-5-
It was no easy matter to convince a distraught Dr. Louis Cage to abandon his hard-won vacation at the Cahokia digs in southern Illinois to come to Michigan on Abe Stroud's urgent request. The medical examiner didn't often find time to be away from Chicago, and when he did, he meant to relax, and like Abe, nothing relaxed him more than roughing it on an archeological dig.
But Abe was firm over the phone, and he was so certain of Lou that he had already sent his private plane out of Andover, Illinois, for him.
"I know it's a lot to ask, Lou."
"Christ, you have a gift for understatement. You do this to me, Abe, and I swear, you'll owe me for ... for ... well, forever!"
"I wouldn't ask, Lou, if it wasn't important. Things here are not right, and I need a man of your talents to bridge the gap between what we know and what we don't know. Only you can provide that for--"
"Only me, only me. Don't they have an M.E. in Grand Rapids?"
"Nowhere near your caliber, Lou."
Lou sighed into the phone in resignation. "This better be worth the ride, pal."
"You ever see a man's arm ripped off, Lou?"
"Sure, in industrial accident victims, and in the war--"
"But as the work of a mad killer?"
"Cut off limbs, sure. Too goddammed often."
"I'm talking ripped off, Lou. Real nasty. Using no saws, only maniacal strength."
Cage considered this in silence before saying, "Jesus, you sure of that?"
"I'll only be sure when you look over the bodies."
"Bodies?"
"Enough to keep you busy, yeah."
Lou cleared his throat and then said, "Sounds like you're in over your head, pal."
"I think I know that. So, you begin to see the need, Lou? I need the best, and I'm willing to pay your going rate for the assistance."
"Damned straight you will," he muttered.
Still, Cage did see the need, particularly when Stroud described the condition of the bodies he had seen, and followed this up with the fact that the police in Michigan believed the killer was on his way to Lou's city.
Lou was on his way.
In the meantime, a police barricade had been placed around the old farmhouse, and with nothing left to do there, Stroud had gone with Chief More to learn what he could from the authorities at the Merimac asylum and prison. Stroud was disappointed, however, learning very little at the prison. Memories had faded, or had been softened by time to ease the horror. Perroto's office had been cleaned. It still smelled of disinfectant and fresh paint.
But something in the room was eerie ... as if Stroud could sense the odor of the animal that had killed Perroto, also covered, by the paint. He asked the director who showed him around if there had been any unusual animal odors left in the killer's wake. The director looked as if he had aged a year at the question. "Yes, a strange, alive, animal odor like musk ... like an animal."
Stroud talked then to the guards who had reclaimed Dr. Perroto's leg in the yard. They told their story without inflection or much embellishment and very little imagination. They'd decided what they saw was either a mad dog or a wolf that had somehow gotten into the compound. They did not see John Kerac that night.
Later, Stroud took a room at the only hotel in Merimac, a god-awful place called the Nomad, where the carpets crawled, and the window shades had never been cleaned, and the curtains cast out spores from the deep, green pile and caused him to sneeze. Still, it offered a bath and running water, giving Stroud a chance to clean up and shave. From the hotel, where Chief More had left him, he arranged for a rental car, and at dusk he drove out to greet Lou Cage at the small municipal airport.
They exchanged a handshake as Cage asked, "Why me, Abe? Couldn't you make do with the local guys?"
"When you meet them, Lou, you'll see why."
"That bad, huh?"
"That bad."
"Well ... I brought everything I could think of, under the circumstances ... from what you said over the phone."
Lou was like a plumber, carrying with him several suitcases filled with the tools of his trade. Stroud asked his pilot to carry these bags off the tarmac, and they were deposited in the waiting car, a large white Lincoln.
"You can fly back anytime that's convenient, Warren," he told the pilot. "We've got the helicopter."
Sooner the better, Warren was thinking as he looked over the area that displayed so little, a one-room airport terminal, a stand of naked jack pine that went off in all directions as if forever. But he calmly replied, "After some coffee and a sandwich, sir, I'll take her back to Andover. Oh, and good to see you."
"Real conversationalist, that one," said Cage, who'd had enough of Warren.
"Hell of a pilot, though. Come on, we'll get you organized, have dinner, and then out to the farmhouse."
"From what you tell me, I think I'll hold on dinner, pal."
"Fine ... Sooner we get in and out, the better."
"Locals already want your scalp, huh?"
"You might say so."
"Quite a place you picked to vacation in, Abe ... quite a place."
"Thanks again for coming, Lou," he said when they reached the car.
Lou shrugged. "What was I going to do?"
They got Lou settled as well as possible in the not so accommodating accommodations and then sped out for the crime scene. Along the way, Stroud filled Cage in on all the details, including those that seemed bizarre, from the nature of the wounds ("I've never seen anything like it since Nam, where guys were blown apart") to the strange tracks found by Miller ("We'll want to make casts of these prints, Lou").
Lou listened politely but held himself in check. He was a born Missourian who'd been replanted in Chicago at an early age, and this made for a no-nonsense, cynical "show me" kind of man. It wasn't that he doubted Stroud, but he knew that people often saw more in a mutilation murder than was there; that it took a trained M.E. such as himself to determine the exact nature of the mutilation.
Lou had seen headless, handless corpses--torsos--fished from lakes and rivers; he had seen what a real chain saw could do to real flesh. Lou had sixteen years with the CPD crime lab. He'd hold his judgment until he saw the corpses.
Stroud soon realized what was going through his friend's mind at the moment. A kind of silent truce was struck between them, and Lou closed his eyes to the unimpressive scenery of a nasty winter that'd turned the area to hard mud and devastated vegetation. He wished that he'd brought a warmer coat.
Cage was stunned, standing there on the steps above the rickety masonry blocks that held it. It was the third time he had had to come back out of the weathered old place to catch his breath and reel in his spinning mind. He had seen brutality before, but this was beyond anything he had ever witnessed, and he didn't mind saying so for the benefit of the others, Stroud, Shanks and Miller.
"I tried to prepare you for it," said Stroud.
"Abe," he replied, sitting down on the stoop, his apron dirty from his work inside, "nothing you could have said would've prepared me for this."
"Then you agree? There's something unexplainable at work here. The weapon he used?"
"Nothing yet ... Nothing I can point to, but Abe--" He was staring directly into Stroud's eyes when the flash of headlights from the car turning in hit him, and Abe saw something in Cage's eyes he had never seen before: fear.
"It's the Chief," said Miller, and the emphasis he placed on the word chief was such that it was insulting.
"More?" asked Lou.
"I want you to meet her, Lou," said Stroud.
Lou stood as the policewoman approached.
"Anything on Kerac?"
"What's happening in the rest of the state?" her deputies wanted to know.
"Nothing ... no sightings ... APB out on the truck hasn't helped." She then turned her gaze to Stroud and Lou Cage. "Dr. Cage, I presume."
"That's me, all right."
"So, Doctor, can you help us with ... with what's inside?"
Lou nodded several times and pulled out a small flask of whiskey, taking a long drink, before saying, "I can tell you this much: you've got one hell of a maniac on the loose."
"Tell me something I don't already know."
The whiskey seemed to be a bad idea, a last straw for Lou's empty stomach, his mind filled with the sight of the flesh heaps left inside by Kerac. He rushed to the side rail suddenly and vomited over it. This made the deputies and Chief More stare, and Stroud knew that they'd all become skeptical of Lou's ability in this moment of weakness.
"Dr. Cruise wouldn't've done that," said Miller to Shanks.
"Stroud," said Lou, "crank up that generator you got out here. I'm going to need floodlights in there."
Cage went to work, displaying his meticulousness, an attention to detail which fascinated Stroud. Chief More relieved Miller and Shanks. She'd lit a cigarette and was pacing the boards outside.
Inside, under the harsh lights, the wounds of the victims came into sharp, disturbing focus, but Cage remained silent and uncommunicative as he worked, so much so that Stroud had quit asking him questions or interrupting. He merely stood by, handing tools and items from Cage's bag to him, should the M.E. request it. In his gloved hands he'd passed small plastic bags, slides, fixatives, sprays, tweezers and a huge magnifying glass. Cage studied the minute details of the flesh and the rents with his keen eye and deft hands.
Occasionally, Cage broke his silence with a hum or a cough. He'd covered his face with a white surgical mask and had offered one to Stroud, which Abe had taken without hesitation. It helped cut the stench. Cage took sample after sample, and he took photographs from every angle. He followed this with measurements in millimeters of the depth and width of gashes and wounds, trying his best to determine the size of the carving knife Kerac had used on these people.
"What kind of meat grinder's tool could do this, Lou?" Stroud had asked at one point, but he'd gotten no answer.
Stroud realized it had to be something Kerac could easily carry and as easily conceal. No high-powered tool or electrical saw could've been used on the men at the prison.
Finally, Cage was finished. It was three in the morning. He got up from his kneeling position over the woman's body, his knees wobbly from the effort. Stroud asked, "Are you all right, Lou?"
"Are any of us?" he replied, leaving the carrion to the room and to those who must come in and carry it out.
Outside, Chief More wanted immediate answers, but Lou put her off with an upraised hand and a statement. "I need a lab where I can work."
"Grand Rapids," said Stroud as he, too, left the dead behind him. "They've got the autopsy reports on Kerac's first victims, anyway, and we can buzz up there in the chopper after you've had some sleep."
"That suit you, Chief More?"
She frowned but said, "They're more likely to welcome you into their labs than our Dr. Cruise."
"Settled, then. If you'd give them a call, pave our way..."
"I will be happy to. I could see from your labor that you ... that you are competent and--"
"Well, thank you."
"--and, Dr. Cage, that you care about those people's lives."
"Yes, well ... of course, I do." Cage then looked at Stroud, his voice breaking when he said, "Do you really have any evidence this madman is heading for Chicago, Abe?"
"According to Chief More," said Stroud.
He looked at her, his eyes imploring a moment, as if to ask her to take it back, to tell him the trail was leading elsewhere.
"It's my guess," she said.
Lou started for the car, carrying his black valise, filled now with, pieces of the victims, the minutiae of murder. Chief More looked at Stroud for some kind of answer, and seeing he had none, she chased after Cage. "Wait, Doctor, you must have learned something in there you can share with me. Anything at all that might help us?"
"Only this, Chief More," he said hesitantly. "I've seen all kinds of brutality, every imaginable wound made by every conceivable weapon that might inflict such horrendous lacerations, tear an arm from a socket, rip a man's head off, but ... but--"
"Yes?"
"I can't ... at this time ... account for this. Not yet, anyway."
"Maybe the plaster cast will help," suggested Stroud. Earlier, they'd taken a break from the torture of the horror show under the harsh lights inside and had come outside to take the cast. It was now solid as a rock and in the trunk of the Lincoln.
"You're not telling me everything you suspect," she said, angry with Cage. "We invite you in, we expect cooperation, Dr. Cage!"
Cage was staring off into the darkness beyond the house lights. The surrounding world might just as well have been a black void, so intense was the country night.
"Lou, Lou," said Stroud, placing a hand on his shoulder. "You okay, Lou?"
Cage turned to More and said, "I'd only be guessing in the dark, Chief."
"Then guess, damn you!"
"All right ... if I had to guess, I'd say that the wounds inflicted on these people were done by some superhuman strength--"
"Superhuman strength?"
"Something possessing much more power than you or I."
"Madmen are known to possess great strength," she said, "and we know that Kerac is mad."
"This goes beyond that," he replied. "Don't you see, no man--no one--can tear out another man's arm with his bare hands, and those marks ... tears, rents ... like talons or claws and teeth--definite teeth marks, but so much deeper than any human teeth, more like ... fangs."
Stroud's stomach turned over with the mention of fangs.
"Animal ... like the footprint," she said thoughtfully.
"Animal, mechanical," said Cage, pulling back on his wild diagnosis. "Who knows ... but a bear, perhaps a panther could rend flesh and bone this way ... tear a man's leg from its socket ... but another man?"
"Are you saying it could not have been the work of a man?"
"That is what I am saying, yes."
"This is what you call expert?" she said to Stroud.
Cage confronted her quickly, raising his voice. "I mean that my eyes--not my microscope--are this moment telling me that what happened here was not the work of a human being; that this ... this thing that fed on these people--literally ate parts of them--is not a man. If he is a man ... he should be shot like a dog."
"Lou, we have to believe it was Kerac. It lines up with what happened at the prison," said Stroud, "and the manhunt had him in the vicinity, and--"
"Here, goddammit, here!" shouted Cage, offering Stroud his arm and elbow.
"What? What, Lou?"
"Take my arm in one of those commando holds they taught you in the war. Take it, take my arm."
"Lou?"
"Twist it, pull it up!"
Stroud went through with the charade as More looked on.
"Harder, go on!"
Werewolf's Grief (Bloodscreams #2) Page 5
