“I’m sorry you had to see what you did out there at the ranch today, Mrs. Jefferies,” Officer Conroy said, his thin lips pulled in a straight line. The young man looked pale, as if the coming winter had already faded him. “Seeing what you did? That must have been pretty terrible.”
Naomi thought about the bodies at the Johanssons’: Little Benjamin, his head covered in blood; the two bumps under the sheet that were Anna and Sybille. Blood. Blood on the sheet. And all around Jacob on the kitchen floor, his throat cut. She shuddered slightly when she recalled the raspy sound of his breathing, the air sucking in through the slit in his throat, the red foam that came out when he exhaled.
“It was awful, Officer Conroy,” Naomi agreed. “It was like… Well… It’s something I’ll never forget.”
Suddenly, Naomi couldn’t go on. She could feel Conroy look over at her sympathetically, expecting her to continue, but she stopped talking. She gave him a weary smile and turned away.
A few minutes in the car and they were on the highway, heading to the ranch. She tried to think of something to say to the young officer, just innocent conversation, but couldn’t. Instead, as they drew closer, she watched the bison grazing in the fields, the mammoth, lumbering animals with their thick hides and curved horns. The bison had their shaggy, dark brown winter coats on their backs and shoulders.
“You know, there’s a frost coming tonight,” Conroy remarked.
“Yes,” Naomi answered. “In fact, I raise bees, and I was supposed to winterize my hives this morning. I still need to do that.”
“Bees, huh?” he asked. “I bet that’s interesting.”
Naomi looked at the small silver watch on her wrist, a tenth anniversary gift from Abe. It was shortly before noon.
“May I use your phone, Officer Conroy?” she asked.
“Sure.” He picked it up from the console between them and handed it to her.
Naomi entered the number to the family’s landline. “Ardeth, one of the officers allowed me to use his cell,” she said, when the oldest of her sister-wives answered. “I wanted to make sure that Clara explained to you what happened at the Johansson spread, and that I’ll be late. Did she?”
“Yes, Naomi, Clara told me. And I’ve heard from others what you walked into. It sounds dreadful. Poor Anna and Laurel, those beautiful children. A terrible tragedy,” Ardeth said, yet Naomi heard annoyance in the way the family matriarch clicked her tongue. “But are you on your way home now? I have my list ready. And I’m dressed to go grocery shopping.”
“No, not yet.” The less Naomi said, she decided, the better. Ardeth would simply assume that Naomi was tied up for the afternoon with the police. “I won’t be home for at least a few more hours. Perhaps not until late this afternoon. Ardeth, the circumstances what they are, you’ll have to do the shopping a day later this week.”
Quiet, while Naomi assumed Ardeth stewed.
“Oh, all right,” Ardeth finally said, just as Officer Conroy pulled into the MRJ ranch’s long driveway and Naomi saw the grand house ahead, so imposing. It had to be one of the most beautiful homes in Alber.
“I’m sorry,” Naomi said, not feeling at all regretful. “But I will be there when I can.”
Naomi hung up the phone and placed it back on the console. “Thank you,” she said.
Officer Conroy smiled over at her. He seemed like such a nice young man. “No problem.”
Thanks to that phone call, Naomi had the van for as long as she wanted it. Considering her options, she wondered how quickly she could get the bees situated. She couldn’t leave them out to freeze, but she had other priorities to take care of. As she considered her options, she decided that rather than see to the bees first, she’d go to the hospital to check on Jacob. His family would be there.
“Dear Lord, they’ll be so grateful, won’t they?” Naomi whispered.
Officer Conroy gave her a strained look. “Did you say something?” he asked as he pulled over and parked.
“No, no. Nothing important.”
He looked over at her and his eyes settled on the front of her dress. “You’re not going to go home and change?” he asked. “You have—”
“Jacob’s blood, yes, I know.” She took a clean piece of the skirt in her hand and straightened it. “I would, but I have some things to do.” At that, she smiled over at him.
Naomi popped open the door and slipped out of the car. She scanned the scene, the crime scene tape and the yellow tented markers. Anna’s and the children’s bodies were gone, taken off in hearses to the county morgue. But Naomi noticed that the vultures remained, planted in the tree above where the bloody sheet had billowed in the breeze earlier. The ghoulish birds were watching, waiting. Shuddering, she wondered if they hoped to find scraps for dinner.
“Are you sure you’re okay? You didn’t say anything?” Officer Conroy said, appearing genuinely concerned about her well-being.
“Oh, it was nothing,” she said with a warm smile. “I was praising the Lord, expressing my wishes for Jacob to recover.”
“Well, okay,” Conroy said. “Let’s just get your van, then.”
As he escorted her to her vehicle, Naomi suddenly stopped and stared at the impressive house. She turned her head to take in the vast fields and the lumbering bison that constituted the Johansson family fortune.
“It’s such a blessing, a heaven-sent twist of fate, isn’t it?” she whispered.
“What?” he asked.
Her smile grew wider. “That I was the one who saved Jacob’s life.”
Thirteen
The land around Carl Shipley’s trailer could have passed for a dump with the piles of broken bricks scattered about. The trailer was anchored in place by more bricks stacked on either side of the wheels. “What’s Carl do for a living?” I asked.
“Works at the bison ranch part-time and for a construction company part-time,” Max said. “Looks like he brings the discards home.”
“Maybe he’s a part-time artist, too, and he considers it yard art?” I said, pointing at the discarded shingles with their frayed wrappers. Max raised one appreciative eyebrow at my sarcasm. I chuckled, but then, looking at him, I thought again about my promise to have dinner at his house that evening with Brooke. My head filled with all the reasons that wasn’t a good idea. Too much, too soon, I worried. Maybe I’m not ready.
I pegged the trailer at about twenty feet long by eight feet wide. The stairs were down, and the hitch protruded up front. Instead of inspecting it on site, we could have hauled it to the crime lab, but that didn’t make any sense unless we found something. I stopped and got a better look at the brown leather recliner near the trailer door, its footrest hanging askew, barely attached on one side. The umbrella overhead had a slit at the back that appeared to be the result of the fabric rotting. Based on all that, I had little hope for the condition of the trailer inside.
Instead, I walked through the door into a well-kept interior. A small table with benches on one wall, a galley kitchen with pots neatly stacked by size on shelves over the stove, a cubbyhole bathroom that doubled as a shower with a drain in the center of the floor, and a bed at the far back, the sheets and quilt pushed to the side as if someone had just crawled out.
“Are we sure Carl lives here?” I asked. “It’s pretty neat.”
“Rather a surprise,” Max replied. “I wouldn’t have pegged Carl as a good housekeeper.”
A spick-and-span trailer, of course, wasn’t what we wanted. We needed the down and dirty; we were looking for evidence of four grisly murders and an attempted murder. We weren’t judging his housekeeping skills but his guilt or innocence. I caught a whiff of something. “Do you smell bleach?”
“I was just about to ask you the same question,” Max said. “What do you think prompted him to clean this morning, to get the place sparkling?”
“Mullins?” I said.
Max understood. I was suggesting that while Mullins was outside shouting, Carl could have been inside destroying e
vidence. I shook my head at the thought that if my lead detective had followed procedures, if he’d called in his hunch so we could join him, we might have gotten here in time to surprise Carl and preserve any evidence.
Skimming over the trailer’s insides, the place looked normal. A pair of cotton boxers lay on the unmade bed, as if Carl had thrown them there when he dressed that morning. Otherwise, nothing looked out of place. I saw a washing machine and a dryer behind a slatted door and swung it open. I put my hand on the outside of the dryer. It felt vaguely warm. I popped the door open and saw faded jeans and a white T-shirt, white athletic socks and white jockey shorts.
“Looks like he’s been washing clothes, too,” I said.
Max gave me a sideways grimace.
“Not to worry. They always miss something,” I said. As hard as folks try to get out stains, blood is hard to hide. It seeps into carpeting, splatters and spreads, drips down into pipes. I once had a case in Dallas where the guy even put new carpet in his living room, pad and all, and we found traces of his next-door neighbor’s blood on the cement underneath.
“You’ll take out the drains and look for blood residue in the sinks and the shower, right?” I asked Lieutenant Mueller, when he joined us inside. There was only enough room for the three of us, so his techs were searching the area surrounding the trailer. Mueller had the CSI unit’s base parked slightly up the hill.
“Of course,” Mueller said. “We’ll get right on it. What’s covered by the warrant? What can we take?”
“It’s pretty narrow. We’re looking for shoes that match that print in the kitchen, any bloody clothes,” Max said, handing him a copy. “Any kind of knife or gun. I know we found both at the ranch, and those are probably the murder weapons, but at this stage, before ballistics and the autopsies, we can’t be sure. Anything that looks like it may have blood on it or any possible murder weapon should be logged in.”
“Lieutenant Mueller,” I said, and he turned from Max toward me. “Also watch for anything that could be tied to the victims, Jacob and his family. It could help us with motive.”
“Got it,” Mueller said. “Now how about you two go outside and let my guys take over in here. We haven’t got a lot of room to work in.”
Max and I did as the lieutenant asked, and once we stepped outside the videographer took our place inside, intent on doing his job and recording the interior as we found it.
On the edge of the clearing, a few folks in the unit had set up a table with supplies. They had stacks of markers, bags and labels to hold and document any evidence. One of the techs had a bottle of luminol waiting to spray anything that looked suspiciously like blood. I thought about that bleach smell again and hoped I was right and Carl wasn’t able to wipe everything away.
Max and I stood close together, watching. My mind kept circling back to the ranch and the bodies. “You know, those little kids shot like that…” I started, but then I felt vaguely sick and instead of finishing the thought muttered, “I hate cases like this.”
Max gave me a sad look.
Just then, one of the forensic techs shouted, “There’s something you need to see back here.”
Max and I followed her voice. We walked behind the trailer and into the woods. After we passed a small corral, we saw an aging mare tied up to the side of a shed munching on what appeared to be the last of a bale of hay. Carl’s horse looked unkempt, like it had been through a war and hadn’t come out the better for it. The mare eyed us suspiciously but didn’t react, just kept eating.
We continued on and found the crime scene tech who’d called out waiting for us at the base of an oak, its fallen leaves forming a brittle, brown carpet beneath it. Not a massive tree, it stood maybe fifteen or twenty feet. Its branches stretched out in all directions, a bony circle of gnarled wood. Someone had taken rough, dark tan twine, hundreds of feet of it, and cinched it from branch to branch, tying one to the other. It looked as if someone had tried to crochet a dandelion top or a spider web onto the tree.
“What the hell—” Max started.
“No clue,” I answered.
Making it even more mysterious, tucked on a smattering of the branches, hanging by hooks and crooked arms, sitting on twigs, taped to knobby limbs, were garish wooden ornaments: skeletons and devilish-looking figurines, skulls painted white and black with menacing grins wearing sombreros, skeleton women in brightly colored frocks and mantillas.
“Día de Muertos symbols,” I whispered.
Max nodded. “You’ve seen an altar like this before? My experience is mainly limited to the occasional Mexican-American house or restaurant decorations.”
“Nothing exactly like this, not on a tree. But I saw altars all the time in Texas, especially this time of year. The Day of the Dead is celebrated at the beginning of November, just a couple of weeks ago.”
We stood and looked, thinking. “Why would he do this?” Max asked. “What does it mean?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But I intend to ask him.” I wondered if it had to be Carl’s handiwork. Maybe someone else who lived in the woods had decorated the oak? I skimmed through the trees, searching for a house, a shack, a path that appeared to lead anywhere, but saw nothing.
We wove our way back to check on the search, and I noticed that the grass was worn away in front of us, as if someone routinely traveled between Carl’s trailer and the macabre tree display. It’s his, I thought. It has to be his.
Lieutenant Mueller was standing at the supply table wearing latex gloves and flipping through a black binder. He didn’t acknowledge us when we approached, seemingly absorbed in whatever he was looking at. Max and I stopped directly across from him and watched as the lieutenant turned one page then another.
Photographs. An album of photographs; stark, black-and-white images displayed in clear plastic covers. Some had a slightly grainy appearance, as if they’d been taken from a distance with a telephoto lens. In one, Laurel and Anna played with the children in the yard. In another, taken through a downstairs window, Laurel leaned over the kitchen table. In a third, she sat in a chair in the upstairs nursery, looking content and happy, while Jeremy suckled at her breast. I wondered how Carl shot that one. He had to be elevated on something to get that angle.
“Where did you find these?” I asked.
Mueller shook his head as if he’d come to, the album’s spell broken. “Inside a slit in the mattress, covered by a piece of duct tape. At first, we thought he’d repaired an old mattress. But then we found the folder pushed inside the foam, along with something else.”
“What?” Max asked.
“This,” Mueller said, as he reached over and picked up a plastic evidence bag holding a white enamel flower rimmed in gold attached to a chain. “A necklace.”
“Page back a bit,” I requested, and Mueller did, flipping through until I said, “Stop there.”
The book lay open at the photo where Laurel bent over the kitchen table. Her arms extended, she appeared to be kneading dough, probably for bread. Dangling from her neck was the chain with the pendant. “Did you find a camera?” I asked. Given the album was discovered hidden in Carl’s trailer, ownership would be assumed. But having the camera that took the photos would further tie him to the strange collection.
“Yeah, in the closet up on a shelf. It’s going in for fingerprinting,” Mueller said.
“Did you find anything else?” I asked.
“No boots or shoes with matching soles. Nothing linked to the case,” Mueller said. “The trailer came up clean. No traces of blood. If there was any on the clothes in the dryer, it’s gone now. The luminol didn’t light up anything. We’re sending the shirt and jeans to the lab, but I’m not thinking we’ll find anything. That’s where the smell came from. He used bleach on the laundry.”
“On a pair of blue jeans?” I asked.
“Yeah.” Mueller’s voice laced with sarcasm, he added, “Maybe the guy needs a laundry lesson?”
He didn’t expect an answer, and we d
idn’t give him one.
“What do we think?” Max asked.
“I think that at the very least Mullins got part of this right,” I said.
“The part where Carl Shipley murdered his best friend’s wives and two of his children, then left said friend for dead?” Max speculated.
“We’ve got a way to go before we book this guy on a murder charge,” I admitted. “But we can certainly say that Carl was obsessed with Laurel. In fact, he was stalking her.”
Fourteen
Max and I had a difference of opinions walking to our cars. He wanted to head back to the ranch to see how things were coming with processing the scene. While Lieutenant Mueller oversaw the search of Carl’s trailer, a few techs remained at the house scouring for any evidence we may have missed. I had a different agenda in mind. I wanted to go directly to the hospital, splinter Michael and Reba Johansson away from their son’s bedside and start asking questions. We split up: Max back to the MRJ Ranch, while I drove to Smith County Memorial Hospital in Pine City.
My trip was longer, so I was still driving when Max arrived back at the scene and called. “Bad news. Just talked to Doc Wiley and no autopsy results until tomorrow.”
“I thought he’d at least get to the children, maybe Laurel or Anna today,” I complained, but then Max reminded me of the realities of working in the sticks. Doc Wiley wasn’t just the medical examiner; he was one of only two general practitioners in the county.
“Doc got called in by one of the midwives to deliver a baby that’s coming breech,” Max said. “Unfortunate, but it can’t be helped.”
Her Final Prayer: A totally gripping and heart-stopping crime thriller (Detective Clara Jefferies Book 2) Page 9