Face of Evil dm-1

by Lee Goldberg

  Face of Evil

  ( Dead man - 1 )

  Lee Goldberg

  William Rabkin

  Face of Evil

  Lee Goldberg

  William Rabkin

  CHAPTER ONE

  February 19, 2011

  In the few minutes before Barney Slezak recorded the gruesome YouTube video that would draw more than a million hits, winning him and his family an all-expense-paid trip to Los Angeles to be on Jimmy Kimmel's show, he was thinking about how much he hated snow.

  For starters, snow was blindingly white, which hurt his eyes, was hard to slog through when it piled up, which exhausted him, and was dangerously slippery when it froze, which meant he'd end up taking a hard fall.

  For snow to even to exist, it had to be freezing outside, and the chill punctured his flabby flesh like skewers. His muscles shivered to generate heat, his pale skin puckered up to retain warmth, and his dick retreated so far into his shriveled ball sack that he might as well be a eunuch.

  Not that he needed his manly equipment when there was snow around. Because when it was cold, his wife, Sophie, went to bed wearing granny pajamas as thick as a bathrobe, puffy slippers, and an Ebenezer Scrooge nightcap, a sight that didn't exactly inflame his libido. But if he used a lot of imagination, and did dare to touch her, she'd elbow him hard in the gut for rustling the sheets and breeching her cocoon of warmth.

  Barney didn't understand why she had to wear all that stuff to stay warm anyway. She was fat enough to be hunted by the Japanese for her blubber. Then again, so was he. But that was completely different. He was a guy.

  But as much as Barney hated the cold, here he was on that fateful Saturday, a hundred miles from home, sitting like a walrus beside his wife in the snow at Mammoth Peaks Resort, just because his five-year-old daughter, Kate, woke up that morning wanting to make a snowman.

  Barney Slezak would do anything to make his daughter happy because she was simply the most beautiful, lovable, talented, and huggable girl ever born.

  Every time Barney looked at her, it astonished him that something so perfect could have sprung from his rarely exercised loins, though he suspected his genes had some promise.

  He'd risen from an inbred family of illiterate, toothless moonshiners to become senior die-cut sorter on the assembly line at Worldwide Patch, which didn't sound like an exceptional achievement, but to him it was the evolutionary equivalent of an amoeba miraculously birthing a four-legged, sentient creature capable of crawling out of the primordial slime.

  If he could do that, and marry a woman with a high school equivalency certificate, there was no telling what potential for greatness Kate possessed.

  She could dream big. Or at least he could on her behalf.

  And because he knew everyone was as enamored of his daughter as he was, he filmed every little thing she did and posted the videos on the YouTube channel that he'd created in her honor (much to the carnal delight of one Clem D. Farlow of Owensboro, Kentucky, who had irritable bowel syndrome, a dog named Miley, and sixteen two-terabyte hard drives full of home videos of children that he'd ripped from the net, but that was another, and far more sordid, story).

  So, naturally, Barney was recording the creation of Kate's snowman with the same solemnity and sense of historical purpose he would have used if he were capturing her presidential inauguration, or her acceptance of a Nobel Prize, or perhaps both.

  The little girl in his view screen was pug-nosed and freckled, with round, rosy cheeks and big eyes that made it seem as if she regarded the world in constant, joyful wonder.

  She was truly adorable now, but later in life, when her eyes were too big for her head, and she was living in Berlin with Gerda, an avant-garde lesbian poet fifteen years her senior, Kate would resemble E.T. with boobs and unshaved underarms.

  But that was a long way off from this moment, as Kate happily dug up snow with her chubby, mitten-covered hands and slapped it against the base of her lopsided snowman, who gazed upon her efforts with delighted acorn eyes and a wide, twiggy smile.

  Kate giggled with glee and eagerly dug up more snow, as if the more she added to him, the greater the chance he might come to life.

  Kate was so intent on piling ice on her snowman, and Barney was so focused on her face, and his wife was so busy devouring a bag of 2nd Degree Burn Fiery Buffalo Doritos, that nobody noticed the hole the child was digging at her side.

  Or what it was revealing.

  Not until the stiff arm sprung up from the ice and the gnarled hand caught the furry hood of Kate's parka as she was leaning forward to pat more snow onto her snowman.

  Not until Kate tumbled onto her back, looked up at the frozen claw suspended above her face, and let out a scream so deep, and so loud, that it made her nose bleed.

  She scrambled away and, as she did, saw beneath her the wide-open, glassy eyes of the dead man staring up at her through the frost.

  And then her scream morphed into a horrified wail that emanated from the depths of her soul and echoed off the mountain, making every creature who heard it instinctively tremble from the primal clarity of her terror.

  She'd found Matthew Cahill.

  CHAPTER TWO

  On a chilly dawn less than two days before his death, Matthew Cahill chopped wood outside his cabin, which he'd built by hand with lumber that he'd cut at the sawmill where he worked.

  He split the firewood with his grandfather's ax, working with a steady rhythm that somehow seemed in step with the cold breeze whistling through the tall, frosted pines and the beat of the water running over the rocks in the creek.

  This was how Matt started every day, rain or shine, whether he needed firewood or not. He had enough wood to survive several winters, though this would be his last one here.

  He did it partly for the exercise, to loosen up and get his blood pumping. But mostly he did to align himself, spiritually and emotionally, to the world around him, to renew his relationship to the most reliable, dependable, and enduring thing in his life.

  Wood.

  It was comfort, warmth, and shelter. It was the roof over his head, the heat in his stove, and the bed where he slept. It was how he earned his living.

  Wood was history and heritage. He could see the past in the rings of every log he cut, in the scratches on a tabletop, in the sag of a bed frame, and in the fading planks of a home's siding. And he could feel it in the rough bark of the pines, in the smooth handle of his grandfather's ax, and in the memories emanating from the cabin walls like heat from an ember that never cooled.

  And wood was pain, sorrow, and loss. It was the pine coffin that he'd made for his wife, Janey, who'd died a year ago in the bed they'd shared in the cabin that he'd built for her.

  But each morning, with each swing of the ax and snap of split wood, his heartache ebbed and his reconnection to the life he was about to lose was strengthened.

  Matt was shirtless this morning, a sheen of sweat on his muscled body despite the cold. He had a rugged physique and tanned skin that came from labor, not applied through hours spent in gyms and sunning on chaise lounges. His body was lived in, not worn like a stylish, tailored suit. It was real muscle, as Janey liked to say.

  He stacked the wood in the storage shed, hung his ax and gloves on their pegs, and went back to the cabin, where he took a cold shower and dressed in his usual mud-caked work boots, faded jeans, and a heavy flannel shirt over a gray hoodie.

  He made his bed, looked wistfully at Janey's photo on the nightstand, and remembered all the mornings that he'd awakened to her smile and her warmth before the cancer claimed her two days shy of her thirtieth birthday.

  This, too, was part of his morning routine.

  He had a quick breakfast of
black coffee and buttermilk biscuits, got in his pickup truck, and headed down the hill towards Deerpark, a logging town built on the banks of the Chewelah River.

  The truck bounced along the rutted old logging road, past a few scattered cabins and old farmhouses, before hitting the smattering of mobile homes that dotted the weedy fields at the bottom of the hill.

  Matt was surprised to see his old buddy Andy Goodis leaning against Lissy Okrum's dented mailbox, smoking a cigarette and watching the road, obviously waiting for him to show up, though they hadn't made any plans.

  Andy was brown haired and blue eyed, laid-back and loose limbed. He wore torn jeans, a faded denim work shirt over a white thermal T, a leather jacket, cowboy boots, and a Stetson. He looked like he was auditioning to be a model in a Levi's ad, something that might have been within the realm of possibility if not for his nose, which had been broken so many times that it looked like it had been molded out of Play-Doh by a very untalented child.

  Matt pulled over in front of the mailbox and looked out the passenger window at Lissy, standing on the steps to her mobile home in her pink bathrobe and cradling a mug of coffee in her hands. Her patch of land was overgrown with weeds and she had a Buick up on blocks, where it had become a home to cats and other strays. Her bed was like that, too.

  In high school, she'd been revered for her tit fucking. The boys lined up for the experience. Matt had been one of them. That was more than twenty years ago. Now Lissy was a cashier at the supermarket, and ever since Janey died, she smiled at Matt the same way she did that day in her father's shed when she removed her shirt.

  Matt waved at her politely and she waved back. Andy flicked his cigarette in the mud and got into the truck.

  "Thanks for the lift," Andy said. "My truck is down at the Longhorn."

  "Ernie took your keys?" Matt asked as he got back on the road.

  Andy nodded. “I was shit-faced drunk."

  "You'd have to be to land in Lissy's bed again."

  "Lissy's not so bad. She still knows how to use those tits, even if she can sweep the floor with 'em now. She asked about you. Wanted to know how you were doing."

  "What did you say?"

  "I said she should go up and see you sometime in your monastery, that you're lonely up there."

  "I'm not," Matt said.

  "Of course you are. When was the last time you had a woman?"

  "You know the answer to that question."

  Andy shook his head. “No wonder you're chopping so much wood. Save a forest and jerk off instead."

  Matt grinned despite himself. “You're an asshole."

  "That's what you like about me," Andy said, grinning back at him. “I do all the things you don't have the balls to do. It's been that way since we were kids."

  "I never wanted to steal Mr. Erdmann's Mustang and drive it through the front window of the Nussbaums' store."

  "You wanted a Mustang, didn't you?"

  "I was eleven," Matt said.

  "But I got us the Mustang, didn't I?" Andy said. “I'm just saying that while other people dream, I make dreams happen."

  They drove through the center of town in silence. Most of the storefronts on Main Street were empty, the businesses long since euthanized by Walmart and the big-box retailers along the highway.

  Matt pulled into the Longhorn parking lot beside Andy's pickup. Ernie had left the keys for Andy on the front tire, as he always did. There was no danger of anyone stealing Andy's truck. It was old, dented, and rust eaten and would have been recognized as Andy's anywhere in Clarion County.

  "Thanks for the lift," Andy said. “See you at work."

  "Maybe I should stick around and make sure it starts up," Matt said. “You don't want to show up late again."

  "Bye, Grandma," Andy said, turning his back on Matt and walking to the car.

  "What if you need a jump start?"

  "I'll call triple-fucking-A." Andy snatched the keys and unlocked his door.

  "You don't belong to triple-fucking-A. I'm your triple-fucking-A."

  Andy climbed into his truck and started the engine. Or at least he tried. It didn't catch.

  He looked up sheepishly at Matt, who sighed, reached behind his seat, and pulled out his jumper cables. Rescuing Andy was just another part of his routine, one that Matt would have been shocked to learn would continue even after his own death.

  CHAPTER THREE

  February 20, 2011

  The forest rangers dug Matt's frozen corpse from the ice, zipped it up in a body bag, and had it delivered to the Clarion County morgue cooler, where it was left to slowly defrost like a Butterball turkey the night before Thanksgiving.

  Matt's body was stacked on a shelf above Aurelio Rojas, age twenty-seven, who'd had eight margaritas too many and whose head and torso were packaged separately as a result of his freeway collision with a big rig, whose unlucky driver was bagged one shelf below and who, at the moment Aurelio's Chevy Cobalt crossed the median and slammed into him, had been thinking erotic and anatomically impossible thoughts about his upcoming sexual encounter with Carla DuPont, who was waiting for him at the Motel 6 in Bigsby and who, when he didn't show up, assumed she'd been fucked and dumped for the umpteenth time and, facing her fourth abortion in ten years, slit her throat with a box cutter.

  But Clarion County assistant coroner Lyle Whittaker knew nothing about Carla DuPont, or what other dominos of fate had been toppled by the three corpses on his Sunday morning to-do list of autopsies. To him, the corpses were just leftover tasks from the previous shift that he had to complete.

  Being a coroner was just a job to him, not a calling, an ambition, or even a remote interest.

  He'd been struggling through medical school when, one day in class, as he was about to cut into a cadaver, he had an epiphany.

  It would be a hell of a lot easier working with dead people than trying to heal the living.

  The idea became even more appealing after he watched a bunch of those CSI shows, which made the profession seem outrageously cool.

  He could definitely see himself wearing Armani, driving a chrome-plated Hummer, and fucking a woman like Eva La Rue.

  As it turned out, the profession was cool, but only in terms of the room temperature of his workplace.

  He ended up wearing Kirkland, driving a used Camry, and fucking his mattress like it was a woman like Eva La Rue.

  But even so, he wasn't bitter or unhappy.

  Far from it.

  He had a secure job that paid decently, that kept him from being a disgrace to his family of doctors, that required no customer service skills, and that left him pretty much on his own to do as he pleased, which was spending hours playing World of Warcraft and fucking his mattress like it was a woman like Eva La Rue.

  And it looked like he'd be able to get back to Warcraft fairly quickly that Sunday morning. There were only three autopsies to do, and it wasn't like the cause of death in any of them was a great mystery. It was all by-the-numbers stuff.

  Lyle decided to start with the simplest case, the guy who'd been buried in the December avalanche. He figured the body had probably defrosted enough to cut into by now.

  The first thing Lyle noticed once he got Matthew Cahill's body on the table was that the corpse's skin didn't feel as cold or as rubbery as he expected, which meant something was wrong with the temperature-control mechanism in the cooler.

  Not good.

  The last thing Lyle wanted to walk into on his next shift was a cooler full of putrefying corpses. After he finished gutting Matthew Cahill, he'd alert maintenance to get the thermostat fixed right away.

  Lyle took his scalpel and made a deep cut through the flesh at Matt's shoulder and was about to rip his way to the sternum and on down to the pelvis, so he could peel it all back, saw off the ribs, and remove the internal organs underneath.

  He didn't get that far.

  He'd barely moved his knife half an inch when he stopped what he was doing and stared in slack-jawed disbelief at what wa
s underneath his blade.

  Blood.

  It seeped out of the wound like the juice from a ripe pomegranate.

  Lyle watched in shock as the blood became a tiny rivulet, ran down the side of Matt's body, and dripped onto the steel table.

  He stuck his gloved finger in the fluid and brought it up close to his eye just to be sure.

  Yeah, it was blood.

  But that was impossible.

  The human body is mostly water. Within two hours under the ice it becomes a Popsicle with skin. On a molecular level, the crystallization shatters the cells, irreparably destroying organs and making resuscitation inconceivable.

  The longest a person had ever survived being frozen was almost ninety minutes.

  The longest any animal had been known to survive, in laboratory conditions, was three hours.

  Matthew Cahill had been frozen for three months.

  If the freezing didn't kill him, the oxygen deprivation alone would certainly have left him not only merely dead, but really, most sincerely dead.

  And yet…

  He was bleeding.

  And for that to happen, there had to be circulation, and for that to happen, there had to be a beating heart, and for that to happen, the central nervous system had to be firing neurons.

  And for that to happen, there had to be life.

  Lyle didn't have a stethoscope. There was no need for one in a morgue.

  That left him only one immediate option for confirming what the blood was telling him, short of continuing his Y incision and cracking the body open to see what the hell was going on.

  Swallowing hard, his hand shaking, he set the knife down on the instrument tray and leaned over the body, slowly and hesitantly placing his ear on Matthew Cahill's icy chest.

  The skin was cold. But not deathly cold.

  At first, all Lyle heard was his own blood pounding in his head. But then he took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and concentrated.