Bed of Nails (14 page)

“Step Eleven. Step Twelve. This is it, guys. One more step down and we get a glimpse of hell on earth.”

“Quit yakking, Tommy.”

“Yeah. Let’s roll.”

“Step Thirteen,” Tommy announced, planting his shoe in the mud at the foot of the sinkhole, then sweeping the beam forward to illuminate whatever lurked in the darkness beneath the Thirteen Steps to Hell. And that’s when he saw the ax.

As the torch flipped end over end out of Tommy’s grasp, it flickered a “now you see it, now you don’t” nightmare in front of Freddie’s eyes
.
When the psycho with an ax appeared in the blinking pit of light and shadow, Freddie thought it was an acid flashback to his prior bad trip. Then he remembered that Tommy had organized this trek into the hinterland, and he figured his conniving buddy had set up this shock to yank his chain. But then—

Whack!

The ax cracked down on Tommy’s crown, cleaving his skull open in a spray of blood and brains.

Freddie pissed himself.

The maul, a fitting name for this ax-shaped weapon, was as wide at the back of its wedge as a sledgehammer. The descending blade sank as deep as Tommy’s shuddering shoulders with a sickening crunch. When the axman jerked the handle up and down to free the steel V, the wedge squeaked against shattered bones and wrenched out of Tommy’s bisected brain with a sucking sound.

The beam winked out.

As Freddie turned to scramble back up the Thirteen Steps to Hell, the last thing he saw before the tumbling flashlight hit the concrete were the gouts of gore splattered all over Charlie Yu’s twitching face. Then it was pitch black down in this hellhole, and Freddie sensed he was an ax stroke away from taking a bone-crushing blow. So, with hands that clutched and clawed like those of the cannibal zombies in
Night of the Living Dead,
he grabbed hold of Charlie and tried to pull him down the steps so that he could crawl over his buddy and turn him into a buffer between the blade and himself.

Clang!

Too late.

Sparks and chips flew as the steel struck a step.

Freddie’s shriek in the darkness echoed in the pit. Blood spewed as Charlie struggled to break free, flailing his limbs like an overturned crab in a frantic attempt to climb the slippery steps backwards. Freddie’s hands still clutched him, so the terrified Texan swung his body from side to side to throw off the inhibiting drag. The result was that Charlie got whapped in the face by the mushy stump of a severed limb. Now he, too, was screaming.

Whack!

Clang!

The maul kept hacking at Freddie. His other arm suddenly let go, releasing Charlie to roll over onto his belly and clamber his way up the Thirteen Steps to Hell on hands and knees.

Step Eight.

Step Seven.

Step Six.

Step Five—

Then someone grabbed his ankle.

“Nooooooooo!”
Charlie wailed as he bumped back down into the pit, his chin bouncing off each concrete step in turn. The dazzling glare of a heavy-duty flashlight lit up the blackness from behind his head, and as Charlie tried to push himself up from the bloody steps, a silhouette of his own head shadowed the cement under his eyes, and over that outline loomed a dark blur, descending fast.

Whack!

Clang!

Charlie never saw the sparks.

Seattle

April 12 (The next day)

Zinc Chandler was mildly surprised to find waiting at the arrivals gate for his flight from Vancouver a Seattle cop who whisked him from SeaTac Airport to a nearby helipad, where a police helicopter sat ready to fly him into the hinterland. It was still drizzling, but far less than the deluge overnight, and as the rotor whirling above their heads blew the rainwater on the Tarmac away, the chopper lifted up into the sodden gray sky.

The pilot gave Zinc a verbal tour through his cockpit headphones as they flew northeast over Seattle toward the Cascade Mountains. Puget Sound and the Pacific retreated on their left.

“Mount Rainier,” the pilot announced, pointing to the snowy volcanic cone dominating the horizon thirty miles away to the southeast. “If that baby ever blows like Mount St. Helens did, it will be one of the deadliest eruptions ever.

“In 1947, an Idaho businessman flew a private plane past the peak en route to Oregon. Supposedly, that’s when he saw nine circular objects hovering in single-file formation. He described them to a reporter as each being about the size of a DC-4, and he said they flew like a saucer would if you skipped it across water. That’s where we got the term ‘flying saucer.’”

Their flight path took them over the lower tip of Lake Washington to the upper tip of Lake Sammamish, farther inland. The Cascade Mountains formed a white backdrop. This morning, the overcast sky made for a brooding vista.

“Lake Sammamish State Park,” the pilot said, indicating an area to the south of the dark body of water. “That’s where Ted Bundy drove his VW Bug in the summer of ’74 to rape and kill several women he picked up near the picnic benches.

“And that,” he added, pointing farther east toward the Cascades, at a distance that Zinc estimated to be around thirty miles from Seattle, “is where you’ll find Snoqualmie Falls. The water plunges a hundred feet more than Niagara. Remember ‘Twin Peaks’?”

“Who killed Laura Palmer?”

“That’s where it was shot.”

The pilot set the chopper down on a country road to the north of Lake Sammamish. To prepare for the landing, a pair of county sheriff’s cars angled across the pavement to block off a section. As Zinc removed the cockpit headphones from his ears, the pilot gave him a thumbs up. The Mountie stepped out into the drizzle, where Det. Ralph Stein of Seattle Homicide waited for him on the shoulder of the road.

The helicopter took off and banked its rotor southwest to return to Seattle. The sheriff’s cars moved aside to reopen the road so that no fewer than four coroner’s vehicles could drive in to park. Now, that was an ominous sign.

“Ralph.”

“Zinc.”

The cops shook hands.

“How are the ankles?”

“Wet weather makes ’em throb, and the added weight doesn’t help. How you faring? Alex and all?”

“Up and down. You know. Losing her broke my heart. To cope, I threw myself into work, but the chief’s not happy. He’s ordered me off to the South Pacific for some R & R. I’ll probably get my knuckles rapped for coming here.”

“The South Pacific? I wish! Let me take your place?”

“Go pack.”

“No need. On a day as wet as this, I’m wearing trunks instead of Jockey shorts.”

“What’s with the four meat wagons?”

“One for each vic.”

“That bad?”

“Uh-huh. We don’t want to mix up the pieces.”

Det. Ralph Stein was bigger—
much
bigger—than when they had last met. Their cop-to-cop relationship went back several years, to an investigation into a blackmailing scheme run by a pimp who’d recruited underage girls for sex across the border. Later, Stein’s accident had taken him out of the joint manhunt that came to be known as the Hangman case, whose repercussions had ultimately cost the Mountie the love of his life. In the aftermath of those personal tragedies, Zinc had paid a visit to Ralph while he was recuperating at home, talking shop for hours in Stein’s kitchen.

“You bring ’em?” Ralph asked now.

“Yes,” said Zinc.

“Where’d you get ’em?”

“From my locker.”

“You said they were hold-back evidence?”

“Right. Key facts. That we found nails hammered into Cardoza’s skull was released to the media. The halo was seen by the chambermaid, so it got out of the bag. But we managed to keep the style and dimensions of the nails under wraps for use as key-fact evidence to trip up any suspects we might interrogate.”

“You still keeping that secret?”

“Yep. To thwart copycats.”

“Let’s hope that’s what we have here. I’d rather go after a copycat than a serial killer.”

“I’ll show you mine, if you show me yours.”

Ralph fished in his coat pocket and withdrew his hand as a closed fist. The Mountie foraged in his travel bag, then held out a fist too. They were like children playing the game of Rock, Paper, Scissors.

“Ready?”

“On three.”

“One, two,
three
,” said Ralph.

They opened their fists.

“Son of a bitch,” said Zinc.

The nails on both palms were identical: non-galvanized flatheads of the same make and length.

“It reaffirms my faith in this,” said Ralph, tapping his nose. “Hard to believe there was a time before computers and high-tech gizmos when cases were linked by instinct—cops discussing their cold ones, then putting two and two together if a similarity cropped up later. The moment I saw that head staked upside down with a crown of nails hammered into the skull, I recalled what you told me about your dead-end Hanged Man case from a year and a half ago.”

“It just reopened.”

“Here, take a look.” The detective popped his umbrella to protect them from the drizzle, then withdrew a photograph of the head stuck on the stake from his shirt pocket.

“Déjà vu,” said the Mountie.

Again, Ralph tapped his nose. “We’d have gotten there anyway, even if you and I had never discussed your case. I had HITS”—the Homicide Investigation Tracking System, developed in Washington State—“check for similarities in previous local cases. Nothing. HITS widened its search to VICAP”—the FBI’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program—“but a sweep of the United States struck out too. Then HITS went to ViCLAS”—the Violent Crime Linkage Analysis System, created by the Mounties—“and it came back with one link: your Hanged Man case.”

“A cross-border serial killer.”

“A killing up there. A killing down here. Is he yours or is he ours? Where does he call home?”

“I hope it’s Seattle,” said Zinc.

“It’s probably Vancouver.”

“So what have you found way out here?”

The detective led the inspector off the road into the dripping trees. Perhaps it was the weather—dismal, depressing, and gray, with wisps that could be ghosts’ breath condensing here and there—but Zinc felt a chill of Gothic morbidity about this bad place. The trees weren’t healthy. They were diseased and gnarled. Claustrophobia closed in around the cops, and crooked limbs reached for their faces. The ground that squished beneath their shoes was wildly overgrown, and only when he almost tripped on a hidden gravestone did the Mountie realize that he was in a cemetery that time had forgotten.

The smell of death grew stronger as they approached what seemed to be a yawning sinkhole in the center of the graveyard. Out of it rose a disembodied voice noting anatomical aspects. As Zinc neared the rim of the pit to gaze down the Thirteen Steps to Hell, Ralph cautioned, “Brace yourself. It’s ugly.”

The Thirteen Steps to Hell deserved their damned name. Littering the sticky staircase were the hacked-up bodies of three young men, the maul left behind on the bottom step. The skull of the lowest victim was cleaved in two. The arms of the middle man were severed from his body. The cranium of the uppermost corpse was reduced to mush.

Zinc’s eyes, however, were riveted on the fourth body. In a hellish parody of the crucifixion of Christ, the Satanic crucifix faced the foot of the Thirteen Steps to Hell. Its crosspiece indented by blunt blows from the backside of the maul, the wooden T was stuck upright in the mud of the pit. Instead of the Roman soldiers who had stared up at the face of Christ on Golgotha Hill, forensic personnel squatted on their haunches to examine the remains of a naked man who’d been hung upside down, his right leg lashed to the beam, with his left leg tied in place behind it to sign a cross. Both wrists were cuffed at the small of the victim’s back to fashion the base of a triangle. In every way except one, the victim at the bottom of the steps was similar to the hanged man displayed seventeen months ago at the Lions Gate. All that was missing here was the nimbus of nails, because this hanged man didn’t have a head.

While driving back to Seattle in Stein’s car, they stopped for breakfast at a roadside diner near Redmond. The café was a ma-and-pa affair, with her out front working the dining room and him back in the kitchen slinging hash. This was Zinc’s kind of eatery, a comfy, cozy harbor off the beaten track where a man could sit back, relax, and feel at home. To the Mountie’s way of looking at modern times, one of the worst developments was the endemic cancer of franchising. It was beyond him how anyone could find succor in knowing that no matter where you went in North America, there was a Denny’s or IHOP close at hand. If Zinc owned a time machine, he would return to the era before cloning took hold, when every restaurant was built to be unique.

“What in God’s name are you doing?”

Ralph looked up from the menu. “Counting calories,” he said.

“With that?”

“Uh-huh. It’s a calorie wheel. What you do is turn this circle until the food you’re considering appears in this slot, then you check here to see how many calories it contains.”

“You’re not telling me it’s got the lumberjack breakfast in there?”

“No.”

“So what do you do?”

“You find what ingredients go into the meal, then you check each one on the calorie wheel and add the numbers.”

“The bulls in Homicide must love you, Ralph. Out goes the squad as a group for lunch, and you call the chef out of the kitchen at the height of the lunchtime rush to have him list the ingredients in the lasagna special.”

“You’re right,” said Ralph. “Fuck it.” He tossed aside the wheel. “I’ll have the lumberjack breakfast,” he said when Ma came to the table for their order.

“Make that two,” said Zinc.

The diner had a jukebox biased in favor of country and western that patrons could feed with coins. No wonder Zinc felt at home in here. As a farm boy raised on the Prairies, he’d grown up on this stuff.

“So,” said Ralph, “what’s your take on the scene?”

“I see why you’re out here. It has to be the other half of what you found at Ted Bundy’s house.”

“It is. The M.E.—”

“Ruthless Ruth? I saw her down in the pit.”

“You know her?”

“She worked the Hangman case. She was on the cruise ship when Alex died.”

“Ruth won’t commit until she compares ’em in the morgue, but it seems the cut patterns on both stumps match. It’s safe to say—given the nails in the spiked head—that it
was
hacked off the body we found strung up like the Hanged Man.”

“Why two dump sites?”

“Why indeed? You got a theory?”

“Perhaps,” said Zinc. “But first I need more info. What gives with the graveyard? It’s unmarked, and it’s ancient.”

“That’s Maltby Cemetery.”

“Never heard of it.”

“The graves go back to the 1800s. Local lore says it was founded by a family of Satanists. That staircase down into the sinkhole is known as the Thirteen Steps to Hell. Over time, the graveyard became a mecca for devil worshipers and vandalizing kids. Though it was erased from all local maps, the legend of Maltby Cemetery wouldn’t die. According to
Ripley’s Believe It or Not,
that graveyard is one of the world’s most evil haunts.”

“I could feel it.”

“So could I. People still come looking for the site. But there’s also an Old Maltby Cemetery around here, which recently converted its name to Paradise Lake Cemetery. The Internet—God bless it—is infested with false information. Someone assumed that name was changed to mask its scandalous pedigree, so now
that
cemetery has taken on
this
cemetery’s Satanic lore.”

“It fits,” said Zinc.

“What? Your theory?”

“One of the motives attributed to Jack the Ripper was that his first four victims were killed in locations that formed an inverted cross hidden in the Hanged Man. The fifth victim—Mary Kelly—was ripped to shreds in Room 13 of Miller’s Court; an inverted occult triangle was among the cuts that tore her flesh.”

“So?” said Ralph.

“This killer may be trying to gain access to the occult realm too.”

Ralph rolled his eyes. “I wish I’d become a plumber.”

“Room 13, supposedly, was essential to that motive because thirteen, of course, is the Magick number. A witches’ coven, with its twelve witches and a grand master, signifies thirteen. Jesus was doomed to crucifixion at the Last Supper, which was attended by his twelve disciples and him—to make thirteen.”