Primal Fear by Brad Boucher Page B

anything to link up—”
    He lapsed into sudden silence, his mouth hanging open but his voice catching in his throat.  Because a string of words had blossomed in his mind, as cold and dead as Slater’s lifeless form upon the table.  A chill rippled through him as he let it seep into his thoughts.
    . . . they won’t leave me be, won’t let me alone . . .
    The words from Slater’s suicide note, words Harry hadn’t had the time to go over and pick apart.  Until now he’d almost forgotten about the note, just another part of the puzzle he’d pushed aside to come back to later.  But now . . .
    The two phrases collided in his thoughts.  The first, spoken by Hughes only a moment before: “Why on God’s green earth would a man do that to himself?”  The second, from the cryptic, bloodied note they’d found on Slater’s rapidly cooling body: “They won’t leave me be, won’t let me alone.”
    Harry had been trying to assign a physical explanation to Marty’s self-mutilation, some sort of serious inner ear infection, or even a hearing malady that could be blamed.  Now, another probability occurred to him, one that was somehow worse, somehow more frightening.
    “Voices,” Harry whispered, almost to himself.
    “What’s that?”
    He blinked, feeling hot and cold all at once, his gaze dropping to Slater’s butchered ear.  “Jesus, you don’t think he was hearing voices, do you?”
    Hughes eyed him cautiously.  “What makes you think that?”
    “The note.  The suicide note Marty left behind, it said something like ‘they won’t leave me alone’, and ‘they won’t let me be’.  Until now, I didn’t really have time to consider who the hell ‘they’ were.  Now I’m starting to wonder if maybe he meant he was hearing voices, that they wouldn’t leave him alone, wouldn’t give him any peace.”
    “That’s a pretty scary line of thought, Harry.”
    “Yeah, I know.  But think about it.  A man would have to be crazy to push a screwdriver into his ear.  Crazy or desperate.  But it happens, doesn’t it?  You hear about some of these cases where the defendant claims to have heard voices, telling him what to do, driving him to murder.”
    “So you think Marty was trying to shut out the voices?”
    Harry shook his head.  “I don’t know what to think at this point, but it’s the only thing I’ve got so far that makes any lick of sense.”
    He peered once more at Slater’s corpse, as if it could provide him with a wealth of much-needed information.  Mercifully, Slater’s right eye was turned away, gazing blindly towards the examination room’s door.  “I’ve got to check out that note again.  Maybe I’m just grasping at straws.”  He turned to Hughes.  “Can I use your phone?”
    “Sure.  Of course.”
    Harry waited while Hughes drew the sheet over Slater’s face.  The coroner performed this task with infinite care, with a reverence that was almost disturbing.  Whatever Slater had been in life—a pedophile, almost certainly a child molester, possibly even a murderer—Hughes still treated him with the same respect he apparently administered to all of his customers.
    Peeling off his surgical gloves with a resounding snap of latex, he led Harry out of the examination room and into the hall, pausing only once in the doorway to flick off the overhead lights before leaving the room.  He gestured towards his office.
    “Help yourself,” he said, “I’m going to take a quick run upstairs to see how the blood work is coming along.  Won’t be long.”
    Harry nodded and stepped into Hughes’ office, checking through his notes and dialing up Marty Slater’s home number. 
    There was a framed photograph on the corner of the desk, a yellowing black and white shot of Delbert Hughes and Harry’s father, taken over twenty-five years before on a weekend fishing trip.  Hughes was grinning broadly, holding up a large mouth bass that must have weighed twelve pounds.  Beside him,