7th Heaven

by James Patterson

  “Vetter? Can you hear me?” Rich’s voice boomed out through the bullhorn.

  Sweat rolled down my sides. The last pages in 7th Heaven depicted a shootout with cops. I recalled the images: bloody bodies on the ground, Pidge and Hawk getting away. They had shielded themselves with a hostage.

  Conklin and I conferred with the SWAT captain, a sandy-haired pro and former U.S. Marine named Pete Bailey, and we worked out a plan. Conklin and I moved quickly to the Vetter house and flanked the front door, prepared to grab Vetter when he opened it. SWAT was positioned to take the kid out if anything went wrong.

  As I neared the house, I caught a whiff of smoke.

  “Is that fire?” I asked Rich. “Do you smell it?”

  “Yeah. Is that stupid fuck burning his house down?”

  I could still hear the sound of the TV inside the Vetter house. The news announcer was getting a feed from the chopper overhead and was keeping up with the action on the ground. It made sense that Vetter was watching the television coverage. And if Rich and I were in the camera’s-eye view, Vetter knew where Conklin and I were standing.

  Captain Bailey called to me on our Nextels, “Sergeant, we’re going in.” But before he could give the order, a woman’s voice cried out from behind the front door.

  “Don’t shoot. I’m coming out.”

  “Hold your fire,” I shouted to Bailey. “Hostage coming out.”

  The knob turned.

  The door opened and gray smoke swirled out into the dull, overcast day. There was the sound of a well-oiled motor, and under the shifting plume of pale gray smoke, I saw the leading edge of a power chair bump and maneuver, then stall on the threshold.

  The woman in the chair was small and frail, maybe palsied. She wore a long yellow shawl draped over her head, fanning out over her shoulders, bunched loosely across her bony knees. Her face looked pinched, and diamonds sparkled on the fingers of her hand.

  She turned her frightened blue eyes on me.

  “Don’t shoot,” she pleaded. “Please don’t shoot my son!”

  Chapter 117

  I STARED INTO Mrs. Vetter’s ice-blue eyes until she broke the spell. She turned her head to the side and cried out, “Hans, do what they tell you!” As she turned her head, the yellow shawl dropped away. My heart bucked as I realized that there were two people sitting in that wheelchair.

  Mrs. Vetter was sitting in her son’s lap.

  “Hans, do what they tell you,” Vetter mimicked.

  The chair rolled forward onto the lawn. I saw clearly now. Vetter’s huge right hand was on the chair’s power controls. His left arm crossed his mother’s body, and he held the muzzle of a sawed-off, double-barreled, twelve-gauge shotgun hard against the soft underside of his mother’s jaw.

  I lowered my Glock 9 and forced a level of calm into my voice that I didn’t remotely feel.

  “Hans, I’m Sergeant Boxer, SFPD. We don’t want anyone to get hurt. So just throw that gun down, okay? There’s a safe way out of this situation, and I want to get there. I won’t shoot if you put down that gun.”

  “Yeah, right,” Vetter said, laughing. “Now listen to me, both of you,” he said, pointing his chin at me and then at Conklin. “Stand between my mom and the cops. Now, drop your guns, or people are going to die.”

  I wasn’t afraid. I was terrified.

  I tossed my gun to the ground, and Conklin did the same. We stepped in front of the wheelchair, shielding Mrs. Vetter and her wretched son from the SWAT team at the edge of the lawn. My skin prickled. I felt cold and hot at the same time. We stood locked in this horrifying vignette as the smoke around us thickened.

  With a muted boom, flames broke through the windows at the front of the house as the living room flashed over. Shards of glass exploded into the front yard, and sparks rained down on our heads. Conklin held his hands out so that Vetter could see them.

  He shouted, “Vetter, we’ve done what you said. Now, drop your damned gun, man. I’ll take care of you. We’ll surround you all the way in, make sure you’re okay. Just put down the gun.”

  There was the roar of the backdraft and then the whine of sirens as fire trucks neared the scene. Vetter wasn’t giving up. Not if I was right that the wild glint in his eye was defiance.

  But Pidge had given himself no exit.

  What the hell would he do?

  Chapter 118

  VETTER LAUGHED LOUDLY.

  For a split second, all I could see were the beautiful, open-mouthed choppers of a kid who’d had the best dentistry in the world. He said to Conklin, “Can’t you just see Francis Ford Coppola directing this scene?”

  I heard a faint click and then a thunderous KABOOM.

  I’d never seen anything like it before.

  One minute I was looking into Mrs. Vetter’s eyes, and in the next moment her head exploded, the top of her skull opening like a flower. The air darkened with a bloody mist that coated me and Conklin and Vetter with a red sheen.

  I screamed, “No!”

  And Vetter laughed again, his smile blinding white, his face a mask of blood. He used the barrel of his gun to shove his mother’s body out of the chair so that she tumbled and rolled, coming to a stop at my feet. Vetter aimed through the space between me and Conklin and fired again, the second horrific boom of double-aught buck sailing over the heads of cops and SWAT twenty yards away at the edge of the lawn.

  I tried to wrap my mind around the horror of what I’d just seen. Instead of using his mother as a ticket to safety, Vetter had blown her up. And SWAT couldn’t get a bead on Vetter without hitting us.

  Vetter thumbed the breech release, cracked the muzzle, and reloaded. He flipped his gun shut with a snap of his wrist and it clacked as it closed. It was a sharp and unmistakable sound.

  Vetter was ready to shoot again.

  There was no doubt in my mind. I was in the last moments of my life. Hans Vetter was going to kill us. I’d never reach my gun in time to stop him.

  The air was heavy with smoke. The fire blazed. Flames leaped from the second floor up through the roof. The heat dried my sweat and the dead woman’s blood on my face.

  “Step aside,” Vetter said to me and Conklin. “If you want to live, step aside.”

  Chapter 119

  FEELING CAME BACK into my fingertips, and hope rushed into the chambers of my heart. Now I understood. Vetter wanted SWAT to take him down in a superhero-style blaze of glory. He wanted to die, but I wanted him to pay.

  As if my thoughts had caused it, Vetter suddenly screamed and jerked in the wheelchair like he was having a grand mal seizure.

  I saw the wires and looked up at Conklin.

  While Vetter’s attention had been focused on the SWAT team, Rich had unhooked his Taser from his belt and fired. The Taser’s electrified prongs had pierced Vetter’s right arm and thigh. Conklin kept the juice flowing as he shoved the wheelchair onto its side, kicked Vetter’s shotgun downhill.

  While Vetter jerked in agony, SWAT swarmed up the slope to where we stood. I choked out to Rich, “You’re smart. Anyone ever tell you that?”

  “Never.”

  “Are you okay?”

  He grunted. “Not yet.”

  I fumbled in the grass for my Glock, then held the muzzle to Vetter’s forehead. Only then did Rich let up on the Taser. Still twitching, Vetter grinned up at me, said, “Am I in heaven?”

  I was panting, my pulse beating a deafening tattoo against my eardrums, the smoke making my eyes stream with tears.

  “You asshole,” I screamed.

  Fire rigs drove up to the curb, and the SWAT team surrounded us. Captain Bailey saw the look of fury in Conklin’s eyes. He said slowly, deliberately, “I’ve got something in the van you can use to clean yourselves up.”

  He turned his back and so did the rest of his team. With the rising blanket of smoke blocking out the news chopper’s view, Rich kicked Vetter in the ribs.

  “This is for the Malones,” he said. He kicked Vetter again and again, until tha
t psycho stopped grinning and started spitting teeth.

  “That’s for the Meachams and the Jablonskys and the Chus,” Rich said. He kicked Vetter hard in the hams.

  “This, you scum. This one’s for me.”

  Chapter 120

  CONKLIN AND I had scrubbed at our faces with damp paper towels, but the stench of fire and death clung to us. Jacobi stood upwind and said, “You two smell like you’ve been wading through a sewer.”

  I thanked him, but my mind was churning.

  Two blocks away, a raging fire was burning the Vetter house to the ground. There might have been evidence inside that house, something that would have tied Hans Vetter and Brett Atkinson to the arson murders.

  Now all of that was gone.

  We stood in front of the house where the dead boy, Brett Atkinson, had lived with his parents. It was a soaring contemporary with cantilevered decks and hundred-mile views. Very, very wealthy people lived here.

  Hawk’s parents, the Atkinsons, hadn’t answered repeated knocks by patrolmen, never returned our calls, and their son’s body was still lying unclaimed in the morgue. A canvass of the neighborhood had confirmed their absence. No one had seen or heard from the Atkinsons in days, and they hadn’t told anyone they were leaving home.

  The engines on the Atkinsons’ cars were cold. There was mail in the mailbox a couple of days old, and the fellow who’d stopped mowing the lawn when we arrived said he hadn’t seen Perry or Moira Atkinson all week.

  While Vetter’s house was a total loss, I still had hope that the Atkinsons’ house might hold evidence of the horrific killings the boys had done. Thirty-five minutes had passed since Jacobi phoned Tracchio for a search warrant.

  Meanwhile, Cindy had called me, saying that she and a handful of TV news vans were parked behind the barricade at the top of the street. Conklin pushed a bloody clump of his hair away from his eyes, said to Jacobi, “If this isn’t ‘exigent circumstances,’ I don’t know what is.”

  Jacobi growled, “Cool it, Conklin. Understand? If we blow this, we’re freakin’ buried. I’ll be retired, and you two will be working for Brink’s Security. If you’re lucky.”

  Fifteen more minutes crawled by.

  I was about to lie and say I smelled decomp when an intern from the district attorney’s office arrived in a Chevy junker. She sprinted up the front walk a half second before Conklin caved in the front window of the Atkinson house with a tire iron.

  Chapter 121

  THE INSIDE OF the Atkinson house was like a museum. Miles of glossy hardwood floors, large modern canvases hung on two-story-high white walls. Lights came on when we stepped into a room.

  It was like a museum after hours: no one was home.

  And it was creepy. No pets, no newspapers or magazines, no dishes in the sink, and except for the food in the refrigerator and a precise lineup of clothing in each closet, there was little sign that anyone had ever lived in this place.

  That is, until we reached Hawk’s room in a wing far from the master suite.

  Hawk’s roost was large and bright, the windows looking west over the mountains. The bed was the least of the room. It was single, with a plain blue bedspread, speakers on each side, and a headset plugged into a CD player. One long side of the room was lined with a built-in Formica desk. Several computers and monitors and high-tech laser printers were set up there and the adjacent wall was lined with thick corkboard.

  Pidge’s drawings, many of which I recognized from 7th Heaven, were pinned to the board. But there were new drawings, too, and they looked to be works in progress for a second graphic novel.

  “I’m thinking that this was their workshop,” I said to Conklin. “That they cooked it all up in here.”

  Conklin took a seat at the desktop, and I examined the corkboard. “Book number two,” I said to Conklin. “Lux et Veritas. Got any idea what that means?”

  “Easy one,” Rich said, lowering the seat of the hydraulic chair. “Light and truth.”

  “Catchy. Sounds like more fires in the making -”

  Rich called out, “Hawk’s got a journal. I touched the mouse and it came up on the screen.”

  “Fantastic!”

  As Rich scrolled through Brett Atkinson’s journal, I continued my study of the drawings on the wall. One of them nailed me as if I, too, were pinned to the corkboard. The drawing depicted a middle-aged man and woman, arms around each other’s waist, but their faces were flat, expressionless. A caption was written beneath the drawing.

  I recognized the handwriting.

  It was the same as the printing we’d seen on the title pages of the books left at the houses of the arson victims.

  “Requiescat in leguminibus,” I said, sounding out the syllables. “Rest in what?”

  Rich wasn’t listening to me.

  “This map on Atkinson’s computer,” he said. “He’s starred San Francisco, Palo Alto, Monterey. Unreal. Look at this! Photos of the houses they burned down. This is evidence, Lindsay. This is frickin’ evidence.”

  It was.

  I peered over Conklin’s shoulders as he opened Web pages, scanned research on each of the victim couples, including the names of their kids and the dates of the fires. Long minutes went by before I remembered the peculiar drawing pinned to the corkboard and was able to grab Rich’s attention.

  “Requiescat in leguminibus,” I said again.

  Rich came over to the wall and looked at the drawing of a couple who might be the Atkinsons. He read the caption.

  “Leguminibus,” Rich said. “Means legumes, I think. Aren’t they a kind of vegetable? Like beans and peas?”

  “Peas?” I yelled. “Jesus Christ! Jesus Christ!”

  “What?” Conklin asked me. “What is it?”

  I hollered out to Jacobi, who was working the rest of the house with the sheriff’s department. With Conklin and Jacobi behind me, I found the stairs to the basement. The freezer was of the trunk variety, extra large.

  I opened the lid and cool air puffed out.

  “Requiescat in leguminibus,” I said. “Rest in peas.”

  I started moving the bags of frozen vegetables aside until I saw a woman’s face.

  “This freezer is deep enough for two,” Jacobi muttered.

  I said, “Uh-huh,” and stopped digging.

  From her approximate age, I was pretty sure I was looking at Moira Atkinson, dressed in her finest, frozen to death.

  Chapter 122

  I WAS WEARING my new blue uniform, and I’d washed my hair thirteen times and once more for good luck when I walked into the autopsy suite the next day. Claire was standing at the top of a six-foot ladder, her Minolta focused down on Mieke Vetter’s decapitated and naked body. Claire looked huge and wobbly up there.

  “Can’t someone else do that?” I asked her.

  “I’m done,” she said. She climbed down the ladder, one ponderous step at a time.

  I gestured to the woman on the table. “I can save you some time,” I said to Claire. “I happen to know this victim’s cause and manner of death.”

  “You know, Lindsay, I still have to do this for evidentiary purposes.”

  “Okay, but just so you know. Yesterday, your patient sprayed me with blood, bone fragments, hair, not to mention brains. You have any idea what dripping brains feel like?”

  “Warm gummy bears? Am I right?” Claire said, grinning at me.

  “Uh. Yeah. Exactly.”

  “One of my first cases was a suicide,” Claire said, getting on with her work, drawing a Y incision with her scalpel from each of Ms. Vetter’s clavicles to her pubis.

  “This old soldier ends it all with a twelve-gauge shotgun under his chin. So I come into his RV, fresh out of training, ya know? And I’m leaning over his body in the La-Z-Boy, taking photos, and the cops are yukking it up.”

  “Because?”

  “I had no idea. You see, that’s the point, girlfriend.”

  I started laughing for the first time in a long while.

 
“So as I’m leaning over the body, about a quarter of the guy’s brain has been slowly peeling off the ceiling – it falls and smacks me right behind my ear.”

  She slapped her neck to show me, and I rewarded her story with a good guffaw.

  “Like I said, warm gummy bears. So, how’d it go?” she asked me.

  “How did which go? The interview with your patient’s devil spawn? Or the meeting with the mayor?”

  “Both of ’em, baby girl. I’m going to be here all night, thanks to your bird friends filling up my vault all over again.”

  “Well, Vetter first, short and to the point,” I told Claire. “He lawyered up, pronto. Got nothing to say. But when he does get around to saying something, I’ll bet you a hundred bucks he says his buddy tortured and killed all those people and he just watched.”

  “Won’t really matter, will it? Killer or accessory, he still gets the needle. Plus, you witnessed him killing this poor woman.”

  “Me and thirty other cops. But for the sake of the victims’ families, I still want him convicted for killing them all.”

  “And your meeting with the mayor?”

  “Hah! First Conklin and I get the high fives and Jacobi almost cries, he’s so proud of us, and I think, ‘Whoa, we’re gonna pull our horrible crime-solution rate out of the basement up to maybe the ground floor’ – when the whole conversation devolves into which jurisdiction has the first bite at Vetter since the killings took place in Monterey and Santa Clara Counties as well as – Claire? Honey? What is it? What’s wrong?”

  Claire’s face had twisted in pain. She dropped her scalpel, and it rang out against the stainless steel table. She grabbed her belly, looked at me with shock in her eyes.

  “My water just broke, Lindsay. I’m not due for three weeks.”

  I called for an ambulance, helped my friend into a chair. A minute later the doors to the ambulance bay banged open and two brawny guys strode into the autopsy suite carrying a stretcher.