Evil Harvest

by Anthony Izzo

  Medical supplies, no doubt, although they wouldn’t need them. The victim was long dead.

  The two paramedics looked confused. They both kept looking around, perhaps waiting for the medical examiner to arrive on the scene. The whole thing looked awfully loose and sloppy. No other officers on the scene, no medical examiner, nobody being questioned as to what they saw.

  Somebody called the police, and yet it didn’t look like a report was being taken.

  “I heard the cop tell the ambulance crew it looked like there were bite marks on the body,” someone said from behind Matt.

  Matt turned around to see where the voice came from. Its owner was a pudgy kid, maybe seventeen. His belly hung over the waist of his cargo shorts.

  “What did you say?”

  “About what?”

  “Bite marks.”

  “Oh. The girl told the officer and the officer told the medics that it looked like there were bite marks on the body.”

  “What girl?”

  “The girl who found the body.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Over there. By the police car,” he said, pointing to the cruiser.

  “Thanks. Harry ...”

  “Here comes the cavalry.”

  Another police cruiser pulled up onto the grass, its siren blaring.

  “The kid behind us told me there were bite marks on the body,” Matt said.

  “Did he see them?”

  “No. The girl who found the body told the cop that.”

  “Where’s the girl?”

  Matt stood on his tiptoes to look over the crowd. He saw a blond girl of about fourteen leaning against the car. She wiped tears from her face with her shirt.

  He wanted to find out what she’d seen. The cops would be busy with the crowd and the crime scene, so Matt had an idea.

  “Let’s go talk to her,” he said.

  “And the cops?”

  “They’re preoccupied. She’ll give us the best information.”

  The red-haired cop who’d pulled up in the cruiser hitched his belt and approached the ambulance crew. After a word with them, the crew got in the ambulance, backed it up and drove away. That was weird. How were they planning on getting the body to the morgue?

  The red-haired cop approached the balding cop at the shelter.

  “Now’s our chance.” Matt tugged at Harry’s sleeve and they walked over to the girl.

  Matt and Harry approached the girl. She leaned against the rear of the police car, arms folded across her chest. Mascara ran down her cheeks, and even in the dark Matt could make out the redness in her eyes. Her bottom lip quivered.

  Matt wished he had a tissue to offer the kid.

  She had on a pink T-shirt cut so that her navel showed. A pair of in-line skates lay on the ground at her feet. She had a thousand-yard stare going, her big blue eyes looking right through Matt and Harry.

  He felt like a shit heel for what he was about to do, but he had to know about the wounds on the body. “Can we talk to you?”

  Matt waited a few seconds and asked her again.

  She snapped out of it, her head twitching like a person coming out of a bad dream.

  “Who’re you?”

  “Detectives Rand and Wilks. Lincoln Police.”

  “Oh,” she said.

  Matt wanted to breathe a sigh of relief. If the girl hadn’t been in a state of shock, she might not have bought the fact that they were detectives. She might see that neither one of them had a badge clipped to their belts.

  “What’s your name?” Matt asked.

  “Sally Perski.”

  “Where were you headed when you found the body?”

  “Home. I was going home from my friend Laura’s house.”

  “Did you see or hear anyone? Was there a struggle?”

  “Yeah. Three of them. Lights started coming on in the houses and they ran. Then there were sirens.”

  “Did you get a good look at anyone?” Harry said.

  “They were big, I remember that. And ... That was it, just big.”

  Matt sensed she wanted to say something else. “And what? You were going to say something else, Sally.”

  “You’ll think I’m weird.”

  “Try me.”

  She looked back and forth from Matt to Harry, maybe trying to gauge if she could trust them.

  “They looked like animals. Only they walked on two legs.”

  She sniffled and wiped her nose with the back of her hand.

  “Where did they go?” Matt asked.

  She pointed to the six-foot chain-link fence that separated the houses from the park. “They jumped the fence and ran through that yard.” Sally craned her neck to look past Matt. “Where’s you guys’ car? I didn’t see you pull up.”

  Harry broke in quickly. “We’re plainclothes, honey. Our car’s unmarked.”

  She might be coming out of the shock, Matt thought, ready to notice that their impression of detectives was not exactly Dennis Franz quality. They might only get in a few more questions before she realized they weren’t cops. Speaking of which, Matt glanced over to the real ones at the shelter.

  The balding one was taking names on a notepad, and the red-haired one was busy peering under the sheet. He stepped right in the pool of blood on the concrete. Matt didn’t know much about crime scene investigation, but he did know that the cardinal rule was don’t touch anything. The redhead was butchering the scene.

  Harry said, prompting the girl, “So these people ran. Then what happened?”

  “I went to see if I could help the person under the shelter. The one they attacked. And ...”

  Sally’s lip quivered and she put her hand over her mouth, as if to hide her shame from Matt and Harry. Fresh tears welled in her eyes. Matt admired the hell out of the kid. A woman was being assaulted, and the attackers were still in the vicinity, but instead of running, she’d tried to help. In a day where so many people had a “don’t get involved” mentality, the girl tried to help, and that took guts. Matt wanted to give her a hug and tell her she would be all right, even though she probably wouldn’t. The corpse would appear in her nightmares for years to come.

  “I know this is hard, honey. But we need your help if we’re going to catch these people,” Harry said. He put a big hand on her shoulder, a decidedly fatherly gesture.

  She wiped the tears from her cheeks and took a deep breath. “Her body was all bit up. And her throat was sliced. There was a lot of blood.”

  “You’re sure there were bites?” Matt said.

  “Yeah. It looked like chunks were missing. Poor Carla.”

  “Carla? You know her?”

  “Carla Reese. She went to Millard Fillmore.”

  The balding cop approached. His red-haired counterpart was shooing the crowd away.

  Matt wondered if any of them would have helped Carla Reese as she was being torn to pieces. Maybe or maybe not. But they were plenty glad to stop and try to get a peek at her mutilated corpse. God, people were morbid.

  “Thanks, honey. You take care,” Harry said.

  “The officers will take you home. Let’s go, Detective,” Matt said.

  They hurried back to the Town Car, Matt wondering if there would be more attacks. And how would Lincoln’s finest handle this case?

  He also worried about the girl. When Rafferty questioned him about what he saw the day his family was killed, he put the fear of the devil in Matt. Would he try and scare Sally Perski too?

  “I wanna check on that girl tomorrow, Harry. I don’t trust that son of a bitch Rafferty.”

  “You think she’ll be all right for tonight?”

  “He won’t risk another murder. I have a feeling they’ll try and cover this one up. Like another murder I know about.”

  “Get her address and stop by the house tomorrow.”

  As they walked away, Matt saw the girl duck her head and get into the back of the cop car. He was pretty sure he heard the cop say, “What detectives?”

>   Matt and Harry parked next to the Lincoln Community Center, a one-story brick building that was formerly an elementary school. Grubby bushes surrounded the building, stopping just below the first-floor windows. To one side of the building was a wooden playground set with bridges and tunnels and slides. They had a good view of the crime scene. Matt guessed a hundred feet from the shelter. Hopefully not close enough to draw attention.

  The car windows were down; a mosquito whined and landed on Matt’s arm, tickling him with spindly legs. He smacked it, leaving smeared blood on his arm. “Damn bugs.”

  Harry looked at him and laughed. “You would’ve lasted about five minutes in Vietnam. Mosquitoes the size of hummingbirds over there.”

  “You were in ’Nam?”

  “Got a Purple Heart too. Took shrapnel in the ass for Uncle Sam. Show it to you some time.”

  “No offense, but I have no desire to see your bare ass.”

  “I meant the Purple Heart, wise guy.”

  The red-haired cop remained at the shelter. The crowd of onlookers had departed, and now the cop paced back and forth, agitated.

  “What do you suppose he’s waiting for?” Matt whispered.

  “Your guess is as good as mine.”

  They got their answer when a white van pulled into the parking area, swung around, and backed up to the picnic shelter.

  Two men got out, one from the driver’s side and one from the passenger side. The back doors flew open and another pair of men jumped out. They had on coveralls, either blue or black, with no markings. Matt found that strange, because if they were police or worked in some other official capacity, they would’ve had some kind of identification on their clothes.

  The men who had been in the back of the van took out an old army-type stretcher, the kind used for taking wounded off the battlefield, and set it on the tabletop next to the body. Then one of them got the corpse’s feet, while the other grabbed the shoulders. They flopped her on the stretcher; one arm poked out from underneath the sheet. The man at the body’s feet stuck it back under the sheet.

  The sheet glowed phosphorescent against the night and the darkened blood that soaked it. Luminescent.

  Matt was not a religious man, but the sheet reminded him of an angel’s robe. He hoped an angel had escorted the girl’s soul to a better world, for she had met an awful fate in this one.

  They lifted the stretcher with the body and slid it into the back of the van. The cop yelled at them to hurry up.

  Once the body was in the van, one of the men took out a plastic bucket and ran to a waterspout near the picnic shelter. He filled the bucket and brought it back to the shelter. The other men brought two mops out from the van and they went to work mopping the concrete pad.

  “They’re trying to erase any sign of the murder. But why?” Matt said.

  “To keep their fellow creatures hidden,” Harry replied.

  “We have to tell that girl’s family what happened. The cops’ll feed them a line of bullshit about what happened. I wish we could get this on videotape.”

  Matt heard the rumble of a big engine coming. A diesel.

  A turquoise dump truck pulled into the parking area. He could make out LINCOLN D.P.W. painted on the door. Its backup alarm beeped as it neared the picnic shelter.

  For a cover-up, they were making an awful lot of noise. Matt was surprised that none of the lights in the houses near the park came on, or that no one peered out the windows. Perhaps the people in the houses were also demons, fully aware of the events in the park. They would have no need to look, for it was a familiar scene taking place in front of them.

  But what about the people who weren’t creatures underneath? They probably knew better than to watch, aware that the men in the coveralls and the cops were not the good guys. They probably feared retaliation if they were caught spying.

  The men set the bucket and mops back in the van and then all four of them picked up the picnic table, two to a side. They leaned it against the tailgate of the dump truck and tipped it into the bed with a hollow crash.

  The cop took one last look at the concrete pad and then gave a thumbs up. The men in coveralls got into the van, and the cop jogged to his police cruiser.

  The dump truck pulled out first, followed by the cop car and the van.

  They had cleaned the site as if it were picnic trash instead of a human being they were dumping. Matt felt his stomach knot. “You believe this?”

  “This town, anything’s possible,” Harry said.

  Rafferty stepped out of the patrol car and slid his baton into his belt. Clarence stood at the picnic shelter, rubbing his hands together, as if trying to warm them. As Rafferty approached, he shifted his weight from foot to foot.

  Clarence had radioed Rafferty on his way back from Jimbo’s and told him there was a murder in the park. Rafferty told Clarence to meet him there pronto.

  Now, Clarence waited for him like a ten-year-old boy who’s broken a window and sees his father coming up the driveway. Rafferty stopped three feet from him.

  “The boys took the body away?” Rafferty said.

  “Yep.”

  “Witnesses?”

  “There was a group of kids. I got their names.”

  “Others?”

  “The ambulance crew.”

  “Our guys.”

  Clarence nodded. “Charles called them. He was the first one on the scene.”

  “Why didn’t Linda call you?”

  “Don’t know.”

  Rafferty punched the wooden support post that held up the shelter’s roof. All calls came right to Linda at the station, for Lincoln had no central dispatcher. She was supposed to call Rafferty, and if he wasn’t around, Clarence. At least it didn’t get out over the scanner.

  The ones who murdered the girl must’ve gotten spooked or been stupid. Besides taking a victim before the Harvest, they violated the essential rules: make the kill in a remote location and consume the body fully. The murderers had left behind evidence, and Rafferty didn’t want strangers poking their noses into his business. Evidence led to questions by Outsiders. Every murder like this meant having to go through a cover-up.

  Each of them made on average one or two kills per year. Most went to neighboring towns and cities to make the kills, so as not to draw attention to Lincoln.

  Rafferty knew what was happening; it was too close to the Harvest. The need to hunt and kill was welling up inside his fellow creatures like a geyser ready to gush. He was losing control of his followers.

  “There was a little girl who found the body.”

  “Where is she?”

  “I dropped her at the station house.”

  Rafferty hunkered down and examined the concrete pad that served as the shelter’s floor. He took out his flashlight and shined it on the floor. The clean team had done a good job mopping up blood, for there was no visible evidence of a kill.

  “Any idea who did it?”

  “No. There were three of them according to the girl.”

  “Where’d they go?”

  “Over that fence.” Clarence pointed to the fence that separated the houses from the park.

  “Something else. The girl said some detectives questioned her.”

  “Son of a bitch. What detectives?”

  “I don’t know. And the press was here too.”

  He felt like slamming Clarence up against one of the posts and knocking some sense into his skull. Where the hell would detectives come from? Lincoln didn’t have a detective bureau, it was too small. The nearest city that did was Buffalo, and the Buffalo cops wouldn’t have known about the murder.

  Shit was getting worse by the moment.

  “Things are going downhill. Jimbo killed someone at the station. And I got into it with him tonight. He challenged me, tried to kill me.”

  “What happened?”

  “I tore out the old bastard’s throat.”

  Clarence’s mouth opened in an O of surprise. “Jesus, Ed.”

  “Ne
ver mind that. Did they take the body?”

  “They did. Got rid of the picnic table too.”

  “The crowd that was here, were they Outsiders?”

  “There were a few.”

  “Give me the names. I want to talk to all of them.”

  Clarence pulled a sheet off of his notepad with a list of names written on it in blue ink.

  “Things are getting out of control,” he repeated. “It’ll be hard to keep this up.”

  “There’s more,” the redhead warned.

  “Now what?”

  “Some woman cop got into it with one of ours in a house on Dorchester. The house burned down.”

  It was that little bitch Donna Ricci who had tried to grill him on the Barbieri murder. He knew it. “What happened to it?”

  “Burned to death. One of the other boys put a few holes in it too.”

  “The body?”

  “In the garage at the station house.”

  “Let’s go see it. Where’s the woman cop?”

  “Lincoln Mercy.”

  “We’ll see her too.”

  CHAPTER 19

  Rafferty entered the squad room with Clarence behind him. He went to his desk and set his nightstick on the desk. “Where is the girl?”

  “In the room,” Clarence said.

  Clarence leaned against his desk, arms folded across his chest, watching Rafferty, maybe expecting an explosion.

  “What about the other item?”

  “In the garage.”

  “Anybody see it?”

  “Don’t think so.”

  Rafferty turned to him; the fluorescent lighting beating on Clarence’s face made him look pale and drawn, like a suspect under interrogator’s lights. He hoped that’s how Clarence felt, because he had fucked this one up but good.

  Too many people got an eyeful of that girl’s body in the park. He didn’t know who he was angrier with—Clarence or the murderers. “You’re sure no one saw it?”

  He scratched his chin and tucked his arm back into the crossed position. “No one saw it.”

  “What about the other officer?”

  “I sent him home from the park.”

  Rafferty half laughed and half snorted. “At least you did something right tonight.”