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  “I still can’t believe anyone in this town bought that load of crap, especially after everything Walter Court did for Paskagankee. The idea that he single-handedly ripped a bunch of people apart with his bare hands is simply ludicrous. But the point is, sooner or later the public fascination with the murders will die down—I think we’re just about there—and when it does, the council will decide our living arrangements are unacceptable, and they’ll move to terminate you.”

  Mike sighed and placed his hand gently over Sharon’s arm. “I know you were close to Wally Court, and there’s no question his reputation took a beating in the official investigation, but what choice did the State Police have, really? Would anyone, anywhere have believed the truth—that the aggrieved spirit of a dead Abenaki mother had been reawakened and was wreaking havoc as vengeance for her baby’s murder more than three centuries ago? Hell, I was there, I saw the thing with my own eyes, fought with it, and sometimes I still have a hard time believing it.”

  “But, still—“

  “—And don’t forget,” Mike interrupted, “Chief Court is dead and gone, so he can’t defend himself. Add to that the fact he didn’t have any close living relatives to demand answers to all the unexplained questions, and the result is that he’s going to remain the scapegoat, no matter how either of us feels about it.”

  “Until Melissa Manheim’s book comes out, that is.”

  Mike snorted, half in amusement and half in frustration. “Okay, Manheim the Maneater knows exactly what happened in that cabin out in the woods, but my question remains the same—who’s going to believe it? Her book is going to be viewed as the hysterical ranting of an attention-grabbing reporter trying to make a name for herself—“

  “—which she is,” they said simultaneously, and laughed.

  “But that doesn’t change the truthfulness of her account,” Sharon pointed out.

  “Truth? The truth is whatever people want to believe,” Mike answered. “And most people aren’t going to buy the whole reanimated spirit angle that Manheim the Maneater is selling, whether she’s a star reporter for the Portland Journal or not. And whether it’s the truth or not.”

  A young waitress cleared her throat and the pair looked up at her in startled surprise. It was clear from the confused half-smile on the waitress’s face that she had heard at least some of their conversation and had no idea how to react to it. “Are you ready to order?” she asked hesitantly.

  Mike deferred to Sharon, who ordered a half-grapefruit with apple juice and coffee, and then Mike added, “A Lumberjack Special with a large black coffee for me, please.” The waitress wrote it all down on a small pad and walked away, clearly relieved to be hearing words that made sense again.

  “Anyway,” Mike continued, “my point—which I don’t believe I made before we got sidetracked with talk about Wally Court and Melissa Manheim—was that I don’t give a rat’s ass about the Town Council. I think you know me well enough by now to understand that. And as far as being a ‘low-time officer with little practical law enforcement experience,’ how the hell do you think you get experience? You work the job! I was a ‘low-time officer with little practical experience’ at one point, too, but I worked the job, day after day, and you know what happened? Eventually I gained the experience and wasn’t viewed as a rookie anymore.”

  He shot her an earnest look and she shook her head glumly. She appeared ready to say something then stopped and stared at the table as the waitress reappeared, her tray piled high. No one said a word as the young woman unloaded their meals and then walked away.

  Mike blew on his coffee, sending tendrils of steam dancing away on an invisible air current. “Don’t quit the force on me,” he continued. “You’re going to be a damned fine police officer some day; you’re already much better than you give yourself credit for. Plus, I need somebody to watch my back around here. It may not seem like it with all that’s happened since I took this job, but I’m still the new guy in town, and I have no real idea who’s going to back me up in this department—besides you, that is—and who will throw my ass to the wolves the first chance they get. Don’t quit,” he said again.

  “I’m not talking about quitting the force,” she replied quietly. “I’m passionate about law enforcement, I have been since my very first day at the FBI Academy, and I know some day I can be a good officer. I want to be a good officer. I want to be an officer like you,” she said simply. She looked everywhere but at Mike and he began to feel uneasy.

  “Then what are we talking about? I thought you were worried about the Town Council. If you’re not thinking about quitting the force, then . . .” Mike grew silent as the impact of what she wasn’t saying began to dawn on him. “You don’t mean . . .”

  Sharon nodded miserably. “Yes,” she whispered. “I think we should stop seeing each other. It’s the only solution that makes sense.” She raised her gaze from the plate on the table to look up at Mike. Her eyes were red-rimmed and moist.

  “Shari, we can work this out, there’s got to be another way.”

  “This town needs you, and it’s going to need you even more when Manheim’s damned book comes out and when filming begins on the movie being made out of the book. Once those things happen, every kook in the northeastern United States is going to trek to Paskagankee, Maine to see the place where the cursed spirit butchered a half-dozen people. We need someone in charge who understands what really went down and who has a good, strong head on his shoulders. That person is you.”

  “Shari, let’s slow down a little, okay? Why don’t we wait until the Town Council makes a move and then try to figure out the best way to respond?” He saw the pretty young officer shaking her head, her short black hair framing her face in the way he loved, and stopped.

  “No,” she insisted. “We can’t wait. If we wait for the Town Council to make the first move it will be too late. Once they fire you they’ll never reconsider. We have to head off that possibility now. Besides, the uncertainty is too painful. I can’t live this way, knowing that at any moment you could lose your job because of me.”

  Mike sat unmoving, his hand hanging in the air halfway to his coffee cup. Things had seemed almost normal this morning as they dressed for work. Sure, Sharon had been quiet, but he assumed she was simply suffering one of the lingering headaches that had plagued her off and on since her emergency brain surgery last fall.

  “Besides,” Sharon added, trying to smile but failing, wiping away a tear with the back of her hand. “I’ll still get to see you at work, right? We’ll still see each other pretty much every day. We’ll still have that.” A sob wrenched her tiny frame and she stood, jostling the table in her haste and sloshing her juice into her grapefruit. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I have to go.” She grabbed her hat and rushed out of the diner.

  Mike watched her leave, stunned by the suddenness of this development, and then pushed his plate away, no longer hungry. Outside he could hear the door to Sharon’s cruiser slam shut and then the rumbling of the engine as she backed out of her space and exited the parking lot. The engine noise faded away and then Mike was alone.

  6

  The basement was dank and forbidding, even under normal circumstances, although it seemed more terrifying than usual now, Max thought. But maybe that was just because of what was about to happen here.

  Two portable work lamps had been set up on sturdy metal tripod legs to augment the dim lighting, one mounted on the north side of the basement and one on the south. The lamps faced each other at an angle, splashing their light across roughly an eight foot gap, focusing the glare onto a heavy-duty tarp which had been spread out on the concrete floor.

  Max and Raven stood side by side next to the tarp, dressed in identical denim coveralls, their hair stuffed under baseball caps. Latex medical gloves adorned their hands and disposable paper booties covered their feet. It was probably overkill—pun definitely intended, Max thought with a smile—but he didn’t care. There was no point risking contact with dead h
uman tissue and bodily fluids when a few simple precautions could more or less eliminate the possibility.

  “Ready?” he asked, and Raven nodded. Together they walked to the corner of the basement where an industrial grade floor freezer had been set up against the east wall. The freezer was constructed of shiny stainless steel and its interior measured more than six feet in length and two-and-a-half feet in width, roughly the size of a casket, making it perfect for their needs. It had set him back nearly twenty-five hundred bucks. He considered the price a bargain.

  Max raised the lid and gazed down at Earl Manning, now almost five days dead, his body a solid block at the bottom of the freezer. The corpse was naked from the waist up. Removing the plastic bag from their victim’s head had been messy and difficult; Max had pulled the sturdy cord so tight during their brief but deadly struggle that it had disappeared into the delicate tissue, leaving a narrow furrow running under the victim’s jawline. It resembled a ghastly necklace.

  Manning’s lifeless eyes stared fixedly at the ceiling. The expression of fear, helplessness and confusion frozen onto his face made it seem as though the corpse was accusing them of his murder. Perfectly understandable, under the circumstances, Max thought. Not that it will do him any good. He’s still dead. For now.

  Max looped an arm around Raven’s waist and pulled her into him. He could feel her body trembling like a tiny bird’s as she stared at the dead man. “Let’s do this,” he said, and walked to the north side of the freezer. Together they reached to the bottom. Max hooked one large hand under each of Manning’s armpits, feeling his fingers immediately begin to stiffen from the intense cold despite being encased in the gloves. Raven placed her own, more delicate hands under the dead man’s ankles.

  Max counted to three and they hauled the body up and out of the freezer. It rose with surprising ease, with their victim’s weight distributed relatively evenly along his nearly six foot frame. It was similar to lifting a heavy wooden plank. They began walking the corpse slowly across the basement floor.

  They worked in silence, the only sound an occasional grunt from Raven as she struggled to balance the dead man’s lower half. When they reached the tarp, they bent and set the cadaver on its back in the middle, then stopped back to catch their breath. Manning had been a perfect fit inside the industrial freezer, filling it lengthwise, his shoulders clearing the side walls with a couple of inches to spare, almost as if he had been measured for it.

  Now, however, the body looked small and lost, positioned in the middle of the mostly empty basement atop the oversized tarp. Its empty eyes stared steadfastly upward as if beseeching God—or anyone else who might be paying attention—to explain what was going on here. If God had an answer, though, he kept it to himself.

  A thin layer of sparkling frost which had built up over Manning’s body now began to melt, giving him the appearance of a sweating athlete, which Max found amusing. Earl Manning’s days of heavy physical exertion—if there had ever been any—were long past, a fact demonstrated by his thin arms and generally scrawny build.

  Max picked up a Black and Decker cordless rechargeable drill, which he had placed in a line of tools on the floor next to the tarp. He squeezed the trigger, listening to the satisfying whine of the motor. The drill was fully charged and ready for use. He straddled the slab of frozen flesh, one knee on either side of the subject’s waist, and placed the tip of the drill bit in the center of the chest, just below the sternum.

  He squeezed the trigger again, exerting a steady downward pressure, and in a matter of seconds had punched a small hole through the mass of unyielding bone and tissue. Backing the drill out of the hole, Acton set it aside and reached for the next tool, a cordless rechargeable jigsaw, also fully powered and ready to use. Raven crouched on her knees next to Max, watching quietly, obsessive fascination glittering in her emerald-green eyes.

  Max smiled at her, then slid the jigsaw’s blade into the hole in Earl Manning’s chest and began cutting. He sliced the flesh in a straight line to the top of the rib cage, the saw’s motor screaming in protest, almost as if speaking for the dead man who could not. The frozen tissue gave way grudgingly but steadily, and after a few moments, Acton withdrew the saw, placing it on the floor next to the drill. He had begun to sweat from the exertion, despite being seated astride what was essentially a six foot long ice cube.

  After a moment to catch his breath, Max picked up a rib spreader, a frightening-looking contraption consisting of a pair of heavy metal bars placed side by side, each one widening out to a flat surface with a curved lip. The two bars were connected at their base by a third bar, adjustable along a corrugated track by a large thumbscrew. Max rested on his haunches atop the lifeless Earl Manning, holding the spreader in his right hand. He smiled again at Raven. “Having fun?” he asked. She smiled back tremulously and said nothing.

  Squinting in concentration, Max leaned down and placed the twin bars of the rib spreader into his crude incision, positioning each lip snugly against the dead man’s ribs. Then he began turning the oversized thumbscrew, literally spreading Manning’s ribs apart inside his frozen chest.

  It was hard work, made even more difficult by the body’s frozen state. Max began to breathe heavily and Raven asked, “Why did we have to freeze him? Wouldn’t this have gone much smoother with a normal body?”

  Max wiped the back of one gloved hand across his forehead. “Sure, it would have been easier. But I froze him for two reasons. Doing it this way is not as messy; there are no nasty bodily fluids running all over the place. It makes clean-up a lot easier. That is the secondary benefit.”

  Raven nodded. “What’s the primary benefit, then?”

  “The main reason we froze him, sweetheart, is because I want to delay the inevitable decomposition of our friend Mr. Manning for absolutely as long as possible. We are only going to have a finite amount of time to accomplish what needs to be done, and every minute counts. So by freezing him, we are left with a body in as close to its original state as possible.”

  “But won’t the freezing and thawing cause damage to his body?”

  “He’s dead, remember? Who cares?”

  “Of course I remember he’s dead, I just wondered if the tissue damage would cause problems for us down the line.”

  “I hope not, but who really knows? This is uncharted territory, my dear.” Max pursed his lips and resumed cranking, moving the metal arms steadily apart, spreading the corpse’s ribs wider and wider. A Crack! split the air and Raven jumped. Max chuckled and continued cranking, breaking more ribs, one after the other, until the opening in Manning’s chest was wide enough to serve his purpose.

  He reached inside and grasped his victim’s frozen heart firmly with his left hand. With his right he picked up a surgeon’s scalpel and began slicing muscle tissue, arteries and blood vessels. He started with the pulmonary veins and arteries, making clean incisions with a steady hand. Then he raised the scalpel, sliced through the thicker inferior vena cava, and finished with the superior vena cava at the top.

  The victim’s heart was now separated completely from his body. Max lifted it out of the frozen chest and held it up for Raven’s inspection. She showed no reaction. He shrugged and stood, holding the muscle carefully in both hands, and walked to a small table set up along the wall near the industrial freezer.

  A box adorned with beautiful, intricate animal carvings had been placed squarely in the center of the table. It was the prize Max had gone to so much trouble to procure three months ago in Arizona. Next to it was a similar box, although much plainer. Both lids were standing open. Inside the fancy box was the strange, perfectly smooth grey stone recently liberated from Don Running Bear, and inside the plain box was a sealable quart-sized plastic freezer bag.

  Max slid the heart inside the bag and zipped it tightly shut, then placed the bagged heart into the plain box. He closed both lids and secured the latches.

  “What do we do now?” Raven asked, glancing at the frozen body of Earl Manni
ng, prone atop the tarp, chest gaping open like it had suffered an explosion from within.

  “Now we wait.”

  7

  The geography of Paskagankee, Maine was deceiving. For a town with such a small population, the landscape encompassed a very wide area, featuring wild, rugged terrain, most of which was heavily wooded and virtually impassable even in the best of weather conditions. Such a large area to patrol made being the chief of the tiny police force a challenge, but was one of the many things Mike McMahon loved about the job.

  He had spent the first fifteen years of his career as a patrol officer in the city of Revere, Massachusetts, a blue-collar, hardscrabble city immediately north of Boston, dealing with issues on a daily basis which were often very different than those he faced now. He had left Revere for the chief’s job in Paskagankee after the tragic shooting of a little girl during a hostage standoff on a steamy July evening, determined to make a fresh start and expecting the job to be a relatively easy; a nice change of pace.

  What he inherited instead, almost immediately upon his arrival, was a horrific killing spree like nothing he had ever encountered, victims being murdered and their bodies savagely torn apart. Looking back on it now, the nightmare seemed somehow surreal, as if he had imagined the whole thing, but Mike recalled with perfect clarity how he and Sharon Dupont had nearly been killed themselves before being saved by Ken Dye, Professor of Native American Folklore at the nearby University of Maine. Dye had identified the murderer to be not a townsperson, not even a person at all, but rather the remorseless spirit of a Native American mother butchered three centuries earlier. The professor ended the bloodshed only at the cost of his own life, validating his life’s work as he sacrificed himself to the vengeful spirit.