Someone else stepped up to the mike, a sergeant, I think, and warned the public to be aware of any dogs roaming around that weren’t tagged at all. This set off another maelstrom of questions from the press, but the sergeant promptly exited stage left.
I went into the bathroom and threw up.
They said it was a tragedy. A hundred times I heard them use that word. It was a tragedy.
In the kitchen I untwisted the twisty-tie that held shut the big black Hefty bag the bloody tarp was in. I opened the bag, and right there, resting atop the thing like a candle on a birthday cake, was the piece of the jawbone I had presumed belonged to the Rose Killer. It was about the size of a pack of cigarettes, and was crowned with two sterling, white teeth. Danny’s clean teeth.
Dear God, I thought. I wanted to reach down and touch it, to express how sorry I was, but that fragment wasn’t Pearce anymore. It was an item that proved to me what a curse I was to the world. It was evidence, and it had to be destroyed. I was sorry to have to think about it. I closed the bag.
I went into the bedroom and closed the door behind me. Up on the wall were all the articles about the Rose Killer and his victims. The Rose Killer was supposed to be dead, not the man who had believed in me, had trusted me, and had been my friend. Something had gone horribly wrong.
I briefly came upon the thought that if the wolf had known what it was doing, that if it had gone out with a mission last night and had killed Pearce, then he must have been guilty of something, if not the Rose killings, then maybe he … I don’t know. Left his seed on the bodies of those dead girls, perhaps. But I knew this was impossible. Pearce couldn’t have been involved in the murders or anything as filthy as I was thinking. First off, he was a normal guy. He had a wife and a baby on the way, and further, those murders went back for years and had occurred all over the country. There was no way that Pearce, while being a family man and a cop, would have the time to travel all over the United States to carve up a couple of dozen women.
But no one knew who the Rose Killer was. So maybe Pearce was a copycat killer.
Maybe he freaked out. Maybe he couldn’t find a cigarette, and he snapped. Maybe he snapped, and to cover up his ghastly crime, he made it look like all those murders out West?
No fucking way, I thought. But why was he dead when he wasn’t the one I’d sent the wolf after?
Could he have left his seed on one, or both, of those girls? Could he have been a deviated pervert like that? He was awfully dirty when he came over to my place that evening not so long
Ago….
No fucking way, I thought. There was only one logical explanation for the tragedy that had occurred. I just didn’t want to admit it to myself.
I went over to my lumpy bed, which was still in the corner because I had forgotten to move it back that morning, and got on my knees to reach under it. I slid out my Remington. It was always oiled and loaded, ready to go.
I sat on the bed and leaned forward. The butt rested against the floor, and the long barrel came up to me like the stem of a flower. I put the business end in my mouth and hooked my thumb around the trigger.
The bottom line was that after so long, so very long, the beast had gone mad. In killing Pearce, it went against my orders and did the one thing it was never supposed to do, and that was to kill an innocent person.
The beast had gone rabid. The beast had fucked our little arrangement right in its pearly little ass. It could not be trusted anymore with the responsibilities I’d bestowed upon it, and because it couldn’t be trusted, I couldn’t be trusted.
There was no way in hell I was going to let myself go on anymore after that. I wasn’t about to go back to living the kind of life I lived before I learned how to control the fucking thing, when every single day was an exercise in torment and every moon was a study in damnation. There was no way I could live with myself, not after having it so good for so many years. I wasn’t going to go backward. I couldn’t be responsible for the death of another child, I just couldn’t, and the knowledge of having killed Pearce burned an acid hole in my stomach.
I glimpsed one of his memories again behind my eyes.
He proposed to her in an Italian restaurant, all cheesy-like, by putting the ring in a glass of champagne. She cried, and it bowled her over. Everyone in the place clapped.
“You’re the best thing that ever happened to me,” he told her.
“Get out of my head!” I screamed to no one in particular.
Knowing that this kind of tragedy (there’s that magic word again) could happen again to some other poor soul so easily made me absolutely sick, hence the gun to my head.
No more blood. No more tears. No more running. Sick of running. I would never again look in a mirror to see my face with that blank, shell-shocked look plastered onto it like a death mask. No more face, I thought. No more killing. No more head. It’s over now.
“You motherfucker,” I gurgled. “We had a deal.”
I could feel the snot and the tears and the spit running out of me, spilling down the barrel of the rifle. I didn’t want to die. I truly didn’t. Jesus, I didn’t have much. I had a truck, an ashtray, a recliner. Doris’s night-light. An old leather jacket with half its flairs missing and a twenty-year-old Led Zeppelin patch on the back. A stinky old eagle feather my mother gave me years ago, which, apparently, was my legacy.
That gun.
My thumb tightened. The trigger went back a hair’s width at a time. I clenched my eyes, wondering if I’d hear the bang.
That fucking beast. How could it betray me?
When all the madness started, the beast would go after anybody—women, children, old folks, you name it. The thing had none of what a common thug would call “decency.” Once I tightened the leash on it, though, it only went after bad guys—people I singled out for it to hunt, even if I didn’t know who they were. I’d give it enough hints to do its job, and it never failed. You’d think that after so many years of routine, the thing would be reliable. I had more than enough information on this Rose Killer to give the beast a good lead, not only from the papers but from a goddamn detective too. And it took my friend down. No one in the world would ever be safe again. The beast was loose. I had to stop it the only way possible.
I would be leaving behind a ratty house with half of its contents hidden, like I was a paranoid old man. No one would ever know who I was, what I was, but because of the articles on the wall, people would be talking about me for years.
In the silence of my bedroom I heard the spring in the gun coil. It was the sound of death made real, and would have been the last thing I ever heard in this world, if not for the roar that erupted in my brain.
I opened my eyes, and I was in the woods.
No I wasn’t. I was in a graveyard. The graveyard in Edenburgh.
The wolf was giving me one of its memories—a brief clip from its night on the town. A single piece of the puzzle.
The wolf was down in Judith Myers’s grave, a great big wall of dirt piled up on one side of the desecrated hole. The full moon rained down silver light.
With one of its giant hands, the wolf angrily swept the dirt from the lid of her coffin, and then broke the locks on it as if they were made of plastic instead of steel. The stench of death wafted up into the monster’s face, forcing a long bellow to echo out from between its frothy lips. The stench of chemicals was thick, of formaldehyde, and alcohol, of makeup for the little girl’s corpse.
It reached behind her neck and lifted her head up. Her lips were red, her dress was a light violet, a draped and high-necked thing of silk. It covered the stitches in her chest. Her eyelids were sealed shut with glue. Behind them, balls of cotton rested where a pair of blue eyes used to be.
Her stiffened abdomen cracked like a knuckle when the wolf raised her up, bringing her up to its pulsing snout. This was something I had seen the beast do before—busting into graves to pick up the scent of its prey from the victim’s body.
The wolf breathed in deep,
hungrily searching to pick up the scent of he who it was sent after. Then the wolf cried, loosening its grip on the dead girl. Her head came back down on the fake pillow heavily, like a brick. The wolf screamed.
And then the spell was broken, and I was back in my bedroom with a rifle in my mouth.
The wolf couldn’t speak the King’s English, but it was clearly trying to communicate with me, perhaps in a simple effort to keep me from blowing a hole in my noggin. It was telling me that it had tried. It hadn’t flipped its lid, and it hadn’t gone after Pearce out of the crystal blue. Something had gone wrong. Something beyond the wolf’s control. But my connection to the monster wasn’t strong enough at that moment to get more than just a snapshot of what had happened the night before. The rest would come to me at some later date. I pulled the barrel out of my mouth. I never did have the balls for that dirty business.
Pearce was a victim. Maybe because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, but he was a victim all the same. I had to find out why. On the one hand, the Rose Killer was still out there. All those dead women needed justice. Pearce needed avenging too. But just as important, I had to find out what had gone wrong. That way I could stop it from ever happening again.
“God have mercy on me,” I said as I slipped the gun back under the bed. As I did so, my telephone began to ring in the living room.
I opened the door to the bedroom, walked over, and picked the phone up from its cradle. I cleared my throat.
“Hello?”
No response. Just breathing.
“Hello?” I said again.
The line went dead.
Evelyn had suffered two losses inside of a week. That should have been bad enough, but it wasn’t. Things were about to get much worse.
THIRTEEN
Pearce—or at least what was left of him—was buried several days later. I woke up real early that morning so I could get dressed for his funeral without having to be in a hurry. I put on my cheap brown suit—the same one I had worn to the little girl’s service—and put on the same black shoes. I would have worn the suit to Gloria Shaw’s funeral, which was two days before Pearce’s, but I didn’t go. I wouldn’t have felt comfortable being there without him. I knew the federales would be there with their cameras, and I didn’t want to be the weirdo that stood out. I combed my hair back and put it in a ponytail. After that I sat down on the couch and watched the television with a cup of coffee. The news station was doing a retrospective of the man’s life. Following that was yet another report of a local man putting a bullet in a stray dog.
Because of that fucking sergeant at the botched press conference, dogs were becoming an endangered species in our little town. Every once in a while I heard a shot in the distance. It was like being overseas, hearing shots in the night, and I didn’t like it.
The night before, the FBI had taken over the network and put on an hourlong show about the Rose Killer. It had broadcast nationally from right there in Evelyn, the middle of nowhere, to every corner of the country. All during the show an 800 number scrolled along the bottom of the screen. For anyone who had information, operators were standing by, eager to talk.
The program gave a time line of the events in the case going all the way back to California, and all the victims got their fifteen minutes of fame. I suppose this was a technique to humanize the girls, to try to inspire crippling guilt in the killer.
One of the agents read off a laundry list of evidence they had gathered from all the crime scenes: semen, which I knew about, a hair, and a fingerprint, which I didn’t know about. I wondered if they were lying to make the killer think it was only a matter of time. I also had to wonder what they were holding back.
Halfway through the program, another agent described the FBI profile of the killer. He was supposed to be a white male. He wasn’t supposed to have a regional accent, and if he did, it would be very faint. He was high school educated, but in all likelihood didn’t graduate. They were presuming the lack of job opportunities that came along with a poor education would have made it easier for the killer to wander. Either that or he was a trucker.
I immediately thought of the goon who had been beating on Alice’s mother. He had blown into town from God knows where, and clearly wasn’t a people person. I had his knife in my kitchen. Maybe, I thought, I should track the fucker down and see what he knows.
According to the FBI, the killer had no visible scars, mutations, or defects. He was a normal-looking man, which was why he was always able to blend into his environments without being noticed. He was a chameleon. A guy with a peg leg and an eye patch would have stuck out. However, they did believe he either had a stutter or was missing toes or something. Something for the man to feel insecure about without it showing for all the world to see.
They believed the killer’s mother was abusive, perhaps overly promiscuous, and the killer maybe even had an aunt or a sister who didn’t do too good by him either. They believed that there was some cataclysmic event that touched off the murders in the first place, something like the killer losing his job, or finding out his old lady was cheating on him, or that she was pregnant. Something stressful to drive him over the edge. The FBI man explained that whatever it was, specifically, it would surely be something that they had come across before, and they understood. There were people out there who cared about the killer, and they knew he needed someone to talk to. It would be better for everyone involved—both the FBI and the killer—if he came to them before they dragged him out of whatever bed he was sleeping in, and whether it was tomorrow, next week, or next month, they would find him.
They said he should turn himself in. Even if the killer didn’t think so, there were people out there who cared about him and didn’t want to see him get hurt. This was something they had seen a thousand times. They said that once he was apprehended, the people who cared would pop up like flowers to comfort him. The reference to flowers was obvious, and was clearly another attempt to connect to the man.
I don’t know if the FBI program was always scheduled to take place when it did, or if they bumped it up so there was a potential for good news on the day of a fellow lawman’s funeral.
I was nervous about going to the funeral. More than anything I was dreading seeing Martha. I couldn’t bear to see her in pain. There was a part of me that was now a home for Danny Pearce. Because of that, I knew her likes, her dislikes. I knew what she tasted like, what her bathroom habits were. I knew how much she loved him, and what she looked like naked. I could never make those images go away no matter how much I wanted to. They just happened.
The phone rang. I broke into a cold sweat and reached for it.
“Hello?”
A shallow breath on the other end of the line.
“When I find out who this is …” I said, and then the line went dead.
I had been getting the hang-up calls since the day Pearce died. They were relentless. Somehow, whoever was behind it always knew when I was home, when I was awake. I didn’t like it one bit. I had enough to worry about as it was—I didn’t need a fucking stalker making me look over my shoulder. I felt like I was being targeted.
I polished off my cup of coffee and headed out the door.
Wild Oaks Cemetery was about a hundred and fifty years old. There was a large area of Civil War burials that took up a good quarter of the land space. Off to one side of the grounds was a narrow pond, like a cascading teardrop on the ground, and scattered about were mangled trees consumed by foot-high patches of ivy. Some of the older graves were buried by the stuff, and no one ever bothered to clear it away. That’s how you knew the families of the deceased weren’t around anymore—no one looked after the final resting places of the ancestors.
The feds’ forensic team had retrieved all the information they could from the detective’s body, but the question still remained: What had killed him?
No one knew. The scientists wanted to have the burial postponed as long as possible to do their tests, especially after word filtered
through to them from local law enforcement regarding the slew of similarly disposed-of bodies in the area surrounding Evelyn over the last few years. However, the pressure was on to have the service, both from the wife and from Pearce’s friends on the force.
“Shouldn’t have to keep the man on ice like that,” I heard some black-clad cop say before the service.
“Fuckin’ A, man,” said another. “Unless it’s a rape.”
“Yeah, that’s a different story,” said the other.
I slipped on my sunglasses and kept on walking. In my brown suit I stuck out like a sore thumb caked in shit.
His wife was sitting up front, weeping, and I guess his closest friends were up there too, because he really didn’t have any blood family left alive. I saw his partner, Van Buren, up there in the front row, and I pretended not to. Then there were a few rows of lawenforcement types, all wide in the shoulders, and behind them were some of the townsfolk who’d come out to pay their respects. I was mixed in with that crowd. No one back there was crying for the man, but I was, under my shades.
Off in the distance, behind some trees and shrubs and so on, was a small handful of chaps who were no doubt federales, taking pictures of the crowd with long-distance lenses. I thought I saw Anthony Mannuzza up on a hill. He was taking pictures, talking to some other guy in a suit. I figured if it was him, he would pull some shit like that, taking pictures of the dead man’s service for his shitty little photo book. I made a mental note to kick his ass if I ever saw him again.
The priest went on and on, talking about goodness, service, care, the Lord, and finally, ashes and dust. The wife broke down twice. The second time, they had to hold her up because they were worried she’d fall in the hole with the coffin or some such thing, injure herself and the baby in her belly.
It occurred to me that Pearce was like a father figure to me. On the one hand that was ridiculous because I was older than him and he only thought he knew me. Instead of locking me up for chronic disorderly conduct, he gave me a chance to prove I was a decent man. But on the other hand, at the age of forty, I still wouldn’t have had anything that resembled a normal life if it wasn’t for him.
The Wolfman Page 12
