“That seems odd, doesn’t it? Did his wife seem agitated? Was she worried?”
“Well, I didn’t think to ask,” Gus said, and saying it reinforced for both of them the difference between him and Ferro. The Philly cop would have asked, and would have done it as a matter of routine, and they both knew it. Gus changed the subject. “Could Ruger have done this before he set out for the hospital last night?”
LaMastra, who had just joined them, said, “No, sir. Jimmy Castle had called into your own office at 4:57 A.M. That’s what? Just shy of two hours ago. He’d called in a request for coffee and hot food because it was getting cold out here.”
Gus’s face was screwed up in puzzlement. “That don’t make sense. Ruger was dead by then. Macchio’s been dead for two days and Boyd was spotted in Black Marsh yesterday, apparently heading southeast. So…who’s that leave?”
“Has to be Boyd,” LaMastra said. “No one else it can be.”
“But why? From what you guys told me Ruger was the only killer. Boyd was a flunky. What’d you call him? A ‘travel agent’…he mostly just got real crooks out of the country and stuff like that. Why would a guy like that screw up his own getaway to come back here and kill two cops? It doesn’t make sense.”
“Christ, Chief, nothing about this case has made a damn bit of sense since Ruger and his buddies wrecked their car here,” LaMastra said.
“Wish I could say that I had a working theory about what’s going on,” Ferro said, “but I don’t. Perhaps the ME’s report will give us something we can use.”
A few yards behind them, hidden in the lee of an ambulance, was a small, balding man with wire-frame glasses and a handheld tape recorder. Willard Fowler Newton, who doubled on news and features for the tiny Black Marsh Sentinel, was staring at Ferro’s broad back, and like Chief Bernhardt and the coroner, he was sweating badly despite the cold. He had slipped through the police cordon in hopes of getting enough for a good news story for the morning papers, but he sure as hell didn’t expect to get this.
Chapter 3
(1)
“Let’s go inside. I’m freezing my nuts off out here, Frank,” complained LaMastra, shivering in his light blue PHILA PD windbreaker. Ferro didn’t seem to mind the cold as much, or at least had more discipline and didn’t show it, but he offered no argument when LaMastra repeated his suggestion. They moved into the Guthrie farmhouse, which was already crowded with cops of various kinds. Most of the officers looked expectantly at Ferro, but one glance told them that he had nothing new to say. The detectives went into the kitchen and the local officers seated at the table cleared out as soon as LaMastra gave them The Look. Ferro sat down and sipped his coffee; LaMastra strolled over and peered into the big pot that stood on the stove. The turkey soup was two-days cold and there was a thin film of grease congealed on the surface. “I’ll just heat this up a bit,” he said, looking at Ferro for approval. “Shame to let it go to waste. Think it’s still good?”
Ferro was too tired to care either way, so LaMastra stirred the soup vigorously, replaced the lid and sat down across from his partner. Vince LaMastra was a big blond ex-jock who had played wide receiver for Temple University before entering the police academy. At thirty he still had the narrow hips, broad shoulders, and bulky muscles of a college ballplayer, but now there were the beginnings of crow’s feet at the corners of his bright blue eyes and laugh lines etched around his mouth. Not that he was laughing at the moment as he sat hunched over, forearms on the table, frowning at Ferro. “Gus was right—this case is getting away from us, Frank.”
Ferro snorted. “We never really had our hands on it. This was a runaway train from the first.” Frank Ferro was older and more battered than his partner, his dark brown skin marked here and there by faded pink scars—souvenirs from his days walking a beat in North Philly. His manner was quiet and refined, but his eyes were cop’s eyes. Quick and hard.
“Not what I mean,” LaMastra said, shaking his head. “These killings, Frank…they bother me—and don’t give me that look. I’m not talking about how it makes me feel, ’cause I’m just like every other cop here. It makes me sick and angry and I would give my left nut to have five minutes in a locked room with Kenneth Boyd—if he’s actually the prick who did this. No, what I’m saying, Frank, is that I just don’t get why Boyd would have done this.”
“Maybe he hung around Ruger too long. Perhaps homicidal mania is contagious. I don’t know.”
“How sure are you that Boyd is the killer here? You yourself said this wasn’t like Boyd. A guy like Boyd shouldn’t even have been at that drug bust that went south. I think Ruger probably planned to screw the deal and then take the money so he could split. He must have found out somehow that Little Nicky suspected that Ruger’d killed his grandparents down in Cape May. The mob’s not big on due process, so Ruger figured that a suspicion alone is more than enough wind up on a meat hook somewhere. So since he had to get the hell out of Dodge anyway he set up the drug buy and then deliberately jacked it so that he and his crew could wipe out the Jamaicans and keep the money all for themselves. Main reason to support this is Boyd being there for that buy. He’s not a soldier, he’s a travel agent. The only reason on earth that Ruger would drag him along is to help him get out of the country afterward. Nothing else makes sense. Boyd’s a tool, not a killer. That’s one of the things that just doesn’t fit.” He got up and began stirring the soup.
Ferro shrugged and rolled his coffee cup between his palms, staring at the liquid as it agitated. “Apparently we underestimated Boyd. Maybe he and Ruger partnered because they were cut from the same cloth. Both of them…just plain crazy. Just because it’s not in Boyd’s jacket doesn’t mean we really have insight into who he is.”
“Let’s look at that.” LaMastra put the lid back on the pot, turned, and leaned a hip against the counter as he began ticking items off on his fingers. “First, we got Karl Ruger’s car breaking down here in Pine Deep. Okay, that makes sense, anyone can have a breakdown. Two, we got Ruger having a serious dispute with Tony Macchio. Who knows why? Maybe he’s really, really pissed at Macchio, or maybe he’s just a sick psycho son of a bitch and tearing people up is how he unwinds. Either way, he focuses on Macchio and tears him up. Spoils him. Eats him, for Chrissakes.”
“Perhaps I’ll pass on the soup.”
“Now, maybe he’s trying to scare the living piss out of Boyd at the same time. You know, make a point? Scare him so bad that he won’t ever think about double-crossing him.”
“But maybe Ruger overdid it,” Ferro offered. “From what we were able to get out of Valerie Guthrie, Ruger believed that Boyd broke his leg in a gopher hole and was cooling his heels out in the cornfield, waiting for Ruger to come back with a stretcher. According to her, Ruger was really torn up when he found that Boyd had bugged out, but that whole thing might have been a dodge. Boyd might have pretended to be injured so he could slip away from Ruger.”
“Maybe. Point is Ruger’s royally pissed and starts blasting away to vent his anger. Shoots Guthrie, beats the shit out of everyone else. Then he dances with that guy Crow and unexpectedly gets his ass handed to him. Okay, so, that leaves Boyd missing. That leaves the money missing.”
“And the coke.”
“And the coke, right. It also leaves Karl Ruger all messed up and it leaves him as one very pissed-off individual. He goes psycho and maybe he figures that Val Guthrie and Crow are the reasons why his life has suddenly turned to shit, sneaks into the hospital for a little payback, but it turns out bad for him and he gets shot to shit. Exit Karl Ruger from the equation.”
Ferro smiled thinly. “Okay, so what is the part you don’t like?”
“I’m coming to that. So, Boyd, no matter how crazy he may or may not be, has to be aware that he is being chased down by half the cops on the eastern seaboard. Logic would dictate that he would just cut his losses and split. Which, apparently, he did ’cause he’s spotted in Black Marsh heading away from Pine Deep.”
“
Without the money or the coke,” Ferro observed. “Witnesses say he wasn’t carrying anything. No bags, nothing.”
“Right, because the area is too hot, and no amount of money is going to do him much good in jail or in the morgue. Probably just stuffed his pockets with as much as he could carry and he’s gone. Except that he isn’t gone.” He stirred the soup some more. “Now we’ve got two dead cops and the only criminal in this whole area who has any connection to this place is Boyd. Which is the part I don’t like. Think about it, Frank. He comes back to the farm—why?”
“Well, for one thing he probably doesn’t know Ruger is dead. That hasn’t made the papers yet. Maybe he and Ruger had worked out a rendezvous thing. You know—if we get separated meet me at such-and-such place at such-and-such time. Boyd could have been on his way back to the farm thinking that Ruger was going to meet him.”
“He’d have to be a complete moron to think that there wouldn’t be a police presence at the farm after everything that happened.”
“I thought we already agreed Boyd was not the sharpest knife in the drawer.”
“Still don’t buy it, though.”
“Another thought is that maybe he hid the money somewhere around here.” LaMastra opened his mouth to speak but Ferro held up a hand. “Consider this, Vince…maybe Boyd let himself be seen in Black Marsh just to establish that he had left Pine Deep. Take the heat off, get us looking in the wrong place. We can assume he knew Macchio was dead, and maybe he witnessed Crow shooting Ruger at the farm the other night and figured that Ruger was dead, too. With the two of them out of the way, and him establishing to witnesses that he was leaving town, then the Pine Deep manhunt is over. Boyd slips back into town to recover the money and drugs he’d hidden.”
“Okay, that’s a better possibility, though he’d still have to be an idiot to believe it. But why attack the cops? How could that possibly work for him in any scenario?”
“Why not? Maybe they saw him when he came back for his stash?”
“Maybe,” LaMastra said and started ladling the soup into a couple of bowls. “But killing two cops? Does that make any sense? Up till now Boyd’s been along for the ride and there aren’t any murder warrants on him. Even in the video from the shoot-out with the Jamaicans it was clear he didn’t even try to hit anyone. Most he’s looking at is drug trafficking and flight to avoid. A good lawyer’d have him out in five even without a plea. Why on earth would he want to up the ante against himself by killing two cops? Does that make any sense?”
“Not if he’s sane, no. Maybe he’s been huffing coke by the handful ever since he hooked up with Ruger. But if Boyd’s that wired and desperate, who knows to what extreme he’ll go?”
“Okay, but does it make sense to tear them to pieces?” He reached over and placed a bowl in front of Ferro.
“Again, not if you’re sane…but when it comes right down to it, do we really know that much about Boyd and his psychological makeup?” Ferro shook his head. “Almost everything we have on him is supposition based on known history.”
LaMastra sat down with his bowl and for a few minutes he and Ferro said nothing as they started in on the soup, which was a rich turkey stock with lots of chunky vegetables and plenty of meat. The fact that it had been sitting on the stove for two days didn’t bother either of them. They’d had much less savory food over the years they’d been on the job.
Ferro nodded. “I don’t have a backup plan here, Vince.”
LaMastra swallowed and said, “I still don’t like it, Frank, because every time I think of it the situation gets worse. I mean, Castle emptied a whole magazine out there. What the hell was he shooting at if not Boyd, and if it was Boyd, how come he missed? And don’t try to sell me any bulletproof vest nonsense, because even with a vest at that range that many shots would have broken just about every one of Boyd’s ribs.”
“Right, and if he didn’t miss,” Ferro said glumly, “how come Boyd isn’t sitting there with a bunch of holes in him? If he was wounded, why was there no visible blood trail leading from the scene?” He sighed. “Maybe we were too hasty about blaming Macchio’s death on Ruger.”
LaMastra looked at him, his spoon halfway to his mouth. “Jeez-us Christ.”
“Just a thought. We know what Ruger was capable of because of Cape May, so we just assumed he’d murdered Macchio, but after what we saw this morning…I don’t know.”
“I don’t know either. It’s—” LaMastra sucked his spoon for a moment, trying to phrase it, but only came up with, “It’s weird.”
Ferro thought about that. He finished his soup, got up, walked over to the stove, and stirred the pot for a few moments. “I had thought we’d be heading home today, Vince.”
LaMastra looked at the wall as if he could see through it and through the timbers of the house and out into the cornfield. “Those poor bastards. That’s no way for cops to go.”
“No way for anyone to go.”
LaMastra grunted and repeated, quietly, “No way for cops to go.”
(2)
Outside the house, on the other side of the kitchen window, Willard Fowler Newton crouched in the shadows cast by the side of the house. He was flushed from nervousness and the cold wind. He had been leaning against the wall for ten minutes listening to Vince LaMastra and Frank Ferro try to work through the killings. His arm ached from holding a small tape recorder up to the window.
As he crouched there he was trying to make sense of what he’d heard, matching it with the info he’d gotten from that kid, Mike Sweeney, last night. The kid had said something about the man who was the center of the police dragnet being the same guy known in the papers as the Cape May Killer, a mass murderer who was the most wanted man in the country. Newton had been excited at first, but when none of the official press releases had even hinted at the connection, he’d dismissed it. Now, however, what he was hearing from these cops was going off like fireworks in his brain.
Willard Fowler Newton was about to break the biggest story of his career, and he knew for sure that it was going to be a total scoop. No one else had a clue about this stuff. No one.
(3)
The Bone Man perched like a crow on a slender branch that reached out from the big oak nearest to the house. All the other branches were filled with night birds, their black-on-black feathers rustling drily in the shadows thrown by the house.
The conversation inside the house ended as the two cops got up and headed back to the crime scene and the reporter crabbed sideways along the house, keeping to the shadows until he could make a break and spring for his car parked out on the road. The Bone Man watched him all the way, and then watched the little car cough and sputter its way up the hill and over; then he stood up, featherlight on the branch, which did not even creak under his weight, and leapt down to the ground. He moved in the opposite direction from Newton, deeper into the corn, past policemen who did not see him and the search dogs who did not smell him—though the oldest of them shivered a bit as he passed, heading deep into the field, and then beyond it to the forest. The stink of blood was overwhelming, and he turned in a full circle, his unblinking eyes penetrating the shadows beneath the trees until he found what he was looking for.
The thing that had once been Kenneth Boyd sat on the rotted trunk of a fallen tree, jaw sagging loose, lips rubber, streamers of flesh caught between misshapen teeth, staring stupidly at the smears of dried blood on its hand, eyes as blank as a doll’s. The Bone Man stood still for a long time, staring at the thing, then as he moved a step forward the creature raised its gory head and looked around slowly until it saw him step into the sunlight. Instantly the vacuous expression transformed into one of feral hate and appalling hunger. Boyd bounded up and lumbered toward the newcomer, staggering on one broken and twisted leg but showing no flicker of pain. Ragged hands that were tipped with black claws reached out toward him as his mouth opened in a guttural scream of rage and hunger.
The Bone Man said nothing, did nothing, just watched as Boyd rushed at
him, watched as he swayed from side to side in a parody of drunkenness. Boyd launched forward with unnatural speed, slashing at him with its claws, snapping at the air with his jagged teeth, rushing forward to try and bowl him over, drag him down, overwhelm him with a savage animal rage. The Bone Man did not try to step aside or run; he merely waited as Boyd leapt the last few yards, snarling with fury—and passed straight through him. The Bone Man turned to see the arc of Boyd’s leap end with a bone-snapping impact on the cold ground. Two nails on Boyd’s outstretched right hand were torn from their roots, and the creature made no attempt at all to break his fall. Boyd’s face smashed into the ground, crunching the cartilage in his nose into pulp and driving a tiny twig deep into the iris of his right eye.
The Bone Man smiled the smallest, thinnest smile. “You thirty years too late trying to kill me, you ugly piece of shit,” he said in a voice that was a whispery echo.
The creature bounded forward again, claws tearing the air, and again he passed through the Bone Man as if he were smoke. The monster tumbled to the ground and once more scuttled around to face him again, mouth wrinkled like a dog’s muzzle, eyes blazing with hate. Boyd rose slowly to its feet, standing in a hunchbacked crouch, glaring at him.
“We can keep this shit up all day,” the Bone Man said. “I’m a ghost, you dumbass.”
Then Boyd froze, head cocked in an attitude of listening, but the Bone Man heard nothing. Boyd sniffed the air with his broken nose, paused and sniffed again. Then as if some unseen hand had reached into his mind and dialed down a rheostat the predatory light went out his eyes and his snarling mouth drooped again into the slack-jawed hang of emptiness. It took two aimless steps backward, turned first to the right and then to the left, both motions apparently without purpose, and after swaying in the sunlight for a full minute, he tottered off across the road back toward the cornfields. The Bone Man watched him go and stood quietly for a long time until even the faintest sounds of his lumbering passage through the corn had faded. He sighed and then sat slowly down on the rotted log, pulling his guitar around so that as he sat it lay across his bony thighs. His long fingers stroked the strings, and as the breeze returned to stir the tips of the tall corn he began to play and sing. It was the old prison blues song, “Ghost Road Blues.” The air above and around him seemed heavy and oppressive as it loomed above the farms and forests of Pine Deep. In the clearing near the cornfields where four people had now died, the Bone Man played blues to lament the dead and to preach the gospel of the dark times. Not times coming at the End of Days, but of the darkness here at hand—an October darkness, abroad and hungry.
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