The front of the house had three windows on the main floor, and two more upstairs. All were covered by curtains, and none showed any light. The porch, with its immense overhang, lay in shadow. The breeze kicked up again, and I saw something flutter in the darkness near the door before going flat again.
As we approached the steps, Clyde’s manner changed. His ears pricked and again he sampled the air. This time he looked more agitated than excited—something more than the death fear. I raised a hand to stop Mac and Phillips.
Clearly visible in the mud were the imprints of bare feet. The prints were large, likely too big to be those of a seventy-one-year-old woman. They led off into the weeds and disappeared.
“Whoever was driving the car, maybe,” Phillips said.
But something else had captured Clyde’s interest. Running parallel to the footprints and a few feet closer to the house were animal tracks, each larger than my hand. They were exactly like the spoor Clyde had found under the trees outside Cohen’s house.
I pointed them out to Mac and Phillips.
Phillips gave a soft whistle. “A dog of some sort.” He stepped clear of the footprints and squatted by the tracks. He held his hand next to one. “A big one, too. Massive. Way too big to be a coyote. A mastiff, maybe. Or a Great Dane.”
“There was a wolf dog near one of the crime scenes on the Davenport case,” I said. “How fresh are these prints?”
Phillips stood. “Water has caught in them, and the edges are blurred. I’d say a day at least. Maybe more.” He scratched his head. “We get a lot of those wolf-dog hybrids out here in the county. People use ’em to run off the coyotes. But they give me the willies. Those animals can never decide if they’re wild or tame. I’ve seen it go both ways. Had one take down its owner a couple of years back. Ugliest scene I’ve ever processed.”
Clyde kept his ears up. But he wasn’t going wild over the prints, so I was confident no predator watched from nearby.
Phillips was staring at the porch. “What is that?”
Mac and I squinted into the shadows. Now that we were closer, I could see something huddled in the gloom just beyond the top of the stairs. Tan fur shivered in the wind. My mind went to the bobcat on Jill Martin’s table.
“The hell?” Mac said.
At the same time Phillips said, “It’s rabbits.”
Phillips was right. Heaped upon the porch was a mound of dead rabbits, their bodies piled atop each other like kindling in a funeral pyre. The bottom carcasses were well along in the decomposition process. The rabbits at the top of the pile looked relatively fresh. Intermixed with the rabbits were ground squirrels, prairie dogs, and a few woodrats.
None of them looked like they’d gone peacefully.
Phillips hitched up his belt. “It’s like a . . . a damn offering.”
Exactly, I thought. The way a cat left a bird or a mouse on the doorstep as a gift for its owner. Only the owner these were intended for never picked them up.
Phillips keyed his radio. “Dispatch, this is Unit Twelve. I’m on scene. Requesting assist. We have anyone in the area?”
“Roger that,” dispatch said. “Deputy Armstrong is thirty minutes out from your location. I’ll send a call-out.”
We went on up the steps, the wood soft and spongy under our feet from the recent rains. We stepped around the dead rabbits and their unwanted guests—the rabbits near the bottom of the pile writhed with maggots, while flies worked the top. Phillips swallowed hard as he went by.
Clyde stayed close to me.
Esta Quinn’s front door was old and scarred, the jamb splintered from years of heat and rain and cold. The doorbell dangled from a single wire. It looked like someone had taken a baseball bat to the porch light.
In the center of the door, someone had drawn a small X.
“The killer has been here,” I said softly.
“What killer?” Phillips asked. “You mean the guy who got the Davenports?”
“You’re up for this, right, Phillips?” Mac asked.
He took a step back. “Maybe we should wait for Armstrong.”
But I shook my head. “Lucy might be in there.”
Phillips swallowed again. “Shit.”
He took another step back and all of us looked up and down the length of the porch, swept our eyes over the windows. I kept my hand on the butt of my gun, but the house appeared to offer no threat. No curtain twitched, no shadows passed the windows.
In silent agreement, Mac went to one side of the door, Clyde and I took the other, and the deputy—in his official capacity—knocked as if it were a perfectly normal visit. The sound echoed around the porch then died away.
Out in the yard, the wind rustled through a line of cottonwood trees and, far over the fields, a bird called. The clothesline kept up its metallic clang.
“Mrs. Quinn!” Phillips yelled through the door. “This is Deputy Phillips with the Weld County Sheriff’s Office. I’m here to see if you need anything.”
Clyde’s ears came up. A second later, I heard it, too. A high, thin wail coming from somewhere deep inside the house—it sounded like the weak screech of an old woman.
“Let’s go,” I said to Phillips.
He tried the handle. The door was locked.
The wailing hiccupped into a cough and faded away.
Phillips stepped back, raised his booted foot, and slammed it into the door, just below the doorknob. The door groaned and a series of cracks appeared in the door’s wooden frame. He kicked it twice more, the frame splintered, and the door burst inward.
As if the house had been holding its breath, a smell rolled out, a dark mix of urine and feces and another odor I knew from Iraq—the sickly sweet stench of rotting wounds. My eyes watered.
“Damn,” Phillips said.
I touched Phillips’s shoulder as he was about to step through the doorway. “Clyde and I will go first. Give us close backup. Once we’ve cleared the entrance, we can split up and clear every room until we find Esta. Keep an eye out for the little girl.”
If an FBI agent and a sheriff’s deputy had problems taking orders from a railroad cop, they didn’t show it. Phillips moved aside, and Mac gave me a nod. Maybe it was because I had the dog.
I turned back to the house. A shadowy hallway disappeared into deep gloom. I reached around the doorframe and felt along the inside wall until I found a light switch. A single, dim bulb came on halfway down the hall.
Clyde and I moved through the shattered doorway. The hallway dead-ended fifteen feet down at a single doorway, which was closed. Just to the left of the door, a staircase led to the second floor. A small alcove on the left held hooks that brimmed with coats; a pile of women’s shoes lay in a jumble below. Through an archway on our right, a living room stretched into the dimness beyond the reach of the light, the space crowded with mysterious lumps of furniture draped in dusty sheets. I stepped that way and found another light switch. Shadows scurried back. Stacks of magazines and newspapers filled the floor. Dirty dishes covered a coffee table. A dry rattling came from behind the walls—cockroaches or termites.
Then, from directly above, another long, thin wail.
Clyde and I went fast, winding our way through the furniture and thigh-high stacks of magazines as we cleared the room before we made our way back to where Mac and Phillips waited just inside the door.
“Clyde and I will check the rest of the lower floor,” I said quietly. “You two head upstairs. Sounds like she’s in a room right over the living room.”
It took me only a few minutes to clear the downstairs. Kitchen, mudroom, a den. All filthy with dust and mouse droppings and old food. I heard the floors creak as Mac and Phillips walked through the rooms upstairs, shouting “clear” as they moved through each space.
Then Mac called out, “Found her! It’s Esta.”
I could tell by her voice that it was bad.
Esta Quinn had been stretched spread-eagled across her soiled bed and shackled to the bedposts. She was nude
and gaunt and barely conscious, tied down in a painful stretch. Only her right hand remained free; a stack of dirty plates and water glasses on the nightstand suggested she’d been allowed to feed herself.
The longer she lived, I thought darkly, the longer the torment could continue.
I downed Clyde in the hallway and stepped into the room next to Phillips. In the confined space, the stench hit like a baseball bat to the knees.
Mac stood on the far side of the bed, her fingers on the woman’s wrist to take a pulse. Mac was pale, and her black eye looked like a fresh wound in the sudden pallor of her face.
“I’ll radio for an ambulance,” Phillips said and went back out into the hall.
I forced myself to the bed and looked down at the ruin of what was now barely a human being. Esta had been tortured over a period of days, maybe weeks, and what had been done to her body revealed both the woman’s astonishing determination to survive and her torturer’s capacity for evil. Broken bones, knife wounds, burns. The room was chilly despite the July heat outside, and I retrieved a blanket tossed over a nearby chair. Mac helped me spread it gently over Esta’s unmoving body. Esta moaned in pain.
I examined the shackles holding her in place. Chains and padlocks. Easy enough.
“I’ll get my tools,” I said to Mac.
When I returned, Esta’s eyes were open. They were overbright, bloodshot, the eyes of a woman who’d gone so far around the bend she wasn’t even within shouting distance of sane. Rick Wolanski had called her a nutcase. But she was well beyond that offhand description, wandering in a faraway fever dream of despair and pain.
Her eyes tracked me as I moved around the bed, my pick and tensioner making quick work of the padlocks. She began a low keening as I worked, and Mac gathered the old woman’s hands in hers.
“Sh, sh,” she murmured. “You’re safe. It’s okay now.”
Esta’s mouth cranked open as if on rusty hinges, the teeth within long and yellow. Her tongue licked out, trying to moisten her cracked and bleeding lips, and Mac went into the bathroom, returned with a glass of water. She cradled Esta’s head, cupping the fragile skull so she could dribble water down the woman’s throat. Esta drank greedily, then coughed. Mac waited until she quieted, then lowered her head back to the pillow.
Clouds rolled over the sun, and such light as there was went to almost nothing. The old woman seemed to fade into the bed until she looked like nothing more than a rumpled blanket. Phillips came back into the room and turned on a lamp.
Esta’s mouth opened. “He . . . he . . .”
We leaned closer. Her voice came from deep in her chest, a ghoulish rattle.
“Who?” Mac asked. “Who did this to you?”
Esta’s fevered eyes turned bright as opals. “He . . . killed . . . them all.”
“Who?” Mac asked again. “Who do you mean?”
The old woman began to thrash. Her body twisted, her back and neck arched, her head lashed back and forth.
“He’s mad!” she screamed. “My wild child. Mad, mad, mad!”
Her hand shot out and clamped onto my wrist with surprising strength, biting down to the bone. Clyde barked until I quieted him.
“My grandson,” Esta hissed, her fingers digging. “Roman. He will haunt me forever. You’ve got to get me out of here!”
“Raya had a child?” I asked. Stray threads began to weave into a picture.
“Raya’s baby. Roman.” Esta’s gaze latched on to mine. She looked as feral and helpless as the rabbits on the porch. “He was hers, but I—I was the she-wolf who suckled the murderer.”
Mac frowned. “You think she means the nephew that Rick Wolanski mentioned?”
Esta cackled. “Nephew. Everyone thought that. Raya’s secret.”
“Do you know where he is?” I asked. “Raya’s son. Where is he?”
A crazy light shot into her eyes and she cackled. “He’s in the ground now. Where he belongs. Deep in the ground, God rot his soul.”
CHAPTER 24
A life lived selfishly is a heavy load.
—Sydney Parnell. Personal journal.
“You think he killed himself?” Phillips asked. “And took the little girl with him? You think that’s what she means?”
“We’re going to assume not,” Mac said.
We were standing in the hallway, whispering. Esta groaned and muttered from the bedroom.
“She’s pretty wacko,” Phillips went on. “All that stuff about him being in the ground. You think it’s true? That she has a grandson and he’s the one who hurt her?”
I ignored him. “Lucy could be here.”
Mac massaged her temples. “Sydney, you and Clyde search the house and grounds. Phillips, get tape up, secure the scene. I’ll stay with Esta and get on the phone, see what I can find out about a grandson.” She dropped her hands and looked at me. “No stone unturned.”
While Mac returned to the bedroom and Phillips went outside, Clyde and I headed for the stairs. I phoned Cohen, left a quick summary on his voice mail of what we’d learned, and asked him to call me as soon as he could. Then Clyde and I went through another run of the house, this time peering into every small place where a child might be stashed. My heart gave a panicked heave each time I opened a cupboard or closet door or looked behind furniture and in shower stalls.
I found keys hanging in the kitchen and went outside and searched Esta’s car. Nothing but a sweater and an empty plastic bag. In the rear of the house I found a root cellar, the dank musty air filling my nostrils as I left Clyde up top and descended a rotted ladder into the dark. My flashlight picked out only empty bottles and spiderwebs. But the image of Esta and her tortured body haunted me, and I realized I was whispering Lucy’s name under my breath, like a prayer.
Phillips and the new deputy, Armstrong, met us at the front door. The ambulance was fifteen minutes out, Phillips said. While they began a more thorough search of the ground floor for any indication of Roman’s identity or where he might be, Clyde and I returned upstairs. We looked into Esta’s room, but the old woman appeared to be asleep.
Mac joined me in the hall.
“We’re searching every database we’ve got for Roman Quinn,” she said. “So far nothing. Maybe this asshole has lived so far off the grid that nothing would have landed him in a database. Or maybe Esta is just crazy. We’ll keep digging, and once we have fingerprints from the crime scene guys, hopefully something will pop.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose where a headache threatened. “If Hiram’s the father, maybe that was why she was so determined to win his love. She wanted a father for her son.”
“It would also give him a motive for killing her,” Mac said. “It’s one thing for a wife to forgive an affair. A child is more difficult. And it would give Roman, if he knew, a reason to destroy Hiram’s family.”
The house creaked around us while outside, wind rattled the trees. I rubbed my arms. “Maybe the answer is here.”
I began my search upstairs with the room I assumed had belonged to Raya’s son when he was a child.
The small space held a bunk bed and a child-size desk. A dresser sat in one corner, and opposite it rose a set of bookshelves filled with Colorado maps and rock-hounding books and Colorado-themed merchandise of the kind you could purchase at any mountain tourist shop. Chunks of pyrite and amazonite and gold ore. Tiny glass bottles holding even tinier flakes of gold. A belt buckle covered with rattlesnake skin. Miniature animal-skin tepees and plastic horses. Perched on the very top of the bookcase was a child’s straw cowboy hat.
One shelf held books, including The Odyssey and the collected plays of Euripides—presumably the sources for the quotes Roman had left. The bottom shelf held a display of small animals, inexpertly taxidermied. A coiled rattlesnake, a hare on its hind legs, a squirrel locked—improbably—in mortal combat with a scorpion. I thought of the dead rabbits on the porch and tried to imagine what went on in a mind like that of Roman Quinn.
My wild child, Esta h
ad called him. Was the wolf dog his? Had he been at Zolner’s house last night? Maybe he was the man who had visited Zolner, claiming to be a salesman. He might have gone in search of everyone employed by the two railroads who’d been at the scene of his mother’s death. He could still be trying to piece the story together.
I looked at my watch. By now, Jill Martin should be at the airport, safely out of Roman’s reach. I called the number she’d given me. She answered, surprised, and confirmed that she had gone through security and was at her gate. I wished her a good trip and hung up.
My mind kept circling back to the question, why now? What had sent Roman to destroy Hiram’s family after all this time?
In haste, I continued my circuit of the room while Clyde watched from the door, my anxiety mirrored in his eyes.
A dresser filled with a boy’s toddler-size clothes; a pair of child’s hockey skates in the closet. The walls were covered floor-to-ceiling with maps of Colorado and postcards of local tourist attractions like Estes Park and the Stanley Hotel, made famous in Stephen King’s novel The Shining. There were street maps, topo maps, photographs of Colorado’s famous peaks along with maps of mines and quarries and popular hikes.
On the desk was a photo of Raya Quinn and a boy I assumed was Roman. He looked maybe three or four, dressed in denim shorts and a plaid shirt, his smile wide. He wore the cowboy hat that now sat on his bookshelf. The photo couldn’t have been taken long before his mother died.
What had it been like for him, I wondered, to grow up out here so far from other people, with a grandmother as drug-addled as Esta?
Clyde lifted his head, and a moment later Phillips appeared in the doorway.
“We haven’t found anything useful about Roman so far,” he said. “But I ran Esta Quinn again, digging deeper this time. Utilities, phone, property taxes, and a few other bills are paid through a lawyer who lives in Chicago, along with a monthly stipend. I called him, and he says a corporate trust was set up years ago to cover Esta Quinn’s expenses. He doesn’t know who set up the original trust, but it came from a third-party lawyer, so I doubt it was a settlement from the railroad for her daughter’s death. No other visible means of support. She hasn’t filed taxes in more than twenty years.”
Dead Stop (Sydney Rose Parnell Series Book 2) Page 28