The Last Child (17 page)

The woman was white, possibly in her thirties, possibly Ronda Jeffries. It was hard to tell because most of her face was gone. She wore filmy lingerie, crusted with blood. One breast hung out, the skin more gray than white. Her face was crushed, jaw broken in two or more places, left eye distended from a shattered orbit. Her torso stretched toward the hall, her legs near the bed. One arm angled above her head, and on that hand two fingers were clearly broken.

The black male was not so horribly disfigured. In life he must have been large; but not now. Now he was reduced. Trapped gas distended his stomach, making his arms and legs look unusually small. His head was staved in on the right side, giving his face a slack, unfinished appearance. He was nude, slumped in an overstuffed chair as if he’d simply decided to sit.

Hunt reached for the wall switch and flicked on the overhead light. It made everything look worse, the violence more complete. Hunt felt the other cops arrive behind him. “Nobody in,” Hunt said.

He knelt by the woman, careful of how he placed his feet. He studied the corpse from the bottom to the top. She had a pedicure, with acrylic beads set into the bright red polish. Calluses on the bottoms of her feet. Legs shaved to the knee. False nails, close to an inch long, made a spike of each finger. No visible scars or tattoos. Thirty-two seemed to be about the right age.

He did the same with the dead man, squatted by the chair and looked him over. Black. Forties. Strong. Maybe six foot two. He had old surgical scars on both knees. No jewelry. Gold fillings. He needed a shave.

Hunt stood. A glance showed work boots by the closet door, jeans, satin briefs the color of candied apples. He found the cinder block beside the bed. “Yoakum.” Hunt gestured and Yoakum crossed the room. Hunt pointed at the cinder block. One side of it was greased with coagulated blood. “I’m thinking that’s the murder weapon.”

“Looks like it.”

Hunt straightened. “Hang on.” He stepped around the dead man’s feet and over the female victim’s arm. The other cops pressed against the open door but Hunt ignored them. He knelt by the door, ran his fingers across the carpet where parallel indentations stretched the length of a cinder block. When he stood, he found Cross at the door.

“What can I do?” Cross asked.

“Tape off the yard and the street. Get Crime Scene and the medical examiner out here.” Hunt rubbed his face. “And find me a Diet Coke.” He caught Cross by the sleeve as he turned. “Not from the refrigerator in this house. And clear this hall.”

Hunt watched the hall empty, sensed Yoakum behind him and turned. Framed against the death and violence, his friend looked flushed and very alive. Hunt looked past him, and when he spoke, he kept his voice low. “It’s early, I know, but I don’t think this was premeditated.”

“Because?”

Hunt flicked a finger toward the base of the door. “Dents in the carpet. It looks like they were using the cinder block for a doorstop.” He shrugged. “Killers with a plan usually bring a weapon.”

“Maybe. Maybe he knew the cinder block would be there.”

“Too early,” Hunt agreed. “You’re right.”

“So what’s the plan?”

Hunt indicated the room with an open palm. “Seal this off until Crime Scene gets here. Canvass the street. Get a cadaver dog out here, just in case.” Hunt stopped speaking, turned into the hall. “Damn!” It came from the gut, an explosion. He slammed a fist into the wall, then stomped into the living room. When Yoakum stepped into the room, Hunt had both palms pressed against the frame of the front door. His forehead made a dull, thumping sound as he tapped it against the wood. “Damn it.” He hit his head harder.

“If you want to bleed,” Yoakum said. “There are better ways.”

Hunt turned, put his back against the splintered door. He knew that his face was naked. “This is not right.”

“Murder never is.”

“She was supposed to be here, John.” Hunt felt a sudden need for fresh air. He tore open the door, tossed words over his shoulder with something like hate. “It was supposed to end today.”

“Tiffany?”

“All of it. Everything.”

Yoakum didn’t get it, but then he did.

The hell that Hunt was living through.

His life as he knew it.

The old station wagon coasted to a halt on a bent strip of narrow black. The road was empty, a dark, lonely stretch beyond the edge of town, bracketed by forest and quiet. Johnny eyed the house, where dim light pushed out from one of the windows. Two weeks had passed since the last time he was here, but the same vehicles rusted under the same trees, the same beer can balanced on the mailbox.

The house itself was a bare hint: a yellow gleam and a collection of hard edges that didn’t seem to line up properly. A rotten-sweet poison seeped in from the dump a mile away. In daylight, the crows flocked and a distant gun barked as the junkman shot rats and cans. At night, the crickets called; but sometimes, for no reason, they fell silent. It was as if the world suddenly closed its mouth. Johnny always froze in that silence, and the air around him felt breathless and cold. Johnny dreamed of that sensation more than he cared to admit, but still he came.

Midnight. Dawn.

Six times.

A dozen.

Burton Jarvis was on the list because he was a recidivist. That was the biggest word Johnny knew: it meant,
sick motherfucker likely to do it again
. He was a registered sex offender who made his money stuffing gut-shot deer and hauling refuse on a flatbed trailer. His nickname was Jar, as in: “Look at the size of this freaking buck, Jar. Think you can stuff one that big?”

Jar didn’t have what Johnny would consider friends, but a few men came by more than once. They passed computer discs between filthy palms and made small talk about how Thailand was still the best place to get laid. Johnny had found those men, too. Where they lived. Where they worked.

They were on his list.

One guy came more than the others. Sometimes he had a gun, and sometimes not. Tall and wiry and old, he had eager, shiny eyes and long fingers. He and Jar drank liquor from the same bottle and talked about stuff they’d done outside some village in Vietnam. They got all smoke-eyed when they talked about a girl they called Small Yellow. They’d spent three days with her in a strafed-out hut full of her dead family.
Small Yellow
, they’d say, bottle going up, one head shaking.
Fucking shame
.

Their laughter was not nice at all.

It took Johnny two trips to become suspicious about the shed behind Jar’s house. It sat at the end of a narrow footpath through dense trees, hidden from the road and from the house. The walls were cinder block, the windows nailed shut and packed tight with pink insulation and black plastic. Johnny could not see in. Light never came out. The lock was half the size of Johnny’s head.

That’s where he went first.

The shed.

By six o’clock the bodies were bagged. Hunt stood on the porch as the stretchers clattered through the door, the black vinyl looking awkward and slick. He eyed the street and the yard, both colorless under a dull, dark sky. The sun had yet to rise, but he felt it coming. Gray light gathered on treetops beyond the tracks and the eastern sky showed the barest hint of something new. Cop cars were all over the place, blocking off the street, angled at the curb. The medical examiner’s van sat at the edge of the yard, back end yawning wide. A dusting of reporters stood behind yellow tape, but it was the neighbors that Hunt studied the hardest. The street left a narrow footprint. Small lots pushed the houses together. Somebody knew something. They had to. His eyes cut back and forth, lingered on an old white man in a yellowed shirt, a black kid with shifty eyes, gang colors, and homemade tats. He studied a wide-faced woman with pendulous breasts and a child in each arm. She lived next door but claimed to know nothing.

Didn’t hear nothing.

Eyes full of hate.

Didn’t see nothing.

One of the department’s canine handlers appeared around the side of the house, his clothing smeared with filth, his face drawn. The dog, a black-coated mongrel, pressed against his thigh. Its tongue lolled out of its mouth as it gazed, unblinking, at the body bags. His handler shook his head. “Nothing in the crawl space or on the grounds. If there’s another body, it’s elsewhere.”

“You’re positive of that?” Hunt asked.

“Absolutely.” He thumped the dog’s head with an open palm.

Hunt felt something like relief, but was loath to put too much faith in the feeling. Just because Tiffany Shore was not here did not mean that she was still alive. He remained viscerally aware of the bodies behind him. “No chance that these threw the dog off?” He gestured at the bags.

“No chance at all.”

Hunt nodded. “Okay, Mike. Thanks for checking.”

The handler made a clicking sound with his mouth and the dog followed him out.

Nothing. They had nothing. Hunt thought about what Johnny Merrimon had said about the girl they’d found in Colorado: walled up in a hole dug into the side of the cellar, caged for a year with a mattress, a bucket, and a candle. Disgust was an organ in Hunt’s gut. The more he thought about it, the more that organ churned. He tried to imagine if he’d been the cop to find that girl. What would he have done first: Would he have lifted her from that stained mattress or put six rounds in the bastard’s face? He wondered if he could do it, forget seventeen years of cop and just pull the trigger.

Maybe.

More than maybe.

Hunt watched Trenton Moore secure the bodies in the back of his van. The medical examiner looked like Hunt felt: tired and gray, stretched as thin as the morning light. When he stepped back onto the porch, Hunt smelled coffee and formaldehyde, a morgue smell. “Sorry to give you two more so quickly,” Hunt told him.

Moore waved it off. “I was going to call you anyway,” he said. “I have a preliminary workup on David Wilson.”

“That was quick.”

“What can I say? I love my job.”

Hunt stepped to the far side of the porch, away from the door and the foot traffic. Moore followed him. “Talk to me.”

“He was alive when he came over the rail. The boy told us that, and my findings are consistent. Most of the obvious injuries, you saw. Broken leg and arm; multiple fractures, actually. Full details will be in the final report. Extensive abrasions from contact with the concrete and the ground. Fractured orbit on the left side. He had seven crushed ribs, also on the left side, massive trauma to his internal organs, internal bleeding, a punctured lung; but none of these things killed him.”

“Explain.”

“I found a single large contusion on his throat.” Moore indicated the front of his own throat, just above the collarbone. “The larynx was crushed, the esophagus. Massive weight was applied until the entire airway was damaged to the point of total obstruction.” A pause. “He suffocated, Detective.”

“But he was alive when Johnny left him. Breathing, able to speak.”

“The contusion on his throat has a pattern. It’s extremely vague, only visible under magnification and not enough to take an impression or get any kind of match, but it’s definitely there.”

“A pattern?”

Moore’s expression was pained. “A tread pattern.”

Hunt felt sweat cool on his neck.

“Somebody stepped on his throat, Detective. Somebody stood on his throat until he was dead.”

Moore’s report changed the tone of the Hunt’s morning. It implied a viciousness that seemed colder, somehow, more cruel and personal.

Hunt walked into the house, unsettled and angry. The bodies were gone, but the black dawn felt darker still. At twenty-five minutes after six, Hunt’s phone rang. It was his son. Hunt recognized the number and flinched. With all that was going on, he’d not thought of the boy. Not even once. “Hello, Allen.”

“You didn’t come home.”

Hunt moved back onto the porch. He looked at the flat, gray sky, pictured his son’s face. “I know,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

“You coming home for breakfast?”

Hunt’s guilt intensified. The kid was trying to make things right between them. “I can’t.”

Silence then. “Of course not.”

Hunt’s fingers tightened on the phone. He felt his son slipping away, but had no idea what to do about it. “Son. About last night…”

“Yeah.”

“I would not have hit you.” Hunt heard breath on the line, then the kid disconnected.
Damn.
Hunt pocketed the phone and put his eyes back on the idlers. They watched the van with dark fascination; all of them except one. The old man in the stained shirt stood on the tracks, one hand clutching the waist of his ragged pants. His eyes drooped enough to show red skin at the bottom lids, and his other hand shook with a palsy as he sucked on a damp cigarette. He stared at Hunt, then gestured with a curl of his fingers.

“Yoakum,” Hunt said, and Yoakum stuck his head through the door. “I’ll be back.” Hunt indicated the man on the tracks, and Yoakum studied the decrepit figure.

“You need backup?”

“Fuck off, Yoakum.”

The bank crumbled under Hunt’s feet as he climbed to the tracks. Smoke curled around the wine-dark root of the old man’s nose, and, up close, Hunt saw that the palsy infected much of his body. He stood seven inches over five feet, bent at the shoulders and tilted right, as if that leg was too short. White hair rose in the breeze. He held out a hand, and his voice made Hunt think of soda crackers. “Can I have a dollar?”

Hunt studied the hand, saw the faded tattoo on the back of it. “How about five?” The old man tracked the bill out of the wallet, took it, and slipped it into one of his pockets. He licked chalky lips and flicked his eyes down the bank on the opposite side of the tracks. Following the gaze, Hunt spotted a tattered green tarp slung in the low brush beyond the kudzu. It faded into the trees, almost invisible. He saw a pile of empty cans, a ring of blackened earth. The man was homeless.