Punishment Read online

  Barnes entered the home. The coppery scent of blood was thick. Shit and piss, too—the final, inescapable indignity of death. There was mildew underneath it all, no doubt from a crawl space beneath the home. The small living room held two paisley-patterned couches set longways and facing each other like pews in a breakneck chapel. The wear patterns on the carpet indicated that the family hadn’t been into rearranging the furniture very often. The small room seemed to offer little choice. A flat-screen TV sat on a squat entertainment center against the far wall, bookended by knickknack shelves filled with porcelain owls, turtles, and doves. There was a giraffe with a broken neck superglued back together. Above that, there were dozens of collectible salt-and-pepper shakers—Tom and Jerry, Abbott and Costello, the sigils of Stark and Lannister. The walls were off-white and in need of a fresh coat. The electrical outlets were old two-prongers gone brown from decades of use, some with smoky burns on the drywall above them.

  Barnes moved into the kitchen without looking down the home’s single hallway. There were voices and movement down there, flashbulbs popping.

  The refrigerator was small with rounded edges and steel handles and brackets. Ancient. It was covered with Realtor and dentist magnets likely pulled from inside junk-mail envelopes with the weight and promise of something worth opening. No soap, unless you felt it was thrilling to know that Joe Lymon, your friendly neighborhood Realtor, was at your service! The magnets held down shopping lists, Christmas photos of other people’s families, and what Barnes assumed were young Kerri’s crayon drawings. He moved closer to see a calendar of MRS. MACINTYRE’S HOMEWORK SCHEDULE—FIFTH GRADE MATH. The school year had just begun; only a couple of weeks’ worth of days had been X’d out. Near the bottom of the fridge there were colorful letter magnets. Most were in a jumbled mess, but several had been moved to form the phrase TOO LATE. The letters were coated in fingerprint powder.

  The stove was electric and greasy. It smelled of fried burgers and pork and beans. Barnes opened a cupboard to find boxes of mac and cheese, bricks of ramen, cans of SpaghettiOs. The kitchen table was Formica over gold legs speckled with rust, a transplant from the seventies. The chairs around it were cracked-vinyl editions with duct-tape repair jobs. There was a sliding glass door with an old, useless lock that’d been replaced by a dowel rod laid on the tracks. The rod was now shattered. The glass door, wide open, led to a small patio outside—a ten-by-ten square of brick pavers holding up black iron chairs and a mesh-topped iron table missing the umbrella. The door’s white frame had already been dusted for prints. Near the base was a familiar dent in the frame from Calavera’s pickax. He’d entered a home this way at least once before, applying slow pressure on the door until the dowel rod cracked or, in the case of a metal rod, bent. The Wilsons’ dowel rod had been wooden—a hacked-off broom handle—and it had splintered down the middle like a tree struck by lightning.

  The useless lock, combined with Calavera’s weapon of choice, had once been the biggest lead in these investigations. Former detective Tom Watkins, with Franklin before, and now Barnes and Franklin again, had followed up with a few hardware and home-improvement stores in the area, hoping to catch a break on a recent pickax purchase, but it had proved fruitless.

  Barnes stepped outside and looked across the small backyard encircled by a cyclone fence. He imagined a man in a white Day of the Dead sugar-skull mask hopping the fence and creeping toward the home. The imagined man wore all black clothing down to the gloves. He stopped halfway through the yard and waved at Barnes with a tilted head before disappearing like a bad jump cut.

  Barnes turned to go back inside but stopped when something on the ground caught his eye—a smear of green against one of the pavers. He bent down to find a leaf from a red cedar tree, some might call it a needle. It’d been smashed beneath a shoe. He scanned the morning skyline for cedars but only found an oak and a few maples. He picked up the leaf and bagged it.

  A voice came from inside the house. “We good?”

  “Yeah,” a second voice replied. “That should do it.”

  Barnes moved back through the kitchen to the hallway mouth. He found the crime scene photographer packing his gear into a hard-sided suitcase with brushed-steel bindings. These guys weren’t paid or respected like they’d been before the machine had rendered them nearly redundant, and it seemed there was always a new guy replacing the one who had just quit. This one was so young Barnes wondered whether his balls had dropped yet. The other man in the hallway was Adrian Flaherty, a freckle-faced officer with a wide, flat forehead and a high-pitched voice. Barnes figured he was picked on as a kid, which seemed to have left handfuls of chips on his shoulders. His thumbs were hooked into his belt loops.

  “What’s up, Barnes?” Flaherty said.

  Barnes nodded.

  The photographer moved out of the hallway to reveal the girl’s body. She was against the back wall, sitting up against a full-length mirror, eyes open. She was haloed by the fingerprint work on the walls and mirror above her head. Neat two-inch circles had been shaved into her temples where the machine’s suction cups had been attached. There was a pinhole in her arm where the needle had been inserted, the serum manually pumped through with an artificial heart. Some of the opaque white liquid dribbled out of the wound, mixing with the little girl’s blood as it traveled down her arm, turning the dark-red streaks to soft pink.

  You might swear she was just taking a rest if not for the pickax sticking out her front. The weight of it was bending her slightly forward. Its long wooden handle was propped in the pool of blood that had spread out from between her legs. The thinner of the two blades had entered her body above the left clavicle, which was broken. The length of the pickax was buried deep in her organs. Barnes felt a tickle in his stomach where he imagined the ax’s end might be. She was holding a small flashlight in her stiff right hand.

  “What do you think?” Flaherty said. He was chewing gum. When he spoke, Barnes could smell the flavor. Grape.

  “I think you need to leave.”

  Flaherty harrumphed. He crossed his arms over his chest, smacked at his gum. A sneer came to his face. “What’s the magic word?”

  A male voice responded from within Barnes’s mind. “Tell him to go to hell.”

  “Shhh,” Barnes thought. Bourbon rose up from his stomach. He closed his eyes and swallowed. His legs felt rubbery. He breathed deeply and tried to steady an internal plumb bob.

  “The magic word is step off before I brain you.” Franklin had come back into the house and stepped into the hallway behind Barnes.

  Flaherty harrumphed again; then he moved slowly toward them, chomping and eyeballing Barnes. He turned sideways to pass between the two detectives and said, “Watch your step, munky.”

  “You’re beggin’ for it, son,” Franklin said, following Flaherty out the front door. He pulled the door mostly closed after them but stopped and looked back. A new cruiser was pulling up to the scene. Its spinning lights flashed behind Franklin’s head. “You sure you’re good?”

  Barnes nodded.

  “We haven’t found it yet.”

  “I’ll find it. Hit the lights.”

  Franklin flicked off the lights and closed the door. Barnes turned off the hallway light, leaving himself in darkness, just as Calavera would have been. He tucked his tie into the breast pocket of his button-down shirt and snapped on latex gloves, produced a voice recorder and a long, black flashlight. He held the flashlight overhand, club-style, clicked it on, and brought the small microphone to his lips. “The mirror isn’t cracked, which indicates the girl was placed against it gently. The flashlight may have been placed in her hand, postmortem.” He lit up the pictures lining the hallway walls. There were three people in each of them—a small, happy family in a variety of poses. Some of the frames were square, some rectangular, some oval, some metal, some wood. The girl would have grown up pretty. The father was marginally handsome, though balding, and the mother seemed a crumbling beauty. The three-person unit re
minded Barnes of the short life he’d lived with just his parents before his little brother, Ricky, came onto the scene. He had only flash memories of those days—a soccer ball, autumn leaves, plaid pants—and there were only two pictures in the hallway of his childhood home with just Mom, Dad, and Johnny. They used to laugh about the story when, a few days after Ricky arrived, Johnny asked, “When are his parents picking him up?”

  Barnes tilted each picture frame and looked behind, though he suspected he wouldn’t find the poem on the wall; the girl’s eyes weren’t pointed there. He stepped around the blood patterns on the carpet and shined his light into the house’s master bedroom. The father was as Franklin described—lying in bed with his head caved in. Save for his hands and feet and the pajamas he wore, the man was hardly recognizable as human. In some cases the crime scene was worse for Barnes than the real-time punishment the machine doled out. To be inside a person who opens their eyes a split second before the darkness of death is a blessing compared with witnessing the results of the pickax in still life.

  Barnes spoke into his recorder. “The father was likely asleep when he got hit, but maybe he caught a glimpse. Don’t skip him.”

  The wife was set up in the bed next to her husband, no doubt placed there postmortem; the pool of blood on the carpet in front of the bed trailed up to her final position. Her eyes were closed, making her look as though she’d fallen asleep sitting up. Her hands were crossed over her waist, and if not for the bald spots on her temples, she could have been patiently waiting at a doctor’s office or a tire-repair shop. Her face remained in decent condition, but the gore at the back of her head told the tale. Her pajamas were satin—green and lacy. Lingerie. Barnes felt a tinge of envy to believe that the couple had spent the last night of their lives having sex. A thought like that might once have disturbed him, made him wonder whether he was depraved, but now such thoughts were like wind gusts through a keyhole. Again into the recorder, “The poem won’t be in the bedroom; the wife’s eyes are closed.”

  “It’s with the girl.” A female voice from within.

  “Definitely.” A crack addict’s voice.

  “Shhh.”

  The bedroom had been dusted, and it could be explored later, if necessary. The first thing was to find the poem. Barnes turned back to the hallway. He stepped past the bathroom toward where the girl was sitting and shined his light into her bedroom. For a surreal moment he saw the shared bedroom of his youth—Bruce Lee posters on the walls, stacks of comics piled high in the corners, and a Nintendo connected to the old TV Mom and Dad had let the boys keep. Sometimes you had to blow into the Nintendo cartridge to make the game work. Barnes had the technique down—he’d put it into the slot and press it down just so. Ricky would close his eyes and clasp his hands together like a prayer, squinting hard over the spring and click of the clean connection. Barnes would tap the “Reset” button, smirk, and sock Ricky’s shoulder. “Ready for an ass-kicking?”

  Barnes blinked and the room was once again Kerri Wilson’s. It was a testament to Justin Bieber as well as the difference between young girls and boys; here everything was neatly in its place, whereas the Barnes brothers’ bedroom had looked like a resale shop had barfed in it.

  Barnes didn’t enter the room. He squatted next to the girl’s body in the hallway and tilted his head to match her angle. He lined up his flashlight beam to see what she might have been looking at. It struck him that he would soon be doing that very thing—seeing, through Kerri Wilson, the final moments of her life, feeling her pain, knowing her terror. A rattle came up from his chest and into his head. It nearly unmanned him, but he bit it back and refocused.

  There.

  Just beyond the girl’s feet, a tuft of carpet was sticking out from beneath the lacquered brown trim. The molding in that spot had been disturbed.

  “Found it!”

  3

  You cleaned the toilets

  And mopped the floors,

  You washed the walls

  And made everything shine;

  With a broom you danced

  And watched the girls,

  Now you lay flat

  Upon you, worms dine;

  With a rag in your hand

  To dust seven calaveras.

  The lights were back on at 1124 Kensington Street. Kerri Wilson’s body had been bagged and taken away—the pickax mercifully removed from her chest—and the carpet and corrugated padding had been peeled back. The poem was on the plywood floorboards beneath, the words written in Calavera’s now-familiar handwriting style in black Magic Marker. The marker’s chemical scent had been trapped under the padding. The blood that had seeped through to the plywood came up just short of the poem’s last line.

  “Shit barely even rhymes,” Flaherty said. He was back in the house, standing over the poem, thumbs returned to his belt loops, teeth gnashing away at his gum.

  “Didn’t know you could read, Flaherty,” Franklin said. He was down on one knee, dusting the area around the poem for prints.

  “Bite me.”

  “It’s a calavera,” Barnes said.

  “A calavera?” Flaherty said. “I thought Calavera was our guy?”

  Both detectives looked up at Flaherty. Franklin’s massive body was almost too big to fit in the hallway. As it was, Flaherty was standing half in the bathroom just to give the detective room. The unforgiving fluorescent light above the officer’s head gave him an alien glow. “Come on, Flaherty,” Franklin said. “Micks don’t celebrate the Day of the Dead?”

  Barnes’s eyes went back to the poem. “It’s an imaginary obituary,” he said absently. “Popular in the late nineteenth century in Mexico. Around the Day of the Dead, people would post them in the local papers as satire.”

  “That’s sarcasm to you, shithead,” Franklin said.

  “Calavera is the Spanish word for ‘skull,’” Barnes went on. “It can mean an actual skull, a sugar skull used in Day of the Dead celebrations, a sugar-skull mask, or one of these poems. And, of course, it also refers to our guy.”

  “Gee, Teach,” Flaherty said. “Sorry I asked.”

  Barnes turned to Franklin. “Wilson was a janitor?”

  “Worked at the same school his daughter attended.”

  “What do you think of this?” Barnes said. He showed his partner the bagged cedar leaf.

  “What’s that?”

  “Cedar leaf. Found it on the patio. No cedars back there.”

  Franklin shrugged. “Cedar’s a pretty common tree.”

  “What about ‘Too late’? Think he’s mocking us?”

  “Doesn’t seem like him. No prints on the magnets. Could be coincidental.”

  Barnes nodded. He held out his cell phone above the poem, snapped a picture, and stood up. “Gimme a few hours.”

  “You got it.”

  Barnes headed down the hallway.

  Flaherty said, “Gonna get hooked into the machine, eh, Barnes?” He slapped the inside of his elbow joint like a heroin junkie preparing for a hit.

  Barnes turned on Flaherty. He gripped the officer’s throat and slammed him against the wall.

  “I hate this asshole.” A delivery driver’s voice.

  Flaherty’s eyes went wide, his cheeks crimson. The officer’s voice was froggy when he said, “Do something.”

  Barnes gripped tighter, felt Flaherty’s Adam’s apple struggling up and down against his palm. Small red veins appeared at the corners of the officer’s eyes.

  Franklin’s hand came to Barnes’s forearm. “Let him go.”

  Barnes squeezed harder. He could feel the tendons in Flaherty’s throat. He imagined the snapping noise they might make.

  “John,” Franklin said, “let him go.”

  “Do it.” An attorney’s voice. “I’ll make self-defense stick.”

  “Shhh.”

  Barnes released Flaherty’s throat. Flaherty worked his head and neck around in a circle as he tugged at his collar. His face was splotchy red and white. His voice was st
ill rough when he said, “Pussy.”

  Barnes left the house. For a moment he stood on the porch, his heart hammering.

  He passed beneath the crime scene tape and was on the way to his car when Jeremiah Holston, reporter for the Motown Flame, stepped out from behind a hedge. He was disheveled and overweight, wearing a Detroit Tigers hat sporting the Old English–style D. His face was covered in stubble. He smelled like fast food.

  “Stay away from me, Holston.”

  “Hold on,” Holston said. He reached out and gripped Barnes by the elbow.

  Barnes stopped, looked down at the hand.

  Holston removed his hand, showed his palm. “It’s him again, right? People deserve to know.”

  Barnes kept walking. “They deserve to hear about it from a reputable source, not a paper that covers Bat Boy and Michael Jackson sightings.”

  “People love Bat Boy,” Holston said.

  Barnes stopped, rubbed both hands over his face. As much as he disliked Holston’s newspaper, he believed in freedom of the press and would argue against anyone who would vote for censorship. John F. Kennedy’s voice, complete with its New England accent and stilted cadence, sounded off in his ears. “The very word secrecy is repugnant in a free and open society.” The voice had come from a speech they’d played on a tape recorder in his high school mass-media class. It was one of the few things to which he’d actually paid attention. “Yeah, it’s him again, Holston. Print what you want.” He turned to leave.

  “People are still questioning,” Holston said.

  “Questioning what?”

  “The morality of the machine.”

  Barnes stopped at his car, a hand on the driver-side door handle. “You’ve got something to say? Say it.”

  “What about the rights of the dead? More importantly, what about the effect of the machine on those who use it?”

  Barnes spread his arms out wide and smiled. “I’m as right as rain.”

  “They say it works by stimulating the hippocampus,” Holston said, “by mixing sensory information from the victim with that of the host.”