The Narrows(70)

“I can’t really say for sure. I examined one of the wounds and it looked like it went straight through the tissue down to the vertebrae. Maybe the kid fell on a two-by-four that had some nails poking up from it.”

“Why’d you say it looked like a scorpion’s wounds?”

“Hell, Ben,” Deets said, and Ben could tell the coroner was already regretting having made the comment to him. “It’s just the first thing that came to my mind.”

“Why?” he pressed.

“Because when I used to live in Albuquerque, a neighbor’s kid got stung by a scorpion on the back of his hand. The wound looked identical to the wounds on the back of the kid you shipped over to me—the entry small and hooked, not straight in, and the surrounding area of flesh irritated, red, puffy…Christ, Ben, I don’t know…”

He was staring at Mike Keller’s photos of the dead boy in the case file. “Okay. You’ll call me if you hear anything else?”

“You know I will.”

“Thanks, John.”

“What’s going on out there, Ben?”

He drummed his fingers on the photographs of the dead boy. “I don’t know,” he told the coroner. “I don’t know.”



2



What had been seated at the back of John Deets’s mind during his discussion with Sergeant Ben Journell was the comment Dougie Overland, one of the morgue attendees, had made after being questioned on the whereabouts of the unidentified boy’s body. Dougie, who was in his twenties and had blue-dyed hair and gold hoop earrings, had assured Deets that no one had come into the facility the night he was on duty, which happened to be the night the boy’s body disappeared. What bothered Deets—and what he found himself unable to relay to Ben, lest he feel like a complete fool—was what Dougie Overland had admitted to later that evening: that he swore, on a few occasions, he could hear muted thumping sounds coming from the room where they kept the bodies in their steel drawers. “It was like someone was trying to get out,” Dougie had said.



3



After he hung up with Deets, Ben went into the dispatcher’s office where Shirley monitored the phones. On the console, a small television set showed one of Shirley’s soap operas.

“Hey, Ben.”

“Hey, Shirl. You got the chief’s personal cell number handy?”

Both of Shirley’s eyebrows arched. “His personal cell?”

“I want to bring him up to speed. I’m not…I’m a little overwhelmed here, hon. Know what I mean?”

She leaned forward and lowered the volume on her portable TV. Sliding her bifocals down her stubby nose, she stared hard at Ben. “People are saying we got some wild animal killing off livestock around town,” she said. It was not a question. “People are saying it could be a bear or a cougar or something. Other people, they’re saying it might even be something else.”

“Something else?” Ben said.

She gave him a look that suggested she knew more than she was willing to let on. “Did something eat all of Porter Conroy’s cows this past weekend? Be honest with me.”

“Something got at them,” he acknowledged. “Ted Minksy’s goats, too.”

“People are starting to worry, Ben.”

So am I, he felt like adding.

Shirley scribbled Chief Harris’s personal cell phone number down on a Post-it and handed it over to Ben. He looked at it then folded it up and stuck it in his pocket. He knew Harris would be annoyed at the interruption in his vacation with his wife, but things were getting out of hand.

One of the phones lit up and started ringing. Shirley’s sharp eyes lingered on him for a moment longer before she turned to address the telephone, picking it up and pressing it to her ear. Into the receiver, she said, “Stillwater Police Department,” then went silent as she listened to the caller on the other end of the line.

Ben went out into the hall and stared for a time at the shafts of daylight that angled in through the wire-meshed windows. He thought he heard someone moving around at the far end of the hall. He went down there and peered into the chief’s empty office, one of the supply closets, and eventually into lockup. Three jail cells lined the far wall, and the first two were unoccupied. A slovenly dressed figure sat hunched over on the bench in the third cell, a mane of iron-colored hair draped down over the man’s face.

Ben walked up to the cell, taking in the familiar, unwashed scent of the lockup’s most frequent visitor. “Hello, Pete.”

Pete Poole, more infamously known as Poorhouse Pete to the guys at the station, looked up at Ben. The man’s face was blotchy and haggard, his eyes red-rimmed and moist. Whitish beard stubble looked like it had been hastily applied with a paintbrush.

Pete shook like a tuning fork. “Hi, Ben.”

“How come you’re still here? You haven’t sobered up yet, bud?”

“Ain’t come in drunk,” Pete advised him. “Not this time.”

“Then what are you doing in here?”

“Knocking over trash cans on Hamilton.”

“Why would you do that, Pete?”

“Wanted to get arrested.”

Ben dragged over a wooden chair from behind one of the desks and sat before the cell. “And why would you want to do that? It’s not that cold out yet.” Once the weather grew cold and winter came, Ben could always count on Pete Poole to act up and cause a scene with hopes of getting locked up and thus be given a warm place to sleep and some hot meals. Everyone knew the routine and, last year, Shirley had even bought Pete a Christmas present—a knitted cap and some gloves—which she’d placed in the cell while awaiting the man’s inevitable Yuletide arrival.