Bones(55)
The engine had stalled; I started it again and got the car straightened out and drove it up to Bertolucci's front gate. The palms of my hands and my armpits were damp, and when I got out the fog turned the dampness clammy and cold. Shivering, I went to the rear fender and shined my flashlight on it to check the damage. Foot-long scrape and a dent the size of my fist; the paint along the scrape was black.
I tossed the flashlight onto the front seat, muttering to myself, and then gave my attention to Bertolucci's house. Dim light illuminated its front and side windows, blurred by the fog. If he'd heard the collision he hadn't been curious enough to come out to investigate. I pushed through the gate and made my way through the tangle of weeds and mist-damp lilac bushes to the porch. The same sign still hung from the door: Ring Bell and Come In. I followed instructions, just as I had on Wednesday.
Bertolucci's display room was empty except for the poised animals and birds staring blankly with their glass eyes. The musty, gamy smell seemed even stronger tonight, overlain with the moist brackish odor of the fog. It was cold in there too; the old wood-stove in one corner was unlit and there weren't any furnace vents or registers that I could see.
“Mr. Bertolucci?”
One of the old house's joints creaked. Or maybe it was a mouse or something larger scurrying around inside the walls. Otherwise, silence.
I walked past the stuffed raccoon sitting up on its hind paws, the owl about to take flight with its rabbit dinner, the two chicken hawks mounted combatively on pedestals. The sound in the wall came again; the stillness that followed it had an empty quality, the kind you feel in abandoned buildings.
“Mr. Bertolucci?”
The faint echo of my voice, nothing else.
The door at the rear, behind the rodents on display in the glass cases, stood partially ajar; more pale lamplight came from the other side. I moved through an opening between the cases and shoved the door all the way open.
Bertolucci's workroom. An organized clutter: big work-table in the middle, labeled containers on a shelf underneath that held clay, plaster of paris, varnish, something called tow; tools hanging from wall racks; battered chest of drawers with each drawer labeled in a spidery hand, one of them with the word Eyes; a chopping block, a carborundum wheel, an electric saw, a box overflowing with cotton batting, spools of thread and twine; tins of wax, paint, gasoline, formaldehyde, and wood alcohol; a tub of what looked to be corn meal. Dusty stacks of wooden shields and panels and mounts of various sizes, teetering in one corner; a jumble of old pieces of wire strewn in another. All this and more, shadowed and fusty in the pale light from a ceiling globe.
But no Bertolucci.
I called his name again, got the same faint echo and the same silence, and went at an angle to another door on my right. This one gave onto the kitchen, sink piled high with crusty dishes, ants crawling in a trail of spilled sugar on the floor. No Bertolucci here either. Two more doors opened off the kitchen, one to the rear of the house and one toward the front. I decided to try the rear one first, and started toward it, and that was when I first smelled the faint lingering stench of spent gunpowder.
The muscles across my shoulders bunched up; my stomach jumped, knotted, brought up the taste of bile. No, I thought, ah Christ, not again, not another one. But I went ahead anyway, pushed open the door and eased through it.
Narrow areaway, opening onto a laundry porch. And Bertolucci lying back there, blood all over him, blood on the floor and splashed on one wall—real blood, not the fake stuff they use in those damned death-mocking splatter movies. Torn and blackened and gaping hole where his chest had once been, and that was real too, and so was his twelve-guage shotgun on the floor to one side. Point blank range: the powder blackening said that. And buckshot, not birdshot.
The back door was wide open; fog reached in like searching fingers, skeletal and gray and grave-cold. That was why I hadn't been able to smell the burnt gunpowder until I got to the kitchen: the wind had blown most of the odor away, even though the weapon couldn't have been fired more than a few minutes ago. The blood was still fresh, glistening wet red in the spill of light from the kitchen.
Driver of that black car, I thought. Has to be. Not a crazy kid, not a Friday night drunk—a murderer fleeing the scene of a just-committed homicide. And if I'd come straight here instead of stopping at the general store, maybe it wouldn't have been committed at all.…
That's crap, I thought, you know better than that. Then I thought: If I stand here any longer I'll puke. I backed up and let the door wobble shut, blocking out the carnage in the areaway. But it was still there behind my eyes, all that blood, all that ruined flesh, as I stumbled back through the house to find a phone and call the sheriff's department.