The Dead Town

Chapter 13

Rafael Jesus Jarmillo, chief of police, lived in a two-story American Victorian on Bruin Drive. The house featured gingerbread moldings along the eaves of the main roof and the porch roof, as well as around the windows and the doors. It was the kind of modest but well-detailed house that, back in the day, Hollywood routinely portrayed as the home of any reputable middle-class family like Andy Hardy and his dad the judge, before moviemakers decided that the middle class was nothing but a dangerous conspiracy of dim-witted, grasping, bigoted know-nothings whose residences in films should reveal their stupidity, ignorance, boring conformity, greed, racism, and fundamental festering evil.

Frost really liked the place.

He and Dagget had driven past the house hours earlier, in daylight. They knew that it was painted pale yellow with robin’s-egg-blue gingerbread, but at night, with no landscape lights, it appeared as colorless as the snow-covered ground on which it stood.

As he parked at the curb, Dagget said, “Wife, mother-in-law, and two kids. That right?”

“That’s what the background sheet said. No dog. No cat. A canary named Tweetie.”

Seen through the bare limbs of a tree, the second floor lay in darkness, but lamplight brightened every downstairs room. An oval of leaded and beveled glass in the front door sparkled like an immense jewel.

Frost didn’t usually find Victorian houses charming. Following Dagget along the walkway to the porch, through the snow, he decided this residence struck him as inviting primarily because it looked warm.

If there was such a thing as reincarnation, then in a previous life, Frost must have been a member of some loincloth-wearing tribe in a sultry equatorial jungle — or maybe a desert iguana that spent his days on sun-baked rocks. Deep in his bones and marrow, he seemed to carry a past-life memory of extreme heat that left him not merely especially vulnerable to this Montana chill but also aggrieved by it, offended, abused.

The irony of being born into the Frost family with an intense aversion to cold was not lost on him. The mysterious power who remained hidden behind the machinery of nature expressed His sense of humor in an infinite number of ways, and Frost found the world wonderfully amusing even when he was the butt of the joke.

Dagget rang the doorbell, and they could hear the chimes inside. When no one answered, he rang again.

The draperies were not closed over the windows, and Frost moved along the porch, checking out those rooms flush with warm light. He saw no one, but in the living room, evidence of recent violence caught his attention: an overturned needlepoint chair, a figured-bronze lamp that had been knocked off an end table, a ginger-jar lamp on which the pleated-silk shade had been knocked askew, and a cracked mirror above the fireplace.

After he called Dagget’s attention to these signs of a struggle, they went around to the back door, which featured four panes in the top, only half-covered by sheer curtains. On the kitchen floor lay scattered knives, a meat cleaver, a few pots and pans, and shattered dishes.

The door was locked. Dagget unzipped his ski jacket, drew his pistol, tapped the barrel hard against the glass, broke a pane, and reached inside to disengage the deadbolt.

The blanketed night and the thick falling snow muffled sound so much that Frost doubted a neighbor would have been alerted by the cracking of glass. He drew his pistol and followed Dagget into the kitchen, closing the door behind them.

The house was as silent as a dream of deafness.

Bracketing doorways, taking turns crossing thresholds, they searched the ground floor. By the time they arrived at last in the living room, they had found no one.

A cascade of sweet clear notes put an end to the creepy silence as Tweetie, in his cage, greeted them. In spite of the circumstances, Frost found the birdsong cheerful and even calming, perhaps because he was reminded of the parrots and other feathered denizens of the equatorial jungle in his past life.

“What neighborhood of Hell is this?” Dagget muttered.

Frost’s attention dropped from the bright yellow bird to a furry blue bedroom slipper lying beside the overturned needlepoint chair. He required a moment to realize that the footwear was not what had inspired Dagget’s question. Beyond the slipper lay a bare foot with toenails painted candy-apple red. A woman’s slender foot with well-formed toes and a delicate arch. Severed at the ankle.

Severed was not the right word because it implied a blade. The flesh and bone were neither clean-cut, as they might have been if the dismembering weapon were a razor-edged sword, nor ragged and splintered, as any kind of saw would have left them. The stump looked both glazed and finely pitted, as if dissolved but simultaneously cauterized by an acid.

Dagget settled on one knee beside that grisly object, to examine it closely. He spoke in a murmur: “It’s damn pale, isn’t it? Skin as white as plaster. No visible surface veins or arteries. The exposed flesh … it’s as pale as halibut. As if all the blood was sucked out of it.”

Not a drop of gore marred the carpet around the foot.

Leaning closer, Dagget said, “The flesh isn’t pitted exactly. It looks … as if it’s been chewed on by a million tiny teeth.”

“Don’t touch it,” Frost whispered.

“I don’t intend to,” Dagget assured him. “It’s evidence.”

Frost’s admonition had nothing to do with a concern about contaminating evidence. The foot looked so strange that he wondered if they could be contaminated by it.

Although Tweetie had most likely continued to sing, for a while Frost had not been aware of the canary. The trilling notes reclaimed his attention, but instead of being cheerful, as before, they sounded thin and shrill and bleak.

“What now?” Frost wondered.

“Upstairs.”

Leaving the living room through an archway, entering the foyer, they discovered part of a hand.