Weinstock whistled softly between his teeth. “Ho-lee shit.”
Gus beamed. “I guess the local boys got sick and tired of that Philly piece of shit kicking up dust out here. Pine Deep,” he said with pride that threatened to pop the buttons on his straining shirtfront, “you can hurt us, but you can’t beat us.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Crow muttered and pushed past him. Weinstock shot the chief a look as he followed.
“What?” Gus asked, totally perplexed.
“You sure that’s Boyd?” Crow asked.
“I sure as hell hope so,” Gus said.
A state police criminalist, Judy Sanchez, was working the scene and turned when she sensed Weinstock and Crow approaching. She knew Weinstock from when Boyd had broken into the morgue to steal Ruger’s body; she knew Crow from AA, though they just acknowledged each other with a slight nod.
“What can you tell me?” Weinstock asked, nodding at the corpse. “Any ID?”
She gave a short laugh. “Beyond the fact that he’s probably male and probably human, no. Those college boys torched him good.”
“They want to know if that’s Boyd down there,” Gus said, still having a blast with this.
“You figure college kids for it, Judy?” Crow said.
“Looks like it. We got joints, beer cans, lots of sneaker prints. Little Halloween doesn’t let go around here very fast, does it?”
Little Halloween was Pine Deep’s unique holiday, celebrated only when Friday the 13th occurred in October; it was like Mischief Night on steroids. Each one was legendary, and when it showed up the kids at the college went out of their way to outdo the pranks of previous classes. The current tally included three bonfires—two of them built around cars belonging to hated teachers—a game of nude touch football between a sorority and a frat that was likely going to end in expulsions and, very probably, a lawsuit; a rock concert played so loud that fish in the Floyd Pond died; a spate of bricks thrown through store windows; a school bus being completely disassembled, with all of the parts placed neatly on the high school soccer field; the vandalizing of the Pinelands Hospital Morgue; and the subsequent burning—in fact rather than effigy—of Kenneth Boyd.
“It’s a fun-loving town,” Crow said sourly.
“Pine Deep,” Weinstock said sotto voce, “a great place to visit. Bring the whole family.”
They stood there looking at the corpse, thankful that the breeze carried the cooked-meat stink out toward the river. Sanchez said, “So…yeah, it’s probably Boyd. Even with all the charring you can tell that the head has received several gunshot wounds.” She looked at Crow. “Your fiancée’s doing, I hear.”
“Yep.”
“Tough chick.”
“She is that,” Crow agreed.
Weinstock blew his nose noisily, “We’re going to need dental records or DNA on it.” He cut a look at Crow, but Crow was wearing his best poker face.
Back in the car they drove in silence for several miles before Weinstock said, “So, are we buying that this is a fraternity stunt?”
“I don’t know. Does it seem like something a vampire would do?”
Weinstock looked at him. “Not really. Somehow I don’t equate the living dead with juvenile prankishness. Even cruel-hearted and extreme juvenile prankishness.”
“In the movies, do vampires come back from the dead if they’ve been incinerated?”
“Not usually. Fire’s always one of those fallback plans. Like beheading.”
“So, Boyd’s toast in real point of fact.”
Crow grinned. “I guess.”
He took a tin of Altoids out of his pocket and put three of them in his mouth, then offered the tin to Crow, who shook it off. Crow put a Leonard Cohen CD into the player and they listened to that while the cornfields—lush or blighted—whisked by on either side.
They were back at the hospital by sunset and the two of them sat in chairs on either side of Val’s bed. A night’s sleep had transformed her from an emotional wreck back into a semblance of her stolid self, and her strength helped steady Crow and Weinstock.
They told her everything and then watched her process it. Val had a tough, analytical brain and Crow knew that engaging her in a complex problem was one of the best ways to keep her from getting too far into grief for Mark and Connie. There would be plenty of time for that later.
Val said, “Let’s go over it. Every bit of it, step by step.”
They did, and each of them played devil’s advocate for any thought, observation, or experience the others brought up. They picked it apart, dissecting it, chewed the bones of it as the sun burned itself to a cinder and left the sky a charred black. Dinner came and went, friends stopped by to visit or deliver flowers and fruit baskets. The phone kept ringing—friends, relatives, the press. Val and Crow both turned the ringers off on their cells. Every time a nurse left or guests made their farewells, the three of them went right back into it, picking up where they left off.
Night painted the window black and the three of them eventually ran out of things to say. Val probed the bandages around her eye as she thought it through. “The question we keep asking is…is this thing over?”
Weinstock looked at Crow, who shrugged.
“Boyd and Ruger are dead, Castle and Nels Cowan are dead and buried. Mark is not…one of them. You’re sure of that?”
“As sure as I can be. And though my gut tells me that this is all over, I think that we should keep Mark and Connie here in, um…storage…until we find some way of medically determining if they are infected or not.” Val shot him a hard look, but Weinstock held up his hand. “Let me finish. I can stall Gus on this—he’s stupid enough to buy any dumb excuse I make up. Maybe I’ll tell him that there was a chance that Boyd was carrying a disease and I need to do more tests to make sure that it’s nothing that will affect the town.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Val said. “Nobody’d believe that.”
“Gus?” Weinstock said, arching his eyebrows.
“Okay, okay,” she conceded.
“In the meantime,” Crow said, “I think we should make sure the bodies are secure. Locks on their freezer doors and maybe restraints of some kind. Newton’s working on the research. We should know in a few days…a couple weeks tops.”
Val closed her eye for a moment, took a breath, then nodded. “Okay. That makes sense.”
Crow patted her thigh. “I think whatever this madness was, we kind of came at it from an angle, and by the time we knew what it was, it was over. There’s nothing that indicates that this went further than Boyd. As far as the morgue break-in…if college kids did this as a Little Halloween stunt or some macho Pine Deep rah-rah bullshit, then we’re done. Fat Lady’s finished her aria and gone home and we can all take a nice deep breath and try to forget this all ever happened.”
“That’d be nice,” Val said. “On the other hand, if it wasn’t frat boys, then we have to consider that burning the body is the one way to destroy any trace of physical evidence that Boyd was anything more than a psychotic killer.”
“There’s that,” Weinstock agreed.
“Problem is…we might not ever know the truth.”
“Uh-huh.”
“So what do we do?” she asked.
“I don’t know, Val. I mean…I still have the videotapes and lab reports, but now I have nothing to back them up, and I don’t know how much mileage I can get out of that stuff. Even if I could make a case for each individual bit of evidence being faulty, or tainted. I’m not willing to risk my whole career on it at the moment, not if there’s a chance this thing is actually over.”
Crow nodded and glanced at Val. “So what do you think we should do?”
Val didn’t answer right away, but her eye was flinty. “I guess,” she said at last, “what I’m going to do is hope for the best.”
“Okay.”
“And from now on, and maybe for the rest of my life…I’m going to keep all my guns loaded.”
Weinstock and Crow looked at her.
“This is still Pine Deep, boys,” she said. “Far as I’m concerned, it’ll never be over. Crow, I think you should see what you can do to beef up security for the Festival, and as often as we can we should brainstorm with Newton. Even if this is over we should all learn everything we can about vampires. From now on we need to be prepared. If—and I only say if because I hope like hell it is over—if we run into another one of these bloodsucking bastards again, then I want the story to have a happier ending. I’m tired of being in the dark, and I’m tired of being blindsided.” When they said nothing to that, she added, “I’m going to have a baby. I want that baby born into a safer world.”
Weinstock smiled at her. “I hear garlic’s good for your health.”
Crow gave him half a smile. “I heard that, too.”
After a moment Val managed a smile. “Then I guess I’d better learn to cook Italian.”
INTERLUDE
The first thing Paul Ruffin did after he threw his suitcase on the motel bed was call the pizza joint the manager had suggested, then he switched on the big screen, popped the top on a Coors, and scooched over to the center of the big bed. His sigh was enormous. After eight hours on the road nothing felt as good as a cold beer, a hot pizza, and nothing in particular to do. Tomorrow he would be busy with his camera, taking photos of the Haunted Hayride and all the spook-film celebrities for a major horror magazine. He was doing a whole spread on scream queen Brinke Stevens, and he was psyched. She’d factored in his fantasies for a lot of years.
The place had cable, so he surfed for a while, amazed as always at how many stations seemed to broadcast either reruns or mind-numbing shit that no one could possibly want to watch. He cruised along the airwaves, then slammed on the brakes as he discovered that yet another service provided by the Pinelands Motel was Showtime. On the screen Carmen Electra was running slow motion down a beach. It was quite something to see, though it had to be at least ten years old—not that it mattered even a teensy bit. He smiled as he sipped his beer. Now there was something he would like to have taken pictures of—her breasts were something out of science fiction.