Chuck Hogan - The Killing Moon - A Novel

Dr. Bolt said, “Interesting.”

Bucky led them to an open, burned-out doorway. A small office inside, a burnt lump that used to be a computer monitor set before a heat-warped ergonomic chair, now a modern-art installation. All that was once paper was now ash; all that was wood was now black; all that was metal was now melted. The room remained suffocatingly hot, the carbon odor mixing with sulfur and something like a meat smell, the air growing oppressive.

The corpse lay behind the chair, glistening black and crisp. Dr. Bolt’s first instinct was to turn away, which he did, his fist covering his mouth until he regained his composure. The body’s elbows and knees were drawn in almost to a fetal position, its tongue swollen between charred lips, its one visible eyelid puffed out like a venous, black egg. The contents of the midsection were exposed where they had cooked into the floor.

“Uhh,” said Dr. Bolt, suppressing a sudden burp, his stomach rising into his throat. “Well — ug-huh — yes, I’d say he’s deceased, all right.” He cleared his throat again and almost lost it.

“Okay, then,” said Bucky, ready to leave.

“His arms are broken,” said Maddox.

Bucky squinted. Dr. Bolt didn’t know how to read these two.

“Well,” said Dr. Bolt, stepping wide around the body. “I do have some experience with barn fires.” If only he knew what Bucky wanted from him here. “Extreme heat does do — brr-hmm — surprising things.” He fumbled for the fat end of his necktie and pinched it over his nose. “The stomach eruption. Looks like a disemboweling, but the intestinal gases, when superheated, can rupture the stomach wall. Heat can also fracture bones.”

“What about his eyes?” said Eddie, from the doorway.

“Well, every fluid has its boiling point,” said Dr. Bolt, swallowing down more acid. “The muscles contract due to simple water evaporation. Why he appears so balled up here.”

Bucky said, “Fine. You can write us up something?”

“Hold on,” said Maddox. “We still have to identify the body.”

“Identify?” said Bucky. “It’s Frond’s house. Guy lived alone.” Then impatience got the better of him. “Fine, let’s flip him over, see his face.” Bucky fingered down the webbing of his latex gloves, kneeling at the corpse’s feet. “Eddie, get the other end.”

Eddie Pail came forward slowly, eyeing the job, crouching reluctantly and placing his hands near where the shoulder had burned into the floor.

“I don’t know about moving him—” began Dr. Bolt.

“On three,” snapped Bucky. “One, two — heave. ”

Later, after Dr. Bolt had finished disgorging his breakfast omelet onto the front lawn, he decided it wasn’t the site of the reddened flesh stuck to the floorboards like dry meat on a nonstick grill that made him run from the house. Nor was it the underside of the skull, where it was stove into the brainpan.

No. It was the cracked chunks of black bone that came rolling out of the corpse’s mouth. The shattered teeth tumbling forth like rotted dice from Death’s own cup.

Trooper Leo Hess of the Mitchum County State Police Detective Unit yawned gustily, chewing the yawn on its way out. “This everybody?”

Pail, the local sergeant, nodded. Six men stood inside the station entrance, all in shorts and matching jerseys and black ball caps, looking more like a police softball team than working cops. The old building they were in resembled a humble chamber of commerce center more than a police station, with its screen door and porch, the unglassed front counter, two no-tech key-lock holding cells in back. Coming from the burned house in the hills, Hess had passed sagging shacks surrounded by gutted cars on cinder blocks, trailers nursing off silver tanks of propane, swayback barns and tarp-covered snowmobiles. Pockets of beauty amid acres of neglect. He rolled right through the center of town before realizing it was the center of town.

These guys just seemed confused. This was like coming out to some desert post to find the local army living off camel meat, too heat-silly to understand that the campaign had ended months ago. Hess was usually luckier than this. Murders were rare out in the sticks.

But whatever. He’d bump up his clearance rate, then head on back to Dodge. In and out in forty-eight hours. Leo the Lion was ready to roar.

“So, Sergeant Pail,” he said. Bucky was a hayseed name. “Who did this?”

Pail’s eyes were too deep-set to offer much. “How the hell would I know?”

Hess looked the others over. “I always ask,” he said. “A town this size, local law usually knows what’s going on. No suspects? No theories?”

The only one who moved was Maddox, the one they had waited for. The overnight patrolman whom Hess had told to come in early, so that he could address them all together. Maddox stood straighter in back, for a better look at Pail.

“Okay, then,” said Hess. “Who called in the fire originally?”

“No one,” said the other Pail, the taller, blond one. Brothers in the same police department: never a good thing.

“Who scrambled you, then?”

The one named Ullard said, “Bucky sent out a page.”

Hess turned back to the small-eyed Pail, waiting.

“I saw black smoke in the sky,” said Bucky. “They teach you that in the certification courses. Usually means a fire.”

Hess crossed his big arms, keeping up his genial smile. “Looks like the fire had multiple points of origin. Anyone know what that means?”

Ullard said, “It started in different places?”

“Wow,” said Hess, taking a moment to marvel. “It means the fire was set. Arson squad found these little — they looked like smoked-down cigars to me, turns out they’re flares. Road flares and good old-fashioned unleaded gasoline. No frills. Somebody tried to burn down the house in a half-assed murder scene cover-up.”

Now he had their attention.

“I say half-assed because only half the house burned, giving us plenty to work with — file that under ‘Good.’ Being almost twenty-four hours out now, that’s a daylong head start for the assailant. But we can make up some of that time once we hear from our eyewitness.”

Now came confused looks back and forth.

Eddie Pail was the first to take the bait. “Eyewitness?”

“The corpse,” said Hess. “The vic. The presumed Mr. Frond. Dead men make the best witnesses. Why? Because they can’t lie. They got no stake in this thing other than absolute truth. Same as me.”

Two officers from Crime Scene Services — badgeless, casual in jeans and jerseys except for their latex gloves — opened the screen door to get Hess’s attention. One held a small brush that looked like an archaeologist’s tool, the other a rolled-up paper bag marked “Evidence” in red.

Hess gave them a hard look that only they could have construed as anger, and they backed out fast. Hess was not to be interrupted during his get-to-know-me spiel. He had to motivate these good old boys to work for him.

“Criminalists, huh?” said Hess, leaning forward as though taking them into his confidence. “Spook the shit out of me. Tiptoeing around with their brushes and lasers. Tweezing things, rolling them up in these little forensic doggy bags. Everything’s an experiment with them. Guys haunt my dreams. Wouldn’t amaze me in the least if the skinny one there was carrying his own shit in that paper bag. Probably huddled together in the mobile lab out there right now, happily picking through it. ‘Joe, when did I eat corn?’”

Snickers from most of them. Hess twisted his thick gold wedding band as though screwing it onto his finger. He was working these yokels good. Be selling them time-shares in Puerto Rico next.