Chapter Five

1

The locals recognized him, Andy gathered, as he roamed the shelves of Anderson Mill’s Florist and Grocery store two blocks south from where he’d finished his conversation with Walter. The stocking clerk gave him a dirty look as he lined cans of Campbell’s soup for a display. The older lady at the florist station, the name on her tag reading “Florence,” snipped a dozen roses at the stem when she raised her eyes up at him. A middle-aged couple sneered at him as they scrutinized the store’s selection of bread. Did his uncle have such a prolonged effect over Anderson Mills? He wondered if Ned encountered this problem on a daily basis. 

This is why he wants to get the hell away from here. Everyone’s tagging the Ryersons as murderers. 

He experienced the urge to shout “boo” at everyone. The fear of the patrons was an interesting phenomenon. The more he considered it, maybe Uncle James’s story deserved to be cleared up. It was dirty laundry swept under the carpet. He couldn’t let his uncle’s name remain in bad light. The murders were never proven to be the work of his uncle even though he was the prime suspect. 

He was so thrown off by everyone’s expressions that he’d forgotten what he came here to buy. There was a refrigerator in the garage at the house, which Uncle James had used for beer storage. Andy decided to purchase bread, turkey meat and a slew of pre-prepared items like potato salad, fried chicken, pork and beans, frozen pizzas, two twelve packs of Coke and five candy bars—Snickers, his favorite. 

He pushed his grocery cart to pay at the front. The cashier was an older man in a fishing hat with small hooks dangling from the brim with gummy green, red and yellow earthworm fish bait. An oak plaque displayed a picture of the cashier holding up a trout by Silver Lake—“Anderson Mills Largest Trout and Mackerel Catch 1984.” The smile from his face dropped when he eyed Andy. To make matters worse, Andy pointed at the bottle of McCormick’s whiskey on the shelf. “I’ll take one of those as well.”

“ID please,” Larry said, the eyes not leaving him until he studied the card. He mouthed the word “Ryerson” and handed it back to him. He gave him the payment, and the exchange was completed without any further words besides, “Have a good day.”

“These people are lunatics,” Andy grumbled after the door closed behind him. “It’s like they want to burn me at the stake.”

He shoved the two grocery bags into the trunk of the Fiesta and caught a girl in her older teens smoking a cigarette near the side of the store. She wore a blue apron that matched the other employees’ in the store, and the girl parted her strawberry blonde hair to look at him. “Are you related to Ned Ryerson? You look just like him. Are you Andy?”

“How can you tell?” he joked. “Don’t tell me you’re going to give me the look of death too. Those bozos couldn’t wipe the dirty looks from their faces with a power sander.”

She smiled. “You look just like your uncle, in a way. The smile on your face, it’s like you’re always happy about something, and that’s not a bad thing. Plus your uncle talks to me when he comes into town. He told me about you.”

“The smile is quite a deception. I’m really a ball of rage and fury.”

The girl was plain-faced with a bored expression. “Ned’s been shopping here off and on ever since…”

“The death of my uncle,” he finished for her. “It’s okay. I know all about it, believe me. My family won’t talk about it, except for Ned. Nobody wants to face the reality of it. I don’t know many people who’ve had a family member ever accused of multiple murders.”

“I’m Sue Rogers,” she said, flicking the ash from her cigarette. “That asshole on the register is my dad. He makes me work the summers without paying me. Says food and board covers the work, but he lets me off during the school year at least.”

“I’d join a union. I’m sure there are ones for small town grocery stores.”

Sue laughed again. “You’re a funny guy, Andy.”

“Hey, does everyone totally hold a grudge against anyone with the Ryerson name?” He jangled the keys at the driver’s side and unlocked the door. “Everyone in there including the customers gave me nasty looks.”

“You have to remember, everything with your Uncle James happened only eight months ago,” she said. “When someone gets pregnant in Anderson Mills, everyone hears the stork swoop in, so just imagine what murders do. And some of the people that died at the club were from here. The families are still taking it hard. My dad’s friend, Jamie, lost her daughter at that club, and it was her twenty-first birthday. And Suzie Elliot lost her husband and her son that night. What I’ve read in the papers, the whole scene was pretty gruesome. And since your uncle disappeared, there hasn’t been a trial or any sense of closure for anyone.”

“It’s still not a reason to believe that I’m a killer,” he defended himself. “But I guess I can’t expect that understanding from complete strangers who are still grieving. I appreciate you being nice to me, though. I’ll probably be back for more groceries later.”

Sue waved goodbye, stubbing the cigarette into the concrete steps of the front walk, and added, “Don’t take it personally, Andy. You didn’t kill anybody.”

 

2

Judd “Jewels” Hammock trained the muzzle of the M-16 on the empty cans of Hamm’s beer stacked across the sawhorse. He opened fire. Brack-brack-brack-brack! The cans combusted, jolted ten feet from their perch. “Woo-eee! Woo-eee! Fuck you!”

He stood in his backyard, which faced Black Hill Woods. He could fire and not be in range of campers or tourists. It was a backwoods privilege for Judd to empty a clip into handmade targets, the targets being sandbags nailed to trees, Suck-off Dolly whenever the blow-up bitch deflated, televisions he salvaged from the junkyard during his evening shift as a security guard on the premises, and his favorite target, empty cans of beer. Judd acquired the M-16 from his friend Hal at America’s Pawn in Coopersburg fifteen miles south of Anderson Mills for a hefty eight-hundred dollars, but since Hal was dating his sister-in-law, he knocked three-hundred dollars off the price. 

It was one in the afternoon, and he’d returned from a double shift at Sal’s Junk Yard. Judd’s winding down procedure involved guzzling three to five beers, heating up a burrito in the microwave, and popping off machine gun rounds in the backyard. 

Judd focused on firing the weapon again, ready for the next release. He created fake scenarios to get worked up about. He imagined Gilbert, his boss, startled awake inside his office trailer when he pounded on the door. “You asleep in there again? You whack-off to Hustler and fall asleep? Poor baby, can I get you a warm rag to clean off your prick? Oh, you’re going to fire me, Gil? Did I hear you right?” He lifted the machine gun and squeezed the trigger. “I’ll whack-off in your face!” 

Brack-brack-brack-brack! 

The next set of cans on the sawhorse exploded as well as the sawhorse itself. “That’s right—that’s right! Fuck you! Fu-uck yeeeeeeeeeeeew!”

The gunner swigged another Hamm’s and caught a moving speck in the sky. He used his Rangefinder binoculars to observe it, and it wasn’t one of the local birds. It was a white and gray hawk. It resembled a bald eagle, but the wing and feather pattern was different. 

“Whatever it is, it’s begging for a good shootin’.”

He took aim and fired immediately, but the shots went wide. The hawk arched its wings and swooped down at him as soon as he’d opened fire on it. The hawk landed on his head. Judd was knocked onto his back, frightened and flapping his arms at the bird. Jagged talons dug trenches into his scalp. Quarter-inch lacerations bled fervently. He flailed and screamed at the attack, blood filling his eyes, now blinded. 

Shrack! Shrack! Shrack!

The hawk’s beak pecked at his forehead, each connection issuing a loud “thuck.” Judd reached up to rip the wings from the infernal creature when the bird’s beak pierced his right eye. His vision was replaced with darkness and electric lances. The next eye was immediately gobbled, and the bird took off again in retreat. 

Judd randomly shot the M-16, unable to see. Before Judd bled to death from his injuries, a stream of M-16 bullets had connected with the hawk’s chest and it burst into bloody feathers—including Judd’s eyes stored in its gullet. 

 

3

Andy pulled over to the side of the road, curious at what caught his eye. The red truck was parked behind a set of trees half a block from his house. It was the truck Jimmy Jennings drove up yesterday afternoon in. 

“Mr. Jennings?” He called out, peering through the dense oak and maple trees and spotting no one. He expected to hear footsteps nearby, or a voice to shout back at him from a distance. “Do you need help with your truck? Did it break down? Hello? Anybody there?”

If it broke down, why the hell wouldn’t it be out on the road instead of hidden like this?

He waited five minutes before giving up the search. Jimmy was close enough to home, perhaps he parked it off the road so nobody would crash into it, and then he walked to retrieve supplies for repairs. 

He let it go at that, satisfied. 

Andy drove home and stored his groceries in the refrigerator inside the garage. Then he checked his watch. It was noon. “Damn, half the day is gone already.”

He brought in a frozen pepperoni pizza with him, the roil in his belly insatiable. The breakfast with Walter was all he’d eaten, and he was starving. The strange day in Anderson Mills occupied his mind as he prepped the oven in the kitchen to three-hundred and fifty degrees. Everyone in town condemned the Ryerson name. Men like Ed Gein and Ted Bundy probably caused the same problems with their family members. How long did it take for a town to move on from a string of brutal killings? It was a good question to pose in a documentary. The theme would be an investigation of how a crime of such a magnitude could affect the small town of Anderson Mills. He considered pitching it to Professor Maxwell and seeing who he could talk to and maybe raise the funds and interest to green light the project. 

The oven’s timer dinged. 

“Huh?” He opened the oven, confused. “It can’t be preheated already.”

The oven was hot enough to convince him it was ready for the pizza. “I hope this thing isn’t broken.”

He shoved the pizza inside and hoped for the best despite his reservations. Andy set the timer for seventeen minutes and wandered into the backyard. Rows of silky red, white and yellow daisies bobbed in the soft wind. They surrounded an oak tree that was hundreds of years old. The branches extended across the yard, and one had grown over the roof of the house, resting on top of it. The garden buzzed with yellow jackets and moths sucking the nectar from the tulips. He kept to the stone path and enjoyed an overhead view of the bottom of the hill. The Jennings’ dairy farm was visible. Cows grazed along the hundreds of acres. Mary-Sue’s truck braked hard in front of the house, and she stormed inside,  weeping and shoving open the screen door. It clapped hard shut behind her. 

“What’s got her so worked up?”

Now that can’t be because of me. No way in hell.

It wasn’t his place to investigate. It would be awkward for the both of them if he randomly showed up at her house and told her he’d spied her from a distance upset and he was concerned. 

He gave up the concern and waited for his pizza to bake. 

 

When it had finished cooking, he used a towel as an oven mitt and removed the pizza. Slicing it with knife, he realized how difficult modern home life could be without the basic amenities. Without plates, he carried the entire pizza out on a towel and brought it into the living room. 

Bachelorhood at its finest, he thought.

He flipped on the film projector and dutifully watched the remaining reels of The Mallet Killer. He was disappointed after the thirty-minute mark when he understood the basic plot—David Anderson loses his job as a carnie, steals the mallet at the “Pound-O-Meter,” and starts picking off the carnie patrons and the workers, including the bearded lady, the elephant man, half a dozen burlesque girls, and an especially interesting death, the operator of the “Tilt-O-Whirl” receives a bump in the noggin and the ride continues to spin as the riders get sick and can’t escape for an hour before the ride finally stops. A magician stops David’s killing spree after shoving him into the Iron Maiden. The closing scene reveals David’s body punctured by spikes and ultimately dying as the credits roll. 

The scenes of carnage can whet the pallet of any red-blooded gore fan, Andy jotted down, and it’s interesting that David Anderson uses the traveling carnival to escape enlistment in the Vietnam War. The flashbacks serve well to dictate the moments between the arrival of the enlistment letter and his father’s patriotism and the pressure he bestows on his son to do the family name well. Soon after he opens the letter, David’s mother weeps as if her son has already died. The following scene where their next-door neighbor receives a letter in the mail saying her son has died in the line of duty sets up the horror for our main character. That woman’s son was David’s best friend, and David comes to the conclusion to run away with the carnival. The carnie master is impressed with his booming voice and ability to sucker people into taking swings at the “Pound-O-Meter.” It’s the moment that David loses his job and he goes crazy that the movie gives up on any commentary about the Vietnam War. I give it an average rating for story, but the gore and effects were wrenching. Five skulls are split open, a sternum is shattered, eight faces are rendered into pulp—the camera fails to flinch at these moments—and there’s a mass vomiting scene at the “Tilt-O-Whirl.” I didn’t fall asleep, but the plot has a major loophole with David’s motivation to kill all those people. 

Five-thirty. He earned a break from work. He chugged a can of Coke and stretched, walking outside the perimeter of the house, then into the backyard, when a cord wrapped around his ankle and he tripped, losing his fizzy drink mid-air. Landing hard, his ribs and left shoulder took the punishment with a loud ka-thump! He glared at his feet. The garden hose had entangled both ankles.

“How the hell did that happen?” He rose to his feet, the palms of his hands bleeding from scuffing the stone path. “Fucking house, it’s a death trap for the clumsy.”

He washed his hands in the kitchen sink after recovering. Deciding to avoid nature and trip falls, he returned to the living room and searched the bin of films: Humanoid Rat Eats Indiana, The Incredible Exploding Man, Frankenstein Versus the Living Dead, The Cannibal Brain, Revenge of the Basement Trolls, Morgue Vampire Tramps Find Temptation at the Funeral Home, and he stopped reading the titles when he thumbed back to Humanoid Rat Eats Indiana.

“Sounds interesting,” he tittered. “I wonder what a rat looks like in a 1973 film. And why does it eat Indiana? Why not Los Angeles or Newark or some drugged out city that deserves to be infested with people-eating rats?”

He placed the first reel into the projector and shut off the lights, then relaxed in the chair and waited for the film to begin. The scene opened with a semi-truck rig winding down a back road. The film was lower quality, perhaps shot in eight millimeter—Super Eight—and the night hues were so dark it obscured any fine definitions of trees or the truck itself. Two men were in the rig, both with mutton chop sideburns. The audio was dubbed, though it was an American movie. A rock tune he didn’t recognize played on the radio, a cross between Ted Nugent and Credence Clearwater Revival. The two were dressed in black denim body suits like housepainters even, though the side panel of the truck read “Sewage Disposal Unit.” 

“Harvey, what’s your wife like in bed now that she’s pregnant?” 

The other—he assumed was named Harvey—smoked a joint and passed it to his co-worker. “Man, Christy hasn’t given it up ever since her periods stopped. I think she resents me. Hell, she was happy in college while I paid the bills and put food on the table. Now that she’s not burning her bra and panties anymore and dropped out of school, she’s turned into a real bitch. She eats all day and watches television. It’s like she’s lost her ambition to please me.”

“She didn’t resent you when you were puttin’ the blocks to her,” Travis added with a sharp laugh of righteousness. “She’ll get over it. Once the idea of a becoming a parent sinks in, she’ll pursue a sex life again. Maybe with you, maybe with someone else…”

“Hey, fuck you, man.” Harvey stole the marijuana cigarette back and sucked in a hard toke. “Ah, I think it’s the cannabis that’s really doing her in. Her grades sunk below C average after a fellow student introduced her to her mind, if you know what I mean.”

“Hell yeah.” Travis pulled out a baggie from his side pocket. “Man, these late night drives bite the big one. It takes this groovy shit to take the edge off.” 

“Is that coke in the glove compartment?” Harvey’s eyes lit up. “Let’s snort it, pal. Nostril napalm!”

Travis produced a mirror from the glove compartment under the stash and cut it with a folded up road map. The shot panned to the rig taking a sharp turn and passing the gates with a faded sign reading: 

DO NOT ENTER

WATER TREATMENT FACILITY

RAW SEWAGE 

Harvey complained, “It smells like my grandma’s farts—maternal farts, you know?” He pinched his nose with his thumb and index finger. “That facility smells worse than what’s in the back of our rig, and that’s saying a lot!”

“Do you know what we’re hauling?” Travis challenged the man, snorting a track down the mirror and toot-toot-tooting in delight. “Ah, that’s what I needed, partner. Yeah, Bert didn’t tell you what’s really in those barrels we’re driving.”

“The line master doesn’t tell me anything. He said I’d get overtime pay for driving this on short notice through Indiana to Wisconsin. That’s all I needed to know. Pay me money. I fucking drive.”

Travis let the secret out. “It’s agent orange sealed air tight in those barrels. A factory in Wisconsin refines it into a powder they can put into missiles.” He put his hand over his heart. “Don’t you feel patriotic? We’re sending it to help our fellow soldiers overseas.”

It was Harvey’s turn to snort the toot. “I pledge allegiance to the flag—hell yeah!”

The semi-truck picked up speed, and when it did, the front wheel struck a pothole. The truck dipped and tilted to the side, jolted so hard the entire vehicle was affected. The rig was spring-ejected from the road, then hurled down a short hill, and finally, it burst through a fence. Barbs and jolts of electricity shot sparks as the steel perimeter was uprooted. The truck kept picking up speed and crashed nose-first into a sewage pond, the water’s surface oily and suspicious. The howls of the drivers faded as the rig sank with a gurgle of air pockets that burst topside. The back hatch opened as the rig sank deeper, and the barrels in back went plop, plop, plop into the water, the cargo escaping one by one. And that’s when the camera closed in on the dozen rats at the water’s edge, where the barrels had collected. The vermin were lapping up the black sludge kept inside the round containers. 

Andy rolled his neck and groaned, already feeling glassy eyed. “Wouldn’t agent orange kill rats? And what about the rest of the local wildlife, like mosquitoes or frogs? How come they wouldn’t be mutated?”

In the next reel, a scene carried on to the following day where a group of people in yellow moon suits combed the sewage treatment area, testing the water in a frenzy. Andy watched the next scene in anticipation when two of the suited men heard a shriek from within a large sewer pipe. 

One said to the other, “You hear that?”

The other man with a device that looked like a tire pump connected to a 9-volt battery in his hands, replied, “It came from that sewer pipe over there.”

“Is it too late to clean this up? Shit, we’re wasting our time, aren’t we?”

“I don’t know. That’s why we’re checking it out. It’s our job to clean up messes, isn’t it?”

“We didn’t find anyone from the truck,” the man whispered, hesitantly edging toward the pipe. “If anyone finds out about this or gets hurt, we’re in deep shit. The government doesn’t have clearance to use civilians to transport the chemicals. These guys will probably contract every form of cancer…if we find them.”

“Shut up about it. We’re scientists. None of this concerns us. We’re here to clean up and that’s it.”

The man moved alone to the giant pipe. He aimed a flashlight inside and turned back to the man Andy guessed was his superior. “I don’t see anything but floating turds.”

The hairy muzzle of a rat extended from the dark shadows, and then the camera cut to the man falling backward with his arm missing, howling in agony. Blood turned the algae-colored water pink. The man screamed, splashing in retreat with one arm. “My arm. Shit! My arm!”

It was obvious the man’s real arm was tucked under the suit.

The other worker was soon attacked, the top of the rat’s head at the bottom of the camera bobbing as it hunkered down upon him. The rat chomped on the man’s head, the neck stump spurting three foot tall jets of blood. 

Andy jotted notes on his pad and prepared himself to endure the rest of the movie. 

 

3

“Wayne, are you inside?” Sheriff O’Malley called out into the empty store. The word on the dispatch was that Wayne had locked an intruder inside the walk-in refrigerator. “Wayne, answer me. Where are you?”

The call from Doris and Bruce Hamden’s house about the group of dressed-up dead men had already put him at an uneasy alert and now he was dealing with this. Those six idiots set themselves up for potential danger. Doris wanted to blow them away for tramping across her garden. What would the next person do who crossed paths with the convincing group of walking corpses? And now Wayne called to say there was an intruder in his deli. How many weird things were going on in Anderson Mills today? 

As he entered the eatery the smell troubled him. It wasn’t deli meats or anything stagnant. It was powerful, though, like the smell of iron in blood. The lights were out, but there was enough late afternoon daylight filtering through the windows to make sense of the shadows. He withdrew his 9 mm handgun. He stepped over to the front counter and combed the area, the gun in his hand. 

“Come out with your hands up. You’re under arrest.” 

Nobody replied.

A series of noises stopped him in his tracks: drip, thap, drip, thap, ka-thud, ka-thud, and then the grating whir of a garbage disposal choking on its fill, the blade cutting through metal or bones by the sound of it. He observed a hand sticking out from behind the wall, dangling limp on the floor. He hurried to investigate it. Someone was in the back of the store at work, but what work was the operative question. With the scent of blood, the curious noises and then the garbage disposal’s churn, he suspected the worst.

He crept to the wall beside the rack of chips and squatted to check out the hand. Now that he could see more, the sheriff cringed at Wayne’s torso. The blood trail behind Wayne’s upper half made it obvious he tried to crawl away even after he was cut in half. 

He dared to peer into the back room. A hanging body dripped from a headless stump. Body parts lined the table top, blood oozing from the edges and streaming into the drain. The meat grinder catcher was heaped full of grainy meat threads and folds of flesh.

Coughing on his own disgust, he forced out the order, “Freeze asshole!”

The intruder popped out at that moment, dressed as Wayne would be on an average business day, a white butcher’s outfit with a black apron over the chest and legs, but this man was burly and well over three-hundred pounds. His black greasy hair was in tangles, and his patchy beard stained in random spurts of blood and flesh. The butcher guided a coil of long intestines into the garbage disposal undeterred by the command and was about to shove a severed foot through as well when he finally paused to study Wayne. 

Eyes bulging wide, his face burning with incredulity and venomous anger at the intrusion of his important work, he barked defensively, “MY CUTS!”

“What did you say? No, forget it. Put the weapon down and get your hands up right now. Shut up and do it! Or, or I’ll shoot you!”

The man didn’t register the commands. He brandished a clever and drove it into the body hanging upside down, hacking and slicing until he wrenched out the innards handful by handful—the butcher winning the awkward game of tug-of-war when the pieces seemed to be stuck but finally gave—and slopped them onto the floor. The sheriff noted the pile of clothes at the exit door, and they looked like what the workers at Eddie Stolburg’s slaughterhouse wore. 

He’d killed all of them.

“How many people have you slaughtered? You crazy son-of-a-bitch, get those hands up right now! Drop the clever—I said drop it!”

It was in that moment he read the name embroidered on the man’s breast pocket: Jorg.

He insisted again, “Jorg, you do as I say, or I’ll shoot you.”

Jorg didn’t budge at the commands. He stroked his blood-sodden finger down a line of butchering knives and stopped at the twelve inch steak knife. He clutched the handle and removed it from the magnetic strip. 

“Put it down—now!”

Jorg’s grin took shape, those awful words ripe with spittle and insatiable hunger, “MY CUTS!”

Wayne pulled the trigger, seeing no other course of action. He was shocked by the damage a single bullet inflicted. A plume of red exploded from the butcher’s chest, and it blew a cinder block sized hunk of flesh from his back that spattered out like wet dough. The skin unraveled along his abdomen as if it was all tied together and the knot had been undone, and the man collapsed in one sickening PLOP. But he wasn’t dead yet. The eyes leered at Wayne, studying him, looking him over. The man clasped tighter to the knife and raised it as if to throw it when the sheriff emptied three more rounds on pure instinct. One shot struck the hand holding the knife, liquefying it into finger and palm debris. The second lodged in the abdomen with little reaction, but the third pierced through the man’s forehead and erupted, spitting a gallon of blood against the wall, finally immobilizing the chef.

Shaken, but snapping out of it, Wayne quickly called for back-up and an ambulance.

 

Officials from the Green County police department accompanied the sheriff to comb the scene for evidence, the crime scene itself confusing as it was unique. The deli was busy with seven crime techs total, each careful with their steps, the evidence splattered at every corner. Crime scene investigator Kyle Redding stepped up to the sheriff with an initial report. “The assailant apparently murdered the workers at Eddie Stolburg’s slaughterhouse and drove their remains here in a stolen truck to butcher.”

“Was he going to eat them?” The sheriff inquired, shaken at the idea of the overweight man feasting on the flaps of meat heaped in the meat slicer’s tray. “Christ, he cut Wayne in half. What could he have used to do it?”

“Uh…gentlemen.” Another investigator named Frank Garrison approached them, a beefy man much like Jorg but handsome in a rugged, authoritative way. “I believe this is the murder weapon.”

Frank held up a scythe in his gloved hand. The blade was seven inches long and wicked from the glare in the overhead light. 

“He must’ve brought it here,” the sheriff suggested, his belly twisting at the thought of it being used on poor Wayne. “Who in the hell is this guy? I’ve got my deputies with your men at Eddie’s slaughterhouse, and they’ve pretty much found the same thing.” He pointed at the body hanging upside down from the ceiling. “More of these bodies were drained of blood like slaughtered cattle, and even the receptionist was murdered. Ironic thing, none of the cattle or money was stolen. The rest of the place was left alone, aside from the workers.”

Garrison added his two cents. “He has no identification whatsoever.” The man’s rotund face turned white. He couldn’t look them in the eye during his next comment. “We haven’t gathered any fingerprints, not even from the knives he used or from his own fingertips. The man’s hands come up smooth, no markings or indentions at all. It’s strange.”

“And impossible,” Redding scoffed. “Maybe he’s put something over his fingers, or he…he, well, I don’t know, but I’m sure there’s a logical explanation.”

The sheriff massaged his eyes, his concern welling up into what could possibly bubble over into a professional breakdown. “I’m going to have to tell Wayne’s wife about this. She’s not going to take it well. Goddamn it anyway.”

Garrison studied the murderer’s head, half of it blown away. “Kyle, look at this. His skull is empty, and we’ve found no brain matter anywhere in the room. You shot him in the head, obviously.”

“Only because he was coming at me after I shot him three times. Crazy lunatic acted like it didn’t faze him one bit. And I saw the exit the wound, and there was no brain or skull material. It’s like nothing was in there. And he kept saying the same two words. My cuts. It didn’t make sense. It reads “Jorg” on his breast pocket. Maybe that’ll help identify him.”

Redding became entranced with the inner workings of the man’s chest. “No remains of the heart either, as if he never had one. The sternum looks ill-formed, cartilage instead of bone. There are no organs, just fatty tissue and muscle. At the back of his head, there’s no brainstem connecting from the spine. I’d like to perform an autopsy. It’s like the body isn’t real. He’s an anatomical anomaly. Any college professor would love this discovery. What if there are more people out there like this?”

“This is as incredible as the James Ryerson incident.” Garrison was genuine in his remark. “We still don’t know how he grafted those bodies together and mismatched people. And some of those people are still missing. It’s only been eight months. The incidents might be connected.”

“James Ryerson is dead.” The sheriff dismissed their line of thinking. He recalled one of the bodies at the Lawrence nightclub twitching alive with three arms attached to one side of the body, the other side a human head lodged where the shoulder should’ve been. He shot it in the head to end its misery, more out of sheer repulsion than sympathy. “This isn’t connected. I want a better answer than this. A logical one.”

The sheriff recalled how the Hamdens had spotted six men dressed as corpses. 

What the hell’s next, he thought. Anderson Mills is really going tits up today.

“The FBI swept the Ryerson incident under the carpet, but the two incidents are within eight months of each other,” Redding said again. “Anderson Mills is about to reach its peak season with tourists. This needs to be wrapped up double quick for their safety.”

The safety of our money, the sheriff thought. “Then what are we going to do about this mess?” He watched another investigator pile organs into a body bag, but the worker couldn’t figure out what parts matched what body and cursed under his breath in frustration. “And is this the only man responsible for these killings? We haven’t asked ourselves that yet. Could one person do this?”

“You two are missing the scientific implications. This man’s body is an oddity.” Redding lowered onto his haunches and pivoted the man’s flimsy head toward them. “There’s no brain, just the components for the man to see and to breathe. He’s fused together by wads of fat, tissue and cartilage. Yes, there could be someone else responsible, and the real question is, are they like this man too?”

The sheriff dismissed the scientific talk. “Just get this place cleaned up. Take the body to your lab, and call me when you’ve performed an autopsy. I’m interested in what you find, yes. All of this unsettles me, though. I pray this man dying was the end of this horrible incident.”