by Susan Dunlap
She jumped down beside him; the pain exploded in her head. Her legs gave way; she fell forward and lay on the floor until she could breathe again.
Dowd lay groaning at the foot of the altar. Slowly, she knelt to untie his hands. The light glinted off something shiny on the floor next to him. Kiernan reached for it—a tiny bottle, an airline liquor bottle, like the ones that littered Joe Zekk’s house. She stared at it, enraged.
Dowd moaned. Kiernan turned back to him, coaxing him into a sitting position with his back against the altar. He coughed, wiped ineffectually at his eyes, and coughed again.
Finally, she got him standing unsteadily and half-walked, half-dragged him out of the smoke-filled church. The fresh air outside revived him briefly. He walked, mostly under his own power, to the rectory and, as if finding safety on Vanderhooven’s couch, he sighed and passed out.
“Damn!” she muttered. The man was breathing, his color was as good as could be expected under the circumstances, his pulse was reasonable. “Lucky not to have a heart attack.” Sighing, she dialed 911, wishing there were a way to call an ambulance and the fire department without alerting the sheriff.
The medics arrived moments before the first fire engine. She passed on the essential information. As they clustered around the bishop, she edged out of the room and across the hallway to the kitchen. Outside a siren shrieked and died. The medics wheeled Dowd along the hallway and out the front door. Kiernan raced out the back, let herself out the gate, and walked quickly down the alley. When she reached the street she slowed her pace and joined the gaggle of neighbors already heading toward the front of the church.
All the windows of the church were open now. Firemen scurried back and forth. Kiernan slithered along behind the onlookers, away from the church, hurried across the street to the Jeep, and drove slowly out of Azure Acres Homes.
Her head throbbed. It was going to take more than Alka-Seltzers this time. Goddammit, Joe Zekk would not get away again. He had half an hour’s lead. But he wouldn’t be expecting her to follow him. He’d be home, rooting through his piles of stuff, yanking out this and that to take with him. If he pictured her at all, it would be in the hospital battling the effects of smoke inhalation. Or in the morgue.
It was already after four A.M. Begrudging the time it took, she stopped at the first gas station, filled the tank, the spare can, and the water bottle. Next door, at the 7-11, she downed four Alka-Seltzers and picked up a couple sandwiches; she climbed back in the Jeep and headed onto the Pima Freeway.
For once the freeway was nearly empty. Only a few red taillights dotted the blackness ahead. The seemingly endless sky was thickly splattered with specks of white. As she veered onto the Superstition Freeway the streaky white of headlights was visible across the divider. The cool night air brushed her face and neck, but it did nothing to cool her anger. She squeezed the steering wheel harder and thought of Joe Zekk.
The whole operation would have been so easy for him. He was virtually a sentry for the town of Rattlesnake. He must have seen Austin Vanderhooven go down there two weeks ago, when John McKinley gave him the instructions for his new will. Then Zekk would have seen Vanderhooven go down that winding road on Saturday—eight days ago now—with the will itself. Had Austin been frustrated and angry when he came back up empty-handed? A four-hour drive for nothing? Had he been angry enough to complain to Joe Zekk? Had he told him about the will but stopped short of telling him where it was? And had Zekk realized the money-making possibilities in murdering Vanderhooven and possessing that new will?
Night was just beginning to fade as she started the climb into the mountains. The sharp hills and craggy peaks seemed to suck the black into themselves; they stood ominous against the paling sky. The stars that had crowded the dark expanse minutes earlier had faded to invisibility against its dark gray.
With the will unrecorded, and John McKinley dead, the retreat was still viable. Had Zekk offered that hope to Bishop Dowd? Planned to sell him the will?
Already the sky was lighter, no longer a battleship gray but a pale gray. The crags had lost their sharp points and gone fuzzy, as if they were covered with velvet.
Sylvia Necri? As a buyer for the will? Or a full-fledged accomplice? When he sabotaged the retreat, Vanderhooven had snatched away her professional chance of a lifetime. The retreat meant at least as much to her as it did to Dowd.
A jolt drew Kiernan’s attention back to the road. Both hands on the wheel, she eyed the straight strip ahead and then let her gaze rise back up to include cloudless expanse above. As she watched, the color of the sky shifted from gray to beige. The road curved to the left; paloverde trees and ocotillo crowded near the sides. She passed jojoba bushes and the squat barrel cacti with their bright orange flowers.
Bud Warren? The longer the church or Sylvia Necri controlled the water rights, the better off he was. He needed three years to show off his process. Kiernan could picture him buying the will. She could see him shrugging off the murder if he thought he could get away with it. But she couldn’t see him as a co-planner. The vicious sexual humiliation involved in Vanderhooven’s murder reeked of revenge. Bud Warren had no reason for seeking revenge. That kind of revenge fit Sylvia Necri. Or Beth Landau.
Beth Landau. She had the Culiacán. She was the only one likely to know the significance of that liqueur. The peace-offering ritual was not something the closed-mouthed Vanderhooven would have told anyone. And she had the revenge motive in spades. But she gained nothing financially.
“Damn!” Kiernan muttered. “Nothing quite fits.”
Over the top of the hills a strip of orange sun poked up. Sprays of blinding yellow turned the hillside gold and caramel and brown. Without thinking, Kiernan slowed down. Beams of light glistened off the tops of the paloverdes and the saguaro cacti like stars on a Christmas tree. And then the sun rose quickly and poured light over crest of the mountains. The trees and jutting rocks reclaimed their shapes, the sepia tones vanished from the landscape, and the mesquite and the paloverde trees stood pale green in the golden mist of morning.
She shook her head sharply to break the spell. It was easy to see how the high desert seduced people. Just as easy to see how those people drove their Jeeps off the road.
The metal Z that marked Joe Zekk’s road came up on the right. She turned onto the unpaved road, driving too fast for even the Jeep’s suspension. What had Zekk said to Dowd at nine-thirty last night to lure the bishop to Mission San Leo? Had he threatened to expose his part in the Rattlesnake massacre? Or had he lied and told him he had the will?
The mesa came into sight. Zekk’s house sat, castlelike, on the edge. At the far end of the mesa she could see the small round rise of Vanderhooven’s dome, and from this angle, that giant forearm and fist of rock that hung over the end of the valley.
She looked back at Zekk’s house. The land in front was empty. Zekk’s green panel truck was gone.
“Damn! Oh, hell! Damn, damn, damn!” She pounded her fist against the steering wheel. She slammed on the brakes and stared at the offending building, then rolled the Jeep forward and parked in front of the house.
If Joe Zekk wasn’t here, at least his house could be useful. She grabbed her water bottle, extricated Austin Vanderhooven’s keys, and headed in through the kitchen door.
The vaguely sweet smell she had noticed yesterday was stronger now. Was it from the sticky soda cans on the counter?
The kitchen looked no different than it had yesterday afternoon. The potential avalanche of dishes in the sink seemed just as precarious, the pile on the counter just as architecturally amazing. She pulled open the refrigerator door and found the contents unchanged: beer, soda, butter, a raw steak—nothing that smelled.
She walked slowly through the living room. It, too, looked as bad as the previous day. As bad, but not lots worse, as it would if Zekk had rooted through the piles for things he wanted to take with him.
Disgusted, she checked the dresser and the closet. No empty drawers or hang
ers. In the bathroom the medicine cabinet appeared untouched. A dry toothbrush hung in its holder.
She walked back to the kitchen, looked at the sink once more, and edged her water bottle in under the tap.
Zekk’s truck was gone, but none of his things appeared to be missing. Or was he gone?
Of course, Zekk hadn’t left for good. What he had to sell was McKinley’s new will. And that was at the bottom of the hill in Rattlesnake. Zekk wouldn’t leave without it.
But how could he get it? The McKinleys were hardly about to let him wander down the switchback road. They had shot at her yesterday; they would shoot at Zekk today. He would never get near the will.
If Zekk planned to steal the will, he would have to wait till after dark. And be very clever, very quiet, and very, very lucky.
38
KIERNAN PULLED THE Jeep against the west side of Zekk’s house and settled in the shade to wait for his return. She ate a sandwich, kept an eye on the switchback road, watching for angry McKinleys, and reviled Joe Zekk for keeping a house that smelled too bad for her to wait in. From time to time she found herself catnapping. Every couple of hours she ventured in to the bathroom. Twice she swallowed more Alka-Seltzer. By noon she had reconsidered her premise about Zekk a dozen times. Maybe Zekk would not return after all. Maybe he had abandoned the will and fled. He could be in L.A. by now. Maybe she was sweating in the middle of the desert for nothing. She considered walking down to the dome. But the last time she had been in there it had been almost as hot inside as out. Instead, she doused herself in water and refilled the bottle. The Rattlesnake River looked tantalizingly cool below. By three in the afternoon she was ready to admit that the day had been wasted. Zekk had to come back to Rattlesnake at night, but there was no reason to assume he would return before then.
But now it was too late to leave. She longed for ten minutes in Zekk’s shower. She yearned for a cool spot, even a merely cooler spot, to wait in.
It had been morning when she was inside the dome yesterday. Maybe it was cooler in there in the afternoon. She didn’t believe it, but after eight hours of waiting, any diversion had its merits. From there she could hear Zekk’s truck approaching.
She drove to the far side of the high adobe wall, walked to the gate, opened it with one of the keys on Vanderhooven’s ring, and walked inside the enclosure.
The stench was overwhelming! How had she not smelled it outside? Maybe the air flowed up from inside the walls. Maybe …
She stared slowly around the garden. Cacti, succulents, hard red dirt. Even more slowly, she walked toward the dome itself.
The door stood open. On the floor, a triangle of light from the skylight stood out against the darkness. It took a moment for her eyes to adjust. She stepped closer, into the doorway. The first thing she spotted was the blowflies, hundreds of them. Then she saw Zekk. She jammed her teeth together and swallowed hard.
Joe Zekk lay on his side. The back of his head had been blown away. Blood and brain and skin and hair stuck to the dome walls, the floor, the sheets on Vanderhooven’s mat.
She spun around and raced outside, swatting at the flies as they buzzed around her nose and mouth. Through her teeth, she breathed in, pulling the fresher air into her lungs. It wasn’t like the autopsy table here. There you knew it was coming. Here … Christ! What kind of gun had the velocity to blow the back of a man’s head off?
The bullet that did that kind of damage had to have been hollow-tipped, a shell that would explode on impact and break through the brains like an electric mixer blade. Or a thin-jacketed shell, the type used in high-velocity rifles. Varmint rifles. Rifles like those the McKinleys carried.
She shivered at the thought. A wave of sorrow shook her as she remembered Zekk, sitting amid the piles of clutter on his sofa, his short dark hair swept so carefully back and the corners of his mouth quivering under his baby-fat cheeks because she’d hurt his feelings. Would she be the only one to feel a stab of grief for his wasted life?
The blowflies kept after her. As she fanned them away from her face, she recalled the fly-ridden animal carcass she had seen on the dead tree below the cliff edge. The blowflies had had a short trip to Zekk’s body.
She hesitated, letting herself wonder what had happened after Joe Zekk called Bishop Dowd at nine-thirty the previous night. Who had had enough of his threats? Or who decided he knew too much? Had that person banged on Zekk’s door as he hung up the receiver? Or had he, or she, waited till the early hours of the morning to kill him?
She swatted at the blowflies. She knew she was putting off what had to be done. Taking a last breath in the outside air, she covered her nose with her hand and made her way carefully into the dome.
The blowflies completely masked large portions of Zekk’s head. They buzzed in flight and resettled. The smell of death filled the room. Zekk lay on his right side. He was wearing the same teal polo shirt and blue deck pants he had had on yesterday afternoon. Now they were flecked with bits of his head.
Swatting the flies away with her left hand, she bent down and felt Zekk’s arm with her right. Cold. Not cool, but cold. She wished she had a thermometer and was simultaneously relieved she didn’t. She tried to flex his elbow. Solid.
On his face there was already a white caking in the blood. The first stage of maggot eggs.
The flies were all around her nose. She swatted with both hands. Stooping quickly, she looked at Zekk’s abdomen. The first hint of green was visible. Decomposition. Already. Probably accelerated by the heat?
She stood. The flies buzzed madly then reclaimed the body. Kiernan moved away and looked quickly at the top of the wooden chest. Nothing there at all. With a cloth she lifted the lid. Books inside, still lying there as they had been the last time she looked. No clock beside the bed. On the floor, no footprints in the blood. The killer must have stood in the doorway.
She turned and walked outside, forcing herself to make a slow circle around the courtyard, checking for threads caught on cacti, for vomit, for any clue.
When she found none, she went back in and looked at Zekk’s body again. Things didn’t add up right. But she could worry about that outside. She glanced up through the pink skylight. Zekk had thought that light was blue, of course, because he had seen it only from the outside. Had he looked up before he was shot and seen it was pink? Or were she and Beth the only ones still alive who shared that small secret?
But, of course, they weren’t.
Aware of the shakiness of her arms and the queasiness in her stomach, she walked out, relocked the gate, and gratefully inhaled the clean, death-free air.
She moved slowly around the high wall, for the moment concentrating only on placing one foot in front of other. What was it that didn’t fit? She passed the Jeep and kept on, walking out along the rocky forearm that hung over the valley. There was something comforting about its presence there, despite its precarious position, as if it had maintained itself by will alone. She walked toward the fist of red rock, staring at the dead tree in front of it. Dead as Zekk, dead as Vanderhooven, but somehow, not so dead. Dirt skidded across the yard-wide peninsula of land and dropped off the edge. Despite her years of training in the gym, practicing balance day after day, she felt a shot of terror. She grabbed the dead tree and shut her eyes against the fear.
She shook her head sharply, and opened her eyes. She took a breath and forced herself to look down at the rocky peninsula on which she stood, down over the side, down the side of the sheer cliff. The remains of the dead animal that she had seen there the previous day were almost gone. Most of the flies had deserted it. Deserted it for the more appetizing banquet of Joe Zekk.
She let go of the tree and walked back, carefully, across the rocky forearm to the Jeep, climbed in, and sat.
Joe Zekk had called Bishop Dowd at nine-thirty. Sometime after that he came to the dome and was killed. That just did not fit.
Zekk’s skin was cool for a hot place like this. He had not been killed this morning—he wouldn’t
have cooled that quickly in the daytime heat. He had to already have been dead in the night when the temperature was thirty degrees lower. “Not enough,” she muttered. Body temperature was notoriously unreliable as an indicator of time of death.
Rigor was set. All that that told her was that Zekk had been killed before she set herself up outside his house this morning.
But the maggot eggs. She had seen flies laying their eggs, she’d seen that white crusty material spread hour by hour. She’d seen it on training films, in lab tests, on bodies left outside. The flies wouldn’t have laid eggs till daylight. The crust of maggot eggs on Zekk’s face was too great to have formed in a mere nine hours’ time. But if the flies had laid those eggs before dusk, a full ten hours earlier …
Still not enough. Not if she had to go to court with it.
But add the decomposition that was starting in the abdomen. That discoloration would not have been noticeable only fourteen or fifteen hours after death. It took longer.
Enough? Maybe not enough to go to court with. Still, it did explain why Zekk’s house had looked the same as it had the previous afternoon. It explained why that steak that he would logically have cooked for dinner last night was still thawing in his refrigerator. It explained his wearing the same clothes. It explained the drop in body temp.
It said that Joe Zekk had been killed not this morning, not late last night, but before dusk. He was dead before Bishop Dowd got his long-distance call. Someone else had used Zekk’s phone to call Bishop Dowd last night. Someone, not Zekk, had dragged the bishop into the church, hauled him up on the altar, and left him to hang. And that person had attacked her there.
She thought of the skylight. She recalled someone mentioning Vanderhooven’s pink skylight. The village boy considered it blue. Only someone who had been inside would see it as pink. The killer. Now the pieces of the puzzle did fit together.