Everything from privy to meat market was darkened with soot from the mines and refineries.
The roads were filled with horses and wagons, prospectors and business-owners, immigrants pushing carts and dirty children chasing balls with sticks. Cabe saw ladies with parasols clustered in whispering groups and whores in their petticoats emptying chamber pots into the streets. The ground rumbled from the industry of the mines above and voices chattered and people shouted and bodies threaded in every which direction. Unlike other frontier towns, you saw very few people lounging about. Everything was business and money and there was no time for loafing.
Cabe, his boots plastered with mud up to the shafts, stepped up onto the boardwalk, then stepped back down again as a trio of elderly ladies passed. He touched the brim of his hat to them. A freight wagon and team roared past him, nearly running down a group of black-faced miners, and splashed dirty water over his pants. A group of men fought to push a buckboard that was buried to the axle in a muddy hole. The batwings of a saloon flew open and a drunken man stumbled out, leaned over the hitching rail and vomited out coils of foam. Dark-clad foreigners gesticulated and mumbled in a dozen different dialects. Indians in blanket robes stood around, watching the ruin of their land.
Cabe kept walking, weaving through groups of miners and laborers, trying to find a place where he could get away from all the noise and activity. But everywhere he turned, every alleyway and street, was crowded with more people and more wagons and more industry.
Dear Christ, he thought, maybe Dirker was right… there’s just too many people here, I’ll never find the Strangler in this piss-pot.
But he wasn’t about to give up.
He would crawl into every crack and alcove of this seething, pulsing hive if he had to.
But he was going to run the Sin City Strangler to ground.
2
Jackson Dirker, looking decidedly pale, said, “I’ve seen atrocities, Doc, I’ve seen true horrors… but this, something like this, I can’t begin to even understand it.”
Dr. Benjamin West, a Whisper Lake surgeon and the Beaver County coroner, just nodded. He was a tall, reed-thin man in a charcoal suit with a gold watch chain that flashed in the sunlight like a winking eye. He clutched his derby hat to his chest and ran long, delicate fingers through his sparse white hair. A cord jumped in his throat.
“Although I’m a man of science,” he finally said. “I would think the Devil rode through here in a black mood.”
Dirker did not disagree with that.
They were standing outside the general store that had served as not only the market, but saloon and gambling house in the placer camp of Sunrise. They stood outside the double doors, looking and looking, and seeing and wishing they were blind. Because what they saw in Sunrise was permanently burned into their vision like a sudden, hurting arc of light.
Dirker was studying what was on the door.
A man with an eagle tattooed on his back had been skinned completely, his hide nailed there in one piece. No less than three heads hung over the entrance like ghastly lanterns. Copper wire had been jabbed into their ears and looped to nails above. The faces were splattered with dried blood, blanched eyes staring dumbly. The head on the left looked like it was about to say something.
Doc West waved a few flies from it. Though the wind had a bite to it, the sunshine was heating things up. Bringing the bugs and the ever-present reek of bacterial decay. “I’m guessing that these heads,” he said, “were not cut off as with a hatchet or knife, but actually ripped from their bodies.”
Dirker had already figured that.
At the stump of the necks there was a great deal of tissue and vertebrae hanging out like party confetti. No clean slice was evident. Someone… or something… had the strength to actually pull a man’s head from his body. Dirker didn’t like to jump to fantastic conclusions like that, but what else was he to think? The evidence spoke volumes.
Sighing, as used to the carnage now as he would ever get, he looked over the shacks and weathered buildings that had made up Sunrise in its heyday before the veins of gold had played out. It looked like a cemetery to him… the gray, windowless structures very much like tombstones in some lonesome, windy graveyard. The mountains brooding above looked down silently like mourners.
A miner named Jim Tomlinson had ridden down from the high country to provision at the store and found the massacre. He was so overwrought by the time he made it to Whisper Lake, Doc West had to shoot some morphine into him to get anything sensible out of him. An hour later, Dirker, West, and two deputies-Henry Wilcox and Pete Slade-made it up to Sunrise.
Henry Wilcox-a man who’d seen his fair share of blood and guts-took one look at what was in the store and promptly ran outside to vomit. The other three were inclined to do the same, but held their own.
Massacre was what Tomlinson had called it and massacre is what it was. Period. There was no way to tell just yet how many had been killed. Corpses and parts thereof where littered about like bison carcasses at a buffalo camp. The bar was heaped with dismembered limbs… legs, arms, hands, feet. Some hands still gripped pistols and some legs still wore their boots. There was blood everywhere, oceans of it dried in sticky pools on the floor and splashed on the walls and spattered up onto the ceiling. Tables had been overturned, chairs shattered to firewood. Sacks of salt and flour had ripped open, their contents powdered over everything like a down of snow. Poker chips and playing cards scattered in every which direction.
Slaughter, plain and simple.
The store had sold everything from picks and shovels to Rochester lamps and sluice boxes. One of the picks had been put to good use-it had been used to impale a man to the wall, his feet a good six inches off the floor. Dirker couldn’t even begin to imagine the strength it would take to do something like that.
And if all of that was bad enough down here, upstairs… Jesus, even worse.
Like a slaughterhouse. The corridor was actually painted red like a child’s fingerpainting, filled with bodies and limbs and viscera. Dirker didn’t do much exploring up there-the sight and smell of all that spilled blood and raw human meat was simply too much for any man-but what he had seen was enough to haunt his dreams forever. Whoever or whatever had been at work up there, had taken their time. Unlike downstairs which was, save a few grisly examples, like a free-for-all just this side of Hell, in the upstairs corridor, the fiends had been in no hurry whatsoever.
Five bodies had been ritually pulled apart-limbs and heads cut from torsos-and then reassembled on the walls where they had been nailed in place. Dirker suppose that was evidence of a sick, grim sense of humor. When he first saw it, he thought he was looking at bloody manikins, but the truth found him soon enough. He hadn’t bothered with the other rooms up there. No doubt they hid more horrors, but he simply wasn’t up to it.
Downstairs with Doc West, Dirker watched the medical man examine the bodies. He probed punctures and gashes with instruments, measured wounds and abrasions. Dirker was thinking about the others. About the miners that had disappeared up in the hills these past months. And the ones that had been mauled by animals… at least what he had thought were animals.
Now, well, he knew better.
But if it wasn’t animals, then what? Lunatics with dogs?