“Hey, Betts.” The small, wiry man winked and snicked his tongue. “What’s that y’ got in yer shirt?”
“Your guess is good as mine, Barn.”
“Where’d you pick ’em up? I’d like to order a set for the wife.” He laughed and slapped Jake’s shoulder. “Let’s get a move on, I got a hot poker game back at the house.” He turned to Betty. “Where’s the Apple, down in his butcher shop?”
“B-1,” she said. “Have fun, boys.”
Leaving her office through a side door, they started down a flight of stairs toward the basement. “You get a good look at that gal?” Barney asked.
“Sure did.”
“Prime. Ooo! How’d y’like playing some hide-the-salami with a prime thing like that? Yeah!”
“She’s a knockout, all right.”
At the bottom of the stairs, Jake pulled open a fire door. Directly across the corridor was B-1, the autopsy room. His stomach fluttered as he walked over and opened the door. From the room came a high whining buzz like the sound of a dentist’s drill.
Steve Applegate, a cigar stub clamped in his teeth, squinted down through the smoke at what he was doing. Whatever he was doing, it involved the head of a naked woman who was stretched out on one of the tables. And it involved the small buzz saw that was making such a racket.
Jake chose to watch his shoes as he walked across the polished linoleum floor.
The saw went silent.
“Who y’got there?” Barney asked.
“Mary-Beth Harker. A probable cerebral aneurysm.”
“Joe Harker’s girl?”
“That’s right.”
“Aw, shit. Shit. When’d it happen?”
“Last night.”
“Shit. She’s not, what, eighteen, nineteen?”
“Nineteen.”
“Shit. That’s his only daughter.”
Jake felt cold spread through him like a winter gust. Kimmy. God, what if it was Kimmy? How could a man go on living if something like that happened to his kid?
He turned away and walked toward another table. The body on this one was covered with a blue cloth. “This Smeltzer?” he asked without looking around.
“That’s Smeltzer, Ronald. I’ll get to Smeltzer, Peggy, later today.”
I killed this guy, he told himself, wanting to feel the guilt, wanting it to come and take away the terror of imagining Kimmy dead. I killed this guy. He’s dead because of me.
His mind began the replay. Fine. Smeltzer raising his head, tearing a flap of skin from his wife’s belly, turning in slow motion to reach for the shotgun.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Steve said, pulling Jake out of the memory. He drew back the cover.
Smeltzer was facedown. Jake’s bullets had left five exit wounds on his back and splayed open the side of his neck.
“Good shooting,” Barney commented.
Jake was looking at the gash that ran from the nape of Smeltzer’s neck, down his spine, over his right buttock and down his right leg to the outer side of his ankle. The raw, bloodless gash was bordered by about half an inch of blue-gray skin. “What’s this?” Jake asked.
“Something of a puzzle,” Steve said. With the tip of his cigar, he pointed at the quarter-sized ankle wound. “Know anything about it?” he asked Jake.
Jake shook his head.
“When I stripped him down this morning, I found it along with the hematoma—that discoloration you see there. Frankly, I didn’t know what to make of it. A bruise is usually caused by blunt trauma that breaks capillaries in the skin. So I asked myself what could’ve hit this man in such a way as to follow the curves of his body this way.”
“Something flexible,” Jake said.
“A whip,” Barney suggested. “Maybe a hose.”
“That occurred to me. The problem is, the epidermis showed no evidence of injury, which you’d expect if the man had been struck by that kind of instrument. And the ankle wound made me suspicious. So I made an incision at the wound and followed the track of the hematoma to his neck. What I found was a two centimeter separation between the fascias and—”
“Spare me the jargon, huh?” Barney said.
“Along the entire length of the bruise, the connecting tissue between the skin and underlying muscle was no longer connected. It’s as if approximately an inch-wide area of skin had been forcibly raised from the inside.”
“What are you gettin’ at?” Barney asked.
“Something entered this man’s body via the ankle wound and burrowed its way up to his neck.”
“Y’mean like somethin’ alive?”
“That’s just what I mean.”
“Balls.”
Steve tapped some ash off the end of his cigar. It dropped into a gutter at the foot of the table. “I found considerable trauma to the brain stem. Appears that it had been chewed into.”
Jake stared at the body. “Something tunneled up his body and bit his brain?”
“That’s sure the way it looks.”
“Jesus,” Jake muttered.
“Okay,” Barney said. “So where’s it at, this thing?”
“Gone.”
“Gone where?”
“After this man was deceased, it chewed through the posterior wall of his esophagus, traveled down to his stomach, chewed through the stomach wall and made a beeline for his colon. Chewed through that, and exited through his anus.”
“You gotta be kiddin’.”
Steve punched his cigar dead in the metal gutter. Then he bent down and picked up a pair of boxer shorts that had been turned inside out. The seat was smeared with feces and blood.
Barney wrinkled his nose.
Steve picked up a pair of blue jeans, also pulled inside out. Down the right leg was a narrow trail that diminished as it neared the cuff. “Kidding?” he asked.
Barney shook his head slowly from side to side.
“What could’ve done something like this?” Jake asked.
Steve shrugged. One side of his mouth stretched upward. “An ambitious snake?”
“Yer a festival a’ laughs,” Barney said.
“I haven’t the faintest idea what did this, but it appears to have been something shaped, at least, like a snake.”
“I never hearda’ snakes doing shit like that.”
“Who has?” Steve said.
“Smeltzer was alive when this thing got in him?” Jake asked.
“Definitely.”
“How can you tell?”
“The amount of subdural bleeding and the quantity of blood on his right sock. I’d guess, from the degree of coagulation of his ankle wound, that the thing got into him only minutes prior to his death.”
“And it left his body after his death? How do you know that?”
“Again, the amount of bleeding. Very little in the areas that it chewed through on the way out.”
“Fuckin’ Twilight Zone,” Barney said.
“So what do you make of it?” Jake asked.
“I couldn’t say.”
“We’re talking, here,” Jake said, “about a guy who blew off his wife’s head and started to eat her. And you’re saying that, before he went at her, this snake-thing burrowed up his leg and bit him in the brain?”
“That’s sure the way it appears.”
“And after I shot him, it took off.”
“Didn’t see it, did ya?” Barney asked.
“I didn’t stick around long. I took a quick look through the restaurant to make sure there wasn’t a third person, then I headed back to my car to call in. I must’ve been gone close to fifteen minutes. I guess that gave it time to get out.”
“The poop-chute express,” Barney said.
“It might still be in the restaurant,” Jake said.
“I already searched around here,” Steve said, “and the van that brought him in. Didn’t want that thing sneaking up on me.”