Strangers Read online

  “I think we probably have a better chance finding evidence of Santa Claus than we do of our guy.”

  Jankowitz nodded. He felt the lack of surprise at her statement, and that depressed him. Had he gotten so jaded that he expected the bad guys to win?

  He made himself look away from Mama Bear’s haunted eyes. The window. It was shattered, bits of glass clinging to the pane like the teeth of a saw. “Forced entry,” he said.

  He had been speaking to himself, and it hadn’t been a question. But Mama Bear answered him. “Actually, we’re not sure about that.”

  “Why not?”

  She pointed with her flashlight at some of the snow piled beside the house. It glittered. More than snow should. Glass. “With forced entry there’d be more glass inside,” she said.

  “So… what?” said Jankowitz. “Someone trying to get out?”

  “Not sure about that, either,” said Mama Bear. “There’d be more glass outside if that were the case.”

  “It fell inside?”

  “No, not much.”

  Jankowitz felt himself grow irritated. “Then where, if it didn’t fall inside or outside? Did it disappear?”

  “It mostly fell on the sill. Straight down.”

  She swung her light up at the window sill, which was slightly above her eye level, and Jankowitz now noticed that there was a large mound of glass on the lower sill. Nor did it look like someone had piled it there. It was in haphazard heaps, some of the shards hanging half off the sill.

  “So someone broke the window, but the glass fell straight down?” he said. “How is that possible?”

  Mama Bear shrugged.

  Then something drew Jankowitz’s attention away from the glass. Around the window itself there were a series of holes. Perfect circles, about the circumference of one of his fingers, evenly spaced about every six inches. They looked like dark eyes, staring at him in the night. He shivered, and only part of it was due to the cold air.

  “What are those?” he said, pointing at the holes.

  “We don’t know yet,” said Mama Bear.

  “What do you know, Mama?”

  “That it’s cold out.”

  Jankowitz looked at Mama Bear again. Under any other circumstances, he would have guessed those words to be a joke. But her voice was bereft of humor. She sounded… gray. Like the house, like whatever she had seen inside it, had leached the life out of her.

  He stepped back –

  (No, don’t kid yourself, Bobby. You’re not stepping back, you’re stepping away. Away from Mama Bear. ‘Cause she has truly, deeply creeped you out.)

  – and looked around the front of the house. He couldn’t see all of it. It was too big, with a couple balconies and other architectural doo-dads getting in the way of his line of sight. But he could see six – no, seven – windows. Four were broken. And though it was too dark to tell for certain, he was pretty sure that all of them had those little holes around them.

  Jankowitz looked away from house. He dropped his gaze to his shoes, as though to escape the dark vision of the crime scene. He knew he hadn’t seen anything – not yet, not really – but he felt oddly tired. Oddly worried. Like he needed a break.

  Between his feet, something peeked out of the snow. He shuffled the frosty powder aside with his left toe, then motioned for Mama Bear.

  “Know what that is?” he said as she came over.

  She shook her head. “Some kind of orange fabric,” she said. “Looks heavy-duty.”

  “Have someone tag it and bag it and let me know what it is, okay?”

  “Sure.”

  Mama Bear gestured for another forensics officer to bring her a camera and evidence bag. Jankowitz moved away. He didn’t want to stay with Mama Bear any longer. He’d never seen her so listless, and it was thoroughly messing with his mind.

  He tramped through the snow, back to the walkway that led to stairs up to the front door. He was about to walk up the short flight to the porch when Ed Royston came out the front door.

  Ed was a grizzled veteran, the kind of guy who could always be counted on to act professionally and to keep it together. He never went in front of the press because he was too gruff and matter-of-fact, tending to refer to “corpses” and “stiffs” rather than “victims” and “deceased.” Not a P.C. guy, which Jankowitz liked about him. He was rock-solid.

  Which was why it was a shock when Ed, after inhaling deeply, lurched down the steps and then barely made it off the walkway before puking his guts out all over the snow.

  Jankowitz just stared. He knew what to do when a rookie did that, but when someone who was tougher than a titanium rat trap did it, what then? Were you supposed to go to them? Ignore it?

  “Geez, Ed,” he finally managed. “You okay?”

  Ed looked over at him, bile still dripping from his lower lip. He was white as the snow around him, the only color on his face coming from his eyes, which were bloodshot and fevered. “I… I never seen….”

  Ed turned his face down and hitched again.

  Jankowitz stepped toward the man. Patted him awkwardly on the shoulder, then headed up to the house. “Try not to puke on any evidence, Ed,” he said. It was a lame quip, he knew, but to leave a seasoned cop without some kind of ribbing would be the worst kind of rebuke. It would be to acknowledge that what he did was not just embarrassing, but dishonorable.

  He left Ed behind, still dry heaving with one hand planted against the side of the house for support.

  A few steps up to the porch.

  Then through the door.

  He felt like he had stepped into another world. It was hot, for one thing. Too hot. He loosened his tie and collar, unbuttoned his coat, and felt sweat burst out on his forehead.

  And the smell. It wasn’t oppressive, but it was definitely unpleasant. A musky, slick scent. It smelled like a wild animal’s den, or perhaps a tiger’s cage in an under-funded zoo.

  Dark forms moved all around, uniforms and plainclothes officers, all wearing latex gloves and holding flashlights that cast weird shadows in the cavernous darkness of the almost-mansion.

  Jankowitz felt his brow knit in confusion. So there was heating? Then….

  “Where’s the light?”

  As with Mama Bear outside, he was speaking mostly to himself. And as with Mama Bear outside, someone answered. Jankowitz didn’t even see who it was, just one more black shape moving past him in the foyer. “Not working,” it said.

  Jankowitz rolled his eyes. “Obviously,” he said. He reached into his jacket pocket. He had been caught in a crime scene under a house early in his detective days, looking for a corpse in the near-dark. Since then he always carried a light. Good thing in this case.

  He pulled out a small Maglite, twisting the bottom to activate the powerful bulb. As soon as it came on, he swung it up, and as he did he realized another tidbit that his subconscious had picked up on: all the cops in the area had their lights pointed down. Like they were looking at their feet.

  And the moment his own light swung up, he understood why.

  The foyer looked like it had been poorly painted. Not in the whites or creams favored by this kind of place, but in a red-rust-brown mixture. Blood. It had been splashed all around the walls and was now congealing into a scab-like layer of gore.

  Jankowitz stared at it, shocked. “Where’d all this come from?” he said. This time he was hoping for an answer. But this time none came.

  He moved into the house. He didn’t want to. But it was his job.

  He noticed as he went that there was a pile of wood in the foyer. Looked like it had once been a nice table. He passed it. Other rooms had similar piles of wood.

  What the hell did these people do to their furniture?

  He saw knocked-out windows from the inside, their jagged teeth gnashing in pain in the night. More blood on the walls around them.

  The smell grew stronger. It was the blood, obviously. But there was more to it. Something beneath the metallic scent of blood, somet
hing darker.

  He moved deeper into the house, his instincts pulling him toward what he sensed was the hub, the center. The place where he might find answers.

  Movement. He glanced to one side and saw what looked like a child’s room. Several cops and forensics officers swarmed around something. Then they parted and Jankowitz glimpsed feet and legs jumbled together. No bodies. Just dismembered feet and legs piled together like poorly stacked firewood.

  He pushed on. Deeper into the house.

  He started to hear something. It sounded like… talking? No. It was too rhythmic, too cadenced. It was almost a chant, a low litany that could only be heard in this church of the damned.

  Another room. A chair. A body, dead but not falling over. Not falling over because it was tied to the chair by loops of barbed wire that held it fast and tight, its head thrown back in a forever scream.

  Jankowitz moved down a long hall. He passed an office where he glimpsed a form swinging from the ceiling. Flashes popped as pictures were taken, and images seared themselves into his mind: a woman, her skin trailing from her body in long curls, hanging from a meat hook that had been jammed through the roof of her mouth.

  The smell got worse. It was… it was….

  He didn’t know yet.

  Jankowitz followed the chanting, like sonic bread crumbs in a forest. Only he wasn’t finding his way home, no, he was following the crumbs to the witch’s house.

  The kitchen.

  He stepped in. Slipped. He looked down and the flashlight reflected off a red river. Unlike the walls in the foyer, the blood on the floor had not begun to congeal. Jankowitz couldn’t tell if it was because it was still too new, or if there was simply too much of it.

  He looked to the source of the chanting, and saw a pile of wood that he supposed was a table and chairs at one point. And beside it….

  Jankowitz walked toward the wood. There was another cop there, a lone detective in this otherwise empty kitchen. Jankowitz tried to remember the man’s name but couldn’t. He gave up and just moved forward, stepping carefully and trying to ignore the wet sucking noises his shoes made in the river of blood below him.

  The other cop was huddled over something. Something that was making the noise. Something that was the source of the smell, that familiar smell.

  Jankowitz saw it.

  “Holy shit,” he said.

  It was a man. Or it had been, once. He was lying in a fetal position on the floor, covered in blood. His eyes moved rapidly back and forth, back and forth, but Jankowitz could tell that the man didn’t see him or the other cop or anything else in the room. There was nothing in the man’s gaze. No comprehension, no reality. Only terror. Madness.

  The man wore the ragged remains of what had once been a nice suit, but it had been cut to pieces, and the skin that showed was bruised and battered. He had been cut, burnt, abraded. It looked like every possible kind of physical trauma had been visited upon him.

  “He was everywhere,” said the man. “He was everywhere and I told. Everywhere and I told. Everywhere and I told.” He repeated the words over and over, his eyes flashing sightlessly in the darkness, trapped in some hell that Jankowitz could not even guess at.

  “How long’s he been like this?” said Jankowitz.

  The other cop’s voice was low, almost reverent. “Since he was found.”

  “Everywhere and I told ….”

  “Jesus,” said Jankowitz. He was not a religious man. But he crossed himself all the same. His mother had done that, and in this moment it seemed the only appropriate thing to do.

  The man on the floor seemed to see the movement. He remained curled up in the blood, his eyes continued to dart back and forth. But his voice began to raise. “He was everywhere and I told. Everywhere and I told. EVERYWHERE AND I TOLD.”

  Jankowitz realized what the smell was. Not just blood and sweat and shit and tears and trauma.

  It was madness.

  The man’s voice continued to rise, louder and louder and louder until it cracked like the windows of the once-lovely house. Jankowitz wanted to leave, wanted to join Ed outside and maybe throw up himself.

  But he didn’t.

  He stayed.

  He watched.

  And felt insanity wash over him. Felt hope’s last life curl and die within him.

  Knew with the sound of the man’s screaming that humanity was a lost cause, and the only relief to be found was death.

  1

  Jerry Hughes drove down a dream, but knew as always that the dream would end badly.

  He was awake, of course. But even awake, he knew that this street – his street – represented the pinnacle of success, the peak of hope. He was driving down the American Dream.

  It was a long street, but not so long that it felt like a thoroughfare. No, it was just long enough to give a sense of grandeur and permanence. Long enough to give those who drove its length a chance to rubberneck, to appreciate, to gape and gasp a bit and – perhaps most important – to grow more than a little jealous that they did not live on such a street of dreams.

  Each house was different. Not that the street seemed at all thrown together. No, each house was different but somehow they all seemed to fit together, presenting different facets of one overarching message that bespoke wealth, progress, and hard-earned superiority.

  Of course, to know that you had to look hard, because these houses, these individual bits of dream on the larger dream that was the street, were mostly hidden from view. High privacy walls shielded all but the tops of most of the houses from the prying eyes of the unwashed masses. And behind many of the privacy walls tall evergreens stood as well. The trees added life to the picture of perfection that was each home and, not coincidentally, also added another ten or twenty feet of obscurity, of privacy, of secrecy.

  Part of the American Dream, Jerry mused, is complete separation from one’s neighbors. Once upon a time we lived in communities, hoping to build a better life by banding together with those around us to create things that were more than we could have done apart. Now we hoped only to do enough to provide ourselves with that most fleeting of goals: the illusion that we were masters – or, even better, sole inhabitants – of our own tiny domains, like feudal keeps surrounded by rivals not so much hostile as simply ambivalent to our existence.

  Jerry sighed. He wondered, as he often did, what would happen if he rang the doorbell of any of the houses bearing a plate of cookies. Just a neighborly thing to do, a thing that he remembered his own mother doing often when he was a boy.

  As always, he immediately knew the answer: there was no way in hell he’d even get to the door. The walls and trees and gates were designed to keep such things from happening.

  Welcome to the American Dream.

  He only knew one of his neighbors. Other than that, he didn’t even know the names of the people on the street. Didn’t know what they did as occupations. Hell, he didn’t even know what most of them looked like.

  Perfect isolation.

  The illusion that we are alone in the world.

  And, he thought, it’s not like I’m any better. I don’t even know what it’s like outside the car. Hot? Cold? Is it spring?

  That was going too far and he knew it. He knew exactly what time of year it was, what the date was.

  What today meant.

  No, try not to think of that.

  He looked at the car’s dashboard. Jerry drove a Mercedes: an acceptable vehicle on this American Dream Street. It was a late model, one he had purchased just a year or so ago. He had bought it, he remembered, not because he needed a new car, but because he could. And really, when it came right down to it, at some point the ability to have something became synonymous with a requirement to acquire it.

  Still, he didn’t like this new car. It had too many buttons. Too many controls. The dashboard looked like something he would expect to see inside a high-tech research department.

  But it did tell him the temperature. Which was nice, he suppos
ed. He also supposed he could have just rolled down the window and stuck his arm out, but….

  Seventy-three degrees. Perfect temperature. Not too hot, not too cold.

  Nice night for a swim?

  Jerry shivered. For a moment he saw a bright green circle in his mind, a red mass to one side like a malignant tumor.