Precious Blood (34 page)

The cannula tubing raked across the mouthpiece again.

He was speaking slowly now, the words spilling out in the gasps between sharp breaths.

“Okay, Doc. It isn’t even ten a.m., and I’ve already had enough excitement to last me a year. Good luck with them in Snowden.”

Jenner could hear that he was about to hang up, and quickly said, “Wait! Mr. Johnson, you said you knew a name?”

“Oh, sure, sorry, Doc. My brother remembered this morning.”

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He was gasping again.

“The guy you’re looking for, name of Farrar, Doc. Robert Farrar of Snowden, PA.”

The orange light of her watch face flared up in front of Ana’s eyes.

A little before noon, Sunday, December 22, it said.

The orange died out, the watch face glowing dimly for a couple of seconds before drowning in the dark.

It would be light outside. Sunny, maybe, one of those brilliant, cold December days where the buildings seem hard-edged and sharp in the sky.

Or maybe it was gray, maybe rainy. Drizzling. Pouring.

Pouring rain, people scurrying along under umbrellas, waiting under awnings for the storm to ease up. But there would be light.

Three shopping days left until Christmas. Xmas. Three days till Xmas. People running around to parties, last-minute Xmas shopping. Where did the poor go at Xmas? Uptown, she guessed. The outer boroughs. Presents from the Salvation Army or something? Something like that.

But at least they could walk outside, be outside in the light.

They could walk into Grand Central, see the light streaming through those big windows into the vast concourse.

How long had she been here? She couldn’t remember. Was it already a week? She didn’t know.

She was losing it. She’d been lying in the dark, starving slowly, her body slowly shutting down. She still had a good bit of the candle left, but she wasn’t using it because of what he’d put on the door.

And now she was clean. She was herself again, sober. No drugs, nothing but pure sensation and emotion.

Even in the dark, she knew what was up there on the door, looking down on her. She’d seen them all, crying and terrified, pleading into the camera as he clicked the button. Seen
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Andie. Seen them before he did what he did, and seen them afterward, butchered and posed, still looking at the camera.

The last one was barely even recognizable as a face, just a bloody mask with empty eye sockets and weird symbols burned into her skin.

She couldn’t look at them, and she was afraid to touch them because of what he might do to her if she did. So she stayed in the dark. She could cover them with the blanket, and have some light for a while, but it was too cold. Not moving, not walking, just lying there, she could feel herself slowly freezing, every muscle stiff and weak, every joint aching.

She didn’t care now if she lived or died. He was only keeping her to kill her. When she’d been sick, he brought her water, once even a battered tin pot filled with water so that she could wash herself. Now he was treating her differently; he’d been expecting something from her, she could tell, but he wasn’t anymore. Had she screwed up an opportunity to save herself? If she’d acted differently, would she be all right now? What had he wanted?

It wasn’t sex—he could have taken that at any time. He knew it, and she had accepted it.

So what
did
he want? What else was there?

She thought of Jenner. A week ago, a year ago, a lifetime ago. She didn’t think he was dead. She hoped not. He had been nice to her. The cops were dead. Rad. Funny Joey Roggetti. Dead because of her.

Soon she’d be dead, too.

Fuck it. Maybe it would be quick.

Jenner’s car crept past the stretch of low clapboard and brick buildings that made up downtown Houtzdale. At the intersection of 53 and McAteer, he saw the Houtzdale PD black-and-white, hazard lights flashing, behind a silver gray F-150; the officer was leaning against the pickup’s side window, chatting with the driver.

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Jenner pulled in behind the truck, and walked up to introduce himself.

The cop looked him up and down, then nodded his head toward the pickup and said, “These are the guys you want—

I’m just saying hi.”

He tapped the roof of the cabin and said, “Andy, Don.

Take care,” nodded at Jenner, then left.

The door swung open, and a young man climbed out.

He shook Jenner’s hand and said, “Andy Slater, Doctor.

Pleased to meet you.”

Gesturing toward the cab, he said, “My dad, Don Slater.

He used to be chief of police in Altoona; before that he ran the volunteer police department that covered most of the rural parts of Clearfield County.”

Jenner bent a little, and saw a tall man, clean-cut and somber, sitting in the backseat, expressionless in aviator sunglasses.

“Doctor. Welcome to central Pennsylvania. You want to get in, we’ll take you where you need to go.”

Jenner said, “If it would be easier, I can just follow you in my car.”

“No need. We’re heading a bit off the beaten track, don’t want you getting lost. Besides, your car will be safe here—

anyone who got sprung from Houtzdale Correctional has already hopped the eleven a.m. bus and is long gone.”

He was grinning slightly, his tan face barely lined.

“Besides, we have things to discuss.” The grin faded.

Jenner climbed into the passenger seat and found himself awkwardly positioned in front of the older Slater. His side still ached, and turning was difficult.

They drove north through the town, over a bridge, across railroad tracks. Don Slater stayed quiet, his son filling up the silence with a running commentary.

“That’s Beaver Run, the stream. First Commonwealth Bank up ahead there.”

The buildings quickly fell away, leaving Andy Slater with
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little to say. The snow was heavier up here. They were in farmland again, boxy red barns floating on a sea of white, like Monopoly hotels spilled onto a big sheet of cotton wool.

He had started up again, “So, we’re on the edges of the Allegheny Plateau—” when his father interrupted.

“So, Doctor. I understand you’re making inquiries about Robert Farrar. That correct?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And this is in reference to those New York City murders, the students?”

“Yes.”

Don Slater took off his sunglasses. His eyes, blue-green and clear, were watering slightly.

“And he’s, what—a suspect in the killings?”

“Possibly.”

The older Slater nodded slowly and tucked the sunglasses into the breast pocket of his heavy jacket.

Jenner asked, “Can you tell me what he looks like?”

Slater shook his head. “I’m afraid not, Doc. I haven’t seen him in more than twenty years. We’ll see if we can find a photo of him for you.”

He watched the fields go by for a while.

“Y’know, Doctor, in any given situation, there’s not just a right way and a wrong way. There’s a thousand different ways, each of them with different degrees of rightness or wrongness. And the rightness or wrongness of a particular choice sometimes isn’t really clear. You try to make the best choice you can on the information you have available, and you hope it works out.”

He ran a hand over his hair, smoothing it down.

“The thing is, even if most of the choices you make will work out, sooner or later you’ll find out you made a wrong one.”

Slater’s manner—the unhurried speech, the calm, clear-eyed gaze—was reassuring. This, Jenner was sure, was a
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man who would help him catch his killer. He let some slack into his seat belt and turned gingerly toward him.

“To understand this better, you’ve got to understand a bit of the history. Where we’re going now didn’t used to be part of Clearfield County, it was its own little county, a hundred square miles of some of the worst farming land in the state, with three towns—Psalter Brook, Barretsburg, and Snowden—each with a population less than two hundred.

When I was a kid, we used to make fun of those kids because they were dirt-poor. The
real
dirt-poor—forget crops, the soil on that land couldn’t support weeds, even.

“But the families never left. Generation after generation just stayed on in the failed farms of the generation before.

These families got increasingly isolated, kept to themselves, living the barest existence, not trusting anyone from the outside, not asking for help for anything.

“When I was a cop around here, we wouldn’t hear a peep out of Barretsburg County, not a peep. And because there was only me and another guy, that was okay with us. From time to time you’d hear rumors about some guy smacking his old lady around, but if there was no formal complaint, there was no grounds for intervention, so we just let sleeping dogs lie. As they say, don’t poke a skunk.”

The land was hillier now, the snowy fields dotted with pocket forests of hickory and oak. Seeing Jenner looking toward the woods, Slater said, “There are forests all over this area, and some of them offer pretty good hunting. Which was how I first met Bobby Farrar.”

He leaned back with a slight sigh and slipped his sunglasses back on, even though the afternoon light was now wan and gray. He sat silently for a minute, his face set in a slight scowl. Then he began.

“About twenty-five years back, a couple of hunters from Pittsburgh were hunting elk around here. Cold fall day, not having much luck. They’re starting to talk about calling it a day, when all of a sudden, in the middle of the woods they
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came across a kid, maybe ten years old, half naked, kneeling in a clearing.

“They call to him, but he doesn’t hear them. He suddenly pitches forward, and he’s lying on the ground, pounding the dirt in front of him. As they get close, they can see he’s covered in blood. In front of him there’s a dead dog, a collie, I think it was. The kid has stabbed it to death—killed it and skinned it. And in front of the carcass there’s this sort of altar, a pile of rocks and branches, and on top of it he’s put candles and the bones and skulls of some dogs.”

They had crested the top of the range of hills and now were going down again, into a valley. The sky had darkened, and Jenner saw the first flakes of snow drifting down. In the valley, the air was heavier, colder; in some areas the drifting snow almost buried the fencing along the roadside.

“They approach the kid, and even though they’re standing next to him, he doesn’t respond. So one of them reaches down and flips him over, and the kid just lies there stiff in front of them, pounding the air like he was still pounding the ground. They said his eyeballs had rolled up inside his head, and that he’d pissed hisself.

“After a while, he slows down, and seems to be going to sleep. It’s fall, October or November, so they can’t just leave him there like that, so one of them wraps him in his jacket, and they bring him out of the woods, taking turns carrying him.

“The first house they come to is so derelict they don’t believe anyone even lives there. But people do, and it turns out it’s the boy’s house. The father is drunk, threatens the hunters with a shotgun, the mother is wailing, takes the boy and begins to wash him down. And they’re trying to tell the guy his son needs to see a doctor, but the father keeps swearing at them there’s nothing wrong with his boy, and then the mother starts screaming they hurt her son, and she jumps up and grabs a big knife, and they run.

“They notify us, we respond to the farm. Father’s sobered
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up a bit, lets us into the house. The mom is sitting on a ratty old couch, holding the boy all wrapped up in a blanket, rocking him back and forth.

“The boy isn’t much to look at, scrawny and all, but they’re obviously giving him food to eat, and he’s clean—of course, his mom has just washed him down. I give him a look-over, and he seems to be okay. He has a couple of welts on his leg, but his dad said he fell while climbing a fence, and I don’t push it.

“The whole time, the boy won’t say a word to us. I ask to see where he sleeps, and they show me his room. It’s filthy, piled up with household junk, no toys. On the walls, they put up pictures from an old children’s Bible—David and Goli-ath, and Daniel in the lions’ den, and so forth. Big picture of Jesus with his chest open, pointing at his burning heart.

“I talk to them about taking him to the hospital to get him checked out, but they say that’s against their religion, that God will provide, and stuff like that. And then I ask them about the altar, and the mom starts screaming it’s not true, and the dad gets pretty upset and tells us to get the hell out.

“So we leave. The hunters are waiting for us up on the road, and they take us down into the woods. It gets dark early in the valley, and mist forms pretty quick. And I tell you, I’m not much for creepy stuff or ghosts and so forth, but walking through those woods in the dark, the mist settling in all around us, going into the clearing and seeing what this little boy had done . . . well, I tell you, it was the goddamned
eeriest
thing I’ve ever seen in my life. The hunters—two big guys from Steeltown, both with guns, one an ex-marine—don’t want to come into the clearing. And I can’t say as I blame ’em.

“My partner shines the flashlight on it, and I look for anything that looks human, and far as I can tell, there’s nothing there. So I kick over the altar, and we throw the dog’s body onto the pile. Jerry brings down some gas from the truck, and I set the whole thing on fire, burned the altar in the clearing.

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“I didn’t think I put that much gas on the pile, but I tell you, those flames were shooting up so high that I was afraid that the trees were going to burn. We back away, I watch from the edge of the clearing, and when it settles down a little, we begin to walk back up the hill to the road.