by John Lutz
“Call for a CSU, Harold,” Vitali said. “Tell them about the flies. They’ll need to get rid of the damned things before they can get her out.”
Mishkin didn’t answer, but pulled his cell phone from his pocket and walked down to the end of the hall. He tried to open the window there, but it was jammed tightly closed, so he contented himself with standing, staring outside, as he made his call. Considering his own reaction, Vitali was surprised that Mishkin had managed to keep down his breakfast.
“Stick here,” Vitali told Henderson. “Keep the scene frozen. That means you don’t go in there, either.”
“I was just about to go check out that bathroom again,” Henderson said.
Vitali had to smile. Humor, no less. The kid with the old eyes was going to be okay. For a second Vitali considered explaining to Henderson how they were going to have to put what they’d seen somewhere in the dark cellars of their minds and not look at it or think about it, never let it escape back into the light. It wasn’t exactly forgetting, but it passed. Then he realized none of this would be news to the young cop. Besides, it wasn’t the kind of thing easily put into words.
“Don’t you even think of going back in there,” he growled at the kid, shaking a finger at him.
Then he went to get Mishkin so they could talk to some of the neighbors before the crime scene unit showed up.
“They’re on the way,” Mishkin said, still staring out the window at the end of the hall. “I was thinking, Sal, how this one looks like it could be habitual.”
Mishkin knew what he meant. A murder like this one, committed in such a brutal and bloody ritualistic manner, might not be the first such crime.
And it might not be the last.
28
“Here!” Fedderman said.
At first Quinn wondered where Fedderman had gotten the white board he was holding. Then he realized it was one of the bottom shelves of the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. They were searching the Galin house’s den, or family room, wherein was a large red leather sofa and matching recliner, as well as the oversized oak desk where all the family’s bills were paid and correspondence was written.
Fedderman and Nancy Weaver had removed almost everything from the shelves, even the large encyclopedia set and coffee table art books on the bottom ones. One of the end-bottom shelves had a hole about half an inch in diameter drilled through it at a sharp angle toward the room, so that it was barely noticeable when the white enameled shelf was viewed by anyone facing it. But if it happened to be noticed, you could insert a finger at the angle of the hole, crook it, and easily lift out the shelf. The bottom shelves were set on a baseboard about five inches above the dark brown carpet, and in the space between this shelf and the floor had been hidden stacks of rubberbanded bills of large denominations. Along with the money were several large, plain brown envelopes.
Pearl had also heard Fedderman and came over with Quinn to see what he’d found.
“Neat little hidey-hole,” Fedderman said, nodding toward the space beneath the removed shelf.
“There’s a small fortune there,” Weaver said.
“Large fortune for a cop,” Pearl said. She glanced over at Weaver’s trancelike stare at the money. “Is it giving you ideas?” She and Weaver had never gotten along for more than minutes at a time.
Weaver’s face reddened, but she said nothing and moved away.
“Don’t start, Pearl,” Quinn said softly.
She didn’t bother to look at him.
Fedderman began opening the envelopes. Some of them contained more money, stacks of hundred-dollar bills. Others contained gold and silver jewelry. Even some gold coins.
“Looks like pirate treasure,” Pearl said.
Still miffed at Pearl and feigning disinterest, Weaver had gone into another room where her partner Vern Shults was working. Quinn saw movement near the door and thought she might have calmed down and was returning, but June Galin entered the den.
She stared at the books stacked on the floor, then at the white shelf, which was now leaning against the wall. Then she saw what was going on, and her eyes widened. Quinn watched her closely. She really did seem surprised.
When she got closer and saw what had been hidden beneath the removed shelf, she seemed genuinely shocked. Quinn was afraid her legs might buckle and braced himself to be ready to catch her if she fell.
But she managed to maintain her equilibrium.
“I don’t understand…” she said. But Quinn knew she did. The knowledge had come suddenly, and at a cost.
“Your husband never told you about this?” he asked.
She began to stammer and then clamped her lips shut. Obviously holding back tears, she looked bitterly up at him. “Who do you think he was hiding all this from?”
Quinn understood how she must feel, betrayed by her husband even after his death. Their relationship hadn’t been as loving and trusting as she’d imagined. It had to be difficult for her.
“I don’t know what to believe now,” she said, rubbing the heel of a hand into her eye. “What else might not be true?”
“We’re going to try to find out,” Quinn said, as gently as he could. He believed—his years of experience and his gut told him—this woman was an innocent caught up in her dead husband’s game.
She swiped the back of her hand across her nose, which had started to run. “I’m so goddamned confused…”
Quinn wasn’t confused. What he felt was rage toward the late Joseph Galin, dirty cop, almost certainly planning on keeping his ill-gotten gains and at some point leaving his wife.
“I’m sure your husband loved you,” he said, “whatever his faults.”
Pearl gave him a look, letting him know this was no way to talk to a suspect. That’s what June Galin had suddenly become, though Pearl had come to the same conclusion as Quinn: it was unlikely that June had known her husband Joe was a bent cop. The hiding place beneath the bottom shelf had been created mostly to keep her from finding that out.
June began sobbing in earnest now, and went to the red recliner and sat on its edge, her face buried in her hands.
Pearl and Fedderman both stared at Quinn, question marks in their eyes. Were they going to regard June Galin as a suspected coconspirator? Cuff her, read her her rights, and take her in?
Quinn, almost imperceptiblly, shook his head no.
Fedderman came over to stand near him, keeping his voice low. “If Galin was dirty, it could be his murder’s got nothing to do with the Twenty-five-Caliber Killer.”
“Maybe,” Quinn said, thinking the investigation was leaning in that direction. There was no shortage of motives when it came to who might have killed Galin.
Then he recalled that inside-out pocket in Galin’s suit coat. And there was something else…
“Hey!” a woman’s voice said.
Everyone turned to look at Nancy Weaver standing in the doorway. She was holding a six-foot-long oak board beneath her right arm, as if she might go surfing, but the surfboard was obviously a bookshelf. And she was grinning.
Quinn remembered the bookshelves in the living room, crowded with glass figurines and a pewter collection.
“There was one of those removable bottom shelves in the living room, too,” Weaver said. “Come see.”
The hiding place in the living room held more money and jewelry, along with an envelope containing three deposit box keys.
When the tally was completed the next day, it was determined that Joe Galin had hidden in his modest home two hundred thousand dollars in cash, as well as ninety thousand dollars’ worth of jewelry. The three deposit boxes had held another fifty thousand and a coin collection that hadn’t yet been appraised.
But what interested Quinn most was something found in the first hiding place they’d discovered. An empty yellow envelope that looked, by the way it was folded and impressed, as if it had once contained money.
Renz was telling Cindy Sellers over the phone whatever she wanted to know about the Hettie D
avis murder. Sensational though it might be, it wasn’t what Vitali and Mishkin feared, the opening act of another serial killer in the city. Not yet, anyway.
“The thing about the flies,” Sellers said, obviously taking notes. “That’s great.”
“Yeah,” Renz said, and swallowed. Ice-hearted bitch.
“Any additional comment?” Sellers asked.
“Just that we’re working day and night and in between,” Renz said. “And the killer should know we’re getting closer with every breath he takes.”
“That’s good,” Sellers said. “You decide to give up police work and politics, you should be a writer.”
“Who’d believe any of it?” Renz said.
After the conversation, he hung up his desk phone, confident that Sellers wouldn’t speculate in her paper about yet another serial killer, this one focusing on women. The way Hettie Davis was killed must have taken a lot of hate, a lot of sickness, a lot of evil.
He pushed the intercom button and told his assistant out in the anteroom that he didn’t want to be disturbed, then got up from his desk chair and cracked the window a few inches. Then he sat back down in his chair and fired up a cigar. Not an illegal Cuban like the ones he knew Quinn was smoking, but a good cigar nonetheless. Smoking wasn’t permitted in the office or anywhere else in the building. Damned near nowhere in the city. But what was the point in being police commissioner if he couldn’t break the law?
He leaned back in his chair and smoked, thinking about Hettie Davis again. Her murder had shaken even two old pros like Vitali and Mishkin. It had to be hard stuff.
What was wrong with people out there in his city? Were they getting worse? Renz had seen plenty of all sorts of crime, most of it committed for the usual reasons: greed, passion, revenge, mental illness…. But sometimes the reason was simply evil. Not often, but sometimes. Renz believed in evil, and he knew Quinn believed in it. They’d both seen it and would see it again.
Renz swiveled his chair so more of the cigar smoke would drift out the window. He didn’t want it to leave a telltale tobacco scent after he’d finished the cigar and sprayed the office with aerosol pine air freshener. He adjusted his position until he saw with satisfaction that the window was drawing well. Smoke seemed to be fleeing the office.
He rested his head against the chair’s high back and blew a perfect smoke ring that dissolved quickly and headed for the polluted outdoors. He thought some more about evil. It was difficult to define, and though you might deny it even to yourself, you could feel it when you were in its presence. It did something to your flesh and stirred something long dormant in the minds of those whose job it was to deal with it. Genuine evil, the real deal, stuck to people, and it scared the hell out of them. Ask Vitali and Mishkin. Ask anyone who’d been anywhere near that crime scene.
Renz tried and failed to blow another smoke ring. In his cynical, self-serving way, he prayed there wouldn’t be another Hettie Davis.
29
Black Lake, Missouri, 1985
The snow-painted woods were quiet after the reverberation of the rifle shot; then there was the crunching sound of boot soles breaking through the icy crust as Marty and his father made their way down the shallow grade toward the kill point.
They stood over the dead ten-point buck Marty had just shot. The action had quickened their blood, and despite the low temperature, neither of them felt the cold. Marty, in fact, was perspiring under his heavy coat.
“We draggin’ it back now?” he asked, his breath fogging out before his face as he looked up at his father.
His father smiled. “We ain’t got my deer yet.”
Marty returned the smile tenuously. “We gonna just let him lay here, pick him up later?”
“Can’t do that. We’ll tree-hang him, cut him so he bleeds out, then come back later and field dress him proper.”
“How we gonna do that?”
Marty’s father drew a coil of thin nylon rope from a coat pocket. “I’ll help you string him up; then I’ll show you what to do. Then you’ll do it.” He walked over to a tree about ten feet away and tossed one end of the rope over a thick branch about ten feet off the ground.
“I’m rememberin’ when me an’ my dad did this,” Marty’s father said.
“How old was you then?”
“ ’Bout your age. Like he was when his father before him showed him how it was.”
“Long time ago,” Marty said.
“Not so long. Grab on, son.”
Marty and his father clutched the deer by its antlers and dragged it over the snowy ground to the tree. It left a long red track of blood along the trail of their boot prints.
Marty’s father made a large loop in the rope and pulled it tight to the branch so a single strand dangled from the tree. He held the dead animal’s rear hooves together and wrapped the rope around them in a weaving motion, around and in and out between the slender legs, so they were tied firmly together. Then he looked around for a stout fallen branch, found one, and broke it over his knee so it was about two feet long. This he inserted in the slack in the rope and began to wind it, tightening as one would a tourniquet. The rope drew taut, and as Marty’s father rotated the branch, his arms well above his head, the deer raised off the ground.
“There’s a wire gizmo called a gambrel you can use to fasten the rear legs,” Marty’s father said. “We use rope. Always have, always will.”
When the deer’s antlers had cleared the ground, Marty’s father looped rope around the piece of branch so it was firmly fixed. He stood back, breathing hard, his breath steaming, and surveyed his work. The deer dangled awkwardly upside down, but the knots were tight and the rope would hold.
“Ain’t goin’ nowheres,” he said.
“Guess not,” Marty said.
His father unbuttoned his coat and reached inside. He drew out his long bowie knife from the sheath on his belt, and with one swift, powerful motion slit the deer’s throat.
Blood spurted from the great severed arteries, brilliant red and steaming on the white snow. The shock and stink of it made Marty gasp and step back.
“Mind you don’t get none on you,” his father said.
Marty felt sick to his stomach. He swallowed and tried to keep his voice as deep as possible, but it still broke when he spoke. “We goin’ lookin’ for your buck now?”
Marty’s father peered closely at him, as if trying to see into him, and smiled, then looked away, almost as if to see if there was anyone else in this part of the woods.
“Ordinarily we would,” he said, “but there’s somethin’ you gotta do first. Let’s jus’ take a little walk, wait for this fine animal to bleed out.”
Marty followed, not at all unhappy to be leaving the scene. As they walked away he could hear blood pattering on the ground. The sound of it, the scent and vivid red of the blood on the pure white snow, would never leave him.
They walked down to the lake, then along the frozen shoreline. Winter had hit with the lake level high, and the dark water that was flecked with ice looked to be halfway up some of the smaller trees. There was no sound in the winter woods other than the crunch of their boots in the snow, and sometimes in the frozen mud.
“There’s somethin’ Alma an’ me don’t much talk about,” Marty’s father said. Alma was his wife, Marty’s mother. He and Marty referred to her by her first name, because that’s what she demanded. His father looked over at him with a faint smile as he spoke. “The both of us—you an’ me—are from a family of hunters, descendents of Red Hawk, who was the most renowned hunter in the Chippewa nation.”
This wasn’t news to Marty. He’d even used the fact to earn some respect at school. Aside from family whispers, he had heard others mention Red Hawk and his father’s Chippewa lineage. He’d even read in some of the books in the school library about his ancestor, the legendary Red Hawk.
“You proud of who you are?” his father asked.
“ ’Course I am. Always been.”
“When
my father was young, his father took him huntin’ when he was just about your age, an’ it was the same way with his father, all the way back to Red Hawk.”
“Family tradition,” Marty said.
“Oh, it’s somethin’ even more’n that.”
They’d left the lake and circled around and were back near where the dead deer hung from the stout tree branch.
When they approached the deer, Marty couldn’t believe how much blood was on the ground beneath the ugly jagged slice in its neck. There was so much blood around the gash itself that it made the cut look even deeper than it was, so it appeared as if the great animal’s head might fall off from its weight and the weight of the antlers.
Marty’s father reached beneath his jacket and drew out a different knife, large, with a sharp blade. About an inch from the knife’s point was a curved barb, jutting out about half an inch like a steel tooth.
“Take off your clothes,” he said to Marty.
“Wha—”
His father smiled. “Don’t be frightened. Jus’ go ahead an’ undress.”
Marty did as he was told, hanging his clothes over some nearby tree limbs, letting his boots sit on the ground with his socks in them. What had seemed a slight breeze became more brisk now, as if taking advantage of Marty’s nakedness.
His father smiled at him again, then turned his attention to the deer. He inserted the point of the blade in between its rear legs, then grunted with effort and made a long incision all the way down, even cutting through breastbone, almost to the gashed throat.
The deer’s stomach opened wide, and its entrails spilled out onto the ground. Marty recoiled from the fetid copper stench of blood and corruption. He could taste it along the edges of his tongue. A long gray section of intestine remained dangling from the body cavity.
His father flipped the knife around in his hand so he was holding it by the bloody blade. He extended the bone handle to Marty. “You finish the job. Ordinary way to do this is to lay the deer down, open it up more gentle, but we do it this way. This here’s a gutting knife. Some hunters like this kind ’cause it’s got a gut hook. You use that sharp barb on the blade to hook the deer’s insides. That’ll help you pull out the internal organs. You cut out the rectum an’ tie it with this cord, else wise you can have a hell of a mess. You gotta clean that deer out good so nothin’ll rot later on, so the meat’ll cure okay. You understand?”