Valknut: The Binding (22 page)

“Dratted thing,” the girl shrieked. She tore
at the yarn, unraveling a row of her knitting. The old lady smacked
her hand and glared at her.

“Stop that, Skuldi! You know what happens
when you don’t finish. Now, tell us—what’s going to happen to young
One-Eye?”

“Won’t.” The girl crossed her arms and stuck
her lip out.

“Hush, you two.” The frizzy-haired woman
leaned so far over the rail that her necklace dangled in the
firelight. Its crystal beads shone like fireflies on a leash.
“Something’s happening.”

The flames had reached the roof of the
church. Sirens wailed and the bucket line parted to let the town’s
only fire truck ease closer to the blaze. Men piled off the truck
and began running out hoses and ladders. Amidst the chaos, One-Eye
struggled with a small boy.

“Verdandi, my old eyes don’t see so far
ahead. Who is that boy?”

“He isn’t important,” said Verdandi. “Just
wait.”

The boy kicked One-Eye in the leg. One-Eye
dropped his spear, which clattered on the cobblestones and rolled
away.

Urdie gasped. “That’s no way to treat
Gungnir! What’s One-Eye thinking?”

Water streamed onto the burning roof as the
firemen fought to keep the flames from leaping to nearby buildings.
Two firemen climbed a ladder to reach the broken window with a
hose.

“Oh, they’re very brave,” said Urdie. “But
surely there’s no one alive—oh!”

Just as the first fireman reached the window,
a falcon exploded out of the church. It wheeled high in the air,
smoke and shadow streaming from its wings. Firelight turned its
speckled white breast orange. Its head darted, its overlarge eyes
searched the teeming street. With a cry, it dove straight at
One-Eye’s back. One-Eye turned, his one blue eye aglow. He threw up
an arm to shield his face, but the falcon swerved and skimmed the
cobblestone.

“No!” One-Eye dropped the boy and charged
after the bird, but he was too late. The falcon snagged the fallen
spear in outstretched talons and flew into the air.

One-Eye raised both arms. “Huginn!
Muninn!”

A pair of ravens exploded out of the trees
and circled One-Eye’s head. “Follow. He’s taken Gungnir.”

The little girl giggled, her knitting
forgotten for the moment. “They’ll follow, but they won’t catch
him!”

Urdie held her hat firmly to her head and
stared upward at the black sky where the birds had disappeared.
“Oh, dear. This is very bad.”

Verdandi straightened her glasses and
gathered her shawl tight around her shoulders. “Very bad,
indeed.”

***

Tall clouds gathered to the west, promising a
storm. Briggs stopped walking for a moment to judge their speed.
Rain would come sooner rather than later.

Golden-pink bars of sunlight knifed through
the clouds over the train yard, lending a red-gold cast to the
control tower’s dirty walls. Yellow tape marked off the area
surrounding a dumpster at the foot of the tower. A pair of
investigators worked methodically over the ground inside the tape.
They seemed to move slowly and carefully, but Briggs knew they were
rushing to collect evidence before the rain washed it away. A man
stood on a ladder that leaned against the dumpster, holding a
camera and an evidence bag. By the sour expression on his face,
Briggs guessed that the air he breathed was none too fresh.

Briggs flashed his badge at the uniform
stationed at the crime scene’s perimeter. “I’d like a look at the
body, if it hasn’t been removed.”

The officer nodded and jerked his head toward
the dumpster. “Go ahead—she’s in there, all right. Some damn
hooker. I brought her in for solicitation just last week.” He
sneered and rolled his eyes. “Called herself Loralee.”

Briggs gave him a sharp look. “Got what she
deserved, eh?”

The officer blinked, looking chagrinned. “No,
I didn’t say that. I just—”

“Right. Just tell me where I can walk.”

Flustered, the officer looked like he wanted
to say something more. Then he shrugged. “Straight to the ladder.
They’re almost done with the grounds.”

The stench hit Briggs as he strode toward the
dumpster and his lip curled reflexively. How long had the body been
in there? But there was something more to the smell than decay.
Something familiar...

A woman popped up from inside the dumpster as
Briggs got to the ladder. A mask, eye shield, and baseball cap
obscured her features, but the lock of blond hair straggling from
under the cap suggested that Briggs was looking at Marybeth Simms
from the Hennepin County Medical Examiner’s Office. He had worked
maybe a half dozen cases with her and had been impressed by her
intuition. He had also been impressed with her thick, blond hair
and easy-going manner and had taken her out to dinner more than
once.

“Here’s the last of it.” She handed the man
on the ladder a baggie and brushed her gloved hands together. “How
about going on a White Castle run while I pack her up? I’m
starved.”

It was Marybeth, all right. Same cheerful
voice, recognizable even through the mask, and same penchant for
greasy burgers. She spotted Briggs and waved. “Grab some gloves and
booties and climb in here. You gotta see this.”

She disappeared into the dumpster before
Briggs could answer. He smiled ruefully. “Hi, Marybeth.”

The man on the ladder tossed him a pair of
booties and left for his burger run so fast that Briggs didn’t have
time to say thanks. Briggs donned the booties and pulled a pair of
latex gloves from his grip. As an afterthought, he added a paper
filter mask, hoping it would block the smell.

The dumpster was mostly empty. Good—less
garbage to wade through. Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad. He climbed
the ladder and lowered himself inside. The putrid odor pierced
through the mask before his feet hit the floor.

“Christ!”

He threw a hand against the wall and waited
for his lunch to decide whether to stay or go. Slowly, his sense of
smell dulled and his lunch decided to stay where it was. Eyes
watering, he stepped between a spilled box of packing peanuts and a
fly-covered, half-eaten pizza to reach the body. Marybeth squatted
near the head, speaking in a low, rapid voice into a recorder.
Briggs crouched near the feet.

From the smell, he expected the corpse to be
rotted and covered with flies. He was wrong. The woman’s body lay
sprawled across a burst trash bag. She was naked, so he could
easily see that her skin was still smooth and intact. No bloating
had occurred. The blood on her neck, the only open wound, was still
wet and red.

“Where the hell is that stench coming from?”
The only organic matter he could see besides the body was the
fly-covered pizza.

“I don’t know,” said Marybeth, her voice
muffled by her mask. “But that’s not the only weird thing. Look at
that wound!”

Marybeth made room so Briggs could get a
closer look at the woman’s neck. Her throat was flat and misshapen.
Puzzled, he leaned closer. It took him a moment to understand what
he was seeing. He sat back with a grunt.

“It looks like it’s been crushed. What did
it?”

“Someone’s hand,” Marybeth said
matter-of-factly.

“Come on, be serious.”

“I am. Look.” She traced a dark indentation
on the left side of the neck. “And see? Four more bruises on the
right side. Exactly where a thumb and four fingers might wrap to
squeeze a victim’s throat.”

Briggs checked again. She was right. And the
blood had come from punctures at the ends of the bruises, where the
attacker’s fingers might have dug into the flesh. “You’re saying
some guy did that with one hand?”

That would certainly shorten the list of
possible suspects.

“Yeah, and not only that—look.” She used a
pencil to lift long, black hair away from the victim’s face. The
discolored skin, hemorrhages around the eyes, and protruding tongue
were typical signs of strangling, but her head lay at an odd
angle.

“Looks like her neck is broken,” he said.
“Might’ve happened when she was dropped into the dumpster.”

“Don’t I wish. I’ll have to verify, but I see
no sign of damage to her head. It looks to me like she landed on
her ass on that trash bag. I suppose someone might have twisted her
neck after she was dead, but I don’t think so.”

She pushed the hair clear of the body’s neck
and pointed at the spine. “There are more bruises here. It looks
like he crushed her throat, then adjusted his grip to encompass her
spine. Big hands.”

She sat back and drummed her pencil on her
thigh. Her eyes blinked rapidly behind her eye shield. “I’ll be
able to say more after the autopsy, of course, but my first guess
is that we have a psycho superman on the loose.”

Just what he needed. “Could the guy have been
hopped up on PCP or something?”

“Maybe. Even Superman needs a little help,
once in a while.” A note of clinical admiration entered her voice.
“I can’t wait to see the samples from under her nails. Maybe we’ll
find out that he’s some sort of genetic weirdo.”

“She scratched him? Then maybe some of this
blood is his.”

He bent close to her hand to check her
fingers for blood. Four long, manicured nails glinted back at him
in a familiar shade of metallic gold. The fifth nail was
missing.

“It couldn’t be,” he whispered. His gaze
traveled to the victim’s face. He hadn’t looked that closely at her
features before. Now he looked past the death contortions and
swore.

He knew that face.

He closed his eyes and saw her as she was in
his dream. Blond at first, then dark haired, singing “Ave Maria.”
And then she started screaming...

“Hey, Briggs! Wake up!”

How could a girl he’d never seen before show
up in a dream and then end up dead in a dumpster an hour later?

Marybeth shook his arm. “What’s wrong? Did
you know her?”

“No.” Briggs blinked stupidly. What else
could he say? “Uh, no. Not really.”

“Okay. Then try to stay focused.” She pointed
at the victim’s neck. “You notice anything weird about those
wounds?”

He took a shallow breath, almost grateful
that the stench gave him something else to think about. “What, you
mean besides the fact that they were made one-handed by someone
with more hand-strength than an orangutan?”

“No need to get sarcastic,” she said, folding
her arms.

“Sorry, it’s been a very long, very strange
day. What am I missing?”

“No flies.”

“Huh?”

“There are flies buzzing all around us.” A
smug note entered her voice. The girl liked to show off. “They’re
coating that pizza over there like a double order of olives. Look,
one just landed on my eye shield. Why aren’t flies going after that
nice, fresh blood on her neck?”

“Good question.” And a familiar one. He had
seen something like this before. But where?

And then it hit him. Briggs had asked the
same question months ago, in a boxcar, the day he had met Jungle
Jim Tuttle. The stench had been awful. The boxcar was hot, but the
body had not degraded enough to explain the smell. And there were
no flies on the body, though they swarmed the blood pooling on the
floor.

“Oh, shit. I gotta go.”

“What’s wrong?”

“I’ve got a hunch.”

This murder was connected with the Hobo
Spider. He couldn’t prove it, but he knew it as surely as if he had
witnessed the killings, himself. He was also certain that James
Tuttle did not have the size or strength to murder Loralee. That
made him a witness—their one and only. Not an enviable
position.

“Well, don’t keep it to yourself!” Marybeth
said. “What is it?”

“I’ll tell you later. But right now, I’ve got
to find someone before he becomes the next victim.”

Chapter 13

Lennie squirmed on the hard bench seat,
impatient for the so-called poetry reading to end. She didn’t see
why Jungle Jim had been so excited about it. The performers were
just that—performers. And not very good ones. None of them had
recited poetry. Jungle Jim hadn’t even shown up.

She and Junkyard sat front and center on
rickety bleachers that might have been dragged out of a high school
gym. It had gotten cold once the sun had set. A gust blew Lennie’s
hair into her face. She shivered, grateful for the jacket Junkyard
had bought her, though she felt a bit conspicuous in it. It was a
black, second-hand letter jacket with leather sleeves and a giant,
gold K on the chest. Between that and the bleachers, Lennie was
having flashbacks to night football games in high school. Come to
think of it, she’d rather watch football than the current
performer, who told Internet jokes while he juggled.

She leaned closer to Junkyard. “I thought
there was supposed to be poetry. And where are all the hobos?”

“Poetry?” He looked puzzled, and then seemed
to understand. “Oh, that’s later tonight. This is just part of the
festival. I thought you might like it.”

“I see,” she said, trying not to show her
irritation. She’d rather be somewhere warm, but she didn’t want to
offend him. “It’s, um, it’s great. Thanks.”

“No problem.”

The performer finished and bowed to anemic
applause. Junkyard went back to watching the stage as if he were
eager for the next act, but a hint of a smirk twitched the corners
of his mouth. Lennie eyed him with suspicion. “This wouldn’t be
revenge for the pinball game, would it?”

“What? No.” He looked at her with wide-eyed
and completely fake shock. “No, of course not. Well, maybe. But it
has the side benefit of being around a lot of people. Seems like a
good idea after our run-in with the Ragman.”

A drop of rain hit Lennie’s face and a gust
of wind tore some hair loose from her ponytail. “Okay, you’ve had
your fun. Surely there are places inside with a lot of
people. I think this metal bench has siphoned all the heat out of
my butt.”