Mac could take no more. He charged past the uniforms and up to the steel table. The air left his lungs. Never had he imagined this.
Her flesh had turned gray and mottled, and glistened with moisture that shouldn’t have been there. Years of decomposition had done that, from the carelessness of those who’d raced to hide her beneath the ground. But that wasn’t the horror.
It was the skull. It was loose. It lay at the top of the bag, its top slightly dislodged above the eye sockets, canted crazily like a poorly fitted lid of some grotesque cookie jar. The jaw hung open in a ghastly silent scream.
Impossibly, it was missing even the barest speck of flesh.
‘Get him the hell out of here!’ Jimmy Bales yelled.
Boots shuffled behind him and strong arms gripped both his arms. They spun him away from the girl.
‘You damned fools! Can’t you see?’ he shouted, struggling to face the hatred in their eyes.
The troopers half-lifted him, propelling him toward the door. Bales raced to jerk it open.
‘Can’t you see?’ Mac shouted as he was shoved into the hall.
‘That’s not her head.’
FIFTY-TWO
One of Bales’s deputies took up a post outside the door to block Mac from trying to get back in. It was a laugh, if laughs could be gotten that morning, so close to the horror that lay on the stainless steel table inside. He never wanted to get near that loose, screaming skull again.
He took off across the green of the courthouse square. Vague, nonsensical thoughts floated in his head. Stronger than any of them, the morning’s dark specter of Abigail Beech, entertainer, psychic, and – please, God – part time lunatic, came back to him. ‘There’s something wrong with her face,’ she’d murmured, rising up from Betty Jo’s ground.
‘Indeed there is, Abigail,’ Mac thought, calmer now. ‘Someone cut it off.’
But there was more than that. Even if his mind did not yet see, his gut had known enough to give it words: ‘That’s not her head.’
He reached the highway and slowed to a walk, the image of what he’d just seen still on fire in his brain. The skin on her body had deteriorated to a soft, gray, paste-like substance, but the skull was devoid of even the smallest particle of flesh. And it was loose.
Footsteps charged up loud behind him. ‘Happy now, you damned fool?’ Randall White sneered.
‘Explain the butchery.’
‘Doc had to remove her head to get at the bullet.’
‘There’s no flesh on the skull like there is on the rest of the body.’
White’s face relaxed, his confidence growing. He actually smiled, showing the stubs of dark teeth. ‘Doc dissolved the flesh away. He moved her head back and forth from one bucket of lye water to another, loosening the soft stuff off to get at the bullet.’
‘He could have used a probe.’
‘I wasn’t there.’ White smiled even more broadly now. ‘All I heard was the bullet was embedded deep, and there was a mad panic to get at it.’
‘Why panic?’
‘Because of the decomp. She needed to be buried to ease the family’s suffering.’
Mac had the errant hope that nothing supernatural had happened that morning, that Abigail Beech had simply learned of Betty Jo’s decapitation, back in the day. She’d used that to whisper her ethereal visions to Mac that morning. She’d been showboating, trying to pass as a psychic; she’d been hustling for a gig.
‘Who else knew Doc Farmont removed her head?’
White smirked. ‘Have to ask Doc.’
‘He’s gone, leaving you to explain everything to the sheriff.’
‘Like Jimmy Bales ain’t already heard?’
‘Bales knew her head had been removed?’
‘Ain’t saying yes; ain’t saying no. I only know I wasn’t in the room when the cutting was done.’
‘You’ll need to tell this to state police.’
‘Say I heard Doc Farmont removed Betty Jo’s head, sloshed it in lye water to get that bullet to plop out, kerplunk, on the floor? You tell them for me.’ White spat once on the sidewalk and walked away.
He went back to the courthouse. The deputy was still guarding the door. Mac leaned against one of the sheriff’s cruisers. He didn’t have to lean long.
Fifteen minutes later, the guard moved aside, and two state troopers, each carrying a large insulated cooler, stepped out. Dr Brown and his assistant followed close behind. Roy Powell and Jen Jessup came next, followed by Jimmy Bales, who was talking to Reed Dean. Clamp Reems came out last, alone.
Mac fell in step alongside Dr Brown. ‘Were her fingernails clipped?’ he asked.
‘What?’
‘Could you tell if her fingernails had been freshly clipped?’
‘If only…’ Brown shook his head.
Bales had been steering Reed toward the corner of the building, away from everyone. But when he saw Mac walking with the doctor, he hustled over.
Bales grabbed Mac’s shirt, allowing the forensics team to walk on. ‘Leave those folks alone.’
‘You’ve got a problem with that skull, Jimmy,’ he said.
‘It’s bullshit, you yelling out it’s not Betty Jo’s. Lots of things can explain it.’
‘Randy White just tried. He said there was a panic to get at the bullet, so Doc Farmont cut off her head. That’s preposterous, but he inferred you already knew that.’
‘I know no such thing. The staties are taking her skull, vertebrae, femur and all the other samples to their lab. They‘ll straighten out your stupid theories.’
Reed Dean walked over. ‘They said they’ll put the hurry-up on it, and report by the end of the week,’ he said to Mac.
‘That’s awfully fast,’ Mac said.
‘You saw the fluid in the bottom of the bag,’ Bales said. ‘Those fingernails you’re so curious about? They’ve been soaking all these years. The doctor doesn’t think he’ll get anything from them.’
Jen Jessup had come to stand next to Reed.
‘Doesn’t it bother you that Pribilski’s corpse was cleaned,’ Mac asked Bales, ‘and that his fingernails were clipped before he was released to his family?’
Jen had pulled out a thin notebook. ‘How do you know these things?’ she asked Mac.
‘Old newspaper microfilms in Chicago. One was especially informative, written in part by a DeKalb girl.’
Jen Jessup’s face changed, just a little.
‘People need to be careful what they write,’ Bales said.
‘You’re not curious about any of this, Jimmy?’ Mac asked.
‘Staties will analyze everything.’
‘Will the staties tell you why her head was cut off?’
‘Like you just said, Doc needed to get that bullet.’
‘Did you notice how the top of the skull was slightly dislodged?’
‘There was a cut, yes,’ Bales said.
‘Doc did that, to get at the bullet?’
‘Let’s wait for the staties.’
‘Odd, isn’t it, to have to remove the whole skull when the top was simply removed?’
‘Maybe the top was removed after,’ Bales said.
‘Why not ask Doc Farmont?’
‘Doc’s on vacation.’
‘So I heard. Still, he’s sure to have a cell phone.’ He looked around. Clamp Reems was gone. ‘In the meantime, you can question your own chief deputy. He might shed light on all sorts of things.’
‘Clamp tried for years to hunt down the killers. It’s the biggest failure of his life.’
The flatbed hoist truck rumbled by, taking Betty Jo in a new cement vault back to Maryton.
‘She’s safe now,’ Bales said. ‘New casket, new vault, all courtesy of Peering County,’ he said to Reed Dean.
‘And still buck naked, except for her underwear,’ Reed said. ‘My mother brought that bridesmaid’s dress to the funeral parlor so she could be dressed proper. Old man Wiley just jammed the dress into the vault.’
‘Not jammed, Reed,’ Mac said quickly, flirting with a new real-ization. ‘It was carefully wrapped in newspaper, then placed almost respectfully between the vault and the casket.’