Either Doc was in a bad mood, or I sounded as if I were complaining. He pulled the scalpel out of Anna’s body, gazed over at me and gave me an annoyed frown. “I know you’re in a hurry, Clara. We all are. We all want the murders solved. But I had a tricky delivery yesterday. Almost lost the baby. I think Max explained that to you, and—”
“Sorry, Doc. Yes, Max explained,” I interrupted. “I’m just wondering where things stand.”
Doc shook his head. “Not on the best footing, I’d say. This is pretty treacherous territory.”
“Are you planning to elaborate?” I asked.
“Heck, Clara.” He looked perturbed and as angry as I felt. “When I took this job, I never thought I’d have a case like this. Two little kids. These two women. You’d think people wouldn’t do such a thing.”
“Unfortunately, we can never predict what people are capable of.” I knew we shared the same feelings of betrayal; these types of killings weren’t supposed to happen, not in bucolic mountain towns. Doc glowered, and I said, “I don’t want to be abrupt, but I have to get to the station. I’m here for a quick rundown. Where are we?”
Doc gave me another peeved glare. “Toxicology samples on the children are on the way to the lab, but won’t be back for a week. I’m not expecting to find anything surprising. I think that the causes of death will be the gunshot wounds we saw at the scene,” he said. “Manner of death, of course, is homicide on both.”
I had a notebook out and wrote Doc’s findings on the children. “And Laurel? Any thoughts on her yet?”
“I’ll get to her next and call you with results later, but I looked the body over and didn’t see anything surprising there either. The cut neck is the only wound, and my guess is that the cause of her death is blood loss. I’ll send off toxicology, but, again, that’ll take a while to get back.”
“Okay,” I said. “Thanks.”
Doc looked down at Anna on the table, and then he closed his eyes and shuddered. I thought when he opened them that I saw tears welling up in the corners. The case was getting to him, and at his age, he had a hard time hiding it. Maybe he was beyond the point of caring if I saw his pain. Personally, I wasn’t far behind him. Anna’s long dark hair spread out around her head, and Doc had shut her eyelids, so that if it wasn’t for the Y-incision he’d cut in her body, shoulders to the chest then straight down to her pelvis, she might have looked as if she were sleeping. “I’m doing all the usual lab tests, of course,” he said. “But I’m not expecting any surprises with Anna either. It’s clear that she had the likelihood of a long life ahead of her, until some coward pulled a trigger and shot her in the back.”
“You’re still thinking that time of death was early yesterday morning? About seven or so? About an hour before Naomi found them?” I drew a timeline starting from Sunday evening through Monday morning, when Naomi called 911. Anna had a short incision in her upper right abdomen where I figured Doc had inserted a thermometer to check her liver temp. A core organ, well protected, livers were routinely used to gauge cooling and estimate time of death.
“On these three victims, the children and their mother, I do think that’s right. I did the readings about eleven yesterday morning, before I got called for the delivery. At that time, their temps were all down about seven degrees, but a little of that must have been due to the ambient temperature, since they were outside and it was a chilly morning,” he explained. “The one that doesn’t fit is Laurel.”
I looked at him, puzzled. “Explain.”
“I’m not sure, Clara.” Doc had a habit of gesturing with the scalpel while we talked, and he used it to point at her on the table. “First off, Laurel was inside the house where it was warmer, so her body should have had a slightly warmer temp than the others if they were all murdered in close succession.”
“But Laurel’s wasn’t?”
Doc shook his head. He walked me over and pulled the sheet off of Laurel, and she had the same incision where he’d checked her liver temp. I looked again at the strange circle of red lipstick around her mouth. “Laurel’s body had cooled substantially more than the others,” Doc said. “Nine degrees more, sixteen degrees in all, to just a little more than eighty-two degrees. If we use the standard measurement of one point five degrees per hour, when we took her temp at eleven yesterday morning, she’d been dead for—”
“Eleven hours,” I said, finishing the sentence for him.
“Although that is, of course, nothing more than an estimate,” he said. “But it’s my best guess, and it is a rough guess, you know. These methods are never precise. But I’m thinking that Laurel died around midnight.”
That didn’t make a lot of sense. If Doc was right, whoever killed Laurel did so in the middle of the night and then came back at dawn and murdered Anna and the children and tried to kill Jacob. I wrote it all out in my notebook, the approximate times, the scenario as Doc thought it unfolded.
“Why would someone do that?” I asked.
“What?” Doc responded, as if not following me.
“Kill Laurel then return to murder the rest of the family?”
Doc smiled at me. “You know, Clara, that’s your problem to figure out. I’ve always been grateful that I do the autopsies, and you police officers have to solve the crimes.”
Twenty-Two
Mulling over what Doc had told me, I headed to my office. I didn’t expect to see what I did when I drove past the front of the building—a small group of women carrying signs, at least a couple I recognized from the shelter the night before, the ones who’d expressed doubt that I was the right choice for police chief. One sign read, Fire the Apostate! Another: Outsiders Won’t Protect Us! And a third: Take Our Town Back!
I considered the irony that, after all I’d been through in my short time back in Alber, someone would question that I wanted to help not hurt the town. I entered through the back door. Kellie stood behind the front desk, staring out at the protesters on the street. “Did you see them?” she asked. After I nodded, she asked, “Why are they doing that?”
“Because there have been four brutal murders. They’re worried and scared. That can bring out the worst in people,” I explained. “And because I was once one of them, but no longer. In this town, this culture, although I grew up a few miles from this police station, I am considered an outsider. And from childhood on, they’ve been taught that they can’t trust those who aren’t like them.”
A pause, and I thought for a moment about the day I left Alber, bruised and sore, tired and frightened. Was there another way? Should I have tried to find a different option? Did I have any choice other than to turn my back on my entire family? And didn’t I deserve some of what I was getting, since I’d run out on them without even saying goodbye?
Kellie got up and walked to the window. She stared wide-eyed at the women marching past the building. “But this is four people killed. It’s not something you can solve overnight. And you are working the case. Working hard. Why are they saying those things?”
I took a deep breath, thinking about how young she was, only nineteen. She had much to learn about life, about people.
“We know that I’m doing my best, but they don’t,” I said. “And the truth is that I don’t blame them for being worried. I haven’t, but this police department has buried cases in the past. We have stacks of unsolved cases to attest to that. By the way, did the night guys go through the backroom files looking for anything on Myles Thompkins and Carl Shipley as I asked?”
“Yeah,” Kellie said. “They skimmed through them. They left me a note this morning.”
“Saying?” I prodded.
“No luck,” she said, with a shrug. “They found a few nuisance complaints and a petty theft charge against Carl, juvenile stuff, but nothing else, nothing violent or big. Not a single file on anything involving Myles.”
It had been a long shot, but I was still disappointed. “Okay, well, any calls?” I asked.
“A few,” she said. “And Detective Mull
ins is waiting for you.”
“I know,” I said. “I’ll be right with him.”
I grabbed my message slips and headed to my office. Apparently, Mullins had been on the lookout for my arrival. Before I could get more than a dozen steps, he’d fallen in next to me. “We need to talk,” he said, the tone of his voice leaving no room for argument.
Conroy was sitting at his desk reading a case file, and the younger officer’s head had snapped up, curious, when he’d heard Mullins’ voice.
“Mullins, it can keep until we get to my office,” I said. “Not here.”
“Sheesh, I…” he started grousing, but then clenched his lips and fell into a lockstep behind me.
In my office, I hung my parka on the coat rack and strapped my old brown leather bag onto the back of my chair. Then I sat down and leafed through the message slips, just to make sure there wasn’t anything important. At the bottom of the stack was a small pink envelope that smelled of vanilla, with my name printed across the front. I opened it. LEAVE NOW. YOU AREN’T WELCOME IN ALBER, it read. I stared at it for a few moments, wondering who wrote it. For just a second, I considered that perhaps Mother was behind it, but I shrugged that off. She didn’t want me here, I knew, but Mother had no problem telling me that to my face. Did she have faults? Sure. But she wasn’t the kind of woman who’d send an anonymous note.
“Just a minute, Mullins,” I said. “I’ll be right back.”
I walked out a little way and held up the envelope. “Kellie, did someone drop this off?”
“It was on the desk when I got here this morning. The night dispatcher said she found it on the floor, just inside the door.”
“She didn’t see who dropped it off? Not on the waiting room cameras?” I asked.
“No,” Kellie said, with a shake of her head. “All she could see was someone cracking the door open wide enough to slip it in.”
“Okay,” I said. “Thanks.”
I turned back to Mullins, then thought of something. “Oh, Kellie, one more thing,” I said. She looked up, expectantly. “Let’s get a price on putting a camera on the front of the building, like the ones we have out back on the parking lot door.”
“Sure,” she said. “I’ll make a few calls.”
Nothing more to be done about the note, I returned to my office and threw it in my desk drawer. Then I turned my full attention on my lead detective, who had enough nervous energy to fuel a power plant. “Why don’t you sit down,” I suggested, gesturing toward the chair across the desk from me.
“I’ll stand,” he said, arms folded across his chest. “You want to tell me why you’re wasting time looking for Myles Thompkins? Because that’s what looking at him is, a waste of time.”
“Jeff—” I started, but Mullins wasn’t in a listening frame of mind.
“Damn it, Chief, I solved this case for you. I know who murdered my Laurel. Her mothers and me, we’re sure it had to be Carl Shipley. Couldn’t be anyone else.”
I got up and closed the door. Mullins didn’t move, so I pointed at the chair and said, “Detective, sit.” He ignored me and stayed stationary, watching me while I sat down behind my desk. I leaned back in the chair, crossed my arms, stared up at him and waited. One of the first things I’d learned as a cop is that silence can be unnerving to the person across the desk from me, and it was often the best way to get what I wanted.
Mullins fumed. A minute passed. I remained resolutely quiet. He finally took one step over and plopped down where I’d told him to. He dropped his head and ran his fingers through his thinning salt-and-pepper hair. I thought about what he and his family must be going through, and as irritated as I was, I felt deeply sorry for him. But I couldn’t let him sway the investigation.
“Jeff, listen,” I said. “A few people, including Jacob’s parents, mentioned the relationship between Myles and Laurel, how they’d been in love since high school. And—”
At that, he apparently couldn’t hold back. He dropped both hands and they fell as fists on his knees. “You think I don’t know she was in love with Myles? You think that’s some kind of surprise?”
“No, I don’t. I know that you were well aware of their relationship,” I said. “But, Jeff, what I’m saying is—”
“Girl almost starved herself to death over that boy,” Mullins said. “Would’ve died if we’d let her. She was so in love with that young guy that her mothers and me thought she’d run away.”
“But she didn’t,” I said.
A long sigh, and when it ended Mullins’ eyes filled with tears. I grabbed a tissue out of the box on the gray metal credenza behind me, but by the time I had it ready to hand to him, Mullins had a well-used white cotton handkerchief he’d pulled out of his pocket. He ran it over his cheeks, wiped his nose and upper lip, and looked like a man who’d lost everything he loved in the world. “Chief, you’ve gotta listen to me. Myles is a dead end.”
“How do you know?” I asked. “You heard about the boot print?”
“Yeah, I heard,” he said. “I can’t explain that, but…”
A beaten man, he stopped talking. Mullins was a veteran officer, one who’d had years of experience at another department before coming to Alber PD nearly a decade earlier. I wondered how many parents and spouses, how many family members and loved ones had sat across from him over the years in similar situations. It must feel like the oncologist who gets cancer, the lawyer who becomes the defendant. I thought about how fickle life could be, and how quickly it could change.
“Mullins, we’ve got the blood evidence on Myles, and that’s powerful. We’ve got a motive, that he loved Laurel,” I said.
“That’s why he couldn’t have done it,” Mullins said, the tears flowing hard, but his jaw anchored in determination.
“Sadly, people kill those they love way too often,” I said. “How does that clear Myles Thompkins?”
“Because he truly loved Laurel,” Mullins said. “Myles loved her like no man I’ve ever seen love a woman. And she loved him as passionately in return.”
“But she married—” I started.
“Yes, she married Jacob Johansson,” he bellowed. I would have bet that he’d thought about this often in the preceding twenty-four hours, and as he talked, it sounded almost as if he were trying to work his way through it, to reassure himself that he and his wives had done the right thing when they forced Laurel to marry Jacob.
“Laurel married Jacob not because we wanted her to. She married him because the prophet commanded it.” Mullins talked to me as if I were one of the uninitiated, someone who didn’t understand the laws that governed Elijah’s People. “Emil Barstow had a revelation, a sign from God that told him that Laurel had to be sealed to Jacob. When that happened, her mothers and me, we couldn’t do anything else. We weren’t in control. We knew Myles and Laurel loved each other, but they weren’t destined to be together. It wasn’t…”
Mullins stopped talking. He sat back as if unable to go on. I thought of my father, my mother, the day they announced who I would marry. I thought of the way those in charge ran Max out of Alber to keep him away from me.
“It wasn’t what?” I asked.
“It wasn’t ours to decide,” Mullins said, his hands turned over, palms up, as if pleading for understanding. “It was the prophet’s call, Chief, not ours. And we had to follow it, and we trusted that if we did, Laurel would have a good life and glory in the afterlife.”
It could have been my father’s voice, my parents’ reasoning, but it wasn’t. I felt anger at Mullins, at his wives for not listening to Laurel, just as my parents ignored my wishes. But this wasn’t about me. None of it. It was about the young mother lying on Doc Wiley’s autopsy table, perhaps at this very moment having her organs removed, the slit in her throat examined to determine what type of knife was used to slice through her neck. It was about Anna and her innocent children. It was about Jacob, unconscious in the ICU, and keeping Jeremy, little Jeremy, safe.
As tied up as my emotions
were, I looked at Mullins with sympathy. He was, after all, grieving a terrible loss. “Jeff, listen,” I said, my voice softer. “You explained why it had to be Carl Shipley yesterday, but—”
“The cut throat!” he shouted. “Myles would never mutilate Laurel that way. He’d never do that. But Carl, those people he used to live with, they’re brutal. They—”
“Believe in blood atonement,” I said. “Yes, the way Laurel was killed and Jacob was attacked does seem to fit blood atonement.”
“We had a case here in town once, Chief, did anyone tell you that?” Mullins asked. When I shook my head, he explained. “About six years ago. Someone from the southern sect showed up in town. He hadn’t left the faith but he’d left El Pueblo de Elijah and came to Alber, wanting to get away. He didn’t have permission from the folks in charge in that town to leave. We were never able to prove anything, but he was found dead out in a cattle field about a week after he got here.”
“Throat cut?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Mullins confirmed. “Throat cut.”
I hesitated, deciding how to answer. “I do understand, Jeff. I’m not discounting what you’re saying, but we have to consider the forensic evidence against Myles. Listen, we don’t know who did this yet, but we’ll figure it out. The last thing Max and I want is to go after the wrong person. You don’t want that, do you?”
“No, but… Well, I think, I mean, I don’t think…” he murmured. He seemed preoccupied now, lost in his thoughts, his emotions carrying him back, perhaps to those weeks when Laurel begged for her future, and he and his wives took it away from her.
“You know how tunnel vision can doom an investigation, right?” I asked. “You know that we have to follow the evidence, and right now the evidence leads to Myles Thompkins. The bloody footprint is—”
“Compelling,” Mullins said.
“Yes, it is,” I said. “If Myles wasn’t on the scene, if it was Carl, why is the bloody boot in Myles’s log cabin?”
Her Final Prayer: A totally gripping and heart-stopping crime thriller (Detective Clara Jefferies Book 2) Page 16