by G. M. Ford
Fullmer opened his mouth for the first time. “And…uh…Sheriff…while you’re at it, could you get us the serial number of Officer Richardson’s revolver? We handed the weapon over to your state police”—he looked embarrassed—“and it seems we neglected to record the serial number.”
“For our records,” Molina added. “I’ve got to get back to New Jersey. I just want to make sure every-thing’s kosher before I leave.”
She almost smiled. “I didn’t think you boys made mistakes like that.”
Fullmer shrugged. “Everybody’s human,” he said. “Long as we catch it now, we’ll have all our i’s dotted and our t’s crossed.”
“I’ll be right back,” said the sheriff. The rubber soles of her shoes squeaked with every step. She stopped halfway to the door. “Anything else you boys forgot I can help you out with?” she asked. This time she managed a grin. “Always glad to help you boys out with your kosher record keeping, I am.”
They assured her that was it. She gave a curt little wave and went squeaking out into the hall. Molina grabbed his briefcase from the floor. Set it on the table in front of him. “Which one of you is taking me to the airport?” he asked Fullmer and Dean.
Dean said he’d be doing the driving. Molina opened his briefcase and pulled out a laundry list of things he wanted the forensics team to check. Fullmer took notes. Then another list of investigative avenues for Fullmer and Dean. They both took notes.
Molina turned to Corso and Dougherty. “This is where you came in,” he said. “From here on, the Leslie de Groot–Sissy Warwick story is the property of the Madison field office. I’m leaving Special Agents Dean and Fullmer here for a couple of days for liaison. You two can stick around for that, if you want. After Madison takes over, you’re history as far as the investigation is concerned. I went to the Academy with Paul Waymer. He’s the SAIC in Madison, and there’s no way in hell he’s gonna let you two look over his shoulder while he investigates.” He snapped his case closed and spun the combination dials.
The sound of the sheriff’s shoes preceded her into the room. She carried the Holmes family album and two file folders, one yellow, one green. She was still smiling. “Color coded and all,” she said, dropping the album and the files on the table in front of Molina. “We may be rural, but we’ve got our stuff together, we surely do.”
Molina slid the album and folders over to Fullmer and Dean. They were busy jotting away as Molina and the sheriff shook hands and said their good-byes. Corso lingered, letting the FBI and Dougherty precede him out the door. When Dougherty looked back over her shoulder to see if he was there, he motioned for her to keep going and then held up an “I’ll just be a minute” finger. He turned back to the sheriff.
She gave him her stoniest gaze. “Yes, Mr. Corso?”
“That little deal you and I had.”
“I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.
He ignored her. “Our arrangement was personal, and it’s going to stay that way.”
She got to her feet. “If you’ll excuse me, I’m really swamped.” Again the black rubber soles of her shoes squeaked at every step as she crossed the room and disappeared.
Ten seconds later, she was back in the doorway. In the harsh overhead light she looked haggard and drawn. She checked the hall in both directions. “Sorry,” she said. “I’m under a lot of pressure here. I didn’t know what in heck I was going to do if you started telling people I let you go. I’ve got all the aggravation I can handle right now. Clint Richardson spends more time in my office than he does in his own.” She shook her head. “Two weeks ago I was worried about what I was going to do if I lost the election, and now I’d give you the damn job for a dollar.” She scooped the folders from the table. “Time for my morning media flogging,” she said with a wry smile. “You gonna be around for a while?” she asked.
“Coupla days maybe.”
“I’m asking because Clint Richardson’s taking his son’s death pretty hard. He’s got a wild hair that no matter what anybody says, you were responsible. He figures you just found some legal loophole. Clint’s a good man, but he’s not real rational right now. I was you, I’d keep an eye out for him.”
“Thanks,” Corso said. “We won’t be around very long. My guess is the Madison Bureau’s not going to put a whole lot of energy into something this cold. They’ll look for anything obvious. Something that points to where she might have gone from here. They find something right away, they’ll pursue it. The minute it looks like it’s going nowhere, they’ll kick it right back to the state, who’ll kick it right back to you, who’ll end up as the one who failed to solve the murders.”
“I see you’ve worked with the Bureau before.”
“Coupla times,” Corso said.
She ran a hand through her hair. “You really think all these girls—Sissy and…what were the little girls’ names?”
“Leslie Louise de Groot and Mary Anne Moody.”
“You really think they’re all the same person?” she asked.
“Yeah. I do.”
She shook her head. “This is like something out of science fiction.” She lifted her hands and then let them flop back against her sides. “All I wanted from you was some little tidbit I could feed to the press. I wasn’t looking for another mystery.”
“You need to be careful what you wish for,” Corso said.
She allowed as how that was true and then stepped back out into the hall. “Come on,” she said. “We don’t want to keep our federal friends waiting, now do we?”
They left the conference room together. Said “So long” at her office door.
In the lobby, Molina, Dean, and Fullmer stood in a tight circle. Dougherty was over by the door, squinting as she gazed out at the mounds of snow.
Molina stuck out his hand. Fullmer tore a page from his notebook and slapped it into Molina’s palm; Molina then separated himself from the others and walked Corso’s way. Molina handed the page to Corso. “Here’s what you wanted,” he said. His black eyes were as hard as rivets. “You think you know something, don’t you?”
Corso pocketed the piece of paper. “Maybe,” Corso said.
25
The snow around the Holmes farmhouse had been trampled to slush. Yellow police tape rippled in the late-afternoon breeze. Four unmarked FBI vans dotted the driveway. Half a dozen orange power cables ran from the Honda generator chugging away on the porch through the front door into the parlor, where the FBI team had set up shop.
“Looks a lot bigger in the daylight,” Dougherty said.
“All I remember from that night was this tiny purple light in the distance. So small it was like a match in deep space.”
“You know what I remember?” She paused and looked to her right. They’d removed the front of the shed and torn up the rest of the floor. All that remained was a hollow depression. A dozen little white flags, whose red numbers marked precisely where this piece or that piece of evidence had been found. “I remember how hard you were to move,” she said. “How it felt like I was trying to carry a car or something.” She looked over at the house and back. “Gets me to wondering how she lugged the three of them out here and then wrapped them up in a nice little package and all. I can maybe see the boys. But the husband? I could barely move you thirty feet, with you trying to help.”
“It’s the truck that bothers me,” Corso said.
“What about it?”
“I keep trying to get a picture of what the scene looked like. So…what? She kills the family, hides the bodies in the shed, then goes back inside, packs up everything in the house, loads it on a one-ton truck all by herself, then gets behind the wheel and drives off into the sunset?” He shook his head. “No way, José.”
Dougherty folded her arms across her chest and thought about it. “Maybe she had Eldred and the boys load the truck before she offed them,” she said finally.
“Possible,” he conceded. “Or maybe she had help.”
&nbs
p; Dougherty laughed. “Probably invited the neighbors over. Mind helping me move old Eldred here? He’s a mite heavy.” She giggled and hid her face with her hands. “Sorry,” she said. “I seem to be getting a little silly here.”
A movement in Dougherty’s peripheral vision pulled her eyes toward the house, where one of the forensic technicians had taken a break from detecting and was making his way in their direction. He was a short little guy with Coke-bottle glasses, wearing the standard black windbreaker with “FBI” in big white letters across the back. He moved carefully, navigating around piles of slush, trying to keep the stuff out of his shoes.
“You Margaret Dougherty?”
“That’s me,” she said.
“We need you to come inside for a minute.”
“What for?”
“We need to take your fingerprints,” he said. He cast a quick glance at Corso. “We’ve got plenty of his,” he said. “And Avalon’s got prints from both the boys. So once we get yours, anything we can’t identify pretty much has to be either the mommy or the daddy.” He smiled. “I hear they weren’t big on entertaining.”
“You can still get fingerprints after fifteen years?” Corso asked.
“Depends on what they’re on,” the little guy said. “On most things, the oil would have dried out by now and blown away. On other surfaces, if they’re not exposed to the elements”—he spread his hands—“anything’s possible.”
Corso looked to Dougherty. “You’ve never been fingerprinted?”
“Nope,” she said.
The little guy took her by the elbow and began to move her toward the house. “Won’t hurt a bit,” he assured her. She looked back over her shoulder at Corso.
“I’m gonna take a little more air,” Corso said. “I’ll be back in a minute.”
They stepped carefully across the field of frozen ruts as they made their way to the porch. “I’m Warren,” the little guy said, offering a hand, as they mounted the stairs.
She stopped in the doorway as a river of images began to flow in her head. For a long moment, she could once again hear the roar of the wind and feel the bite of the cold on her skin. The memory caused her to shudder.
The FBI had moved in. On the left, against the far wall, a series of tables had been set up for use as desks. A trio of agents sat in front of laptop computers, pecking away at their keyboards. Special Agents Fullmer and Dean were seated side by side, each with a cell phone glued to his ear, talking and taking notes at the same time. Half a dozen technicians crawled over the place like ants. Power cables grew off in all directions like orange tendrils.
They stepped over the cables as they made their way to the kitchen, where Warren handed her over to a middle-aged woman named Claire and then disappeared.
Dougherty was still wiping the last of the ink from her fingers when Warren came back through the kitchen door. “We can wait for an official comparison,” Claire said, “but I can tell you right now she’s not a match for what we got from the contact paper.” She picked up the white card upon which she’d rolled Dougherty’s fingerprints, held it by the edge, and handed it to Warren. He brought the card up close to his face and squinted at the impressions. “The exemplars on the paper were all archs and tent archs,” Claire said. “These are all whorls and double loops.”
Warren nodded his agreement. “Have Billy take some pictures of what we got from the contact paper and shoot them off to Washington. Let’s see what the computer has to say on the subject.”
Claire fanned herself with the card as she walked out onto the back porch, only to return a minute later with what must have been Billy, a balding character with a face that spoke of perpetual aggravation. Dougherty watched as the man attached a Nikon digital camera to a short stand, slid the prints under the lens one at a time, and took shots.
Finished, he stowed the gear back in his bag, popped the flash card from the camera, and headed for the computers in the front room. “We’re almost done here,” Warren said. “We got a heck of a good right hand from some contact paper we found out by the fireplace. The glue had dried out, but the impressions were plain as day. Just like they’d been made yesterday.”
“That was what I used to start a fire,” Dougherty said. “It was lining the kitchen drawers.”
“That’s what we figured,” the little guy said. “If they’re not yours—which Claire is right about, they’re not—then they pretty much gotta belong to whoever lined the drawers in the first place, which I’m figuring is most likely the missing mommy.”
He turned to Claire. “I think that’s a wrap,” he said. “Everything we turned is consistent with the lab findings, so why don’t we get everybody packed up and head for the motel.”
Claire rolled her eyes. “Another night at the Timber Inn,” she said. “Be still, my beating heart.”
Warren tried to cheer her up. “We’ll be back home in Madison by noon,” he said.
“If the food doesn’t kill us first,” Claire said, and headed for the porch.
Warren squinted out through the open back door to the snow-covered yard beyond. “They were laid out right there in the backyard someplace,” he said.
“Laid out?”
“The lab estimated they were dead for at least seventy-two hours prior to being wrapped up in plastic. Left outside, probably naked.” He looked myopically around the room. “Everything we’ve found supports that thesis.”
“How’d they figure that?” Dougherty asked.
“The maggots,” he said. “They found a bunch of third instars in the rectal cavities.”
“Third what?”
“Third instars. It’s a stage in maggot development.”
The putrid look on her face seemed to encourage him. “Okay now, this isn’t strictly my field. This would be what a forensic entomologist does, so…you know…I’m just kind of winging it here.” He grinned. “If you’ll forgive me the phrase.” And winked. “So if you take a body and you put it outside, the first things that are going to find it are the flies. Most likely the blowflies and the common house flies are gonna come upon it first. Now as soon as they get there they’re gonna lay masses of eggs in any natural body openings they can get to or in any wounds they find.”
“Eggs?”
“Millions,” he said. “This is where it gets interesting. Depending on the temperature and the species of fly involved, the eggs take anywhere from fifteen to thirty hours to hatch. Most cases somewhere right around twenty hours. So anyway, the eggs hatch into the first-stage maggot.”
“A first instar.”
“Exactly. Okay, so after hatching, they immediately begin to feed on the tissues, and of course they start to grow. Real quick they get too big for the cuticle.” He stopped. “That’s like this little flexible case the maggot lives inside of. They call it a cuticle. Anyway, soon as it grows too big for its cuticle, it makes a new cuticle and then sheds the old one. Most maggots do this three times in their life cycle.”
“First, second, and third instars.”
“Precisely. The first instar usually takes the shortest time. Averages about sixteen hours. The second goes about twenty-three and the third-stage about thirty hours. All in all, you average it out, you find third stage instars, the body’s been there about three days. You find them in the rectal cavity, the body was probably found naked. There’s easier ways to get into a body than crawling up under somebody’s shorts.” He offered her a shy smile. “Did I mention that the bodies had been set on fire? Postmortem. Then probably hosed off before they were packaged.”
“Why would anybody do that?”
He made a “who knows” face. “If I had to guess, I’d say the stiffs were all covered with creepy crawlies, and whoever did it wanted to get rid of them before they moved the bodies. Or…maybe they just liked to burn things. You put the family album in the grave with your family, and the way I see it, that makes you pretty much unpredictable. Either way, the fire didn’t harm the bodies much, but it killed the maggot
s before they got a chance to do their thing. The plastic kept subsequent generations of flies from laying eggs on the bodies, so they just sat out there in the shed and more or less mummified.”
“Any word on what killed them?”
He looked insulted. “Didn’t exactly take a rocket scientist,” he said. “Head trauma. Nonblunt. Something like a hatchet or a small ax.” He pointed to the stairway. “They got it in their beds. The father first and then the kids.”
She pulled back. “You’re messing with me here.”
“Swear to God,” he said. “It’s all right there.”
“You mean to tell me…all these years later, you can come in here—with the place completely deserted and all—and figure out how these people died and what happened to them after that, and in just a few hours?”
“You want to see?”
“Yeah, sure,” she said. “That’d be great.”
He walked over to the pile of cop equipment against the front wall, dug around for a moment, and came out with a black fanny pack, which he buckled around his waist. He reached into the heap again and produced a yellow flashlight. He flicked it on with his thumb, made sure it was working, and then started across the room.
He reached up over the entrance to the stairs, pulled a couple of ties loose, and allowed a canvas curtain to flop down over the doorway. “Gotta be dark,” he said.
He held the curtain aside long enough for Dougherty to step through. He put a hand on her waist as they mounted the stairs, moving tentatively behind the dancing circle of light. At the top of the stairs, he guided her to the right, into a bare room overlooking the front of the house. He pointed the flashlight beam at the far wall. Moved it back and forth a little. “The bed must have been right about there,” he said. “Hubby slept on the left. Mommy on the right.”
“Come on,” Dougherty scoffed. “Give me a break.”
“Watch,” he said, taking her by the hand and pulling her across the room. He held out the flashlight. “Hold this.” She took the light. Moved it around the peeling walls, while Warren unzipped the pack and pulled out what looked like an oversized electric flash unit. A little black ray gun was attached to the pack by a three-foot length of telephone cord.