Dead Man's Song полностью

“Yeah, well don’t spread it around. Anyway, go celebrate being a responsible adult with at least an adequate sperm count. Congrats and give Val my love.” Crow clicked off and Weinstock closed his phone and dropped it in his lab coat.

The cleaners finished, packed up their mops and spray bottles, and left, both of them giving the room a spooked glance, their eyes darting toward the polished steel doors behind which lay three corpses. No—four bodies, because what was left of Tony Macchio was still behind Door #2. Three murder victims and one murderer who had been slaughtered by the Cape May Killer. He couldn’t blame the cleaners for being spooked, even with the lights on and the cold-room doors firmly shut, and he knew that it wasn’t just the fact that it was the morgue that was giving them the jitters—it was the fact that someone had broken in and stolen—actually stolen—a dead body. It was all very creepy, and Weinstock had to agree with their reactions. This whole thing was giving him an increasingly bad feeling. Not just the grief over Henry’s death and the deaths of the two cops, and not just the proprietary sense of violation he had about the violence and theft here in his hospital. It was just a general case of the heebie-jeebies. One of Crow’s words, and nothing Weinstock could think of described more aptly what he was feeling.

A really big case of the heebie-jeebies.

(6)

Newton came back to his desk with another cup of coffee, sat down, set the cup on a little electric hotplate, and frowned at the screen. All afternoon he had been busy making notes for his feature article, planning his research, surfing the Net to see what data were available, checking the Sentinel’s microfilm records of thirty years ago, and outlining his plan of attack. Most of the town’s folklore was easy enough to find—there were literally thousands of articles and over a dozen books written about Pine Deep, recent and long past. What was missing from all of this, however, were detailed and accurate records of the Pine Deep Massacre of 1976. That it had happened was certain, because there were secondary references to it, and he was able to cobble together a list of the victims by burrowing through public death notices, both in the paper’s records and at Pine Deep’s Town Hall. But there was no reliable account of the actual events, and none of the issues of the Black Marsh Sentinel for that year had been committed to microfilm. He found that really odd, since there were microfilm records of papers from 1960 through 1975; and from 1977 to 1998, when the paper began storing issues on disk and in Web site archives. But 1976 was missing. The whole calendar year.

Newton called one of his friends at the Pine Deep Evening Standard and Times, which was owned by a chain that published papers in most of Bucks County’s towns. “Toby?”

“Hey, my man Newt. They offer you the anchor of the CNN Evening Report yet?” Toby Gomm edited the op-ed page and was usually good for an info swap.

“Not yet. I’m holding out for Nightline. Hey, Toby, listen, Dick’s got me doing a feature piece on P.D.’s haunted history, you know the kind of thing.”

“Yeah, we’ve done a million of them. Bo-o-o-oring.”

“No kidding. Look, I wanted to go a little further, maybe flesh out the backstory by including some stuff from the Massacre of Seventy-six. You got anything on that?”

“Before my time, but I heard about it. Haven’t run anything on it lately, for the obvious reasons.”

Bad for tourism, Newton thought, but asked, “You got anything in the archives from September, October of that year?”

He expected Toby to have to look into it, but he said, “Nope.”

“Nothing? You mean you didn’t cover it?”

“Nope, I mean that our microfilm records from the mid-seventies through about eighty-two got melted in a fire. Some asshole maintenance guy tossed a lit cigarette into a trash can and burned half the records room down. You have to remember that—it was when we moved to the new building. Late 1990.”

“No, I was still in college.”

“Didn’t miss much. Trash fire is no news even when it’s old news that’s on fire. No biggie, though, we’re a corporate rag…we leave hardcore journalism to our colleagues in Black Marsh.”

“Very funny.”

“On the other hand…” Toby said. “I do know a guy who knows everything about what went on there. His family got caught up in it. Brother even got killed.”

“Are you talking about Malcolm Crow? The guy who shot Ruger?”

“Yep. He’s always being used as a source for haunted history stories.”

“I know. Dick told me that his family was involved, but I just haven’t seen anything about the Massacre that he’s quoted in.”

“You won’t, either, but I talked about it once with him. Kind of. Was back when he was on the cops, and he was walking a line between being a real hotshot cop and a total screwup.”

“Oh?”