Possession (31 page)

"With this ring, I thee wed. I did not exist before you and you did not exist before me. Separated, we no longer live. Do you believe that?"

"I believe that."

"If I die, you will no longer exist. If you should die, I would not exist. We are entwined, flesh together, blood together, bone together, throughout eternity."

"Together."

"I would kill for you. And you would kill for me."

She shivered.

"You would kill for me."

".. . and I would kill for you."

"And if we should die together, here on this mountain, we would be glad."

She bent her head against his chest, and he could see the

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slenderness of her neck, tender and fair where her hair fell away. "We would be very glad."

"Very, very glad."

She looked up at him, and he saw himself in her pupils. He regretted that they had to leave.

"I want to say a few words for him," he said finally.

"For who?"

"For Danny."

"Oh." She looked away, back toward the mountain behind them, and he could sense that she seemed distracted. He spoke quickly. "Give me the ring—the one you took off."

She handed it to him absently and watched as he snapped three white daisies from the ground and slipped the wedding band over their stems. He lay the flowered ring on the large boulder and bent his head, his eyes open and watching her, "In memory of Daniel—was it Daniel or Danny?"

"Either. But he hated Daniel. Say Danny."

"In memory of Danny Lindstrom. Ashes to ashes . . . dust to dust."

He could see that she no longer really remembered who Danny was.

The rock turned black as the sun sank lower and they shouldered their packs again and walked away into the forest. The trees closed in behind them as the trail fell away, down steeply. She kept her hand hooked into his belt, afraid of losing him.

23

"I know who you are. What puzzles the hell out of me is what you were doing messing around one of my scenes? You really threw your weight on my men. You're not going to sit on me, buster." Captain Rex Moutscher glared at Sam, letting him stand

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at the counter like a citizen making a lost dog complaint, obviously unwelcome in the Chelan County Sheriffs Office.

"Can I come in?"

"You're asking permission now? That's a pleasant change. Clinton, the big shot. This is my county. This is my office. I don't care if you're governor of Washington. You don't fuck up my scenes. And you don't order my men around. If you've got any ideas about playing God, here, you can turn your ass around and find the door out."

"I lost my partner. I needed to know why."

Moutscher softened only slightly. "I'm aware of that. And I'm sorry. But that's no license for what you did—not in my book. What do you want here?"

Sam leaned his elbows on the counter, monumentally fatigued. "I've been up in the mountains for three days. I flew down in a little-bitty plane through a snow storm, and then I drove from Chelan here. And I'm out of cigarettes."

Moutscher held out a pack and Sam took one, waiting.

"That all you want? A smoke?"

"I came for the post. I want to attend the post."

"I haven't decided if we need one."

Sam fought to hold his tongue.

"Come on in." Moutscher held the pass-through door open. "Sit down there and keep your hands in your lap."

"I'm not here to grab your follow-ups and run."

"You bet your sweet ass you're not. You used to be with Seattle, didn't you?"

Sam sighed. "Seventeen years, until 1977."

"How come you vested with three years to go?"

"Personal reasons."

"I heard you blew it over there. I know a lot of those guys."

"What did they say?"

Moutscher looked away. "Said you hit the sauce."

"That was nice of them. You got on the phone right away, didn't you?"

"Look, Clinton. You were up there doing a very, very accurate impersonation of a 220.1 expected you to show up

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here—why else do you think I'd be sitting here on Saturday night? I wanted to know what to expect."

"And here I am. Two heads. Breathing fire. Loony-Tunes." Moutscher grunted. "Why do you want an autopsy?"

"I don't believe grizzly now. I don't believe any kind of bear. I don't believe any of it."

"You're fighting the obvious. Why?"

"I knew him. I knew how he reacted, and he reacted fast and he wouldn't go down without tearing up the landscape and himself. Not with her up there too."

"They find any sign of her?"

"They didn't call down here yet?"

Moutscher shook his head. "They won't find her alive. Face it."

"You're a real bleeding-heart, aren't you, Captain?"

"I'm a realist." Moutscher looked away from Sam and stared out over the trees that surrounded the old courthouse down toward the Wenatchee River. "You're wrong about no bear. The way Lindstrom looked—I saw him, and I don't agree with you. Have you ever seen somebody a bear was into?" Sam shook his head slightly.

"Well, I have. And he looked familiar. I'll tell you what— I'll make you a deal so's we both come out of this with our feathers battened down. You turn over all that physical evidence you withheld from my team, and I'll have Doc Hastings meet us tomorrow morning at seven. You can have your post."

"I thought we might give Doc Reay a call in Seattle. I know him; he'd fly over. You've got a coroner system here. I want a medical examiner."

"Clinton, if you think the coast is the only part of the state of Washington able to handle for-en-sic sci-ence, why didn't you stay there?

You see this file? You see here? We've had eight homicides this year. And we've had eight convictions. They match that over there? Not on their butts they can't. They're lucky if they do 75 percent. So don't you go sticking your nose up at us. I've been to Louisville. I've been 23 1

to the FBI Academy in Quantico. And I've been around. Take it or leave it."

Sam knew better than to remind Moutscher that his 100 percent on eight had undoubtedly been Mama-Kills-Papa or

Papa-Kills-Mama-and-Mama's-Lover homicides— messy to mop up, but easy to solve. The dicks on the coast had strangers killing strangers, nut cases killing strangers, druggies killing each other with no mourners, and murderers with a lot more room to hide. Given that, 75 percent was damn good. He looked at Moutscher and let the argument go.

"I'll take it."

"Where's my baggies full of stuff?"

"In my car."

"Then you go get them now—as security—and I'll call Hastings."

"Where's Albro?"

"In Dallas."

Moutscher had him by the short hairs, and Moutscher didn't like him. He had broken all the rules of getting along with a fellow officer, and Moutscher was never going to like him even if he reached across the desk and gave him a kiss and a hug. Fuck it.

He turned over the baggies, but he kept the long, dark hairs and the green plaid. They didn't know about that, and they weren't going to; they'd probably throw them away.

Sam left his truck where it was, lonely on the street behind the looming courthouse, and walked downhill to the Cascadian Hotel where he lost himself in the lounge full of Saturday night cowboys and their girls.

He sat at the bar and listened to the jukebox. He ordered Glenlivet and had downed three doubles before he realized someone was playing the same damn song over and over and over: "Woman" by John Lennon. After three hours of Lennon and drinking, listening to a dead man sing of improbable, impossible, true love, the bartender pulled the plug and the jukebox blinked off and died too. The woman at the jukebox turned to Sam and tried to focus on his face.

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"Doesn't that just want to make you puke it's so sad?"

"Almost everything does, ma'am."

"You want to go upstairs with me?"

He considered it and remembered with a dull jolt where he would be in less than five hours. He lifted her hand, turned it over, and kissed her palm. "No thank you, ma'am—I'm driving." It seemed to make sense to her. She got up gravely and maneuvered her way to the exit, still wiping her eyes. The bartender washed her glass and winked at Sam. "Don't blame you. She's a pig."

"So am I."

"Have it your way, ace."

He remembered that he hadn't called Elizabeth Crowder or Fletch, or Fewell, or anyone. Maybe Moutscher had. There was no point in getting a room; he couldn't remember when he'd slept in a bed. He couldn't remember when he'd slept.

He threw twenty dollars on the bar and walked out into the cold air of Wenatchee. He slept in the back of his truck with Lennon's song going round in his head.

He woke with an unbelievable pain behind his eyes and a pounding in his ears. Moutscher was banging on his truck and Hastings was waiting for him.

Sam washed up in the lavatory on the first floor of the courthouse, the cavernous, high-ceilinged room unchanged since the building went up decades before, grandiose with marble floors and golden oak cubicles. He wondered idly where they'd gotten the money for such a fancy outhouse. The radiators buzzed on and filled the room with the smell of layers of baking paint, but there was no hot water and he sluiced his face with cold water in the vain hope he could wash away the scotch that still fogged his brain. Moutscher watched him silently, puffing on a pipe.

Sam turned with a grin that didn't work. "You got a 'reath mint?"

'Don't bother. You smell like a distillery. I smelled you 233

when you crawled out of your truck, and Doc Hastings can't smell anything but formaldehyde. Fewell puts up with your kind of drinking?"

"I don't drink with Walker; I don't socialize with Walker, and Walker has no jurisdiction over what I do off-duty."

Moutscher said nothing; maybe he knew Walker Fewell.

Sam stared into the mirror and had difficulty recognizing the image he hadn't seen in five days. An old man looked back at him, the pouches around his eyes creased with dark new gouges, the eyes themselves sunk in their sockets and branched with red. He had needed a shave for days, and his beard was gray. He had never seen it gray before. He brushed his sandy hair back with his hands in lieu of a comb. No wonder Moutscher thought he was a derelict. He was a derelict.

But Hastings, as it turned out, was older. "This is Dr. Wilfred Hastings. Sam Clinton, Doctor."

Sam took the pathologist's veined hand and felt the bones beneath the thin skin, the tremor there. Hastings looked at! him from behind trifocals, his pale blue eyes huge and vague. Sam guessed seventy-five—no, eighty-five.

"Doc Hastings was coroner here—when was it, Doc? 1945?"

"1936 to 1962."

God. It was a joke.

It wasn't a joke.

The room was too bright, the slick tiled walls reflecting the lights that dangled over the sheeted mound in the middle of the room. Sam inhaled formaldehyde and refrigerated death, and the floor slid downhill beneath his feet. He shut his eyes, aware that they were staring at him—the fat detective captain in his white socks and the old man. He concentrated then on the framed sign on the wall:

All Who Lay Here Before You Were Once Loved;

Respect and Dignity For the Dead

Will Be Maintained At All Times.

As He Is, You Will Be—As You Are, He Was.

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And beneath the words in very small print, "Courtesy, East Wenatchee Sign Co." The thing was printed, apparently mass printed. How much call would there be for such homilies? Every home should have one?

A flash of light pierced the brightness, and Sam turned to see Moutscher winding the film sprocket of his Yashica. The first frame would show Danny's shrouded body, awaiting Dr. Hastings' ministrations. The sheet was whipped off and it began.

As he is, you will be; as you are, he was. I hope the hell not, Sam thought, staring at the felt pen scrawl on Danny's thigh—the coroner's reference number.

Something on the body moved. Maggots, tumbling over themselves, gray-white and fat in the black chest wounds. Sam's hand darted out and closed around the container of ether. He sprayed the parasites and saw them stiffen and roll onto the table, dead. His gorge rose and he swallowed the acid that had been expensive scotch, turning his head toward Moutscher.

"The container. Give me the container."

"Let them be! Knock them on the floor!"

"I want the goddamned box."

Moutscher passed a thin plastic vial over, and Sam scraped a clot of maggots into it, capped it, labeled it, and finally was able to breathe.

"I want to know when he died. The flies come and they lay their dirty little eggs and they hatch and they crawl and they fly and they lay eggs and they never change their timetable. Those goddam grubs can tell us something."

Moutscher seemed about to argue, and then his face changed. Sam recognized the expression. Don't argue with a maniac.

"You ready to go ahead?" Hastings was ignoring Sam completely, looking to Moutscher for permission to cut. Moutscher took four angles in his lens, snapped, again, again, and then nodded.

|'Wait," Sam blurted.

"Now what?"

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"Could you cover his face?"

"Why don't you wait outside?"

"I have to be here. Could you cover his face?"

Moutscher turned to the old man. "Put a drape over his face." And to Sam. "It's not going to hurt him any more." Sam could not isolate the emphasis in the words. Sympathy? Empathy? Scorn? The words lay flat.

With Danny's blackened features hidden, it was not all right, but it was bearable. He concentrated on the old doctor's hand, saw it pick up the scalpel, saw the hand and cutting tool shake, and then plunge with remembered deftness as it cut obliquely down from each shoulder to the midline, leaving the skin flayed open in a wide V. Again, Hastings cut—straight down the midline from sternum to pubis, forming an elongated Y opening.

Sam roared, and the old man jumped back with alarm.

"You cut through one of the fucking wounds! Can't you see what the hell you're doing?"

"Shut up!" Moutscher bellowed so loud that his words bounced off the tiled walls. "You say anything else and your ass is going to be out in the hall! Go ahead, Doc."