Angel of Death

by Ferguson, Alane

  “Where did they find him?” she asked softly. Her breath frosted the glass.

  “It seems he was found in his own bed.”

  “At least that sounds peaceful.”

  “I’m not sure about that—not from the way Jacobs was babbling about the body’s condition. I guess we’ll know more when we get there.”

  Cameryn thought about the death, but forced herself to think about his life. “Mr. Oakes wasn’t married, was he?”

  Her father squinted, thinking. “If memory serves he is—was—a single guy.”

  “So who was it that found him? A girlfriend?”

  He shook his head. “No. Sad to say he was discovered by a Boy Scout.”

  It took a beat for Cameryn to register this. “A Boy Scout found the body? Exactly how did that happen?”

  Her father put on his blinker and turned onto Snowden, a winding dirt road that took them close to the cemetery. “Oakes was a Scout leader—did you know that?”

  “No. He was a real health-nut type of guy—a hiker and mountain biker—but I didn’t know about the Scouting. Then again, I haven’t been in a troop since Brownies.”

  “Sheriff Jacobs told me Oakes was supposed to take a group on some wilderness hike. When he didn’t show, one of the Scouts went looking for him, pounded on the front door, and then let himself in. That’s when he found the body. The kid’s apparently pretty shook up.”

  Cameryn rubbed her knees through her jeans as she thought about this. “Do you know the kid’s name?”

  “All I know is Jacobs said he’s some Eagle Scout—”

  “An Eagle Scout?” She straightened and looked at her father in surprise. “Then it’s got to be Kyle O’Neil. He’s the only guy in Silverton who’s made it that far.”

  “It’s probably him, then. And here we are.” Easing the station wagon into Mr. Oakes’s driveway, Patrick turned off the ignition. But he didn’t move. Instead, he rested his elbow on the steering wheel, tapping his forehead with his index finger. She could tell he wanted to say something, so she waited, outwardly patient, although her mind was already focused on what she’d find inside the blue house.

  The clipboard with the coroner form was on the dashboard, so she pulled it onto her lap. Checking her watch, she entered their arrival time: 1126 military time. She’d already taken out a pair of latex gloves from the death bag, so she wriggled them on and snapped the bands against her wrists, stinging her skin. Her hair had been tied back, and the peppermint oil, perfect for covering smell if need be, was secure in her pocket. Cameras weighed down the death bag. She was ready.

  Patrick sighed. “Could you stop for just a second, Cammie? I want to talk to you before we go in there.”

  She clipped the pen into the top of the board, not meeting his gaze. “What about?”

  “We left off our last—conversation—pretty suddenly and . . . you and me—we’re still good, right? You’d come and talk to me if . . . if you needed to. About Hannah.” He turned his head to look at her. And for the second time in as many days, Cameryn raised her own eyes and lied straight into his clear, blue, fatherly eyes.

  “You know I would,” she said, marveling at her own nerve.

  Relief washed over his face, and for a moment she felt a pang of regret. He was her father, after all. But now was not the time to do anything but focus on the case at hand. She swallowed her emotions so that they disappeared once again.

  “We’d better get going, Dad,” she said. “Look—Sheriff Jacobs is pacing in front of the window.”

  “Right,” he said. “Let me get my bag.”

  Cameryn stepped onto the dirt driveway. She had never been to her teacher’s home, and she was surprised at the size of it. It was small, even by Silverton standards. The house was shaped like a shoebox, long and narrow, with two giant fir trees towering past its roofline, dwarfing it even more. The shingles were dark blue while the house was a lighter shade, the exact color of the Silverton sky, which Cameryn, as a kid, had named Crayola Blue. All the way around the perimeter a plastic yellow tape had been wrapped in an uneven square, looped around the fir trees and slung across a fence post in the back. It read CRIME SCENE: DO NOT CROSS. Cameryn heard a dog barking in the backyard as she ducked beneath the tape. She was nervous, ready.

  “Well hello there, Cameryn,” Sheriff Jacobs said, swinging open the front door and motioning her inside. She stepped into an alcove and smelled something like rain on wool. Jacobs’s jacket, maybe. “Here you are. Again,” he told her.

  She could feel it, the waves of disapproval radiating in her direction. There was an awkward pause, so she said, “Are you declaring this a crime scene?”

  “I’m just being careful, going by the book,” he answered slowly. “I’ve never seen anything like what’s in the room back there.”

  “What’s wrong with the body?” she asked, but Jacobs brushed her question aside.

  “Told your dad he might not want to bring you, with the remains being in the condition that they are.”

  “I can handle it, Sheriff.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. You could say your father’s got a lot of faith in you. Or you could also say Patrick doesn’t know where the lines are.”

  Sheriff Jacobs had always reminded Cameryn of a rodent. He was a diminutive man, with quick, darting movements and deep-set eyes that appeared even smaller behind his wire-frame glasses. Gray hair, so thin it showed teeth marks from his comb, had been slicked back. Although he and Patrick were friends, Jacobs always made it clear that he was not comfortable with Cameryn’s job as assistant to the coroner. “I’m telling you, Pat,” she once heard him say, “this job’s too hard for the girl,” to which her father had replied, “You let me take care of my own daughter. She’s smart, and what’s more, I need her.”

  Today the sheriff had on his regular street clothes with heavy boots laced up past his ankles. The only thing that distinguished him from the other Silverton residents was the gold five-pointed star he’d pinned onto his red flannel shirt.

  “Is Deputy Crowley here?” Cameryn asked. It wasn’t that she cared, but she was desperate for something to say that would break the man’s laser stare from her face.

  “He’s in the kitchen interviewing the witness. Why don’t you go on back there and help him.”

  But I want to see the body, she thought. And I don’t want to see Justin again. And why hadn’t her father come inside? How long did it take to get equipment from a car?

  She shrugged her shoulders, cramming her hands into her jeans pockets. “No, thanks. I’ll wait for my dad. So has time of death been called?”

  “Del Halbrook has already come and gone. He ran the strip and contacted Dr. Kearney in Durango, so we got a declared time of death at”—he looked at his notebook and flipped back a page—“eleven hundred hours.”

  Del Halbrook was a volunteer firefighter, and Cameryn wasn’t surprised he’d already left the scene. Procedure said the emergency medical technicians had to put leads on the decedent’s chest and run an electrocardiogram strip, even if they were obviously dead, then phone in the results to a doctor in order to get a declared time of death. Her father always called the EMTs “phantoms” because they vanished from the scene so quickly. “I guess they only like to treat the living,” he’d say. “There’s not a lot you can do for a corpse.”

  She heard the heavy clump of boots behind her. “Sorry, I had to take a call,” her father said, holding up his cell phone. “So what’d I miss?”

  “Here’s what we know so far.” Jacobs shuffled through the pages of his notebook and began to read. “Brad Oakes was scheduled to take a group of Scouts on a wilderness hike at ten A.M., departing from the Congregational Church. When he didn’t show, Kyle O’Neil—do you know Kyle?”

  “Vaguely,” said her father.

  “I do, and he’s a great kid. It’s a real shame he had to find the body like that.” Jacobs cleared his throat and continued. “So anyway, Kyle gets sent by another Scout leader to get
Oakes. Kyle says he drove up here and that he didn’t see anything out of place—no other person coming or going, nothing unusual.” With an index finger, Jacobs pushed up his glasses, which had slipped down his thin nose. “Kyle goes inside, finds the body, and calls me real quick. I hightailed it over here. And that’s about it.”

  Patrick nodded, rubbing his hand over his chin. Cameryn noticed there were whiskers growing where he hadn’t shaved, white stubble that looked like grains of sand. “You keep hinting that there’s something strange about the body,” he began, but Jacobs just shook his head.

  “At this point I think it’s better if you just tell me what you see, without me influencing your expert opinion, Pat. And if you want my advice”—he gave Patrick a hard look—“you should get a look at the remains by yourself .”

  Ignoring the warning, Patrick unzipped the death bag and handed Cameryn a pair of paper booties. “Since we don’t know what we’re dealing with, I’d like you to put on a pair of these, too,” he said, handing a pair of blue booties to the sheriff. “I realize you’ve already been in the room, but if it is indeed a crime scene we want to take as little as possible in and leave even less behind.”

  “You’re the coroner,” Sheriff Jacobs said. Leaning against the wall, he twisted up one foot, then the other, stretching the blue fabric over his boot. Cameryn and her father did the same.

  “Here, you’ll want the camera,” her father said, handing Cameryn the bag. With the booties on, the three of them padded down the hall.

  Somewhere in the distance she could hear muffled voices. It must be Justin interviewing Kyle, she decided. The floor of the hallway was made of wood polished so smooth Cameryn felt herself slip in the booties, but her father grabbed her elbow to steady her.

  They passed a small room that must have been an office. She paused for a moment at the door, curious over the precise order inside. Papers had been left on the desk, but the neat stack was perpendicular to the desk’s edge and the glass top had been polished so that it shimmered as though it were made of water. Spines of books lined a bookshelf, grouped according to height, like slats in a fence. A vase filled with wild blue flax, aspen daisy, and Indian blanket flower had been set next to the telephone.

  “Are you coming, Cammie?” her father called.

  She answered with a nod.

  “He’s in the back bedroom there,” Sheriff Jacobs said, pointing. His eyes shifted to Cameryn’s. “You don’t know what’s in there. You sure about bringing—?”

  “I’m sure,” her father snapped. “Let’s just get on with it.”

  She was grateful for her father’s confidence, but as she walked closer to the door at the end of the hallway her throat tightened until she couldn’t swallow. Her father’s face was grave as he placed his hand on the small of her back, as though he might need to give her a boost inside. She leaned against the hand as he propelled her forward. Was she resisting? Curiosity mixed with fear as the door creaked open, the hinges protesting, it seemed, those who dared to disturb the dead that lay within.

  “All right, then. He’s on the bed, just like I found him,” Jacobs said. “I’ll be dogged if I know what to make of this.”

  Cameryn took a sharp breath, then pushed through the doorway.

  In the corner of the room stood an oak sleigh bed, and in the middle of the bed were the remains of Mr. Oakes. His limbs were at odd angles, like gnarled branches of trees, the legs contracted so tight his knees made steeples beneath the cotton sheet. She could see the tip of his tongue protruding. It was a strange color, a dark gray, extending beyond his lips—a shriveled turtle’s head of a tongue peeking from the edge of his mouth.

  But that wasn’t the horror of it. When her mind finally registered the picture, she wished, in that instant, that she’d listened to Sheriff Jacobs. Because she was looking down at the face that was no longer there. A mask, like that from a horror show, replaced the face she had known.

  Skin, no longer smooth like her teacher had worn in life, had now withered to the bone. Blood seeped down his teeth like painted lashes. But the worst was his eyes. The lids of his eyes had rolled back like window shades, revealing two dark holes.

  The eye sockets were empty.

  Chapter Four

  “SO WHAT DO you make of the eyes, Pat?” Sheriff Jacobs asked.

  Patrick moved forward, peered closer, and then closer still. Straightening, he said, “Truthfully? I have no idea.”

  Cameryn nodded in silent agreement, the only motion she made that the others could see. Inside, she was reeling. Like her father she’d moved nearer, and now what she wanted most to do was move away again, as far away as she could go.

  The gel from inside Oakes’s eyes had mixed with blood, fusing into a substance that had exploded from both sockets. A starburst pattern of deep red stretched from his forehead all the way to his cheeks, and where the eyes had been were sockets that seemed filled with earth. With a start she realized the small, coin-shaped piece of brown clinging to the side of her teacher’s nose was in fact his iris. In that instant she fought the bile that rose from her stomach in a hot foam. She took a series of deep, short breaths and commanded herself, Think clinically. Leave all your emotion behind and stay professional. You’ve got a job to do, so do it.

  “You okay, Cammie?” Sheriff Jacobs asked, and she thought there might be a hint of smugness in his voice. “You’re looking mighty pale there.”

  “I’m fine,” she answered. Because Jacobs wanted her to fail, in a strange way it braced her, shored her up. “It’s just so . . . bizarre. I’ve never seen anything like this.”

  “Well, neither have I, and I’ve been sheriff a lot longer than you’ve been assistant to the coroner. You think it’s some kind of weird medical condition, Pat?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know, I’m not a doctor.” His tongue made a clicking sound between his teeth. “I’ve heard of proptosis—”

  Sheriff Jacobs looked at him sharply. “English, please.”

  “Proptosis—a bulging of the eyeballs. There are a couple of conditions that can cause it, but to have an eyeball actually explode . . .” He shook his head and let out a small stream of air through his lips, continuing, “I have to say I’ve never heard of that. I’m at a complete loss, John. A complete loss.”

  “Dad,” Cameryn interrupted, suddenly remembering, “this may be way off, but I saw a dog this morning—it was on the side of the road, and it didn’t have any eyes, either. It looked just like this. Do you think there could be a connection?”

  “Nah,” Sheriff Jacobs interjected, “my deputy told me the same thing. One’s got nothing to do with the other.”

  Already prepared for the sheriff to blow her off, Cameryn asked, “What do you think, Dad?”

  Her father’s eyes half-closed as he considered it. “John’s right. A dead dog left outside is bait for predators and they’ll chew up remains in a matter of hours, and the eyes are always the first thing to go. But there are no predators here—inside this bedroom, I mean. Look, all the windows are shut and there’s no way in or out. Scavengers didn’t have access to this body, unless . . .” Patrick turned to the sheriff, who was busy scratching notes on a pad. “Wait a second—Oakes’s dog was found outside, right?” he asked.

  “Yep.” Jacobs pointed the tip of his pen toward the window. “I know that dog—he’s a spaniel named Rudy. The dog’s locked up out back, just like we found him.”