William Diehl - Seven ways to die

He spit in Cody’s face.

Hamilton spun his body and managed to let loose a roundhouse that caught the detective square in the solar plexus.

Caught off guard, Cody doubled over with the pain and surprise of the blow.

But only for a moment.

Grabbing hold of the cuffs he wrenched with all his strength and turned Hamilton back around so his back was toward him.

Hamilton was ready for this, reached back to catch Cody’s butt, and flipped him over himself like a circus act.

Cody landed on his feet, gnashing his teeth from the pain from his wound.

Hamilton attacked, raining blows first into Cody’s abdomen then concentrating his fury on Cody’s wounded thigh.

Cody, holding on, turned Hamilton’s strength against him. He allowed himself to be backed up, inch at a time. He could hear the crack as his elbow broke one of Hamilton’s ribs.

Bellowing, Hamilton charged again-and the two men plummeted together from the cliff.

This time the surprise was Hamilton’s, and Cody had the advantage as he twisted the writer’s heavier torso so that he landed on his back-knocking the air from his lungs-but cushioning Cody’s fall on top of him.

Which further took away the killer’s breath.

As Hamilton lay gasping, Cody moved to grab the writer’s right arm and force his hand into the remaining cuff.

But Hamilton, despite his pain, was too fast. With a heroic contortion, he grabbed an arrow from his quiver and wielded it at Cody, causing the detective to roll off and keep his distance.

Before Cody could stop him, Hamilton placed the tip of the arrow into his mouth and sucked on it.

“You don’t think I’m giving you the last laugh?” he gasped. Then he stabbed himself in the side.

Well, Cody thought, in its own bizarre way, this was classic “depression phase,” the last of the serial killer’s psychological phases as defined by psychologist Joel Norris. He watched Ward Lee Hamilton’s paroxysms, making no effort to come to his assistance.

This time the howl was only yards away, making the hair on Cody’s arms stand up. But he was weyekin. He understood the language of animals.

This time it was a welcome howl.

Cody waited for the man’s paroxysms to end before he reached for his cell phone.

That was when he saw the wolf.

Thursday, November 1

Brother Wolf sat and watched, bemused. Then he looked up at the moon, then back at Cody and growled. Not a threatening growl, but stern.

The alpha male was crouching on its forelegs, snarling at the strangely-garbed man whose death throes he had just witnessed. When Hamilton’s paroxysms ended, and he was no longer a threat, the wolf acknowledged Cody, who used the weyekin language to thank it for its concern.

“Hey, boy,” Cody asked, “How the hell did you get out?”

“He jumped the fence,” came the voice of Dave Runningfox, as he ran into the tiny clearing beneath the cliff.

“Jesus, Dave. What the hell’s going on?”

“One might ask you the same thing. You look like you’ve just boxed with the devil.”

“I have.”

Dave’s eyebrows rose as he stared at Hamilton’s red-clad body. “The alpha was howling for you. I couldn’t shut him up-not even with that extra bone you left the other night.”

Cody was squatting next to the animal, which seemed subdued now that he saw Cody was not in danger. “Well, he’s obviously fully recuperated,” he said. Cody nodded for Frank to use the tranquilizer gun on the wolf so he could be transported back safely to the zoo.

As the alpha male slumped into unconsciousness, Cody looked at Dave. “They got Charley,” he whispered.

“Yeah, I know. The alpha led me to him. He’s already in my van.”?

En route to the morgue, Cody phoned Amelie to tell her that he was okay, but he had lost Charley.

“I am so sorry,” she stammered, knowing that anything she could say would be inadequate. “I know you loved him.”

And Cody realized he loved this woman too.

Bergman, Wolfsheim, and Annie were waiting for him, along with the corpses of the Androg duo that had just been positioned on the examining tables.

Ward Hamilton’s badly bruised body was further distinguished only by its enormous post-mortem erection.

Later, Wolfsheim would confirm that the writer’s brain was indeed riddled with cancer. “I’d have given him no more than two months to live, at most,” he judged.

Bergman had immediately identified Victoria’s perfume as the one worn by the woman in red who’d passed his table Friday night at La Venezia-two hours before Uncle Tony’s murder. He’d verified from an eyewitness that the heartless bitch had a limousine wait for her in the parking lot while she did her work inside.

Calling for a check on Jake Sallinger’s whereabouts, Larry reported that NYPD responded to an anonymous 9-1-1 call and discovered the editor’s body a few hours ago. TAZ had been informed immediately, and Rizzo and DeMarco were at the scene at Sallinger’s apartment.

An hour after the autopsies were concluded the hastily-assembled TAZ staff tried to make sense of the matrix of deaths caused by the autoerotic duo, as projected on the wall by Larry Simon:

MELINDA CRAMER Victim: 0(?) — practice run? Appearance: blunt trauma/suicide — fall from balcony Mechanism: asphyxiation Cause Of Death: suffocation — plastic bag over head

RAYMOND HANDLEY Victim: 1 Appearance: slashed throat/alcohol amp; drugs — throat slashed after death Mechanism: brain damageaheart attack — blood drained, blood pressure drop combined with Yohimbe/nitro and oral sex Cause Of Death: puncture wound — to insert I.V. for exsanguination

UNCLE TONY Victim: 2 Appearance: thermal-freezing to death — wine bottle amp; glass at foot of chair Mechanism: asphyxiation Cause Of Death: drowning — in red wine and water

STEAMROLLER JACKSON Victim: 3 Appearance: heart attack caused by drugs/alcohol overdose — empty bottle of Chivas nearby Mechanism: arrhythmia from electrical shocks, leading to heart arrest — Taser pressed against his side until heart arrest Cause Of Death: electrical/thermal — Taser caused fatal ventricular tachyarrhythmia

SONG Victim: 4 Appearance: poison — cyanide found on lips from contaminated Excedrin Mechanism: massive brain damage — gunshot entry wound discovered on back of skull Cause Of Death: gunshot wound — with ice bullet

JAKE SALLINGER Victim: 5 Appearance: asphyxiation — inhaling powder led to paroxysm after which death came from hitting head against towel rack as he fell. Mechanism: massive brain damage — inhaling veratrum album (sneezing powder) led to paroxysm during which he was bludgeoned repeatedly against the towel rack Cause Of Death: blunt trauma — found in pool of blood where he died from massive hemorrhaging as his head repeatedly hit against towel rack

VICTORIA MANSFIELD Victim: 6 Appearance: cutting/stabbing puncture wound in spinal column Mechanism: arrow severs spinal cord — leads to paralysis, but heart attack caused by poison Cause Of Death: poison on tip of arrow — led to heart attack in about ten seconds

WARD HAMILTON Victim: 7 (?) Appearance: arrow through heart Mechanism: massive heart damage Cause Of Death: stabbing and poison — sucked on arrow head before stabbing himself with it

Next to this chart was juxtaposed “Wolf’s Seven Ways,” the simpler list made previously by Vinnie. Simon had scrawled, “7 Ways in 7 Days?” sideways across the new chart.

But Cody was frowning. Something was wrong with this picture, and at first he couldn’t put his finger on it. Hamilton was a perfectionist, and Cody’s instinct told him he wasn’t through with him yet.?

Wolfsheim came in from the morgue, grabbed the cup of coffee DeMarco handed him, then sat down to quietly contemplate the charts and the list, mentally checking off the orchestrated murders one by one.