David Wiltse - Prayer for the Dead

Becker had never seen him so agitated.

“I’m not going to hurt anything, you know that.”

“I know that.”

“If you don’t feel comfortable about this. Tee, you don’t have to let me in.”

“I know you won’t hurt anything. I know you know what you’re doing. I know when the state boys show up in the morning, they’ll never know I let you in.” He paused. “Right?”

“Tee, the house is sealed by the order of the state police, but it’s in your jurisdiction, too. You can break the seal if you want to.”

“I know this.” Tee remembered Captain Drooden, who had slapped the seal on the door only hours before. Hard-nosed bastard. Threatened to remove Tee’s gonads if he so much as breathed on the house before Drooden’s full forensic team could arrive from a murder scene in Greenwich.

“But you still have a problem with this?”

“I don’t have a problem with it. Quit saying I have a problem. I’m not afraid of Drooden, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“1 wasn’t thinking that. You fear no man.”

“It’s those damned brown uniforms the states wear. Makes them act mean. Drooden doesn’t scare me… What are you going to do in there?”

“Nothing.”

Tee eased the door open but stayed on the porch. He had no desire to go in again; once had been enough. Even now the house was virtually untouched since he and Becker had responded to Helen’s panicked telephone call. Just what damage she had done, he couldn’t say, but he and Becker had touched nothing, even though Becker had prowled like a dog on the scent. The smell of the place was too much for Tee, but Becker had not been bothered and had squatted beneath the sink for fifteen minutes, just staring at the skeletons as if he expected them to stir and speak at any moment. When Becker finally rose, it was to tell Tee to call the forensic people in Hartford, taking the case immediately out of Tee’s hands. Tee had not even considered arguing.

“If you’re not going to do anything, why go in? Or is that a silly question?”

“After Drooden’s men get finished, the place will be sterile. They will have lifted all the fingerprints and sought out all the hairs and fibers, and that’s great, they need to do that, but there won’t be any spirit left. A crime scene feels like a museum after the forensic snails get through with it. It looks the same, but it’s a re-creation.”

“Spirit? Jesus Christ, what are you talking about? You’re not into that kind of thing, are you, John? You’re not talking psychic shit here, are you?”

“I’d prefer not to be talking at all. Tee, if you’d just step aside and then get out of here.”

“Okay, you’re the expert-but what are you going to do?”

“Just sit there for a couple hours.”

Tee shivered. “A couple hours?”

“More or less. It’s nothing mystical, Tee. It’s just an exercise in imagination, but it helps me to be on the scene.”

“What are you imagining?”

“We don’t have to do it. Drooden will probably find out all you need with his microscopes and tweezers.”

“Okay, okay. Go. Enjoy yourself” Tee stood aside as Becker switched on his flashlight and stepped into the house. “And you’ll remember to put the seal back?”

“Go find Dyce.”

“We’re looking. He’s walking wounded, how far can he get? We’ll have him in no time.”

But Becker was already concentrating on the house. He didn’t seem to notice as Tee closed the door.

Thank God, Tee thought, that I’m just a Clamden cop. An exercise in imagination? Sitting in a house for a couple hours where we’ve found God knows how many bodies under the floorboards? What kind of imaginings could that inspire?

Tee looked up and down the block as he walked to his car. Lights were on, televisions playing. The excitement of the afternoon with cop cars and flashing sirens was over, and the good citizens had already stopped thinking about the commotion in the Dyce house, whatever it was. He wished he could do the same. Traffic violations and the occasional breaking and entering were all he aspired to. He didn’t want any part of communing with goddamned spirits, and the spirit of a mass murderer at that.

Thinking of Dyce lying on his hospital bed twelve hours ago. Tee still could not picture the innocuous, defeated little guy killing anyone, much less eight or more. It had almost seemed to Tee that they were after the wrong man, that the skeletons had been inherited or had crawled in there on their own to die. Any explanation seemed more likely than thinking it was the man with his face punched in on the hospital bed, the guy with the girlfriend who thought she was his mother-crime in Clamden had not prepared him for this. Everybody cheated a little bit, everybody drove too fast and lied on his taxes, and the sons of the privileged were just as apt to get into drugs as the children of the poor-maybe more likely depending on the price of the drug-but when it came to actual crime, in Tee’s experience that was still done by criminals. The kind who started out bad and stayed bad, and they were easy to recognize. Tee knew who they were and where they worked and where they lived. He wanted his monsters to wear horns and spit fire and felt no remorse about not recognizing the man for what he was, but Becker was furious, berating himself during the whole frantic search of the hospital and the neighborhood and the town.

“I knew,” Becker had said. “I knew but I didn’t say so.”

“Knew? How could you know?”

“I knew.”

“Did you have any proof? Did you even know his crime? What could you have done even if you did know?”

“I knew, and he realized it, and I didn’t act and he did, and that’s why he’s gone.”

“We’ll get him,” Tee had said, wondering how. This was not an isolated town in Nebraska. He could not throw up roadblocks and seal off the city. Given a car and a fifteen minute head start, Dyce could be in any of three adjoining towns or a few miles from Hartford. Given an hour of lead time, he could have vanished as completely as a rat down a sewer. As far as they knew, he had had at least three hours’ head start.

The mess would only get worse, he realized. Tomorrow there would be the press and the Hartford television people, and after that probably the national television as well. Mass murder was good for a minute or two on the evening news. But the actual police-work was already in other hands. Drooden was a bastard and deserved all the trouble he could get. Wherever Dyce was now. Tee was glad it was no longer Clamden.

As he drove off he realized that he could see no light coming from the Dyce house.

Standing in the bedroom, Becker played the beam of the flashlight slowly over the heavy oaken furniture, the thick drapes, the simple, almost monastic bed. Clearly not a room where Dyce spent any time; there were no comforts, no books by the bedside, no television. Becker held the beam on the silver-backed hair brushes atop the dresser. Old, like the furniture. None of it was rare enough to be antique; it was just old. Either he had a taste for it, or he had inherited it, but in either case, it was a link to the past. And what keeps you in the past, Becker wondered. What happened then? Or is still happening? Whatever it was, it would not be in the bedroom.

Becker went cursorily through the kitchen again, but that was simply a workplace, a room in which to butcher and boil and bury, a place of grisly utility, but not the place to catch the spirit of the man.

Dyce dwelt in the living room: Becker could feel it. It was the only room in the house where anyone had actually lived. Was it the room in which they had died? Like all the windows, these were covered and sealed with soundproofing material. That meant there was noise, that meant they were alive when he brought them here. Anesthetic in the syringe, the syringe in the car. So he drugged them when he took them, brought them into the house drugged. The garage was at the back of the house. Becker returned to the kitchen and looked into the backyard, playing the light on the garage and then the driveway. If he parked in the right spot, it was no more than four steps to the kitchen door. The house shielded him from the view of the neighbors on one side, the car on the other. Four steps in the dark of night and into the house with a body, drugged and helpless, into the house, into the kitchen. If he killed them then, while they were still unconscious, there was no need for soundproofing.