Serpent's Tooth. Michael R. Collings

particularly helpful, since the room was smallish and the bed stuck out from the wall like a rumpled peninsula in a sea of trash.

      Victoria stepped closer, however, like us trying not to disturb anything. I could almost read her mind: “We’ll have to be able to tell the police that this was the way we found it...but I need a closer look.”

      She stood next to the bed, occasionally leaning forward slightly.

      Eric Johansson lay stretched out on the bed. There was no pillow—it had somehow ended up on the floor under the half-closed window. The only bedding still on the bed was the single sheet on which the body rested. The remainder was twisted and knotted on the floor at the foot of the bed, as if at some time he had had a truly bad night and kicked off the other sheet and the thin, worn quilt.

      I didn’t think that it had happened last night. There were a couple of odds and ends of clothing on top of the bedding, including a black leather belt studded with what looked like three rows of tiny silver pyramids along its entire length, that coiled on itself like a snake, its metal buckle half-hidden and glinting sinisterly in the light.

      “Was this the way you left him when you put him to bed?” Victoria did not turn to face Carver but we knew that she was talking to him.

      “Yeah. Pretty much. I got his boots and socks off,” he said, pointing to a pair of mud-caked books nearly hidden beneath the bed. “And his shirt.” This time he indicated a crumpled wad of plaid near the head of the bed. “It was warm last night. I didn’t want to undress him anymore so I left his jeans and T-shirt on, and besides he was almost asleep by that time. And I didn’t think he would need to be covered up.”

      Victoria nodded.

      By this time, both Carver and I had shuffled a bit nearer the bed and could see the body—which had been partially hidden by Victoria standing between us and it—clearly and completely.

      The young man—the boy really, since he was barely out of his teens, I would guess, if that—was flat on his back, both arms straight along his side, as if he had been arranged that way. I didn’t ask Carver if he had done that.

      One hip was canted slightly, and his right leg, the one nearest us, was bent at the knee.

      Victoria pointed to the boy’s jeans.

      “Did that happen last night?”

      “What?”

      “Those rips along the knees. I can tell that he was in a fight of some sort before you brought him home”—she didn’t mention the alternative...that Carver had beaten the boy—“and I need to know if that was when he tore his pants.”

      “Uh...no. No, all of his jeans were like that. He wore them like that on purpose. I don’t know if he did it himself or bought them already torn.”

      I leaned in a bit more and studied the leg.

      The flesh, where it was exposed by a long ragged rip that extended from seam to seam and was feathered along the edges until the remaining thread looked like small fluffs of dirty cotton, resembled raw meat loaf gone bad. The knee itself was swollen, taut and shiny. The skin along the upper surface was raw, scored, and bloody, crusted, with bits of something that might have been gravel, or just clotted blood, caught in the scabs. It must have been painful...except that Rick Johansson was dead and would never feel it or anything else again.

      “What about the other leg?” Victoria asked.

      I was in the best position, so I leaned a bit further over the body.

      The left leg was straight, so the tear—artfully arranged, apparently to give the wearer of the jeans just the right touch of insousciance about things sartorial—was nearly closed. It was harder to see beneath to the knee and I didn’t want to pull the material away to check any more closely. But....

      “I think so. At any rate, there is blood on the denim, and the edges where the jeans are torn look like...like the fringe on a cheap rug after it’s been on the floor for a while...,” I finished, rather lamely.

      “Yes,” Victoria said. “I see.”

      “But what about the rest, the...the cuts and bruises?” I was standing at the foot of the bed but I could see the boy’s head well enough to tell that something dreadful had happened to him, and not that long before.

      “Yes,” Victoria said, but now she turned toward Carver. “What about the rest?”

      Carver looked distinctly uncomfortable, as if the thought had just struck him that he might be held accountable for the shape the body was in.

      “Well, part of it came from yesterday afternoon, I know that. He and Mr....he got into a fight at the field where we were working and...someone gave him a good right across the jaw. It knocked him ass over teakett....” Carver stopped abruptly.

      “I’m familiar with the expression, dear. So don’t worry about your language right now. But I’m afraid that you are going to have to tell us...or at least tell someone...who was fighting with this boy.”

      Carver swallowed hard but did not speak.

      “Yes, I can see a large bruise along the jawbone,” Victoria said, pointing with one finger—a remarkably calm and steady finger. “That would be where he was first struck.

      “But what about the rest?” and here she gestured toward a wicked looking cut over Rick’s right eye, another along the curve of his cheek next to his eye, and a huge bruise on his temple. Against the pallor of the bloodless flesh, the cuts looked like living things, white-edged lips caught half-open in some horrible kind of stasis. The bruise was vivid purple.

      “I don’t know,” Carver said simply. “He was like that when I picked him up last night at the bar.”

      “Did he say anything about another fight?”

      “No. Actually, he never said anything much about anything. Just grunted and moaned now and then when I loaded him into the car. By the time I got him here and up the stairs—now that was a real chore—he was pretty much out of it.”

      “I wonder,” Victoria said, more to herself than to any of us.

      She caught the lower edge of the boy’s T-shirt with one finger and gently lifted.

      “Oh no,” I breathed, not able to stop myself.

      “Shit,” Carver said at the same time, then: “Sorry, Miz Sears, Miz Hanson.”

      Neither of us responded to his apology.

      We were mesmerized, I think, by what Victoria had just revealed.