Kiss The Girls and Make Them Die (2 page)

A weight landed on his back and clung.
Wendell, you asshole
. The weight bore him down, bending his knees toward the floor. He ducked his head between his legs and threw himself backward, felt the weight slide off his neck. Wendell lay on his back, his long legs flailing, tangling with the sheriff’s as he tried to roll over and climb to his feet. Colley staggered up the steps with a sick look in his eyes, his mouth a greenish smear.

Dan felt tempered, alert, eager for more action. Behind him stood the open door, beyond that the black night and the dark haven of the forest. He turned to run—

“Hold it!”

The sheriff’s eyes were like pale oysters, his gun pointed at Dan’s chest.
Better think about this, Dan
. The sheriff’s hand was steady as a vise, the black hole in the end of the barrel swelled until it looked like the maw of a volcano.
Inside, a little lump of lead waited for its freedom. The sheriff had only to touch the trigger, and the slug would burst his sack of flesh and rip through lungs, heart and any other organs that got in its way, leaving behind a great ragged hole which would leak away his life …

“Okay,” said Dan, breathing deep. “Okay …”

Wendell got to his feet and sidestepped warily, placing himself between Danny and the door. Colley moved in from the right with a rat-gleam in his eye, his stick swinging wide.

Dan felt the first blow smack his right temple. A hollow roar filled his ears, then another billowing numbness spread out from the back of his head. His lips kissed the hard oak floor—tenderly, it seemed, but he tasted blood. He was aware of thumping blows raining down on his back, pulverizing his kidneys. He could hear his own burbling, wheezing voice: “I bet your mothers are proud of you, you goddam heroes. I bet they’re
really
proud—”

He felt himself sinking down, down into a tank full of slime. Distant sweet music came from somewhere above, a soothing voice said:
Dan, it’s all right. It’s ALL RIGHT!

If he could only pull himself to the surface of the tank, he would burst into a region of dazzling radiance, weightless and serene. And there would be all his old friends, beloved faces from the beginning of the New World, waiting to welcome him home …

Less than an inch of rain fell on that particular corner of the Ozarks during the month of May, and June had no measurable moisture during the first twenty days. Lawns turned waxy green. Oak leaves pinched and curled at the edges. Hot sunlight sucked moisture out of the thick litter of the forest floor.

A drunk tossed his empty Boone’s-Farm wine bottle out of a car. The sun reached through the curved glass and condensed to a needlepoint of incandescence. A fragrant wisp of smoke looped and spiraled in the hot still air. Flames, betrayed only by a circle of blackening leaves, spread swiftly and silently like oil and water.

Within an hour the fire created its own breeze. Flames rippled along the ridge crest and clothed the tree trunks in fiery petticoats. Looping arms climbed into the lower branches and ignited the sere leaves in puffs of greasy smoke.

From the top of his ninety-foot steel tower, the Ranger focussed his binoculars, turned to his radio, and called the Fire District officer in Pickettsville. The officer glanced at his wall map and noted that his three fire crews had all their equipment strung out along seventeen miles of railroad right-of-way. He told the Ranger to call out volunteers or else start doing a rain dance.

The Ranger was a pious man. He prayed. White puffs of cloud began to form in the milky blue haze. Darkening
at the base, they roiled higher, multiplied, pulled themselves into a towering thunderhead whose boiling top reached twenty-thousand feet. Forked lightning raked the earth. Slanting streamers of rain trailed along the ridge and damped the fire until only wisps of acrid smoke rose from charred leaves.

Still the rain hissed down, churning soot and dust into gray-yellow soup. Gushing torrents scoured a channel down to bedrock and gouged the earth away from the bank, too blunt-ended to be a tree root. It suggested the tipped, clawing at its neighbors with gnarled, spiky limbs. With a great whispering sigh it fell, crushing the young saplings which had grown up in its shade, tearing a giant slab of root-impacted yellow clay from the earth.

The slab rested on its edge, like a manhole cover opening to a nether world. The crater filled with water. The edges were undercut and slid under the yellow froth with soft whispering plops. An odd shape protruded from the bank, too blunt-ended to be a tree root. It suggested the elongated head of a golf club or a very thick hockey stick.

All night the rain beat down, pulverizing the decayed tissue between the metatarsals, gouging out the flesh between the tibia and fibula, revealing the unmistakable configuration of a human leg. The sun rose clear, its red rays reaching through the charred trunks and alighting on two legs protruding from the clay bank, one exposed to about midway between thigh and knee, the other a few inches above the ankle. Around nine
a.m
. these were spied by a dog named Specks, a fat mud-colored mongrel who fancied himself the sole protector of a widow named Maude Adams. Miz Adams wore a flowered silk kerchief over her head, knotted under the chin, with strands of gray hair peeping out around her brown wrinkled face. She wore loose bib overalls with the cuffs tucked down into black rubber boots. The left one kept pulling off her heel; each time her foot came down it forced the pressurized air up around her fleshy calf with a wet farting sound. She held her gingham apron gathered in front of her, sagging with the weight of several porous morel mushrooms,
some white puffballs shaped like English muffins, and some slick opalescent fungoids she’d plucked off a decaying tree trunk. Specks, whose price of discovery overwhelmed his urge to crack the bones between his jaws, wrenched the right leg off at the knee and trotted to his mistress. He lost the foot enroute, and laid at her feet a joint of bone whose origin was unrecognizable. Miz Adams toed it with her boot, wrinkling her nose and remembering a Hereford calf which had disappeared last February.

“Where’d you get that? Show me!”

The dog turned and trotted away. Seeing the foot half-covered by dead leaves, Miz Adams stopped. For a moment she stood still, her breath loud in the stillness of the forest, the sun sparkling on the raindrops which still hung like jewels on the undersides of leaves. The dog’s barking hammered in her ears and she walked toward the sound, heavily, as if her boots were trapped in thick mud.

She stopped, frozen, and stared across the water-filled crater. She swung around on one foot, took a quick step away, then drew a deep breath and marched around the bank. Digging her heel into the bank, she half-closed her eyes and caved off a slab of clay. It splashed into the muddy water, pulling the whole body after it. Miz Adams glimpsed the rotting fabric of a shawl knotted beneath the jaws of a grinning skull, all stained a ghastly yellow-gray by the soil in which it had lain.

Miz Adams was no stranger to death. Last September, her husband had died of a massive coronary. Three days later a large gray cat had come scratching and yowling at her door. She had let him in and the cat had gone immediately to the leather recliner that her husband had used; curled up and began purring. The cat had disappeared a week later, leaving Miz Adams with a great sense of relief, and a new skepticism about the borderline between life and death. She stood frozen, looking at the skull which was sinking slowly into the yellow water. Her mind fuzzed, she thought of her own bones safely hidden within the padding of flesh. Resolving to have herself
cremated, she looked around. The trees marched silently in all directions, the leaves whispered something incomprehensible to her ears. The steamy heat of the morning somehow failed to reach her; she felt a cold clamminess pulling at the flesh at the back of her neck. She turned and ran thirty yards before she remembered her own heart; realizing there was no need to hurry, she slowed to a walk …

Sheriff Logan moved through the woods with the swift ease of an otter, dipping and sidestepping to avoid the gnarled branches and spiky bushes which snagged his deputy. Wendell was not dressed for the boonies. The leather soles of his black pointed shoes had acquired a glossy, resinous coating from the dead leaves; twice his feet shot out from under him and left him sitting, startled and angry, amid the litter.

Miz Adams reached the hole first, and looked down at the placid yellow water. “It’s in there. Must’ve sunk.”

The sheriff got a long dry stick and squatted on the rim, pulling his creased tan gabardines up off his knees. He wore polished ox-blood boots with straps running under the insteps. His belt was broad tooled leather, his badge a gold star no larger than a two-bit piece, pinned off-center above his left breast pocket.

He probed for a minute with the forked stick, then hoisted a slimy mop of fabric which dripped yellow water. He threw it out on the bank and used the stick to untangle the wad, revealing a woolen shawl of coarse weave and undetermined color. He reached down and picked up something, rubbed it between his fingers and finally drew it between his thumb and forefinger. It was a hair about twenty inches long, blonde or pale auburn.

“Told you it was a woman,” said Miz Adams.

“Hair don’t mean nothin these days. Wendell, jump in there and poke around. Miz Adams, you mind walkin off a ways? He’s gonna have to strip down to his shorts.”

Muttering, Wendell took off his pants and shoes and
socks and stood in red-striped shorts which belled out around his hairy white legs. He went in warily, toes first, holding onto a tree root while his lips curled back in distaste. His feet slid forward, and he went down with his right arms flailing backwards, yelling “whoop!” as he sat down in bubbling water up to his armpits.

The sheriff took out his handkerchief and daubed a damp spot on his shirt front. “Now you don’t have to be careful. Just reach on in there and yank it out.”

Mouth quivering, Wendell levered himself erect and stretched his arm down into the water. His mouth pulled in several different directions as his hand groped, then his lips peeled back in a rictus of effort as he hoisted a dripping clay-colored torso from the water. He lurched toward the bank, and the sheriff edged forward and reached out, seizing the spine in the lumbar area and dragging it up on the rim.

“Now find the head,” he grunted.

In twenty minutes they had it laid out, face up, like a corpse arranged for burial. The three stood looking down at it, unconsciously arranging themselves at three points of the cross, with the sheriff at the foot and Wendell and Miz Adams at either side. Soft clay filled the area between the curving rib cage. The pelvic cradle was stained yellow, like old ivory.

“No way of telling how she died,” muttered Wendell.

The sheriff sighed and walked to the cavity where the body had lain. He squatted on his haunches and raked the dirt with his stick.

“Whatcha lookin for?” asked the deputy.

“Nothin,” grunted the sheriff.

He loosed the earth to a depth of eight inches, then took out his pocketknife and whittled a point on the stick. He stabbed it into the dirt several times at spaced intervals, then straightened and looked gloomily at the deputy.

“What’d you find?” asked Wendell.

The sheriff shook his head and flicked his eyes toward Miz Adams. Then he turned and strode up to her. “Miz
Adams, I’d like to request that you take my deputy back to your house, and lend him a spade, if you got one.”

She nodded, her eyes wide. “I sure have. It’s rusty but you’re welcome to it.”

“I will appreciate that very much. Also I will appreciate very much if you don’t say anything about this.”

“Oh, well, sure, I uh … you think there’s more’n one?”

“I’d rather not speculate just yet, Ma’m.”

By the time they got back the sheriff had uncovered the second body, but had left it imbedded in yellow clay. This one had been protected from the elements and still had the flesh attached, though it was soft and greasy and had the deep rich purple color of ripe eggplant. Already it was beginning to draw flies and send a ripe musty odor into the air. There were bracelets around the wrists and a butterfly embroidered on a patch of stained nylon in the area of the right hip.

The sheriff stood looking at the body, pulling out his lower lip and twisting it first one way and then the other. The deputy stood holding the spade, which was pitted with rust and lacked a crossbar in the handle. After about five minutes, he asked: “You want me to dig her the rest of the way up?”

The sheriff shook his head without taking his eyes off the body. “Who owns this land, Miz Adams? It’s national forest, ahr’t it?”

“No it ain’t,” said Miz Adams. “This part here belongs to a real-estate man, lives over in Wainright.”

“Know his name?”

“Never met the man.” She came forward, her loose boot making a
clump-ffffht
sound which drew a startled look from the sheriff. Her voice dropped to a confidential mutter: “But I seen that boy he had livin’ there … the one who built the cabin. I reckon you know who I mean?”

“Can’t say I do.”

“‘You had him in jail a couple weeks ago and you let him get away from you.”

The sheriff wheeled on his deputy. “Who’s she talkin’ about?”

The deputy rested his foot on the spade and looked sternly at the woman. “What’s this kid look like, Miz Adams?”

“Tall, kinda light-brown wavy hair, beard … drove an old gray Ford pickup.”

“Hey, that sounds like the guy we sent—”

The sheriff shot an angry scowl at the deputy, then turned back to the woman. “This kid … was the real-estate man his brother?”

“Some kind of kin. Brother-in-law, I think.”

“Yeah, well, he didn’t get away from us. We know where he is.” He took another turn around the excavation, viewing the object within from several different angles, then looked at the deputy, who had been jabbing the spade into the earth, pulverizing a square yard of leaf mold.

“I don’t think we better dig anymore, Wendell. If I can get the mobile lab down here …” He trailed off, thinking about the coroner, and the meatwagon, and the mobile crime lab, and the search party, wondering how to get them into the woods and out again without attracting a swarm of rubbernecks …

“Tell you what, Wendell. You stay here—”

The deputy moaned. “I’ll miss lunch!”

“I’ll have Fanny put up a snack. Don’t let anybody touch the body until the coroner does his business. I’m gonna have Colley round up a search party, and I want you to see that they go over the whole property. You won’t be lucky enough to have trees tip over and turn up every stiff. That last one was three feet down. So take it slow, look for sunken depressions and stuff like that”

“Where
you
goin?”

“To see if the shrinks are done with our suspect.”

“What if they ain’t?”

“Well if they ain’t they might just hafta get their asses in gear. Sorry Miz Adams. See you, Wendell.”

Sheriff Kent Logan was thoughtful as he drove between the granite pillars of the state hospital. Ahead, the blacktop arrowed through landscaped grounds to the gray limestone steps of the administration building. He was aware of the sudden peace and quiet behind the walls and felt his power leaking away.

He had resigned his major’s commission the first time he was passed over for promotion, knowing that the second time he’d be asked to resign. He’d planned to give the county good service, gradually let the people know that they had a good sheriff—not smart, but honest—and from there continue his climb. The double murder now could either make him or break him. One thing sure, the easy way was not necessarily the best Kelley had attracted attention by putting down the black riots in Kansas City, and wound up as head of the FBI.
Power
, he thought to himself.
Power, that’s all it is
. His big hands squeezed the steering wheel. But it had to be done easy …

He pulled into a reserved parking space, undipped his gun, locked it in the glove compartment, and went inside. The administrator was a small white-haired man he’d met before; he had a knack of being agreeable without ever saying yes.

“Patient care,” he said, “is under the chief psychiatrist. However Dr. Kossuth is on vacation at the moment I’ll call Dr. Bodac, who is the staff psychiatrist in Bollinger’s area. I’m sure Elizabeth can arrange an interview, or at least find out what you want to know …”