Its Loose

Ln Don Faraday, Ice Island's Only Police Officer, Drove Out lo the Cmpty Summer Cabin Where Old Tim Landers Had Found a Body • • • The corpse was in the living room—a guy about thirty-five, dark-haired, wearing jeans and a flannel shirt. The shirt had been unbuttoned and his T-shirt pushed up where the kitchen knife protruded from his stomach. The knife had been plunged into the guy so deeply it had nearly gone all the way through him. And it wasn't a simple stabbing. The knife had been worked upward, toward the guy's chin, leaving a six-inch-long gash. The blood flowing from the wound had run down both sides of his stomach and onto the floor, where it had puddled and frozen into red ice . . . That knife was a wicked-looking thing, Don thought, the blade about ten inches long, the kind of knife the crazed killer usually wielded in splatter films. Yet Landers was sure there'd been only one set of tracks in the snow—one set going in, nothing coming out. It had to be suicide, but how the hell did someone jam a knife like that into his own gut, slicing through his insides while blood oozed out around his fingers? What kind of single-minded determination did it take to do something like that? What madness could have driven the man? . . . Books by Warner Lee Into the Pit It's Loose Published by POCKET BOOKS Most Pocket Books are available at special quantity discounts for bulk purchases for sales promotions, premiums or fund raising. Special books or book excerpts can also be created to fit specific needs. For details write the office of the Vice President of Special Markets, Pocket Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020. Warner Lee POCKET BOOKS New York London Toronto Sydney Tokyo Singapore This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. An Original Publication of POCKET BOOKS POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster Inc. 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020 Copyright © 1990 by Warner Lee Cover art copyright © 1990 Mark & Stephanie Gerber All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Pocket Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020 ISBN: 0-671-67252-5 First Pocket Books printing July 1990 10 987654321 POCKET and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster Inc. Printed in the U.S.A. To Jim Wofford, who's been a friend for more than thirty years Prologue 1 o pening the oven, Charles Capwell stared at the TV dinner, wondering whether it was done. With the thing covered with foil the way it was, you couldn't tell whether the food was bubbling or still frozen in the center. Although he knew how long the package said you were supposed to cook a sliced-turkey-with-stuffing-and-carrots frozen dinner, he hadn't noted the time when he put it in the oven. He almost always forgot to do that, which meant he had this problem often, since frozen dinners were the mainstay of his diet. Capwell eyed the foil-covered rectangle, trying to make up his mind. The small oven was in dire need of cleaning. Black crud God knew how thick coated its interior walls. Not surprising, he supposed, since he'd lived here for eight years and had never cleaned it. But then cleaning ovens was woman's work, simply not the sort of thing a guy did. You made the oven all shiny, and it looked better, but it didn't work any better. What difference did it make how it looked—especially inside where nobody could see it? Finally Capwell did what he always did: he got a fork and poked a hole in the foil. Steam came out. His meal was ready. Seated at the scarred wooden table, he peeled back the foil and stared at compartments containing steaming portions of turkey and stuffing and carrots and a square of some sort of dessert. You were supposed to tear off the foil covering the dessert, but Capwell never bothered with that. You did, you didn't, the stuff tasted the same. Like the house itself, the kitchen was small. Worn linoleum with a faded flower pattern, a few cabinets whose white paint had turned a yellowish brown, the result of years of fried eggs and bacon for breakfast. The sink had a permanent brown stain where the faucet dripped. It was nearly as bad as the toilet, whose bowl had turned grungier and grungier over the years Capwell had lived here. He cleaned it occasionally—grudgingly—but the rust-colored crud just kept getting thicker. Although he wasn't much for the inside stuff, the woman's work, he kept the outside of the place immaculate. Failure to do woman's work didn't affect his self-esteem, but letting the lawn go or watching the weeds take over the flower beds would make him look bad in the eyes of his neighbors. They'd think he was lazy, slovenly. So Capwell worked hard in his yard, keeping it among the best maintained in his working-class Pittsburgh neighborhood. Capwell figured most of the people living on the block thought of him as a good neighbor! He was quiet, never bothered anyone, always wished people a good day if they walked past while he was outside working in the yard. Except for his job, that was the extent of Capwell's social contact. He was what people called a loner. He had no friends. Not one. Capwell had been married once, back when he lived in Kentucky. He was eighteen, just out of high school, and Lori Ann was sixteen and pregnant. The marriage lasted two years. Lori Ann divorced him so she could marry an evangelist she met at a revival. Got religion, she said, wanted