Time of Death
Page 13
no cop it was like summer camp for computer geeks
gronz_eye has left the room
Chapter 22
THE PACER MADE ITS way out St. Charles Rock Road toward the suburb of St. Ann. PJ hugged her bruised ribs, unobtrusively, she hoped.
“You take that pain medicine?” Schultz said. Her movement probably hadn’t escaped his attention, even though he was driving.
“Yes,” PJ said, not bothering to mention she’d only taken half of it. She didn’t want her mind fuzzy, and was willing to put up with the resulting discomfort. At least, in theory. In practice, she was hurting far more than she anticipated. Just folding her body enough to get into Schultz’s car had caused her to bite her lip. “How far is it?”
“Geez, you sound like a kid asking if we’re there yet. Interesting thing came up while you were in the hospital,” Schultz said.
“One of many, it seems,” PJ said.
“Anita went through June’s neighborhood, interviewing the neighbors again. There were a couple of people she hadn’t been able to get in touch with. One of them swears he saw June getting the newspaper on a morning she was supposedly in Kansas City. This man also saw her twice more during that weekend.”
“Do you think he was seeing the look-alike, living in the house and pretending to be June?”
“Personally I think he saw June, being herself. Can I prove it? No.”
“So tell me about all these people who had reason to shoot Frank.” She’d missed that discussion while in the hospital.
“First of all, there’s Arlan. You know about that one.”
“Yes, he was pressuring Frank to get involved in some real estate deal. I doubt if Arlan reached out from the grave and pulled the trigger, though.”
“Not Arlan himself, but maybe his representative on Earth. June or Fredericka or a hired assassin. You’re gonna love the next one.” He concentrated on his driving for a moment, as the Pacer seemed to have it in for some pedestrians on the sidewalk. He corrected the car’s pull with one hand and shifted gears with the other. He was good at it. It was almost like the Pacer had become an extension of him. A really odd extension.
“May Simmons hired an interior designer named Thul Volmann,” he continued, “and Frank didn’t like the results. Frank spread his opinion around to his society friends. Volmann claimed that Frank cost him future business from the most profitable sector. There was a slander suit filed, but the Simmonses’ high-powered attorney got the case dismissed.”
“The famous Jack,” PJ said.
“Yeah, him.”
“Leaving a murderously-inclined designer,” PJ said. “You know, the maid was interested in becoming an interior designer. I wonder if there’s any link there.”
“And I haven’t even gotten to the good one yet,” Schultz said. “Frank owned an apartment building he wanted to tear down for a commercial development.”
“Let me guess. The tenants didn’t like the idea.”
“She’s quick, ladies and gentlemen,” he said. “The occupants formed a tenants’ association dedicated to making Frank’s life a developer’s hell. They’re a quirky bunch, too, and hot-headed, some of them.”
“Are we sure that Arlan didn’t have a hand in that tenants’ association? Part of the pressure he was exerting on Frank for the Chicago warehouse investment?”
“Hey, I didn’t think of that. This is one fucked-up bunch of people. It seems like they’re all connected, and they’re probably all guilty of murder. Well, capable of it and thinking about it, anyway. Anita and Dave are running down the designer and the tenants. They’re having all the fun, while we’re heading for some suburban farmer’s place.”
“Leo, I think we’re dealing with people with different motivations for these killings, but a common interest in having the victims out of the way. Two people who pair up to kill, then go their separate ways. It’s interesting what you said about they’re all thinking about murder. Suppose we have a whole nest of killers.”
“Personally I’m not even convinced about a team. I think we’ve got a loner here and we don’t know enough to connect the victims.”
They argued over that point for some time, the words becoming more heated as they went along, and the discussion straying into personal matters. Finally, PJ called a halt to it. She wanted to go over in detail what the Simmonses’ maid had said about Arlan delivering eggs to the Simmons home on the day he disappeared. Eggs from Old Hank’s farm, where they were headed.
“It was one of those weird family traditions, and they still go there for eggs today. Old Hank may not be able to keep the place much longer, though,” PJ said.
“The land’s probably worth a bundle. He should sell it and retire someplace without chickens. Give it a rest.”
PJ shook her head. “If he has a choice about it, he’ll probably be running that place until he keels over. There, that must be it.”
She was pointing at a dilapidated sign that said Hank’s Chicken Ranch. A blacktop driveway wound back from the street, passing through a heavily-wooded tract of land.
“Must drive the city fathers crazy,” Schultz said, “having that undeveloped acreage just sitting there, not paying much in the way of taxes into the coffers. By the way, I gave the St. Ann PD a heads-up that we’ll be on the property to talk to Hank and look around. I don’t think they’ll meet us there, but don’t be surprised if a cruiser shows up. If we find anything, Lieutenant Wall will pick up the coordination.”
PJ nodded. Turning into the driveway, they discovered that it turned to gravel as soon as they passed the first bend, out of sight of the street. They came to a fork, one side labeled Eggs 4 Sale and the other Private—Trespissers Shot.
“I like this guy already,” Schultz said, yanking the Pacer’s steering wheel toward the Private drive. He pulled up in front of a two-story frame house that showed the burden of its years. Window and door frames and porch supports all sagged. Different layers of paint showed through on areas of the house, like painting had been started and given up as too much work, several times. The porch steps were cupped upwards so that the nails at the ends of the boards were pulled halfway out. The faded blue shingles reminded PJ of blue hair on an elderly woman. In fact, the house seemed like a tired, old woman counting the years until she could rest.
Schultz got out of the car. “Stay here,” he said, “in case the old geezer remembers where he put his shotgun.”
She was about to object to being left behind, and decided it wasn’t worth provoking Schultz.
This time.
She watched him move toward the porch, noticing that he was limping a little. His body had hard wear on it, like a car run too many miles with too little maintenance. Once, propped up on her elbow in bed next to him, she’d traced the record of his law enforcement service on his skin: smooth scars and rippled areas where muscle had been lost. Anita, indoctrinated in The Job from an early age by her father, had told PJ that career law enforcement officers accumulated injuries, some large, some small, like other people collect stamps or old movie posters. Walk into any cops’ bar, she’d said, and ask for a show of old wounds. The veteran cops would all have a few, and stories to go with them.
PJ was no exception, although
she was on the outside of Blue culture looking in. She bore the scar of a psychopath’s knife and she had a scar on her soul, too, from killing a man.
Through the leafless trees, she could see a couple of buildings not far away. A conspicuous path headed through the woods in that direction. PJ rummaged in Schultz’s car, not a pleasant task, until she found a fast food receipt and a pen. When she was out of the office, she carried a credit-card-sized wallet in her pockets along with her car keys and cellphone. A purse could get in the way, or, as Schultz had pointed out, could have its strap grabbed and wrapped around her throat. She was used to the arrangement, but sometimes it was a nuisance not having the resources of a large purse handy.
PJ, still heated from their earlier discussion, left a rather snotty note for Schultz, propping it up on the steering wheel. The path through the woods beckoned.
It actually felt good getting out in the fresh air and walking. She ached in more places than she could count, but as her muscles warmed to the task, it was almost a good ache. Her sore but working body was a reminder that the outcome of the attempt on her life could have been very different.
The first building, larger than she’d originally thought, contained chickens. It was an old-fashioned chicken coop, with a roosting area indoors and a fenced yard for chickens to scratch. The yard was relatively quiet, since most of the hens were dozing in the sun. There was a substantial buffer zone between the coop and the surrounding homes. The woods didn’t continue far past the buildings, but beyond them was a pasture area that had probably held cattle in years past.
The barn had a feeling of abandonment about it. If the farmhouse was a tired, old woman, then the barn was a corpse long buried. There was an oversized door, wide enough to admit cattle. She went to the door and tugged on it. It swung open on creaky hinges.
It wasn’t pitch black inside because the old roof had gaps that let in the sun. Shafts of light fell to the floor, filled with motes that looked more substantial than dust. There were massive beams far above her head, stained with what she assumed was pigeon shit.
The smell of rotten blood hit her nose, strong enough that she reeled back from it. PJ wondered if Old Hank killed chickens there. She pushed herself forward, remembering the little jab from Schultz about her staying in the car.
If chickens had been killed here, it must have been poultry’s equivalent of Custer’s Last Stand. There was a workbench near the center of the open space that was stained with blood. The dirt floor around the bench was churned up and reddish. Sluggish flies crawled across the surface of the workbench on the far end. It was December, after all, and while she might see an occasional fly indoors, there were more here than she would have expected.
Giving the bench a wide berth, PJ followed the wall of the barn, stepping on straw that at one time must have filled the barn with a clean, earthy scent. She didn’t want to contaminate the place, but she had to see what the attraction was for the flies on the workbench.
Moldy chicken heads, no doubt.
PJ had to detour around a six-foot-high compost pile that smelled strongly of ammonia. Light wisps of steam rose from the decomposition process of the chicken manure. Hank had probably gotten complaints about outdoor composting, so he would keep enough manure to use on a garden and have the rest hauled away. Flies must love it. For them it would be like living in a sauna that was simultaneously a buffet. Old Hank was growing flies as well as chickens.
She was almost there. The air was still and heavy, and she was reminded of her image of the barn as a corpse long buried. She was breathing the kind of air she imagined would be in an old wooden casket. The barn creaked in a hundred places, weathered wood rubbing against itself, as the wind blew outside. The air inside resisted or absorbed the wind’s motion, so that she stood below the groaning rafters with not the slightest air movement at ground level, other than the wings of the flies, to stir the straw.
As she walked, new angles of the workbench and its surroundings opened up to her. Stainless steel basins littered the floor, some blood spattered, some containing odd-shaped chunks that didn’t look like chicken heads. The closer she got the more activity she saw from the flies. A few more steps and she had a clear view of the end of the workbench. There was something nailed there, several somethings, with nails that were decades newer than the wood into which they were pounded. A scream built in her belly and was working its way toward her mouth when she heard Schultz’s voice.
“There you are. … Holy shit! I think we found where Arlan Merrett was killed.”
PJ swallowed her scream. “I think we found Arlan Merrett’s missing parts, too,” she said.
Chapter 23
PJ SAT AT HER desk, aching. She’d like to go home, soak in a hot bath, and put her sore body to bed. She was caught up, though, in the drama of having found the place where Arlan was murdered and the prospect of finally putting together a complete virtual reality re-creation. She’d left Schultz, Dave, and Anita at the scene and gotten a ride back to Headquarters. She needed to do what she did best, and let them do the same.
The stale air in her office didn’t seem nearly as oppressive as it usually did, in comparison to the air in the barn.
Her riverfront scenario had yielded a potentially valuable insight. Maneuvering the solidly built Arlan to the dump site would at least be possible for women as well as men. That included petite females such as Fredericka and males working at a disadvantage, such as Frank.
Frank! There had hardly been a minute to absorb the fact of his murder and to fit it into theories she’d been tossing around. The husbands of two sisters dying violent deaths within such a short time cried out for connecting the dots, but PJ was missing some of the dots. And how did Marilee Baines’s brutal murder fit in?
Three deaths in three days, followed by a likely attempt on her life. It was shaping up to be a week for the record books in both her professional and private lives. Her relationship with Schultz was like background music to everything she did, except she couldn’t figure out if it was harmony or discordance.
Who had tried to kill her?
The car that made contact with hers had left trace evidence, a scrape on her bumper, with paint embedded in it. Forensics identified the paint as belonging to a blue 1991 Chevrolet Lumina. A car matching that description had been stolen the day before from a commuter parking lot in St. Charles. The stolen vehicle belonged to a construction worker named Antoine Card. Having no transportation since his car was stolen, Card hitched a ride with friends. He was at the site of a new subdivision development moving earth with a backhoe loader at the time his car, if it was his, was used to push PJ into traffic. The stolen car hadn’t turned up yet.
The person who’d tried to harm her was still out there, maybe planning another attempt. Was it even connected with this case? It might be a relative or friend of someone she’d help put away for murder, or even something further back in her life. Perhaps evil Carla the home wrecker was after her for some demented reason. Taking away PJ’s husband wasn’t enough. PJ admonished herself for that little twinge of paranoia.
Take it one thing at a time.
Focusing on the first murder, she started making notes on a profile of the killer or killers. She still favored a team theory. The profile was a description of personality and lifestyle that can help narrow an investigation but never dictated it. A behavioral fingerprint. The place to start was looking at what the killer chose to do and what not to do.
Arlan disappeared sometime after four in the afternoon last Wednesday. He was killed Saturday night in Hank’s barn, and dumped at the edge of the Mississippi in time to be spotted by a Sunday morning dog walker. He’d never made it to Chicago to meet with clients, and his car had never been found. Where had he been until the time of his death?
Arlan was involved with some shady real estate developers in Chicago, maybe the type who might arrange a murder if cheated or if there was a monetary advantage to having an associate out of the picture. In that case
the killing would have been cold and efficient, a garroting or slit throat or bullet in the head, with no wasted effort. Certainly not the elaborate setup in Hank’s barn. There was something very personal about that.
Someone watched those tears, with hatred or satisfaction.
Unless the whole setup was a ruse to make the police think a psycho killer was on the loose. She decided to set aside that consideration for now. If she was falling into the killer’s diversionary trap, she’d have to extricate herself later.
The killer had to be organized and confident enough to abduct in daylight, emotionally involved enough to take out anger in the flesh. That pointed to a love affair, a marriage, a soured business relationship, a dysfunctional family. The problem was the killer could be experiencing any or all of those things with someone other than his victim. Some murderers can’t bring themselves to attack the true target, and take it out instead on strangers carefully selected because they invoke the same sick feelings. The son whose mother sexually abused him and warped him for life kills wanton, dirty women—prostitutes—but not his mother, for whom he still has a sharply conflicted love.
The killer could be a stranger who chose Arlan for some twisted reason, and the swirl of suspects her team had been considering could have nothing to do with it.
Look-alike Marilee could have been chosen as the permissible target by someone who despises June, but couldn’t attack her directly.
Frank, whose killing was straightforward and toward the impersonal end of the spectrum, could have been done by a killer who just wanted him out of the way for monetary reasons.
Focus! One thing at a time.
Spread out on her desk were photographs of the barn, sketches she’d made showing dimensions and relative locations of items, riverfront photos, and Arlan’s autopsy report.
What was done to Arlan that wasn’t needed in the killing, but provided some twisted, personal satisfaction to the killer?
That was easy. Practically everything about his murder wasn’t needed to kill him. Keep him captive for four days and then stage an elaborate operating room scene. Cut off his male equipment, his fingertips, his mouth, dig through his flesh to stab him in the heart up close and personal. Continue the mutilation by nailing the severed parts to the workbench.