Joe Lansdale - Leather Maiden

Mercury typed a bit, paused, said, “Fairs and carnivals and circuses and horse shows and local festivals. The festivals are connections only in that all these towns have some festival or another. Blueberry Festival, Crawfish Festival, Multicultural Fest. Every town has that kind of thing, so no real deal on that.”

I thought for a moment. I thought about Stitch, and how he looked, and it was a long shot, probably a dud, typecasting from Ernie and Tabitha, but I said, “Put the festivals aside for a moment,” I said. “Look at the carnivals.”

“Again, all these towns will have carnivals. They pass through on a regular basis. That’s how they make a living.”

“Try to find a particular carnival in the towns where the murders took place, one where the dates of the murders and skinnings and the passing of the carnival are similar.”

He did, and after a moment, he said: “You got certain carnivals and circuses that have been through all these towns, and you got a carnival that not only was in all these towns, but at the same times you asked about. It was going from Wisconsin to Texas, from Texas to Wisconsin. Fact is, the carnival was here in Camp Rapture, but there’s no connection. No woman skinned.”

I didn’t correct him.

“That carnival was here?”

“Several months ago.”

“Was it here when Caroline went missing?”

“No. It came before she went missing.”

“What about the last murder and the last carnival?” I asked.

“The last murder was in Kansas, a skinning. That was two years ago. You want more specifics on that?”

“Not just yet. I don’t guess there’s any way to look at who worked in these carnivals?”

“Not that I know of. You might find the owners, but a lot of these carnival people are seasonal, or they know when to meet up, and they are paid cash under the table. So there’s no list. I know, because my aunt worked in a carnival as a bearded lady. ’Course, her beard was glued on and she had also been Miss Carthage, Texas, when she was younger. She did the bearded lady thing for two, three years. She had a crush on the guy who worked the whirligig. They got married and he became an accountant and she sells Mary Kay products. Without the glued-on beard.”

I tried to smile in a way that didn’t let on that at this moment in time I didn’t give a shit about the romance of false bearded ladies and whirligig operators.

“What I want to know then is if there is something else these towns have in common?”

Mercury pursed his lips and twisted them around and cocked his head toward the ceiling. I didn’t mean to, but I looked up as well. The tile up there was black and white and in squares. I had a sudden urge to count them.

“All right,” Mercury said, “let me try something else.”

I sat down in a chair and tilted my head back on the headrest and started counting tiles. After a while, I shifted the chair and counted some more. I paused and took out my phone and looked at it to make sure the ringer was on and the battery had power. Yes and yes.

I went back to counting the checkerboard tiles. It soothed me and kept me from pushing Mercury, bad as I wanted to. It kept me from thinking about Belinda in the hands of those cold-blooded killers and that I had left a self-confessed sociopath killer waiting in my living room with a .45 named Mr. Lucky.

“Here’s something interesting,” Mercury said. “Well, there’s a lot interesting. But let me start with the small stuff and move upstairs. Every one of these places had a series of slightly odd events during the times of the skinned women. It didn’t all happen on the days the carnival was there, but a little before or after, and sometimes during. One of the women was found out in a field, made up like a scarecrow, on a post, wearing a hat, dressed in a black coat. Or rather what was left of her was on a post; she was skinned and stretched over a frame, then someone had put the coat and hat on her. All the others were skinned too, and found in different ways, different positions, and there were notes found at all the sites, inside the women’s skulls, but at the same time all this was going on, lesser weird things were happening: cows were found dead in front of schools in a town in Wisconsin. Silly things like yard gnomes were stolen and later were found in prominent buildings: schools, courthouses, that sort of thing. In another town, in Oklahoma, during the night, someone took the back doors off an entire row of houses. That took some goobers, something like that. You know what you’re doing, you can take a door off, but that requires some time and attention and maybe some noise. Man, you got something going here, but I got a feeling it’s more than you’ve told me. You want to tell me?”

“Games,” I said. “Someone is playing games, and it always ends badly. Whoever is doing it arrives with the carnival, then the games begin, and gradually become less gamelike.”

“The skinnings?”

“That’s right. Then they move on to the next carnival site. You notice it’s not every town, and it’s not every time the carnival arrives, so this is someone who works there part-time. Someone of a transient nature. Someone who knows how to hide out in large towns without giving himself away. A night person. A work-as-needed kind of guy, or guys. Someone experienced at this kind of work, who can pick up a carnival job as needed.”

“And when he’s with the carnival he plays his games,” Mercury said.

“And sometimes when he’s not. But the carnival is the original connection. Maybe he has money now, from somewhere, and this time is his own.”

“There’s something else,” Mercury said. “There’s this pattern of the games, the pranks, gnomes, dead cows, and then the murders, and finally there’s one other connection in all these towns. You holding on to your ass?”

I assured Mercury that I was.

“Here’s the biggie. And these events were in the news. I remember some of them, but they took place over a period of time, so there was nothing to link them. There were assassinations.”

“There were what?”

“Assassinations. There’s not a better name for it. In Wisconsin, at a rally for gay rights, the speaker was shot from a distance. A professional hit. It made all kinds of stink.”

“Hell, I remember that,” I said. “I was living in Houston then.”

“And in Arkansas a team mascot wearing one of those outfits was killed.”

“What kind of outfit?”

Mercury scrolled around on the screen. “Team called the Indians. A high school team. A kid got shot, seventeen years old. And get this, they figure someone positioned themselves under the stands, with a silencer, and shot the kid, right through the big Indian head he was wearing, and killed him. Here’s an added corker: the kid was a real American Indian. At a Texas university, an animal mascot, a longhorn steer, was stolen, killed and found cooking on a barbecue grill in front of the post office. The first assassination, though, was of an armored car guard. This was Illinois. Guard would sit in the car and open the door and let the smoke out while his partner went inside, I guess to get more money. He wasn’t supposed to do that, open the door that way. Someone shot him with a .22 rifle, probably silenced. The money was taken before the other guard even knew about it, over three million dollars, and no one has got a clue to this day who took it. They just took the armored car and drove it off, and it seems that an accomplice followed in another vehicle. They dropped the car off in a church parking lot minus the money and a bunch of cashier’s checks. All that was left were some wrapped coins. Later that day, the car and the guard’s body were found. Few days later, the checks that were in the rip-off were mailed back with a thank-you note for all the money. It said: ‘The money was nice, but we can’t cash the checks easily enough, so we are returning those to show our appreciation.’”