Diehl, William - Show of Evil Read Free

although it
was impossible to find anyone who actually had heard it.
    Vail was half asleep, his coffee mug clutched between both hands to
keep it from spilling, when Stenner turned off the highway and headed
down the back tar road leading to the sprawling county landfill. His
head wobbled back and forth. Then he was aware of a kaleidoscope of
lights dancing on his eyelids.
    He opened them, sat up in his seat, and saw, against a small
mountain of refuse, flashing yellow, red, and blue reflections against
the dark, steamy night. A moment later Stenner rounded the mound and
the entire scene was suddenly spread out before them. There were a
dozen cars of various descriptions - ambulances, police cars, the
forensics van - all parked hard against the edge of the landfill.
Beyond them, like men on the moon, yellow-garbed cops and firemen
struggled over the steamy landscape, piercing the looming piles of
garbage with long poles. The acrid smell of the burning garbage, rotten
food, and wet paper permeated the air. For a moment it reminded Vail of
the last time he had gone home, to a place ironically called Rainbow
Flats, which had been savaged by polluters who repaid the community for
enduring them by poisoning the land, water, and air. First one came,
then another, attracted to the place like hyenas to carrion, until it
was a vast island of death surrounded by forests they had yet to
destroy. He had gone home to bury his grandmother thirteen years
earlier and never returned. A momentary flash of the Rainbow Flats
Industrial Park supplanted the scene before him. It streaked through
his mind and was gone. It had always angered him that they had had the
gall to call it a park.
    Three tall poles with yellow flags snapping in the harsh wind seemed
to establish the parameters of the search. They were bunched in a
cluster, a circle perhaps fifty yards in circumference. The sickening
sour-sweet odour of death intruded on the wind and occasionally
overpowered the smell of decay. Four men came over a ridge of the dump
hefting a green body bag among them.
    'That's three,' Stenner said.
    'Bodies?'
    'Where the flags are.' He nodded.
    'Jesus!'
    'First one was over there, in that cluster. A woman. They tumbled on
the second one when I called you.'
    A freezing blast of cold air swept the car as Stenner got out. Vail
turned up his collar and stepped out into the predawn. He jammed his
hands deep in his coat pockets and hunched his shoulders against the
wind. He could feel his lips chapping as his warm breath turned to
steam and blew back into his face.
    Two cops, an old-timer and a rookie, were standing guard beside the
yellow crime-scene ribbons as Vail and Stenner stepped over them. The
wind whipped Stenner's tie out and it flapped around his face for a
moment before he tucked it back under his jacket as they walked towards
the landfill.
    'Jesus, don't he have a coat? Gotta be ten degrees out,' said the
rookie.
    'He don't need a coat,' the older cop said. 'He ain't got any blood.
That's Stenner. Know what they used to call him when he was with the
PD? The Icicle.'
    Twenty feet away Stenner stopped and turned slowly as the cop said
it and stared at him for a full ten seconds, then turned back to the
crime scene.
    'See what I mean,' the older cop whispered. 'Nobody ever called him
that to his face.'
    'Must have ears in the back of his head.'
    'It's eyes.'
    'Huh?'
    'It's eyes. He's got eyes in the back of his head.'
    'He didn't see you, he heard you,' the young cop said.
    'Huh?'
    'You said -'
    'Jesus, Sanders, forget it. Just forget it. Coldest night of the
year, I'm in the city dump, and I draw a fuckin' moron for a partner.'
    'There's Shock,' Stenner said to Vail.
    He nodded towards a tall, beefy uniformed cop bundled in his blue
wool coat, standing at the edge of the fill. Capt. Shock Johnson was
ebony black and bald, with enormous, scarred hands that were cupped in
front of his mouth and shoulders like a Green Bay lineman. When he saw
Vail and