Part 8 (2/2)
He stopped, looked down, concentrated on his shoes for a moment. The leather had begun to part from the sole on his left one.
Walter reached his side, got his look at it, stared like a moth at the sun. James waited for the cursing, but all his partner could muster was: ”Wow.” After a moment, he added, ”Did you see stuff like this in the war?”
James had seen every type of injury a soldier could suffer, delivered by everything from a bayonet to heavy artillery, every way men could use machines to kill other men, but that had been different, impersonal, cold. ”Not like this,” James said. ”Nothing like this.”
”It doesn't stop there,” a nearby cop told them. Jazzed by the drama, he promptly became their tour guide and led them to a second body that had been treated just as the first. No head. The missing genitalia from both men had been left together in a sad little heap.
James noticed two uniformed guys using trowels to turn over the earth where a dark material mixed in with the weeds. ”What are they doing?”
”Digging up the head. The-whatever he is buried both heads but left their hair sticking up through the dirt.” The cop shrugged, one sharp spasm of movement. ”Buries them and then leaves it so they're found. Why do that?”
James nodded at the small pile of severed parts. ”Why do that?”
Walter took out a cigarette, lit it, and puffed deeply without once looking away from the decomposing tissue. ”I've seen a lot of weird things on this job, Jimmy. Bad things. Sick things.”
James nodded again. ”But nothing like this.”
”s.h.i.+t no.”
It should smell like a slaughterhouse, James thought, but it doesn't. A whiff of death, yes, but not the metallic, turned-meat odor of carnage. He looked again, this time pus.h.i.+ng the horror to a far corner of his mind.
”They're awfully clean, the bodies. I don't even see any blood soaked into the ground. One guy strafed with a German machine gun would leave a puddle three feet in diameter.”
”Coroner says they were moved,” the uniformed cop told him.
”Haven't been dead that long, either,” James said. ”It hasn't rained in the past few days, so that wouldn't have washed all the blood away.”
His reasoning failed to impress the uniform. ”You're about the tenth cop to point that out. They were dumped here, like the coroner said. We've searched all the open areas out about two square miles, and there's no pools of blood anywhere.”
James moved back to the first body, taking in the lack of scratches and the relatively clean socks. ”These are two good-size guys, and they weren't dragged. This guy carried them down here?”
”He must be a moose,” Walter said, trailing behind him. ”Or he had a partner. Maybe partners.”
”There's nothing here-no houses, stores. He must have a car, got them as far as the top of the hill. Why not toss them out and go?”
”Because he wanted to do the little burying-the-heads thing. And leaving the...in a pile,” Walter answered.
”Because he wanted to,” James mused, staring hard at the body now.
”So much so it made the risk worthwhile.”
The uniformed guy shook his head hard enough to loosen a few Bryl-creemed locks. ”Pervert. Killing guys like-that. Got to be some kind of queenie.”
”Or he didn't come down the hill,” James added.
Walter had gotten over the first shock of seeing the bodies and now took refuge in sarcasm. ”What, he flew?”
”No, he definitely didn't fly. I'm just saying maybe he didn't come from the road.”
”From where, then?”
James did a quick 360 scan. ”A train?”
Walter turned to the myriad of rails crossing the valley floor, beginning two hundred feet behind them, glinting in the slanted afternoon rays. ”He hopped off a train with a dead body tucked under each arm? Jimmy boy, you've got to stop going to bank nights at the Allen. Those movies are giving you a wild imagination.”
”He didn't need to bring both at once. And it would explain where all our blood is.”
”It rode away in a boxcar? A bull would have found it by now. They inspect those cars every day.”
”Unless it was on its way out, turned up in some other town where the railroad police are puzzling over it right now.”
”I think it would be easier to come down Jacka.s.s Hill with one of these guys hefted over your shoulder than jump off a moving train with one. You'd break both legs. Unless he really is some kind of giant.”
”No. Nah, you're probably right. Or he-”
”McKenna! Miller! Get over here!”
Their captain, short but hefty, his hair a crawling fringe around a widening bald spot, and a uniformed guy had been inventorying a pile of clothing left by the bodies. Very neat, James thought, he stacks the clothes in one spot, the cutoff body parts in another, and reached out to accept the brown paper sack the captain held toward him. ”That's a coat. We think it belongs to the second guy, from the size of him. Find out where it came from and who it belonged to and don't let me see you again until you do.”
”Sure thing.” The captain didn't seem to trust James any more than the rest of the cops and didn't speak to him often. Encouraged, James held the paper bag out for Walter to see as if it were a new nickel.
His partner screwed up his face. ”You carry it. I'm not touching anything this murdering pervert had his mitts on.”
James did not relish the idea himself but put the distaste out of his mind. How to proceed? Most of his detective work so far had been questioning witnesses and informants until one coughed up a name. But once he had tracked down a hammer used in a burglary by finding the store that sold it and visiting every one of the customers they sold that brand to until one of those customers bolted at the sight of him. He and Walter would have to do similar work now.
Once in the car, he shuffled the garment around within its bag until he found a label. ”B. R. Baker Company. I guess we'll have to find a store that carries these.”
”They'll be closed now. We'll have to start again in the morning.”
”We could find the owners at home, get them to open up.”
”Then they'll have to call in the department managers, and they'll have to call up the sales managers and then the floor men-it will take two hours tonight to do what we could do in ten minutes tomorrow when everybody's there. Applesauce. It's been a long enough day as it is.”
James gave up. The most bizarre homicides this city had ever seen, and his partner wanted to go to sleep.
But he hung on to the bag, didn't leave it at the station. The captain had given it to him and with him it would stay. He hadn't even wanted to leave the station itself, a situation as unusual as the two bodies on the hill in its way. For one evening he didn't feel like an outsider with his own coworkers. For one short period the other cops forgot all about who was on the level and who was bent and who was out-and-out crooked, united by a common horror.
He walked home from the precinct house at Wilson and East Fifty-fifth, dead leaves scuffling under his feet, fresh air in his lungs, carrying the paper bag.
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