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Evan rang the doorbell twice, but no one answered. Ruby was back in the car, still within eyeshot. She hadn’t spoken a word since they’d left Angela Buford’s place.
He stood on the ledge of a concrete planter to peer through the barred transom above the front door. Then he knocked a few times.
He heard tiny footsteps inside. Then panting.
A dog wobbled into view from around the corner. Pink tongue dangling, coat like a porcupine, dark around the muzzle.
Something seemed off.
Evan knocked once more, drawing the dog forward another few steps.
Her muzzle looked slick, matted. A drop fell from it, hitting the floor in a patch of thrown sun.
Bloodred.
The dog ambled forward some more, leaving crimson paw prints in her wake.
Evan hopped down, checked on Ruby sitting quietly in the car.
The lock was robust enough to suit the neighborhood. It took Evan a good two minutes with a snake rake and a tension wrench before it yielded.
The smell. He knew the smell.
The dog approached him and yipped a few times, droplets spraying from her bloody muzzle. Then she darted off.
Evan followed the bloody paw prints in reverse, the main room drawing into view.
Duct tape adhered the pimp to a wooden table, his arms secured beneath, his feet bonded to the floor. A strip of saturated denim on his leg looked to have been lapped at roughly by the dog. The visible band of the man’s face was twisted at an unnatural angle, contorted in pain and swollen nearly beyond human recognition. Nose and lips enflamed, puffed-up flesh bulging the eyes outward, skin afire with a shiny rash that looked moist. A glass tube stuck up from the top nostril like a golf flagstick.
Not wanting to step in the tacky patch near the man’s feet, Evan kept his distance. He had seen plenty of crime scenes, but none like this. He wondered what the hell had gone down here.
A faint movement by the rouged lips drew Evan’s attention, the skin seeming to bubble outward. Then something broke the seal of the mouth, pushing through.
A red ant.
Nearly two inches long.
Even from halfway across the room, Evan could make out its jagged mandibles.
He backed out of the room, through the front door, and closed it in his wake.
As he turned, a piece of trash fluttering in the box hedges caught his attention, an ant drawn on one crumpled edge. He picked it up, smoothed it out. A scribble of numbers and images.
He turned the sheet of paper over.
A rough sketch on the back showed a cooked turkey, plump and ridiculous, a wing squiggling at the side, femur bones protruding. But that wasn’t what froze Evan’s breath in his throat.
In place of a turkey head, a human’s was drawn instead, cartoon features looking shocked and scared on the serving platter.
The face of Ruby Seabrook.
36
Monsters
“We say there’s no such thing as monsters.” Ruby’s voice was flat, without intonation.
Racing back to Wellesley, Evan had the speedometer pegged well above the limit. The grotesque drawing was folded up in his back pocket. He hadn’t given her details of what he’d seen in the row house, only that the pimp had been killed. It was clear that her mind was still back on the floor of Angela Buford’s room, that stain like a chalk outline.
