by Tim Waggoner
“Why don’t you tell me? I am the reporter, you know.”
Joanne smiled. “True. I did the initial walkthrough and took pictures while Alec marked off the scene. I spoke with the guy who discovered the body, and Alec’s taking a statement from him now. Terry got here a few minutes ago, and he’s giving the body a preliminary once-over. I’m no doctor, but I think it’s safe to say the victim didn’t die a natural death.”
“You think?” Dale said.
The boy — he couldn’t have been more than nineteen, twenty at the most — lay on his back in the shallow ditch, eyes open wide, staring sightlessly up at the night sky. The front of his t-shirt was soaked with what appeared to be blood, and his throat had suffered some manner of injury. Joanne was willing to bet it had been cut, but she’d wait for Terry’s verdict. She’d been in law enforcement too long to jump to conclusions about anything.
Terry — more formally, Dr. Terrance Birch — crouched next to the body, probing it gently with rubber-gloved hands. Joanne wasn’t worried about his disturbing any evidence. Though the office of coroner was an elected position in Cross County, Terry was a skilled doctor with a great deal of experience at crime scenes. In short, he was a pro. And he was Joanne’s on-again, off-again lover. Unfortunately, more off than on these days.
“Was he killed in the ditch or dumped there?”
The coldly casual tone Dale always affected in the presence of death bothered her. There was such a thing as taking professional detachment too far.
“From what I’ve seen, I’d say neither.” She nodded in the direction of a wide circle of small orange cones she’d set up on the road less than ten feet away to mark a pool of what appeared to be blood. “Looks like he was cut over there, staggered a few steps, fell into the ditch, and then rolled onto his back.” She’d placed a series of plastic orange flags mounted on wires into the ground to mark the blood trail from the road to where the body lay.
“Any sign of a weapon?” Dale asked.
“Not yet, but we’ve only searched the immediate scene so far. We’ll search a wider area once Terry finishes and the EMTs take the body away.” She hated talking like that, referring to dead people as bodies. She also hated the fact that it bothered her a little less each time she did it.
“Anyone recognize him?” Dale asked.
“No, and there’s no wallet on him.”
“Any tire tracks?”
“Not that we’ve found so far. If there was a car here, it doesn’t look like it pulled onto the shoulder or left behind any skid marks.”
“So … what? The poor boy was just out for a late-night stroll in the country and someone walked up to him and slit his throat?”
“Too early to tell.” But that’s exactly what it looked like to Joanne. She hoped Terry might be able to shed more light once he finished his examination.
Dale nodded toward the man Alec was interviewing. “I take it that’s the guy who discovered the body?”
Joanne nodded. “He was driving home from a poker game — or so he says. From the way he stinks of cheap perfume, my guess is he was out cheating on his wife and doesn’t want to admit it. At any rate, he was driving down the road when his headlights washed over the ditch and he caught sight of the body. He stopped, walked over to the edge of the ditch, and called out to see if the boy was all right. It didn’t take him long to realize the boy was hurt bad, and he ran back to his SUV, got in, locked the doors, and called 911. He was waiting for us here when we arrived.”
“You think he did it?” Dale asked.
“No. He wouldn’t have called it in if he had. Besides, if he cut that boy’s throat, he’d have blood all over him. But he’s clean.”
“I’m surprised he stuck around after he called. You think he’d have been worried the killer might still be nearby.”
“I wondered about that, too,” Joanne admitted. “I figure either he was in shock and it didn’t occur to him that he might be in danger or, more likely, he was already late getting home to his wife, and he realized that staying to cooperate with the investigation would give him an alibi.”
Dale smiled. “So he’s more afraid of his wife than a mad slasher, eh?”
“Looks that way.”
Dale glanced up and down the road before turning back to Joanne. “Quiet tonight. You’d think the vultures would be out in force.”
Vultures was Dale-speak for TV news reporters. Cross County didn’t have its own local television station, but they were close enough to both Dayton and Cincinnati for their reporters to come out — especially for a grisly murder like this one. But none had.
“Maybe we’ve been lucky and they haven’t gotten wind of the murder yet,” Joanne said.
“Maybe,” Dale allowed. “But you and I both know it’s more likely that someone’s pulled a few strings to make sure there’s going to be no on-the-scene TV coverage. Someone whose last name is Cross.”
Before Joanne could reply, Terry called out. “I’m ready.”
As soon as she’d arrived on the scene, Joanne had slipped sterile hospital booties over her shoes, as had Alec and Terry. She was about to tell Dale to stay where he was, but he reached into one of his suit jacket’s outer pockets and pulled out his own pair of blue booties. Joanne shook her head. She should’ve known.
She stepped carefully as she walked into the ditch to crouch next to Terry and the body. A moment later, Dale — booties on — joined them, but he remained standing. She didn’t worry that Dale might disturb any evidence. He’d been present at more crime scenes during the course of his career than she had in hers.
“What have you got for me, Terry?” As soon as the words escaped her lips, Joanne regretted them. Terry could be something of a tease at times, especially when he was handed an impossible-to-resist double entendre like that.
His mouth twitched, as if it were attempting to form a smile, but he fought it down and maintained his professional composure.
“I doubt this will come as any great surprise to either of you, but the cause of death appears to have been exsanguination due to throat laceration. Looks like a knife wound of some sort — a single stroke. Whoever did the cutting knew what they were doing and was damn cold-blooded, too. A cut like this was made swiftly, without hesitation. No defensive wounds are apparent, so either the victim knew his assailant or was taken by surprise. The swiftness with which the cut was made would argue for the latter, but I’ll be able to tell more once I’ve finished the autopsy.”
Even when he was discussing such grisly details, Joanne thought Terry had a sexy voice. Low, soft, with a bit of a sardonic tone. She’d always thought that if he hadn’t chosen to go to medical school, he would’ve made a great late-night radio DJ. He was dressed in a blue windbreaker, jeans, and running shoes, and possessed the lean build of a marathon runner, though he didn’t compete. He was in his late thirties, ten years older than Joanne, and had chestnut-brown hair and matching eyes. His neatly trimmed mustache held more black than brown. When she’d first met him Joanne had thought the contrast in colors odd, but over the years she’d come to accept and even like it.
“Is that all you’ve got to show us?” Dale said.
“Show the sheriff, you mean.”
While Terry tolerated Dale’s presence at crime scenes, he wouldn’t tolerate even a hint of dispespect toward Joanne’s authority. She was the youngest sheriff ever elected in Cross County — for all she knew, the youngest ever elected in Ohio. Most people in the county accepted her in the job, but there were some who thought her too young, especially for a woman.
But there was no need for Terry to defend her. Not only was she perfectly capable of taking care of herself, Dale was the last person who’d deny her authority. After all, he’d been the one who’d convinced her to stand for election in the first place.
Terry reached out, took hold of the bottom of the victim’s t-shirt, and pulled it up.
“Now there’s something I didn’t think I’d see again,” Dale sai
d, his voice nearly a whisper.
Outside of old crime scene photographs, Joanne had never seen it before. Carved into the flesh of the victim’s stomach was a triangle, bisected with a jagged line that resembled a bolt of lightning.
Joanne’s mouth went dry, and there was a roaring in her ears, like the sound of the ocean inside a seashell, but a hundred times louder. Nausea surged through her gut, and the bones in her legs felt like they’d turned to jelly. She felt a nerve-jangling tingle at the base of her skull, and she began trembling as if caught in the throes of a winter wind.
She’d experienced these sensations too many times before, and she knew what they meant.
“This is bad,” Joanne gasped. “Very bad.”
CHAPTER FOUR
She sits naked on a cold stone floor, her body shivering to generate warmth. She’s so tired, and she wants to lie down, but she knows she can’t. The more of her skin that touches the stone, the faster her body heat will be leeched away. If she wasn’t so weak, she’d stand or crouch so that only the bottoms of her feet were pressed against the stone, but it’s taking what little strength she has left simply to stay awake. She may only be nine, but she understands one thing very clearly. If she falls asleep and slumps over onto her side, she will die.
Darkness surrounds her, but she’s been in this place long enough — though she doesn’t know exactly how long — that she’s no longer frightened of it. At first she feared there was someone or something with her here in the blackness, moving slowly toward her inch by silent inch, reaching out with long cold fingers. But after hours of hearing nothing but her own breath and heartbeat, she knew she was alone. Then she began seeing ebon shapes in the darkness swirling and dancing before her eyes. Strange, amorphous forms resembling one-celled organisms viewed through the lens of a microscope. Illusions, she eventually decided. With nothing to see, her mind had created its own images, like a bored artist doodling on a blank piece of paper. At least for a time the inky swirls had provided some measure of entertainment, but after a while they’d vanished. Just like the emperor’s new clothes: once an illusion was revealed to be an illusion, you could no longer believe in it, even if you wanted to. Especially if you wanted to.
So she sits and shivers and stares at the darkness. She has no idea if her eyes are open or closed, but it doesn’t matter. The view’s the same either way.
Slender warm fingers curl over her right shoulder from behind, and warm air puffs against her ear as a voice whispers her name. A raspy scream tears loose from her throat and slices through the dark like a razor.
• • •
Joanne opened her eyes and saw softly glowing blue shapes hovering in the air before her. It took several seconds before she understood the shapes were numbers, and several more before she could make any sense of them.
4:54.
She continued staring at the numbers until she realized she was looking at the time display on a microwave. She was in a kitchen … her kitchen. She realized then that her fingers ached, and she looked down to see that she was gripping the counter so hard that her knuckles were bone white. With an effort, she relaxed her hands and let go of the counter. Her fingers were stiff and she shook out her hands to work some life back into them. She wondered how long she’d been standing here gripping the counter like that. Minutes? Hours? There was no way to know.
Twenty years ago … but in some ways — too many — it was as if it had happened only yesterday, was still happening right now, this very second, and was never, ever going to stop.
The light over the sink was on, but Joanne nevertheless walked over to the switch plate by the doorway and turned on the ceiling light with fingers she couldn’t keep from trembling. Right now, the brighter the better. She got a glass from the cupboard, went to the sink, and filled it with tap water, concentrating on keeping her hand as steady as possible. She liked the taste of bottled water much better, but she was too practical to waste money on little luxuries like that, especially on her salary. She gulped the water, not caring that some of it trickled down the sides of her face and dripped onto the front of her red silk pajama top. That and a pair of panties was all she wore when she slept, no matter the time of year or the temperature.
When she’d finished the water, her throat still felt dry and constricted, so she refilled the glass, gratified to see that her hand no longer shook, and then sat at the small wooden table in the breakfast nook. Every morning — when she didn’t have to go in to work early, that is — she sat here with her coffee and a toasted onion bagel with butter and looked out the window as dawn came to Cross County.
She lived five miles outside of Rhine in a small farmhouse, though she only owned a couple acres of land. When the previous owner had decided to retire after his wife passed away, he’d sold most of his property to a neighboring farmer. That man had decided to use his new land to grow Christmas trees, and while he wasn’t getting rich, he did better than many of the county’s farmers.
Normally Joanne liked looking out her window at the regular rows of small evergreens, but she left the blinds closed for now. It was still night, and after the dream she’d had, she wanted nothing to do with darkness for a while.
As bad as the dream had been, she was more disturbed by the fact that she’d apparently been sleepwalking. It had been a long time since she’d done that. The last time she’d slept over at Terry’s place, actually — which was why it had been the last time. She’d had a nightmare then, too, though she hadn’t told Terry about it. She’d never told anyone about the nightmares: not her parents, and none of the few lovers she’d had in her life. She’d never even told the therapist her mom and dad had forced her to see when she was nine. For one thing, the details faded soon after she awakened, though she never forgot the darkness and the cold. But for some reason she felt that the nightmares were a private thing, something she didn’t want to share … or perhaps wasn’t supposed to.
Thinking of Terry made her long for his presence. Right now she wanted nothing more than to feel his strong arms wrapped around her, to press her ear to his chest and hear the reassuring sound of his heart beating, to feel his breath warm and tingly on her neck, feel his moist gentle lips slide against hers. For a moment she was tempted to give Terry a call and ask him to come over, but the moment passed. She didn’t want to wake him, not after he’d been out to a crime scene so late. Let him sleep. Maybe they could get together tomorrow night.
Joanne took a sip of her water, wishing it were something a hell of a lot stronger. She had booze in the house — half a bottle of merlot in the fridge and a bottle of Royal Crown whiskey Dale had given her for her last birthday that she still hadn’t opened. But she resisted the temptation. She’d gotten in around three, and though she’d only been asleep for a couple hours, she needed to get back to work as soon as possible. Homicide investigations weren’t exactly the kind of thing you could put off until you were well rested. She knew from experience that she would have a hard time going back to sleep after a nightmare bad enough to cause her to sleepwalk, and the amount of booze it would take to put her down would make it damned hard to get back up when she’d need to. Better to stick with water for now, as unsatisfying as it might be.
She closed her eyes and once more saw the mutilated corpse of the teenaged boy lying in the ditch. The image in and of itself didn’t disturb her. Cross County didn’t have the amount of crime that urban areas did, but the boy wasn’t the first dead body she’d seen in her career, and she knew he wouldn’t be the last. What bothered her was the feeling she’d experienced at the crime scene — the nauseating, overpowering sensation that Something Was Wrong. She was a pragmatic person, not given to putting stock in hunches and intuition, though she knew law officers who swore by them. She believed in gathering evidence and making rational inferences based solely on that evidence. That was how she’d been trained, and that was how she operated.
Usually. But there were times …
The electronic tone of her cell
phone made her jump, causing her to spill water onto the table. She put the glass down and looked in the direction of the sound. Though she’d left her phone on the nightstand when she went to sleep, it now rested atop the counter next to the stove. Evidently she had brought her cell into the kitchen with her when sleepwalking. She couldn’t stop being sheriff, it seemed, even when unconscious. She couldn’t decide it that was comforting or not.
She got up, walked over to the counter, and answered the phone, half-hoping it was Terry.
“Sheriff Talon.” She didn’t say hello, just in case this wasn’t a personal call.
“You should be asleep.”
Joanne couldn’t help smiling. “So should you, Dale.”
“I don’t need much sleep these days. I pulled out my notes on the Coulter murders.”
Dale would never say Carl the Cutter’s murders. He was never flippant when it came to death, not even indulging in gallows humor as many cops and reporters did in order to come to terms with the darkness that too often accompanied their jobs. Dale had too much respect for death to ever treat it lightly.
Joanne tore a paper towel off the roll attached to the bottom of a cupboard and walked back to the table to mop up the water she’d spilled.
Just hearing Dale’s voice made her feel better. “If you’re in a mood to work, why don’t you come over here?” Joanne said. “My shower needs to be re-grouted.”
“Sorry,” Dale answered. “Typing’s the only manual skill I possess, and even then I’d be hopeless if it wasn’t for spellcheck. I don’t have any of the crime-scene photos from Coulter’s murders, but I do have some sketches of Coulter’s calling card that Stan made for me. The design looks exactly the same as the symbol carved into the boy’s belly.”
