“Oh, Christ,” he said when he saw what was behind the couch.
It was a man, presumably Michael Gordon, bloody like the others, with his clothing torn. There was a ragged, bloody stump where the head should have been.
“Wh—” Don’s mouth was so dry he had no voice. “Where’s his head?”
“There,” Doc Ingram said, his voice barely above a whisper.
Don followed the direction of the physician’s gaze. Michael Gordon’s head was sitting on the stairway leading to the second floor. Its lips were pulled back in a hideous grin, and its eyes were open, looking at Don. He had the feeling it was still alive, watching him and grinning that grotesque grin, thinking what a dumb shit this hick constable was. The feeling passed. Michael Gordon’s eyes were lifeless; they saw nothing. And the grin was some trick of muscles that had lost their life-giving blood and could no longer receive directions from a dead brain.
“I’m going to be sick,” Doc Ingram said. But he just stood there, stunned, making no move to leave the room.
“I’m going to need your help here,” Don said.
“What can I do? You need a mortician, not a doctor.”
“You know what I need,” Don said. “Look them over and tell me what you can.”
The physician just stood there, staring, not moving.
“Come on,” Don said, leading him outside. “You stay out here and get some fresh air while I take pictures.”
Hiram Bellamy, who’d been waiting for them outside, said, “What do you think happened?”
Before Don could respond, Doc Ingram said, “The devil got loose in there.”
Don got his Polaroid camera from the Cherokee and went back inside to take photos before anything was disturbed.
When he was finished and rejoined the others, Doc Ingram seemed to be feeling a little better.
“Can you give me a hand in there now?” Don asked.
Ingram nodded. “Let’s go.”
The physician started with the woman. He squatted beside her, feeling her flesh in places, examining her wounds, checking her limbs for the degree of rigor mortis.
“I’d say she died last night, between eight and midnight. That’s just a guess, however, no guarantees.”
The physician grunted and continued his examination of the body. “Look at this,” he said.
“What?”
“Here on her neck, where the flesh is missing.”
Don looked. There was a hole in her neck, a red and ragged pit. The doctor lifted the body up, pushed away the shredded material of Samantha Gordon’s clothing, and studied the flesh. What had happened to these people? What kind of a maniac would indulge in such a bloodbath? Don recalled what Doc Ingram had said a few moments ago. The devil got loose in there. He pushed the thought away.
“I don’t understand this,” the doctor said.
“What?”
“Any of it.”
“Could you be a little more specific?”
“Yeah. This hole in her neck I was showing you. The flesh was bitten off.”
“You mean an animal did this?” As soon as he said it, Don realized how ridiculous the notion was. The only wild animals on the island big enough to do something like this were bears. The snow cover hadn’t melted away yet, so the bears would still be hibernating. Besides, who ever heard of a bear closing the door? And the Gordons sure as hell wouldn’t let one into their house.
“No,” Doc Ingram said. “No animal did this. Look at those marks on her wrists. She was tied up.”
Don shuddered. There was a psycho loose on the island. A psycho who bit off pieces of his victims.
“There’s something else I’ve got to tell you,” Doc Ingram said. “And you’re going to think I’m crazy when I say it.” He look a slow breath. “I think her cause of death was loss of blood.”
“That’s not surprising,” Don said. “Just look around.”
“I don’t mean she bled until her heart stopped. I mean there’s no blood in her at all. She’s dry.”
“How?”
“I don’t know how.”
“You mean that … that whoever killed her …” Don let his words trail off. Was there a vampire loose on the island? He saw himself discovering the monster’s hiding place, raising the lid of its coffin, placing a stake against its heart, raising the hammer …
“I don’t know what I mean,” Ingram said. Almost as an afterthought he added, “There’re bite marks on her shoulder.”
“What kind of bite marks?”
“Human bite marks.”
Don muttered something that was incomprehensible, even to himself.
They examined the other bodies. All of them had bite marks and places where the flesh was missing. All of them had been bound. One of the children, the boy, still had a piece of cord dangling from one wrist. Doc Ingram estimated the time of death for all of them was between eight and midnight.
“He must have made the others watch,” Don said. A shiver hit between his shoulder blades, traveled down into his midsection.
They were standing over the two dead children. Was this the work of the same person who killed Paul Edley? The scene looked so similar with the bloody corpses, the spattered walls. If this was the work of the same person, then his earlier assumption that the motive for Edley’s death was jealousy or revenge was now worthless. This was mindless slaughter. This was the work of a raging maniac, somebody whose thought processes were going around and around like a cracked record, screaming, Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Over and over and over.
“It’s so terrible when it’s children,” Doc Ingram said.
“Wasn’t any picnic for the adults either.”
“No,” the doctor said. “Not for any of them.”
“Doc, can you get someone to come out and pick you up? I’m going to be here for a while.”
“No problem.”
“Also, I’m going to need you to come back later on so we can load up the bodies.”
“I’ve only got two patients coming in today, both in the afternoon. Unless there’s an emergency, there shouldn’t be any problem. Are you going to leave it up to me to find somewhere to put the bodies?”
“It would be a big help.”
The physician nodded. “You’re really going to owe me. I hope you know that.” Without waiting for Don to respond, he added, “Could one person do this to four people?”
“Probably,” Don said. “Line everybody up against the wall, hold them at gunpoint, tie them up one at a time—or make them tie each other up.”
“How many people do you think did it?”
“I don’t know. Why?”
“I was just wondering how many psychos we have running around.”
They went back outside. Hiram Bellamy was standing there, looking as ashen and close to collapsing as he had before.
3
Mrs. Anna Neuhaus walked purposefully into her kitchen, put the wall-mounted phone’s receiver to her ear, and dialed Reverend Douglas Pfeil’s phone number. Irritably, she pushed some errant strands of blonde hair out of her face. In the back of her mind, she noted that she’d have to check the roots, see if any gray was showing up yet.
Anna Neuhaus was getting more annoyed by the moment. Reverend Pfeil had promised to come over yesterday evening and have a chat with Brooke, and he’d never shown up, never even phoned to say he couldn’t make it. All day she’d been trying to get in touch with him, and he hadn’t been there.
The Pfeils’ phone rang for the third time.
Every time Anna had called, Carolyn Pfeil answered, sounding tinny and distant, as if the conversation were being held over a phone nearly as primitive as the one Alexander Graham Bell had built. But it wasn’t the connection; it was Carolyn, who sounded as if she were talking in her sleep.
The phone rang for the tenth time.
Anna Neuhaus disliked being treated with so little respect. She was, after all, a member of the church’s board of trustees. And her husband was on the town
council. They owned the Michigander Inn and Lakeview Cabins. All of which put them among the town’s leading citizens, and Anna Neuhaus expected to be treated accordingly.
The phone rang for the twelfth time.
Mrs. Neuhaus was simmering now, each ring of the phone just that much more fuel for her anger. She let it keep ringing, as if that would somehow make a statement, show that Mrs. Anna Neuhaus was no one to be trifled with.
The phone’s fifteenth ring hummed in her ear.
On the sixteenth ring, someone picked up the receiver. But no one spoke.
“Hello,” Anna Neuhaus said.
Silence.
“Hello,” she said, making her annoyance plain. “Is someone there?”
Silence.
“This is Anna Neuhaus,” she said. “I have no time for games.”
“Oh, hello, Mrs. Neuhaus.” It was Reverend Pfeil.
“I’ve been trying to reach you all day.”
“Oh?”
“You promised to come over and talk to Brooke.”
“Hmmmm. I did, didn’t I?”
“You never showed up.”
“I didn’t, did I?”
“No, you certainly didn’t.” Anna Neuhaus was beginning to feel vaguely uncomfortable about the way this conversation was going. Why did the reverend seem so nonchalant, almost mocking? And then a truly horrible thought occurred to her. What if the minister was on drugs? A man of God corrupted, corrupting them.
“Is there anything else?” Pfeil asked.
For one of the few times in her life, Anna Neuhaus was at a loss for words.
“In that case, I’ve got something to say to you,” the minister said. “Something I’ve been dying to tell you for years, Mrs. Neuhaus.”
“What?” she managed to say.
“Stuff it up your ass, Mrs. Neuhaus.”
Anna Neuhaus wasn’t sure she’d heard correctly. “I beg your—”
“Mrs. Neuhaus, you listening?”
“Yes. And I—”
“Get fucked.”
The line went dead.
4
Don sat at his desk, feeling the weight of five murders pressing down on him. Five particularly gruesome murders in a place where the leading cause of death was old age. The second most common reason for people dying was drowning, which usually only happened to summer people. Now someone had bludgeoned a man to death, and someone—maybe the same someone, maybe someone else—had murdered a family of four.
Literally ripping off chunks of the victims’ flesh with his—or her—teeth.
Decapitating one.
Draining the blood from another. (He refused to think of it in terms of sucking. There were no Bram Stoker elements to this. Uh-uh. No way.)
As far as Don could tell, the prints on the tire iron used to kill Paul Edley didn’t match any of those he’d found in the Gordon house. But that didn’t mean a whole lot. The killer could have worn gloves while butchering the Gordons. And the prints from the tire iron could have come from the murderer’s right hand, while prints taken from the Gordons could have come from his left—or even different fingers on the same hand. But then Don’s knowledge of fingerprinting was rudimentary. Maybe an expert could match prints he thought were unalike.
Doc Ingram and he had loaded the bodies into the Cherokee. They’d put the children on top of the adults, but then none of the victims was going to complain about the cramped, uncomfortable ride. The corpses were now at Doc Ingram’s office, where the physician was giving them a more thorough examination than he had at the scene.
Don was sure everyone on the island knew what had happened. Despite her love of gossip, Corrine knew enough to be circumspect about discussing police matters. But Hiram Bellamy and Doc Ingram were also aware of what had happened, which meant the gory details of the Gordons’ bizarre deaths had been told in stunned tones to numerous shocked listeners.
Corrine looked somewhat dazed, the expression on her face asking, What the hell’s going on here? She had not asked Don that question, apparently realizing he had no answer for it. The phone rang, and Corrine answered it. “Doc Ingram,” she said.
Picking up his phone, Don said, “Whatcha got for me, Doc?”
“I’m going to have a bill for you shortly.”
“Besides that.”
“The others had some blood left in them. Only the woman was dry.”
“Doc, how … how do you drain someone like that?”
“I don’t know.”
“How could it be done? With a mechanical device of some sort?”
“What, pick up the Sears catalog and order a mechanical bloodsucker? I just don’t have an answer for you. Draining the blood from people’s something I’ve never been too heavily into.”
The doctor’s reference to a mechanical bloodsucker made Don think of Kesselring’s pool cue case. But he didn’t know what to do with the thought. Even with everything that had happened, he wasn’t ready to think the ex-cop was carrying around a machine that drained people’s blood.
“How do funeral homes drain the blood when they embalm people?” Don asked.
“They make an incision in the neck, exposing the carotid artery and the jugular vein. They make an incision in the vein, pump embalming fluid into the artery, and as the blood is displaced by the fluid, it flows out of the vein and into the drains on the table.”
“I take it Mrs. Gordon’s blood wasn’t displaced by anything.”
“No. She was just dry.”
“Jesus.”
“Here’s something else for you to chew on. Michael Gordon’s head was gnawed off.”
“Gnawed?”
“Yes, gnawed. At least the flesh was. The bone was simply snapped.”
“Snapped?”
“Are you going to repeat everything I say?”
“How much strength would it take to … to do something like that?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never had occasion to sever any human heads. I suppose someone who’s determined to do it could get the job done somehow.”
Don was unable to think of an intelligent-sounding question.
“Phil Deemis says he doesn’t want any more corpses in his freezer. What am I going to do with them? Right now I’ve got them on planks stretched between chairs in the back room. They can’t stay there.”
“You don’t know anyone else with an empty freezer?”
“Not anyone who wants a corpse in it, no.”
“Buy one, charge it to the town.”
“You kidding?”
“Okay, I’ll handle it. If I can get O’Connor to send one over, will you store the bodies for me? It’ll be easier than hauling them over here.”
Doc Ingram sighed. “Yeah, I’ve got room.”
They were silent for a few moments, then Don said, “What kind of a person drains the blood out of a woman?”
The physician had no answer for that.
Don said, “I don’t even know whether the killer took the blood with him or just used it to add to the splatter on the walls.”
“Maybe he drank it,” the doctor said.
“You’re not serious, I hope.” Don didn’t like that notion at all. It was getting entirely too close to good old Bram Stoker.
“It’s not that unusual,” the physician said. “Warriors in some cultures drink the blood of their enemies. Some people consume the blood of animals.”
“As a rule, here on Ice Island, they restrain themselves.” Don massaged his forehead. “Doc, what am I looking for here? A psychopath who carries a bloodsucking device around with him?”
“I don’t know what you’re looking for,” the physician said. “I don’t understand this any better than you do.”
After ending the conversation with Doc Ingram, he called Dennis O’Connor, who operated a used-appliance shop and appliance repair service. He persuaded Dennis to send his biggest freezer over to Doc Ingram’s and bill the town. Then he called the state police office in Marquette and asked for Lieutenant R
oper.
“Hey, Don,” the lieutenant said. “What’s happening?”
Don told him.
“Jesus Christ! You got a real mess on your hands there. Got any suspects?”
“No. And I really need some help. Need it badly. I’m having to buy freezers to preserve all the bodies.”
“I can’t tell you anything encouraging about the chopper. We checked on the parts, and the outfit we ordered from seems to have lost the paperwork.”
“This is urgent,” Don said. “I can’t handle this.”
“I tried to get another chopper out of Detroit, but I couldn’t. I got another idea, though. Let me try that.”
“Whoever’s doing the killing might not be through yet.”
“I know your situation’s serious,” the state policeman said. He paused, then added, “What kind of a person decapitates one victim and sucks the blood from another?”
Don wished Roper hadn’t used the word suck. “A very sick person,” he said. “A very dangerous person.”
“Let me get back to you,” the lieutenant said. “With what you’ve got on your hands out there, I’m sure I can find some way to get some help to you. Just let me work on it.”
After hanging up the phone, Don leaned back in his chair and rubbed his eyes, making little gold lights dance on a field of blackness. And he recalled Doc Ingram’s reaction to the gruesome scene in the Gordons’ house.
The devil got loose in there.
No devil. No Bram Stoker. The killer was a bloodthirsty lunatic, a crazy person, someone with a brain in which the psychological equivalent of a computer chip had burned out—or maybe a whole bunch of computer chips. And that was scary enough all by itself.
And yet Doc Ingram’s words continued to taunt him.
The devil got loose in there.
Don shivered.
Eight
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