Ghouls, page 22
Greene walked to the other side of the room and opened a large gray metal door which no one had noticed in the anteroom’s slabs of shadows. Its doorknob was in the middle, and it bore a sign that read, KEEP THIS DOOR CLOSED, AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. Greene disappeared into a slant of white blaze. “The doorman to hell,” Bard whispered. “Get a load of this guy.” They followed reluctantly, single file.
A high fluorescent fixture veiled them all in flat light. Fumes in the air chafed Kurt’s eyes and reamed his sinuses; he thought of the hot sausages they sold in jars at the Jiffy. “Sorry about the horrible smell,” Greene apologized. “It’s fixation fluid. Trade hazard.”
Kurt felt the blood empty out of his face. The slightly cooler air made his skin tighten. There were no metal drawers here as he’d seen on TV. The room had a bare cement floor potted with crusty drains, and was walled all around by slate-gray tile. Metal shelves occupied one entire wall; they seemed bowed under the weight of countless white five-gallon buckets each taped with various labels as JORES’, ZENKER’S SOLUTION, PHENOL, FORMALIN 20%. A tin tray marked AMYLOID/FAT NECROSIS PREP held several bottles of iodine and copper sulfate. A large sink and heat-sealing iron hung on one wall, and at the opposite wall was another door. Kurt didn’t care to see what was behind it.
“Chief Bard, Officer Morris, Mr. Rodz,” Greene said, extending a hand, “I’d like you to meet Ollie, Nick, and Christine.”
Kurt didn’t get it at first, then it occurred to him that Dr. Greene’s sense of humor kept in line with his job. He’d been introducing them to cadavers which lay on three trough-like tables. All three corpses had been macabrely wrapped in white plastic bags from crotch to head, so that only bare legs were visible. They made Kurt think of bundled meat.
In the middle of the room was the autopsy table, brushed aluminum, with a total scale, inclination and height adjustment, suction lines, and a removable filter trap. “Here she is,” Greene said. He gestured toward the table’s slatted platform.
Kurt felt as though he were standing on someone’s roof when he looked. A skeleton lay stretched across the table—a skeleton for the most part at least, because the frail arrangement of bones seemed flecked and hanging with an indescribable matter which reminded him of creek scum. It was not a clean skeleton. Parts of it glistened wetly in the light.
“This is what I found tonight,” Glen said in a parched tone.
“Where?” Kurt asked. He contemplated his vomit bag.
“Right next to one of the back access roads. Less than a mile from where I found Drucker.”
Greene set his milk down on top of a compact cassette tape recorder. He looked at them, indifferent but speculative. “This could be the missing person you reported.”
“The Fitzwater girl’s only been missing a couple of days,” Kurt told him.
“There’s almost nothing left of it,” Bard added. “It’d take a lot longer than a few days to do this.”
“Not true,” Greene asserted. “This body’s been almost stripped to the bone. It would take weeks for it to rot to this state; putrefaction just doesn’t happen that fast… This body was devoured by animals, which isn’t all that strange in a heavily wooded area. It’s just a little surprising that it could happen so quickly, provided that this is the Fitzwater girl.” Lazily, Greene turned his head, immune to this environment of death. He pointed to the skull with unsettling detachment, and brought to light a rough hole at the back. Kurt felt his stomach flutter when he absorbed the implication. The skull had been bitten open, its contents evacuated.
Greene continued. “This is the only part that really bugs me—no brain. Very clean job, almost like it was scooped out through that hole. At least I’ve never seen a head trauma like this before; and don’t get me wrong, I’m not a zoological expert, but I couldn’t tell you what kind of animal could bite a hole like this in the cranial vault and then get the brain out so cleanly.” He arched a shoulder, unimpressed at even his own grisly revelations. “We’ll see what the boss says in the morning. If he doesn’t know, he’ll find someone who does.”
Kurt winced one last time at the opened skull. It conjured an image of huge, snapping jaws and teeth. “If this person died more than two days ago, then we know it can’t be Donna Fitzwater. Are you going to be able to give us a time of death?”
Greene leaned casually against a bracketed tray cluttered with clamps, scissors, and smudged scalpels. The light reflected off his glasses in opaque white discs and made him look like a misanthropic cartoon character. “This 81 of yours lacks all of the normal major factors by which we determine time of death. We can’t make muscle pH and glycogen readings because there’s not enough muscle left. No way to measure the extent of gas formation in the blood, no way to measure fixation, temperature, or rigor. We can usually narrow TOD down to two or three hours by graphing the potassium levels in the ocular fluids of the eyes. But as you can see—”
“No eyes,” Kurt said.
“No nothing,” Bard said.
“All I can tell you now is that she hasn’t been dead long. One thing we could measure was the state of H2O retention in the ligaments and tendon ends, plus the absence of sufficient peroxidation—”
“Wait a minute,” Bard interrupted. “You said she. It’s a fucking skeleton. How do you know it’s a she?”
“Sex-chromatin test?” Kurt ventured.
“No,” Greene said. “What little tissue material is left has already turned karyolytic. But that’s all beside the point. You don’t need any of that for a complete skeleton. Basic osteology proves this is a woman. Broad oscoxae. Improminent supercilliary ridge. Wide pelvic inlet… She’s a woman, all right. No bout a doubt it.”
No one laughed at Greene’s quip. Kurt could only stare at the twiglike thing on the table. It had been hollowed out, its bones gnawed. “What about age?” he asked. “Dead end?”
Greene seemed to be losing interest fast; he looked ready to fall asleep. “From this, exact age’ll be impossible to determine. We’ve only got guidelines. The fusion state of the epiphyseal plates indicates she’s older than eighteen, while the marginal fusion of the coronal and sagittal sutures in her orbital dome points out that she’s younger than, say, forty.” He picked up a long bivalving knife and tapped the stripped jaw, as if to test its solidity. “Most important of all is that her back row of molars are coming in, so unless she was subject to several superincumbent nutritional deficiencies, she’s more than likely in her early twenties.”
Kurt glanced glumly to Bard. “The Fitzwater girl was twenty-two.”
“Piss,” Bard said. He was a fat, angry mannequin in the ghastly light. “Piss. Cock.” Then, to Greene: “You’re sure of all this?”
“Sure I’m sure,” Greene said. He seemed amused that his competence had been questioned. “Now for the clincher. The most obvious atypical aspect of this 81 was the definite osteoporosis of the lower extremities. So I ordered some X rays and found positive evidence of complete spinal transection. Severe displacement of the upper lumbar group. Fractured neural arch.”
“In other words,” Kurt said, “she was crippled?”
Greene adjusted his glasses. His biceps made his sleeves look stuffed. “Exactly,” he verified. “But it wasn’t a recent fracture. This back injury occurred years ago, maybe many years. Was Donna Fitzwater paraplegic?”
“Yes,” Kurt droned. By now the fumes were making his eyes water. “Her father said she’d been crippled since she was young.”
“Then there’s no doubt that this is Donna Fitzwater,” Bard concluded, bile in his words.
“Unless you’ve got another missing person who’s a girl in her early twenties with a broken back,” Greene said in a long, laborious breath. “Bring in her dental records for positive ID. The M.E. will examine everything in the morning, but he won’t tell you any different.”
Bard glanced around, then looked into his vomit bag and gulped. “Let’s get the hell out of here,” he said, pawing his gut. “My belly’s doing cartwheels.”
“Thanks for your time, Doc,” Kurt said. “We’ll give you a call tomorrow for the preliminary.”
Greene smiled faintly, shaking his head as Kurt, Bard, and Glen made a swift exit. They took long, nearly ludicrous strides until they were in the darkened lobby, a comfortable distance from Green’s facility.
“Fucking place is like a goddamned lab at Auschwitz.” Bard collapsed into a seat. “And how do you like that meat rack in there? You need a Ph.D. in anatomy just to understand the guy. He might as well be talking fucking Swedish.”
“Yeah, but that meat rack saved us a hell of a lot of time,” Kurt said. “At least we don’t have to rush being confused.” The light in the candy machine continued to flicker and buzz. Kurt couldn’t believe they’d put one this close to the morgue, of all places. He blinked rapidly till the sting in his eyes began to subside. He relished air that was free of fixators, and shortly the sick wooziness cleared from his head.
Bard looked like a limp sack in the seat. “For two days straight I’ve been praying that girl would turn up.” Then his voice roughened. “I should’ve known she’d turn up like that.”
“And how are we going to find out what happened to her?” Kurt drew on the complaint. “Unless we find something at Belleau Wood. We don’t even know the cause of death. How can we get a line on who’s responsible?”
Glen spoke for the first time since they’d entered the morgue. Dark circles under his eyes looked like smudges of soot. His voice was dull as wax. “What makes you think there was even a crime committed? Looks to me like she just got dragged off by some dogs or something. A crippled girl wouldn’t stand a chance against wild dogs, even in front of her own home.”
“Yeah, but she wasn’t in front of her own house,” Kurt reminded him. “She wasn’t even outside. Harley Fitzwater said her wheelchair was still by her bed, so even if she wanted to go outside for some fresh air or something, she would have been in the chair. There’s no way this is an accident. Someone entered that trailer and physically removed her.”
Bard and Glen finally surrendered to the conclusion. A drape of silence followed them down the corridor and out into the abandoned parking lot. They walked tilted, like drunks, still slightly warped by the state of affairs in Greene’s shop of horrors.
“I’ll have to call Choate, give him a complete report,” Bard complained. “The fucker’ll have county shirts all over my town.”
Emptiness amplified Glen’s otherwise subdued voice. “Somebody’s going to have to tell Harley Fitzwater that that skeleton back there is probably his daughter.”
“We’ll wait till positive ID is official,” Bard said. “And you’ll have to do some writing for this. County, too.”
“I know,” Glen said, and pulled open his Pinto’s door.
“You log trespassers at Belleau Wood, don’t you?” Kurt interjected.
“Sure.”
“Anything out of the ordinary last night?”
“No. No one on foot, at least.”
“Any smoochers?”
“A few, but that’s not out of the ordinary. I’ll give you the plate numbers tomorrow, and all my logs for the last couple of weeks.”
Kurt and Bard slid into the T-bird. Bard made no attempt to turn the ignition. Instead, he stared past Kurt, out the passenger window. He seemed to be staring at Glen.
“Something’s really starting to smell like a can of shit around here,” the chief said as Glen weaved off the lot.
“Elaborate, huh?”
“You know what I’m talking about.” Bard singled out the ignition key in the dark. “A dug-up coffin, a missing cop, and a crippled girl stripped down to the bones. And look what they all have in common.”
“Maybe I’m just naturally stupid this time of the morning,” Kurt said. “So how about telling me what you’re driving at.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Kurt. Open your fucking eyes. All this shit’s gone down at Belleau Wood. And Glen just happens to work there, and he just happens to be the one finding it all of a fucking sudden.”
“Unless I’m reading you wrong, you’re saying Glen’s got something to do with it, aren’t you? Look, Chief, I’ve known the guy for damn near my whole life; he’s practically a brother, and he’s straight. I don’t know what you’ve got in mind, but whatever it is, the idea that Glen’s involved is ridiculous.”
“Ridiculous?” Bard retorted, finally starting the car. “Just ’cause we’re friends with the guy doesn’t mean he can’t drop a few bolts. Now, I don’t know what he might be up to, and I’m not saying he’s the perper or anything. But one thing’s certain. Glen sure as hell knows something he’s not telling us.”
— | — | —
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Dawn broke faultily, changing the spectacle of first light into a blunder. Low and gray, storm clouds massed in the sky and crawled like swollen tumorous creatures ready to burst. Fog hung adhesively between the trees, and a chill breeze made the forest shiver, while animals hid from the certainty of rain.
By 5:30 a.m., Kurt had traveled the length of Route 154 several times. He’d gone back to bed after Bard had dropped him off, but found sleep impossible, thanks to the residual images of Greene’s morgue. Next, after a steaming, nearly painful shower (he felt sure the formalin fumes had seeped into his pores as well as his clothes) he paced the front porch, smoking, thinking, and staring across into the fog-filled woods until his solitude and the silence chased him out. He got into his car and drove, randomly and quite conscious now that the Ford had become a sanctuary against the private paranoias which seemed to be circling him over the past week. He lost track of time. He drove. And thought.
He thought about Vicky. He thought that he should be happy, since she was getting out of the hospital today. Instead, he felt cold and dry inside. For years his inhibitions had kept his feelings for her safely distant. But with her release from the hospital—and her departure from Lenny—Kurt knew that this was his last opportunity to confront her with the truth. It would be the first positive move he’d made with her, yet the prospect filled him with a sudden, certain dread.
Then he thought about Bard’s suspicions of Glen. Kurt knew both men well but knew Glen better. Glen was a loner, he’d always been. He’d once told Kurt that he preferred just a few friends, choosing them carefully to maintain quality friendships rather than superfluous ones. Lots of people misinterpreted this idea—along with his preference to work at night—and tended to dismiss Glen as peculiar. “I’ll always work at night,” he’d once laughed to Kurt. “No traffic jams, no rush hour, no hot sun to make your upholstery simmer and your ass burn. And at night I don’t have to be around lots of people and catch their colds”—an antisocial notion perhaps, though Kurt could not remember Glen ever being sick.
No, Glen wasn’t a flake, he was just set in his ways. And despite a few flukes, he was the most honest person Kurt had ever known. He was the kind of guy who returned lost dogs and declined the reward, and who left other’s forgotten change in pay phones. If he found money in the parking lot and was unable to locate the owner, he would drop it in the Jerry Lewis bottle at 7-Eleven, because the idea of spending money he did not earn seemed as bad as stealing.
So why did Bard link Glen with Belleau Wood’s recent mysteries? Bard had always been a fussbudget, a walking case of anxiety; he lived to worry and to suspect. Kurt acceded almost immediately that a progression of mishaps had piled up against Glen’s favor, had made him victim to coincidence. It was a rational conclusion, but Bard, though, had never been one to demonstrate rationality. And exactly what did Bard suspect? That Glen was a closet sociopath? A necrophile? A murderer? Outlandish.
Kurt turned around at the Liquor Mart, the very end of Route 154. Left of him, at the intersection that marked Tylersville’s boundary, intermittent vehicles blew through the traffic light, barreling away down West Street, strangely silent in the queer darkness of early morning. This was the secret pre-rush hour of Annapolis, pickup trucks mostly, or watermen on their way toward the docks center of town. Kurt parked here for a time, the Ford’s headlights stressing the fog which blurred 154’s most northern end. Just yards ahead, the road descended like a narrow tunnel, or a maw. Mist grew on the windshield. The fog seemed to be moving toward the car, thickening, as if the maw were expelling breath on him.
It was an eerie passage of minutes. With the rumbling of the Ford’s engine, he tensed at his own perceptions and sensed something ominous in the fog, as though some malignant entity had slipped into his town unnoticed and was pulsing there now, steady and content.
It was not a coincidence, nor a series of inexplicable events. Conspiracy thrived within the fog, a subtle corruption waiting to devour the town he’d lived in all his life.
It was there. He could feel it quite clearly now. Somehow, he knew. There was something in Tylersville that had never been there before. Something vile. Something atrocious.
««—»»
“No,” Vicky said. She looked peevishly into her lap. Did she really mean no? Or could there be something appealing about the idea? “No, I couldn’t. I don’t want to intrude.”
“Who’s intruding?” Kurt argued, one eye on the road and one on her. “Uncle Roy won’t be back for another week, and he wouldn’t mind anyway. Besides, where else can you go?”
She didn’t answer, still contemplating her knees.
Kurt drove steadily down 301, heading back to Tylersville. It was past noon now; he’d picked Vicky up at the hospital as soon as the doctor had authorized her release. But that presented a problem, as it had not yet been established exactly where she was going. Waiting in the left-turn lane at the junction of 301 and 154, he decided to change the subject rather than press her further. “You look a lot better,” he said.
