn’t come here to start a fight, Desdemona,” said Trout.

“Call me that again and I’ll put a baton across your kneecaps. It’s Dez or Officer Fox. Actually, for you it’s only Officer Fox. Now tell me what you’re doing here.”

Trout bit back something he was going to say, and instead pointed at the crooked line of parked police units. “Chasing a story, Officer Fox. Why else would I be here?”

“There is no story. Thanks for coming. Have a nice day. Fuck off and die.”

“No story? So why are half the cops in the county here? And … Christ … is that blood all over your shirt?” His guts knotted like a fist. “Damn it, Dez, are you hurt?”

Dez stepped back from him, and Trout could see shutters drop behind her eyes. She cut a look at JT, and when Trout followed the line of her gaze he caught Sergeant Hammond giving a tiny shake of his head.

Dez cleared her throat. “This is an active crime scene,” she said in the uninflected tone cops are taught to use at the academy. “Should the situation require it, a formal statement will be made at the appropriate time.”

She started to turn and Trout touched her arm. “Come on, Dez, don’t run that shuck on me. I own the patent on bullshit in Stebbins County. There’s something serious going down here and I want in.”

Dez, in control now, stopped and looked pointedly at the hand and then at his face. “Please remove your hand, sir.”

“‘Sir’? Oh please … cut the shit, Dez,” said Trout, though he took his hand back. “At least tell me if you’re hurt.”

It took Dez a while to reply to that, and Trout watched various emotions struggle to present themselves on her face, but the wooden cop face won out.

“Why?” she asked.

“Why do you think?” Trout forced a smile despite the hurt he was feeling. “Look … just because we have some issues—”

“‘Issues,’” she echoed softly.

“—doesn’t mean that I don’t care about what happens to you.”

Dez glanced down at the drying blood on her clothes and then looked up into Trout’s eyes for a long three count.

“I’m not injured,” she said, her tone and selection of words coldly formal.

Trout felt his stomach begin to unclench. “Then what happened?”

“Just go away, Billy,” she said as she turned and began walking away.

Trout ground his teeth. Ah … fuck it, he thought, and then called after her, “Is this about Homer Gibbon?”

That stopped Dez in her tracks. Trout knew that she was too good a cop to do something as lame as whirl around in shock, but the sudden tension was there in every line of her body. She turned and walked back to Trout.

“Would you repeat that, please?” she said.

Trout licked his lips. “Does that mean that this is related to the Homer Gibbon case?”

“What do you know about that, Billy?”

Not “sir.” Not “fuckhead.” She used his actual name.

“I know that he’s here,” said Trout, nodding toward the mortuary.

Dez said nothing.

“Did something happen?” Trout asked. “There were some threats during the trial and before the execution. Did someone break in to desecrate the body?”

Nothing. Dez’s eyes might as well have been made from cold blue stones.

“Did someone steal the body? There were threats about that, too.”

There was a flicker in Dez’s eyes that told Trout that he’d scored a point. Holy rat shit, he thought. Someone actually did steal Gibbon’s body. If the execution was the third act, this is a solid gold epilogue.

He kept the triumphant smile off his face. “Any theories on who stole it?” he asked.

“I never said a goddamn thing about—” Dez began and then stopped as JT Hammond crossed the road and stood next to her. Goat followed silently in his wake.

“Do you have information to share with us, Billy?” asked JT, his voice as cool as Dez’s.

“No, but I’d like to get some information from—”

“Then please get into your car, turn around, and go back to the road,” said JT.

“You can’t throw me out. This is news and—”

JT stepped close. Trout was tall at six feet, but JT was two inches taller and a great deal tougher. “This is a private road, Billy,” said JT. “It’s mortuary property all the way down to Doll Factory. You can wait down at the crossroads or up the road at the diner, but you cannot park here.”

“Since when did you join the gestapo, JT?” Billy asked in a disappointed tone.

The skin around JT’s eyes tightened. When he wanted to, JT’s face could transform from the genial nerd Samuel Jackson from Jurassic Park to the far more predatory Samuel Jackson from Pulp Fiction. This was the first time the transformation was done for Trout’s benefit. “You didn’t have many friends when you arrived here, Billy … and you have fewer of them now. Now get in your car and drive out of here. I won’t ask again.”

Billy Trout tried to outstare JT Hammond, but he knew that it was a lost game before it started. He had no cards to play.

So, without another word, he turned around, gestured curtly for Goat to get in the car, and within ten seconds he was driving down the road. Just to piss off the two cops he broke the speed limit all the way. It was a silly little victory and it made him feel about three inches tall.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

“This is Magic Marti at the mike with news from the exact middle of nowhere. If you’re in a hurry this morning, steer clear of Doll Factory Road east of Mason Street. There’s some police activity in the area and we’re getting a rubbernecker slowdown.”

Sound of canned thunder.

“Time for an update on that storm that’s grinding its way here from Pittsburgh. Heavy winds have picked up, and we’re seeing fifty-mile-per-hour sustained winds and gusts reported up to ninety miles per hour. The National Weather Service has classified it as a Category One hurricane, and there are reports of moderate damage to motor homes, billboards, and other light structures, as well as small to moderate stream flooding. It’s expected to hit our area in two hours, so expect a list of school and business closings.”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

“How the hell did he find out about this?” growled Dez as they watched Billy Trout’s car vanish.

JT shrugged. “Maybe he was monitoring the police radio and heard the call.”

“Doesn’t explain how he knows about Gibbon.”

JT shrugged. “He’s a good reporter, Dez. He probably has sources. Maybe in the department, maybe with the courts, or even the prison. Could have been anyone, and it’s moot. He knows and now this circus is going to turn into a state fair. This will draw down the big media. CNN, Fox, and everyone else.”

“Yeah.”

JT looked at Dez, who was rubbing her temples and wincing. “Why are you so hard on that young man,” he asked.

“Don’t start.”

“Dez—”

“Billy wants too much. He wants shit that I can’t give.”

“I know what he wants, Dez. I was there the last five or six hundred times you two broke up. What I can’t understand is why you’re always giving him such a hard time. I’ve seen you treat wife-beating meth addicts with more compassion. All the boy did was ask you—”

“What’s it to you what he asked?”

JT pointed a finger at her. “Don’t take that tone with me, girl.”

Dez glared at him for a moment, then her eyes shifted away. “Sorry.”

In a softer tone, JT said, “It matters a lot what happens to you, Dez. You’ve been a raging bitch since the last breakup. You were drinking too much before, and now—”

Dez’s hands were clenched into fists. “Listen, Dr. Phil, I don’t need you to tell me how fucked up my life is. The real news flash is that I’m doing okay with it. Fucked up is my comfort zone, so stop trying to be my mother.”

“If I was your mother I’d send you to your room.”

Dez stabbed a finger toward the mortuary. “Is this about what happened in there? You trying to build a case for diminished capacity or something? Poor Dez, she’s so torn up with a broken heart that she’s been pickling her brain in Jack Daniels. Can’t trust a fucking word she says these days. Pink elephants and—”

“What’s with you today, Dez? You keep thinking that I didn’t back your play in there, but if you’d stop shouting at everyone for two minutes maybe you’ll remember that I sure as hell backed you up.”

“You sold me out in there. You didn’t believe me and you didn’t back me up.”

“The hell I did. I had your back then and I have it now. All the way, and you damn well know it. I told the chief the only version of the story that makes sense, so stop trying to alienate everyone. I am not your enemy. Neither, by the way, is Billy Trout or the rest of the human race.”

Her eyes blazed with icy blue challenge. “So, you’re saying that you believe that the Russian broad attacked me?”

“How many ways would you like me to say it?”

She poked him hard in the chest with a stiffened finger. “Then why didn’t you say so when we were inside?”

JT pushed her finger aside. “Because I was in shock, what the hell do you think? You were in shock, too. At that moment I didn’t know what to think about anything. Can you stand there and tell me that everything that’s happened today makes sense? That it’s easy to swallow?”

Dez said nothing.

JT nodded. “What I thought. So, what would you have said if I’d told you that Doc Hartnup just got up and strolled off? You trying to tell me that you’d accept that without pause? Without question? No … you wouldn’t because it doesn’t make sense. But we know it happened. Just like we know the cleaning lady attacked you. None of this makes sense.”

JT and Dez stood staring at each other for several silent seconds. Far to the west there was a low mumble of thunder. The sound broke the moment, and Dez’s eyes flicked to the west and then down at the gravel.

“Shit,” she said.

“It’s okay,” JT said softly, touching her arm. “We’ll get it all sorted out.” He didn’t specify which issues would be resolved. The case, Billy, or the train wreck that was Dez’s life. Even so, she nodded slowly.

There was a dull crackle behind the trees. Dez looked up at the clouds. The radio said that a bad storm was coming, but …

The crackle came again.

Not distant thunder.

It was gunfire.

That’s when the screaming started.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Dr. Herman Volker nearly shot himself when the phone rang. His nerves were fiddle-string taut, his heart fluttered like nervous fingers on a tabletop, the old Makarov pistol rattling in his hand. His clothes smelled of body odor, Old Spice, cigarettes, and fear. He had the barrel pressed to his temple but had not yet slipped his finger inside the trigger guard. If he had, he would already be dead. Instead his finger jerked tight round the outside of the guard.

“God!” he gasped aloud. There was no one to hear him there in the brown shadows of his house. The single word banged off the walls and burst apart into silent dust.

The phone rang again. It was an old hotel model. Kitschy when he bought it, merely cumbersome now. And loud. The bell seemed to shriek at him.

Volker’s entire body had jerked on the first ring and he could feel the tremulous echo still reverberating in his chest. The sensation grew worse with the second ring. Anxiety was a cold wire in his stomach.

Was it the police? Had his handler called them? Turned him in for what he’d done? Would the police call first or just burst in? Even after all these years working with prisons he didn’t really know.

Ring!

Mr. Price — Volker’s handler at the CIA — would call his cell rather than the home phone. So would the warden and the staff at Rockview.

The hand holding the pistol twitched like a dying fish. He slapped the pistol down on the table, jerking at the solid clunk the metal made against the hardwood. Then he jerked again a second later as …

Ring!

Volker knew that he was a dead man. Even if the police broke down the door and arrested him before he could pull the trigger, he was dead. A prison official in jail was marked. The convicts would tear him apart. Especially when what he did got out. Homer Gibbon was a legend at Rockview. A convict’s convict. They called him the Angel of Death. Some of them had Gibbon’s face tattooed on their arms.

When they learned what Volker had tried to do — had, in fact, done — they would … His mind refused to form any specific end to that thought.

Volker held his breath as he watched the phone ring two more times. Five in all. There was no answering machine attached to the phone. No voice mail. It would ring until the caller gave up. Or until Volker went mad.

Who was calling?

Then he abruptly lunged for it, snatching the receiver from the cradle before it could ring again, pressing the phone to his ear and mouth. And here he faltered once more, unable to speak a word.

A voice crackled down the line. “Hello?”

Volker closed his eyes in relief. A stranger’s voice. Not his handler. Not the warden. Not the cool formality he imagined the police would use.

After a moment, the voice said, “Dr. Volker?”

The doctor swallowed a lump in his throat that felt as big as a fist. “Y-yes…?”

“Oh, good,” said the caller brightly. “Thought I’d misdialed.”

“Who’s calling?”

“Ooops, sorry. This is Billy Trout, Regional Satellite News. I was at the prison yesterday and—”

“Please,” interrupted Volker, his irritation immediately overriding his fear, “I cannot comment on that event; and I would appreciate it if you—”

Trout cut him off. “This isn’t about the execution. Not exactly…”

Volker said nothing. God! Did this man know about Lucifer 113? If so — how?

“I apologize for calling you at your home, doctor,” Trout continued. “I tried your office and your cell.”

“Then why are you calling me?”

“I’d like to talk with you about Aunt Selma.”

“Who?” He knew it sounded like the lie it was.

“Selma Conroy,” prompted Trout. “Homer Gibbon’s aunt. The one who claimed the body…? It’s my understanding that you released the body to her?”

“Yes,” said Volker woodenly. Even to his own ears his voice sounded dead. He glanced at the pistol lying on the table. He closed his eyes. “How do you know about her, Mr. Trout? It was my understanding that such information was not to be released to the press. How did you find out?”

“Sorry, Dr. Volker. Confidential sources,” said Trout.

Volker gave a disgusted grunt. “What do you want? My part in this is over. If you were at the prison as you say, then you know that.”

“Ye-e-es,” Trout said, stretching the word to imply other possible meanings.

“Then what do you want?” Volker asked again. Was the phone tapped? It would not surprise him if the CIA had kept this place tapped since they moved him in. He looked around as if he could see agents huddled over elaborate wiretapping equipment, but all that surrounded him were the empty shadows of his sterile home.

“I want an opinion, Doctor,” said Trout. “As the prison’s senior medical officer you would be in a unique position to know Homer Gibbon. On a personal level, I mean. People talk to their doctors.”

“No,” Volker said evasively. “I was the doctor for the whole facility. I had a large staff. I was not that man’s therapist or caseworker.”

“I understand that, but can we agree that you knew Homer Gibbon? I mean, at least as well as anyone on the medical staff?”

“I…” Volker said and let his voice trail off, not knowing which answer was safest.

“So,” continued Trout as if Volker had given his agreement, “could you speculate, doctor, as to why someone might want to steal his body?”

“‘Steal’?” Volker’s chest heaved so sharply that he almost vomited onto the phone. He slammed down the receiver and backed away from the instrument as if it could bite him. “Oh, God,” he said to the brown shadows that filled the room. “Oh, God. What have I done?”

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

“Smooth,” said Goat, grinning with a mouthful of Burger King french fries. “Watching you in action is like a crash course in investigative journalism. You really opened Dr. Volker up. Wow.”

“Shut up,” grumped Trout.

“No, really … I’ll bet Anderson Cooper thinks you’re a rock star. I mean, I was impressed with how you dealt with that lady cop, but when you do a phone interview people unburden their souls to you. Wish I had video of that to put on YouTube.”

Trout gave him a withering stare. “You finished?”

Goat considered, shrugged. “Yeah. Unless there’s a third act to this comedy.”

Trout sighed.

“Speaking of the cop,” Goat said, “what’s with you and Lady Deathstrike?”

Trout chewed on it for a bit, then sighed. “We’ve been seeing each other off and on for a while. A long while. We mostly kept it off the radar — you know, cop and reporter. That sort of thing always looks hinky. But … things keep getting more serious, and we kind of hit a wall. You know how it is — one person wants to commit and the other wants to keep things ‘open.’ After a while all we were doing was fighting.”

“Let me guess,” Goat said with a grin, “you were the asshole who didn’t want to commit. All those wild oats to sow.”

Trout looked through the windshield as if it were a window into the past. He sighed again … deep and long. “No,” he said, “I was the asshole who wanted to marry her.”

That shut Goat up. He stared at Trout’s profile for a while and then shook his head. He fished out his iPhone and began trolling Twitter.

Trout didn’t bother filling in any details about the breakup. He didn’t want to go any farther down that road. The breakup with Dez was six months old and it felt like yesterday. From what he’d heard, Dez had soothed her shattered heart by screwing anything that had two legs, testosterone, and a tolerance for boilermakers. And every one of them was probably the same type, too. Tall, blond or sandy hair, blue eyes, an outdoorsy face with laugh lines and a tan. That was Dez’s type. It had been ever since high school and that sizzling junior year when they were dating for the first time. They’d broken into the school at night and lost their virginity together on the couch in the vice principal’s office. The detention couch, no less.

On his good days, Trout believed that he was the template for Dez’s subsequent conquests. Trout had blue eyes, blond hair, and a passable version of a weathered smile. On his bad days, he wondered if he simply fit the bill that had coalesced in her head during puberty. He knew that some people were like that; they fixate on a type and go hunting for it. Years ago, before he and Dez had become an item for the third time, a reporter friend had once remarked that “Dez would blow the captain of the Titanic all the way to the bottom of the Atlantic if he had blue eyes and a cowboy smile.”

So far they had been an item five times, and between some of those times Trout had gotten married and divorced. It did not help his peace of mind any when that same reporter friend pointed out how much each of those women looked like Dez.

The last time they’d been involved, Trout had given Dez an ultimatum. He couldn’t take the roller-coaster ride anymore. He wanted to make it permanent with Dez, despite the therapy bills and probable mutual murder that would almost certainly go along with that. Dez had told him she wanted to think about it.

The next day he went to her trailer with a ring, flowers, and plane tickets to Aruba. He let himself in with the key she’d given him, smiling like a kid and ready to put it all on the line — his heart, his career, his actual hopes and dreams. Dez was sprawled naked in the arms of a biker with jailhouse tats and long blond hair.

Trout lost it. He threw the flowers at Dez, dragged the biker out of bed by his hair, kicked him in the nuts, and threw him naked into the dirt outside. Then he called Dez a lot of names that he normally reserved for the lawyers who had represented his ex-wives.

Dez chased him out of the trailer and halfway down the road with a shotgun.

She was naked, and the shotgun, it turned out, was unloaded. It took JT Hammond and two pairs of handcuffs to quiet things down, but the magic seemed to have gone out of their relationship.

Ain’t love grand? Trout mused as he drove.

“I posted another teaser on Twitter,” Goat said, breaking into Trout’s dismal reverie. “So, what’s next?”

“Let’s listen to the call again.” Trout had recorded the call on his digital unit and played it back with the speakers on high. Even with the mild distortion, Volker’s voice and inflection had been clear. “Okay, O mighty Goat … you’re supposed to be the great filmmaker and director.… Give me notes on Volker’s performance.”

Goat stared up at the roof of the car, considering. “Well … he was upset.”

Trout twirled his finger in a “keep going” gesture.

“Volker was either trying to keep his voice in neutral, and fucking it up,” Goat said slowly, “or he was scared.”

“Scared? I didn’t get that.”

“Sure, scared and maybe paranoid. His voice was stiff. He vacillated between guarded defensiveness and trying to figure out what you knew.”

Trout was fascinated. “Explain.”

“Well, think about it. You called this guy at his house. When you were dialing, you told me that he was probably going to hang up on you. Which he did, but not at the right time. He’s a prison’s senior medical guy and he just performed a lethal injection on a mass murderer. He’s probably been dogged by everyone from the media to the Christian right. If his home number was public knowledge, then he’d be letting it go right to voice mail, or he’d yank the cord because he’d be getting a million calls, right?”

“Right.”

“But it wasn’t public knowledge. You had to call in favors to get that number. Volker isn’t getting calls on that line, so yours must have been a genuine surprise.”

Trout nodded, seeing the shape of it now. “So he should have been outraged at my call. He should have read me the riot act, threatened repercussions, yada yada.”

“And he didn’t. He didn’t even press you to find out how you got the number. He wanted to know why you called. Anyone else in his position would already know why you were calling — an insider’s view on Gibbon or the protests, or the issue of execution. That stuff. The sort of stuff you usually do. But Volker didn’t do that. I think he was not only trying to figure out why you called but was afraid of what you’d say.”

Trout grunted. “You’re building a case for guilty knowledge.”

“Hey,” said Goat, tapping his own chest with a crooked french fry, “if I was building a guilty knowledge scene in a movie, this would be cookie-cutter.”

Trout settled back and stared into the middle distance. Goat held out the cardboard sleeve of fries; Trout took one and munched it slowly, biting his way along its length with tiny, contemplative nips.

“What’d you get out of it?” asked Goat.

“Not that much. You’re good, kid,” said Trout. He picked up his cell and punched a speed dial number.

“Regional Satellite News,” answered a voice that was as bright and flowery as a spring meadow.

“Dear Marcia,” said Trout, “how would you like to earn some overtime cash?”

“As long as it doesn’t involve a stripper’s pole or popping out of a cake, I’m your girl.”

Trout grinned. Marcia Sloane had the voice that promised the smile and curves of a twenty-something California blonde. Everyone who called the bureau fell in love with her. She was actually just north of forty and far north of two hundred pounds. Curvy to be sure, with a heart-shaped face, masses of curly black hair, and — she claimed — nineteen separate piercings. Billy Trout had seen eight of them and, despite the fact that she outweighed him by at least fifty pounds, was intrigued to one day discover the rest.

“Sadly, not this time,” Trout said.

“Murray approve it?” she asked. Their editor, Murray Klein, was notorious for denying overtime for anything, expecting his staff to finish their work on their personal time. Trout didn’t hate him for it, though. Regional Satellite News worked with a budget surplus that could barely finance two cups of diner coffee.

“Yes,” Trout said, fudging the truth. Although Klein hadn’t approved this, given the nature of the story, he would. “I need some of your research magic. You could find Jimmy Hoffa if there were any legs left to that story.”

“Probably. What can I do for you, Billy?”

“I need everything you can dig up on two people. Deep background. I need what’s on the Net and anything you can find from other sources. First is Selma Conroy. Don’t know if that’s her maiden or married name.”

“Sexy Selma? God — don’t tell me she’s back in business. She went to school with my mom, and I’m pretty sure she was at least some part of my dear parents’ complicated divorce.”

“Look … this is for something really important. Major. You can’t tell anyone. An-nee-one.”

“Lips are sealed.”

“I’m serious.”

“So am I.”

“Okay … this is tied to the Homer Gibbon case. And there is a strong possibility that Selma Conroy is Gibbon’s aunt, and she filed to have his body brought here to Stebbins.”

Marcia grunted.

Trout said, “That’s it? I thought you’d be surprised.”

“Actually … I’m not,” she said, “’cause now that you say it I can see a little resemblance.”

“To Selma?”

“No … to her sister.”

“There’s a sister?”

“There was. She died a while back. Look, I’ll put that stuff together. I know where to look for everything on the Conroys. Who’s the other target?”

“Prison doctor from Rockview. Herman Volker. When I did a background on him for my story I got as far as him being from Europe. The name’s German, but the accent isn’t. Sounds Polish or something. Lived here a long time. Medical degree from Jefferson in Philly.”

“Okay. I’ll get what I can get. Anything else?”

“No, sweetie, but I need this ASAP.”

“Is this tied with what’s happening at Doc’s?”

“I don’t know. We stopped there and ran into Dez, and that could have gone better. She ran us off.”

“Ouch,” she said. “I’ll see if I can find out what’s going on out there. Lots of cops on that one and more coming in, and they just made a second call for ambulances.”

“Who’s hurt?”

“Unknown. They’ve switched to a tactical channel that we can’t get.”

Trout felt a momentary flash of panic in his chest. Please don’t let it be Dez, he thought.

Marcia, insightful as ever, said, “I’ll call Flower over at the station and see if I can pry anything out of her. Dez probably beat someone up because he looked like you.”

“Nice.”

“Seriously, Billy, I’m sure everything’s copacetic,” Marcia laughed.

“Thanks. You rock, Marcia.”

“You have no idea,” she said with a wicked laugh and hung up.

Goat was grinning as Trout put his phone away.

“What?” asked Trout.

“When are you going to tap that?”

“She’s a coworker.”

“Uh-huh. Not after hours and not between the sheets. She’s a wild woman.”

“How the hell would you know?” growled Trout.

Goat’s grin broadened. “The only way there is to know.”

Trout looked at him. “Is there anyone you haven’t screwed?”

“In Stebbins?”

“In North America.”

Goat considered. “I haven’t screwed that cop with the tits.”

Trout shook his head. “You’re not her type.”

“Why? ’Cause I’m Jewish?”

“No. ’Cause you’re sane.”

He turned the key and put the car in drive.

“Aunt Selma’s?” Goat asked.

“Aunt Selma’s.”

Billy Trout cut through the parking lot, bullied his way into traffic, spun the wheel, and kicked the pedal down toward Selma Conroy’s farm. He didn’t care at all about the speed limit. All of the cops were busy.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

The gunshot echoes bounced around under the low ceiling of storm clouds. Dez whirled, instinctively pushing JT out of the line of some imagined fire as she reached for her gun. It was all reflex and it was very fast.

A long, high piercing shriek ripped through the air, muffled by humidity and flattened by distance. There were two shots. Then three more. Then continuous fire until a second scream rose higher and sharper. The scream disintegrated into a wet gargle.

Then silence.

“There!” JT barked, pointing toward the tree line, but Dez was already running.

“Shanahan!” she yelled. “That was Natalie Shanahan. She went into the woods with that kid, Diviny.”

JT caught up with her as they pelted along the path that lead past the mortuary. Officers came spilling out of the building, running in the same direction. Chief Goss waddled along in the center of the pack, but the fitter cops were outstripping him, racing toward the trees. Everyone had guns drawn, but Dez didn’t like what she was seeing. Most of these guys were as inexperienced in combat as JT, and the academy training was far from enough and, for most of them, too long ago. Or too recent. They ran with panic on their faces. Someone was going to get shot, she thought, and it wasn’t going to be the bad guy. It was going to be another cop, or maybe a civilian.

She poured on the steam and cut left to get ahead of the pack, waving one arm in an attempt to slow them to a safer pace. But those screams still seemed to echo in the air.

“JT … watch my back.”

“Got it,” he said. “Go.”

Dez reached the tree line first and then slowed to a careful walk as she stepped from gray daylight to purple shadows. JT broke right and brought his gun up. They fanned their barrels back and forth in overlapping patterns. They saw nothing except tree limbs and bushes shifting in the breeze.

As the other officers reached the tree line, Dez stepped clearly into view and raised a fist. Most of them spotted it and skidded to a stop. Two officers collided and fell, but JT was there to help them up and warn them to silence.

Dez turned to look at the cops. Two from Stebbins and seven others. Three of them, she knew, were combat vets. Dez saw them watching her, and she hand-signaled them to advance in a wide line. She waved the others back.

“What do you need, Dez?” whispered JT, coming up on her flank.

“Keep them back. Line of sight with each other, but spread out. Make sure Simmons keeps his fucking finger out of the trigger guard. I’ll take the others with me.”

He nodded and faded back to close on Officer Simmons, the youngest officer in the county.

Dez checked left and right to see that the vets were formed up in a wide line but behind trees. Two of them — Schneider and Strauss — had pistols in two-handed grips, the third — Sheldon Higdon from Barnesville — carried a FN self-loading shotgun.

Dez pointed forward with a slow movement of her hand and she broke cover and began advancing at a quick walk-run from tree to tree, zigzagging to alternate her route and deter possible return fire. She heard the crunch of shoes on dry leaves as the others kept pace. After three hundred yards, Dez stopped to assess the terrain. She saw two sets of footprints and off to the left, a third. The third set was Doc Hartnup’s, she was sure of that. One set of prints diverged to follow the Doc, and from the size she figured it for Andy Diviny. The smaller set was Natalie’s, and they broke right to follow a downland path. That was odd. Why wouldn’t she have accompanied the other officer to follow a clear trail?

She waved Mike Schneider over and showed him the upland trail. Schneider got it and nodded, and he peeled off to follow that, jerking his head for Strauss to follow him. Dez flagged Sheldon and pointed downland. He nodded and as she began creeping forward, he followed along on her wide right flank, his gun steady, his eyes narrow and hard.

As they moved down the shadows grew deeper. There were boulders, left behind by a glacier thousands of years ago. Natalie Shanahan’s trail was easy to follow through dirt or moss, but soon it vanished as the ground became rockier. After another hundred yards Dez lost it completely.

Two minutes later Sheldon gave a sharp, short whistle, and when Dez turned, he waved her over. She saw why before he even pointed it out. Natalie’s trail reappeared in a different spot than Dez expected to see it. It looped around one of the big boulders and headed uphill in a straight line. The shoe impressions were deeper on the balls of the feet.

“She went running up that hill like a bat out of hell,” murmured Sheldon.

Dez nodded. “I’ll go up the hill. You go around and come up the east slope.”

“On it,” he said, and he was off, running low and fast. Dez watched him for a moment, nodding approval. Like her, Sheldon had dropped the veneer of “cop” and was back in the Big Sand.

The hill was too steep to climb without using both hands, so Dez holstered her gun, grabbed some roots, and pulled herself up. She was surprised Natalie managed to haul her ass up this way. Natalie was the queen of Weight Watchers but she snarfed down two Big Macs every lunch break.

As she reached the top of the hill, Dez took a firm left handhold and drew her pistol. She couldn’t hear Sheldon, but she knew he would be coming up the slope. It was a longer route but easier, so they should be hitting the same spot at the same time.

Dez took a breath, pulled herself up, peered briefly over the edge, and then ducked down, letting her mind process what her eyes had seen in that flash look.

The green forest was red.

“Christ,” Dez said aloud as the data splashed across her mental screen. Leaves and grass painted a dark crimson. Something lying there. Pale and streaked with dark lines of red. An arm. She was sure of it. Was there a figure standing there? No. It was a tree. She was sure of that, too.

Dez’s heart was hammering as she tightened her grip on the root and the gun. Then, with a grunt and a curse, she was moving, her feet scrabbling and slipping on the mossy stones of the hill. Up, up and then she was over the edge, swinging her Glock around into both hands, fanning the barrel from point to point, checking everything, making sense of shapes, putting everything into order.

Except that it wasn’t orderly. None of this was going to fit into a picture that would make sense. She knew that at once, and for a disjointed moment she couldn’t even feel the gun in her hand.

Natalie Shanahan lay sprawled on the leaves and moss. Her eyes were open. So was her chest. The vest was torn open. Shirt and bra in rags. Ribs stood up jagged and white through the torn meat of her breasts. Her body was bathed in blood, her face was splattered with black mucus. The skin around the wound was ragged, the ends pulled and torn. Steam curled upward from the burst meat. Smoke curled from the barrel of the pistol that was still clutched in Natalie’s hand; the slide was locked back. Brass cartridges lay scattered among the leaves and stones and dropped pieces of flesh.

Nothing else moved in the clearing. No perp. Nothing.

“Jesus God Almighty…”

Dez didn’t even turn as Sheldon Higdon spoke. She couldn’t. She was unable to move.

“Officer down!” yelled a voice. “Officer down!”

Dez looked up. Sheldon glanced at her and then they both turned and stared off to the east. The cries were coming from farther up the slope. She recognized the voice. One of the other two combat vet cops. And with a sinking dread, Dez knew that they had found Andy Diviny.

“God,” she murmured. “God…”

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

“Jesus…,” breathed Sheldon. “Look at her!”

“I know,” said Dez.

There were more shouts and then the hollow pok-pok-pok of pistol fire.

“Dez…” began Sheldon, but she cut him off.

“I know,” she barked again, and that fast she was charging up the slope. Sheldon was right there with her.

“The fuck is happening?” grunted Sheldon as he ran.

Dez said nothing. The day was all wrong and it was spinning away out of her reach. Even as she ran forward she felt like she was shrinking back, retreating within her own mind. This was all impossible.

She tore the shoulder mike from its clip and yelled into it. “We have officers down, repeat, officers down. We need backup right fucking now!”

Then she and Sheldon broke through a screen of shrubs … and the day became even more impossible.

Officer Jeff Straus lay faceup on the grass at the far side of the clearing. His entire face was … gone. Torn away to reveal ragged red muscle and white bone. Blood oozed down the sides of his face. Strauss’s pistol lay three inches from his hand.

Much closer, just a few yards away, Officer Mike Schneider stood with his back to Dez and Sheldon. Schneider’s Glock was down at his side, clutched in a tight fist. Schneider’s whole body twitched and he jerked the trigger. The blast was sharp and loud and the bullet punched a bloody groove through the side of Schneider’s ankle bone before burying itself in the dirt. Then Schneider’s legs buckled and he dropped full-weight onto his knees, the jolt knocking the gun from his twitching fingers. There was a hissing sound and Dez saw a geyser of bright red blood shoot outward from below Schneider’s chin and splash the pale face of Andy Diviny. The blood struck him in the mouth and eyes and splattered the rubbery leaves of a big rhododendron. As Schneider canted sideways and fell, Diviny stared straight at Dez.

Purple lips peeled back from bloody teeth and Diviny hissed at her.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

“No…”

Dez heard the word, but she could not tell if she spoke it, or Sheldon. It could not have been Strauss. That much was obvious. He had no lips left with which to speak. His mouth and cheeks had been torn away, and his eyes stared in terminal astonishment up at the roof of green leaves.

The sounds of the forest were gone, washed out of the moment by another sound. That of Andy Diviny chewing a mouthful of flesh.

“No!”

This time it was Sheldon who spoke — who almost sobbed the word — and then his sob turned into snarl as he rushed forward and swung the stock of his shotgun at Diviny’s jaw. Dez watched, unable to react. There was a terrific crack! Bone shattered, teeth flew, and the young cop’s head whipped around so fast that his whole body was spun into an awkward pirouette. Diviny crashed into the rhododendron and fell almost out of sight except for his twitching legs.

Sheldon looked down at him and then jerked his head around to look at Schneider and Strauss; then he spun toward Dez. His eyes were huge and wild and he was breathing in and out with alarming rapidity.

“Fucking no!” screamed Sheldon.

Dez shook her head in mute agreement and denial.

There were sounds behind her. Yells, bodies crashing through the brush, and, as she turned, JT was there, and the others were right behind him. They hit the edge of the clearing and jerked to a stop as if there were a force field. It was impossible to them as well.

Three officers down. Two dead. One battered and twitching. Everyone looked around wildly for the perps, for the maniacs who had done this; and gradually those eyes focused on Sheldon and Dez.

“It was Andy Diviny,” said Dez woodenly. “When we got here Strauss was down and Andy was … biting Schneider. I don’t … I don’t…” She shook her head, unable to construct a logical end to that sentence.

JT stood blinking at the dead officers, his eyelids fluttering as if they could brush away the image that he was seeing. Then he took a tentative step in, and another, and then he ran the rest of the way to Dez. He took her by the arms and stared at her, his gaze flicking up and down, looking for injuries.

“Dez! Are you hurt?”

She half laughed. That was what he had asked her before. The answer was clear. The answer was yes.

She said, “No.”

He suddenly pulled her to him and gave her a fierce hug. Like a father would. Like a brother in arms would.

Chief Goss came waddling into the clearing, his face bright red and his uniform damp at the chest and armpits with fresh sweat. Dez pulled free of JT’s hug and turned toward him. She watched him as he tried to read the scene.

“It was Andy,” said Sheldon in a hoarse voice. “Andy Diviny … He … he…” He shook his head. Like Dez, he did not possess a vocabulary for this.

“He did what?” shouted Goss. “What are you trying to say?”

“It’s true,” croaked Dez. “Diviny, he … when we got here he was…”

“Hey!” yelled JT. “Sheldon … watch … He’s getting up?”

Everyone turned toward Diviny, who was struggling to get to his hands and knees in the dense tangle of the shrubbery. He snarled, exposing jagged rows of broken teeth. Then, with a savage growl, Sheldon Higdon stepped forward and grabbed him by the back of the belt and hauled him up, spun him violently around and then flung him face first onto the grass.

“Cuff that sick son of a bitch!”

The two closest officers hesitated. This was all so weird.

“Wait … what are you saying, Shel?” said the older of the two. “You’re all screwed up here. Andy got here the same time we did. He couldn’t have attacked Doc and—”

“Open your eyes! He just killed Mike Schneider and Jeff Strauss, goddamn it. We saw him do it,” yelled Sheldon, and he aimed a savage kick at Diviny’s backside, knocking the young cop down as he tried to get up. “Throw some cuffs on that motherfucker before I pop a cap in—”

Diviny twisted around on the ground. His eyes were wide and dark and empty. His shattered chin was bearded with blood, and his throat was a junkyard of torn flesh. His mouth was a feral snarl. With another unnatural hiss, he threw himself at the older cop, but the officer jerked away, backpedaling ten feet. Every gun swiveled around and pointed at Diviny.

As Diviny rushed at Sheldon, Dez stuck a leg out and tripped him. The deranged young cop fell hard, but again he began climbing to his feet, showing no signs of pain or fear.

“What the hell’s wrong with him?” demanded Goss.

Dez began moving around the edge of the circle of cops, waving them back. “I don’t know. He just went crazy.” She grabbed Goss’s sleeve. “Chief, listen to me … Natalie Shanahan’s down, too. I think Andy killed her, too.”

“Holy Jesus.”

Andy Diviny’s body swayed and trembled. Black drool trickled from his mouth. Dez remembered that same ooze coming from the lips of the Russian cleaning lady. She didn’t know what it was, but just the sight of it filled her with an atavistic dread.

“Be careful!” yelled Dez. “Don’t let him spit on you.”

Everyone was yelling at him. “Andy! Get down on the ground. Arms out to your sides. Do it now! Do it!”

If the young officer was able to understand the shouts there was no sign of it on his snarling face. He suddenly rushed at Chief Goss, reaching for him with clawlike fingers.

JT and Sheldon raised their shotguns and fired. The Mossbergs were loaded with small fabric pouches filled with #9 lead shot weighing about an ounce and a half. They were nonlethal but each one kicked like a mule and the rounds caught Diviny on both sides of his chest. He was plucked backward like he’d been pulled from behind by a chain and crashed to the ground. By all rights he should have been dazed, coughing, and nauseous; instead he immediately rolled onto his stomach and got up again.

“No fucking way…” breathed Chief Goss.

Someone yelled, “Pepper him!” But Dez already had her pepper spray in her hand. She slapped Diviny’s reaching arm aside and blasted him in the eyes.

He did not cough or choke or even blink. Instead he tried to spit at her.

Dez hit him again and again, but now she was backpedaling away from those bloody fingers, away from that black mucus.

“Christ!” she cried. “Somebody drop this crazy son of a—”

Five officers fired their Glocks at once, the bullets punching into Diviny, slamming into the Kevlar and shattering bones beneath the vest, making the officer dance and judder like a puppet. The barrage sent him sprawling backward against a tree trunk, and he hit it with enough force to knock pinecones from the branches. But even as they rained down, Diviny rebounded from the trunk and made another run at Goss.

“Andy, for the love of God, stop!” cried JT, but the officer flew at the chief, bloody spit flying from his mouth. JT pointed his gun at Diviny’s head.

“Hold your fire!” bellowed Dez. She threw down the pepper spray, whipped out her baton, stepped forward and smashed Diviny across the shins with it. The shock vibrated a line of hot needles up her arm, but the blow swept Diviny’s legs out from under him and he crashed onto his chest. Before he could roll over, JT was there, dropping his knee down hard between Diviny’s shoulder blades, and then six pairs of hands were at work, grabbing Diviny’s hair to hold his head down and his snapping mouth toward the dirt, fishing for the flailing arms, twisting them behind the young man’s back, snapping cuffs around the wrists. His weapons were removed and his utility belt unbuckled. JT kept his weight in place. They didn’t have leg shackles.

“Christ, what’s wrong with him?” Goss asked over and over again, but no one had an answer.

Dez looked around. “Anyone have a spit hood?”

“I got one,” said an officer from Martinville. He opened a small pouch on his belt and removed a disposable spit sock hood. Dez shook it out and pulled it over Diviny’s head. The elastic throat band would keep it in place but wouldn’t choke the officer. There were better devices, including plastic bite masks, but none of them carried one on them or in their cars.

“Got to do something about that throat,” advised JT. He fished in his pocket and produced an Izzy, tore open the plastic cover and handed it to Dez, who had the best angle to apply it.

She quickly wound the bandage around Diviny’s throat. The dressing — formally called an Israeli bandage as a nod to where it was developed — had a built-in plastic tension bar that applied continuous pressure to a wound, allowing the bandage to act as a stand-alone field dressing. All soldiers carried them and they had become very common in domestic law enforcement. Diviny spit at Dez as she worked, but the spit hood caught the spray of black blood.

“Careful not to make it too tight,” JT cautioned.

“Ought to strangle the cocksucker,” muttered Sheldon.

They ignored him. Dez tested the tension and nodded.

“If he’s going to live,” said Dez, “that should hold him.” Dez directed two officers to keep him pinned down.

The other officers stood in a ragged circle around Diviny. As Dez got to her feet, she studied their faces and saw each of them take quick, frightened looks over at what was left of Mike Schneider and Jeff Strauss.

“What the hell’s going on?” someone asked in a hollow voice.

Dez realized with a sick jolt that the voice had been hers.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Oscar Price stared at his cell phone and considered what to do.

He was a cool, disciplined man, and he was in a climate controlled office and yet sweat was popping out along his forehead.

“Jesus Christ,” he said softly. He was alone in the office but he looked around as if he expected someone — maybe even Jesus Himself — to step up and offer a solution. A few moments later he snarled, “Shit!”

Price sat back in his chair, trying to pretend a posture of calm nonchalance in the hope that it would trick his body into relaxing. He could feel a newborn migraine wailing at the edges of his consciousness.

Price was absolutely certain that if he and Dr. Herman Volker were alone in a quiet place, he would put the doctor on his knees and park two hollow points in the back of the stupid bastard’s head.

Lucifer 113 was off the leash.

That was what Volker had called to tell him. Not exactly in those words, but close enough.

It was a protocol improbability bordering on impossibility. Everything about Project Lucifer was old news. Buried with the Cold War. Virtually forgotten, except by psychotic sons of bitches like Volker, and luckless schmucks like himself.

On the whole, Price had a fairly simple job, day in and day out. No stress, no dramatic moments. There were twenty-two low-profile “clients” in his caseload, and each of them was in some phase of career step-down. No longer integral to the research machine that was Department Ten. Most of them were years past their prime, naturalized foreigners who now lived in an age when “Cold War” was not even a phrase anymore. Old men and women, their genius spent, but still potentially useful enough as consultants — on works now long in progress — that they still merited a Level Two handler instead of a Three or Four. The Threes and Fours were also on career downslopes. Twos, like Price, were short-listed for steps up.

Except when things like this came along. That bothered Price, because he really wanted that step. Working for the Company wasn’t a hobby. He wanted a regional directorship or a chief of station in a country that mattered. Japan, for instance, now that North Korea was a constant threat.

This matter with Herman Volker, however, could reverse that upward momentum and very quickly bury Price’s career ten feet under an outhouse. Or … handled the right way, he mused, it could shine a bright, white light on him.

The question was … what was the right move?

Volker was a former CIA all-star. The information he’d taken with him when he’d defected was the political equivalent of a nuclear bomb. Reagan’s diplomatic corps had used it to beat the shit out of the Soviets. It may not have actually torn down the Wall, but it sure as hell knocked out the first brick. Price still marveled at it. Fucking zombie parasites as bioweapons. Or, as it was called in the Project Lucifer documents: metabolically minimalized ambulatory organic hosts. A dreadful weapon that contravened every global and closed-door biological warfare agreement on the books. Should have called it Project Screw the Pooch. It truly did not matter that the Lucifer research had hit a dead end and was scheduled for termination by the Soviets, documents to be sealed. Volker got out of Dodge weeks before that was implemented, and by then Reagan and the Company had the goods.

The tricky thing was, Volker was not supposed to be working on anything related to Project Lucifer. The old fart was supposed to be indulging his damaged brain by messing with death row patients who, let’s face it, thought Price, nobody gave a sloppy fuck about. Volker was not — by federal order and private agreement — supposed to be screwing around with anything even remotely related to Lucifer. Nothing. Nada.

And yet.

Price sucked his teeth as he thought about what to do.

It was not in his pay grade to know whether the US of A was doing anything with the project research. Price hoped they’d left it in a sealed box, ideally buried in a ten-foot cube of cement. But he was far from stupid, and never naïve. Somebody, somewhere had to be working on it. They’d had it for thirty years. Thirty years without outbreaks, he reminded himself, which suggested that they were at least being careful.

Volker, on the other hand …

Price drummed his fingers on the desktop hard enough to rattle the phone in its cradle. He knew that he had to call this in. Question was — who to call? Protocol demanded that he take it directly to his section chief, and though Tony Williams was no fool, he was very career minded. Would he, in turn, pass it along? Or would he use it to crush the young go-getter nipping at his heels? Price rather thought the latter. This could very easily be made into a blame game, with Price as the target.

People were dying, though, and the longer it went on, the higher the body count. Price did not lie to himself that his motivations stretched to cover the lives of a bunch of Pennsylvania redneck farmers with cow shit on their boots. But he had to be seen to care.

Which made the second option look tempting. Doing an end run around Williams and taking this directly to regional director Colleen Sykes. She was a classic ballbuster, but she was so tightly networked into D.C. and Langley that her career was virtually bulletproof. She could get something done on this ASAP, no question.

But, she was also pretty much by the book, so how would she view the end run? Would she see Price as a man on a mission who risked everything to protect the common good? Or would she seem him as a self-serving loose cannon who broke protocol?

Price didn’t really see a clear path. Either way, this could kill him in the Company.

“Fuck it and fuck you,” he said aloud. And then reached for the phone.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

“What do we do now?” asked one of the greener officers in a voice tainted with panic. He wore a guilty, caged expression as if this was somehow their fault rather than something that had come out of nowhere and swept over all of them.

“We don’t do a goddamn thing,” barked Chief Goss. “This situation is way out of our control, so we’re going to sit tight and wait for the staties. They’ll be here any minute.”

“Chief,” said JT discreetly, “shouldn’t we call this in?”

Goss pulled his walkie-talkie out of its holster and keyed it. “Dispatch … we have officers down, I repeat officers down.”

“W-What?” exclaimed Flower. “Who’s hurt—”

Goss cut her off. “I need paramedics and additional units. Expand the call out another tier. Send everyone you can get … and give me an ETA on the state police.”

Flower stumbled over her words for a second before she could organize an answer. “State police are eight minutes out. Two units are—”

“I don’t want to hear that shit, Flower. Tell them to roll every available unit because we’re going to need roadblocks and a lot of feet on the ground. I want choppers, too. And get on the horn to the Zimmer boys — Carl and Luke. We need them and their dogs out here. And get me somebody to handle crowd control.”

“What’s happening?” Flower demanded, her voice rising to a screech.

“Just do it,” Goss snapped, and turned off the walkie-talkie. He was sweating badly and there were starbursts of red on his cheeks. Damp winds blew up the slope and rifled his sweaty hair.

“Rain’s coming,” said JT, still pitching his voice to keep things in neutral. “And with these winds … I don’t think we’re going to be able to use helos or spotter planes.”

“Rain and wind won’t stop the dogs,” said Sheldon. “The Zimmers have hounds that can track a weak fart in a hurricane.”

Dez looked at the chief, whose expression was that of someone a short step away from screaming. Dez could understand it. Like most of these officers, Goss was a career cop in a town where there just wasn’t any serious action. Bar fights and DUIs don’t instill the same combat awareness that big city cops and veteran soldiers have. This was way beyond Goss’s experience and he was losing control of the details. “Chief,” she said, pitching her tone to match JT’s, “we have people all over the place and we don’t know if this is the end of this. Shouldn’t we get a head count?”

Goss blinked at her for a few moments as if she had asked the question in Swahili. Then understanding flicked back into his eyes, and he nodded. “A head count. Good, good…” He looked around as if he expected everyone to be there ready to be counted.

Christ, thought Dez, he’s really losing it.

She glanced at JT, whose brown face seemed to be carved from an inflexible hunk of mahogany though his eyes were bright and almost unblinking. He was trying to keep his game face in place, but he was at the edge, too. Even Sheldon, who had been in Afghanistan, was freaked.

Dez swallowed. I guess we all are. All of us.

Then Goss grabbed his walkie-talkie again and keyed it to the team channel. “All officers report in. Name, location, and status.”

One by one the calls came back. Paul Scott, two paramedics, and another forensics collector were in the mortuary. Five officers — all from other towns — were here with Goss, JT, and Dez. That left two unaccounted for.

“Wait — who’s missing?” asked JT.

Dez said, “Wait, who was it that went up to check on Doc’s sister and her kids?”

Goss cursed and keyed the walkie-talkie again. “Hold the air. Officers Gunther and Howard, report your location and status.”

Then there was sharp hiss of static and a voice spoke intermittently through the squelch.

“We’re at the Hartnup place. Nothing to report. I thought I heard shots. I called Flower but she—”

Goss cut him off. “Did you tell April about her brother?”

“You said not to.”

“Good, because he might not be dead.”

Gunther paused. “Say again?”

“It’s not confirmed, but be aware that Doc Hartnup’s body is missing and there is a strong possibility that he is injured and in shock, maybe delirious, and somewhere in the Grove.”

“How? Chief … I thought Dez and JT said he was—”

Goss cut him off. “Don’t ask me how ’cause I don’t know. Just keep your eyes open. Doc might be trying to head to his sister’s place. I want one of you on the porch and the other inside with the family. Do not let April see her brother if you can avoid it, and definitely not the kids. You see him — or anyone — call it in right away.”

“Yeah, okay, Chief.”

Goss disconnected. If he was relieved by what Gunther had told him, it didn’t show. Fresh beads of sweat glistened on his head. Dez was afraid he was going to stroke out if things didn’t calm down. “The staties will be here soon,” Goss repeated. He looked around, licking his lips with a nervous tongue tip. “We need to secure this crime scene and also where … um … Natalie was…”

One of the other officers said, “I got that.” He tapped another cop from the same town and they set off down the slope, following Dez’s directions.

“I want in on the manhunt,” protested Dez. “We should be out there now so we can get a jump on—”

“On who?” snapped Goss. “Do you know what the hell’s going on? ’Cause I sure as shit don’t. We got a double homicide at the mortuary that turned out not to be a double homicide. One vic attacks you and the other goes for a stroll in the forest. We have an officer-involved shooting of one of those presumed homicide victims. We got an unknown person in bare feet leaving the scene of the crime; and we don’t know how or if he was involved. We also have the theft of the body of a dead serial killer. And now we have three dead officers and one who’s gone completely batshit nuts.”

“Chief, I—”

“So you tell me, Officer Fox … exactly what crime scenario are we trying to get a jump on? If it wasn’t for the fact that all of this is happening right here and right now, I couldn’t build a reasonable argument that they’re all part of the same goddamn case.”

Dez clamped her mouth shut. She had no answers and it was clear that arguing with Goss was likely to end badly. She didn’t like the man, but she didn’t actually want to cause the big vein in his head to explode.

“Okay, Chief, we hear you,” said JT gently. “If you had to make a horseback guess, what would you say is going on?”

Goss eyed him for a blistering moment. “How the fuck should I know?”

“Chief,” said JT, moving closer, his voice ever quieter, “I think we should dial it down a few notches, what do you think?”

The chief took a deep breath that threatened to pop buttons on his shirt, then he exhaled slowly, nodding. “Christ. I don’t need this shit. I really don’t.”

Dez couldn’t argue with that.

“Maybe this isn’t a murder scene,” suggested Sheldon, who had also managed to regain control of his emotions. “Look, you got ordinary people suddenly doing some mighty weird shit. Inexplicable shit. Maybe this isn’t people committing crimes … maybe this is something else. Something that’s affecting people. Y’know, like a toxic spill, or something in the water…”

They all looked at each other and the idea changed the mood as abruptly as switching stations with a TV remote. Even Goss’s posture relaxed as he stared into the middle distance, considering the question.

“I don’t think it’s in the water, Shel,” said Dez slowly. “Andy got here after Doc and the Russian woman were attacked. And I didn’t see him take a drink after he got here. Not tap water or anything.”

“Whatever it was,” JT said, “it must have hit Strauss or Schneider, too. I mean … look at Andy’s throat. He didn’t do that to himself.”

Goss paled. “So, you’re saying that we have another one out there?”

“Stands to reason,” said Dez. “Could even be Doc, if this thing affects people. Or it could be whoever left the bare footprints that went out of the mortuary office.”

“Maybe it’s something you get from a bite,” suggested Sheldon. “Somebody bit the cleaning lady and then she went apeshit on Dez, right? Maybe the same thing happened to Andy. He got bit, got sick, and freaked out.”

“Isn’t that awful fast for an infection to spread?” asked JT. “Doesn’t that sort of thing take days?”

“I’m just saying that we need to look at it,” Sheldon said.

“Could it be something in the air?” asked one of the officers who still knelt to keep Diviny pinned down.

“If so, we’d all have it,” countered Dez.

“A virus,” said JT. “Not everyone reacts the same way to diseases.”

Sheldon nodded. “Allergens, too. Some weird plant the Doc brought in for a funeral. Or a chemical he uses. Maybe certain people are susceptible to it.”

Suddenly everyone was throwing suggestions at him while, on the ground, Andy Diviny still writhed and tried to bite.

Finally Goss held up his hand. “This isn’t getting us anywhere. If you have a theory, then we share it with the state police and the doctors.” He pointed at Diviny. “Right now, though, we need to get him tested. Dez, JT … get him into an ambulance and get his ass over to Wolverton Hospital. Call ahead, tell them that this is a potential biohazard situation.”

“Okay, Chief,” Dez said and then punched JT on the arm. “Come on, Hoss.”

“Hey,” said the chief. “Nobody here talks to the press. Nobody calls home and tells their family and nobody fucking puts this on Twitter. This is a family matter now, so let’s keep it indoors until we know where we all stand.”

They all looked at one another and slowly nodded. Even the younger cops.

Dez exhaled a ball of dead air that she’d been holding in her chest, and then nodded. She and JT grabbed hold of Diviny and half dragged, half carried him down the hill. The moment had become orderly, but the day was still impossible.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Lorne McMasters, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, looked at the name on his phone’s screen display. He smiled as he picked up the receiver.

“Colleen,” he said brightly, “how are you? How’s Ted and the—”

“Lorne,” interrupted Colleen Sykes, “this is a Livewire Protocol.”

McMasters took a half beat on that, then punched the scramble on his phone. “Confirm. What’s on the window sill?”

“Bluebird,” she said, giving the first part of the day code.

“And in the tree?”

“Yellow kite.”

“What’s the other thing?”

“Foxhounds.”

“Confirmed,” said Lorne. “What’s happening, Colleen?”

Colleen Sykes was deputy director of the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology. Only once before in her career had she made a call of this kind. The first situation had been resolved quickly and with minimum fuss, and no trace of it had reached the news radar.

“I just received a report that the ‘devil is out of the bag,’” she said.

McMasters opened a screen on his intranet browser and typed that in. The name Lucifer 113 popped up, followed by bullet points about the science, the dangers, the key players, and the in-place protocols. In the upper right corner of the screen was a coded threat status icon. Not the same color codes that Homeland used. Blue was the lowest level of threat, black was the highest. This file was coded black.

“Christ,” he snarled. “Tell me.”

Sykes told him what Oscar Price had told her.

“Has this entered the population yet?” demanded McMasters.

“We have no direct confirmation, but there is a suspicious incident developing at the mortuary where Gibbon’s body was taken. We’ve gotten conflicting reports of a double homicide, but follow-up reports indicate that the ‘victims’ may not have been dead. One allegedly attacked a responding officer who was apparently compelled to use lethal force to defend herself. The other suspected victim is missing, having apparently left the scene of the crime under his own steam.”

“I’m still a half-step behind you on this, Colleen. What does that mean? Dead people don’t attack cops and they don’t get up and walk away.”

Sykes paused. “Actually, Lorne … if you open report sixty-three in the translations of the ‘Soviet Strategic Implementations’ folder you’ll see that this is in keeping with predicted effects. It is, in point of fact, the primary reason that the entire research line was ultimately scrapped by the Russians.”

McMasters read through the data. He could feel the blood draining from his cheeks. “This is … Good God, Colleen, are you telling me that we let someone continue this project?”

“No we didn’t,” Sykes said firmly. “Dr. Volker was under express orders not to go anywhere near this project, or anything remotely related to it.”

“Then how did he gain access?”

“His handler believes that Volker did not so much gain access as ‘re-create’ the research … and then take it forward an additional few steps. Volker is a brilliant scientist. At his request we set him up as a prison doctor, and unfortunately it looks like he played us. The security buffer we provide, plus the additional security at a secure correctional facility, made it harder for Price — or anyone, for that matter — to keep tabs on everything the doctor was doing. Lucifer 113 is not an expensive project, and many of the components are neither controlled substances or on watch lists. Volker took his time — decades, really — and he fooled everyone.”

McMasters was seething. “If he’s so fucking smart then how did he lose control of this thing? It’s not like letting your dog off his leash so he can fuck the neighbors poodle, goddamn it.”

“I know.”

“Is Volker a terrorist?”

“Unknown, but unlikely.” She told him what Oscar Price had told her about Volker’s motivations.

“Sweet suffering Jesus,” said McMasters. “I’m going to have to brief the president, and he’ll need to contact the governors of Pennsylvania and Maryland.”

“Possibly Ohio and West Virginia, too. Maybe even Virginia.”

“Tell me you’re joking, Colleen.”

“I wish I could, Lorne.”

“Okay, okay … give me some talking points for my call to the president. Where do we stand and how bad can this get?”

“Lorne … I’m not sure you looked closely enough at the Soviet strategy stuff. The only limit to the spread of this thing are natural barriers and direct sterilization.”

McMasters closed his eyes.

“Mary, Mother of God,” he whispered.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Billy Trout followed a crazy zigzag of back roads and side roads to find Selma Conroy’s place. It was deep in the heart of the county’s endless farm country. Though the town of Stebbins was small, the county was huge, composed mostly of a patchwork of enormous fields of wheat, barley, potatoes, apples, peaches, and corn. Cut between these were tracts of grazing land for cattle and sheep. Houses and farm buildings were scattered around, but the farmlands were so broad that each house looked like a lost island in a vast sea of waving green.

When Marcia called, Trout pulled onto the shoulder of the road and put her on speaker.

“What’ve you got?” he asked.

“Half the job,” she said. “Dr. Volker’s taking some time, but I think I got just about everything on Selma Conroy. You want all of it now?”

“E-mail me everything but for now give me the bullet points.”

“Okay,” said Marcia, and they could hear her tapping computer keys. “Selma Elsbeth Conroy is eighty-two years old, born in East Texas. Dinky little place called Red Lick near the Arkansas border. Moved to Stebbins in 1969, and even though she had family here in Pennsylvania, the move was apparently along the lines of being run out of town on a rail. Her mother was a similar paragon of virtue. Six kids, five fathers. Class. Want to guess what one of the father’s names was?”

“If you say Gibbon I will kiss you.”

“It is Gibbon and do I get to pick where that kiss lands?”

“We’ll talk. Tell me about the Gibbon connection.”

“Is Goat listening to this?”

“And enjoying it,” said Goat.

“Well, you boys are going to love this. Homer is Selma’s sister’s only child. Want to guess what Homer’s mom’s first name is? Clarice!”

There was a two count as Trout looked at Goat. They burst out laughing.

“Are you shitting me?” Trout demanded. “The mother of a serial killer is named Clarice?”

“Hello, Clarice,” Goat said in a passable Hannibal Lecter.

“I kid you not,” Marcia assured them. “Is that life imitating art or something like that? Anyway, now here’s a wrinkle. The family name is actually Gibbens. Clarice Gibbens. G-I-B-B-E-N-S. No idea where the spelling change started. Court and birth records are sketchy at best, but from what I could piece together, Clarice had a child out of wedlock and put it up for adoption within a few months. Whoever filled out the adoption intake form misspelled the name.”

“How come nobody traced this back to Stebbins before?” Trout asked.

“No reason to. Clarice gave a cousin’s address in Pittsburgh when she turned over the baby. There’s no one in Stebbins with the name Gibbon or Gibbons, and Clarice only stayed here for a while. She was never an official resident. Besides, I was only able to piece this together when I added Selma Conroy’s name to the search. Selma was given as next of kin for Clarice. Even then, though, it was Selma’s East Texas address. The records are messed up six ways from Sunday.”

“Intentionally?”

“Can’t tell. Most of it was probably the result of some semiliterate white trash filling out hospital forms. And later maybe Homer Gibbon brushed out his own backtrail.”

“What about the mother, Clarice? Where’s she?”

“Off the radar, and probably dead. Last record of her was an arrest for possession in Harrisburg in 1993. My guy at Harrisburg PD looked in her jacket, and she had a dozen arrests for drugs and solicitation. Medical records say she had HIV and a bunch of other problems. She probably died in a crack house. Lots of junkies die in those places without ID, or their ID gets stolen after they OD.”

“Dead end,” Trout said. “Any other living relatives?”

“None of record. There’s more background stuff but nothing else exciting. Copies of records, stuff like that. I’ll dig in on Volker now.”

“Okay, Marcia,” said Trout. “You are the best.”

“I know I am,” she said with a bit of sauce, and disconnected.

Trout turned to Goat. The cameraman was grinning. “Oh yeah,” he said, “Pulitzer for sure.”

“Movie for sure,” countered Trout. He restarted the car. “Now, let’s go see Aunt Selma.”

The GPS directed them onto smaller and smaller roads, until they thumped along a rutted dirt road that threatened to tear the undercarriage out of the Explorer. They turned onto a lane that was so small the GPS had no name for it.

“Is this even a road?” complained Goat as he bounced around in the passenger seat.

The road rounded a bend and passed under the reaching arms of a double line of twisted elms whose bark was mottled with blight and wrapped in hairy vines. Poison ivy lined both sides of the lane that twisted a crooked half mile toward a weathered, abused old farmhouse.

Trout rolled to a stop, his foot on the brake, the engine idling quietly.

“Jeez,” breathed Goat, and Trout nodded. Not even the blaze of fall colors could lend this place a shred of grace. The reds and oranges melted together into a pattern like the skin of a burn victim. The house itself was shuttered against the coming storm. The walls had once been whitewashed, but the paint had peeled to reveal leprous gray wood beneath. A broad gallery porch surrounded the house, and a row of empty rocking chairs creaked in the stiff westerly breeze that came whipping off the overgrown cornfields. Those fields were withered and brown, the stalks sagging under the weight of unpicked ears.

“Get some footage of this place,” said Trout. “This is gold.”

“I know,” Goat said, already fiddling with settings on a small high-definition digital unit. “Frickin’ Addams Family farm. I’ve been to haunted hayrides that are cheerier. Be best if we can get flyover shots from a chopper.”

“Who’s going to pay for that?”

Goat smiled. “I’m just saying. If you want to put some real mood in this thing.”

Trout rolled down his window and leaned out. Even the air was ripe with the sweet stink of vegetable decay.

“This place has all the mood we’re going to need,” he said as he eased off the brake and drove the rest of the way to the front of the house.

They parked in a roundabout next to a two-year-old Nissan Cube that was so clean and out of place that it looked Photoshopped into the landscape.

“Aunt Selma drives a Cube?” asked Goat, grinning at the thought.

Trout shook his head. “Got to be a visitor. She’s old, so maybe it’s a Meals-on-Wheels thing. I don’t know. Car’s clean. Nothing else out here is.”

They got out of the car and began walking toward the porch steps. Goat had his full-size camera now and he hoisted it onto his shoulder, the tape already running.

As they approached the bottom step, the front door opened a cautious five inches. Trout stopped and touched Goat’s arm. The face that peered out at them was that of a woman whose skin was so comprehensively wrinkled that she looked like an ancient mummy. The one eye they could see, however, was a startling and lambent green.

Before Trout could say anything, the woman demanded, “What?” Her voice was as sharp as a breaking stick.

“Pardon the intrusion, ma’am,” said Billy Trout in his very best hat-in-hand, aw-shucks voice. For all that Pennsylvania was a nominally northern state, there was a lot of country out here in the farmlands. “I’m with Regional Satellite News. My name is—”

“I know who you are,” she cut in. “I’ve seen the TV.”

Swell, Trout thought, this is my demographic?

He kept his smile in place. “I’d like to ask you a few questions.”

Selma Conroy studied him with that fierce green eye, then opened the door and stepped out onto the porch. She was thin and old, but Trout could see that beneath the wrinkles was a woman who was probably very beautiful before life and her own bad choices had chopped her down. She wore a faded blue frock under a thick gray bathrobe which she cinched tight as she came to the edge of the porch. “Questions about what?”

“About your nephew,” Trout said. He didn’t say the name and wanted to see how she would respond.

Selma’s cold eyes went colder. “All my family’s dead,” she said.

“I understand you had a sister and she had a son.”

She gave a brief, bitter shake of her head. “My sister’s long dead. And I’ve got a ticket for the same train.” She turned and spat off the porch into a row of withered roses.

Trout put a foot up on the bottom step of the porch.

“But you do know about your nephew.”

Selma said nothing, but she cut a single brief look toward the car in the turnaround. Trout noted it but didn’t know how to approach that subject.

“What about him?” Selma asked quietly.

“You arranged to have him brought here to Stebbins.”

She said nothing.

“With,” Trout continued, “the intention of having him buried here on the family farm.”

“How do you know about that?” she demanded.

“Does it matter?”

“You’re not supposed to know about that. No one’s supposed to know. The judge and the prison guaranteed it.”

“I don’t think anyone knows but me,” said Trout as he stepped up onto the first riser and put his foot on the second. Selma held her ground.

“That’s a bullshit statement,” she fired back. “You’re here for a story and whether I say anything or not, you’re going to tell the world. That’s what you reporters do. You find people who have been hurt and you dig into their wounds. What’s that expression? ‘If it bleeds, it leads?’” She shook her head. “Why would I want to talk to someone like you?”

“Okay,” said Trout, “fair enough. Reporters trade in pain. It sells papers. Everyone knows that. And this story will get out, no doubt about it.” He stepped up so that he was almost eye level with her. “It’s your call, though, as to whether it gets out with your voice and opinion included … or not.”

“Is that a threat?”

Trout spread his hands. “It’s journalism.”

“You’re a shit.”

“And you’re an ex-whore,” Trout said flatly, dropping all pretense. “Let’s start there and see if we can get somewhere interesting.”

Aunt Selma folded her arms across her breasts and studied Trout with the frank coldness of a butcher appraising a side of beef. Then she smiled. It was small, just a curl of one corner of her mouth.

“Okay,” she said. “Let’s have a talk.”

But before Trout’s smile could blossom on his face, Selma pointed a sharp finger at Goat. “Not him, though. This doesn’t go on the camera. I got about a spoonful of self-respect left and I can keep that intact if I can say that it’s your word against mine. No pictures, no video, no tape recorder.”

Trout thought about it, then nodded. He turned to Goat. “Wait in the car, okay?”

“Sure,” said Goat. He turned and trudged down the lane and vanished behind the Explorer.

Trout turned back to Selma. “Shall we go inside and—”

“No,” she said flatly. “There’s a lady from church in there and she don’t need to hear this.”

Ah, thought Trout, the Cube.

Without another word, Selma walked down the steps and headed toward a rust-colored barn that stood by a creek sixty yards into the field. Trout put his hands into his pockets, used his left thumb to click the button on his digital tape recorder, and followed.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

The president went through the day-code ritual with Lorne McMasters, feeling his gut tightening as he did so.

“Go ahead, Lorne,” he said when the protocols were completed and the secure line verified.

“Mr. President, there has been a deliberate but unauthorized release of one of a Class F biological in rural Pennsylvania.”

“Terrorists?”

“No, Mr. President. One of our guests.” McMasters quickly brought the president up to speed on Volker, Lucifer 113, Rockview, Homer Gibbon, and the real possibility of an outbreak in Stebbins. As he spoke, corresponding information filled the screen on the president’s laptop.

“My God,” breathed the president. “Where are we on containment?”

“Law enforcement agencies have been notified, Mr. President,” said McMasters. “Local law in Stebbins may be compromised, but we’re coordinating with the state police in Pennsylvania and Maryland. However, we’re going to need the National Guard to lock down the entire area.”

“I’ll call Governor Harbison immediately. Stay on the line.” The president punched a button. “Janine, please get Governor Harbison on the line. Code One emergency. Also, get the national security director and the secretaries of defense and state in here. Now.”

His secretary had the governor of Pennsylvania on the phone in under a minute.

“Mr. President,” began Harbison, “what a pleasure. What can I—”

The president cut him off. “Teddy, I need you to listen to me. Time is critical.”

He hit Harbison with both barrels.

CHAPTER THIRTY

Goat peered around the Explorer and saw Selma and Trout walking down a crooked lane toward a barn, their backs to him. Goat opened the hatch, set his heavy camera inside and took out a smaller unit. He checked to make sure the coast was clear, then sprinted to the near side of the house.

He moved along the side of the gallery, then, when he was sure it was safe, he climbed onto the porch using the side steps. There were three windows on the side and he moved to the first one, where he knelt and peered in through the bottom corner of the window. The glass was smoked gray with grime but still clear enough for him to see the living room. Couple of big armchairs that looked like they were a thousand years old; mismatched sofa. Various tables and cabinets filled with all kinds of collectible crap. Decorative spoons, plates with Disney characters, a collection of porcelain bunnies. Bunnies? He loved it. Juxtaposition always worked in stories like this. Hooker with a soft side. Or, maybe hooker who’d become a sad, lonely old lady surrounded by cheap tchotchkes. Sweet.

He raised the camera and shot the room from various zoom levels.

The second window revealed a dining room with a table with one end piled high with stacks of mail and piles of old magazines. The other half of the table was set out for tea. China pot, two mismatched cups, sugar bowl that was a souvenir from Atlantic City, opened pint carton of half-and-half, and a plate of cookies. As he had walked away Goat had overheard Aunt Selma tell Trout that she had company. A lady from church. No sign of her, though, so Goat moved on. As he swung the camera across the window he thought he saw a piece of shadow detach itself and moved toward an open interior door. Goat shifted around to the rear window of the kitchen to try and get a better view, but the figure was gone.

It had been a figure, too. A person. The church lady? Probably, he thought, though it had seemed too large.

There was nothing else to see downstairs so he moved to the yard, which was as dreary as the front of the house — diseased elm trees supporting a threadbare hammock filled with last year’s rotted leaves, a picnic table with one missing leg that sat unevenly on cinder blocks. Junk that made a statement about a life spiraling downward, so he shot it all. This was all background footage. There was nothing actually happening here, so he clicked off the camera and trudged back to the Explorer to kill time plugging the story on Twitter.

Goat did not see the shadow that moved slowly from window to window, watching him go.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

“Give a hand!” Dez called, and two paramedics erupted from the back of their ambulance and sprinted to meet them. Dez knew them — Don and Joan. A male and female team who looked like they could have been siblings: they were both tattooed and muscular, neither had much of a neck, and they looked like they had bulldog genes somewhere in their DNA.

“Is that a throat wound?” Joan asked. She reached for Diviny, but Dez batted her hand away.

“Careful,” Dez warned, “he’s a biter … and he’s spitting some nasty black shit.”

“Get the gurney,” Don said, and Joan peeled off back toward their vehicle. She pulled it out and began loading equipment onto it. JT and Dez held onto the squirming Andy as Don bent forward as close as he dared and lifted the edges of the Izzy to try to see the wound.

“What’s the nature of the wound?” demanded Don.

“Bite,” said Dez.

Don flicked a look at her. “What kind of bite?”

“Human.”

“Christ. Looks ragged as hell. But he hasn’t bled through the dressing, so I’m going to leave it in place. We need to get him to an ER stat.”

“That’s the plan,” Dez said between her teeth.

“Why’s he cuffed?” Don asked.

“He went crazy,” JT said. “Reason unknown. Killed at least two other officers, possibly three.”

The paramedic gaped at JT. “Bullshit! I know Andy and—”

“You ever known him to eat anyone?” Dez said sourly.

“You’re out of your mind, Dez, Dez…”

“Really? Take off the spit mask and bend a little closer,” she said. “After he’s done eating your face we can have this conversation again.”

Joan returned with the gurney and collapsed it down. “What’ve we got?” she asked Don.

“They said Andy lost it and started attacking people.”

“Killing people,” JT corrected. “Jeff Strauss, Mike Schneider, and maybe Natalie Shanahan.”

Joan’s face went white. “Oh my God!”

“I’m telling you,” insisted Don, “that’s impossi—”

Diviny surged forward so unexpectedly that Dez and JT almost lost their grip on him. The young officer’s teeth bit the air inches from Don’s nose.

“Holy rat fuck shit!” Don screamed as he fell backward against the gurney.

“Stop screwing around and get the backboard,” JT yelled as he and Dez wrestled Andy back down.

The paramedics were stunned for a moment. Dez saw the spark of disbelief flare in their eyes and knew exactly how they felt. Impossible. Every damn thing was impossible. Then they snapped back into the moment and went to work.

The backboard was a body-length piece of heavy-gauge plastic with holes along the edges that served as handholds or places where a patient could be secured. It took the four of them three minutes of sweating and cursing to force Andy Diviny onto the board, cuff his wrists to the sides, and secure his legs with duct tape. Better equipped departments had expensive strapping for these kinds of situations, but out here in the sticks duct tape was quick and durable and always available. Joan wrapped the tape around and around each shin. Then she repeated this around his midthighs and chest.

“You have a plastic bite mask?” asked Dez as she forced Diviny’s head down for the twentieth time.

“Philadelphia collar’s better,” said Don and he pulled one out of an equipment case. The device was a two-piece foam plastic cervical collar that fit together with Velcro and had an opening to allow access to the throat. It effectively kept Diviny from opening his jaws wide enough to bite, and nicely immobilized his head. They reinforced this by winding another turn of duct tape around his forehead, securing it to the backboard. Dez grabbed the tape from Joan and put a final loop around Diviny’s chest and shoulders.

Then Dez and JT sat back, drained and sweating. Don and Joan wavered with indecision.

“Is he safe?” JT asked.

Diviny moaned and snarled and thrashed.

“Can you give him something?” asked JT as he wiped sweat from his eyes. “Don’t you have some kind of chemical restraint? Valium or something?”

“We use Midazolam — Versed — these days,” Joan said, fishing in the trauma kit. She produced a hypodermic, removed the safety cap, shot a little into the air to remove bubbles. But she hesitated. “With him thrashing like that I could get this wrong, and I sure as hell don’t want to nail myself with an accidental needle stick.”

“Go intranasally,” suggested Don. “Doesn’t kick in as fast, but it’s a lot safer.”

Joan handed him the equipment and Don fitted a port into one of Diviny’s nostrils and attached the syringe to that. Once in place he pushed the plunger and the filter converted the liquid stream into a mist.

“Let’s get his vitals,” Don said, “and then get him the hell out of here.”

Joan clipped an oximetry monitor to the tip of Diviny’s right index finger while Don wrapped a pressure cuff around Diviny’s arm and began pumping the rubber bulb.

Joan keyed the portable radio and called the hospital. When an ER doctor came online she said, “We have a police officer down with trauma to the throat. Other officers think that it’s from a human bite. They applied an Izzy and the patient has been administered intranasal Midazolam. Taking vitals now. Patient’s skin is cold.” She took a digital thermometer and placed the tip in Diviny’s ear. “Whoa … temperature is eighty-eight point four. Pupils nonreactive. Not getting any pulse with the oximeter.” She dug her fingers into Diviny’s wrist, made an irritated face, tried again in a different spot. Tried again. Into the radio she said, “Doctor, I still can’t find a pulse. He’s in serious shock and—”

“BP is nonpalp. Zero over zero,” said Don as he began pumping the pressure cuff again. And again. “Damn cuff’s broken.”

“Forget this shit and let’s go!” urged Dez.

Don ignored her. He looped his stethoscope from around his neck and pressed the chestpiece against Diviny’s ribs. His face went from confused to blank. “No respiration. We need to intubate him.”

Diviny snapped and bared his teeth.

“Can’t intubate a biter,” Joan said.

“We’re losing him,” Don yelled, “he’s crashing…”

His words trailed off. Diviny wasn’t crashing. He continued to snarl and writhe and fight against the restraints.

“This doesn’t make sense,” he said.

“What doesn’t?” asked Dez.

Dez could hear the doctor yelling for information and clarification, and Joan picked up the mike. “We are unable to get reliable vitals at this time.”

She listened for a moment and then disconnected.

“He wants us to start an EKG as soon as we get him into the ambulance. And take a blood glucose reading. He’s prepping a room.”

The four of them stared at each other for a moment, and then looked down at Diviny.

“I don’t understand this,” said Joan in a distant voice. “He has no blood pressure, no pulse. He’s not breathing…”

“What are you saying?” asked Dez.

Joan almost said it, but didn’t. What she said was, “We can’t get any vitals from this patient.”

“It’s not the equipment,” added Don quietly. “We just … can’t get any vitals. He’s … he’s…” He shook his head.

Neither of them said the word.

Dez looked at JT, who was sweating as badly as if he stood next to an open fire.

“Let’s get him to the hospital,” Dez said quietly. “And I mean right fucking now.”

Without another word they hoisted the gurney into the back of the ambulance. Joan climbed in back but she sat on a metal fold-down stool as far away from Diviny as she could. JT climbed in with her and Don got behind the wheel. Dez ran to her unit, fired it up, and led the way through the maze of haphazardly parked vehicles. Another Bordentown unit was parked down by the road and the officer was erecting sawhorse barriers. Beyond his unit were a dozen cars and vans. The press had arrived, and once the true nature of this got out there would soon be more reporters than cops. Rubberneckers were walking along the highway and cutting through the woods, their cars parked on the shoulders of Doll Factory Road for half a mile in either direction.

As soon as they reached the blacktop Dez hit lights and sirens and kicked the pedal all the way down. The cruiser shot out onto the road and went screaming away from that place of death and mystery. The ambulance, carrying its own mysteries, followed.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

Chief Goss stared down at the madness that lay sprawled in shades of red and green before him. Two officers here. Another down the slope. Not his officers, but that didn’t matter. The towns in this part of the county always shared work; their cases always overlapped. They were all a family.

Three dead.

One completely out of his mind.

The clearing was still. No one moved. Shock danced in every set of eyes; it beat wildly in their chests.

He stared at the bodies. Mike Schneider, Jeff Strauss. Not only dead but torn apart. What the hell was Andy doing to them? Eating them?

Goss felt the contents of his stomach turn to greasy sludge. He wanted to throw up. He wanted to go the hell home. He turned to Sheldon.

“Shel,” he said softly, “what happened here?”

Sheldon shook his head. Then he took a breath, licked his lips, and explained things exactly as he’d seen them. Goss was shaking his head throughout. Not to suggest that Sheldon was lying, but because it was all so weird. So wrong.

“Any sign of Doc Hartnup?”

He carefully lowered his bulk to one knee a few inches from Strauss. Goss knew him better than Schneider. Their kids were in the same grade, they played on the same Little League team. Strauss’s son was the shortstop, his own Mikey was the catcher.

This was going to have to be a closed casket. The whole lower half of Strauss’s face was gone. Pieces of it were stuck to the dead man’s uniform, to the grass, to his hair. The rest was …

He couldn’t allow himself to frame the thought.

“Ah, Jeff … damn it to hell.”

Goss had never been beside the body of a fallen friend. Everyone he knew had died in bed or in the hospital, and accident victims were usually strangers. He wondered if he should close Strauss’s eyelids. That’s what they always did in movies. Close the eyelids. Kind of like closing a door, or pulling up a sheet. It meant something, he supposed. A show of respect. A gesture to restore some little bit of dignity.

Would it matter to the forensics guys?

He thought about that, lips pursed, heart heavy.

“Yeah,” he murmured to himself, “it’s only right.”

He reached his hand out, his fingers trembling with adrenalin and shock. And revulsion. It was hard to look at that torn face. Goss felt the greasy sludge in his stomach bubble and churn.

His fingertips brushed the half-closed lids.

Suddenly Jeff Strauss’s lipless mouth lunged forward and those naked teeth clamped down around Chief Goss’s fingers.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Sergeant Teddy Polk stood in the rain, waving his men forward and pushing them up into the back of the troop truck. A line of troop transport trucks stood idling in the downpour.

One of the soldiers, a corporal named Nick Wyckoff, from Pine Deep, the same small town as Polk, nodded at the convoy. “What’s the op? Sandbagging streams and shit?”

Polk shook his head. “Nobody’s saying nothing, Nickie.”

Wyckoff nodded and reached for the strap to pull himself up into the truck, but Polk tapped his shoulder and Wyckoff bent close. “Couple weird things about this, man.”

“Yeah? Like what?”

Polk spoke as quietly as he could given the roar of the rain. “We were told to handpick single men. No one with family in the area, no one with kids. Married guys are to be used for flood control and emergency evac only. None of them roll with us.”

“What’s the—”

“No, wait,” said Polk, “it gets weirder.… I saw them loading some crates into a couple of the trucks.”

“Crates of what?”

Polk licked his lips. “Hazmat suits.”

“Oh … shit, man,” murmured Wyckoff.

“Yeah.”

A few minutes later the trucks were rolling through the gate.

Major General Simeon Zetter stood at the window in his office, hands clasped behind his back, face impassive, eyes fixed on the line of vehicles heading into the storm. He was alone in his office. All of his senior officers had gone with the convoy. This wasn’t an operation that could be trusted to lieutenants.

The rain troubled him. It was like a thick gray veil and even from where his office was set it was hard to see the line of trucks. With these winds his Apaches and Black Hawks were grounded. That was bad. If there was ever something that was a perfect operation for the air cav, this was it.

Ground troops? Stebbins County was sparsely populated, but it covered a huge amount of ground. Fields and forests and barns. So much natural cover. In any other situation he could rely on thermal scans for target acquisition, but during the conference call with the governor, the president, and the national security advisor, he had been told something that still echoed in his head. Something that screamed in his head.

“Hostiles may display variable heat signatures,” said Blair, the national security advisor.

“Sir?” Zetter had asked.

“We have to prepare for the possibility that a fair number of the infected may not be trackable by body temperature.”

“How so? Are they using thermal suppressors or—”

“No,” said Blair, “these are civilians.”

“Then I don’t—”

“Their body temperatures are dropping. On average, one degree per hour. Faster in this cold.”

“Is … is this a symptom of the disease, sir?”

Blair said, “No, General Zetter, it is proof of the absence of life.”