Judd could hear Angeli groping along the walls looking for the light switch. Judd kept moving forward. He could not see the other two men. “Moody!” he called.
He heard Angeli’s voice from across the room. “Here’s a switch.” There was a click. Nothing happened.
“The master switch must be off,” McGreavy said.
Judd bumped against a wall. As he put his hands out to brace himself, his fingers closed over a doorlatch. He shoved the latch up and pulled. A massive door swung open and a blast of frigid air hit him. “I’ve found a door,” he called out. He stepped over a sill and cautiously moved forward. He heard the door close behind him and his heart began to ham mer. Impossibly, it was darker here than in the other room, as though he had stepped into a deeper blackness.
“Moody! Moody…”
A thick, heavy silence. Moody had to be here somewhere. If he weren’t, Judd knew what McGreavy would think. It would be the boy who cried wolf again.
Judd took another step forward and suddenly felt cold flesh lick against his face. He jerked away in panic, feeling the short hairs on his neck rise. He became aware of the strong smell of blood and death surrounding him. There was an evil in the darkness around him, waiting to close in on him. His scalp tingled with fear and his heart was beating so rap idly that it was difficult to breathe. With trembling fingers he fumbled for a book of matches in his overcoat, found one, and scraped a match against the cover. In its light he saw a huge dead eye loom up in front of his face, and it took a shocked second before he realized that he was looking at a slaughtered cow dangling from a meat hook. He had one brief glimpse of other animal carcasses hanging from hooks, and the outline of a door in the far corner, before the match went out. The door probably led to an office. Moody could be in there, waiting for him.
Judd moved farther into the interior of the inky black cav ern toward the door. He felt the cold brush of dead animal flesh again. He quickly stepped away and kept walking cau tiously toward the office door. “Moody!”
He wondered what was detaining Angeli and McGreavy. He moved past the slaughtered animals, feeling as though someone with a macabre sense of humor was playing a horrible, maniacal joke. But who and why were beyond his imagining. As he neared the door, he collided with another hanging carcass.
Judd stopped to get his bearings. He lit his last remaining match. In front of him, impaled on a meat hook and grin ning obscenely, was the body of Norman Z. Moody. The match went out.
Chapter Fourteen
THE CORONER’S MEN had finished their work and gone. Moody’s body had been taken away and everyone had de parted except Judd, McGreavy, and Angeli. They were sit ting in the manager’s small office, decorated with several im pressive calendar nudes, an old desk, a swivel chair, and two filing cabinets. The lights were on and an electric heater was going.
The manager of the plant, a Mr. Paul Moretti, had been tracked down and pulled away from a pre-Christmas party to answer some questions. He had explained that since it was a holiday weekend, he had let his employees off at noon. He had locked up at twelve-thirty, and to the best of his knowl edge, there had been no one on the premises at that time. Mr. Moretti was belligerently drunk, and when McGreavy saw that he was going to be no further help, he had him driven home. Judd was barely conscious of what was happen ing in the room. His thoughts were on Moody, how cheerful and how full of life he had been, and how cruelly he had died. And Judd blamed himself. If he had not involved Moody, the little detective would be alive today.
It was almost midnight. Judd had wearily reiterated the story of Moody’s phone call for the tenth time. McGreavy, hunched up in his overcoat, sat there watching him, chewing savagely on a cigar. Finally he spoke. “Do you read detective stories?”