1

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“It’s pickled,” Gaylord told us.

We’d driven all the way to Richmond.  I’d slapped my beacon on the roof and run ninety where I could.  Kate was on the phone most of the trip with some buddy in the Bureau who was digging dirt on Fullers for us and looking for that Pope.

“Like in . . . saline?” I asked him.

He was holding up the pancreas we’d discovered in a jar.  It looked like some sort of sea-bottom dweller, pale and with fluting around the edges that might have worked for fins.

“No.  Pickled.  Clove.  Bay.  Mustard seeds.  Allspice. Peppercorns.  Salt.  Pickled.”

That was a wrinkle.  I glanced at Kate.

“Are they eating this stuff?” she wondered.

“Wouldn’t rule it out,” Gaylord told us.  “We’re running DNA.  You’ve got bodies going back to . . . what?  ’85?”

Kate nodded.

“I put a rush on it.  Might know whose this was in a couple of days.”

There was symphonic music playing through the ceiling speakers in the morgue.  Gaylord told me, “Mendelssohn,” when he caught me glancing up.  “Helps,” he added, but just at that moment Miss Song fired up a bone saw, and it was hard to see how an overture could compensate for that.

She was cutting some guy on the farthest table.  Rita and L were on our end.  They’d both been laid wide and stitched back shut.  They were waxy-white and entirely uncovered and had that quality of corpses that’s both familiar and surreal.

“Colon,” Gaylord told us as he pointed at Rita.  “And not a bad job of it.  You’re not looking for a surgeon, but somebody has studied up.”

“Maybe just practice?” Kate offered.

“Could be, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it was a nurse or a medic, possibly a veterinarian.”

“Based on what?” Kate asked him.

“Sutures.  Clean incisions.  Knowing where to go and what to cut.”

I pointed at L.  “What did they take?”

“Case in point.  Gallbladder.  Not so easy to find.  Not so easy to get out.”

“Would a medical book be enough?” I asked him.

“Maybe.  Some people just have a knack.”

“Any kind of signature?” Kate asked.  “From the guy in the tree to her to him?”

Gaylord nodded.  “I was coming to that.  The knots.” 

Gaylord motioned for us to join him over by L.  He hadn’t touched the incision the gallbladder had come out through.  “What do you see?”

We leaned in as close as we dared.  It was tidy enough, as sewing goes.  The sutures looked like butcher’s twine.  The knots were taut and uniform. 

“What are we looking for?” Kate asked.

Gaylord waved us over to Rita.  She was a little harder to tolerate naked than L.  There was an awful lot more of her, and it was lounging all over the place.  She was a study in repose of the demands of gravity.  By turns pasty and splotchy, Rita remained in death a monument to chafing, and even with all the cleaning they must have done, she still smelled like her musty house.

She had a far larger incision than L’s, colon sized and stitched up with what still looked to me like sneaker laces.  A tidy job with regular spacing and knots on either end.

“What do you see?” Gaylord asked us again.

“Same shit,” Kate told him.  “Bigger string.”

Gaylord was disappointed in us.  “The knots,” he said.

We studied them afresh, moving from Rita back to L. 

“They look about the same,” I told him.

“Exactly the same.  It’s called a trucker’s hitch.”

“That’s an actual knot?” I said. 

Gaylord nodded.  He fetched a length of cord off a counter by the wall and gave us a demonstration.  “It’s a slippery half hitch.  Run the end through the loop, and then two half hitches to cinch it.  It’s for tying down loads.  Not nautical.  And very regular.”  He pointed at Rita, at L.  “I went back and checked the tree guy too.  All the same.  Exactly the same.”

“Would a proper doctor ever use it?” Kate asked him.

“Doubtful.  Works though, and if it’s a knot you know . . .”

“Can I have that?” Kate asked him of the cord, and Gaylord tossed it to her.

“Got nothing else really.  They’re wearing gloves and smocks or something.  I got an imprint off her,” he gestured toward Rita.  “Close weave fabric.  Might even be a kitchen apron.  Maybe paper."

“Shoes?” Kate asked.

Gaylord fetched a file and showed us photographs.  “The odd tread pattern, but that much blood has a way of filling it in.”

“Let’s talk about the blade,” Kate said to Gaylord.

“Not a scalpel.  Not on any of them.”

“Same blade on all three?”

Gaylord wasn’t prepared to tell us that.

“It’s thin and sharp.  One of them is anyway.”  He turned to Rita.  “As thick as she is, they had to do a little sawing.”

“With what?”

Gaylord fetched some sort of serrated kitchen knife in a bag.  “It was in the sink,” he told us.  He pointed to the handle back where the shank if the blade had been riveted in.  “Her blood.  And the serrations match up.  It was like sawing through a roast.”

“And the other two?” Kate wanted to know.

“Might be a fillet knife.  Some kind of stiletto.  Damn sharp is all I know for sure. Not a razor.  Not a box cutter.  A little off on the bevel, so it might be hand honed.”

“And the clothes?”  Kate was dipping ashes right onto the floor.  Miss Song was boring holes in her while simultaneously laying open a cadaver.

Gaylord had everything neatly bagged up.

“Can’t say much about the slicker.  No label.  Lightly used.  Could be from last year.  Could be from ten years ago.  Boots about the same.  Used but not much.  Made in China.  Sold all over the place.”

Then he took up the bag with the negligee in it.  “Let’s call it . . . bespoke.  Homemade.”  He showed a bit that was inside out so we could see the stitching.  It was haphazard and ran all over the place.  “The elastic is on the rotten side, so it’s been sitting around a while.  Size fourteen maybe.  Did you have any victims that big?”

“Woman in Crestview,” Kate told us both.  “She was pushing two hundred.”

“This too,” Gaylord said as he showed us a necklace.  A delicate gold chain with a dainty crucifix on it.  “Eighteen carat.  No engraving.  Hers, you think?”

That sure didn’t look like Rita to me, but I might have missed that tiny chain in all those rolls she had.

“For him,” Gaylord told us, glancing at L, “just a flannel shirt and trousers.  Both from Sears and Robuck.  Smell like mothballs.”  He opened the pants sack so we could have a whiff.  “Faded a little.  They both look old.  Worn but not worn out.”  He reached for the bag with the sneakers in it. “Different vintage.  K-Swiss.”  He drew out an insole from the left shoe.  “Orthotic.  Specially made.  No markings left, but somebody with a bunion or something wore these.” 

Gaylord gave me the bags, all of them.  Kate was busy field stripping her cigarette.  Miss Song was revving her bone saw, but Kate didn’t seem to notice.

“Anybody dead today?” he asked us.

“Early yet,” I told him.

***

Kate’s buddy up in Quantico was jumping through hoops for dirt on our Fullers.  As we were driving west on the interstate, he called to tell Kate half the stuff she wanted was sealed.  The implication seemed to be the Fullers either had the friends they needed or they’d cut a deal nobody wanted getting out. 

“What about Pope?” Kate asked him.  She listened while he told her something at length.  “Where?”  I could just hear the tinny sound of his voice coming through the phone.  “All right.  Let me know.”  With that Kate signed off and went fishing for a smoke.

“So?”

“The Fullers are singing on somebody.”

“Somebody local?”

“He hasn’t gotten that far.  And Pope might be a guy they got arrested with last year.”

“For what?”

“Redacted.  But it looks like Pope’s an alias.” 

“Now what?”

“Let’s go roust a Gruber.  I know you’ve got a soft spot for them.”

I’d never so much as heard of Danny Gruber until that Fuller brought him up, and I prided myself on keeping current with the rubbish Grubers were up to.  If a lunatic nephew had come back into the fold, I was a little embarrassed I didn’t know about it.  We swung by the station house to see what Ronnie and Verle might know and do a little planning and orienteering before we set out after Danny. Verle was locked away in his office on the phone with a reporter.  He’d brought in Melody, his wife, to help tend to the civilian overflow and answer the station house phones, which had been ringing two days solid. 

Like Kate had predicted, nobody was leaving tips.  They were just distressed and anxious and wanted to know what we were up to, had all kinds of misinformation they were hoping we’d confirm.  Nobody had seen anything to speak of.  Nobody had suspicions. Nobody had neighbors or in-laws they were hoping to turn in.   They just wanted to call and hear what we were doing straight from us.

Doug was talking to a woman who’d come in to town to tell him about her cat.  His name was Jasper, and he’d gone missing about a year and a half ago.

I knew the woman a little.  She’d buried her husband a decade earlier and had never gotten past it.  I have to guess she was probably a little crazy all along, but her husband kept her close to level and maybe shut away.  With him in the ground she was unchecked all over. 

“He came back on a Tuesday.  It was Jasper,” she said to Doug and then whispered, “but he wasn’t like he’d been.”

“What do you mean?” Doug asked her.

“Do you have cake?”

Doug shook his head.  No cake.

“Pity.”  She picked up a rock from Doug’s desk, a hunk of quartz he’d collected somewhere.  The way she examined it you would have thought she was wearing a jeweler’s loop.

“He came back Tuesday?”  Doug asked her.

She offered Doug his rock, kept shoving it at him until he finally reached out and took it from her.

“Your cat?” he asked her.

“Jasper.”

“He came back Tuesday?”

She nodded.  “Last year.”

“Tuesday year ago?”

She nodded.  “He’s never been the same.”

I could muster just enough compassion to bail Doug out of this one.

“Hello Mrs. Crowder.  Remember me?”

She shook her head, didn’t know me from Adam.

“I came out to your house when Jasper turned up.  We talked about how he was different.”

“Did we?”

“And we decided he was just mad at you for locking him in the toolshed.  Remember?”

She didn’t recall that part of it, didn’t seem to recall any of it really.

“Do you have cake?” she asked me.

“You go on home, and when the cake’s finished cooking, we’ll bring you a big piece.”

“Won’t that be lovely?”

Me and Doug grinned like fools and nodded.  She grabbed up her handbag and wandered out of the station house.

“Anything on Pope?” Kate asked Doug.

Doug handed her a quarter inch of DMV printout.  “All the tow trucks and rollbacks and just regular flat haulers in this county and the three surrounding.  No Popes.  One Baptist preacher though.”

Kate shot him her red wine wince and told him, “Funny.”

“Where’s Ronnie?” I asked him.

Doug pointed at the ceiling.  We found Ronnie upstairs with his shoes off heating soup for lunch.  Suddenly the stink of the place made sense, the marriage of microwave and feet stench, along now with a little stale Iroquois smoke and general human waftage.  The place smelled a bit like the bedroom of a fourteen-year-old boy.  Looked a little like one too, given the clutter and decor, most particularly the parade of corpses Kate had pinned up to the wall.

“Hey,” Ronnie told us.  He rubbed his foot while he waited for his soup to heat.  “Damn boots ain’t right.”

“Take them back,” I said.

He shook his head.  “Wore them in the creek.”  The age-old country way of stretching any and everything.

Kate migrated to the photos.  She worked from first to last and paused to study the forensics.

“What do you know about Danny Gruber?” I asked Ronnie.

“Went to Hargrave together.” That was a military school downstate where the discipline cases got sent.

“And?”

Ronnie shrugged.  “Didn’t run with him much.  He was in all kinds of trouble.”

That was a hell of a thing to hear from Ronnie, given his history of wanton cruelty.  Ronnie was a helpless animal killer from way back, tried to graduate to people when Verle took him on the force, but we all threw in together and retrained him. 

There was a guy when I started, Lowell, who particularly took Ronnie under his wing, taught him how to be a subtler sadist, helped Ronnie to get his licks in primarily on the sly.  Thanks to Lowell, when Ronnie hauled in a drunk or some marauding hillbilly with a busted lip and a broken nose and a tooth or two in his pocket, Ronnie could tell us with a straight face, “He fell down.”

Kate perked up.  “What kind of trouble?” she asked him.

Ronnie had never been much of a student of other people’s circumstances.  He had his victories and his disappointments and his befuddlements and his complaints, and they tended to crowd out most everything other people might be up to.  So I was expecting him to shrug like he usually did and tell Kate, “You know.  Stuff.”

Instead, Danny Gruber had made himself memorable to Ronnie, which meant Ronnie must have admired him more than a little at the time.  “He was hard on the girls.  Used to knock them around and shit.”

“What girls?” Kate asked him.

“He’d meet them somewhere.  He had this hair and all.  Girls liked him.  Then the next thing you’d hear they were hauling him in and he was in the lockup in town.”

“Chatham,” I told her.  “I’ll see what I can pull up,” and I went down to get on the computer.

Verle popped out of his office when I hit the landing.  “No calls,” he barked at his wife, and she gave him the sort of huffy look that reminded him she was doing him a favor.  Verle walked over to her and asked her sweetly not to put anyone through.  Then he waved me into his office and shut the door behind us.

“Every goddamn body,” he told me, “is a bottom feeder anymore.”

“What are you giving them?”

“People murdered.  Four so far.  Three cut up.  One strangled.  If anybody’s seen anything, heard anything . . . like that.”

“Do they know about the other killings, the ones all over the place?”

Verle shook his head.  “Matter of time, I imagine.  Get anything in Richmond?”

I nodded.  “That pancreas was pickled, and I mean pickled like granny used to do it.”

Verle told me, “Aw,” and ran his hand through his hair.  “What the shit is all this?”

“Gaylord thinks the killer could have a little medical training, but he says the suture knot’s a trucker’s hitch.”

“What does that mean?”

“I don’t know.  We’re looking for half a doctor who knows a thing about tying down loads.”

Verle told me, “Shit,” which seemed about right.  Verle circled his desk and fairly flung himself into his chair.

“Want to pull a sheet for me?  Danny Gruber.”

“One of our Grubers?”

I nodded.  “We hear he’s . . uh . . troubled.”

“Who from?”

“A couple of Fullers.”

“They ought to know.”  Verle logged onto the database and had Danny Gruber’s particulars in short order.  He scanned through the various charges and convictions.  “You like him for this?”

“We’ll run out and poke him a little.  Got an address?”

Verle was printing the pedigree up.  He checked his screen.  “Yeah, but it’s Roscoe’s.”

“Still don’t want me bothering decent people?”

“Hell, bother whoever you like.”

2

Roscoe was watching Judge Judy with his brassy Tennessee wife.  They had the volume cranked up so that we could make out everything from the driveway.  A woman had come to Judge Judy’s court to seek redress from her caterer who’d spoiled her wedding reception with tainted food.  She kept going on about her special day and blubbering a little.  She claimed her guests had been felled by the gumbo.  The caterer insisted they were just drunk. 

Judge Judy was getting testimony from the plaintiff’s husband who, as it turned out, had already legally separated from the plaintiff who seemed prepared to blame that on the gumbo too.  I knocked on the screen door.

Roscoe said, “Go on with you.”

“Ray Tatum, Roscoe.”

I heard his wife whispering to him.  Me and Kate stood there on the porch through an entire advertisement for lemon-scented bathroom cleaner.

The wife finally wandered over to tell us, “This is our us time.”

“Sorry,” I said.  “Can’t wait.”  Then I called out so Roscoe could hear me, “We need to talk to Danny.”

“Aw, hell.”  Roscoe switched off the set, groaned as he shoved up out of his chair.

“Let em on in,” he told his wife.

She unlatched the door.  “You tracked last time,” she said to Kate.  “Wipe.”

Kate flicked the butt of her cigarette out into the shrubbery.  She shuffled her feet on the doormat for a nanosecond, bulled her way on in and followed Roscoe back into the kitchen.

“A Yankee, isn’t she?” the brassy wife asked me.

“More like Martian,” I said.

Roscoe had assumed the position, was sprawled in his dinette chair with his hands resting on his belly.

“What now?” he asked us.

By this time, we were fully acquainted with Danny’s repertoire, from punching his dates and forcing himself on reluctant girls and women, to beating a man on account of a fender bender, to larceny—both petty and grand—to shivving a guy in the Laredo lockup, to going off his nut in a Kansas shopping mall when he couldn’t find the watchband he wanted.  That earned him six months in a psych ward at Prairie View.

“Got a few questions,” I told him.

“He ain’t much of a talker.”

“Where is he?” Kate asked.

Roscoe ignored her.

“Gave this as his address.”

Roscoe didn’t even look her way.

“On parole?” I asked.

“Something like that,” Roscoe told me.

“Then he’s got to be where he says he is or he’s sure to go back in.”

“I put him to work,” Roscoe told us.

“Where?”

“Where’s Danny?” he shouted at his wife in the front room.

She showed up in the doorway.  “Why?  What’s he done?”

“All right,” I said.  I pointed at Roscoe.  “Obstruction,” I told Kate, and she was out with the cuffs and slapping them on before Roscoe could muster the indignation to be properly outraged.

She cranked them down.  I could hear the chatter.  Roscoe made a bid to laugh it off, but she’d hooked him up too tight for that. 

I pulled out my cuffs and stepped toward the wife.  She gave me one of those simmering Nashville cotillion don’t you dare! looks.  I just spun her around and locked her down.

“Roscoe!” was all she could manage.

“I’ll take you,” Roscoe said.

“Tell her,” I told him.

He looked at Kate.  “I’ll take you,” he said and added in due time, “ma’am.”

He was too proud to ask her to take off the cuffs, so he rode in the backseat of my Crown Vic with increasingly blue hands.  Roscoe directed us to yet another orchard out North Garden way, all nectarines on a rolling hillside with a couple of junky houses. 

“Can’t be too hard on Danny,” he kept telling us.  “He ain’t built like regular folk.”

He wouldn’t elaborate, not anyway while trussed up in the car.  He had us pull into the orchard on a rough track the tractors used, and we bounced along as close to the houses as a car was meant to go.

We hauled him out, and it took him about another mule-headed few minutes before he said to Kate, “I’d be awfully grateful if you’d take these off.”

She obliged him, saying nothing.  Roscoe rubbed his wrists and turned to walk toward one of the houses.

“Hold it,” Kate said.  “Not built like the rest of us how?”

“You’ve seen his record.”

“What’s it not saying?”

“Sometimes Danny’s clear in the head.  Sometimes he’s a little cloudy.”

“What happened out in Kansas?” I asked him.

The trees in the orchard were heavy with fruit, plump and deeply ruddy nectarines.  Roscoe stepped off the track and examined two trees before he found a nectarine he liked.  He made a show of rubbing it on his shirt and then took a healthy bite.  He showed us the flesh.

“Won’t find a better one.”  He said it by way of an offer.

I shook my head.  “Kansas.”

Roscoe took another bite.  “Danny had a spell.  He’s wrong in the head sometimes.  What do you want me to tell you?”

“How long has he been living out here?” Kate asked him.

“Eight months maybe.  A year.”

“Keith’s son?” I asked Roscoe.

He nodded but not in a way that struck me as crisp and resolute.  There was something not just cloudy in Danny but cloudy about him as well.

“And what’s Keith’s wife’s name?” I asked him.

Roscoe scratched his chin.  He bit his nectarine.  He looked around.

“Just between you, me, and the phone pole, got nothing to do with her.”

We waited.  Roscoe chewed.  Kate lit an Iroquois.  He finished his nectarine, tossed off the pit, wiped his mouth with his shirtsleeve, and said, “Keith sowed some wild oats.”

“Who’s the mother?” I asked.

Roscoe shrugged.  “You need to talk to Keith about that.”

“Call him,” Kate said.

“Cell’s at the house.”

“He’s your goddamn son.  You don’t know his number?”

“Don’t know anybody’s number.  See what technology’s up and done.  Let’s ask Danny.”  With that Roscoe struck out up the rugged track.

One of the houses was tidy.  The other was a sty with trash on the porch in grocery bags and cans glinting in the yard.  It turned out a dozen Mexicans lived in the neat house, and Danny had crapped up the other one by himself.

“Hey, boy,” Roscoe barked out.

We both pulled our sidearms.  I told Roscoe, “Shut up.”

“Go on with you.” Roscoe was yelling now, warning Danny as best he could.

Kate wheeled around and hit him, caught him flush on the jaw.  For efficiency’s sake she used the hand that was already holding her Glock and laid Roscoe open at the cheek.

He only smiled and said, “Now, sugar.”  He sat down on the steps. 

I took the front door.  Kate circled around back.  The panel door was standing open.  The screen was punched through at the bottom.  It was an old frame house with most of the paint sun-bleached and worn away.  The stairs creaked and popped as I climbed them.  The garbage was all flyblown and stank powerfully.  The screen door was unlatched, and the spring popped and sang as I drew it open.  I about half expected a shotgun blast and couldn’t imagine the clapboards would do much to help me out.

I heard Kate at the back door just as I entered through the front to discover that the porch and yard were the parts that Danny kept nice.  The front room alone made Rita’s house look like a swanky showplace.  It was piled with everything even Danny must have been too embarrassed to put outside.  Black leaf bags full of something.  Big piles of soda and beer cans.  There was a table heaped with what I wouldn’t dignify by calling it drug paraphernalia.  Danny had been cooking or smoking or just flat ingesting the sweet Lord only knew what.  He had glue and nose drops and spray whipped cream and toilet paper spindles along with a bong made out of PVC and a needle I wouldn’t have used on livestock.

I was stunned by the sheer magnitude of the squalor, and this in a part of the world where living in squalor is kind of a local avocation.  So I was loitering there in the front room just soaking everything in and not really holding up my part of the onslaught.  That left Kate to work through the rest of the house.  I kept hearing her shouting, “Clear!” while I just stood there and wondered how a life could come to this.  Even the life of a fellow who was “troubled.”

Kate joined me presently.  She said, “Jesus.”

“Is the rest of the house like this?”

She nodded.  “But less furniture.  Just crap.”

I took the tour.  There was a mattress in the bedroom, a nasty thin thing resting on the floor.  Every other square inch of planking was covered in a mixture and clothes and trash.  Mostly food wrappers and boxes.  Danny appeared to have a weakness for Cheez-Its, and he seemed to have worked his way through every butter cookie on offer.  The ants were eating all the crumbs he’d left.  There were signs of mice all over and the stink of vermin’s nests.  A rat or something had chewed a hole clean through the wallboard and had dragged a couple of socks and a t-shirt in.

The bathroom was alarming.  I couldn’t bring myself to step inside since I felt half-infected standing in the doorway.  Kate told me, given the choice, she’d come by cholera somewhere else.  What we took for a second bedroom was chest deep in all manner of stuff.  Piles of it.  Bags of it.  Heaps of it.  It looked like Danny had robbed the Goodwill Store.  He had blankets and bedspreads and old, ratty towels.  There were topcoats and trousers and sweaters and shoes.  The dank, fetid smell of the place mixed with the stink of mothballs was nearly overpowering.

I was wondering if I’d ever get scoured clean again when Kate brought me around with a question. 

“They’re not getting clothes from here, are they?”

“Oh,” I said.  “Right. Clothes.”

And suddenly it didn’t look like mere rubbish.  It looked like evidence waiting for Ronnie and Doug to zip up in their coveralls and sort through.

We found Roscoe still sitting on the front steps.  He was pressing a handkerchief to his cheek to staunch the blood.

“Home?”

“Danny’s about the only thing that’s not in here.  Come have a look.”

“I’m fine,” Roscoe told me.

“Be fine in here,” Kate said by way of invitation.

Roscoe eyed the blood on his handkerchief.  He stood up eventually. Roscoe lingered on the porch decking, looked around and told us, “This place could do with a straighten up.”

“What does Danny do out here?” I asked him.

“He’s management.”

“Yeah, so,” Kate said, “what does Danny do?”

“I can’t be driving out here, and Keith’s up to other stuff, so Danny’s our eyes and ears.  Keeps things in line.”  Then Roscoe showed us his cut, his bloody handkerchief.  “Bet I’m gone need stitches or something.”

“Ought to watch where you're going,” I said.

Roscoe laid a hand to my shoulder, massaged me a little in a fashion I resented.  “Son,” he said, “you ain’t no better than the rest of them.  Know you think you are,” he told me, “but you’re not.” 

“Come on.” Kate held open the doorscreen for Roscoe.  He started to say another thing, but Kate grabbed him by the belt buckle and jerked him inside.

Roscoe looked prime to object but the state of the place shocked even him.

“Well now,” he said and looked around.  He shook his head.  “Well now.”

“Management?” I said.

“Got family?” he asked us and shrugged. 

We walked Roscoe into the kitchen. It was stacked with pizza boxes and littered with Hardee’s bags.  The sink was heaped with the sort of crusty, neglected dishes that would surely never come clean.  The pots on the stovetop had been used for cooking Danny-sized batches of meth.

“Weak boy.” Roscoe said.  “Always been a weak boy.”

“How much shit exactly have you kept him out of?” Kate wanted to know.

Roscoe dumped one of Danny’s dinette chairs clean and dropped onto the seat of it, rested his hands on his belly.

“Steals mostly,” he said.  “Not money so much.  Car or two, just shit he sees around.”

“And the girls?” I asked him.

Roscoe dropped his head in what looked now like genuine sadness, as genuine anyway as he could manage.  “Yeah.  Been hard on a few.”

“We know what he got caught for,” Kate said.  “What did he get away with?”

Roscoe appeared to weigh and sift through all the reasons why he shouldn’t say a damn thing, thought better of it and started in.  Slowly at first, tentatively.  “Hit a girl,” he said, “back in Chatham.  Liked it too much.  Hit a few more.”

“Went in for two of them,” I said.

“Tip of it,” Roscoe told us.  “Got so bad, we checked him into Butner.  I ain’t telling you nothing, but there’s people around that can’t be fixed.”

“And aside from the girls?” Kate asked him.

“Bar fights.  Knifed a boy out in Schyler.  Some drug shit gone sideways.  I don’t know.”

“Back room’s full of clothes.  What’s that about?” Kate asked him.

Roscoe shrugged.  “Pack rat, I guess.  Shit, look at this place.  Who the hell knows what’s going on in his head.”

“Have you been in here before today?” I asked.

Roscoe shook his head.  “Tell you a true thing.  The boy scares me a little.” Coming from a Gruber that was something hear.

“Why?” Kate took Roscoe’s handkerchief from him and carried it to the sink.  She shoved enough dishes out of the way to make a path to the faucet.

“Something off in him.  Wild, you know?”

“Think he’s ever killed anybody?” Kate was rinsing out the handkerchief as she talked.

“Says he has.”

“Who?” I asked him.

“A couple of folks.  One of them sounds like a tale.  Ass kicking gone wrong.  Fighting over some biker chick.  That sort of shit.  But the other one.  He got this look, you know?”

Kate approached Roscoe and dabbed at his cheek, mopping away the encrusted blood.

“Some woman somewhere, out west, I think.”

“Beat her?” I asked.

Roscoe gave his head a slight shake.  “Cut her up.  Don’t know why really.  She did something or another.  Danny ain’t big on reasons.  But they cut her up, and when he tells it . . . I don’t know.  He hadn’t got the brain to make up shit like that.”

“They?”  Kate had Roscoe looking nearly sanitary.  She stepped to the sink to rinse the handkerchief again.

“Yeah, there was a couple or three of them.”

“Remember where?” I asked.

“Want to say Nebraska.  Don’t know.  Danny passed a little time in Omaha or somewhere.”

“Ever try to track it down?  Look it up?” I asked.

Roscoe peered up at me like I was simple. 

“Where are we going to find him?” I asked Roscoe.

“Let me do some phoning.”

“Now’s good,” Kate told him and poked him with her phone.

“Every time I like you a little,” Roscoe said, “I up and don’t like you no more.”

He started with Keith who insisted on coming over.  He had things he wanted to tell us out of the presence of his wife.

A crew was picking nectarines on the far side of the orchard, and me and Kate walked over while we waited for Keith and while Roscoe made his calls.

The pickers were all illegals, judging from the calculations they seemed to be making once we’d shown them our badges. We told them in English not to go bolting off, tried to tell them in Spanish too, but it was hard to know—between the two of us—what we actually might have told them.  Whatever it was, they stayed put.  It probably helped that they were weighted down by the canvas sacks of nectarines over their shoulders.

“Donde es Danny?” Kate asked them.

That touched off a spot of intramural chatter before the guy behind the wheel of the tractor—pulling a trailer loaded with fruit bins—told me and Kate, “He gone.”

“You know where?” I asked him.  “Donde?”

He pointed in a direction that included most of the rest of the country.  Better than the little dipper, I had to guess.

“Quando?” Kate asked.

The crew couldn’t quite decide between them, but the consensus appeared to be that Danny hadn’t been around for two or three days.

“Drove off?”  I pantomimed as best I could.

Most of them shrugged, but one of them shook his head.

“No?” Kate said to him.

He shook his head again.

“With somebody?”

“Si,” he told her.  “With.”

“Quien?”

He shrugged.  He looked maybe ten.  His fruit sack was nearly touching the ground.

“A man?  A woman?”

“Si,” he told her.

“Hombre?”  Now I was comprehensively out of Spanish.

“No,” he told us.  “Una Mujer.”  Then he coughed like he was hopeful of hauling up a lung.  We didn’t catch it at first.  I just figured he had some sort of ghastly Latino cold. Then he told us, “Mira,” and he coughed again.

***

Ronnie thought he was keen to do anything by way of avenging L until he rolled up on Danny’s house, and I sent him inside.

I should have gone with him or at least prepared the way, but I just let Ronnie blunder on in and blunder, almost immediately, out again.

“What the fuck’s this?”

“Want Doug out here?” I asked him.

“Want a damn airstrike.”

What could I tell him?

“I want to fuck up somebody, not pick through this shit.”

“This shit first.  Got to find out who to fuck up.”

That made impeccable sense to Ronnie for some reason.  “Oh,” he told me.  He peeked inside, shook his head.  “What’s the drill?”

We found Ronnie a big stout stick to stir the rubbish and the clutter with.  It was snake season after all, and a fellow might get bit.  It wasn’t long enough as sticks go.  Ronnie seemed to be hoping to do his stirring while standing out in the yard.  I helped him a little at first.  We made short work of the front room and only found one dead rat and the mummified carcass of a baby possum. 

“He lived here?” Ronnie kept asking me, stepping on “lived” a little harder each time it came out.

Kate was seeing to Roscoe and talking to Quantico both.  They’d retired to the good house, the one with the flowers and the shrubbery and the square of mowed lawn.  Roscoe was sitting on those porch steps now.  Kate was standing in the yard.

“This the guy?” Ronnie wanted to know.  “This him?”

“One of them maybe.”

“That did L and shit?”

“Could be.”

“Fucking Grubers.”  Ronnie pointed with his stick toward Roscoe across the way.  “Him too?”

I shook my head.  “Helping us find him.  Danny’s only half Gruber.  Half something the hell else.”

We turned up thirty-eight dollars in the front room, bills just crumpled on the floor.  That was enough to keep Ronnie going.  When he moved off down the hallway to start in on the back, I slipped out onto the rickety porch and made my way over to Kate.

Roscoe and Kate were chatting like they were regular pals.  She was even eating a nectarine and appeared to be liking it.

“Anything?” I asked them both.

“Danny’s nowhere,” Kate told me. 

“Keith’ll be out any time, but I doubt he’ll know more than I do. Nobody’s got any idea about Danny,” Roscoe said.  “Can’t find a soul who’s seen him.”

“Did you ask him about the woman?”

Kate shook her head.

“She’s got a cough,” I told Roscoe.

“Hell, I’ve got a cough.”

We all turned to watch Keith wheel his truck into the orchard and come racing up the track toward us.  He came tumbling out of the cab almost before he’d stopped.

“What’s he done now?” 

Roscoe didn’t offer an answer but just pointed at me, at Kate.

“Crimes against housekeeping for the moment,” I said.  “But it’ll probably get worse.”

“Daddy told you about him?” Keith glanced at Roscoe who nodded.  “All about him?” Roscoe managed a pained smile as he nodded again.

“We want to hear about his mother,” Kate said.

Keith gave us a shrug.

“Local girl?” Kate asked.

Keith nodded.  “Kind of.”

“Spill it, boy.”  Roscoe laid a hand to Keith’s shoulder and gave him the sort of massage I’d received.  Keith squirmed a little.  He glanced up at Roscoe and noticed his wound for the first time.

“What’s that?”

“Bumped it,” Roscoe said.  “Tell them.”

“Met her in the damn IGA,” Keith began. “Whirlwind sort of thing, and I’m not proud of it.”

“When was this?”  I’d found you had to poke a Gruber or he’d just piddle out and dry up. Keith was reliving the romance. I could see that in his face.  Regretting it maybe, ruminating on it.  Everything but babbling about it.

“How old’s Danny now?” he half asked himself, half asked his father.  “Thirty-four?  Guess I was twenty-two, twenty-three.  She might have been pushing forty already.  Don’t really know.  Didn’t seem right to ask.”

“She got a name?”

Keith treated Kate to the Gruber stare.  “Yeah.”

Roscoe massaged a little more by way of encouragement. 

“Teresa’s all she ever told me.  She also said she was a Buford from down by Newport News, but that turned out to be a bunch of crap.”

“She got pregnant?” I said just to keep it all rolling.

Keith nodded.  Ronnie broke something over in the trashy house.  Keith glanced toward the racket as he told me, “Yeah.” 

Then he described the woman in such a way as to blend his lingering adoration with what sounded to me like decades of pent up rancor and regret.  He had us to know she was lovely and wicked both.  Kind but not at all to be trusted.  She could be thoughtful and cruel by turns.  Mostly, she’d been willing.

“Hell,” Keith said, “I was just a kid.”

“Did you know she was pregnant?” Kate asked him.

Keith shook his head.  “She told me she was taking a pill, wearing a cup or something.  I don’t know.  I was a fool when it came to women.  I’d been in orchards all my life.”

“So how did it play out?”

He shrugged at me.  “She was just up gone and one day.  I went out to see her.  She rented a place over by Ragged Mountain, little house out past the gas mart.  Wasn’t nothing there.  Just picked up and left.  Not word one to me.  Gone,” he told us and got massaged again.

“Did you track her down?” Kate asked.

“Sure as shit tried.”

Roscoe grunted and nodded like a man who might have bankrolled all the trying.

“But you found Danny somehow,” Kate said.

Keith shook his head. “He found me.”

“Just out of the blue?” I asked him.

Keith nodded.  “Eighteen years later, and he was sitting in jail.  Got picked up for fighting or thieving or something.  Hard to remember now, he’s been into so much shit.” 

“How did he find you?” Kate asked.

“Her.  Said she told him all about me.  It turned out she was out in Idaho or somewhere by then.”

“And that’s when you first saw Danny?”

Keith nodded.  “He came out for a while six or eight months later.  Boy was a hellion, I can tell you that.  In every kind of bullshit a fellow can get into.  We sent him to Hargrave.  Thought that might straighten him out.”

Roscoe tapped his chest.  He did all the sending to Hargrave.

“I guess you heard about that shit down in Chatham,” Keith said.

“Saw the charge sheet,” Kate told him.  “Worse than it looked?”

Keith shot a glance at his father who nodded slightly to give clearance.

“Wonder he hadn’t killed those girls.  There’s a beating, and then there’s a beating.  He got six months in county.  The lawyers did it.  Worked over here a while after that, and then he just took off.  He was in Ohio next I heard, came back running from some sort of mess he’d made.  Got arrested in Texas for some sort of assault.  Then Kansas maybe three years back.  Went nuts in a shopping center.  We thought they’d keep him locked up, but they turned him out in a while.”

“And his mother?” Kate wanted to know.  “Did you ever hear from her?”

“Finally,” Keith told us.  “She just showed up.  I’m standing in the damn drugstore.  I was trying to keep my hair back then and looking at all the shit you need to do it, and she just walks up and does this.”  Keith ran his fingers through the scant hair he had left.  “Like I was somebody she could do that to.  Like she’d never gone anywhere at all.

“Women, huh?” 

Keith was a little confused to hear that coming from Kate, but he spat and nodded and, at length, he told her, “Shit.”

“She still around?” I asked him.

“Oh yeah.”

“Where are we going to find her?”

“For what?” Keith got all protective in a flash like she was his again.

“Tell them, boy.”  More massaging from Roscoe.

Keith finally pointed country style.  “Not like I’ve ever been out there.”

“See her around?” Kate asked him.

“Sure try not to.  Wife wouldn’t much like it, and I’m pretty well ready to let it all go.  Her and Danny and the rest of that crew.  Damn strange bunch if you ask me.”

“What crew’s that?” I asked him.

“Her kids, I think.  Probably some strays in there too.  Like a damn commune or something out there.”

“Where exactly?”

He pointed to his left, which would be west.

“I can’t say for sure.  Wasn’t even really looking for the place when I ran across it. Out there seeing a fellow about some land he wanted to sell."

That was just when Ronnie let out a whoop from over in the nasty house.  I thought he’d probably uncovered a copperhead or a rattle snake or a bear cub until he charged out on the rickety front porch and waved his trophy at us.

“Hey!” he told us and held it high.  He had a pair of trousers.  I was sure I’d seen them before. Putt Putt pants. They were pleated and puce.

3

L’s shirt was over there as well and L’s loafers with the hardware—a gold chain across the top.  I recognized them straightaway.  Ronnie was convinced he’d turned up some of Rita’s clothes as well.  Cavernous stuff with that moldy cracker stink about it.

Ronnie showed me and Kate where he’d found L’s clothes, just poking through a pile with his stick, and that’s when he turned up the copperhead, a big fat one coiled under a blouse.  Kate shot it as cleanly as you please.  Me and Ronnie were still airborne when she fired.

“I want all this,” Kate told Ronnie, shoving her Glock back in its holster.  “Every damn thing.”

“And Teresa from Newport News?” I asked her.

“That’s us,” Kate said.  “I guess we’re riding Keith around.”

Roscoe drove his boy’s truck home, and Keith piled in with us.  When we hit the blacktop, the only directions he gave us at first were, “That way.”

“Did Danny ever mention somebody named Pope?” Kate asked him as we were hitting the near side of Batesville.

“Danny’s not big on names.  It’s always 'this boy' did this or that.  He calls everybody 'you.'  Me.  Daddy.  Everybody.”

“What’s Danny look like?  They haven’t sent us mug shots yet.”

“Me, I guess.  But worse. Scrawny as hell.  The drugs and all.”

“Meth mostly?”

“Any damn thing, from fortified wine on down.”

“Ever hold a job that you know of?”

Keith’s snort was all I needed to hear.

He wasn’t sure where we were going.  He’d never found the guy with the land for sale. “I was riding all back in there looking for him.  Just happened to see her car.”

“How did you know what she drove?” Kate asked him.

“Followed her out of the drugstore.  Pontiac or something and purple.  Bad paint job, like it was done with a brush. It was just sitting there, out in the yard.  Not like I could miss it.”

Keith turned out to be one of those guys who never knew exactly where he was.  When we got beyond Batesville, we took Ortman Road down to 250.  At the intersection, he told us both, “Oh.”

“Raised here, right?” I asked him.

He nodded.  “Dyslexia or ADD or something.  Daddy could tell you.  They had me tested.  You put me out of the car right here, I wouldn’t know which way was home.”

Kate groaned like she feared we’d be facing another Leslie day of touring the countryside to no good end.

We made a pit stop at a gas station over by Turks Mountain where Keith went in for a sausage biscuit and cup of bitter coffee, came back out and forgot what he’d been riding in.  Me and Kate were standing at the register.  She could see him through the window.

“Look,” she told me, and together we watched Keith wander around the lot.

He chatted up a fellow who’d stopped in for gas.  He glanced at the door of the grocery mart, hoping for us to show, I guess.

“Keith’s not all there,” Kate told me.

We watched him stare at the rear of my sedan.  He even peeked in the window like he was searching for something familiar.

“A little dotty,” I allowed.  I pulled out my phone.  “Think Roscoe’s home by now?”

“If he’s not, I’m sure that wife of his would love to help you out.”

I tracked down the number.  She answered.  “What exactly,” I asked after the chilly formalities, “is wrong with Keith?”

She was right in the middle of telling me hardly anything at all when Roscoe showed up, took the phone from her, and told me all about Keith’s condition.  Some kind of advancing feeblemindedness.

“Any chance he can show us where this woman lives?”

“He gets all right sometimes and then goes away again.  I’ve seen him straight for whole days.”

“Lately?”

“Well,” Roscoe told me, “no.  Been in a bad spell for a stretch.”

Then his wife grabbed the phone and unloaded at length on the topic of Roscoe’s injury.  “Says he fell down, but I know it was you,” she told me. “You and that cunt,” she said.

In her honied Tennessee accent, it almost sounded genteel.

“So?” Kate asked me.

“Mrs. Roscoe says Hey.”

Keith was hanging out at the pump island by the time we finally reached him.

“Your daddy tells me you’ve got a problem remembering stuff,” I said.

Keith looked at me hangdog like I’d discovered a gambling debt he owed.

“I get these spells,” he said.  “Used to come and go more than now.”

“Any idea about the guy with the land for sale?” I asked him.

“I figure if we hit the right road, it’ll wake me up, and we can go from there.”

“Yeah, but where do we start?”

Keith did some country pointing.

We headed south, toward Wintergreen.  I stayed on the main road so Kate could bring in signal enough to call in bureau favors and keep up with her buddy at Quantico.

Keith kept thinking he recognized stuff, but he couldn’t truly say from where.

“Maybe you wrote down the guy’s address somewhere, the fellow with the land,” I suggested.

He had written it down, he told us, about two and a half years ago.  “Put it somewhere,” Keith said to me.  “Want to look for that too?”

Kate’s buddy at Quantico was just coming up with the usual dirt on Danny.  He had a fairly extensive record for piddling mischief and a couple of charges for outright robbery and assault.  The psych report was awash in jargon, but Danny had clearly lost his shit.  He’d threatened to butcher two fellows and a little girl in a mall outside of K C because they didn’t have the watchband he wanted in brown.

The Quantico guy sent a recent photo of Danny to Kate’s phone.  She showed it to Keith.  “This a good likeness?”

“That’s him.  But no mustache now, and he got a nasty cut.”  Keith ran his right forefinger the length of his left cheek.

“What from?” Kate asked him.

“Don’t know. Wouldn’t tell me.  He didn’t have it, and then he did.”

I pointed toward a county bank and a U-Store-It place on the roadside.  “Ringing any bells?” I asked Keith.

He gazed out the side window. “Yes,” he told me, “and no.”

It went like that clear to Wintergreen where I pulled into Toad’s shop.  Hoss came out blinking.

“Remember me?” I asked him. 

He wiped his nasty hands on an equally nasty rag.  He watched Kate from her collarbones down.   “Remember her,” he said.

“Know him?” Keith was up and out by now and convenient to point at.

Hoss wiped some more and told me, “No.”  He gave Kate another glance.  “Boy might,” he said and shouted him out from the shop.

So we talked to Toad while Hoss stood by and leered.  Kate showed him the photo of Danny on the screen of her phone.  “But no mustache,” she told him.

“I don’t know,” Toad said. 

“How about a guy named Pope?” I asked them.

“What Pope?” Toad wanted to know.

“Drives a tow truck or a rollback.  Maybe both.”

Toad nodded a little like he was digesting the info. “The rollback’s some shit he slapped together?  Like a Dodge and a Hino he just welded up?”

“So you know him?”

“Hell,” Toad told me, “you know him.”

“Where from?”

“Back up there.” He country pointed. “That wagon in the gully.”

“Chip?”

Toad nodded.

“The clean guy?” Kate said.  “The one that didn’t say shit?”

Toad spat and nodded.  “I heard he was out at the quarry for a while, driving one of them loaders or something.  I got a card or something somewhere.”

Me and Kate followed Toad into the office, Toad called it.  It was just like the one-armed mechanic’s office, though maybe slightly more of a mess. There was a desk in a corner of their cluttered garage with boxes of oil filters piled upon it. Air filters and belts and tail pipe hangers as well.  On top of a pile of parts catalogs and assorted tool calendars from years past was a shoebox full of scraps of paper and outright business cards. 

Toad shoved it at me.  “He’s in there.”

We dumped the shoebox contents onto the hood of my car once we’d rounded Keith up.  He’d circled the tumbledown makeshift fence Toad and Hoss had constructed, drawn by the sight of the coffee bar and creperie just down the road.  Business cards and refrigerator magnets.  Scraps of phone book pages and crumpled notepaper.  The odd machine screw and rotten rubber band.

Keith had been helping us sift and separate for a minute or two before he asked us, “What are we doing?”

“He’s in here,” I told him.  “Pope.  Anybody that’s not him we’re putting back in the box.”

Keith got distracted by the sound of Hoss’s air wrench and went wandering off toward the garage.

“Is he getting worse right in front of us?” I asked Kate.

“I’d say he was sundowning, but it’s only half past two.”

We ended up with seven candidates for Pope, just phone numbers and post boxes, one street address in Dooms.  We called Toad out to look them over.  He had a slow peruse, told us, “Huh,” and then shouted for Hoss to join him.

“That one,” Hoss told us.  It was the Dooms address.

Toad informed us, “Naw,” and handed over the number for a post box back in Ennis. “Or this,” he told us and tapped on a street address written on the back of a Basic City Diner receipt.

“But the rest of them?” Kate asked him of the remaining four.

Toad and Hoss consulted with snorts and glances.  Hoss told Kate’s breastbone, “Nuh uh.”

***

The postmaster at Ennis wanted “a damn court order.”

“At most,” I told him, “we’d need a warrant.”

“Then get one.”

“Special circumstances,” Kate informed him and showed him her badge again.

“I seen it,” he told her.  Then he launched in on his fractured reading of the Constitution like I knew from the moment I laid eyes on him that he probably would.

It was all boot-on-the-neck-of-the-little-guy stuff.  Rights and privileges.  Fourth amendment.  He gave the impression of a man who preferred an indignant lather the way some people like polka music or the color red.  A snit just suited him down the ground, so he’d have one whenever circumstances conspired.

“Unless he’s a judge,” that postmaster told us as he pointed out the window at Keith sitting in the car, “there’s not a blessed thing else to discuss.”

I could tell Kate was sizing him up for a slap with her open hand, and I felt certain that would only drive him to tears and litigation.  So I told him, “Look,” and I think I sounded just like Verle when I said it, “this is a murder investigation.  Four dead already. . .” 

But he wouldn’t even let me ladle on the civic-mindedness before he told me, “I ain’t giving you shit.”

That’s when Kate smacked him flush across the jaw with her open hand.  It sounded like a fat kid hitting the water off the high dive.  He’d meant to do a gainer but hadn’t gotten full around. The sound rang in that little P.O., and then we waited to see what would happen.  I think the postmaster waited a little to see what would happen as well.

I was expecting some half-assed recitation of the Bill of Rights, but instead he rubbed his cheek and told Kate chiefly, “All right, then.”  He dug out a file from behind the counter.  “Box what now?” he asked.

“One seventeen,” she said.

“Here it is.  Answard Willis Jenkins,” he told her.

Kate said, “Answard?” to me.

I nodded.  “Wrong guy. They called him Andy, and he’s dead.  Used to have a machine shop.  Got sick last year.  Went fast.”

“His box payment’s overdue,” the postmaster sniffed.

“Next,” Kate said and we were out the door and in the lot before the shock wore off and that fellow decided he’d probably better sue.

“Where’s Dooms?” Kate asked me.

It was Keith who told her, “Far side of the ridge, halfway to Weyers Cave.”

I nodded.  Keith was back with us again.

“We’re talking forty-five minutes, and it’s probably nothing. I say we head over to the quarry and try to track him down that way.”

Kate allowed that was fine with her, and from the backseat Keith said, “Alice.”  He let it out in a fearful whisper like he was naming the antichrist.

She was in a rare mood, even for Alice.  Brewster had forgotten her birthday.  She’d let him not just forget it on her actual birthday but had allowed him to go on forgetting it for the five days after that.  And every comment he’d made to her in a regular unbirthday way, she’d logged against him as a further cause for venom.  Then Brewster had looked at a calendar or heard from a colleague or consulted with his wife.  Something had clued him in anyway that Alice was turning fifty, so he called in an order for flowers that got delivered to the quarry about twenty minutes before we arrived.

Brewster had compounded his problems by making several miscalculations.  He’d used the florist in Afton who made arrangements you wouldn’t put on an in-law’s grave.  Worse still, he’d asked for carnations when, as it turned out, Alice had long made her distaste for carnations abundantly (she believed) clear.  And to save money, Brewster had taken delivery late in the day, after the flowers had already ridden around in the van for several hours.  And not even in the good van with the proper delivery boy, but in the dented Caravan with the donut on the passenger rear driven by the Ludlow boy who didn’t actually have a license because (and everybody knew this) he wasn’t exactly right.

So the flowers came in, carnations of all things, and the Ludlow boy said, “Here.”  He set the vase down on Alice’s junky desk and waited for his tip.  Because he wasn’t right, he was a bad one to wait for tips.  He’d usually just stand there until he heard, “Get out.”

Brewster was out in the quarry somewhere when Alice opened the card that had come with the flowers, so she couldn’t immediately throw her carnations at him.  Instead she stewed and explained to the delivery boy why she was so upset.  He was just the sort of not right to make it look like he was listening, even when he was just standing around waiting for a tip.

Alice needed a compassionate ear and convinced herself she had one.  It didn’t hurt that she’d dug up the petty cash box and was organizing the bills and the silver as she spoke.  She went on at some length about everything she’d given the quarry, all she’d done for Brewster—some of it gravel-related, some not.  Then she gave that Ludlow boy an entire dollar right out of petty cash, and he was heading toward the door and nearly clear of danger when Brewster arrived on the landing and stamped like he always did.  That gave Alice time to load and cock.

Brewster opened the door to the rickety office just as the delivery boy reached it, and Alice fired the vase of carnations in their general direction.  It didn’t appear that she much cared who she hit, so naturally the vase broke on the skull of the boy who wasn’t right.  He was only lucky he worked for the lousy, cut-rate florist in Afton since they weren’t about to use a decent vase.

When we arrived, the delivery boy was still wet and had glass in his hair, and Brewster was explaining his forgetfulness to Alice.  He’d not ventured fully inside and was using that stunned, wet boy for cover because Alice was pitching flingable office equipment toward the door.  The delivery boy caught the tape dispenser just behind his right ear.  His legs buckled a little, but he managed to hang onto the doorframe.

“Now hold on,” Brewster kept yelling at Alice.  He told her she never remembered his birthday, which got that delivery boy a coffee mug off his forearm.  By then he’d spied me and Kate over Brewster’s shoulder. He shook his arm and told both of us, “Ouch.”

Keith was out of the car by then, and he said one more time just, “Alice.”  Then he showed the good sense to put the Crown Vic between himself and us.

“What’s up, Brewster?”  I had to wait until Alice was low on projectiles and about half out of breath.

Brewster told us from the office doorway, “Aw . . .”  He pointed toward Alice, we had to guess, inside.  He was about to enlarge on “Aw” until Alice found an ashtray.  It was one of those clay palm-print things somebody’s grandchild had made.  It missed the flower boy by a scant half inch, hit the landing rail and busted into shrapnel.

Kate got hit with enough chunks and spray to prompt her to say, “All right.” 

So she was the one to wade into the office and put an end to Alice’s snit.  I stayed where I was and waited for the gunfire, but the ladies found a way to work it out.  They probably agreed that men were fools and maybe Kate rounded up and quarantined the remaining projectiles within reach.

All I know is she shouted, “Clear,” just like at Danny’s house.  Even still Brewster only went in with me in front of him for cover while the flower boy told us, “Bye now,” and loped off toward his van.

We let Brewster and Alice have a private moment to iron out their troubles.  Alice screamed at Brewster about everything she did for him and his quarry, all the hours she worked, all the shit she took, all the money she didn’t make elsewhere just to stay on Brewster’s team.  And all she asked of Brewster was a show of appreciation once a year, but he couldn’t even seem to manage that, and that’s when Alice fell to blubbering. 

She was an unsavory fireplug of a woman even in her normal humor, but blubbering she was a spectacle to see.  Her mascara ran.  She drooled and dripped.  She lurched around the office.

Brewster just told her, “Aw, now,” and sort of held out a hand of peace like you would if you’d been charged to pet a cobra.

I don’t think there’s much he could have done.  Alice felt due a snit and would take it no matter what.  So we had to wait until she’d spent all her hoarded self-pity and knocked over everything in the office that was ripe to be knocked down.  Then she plopped into her desk chair and blubbered until that petered out.

That’s when Brewster rested his hand on her head, laid it right on top of her do, and told her like he’d said a dozen times already, “Aw, now.”

“Sorry,” Alice told him, “about the flowers and all.”

Brewster nodded and patted her head a little, told her back, “Aw, now.”

Kate was twitching by then.  She didn’t have much use for local rhythms and guessed she’d already been more than patient enough.  “Our turn,” she told Brewster and Alice together.  “You hired a guy named Pope.”

Brewster told her, “All right,” in that way that means “if you say so” down here.

“We hear he drove a loader,” I added.  “Can’t say when exactly.”

“Pope?”  Brewster was talking primarily to Alice now.

“That’s all you got?” Alice asked me, asked Kate a little as well.

“Quiet guy.  We saw him a few days ago. Skinny, boney even.  Salt and pepper hair.  I get the feeling he hardly talks at all.”

“A loader, you say?”  Brewster gouged out an ear with his pinky.

“That’s what we’re told.”

“Where’s the . . . uh . . .?”  Brewster glanced at Alice who shot him a look back like there wasn’t any way on God’s earth she was digging through 1099s to find a boney quiet guy we only knew as Pope.

Brewster appeared to take her meaning well enough and told us, “Let me think on it.”

He located his desk chair under a trio of banker’s boxes, dumped them onto the floor and sat himself right down.

“Let’s get Winky in here,” he told Alice.  “Where’s the damn radio?”

We could all hear the static of it, somewhere or another.  Before any of us had moved to dig it up, Alice told us, “Don’t make a mess.” 

A match would have been quicker and a lot more merciful, but we finally found Brewster’s two-way nonetheless.  Kate plucked it out of a box crammed with files and shoved it at Brewster who spent a few minutes trying to raise an employee, any employee who could be bothered to answer back. 

He finally got a “What?” from somebody in the pit.  We could barely hear him for all the racket from the trucks and loaders.

“Winky?”

“Hold on.”

We all waited a good five minutes, and I was about ready to walk out the door and go fetch him the old-fashioned way when Winky came stomping in, raining rock dust everywhere.

“A guy named Pope,” Brewster said.  “Remember him?”

“Where from?”

“Loader?” Brewster asked us, and me and Kate both nodded.  “Loader,” he said to Winky who went about accounting for his name.  He indulged in a spot of such rapid-fire blinking you’d have thought he was being sprayed in the face with a hose.

“When?” Winky managed in among all the blinking.

Brewster looked to me and Kate to tell him. 

“Some time or another,” Kate said.  “We don’t know.”

Winky blinked at an accelerated pace, told her back, “All right.”

"Skinny guy.  Fiftyish.  Doesn’t talk much.  Tidy, you know,” I said.  “Neat and tucked in.”

“Lives over by Ragged Mountain?”

“Could be,” Kate told him.

“I remember a fellow kind of like that.  Never did know his name. Don’t think he stayed on but maybe a month or two.  Seem to recall I carried him home once when his alternator went out.”

“Remember where he lived?”

Winky had to blink and ponder before he said, “I think I dropped him out by Linebacks or somewhere.  Wouldn’t let me carry him all the way. Said his brother was coming to fetch him. I think that was him. A year back maybe. Yeah, sounds like your guy.”

“Can you show me on a map?” I asked him.  Kate was already on the way to the car.

Winky nodded.  “What’s he into?”

“Maybe nothing,” I said.  “Know better when we get a word.”

“Good on a loader.  I remember that.”

“Did he make any friends around here?”

“Not the friendly sort.  For a while there I wasn’t even sure he could talk.  Just nodded and shit, but good on a loader.  Better than what I got now.”

“Why did he leave?”

Winky couldn’t say.  He looked for Brewster to tell me, but Brewster instead just said, “I didn’t even know he was here.”

Kate came in with my gazetteer and handed it to Winky.  He flipped through it muttering to himself, “Where the hell are we?”

Winky had to borrow glasses from Brewster who was obliged to locate them first, or ask Alice to locate them anyway.  Instead she just gave Winky hers.  So there he stood in his coveralls looking like he’d been dredged in seasoned flour while trying to scan a map in a pair of ladies’ violet readers to find a spot where he’d dropped off a guy, a guy he could barely recall.

“Maybe here,” he told me.

“That’s over by Palmyra.”

Winky just said, “Oh,” and turned the page.  “Where’s this?”

“Out Wintergreen way.  There’s one-fifty-one.”

“All right then,” Winky said and traced the road south with his finger.  “Went back in here somewhere.  Dropped him at some place near Linebacks.  Sold chicken biscuits.  Shit like that.  Rented movies.”

“Maybe Shorty’s?” I said and tapped the map where I knew Shorty’s to be. “Junky.  Gas island but no pumps?  Got an old red Willys in the parking lot with flat tires all around?”

Winky nodded.  “That’s sounding right.”  He looked where I was pointing.  “Yeah.  That’s him.  Back in there.”

I thanked Winky.  I thanked Alice.  I told Brewster to find a pay stub somewhere if he could, and then me and Kate went out into the uproar of the quarry.  We’d climbed into my Crown Vic, and I’d dropped it into reverse before Kate said, “Shit,” and asked me, “Where’d Keith go?”

4

Roscoe picked up Keith at the station house.  His wife had ridden along with him so she could dress us all down.  We’d gone and treated Grubers like most everybody else, and Roscoe’s Tennessee bride was there to inform us that simply wouldn’t do.  In truth, she was there to inform Verle mostly, and she lucked into an ally with Melody, Verle’s wife, who normally wouldn’t have been around to give us shit as well.

Me and Kate got the yeoman’s dose of the stuff.  Me really since Kate wasn’t the sort to pay much heed to a tirade.  So while Roscoe’s wife and Melody had a dialogue between them about the type of things rash, misguided people get up to sometimes—which were very much different (they had me know) than what decent people do—Kate was on the phone to her Quantico guy and wouldn’t even look over when the Mrs. directed Roscoe to show us his injury. 

She’d carried him to a proper doctor by then, so Roscoe had actual stitches instead of second-hand packing tape.  Green sutures the color of a Christmas sweater.  The bruising had taken hold in a fairly gaudy way, so instead of looking like he might have fallen, Roscoe looked like he’d been kicked down a hill.

Even with all our homicides and a butcher on the loose, Verle still managed to work up a spot of hat spinning entirely for Roscoe’s sake.  Not that Roscoe seemed to need one, but his wife was in a lather that had contaminated Verle’s wife too. 

So Verle told me, “Look,” and launched into the sort of explanation of what was justified procedure and what most decidedly was not, which I didn’t need to hear but Kate wouldn’t listen to.

I made out not to have much memory of exactly what had happened, which left me free to agree with everything Verle said.

“That bitch there,” Mrs. Roscoe told us and pointed at Kate across the way, Kate who could hardly hear Quantico because of all Mrs. Roscoe’s prattle and so raised a finger and told Roscoe’s wife, “Zip it, sister.” 

The moment of silence that followed was so pristine and thoroughgoing that I felt like I was in a vacuum. 

Kate said to just me, “Got him.”

“Pope?”

She nodded.  “Did a stint with the Marines.  Motor pool.  Got three possible addresses for him.”

Verle followed us out onto the street.  “What do you need?” he asked out on the sidewalk.

“A few more hours of daylight,” I told him, but the sun was fast sinking by then and would have dropped behind the ridge before we could get where we needed to be.

“We’ll check these places,” Kate told him and waved the sheet she’d been jotting on. 

“This . . . uh . . . Roscoe thing,” Verle managed.

“He was an asshole, and I hit him.”  Kate dropped her clip to make sure she was fully loaded.  “We got all right after that.”

“Well,” Verle said and nodded as if Kate had apologized.

“Roscoe knows how the world works,” I told Verle.  “Give him time.  He’ll explain it to her.”

“Who’ll explain it to Melody?”  That was followed by a spot of vigorous hat spinning.

“We’ll call,” I said.

Verle nodded, drew a deep sharp breath, and ventured back inside.

His name wasn’t even Pope, as it turned out.  That was some sort of jarhead nickname. 

“He’s a Yount,” Kate told me.  “Horace Raphael.”

We were racing west into the wilds of the county by then.

“So how did your buddy find him if Pope wasn’t even his name?”

“I gave him map coordinates from what whosey at the quarry told us. He got the full 411 on everybody within ten square miles.”

“Who from?”

“NSA.  HSA. Who the fuck knows?”

“You trust this shit?”

She shrugged.  “We’ll sniff a little first.  See what’s what.”

“Start at Shorty’s?”  I asked her.

She nodded.

“Get a photo, by any chance?"

“He’s still trying to round one up.”

Shorty’s might have been just a trashy grocery mart by day, but it was a regular open-air roadhouse come evening.  The widow Mrs. Shorty was old enough and far enough gone with weariness that she didn’t give a hot damn about much of anything anymore.  If folks wanted to buy beer in her store and then drink it where they stood, she couldn’t work up the energy to care.  If the law wanted to take her license away, then that’s just what would happen.  It didn’t make any difference to her since she was sick of the place as it was, so she tended to run her store like she was already half out of business.

So Shorty’s was kind of a beer hall with Slim Jims and Nabs and Twinkies come twilight, and the locals were making a rowdy evening of it by the time we reached the place.  There were cars and trucks parked every which way.  We couldn’t even get into the lot but had to park up the road just off the apron of a fellow’s driveway. 

Kate wanted to go in Shorty’s first and have me hang outside.  Somehow she was persuaded the patrons wouldn’t take her for a cop and might just keep up with their palaver while she wandered the aisles and browsed.

“Browsed?” I said.

She was fixing herself to look more local, tugging her blouse out and such. I explained that while Shorty’s rented videos, they were all about five years old, and the worst bodega in New Jersey had newer merchandise than Mrs. Shorty.  I figured Kate would be hard pressed to find anything, except for beer, that wasn’t dusty and expired.

“If you browse,” I told her, “they’ll make you straightaway.  Buy a tallboy and a chicken biscuit, a couple of packs of Iroquois.  Don’t touch anything else and don’t tell anybody shit.”

“How’s this?” she asked me.  Kate had gotten about as scruffy as she could get.

“Maybe,” I told her.

She pulled her hair back and gathered it up in an unflattering sort of way.

“Better,” I said, “but not enough tattoos and a few too many teeth.”

She tied her shirttails up to show her midriff.  I could see part of her bullet scar.  She unclipped her holster and handed me her gun.

“Give a shout if you need me.”

She sneered like she never would.

Kate went on into Shorty’s while I lurked out of the reach of the parking lot lights around the side of the store.  There was a puny window over there with a partial view of the store.  You had to look through a bread rack, but there wasn’t much stock to speak of, a couple of packs of hot dog buns and one sack of Parkerhouse rolls.

I saw Kate head for the beer case and come away with a Bud.  She asked for a couple of packs of smokes and a chicken biscuit from Mrs. Shorty who stirred herself with a groan that I could even hear outside.

Then Kate started in on how she’d driven over to see her brother.  She told anybody who cared to hear that she’d been locked up for some bullshit, did a split bit at Beckley Correctional and hadn’t seen family for a while.

Some wiry cracker—I could only see his shirtsleeve and his elbow—tried to tell Kate he’d done time in Angola on some federal beef, but Kate called him a goddamn liar and got up in his face.  Then I couldn’t see his shirtsleeve or his elbow anymore, just Kate standing right where he’d been standing as she backed him up.  I figured he’d either be ducking out the door soon or was hopelessly in love.

There was a good eight or ten people in the store.  A couple of them I knew, recognized them just from the pitch of their raised voices.  The whole crowd sounded about half drunk, and a few of them piled on that wiry cracker once Kate had finished telling him all he hadn’t done and everywhere he hadn’t been. 

Then I saw her pull some crumpled money out of her back pocket and fling it on the counter just like authentic white trash would.  She got her cigarettes and her biscuit.  She popped the top on her Bud and knocked back a fair bit of it, wiped her mouth with her forearm. 

She asked some big, filthy guy with curly hair and a Billy Ray Cyrus t-shirt if maybe they hadn’t met up in Wheeling eight or ten years back.

He shook his head.  He told her that would have made him seven.  “I ain’t never been to Wheeling anyway.”

“Well fuck me all to pieces,” Kate informed him back.

There was a quite a lot of chatter and rude talk after that, and I got distracted by a guy who rolled up on an old Ford tractor that was chugging and missing and spitting all the way along the road.  He tried to park between a couple of cars and very nearly succeeded.  The front end fit, but the back tires scuffed up paint on either side. 

I heard him tell himself, “Shit,” as he hunted for reverse. 

Kate was cultivating a couple of boys by the time I found her again through the window.  The one with the Billy Ray t-shirt and the wiry cracker she’d gnawed on there at first.  It got to where they were competing to prove they knew Kate’s brother best.  From what I could hear, it sounded like they both knew him a little.  They ganged up together to describe the truck he drove and the slate gray uniform shirts he favored, the ones with the embroided oval and his embroidered name in red.

“Charlie or something,” the boy in the Billy Ray Cyrus t-shirt said.

But the wiry cracker knew better.  He shook his head.  “Chip,” he told Kate.

“Skinny guy, right?” Kate asked them.  “Don’t say much.” 

They both assured her, “That’s him.”

“Where’s he staying?” she wanted to know.  “His old landlord says she don’t know where he went?”

The t-shirt guy did some country pointing from inside the store.

“Where now?” Kate asked him, and she led the pair of them out into the lot.

The t-shirt guy flung his arm again.  “Back in there,” he said.

“Aw, hell now,” the skinny one said.  “That whole gang of them’s down toward Myndus.”

“Where’s that?” Kate asked him.

He did some useless country pointing of his own.

“Can you show me?”

“Ain’t got no car.”

“I’ll ride you over and bring you back. If you’re still wanting to come back,” Kate said and grabbed up a piece of his shirttail in a coquettish sort of way.  Country coquettish anyhow, which meant she almost jerked him topless.

“Ain’t you something,” was all he could manage as he followed her across the lot and up the road toward my sedan. 

He put a boney arm around her in the road and she let him, tormented him all the way to the car with the stuff they might get up to.  If she could just find that brother of hers and know some peace of mind. 

“Ain’t far,” he said and pointed with his nose.

“Been there?”

“By it all the time.  He’s living back in there with a whole pack of people.”

Kate was too distracting to give that gentleman the leisure to pay much notice to my car.  The whip antennas ordinarily give it away, but he was getting his shirttail tugged, and Kate was telling him about prison life.  I heard her rattling on about the stuff girls get up to when there aren’t any proper men around.

I’m sure that wiry cracker was feeling blessed among men, most particularly once Kate had leaned him roughly against my Crown Vic fender and was closing on him like she had designs on swabbing the back of his throat.  When she grabbed his belt buckle, I was still a dozen yards up the road, but even from there I could see him shiver and twitch.  Even when she spun him full around and forced him facedown on the trunk, he just said, “Aw, baby,” and ground a little against my fender.

I don’t think he had much doubt about where exactly he’d soon put what until he heard me ask Kate, “Got him?”

She was shutting cuffs on that boy by then.  “For your protection,” she said, one of those things no civilian ever quite believes because no civilian should.

By the time he saw me, all he could manage was one long, pitiful, “Shit.”

I could place him by then.  He didn’t just have an actual wife in Lynchburg but a common law wife as well in a Batesville trailer park whose neighbor was some kind of legal aide.  Consequently, whenever the Batesville wife would get to feeling slighted, her neighbor would help her draw up papers that me or Ronnie or Doug would serve.  They were a nuisance for us, a nuisance for him, but some kind of sweet balm for a spouse who, while not taken in actual marriage, still had the standing to raise a stink.

“I paid her,” he told me.  

“Not about her,” I said.

He went rifling, like his sort do, through his offenses in his head.  He didn’t appear to come up with anything I ought to know about.  Then he gave Kate a hard once over.

“You ain’t like no cop I ever seen.”

“Just in case it helps at all,” I told him, “me neither.”

We talked to him there at the fender well, did some tag-team explaining to him about who we were looking for along with an opaque version of why. 

“Know where he lives?” Kate asked him, “Or were you just trying to get in my box?”

“Can’t it be both?”  He showed Kate his teeth, along with places where teeth had been.

“What’s your name?” she asked him.

“Folks call me Buck.”  He winked.

“More folks call him Maurice,” I told Kate.  “You know Pope or not?” I asked him.

“I might, but these come off.”  Maurice raised his arms and shook them to make his handcuffs jangle.  “And you don’t serve no more paper on me the rest of the year.”

I was about to explain where the warrants and the judgements and the liens against him came from when Kate took the short route and just told Maurice, “Done.”

“And I could use a little folding money.”

I showed Maurice a twenty.  When he flashed me a Kroger red wine face, I added another to it.

“You must want this boy awful bad,” he told me as he took the cash.

When Kate pointed at the backseat of my sedan, Maurice started making noises about his needing to ride up front.  Kate smacked the cocky grin right off his face. 

“Next time I make a fist,” she told him. 

Maurice was no fool.  He climbed right in the back.

Maurice directed us straight down 151 a little past Nellysford and had us turn back east on a road I’d traveled a time or two before.  It was the only way in or out of a place the locals called Gullysville.  On maps the road went through to Myndus and Grape Lawn and Davis Creek as well, but on the ground it turned into a track and got choked off by a thicket between the bottom and the ridge.

At Nellysford the last of the light had been spilling over the mountains.  On the road back to Gullysville, we were through with day entirely.  It was night already back in there, had probably been dusk by about five.  The road didn’t look like it had seen a motor grader in an appreciable while.  It was hard packed and washed free of gravel, profoundly rutted here and there, so we were just creeping and crawling along.  Maurice pointed out all the deer along the way, and there was no end of them darting in and out of the woods.

“You like that deer meat, sugar?” he asked one time of Kate, and judging from the way she wheeled and smacked him, I figured one time was all he’d need.

“How the shit you stand her?” Maurice massaged his scarlet ear.

“Works out all right.” I told him.  “I don’t ever call her sugar.”

“You know my trouble?” he asked us.  Me chiefly, I guess.  “I’ve got some kind of pull on girls.  Can’t do a thing about it.  Deer.”  He pointed at a doe lurking up the road cut, where the dirt and the rock gave way to laurels and tulip trees.

We’d fetched up at some sort of Gullysville intersection.  The road, such as it was, took a turn and disappeared over a rise.  We had a track to the right and two to the left.  Only one of them looked used lately.  The other two were grown up with clammy locust stalks and Johnson grass.

“Are we right?” I asked Maurice.

“Dark and all,” he told me. 

He threw open a back door and popped out of the car. 

“Got a light?”

I gave him my cheap plastic flashlight just in case he took off, and he played the weak, yellow beam of it up one track and then another. 

“Have you been to his house?” Kate asked.

Maurice nodded.  “The once. He was selling a splitter, and I was looking for one.”

“How long ago?”

“January maybe,” Maurice told her.  “Didn’t none of it look like this.”

He shone the light all around and finally said, “That one maybe, all mashed down.”

“Get in,” I told him and eased my Crown Vic off the road and onto something worse.  I felt like I was navigating a creek bed.  That track was weedy and swampy and impossibly rocky all at the same time.

“What’s back here?” Kate asked.

“Shed and stuff.  A couple of houses maybe.  A corn crib like they kept cows or something once.”

“Did you buy the splitter?”

“That was the hell of it,” Maurice said.  “Never even saw it.”

“Sold it already?” I asked him.

“Hell if I know.  I showed up like he asked, cash money in my pocket, and him there acting like he’d never said to come.”

“What do you figure happened?”

Maurice shrugged.  “I know that momma of his was in a mood. Can’t say about nothing else.”

“You know her too?” Kate asked him.

“See her around sometimes.  Not so much since she got sick.”

“Bad cough?” I asked.

Maurice nodded.

“What’s wrong with her?” Kate asked.

“Cancer, I guess.   Or something.  Been looking like hell is all I know.  Half the size she used to be.”

There was a bear in the track, a good-sized sow.  She reared up on her back legs and had a deliberate and leisurely look at my Crown Vic. 

Maurice informed us, like I knew he would, “Bear.”

She finally dropped to all fours and went crashing into the bordering scrub like they do, and Maurice was starting in on some sort of bear-carnage bullshit story —“I was up at Ennis one time and didn’t have nothing but a two-shot .25.”—when Kate spied a light up ahead through the trees and told Maurice just, “Shut it.”

I switched off my headlights, which put us immediately in the inky dark.  I stopped the car and killed the engine. 

“Stay here,” Kate told Maurice, but Maurice had other ideas about what he should do and why.

“Sitting here in the middle of the road ain’t no place to be.  Not if there’s going to be shooting and shit and folks trying to run away.”

Kate was checking her Glock again. Maurice could hear the action.

“Then stand in the woods,” she told him.

“Bears in there.”

“Stay well back of us,” I advised him. 

Like I knew he would, Maurice began to lobby for a gun.  I don’t know how Kate found him in the dark, but it sounded like she caught him flush.

So he stayed well back, which he decided worked for him after all since we’d be the ones to roust the bears and agitate the snakes.  I had my good flashlight, and I’d switch it on but just for a second or two at a time since I wasn’t too anxious to roust or agitate anything myself.

We kept on to where the woods broke and we could see a chunk of moonless sky.  There looked to be three or four separate buildings, but we couldn’t tell what was what.  Houses or sheds or barns or garages.  It was some sort of compound for sure with the odd light in a window here and there but no sign of people about.

“Want to call Verle?” I asked Kate.  I figured I knew the answer already.

She just grunted and gripped my forearm before I could ask her anything else.  I could hear the voice now too.  Low and jagged, well away.  We put it in the farthest structure, well back to the right.  There were a couple of lights burning inside the place.  Once Maurice had blundered up on us, we quizzed him to try to find out what was what.

“There’s a shed, you know,” he told us.  “A barn, I think.  A couple of houses and maybe a trailer.”

“Stay here,” Kate told him.

“All right.”

But he followed us anyway.  I’m not even sure he meant to, but standing alone in the dark was just something his feet wouldn’t let him do.  So we moved off toward what we took for the shed, and Maurice came along behind us, far enough back so Kate couldn’t reach him, and he’d stop whenever we’d stop.

We were listening for dogs and I was waiting for a ropy length of a snake underfoot.  This is a bad part of the world for copperheads roaming around at night.  I hated to imagine the yelp I’d loose if I got tangled up with a reptile, half feared that Kate would just wheel and shoot me for convenience’s sake.

I played my light briefly on the shed door.  It had a hasp but no lock, so we eased it open to have a look inside.  I’ve seen the guts of plenty of sheds in my day but never a tidier shed than this one.  The shovels and mattocks and rakes and hoes were all hung on the walls.  There was a shiny lawn tractor parked right in the middle, not new but spotless with not even a blade of grass on the mower deck.  Even the gas cans and the oil jugs all looked to have been wiped clean. 

We moved on to the barn and found it locked up tight.  Way out in Gullysville and well back in the woods, why (I had to ask myself) would anybody lock a barn?

And there wasn’t anything casual about the way they’d locked it either.  They’d bolted plates to the carriage doors and mounted the hardware on those.  So it wasn’t like you could take a pry bar and yank the whole business off.

“Didn’t get in here, did you?” Kate asked Maurice who was lurking still out of arm’s reach.

“Told you,” he reminded Kate.  “Didn’t get in nowhere at all.  Come out.  Went home.  Didn’t hardly clear the driveway.”

We circled around to the left to put the barn between us and what we guessed were the houses across what appeared an authentic lawn.  Not the sort of junk-strewn pasture you’d usually meet with back in the hollows.  This was a full stretch of manicured yard with, from what little we could see, horticultural touches.  Gladiolas and lilies and, to judge by the stink, a fair number of boxwoods as well.

Kate found a window about midway along the side wall.  It looked to be a good twelve feet off the ground.  We would have had to be Chinese acrobats to get her up and through it, so we were casting around for a ladder or something to help us boost her with when Maurice blundered across a weather-warped loose batten on the side wall.  He gave it a tug, and it came right off.  That left a gap between siding planks that we were able to fit the blade of a mattock through.  Once we’d pried off a couple of boards, we could all slip right inside. 

I switched on my light to reveal a barn like most any other barn.  There were a couple of stalls across the way and square bales in the loft.  There was a bush hog and a harrow situated against the back wall.  Otherwise, the place was cavernous and empty.  It looked like somebody had kept cows in it once but not for a great while.  The plank floor was covered in loose, clean straw, and there was the faintest scent of manure.  Ancient and mild and wholly inoffensive.

“Why the lock?” Kate asked.  “Bush hog rustlers?”

“Just paranoid maybe,” I told her as we wandered out into the heart of the barn to get a better look at the loft.  I played my light on square bales of hay and little otherwise.  We checked the stalls.  There were four of them, and they were tidy and empty as well.

We were on our way back across to the hole we’d made in the far wall, and Maurice was telling us how he guessed, given the danger and his time and all, he probably ought to be deputized and paid, when he pitched right over face-first with both a clank and a groan. 

Clank first, I noticed.  Kate noticed it too.  We left Maurice squirming in the hay and swearing about his broken foot while we backed up to find the stout steel ring in the floor he’d stumbled over.  We brushed the hay away to reveal a plank door with a massive iron pull and a couple of thick strap hinges.  Damned if it didn’t have a lock on it too, even stouter than the one on the door, so I went and fetched the mattock, and we even attempted to pry it loose.

“Fuck it,” Kate said after a minute or two, and she took the first full whack.

Maurice was mad enough at the iron pull to beat on it a little himself, but I ended up pounding it most.  It took us a solid half hour and no little bit of racket to finally splinter the wood enough to knock the lock loose.  Then we lifted the door.  No easy thing.  It was sizable and stout, double-thick with planks, and the thing was sheathed in a half-foot of solid foam insulation.  We took turns listening at the outer barn door in case we’d alarmed anybody, but we only heard the TV off and away and the coyotes in the woods.

I went down first because I had the light.  The stairs were steel and worn shiny from wear.

“Something’s sure going on down here,” I said and cast my beam around in what looked far grander than a cellar.  The floor was poured cement, and I could see there was shelving and furnishings about.  The chairs and tables (it looked like to me) were all draped in plastic sheeting, while the shelves were the metal, modular sort, and they appeared fairly crowded with stuff.

I saw light fixtures attached to the overhead timbers and so went looking for a switch. 

“Hold on,” I told Kate.  “Got to find the lights.”

That didn’t prove so simple.  I followed a shiny tube of conduit attached to the near wall, assuming it would give out at a switch.  It did but not before I was well away from the stairs and in between two rows of shelves arranged like stacks at a library.  There were containers on the shelves, big glass canisters of the size and shape I’d often seen in barbershops with combs and sea-blue Barbasol in them.  I hit one of them with my light beam as I was reaching for the switch, and even I could tell there was a human kidney in it.  I drew back in a hurry.  Anybody would have, and I made a point of not looking at any other jars before I steeled myself to reach past that one and switch on the cellar lights.

They were brighter than I expected.  White-hot and thoroughgoing.  There was nothing unilluminated in that cellar after the lights came on.  Kate was standing at the bottom of the stairs by then.  I could see Maurice behind her, Maurice anyway from about his kneecaps up.

“Christ,” was all Kate managed. 

She was just fixed on the shelves with jar after jar, each of them with some sort of organ floating in it.  It took me a while to notice they weren’t all of them human-sized.  There was a heart a shelf down that would have fit into a beagle and lungs I would have wagered from a raccoon or a cat.

Maurice finally reached the cellar proper and let go with a “Shit howdy!”

I told him probably the last thing he had any need to hear.  “Don’t touch anything.”

He eyed ever so briefly a jar full of intestines, put his hand to his mouth, and went clattering up the stairs.

“Ready to think they’re our guys?” Kate asked me.

I confessed I was.

There was what looked like a table at the far end of the cellar, and the floor beneath it was either comprehensively stained or had been painted a dark, dull brown. I followed Kate over.  A milky sheet of plastic covered the whole business.  She grabbed it at one end while I took the other, and together we whipped it off. 

What we uncovered was a proper autopsy table like Gaylord had in Richmond.  A shiny metal bed with assorted sluice channels and drain holes at either end.  There was a cart alongside it with a few knives on it and what looked to me like a tree saw along with vacant spots where other knives or saws or axes had been.

It was all a little hard to take in, not just the stuff and the carnage it suggested, but the planning and the labor and abiding personal ardor that had gone into transforming the cellar of a barn.  The ceiling was insulated from end to end with the sort of thick foam panels you’d use up in Sitka.  The lighting was impeccable, and the jars all looked dusted to me.  It was hard to even conceive of a person who’d take pains with such as this.

Then Kate found the cage back behind a sort of curtain, one of those sliding accordion doors like you used to see in public schools.  It looked like an oversized dog kennel, homemade for sure, and doubtless built in place because it looked too heavy to move.  It was made out of rebar welded and reinforced with thick steel banding.  There was an old-timey thunder bucket in the corner—white enamel with a lid—and a couple of soda bottles full of water.  The floor was chiefly covered by the sort of mattress you would have found at Alcatraz, and there was a pair of handcuffs dangling from the rebar overhead.

The whole thing was maybe five feet long and three or four feet high, and the door on the front looked just large enough to squeeze a bar owner from Watchung through.

Kate found a stray length of rebar leaning against the wall.  She used it to poke through the pile of clothing in the corner of the cage.  Shirts and underthings, a pair of ladies’ stockings, a bright yellow jumper that was just the sort of thing a child would wear.

We looked at it together in dull silence for a moment.  I got the feeling I didn’t really want to be human anymore.