Jonathan Maberry: Dead of Night

“Copy that.” JT turned to Dez. “Flower said she told the cleaning lady to stay in her car. Maybe she went inside.”

They unsnapped their sidearms as they approached the mortuary, each of them fading to one side to be out of a direct line if someone fired through the door. They came in on good lines of approach, working it like they worked every potential crime scene. The town may have been a no-Starbucks wide spot in a farm road, but they took their jobs seriously.

The cleaning lady had been right. There was something wrong with the back door. Dez saw it first and nodded toward it. JT leaned over and saw that the door was a half inch into the jamb but not far enough for the spring lock to engage.

“How do you want to play it?” he asked quietly. They didn’t speak in whispers. The sibilant ess sounds of whispers carried farther than ordinary voices speaking low.

Dez studied the door. “No sign of force. Lock’s intact. But I don’t like it, Hoss. Boy Scout motto,” she said.

He nodded and they drew their guns. Glock 22s with a round already in the chamber and a fifteen-round high-capacity magazine in the receiver. They both lived by the “Be Prepared” wisdom.

This felt good to Dez. Just the thing to erase the memories of the Love God laying in his puke on her bedroom floor. This kind of entry — or a call to a bar fight or serving a warrant on a child molester — made her blood pump. It made her feel like crawling out of bed in the morning had some purpose. Dez knew, however, that JT hated this part of police work. He was at the opposite end of the evolutionary scale, and Dez knew it. JT actually believed that the “peace” in “peace officer” meant that the job was all about keeping things dialed down to a no-violence, no ass-kicking state.

JT keyed his shoulder mike. “Dispatch, Unit Four. Hold the air and stand by.”

“Copy.”

“I’m on point,” said Dez. “You, me, left, right.”

Dez put the toe of her shoe against the door, mouth-counted from three and pushed. The door swung inward on silent hinges. Dez and JT faded back for a moment, and then went in fast; she cut left with him covering her, and then he was inside, checking behind the door and clearing the corners. Guns were up and out in two-handed grips, eyes tracking together with the light.

They were in a large utility room, a shed that had long ago been built onto the house. There were cabinets and an industrial washing machine on one wall, shelves with cleaning supplies on the other. The far wall had another door and this also stood ajar.

“I’ve got blood,” barked JT.

“I see it.”

It was impossible to miss. A handprint, small, a woman’s, pressed flat on the wall by the door. Blood trails had run all the way to the floor. That hand would have to have been soaked with blood to leave trails that long. Dez felt a familiar shift inside her head, as if a switch had been thrown. It was something she first experienced midway through her first tour, and it happened all the way through her two tours in Afghanistan. When she tried to describe the feeling to a sergeant over a bottle of Beam in a tent in northeast Afghanistan, the scarred vet said that it was part of the warrior mind. “It’s the caveman mind, the survivor mind,” he’d told her. “It’s when you realize on a deep level that you just stepped out of the ordinary world and are walking point through the valley of the shadow.”

Dez had tried to explain this to JT once, and though he understood on an intellectual level, the bottom line was that he’d never been in the military, he hadn’t walked the Big Sand. And in thirty years on the job, he had never fired his service weapon and had never taken fire. That made a difference, even if neither of them ever said so aloud. He was smart and did everything by the book, but on some level he was a civilian and Dez could never claim that exemption ever again.

The mind shift changed her body language; weight easing onto the balls of her feet, knees bending for attack or flight, eyes blinking less often, hand readjusting on the grip of the Glock. She was aware of it on a detached level.

JT peered at the blood and then leaned back. He gave his lips a nervous lick. “I do not like this, Dez.”

“Liking it’s not part of the job, Hoss.”

Dez used two fingers to turn the knob, and this time JT kicked the door— hard . Then they were moving fast, rushing into the main preparation room, checking corners, watching each other, tracking everything … and stopping dead in their tracks. The interior lights were on, fluorescents gleaming from stainless steel tables and dozens of medical instruments.

There was no movement in the room, but everything was wrong.

A gurney lay on its side by the open cold-room door, sheets and straps were tangled and askew. Beakers and bottles had been smashed. The delicate instruments of the mortician’s trade were scattered like pickup sticks. Everything — walls, floor, debris — was covered with blood.

It was a charnel house.

“Jesus H. Christ,” breathed JT, and for a moment his professional calm drained away, leaving in its place a shocked spectator. The air was thick with disinfectant, old meat, and the sheared-copper stink of fresh blood.

“Clear the fucking room, Hoss,” snapped Dez, her voice as hard as a slap.

JT immediately shook off his shock and moved around to the far side of the room, kicking open closet doors, checking the cold room, making sure that the prep room was as empty as it looked.

Except it wasn’t.

“I got a body,” he called, and Dez cut a look his way. “Ah, geez … It’s Doc.”

Fuck.

“Gunshot?” Dez barked.

“No … Christ … I don’t know. Knives maybe … This is bad. He’s all messed up.”

Dez was not looking at the dead mortician, however. She clicked her tongue, and when JT looked up she ticked her chin toward a door on the far side that led into the mortuary offices.

“Blood trail,” she said. JT forced his emotions down and locked the cop focus back into place. He hurried to her side. He had his gun ready and his eyes open, but Dez could see fear sweat popping out all over his face.

There were two sets of footprints. Bare feet and shoes. The bare feet were male and large, easily size twelve; the other set was smaller, though still large for what was obviously a woman’s work shoe.

The marks were scuffed and swirled as if the two figures were dancing as they exited. Violent struggles make the same patterns.

“Fuck,” growled Dez and kicked open the door.

They rushed into the office, shouting at the tops of their voices.

“Police! Put your hands on your head! Police!”

Their shouts bounced off the walls and died in the still air.

As with the prep room there was only one person in there, and as with the other room the person was already dead.

JT stopped in his tracks and stared at the body. “God…”

Dez crossed to the only other exit, a front door. The barefoot blood trail went outside and vanished into the grass lawn, beyond which was a stretch of dense forest called the Grove.

“We got someone on foot.” She backed away from the door and called it in. “Dispatch, Unit Two, we have multiple victims. Suspect at large and possibly on foot in vicinity. Roll all available units and crime scene.”

Then she closed the door, flicked on the overhead lights, and crossed to where JT stood staring at the victim. The dead woman sat slumped backward in a wheeled leather desk chair that was parked in a lake of blood.

She was dressed in a blue cleaning smock that buttoned up the front. She had gray support hose and sponge-soled shoes. Her dark hair was pulled back into a tight bun; reading glasses hung around her neck on a cheap junk jewelry chain. Her name tag read OLGA ELTSINA.