Tow-Truck Eddie Oswald was directing traffic, his uniform uncharacteristically rumpled and his face haggard. Eddie was usually neat as a pin. Once he recognized them, he waved them through and told them where to park. As they got out they could see Chief Gus Bernhardt standing at the crest of the embankment that led down to the river and beyond him the near leg of the old iron Black Marsh Bridge. Smoke curled sluggishly up between Gus and the bridge. Crow shot a look at Weinstock, who shrugged, and they crunched over gravel to the grassy hill to join Gus, who was in animated conversation with a couple of firefighters.
“Hey, fellas,” Gus said as Crow and Weinstock joined him. “I hope you brought some weenies for roasting.” His pink face was alight with pleasure as he turned and swept an arm down the hill like an emcee introducing a headline act. “Voilà!”
“Holy jumping frog shit,” Crow said.
Gus clamped Crow on the shoulder. “I think we can pretty much close the file on Kenneth Boyd.”
At the base of the bridge support, tied to the concrete block that anchored the big steel leg, a body stood wreathed in wisps of smoke, the arms and legs twisted into dry sticks, the skin black and papery, the head nothing more than a leering skull covered in hot ash. A crudely lettered and soot-stained sign had been affixed to the support by bungee cords. It read: DON’T FUCK WITH PINE DEEP!
Weinstock whistled softly between his teeth. “Ho-lee shit.”
Gus beamed. “I guess the local boys got sick and tired of that Philly piece of shit kicking up dust out here. Pine Deep,” he said with pride that threatened to pop the buttons on his straining shirtfront, “you can hurt us, but you can’t beat us.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Crow muttered and pushed past him. Weinstock shot the chief a look as he followed.
“What?” Gus asked, totally perplexed.
“You sure that’s Boyd?” Crow asked.
“I sure as hell hope so,” Gus said.
A state police criminalist, Judy Sanchez, was working the scene and turned when she sensed Weinstock and Crow approaching. She knew Weinstock from when Boyd had broken into the morgue to steal Ruger’s body; she knew Crow from AA, though they just acknowledged each other with a slight nod.
“What can you tell me?” Weinstock asked, nodding at the corpse. “Any ID?”
She gave a short laugh. “Beyond the fact that he’s probably male and probably human, no. Those college boys torched him good.”
“They want to know if that’s Boyd down there,” Gus said, still having a blast with this.
“You figure college kids for it, Judy?” Crow said.
“Looks like it. We got joints, beer cans, lots of sneaker prints. Little Halloween doesn’t let go around here very fast, does it?”
Little Halloween was Pine Deep’s unique holiday, celebrated only when Friday the 13th occurred in October; it was like Mischief Night on steroids. Each one was legendary, and when it showed up the kids at the college went out of their way to outdo the pranks of previous classes. The current tally included three bonfires—two of them built around cars belonging to hated teachers—a game of nude touch football between a sorority and a frat that was likely going to end in expulsions and, very probably, a lawsuit; a rock concert played so loud that fish in the Floyd Pond died; a spate of bricks thrown through store windows; a school bus being completely disassembled, with all of the parts placed neatly on the high school soccer field; the vandalizing of the Pinelands Hospital Morgue; and the subsequent burning—in fact rather than effigy—of Kenneth Boyd.
“It’s a fun-loving town,” Crow said sourly.
“Pine Deep,” Weinstock said sotto voce, “a great place to visit. Bring the whole family.”
They stood there looking at the corpse, thankful that the breeze carried the cooked-meat stink out toward the river. Sanchez said, “So…yeah, it’s probably Boyd. Even with all the charring you can tell that the head has received several gunshot wounds.” She looked at Crow. “Your fiancée’s doing, I hear.”
“Yep.”
“Tough chick.”
“She is that,” Crow agreed.
Weinstock blew his nose noisily, “We’re going to need dental records or DNA on it.” He cut a look at Crow, but Crow was wearing his best poker face.
Back in the car they drove in silence for several miles before Weinstock said, “So, are we buying that this is a fraternity stunt?”
“I don’t know. Does it seem like something a vampire would do?”
Weinstock looked at him. “Not really. Somehow I don’t equate the living dead with juvenile prankishness. Even cruel-hearted and extreme juvenile prankishness.”
“In the movies, do vampires come back from the dead if they’ve been incinerated?”
“Not usually. Fire’s always one of those fallback plans. Like beheading.”
“So, Boyd’s toast in real point of fact.”
Crow grinned. “I guess.”
He took a tin of Altoids out of his pocket and put three of them in his mouth, then offered the tin to Crow, who shook it off. Crow put a Leonard Cohen CD into the player and they listened to that while the cornfields—lush or blighted—whisked by on either side.
They were back at the hospital by sunset and the two of them sat in chairs on either side of Val’s bed. A night’s sleep had transformed her from an emotional wreck back into a semblance of her stolid self, and her strength helped steady Crow and Weinstock.
They told her everything and then watched her process it. Val had a tough, analytical brain and Crow knew that engaging her in a complex problem was one of the best ways to keep her from getting too far into grief for Mark and Connie. There would be plenty of time for that later.
Val said, “Let’s go over it. Every bit of it, step by step.”
They did, and each of them played devil’s advocate for any thought, observation, or experience the others brought up. They picked it apart, dissecting it, chewed the bones of it as the sun burned itself to a cinder and left the sky a charred black. Dinner came and went, friends stopped by to visit or deliver flowers and fruit baskets. The phone kept ringing—friends, relatives, the press. Val and Crow both turned the ringers off on their cells. Every time a nurse left or guests made their farewells, the three of them went right back into it, picking up where they left off.
Night painted the window black and the three of them eventually ran out of things to say. Val probed the bandages around her eye as she thought it through. “The question we keep asking is…is this thing over?”
Weinstock looked at Crow, who shrugged.
“Boyd and Ruger are dead, Castle and Nels Cowan are dead and buried. Mark is not…one of them. You’re sure of that?”
“As sure as I can be. And though my gut tells me that this is all over, I think that we should keep Mark and Connie here in, um…storage…until we find some way of medically determining if they are infected or not.” Val shot him a hard look, but Weinstock held up his hand. “Let me finish. I can stall Gus on this—he’s stupid enough to buy any dumb excuse I make up. Maybe I’ll tell him that there was a chance that Boyd was carrying a disease and I need to do more tests to make sure that it’s nothing that will affect the town.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Val said. “Nobody’d believe that.”
“Gus?” Weinstock said, arching his eyebrows.
“Okay, okay,” she conceded.
“In the meantime,” Crow said, “I think we should make sure the bodies are secure. Locks on their freezer doors and maybe restraints of some kind. Newton’s working on the research. We should know in a few days…a couple weeks tops.”