Dead Man's Song by Jonathan Maberry Page A

Two bodies, savagely torn. Worse than what had been done to Ruger’s buddy Macchio. That killing had, at least, a sense of ritual about it, but this looked to be less…what was the word? Controlled? Animals? It seemed unlikely. Not in this part of Pennsylvania. Shell casings everywhere. That meant that Castle had nearly emptied his magazine. Castle was ex-Pittsburgh PD—it seemed pretty unlikely he’s have fired off that many rounds without hitting something, but there was no other body around. No trail of blood, either, or at least no blood trail beyond the spatters that filled the clearing. So if Castle hit anything, there was no immediate visible evidence of it.
    It was a mystery and Frank Ferro hated mysteries. He hadn’t joined the police force to solve them, and he hadn’t welcomed the promotion to detective division to pursue them. Ferro preferred order. He had a hunter’s nature, and that was something he liked: the hunt for clear answers, not for the unexplainable. When he and LaMastra had come to Pine Deep on the trail of Karl Ruger and his accomplices, they’d both thought it was going to be a straightforward hunt. Difficult, yes, dangerous, to be sure—but in essence a hunt. Now, after two days in this town he knew that the hunt had tangled itself into the weirdest set of circumstances he’d ever encountered. The most brutal murders of his career, killers who can take a chestful of bullets and still have the strength and power to lay siege to a hospital and nearly kill three people. Dead civilians, dead policemen. Ferro unwrapped a second stick of gum and chewed it as he stood there, his face giving nothing away, his dark eyes flat and apparently emotionless as he worked the scene in his head. He saw something else that puzzled him. The blood. There were smears and splashes, sprays from opened arteries that painted the corn and the slat fence…but throat wounds like that, even if the hearts of the men had stopped quickly, should have spilled a lake of blood. There wasn’t nearly enough of it. He stepped forward and took a pencil from his pocket, then knelt and probed the ground as close to Cowan’s shoulder as he could reach without risking the integrity of the crime scene. The pencil slipped easily down into the soft earth. Despite the chill, the rain of two nights ago still left the earth very muddy and yielding. He pushed the pencil down three inches and then withdrew it to examine it like a dipstick. There was a little blood and a lot of damp earth. Not enough blood, though, not enough by a long shot. It should have seeped deeper than this. He rose, looking around for other anomalies. That was the smart thing to do—to be a scientist, a criminalist, not a gawking bystander, and he could feel his detachment creeping back by slow degrees. He caught LaMastra’s eye and then jerked a chin toward the blood splashes. “You reading this?”
    The younger man had seen Ferro probe the ground with his pencil and understood the implications. “The blood?”
    “Uh huh.”
    “Maybe the ME will figure it out.” He pointed with his Maglite to a spot in the clearing where bare earth showed through the mess. “You see that?” There were several footprints clearly pressed into the mud. He glanced at the shoes of both dead officers, then grunted. “Gotta be the perp’s.”
    “Make sure the lab guys take castings. See how they match up against the ones we got from Ruger and Boyd.” Ferro rose, his knees creaking a little.
    “Not going to be Ruger’s,” LaMastra said.
    “No,” Ferro agreed.
    “So…you make Boyd for this shit?”
    Ferro gave a small half-shrug. “Who else? Macchio’s dead. Ruger’s sure as hell dead. Unless there was a fourth man in that car, the only suspect we have left is Boyd.”
    “Yeah,” LaMastra said dubiously, “but I don’t like the feel of that, y’know?”
    “No kidding, Vince.” With a sour-faced LaMastra in tow, Ferro walked the perimeter of the crime scene,