“And you didn’t go after her?” Mr Jones’s voice is low and precise, and all the hairs stand up on the back of my neck. This is not good for Brian. But what does he know? He’s eighteen, he’s rich, probably thinks he’s immortal.
“She said she hated me; was going to take a cab home. I — ” He makes a strange squeaking noise as Mr Jones takes a hold of his face and shoves him back, banging his head off the wall.
“You let my daughter, my SIXTEEN-YEAROLD daughter wait alone for a fucking cab? In the middle of the fucking night? In the dark? In that part of town?”
Sergeant Maloney can see what’s coming. “Come on now, Mr Jones, let’s all just calm down. I’m sure — ”
Mr Jones smashes a fist into the Sergeant’s face and the cop falls to his knees, hands clutched over his nose, blood pouring out between his fingers. Moaning in pain.
“Mark,” Mr Jones speaks to me without looking round, “take Sergeant Maloney and get him a drink.”
I say, “Yes, sir,” and help the guy over to the couch — then hand him a stack of napkins and a large scotch with ice. He dabs his broken nose with one and sips at the other, thanking me.
Brian sees this — sees Mr Jones punch a police officer and the police officer taking it — and something clicks on in his brain. It’s fear. The sudden knowledge that being rich and eighteen isn’t going to be enough this time. That Mr Jones doesn’t give a flying fuck if Brian’s father is chairman of the golf club. That Mr Jones wants his daughter back and he wants her back now.
And Brian left her to take a cab home on her own, and some bastard snatched her.
“Henry,” says Mr Jones, “go fetch the bolt cutters. I think Brian here’s about to have an accident.” It’s not a sight I’m going to forget in a hurry.
Chapter 4
Today — Friday — back in the morgue
Henry looks down at what’s on the autopsy table, then pulls out his Fifth of Old Kentucky and takes a long swig. He offers me the bottle, and I know I’m driving and everything, but I take a drink anyway. It’s not every day you’re faced with two sets of severed arms and legs laid out like that.
I don’t offer the bottle to the Weasel, just ask him what the hell we’re looking at.
“They’re arms and legs. Women’s arms and legs.”
Henry stares at him. “We know they’re fuckin’ arms and legs. We’re not blind!”
I know the Weasel can hear the voice — ‘Don’t poke the fucking bear!’ — because he hurries over to the counter-top and comes back with a clipboard, flicking through the pages and stammering in his rush to be helpful. “We. . we’ve got another three sets of limbs in the morgue. .” pointing at a row of refrigerators “… they were all removed ante-mortem with a sharp knife and some kind of saw — ”
I say, “Back the fuck up. Who the hell is Auntie Mortem?”
“Ante-mortem. . it means ‘before death’. The victims were alive when he cut them up.”
“Fuck.”
Henry pulls a pair of latex gloves from a box next to the table and snaps them on. Then he leans over and prods at the remains. “Not easy,” he says, one hand resting on an upper thigh, “taking a leg off someone who’s still alive.” He makes like he’s got a saw in his other hand, hacking away at the point where the pale yellow-purple skin turns in to raw meat and bone. “They’d struggle like hell. You’d get blood everywhere.” He lets go of the woman’s thigh. “Much easier to hack someone up when they’re dead.”
And he’s right. We’ve done more than our fair share of nasty shit in our time, but we’ve never cut some poor bastard’s arms and legs off while they’re still alive. Not to say we’ve never chopped anyone up, but just, you know, after they’re dead.
The Weasel goes pale. “Right. . Yeah. . Er. .” eyes scanning the coroner’s report, looking for something that will get us the hell out of his nice quiet morgue, “we’re doing a tox screen on the blood, but the labs are swamped right now. They’re supposed to be sending an FBI agent down to — ”
“Special Agent David Mills.”
Weasel nods. “That’s — ”
“He’s not going to make it.” That’s because he’s lying dead in the trunk of our car. But he was nice enough to tell us everything the Feds knew before Henry finished with him.
And the guy goes even paler. “Ah … right. OK.”
“We want details,” I tell him, “like: where did they find the bits? How long they been dead?”
“Ah. . that’s just it, isn’t it? The arms and legs were removed when they were still living. There’s nothing to say the victims are dead. I mean with the shock and everything it’s likely, but you never know. They could still be alive.”
I look at Henry and I know he’s thinking the same thing I am. Laura, no arms or legs, trapped in some shitty bastard’s basement while he does stuff to her. She’s only sixteen, for fuck’s sake.
Henry growls.
I scrawl my cellphone number on a scrap of paper and tell the Weasel to call me if anything else comes up.
“And you remember,” Henry tells him, as we march back through the corridors to the exit, “we never been here. You haven’t seen us. ’Cause if I hear that you’ve been talking, I’m going to come back and make sure your arms and fuckin’ legs are all they find. Understand?”
Chapter 5
The car’s making some strange noises as I pull up and kill the engine. Friday afternoon and we’re parked deep in the woods off Highway One Fifty, miles from anywhere. The sort of place you expect to hear fucking banjo music and people telling tourists to squeal like a piggy. The road up here was bumpy, rutted. I bet if it wasn’t for the odd logging truck it wouldn’t be used at all.
“This OK?” I ask, and Henry nods. He needs somewhere quiet and out of the way to work, where no one’s going to hear the screams and call for help.
We climb out into the afternoon. It’s stopped raining and the forest floor steams in the sunlight. I go round the back and pop the trunk.
“Jesus. .” Backing away because of the smell. It’s not just Special Agent Mills who’s rank, the cop stinks as well — I think he’s pissed himself. Not surprising.
He stares up at me with terrified eyes. I can see his mouth working on the gag, trying to threaten us, plead, something. Henry and I grab him by the shoulders and pull him out into the sunlight.
The cop tries to get to his feet, but ten hours locked in the trunk with a rotting FBI agent and his legs are like rubber.
“Jack,” says Henry, taking off his suit jacket and hanging it on a nearby tree branch, “I need you to get rid of Special Agent Stinky.”
“Ah, fuck. .” says Jack, peering out from the back seat, “why me?”
“’Cause I said so.” Henry takes off his sweater and it goes on the branch next to his jacket. Then it’s the shirt’s turn.
Jack swears his way out of the car, “Cock-sucking, God-damned, lousy, mother-fucking. .” He takes a handful of plastic sheeting and hauls the agent’s body out of the trunk onto the grass and mud. Jack’s feet slither as he drags the wrapped corpse away into the woods. “Got my fucking new shoes on as well. .”
“You know,” I say to Henry, pointing at the cop, “we have to ditch the car. They’re going to notice this guy’s missing — if they haven’t already — check what his last call was, and then every cop in Illinois is going to be out looking for us.”
Henry stands there in a white undershirt, his US marine ‘Semper Fi’ tattoo sitting high and proud on his arm. “I think we need to talk about Jack,” he says, snapping on another pair of those latex gloves. “What you know about him?”
“He’s from the Bronx.”
“Yeah, but what’s he done?” Henry hauls the State Trooper backwards till the guy’s sitting against a tree trunk.
I shrug. “What you mean, what’s he done?”