Black Irish (4 page)

“Behind the tarp,” she said.

Z moved toward it, but stopped as his foot slid in something red and wet.

“Fuuu-uucck. What is this?”

“Animals,” she said, dropping her gun to her thigh, doing a quick inventory: deer, fox, bear. “They’re probab—”

Abbie felt the air shift and instantly began to pivot. The hanging tarp had snapped back and a man was charging at Z, a knife flashing in his hand.

“Z!”

Abbie snapped her boot out and kicked the man’s knee as he went by. The knife swooped down and missed Z’s arm by two inches as the man collapsed sideways and hit the tarp.

“Don’t shoot!” she said, grabbing Z’s arm.

“Who the fuck—”

Abbie took two steps toward the man—a burly six-footer with a bushy red beard, a ripped Carhartt jacket, and oil-stained jeans. He was clutching his left knee and his eyes glowed crazily in the gloom.

“Drop the knife,” Abbie said, her voice calm and her gun leveled at the man’s forehead.

“Fuck you. Get the fuck out of my garage.”

“Buffalo Police,” Abbie said. “I said drop … the … knife.”

“Police?” the man said. “We ain’t got any bitch detectives in the County.”

Abbie heard Z snort behind her.

“I’ll introduce you to my fucking boot and—” he said.

Abbie made a small movement with her free hand. She took her case out and flipped it open. Her badge glinted in the weak light.

“So? The fuck you want with me?”

“Drop … the … knife, sir. I’m not going to tell you again.”

The knife—a ten-inch blade that looked like a prop from a gladiator movie—bounced off the tarp.

“Sit up.”

The man muttered and sat on his haunches, straining to sit up over his belly. He looked at Abbie with hatred.

“You live here?” Abbie said, the muscles in her shoulder finally relaxing.

“I think you broke my damn knee. Hell yes, I live here.”

Abbie studied him. He looked like some kind of mountain man, sawdust and small twigs in his hair, his eyes wild, goggling.

“What are you doing with all these carcasses?”

“It’s called survival, bi—”

Abbie brought the gun barrel up and centered it between his eyes.

“It’s called survival, lady.”

“Try ‘Detective,’ ” she said. “Detective Kearney.”

The man made a “psssh” sound and his pupils seemed to grow even smaller. Abbie wondered if he was on meth.

“Answer the question,” Abbie said.

“It’s roadkill. Something gets hit on the highway, I got a trooper friend who calls me or maybe a trucker on his CB. I go and get it.”

“What’s your name?”

“I don’t have to give you that.”

It was the needless aggravation that wore you down in the County. People here—even the Poles and the few Lithuanians who’d wandered in—seemed to have an ancestral memory of being oppressed in a country they’d never been to, and they carried it with them always, like their mother had been truncheoned the day before.

“Actually, you do. Or you’re taking a ride with us.”

“Fascism is coming. Sure as we’re standing here.”

“Your name.”

“You’d just look me up in your computers anyway. Joseph Wardinski.”

“What do you do with the carcasses, Mr. Wardinski?”

“I bring ’em back here, skin ’em, empty ’em out, and sell the meat. Or we freeze it.”

“And the heads?”

“Stuff ’em. It’s called paxadermy.”

Z snorted but Abbie’s expression didn’t change.

“Somebody buys those?” she said.

“People up north. Farmers. Real Americans.”

The last was said with a narrowing of the eyes.

“You got a license for any of this?” Z said.

“License? This don’t have nothing to do with the government.”

“This isn’t the Yukon country, sir,” Abbie said. “You need a license. Stand up.”

“The
Yu
-kong?” the man said as he struggled off the ground. “The fuck’s that?”

“This isn’t the frontier is what I’m telling you.”

The man just stared at them, his mouth working silently.

“Listen, Mr. Wardinski. Just take a deep breath and listen.”

Abbie holstered her gun.

“Some of this wild game carries disease. Trichinosis, other bad stuff. If you want to poison yourself, go right ahead, it’s a free country last I heard. But you don’t want to be feeding this stuff to your kid.”

“How’d you know I have a kid?”

“The Dora stickers on the third-floor window.”

The man said nothing.

Their radios blared in stereo. “Detective Kearney, come in.”

“You’re going to have the health inspector down here if you don’t keep this place clean,” Abbie said. “Check the meat before you use it. You know what to look for?”

The man looked down at his grease-black boots on the blue tarp.

Abbie motioned to Z and they started down the driveway. As they passed the man, he whispered something.

“What was that?” Abbie said, her voice dead quiet.

He stared at her, his eyes filled with a crazy urgency, and for a second she thought he would go for her gun.

“Detective Kearney, come in now, please,” McDonough bleated on the radio.

Z picked up his radio. “This is Zangara, go ahead.”

“Nothing,” the mountain man said, turning away.

“We found him.” McDonough’s voice was ragged. “He’s cut up ba—”

“Get off the radio,” Z barked, then dropped the radio to his side. “Idiot.”

Abbie gave the mountain man one last look and then followed Z.

They hustled out toward Abbie’s car. Abbie jumped in the driver’s seat, turned the key, and revved the engine before swinging into a U-turn.

She headed over to Abbott Road, then made the right into Cazenovia Park. Black clouds were gathering above the park oaks.

“Z,” she said, turning to her partner.

“Yeah?”

“You see that guy?”

Z glanced at her. “Yeah, I saw him.”

Abbie was quiet for a minute.

“Ever feel something’s not really right in the city? That the clocks are … running backward?”

He made a face. “No. I never think about that.”

“I do.”

“Whatever. Listen, Ab. Don’t go spooky on me.”

“Going spooky” was Z’s term for depression. They’d been through one major episode together. Her episode, of course. Zangara was a rock.

“It’s this place,” Abbie said. She felt a wave of black-winged sadness come over her, thinking about the mountain man’s daughter—the girl who loved Dora—eating roadkill and listening to her father rant against government mind control and the coming of the Last Days.

“You know what I say?” Z said.

“What?”

“Fuck this place.”

M
C
D
ONOUGH HAD FUMBLED OUT AN ADDRESS ON
S
ENECA
. B
EFORE THEY
pulled up, Abbie knew it was St. Teresa’s, the church she’d gone to as a child. Now it was closed up, the parishioners having been shunted off to St. John the Evangelist as the Catholic population died off or went astray. The faithful had protested for months, circling in the snow in front of the church with signs and rosaries in their hands. But the parish was too poor to afford so many churches, eventually the protesters’ number had dwindled to nothing, and the church had been padlocked.

As they pulled up and walked to the arched entrance, there were a few people looking at them anxiously, milling around the church steps.

“Damn McDonough,” Z muttered. The County was well known for harboring police groupies. Half the people had relatives in the force and police scanners on their side tables or nightstands, running day and night, old men listening as they watched the light fade in their rocking chairs. Now the address was out, and probably the fact that they’d found a body.

“Who’s in there?” a ragged voice called out as they hurried in. Abbie didn’t turn her head.

They entered the gloom of the church. Light angled down
from high windows, picking up dust motes. There was a scrum of people in the middle of the aisle. Abbie made out the slim form of McDonough, a fat bundled-up cop that must be Juskiewicz, and an old man in a blue jumpsuit. As they parted, Abbie got a glimpse at what they had been looking at—a thick pool of blood that had spattered the smooth flagstones, with a trail leading toward the back of the church.

The shocked looks on their faces begged Abbie to take the responsibility for what sat at their feet. She hurried ahead of Z.

“He’s downstairs,” McDonough said.

Abbie nodded and the group moved off, with the thin cop in the lead.

“Who found him?” Abbie said.

“I did,” Juskiewicz said. His eyes seemed to apologize for the fact.

“Tell me about it.” They reached the stairs. Her flashlight picked out stone steps circling downward.

“I … I was doing this side of the street. I came to St. Teresa’s and looked for a place to get a peek inside. I started around to the east there and was looking in the window. I saw something on the ground, so I asked around until I found the caretaker.”

Abbie nodded. She knew the church by heart. She’d peeked in the same window years ago to find her father when he came to St. Teresa’s alone. She’d spot him, head bowed, four rows back, tilted over slightly because of the gun that must have poked into his right thigh as he kneeled.

They reached the basement floor. She’d only been down here twice, when she served as an altar girl. It was cold and it smelled like wax and clay.

Five feet away, Jimmy Ryan sat in a wooden chair, his face a smear of dried blood. His head wasn’t human looking anymore; it looked like a black candle that had burned through the night, spattering wax downward. There was a yellow nylon rope clinched tightly around his neck extending down his back; it was looped around both his ankles and tied to the front chair legs, which were battered and scraped near the bottom.

Abbie began to move around the body. The men stepped back. She saw that gouts of blood had fallen to the floor along with what looked like sheared-off sections of flesh, and she stepped carefully around them.

“He was stuffed in this little storage room over here. I don’t know what—”

“It’s called an undercroft,” Abbie said, walking closer to the body. “They stored vestments and Bibles here.”

The undercroft looked like a brick-lined oven, at waist height, with a heavy wooden door, now hanging open. She shone her light inside and saw it was just barely big enough to fit a man. The floor of the space was smeared with dried blood.

“You dragged him out?”

“Had to,” Juskiewicz said. “I couldn’t tell if he was dead.”

“You could have felt his ankle, you idiot,” said Z, his face six inches from Jimmy Ryan’s.

“Oh.”

McDonough pointed at Ryan’s face. “His eyelids—”

“Yeah?” barked Z, still angry about the radio.

“Well, they’re gone.”

Abbie took her flashlight, crouched down level with Ryan’s face. His blue irises, rimmed by broken blood vessels, were staring up.

“The killer started up in the nave,” she said. “I wonder if Ryan was made to look at anything specific. A station of the cross, a saint.” Grotesque visions of Christ in agony, Saint Stephen the first martyr—the church had the whole set. And the ceiling beams of the church were painted in gold leaf with Latin script, she remembered, but if the killer was showing Ryan something, there was no way to tell now.

She pointed the beam of the flashlight at his mouth. Ryan’s mouth was battered, the lips grooved with cuts and ripped at the corners. She shone the light inside.

“There’s something in here,” she said. “Hold on.”

Abbie reached into her pocket and pulled out a pen. She ducked
down, shone the light in and, with the other hand, inserted the top of the pen inside Ryan’s mouth, angling it up past the swollen, blackened flesh of his tongue. There was something between the flesh and the roof of the mouth. She tapped on it and it made a tiny clicking sound.

“I want to get this out,” she said to Z. “Give me some light.” Z crouched beside her and shone the light past the hacked-up lips. The object was light brown and thin.

Gently, Abbie swept the pen tip across it and the object slid forward. After two minutes of coaxing, it brushed against the inside of the dead man’s cheek and hung halfway out.

“Is that a—”

Abbie withdrew the pen, laid it on the ground, then stood up and reached in her back pocket, where she kept a fresh pair of thin crime-scene surgical gloves, the talcum-free kind. She pulled one on her right hand, motioned to Z, then bent over and carefully reached with two fingers inside the corpse’s mouth.

“Jesus fuckin’ Christ,” McDonough said.

Z hissed at him.

She began to pull out the object. There was a gasp and the caretaker went running for the stairs. Abbie heard him begin to vomit before he reached the outside door.

Abbie showed Z the object. It was a toy monkey, a thin sliver of plastic with a painted face, black eyes, tan nose, red lips. The eyes were bulging and its little arms reached around and were clasped in front of its mouth.

“Speak no evil?” Z said.

“Maybe. Got an evidence bag?”

“Yeah.” He produced one out of his jacket pocket with a flourish, and Abbie laid it inside.

“McDonough,” she said. “Go out front and make sure no one gets a look in here. Press especially. Juskiewicz, keep everyone away from the side windows. Grab the custodian and tell him no talking. To anyone.”

They nodded and hurried off.

Abbie began to shine her light around the little vestibule they stood in. Off to the right was the sacristy, where the priest could wash his hands, dress, and get ready for mass.

“Why a church?” Z said.

“And why leave the body down here?” All the gold, the statues, the holy things you associate with a church were upstairs. Down here was like a dungeon, bare as a graveyard.

“The church itself doesn’t feel important to me,” she said. “If you want to send a message, you take him to the altar. If the church is part of your agenda, you make it clear. You
use
something. He didn’t do that.”

“But there are tons of abandoned buildings on Seneca these days. He chose this one.”