I hated it when she was nice to me, because it seemed like she only did it in emergencies. It was like an open acknowledgement that something was wrong; I preferred to let things fester in silence.
I chewed my food slowly, wondering what Mom and Margaret would do if they knew the truth—that I had not been hiding because of fear or emotional turmoil, but because I was fascinated by the possibilities of a supernatural killer. I'd spent the night piecing together bits of the puzzle and the criminal profile, and I was delighted by how well it all worked. The killer was stealing body parts to replace ones that no longer worked—Crowley had bad lungs, so he got new ones, and it made sense that he'd killed the other victims for the same reason.
His leg used to be so painful, but yesterday he had walked without limping or straining—he had replaced his bad leg with the one he stole from Rask. The black sludge found by each victim came from the old, degenerated parts he discarded. The victims were old, large men because Crowley was an old, large man, and needed body parts that fit him. The dual nature of the violent killings and the methodical aftermath came from Crowley's own dual nature—a demon in a man's body.
Or, more correctly, a demon in a body made up of other men. The forty-year-old story Ted Rask had found in Arizona was probably the same thing—probably the same demon. Were there more demons like him? Had Crowley been in Arizona forty years ago? Rask, despite being a showboating jerk, was on to something, and he died because of it.
But throughout my thinking, I kept going back to the killing itself, and the blood, and the sounds, and the screams of a dying man. I knew, academically, that it should bother me more—that I should be throwing up, or crying, or blocking the memories out. Instead I simply ate a bowl of cereal, and thought about what to do next. I could send the police to his house, but what evidence would they find? The last death had been a drifter that no one would even remember, let alone miss, mid Crowley had sunk the body and all the evidence into the lake; he was getting smarter. Would they dredge a lake on an anonymous tip? Would they search a respected man's house on the word of a fifteen-year-old? I couldn't imagine that they would. If I wanted the police to believe me, I had to get them there at the scene of a murder—they had to catch him demonhanded. But how?
"John, can you help me with this stuffing?" Mom was standing by the table chopping celery, watching the parade in the other room.
"Sure," I said, and got up. She handed me the knife and a couple of onions from the fridge. The knife was almost identical to the one the drifter had tried to kill Crowley with. I hefted it a bit, then chopped down through layers of onion.
"Time for the juice," she said, and pulled the turkey out of the oven. She picked up a large syringe, poked it into the turkey, and squeezed the plunger. "I saw this on TV yesterday," she said. "It's chicken broth, salt, basil, and rosemary. It's supposed to be really good." By force of habit she'd poked in the syringe just above the turkey's collarbone, right where she would have inserted a pump tube into a corpse. I watched her inject the broth and imagined it swirling through the turkey, embalming it with salt and seasonings, filling it with an artifical perfection while a thick stream of blood and horror dripped out the bottom and fled underground. I peeled off the skin of the second onion, dry and papery, and chopped the bulb in half.
Mom covered the turkey and put it back into the oven.
"Don't we need to put the stuffing in?" I asked.
"You don't actually cook stuffing inside the turkey," she said, rooting through the cupboard. "That's a case of food poisoning waiting to happen." She pulled out a small glass bottle with a tiny pool of brown at the bottom. "Oh no, we're practically out. John, honey?"
There was that word again. "Yeah."
"Can you run over to the Watsons and borrow some vanilla? Peg's sure to have some; at least someone on this street has her head on straight."
That was Brooke's house. I hadn't allowed myself to think about her since Dr. Neblin had asked me about her—I could feel myself fixating on her, thinking about her too much, so my rules stepped in to stop me. I wanted to say no, but I didn't want to have to explain why. "Sure."
"Take a coat, it snowed again."
I pulled on my jacket and went down the stairs to the mortuary. It was dark and silent; I loved it like this. I'd have to come back later, if I could do it without making Mom suspicious.