Astronomy(42)

Susan saw the back door open as they parked on Berendstrasse. Shrieve was too tired even to yell about security.

“Christ.” He sounded disgusted. “They must be looking to meet their first German.”

“Smells like they’re cooking dinner for him and everything.” Whatever was going on the stove, it smelled wonderful.

“Hey,” she called out. “Who’s supposed to be down here?” She heard dinner music coming from the dining room, a light waltz from one of the lesser Strausses.

Charley held her up at the door before they went inside.

“When we first saw you in that warehouse on Münterstrasse, Bogen and I may have been a little . . .”—he squirmed a bit—“skeptical, I guess.”

“You mean because I’m a woman.” She smiled. She thought that was dear. “Fifty years from now, lots of women will shoot guns. It won’t be a big deal anymore.”

Perhaps there was more to it than that. Shrieve started to raise his hand toward her slightly crossed eyes. But he stopped himself. He smiled, nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “Something like that. Anyway, I just wanted to tell you that—Christ, I had this thing all rehearsed in my head. I just wanted to tell you that I’d have you at my back anytime. You did real well up there.”

“You did real well up there too,” she said. She didn’t know whether one returned a compliment to one’s case officer or not, but Charley just smiled.

“We should find out when dinner is,” he said. “I’m starving.”

She told him to go clean up; she’d have a look in the pot. He lingered on just a moment, and she smiled at him, What?

“Nothing.” He shook his head, embarrassed. He went off, calling after Bogen.

Susan felt her cheeks warming. Curse of the red-haired woman, she blushed easily. Good thing Shrieve wasn’t here to see.

She washed her arms in the sink. It felt so good, she leaned her head under the water and let it pour down on her till the gasoline smell faded.

She yelled for whoever was making dinner tonight. Betty Lou Sharpe, she said to herself, and laughed at her own joke. This was the tail end to a running gag: Anything that didn’t smell of garlic, Betty Lou Sharpe must have cooked it.

She wadded up a towel around the lid handle. Christ, it must have been boiling for hours. She could hardly pick it up.

She looked for a heating pad to lift the lid. She found one on the back of a chair, but it was covered in some kind of blood.

Susan stared at it a moment.

Blood.

Shrieve called to her from the dining room. “You need to see this,” he said. Something in his voice made her run.

* * *

She found him by the door, crouched over himself. His arms were folded across his chest and his fist was shoved under his nose. He might have been studying a dinner table tableau prepared for the cover of the Saturday Evening Post.

Before them lay some formal occasion. Candlelight and mismatched dinnerware gave it an air of low-rent elegance. Eight good friends sat across the table from each other.

Any minute now, Pete DeLeone was going to ask Johnny the Plumber to pass the gravy. Sandra Obersmith would have another awful run-in with the Dutch librarian at the shipping museum. The conversation would pick up from there.

If only they could spit out the rope of pink intestine gorging each of their mouths.

Susan found the doorjamb and steadied herself. She had to force herself toward the table. Evidence must be gathered. Yes.

Over each stuffed mouth, eyes were creased in horror, agony, outrage. They had each died right where they sat, consuming themselves an inch at a time.

She looked down at their hands. Their hands were wired to their chair arms. Each had been provided cutlery. A fork poked out of each right hand, a knife out of the left. Somewhere beneath the blood and viscera of their bellies, each wore a napkin, neatly pressed into his or her lap.

Shrieve was saying something about Dale Bogen.

Dale Bogen, she realized. Oh, Christ. He wasn’t here.

“Maybe he escaped?”

“He didn’t escape,” Shrieve said into his hands. He had been up to Bogen’s room, but he would not elaborate on what he found. “Did you,” Shrieve had to clear his throat to keep talking. “Did you check the pot?”

“What?” She couldn’t understand why he was talking about dinner at this particular moment.

“The pot on the stove. Did you look inside?”

And then her brain-lock let up just long enough; she saw what he was getting at. Oh, Jesus.

Shrieve told her to stay put. She just looked at him, Yeah right I’ll stay put. She did let him tip back the lid from the pot. She couldn’t bear that.

Shrieve looked a long time. When he’d seen enough, he set the lid gently back in place. He wouldn’t look at her. She saw his shoulders go up and down, heard something like a sigh.