The Dead Town

Chapter 17

In the foyer of Chief Rafael Jarmillo’s house, the portion of the hand on the floor consisted of the thumb, the forefinger, the connecting span that was called the anatomical snuffbox, and a piece of the fleshy thenar eminence. The tips of the thumb and finger were pressed together as if in the OK sign.

Frost had no way of knowing if someone had arranged the digits in that fashion or if instead the macabre gesture occurred by chance. In either case, he was not amused.

Most cops lacked a sharp sense of black humor when they entered law enforcement, but they quickly developed one as a psychological-defense mechanism. Nevertheless, Frost suspected that nothing he encountered in this house would tickle the dark side of his funnybone.

The eaten edges of the flesh had the same appearance as the stump of the foot in the living room. Bloodless. Glazed but pitted. And the flesh was unnaturally pale.

Dagget flicked a switch, and the open staircase brightened. In a hunt, stairs were always bad, either going up or coming down. You were vulnerable from above and below, with nothing to duck behind, with nowhere to go other than straight into the line of fire, because turning your back and running was even more surely a ticket to the morgue.

Cautiously but quickly, they ascended. Dagget took the lead, back to the curved wall, attention on the head of the stairs. Frost followed six steps behind, focused on the foyer below; although they had cleared the ground floor, there might be a way someone could get behind them.

They didn’t even whisper to each other anymore. They had nothing to say. From here on, what needed to be done would be clear as events unfolded.

They didn’t find any additional scraps until they reached the upper hall, where a bloodless ear, as white as a seashell, lay on the carpet. Judging by the size and the delicacy, it must have been the ear of a young child.

Chief Jarmillo had two children.

Of all crimes, those involving violence against children most infuriated Frost. He didn’t believe in life sentences for child murderers. He believed in any kind of slow execution.

Jarmillo’s behavior on duty the previous twelve hours argued strongly for his corruption. If the chief was part of some bizarre conspiracy, then it seemed to follow that he, rather than a serial killer chancing upon them, must have murdered his wife, mother-in-law, and kids. Murdered and dismembered.

But Frost couldn’t make sense of what they had found thus far. The huge sums funneled into this town through Progress for Perfect Peace suggested a criminal enterprise vast in scale. In fact the laundered funds were so enormous that the possibility of a terrorist plot of historic dimensions could not be dismissed. A cop on the take, getting immensely rich for helping the bad guys conceal their activities, wasn’t likely to derail the money train by chopping up his family over a disagreement with the wife.

Four bedrooms, a master-suite sitting room, various closets, and two of three bathrooms offered them only two more grisly pieces of evidence. Both were in the master bedroom.

On the floor near the dresser lay a fragment of a jawbone from which protruded two molars, two bicuspids, and a single canine tooth. Something green trailed from between the molars, perhaps a sliver of skin from a bell pepper or a jalapeño. The facets of the bone that should have been shattered, where they had broken away from the rest of the jaw, instead looked … melted.

Because it was not just another bit of biological debris but an impossible construct out of a surrealist’s fantasy, the second find in the master bedroom proved more unsettling than anything they had discovered thus far. It lay at one corner of the neatly made bed, near the footboard, not as if carefully presented but as if tossed aside — or as if spat out. The thick tongue, curved and with the tip raised as though licking something, would have been repulsive and alarming if it had been nothing more than that, but instead it was like an image by Salvador Dalí inspired by H. P. Lovecraft. In the center of the fat tongue, not balanced upon it but snugly embedded in its tissue, actually growing from it, was a brown and lidless human eye.

Frost saw the monstrosity first. In the instant of discovery, he was overcome by a sensation about which he’d often read but of which he had no previous experience. The skin on the back of his neck went cold and seemed to be crawling with something as real as centipedes or spiders.

As an agent of the FBI assigned to the equivalent of a black-ops division, he had seen horrors enough and had known fear in a variety of textures and intensities. But nothing until this had touched that most deeply buried nerve, which was not a physical nerve at all, but an intuitive sensitivity to the uncanny, whether of a supernatural or merely a preternatural kind. Neither all of his education nor his vivid imagination could explain the existence of this abomination. As he stared at it, the crawling sensation burrowed deeper, from the back of his neck into his spine, and a chill scurried down his laddered vertebrae.

He gestured for Dagget to join him. Frost didn’t need to look up to gauge his partner’s reaction to the loathsome object. The sudden intake of breath and a wordless expression of revulsion in the back of his throat conveyed Dagget’s disgust and dread.

For a moment, Frost anticipated that the eye might turn in its fleshy socket, focusing on him, or that the tongue might flex and curl in an obscene quest. But that expectation was imagination run wild. The tongue and the eye on the bed were dead tissue, no more capable of movement than the teeth in the jawbone fragment would be able to chew the carpet under them.

A mere pistol and two spare magazines seemed to be inadequate armament against whatever enemy they faced. The explanation behind events in Rainbow Falls was neither ordinary criminal activity nor terrorism of a kind before seen.

As though he had been cast back to childhood, to the confusions and anxieties of a preschooler, Frost looked down at his feet, inches from the hem of the quilted bedspread, and he wondered if something hostile might be hiding under the bed. Where in the past there had never been a boogeyman or a troll, or any kind of witch’s familiar, might there now be something more mysterious and yet more real than any of those fairy-tale threats?

The spell of childish timidity held him in thrall only for a moment and was broken by the announcement of a real threat. From the darkness in the adjoining bathroom, through the half-open door, into the stillness of the master bedroom came a sound like scores of urgent whispering voices.