“I know,” John said.
Dr. Kelly nodded. She understood that the contents of that cheap foam cooler represented his son’s life in many ways.
A small mass of tissue meant life or death—an end to suffering or simply an end. Patrick Horn sent this flesh-and-blood proclamation—he alone held the power over Tommy’s life.
THIRTY-TWO
Alone in a house that swelled with pain, fear, and disappointment, John wandered from room to room, searching for something to replace the emptiness he carried. Instead of happy reminders of his family, he found dashed dreams and broken promises. Hope. He once held the elusive creature in his hand; now even hope disappeared as fine grains of sand through his grasp.
John poured a Scotch and leaned against the counter. He turned the crystal tumbler in his hand and became lost in the amber ripples. Melissa had found the etched glass during a trip to Europe in the days before the kids came along. An episode of food poisoning in London turned out to be morning sickness. Melissa was pregnant with Kari.
John smiled at the thought. Then he caught his reflection in the etched glass, an irregular web of lines and distortions projected on his face. The reflection of a broken man.
A faint knock at the front door broke his fixation with the image of the damaged man he had become. John placed the untouched Scotch on the counter and went to the door.
He drew the door back a few inches, expecting to see one of the nosy old women from across the street prying for gossip she could share with her bridge club.
Instead, Paula Newberry stood under the porch light. She held two white paper coffee cups, and the dark circles under the detective’s eyes said she needed the caffeine fix as much as John.
John stepped aside; Paula took his lack of protest as an invitation and crossed the threshold, handing one of the coffees to him.
“Look, John, I’m sorry.”
“Don’t.”
“You needed to get booted off the case,” she said.
“You put me farther away from my son.” The words didn’t carry venom. They held disappointment at his partner. “Why would you do that?” John turned away and walked into the living room, leaving Paula near the open door.
“So the lieutenant pulled you off the case too? I guess you didn’t count on that getting in the way of your climb to the top,” John said.
“You think that’s what this is about?” she said, slamming the front door shut and following him.
“A case like this would be a big stepping-stone for you. Get you back on the good side of the brass.”
“Screw them! I didn’t put my ass on the line for them.”
“Seems to come easy for you. I get why you needed to take down Carson for what he did in the evidence room, but shit, Paula, what did I do to get on your list? Coming after me is one thing. I can deal with that. But to stop me from getting my son back?”
“You’re an asshole, you know that? For a detective, you are completely clueless,” she said.
“I told you I don’t care what you did in the Carson case. He deserved to go down.”
“You might not care, but there are a hell of lot of others who do. I hear the comments from jerks like Stark and the others. I took a risk when I forced the lieutenant to take you off the case because it was the right thing to do.”
“The right thing to do? It’s not that easy in this job, you know that. And when my kid is on the line—”
“John, I had—”
“Thanks for the coffee. You know your way to the front door.”
“I said, you needed to be officially off the case,” Paula said, stepping closer to him.
He squinted and shook his head. “What the hell are you saying?”
“Because of what we need to do.”
John waited and took a sip from the coffee cup. Bitter and cold.
“How long were you waiting outside?”
“About an hour. I wanted to make sure everyone finished and got out.”
He cocked his head. “Why?”
She looked at her watch. “We have two hours until you have to make contact.”
“Yeah?”
“The mayor’s office called in the FBI, and the feds are on their way. They won’t give a damn about Tommy. Once they come in, we’re gonna get pulled. We have two hours to go get Tommy before the feds do something stupid and get him hurt,” she said.
John dumped the cold coffee in the kitchen sink and poured a half cup of hot coffee into the container from a carafe on the counter. “Want some?”
She poured the remnants of her coffee in the sink and handed the cup to John. “I went through Patrick Horn’s apartment in Midtown. Nothing there. Completely clean. Too clean,” she said.
“Anything else listed in his name?”
She shook her head. “No. Not in his name, but I got a list of properties from Marsha Horn’s estate documents. Two of the three properties were sold off within a month or so of her death. Only one remains in the estate. It’s abandoned and has a county tax lien on the property for back taxes. It doesn’t look like Patrick Horn made any effort to claim the house.”
“Any utilities accounts at the house?”
“Nothing. I couldn’t get a warrant to search the place because I couldn’t tie Patrick Horn to the place directly. I got it kicked back from the night judge, unless I come up with evidence that Horn was actually ever there. Judge Fogerty suggested I go sit outside the place and watch. Which brings me to why I’m here.”
“We need to hit that place. He might have Tommy there. I can’t wait around and hope Horn shows up,” John said.
“Which is why we can’t do it officially. No warrant and lack of probable cause.”
John shut off the kitchen lights and grabbed a jacket on the way to the door.
Paula followed and waited on the front porch while he locked up. John paused after he withdrew his key and regarded the home that had once protected his family. The memories of carefree times deemed distant, unretrievable. Before paralysis set in, John stuffed the keys in his pocket and walked past Paula.
Paula’s silver Mazda Miata sat in the driveway, tucked behind John’s undercover police sedan.
John shot her a look of disbelief.
“It’s not like we can cruise up to the place in a city car,” she said.
The passenger door cried on rusted hinges when John tugged it open.
“This keeps getting better.”
“Shut up and get in.”
John ducked inside the compact car, sitting on piles of fast-food menus and crumpled hamburger wrappers. He lifted his butt and scraped the junk onto the floorboard. The paper crinkled when he moved his feet.
“Don’t start with me now. I didn’t have time to have the car steam cleaned for your OCD ass.”
“A quick pass with a leaf blower would have been nice.”
Paula turned the key in the ignition, and the small motor hummed to life. “The place is on the river, not far from the airport.”
“How far from Cardozo’s body dump?”
Paula backed out of the drive and popped the gearshift out of reverse. She feathered the clutch, ran through the gears, and shot up the street. “Less than a mile upriver.”
John held on to the dash as Paula took a corner. She hit the Interstate 5 on-ramp at I Street at seventy-five miles an hour. The little car rattled off the uneven road where the ramp transitioned into the four northbound lanes.
She accelerated and swerved the car to the left, into the fast lane, cutting in front of a semitruck. A short blast of an air horn from the truck driver didn’t seem to register with Paula as the speedometer needled to eighty-five.
“This—this is why I don’t let you drive,” John said with a hand clutched on the handle over the passenger window.
Paula grinned. “That trucker had plenty of room. If he wasn’t so amped up on crank, he would have let it go.”
The junction of Interstate 5 and State Highway 99 flew past, and Paula shot
across all the traffic lanes to the far right for the next exit, marked Airport Boulevard. She turned left, away from the airport, onto North Bayou Road.
The narrow levee road forced Paula off the gas. “Look for Garden Highway.”
They didn’t need to wait long; the road ended at a stop sign at the intersection with Garden Highway along the riverbank.
“Where is the place?” John asked.
“Should be up here, 56723 Garden Highway,” she said.
She started into the intersection but slammed on the brakes when a fire truck flew past, red lights flashing. The truck let loose a wail from the siren after it passed through the intersection. The growl of the emergency vehicle’s heavy engine dissipated as it rounded the corner.
“Always a traffic accident on these river roads. Hope this one didn’t slip into the water,” Paula said as she checked traffic. She turned right and followed in the wake of the fire engine.
Along the riverbank, the homes sat on larger lots with expansive views, if your idea of a view was the grass-covered levee bank on the far side of the water. The homes sat on or inside a levee channel, which made them prone to seasonal flooding. It was easy to see why the flood risk in the Sacramento region rivaled that of New Orleans. Some of the homes sat atop tall pillars, ten feet or more above the ground, allowing floodwaters to ebb and flow under the home without seeping inside. Others bore witness to repeated flooding, marked by the water stains and rot on their siding.
“Should be up ahead,” Paula said, scanning the homes for the number.
They could smell it before they drew near. Smoke, thick and acrid, poured from one of the riverside structures. Flashing red lights shone through the smoke in uneven patches, with an occasional tongue of orange flame lashing out like a wild creature, resisting efforts to tame its beastly nature.
John grabbed the dashboard, peering forward through an ink-black smoke plume that settled over the roadway.
Paula hesitated and tapped the brake.
“Go!” John said.
Paula stabbed the gas pedal and guided the car into the black mass. As quickly as it engulfed them, they broke through the smoke cloud into a clearing, where a dozen fire and emergency vehicles attended to a home engulfed in flame. Orange-and-yellow tendrils reached out through the windows and clutched the roof. Smoke belched from the broken underbelly of the building. Teams of fire personnel attended a snake’s nest of hose lines from trucks and hydrants to the blaze. A pickup truck emblazoned with “Battalion Chief” blocked the road ahead.
“That’s the place! That’s the house we were looking for!” John jumped from the passenger door before Paula had come to a full stop. He ran in the direction of the house, and two firemen grabbed him as he approached.
“Hey, buddy, you can’t go in there,” one of the firemen said. He gripped John’s arm.
“Let me go! My son is in there!”
The fireman looked at his partner, then called out, “Hey, Chief! This guy says he knows someone inside.”
A burly man with a soot-stained turnout coat approached. As he drew closer, the battalion chief badge on his helmet became legible.
“This your place?” the battalion chief asked.
“No. You gotta let me go in,” John said.
“Ain’t no one inside anymore. We cleared it, so relax.”
“You found him? Where is he?” The pumps whirred at a high pitch, making it hard to hear one another.
The chief gestured to the open doors of an ambulance on the far side of the house.
John took a step, and the chief stepped in his path. “I gotta warn you.”
Those four words nearly crippled John. He was too late.
The chief pulled close so that he could look John in the face. “He’s in bad shape, more than burns. He’s got a chance to make it if we get him to the trauma center fast.”
More than burns. The warning tumbled through John’s brain. He ran for the ambulance, legs pumping hard, heart pounding.
Fifty feet from the blaze, he felt the searing heat against his skin. Tommy had suffered in that inferno.
The ambulance doors slammed shut, pulled closed by a paramedic inside. Through the glass window, John saw someone on a gurney and wisps of steam rising from the patient.
John reached the back door as the driver started up the engine. John slammed his fist on the back door and yelled, “Wait!”
The ambulance lurched and stopped. The paramedic opened the rear door. “We got to get moving.”
“He’s family,” John repeated under a heavy, ragged breath. The cloth-draped figure smelled like burnt flesh and nearly gagged John.
“Get in.”
John pulled himself up into the rear of the ambulance, and the paramedic pulled the door shut behind him. The driver pulled forward. John grabbed a storage cabinet to steady himself as the ambulance accelerated.
The paramedic adjusted the flow on a clear bag of IV fluid. The small form covered by sterile sheets looked lifeless. Gauze dressings lay over a fire-ravaged face. Exposed hair had turned to crispy wisps of ash.
The paramedic opened a bag of saline and rinsed a spot on the patient’s chest to attach a heart rate monitor. He quickly cleaned the area, peeled the adhesive back from the electrode, and set it in place. A blip on a monitor screen came to life.
“I’ve got a pulse.”
John didn’t hear him because he was focused on the body’s charred face. Something wasn’t right. The size of the person under the sheet was off. A face too weathered for a nine-year-old. John couldn’t put it together until a milky eye flicked in recognition. The eye of Donovan Layton.
John grabbed the oxygen mask, and it took all the restraint he possessed to not rip it from the patient’s face.
“Don’t touch that!” the paramedic said, then took John’s hand.
If capable of communicating, Layton gave no indication, other than an occasional flickering glance in John’s direction. Layton ignored John’s repeated questions about Tommy. By the time the ambulance pulled into the portico at the hospital, the old man was unresponsive, his blood pressure and pulse weakened with each passing second.
The trauma center staff flung open the rear doors as the ambulance rolled to a stop. With efficient, practiced movements, the hospital staff unloaded the gurney and took over resuscitation and the IV bags from the paramedics.
John followed close behind Layton. This husk of a man knew where Tommy was, along with other dark secrets held in his lesioned brain. Triage began in the hallway as the gurney wheels clacked over the linoleum floors. A young woman in pale-green scrubs barked orders, and John pegged her as the doctor in charge.
One of the nurses gently peeled a section of scorched clothing from Layton’s chest as the team started debridement of the wounds. Layers of skin, fatty tissue, and muscle tissue came up with the cloth. Dark threads of fabric and ash remained behind, embedded in the open wound.
“Holy crap,” one of the attending medical staff said. She lifted the sterile dressing the paramedics had placed on the patient’s lower right arm. The dressing oozed a thick, crimson gel from a ragged stump were a hand should have been.
Another nurse unwrapped an IV tube from a sterile bag. She held the IV in one hand and pulled back the sheet on the opposite arm. “Son of a . . .” she said.
Donovan Layton’s left hand was gone too. The raw tissue and exposed bone on the wrist had no sign of burn damage. A tight leather strap wrapped around his forearm several times, indenting his flesh, and was precisely finished off with a tight knot.
“Someone tied him off with a tourniquet. He sure as hell didn’t do it himself,” the attending doctor observed.
“Doctor, his legs . . .” the nurse with the IV said.
The doctor lifted the sheet at the foot of the gurney. Both legs ended four inches below the knee. Each leg bore the same leather-strapping tourniquet. The tight bands on the legs were charred into the thigh muscle, above each knee.
A thi
n, raspy wheeze issued from Layton’s throat.
“He’s crashing,” a nurse said, watching the monitor display.
“I’ve got a new IV line in,” another called out.
“Five hundred milligrams epinephrine, Ringer’s lactate, and two hundred milligrams morphine sulfate in the line,” the doctor ordered.
Bottles of sterile water were emptied over the burnt flesh, creating a pool of dead skin, charred fabric, and oozing fatty tissue on the gurney. Entire sections of tissue sloughed off Layton’s torso.
“Heart rate steady at 150,” the monitor nurse said.
“Let’s get him stable and handed off to the burn unit,” the doctor ordered.
Paula Newberry found John in the trauma unit and stood next to him. She smelled of soot and smoke from the fire. She held a scrap of fabric in one hand.
“Horn?” she said.
“No, old man Layton.”
“He gonna make it?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” John said. His attention went to the piece of fabric in Paula’s grasp.
“That’s Tommy’s sweat shirt.” The words sounded final.
“They found it inside the house. No sign that Tommy was caught in there when the place went up. He isn’t there, John.”
John took the remnant of Tommy’s charred sweat shirt. “What happened to him?”
“Maybe he got away in the confusion of the fire. He’s a smart kid,” she said.
“Then he would have found a way to contact me. He wasn’t in the best of shape when Horn took him from the hospital. The man who did this to his own stepfather has my son,” he said as he pointed to the dismembered Donovan Layton. “I’m supposed to contact Horn soon. What am I supposed to say?”
“Excuse me, are you this man’s family?” a nurse said from Layton’s bedside.
“No . . .” John started.
“Yes, he’s my uncle,” Paula blurted.
“We’re doing what we can for him, but he’s in very bad shape. The pain meds are helping a little. You can sit with him for a few minutes until we move him to the burn unit.”
“Thank you,” Paula said, then dragged John by the arm to Layton’s bedside.
The nurse pulled a curtain to afford privacy for the “family.”
At What Cost Page 21