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Paul Cleave

The Laughterhouse

PROLOGUE

It was Christmas in August. A real winter wonderland. Yellow tape decorated the scene like tinsel, wisps of fog snap-frozen across the words Do Not Cross, blurring the letters to the point where nobody could tell one from the other. There was a small brown shoe in the snow. It was on its side, and snow had built up around the bottom of it. It had fallen off the girl when she was carried from the car into the building. The air was deathly still and cold, so cold it seemed your breath might solidify in front of your face and fall to the ground, where it would land softly in the snow by your feet and add to the frost biting at your toes. The snow was white in most places, gray where it had been ripped open by footsteps and vehicles. In other areas, mostly closer to the building, it reflected the halogen lamps and the colorful lights coming from the police cars. Those same lights streaked across the nearby dirty windows, the depths of the rooms behind the glass absorbing the light.

It all looked like a Christmas scene; Santa had come to the wrong part of town, met the wrong kind of people, and paid the worst kind of price. The halogens and headlights pointed at the old building, spotlighting the tragedy and turning it into a pageant. The place was abandoned, had been for nearly half a century, empty except for retired equipment and rusted pieces of iron everywhere, old tools and furniture not worth the money or time it’d take to pick them up. And of course the smell.

It smelled of the death that had marched through the doors two by two, like animals heading onto the ark, except there wasn’t any salvation here for them. The floor had absorbed the blood and shit and urine over the few years the slaughterhouse operated, death and all the messy bits that come with it were entrenched in the cement, buried in the foundations and the walls and even the air, as though the air didn’t cycle in here, but was stagnant, too heavy to move outward, too thick to fit anything fresh in.

How much blood had been spilled here, Officer Theodore Tate didn’t want to know. He didn’t want to think too long or hard about that-he just wanted to do his job, stay alert, and not get in the way. He and his partner, Officer Carl Schroder, were the first on the scene after the call had come through. They had gone inside slowly, carefully, and they had found the young girl with the matching shoe still on her foot, along with the sock, and it was all she was wearing. The rest of her clothes were torn and piled up to her left. Neither of them had seen much in the way of bodies-a few suicides mostly, a couple of car accidents, one where the driver had been cut in half, twenty meters between his legs and chest and they never did find one of the hands-but this was Tate’s first homicide, the blood fresh, the eyes cloudy, tragedy by force rather than by bad luck.

They’d secured the area, words at a minimum between them, then waited for the others, spending their time rubbing their hands together and stamping their feet to try and kick-start their circulations. Seeing the young girl made Tate want to give up being a cop, and it also made him want to become a homicide detective. Like his priest had told him, life was full of contradictions and bad people.