by Nene Adams
“Roadblocks?”
“Our budget can’t afford the man-hours necessary to cover the whole county. Besides, I bet Cutshall is Dempsey’s sugar daddy. I don’t think the doctor will stray too far from his source of income. In fact, I think Dempsey’s probably hiding out at the church.”
“But we can’t prove it.”
“Not to a judge’s satisfaction, damn it, not unless we can show Dempsey’s actually there. Catch-22. We can’t get a search warrant or use thermal imaging, either, and I doubt we’d get permission for a wiretap, but we’ve got other options. Starbuck!” Annalee called on sighting the deputy. “I’ve got just the job for you.”
Cynthia was given the task of coordinating a stakeout at the church. Annalee planned to bring in other deputies in rotating shifts, keeping the church under surveillance twenty-four hours a day until the case broke. That much, her office could afford. If Dempsey had gone to ground in the church, she believed he’d eventually have to come up for air. One confirmed sighting was all it would take to get the search warrant she needed.
“Okay, so that’ll be Rourke, Gilchrist, Petrie and Ames on days,” Annalee said to Cynthia, who scribbled a list on a notepad. “Try to bring in Foster, too, as an alternate—” She broke off when her cell phone rang. “Hold that thought, Starbuck.” She checked the caller ID. The call originated from her office’s switchboard. “Crow here.”
Minnie Hawkins’ voice came through. “Sheriff, sorry, couldn’t raise you on the radio. We’ve got a report of a DB out by mile marker sixty-two on the Ateeska side of the Lauder extension road. Couple of fishermen called it in. Sounds pretty gruesome from the description. CSU and the ME are en route.”
“I’m on it.” Annalee closed the phone. “We’ve got a body,” she said to Cynthia.
“Another one?” Cynthia frowned. “That’s quite a bumper crop.”
“You coordinate the stakeout. Get with Noah if you have questions. I’ll handle the DB. I expect to see a progress report on my desk when I get back to the office.”
“No problem.”
“If there’s a break in the case, call me.”
Cynthia nodded and made shooing motions at her. “I’ll handle it, don’t worry.”
Annalee would have preferred staying in Dempsey’s apartment and supervising, but she trusted her deputies to do the job properly.
The drive out to mile marker sixty-two was a long déjà vu moment. She had taken the same route the day before, traveling out to the Skinners’ place to question Ezra about Lassiter. The recollection brought her mind circling back to Lunella. The feel of the woman’s body, the taste of her mouth, the golden flash of her eyes, her deep-throated sexy growl… She snorted. She was getting downright obsessive about somebody she barely knew. Maybe I just need to get laid. That might be the ticket. Go to Atlanta for a weekend, hit the clubs and bars, party hard. Get down and dirty and get it out of her system.
Shit, who am I kidding? Annalee rubbed her jaw and groaned. She didn’t really want meaningless sex with a stranger. She wanted Lunella Skinner, damn it.
“I am so, so very screwed,” she muttered, suddenly recalling the confrontation between Lunella and Rachael at the house and the way Lunella had said “mine,” as if claiming her. The memory sparked another.
In the erotic dream, she had also heard a voice. With a start, she realized the dream voice sounded a hell of a lot like Lunella, sexy growl and all. After a moment’s consideration, she chuckled at her foolishness. Her desire for Lunella had clearly affected her memory of the dream. No other explanation made sense.
Dr. Betty Vernon was already at the scene when she arrived. The medical examiner’s dark skin was sheened with sweat, glistening in the strong sunlight bathing the area.
There was precious little shade at this point on the Ateeska, just a few cottonwoods straggling beside the riverbank. The water was dark green and seemed quiet, the surface disturbed by subtle ripples of turbulence. A cloud of tiny flies swarmed through the air. Annalee closed her mouth, held her breath and batted the insects away from her face.
“I’m hoping to write this one up as a unique case study for the Journal of Forensic Medicine and Pathology,” Betty said as Annalee picked her way carefully down the side of the embankment, trying not to break an ankle or lose her balance.
“How so, Doc?” The humid heat felt like being hit in the face with a steaming wet mop. She had to work not to gasp.
“You’d better see for yourself. If I told you, you’d think I was pulling your leg.”
Annalee went over to the body. At first, she wasn’t certain of the sex of the horribly deformed corpse, but the lack of male genitalia clued her that the victim was female. No clothing, just a few dirty tatters of cloth around the neck and wrists. The victim’s dirt-smeared skin was drawn tight over lumpy bones, so tight every tendon and the knobs of the vertebrae stood out in sharp relief. The fingernails and toenails were quite long and encrusted with filth. The face was the worst aspect, more animal than human—the nose was flat, the lower and upper jaws pushed forward grotesquely, showing oversized canines. The thickly tufted eyebrows ran together in a single caterpillar line stretching almost to the temples.
She had never seen anything like it in her life, yet she could have sworn the victim was familiar. Another sense of déjà vu shivered through her. Try as she might, she couldn’t reconcile the victim’s features with any of the faces she dredged out of her memory. Surely she couldn’t have forgotten a woman who looked like that! Were it not for the presence of the medical examiner and other law enforcement officers on the scene, she might have thought there was a hidden camera somewhere and the corpse merely a horror movie prop.
“I can’t tell you how surprised I am to find such profound maxillomandibular deformity,” Betty said, squatting beside the corpse and pointing a nitrile-gloved finger. “It’s quite rare, even unique in my opinion, although I’m not sure if the abnormalities are the result of a tumor or birth defect. This poor woman had to be in considerable pain.”
“Time of death?” Annalee asked.
“No rigor to speak of, the liver temp’s ninety-six degrees, it’s a very warm day and the vitreous humor is clear, so I’d say possibly within the last three hours or so.”
“Cause?”
“There aren’t any obvious injuries. We’ll know more after the autopsy. I can tell you that lividity suggests the victim was killed elsewhere and her body transported here, and there are also abrasions on the heels.”
“Shit. The killer held her by the arms and dragged her. That makes this the secondary crime scene. We still have to find the primary.”
Betty stood from her crouch. “I’ll try to find out if any local doctors were treating a patient with these deformities. That should make identifying the victim somewhat easier.”
“Sheriff! Over here!” called a CSU investigator processing the crime scene.
Annalee had almost turned to go when she saw Betty lift a lock of matted hair away from the side of the victim’s head. A startlingly bright gold eye stared at her from the deformed face. The sick feeling in her stomach increased. She walked off hurriedly.
The investigator waving at her from about ten yards away had found a dead animal. A wolf, as it proved, but not one of the pale-coated wolves populating Malingering Deep. The animal’s coat was brindled black and silver. Its lips were drawn back from teeth that seemed far too small and too blunt for a predator’s muzzle.
Checking the corpse, Annalee found little sign of insect activity and decided it must be fairly fresh. Perhaps the wolf had been killed around the same time as their other victim. If so, why hadn’t the hunter reported finding a woman’s body?
She knelt down and ruffled through the fur, finding at least a dozen small wounds in the chest and head, none of which seemed damaging enough to have caused death. “Looks like the wolf was hit by shotgun pellets,” she said. “From the spread, I’d guess the weapon was a twelve-gauge fired at a distance of twenty
yards or so.”
“Yeah, I found a pellet in the forest litter.” The investigator held out an evidence bag. “Probably double-aught buckshot. The size is right, but the weight feels off.”
The pellet looked like highly polished steel… But the color’s not quite right. Annalee weighed the bag in her palm and returned it to the waiting investigator. “You’re right. I don’t know if this is connected to our murder victim, but bag the wolf and take it to the morgue as well,” she said. Her cell phone rang. She answered the call. “Crow here.”
“It’s Noah. We just started the first shift of the church stakeout,” he reported. “Nothing much going on except for one thing.”
“What’s that?” Annalee tried to tune out a nearby cicada’s enthusiastic resonant buzz.
“The basement door around the back of the church is busted.”
“And?”
“Looks like the damage was done from the inside, like somebody tore his way out of the basement with an axe.”
“Any witnesses?”
“Not so far, sorry. And the basement’s empty, no immediate sign of blood, no victim, no nothing. Without a warrant or a valid reason, I wasn’t going any further than that.”
“Did you notify the property’s owner?”
“Couldn’t get hold of Mrs. Lassiter.”
“Okay, keep your eyes peeled. Canvass the area, find out if anybody saw anything. We get evidence of a crime, even vandalism, we’ve got an excuse to search the church.” She looked at her watch. The crime scene was in good hands and progressing well. “My stomach thinks my throat’s been cut,” she told Noah, “so I’m headed over to Double Pete’s for dinner. I suggest you, Jeeter and Cynthia eat while you can, maybe go home and take a shower when second shift shows up. We’re going to pull long shifts till this is over.”
“The dead body…we know him?”
“Her. No identity yet, no cause of death. Got a dead wolf at the scene too.”
The abrupt silence on the other end of the call made her nerves crawl. Finally, Noah asked, his voice cracking, “A wolf? You sure?”
“Not one of the Deep wolves,” Annalee reassured him, even as she wondered why she felt the need to do so. How had she known that was his concern? “The fur’s colored wrong,” she said. “Black and silver, not pale.”
“Thank God,” he breathed.
Annalee coughed self-consciously. “Um, you heard anything from Lunella?”
“Such as?” Now he sounded amused.
“Nothing,” she mumbled. Was she fourteen years old? Would she start passing notes next? Check the first box if you like me, the second box if you don’t. Christ! “Look, you got anything from the church members yet?” she asked, making herself return to business.
“We’ve tracked down four members so far, have another six on the list. Ain’t nobody knows nothing. See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.”
“No surprise there. You ought to get in touch with Jane Darnell,” Annalee said, suddenly remembering her gossipy hairdresser’s cousin. “She’s the church’s cleaning lady. I’ll bet she can give you more contact information.”
“Jane Darnell, right. Anything else?”
“I’ll keep you in the loop.” Annalee snapped the phone shut.
Leaving Betty and the CSU team to their work, Annalee drove to Double Pete’s, a diner in Brightbrook. The half-pound blue-plate-special hamburger was greasy and delicious, flavored with onions and mustard. The platter came with fries, coleslaw and Pete Hollander’s homemade green tomato relish. After dinner, she debated having a slice of the diner’s famous “mile-high” lemon meringue pie for dessert, but feeling her uniform pants might be getting a tad tight around the waist, she settled for a cup of frozen vanilla yogurt topped with fresh fruit. She asked Pete to pack her some end slices of roast beef to go, intending it as a treat for her cat since Mongo would eat a brick if it was wrapped in meat.
She returned home close to dusk. She was tired, wanting nothing more than to sit down and spend a couple of mindless hours on the sofa in front of the television set. She walked up the porch steps and stopped at the top, puzzled. Usually, Mongo was right beside the door waiting for her, but there was no sign of the Maine Coon cat.
“Hey, Mongo!” she called, rattling her house keys. “I’ve got roast beef! Come and get it, kitty. Come on, don’t be shy.”
No answering meow.
Annalee went to the door and reached for the knob. The door swung open under her touch. Someone had picked the lock.
Her muscles immediately tightened with a painful tension born of anticipation and apprehension. Her neck twanged under the strain. She dropped the bag and ring of keys and drew her service weapon. Nudging the door further open with her hip, she sucked in a breath and called, “Police! If you’re armed, drop your weapon and show me your hands!”
No one replied. No gunshots greeted her. She couldn’t hear anyone moving around inside. Nevertheless, she raised her voice and hollered, “I am authorized to use deadly force if you do not exit with your hands in plain sight right now!”
This was her home. She had a tactical advantage since she knew the locations of all furniture and light switches. Rather than stay silhouetted against the doorway and continue to be an obvious target, she crouched and scuttled over to the living room sofa, where she was greeted with a loud and very aggrieved meow. She tried to shush the indignant cat without giving away her position, but Mongo was having none of it. He yowled and bumped her with his head, demanding attention or possibly the roast beef still in the bag on the porch.
“Damn it, will you quit that, you demented fuck-nut.” Annalee pushed Mongo away. She cocked her head, listening as hard as she could, but unless the erstwhile housebreaker played the tuba or blew an air horn she couldn’t have heard him over the cat’s loud rumbling purr and near-continuous meows. For such a big animal, Mongo had a voice as high-pitched as a castrato, which he was, but his soprano yowls never ceased to amaze her.
At last, after several tense minutes when nothing happened, Annalee holstered the weapon and straightened from her crouch, willing her pulse to return to normal.
She clicked on a lamp. The living room looked the same as usual; nothing seemed out of place. Moving to the kitchen and trying to avoid stepping on the cat winding around her ankles, she found the same thing. Had she simply forgotten to lock the door when she left that morning? She tried to remember but came up blank. In her defense, locking doors and windows was an ingrained habit. She had seen the results of breaking and entering too many times, had interviewed too many victims who felt violated and afraid, not to take care of her own home’s security. Still, she supposed anyone might suffer a momentary lapse.
Going upstairs, she found nothing amiss, no signs of an intruder. Guess I’m getting senile already, she thought after doing a search of the bathroom.
Mongo was frantically meowing downstairs, so she returned to the living room, picked up the diner bag and took it to the kitchen. Leaving the cat to gobble his roast beef treat, she walked outside to the backyard.
The dense line of trees was the same, the greens and browns turning smoky gray as evening approached. Overhead, the first stars glimmered, with Orion the Hunter sprawled to the east. Her gaze sought and found the Big Dipper constellation. She followed the handle pointing to the brilliant speck of light named Arcturus. The moon was a milk-white crescent, bright as newly minted silver against clouds dyed plum and indigo by the faint twilight. She inhaled deeply, her spirits settling as peace stole over her.
Suddenly, she frowned. One thing marred the perfection of the moment, but she didn’t know what was missing. The answer was on the tip of her tongue. The more she considered the matter, the more elusive the information she chased became. Frustrated, she blew out a breath and raked a hand through her hair, and just like that, she knew.
No wolf.
She had only seen the animal once in her backyard, a pale, watchful presence with haunting gold eyes. Why did she
miss it now? Why did she feel so lonely? She couldn’t understand her emotions. Her attraction to Lunella was enough of a problem—she didn’t need to develop a weird obsession with the local wildlife on top of everything else.
Annalee sighed. All these years of resisting temptation had caught up with her. She was too tired for any more self-examination and besides, thinking about what she wanted and couldn’t have was depressing. An hour or two watching dumb- ass procedural dramas on the idiot box sounded good.
Turning around to return to the house, she caught sight of the back door at the edge of her vision. As she completed the turn, a sickening jolt of dread froze her in mid-step, her belly tightening in a painful cramp. Jesus Christ Almighty.
Someone had drawn a crude target in red paint on the door’s surface. In the center of the target was a crow, its glossy wings spread wide. Nails driven through the wings held it in place. To her shock, she realized the bird was still alive. Its beak was open and it breathed in shallow, panting inhalations, fine tremors quivering its feathers.
She started to shake and had to sit down on the top step quickly, wiping her mouth over and over with the palm of her hand, trying to control her rising gorge. Despite having seen many examples of man’s inhumanity to his fellow creatures in her career, this act of barbaric cruelty was truly one of the most horrifying, no less so because it was a violation that struck at the heart of her home. After a few moments, she decided it was time to get up and do what needed to be done to end the crow’s suffering. Not permitting herself to delay any further, she snapped the bird’s neck, killing it instantly.
A childhood rhyme about crows ran through her mind:
One for sorrow, two for joy,
Three for a girl, four for a boy,
Five for silver, six for gold,
Seven for a secret never to be told.
Who had nailed this abomination to her back door? She was certain it was meant as a threat. There were any number of people who might have cause, she thought. One of the Ricketts, perhaps, desiring vengeance for the death of Barabbas or for her role in breaking up their gambling ring. Several of the men in that family, including Cleophus and his two brothers, were in jail awaiting trial on a variety of charges, but there were still plenty of their relations who could have done it.