Killing Floor (11 page)

“Everybody used to stop off here,” he said. “North side of town was just pretty much a mess of bars and rooming houses to cater to the folks passing through. All these fancy gardens between here and the firehouse is where the bars and rooming houses used to be. All tore down now, or else all fell down. Been no passing trade at all for a real long time. But back then, it was a different kind of a town altogether. Streams of people in and out, the whole time. Workers, crop pickers, drummers, fighters, hoboes, truckers, musicians. All kinds of those guys used to stop off and play and my old sister would be right in there singing with them all.”

“And she remembers Blind Blake?” I asked him.

“She sure does,” the old man said. “Used to think he was the greatest thing alive. Says he used to play real sporty. Real sporty indeed.”

“What happened to him?” I said. “Do you know?”

The old guy thought hard. Trawled back through his fading memories. He shook his grizzled head a couple of times. Then he took a wet towel from a hot box and put it over my face. Started cutting my hair. Ended up shaking his head with some kind of finality.

“Can’t rightly say,” he said. “He came back and forth on the road, time to time. I remember that pretty well. Three, four years later he was gone. I was up in Atlanta for a spell, wasn’t here to know. Heard tell somebody killed him, maybe right here in Margrave, maybe not. Some kind of big trouble, got him killed stone dead.”

I sat listening to their old radio for a while. Then I gave them a twenty off my roll of bills and hurried out onto Main Street. Strode out north. It was nearly noon and the sun was baking. Hot for September. Nobody else was out walking. The black road blasted heat at me. Blind Blake had walked this road, maybe in the noon heat. Back when those old barbers had been boys this had been the artery reaching north to Atlanta, Chicago, jobs, hope, money. Noon heat wouldn’t have stopped anybody getting where they were going. But now the road was just a smooth blacktop byway going nowhere at all.

IT TOOK ME A FEW MINUTES IN THE HEAT TO GET UP TO THE
station house. I walked across its springy lawn past another bronze statue and pulled open the heavy glass entrance door. Stepped into the chill inside. Roscoe was waiting for me, leaning on the reception counter. Behind her in the squad room, I could see Stevenson talking urgently into a telephone. Roscoe was pale and looking very worried.

“We found another body,” she said.

“Where?” I asked her.

“Up at the warehouse again,” she said. “The other side of the road this time, underneath the cloverleaf, where it’s raised up.”

“Who found it?” I said.

“Finlay,” she said. “He was up there this morning, poking around, looking for something to help us with the first one. Some help, right? All he finds is another one.”

“Do you know who this one is?” I asked her.

She shook her head.

“Unidentified,” she said. “Same as the first one.”

“Where’s Finlay now?” I asked her.

“Gone to get Hubble,” she said. “He thinks Hubble may know something about it.”

I nodded.

“How long was this one up there?” I said.

“Two or three days, maybe,” she said. “Finlay says it could have been a double homicide on Thursday night.”

I nodded again. Hubble did know something about it. This was the guy he had sent to meet with the tall investigator with the shaved head. He couldn’t figure out how the guy had gotten away with it. But the guy hadn’t gotten away with it.

I heard a car in the lot outside and then the big glass door sucked open. Finlay stuck his head in.

“Morgue, Roscoe,” he said. “You too, Reacher.”

We followed him back outside into the heat. We all got into Roscoe’s unmarked sedan. Left Finlay’s car where he’d parked it. Roscoe drove. I sat in the back. Finlay sat in the front passenger seat, twisted around so he could talk to the both of us at once. Roscoe nosed out of the police lot and headed south.

“I can’t find Hubble,” Finlay said. Looking at me. “There’s nobody up at his place. Did he say anything to you about going anywhere?”

“No,” I said. “Not a word. We hardly spoke all weekend.”

Finlay grunted at me.

“I need to find out what he knows about all this,” he said. “This is serious shit and he knows something about it, that’s for damn sure. What did he tell you about it, Reacher?”

I didn’t answer. I wasn’t entirely sure whose side I was on yet. Finlay’s, probably, but if Finlay started blundering around in whatever Hubble was mixed up in, Hubble and his family were going to end up dead. No doubt about that. So I figured I should just stay impartial and then get the hell out of there as fast as possible. I didn’t want to get involved.

“You try his mobile number?” I asked him.

Finlay grunted and shook his head.

“Switched off,” he said. “Some automatic voice came on and told me.”

“Did he come by and pick up his watch?” I asked him.

“His what?” he said.

“His watch,” I said. “He left a ten-thousand-dollar Rolex with Baker on Friday. When Baker was cuffing us for the ride out to Warburton. Did he come pick it up?”

“No,” Finlay said. “Nobody said so.”

“OK,” I said. “So he’s got some urgent business some-where. Not even an asshole like Hubble’s going to forget about a ten-thousand-dollar watch, right?”

“What urgent business?” Finlay said. “What did he tell you about it?”

“He didn’t tell me diddly,” I said. “Like I told you, we hardly spoke.”

Finlay glared at me from the front seat.

“Don’t mess with me, Reacher,” he said. “Until I get hold of Hubble, I’m going to keep hold of you and sweat your ass for what he told you. And don’t make out he kept his mouth shut all weekend, because guys like that never do. I know that and you know that, so don’t mess with me, OK?”

I just shrugged at him. He wasn’t about to arrest me again. Maybe I could get a bus from wherever the morgue was. I’d have to pass on lunch with Roscoe. Pity.

“So what’s the story on this one?” I asked him.

“Pretty much the same as the last one,” Finlay said. “Looks like it happened at the same time. Shot to death, probably the same weapon. This one didn’t get kicked around afterward, but it was probably part of the same incident.”

“You don’t know who it is?” I said.

“His name is Sherman,” he said. “Apart from that, no idea.”

“Tell me about it,” I said. I was asking out of habit. Finlay thought for a moment. I saw him decide to answer. Like we were partners.

“Unidentified white male,” he said. “Same deal as the first one, no ID, no wallet, no distinguishing marks. But this one had a gold wristwatch, engraved on the back: to Sherman, love Judy. He was maybe thirty or thirty-five. Hard to tell, because he’d been lying there for three nights and he was well gnawed by the small animals, you know? His lips are gone, and his eyes, but his right hand was OK because it was folded up under his body, so I got some decent prints. We ran them an hour ago and something may come of that, if we’re lucky.”

“Gunshot wounds?” I asked him.

Finlay nodded.

“Looks like the same gun,” he said. “Small-caliber, soft-nose shells. Looks like maybe the first shot only wounded him and he was able to run. He got hit a couple more times but made it to cover under the highway. He fell down and bled to death. He didn’t get kicked around because they couldn’t find him. That’s how it looks to me.”

I thought about it. I’d walked right by there at eight o’clock on Friday morning. Right between the two bodies.

“And you figure he was called Sherman?” I said.

“His name was on his watch,” Finlay said.

“Might not have been his watch,” I said. “The guy could have stolen it. Could have inherited it, bought it from a pawnshop, found it in the street.”

Finlay just grunted again. We must have been more than ten miles south of Margrave. Roscoe was keeping up a fast pace down the old county road. Then she slowed and slid down a left fork which led straight to the distant horizon.

“Where the hell are we going?” I said.

“County hospital,” Finlay said. “Down in Yellow Springs. Next-but-one town to the south. Not long now.”

We drove on. Yellow Springs became a smudge in the heat haze on the horizon. Just inside the town limit was the county hospital, standing more or less on its own. Put there back when diseases were infectious and sick people were isolated. It was a big hospital, a warren of wide low buildings sprawled over a couple of acres. Roscoe slowed and swung into the entrance lane. We wallowed over speed bumps and threaded our way around to a spread of buildings clustered on their own in back. The mortuary was a long shed with a big roll-up door standing open. We stopped well clear of the door and left the car in the yard. We looked at each other and went in.

A MEDICAL GUY MET US AND LED US INTO AN OFFICE. HE
sat behind a metal desk and waved Finlay and Roscoe to some stools. I leaned on a counter, between a computer terminal and a fax machine. This was not a big-budget facility. It had been cheaply equipped some years ago. Everything was worn and chipped and untidy. Very different from the station house up at Margrave. The guy at the desk looked tired. Not old, not young, maybe Finlay’s sort of age. White coat. He looked like the type of guy whose judgment you wouldn’t worry about too much. He didn’t introduce himself. Just took it for granted we all knew who he was and what he was for.

“What can I tell you folks?” he said.

He looked at all three of us in turn. Waited. We looked back.

“Was it the same incident?” Finlay asked. His deep Harvard tones sounded out of place in the shabby office. The medical guy shrugged at him.

“I’ve only had the second corpse for an hour,” he said. “But, yes, I would say it’s the same incident. It’s almost certainly the same weapon. Looks like small-caliber soft-nose bullets in both cases. The bullets were slow, looks like the gun had a silencer.”

“Small caliber?” I said. “How small?”

The doctor swiveled his tired gaze my way.

“I’m not a firearms expert,” he said. “But I’d vote for a twenty-two. Looks that small to me. I’d say we’re looking at soft-nose twenty-two-gauge shells. Take the first guy’s head, for example. Two small splintery entry wounds and two big messy exit wounds, characteristic of a small soft-nose bullet.”

I nodded. That’s what a soft-nose bullet does. It goes in and flattens out as it does so. Becomes a blob of lead about the size of a quarter tumbling through whatever tissue it meets. Rips a great big exit hole for itself. And a nice slow soft-nose .22 makes sense with a silencer. No point using a silencer except with a subsonic muzzle velocity. Otherwise the bullet is making its own sonic boom all the way to the target, like a tiny fighter plane.

“OK,” I said. “Were they killed up there where they were found?”

“No doubt about it,” the guy said. “Hypostasis is clear in both corpses.”

He looked at me. Wanted me to ask him what hypostasis was. I knew what it was, but I felt polite. So I looked puzzled for him.

“Postmortem hypostasis,” he said. “Lividity. When you die, your circulation stops, right? Heart isn’t beating anymore. Your blood obeys the law of gravity. It settles to the bottom of your body, into the lowest available vessels, usually into the tiny capillaries in the skin next to the floor or whatever you’ve fallen down onto. The red cells settle first. They stain the skin red. Then they clot, so the stain is fixed, like a photograph. After a few hours, the stains are permanent. The stains on the first guy are entirely consistent with his position on the warehouse forecourt. He was shot, he fell down dead, he was kicked around in some sort of mad frenzy for a few minutes, then he lay there for around eight hours. No doubt about it.”

“What do you make of the kicking?” Finlay asked him.

The doctor shook his head and shrugged.

“Never seen anything like it,” he said. “I’ve read about it in the journals, time to time. Some kind of a psychopathic thing, obviously. No way to explain it. It didn’t make any difference to the dead guy. Didn’t hurt him, because he was dead. So it must have gratified the kicker somehow. Unbelievable fury, tremendous strength. The injuries are grievous.”

“What about the second guy?” Finlay asked.

“He ran for it,” the doctor said. “He was hit close up in the back with the first shot, but it didn’t drop him, and he ran. He took two more on the way. One in the neck, and the fatal shot in the thigh. Blew away his femoral artery. He made it as far as the raised-up section of highway, then lay down and bled to death. No doubt about that. If it hadn’t rained all night Thursday, I’m sure you’d have seen the trail of blood on the road. There must have been about a gallon and a half lying about somewhere, because it sure as hell isn’t inside the guy anymore.”

We all fell quiet. I was thinking about the second guy’s desperate sprint across the road. Trying to reach cover while the bullets smashed into his flesh. Hurling himself under the highway ramp and dying amid the quiet scuffling of the small night animals.

“OK,” Finlay said. “So we’re safe to assume the two victims were together. The shooter is in a group of three, he surprises them, shoots the first guy in the head twice, mean-while the second guy takes off and gets hit by three shots as he runs, right?”

“You’re assuming there were three assailants?” the doctor said.

Finlay nodded across to me. It was my theory, so I got to explain it.

“Three separate personality characteristics,” I said. “A competent shooter, a frenzied maniac, and an incompetent concealer.”

The doctor nodded slowly.

“I’ll buy that,” he said. “The first guy was hit at point-blank range, so maybe we should assume he knew the assailants and allowed them to get next to him?”

Finlay nodded.

“Had to be that way,” he said. “Five guys meeting together. Three of them attack the other two. This is some kind of a big deal, right?”

“Do we know who the assailants were?” the doctor asked.

“We don’t even know who the victims were,” Roscoe said.

“Got any theories on the victims?” Finlay asked the doctor.