Dead Man's Song полностью

Crow wasn’t up to another battle, so he kissed Val and hobbled back to his room with Polk in tow, and when he climbed weakly into bed Polk made no offer of assistance. They had never been friends, even when Crow had been a Pine Deep police officer. He had always taken Polk for a weasel and a suck-up, mostly to town lowlifes like Vic Wingate. He wasn’t sure why Polk disliked him, but had never felt interested enough to find out. Polk picked up Jerry Head’s copy of Maxim and tuned Crow out completely. Fine with him. Crow reached for the TV remote and surfed through the channels until he found the news. None of the towns in that part of Bucks County were big enough to have their own TV station, so he settled for CNN. The multiple murders in Pine Deep were still getting serious play, especially now that two police officers had been killed, but so far no one had made the connection to Cape May. Crow thought that was strange.

A couple of years ago a group of senior citizens who were visiting the famous lighthouse in Cape May, New Jersey, were attacked and slaughtered by person or persons unknown. The attack had been incredibly savage and the killers had literally torn the tourists to pieces. A total of eighteen dead, two of them the grandparents of the head of the Philadelphia mob. The murders at the Cape May Lighthouse had made the papers across the country and throughout much of the world. Books had been written about it, there had been documentaries on the History Channel and Court TV, and Jonathan Demme was already making a movie about it with Don Cheadle and Colin Farrell, but no one had ever been arrested for the crimes or even named in the press.

As of the other night—when everything was going to hell and Ruger was still on the loose—Crow knew only the local cops, the mayor, and Crow were privy to the truth that Ruger was the Cape May Killer. Now that Ruger was dead he didn’t understand why the story hadn’t broken. He turned to Polk and was on the verge of asking him about it, and decided against it. Instead he reached for his cell phone on the bedside table and speed-dialed Terry Wolfe’s cell number, but it went straight to voice mail. He clicked off and dialed Terry’s home number. Same thing. He tried Sarah Wolfe’s number, but her phone was apparently turned off. “Damn it,” he muttered.

Polk looked up. “You say something?” When Crow didn’t answer Polk gave a sour grunt and went back to his magazine.

(4)

Saul Weinstock was not performing the autopsy on Karl Ruger, or on either of the two murdered officers. Instead he was sitting in his office, wringing cold water out of his socks and seething with fury. He had scrubbed and dressed for the postmortems and had come breezing into the morgue only to slosh to a halt ankles-deep in icy water. Water geysered up from a broken pipe by the big stainless-steel autopsy table and the whole morgue was awash.

“Son of a bitch!” Weinstock yelled and then splashed over to the valve, but by the time he shut the water off he was completely drenched. Cursing sulfurously, he examined the pipe and saw that it was completely separated from the spigot set, not actually broken but clearly dislodged. How in blue hell had that happened? Could water pressure have done it? He doubted it, but there were no obvious signs of tampering. And who would do that anyway? Then he thought of some of the outrageous-verging-on-criminal “jokes” the first-year med students had pulled over the years. For one stunt they had broken in and dressed four corpses as the Beatles, complete with Sergeant Pepper costumes. Another time they had removed the heads from three anatomy cadavers and mounted them like hunting trophies over Weinstock’s desk. No one had ever been caught, and it was Gus’s disillusioned opinion that the first thing med students at Pinelands learned was how to bypass the hospital’s years-out-of-date surveillance equipment.

Weinstock slogged to the office, tore off his clothes, and climbed into a clean set of scrubs, but his socks and shoes were soaked and the paper booties wouldn’t do him any good. His feet were freezing. He snatched the phone off the hook and called maintenance and read some poor sap the complete riot act, slammed the phone down, waded barefoot through the pool—which was draining through the floor grille now that there was no torrent to feed the flood—and left a set of wet bare footprints all the way to the elevator, snarling at everyone he met along the way.

(5)

The Bone Man stood in the shadows of Dark Hollow, at the base of the slope that climbed up through darkness into the wan sunlight hundreds of yards above. Up there was the Passion Pit, where young lovers came to sweat and grunt, and it was where the police had paused in their search for Boyd. He sighed. It was also the place where, thirty years ago, a gang of local men had beaten him to death.