In the Dark of the Night

Chapter 28

AT PRECISELY EIGHT o’clock the next morning, Ashley Sparks parked her car in the small lot behind Carol Langstrom’s antiques shop and found the key to the back door in the same spot where it had been “hidden” for at least the last five years. She was an hour early; that would give her time to go over the inventory book and familiarize herself with anything in the store she might not have seen before.

A square brown box — stained and battered — sat on the top step, and Ashley opened the door, turned off the alarm with the code Carol had given her, then picked up the box. Taking it inside, she put it on Carol’s desk and started to open it. But even before she’d pulled the first of the interlocking flaps loose, she hesitated.

Why hadn’t the box been taped shut? Surely it hadn’t been shipped like this. It took her less than five seconds to find the answer to that question: the box bore no label at all, which meant it hadn’t been shipped.

Then why was it there?

The answer to that question came just as quickly: it was something personal that someone had left for Carol, not knowing it wasn’t going to be Carol who opened the store. And if it was personal, she shouldn’t open it.

Turning away from the desk, Ashley moved through the office door into the shop itself, savoring the fragrance of the store; it smelled like tung oil and furniture polish. She’d always loved that smell, ever since she’d been a little girl and started poking around antiques shops with her mother. But this morning there was a dark undertone to the familiar fragrance.

She found the light switches, then turned on all the lamps in the showroom to show off their ornate shades to best advantage, and in less than fifteen minutes, everything was ready. She’d adjusted the positions of at least three dozen of the porcelain figurines that were Carol’s specialties, even moving one of them — a little boy sitting self-consciously on a toilet, his pants around his ankles and a surprised look on his face — into the restroom, certain that whoever was the first to use the tiny chamber that day would buy the item. Just as she was about to take a tour of the showroom, she heard the back door open.

“Hello?”

A second later Carol Langstrom appeared in the doorway. Though dressed perfectly, Ashley could clearly see the lines around her eyes and mouth, and the pallor that her makeup didn’t begin to cover.

“Carol? What on earth are you doing here?”

Carol smiled wanly, her sad eyes betraying the depth of her grief. “I can’t stay home alone — not by myself. At least not yet. All I do is think about Ellis and what I could have done to keep him from going out that night.” She bit her lower lip, and Ashley could see her struggling to control her tears. “I need to stay busy — I need to work. But not by myself.” The look in her eyes threatened to break Ashley’s heart. “You’ll stay with me today?”

Ashley reached out and gently touched her friend’s arm. “Of course.” As Carol retreated to the office in back, Ashley followed.

Carol glanced around the office as if searching for something, though Ashley was fairly certain she was doing nothing more than trying to distract her mind from thoughts of her son. Finally, her eyes came to rest on the unopened box on her desk. She gazed at it uncertainly, then turned to Carol. “What’s this?”

Ashley shrugged. “It was on the back step.”

Carol moved closer, then drew back. “Phew! It certainly smells strange.” Reaching out with her hand while still trying to keep her nose as far from the box as possible, Carol opened two of the flaps.

The stench that Ashley had been only barely aware of a few moments earlier now poured forth as a sickening odor, and Ashley struggled not to gag. “My God, what is it? It smells like a dead animal!”

Carol peered inside. For just a moment she thought it must be someone’s idea of some kind of strange art. There was what looked like some kind of wire construction and—

Oh, God!

Carol recoiled a step. “Call the sheriff,” she said, her voice catching.

“The sheriff?” Ashley echoed. Holding her breath against the noxious odor, she edged close enough to look over the edge of the box.

What looked like scraps of some kind of raw meat were hanging from whatever the wire had been formed into. She felt her breakfast rise in her gorge, and quickly closed the flaps of the box, putting a phone book on top to hold them down.

Only as the worst of the stench faded from her nostrils did Ashley finally pick up the phone and dial the number Carol Langstrom recited.

“

THAT WAS ON my doorstep,” Carol Langstrom said, pointing at the box that neither she nor Ashley Sparks had been able to bring themselves to touch during the few minutes it took for Rusty Ruston to get to the shop.

“Where did it come from?” Ruston asked.

Carol shrugged helplessly.

Ruston moved closer to the box. “No label at all? No note?”

“Nothing on the outside,” Carol said. “I don’t know about the inside.”

Ruston opened the flaps of the box, recoiling from the stench just as the two women had earlier. As Carol and Ashley automatically stepped back, he first looked into the box, then produced a pair of thin latex gloves from one of his pockets, put them on, and reached inside. Very gingerly he lifted the contents out of the box.

“Here,” Carol breathed, opening the morning newspaper and spreading it over a tabletop. “Don’t set it back on my desk. Set it here.”

Ruston placed the object on the table, then stepped back, and suddenly both women had a clear view of what it was that had been left on Carol’s back step during the night.

It was the bent and rusted frame of a lamp shade, whatever original covering it may have had long since stripped — or rotted — away.

Where perfectly sewn panels of silk or linen had once been stretched, there now hung ragged scraps of raw skin, held together by crudely tied pieces of string.

The skin had not been tanned; pieces of decaying flesh and rancid yellow globules of fat still clung to it, and the holes through which the string was unevenly laced looked as if they must have been made by an ice pick.

As Ashley struggled once again to control the nausea rising in her belly, a maggot dropped from the grotesque construction onto the newspaper. “My God,” she said. Choking on the words, she turned away.

Carol Langstrom, though, stayed where she was, staring numbly at the object. “Why?” she finally asked, her voice hollow. “Why would someone leave something like that on my step?”

Ruston ignored the question for the moment, carefully studying the hideous thing. He moved slowly around it, examining it from every angle.

And then Carol saw it.

A bluish mark near the top of one of the strips of skin.

A mark that looked familiar.

A terrible foreboding building inside her, Carol forced herself to look closer.

No!

Oh no, God no, please no.

But even as she silently screamed the prayer, she knew it would not be answered.

She knew what the mark was.

It was a symbol.

An old Viking symbol, called Thor’s Hammer.

Ellis had had it tattooed on his shoulder.

And now she was staring at that tattoo.

A shriek rose in her throat and exploded from her mouth before she could stop it.

Ruston, jerked out of his reverie, moved instantly to her side, asking what was wrong, but there was no way she could speak.

All she could do was point at the mark.

At the tattoo.

At the skin from Ellis’s missing arm.

“Ellis,” she finally managed. “It’s Ellis’s tattoo.”

Then she felt Ashley’s hands on her shoulders, and as her knees weakened, she let herself be helped to a chair, too stunned even to think.

“Jesus,” Ruston whispered. He studied the mark a moment longer, then carefully lifted the object back into the box, where Carol at least wouldn’t have to see it. “You going to be okay?” he asked. Carol nodded, her face pale, her eyes fixed on some invisible place in the far distance. Ruston was fairly certain she wasn’t going to faint, at least not right now. He took a deep breath, turning to Ashley Sparks. “I need you to show me exactly where you found this, Mrs. Sparks.”

“It was right here, sitting on the step,” Ashley said a moment later as she and Ruston gazed down at the steps behind the back door.

Ruston scanned the step, then the small parking area.

Then he spotted the Dumpster next to the building. “Okay,” he said. “Thanks. Why don’t you go see to Carol while I look around a little bit?”

Ashley turned and went inside, while Ruston walked over to the Dumpster and lifted its lid.

It looked like Carol’s shop shared the Dumpster with a couple of neighboring shops, one of which was the bakery, which Ruston knew regularly disposed of bags of bread and bagels too old to sell.

Too old to sell, but not to scavenge.

The Dumpster had not yet been emptied this morning, but there were no bags of baked goods — only garbage utterly unfit to eat — and Ruston knew of only one person who was known to go through the Dumpster.

Someone who, if memory served, also used to run a trapline up in the woods.

Which meant he would know how to skin an animal.

Or an arm.

Now Ruston’s gut was truly churning.

GERALD HOFSTETTER REFILLED his coffee cup in the newspaper’s front office, then looked out the big window and watched Billy Stevens in his cherry picker hang a Fourth of July banner from the tall pavilion roof. Rich Patrick was unloading a van full of folding tables into the pavilion where the Chamber of Commerce would be selling hot dogs, hamburgers, corn on the cob, and everything else anyone might be willing to eat tomorrow at the big picnic. Rich’s wife, Marge, and her whole Red Hat club were blowing up balloons and hanging quilts to be raffled off.

Al Stevens was setting up the fireworks scaffolding over by the footbridge. Hofstetter shook his head. Al Stevens and his incendiary devices were a disaster waiting to happen, given that Al’s reluctance to stay sober consistently was combined with his seeming inability to work for more than five minutes at a time. Still, Al had been doing the fireworks display for almost thirty years, and so far, so good.

At least no one had died yet.

Gerald heard the phone ring on his secretary’s desk behind him and felt a brief flare of hope that it was Ruston with the coroner’s report, but a moment later that hope died as it turned out it was just his secretary’s boyfriend calling for the fourth time that morning.

But then, as his attention reverted once more to the scene beyond the window, he saw something that made that brief flare of hope burst into full flame: Ray Richmond was crossing the street — actually, he was almost loping — and as he disappeared through the front door of the sheriff’s office, everything about his pace, his posture, and his attitude told Hofstetter that Richmond was in full mayoral mode.

This wasn’t just the grocer dropping in for a quick cup of coffee.

Gerald smelled news.

He left his coffee cup on his desk and grabbed a fresh pad from the bookcase.

Rusty Ruston was just dropping the privacy blinds on his office window when he saw Gerald come through the door, and he shook his head in resignation. “One guess who just walked in,” he said to Ray.

“Hofstetter, of course,” Ray replied. “I swear to God, that man never stops looking out his window.” He shrugged. “Might as well let him in — he can’t put out a newspaper until Friday, and by that time everybody will know everything anyway.”

Rusty opened his door and waved Hofstetter in. Abandoning the blinds, he handed both men copies of the coroner’s report, then settled into the chair behind his desk as they scanned it.

“Well,” Gerald Hofstetter said, leaning back in his chair as he folded the report and slipped it into his notebook. “So much for Ray’s nice little theory that an animal attacked Ellis Langstrom.” His eyes fixed on the sheriff. “Any idea who did it?”

Ruston nodded as Ray Richmond, too, finished the report, tossing his copy back on the sheriff’s desk as if it had suddenly become poisonous. “I do, indeed,” he said. “And by the way, Gerald, I don’t remember saying you could keep that.”

“It’s a public document, isn’t it?” Hofstetter countered.

Ruston decided it wasn’t worth a fight, especially given that in the end Hofstetter would get the report anyway. “I’m thinking Riley Logan is the man we’re looking for.”

“Riley Logan,” Hofstetter repeated as Ray Richmond sat silently in his chair, his face ashen as he thought of what the report he’d just read could do to the town’s economy. “What makes you think it was Logan?”

Ruston tipped his head toward the cardboard box he’d brought from Carol Langstrom’s shop and placed in the corner of his office farthest from his desk. “You might want to take a look at that,” he said, rising and moving to the box. “Someone left this for Carol Langstrom last night.” He opened the box, wincing at the odor that rose from it, and stepped back so the mayor and the newsman could peer at the object inside.

“Mother of God,” Ray breathed.

As both men backed away, Rusty donned another pair of latex gloves and carefully lifted the grotesque lamp shade out of the box, turning it so that they could see the blue mark. “Ellis Langstrom’s tattoo.” Though he spoke the words softly, Ray Richmond looked as if he’d been struck, and even Gerald Hofstetter’s face paled.

As Hofstetter started scribbling in his notebook, Ruston put the grotesque object back into the box and folded down the flaps. “I’m taking Derek Anders with me, and we’re going to go get Logan and bring him in.”

“Jesus Christ,” Ray said, still shaken.

“You still haven’t told us why you think Logan did it,” Hofstetter said without looking up from his pad.

“We know he was locked up in Central State for a lot of years, we know he used to run a trapline, which means he could have done that”—he tipped his head toward the box again—“and I can’t think of any other person who might have done it.” Now he fixed his eyes on Ray Richmond. “Maybe he didn’t do it,” he added. “But we’ve got enough to bring him in and question him, and there’s no way we’re going to keep a lid on this. The best we can do is have him locked up, at least through the Fourth. Then we’ll see.”

Richmond and Hofstetter exchanged a long look, and finally the mayor nodded. “Do what you have to do,” he sighed. “And be careful, okay? Don’t you be letting Derek Anders ‘accidentally’ shoot anyone. Understand?”

Ruston nodded. “Derek’s on his way over. We know where Logan’s shack is, and it shouldn’t take long.”

As Richmond and Hofstetter got to their feet and started out of his office, Ruston unlocked his gun safe and took out a shotgun.

Just in case.