Camouflage nd-36

by Bill Pronzini

  He said, “We can talk over there in the garden.”

  “I have to eat something. I’ll be sick if I don’t eat.”

  “Do you want to go home instead? Or to a restaurant?”

  “No. I’d rather stay here, close to Jesus.”

  She made no objection when Runyon put a light hand on her elbow, guided her into the garden. The bench creaked and tilted when she sat on one end. Immediately she opened her voluminous purse, brought out three candy bars: Hershey milk chocolate, Butterfinger, a triangular package of Toblerone. She tore the wrapper off the Hershey bar first, balled it, returned it to the purse, and then filled her mouth with half the candy in a series of quick, avid bites. Watching this made him wince. He felt her pain, he pitied her, but that wasn’t going to stop him from adding more hurt to her already-battered emotional state.

  “You like chocolate, don’t you, Gwen.”

  She murmured something that sounded like “Comfort food.”

  “Chocolate milk, candy bars. What else?”

  “Ice cream. Double chocolate fudge.”

  “And chocolate-chip cookies.”

  No response. She was busy devouring the rest of the Hershey bar.

  Runyon said, “Fresh-baked Toll House cookies. I’ll bet they’re another of your favorites.”

  “They used to be. Not anymore.”

  “Not since Thursday afternoon.”

  He watched her open the Toblerone, shove in three wedges of the chocolate, honey, and almond nougat candy. She chewed ravenously, some of the gooey mess oozing out at the corners of her mouth. As soon as she swallowed she reached into her purse again, picked out a Kleenex, and used it to wipe the residue away.

  “Tell me about Thursday afternoon,” he said.

  It was a little time before she answered. “Taking a life is a cardinal sin. I begged Jesus to forgive me and he has; he told me so.” The rest of the Toblerone vanished. “But I can’t forgive myself. Thou shalt not kill. Francine was wicked, but she was my sister. Thou shalt not kill. Jesus forgave me, but I don’t think he’ll let me into heaven. I’m afraid my immortal soul will burn in the fires of hell.” All of this in an emotionless voice blurred by the glot of candy.

  “Why did you go to see Francine?”

  “The fires of hell,” she said again, and her features squeezed together and for a few seconds Runyon thought she might break down. But the Butterfinger saved that from happening.

  He repeated his question while she peeled off the wrapper.

  “Why?” she said. “Because of what you told me.”

  “That she’d been hurting Bobby Darby.”

  “I kept thinking about that. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. All the things she did to me, to Tracy when we were little… all those terrible things. I couldn’t let her keep on hurting another of God’s children.”

  “But you didn’t go there to kill her.”

  “Oh no. No.” Half the Butterfinger in one bite. Chewing, she said, “Just to talk to her, tell her she mustn’t hurt that little boy anymore. Ask her to pray with me. I remembered the man’s name, the man you said she was living with in sin-Robert Darby. I looked up his address and I drove over there to see her. I didn’t want to, not ever again, I’ve always been afraid of her, but I went anyway.” Another dab at her mouth with the Kleenex. “I shouldn’t have. The Devil had crept inside me that day and I didn’t know it.”

  Runyon said nothing. No need to prompt her anymore. It was as if she were back in church, confessing to her savior-a confession he thought she would be compelled to make again and again, to anyone who would listen, for the rest of her life.

  “She wasn’t happy to see me. She said I was disgustingly fat, a bloated pig, a walking pile of blubber. She laughed when I asked her to stop hurting the boy and pray with me, find salvation like I have in the bosom of Jesus. She called me more names, filthy names through her candy smile. My sister, my flesh and blood. Evil.”

  The last of the Butterfinger disappeared. Gwen Whalen did some more rummaging in her purse, came out with another Toblerone. “I can’t stop eating,” she said.

  Runyon looked away.

  “I couldn’t stop that day, either. The awful things Francine was saying to me, I wanted to put my hands over my ears, I wanted to run away, but all I did was reach for one of the cookies she’d been baking. Warm cookies on a plate, I could smell them, why should she care if I took one? But she did. She said, ‘Don’t touch those cookies, you fat cow’ and slapped my hand. She hit the plate too and it fell and broke on the floor, but she said it was my fault. She called me a cow again, an effing cow, and slapped my face, hard.”

  Fat cow, effing cow. The “weird stuff about cows” Bobby had heard.

  “Then she punched me in the stomach with her fist like she did when we were growing up. It hurt, it hurt, and Satan reared up and seized control and put the knife in my hand and I… She screamed and I slew her, I slew my sister. Thou shalt not kill. Her blood was on my hand, I couldn’t stand to see it, I hid it inside a dish towel. Then I ran away and drove home, I don’t know how but I did, and begged Jesus to cast out the Devil. He did, he forgave me, but I kept seeing Francine’s face, her blood like the blood of Christ. I prayed and prayed, but they wouldn’t go away. Candy smile, chocolate smile. I’m so hungry…”

  The second Toblerone went in two gulping bites. She pawed frantically inside the purse once more, came up with a handful of Hershey’s Kisses. That was as much as Runyon could stand; he’d heard enough, seen enough, added enough to her suffering. Crabtree, Farley, Halim, somebody else, anybody else, could take over and be the next to listen to Gwen Whalen’s confession.

  He left her sitting there with her eyes squeezed shut again, her chocolate-smeared mouth moving silently, her fingers unwrapping more of the Hershey’s Kisses-still trying to pray away, eat away, her guilt.

  26

  The climb down the hill was a lot easier than the ascent had been; I wasn’t winded when Chavez and I reached flat ground. Still, the muscles in my legs and thighs were tight and quivery as we hurried along the rutted track. Kerry was right: I needed to get more exercise. She was always after me to go for long walks, join a gym, take up jogging again. No way on the jogging; I’d tried that a few years back and gave it up quick, mainly because I felt like an attention-drawing idiot pounding along public streets in my sweat suit. I’d feel the same way in a gym, huffing and puffing on treadmills and the other machines they have in those places. The long walks, though, were a good idea, and I’d been promising myself I would start taking them on a regular basis. Now maybe I had the impetus to follow through.

  The sky was mostly clear now, the day warming up. I could feel sweat dripping under my arms, down the back of my neck into my shirt collar, as we moved ahead. The road ruts were deep and the earth between them and on either side rumpled and broken in places, so that you had to watch where you put your feet. The last thing either of us needed now was to sprain an ankle.

  Once we were through the narrow passage between the hill folds, we angled ahead to where the track made its long loop to the north and stopped there. The buildings were visible from that point, with very little ground cover between. I unsheathed the Zeiss glasses for another sweeping scan. Still a frozen tableau, no sign of life anywhere. But when I had the binoculars cased again, I put my hand back on the butt of the. 38 in my pocket. Never take anything for granted when you’re in unfamiliar territory.

  Moving again, Chavez letting me have the lead now. The hush seemed deeper here behind the hill; even the birds had quit cawing and chirping. We put a little distance between us as we came into the cluttered yard, walking on either side of the track. The ground was softer here, the ruts deeper and showing the tire indentations we’d seen from the hilltop. Fresh, all right.

  The track petered out in gravel and clumps of grass, but the tire marks made a new trail straight to the barn. Check there first. The weather-beaten structure looked as if a stiff wind would knock it down
into rubble: listing a little off-center, the roof caving in the middle, the entrance doors hanging crooked. When I got in close enough I saw a rusted hasp on one door half, with a padlock hanging from it by the open staple. There was a narrow gap between the two unlocked halves.

  Chavez and I both drew our weapons. Then I wrapped fingers around the edge of one door, dragged it open. Its bottom scraped along the ground, making a sharp noise. I pulled harder, backing to the left, Chavez moving to my right at the same time so that neither of us was standing in front of the open doorway.

  Nothing happened.

  All I could see in there was gloom broken by skinny shafts of daylight slanting in through gaps in the roof and walls. We eased in, again fanned one to either side. Commingled smells of decaying wood, damp earth, mold, dust, excrement that was probably rodent generated. Something made a faint scurrying sound in the darkness. Yeah-rodents. My nostrils puckered; I started breathing through my mouth.

  At first, as my eyes adjusted, I thought the cavernous interior was empty. But after a few steps I could make out irregular piles and stacks along one side, some of which appeared to be covered with the kind of plastic sheets painters use for drop cloths. I went that way, pocketing the Colt so I could fish out my keys and the pencil flash attached to the ring. Chavez came up beside me as I clicked on the light and ran the beam over what was stored there.

  Cardboard moving boxes, different sizes, at least a couple of dozen. Chavez lifted one of the sheets to reveal an ornate secretary desk, a slat-backed, hand-carved rocking chair, an antique drop-leaf table, a quartet of Tiffany lamps. Under another tarp was a 48-inch flat-screen television.

  “All the stuff they moved out of the house,” Chavez said. “Too much to fit in that one load yesterday-three or four trips.”

  “Over the past couple of days, yeah.”

  “You think that’s where they went this morning, back for another load?”

  “Not after they spotted you on their tail yesterday. Too much risk.”

  “Well, they wouldn’t leave all this here indefinitely. Too much chance of it being ruined by rats, mice, the weather.”

  “Right. They’re planning to come back.”

  “But how soon?”

  “When they get themselves a new set of wheels, maybe. Or a better place to hole up.”

  I switched off the flash and we went out into daylight. “Might be something inside the farmhouse,” I said then, “if that’s where they spent the night. Better have a quick look.”

  “I’ll check around out here.”

  I crossed to the house, sidestepping the scattered refuse. The porch roof was held up by sagging supports, one of them cracked and bent near the roofline; the floor had a spongy feel underfoot-termite ridden and riddled with dry rot. There was no lock on the closed door. I pushed it open and went inside, testing the floorboards as I advanced.

  The interior wasn’t much more than an empty shell divided into six small rooms, littered here and there with the remnants of long-ago living: a broken-legged table, a cracked lamp thrust on its side into a corner, a freestanding kitchen cabinet with one door missing and the other hanging askew from its hinges. The floors were carpeted with layers of dirt, dust, broken glass fragments, half-petrified rodent droppings, all of it long undisturbed except by small four-legged creatures and now me. Nobody else had been in there in a long time. If McManus and Carson had spent the night on the property, it had been forted up inside the Ford Explorer and the barn.

  I didn’t linger; the dust and the mustiness of decay drove me back out into the fresh air. I was coming down off the porch, taking deep breaths to clear my lungs, when I heard Chavez shout my name.

  “Bill! Over here-quick!”

  He was standing near the well house, almost in the shadow of the skeletal frame of the windmill. I cut over that way, taking a zigzag route because of all the crap in the farmyard. A light, warmish breeze had kicked up, coaxing the remaining sails in the windmill into a slight, creaking turn. It wasn’t until I heard the creaking that I smelled the ugly sour-sweet odor the breeze was carrying-very faint at first, then stronger as I closed in on Chavez. The hackles on the back of my neck lifted. There is no mistaking that smell and what it means.

  “Inside the well house,” Chavez said. He crossed himself, not once but twice. “Maybe you don’t want to look.”

  I didn’t, but I looked anyway. Had to.

  He’d left the door shut. When I dragged it open, the rotting meat stink came pouring out at me. My gorge rose; I kept swallowing to hold it down while I dragged out my handkerchief and slapped it over my mouth and nose, peering ahead into the gloom. The stench was coming from within a six-foot-high circular wooden cistern. I had to force myself to go over there, stretch up, and look down into it.

  Sweet Jesus.

  The cistern was dry, its floor littered with bundles… what had once been human-sized bundles wrapped mummylike in layers of plastic sheeting and bound with duct tape. The largest and newest of them was still mostly wrapped, but some of the plastic had already been torn away by rats. The rats had been at what was inside, too. One end gaped open and there was just enough left of the head and face revealed there to be recognizable.

  Now I knew for sure what had happened to David Virden.

  There was not much left of the other bundles. Remnants of sheets long ago torn into shreds and carried away to nests; jumbles of gnawed, fleshless bones, some bleached white and some with fragments of gristle still clinging to them. There was no telling how many bodies there’d been.

  McManus and Carson’s victims-the ones they’d murdered since getting their hands on this property more than three years ago.

  Dumping ground. Charnel house.

  I got the hell out of there, still swallowing, trying not to puke into my handkerchief, and jammed the door shut tight. Chavez had backed off by several yards to escape the worst of the stink. The sick expression he wore probably mirrored mine.

  He said, “The client, Virden?”

  “Yeah. In there since Tuesday.”

  “Must be four or five others.”

  Rose O’Day and Gregory Pappas among them. “Yeah.”

  “Those women… Ah, Dios.” Chavez shook his head, made the sign of the cross again. “Monstruos.”

  Monsters. Tamara’s term for them, too. I was glad she wasn’t here to find out firsthand just how right she’d been.

  The wind was still causing the rusty windmill blades to creak; the sound had a chilling quality now, a scrape on my nerves. By tacit consent Chavez and I moved still farther away from the well house, at an angle between the farmhouse and the creek. The stench wasn’t so bad there, upwind. I could breathe without the handkerchief and without wanting to gag.

  My cell phone had some sort of glitch in it, didn’t always pick up a signal even in the city. But it worked all right out here. I put in a 911 call to the Marin County sheriff’s department, identified myself, gave the dispatcher a brief account of the situation and the address. Yes, I said, we’d be waiting when officers arrived.

  But we weren’t going to do our waiting back here with that stink in the air and that damned creaking. Out on the road, by the gate. That was fine with Chavez; he had no more desire to hang around this godforsaken place than I did.

  We started back across the littered farmyard. But our timing was off, just a few minutes off.

  We hadn’t gone more than twenty yards when I heard the rumbling and rattling on the far side of the hill, low and distant, then rising. Oncoming vehicle jouncing over that uneven track. No, more than one-two distinct engine sounds, one louder than the other, moving in tandem toward the notch between the hillsides. Not county sheriff’s cruisers; there hadn’t been enough time.

  Chavez caught hold of my sleeve.

  “It’s them,” he said. “Coming back.”

  27

  You don’t have much time to make a decision in a situation like this. Flash through your options, pick one, take action. Four
choices here. Stay where we were in the open, guns drawn-stand and deliver. Run for the house. Run for the barn. Run for the shelter of the trees along the creek behind us. We were about equidistant from each of those last three.

  The engine sounds were louder now, faintly hollow-the vehicles grinding into the declivity. Not much more than a minute before the lead driver would have a clear view of the farmyard.

  I said, “The barn!” and broke into a run.

  Chavez didn’t hesitate; he was right there beside me. There were fewer ground obstructions in that direction, letting us run in more or less a straight line. But clusters of weeds grew along there, one of them a tall thistle plant that I didn’t see in time to avoid because I’d cast a quick sideways glance at the track. I plowed through the thistle, trampling it, and its sharp little spines snagged at my pant leg, pitched me into an off-stride stagger. I might’ve gone down if Chavez hadn’t been close enough to grab hold of my arm, keep me upright and steadied.

  Thirty yards to the barn, twenty, ten. He put on a burst, reached the doors a couple of steps ahead, yanked one half-open a foot or so as I pounded up. The nose of some kind of car was just poking into view. He nudged me through the opening, crowded in behind me. When he pulled the door shut behind us, it muted the approaching vehicle sounds to a low rumble.

  There were chinks and gaps in the door halves that made for eyeholes. I found one, Chavez another. Both vehicles were in sight now, jouncing along the track. Neither one was the Ford Explorer. The lead car was a gray four-door Nissan compact, dwarfed by the medium-sized U-Haul truck immediately behind. Those women were no dummies. They’d sold or traded or dumped the SUV, bought or rented the compact, and then rented the U-Haul, and they’d no doubt done the buying and renting using one or the other’s real name.

  Both of us drew our weapons. I sucked in a couple of deep breaths, trying to slow my pulse rate, as the car and truck rattled into the yard. Sun glare on the Nissan’s windshield prevented me from seeing who was driving until it turned to the right off the track. Carson. With the yellow-eyed Rottweiler, Thor, beside her. The driver’s door stayed shut while the U-Haul rolled past toward the barn.