He lay back, muggy in the bed. The a/c droned, yet his skin was clammy, stale with sweat. Something nagged at his brain, the notion that something bad had happened, a subconscious terror that cruelly refused to reveal itself, like a hideous face behind a dark veil. Had he dreamed?

  He fought to remember, gritting his teeth. Then, in visual wafts, like smoke, it replayed in his mind, image by grueling image.

  He’d dreamed about Marlene.

  Oh, God… It was true. How could he feel more ashamed? And the dream itself?

  Carlton felt ill.

  If dreams could have a smell, this dream stank. It made him mentally recoil, just as someone would physically recoil after stepping in wormy roadkill on a hundred-degree day. In the dream, he hadn’t been making love to Marlene, he’d been fucking her. Using her body as a receptacle for pleasure, not a person, a thing to placate his sex drive. He also knew that he didn’t care about Marlene at all in the dream—it didn’t matter that he knew her, it didn’t matter that they were friends. Carlton discarded all that; in fact, he even hated her in the dream, hated her for being more than simply a luscious physical body with a hole for his needs. The soulless lust and hatred made him think of serial killers who murder the women they raped after they’d had their orgasm. Marlene’s hands were at his throat as he thrust into her, and his were on her throat. They were strangling each other as they bucked, and when Carlton came and looked down at her—expecting her to be dead—she grinned up at him in lust as perverse as his own. “Do it again,” she panted, “do it again. Do it real hard this time, do it to me till I pass out. You can even kill me if you want—I don’t give a shit. Just do it to me again… “ It was awful, it was so wrong, and in the dream part of his sentience knew this—and was repulsed—but it didn’t matter. The sexual Mr. Hyde in him had been tapped and was unloading full force—on her. They did it again, and again, and again, just like that, spending themselves and bringing each other to near-death at the brink of each demented climax.

  Carlton chuckled, animal-like, after finishing. She’d been on top for the last one, and he simply shoved her off where she sidled over on the dirt-flecked floor, his handprints throbbing on her throat. Had he actually killed her this time?

  He didn’t care. He’d had his fun.

  An even more forbidden idea began to occur to him as she lay there unmoving, but then her puffed eyes opened to slits, and she frowned.

  “You are one dull lay, Carlton, Jesus Christ,” she griped, and then she was up in a huff, beads of sweat flying off her flushed skin. Stomping away, putting her postal uniform back on, grabbing her route gear. Carlton particularly noticed her carrier bag, and…

  What appeared to be the wire-stock of a small machine-pistol sticking out of it.

  “Now I’m gonna go have some real fun, you asshole,” she said, and left.

  The dream’s fringes were throbbing, like the chokemarks on her throat, pinkish-blue around the edges. That’s when Carlton noticed where the demented foray had taken place: in the basement of the newly reopened West Branch.

  Awake now, head thumping as if hung over, he shivered at the nightmare and all its disgust. How could his mind create such a scenario? Marlene was a friend, a co-worker, and I just dreamed about having sex with her. Hardcore sex, like nothing I’ve ever had or would ever want to have. She’d been married, had a son. She’d been a good person. Carlton had never felt so ashamed in his life. The shame tripled when he made this next observation: he was outrageously aroused.

  What the hell is wrong with me?

  A final image henpecked him. It was something from the nightmare, but the nightmare had changed. It had changed places. The humid night beat down on him. He was standing outside and could hear crickets. Mosquitoes buzzed around his head, some landing on his skin to taste his sweat and drink his blood. The moon shone behind him and in its light, when he looked down, he realized where he was.

  A cemetery.

  But not any cemetery. Winter-Damon Cemetery.

  He realized what he was looking at.

  Marlene’s gravestone.

  For a moment, just a single moment, he brought his hand to his erection in the most ultimate shame of all. But he stopped at the effort: his hand came away…granulated. Gritty.

  He jerked himself to one side, hugging the pillow, as if to turn away from all that disgust that his brain had produced. But…

  The pillow felt gritty, too.

  The awful taste in his mouth raged, and when he licked his lips…

  They felt gritty.

  Gritty as if with flecks of soil.

  (II)

  What a flippin’ week, huh, Bobby? Bobby asked himself in thought. He had a way of having conversations with himself, so many years of first shift. Who’s on the mound for the Yanks tonight? Hmm, Bobby, I don’t really know but I’d guess it’s either Wells or Mussina. Oh, yeah, I guess you’re right ’cos Clemens pitched last night, didn’t he? He sure did, Bobby, and he LOST. To BALTIMORE! Like that. He was a little screwy.

  Bobby Weaver wasn’t a carrier or anything, he was the maintenance supervisor for West Branch, more title than function, though. Pretty funny, huh, Bobby? You ain’t kidding, it’s funny. Yeah, like who the flyin’ flip do we supervise when we’re the only maintenance employee in the flippin’ building!

  You got that right, Bobby.

  Bobby was typically the first employee in the building. Arrival time? 4:30 a.m. Bobby didn’t mind. He made sure all the lights worked, prepped the sorting machines, cycled the circuits, that sort of thing. Not a hard job, but essential in its own way. The first drop-offs usually started coming in around five o’clock, so he had to get ready for that, too.

  No biggie, right, Bobby? Naw, it’s a walk in the park.

  He whistled, going down his daily checklist. This building’s unfamiliar look comforted him; until very recently he’d worked at the Main Branch, and nobody would ever forget what had happened there. Yeah, can ya believe that shit, Bobby? Flippin’ broad MACHINE-GUNS the Main Branch! Yeah, but AFTER offing her husband and kid! No, neither of them could believe that shit.

  Bobby didn’t know her, really, he’d just seen her coming in each morning to do her pre-sort. Never saw her when she got off because his shift’d be over by then. Seemed nice enough, though, huh, Bobby? Sure, and a looker, too. Nice little apple-dumpling cart up front and not a bad bucket in back, either. Cut that shit out, Bobby! The broad’s DEAD and you’re rapping about her bod for chissakes! Yeah, sorry…

  Proof that it was a nutty world, though. A sure-fire, whacked-out flippin’ world.

  Bobby sighed. The last item on his checklist was always the kick in the tail. Come on, Bobby. Let’s go reload ALL the flippin’ stamp machines out front. Aw, Christ, I HATE doing that. There’s TEN machines out there!

  Tell me about it, Bobby.

  Three-cent, thirty-seven-cent, Priority, Air, dollar stamps, ten-packs, twenty-packs, and hundred-stamp first-class rolls—all these slots had to be filled, the change removed, the changers topped off. Pretty tedious.

  But there was nothing tedious about the rest of the day when Bobby waltzed into the vending lobby, keys in one hand, sack of packed stamps in the other, whistling Dixie.

  He walked around the counters, passed the first rank of P.O. boxes, then stopped cold.

  Dropped his keys.

  Dropped the stamps.

  Then hit the floor when all the blood drained out of his head from the vision of horror that stared right back into his face.

  A woman was standing there in the corner of the vending cove, her arms spread out as if in wait for Bobby. She was naked and very pale. Hair that was a merge of blond and brunette straggled to her shoulders. Before Bobby lost consciousness, he had a few moments of reason, thinking for sure that some nutty homeless woman must’ve gotten into the post office, or some drug addict or something like that. What else could explain this woman being here, and in this state? Naked, ragged, pale?

  But then Bobby recognized the woman…

  It was Marlene Troy, who’d been killed by police a few days ago, and who’d just been buried.

  Bullet holes full of clotted blood pocked her torso. Dirt clods hung in her hair, while more grave dirt peppered her skin. The woman was dead but she was standing there on her own. Her eyes were open, mortician’s glue unseated, their whites jaundiced by embalming fluid. Bobby knew it was impossible but for a split second it seemed as though she’d blinked.

  And her smile glimmered like newly honed cutlery.

  These were the details Bobby noticed in those first handful of seconds. Then he fainted and collapsed to the floor. What he hadn’t noticed, though, was the bizarre design scrawled on the floor at Marlene’s feet: something that looked like a bell.

  After Bobby fainted, Marlene Troy’s arms fell limp at her sides, then the cadaver collapsed right on top of Bobby.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  * * *

  (I)

  Jane imagined what it must be like for some to, for instance, be standing on a street corner in broad daylight and suddenly witnessing a fatal car crash just yards away in the road. Instant death and calamity right before her eyes. That’s how she felt at that moment in her office. The initial shock was gone now, leaving something worse, something like a colossal mental hangover, her disbelief colliding with the horror of what someone—someone in this same town—had done.

  This…is…crazy… she thought.

  Steve Higgins, the police chief, sat grimly opposite of her, a notepad on her desk, leaning over, jotting things down.

  “This is absolutely disgusting. How could somebody do something like that? Digging up a dead woman and propping her body up in the lobby? What kind of a sick prank is that?”

  “It could be more than a sick prank, Ms. Ryan,” Steve said. “And it’s pretty clear that Marlene Troy was into some stuff that no one knew about—some pretty off-the-wall stuff.”

  “Stuff,” Jane repeated. She still couldn’t believe it. “You mean occult rituals, satanism, demonology. Stuff like that.”

  “That’s what it’s looking like, isn’t it? This isn’t like some punk egging a bunch of cars or knocking over garbage cans. Somebody exhumed a corpse, brought it here, and drew occult markings on the floor.”

  “And they did it here, they brought the corpse here, to my post office,” Jane added to the confusion. “First, the tragedy at the Main Branch, and now this, here. It’s crazy.”

  Steve nodded. “Calm down. At least we’ll be able to keep this one out of the papers. The evidence team got the body out of here before any residents showed up. It’s possible for the body to have been seen through the front window, but that early in the morning? If somebody had seen it—some guy walking his dog or out for a jog—then he would’ve called the police immediately. That didn’t happen, so it’s very important that all parties keep quiet about this.”

  “You sound like the mayor,” Jane said with some bitterness. “Worried about the beautiful town of Danelleton getting a bad reputation.”

  “I couldn’t care less about that, Ms. Ryan. It’s simply that the fewer people who know about this, the better. We don’t want to have to deal with the media; all that’ll do is reduce the effectiveness of our investigation.”

  When Bobby Weaver had regained consciousness in the vending cove, half out of his mind, he’d shoved Marlene’s body off and called the police. Steve and some subordinate officer arrived at once. The body was removed before any other postal employees had arrived. Steve had called Jane directly and now here she was, at 5:30 in the morning, just when the carriers and processing staff were coming in. When she’d arrived, Bobby was still being interviewed by a lieutenant, and Jane couldn’t help but overhear some of the claims being made.

  “What’s your explanation,” she asked, “about what Bobby was saying before he left? He said the corpse fell on him. He said that Marlene’s eyes were open, she was grinning at him. She was standing there holding her hands out, like she was still alive.”

  “She was in the ground for over twenty-four hours, Ms. Ryan. I guarantee you, she wasn’t alive by some fluke. She was killed by multiple gunshots—one of the bullets destroyed the left ventricle of her heart.”

  “But Bobby said she was standing there,” Jane countered. “On her own. Then she collapsed on him.”

  “Let’s not go off the deep end here. The medical examiner will get back to me later with a list of physiological prospects, but there are a lot of possible explanations right off the bat.”

  “Like what?”

  “Postmortem rigidity, rigor mortis, things like that. Things like temperature, humidity, length of time that’s passed since death, even ingredient concentrations of embalming fluid can determine the extent and duration of rigor mortis.”

  “You’re saying that the body was still stiff and somebody propped it in the corner of the cove and it just stood there like a storefront mannequin on its own? Eyes open? Arms out? Grinning?”

  “It’s possible. Then the rigor wore off and the body collapsed.”

  “It collapsed on top of Bobby?”

  “Why not? He’d already passed out from the trauma. He was already on the floor.”

  Jane frowned.

  “Then we have to consider the reliability of the witness in the first place. That’s quite a scare, isn’t it? Wouldn’t you be scared, wouldn’t you be terrified, if you walked in here by yourself one day, turned the corner, and saw a dead body propped up in the corner? Wouldn’t you be terrified?”

  “Of course, but—”

  “Traumas like that can do strange things to the human mind. Bobby was terrified. Bobby thought she was standing there with her arms out. Bobby thought her eyes were open and she was grinning. Some kind of trauma-based hallucination. Maybe the body had simply been left on the floor.”

  “Bobby said it was on top of him when he came to!”

  Steve pitched a brow. “Bobby probably just thought it was. He was stressed out to the max, he was close to a clinical state of shock. The mind plays tricks on people in situations like that.”

  Jane eased back in her office seat. “I don’t know. Maybe you’re right. I guess I’m still not over the shock myself. Marlene killing her family then going on a shooting spree. Now this.”

  “I know.” Steve seemed to be uncomfortable in his seat. “But let’s talk about something else right now, okay?”

  His tone and poise bothered her. “All right.”

  “For one thing, Marlene’s body was exhumed. And the county forensics people knew right away that it was done with a shovel. That’s hard work. That’s a lot of effort for someone to go through, so that’s how we know this isn’t just a prank. And look what happened after that: the body was then transported from Winter-Damon Cemetery to your post office. That’s a lot of risk.”

  “What are you getting at?”

  “The body wasn’t just dropped off out front, it was brought inside the building, supposedly before Bobby Weaver came on duty.”

  “Yes?”

  “There are no signs of a forced entry. We’ve checked top to bottom. So that can only mean one thing. The person had access to the building’s keys.”

  Something snapped in her mind. “I didn’t think of that…” Another snap, and some alarm. “No, no way. You don’t think it was Bobby Weaver? He’s harmless. He’s a little flighty sometimes, but I just can’t see him doing anything like this.”

  Silence for a moment, then: “Let me ask you something. Is it possible that Marlene may have belonged to some sort of religious cult?”

  The comment pissed Jane off. “I told you the other day. No. The idea is totally absurd. She was a mother, a resident in good standing, and a diligent, hard-working employee. She was probably the most normal, level-headed person I’ve ever worked with. A cult? What makes you ask that? The drawing of the bell you found at her house? It sounds to me like, if anything, she was the victim of some kind of cult. Maybe somebody abducted her, gave her some psychedelic drug that made her do those things. And as far as that design goes, do you even know that she was the one who drew it?”

  “Not yet, but we’re checking. The Danelleton Police Department is pretty small; we’re a municipal department, so we don’t have our own crime-scene units and evidence techs. We have to rely on county and state services for that, and it takes a while. But the county graphologists are examining the first sketch right now. And don’t forget, the same bell-shaped design was found here, too, this morning. Drawn on the floor in blood.”

  Jane couldn’t help a little sarcasm. “Well, I guess we know she didn’t draw that one, huh?”

  Steve smiled faintly but just for a moment. “Yes, we definitely know that. But there are a lot of things we still don’t know. For instance, who was the last person to have sex with her.”

  More sarcasm. “Well, I do know for fact that she was happily married, so—I don’t know—I’ll gamble here and say that her husband was the last person to do that.”

  “So it’s inconceivable to you that Marlene Troy was seeing other men?”

  “Yes. Very inconceivable.”

  “According to the county medical examiner, there were abundant traces of seminal fluid in her vaginal vault.”

  Jane pursed her lips as if she’d just sucked a lemon. Seminal fluid. Vaginal vault. “God, you really have a way with words, Chief Higgins.”

  “Sorry. What do you want me to say? But we know she had sex on the morning she murdered her family and killed everyone at the Main Branch. With two men.”

  Jane felt like a door had just been slammed in her face. Two men? “Are you sure about that?”

  “The evidence doesn’t lie,” Steve remarked. “There was semen in her, two different secreter types. Two different men. The M.E. says he’s sure she’d been with both men within hours of her death. Marlene’s husband was in the Naval Reserves; since 1990 all military personnel have DNA profiles put in their medical records. One of the seminal types matched her husband. All we know about the second semen traces is that they’re from a person with A-negative blood.”