I pointed my gun at his back, and said, “Freeze.”
Things just sort of stopped at that point. In that instant, I took in the fact that there was a transparent length of surgical tubing leading from the side of Huck's neck into a stainless steel basin on the floor; that there was a forceps clamping the tubing off; that his hand was on the forceps; that the tubing was secured to her neck with a tape wrap.
He froze, exactly what I'd told him to do. Looking at his back, I could see his shoulder muscles twitching. I remember thinking that he had great definition.
I moved to my left, toward Huck's head, keeping my gun pointed at him. I felt Byng come in behind me.
“Cover him from there, Byng,” I said. “He moves, shoot him.”
“Yep,” said Byng, sounding very matter-of-fact.
“Your bullets,” said Dan Peale, with an excellent upper class English accent, “cannot harm me.”
There was something very disconcerting about the way he said that. Calm, informative, with absolutely no doubt in his mind. He didn't turn.
“Step slowly back away from her,” I said. “Don't make any sudden moves. We don't want to put that theory to the test, do we?… ”
He was obedient. As he began to step back, slowly, he very deliberately squeezed the forceps, and then released it. Blood flowed instantly from Huck's neck, down the tube, and into the basin. Before I could stop him, he continued his motion by raising his left hand, and almost casually flipping the forceps over the back wall of the cubicle. Then he completed his step back from her.
Huck started to make gasping sounds, and strained at her straps. Dan Peale made a series of hissing noises, sucking air deep into his lungs, and forcing it out. Ventilating. He turned his head, farther than would have seemed normal, and I saw his face for the first time.
Dan Peale had a longish face, with pronounced musculature at the jaws. Dark hair and dark brown eyes. No facial hair except the eyebrows. And fangs, nearly an inch long, made more prominent by a wide, predatory grin. Even knowing that they were prostheses, they were startling. There was a smear of blood on his lips and chin.
I'd never seen him before in my life, but I felt I knew him.
“Put your hands behind your back,” I said. “Now!” I had to get to that tube…
“Bleeding… ” came from Huck.
Dan Peale grimaced and hissed again.
I reached down without taking my eyes from Peale, and got my left hand on the tube. I fumbled and felt the warm liquid running over my hand. Now the tube was slick, and I couldn't get a grip on it without looking down. I glanced at it for an instant, got a purchase, and squeezed it as hard as I could between my thumb and forefinger. It greatly reduced the flow, if not cutting it off completely.
“Cuff him,” I said to Byng.
Dan Peale had a fine sense of timing. Byng, out of his view, had glanced down at his holster, as he put his gun away so he'd have both hands free for using the cuffs. I had relaxed just a tad, having succeeded in nearly stopping the blood pouring from the tube in Huck's neck. And Dan Peale just lifted his knees, dropped way down, straightened abruptly, leaped up onto Huck's table, and jumped over the back wall of the cubicle. One, smooth motion, and he was gone.
I got off one shot, and thought I might have hit him.
I dimly heard a “Hey!” from outside. Borman. I had been nearly deafened by the sound of the shot.
Byng, taking the best action he could, jumped back through the door, and took off around the back of the little room. I saw Sally and Borman going by, and I hollered “Sally!”
I looked down at Huck. “We'll get you out now,” I said.
She was gulping shuddering breaths, trying to hold still. Her eyes were wide, and I don't think she understood a word I said.
Sally came in behind me. “Holy shit,” she said. It was like I was hearing underwater, with the addition of a monotonous squeal. That shot had been really loud.
“You want to kink this tube, and squeeze it for a minute? Don't let go, and don't try to remove the needle from her neck.”
“Right.” She reached out, hesitated. “Gloves?”
“Later. Unless you got a cut on your hand. I'm going to try to find a clamp or something, and we can start getting her out of here.”
“Right.”
As Sally took over the job of closing off the tube, I released the restraints from Huck's wrists and ankles. She was wearing faded green sweatpants, and her feet were bare. They looked very pale and cold.
She had on a thin, dark blue T-shirt. She was shivering, a combination of the cold air and blood loss. The only thing I could find was a large roll of paper toweling. I unrolled strips about as long as she was, and placed several layers over her.
“Do you feel strong enough to walk?” I asked her.
“Nuh, nuh, no.”
Great. Well, I wouldn't have, either. I had no idea how much blood she'd lost, but I suspected it had been quite a bit. The basin at my feet was just about full.
“We'll get him,” I said. “You're going to be fine.”
“Yeah,” she said, weakly, and her head bumped softly back against the bench. “Sure.”
Borman stuck his head in the cubicle. “Where'd he go?”
“I don't know,” I said. “Did you see a forceps laying on the ground outside here?”
He looked down.
“Out that way,” I said, pointing to where he'd come from.
“No.” He was already starting off toward the other cubicles.
I left Huck and Sally, and worked my way into the yard wide area behind the cubicle where Dan Peale had pitched the forceps. I shone my flashlight on the ground, and sure enough, there they were. My relief was a palpable thing. I holstered my gun, and bent down to pick them up. As I did, my light moved, I became aware of a fine trickle of sand sparkling its way down onto the floor about six feet ahead of me, alongside the bare wall of the chamber. I picked up the forceps, bracing myself for a blow to my back. Nothing. I straightened up, and held the forceps up, over the cubicle wall.
“Sally, here you go,” I said.
A moment later, I felt her take the forceps from me. The primary mission was accomplished.
I drew my gun, and took one more step away from the falling sand. Then I turned, abruptly, and shined my flashlight straight up into the darkness above the level of the fluorescent lights.
There he was. About twenty feet up, in the clear area between the pillar and the drop-cloth ceiling support, clinging to God knows what with his hands and feet.
“Hey, Dan!” I hollered.
He looked down. Those damned fangs glistened, pressing into his lower lip. He was gripping tightly with both hands, with one foot parallel to the pillar's face and braced against a small bump in the surface. The other foot was nearly perpendicular, with the toes wedged into a crack. I could see a dark spot on his lower left side, toward his back. There was a trickle of blood running down from there into his shorts. It looked like I'd hit him.
“You need any help gettin' down?” I yelled, unable to resist.
Two things happened at once. Byng and Borman came flying around the far end of the cubicles, looked up, and Byng said, “Damn!”
At the same time, Dan Peale just pushed himself away from the wall. For the life of me, I thought he hung up there, suspended in space, for an instant. I think in that moment, we were both wondering if he could really fly. Then he plummeted twenty feet to the sandy floor. I guess he was prepared to fly, because he did absolutely nothing to break his fall, or roll with it. He hit feet first, arms outstretched to his sides, with a jarring thump that seemed to send a visible ripple upward from his ankles to his neck. His legs went all weird between the ankle and hip, and he collapsed onto the floor of the mine.
I sent Borman up the elevator to get help. Byng and I tended to Dan Peale. Along with a gunshot wound in his back, he had a compound fracture of his lower right leg, an obviously broken or very badly sprained left ankle, and I feare
d some internal injuries as well. He was silent, never uttering a word of pain or complaint. Meth combined with ecstasy, they tell me, will do that sometimes. I met his gaze a couple of times as we put toweling over his fracture. He never blinked. I really think he would have tried to escape by crawling, if we hadn't both been there.
We kept clear of his teeth.
Borman returned, with a paramedic, who was being followed by two more. He told me that Lamar and the others had finally gotten in the main mine entrance, and should be up our way very soon. They could easily drive an ambulance up to us, as soon as they figured out which chamber we were in.
I left them, and went back to Huck. She was asleep, and Sally was just standing there, staring at her and adjusting a trauma blanket to try to keep the younger woman warm.
“She's wiped out,” she said.
“Yeah. Who wouldn't be? The last ten or fifteen years have been long ones for her.”
“Peale alive?”
“Yeah,” I said, “but pretty well busted up.”
“Did you hit him with that shot?”
“No doubt.”
“Attaboy,” she said.
There was a commotion in the outer chamber, followed by Lamar and our reinforcements arriving. They'd brought an ambulance with them.
“Sorry we're late,” said Lamar, after hearing my verbal report. He looked around the area where Huck was lying, and saw the tubing and the basin and the straps and everything.
“Is this where Edie…?” He couldn't ffnish.
“Yeah. I believe so.”
“Aw, hell,” he said with his sore throat. “It's cold here. Damn. Edie hated the cold.” He turned away, and went back through the hanging carpet.
“I've never seen him like that before,” said Sally.
“Yeah.”
She looked around. “This really is a lonely place.”
Harry and Hester showed up just as we were taking Dan Peale out to the ambulance. Harry, in particular, was very disappointed to have missed the excitement. Hester told me that she and Harry thought Tatiana had snitched Huck off.
“I believe,” she said, “that she wanted to make sure Dan did something terrible. So he'd get out of Jessica's life, permanently.”
Considering that we thought Jessica had damned near invented Dan Peale, and would probably create another one, it had been a waste of time.
After countless examinations and three separate hearings, Dan Peale was eventually declared insane, and placed in a secure mental health facility. God only knows what he'll do there. He is scheduled to stand trial in Wisconsin, for the murder of Randy Baumhagen, but is currently fighting extradition on the grounds that he's been already declared legally insane. What really bothers me is that, since he wasn't tried, we haven't been able to get a determination on exactly what happened with Edie. Hester and I talked about that at some length, and what we came up with was this:
Dan and Toby had Edie in that “crypt” of his. Dan seems to have planned to bleed Edie for a while in advance, and while he intended to bring Edie very close to death, we couldn't prove he intended for her to die. That would have been enough for second-degree murder, though, and we were fairly certain he would have been convicted. That left us with the question as to just what happened after she died. We found that out at Toby's trial.
Toby said that Dan didn't want people snooping around, doing a search for a missing woman. He was afraid they might stumble across the elevator, or just go looking for her in the mine. He decided to make it look like a suicide, to prevent a search. Dan was the one who made the cut in Edie's neck, to cover the needle entry point. Toby insisted it was post mortem.
Then they had to carry her back to the Mansion, and put her in the tub. They'd used the elevator, and that explained the wood stain on the body bag. They carried her to the house, and had to set the body down while Toby was sent to get Kevin. Since they didn't want to be seen, Dan had unlocked the back stair door to the third floor, and they'd placed her in the stairwell. That fit nicely with that bloodstain.
While Toby was up with Kevin, Huck had awakened, and was moving about. Toby thought she was taking a shower. He hustled down to Dan, and they took Edie right up the main staircase, so they didn't have to pass Huck's room. The stain on the carpet came from setting her down, just as we figured. Our only mistake on the direction was in thinking the stain at the bottom of the back stair meant that they'd brought her down from the third floor.
The weird part was, Toby was the only one who actually did any prison time for the whole thing. He got five years for helping Dan kill Edie. When he'd told us that he hadn't been able to kill her in the so-called crypt, he'd told the truth. But he'd held on to her while Dan did it. But, I mean, is that ironic or what? Here he was, the only one nuts enough to really believe the officially insane Dan Peale was a vampire, and he was the one judged sane enough to stand trial. “The fool? or the fool who follows him?” I think it goes.
Hanna and Melissa continued rooming together, around the general area. Huck, after a brief stay in the hospital, moved to Dubuque, and got a job dealing on the gaming boat down there. She came back to testify at Dan's hearing, but seemed distant to us.
Kevin turned up in Freiberg. He'd split as soon as he became aware that Dan was back in the house. The county attorney said we didn't have much on him, and subpoenaed him as a hostile witness in one of Dan's hearings.
Jessica and Tatiana both testified that Dan had flagged them down, and taken them hostage at gunpoint, and forced them to take him back to Lake Geneva. They got away with it. Hester, Harry, and I approached the prosecutor's office, with a request to prosecute Jessica as the principal orchestrator of the entire business. They told us that they'd never be able to convince a jury of that, especially in the light of the defense team she could afford to retain.
I'll never forget what the head prosecutor said. “You guys just have to learn to be realistic about these things.” Right. While working a vampire case?
Jessica is still doing her thing, as far as we can tell. Hawkins keeps in touch.
We found William Chester's pack in the woods well north of the elevator shaft. It contained a stake, garlic, a crucifix, and a mallet. We didn't have any idea where he'd gone for several weeks, and were beginning to wonder if Dan Peale had killed him and dragged him into a dark area of the mine. Then Harry got a call from the cops in Lake Geneva, wanting to know if he'd ever heard of the man. They'd popped him in a stalking case. Apparently, he was taking an interest in Jessica Hunley. When questioned, he'd actually used Harry as a reference. That was a hoot. Personally, I think he caught a glimpse of Dan Peale that rainy night on the bluff. I think the reality of Peale finally dawned on him, and he just couldn't handle it. I think he simply ran away.
The Mansion is still there, although Jessica sold it soon after Dan was committed. I understand it's about to become a resort, since it's so close to the gaming boat and the Mississippi. I don't think Sue and I'll be staying there. I never did get inside the Hunley estate in Lake Geneva.
Oh, yeah. Borman. He lost his action against me. He tried to say that I'd done the same thing that he had done-ffred a warning shot. One that just happened to hit Peale by accident. Right.
Borman left the department after that, and signed on with a university security service on the West Coast. That was too bad, in my opinion. I still thought he had a lot of potential.
GLOSSARY
AG: Attorney general, either state or federal.
COMM: Police radio call sign of the communications center in Nation County.
DCI: Division of Criminal Investigation, a division of the Iowa Department of Public Safety.
DEA: Drug Enforcement Administration, an agency of the U.S. Government.
DNE: Division of Narcotics Enforcement, an agency of the State of Iowa and an offshoot of DCI.
DNR: Department of Natural Resources, an agency of the State of Iowa.
FBI: Federal Bureau of Investigation, a bureau of the
U.S. Department of Justice.
ISP: Iowa State Patrol, the uniformed division of the Department of Public Safety.
ME: Medical examiner.
SA: Special agent, either of the Iowa DCI or the FBI.
SAC: Special agent in charge, either of the DCI or the FBI.
SO: Sheriff's office.
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Document creation date: 20.09.2011
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