The Body Farm

  Pipes didn’t quite work, because the threads weren’t thick or widely spaced enough to have left the strange striped pattern we found on Bray’s mattress. Tire tools didn’t even come close. I was getting very discouraged by the time I reached the masonry section of the store, and I saw the tool hanging on a distant peg board and I felt flushed, my heart jumping.

  It looked like a black iron pickaxe with a coiled handle that brought to mind a thick large spring. I went over and picked one up. It was heavy. One end was pointed, the other like a chisel. The tag on it said it was a chipping hammer and cost six dollars and ninety-five cents.

  The young man who rang it up had no idea what a chipping hammer was, and didn’t know the store carried such a thing.

  “Is there anyone here who would know?” I asked.

  He got on an intercom and asked for an assistant manager named Julie to come to his register. She got there right away and seemed far too proper and well dressed to know about tools.

  “It can be used in welding to knock off slag,” she let me know. “But much more commonly it’s used in masonry. Brick, stone, whatever. It’s a multipurpose tool, as you can probably tell by looking at it. And the orange dot on the tag means it’s ten percent off.”

  “So you might find these at any site where masonry is involved? It must be a rather obscure tool,” I said.

  “Unless you’re into masonry, or maybe welding, you’d have no reason to know about it.”

  I bought a chipping hammer for ten percent off and drove home. Lucy was not there when I pulled into the driveway, and I hoped she had gone to MCV to pick up Jo and bring her back to my house. A flat bank of clouds was moving in seemingly out of nowhere, and it was beginning to feel like it might snow. I backed my car into the garage and went inside my house, heading straight for the kitchen. I thawed a package of chicken breasts in the microwave oven.

  I poured barbecue sauce over the chipping hammer, especially on the coiled handle, and dropped it and rolled it on a white pillow case. The striping was unmistakable. I pounded chicken breasts with both ends of that ominous black iron tool and recognized the punched-out shapes right away. I called Marino. He wasn’t home. I paged him. He didn’t get back to me for fifteen minutes. By then my nerves were shorting out.

  “Sorry,” he said. “The battery went dead in my phone, had to find a pay phone.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Driving around. We got the state police fixed-wing plane circling the river, probing everything with a searchlight. Maybe the bastard’s eyes glow in the dark like a dog. You seen the sky? Goddamn, they’re suddenly saying we might get six inches of snow. It’s already started.”

  “Marino, Bray was killed with a chipping hammer,” I said.

  “What the hell is that?”

  “Used in masonry. You aware of any construction along the river that might involve stone, brick or something like that? On the off chance he got the tool from there because he’s staying there?”

  “Where did you find a chipping hammer? I thought you was going home? I hate it when you do shit like this.”

  “I am home,” I impatiently said. “And maybe he is, too, right this minute. Maybe it’s some place putting in pavers or a wall.”

  Marino paused.

  “I wonder if you use something like that on a slate roof,” he said. “There’s this big old house behind gates, way back from Windsor Farms, right on the river. They’re putting on a new slate roof.”

  “Is anybody living there?”

  “I didn’t think anything about it, since construction guys are crawling around it all day long. Nobody’s in it. It’s for sale,” he said.

  “He could be inside during the day and come out after dark when the crew is gone,” I replied. “Maybe the alarm isn’t on for fear the construction noise would set it off.”

  “I’m on my way.”

  “Marino, please don’t go there alone.”

  “ATF’s got people all over the place,” he said.

  I built a fire and when I went out for more wood, it was snowing hard, the moon a faint face behind low clouds. I cradled split logs in one arm and tightly gripped my Glock in my hand as I kept my eye on every shadow and tuned my ear to every sound. The night seemed to bristle with fear. I hurried inside my house and reset the alarm.

  I sat in the great room, flames lashing the sooty throat of the chimney, and I worked on sketches. I tried to reconstruct how the killer might have gotten Bray back to the bedroom without inflicting a single blow. Despite her years in administration, she was a trained police officer. How did he incapacitate her seemingly so easily without apparent injury or a struggle? My television was on, and every half hour or so the local networks had news breaks.

  The so-called Loup-Garou couldn’t have been pleased about what was being said, assuming he had access to a radio or television.

  “. . . been described as stocky, maybe six feet tall, maybe bald. According to the chief medical examiner, Dr. Scarpetta, he may have a rare disease that causes excess hairiness and a deformed face and teeth . . .”

  Thanks a lot, Harris, I thought. He had to pin all that on me.

  “. . . are urged to exercise extreme care. Don’t answer the door until you’re sure who it is.”

  Harris was right about one thing, though. People were going to panic. My phone rang at almost ten.

  “Hey,” Lucy said, and she sounded more cheerful than I’d heard her in a while.

  “Are you still at MCV?” I asked.

  “Closing up things here. You see the snow out there? It’s coming down like a bitch. We should be home in about an hour.”

  “Drive carefully. Call me when you pull up so I can help get Jo inside.”

  I put two more logs on the fire, and no matter how secure my fortress was, I started to feel scared. I tried to distract myself by watching an old Jimmy Stewart movie on HBO while I paid bills. I thought of Talley and got depressed again, and I was angry with him. No matter my ambivalence, he hadn’t really given me a chance. I had tried to get in touch with him, and he hadn’t bothered to call back.

  When the phone rang again, I jumped and a stack of bills fell off my lap.

  “Yes?” I said.

  “The son of a bitch’s been staying there, all right,” Marino exclaimed. “But he ain’t there now. Trash, food wrappers, crap all over the place. And hairs in the damn bed. The sheets stink like a dirty, wet dog.”

  Electricity crackled up my veins.

  “HIDTA’s got a squad out somewhere, and I’ve got cops all over the place. He takes one dip in the river and we got his ass.”

  “Lucy’s bringing Jo home, Marino,” I said. “She’s out there, too.”

  “You’re by yourself?” he blurted out.

  “Inside, locked up, alarm on, pistol on the table.”

  “Well, you stay right where you are, you hear me!”

  “Don’t worry.”

  “One good thing is, it’s snowing really hard. About three inches already, and you know how snow lights up everything. Ain’t a good time for him to be out wandering around.”

  I hung up and skipped from channel to channel, but nothing interested me. I got up and wandered into my office to check my e-mail but didn’t feel like answering any of it. I picked up the jar of formalin and held it up to the light, looking at those small yellow eyes that were really gold dots reduced in size, and I thought about how off-base I’d been about so much. I anguished over every slow step and every wrong turn I’d taken. Now two more women were dead.

  I set the jar of formalin on the coffee table in the great room. At eleven I turned to NBC to watch the news. Of course, it was all about this evil man, this Loup-Garou. As I changed to another channel, I was shocked by my burglar alarm. The remote control fell to the floor as I jumped up and fled to the back of the house. My heart was coming out of my chest. I locked my bedroom door and grabbed my Glock, waiting for the phone to ring. Minutes later it did.

  “Zone six,
the garage door,” I was told. “Do you want the police?”

  “Yes! I want them now!” I said.

  I sat on my bed and let the alarm beat my eardrums as it hammered and hammered. I kept an eye on the Aiphone monitor, and then remembered it would not work if the police didn’t ring the bell. And, as I knew so well, they never did. I had no choice but to turn the alarm off and reset it and sit and wait in silence, straining so hard to hear every sound that I imagined I could hear the snow falling.

  Barely ten minutes later, there was a sharp rapping on my front door and I hurried down the hallway as a voice on the porch loudly called out “Police.”

  With great relief I placed my pistol on the dining-room table and said, “Who is it?”

  I wanted to be sure.

  “Police, ma’am. We’re responding to your alarm.”

  I opened the door and the same two officers from several nights before knocked snow off their boots and came in.

  “You’ve not been having a good time of it lately, have you?” Officer Butler said as she pulled off her gloves, her eyes moving around. “You might say we’ve taken a personal interest in you.”

  “Garage door this time,” McElwayne, her partner, said. “Okay, let’s take a look.”

  I followed them through the mud room and into the garage, and instantly knew this was no false alarm. The garage door had been pried up about six inches, and when we got down to look through the opening, we saw footprints in the snow leading to the door and then away from it. There were no apparent tool marks except for scrapes on the rubber strip at the bottom of the door. The footprints were lightly dusted with snow. They had been left recently, and that was consistent with when the alarm had gone off.

  McElwayne got on the radio and requested a B&E detective, who showed up twenty minutes later and took photographs of the door and footprints and dusted for fingerprints. But once again, there really was nothing more the police could do other than follow the trail of footprints. It led along the edge of my yard and out to the street, where the snow was chopped up by tires.

  “All we can do is step up patrol around here,” Butler told me as they left. “We’ll keep an eye on your house as best we can, and if anything else happens, call nine-one-one right away. Even if it’s just a noise that bothers you, okay?”

  I paged Marino. By now it was midnight.

  “What’s going on?” he asked.

  I told him.

  “I’m coming over right now.”

  “Listen, I’m all right,” I said. “Rattled, but all right. I’d rather you stay out there looking for him instead of coming here to baby-sit me.”

  He seemed unsure. I knew what he was thinking.

  “It doesn’t seem his style is to break in anyway,” I added.

  Marino hesitated, then he said, “There’s something you ought to know. I didn’t know if I should tell you. Talley’s here.”

  I was stunned.

  “He’s the head of the squad HIDTA sent in.”

  “How long has he been here?” I tried to sound curious and nothing more.

  “Couple days.”

  “Tell him hello,” I said as if Talley meant very little to me anymore.

  Marino wasn’t fooled.

  “Sorry he turned out to be such an asshole,” he said.

  The minute I hung up, I contacted the orthopedic unit at MCV and the nurse on duty didn’t know who I was and wouldn’t release any information about anything. I wanted to talk to Senator Lord. I wanted to talk to Dr. Zenner, to Lucy, to a friend, to someone who cared, and at that moment I missed Benton so acutely I thought I couldn’t go on. I thought of being buried in the wreckage of my life. I thought of dying.

  I tried to revive the fire, but it was stubborn because the wood I’d carried in was damp. I stared at the pack of cigarettes on the coffee table but didn’t have the energy to light one up. I sat on the couch and buried my face in my hands until the spasms of grief subsided. When a sharp rapping sounded on the door again, my nerves ached but I was just so tired.

  “Police,” a male voice said from outside as he rapped again with something hard like a nightstick or blackjack.

  “I didn’t call the police,” I said through the door.

  “Ma’am, we’ve gotten a call about a suspicious person on your property,” he said. “Are you all right?”

  “Yes, yes,” I said as I turned off the alarm and opened the door to let him in.

  My porch light was out, and it had never occurred to me he might be able to speak without a French accent, and I smelled that dirty, wet doglike smell as he pushed his way in and shut the door with a back-kick. I choked on the scream in my throat as he smiled his hideous smile and reached out a hairy hand to touch my cheek, as if his feelings for me were tender.

  Half of his face was lower than the other and covered with a fine blond stubble, and uneven, crazed eyes burned with rage and lust and mockery from hell. He tore off his long black coat to net it over my head and I ran and this all happened in a matter of seconds.

  Panic hurled me into the great room and he was on my heels making guttural sounds that didn’t sound human. I was too terrified to think. I was reduced to the childish impulse of wanting to throw something at him and the first thing I saw was the jar of formalin that held part of the flesh of the brother he had murdered.

  I snatched it off the coffee table and jumped on the couch and over the back of it and fumbled with the lid, and he had out his tool now, that hammer with the coiled handle, and as he raised it and grabbed for me I dashed a quart of formalin in his face.

  He shrieked and grabbed his eyes and throat as the chemical burned and made it difficult for him to breathe. He squeezed shut his eyes, shrieking and grabbing at his doused shirt to rip it off, gasping and burning like fire as I ran. I grabbed my gun off the dining-room table and hit the panic alarm as I fled out the front door into the snow. On the steps my feet went out from under me and my left arm shot down like a brace to stop my fall. When I tried to get up, I knew I’d broken my elbow, and I was shocked to see him staggering after me.

  He clutched the railing as he blindly made his way down, still screaming, and I was sitting at the bottom of the steps, panicking, pushing myself back as if I were crewing. His upper body was dense with long pale hair that hung from his arms and swirled over his spine. He fell to his knees, scooping up handfuls of snow and rubbing it into his face and neck again and again as he fought for breath.

  He was within reach of me and I imagined him springing up any moment like a monster that wasn’t human. I raised my pistol but couldn’t pull back the slide. I tried and tried, but my fractured elbow and torn tendons wouldn’t let me bend my arm.

  I couldn’t get up. I kept slipping. He heard my noise and crawled closer as I scooted back and slipped and then tried to roll. He gasped and then lay facedown in the snow, the way children make angels, as he tried to lessen the pain of his severe chemical burns. He dug up snow like a dog, piling it over his head and holding handfuls against his neck. He reached out a matted arm to me. I couldn’t understand his French, but I believed he was begging me to help him.

  He was crying. Shirtless, he was shivering from the cold. His nails were filthy and ragged, and he wore the boots and pants of a laborer, perhaps someone who worked on a ship. He writhed and screamed, and I almost felt sorry for him. But I wouldn’t get close to him.

  Tissue was hemorrhaging into my fractured joint. My arm was swelling and throbbing, and I didn’t hear the car drive up. Then Lucy was running through the snow, almost losing her balance several times as she racked back the slide in the forty-caliber Glock she loved so much, and she fell to her knees close to him, assuming a combat position. She pointed the stainless steel barrel at his head.

  “Lucy, don’t!” I said, trying to pull myself up to my knees.

  She was breathing hard, her finger on the trigger.

  “You goddamn son of a bitch,” she said. “You fucking piece of shit,” she said as he c
ontinued to moan and wipe his eyes with snow.

  “Lucy, no!” I yelled as she gripped the pistol more tightly in both hands, steadying it.

  “I’m going to put you out of your misery, you fucking son of a bitch!”

  I crawled toward her as feet and voices sounded and car doors shut.

  “Lucy!” I said. “No! For God’s sake no!”

  It was as if she didn’t hear me or anyone. She was in some hateful, angry world of her own. She swallowed hard as he writhed and held his hands over his eyes.

  “Stop moving!” she yelled at him.

  “Lucy,” I moved closer and closer, “put the gun down.”

  But he couldn’t stop moving, and she was frozen in her position, and then she wavered just a bit.

  “Lucy, you don’t want to do this,” I said. “Please. Put the gun down.”

  She wouldn’t. She didn’t answer me or look my way. I became aware of feet all around me, of people in dark battle dress, of rifles and pistols all held in safe positions.

  “Lucy, put the gun down,” I heard Marino say.

  She didn’t move. The pistol was shaking in her hands. This wretched man called Loup-Garou struggled for air and moaned. He was inches from her feet and I was inches from her.

  “Lucy, look at me,” I said. “Look at me!”

  She glanced in my direction and a tear slid down her cheek.

  “There’s been enough killing,” I said. “Please. No more. This is a bad shooting, Lucy. This isn’t self-defense. Jo’s in the car waiting for you. Don’t do this. Don’t do this, please. We love you.”

  She swallowed hard. I carefully reached out my hand.

  “Give me the gun,” I said. “Please. I love you. Give me the gun.”

  She lowered it and tossed it into the snow, where the steel shone like silver. She stayed where she was, her head bent, and then Marino was with her, saying things I couldn’t focus on as my elbow throbbed like drums. Someone lifted me with sure hands.

  “Come on,” Talley gently said to me.