The Laughterhouse

PROLOGUE

It was Christmas in August. A real winter wonderland. Yellow tape decorated the scene like tinsel, wisps of fog snap-frozen across the words Do Not Cross, blurring the letters to the point where nobody could tell one from the other. There was a small brown shoe in the snow. It was on its side, and snow had built up around the bottom of it. It had fallen off the girl when she was carried from the car into the building. The air was deathly still and cold, so cold it seemed your breath might solidify in front of your face and fall to the ground, where it would land softly in the snow by your feet and add to the frost biting at your toes. The snow was white in most places, gray where it had been ripped open by footsteps and vehicles. In other areas, mostly closer to the building, it reflected the halogen lamps and the colorful lights coming from the police cars. Those same lights streaked across the nearby dirty windows, the depths of the rooms behind the glass absorbing the light.

It all looked like a Christmas scene; Santa had come to the wrong part of town, met the wrong kind of people, and paid the worst kind of price. The halogens and headlights pointed at the old building, spotlighting the tragedy and turning it into a pageant. The place was abandoned, had been for nearly half a century, empty except for retired equipment and rusted pieces of iron everywhere, old tools and furniture not worth the money or time it’d take to pick them up. And of course the smell. It smelled of the death that had marched through the doors two by two, like animals heading onto the ark, except there wasn’t any salvation here for them. The floor had absorbed the blood and shit and urine over the few years the slaughterhouse operated, death and all the messy bits that come with it were entrenched in the cement, buried in the foundations and the walls and even the air, as though the air didn’t cycle in here, but was stagnant, too heavy to move outward, too thick to fit anything fresh in.

How much blood had been spilled here, Officer Theodore Tate didn’t want to know. He didn’t want to think too long or hard about that-he just wanted to do his job, stay alert, and not get in the way. He and his partner, Officer Carl Schroder, were the first on the scene after the call had come through. They had gone inside slowly, carefully, and they had found the young girl with the matching shoe still on her foot, along with the sock, and it was all she was wearing. The rest of her clothes were torn and piled up to her left. Neither of them had seen much in the way of bodies-a few suicides mostly, a couple of car accidents, one where the driver had been cut in half, twenty meters between his legs and chest and they never did find one of the hands-but this was Tate’s first homicide, the blood fresh, the eyes cloudy, tragedy by force rather than by bad luck.

They’d secured the area, words at a minimum between them, then waited for the others, spending their time rubbing their hands together and stamping their feet to try and kick-start their circulations. Seeing the young girl made Tate want to give up being a cop, and it also made him want to become a homicide detective. Like his priest had told him, life was full of contradictions and bad people.

The detectives who had arrived since then had nobody to interview. The only witnesses out here were the ghosts of those peddled through the doors of the slaughterhouse on their way to becoming supermarket specials and hamburgers.

It was a little after ten o’clock. A degree or two below thirty. A couple of days away from a full moon. The snow had started the night before. The areas the halogens didn’t hit were bathed in pale moonlight. The words North City Slaughterhouse were stenciled on the front of the building in big letters. Somebody had blacked out the S on the signage, so it now read laughterhouse, and others had vandalized the hell out of the place. A day and a half ago the cutting and slicing had started up again, only it hadn’t been cows and sheep this time.

They already had the man who did this in custody. They’d had him for twenty-four hours. For twenty-two of those he had given up nothing. The parents had been at the station the entire time, begging to speak to the man who had abducted their girl; they felt like there was a chance they could get their daughter back. The cops knew they’d get her back but not in the condition they’d like.

In the end a detective had marched into the interrogation room and started beating the suspect. He’d just had enough, picked up a phone book, and used it to go to town on the accused. The cop would lose his job, but the suspect had given up the location.

One of the officers came out of the building, spotted Tate, and came over.

“Hell of a scene,” Officer Landry said, then patted down his jacket pockets. He stopped when he hit a packet of cigarettes, then pulled them out. “Jesus, my fingers are so damn cold I’m not sure I can even light one.”

“It’s a sign you should give up,” Tate said.

“What, from God? From what we saw in there He’s got better things to be doing,” Landry answered. “You see that floor?”

Tate nodded. He’d seen it and would never forget it.

Landry carried on. “That’s a scary looking floor. Can you imagine that being the last damn thing you ever see?” He drew heavily on the cigarette and the tip of it flared red. He looked up at the lettering on the side of the building. “Laughterhouse,” he said. “That supposed to be some kind of sick joke?”

Tate didn’t answer. Just kept his hands in his pocket, bouncing slightly on his feet.

“That poor girl,” Landry said.

“Jessica,” Tate said.

Landry shook his head. “You can’t do that. You can’t give her a name.”

Tate looked at him, then looked down.

“Listen, Theo,” he said, taking the cigarette out of his mouth. “I know she has a name, okay? But you can’t do that. There will be plenty of future sad stories, and you’re going to have to think of these victims as cases, nothing more, otherwise you’re not going to last in this job.”

Another detective stepped outside of the slaughterhouse, in his hand a bright red schoolbag with a rainbow drawn across the back of it. He was holding it ahead of him with a straight arm, as if carrying a dead mouse his cat had just brought inside.

Landry took another drag on the cigarette. “You heard about the confession, right?”

Tate nodded. He’d heard.

“The son of a bitch is going to get away with it,” Landry said, then finished his cigarette. He walked back inside, leaving Tate alone in the snow to stare at the brown leather shoe no bigger than his hand.