Barney sidestepped, reached over, pinched a leg of Steve’s white trousers and lifted. “I already checked that, myself,” Steve said. He raised both cuffs above his socks.
Barney crouched for a close look, then turned to Jake. “How ’bout you?”
“I took three showers after—”
“So y’got hygiene. Lift your pants.”
Jake drew them up to his knees. Barney squatted beside him, took a long look, then slid Jake’s socks down around his ankles.
“Okay, so now we know you guys aren’t gonna start munchin’ on me.”
Jake nodded. “So I’m not the only one who thinks this snake-thing made Smeltzer go haywire.”
“It don’t make sense, but it makes sense.”
“I’m afraid I have to agree,” Steve said. “It sounds mad but the possibility is certainly there…some kind of creature that sustains itself through a symbiotic relationship with its human host. A parasite. But it doesn’t simply take its nourishment from its host, it somehow controls his eating habits.”
Barney smirked. “Less Smeltzer was in the habit a’ eatin’ his wife.”
“So we’re talking,” Jake said, “about a snakelike creature that burrows into a person, takes control of his mind, and compels him to eat human flesh. That is what we’re talking about here, right?”
“Can’t be,” Barney said. “Last time I looked I wasn’t nuts.”
“If there’s another way to interpret this situation,” Steve said, “I’d be more than eager to hear it.”
“Yeah. You guys are figments a’ my fuckin’ nightmare.”
“Neither of you, I take it, has ever heard of a similar situation.”
“You gotta be kiddin’.”
“I’ve heard of cannibalism,” Jake said, “but never anything about a snake or whatever that gets inside you and turns you into one.”
“Gentlemen, I think we’ve got a situation.” Steve slipped a fresh cigar from a pocket of his white jacket, stripped off its wrapper, and bit off its end. He spat the wad of leaf into the table gutter. He licked the whole cigar. Then he poked it into his mouth and lit up.
“I drove over to Marlowe, yesterday, at the request of a colleague, Herman Willis. Thursday afternoon, the nude body of a twenty-two-year-old female was found. It had been buried in a field just east of Marlowe. Might never have turned up, except a kid happened to be out playing in the field with his dog. The dog found the grave. The kid ran home for a shovel, apparently thinking he had stumbled onto a buried treasure. He dug for a while, then ran home yelling.”
“Musta’ gave’m a good turn.”
“Here’s the interesting part: the body had been eaten. Quite a lot of the skin had been torn off, portions of muscle devoured.” The cigar in Steve’s hand was shaking. “She had bite marks all over her body. Some were just enough to break the skin, others took out chunks of her. Her torso had been ripped open. Her heart had been torn out and partly eaten. Her head…she had been scalped. Her skull had been caved in with a blunt instrument, possibly a rock. Her brain was missing.”
“Holy fuckin’ mayonnaise,” Barney muttered.
“Willis had never seen anything like this. I think he called me in more for moral support than for my professional opinion. At any rate, the teeth marks and the saliva samples we took from the wounds indicated that her assailant was human.”
“Yer sayin’ she was a victim of this thing.”
“Of someone ‘occupied’ by this thing.”
“When was this person killed?” Jake asked.
“Wednesday, around midnight. Willis was able to pinpoint the time of death pretty accurately based on her stomach contents. She’d been seen at a local pizza joint at eight that night. The degree to which the pizza had been digested—”
Barney flicked the back of his hand against the hip of the body stretched in front of him. “So, where was Ronald Smeltzer Wednesday night?”
“I don’t think Smeltzer did it,” Jake said. His heart was beating fast. “That van, the one that tried to run down Celia Jamerson, was coming from the direction of Marlowe. Thursday afternoon. Someone, something, got out of the van alive. There was blood on the pavement behind the rear door. I followed the traces into the field, but couldn’t…” He shook his head. “Where the van crashed was only a few hundred yards from the Oakwood Inn. Suppose what I tried to follow was this snake-thing and it found its way to the restaurant, got into Smeltzer that night?” Jake turned to Steve. “You got that John Doe from the van?”
“This way.”
They followed Steve out of the autopsy room, down the corridor, and into a room, with a dozen refrigerator compartments. He checked the drawer labels, then slid one open. The body that rolled out was covered by a sheet. Jake was grateful for the aroma of Steve’s cigar, though it wasn’t enough to mask the odor of burnt flesh and hair.
“If you’d prefer not to see this,” Steve said, “I think I know what we’re looking for.”
Jake, who had seen the charred corpse hanging out the windshield of the van, wasn’t eager for a close-up view. But he didn’t want to look squeamish in front of Barney, so he kept quiet.
“Let’s see’m,” Barney said.
Steve drew back the sheet. Jake stared at the edge of the aluminum drawer. Though he didn’t focus on the body, he saw it. He saw a black thing vaguely shaped like a human.
“I’ll have to turn him over,” Steve said.
“Manage?” Barney asked, sounding reluctant to help.
“No problem.”
Jake swung his gaze over to Steve and saw that he was wearing surgical gloves. He watched Steve bend over the body. Jake heard papery crumbling sounds. He heard himself groan.
“Guy’s a real flake,” Barney muttered. “Fallin’ apart over ya.”
Steve grinned rigidly around the cigar in his teeth. Lifting and pulling, he wrestled the black lump onto its front. When he finished, the front of his white jacket looked as if someone had rubbed it with charcoal.
“Jake, you were right.”
Jake let his eyes be guided by Steve’s pointing finger to the gray knobs of spinal column laid bare from the nape of the corpse’s neck to midway down its back.
“Looks like the thing was positioned the same as in Smeltzer,” Steve said.
“Only didn’t take a sneaky way out,” Barney added.
“With all this damage, it’s hard to be sure exactly what happened, but it appears that the thing made an emergency exit by splitting open the skin all the way up.”
“Must be awfully strong,” Jake said, “to do that.”
“Yeah,” Barney said. “And to open the van’s backdoor.”
“The impact probably popped the door open,” Jake told him.
“Yeah, maybe.”
“I’ll take a mold of this man’s teeth and draw a blood sample,” Steve said, “and make a run over to Marlowe. I’ll call from there and let you know if it’s a match, but I’d be willing to bet on it.”
“Call me at home,” Barney told him. “I got a hot poker game goin’.”
“If this is the guy who killed the woman in Marlowe,” Jake said, “it pretty much clinches our theory.”
“I think we can assume it’s clinched.”
“Yeah,” Barney agreed. “So we got us a snake that gets inta guys an’ turns ’m into cannibals. Y’believe it?”
Jake stepped away from the corpse. He leaned against the wall of drawers, scooted sideways to get a handle out of his back, and folded his arms. “The thing killed on Wednesday. It tried for Celia Jamerson on Thursday afternoon, then started to go for Peggy Smeltzer on Thursday night. That looks like maybe it goes for a new victim daily.”
“Give us this day our daily broad,” Barney said.