Phantoms Part 24

Bodys.n.a.t.c.hers In the lobby of the Hilltop Inn, on a rust-colored sofa, against that wall which was farthest from the restrooms, Jennifer Paige sat beside her sister, holding the girl.

Bryce squatted in front of the sofa, holding Lisa's hand, which he couldn't seem to make warm again no matter how firmly he pressed and rubbed it.

Except for the guards on duty, everyone had gathered behind Bryce, in a semicircle around the front of the sofa.

Lisa looked terrible. Her eyes were sunken, guarded, haunted. Her face was as white as the tile floor in the ladies' room, where they had found her unconscious.

"Stu Wargle is dead," Bryce a.s.sured her yet again.

"He wanted me t-t-to... kiss him," the girl repeated, clinging resolutely to her bizarre story.

"There was no one in the restroom but you," Bryce said. "Just you, Lisa."

"He was there," the girl insisted.

"We came running as soon as you screamed. We found you alone-"

"He was there."

"-on the floor, in the corner, out cold."

"He was there."

"His body is in the utility room," Bryce said, gently squeezing her hand. "We put it there earlier. You remember, don't you?"

"Is it still there?" the girl asked. "Maybe you'd better look."

Bryce met Jenny's eyes. She nodded. Remembering that anything was possible tonight, Bryce got to his feet, letting go of the girl's hand. He turned toward the utility room.

"Tal?"

"Yeah?"

"Come with me."

Tal drew his revolver.

Pulling his own sidearm from his holster, Bryce said, "The rest of you stay back."

With Tal at his side, Bryce crossed the lobby to the utility room door and paused in front of it.

"I don't think she's the kind of kid who makes up wild stories," Tal said.

"I know she's not."

Bryce thought about how Paul Henderson's corpse had vanished from the substation. d.a.m.n it, though, that had been very different from this. Paul's body had been accessible, unguarded. But no one could have gotten to Wargle's corpse-and it couldn't have gotten up and walked away of its own accord-without being seen by one of the three deputies posted in the lobby. Yet no one and nothing had been seen.

Bryce moved to the left of the door and motioned Tal over to the right of it.

They listened for several seconds. The inn was silent. There was no sound from within the utility room.

Keeping his body out of the doorway, Bryce leaned forward and reached across the door, took hold of the k.n.o.b, turned it slowly and silently until it had gone as far as it would go. He hesitated. He glanced over at Tal, who indicated his own readiness. Bryce took a deep breath, threw the door inward, and jumped back, out of the way.

Nothing rushed from the unlighted room.

Tal inched to the edge of the jamb, reached around with one arm, fumbled for the light switch, and found it.

Bryce was crouched down, waiting. The instant the light came on, he launched himself through the doorway, his revolver poked out in front of him.

Stark fluorescent light spilled down from the twin ceiling panels and glinted off the edges of the metal sink and off the bottles and cans of cleaning materials.

The shroud, in which they had wrapped the body, lay in a pile on the floor, beside the table.

Wargle's corpse was missing.

Deke Coover had been the guard stationed at the front doors of the inn. He wasn't much help to Bryce. He had spent a lot of time looking out at Skyline Road, with his back to the lobby. Someone could have carted Wargle's body away without Coover being the wiser.

"You told me to watch the front approach, Sheriff," Deke said. "As long as he didn't accompany himself with a song, Wargle could've come out of there all by his lonesome, doing an old soft-shoe routine and waving a flag in each hand, and he mightn't have attracted my notice."

The two men stationed by the elevators, near the utility room, were Kelly MacHeath and Donny Jessup. They were two of Bryce's younger men, in their mid-twenties, but they were both able, trustworthy, and reasonably experienced.

MacHeath, a blond and beefy fellow with a bull's neck and heavy shoulders, shook his head and said, "n.o.body went in or out of the utility room all night."

"n.o.body," Jessup agreed. He was a wiry, curly-haired man with eyes the color of tea. "We would've seen them."

"The door's right there," MacHeath observed.

"And we were here all night."

"You know us, Sheriff," MacHeath said.

"You know we aren't slackers," Jessup said.

"When we're supposed to be on duty-"

"-we are on duty," Jessup finished.

"d.a.m.n it," Bryce said. "Wargle's body is gone. It didn't just climb off that table and walk through a wall!"

"It didn't just climb off that table and walk through that door, either," MacHeath insisted.

"Sir," Jessup said, "Wargle was dead. I didn't see the body myself, but from what I hear, he was very dead. Dead men stay where you put them."

"Not necessarily," Bryce said. "Not in this town. Not tonight."

In the utility room with Tal, Bryce said, "There's just not another way out of here but the door."

They walked slowly around the room, studying it.

The leaky faucet drooled out a drop of water that struck the pan of the metal sink with a soft ping.

"The heating vent," Tal said, pointing to a grille in one wall, directly under the ceiling. "What about that?"

"Are you serious?"

"Better have a look."

"It's not big enough for a man to pa.s.s through."

"Remember the burglary at Krybinsky's Jewelry Store?"

"How could I forget? It's still unsolved, as Alex Krybinsky so pointedly reminds me every time we meet."

"That guy entered Krybinsky's bas.e.m.e.nt through an unlocked window almost as small as that grille."

Bryce knew, as did any cop who handled burglaries, that a man of ordinary build required a surprisingly small opening to gain entrance to a building. Any hole large enough to accept a man's head was also large enough to provide an entrance for his entire body. The shoulders were wider than the head, of course, but they could be collapsed forward or otherwise contorted enough to be squeezed through; likewise, the breadth of the hips was nearly always sufficiently alterable to follow where the shoulders had gone. But Stu Wargle hadn't been a man of ordinary build.

"Stu's belly would've stuck in there like a cork in a bottle," Bryce said.

Nevertheless, he pulled up a stepstool that had been standing in one corner, climbed onto it, and took a closer look at the vent.

"The grille's not held in place by screws," he told Tal. "It's a spring-clip model, so it could conceivably have been snapped into place from inside the duct, once Wargle went through, so long as he wriggled in feet-first."

He pulled the grille off the wall.

Tal handed him a flashlight.

Bryce directed the beam into the dark heating duct and frowned. The narrow, metal pa.s.sageway ran only a short distance before taking a ninety-degree upward turn.

Switching off the flashlight and pa.s.sing it down to Tal, Bryce said, "Impossible. To get through there, Wargle would have to've been no bigger than a child and as flexible as the rubber man in a carnival sideshow."

Frank Autry approached Bryce Hammond at the central operations desk in the middle of the lobby, where the sheriff was seated, reading over the messages that had come in during the night.

"Sir, there's something you ought to know about Wargle."

Bryce looked up. "What's that?"

"Well... I don't like to have to speak ill of the dead..."

"None of us cared much for him," Bryce said flatly. "Any attempt to honor his memory would be hypocritical. So if you know something that'll help me, spill it, Frank."

Frank smiled. "You'd have done real well for yourself in the army." He sat on the edge of the desk. "Last night, when Wargle and I were dismantling the radio over at the substation, he made several disgusting remarks about Dr. Paige and Lisa."

"s.e.x stuff?"

"Yeah."

Frank recounted the conversation that he'd had with Wargle.

"Christ," Bryce said, shaking his head.

Frank said, "The thing about the girl was what bothered me most. Wargle was half serious when he talked about maybe making a move on her if the opportunity arose. I don't think he'd have gone as far as rape, but he was capable of making a very heavy pa.s.s and using his authority, his badge, to coerce her. I don't think that kid could be coerced; she's too s.p.u.n.ky. But I think Wargle might've tried it."

The sheriff tapped a pencil on the desk, staring thoughtfully into the air.

"But Lisa couldn't have known," Frank said.

"She couldn't have overheard any of your conversation?"

"Not a word."

"She might have suspected what kind of man Wargle was from the way he looked at her."

"But she couldn't have known," Frank said. "Do you see what I'm driving at?"

"Yes."

"Most kids," Frank said, "if they were going to make up a tall tale, they would be satisfied just to say they'd been chased by a dead man. They wouldn't ordinarily embellish it by saying the dead man wanted to molest them."

Bryce tended to agree. "Kids' minds aren't that baroque. Their lies are usually simple, not elaborate."

"Exactly," Frank said. "The fact that she said Wargle was naked and wanted to molest her... well... to me, that seems to add credibility to her story. Now, we'd all like to believe that someone sneaked into the utility room and stole Wargle's body. And we'd like to believe they put the body in the ladies' room, that Lisa saw it, that she panicked, and that she imagined all the rest. And we'd like to believe that after she fainted, someone got the corpse out of there by some incredibly clever means. But that explanation is full of holes. What happened was a lot stranger than that."

Bryce dropped his pencil and leaned back in his chair. "s.h.i.+t. You believe in ghosts, Frank? The living dead?"

"No. There's a real explanation for this," Frank said. "Not a bunch of superst.i.tious mumbo-jumbo. A real explanation."

"I agree," Bryce said. "But Wargle's face was..."

"I know. I saw it."

"How could his face have been put back together?"

"I don't know."

"And Lisa said his eyes..."

"Yeah. I heard what she said."

Bryce sighed. "You ever worked Rubik's Cube?"

Frank blinked. "That old puzzle? No. I never did."

"Well, I did," the sheriff said. "The d.a.m.ned thing almost drove me crazy, but I stuck with it, and eventually I solved it. Everybody thinks that's a hard puzzle, but compared to this case, Rubik's Cube is a kindergarten game."

"There's another difference," Frank said.