Chills (8 page)

W
hen Teagan found him, Jack was standing stone still amid the bustling of uniformed officers cordoning off Chandler Park, white puffs of breath making tight little clouds in front of his face. Beneath a canvas tent, half-frozen bodies, minimally clothed and illuminated by park street lamps on old-fashioned iron poles, were laid out atop the rows of picnic tables, attended to by Cordwell and Brenner and CSIs who were taking pictures and measurements and poking and prodding. There were a lot of bodies—eight or nine—and Jack stood in the center of them, amid the rows of tables, staring up into the snow-smeared night. Occasionally, flashlight beams arced through the tight circumference of the scene's darkness, followed by mumbled comments carried on frosted breaths. So far as Teagan could tell, Morris and Kathy weren't anywhere on the scene.

“This is one of three,” Jack said without looking at him.

“One of three what?” Teagan asked, joining him among the bodies. He took an unlit Camel from his flannel shirt pocket and popped it between his lips. He'd quit three years ago, but the presence and taste of the little stick, even just hanging there unlit, was both a comfortable affectation and personal challenge, a reminder of a vice he'd conquered. He blew on his hands to warm them up, then shoved them into the pockets of his jeans.

“Three crime scenes just like this. Ormann Park, the Colby Public Library parking lot, a baseball diamond behind the high school on Fremont Ave. Information's still trickling in, but estimates quote twenty-seven dead. Nine each at the three crimes scenes, which I'm sure Kathy will tell you is of occult numerological significance. All Colby townspeople. Business owners, bums, teachers, hairdressers, landscapers, cooks, carpenters, bus drivers, factory workers, retired folks, even cops. Kids, Teagan. Little kids. Third body from the left, that little one there, is a kindergartner. Gracie Anderson. She was five fucking years old.” Jack's voice never rose above a tight, strained monotone.

Teagan knew the man well enough to understand the incredible restraint it must be taking for Jack not to break, especially regarding the child. He felt much the same way at the moment. “Jaysus,” he said. “What the fuck is going on in this town?”

“Well,” Jack replied, “Cordwell says at least three people at each scene were murdered by other people—our Hand of the Black Stars cultists, I'd say. And on those nine vics, Cordwell found evidence of manual strangulation, use of bladed implements—knives, straight razors, that sort of thing—and gunshot wounds. But the rest he swears are some kind of animal attacks, like our first John Doe.”

“Chris Oxer,” Teagan said.

“You ID'd him?”

“Aye. He used an ATM card at that convenience store, and the bank gave us a name. Family confirmed the identity. And here's a biteen of news. They say the lad had taken up with some new friends—no one the family had ever met. They said Chris was almost superstitious in not talking about them.”

Finally, Jack looked at him, then nodded. “Well, it looks like Oxer's new friends had a field day this afternoon. And turning on him wasn't enough, apparently. Most of these vics went the way of Oxer. Ripped apart, half-eaten, bones gnawed and snapped . . . and those damned symbols carved all over them still. But the killers made it easier to sort things out this time. Wallets and cell phones were all left behind. Like covering up the murders doesn't matter anymore.”

“Well, that was a sound bit a help, that.”

“Yeah. And the uh . . . jars . . . are over there,” Jack added, nodding in the direction of a cordoned-off park bench with a row of mason jars on it.

“Jars?”

“Eyes. Mostly eyes. Some tongues. A couple of fingers and an ear.”

“Fuck,” Teagan said.

“I think the sigils bother me the most. Every one of these bodies has that same symbol as Oxer's carved into it, or one like it. Damned if I can tell the difference, but they look pretty much the same to me. And apparently it's the same deal at the other scenes. It's like they're being tagged, marked somehow as belonging to the cultists. That gets under my skin, ya know? They're flaunting their sickness all over this town—bodies, jars. But no footprints, Reece. For all this fucking snow, not a single damned footprint, no animal droppings or animal prints, despite all the animal attacks that supposedly happened, and no evidence of snow brushed aside or out of the way. No weapons. No hairs or fibers. It's like ghosts killed them all.”

“What do Morris and Kathy think?”

“Don't know. Morris was supposed to be at the high school, but he texted that he was detained, whatever that's supposed to mean. Don't know the details yet. And I have no idea where Kathy is. But you know . . . that's Kathy. She can handle herself.”

The two men stood in silence for a few moments. Teagan frankly wasn't sure what to say, and sensed that Jack hadn't quite found a way to look objectively at the crime scene all around him. It was a struggle sometimes to do that. Teagan knew the feeling of having to fight the personal and professional fear and insecurity in one's soul to regain composure and do his job. Rapists, child molesters, murderers, torturers, terrorists, the sad, the lost, the widowed, the orphaned, the insane . . . Sometimes it was a heavy, monstrous job, and it could get inside of a person, if one wasn't careful. The various everyday evils and their aftereffects could find a way inside the less tangible substances, the “cells” of the heart, mind, and soul, injecting its icy blackness and sucking out the life and light. It could make a person feel weighed down and even monstrous, too. Take this case, for example.... What was
wrong
with these cultists? He had seen hate before—had, in fact, been in the thick of hate that had hardened and grown stronger over hundreds of years. But what kind of hate could drive someone to jar up the parts of other human beings? To carve them up like hams and feed them to wild animals? And was it even hate? The thought turned his stomach that it could be simple indifference to other people's suffering . . . old people and children. . . . Sometimes the scope of evil, plain and simple human evil, was overwhelming.

But the catch-22 of it was in the alternative. Teaching yourself to feel nothing or next to nothing was too easy—too damaging, Teagan had found—to allow it to become the quick and convenient defense mechanism against all of life's pain.

However, standing there waiting for the old habit of swathing oneself in indifference to kick in might not be the best option in this case. Maybe a little outrage was needed to match the senseless indifference of the crimes surrounding them and spur them to action. Furthermore, it was cold out, and Teagan's fingertips were getting numb. So finally he spoke.

“Jack . . . what's the plan?”

“Well, I think the first thing to do is—” Jack stopped abruptly, mid-sentence.

Teagan followed his gaze to a dark spot at the corner of the park, where the hiking trails began. “What is it, Jack?”

“I . . . I don't know yet. Come on.” He started off toward a far dark corner across the field that was devoid of all police action. If Teagan remembered correctly, the beginnings of the hiking trails were over there. It was an odd move, to be sure—Jack was not usually the type to walk away from the heart of a crime scene. But then again, maybe diversion was what he needed to get his head right again.

Or maybe Jack's gut was telling him something connected to the scene—or worse—was out there in those woods.

“Jack, wait up, mate.” Teagan dropped the Camel back into his shirt pocket and did his best to sprint in the snow drifts after the senior detective, his hand on his gun's safety.

Jack had made his way nearly to the tree line, his .45 drawn, when he stopped. The snow coming down around him in the moonlight formed a kind of halo of shimmering movement and shadows.

“For the love-a God, mate, what're we chasin'?”

On the hiking trail, a pale blue shadow—
a shadow of blue light
, despite the contradiction of terms, was exactly what Teagan thought it was—passed from a bank of charcoal night behind one tree to another. It was human-shaped but missing any discernible detail, a semi-transparent thing moving through the surreal shade of unbroken, wooded stillness. He drew his .45.

Jack motioned silently for them to flank the grouping of trees behind which the phantom had disappeared. They crept to the tree line, parted, and submerged themselves in the gloom. Teagan tried to breathe shallowly, afraid that even the puffs of his breath would put him somehow at a disadvantage to the stealthy thing in the woods.

Once Teagan stepped into the forest, all sounds from the crime scene were suddenly muffled, as if he'd closed a door or window. But he felt something, all right—not quite a sound or smell, far less than a physical touch, but something that stirred the hairs on his arms and brushed cool non-fingers across the back of his neck. He'd spent time camping one college weekend with friends at Seafield House in County Sligo, the allegedly haunted ruins of an old Irish mansion overgrown with trees and ivy, and the feeling on the grounds had been similar—the feeling that energy was moving around him, anxious, even hostile, crowding and closing in.

His gut told him to step out of the area, to back away from it and not turn his back on it, to go back to the crime scene. That's what his gut said, but his brain told him he was being a right savage tool. There wasn't anything in here, in the snow and dark, that hadn't been here any of the countless times he'd come through before, running or hiking or bringing a bird on a romantic nature walk. He set his jaw, narrowed his eyes against the rising wind, and began searching for the figure. If it was a cult member, it better hope that Teagan found it before Jack did; Jack was bulled enough to lamp whoever it was but good.

As he crept slowly over the underbrush toward the hiking trail, he listened. It made sense that the figure (he couldn't quite conclude to himself, for reasons unknown, that it was anything quite as tangible as a person just then) must have hit upon the hiking trail. There was no crunch of shoes breaking branches or rustle of trudging through foliage, and no visual evidence of it, either. Not that Teagan was a tracker of any kind, but he didn't hear or see much of any sign of life, human, animal, or otherwise. The cold was seeping into him. His toes felt like hard, painful little rocks in his boots, his fingers stiff and raw around his gun. He wished Jack would emerge from behind some tree or other and call off the search. Maybe what he had thought was a figure had been a strange effect of the moon glancing off of an icy tree trunk, or maybe some animal with its winter coat, bounding away back to the cover of the woods.

A glint of bright silver from the corner of his eye caught his attention, and he looked toward his left. He just caught darting movement beneath a swish of soundless blue-white fabric before it ducked behind another tree and was gone. Teagan hesitated, considering a quick shout to Jack, but decided there was no time to wait for the other detective. He took off after the figure. The graceless hopping and pounding of his half-frozen feet over the uneven terrain sent bolts of pain right up to his shins, but he kept running, picking up the hiking trail where he could.

Teagan's pursuit was arrested by a root-glutted ridge of dirt and rock, and he looked up to see a figure standing motionless on top of it. Moonlight backlit it in a halo of bluish light, obscuring its features in shadow, but so far as Teagan could make out, there was nothing like a condensing breath escaping into the air.

He aimed his weapon. At the clicking off of the safety, the figure's bent head rose into moonlight and turned in his direction.

Teagan whispered a string of Irish Gaelic swears that would have made his old granddad blush. He backed away from the thing on the hill, but couldn't take his eyes off the face.

It had no eyes. Empty black sockets seemed to swallow up the dark around it. The skeletal face was blue—corpse blue, frost-bite blue, a blue of things that had never seen warmth or sun. It opened its mouth, and Teagan was blinded by the light that poured forth from its throat. When the light finally faded several seconds later, the figure was gone.

Teagan ran. Blinded by the snow and the afterimage of the light from that thing's mouth, an odd shaft behind his eyelids of shifting colors that made the near-lightlessness of the woods somehow more impenetrable. He stumbled, scraping arms and hands as he flailed against trees to stay upright, stay moving.

He had just about reached the spot where he'd first taken off after the figure when he heard rustling to his right and skidded to a stop. Someone was heading toward him through the overgrowth that had retaken a giant fallen tree. He swung his gun around that way, sure for several irrational seconds that whatever was making its way toward him was not human, cultist or otherwise.

A pale hand reached over the massive trunk, its fingers curling slowly on the bark.

Teagan steadied the gun at it.

Moments later, a head emerged—Jack's head. Teagan sighed with relief, replacing the safety and re-holstering his weapon.

“Reece,” the detective breathed.

“Jaysus! You put the heart crossways in me, mate,” Teagan said, reaching a hand out to help Jack over the trunk. “Hey, you'll never belie—” When he got a good look at Jack, he frowned. “What the fuck happened to you?”

Jack's hair was peppered with clumps of dirt and twigs. His tie was askew, he had long streaks of snow and dirt on his normally pristine dress shirt, and the hem of his jacket was torn. His coat was missing, and his teeth were chattering uncontrollably. A gash in his forehead had dribbled blood into his right eyebrow, and his nose, if not broken, had certainly taken a bruising wallop. His right foot was twisted at an ugly angle, the swelling visible even beneath his boot.