Werewolf Cop (23 page)

What had happened? What could have happened? His memory had never been so blank . . . or, wait, yes, once. On the operating table, when he'd had his appendix out. That's what came back to him. They'd put the anesthesia mask on him, and the next instant he was in the recovery room. It was a blackout so complete, it made him doubt the immortality of the soul. This was just like that. There was that thorough a blackness between Margo's last words and this. But at the same time, even though he remembered nothing, thoughts were rushing in from the edges of his mind to the center of it, unthinkable thoughts about Gretchen Dankl and Peter Stumpf and the Black Forest and Dominic Abend and those waterbugs. . . . He was thinking about all that—and only the fact that it was all so unbelievable kept him from putting things together and fully realizing the truth.

What time was it? His watch was gone. He checked the moon. Had to be midnight or not long after. Grace! And, Christ: Margo. He had to get out of here. He had no idea where he was, how far he'd traveled. But the road was at the brink of the gorge and he was at the bottom of the gorge—so just head up the hill. That would lead him back to the road eventually.

He took a step and grimaced. Of course—he was barefoot. The twigs and rocks bit into his soles, the mud rose uncomfortably between his toes. It didn't matter. He had to get out of here.
Had
to. He edged along the narrow strip of shore until he spotted a trailhead in the blue moonlight. Then he headed up into the woods.

It was a half-hour climb. Not easy. Beneath the autumn trees, the moonlight reached him only intermittently and there were long stretches of deep shadow. It was difficult to keep to the trail and, whenever he strayed from it, unseen branches scratched at his face and arms. Sticks jabbed into his feet. Sudden slithering movements in the duff made him pull up short, alert, listening. The cold began to seep into his skin and make him shiver. He had to fight through tangles of thick vines and roots to make his way back to the path again. Then he plodded on—up—out of the gorge—through the moonlight and darkness. Thinking: What happened? What the hell happened? Black-hearted with foreboding all the while, because deep down he understood. He finally understood, but he couldn't bring himself to face it. He couldn't see what he could not bear to know.

Finally—there—up ahead: a glow and then a yellow light. A house window through the branches. The ground began to level out. The sky appeared and even though the moon was slipping down behind the forest, the trail became brighter.

Panting from the climb, he edged toward the tree line until he saw the house clearly in the glowing midnight. It was Margo's place. He recognized its shape against the stars. A few more steps and he could make out her living room through the lighted window. He stopped at the brink of the forest, holding a branch to keep himself steady. He stared at the place.

He was afraid of what he would find there. He had never felt so afraid.

Slowly, he moved onto the lawn. The grass was soft and cool beneath his feet, easier to walk on. He stumbled toward the house, a man in a daze, carrying his misgivings like a weight against his belly. As he came around the side of the building, he saw something sparkling at the edge of the driveway, where the grass met the gravel. Shattered glass from the window there, the very window he'd been looking through when the moon came up. It must have burst outward violently.

Please God . . .
he thought.
Please God. . . .

He walked around the glass by sticking to the thin strip of lawn at the edge of the garden. He glanced through the busted window as he passed it—but he only looked in briefly, and all he saw was the living room, all he noticed out of place was an overturned wing chair.

He walked over the gravel drive. The gravel stung but he barely felt it, barely felt anything now. He sleepwalked to the front door and tried the knob. The door was unlocked and swung open. He stepped in after it.
Please God. . . .
He wanted to turn back. He wanted to climb into his car, naked as he was, and drive away and keep driving. But helplessly he went on, passing through the foyer to the living-room archway.

Aside from that overturned wing chair, the room seemed strangely undisturbed. From where he was, beneath the arch, he could see the crystal candlestick—the one Margo had thrown at him—lying under the armchair. As he came forward, he saw that the other candlestick had also fallen and lay chipped on the wooden floor at the base of the table on which it had stood. He dared to hope that he wasn't going to find what he knew he would find, but that hope died when he came to the edge of the sofa and saw his clothing on the floor.

The rags of his jeans and his jacket and shirt, the scraps of what had been his sneakers, his wallet, his cell phone, some spare change—it all lay in a weirdly neat circle, half on the braid rug, half on the wooden floor, a hollow at the center. It was, he thought, as if he had exploded, sending his clothes and pocket-stuff in one burst around the spot in which he'd stood.

He slowly turned his head to look at the place where Margo had been standing when his memories ended—there, by the window, the one that was broken. No sign of her. His gut was clenched so tight, he couldn't even release the prayer at the center of it.

Please God. . . .

He took one more step and brought his gaze around to the opposite wall. That's when he found her.

Margo had tried to escape down the hallway to the guest bedroom. There she still was, what was left of her, which wasn't much. She was now little more than a red smear from one end of the blue-walled corridor to the other. She was raw meat and splayed viscera in gory piles at stations along the way. She was bones, some of them chillingly white and clean. Even her face, Zach saw, had been ripped to tatters. Only an eyeless patch of her features still adorned her shattered skull. A silky hank of yellow hair hung twisted down the side, the end plastered to the bloody corner of what was left of her mouth.

But it wasn't the carnage that made his gorge rise. He'd seen plenty of carnage. It was the full moral understanding of what had happened, of who he was now, what he was now—that's what filled him with sudden, staggering nausea. He—Zach Adams—had done this thing. To Margo, who had been vivid and beautiful not seven hours ago, who had been angry and calculating and self-assured and in emotional pain, whose body and manner—not very long ago at all—had been alluring enough to make him draw her warm flesh against him and press his body inside hers in at least a semblance of passion and affection. He—federal Agent Zach Adams—had transformed that human being with all her attractions and flaws and feelings and points of view into these smears of blood, these empty piles of bone and flesh, this dead ruin haunted by the thought of her. That—that understanding—not the gore itself—was what made him stagger across the hall to the bathroom door. That's what made him drop to his knees on the elegant parquet flooring in front of the toilet. And when he saw what he vomited into the bowl, the horror was complete, the realization was sealed, the new nightmare of his existence enveloped him wholly, the old reality gone forever.

Gone forever. When he was finished, he stood up slowly. He looked around him, and everything was different. He was different, and that changed everything else. He had passed from his fears and his desperate prayers into full knowledge—the full knowledge that he was not the man he had been seven hours ago. He was not a man at all anymore.

He was a monster.

19

THE DEAD MAN IN THE BACK SEAT

Z
ach had killed twice before in his life. Once, as a young patrolman in Houston, he had exchanged gunfire with a rapist punk who had been terrorizing the Trey. Everyone in the neighborhood saw the shootout and no one was sorry when the kid went down. Then, of course, there was Ray Mima, the crazed kidnapper of five-year-old Emily Watson.

When you kill someone, Zach had found, he becomes part of you. Ever after, his soul runs in your veins. The rapist punk—Trevor Standard, his name was—and Ray Mima—they never left him. In the flesh, he had encountered each of them for mere frozen seconds of live-or-die danger: good guy—bad guy—bang, bang, bang. But afterward, when they lived inside him, he came to know them in their full humanity. Their sorrow and pain, their yearning and love, their wickedness and cruelty and their thwarted desire for the life he had taken away from them—all these stared out at the world through his eyes. They deepened his sense of pity, his sense of connection to his fellow travelers from the universal cradle to the universal grave.

With Margo, it was different. It was murder, first of all—at least, he felt it was. And whereas Standard and Mima, whom he'd killed in self-defense, had more or less dissolved into him, melded with him, their sin and suffering and desire becoming part and parcel of his own, Margo remained whole unto herself, a thing apart. She stood like a ghost inside him, a motionless figure, staring at him, staring at his spirit from within. Her hollow and accusing gaze was unrelenting. Unbearable. He knew he was not going to be able to live with what he had done to her.

An hour after he found her remains spread over the hallway, he stepped out of her house into the drive, leaving the front door open behind him. It was past two
A.M.
now. He was wearing nothing but a bath towel of Margo's he had wrapped around his middle. He was carrying the tatters of his clothes in one of her garbage bags. He was carrying his car keys and his cell phone and his wallet and his spare change in his other hand.

He moved to the Ford. He used the button on his keychain to pop open the trunk.
Take a change of clothes
, Grace had said to him when he'd left the house yesterday evening—and there it was in his gym bag.
Is that woman the perfect wife, or what?
He made the joke to himself humorlessly. Unsmiling, he proceeded to climb into fresh underwear, his suit pants, and a clean white shirt. Margo, the inner ghost of Margo, stared at him, stared into him, the whole time.

He had cleaned the death scene and the surrounding grounds. He had retraced his footsteps and removed as many signs of his presence as he could find, including the muddy footprints on the floor and on the front step and in the driveway gravel. It wasn't a perfect job, nowhere near it, he knew that. But he also knew it didn't have to be. Margo had not been killed by a man. Only an animal could have torn her to pieces that way—anyone could see that, and the forensics would confirm it. Even if the police found out he had been here, he doubted they would suspect him of anything. They might not even bother to track him down.

And even if they did find him, even if they did suspect him, it didn't matter, he didn't care. As long as he could hold them off just a couple of days, it would be all right. A couple of days was all he wanted—it was all he needed to try to do what he meant to do. It was all he was going to be able to stand, in any case.

He finished dressing, closed the car trunk, took one last look around at the scene, then got into his car. The headlights came on with the engine. He backed the car up, swinging it around. Then he faced front—and saw the shadow of a man in the headlight beams.

Zach gasped, and braked and stared through the windshield. The man was gone, just like that. Zach put the car in
PARK
. Pushed the door open. Stood up with one foot out of the car on the gravel and peered into the early-morning darkness. No one was there.

His heart beating hard, Zach lowered himself unsteadily behind the wheel again and shut the door.

He drove back up to the dirt road and motored under the canopied branches toward town and the highway. About a half mile on, he saw the shadowy man again. He was standing just within the trees now. A heavy-set man dressed in black, bald with a fringe of gray hair and a sharp gray goatee. His eyes followed Zach eerily as Zach drove by him.

Zach's heart sped up again at the sight of him, but his mind remained clear and calm. It was a false calm, he knew that. It was the calm of shock. He had suppressed his intolerable feeling of guilt at killing Margo, and as a result he couldn't feel anything. Still, whatever caused it, his thoughts were cool and crystalline and bright, like diamonds in the black setting of a jewelry box.

He thought:
History is in my blood, and the sins of history. I'm one of them now.

He reached the end of the dirt road, paused on the brink of the two-lane. He checked to the left and right. The way was clear. He was about to step on the gas when his nostrils filled with the smell of rank and awful death. He looked up into his rearview mirror and saw the man sitting in his back seat, gazing at him.

It was a jolt. He was startled. But he wasn't surprised.

I'm one of them.

He said nothing. He started driving again, past the mansions in the forest toward the center of town. He was sick with the smell of the corpse behind him.

“We all want to die at first,” said the dead man in the back seat. He was speaking a foreign language. German, probably. Sounded like it. But somehow Zach understood him. The words weren't translated exactly, and yet his brain comprehended their meaning instantly, as they were spoken. It was more like seeing than hearing.

Zach buzzed one of the back-seat windows down halfway. The smell of rotted flesh was just too much. He cracked his own window open a little and the cold night air washed in, refreshing him. He looked out the windshield at the two-lane in the headlights, but he knew the man was still sitting behind him.

Raising his voice above the sound of the rushing wind at the windows, he said, “Look, I know what y'all want me to do. And I'll try, I will. But I can't live with this, not for long. I'm sorry. I just can't.”

“It is dreadful, isn't it?” said the dead man. “I have killed many men. Women too. With my sword. With ropes and hot pincers. Sometimes I crushed them to pieces with a wagon wheel. They were deemed criminals and I was an executioner. This was the law in those days. And everyone I killed, I carried with me afterward. They made me wiser somehow, in a dark, sad way.”