"Sure," Druze grunted. He jammed the flashlight into the branches of a bare bush and scooped up a shovelful of muck. "Dig."
Bekker worked frantically, shoveling, talking to himself, spitting in the rain, digging like a badger. Druze tried to be more methodical but after a few minutes simply tried to stay out of the way. To the north, the thunderhead was still rumbling, and another burst of rain put a half-inch of water in the hole.
"I can't tell…" Bekker said, gasping between words, "I can't tell… if the water's from the rain… or if it's coming up… from below."
"Some of both," Druze said. The flashlight caught a lump that looked different, and Druze prodded it with the tip of his shovel. The blade hit something resilient. "I think I got him."
"Got him? Here, let me…"
Bekker motioned Druze aside and knelt in the hole, holding the blade of his shovel like a scoop, working like a man in a frenzy, throwing the muck out in all directions. "We got him," he said, breathing hard. A hip, a leg, a shoulder, the sport coat. "Got him got him got him…"
Druze stood back, holding the light, while Bekker cleared the mud away from the top of the body. "Shit," he said, looking up at Druze, his pale face the color and consistency of candle wax, "He's facedown."
"I just kind of dumped him…" Druze said, half apologetically.
"That's okay, I just have to…"
Bekker tried to free the body by pulling on the sport coat, but there was still too much dirt around it and it held George as firmly as if he were frozen in concrete.
"Suction or something," Bekker grunted. His rain suit and his face were covered with mud, but he paid no attention. He straddled what he could see of the body, put his hands around George's neck and tried to pry the head free. "Can't fuckin' get it," he said after a minute.
"We have to clear away."
"Yeah." Bekker went back to the shovel, still using it as a scoop, a pan, and dug around the body, trying to loosen the arms, which were apparently sunk in the mud below. He got the left one first, the hand white as chalk, the fingers rigid and waxy as candles. Then Bekker got part of the left leg and turned his face up to Druze and said, "If you could help just here."
Druze squatted on the rim of the hole, reached in, grabbed George's belt. "Get his head," he said. "Ready? Heave."
George came partway out of the hole like an archaeological artifact on the end of a crane cable. Not stiff, but not particularly loose, either, his legs still anchored in the muck, his head hanging forward…
"There," Druze said, and with a heavy pivoting motion of his shoulders he managed to flip the body onto its side, the legs rolling out of the muck below. Mud caked the nose and mouth, but one eye socket was clear. As the rain washed away the last of the soil, they could see the dead white orb of an eye looking up at them.
"Jesus," Druze said, stepping back.
"I told you!" Bekker screamed. His hand groped in his pocket and came out with a screwdriver. "I told you, I told you, I told you…"
He held the corpse's head by the hair and drove the screwdriver first into one eye socket, then the other, over and over, ten times, twenty, thirty, with furious power, screaming, "I told you," until Druze grabbed him by the collar and jerked him out of the hole, hollering, "Enough, enough, enough…"
They stood looking at each other for a moment, the rain still driving down, Bekker gasping for breath, staggering, Druze afraid he was having a heart attack, and then Bekker said, "Yeah… that should be enough."
He took the flashlight from Druze, squatted next to the hole and with an almost gentle hand turned George's head. The eyes were deep bloodless holes, quickly filling with mud.
Bekker looked up, and a long flash of lightning from the distant storm lit him up as clearly as a fly on a television screen. His face was beautiful again, clear, the face of an angel, his white teeth flashing in a brilliant smile.
"That should do it," he said. He let George's head go, and the body flipped facedown into the watery hole with a wet, sucking splash.
Bekker stood up, turning into the rain, letting it wash him. He was bouncing, Druze thought: Jesus, it's a dance. And as Bekker danced, the rain slowed, then stopped. Druze was backing away, frightened, fascinated.
"Well," Bekker said a moment later, his labored breath squeezing through the hysterical smile, "I suppose we should fill the hole, should we not?"
The grave filled quickly. The last they saw of Philip George was his right foot, the sock pulled down around the hairless, paper-white ankle, the shoe already rotting with water. Druze beat the surface down with the shovel, then kicked some leaves and brambles over the freshly turned soil. "Let's get the fuck out of here," he said.
They hurried back to the car, and Druze had to jockey it back and forth to turn in the narrow track in front of the cabin. Bekker, his voice clear and easy now, said, "Check the answering machine. Three, four times a day. Call from public phones. When George turns up missing, the cops are probably going to sit on me. If I've got to talk to you… the tapes are the only way. And listen, don't forget to press number three, and reset the tape."
"I meant to ask you about that," Druze said, as he wrestled the Dodge onto the blacktopped road. "If you reset the tape, isn't the message still there…?"
Across the lake, the yellow rectangle burned in the cabin window. A woman in a pink robe, her hair in curlers, sat under the light reading an old issue of Country Living. She was facing an old-fashioned picture window, positioned to look over the lake, when Druze and Bekker got back to the car.
"Richard," she called to her husband, and stood and looked out the window. "There are those headlights again… I'm going to call Ann. I really don't think they were planning to come up tonight."
CHAPTER 17
Lucas punched the Porsche down the country highway, hissing along the wet blacktop, past woodlots of unleafed trees and the sodden, dark fall-tilled fields. The day was overcast, the clouds the color of slag iron. A deer, hit by a car, probably the night before, lay folded like an awkward, bone-filled backpack in a roadside ditch. A few hundred yards farther along, a dead badger had been flung like a rag over the yellow line.
He'd been to two hundred murder scenes, all of them dismal. Were murders ever done in cheerful surroundings, just by accident? He'd once gone to a murder scene at an amusement park. The park hadn't yet opened for the season, and although it made a specialty of fun, the silent Ferris wheels, the immobile roller coasters, the awkward Tilt-A-Whirls, the Empty House of Mirrors were as sinister as any rotting British country house on a moor…
He crested a low hill, saw the cop cars parked along the road, with an ambulance facing into a side road. A fat deputy sheriff, one thumb hooked under a gunbelt, gestured for him to keep moving. Lucas swung onto the shoulder, killed the engine and climbed out.
"Hey, you." The fat deputy was bearing down on him. "You think I was doin' aerobics?"
Lucas took his ID out of his coat pocket and said, "Minneapolis police. Is this…?"
"Yeah, down there," the deputy said, gesturing at the side road, backing off a step. He tried a few new expressions on his face and finally settled for suspicion. "They told me to keep people moving."
"Good idea," Lucas said mildly. "If the word gets out, you're gonna get about a million TV cameras before too long… How come everybody's parked out here?"
Lucas' collegial attitude loosened the deputy up. "The guy who answered the call thought there might be tracks down there in the mud," the fat man said. "He thought we ought to get some lab people out here."