Packing for the trip, Chris was standing in her bedroom selecting a camouflaging wig to wear in Dayton when Karl appeared at the open door. There was someone to see her, he told her.
“Who?”
“Detective.”
“Detective? And he wants to see me?”
“Yes, Madam.”
Karl entered and handed Chris a business card. WILLIAM F. KINDERMAN, it announced, LIEUTENANT OF DETECTIVES. The words were printed in an ornate, raised Tudor typeface that might have been selected by a dealer in antiques. Tucked in a corner like a poor relation were the smaller words Homicide Division.
Chris looked up at Karl with a tight-eyed suspicion. “Has he got something with him that might be a script? You know, a big manila envelope or something?”
There was no one in the world, Chris had come to discover, who didn’t have a novel or a script or a notion for one or both tucked away in a drawer or a mental sock. She seemed to attract them as strongly as priests attracted derelicts and drunks.
Karl shook his head. “No, Madam.”
Detective. Was it something to do with Burke?
Chris found him sagging in the entry hall, the brim of his limp and crumpled hat clutched with short fat fingers whose nails had the shine of a recent manicure. Plumpish, in his early sixties, he had jowly cheeks that gleamed of soap. He wore rumpled trousers, cuffed and baggy, beneath an oversized gray tweed overcoat that hung long and loose and old-fashioned. As Chris approached him, the detective told her in a hoarsely emphysematous, whispery voice, “I’d know that face in any lineup, Miss MacNeil.”
“Am I in one?” Chris asked.
“Oh, my goodness! Oh, no, no! No, of course not! No, it’s strictly routine,” he assured her. “Look, you’re busy? Then tomorrow. Yes, I’ll come again tomorrow.”
He was turning away as if to leave when Chris said anxiously, “What is it? Is it Burke? Burke Dennings?” The detective’s loose and careless ease had somehow tightened the springs of her tension. He turned and came back to her, dolefully staring with moist brown eyes that drooped at the corners and seemed perpetually staring at times gone by. “What a terrible shame,” he said. “A shame.”
“Was he killed?” Chris asked him bluntly. “I mean, you’re a homicide cop. Is that why you’re here? Burke was killed?”
“No, as I told you, it’s routine,” the detective repeated. “You know, a man so important, we just couldn’t pass it. We couldn’t,” he repeated with a helpless look and a shrug. “At least one or two questions. Did he fall? Was he pushed?” As he asked, he was listing from side to side with his head and an uplifted hand, palm outward. Then he shrugged and whispered huskily, “Who knows?”
“Was he robbed?”
“No, not robbed, Miss MacNeil, never robbed; but then who needs a motive in times like these?” The detective’s hands were constantly in motion, like flabby gloves informed by the fingers of a bored puppeteer. “Why, today, for a murderer, a motive is an encumbrance, maybe even a deterrent.” He shook his head. “These drugs,” he bemoaned. “All these drugs.” He tapped at his chest with the tips of his fingers. “Believe me, I’m a father, and when I see what’s going on, it breaks my heart. It does. You’ve got children?”
“Yes, one.”
“Son or daughter?”
“A daughter.”
“God bless her.”
“Look, come on into the study,” Chris told him as she turned to lead the way, intensely anxious to hear what it was he had to say about Dennings.
“Miss MacNeil, could I trouble you for something?”
Chris stopped and turned to face him with the dim and weary expectation that he wanted her autograph for his children. It was never for themselves. It was always for their children. “Yeah, sure,” she said amiably in an effort to mask her impatience.
The detective gestured with a trace of a grimace. “My stomach,” he said. “Do you keep any Calso water, maybe? If it’s trouble, never mind.”
“No, no trouble at all,” Chris answered with a faint, tight smile. “Grab a chair in the study.” Chris pointed, then turned and headed for the kitchen. “I think there’s a bottle in the fridge,” she said.
“No, I’ll come to the kitchen,” the detective said, following with a gait that bordered on a waddle. “Yes, I hate to be a bother.”
“It’s no bother.”
“No, really, you’re busy, I’ll come. You’ve got children?” the detective asked as they walked. “No, that’s right,” he immediately corrected himself. “Yes, a daughter. You told me. That’s right. Just the one. And how old is she?”
“She just turned twelve.”
“Ah, then you don’t have to worry. No, not yet. Later on, though, watch out.” He was shaking his head. “When you see all the sickness day in and day out. Unbelievable! Incredible! Insane! You know, I looked at my wife just a couple of days ago—or maybe weeks, I forget—I said, Mary, the world—the entire world”—he had lifted his hands in a global gesture—“is having a massive nervous breakdown.”
They had entered the kitchen, where Karl was cleaning and polishing the interior of an oven. He neither turned nor acknowledged their presence.
“This is really so embarrassing,” the detective wheezed as Chris opened a refrigerator door; and yet his gaze was on Karl, brushing swiftly and questioningly over the back of the manservant’s head like a small, dark bird skimming low above a lake. “I meet a famous motion-picture star,” he continued, “and I ask for some Calso water. It’s a joke.”
Chris had found the bottle and was looking for an opener.
She said, “Ice?”
“Oh, no, plain. Plain is fine.”
Chris opened the bottle, found a glass, and poured bubbly Calso water into it.
“You know that film you made called Angel?” the detective mentioned with a faint, fond look of reminiscence. “I saw that film six times,” he said.
“If you were looking for the murderer, arrest the director.”
“Oh, no, no, it was excellent—really—I loved it! Just one little—”
“Come on, we can sit over here,” Chris interrupted. She was pointing to the windowed breakfast nook. It had a waxed pine table and seat cushions covered in a flower pattern.
“Yes, of course,” the detective replied.
They sat down, and Chris handed him the Calso water.
“Oh, yes, thank you,” he said.
“Don’t mention it. You were saying?”
“Oh, well, the film—it was lovely, really. So touching. But maybe just one little thing,” the detective ventured, “one tiny, almost minuscule flaw. And please believe me, in such matters I am only a layman. Okay? I’m just audience. What do I know? However, it seemed to me the musical score was getting in the way of certain scenes. It was too intrusive.” Chris tried not to fidget with impatience as the detective went on earnestly, caught up in the rising ardor of his argument. “It kept on reminding me that this was a movie. You know? Like so many of these fancy camera angles. So distracting. Incidentally, the score—the composer, did he steal it perhaps from Mendelssohn?”
Chris had started drumming her fingertips lightly on the table but now abruptly she stopped. What kind of detective was this? she wondered; and why was he constantly glancing to Karl?
“We don’t call that stealing, we call it an homage,” said Chris, smiling faintly, “but I’m glad you liked the picture. Better drink that,” she added with a nod at the glass of Calso water. “It tends to get flat.”
“Yes, of course. I’m so garrulous. Forgive me.”
Lifting the glass as if in a toast, the portly detective drained its contents, his little finger arched up in the air demurely. “Ah, good, that’s good,” he exhaled. As he set down the glass his glance fell fondly on Regan’s sculpture of the bird. It was now the centerpiece of the table, its long beak floating mockingly above the salt and pepper shakers. “It’s so quaint,” he said smiling. “So cute.” He looked up at Chris. “And the artist?”
“My daughter.”
“Very nice.”
“Look, I hate to be—”
“Yes, yes, I know. You’re very busy. Listen, one or two questions and we’re done. In fact, only one question, that’s all, and then I’ll be going.” He was glancing at his wristwatch as if he were anxious to get away to some important appointment. “Since poor Mr. Dennings,” he began, “had completed his filming in this area, we wondered if he might have been visiting someone on the night of the accident. Now other than yourself, of course, did he have any friends in this area?”
“Oh, he was here that night,” Chris told him.
“Oh, really?” The detective’s eyebrows sickled upward. “Near the time of the accident?” he asked.
“When did it happen?”
“At seven-oh-five P.M.”
“Yes, I think so.”
“Well, that settles it, then.” The detective nodded, twisting in his chair as if preparatory to rising. “He was drunk, he was leaving, he fell down the steps. Yes, that settles it. Definitely. Listen, though, just for the sake of the record, can you tell me approximately what time he left the house?”
With a tilt of her head to the side Chris appraised him with mild wonder. He was pawing at truth like a weary bachelor pinching vegetables and fruit at a market. “I don’t know,” she replied. “I didn’t see him.”
The detective looked puzzled. “I don’t understand.”
“Well, he came and left while I was out. I was over at a doctor’s office in Rosslyn.”
The detective nodded. “Ah, I see. Yes, of course. But then how do you know he was here?”
“Oh, well, Sharon said—”
“Sharon?” he interrupted.
“Sharon Spencer. She’s my secretary.”
“Oh.”
“She was here when Burke dropped by. She—”
“He came to see her?”
“No, he came to see me.”
“Yes, go on, please. Forgive me for interrupting.”
“My daughter was sick and Sharon left him here while she went to pick up some prescriptions and by the time I got home, Burke was gone.”
“And what time was that, please? You remember?”
Chris shrugged and puckered her lips. “Maybe seven-fifteen or so; seven-thirty.”
“And what time had you left the house?”
“Six-fifteenish.”
“And what time had Miss Spencer left?”
“I don’t know.”
“Between the time Miss Spencer left and the time you returned, who was here in the house with Mr. Dennings besides your daughter?”
“No one.”
“No one? He left alone a sick child?”
Chris nodded, her expression blank.
“No servants?”
“No, Willie and Karl were—”
“Who are they?”
Chris abruptly felt the earth shifting under her feet as the nuzzling interview, she realized, was suddenly a steely interrogation. “Well, Karl’s right there.” Chris motioned with her head, her glance fixed dully on the manservant’s back as he continued to clean and polish the oven. “And Willie’s his wife,” Chris said. “They’re my housekeepers.” Polishing. Polishing. Why? The oven had been thoroughly cleaned and polished the night before. “They’d taken the afternoon off,” Chris continued, “and when I got home they weren’t back yet. But then Willie…” Chris paused, her eyes still fixed on Karl’s back.
“Willie what?” the detective prodded.
Chris turned to him and shrugged. “Oh, well, nothing” she said. She reached for a cigarette. Kinderman lit it. “So then only your daughter would know,” he asked, “when Burke Dennings left the house?”
“It was really an accident?”
“Oh, of course. It’s routine, Miss MacNeil. Absolutely. Your friend Dennings wasn’t robbed and so what would be the motive?”
“Burke could tick people off,” Chris said somberly. “Maybe someone at the top of the steps just hauled off and whacked him.”
“It’s got a name, this kind of bird? I can’t think of it. Something.” The detective was fingering Regan’s sculpture. Noticing Chris’s steady stare, he took away his hand, looking vaguely embarrassed. “Forgive me, you’re busy. Well, a minute and we’re done. Now your daughter—she would know when Mr. Dennings left?”
“No, she wouldn’t. She was heavily sedated.”
“Ah, a shame, such a shame.” The detective’s eyelids drooped with concern. “It’s serious?” he asked.
“Yes, I’m afraid it is.”
“May I ask…?” He had raised his hand in a delicate gesture.
“We still don’t know.”
“Watch out for drafts,” the detective said solemnly. “A draft in the winter when a house is hot is a magic carpet for bacteria. My mother used to say that. Maybe it’s folk myth. Maybe. I don’t know. But plainly speaking, to me a myth is like a menu in a fancy French restaurant: it’s glamorous, complicated camouflage for a fact you wouldn’t otherwise swallow, like maybe the lima beans they’re constantly giving you whenever you go out and order hamburger steak.”
Chris felt herself loosening up. The odd, homey digression had relaxed her. The fuddled-looking, harmless St. Bernard dog had returned.
“That’s hers, Miss MacNeil? Your daughter’s bedroom?” The detective was pointing up at the ceiling. “The one with that big bay window looking out on those steps?”
Chris nodded. “Yeah, that’s Regan’s.”
“Keep the window closed and she’ll get better.”
Tense the moment before, Chris now had to struggle to keep from laughing. “Yes, I will,” she said; “in fact, it’s always closed and shuttered.”
“Yes, ‘an ounce of prevention,’ ” the detective quoted sententiously. He was dipping a pudgy hand into the inside pocket of his coat when his gaze fell on Chris’s fingertips lightly drumming on the table again. “Ah, yes, you’re busy,” he said. “Well, we’re finished. Just a note for the record—routine—we’re all done.” From the pocket of his coat he’d extracted a crumpled mimeographed program of a high-school production of Cyrano de Bergerac and now he was groping in an outer pocket, retrieving a short yellow stub of a number 2 pencil whose point had the look of having been sharpened with either a knife or the blade of a pair of scissors; then, pressing the play program flat on the table and tamping out the wrinkles, he held the pencil stub over it and wheezed, “Just a name or two, nothing more. Now that’s Spencer with a c?”
“Yes, a c.”
“A c,” the detective repeated, writing the name in a margin of the program. “And the housekeepers? Joseph and Willie…?”
“No, it’s Karl and Willie Engstrom.”
“Karl. Yes, that’s right; Karl Engstrom.” He scribbled the names in a dark, thick script. “Now the times I remember,” he breathed out huskily while rotating the program in search of white space. “Oh, no, wait! I forgot! Yes, the housekeepers. You said they got home at what time?”
“I didn’t say. Karl, what time did you get in last night?” Chris called out to him. The Swiss turned his head, inscrutable. “I am home at exactly nine-thirty.”
“Oh, yeah, that’s right. You’d forgotten your key.” She turned her gaze back to the detective. “I remember I looked at the clock in the kitchen when I heard him ring the doorbell.”
“You saw a good film?” the detective asked Karl. “I never go by reviews,” he said to Chris in a quiet aside. “It’s what the people think, the audience.”
“Paul Scofield in Lear,” Karl informed the detective.
“Ah, I saw that! It was excellent!”
“I see it at Gemini Theater,” Karl continued. “The six-o’clock showing. Then immediately after I take bus from in front of the theater and—”
“Please, that’s really not necessary,” the detective protested as he held up a hand, palm outward. “No, no, please!”
“I don’t mind.”
“If you insist.”
“I get off at Wisconsin Avenue and M Street. Nine-twenty, I think. And then I walk to house.”
“Look, you didn’t have to tell me,” the detective told him, “but anyway, thank you, it was very considerate. By the way, you liked the film?”
“It was good.”
“Yes, I thought so too. Exceptional. Well, now…” He turned back to Chris and to scribbling on the program. “I’ve wasted your time, but I have a job. That’s the sad yin and yang of it. The whole deal. Oh, well a moment and we’re finished,” he said reassuringly, then “Tragic … tragic…,” he added as he jotted down fragments in margins. “Such a talent, Burke Dennings. And a man who knew people, I’m sure: how to handle them. With so many who could make him look good or maybe make him look bad—like the cameraman, the sound man, the composer, not to mention, forgive me, the actors. Please correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems to me nowadays a director of importance has also to be almost a psychologist with the cast. Am I wrong?”
“No, you’re not because we’re all insecure.”
“Even you?”
“Mostly me. But Burke was good at that, at keeping up your morale.” Chris shrugged diffidently. “But then of course he had one sweetheart of a temper.”
The detective repositioned the program. “Ah, well, maybe so with the big shots. People his size.” Once again he was scribbling. “But the key is the little people, the people who handle the minor details that if they didn’t handle right would be major details. Don’t you think?”
Chris eyed her fingernails and shook her head. “When Burke let fly,” she said, “he never discriminated. But he was only mean when he drank.”
“All right, we’re finished. We’re done.” Kinderman was dotting a final i when he abruptly remembered something. “Oh, no, wait. The Engstroms. They went and came together?”
“No, Willie went to see a Beatles film,” Chris answered just as Karl was turning his head to reply. “She got in a few minutes after I did.”
“Oh, well, why did I ask that?” said Kinderman. “It has nothing to do with anything.” He folded up the program and tucked it away along with the pencil in the inside pocket of his coat. “Well, that’s that,” he breathed out with satisfaction. “When I’m back in the office, no doubt I’ll remember something that maybe I should have asked. Yes, with me, that always happens. Oh, well, whatever,” he said; “I could call you.” He stood up and Chris got up with him. “Well, I’m going out of town for a couple of weeks,” she said. “It can wait,” the detective assured her. “It can wait.” He was staring at the sculpture with a smiling fondness. “Ah, so cute, so really cute.” He’d leaned over and picked it up and was rubbing his thumb along the sculpted bird’s beak, then replaced it on the table and started to leave. “Have you got a good doctor?” the detective asked as Chris accompanied him toward the front door. “I mean for your daughter.” “Well, I’ve sure got enough of them,” Chris said glumly. “Anyway, I’m checking her into a clinic that’s supposed to be great at doing what you do, only with viruses.”
“Let’s hope they’re much better at it, Miss MacNeil. It’s out of town, this clinic?”
“Yes, it is. It’s in Ohio.”
“It’s a good one?”
“We’ll see.”
“Keep her out of the draft.”
They had reached the front door of the house. “Well, I would say that it’s been a pleasure,” the detective said gravely while gripping his hat by the brim with both hands; “but under the circumstances…” He bent his head slightly and shook it, then looked back up. “I’m so terribly sorry.”
Her arms folded across her chest, Chris lowered her head and said quietly, “Thank you. Thank you very much.”
Opening the door, the detective stepped outside, put on his hat and turned back to look at Chris. “Well, good luck with your daughter,” he said.
Chris smiled wanly. “Good luck with the world.”
The detective nodded with a warmth and a sadness, then turned to his right and, short of breath, slowly waddled away down the street. Chris watched as he listed toward a waiting squad car that was parked near the corner. He flung up a hand to his hat as a sudden gust of wind sprang sharply from the south and set the bottom of his long, floppy coat to flapping. Chris lowered her gaze and closed the door.
When he’d entered the passenger side of the squad car, Kinderman turned and, looking back at the house, he thought he’d seen movement at Regan’s window, a quick, lithe figure moving quickly to the side and out of view. He wasn’t sure. He had seen it peripherally and so quickly it was almost subliminal. He kept looking and noticed that the window shutters were open. Odd. Chris had told him they were always closed. For a time the detective continued to watch. No one appeared. With a puzzled frown, the detective looked down and shook his head, and then he opened the glove compartment of the squad car, extracted a penknife and an evidence envelope, and, unclasping the smallest of the blades of the knife, he held his thumb inside the envelope and extracted from under a thumbnail microscopic fragments of green colored clay he’d surreptitiously scraped from Regan’s sculpture. Finished, he sealed up the envelope and placed it in the inside pocket of his coat. “Okay,” he told his driver, “let’s go.” They pulled away from the curb, and as they drove down Prospect Street, Kinderman cautioned the driver, “Take it easy,” as he noticed the traffic building up ahead. Then lowering his head, he shut his eyes, and gripping the bridge of his nose with weary fingers, he breathed out despondently, “Ah, my God, what a world. What a life.”
Later that evening, while Dr. Klein was injecting Regan with fifty milligrams of Sparine to assure her tranquility on the journey to Dayton, Ohio, Kinderman stood brooding in his office with the palms of his hands pressed flat atop his desk as he pored over fragments of baffling data with no other light in the room but the narrow beam of an ancient desk lamp flaring brightly on a clutter of scattered reports. He believed that it helped him to narrow the focus of his concentration. His breathing was adenoidal and heavy in the darkness; his glance flitted here, now there, and then he took a deep breath and shut his eyes. Mental Clearance Sale! he instructed himself, as he always did whenever he wished to tidy up his brain for a fresh point of view. Absolutely Everything Must Go! Then he opened his eyes and reexamined the pathologist’s report on Dennings:
… tearing of the spinal cord with fractured skull and neck, plus numerous contusions, lacerations and abrasions; stretching of the neck skin; ecchymosis of the neck skin; shearing of platysma, sternomastoid, splenius, trapezius and various smaller muscles of the neck, with fracture of the spine and of the vertebrae and shearing of both the anterior and posterior spinous ligaments…
He looked out a window at the dark of the city. The Capitol dome light glowed in signal that the Congress was working late, and once again the detective shut his eyes, recalling his conversation with the District pathologist at 11:55 P.M. on the night of Dennings’s death.
“It could have happened in the fall?”
“Oh, well, it’s very unlikely. The sternomastoids and the trapezius muscles alone are enough to prevent it. Then you’ve also got the various articulations of the cervical spine to be overcome as well as the ligaments holding the bones together.”
“Speaking plainly, however, is it possible?”
“Yes. The man was drunk and these muscles were doubtless somewhat relaxed. Perhaps if the force of the initial impact were sufficiently powerful and—”
“Falling maybe thirty, forty feet before he hit?”
“Well, yes, that; and if immediately after impact his head got stuck in something—in other words, if there were immediate interference with the normal rotation of the head and body as a unit—well maybe—I say just maybe—you could get this result.”
“Could another human being have done it?”
“Yes, but he’d have to be an exceptionally powerful man.”
Kinderman had checked Karl Engstrom’s story regarding his whereabouts at the time of Dennings’s death. The show times matched, as did the schedule that night of a D.C. Transit bus. Moreover, the driver of the bus that Karl had claimed he had boarded near the front of the theater went off duty at Wisconsin and M, where Karl had stated he’d alighted at approximately twenty minutes after nine. A change of drivers had taken place, and the off-duty driver had logged the time of his arrival at the transfer point: precisely nine-eighteen. Yet on Kinderman’s desk was a record of a felony charge against Engstrom on August 27, 1963, alleging he had stolen a quantity of narcotics over a period of months from the home of a doctor in Beverly Hills where he and Willie were then employed.
… born April 20, 1921, in Zurich, Switzerland. Married to Willie nee Braun September 7, 1941. Daughter, Elvira, born New York City, January 11, 1943, current address unknown. Defendant…
The remainder the detective found baffling:
The doctor, whose testimony was deemed a sine qua non for successful prosecution, abruptly—and without explanation—dropped the charges. Why had he done so? And as the Engstroms had been hired by Chris MacNeil only two months later, the doctor had given them a favorable reference.
Why would he do so?
Engstrom had certainly pilfered the drugs, and yet a medical examination at the time of the charge had failed to yield the slightest sign that the man was an addict, or even a user.
Why not?
With his eyes still closed, the detective softly recited the beginning of the Lewis Carroll poem “Jabberwocky”: “ ‘ ’Twas brillig and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe…’ ” It was another of Kinderman’s mind-clearing tricks, and when he had finished the recitation, he opened his eyes and fixed his gaze on the Capitol rotunda. He was trying to keep his mind a blank, although, as usual, he found the task impossible. Sighing, he glanced at the police psychologist’s report on the recent desecrations at Holy Trinity: “… statue … phallus … human excrement … Damien Karras,” he had underscored in red. His breathing slightly whistling in the total silence, he reached for a scholarly work on witchcraft and turned to a page that he had marked with a paper clip:
Black Mass … a form of devil worship, the ritual consisting, in the main, of (1) exhortation (the “sermon”) to performance of evil among the community, (2) coition with the demon (reputedly painful, the demon’s penis invariably described as “icy cold”), and (3) a variety of desecrations that were largely sexual in nature. For example, communion Hosts of unusual size were prepared (compounded of flour, feces, menstrual blood and pus), which then were slit and used as artificial vaginas with which the priests would ferociously copulate while raving that they were ravishing the Virgin Mother of God or that they were sodomizing Christ. In another instance of such practice, a statue of Christ was inserted deep in a girl’s vagina while into her anus was inserted the Host, which the priest then crushed as he shouted blasphemies and sodomized the girl. Life-sized images of Christ and the Virgin Mary also played a frequent role in the ritual. The image of the Virgin, for example—usually painted to give her a dissolute, sluttish appearance—was equipped with breasts which the cultists sucked and also a vagina into which the penis might be inserted. The statues of Christ were equipped with a phallus for fellatio by both the men and the women, and also for insertion into the vagina of the women and the anus of the men. Occasionally, rather than an image, a human figure was bound to a cross and made to function in place of the statue, and upon the discharge of his semen it was collected in a blasphemously consecrated chalice and used in the making of the communion host, which was destined to be consecrated on an altar covered with excrement. This—
Kinderman flipped the pages to an underlined paragraph dealing with ritualistic murder, reading it slowly while nibbling at the pad of an index finger, and when he had finished he frowned at the page and shook his head, then lifted a brooding glance to the lamp. He flicked it off and left his office.
He drove to the morgue.
The young attendant at the desk was munching at a ham and cheese sandwich on rye and was brushing the crumbs from a crossword puzzle as Kinderman approached him.
“Dennings,” the detective breathed out hoarsely.
The attendant nodded, hastily filled in a five-letter horizontal, then rose with his sandwich and moved down the hall. “Down this way,” he said laconically. Kinderman trailed him, hat in hand, following the faint scent of caraway seed and mustard to rows of refrigerated lockers, to the dreamless cabinet used for the filing of sightless eyes.
They halted at locker 32. The expressionless attendant slid it out. He bit at his sandwich, and a fragment of mayonnaise-speckled crust fell lightly to the graying shroud. Kinderman stared, and then, slowly and gently, he pulled back the sheet to expose what he’d seen and yet could not accept: Dennings’s head was turned completely around and facing backward.