He wasn’t thinking it was kids now.
He was remembering all too well what was said about this place.
Riegan came over. “Somebody watching us over by those trees,” he whispered. “I’ll sneak around behind them and flush them out.”
“There’s more than one,” Snow said. “We better—”
“No, just wait. I’ll flush him.”
Before Snow could object, Riegan darted off into the fog behind them. He was going to circle around. This was fucking bullshit. This wasn’t deer season. This wasn’t flushing game on a crisp November afternoon. This was… this was…
God, he just didn’t know what this was.
Only that it was bad. So bad that it felt like his entire body was creeping, moving with the consistent hammering of his heart. Any moment now, Riegan was going to make contact with what was out there and he was either going to regret that or Snow himself would.
The fog seemed to be creeping in, moving in flowing white ghost sheets. Sticks cracked. There were splashing noises. Then something off to the left. The sound of someone walking through the muck in his direction with slopping, mucky sounds like a man walking in hip waders.
Snow pulled his gun, a Glock 9mm.
For godsake, don’t shoot Riegan, whatever you do.
No, he wasn’t going to do that. Whatever came out of the fog would not be Riegan. It would not even be human. It would be a dragging, hunched-over shape with a face like a rotten, blackening mushroom.
“Rich!” Riegan called out. “Do you see them? Jesus Christ, there’s three or four of them… hey, do you see ’em?”
Snow was scanning the fog with his gun and flashlight now, just waiting, shaking and scared and he didn’t know at what, but he was ready. He was ready to face whatever came out at him. He only hoped it would—
A scream tore through the night.
It was Riegan.
He began running toward the tree, and as the fog thickened around him he became disoriented. He wasn’t sure where the hell he was, where Riegan was and where the goddamn road was.
“DAVE!” he shouted. “DAVE!”
Riegan screamed again, only this time it was cut off like his throat had been slit or something had been stuffed in his mouth. Then there was silence. There wasn’t a single noise out there but the sound of raindrops falling from branches.
Nothing more.
Then splashing. Footsteps, slow and dragging, approaching from all directions. He saw an impossible, grotesque shape through the trees. Another darted off into the fog. He knew he should open up or call for help, but inside he seized up. Nothing made sense.
Nothing but running.
He ran, stumbling and fighting until he reached the hill and then he was scrambling up it into the car. Once inside, he floored the accelerator, barely making the twists and turns of the road. Cold sweat poured down his face and a choked whimpering came from deep in his throat.
He only knew one thing: Dave Riegan was dead.
4
In one of the trailers that had been set up for the cops and techs to dry out in, Spivak said, “I’ve been doing this for fifteen years, Lou. I’ve seen it all. Maybe not as much as you, but I’ve had my share. I’ve only been in on a few murders and those have been pretty easy to peg—hunters gunned down, jealous husbands killing their wives. The usual. Around here, it’s never anything spectacular.”
“Until now?” Kenney said, sipping his coffee.
“Until now.”
He could have told her all the things he’d seen, but he wasn’t about to. He’d been a cop for twenty years now and he had the look of all seasoned cops—dead eyes, tight face, the grim demeanor. He supped full of the dark side of humanity on a regular basis and you could only swallow so much of that, hold so much of it down, before it changed you emotionally and physically. His job had cost him two marriages. There was always a price to pay.
“Those bodies… those remains,” Spivak said, dread twisting beneath her words like worms considering bad meat, “there’s no point in beating around the bush as to what we’ve got here. They were eaten and we both know it, we only don’t know by what. The questions that plague me concern the bones… those teeth marks—at least what I think are teeth marks—I’ve never seen anything like it and I don’t think you have either and, frankly, it’s getting under my skin.”
Of the bodies disinterred thus far, there was no observable evidence of death: fragmentation to the bone or trauma to the flesh that might have been caused by foul play. And he didn’t like what that suggested at all.
He went to the window, looked out on the fields lit by flood lamps. He saw the collapsing hulk of the barn, the jutting finger of the silo, a few ancient outbuildings gone to kindling. Dark woods pressed in from all sides. The farm and its surrounding grounds—some eighty acres of tangled thickets, overgrown meadows, and swampy basins—was owned originally by a family named Ezren. Long dead now, the holdings were on paper with some relatives from out east. The farm had been vacant nearly thirty years now.
Funny they haven’t sold it off or broken it up into lots or something. The fields seem fertile, how come they haven’t at least rented them out to other farmers?
Spivak stirred some cream into her coffee. “I’m going to make some wild and possibly irrational assumptions here. The first few bodies were fresh. I’m gonna say they’ve been in the ground no more than six months. And what bothers me, really bothers me about them is that I can find no evidence of blood. No lividity, nothing. Some of the others, Jesus, I’m going to say—given the condition—that they died decades ago. Depending upon environmental factors, soil acidity, etc., it looks as if some of those bones are fifty, sixty years old. Maybe even older.”
Kenney swallowed. “That old?”
“It looks like it.”
He, of course, had been thinking some serial crime here, mass murder. But if some cadavers were fairly fresh and others that aged, well that pretty much put the homicidal maniac theory to bed. He couldn’t conceive of a killer whose activities spanned that stretch of time. It just wasn’t feasible.
Spivak went on about dating bones, on rates of excarnation and dissolution. All things he’d heard of or read of and knew by heart, things he wasn’t listening to now. Because beneath her authoritative, clinical demeanor, there was something else. Something trembling just beneath her words.
“Say it,” he said. “Tell me the thing you’re trying like all hell to avoid.”
She stared out the window. “I told you how I found no traces of blood. I think the reason is that these bodies—some of them anyway—have been embalmed.”
Kenney’s face drooped, seemed to brush the floor. “What—”
But he never finished that for the door was thrown open and Chipney stood there in a spray of rain and wind. “Chief, we got a situation here. Seems we’re missing one of our cops.”
5
Out on the back forty, a tall deputy named Snow, just as lanky as a sapling, was going through it again while the fog crawled up from numerous hollows, played around his legs like the family cat: “We… we were just, you know, keeping an eye on the area… policing it… making sure no reporters or curiosity seekers slipped through…”
Kenney walked up, surrounded by what seemed a battery of bobbing flashlight beams. The rain had subsided, but a wet, heavy mist hung in the air. He listened to Snow, though he had been pretty much briefed on what came down already. But he listened, and twenty years’ worth of police work, of gut-sense, told him one thing and one thing only: this kid was scared. Terrified, maybe, like a little boy who’d just come face-to-face with the thing that lurked in his closet. Kenney recognized that and something black spread out in the pit of his belly, something evil and wasting.