A Hard Death (39 page)

M
aggie? It's over.” Jenner stood. “Put the gun down, now.”

She looked down at the pistol.

“I had to, Jenner. He wouldn't have left her alone.”

“What do you mean?”

“She's all I've got, Jenner.”

He wanted to reach out to her, to touch her. To somehow make it easier for her.

Maggie stood in front of him, staring down at her dead father.

She turned to him. “I found her journal this evening. He was calling her, talking to her—he'd given her a cell phone, I didn't know, I swear, or I'd have stopped it.” A big tear welled up in her left eye and spilled down her face.

“He was calling her most nights, Jenner. Daddy was making her…do things. To herself.”

She sat on the bed, looking up at him. “He was making her sick, you know? He told her she was fat, even when she weighed eighty-seven pounds, Jenner. When my little girl was just a crumpled paper bag of tiny bones, he told her she was fat. He gave her a kind of anorexia prayer list, sick little prayers, horrible things to make her hurt herself.”

Maggie held the gun loosely in her lap. “He was calling her most nights, calling while I was painting shitty paintings, or out at the Polo Grounds with shitty men.”

Jenner said, “It's finished, now. Give me the gun, okay? Let me take it…”

She shook her head. “There's one thing left, one more step to get rid of everything that man polluted.”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, Jenner, don't even! I know you know. You figured it out pretty quickly; I could tell you knew when you came to my house this afternoon.”

He was silent.

“Say it. I know you know. Say it!”

He knew. “He said he just wanted to go away with his daughter, but he took her, not you.”

She sneered. “Oh, I'm his daughter all right! One hundred percent Craine DNA…Can't you tell?”

“And Lucy?”

She smiled, her face suddenly calm. “You're getting warm…”

“Lucy was his daughter too?”

She crumbled, put her face into her hands, the pistol nuzzling her thick hair, her shoulders curving and sagging as the sobs rocked her body.

“It was the worst thing that ever happened to me, and the only good thing I ever did with my life.” Behind her hands, her face was red and wet.

“Tell me what happened.”

She sat up, wiping her eyes. “Well, it wasn't a stork!”

Jenner sat next to her.

“What happened, Maggie?”

She was crying hard again, her knuckles white around the gun, her fingers wet with tears.

Jenner waited.

“It's so fucking dull…it happens every day to some girl somewhere in the country.” She calmed a little, wiped her face. She said, “I was twenty-three, home from grad school for spring break. And we went to the Polo Grounds, and we got drunk, both of us, real drunk.”

She sat straighter and wiped the damp hair from her eyes.

“We were in the kitchen alone, and ‘Stand by Me' came on the radio, and he hugged me, and we were dancing in the kitchen. And then I felt him pressing against my leg, and I pulled away, but he wouldn't let me go. He dragged me into the breakfast room, and he was kissing me,
trying to get his tongue in my mouth, but he couldn't, so he was licking my neck—I remember that so clearly, his spit on my neck, the smell of alcohol in his mouth. And he was too big for me to get him off of me. And it was like, you know…It all went quiet inside me. I just let him do it, I stopped fighting and just let him do it.”

Maggie breathed out. “When he finished, he rolled off me, and went to the kitchen and got a bottle of wine, and asked me if I wanted any. And that was that.

“I mean, I washed myself as best I could, but there wasn't a morning-after pill back then. And when I told him I was pregnant, he wasn't mad or even upset—he was…
interested
. He took me out of school, brought me back to Stella. He took me to a clinic in Gainesville to have early amnio, and when it came back all right, he promised me all sorts of things. And I kind of just went along with it.”

She noticed the photo of Lucy on the bedside table and picked it up, running her thumb softly over the little face.

“I was worried, but she came out pretty much perfect. She had some hearing problems; the doctor didn't know, he said I probably had a viral infection while I was carrying her. But she was beautiful, and sweet, and a good girl.”

There was crackling on the police scanner. She stood abruptly, flicked the scanner off.

“But she's dead, and my father's dead—my turn now! Sorry.”

Maggie smiled helplessly at Jenner, lifted the gun to her temple, and he shouted, “No!”—and she pulled the trigger.

She fell back against the bed and slipped to the floor as he tried to gather her in his arms. Blood soaked her hair. She wasn't moving.

Jenner laid her flat. He touched his fingers to her neck, felt for a pulse. He pressed harder, felt nothing but the beat of his own heart in his fingertips.

He pressed the heel of his palm into her breastbone and began to pump, felt the give of her chest wall, the recoil of her lungs. He pumped for a minute, then felt for a pulse again.

And there was none, and Jenner knew she was dead.

He stood, looked around the room. Craine lay dead on the floor, his daughter by the bed, four feet away from him.

Jenner went to the scanner and tried to find a microphone to call for help, but there was none. He switched it on, and the overheated chatter from the farm filled the room. In the moment, confronted with the carnage and the loss, the deputies had given in to chaos, abandoning ten-code and just blurting out whatever was going on out into the air-waves. The sheriff was on the scene now, shouting out orders to establish a perimeter, to keep the press at a distance.

Jenner walked down the stairs. In the kitchen fridge, he found a carton of apple juice. He poured a tall glass, sat at the counter, and drank it, tried to figure out his next step. He had Maggie's blood on him, both her blood and her father's; God only knew what else he'd touched in the house.

He finished the glass and poured another. He drank, then rinsed the glass, and put it back in the cabinet.

He took the bags of cash from the breakfast room and walked them out to his car. He jammed them into his trunk, pressed them as flat as he could get them, then covered them with his clothes.

In Craine's bedroom, the air smelled of blood and metal and gun smoke. Jenner stood in the doorway, looking at the bodies. Maggie Craine lay stretched next to the bed, her right leg draped over her left; she looked like a mannequin now, as if she'd never drawn breath.

Jenner listened to the noise of the scanner for a minute, then went out to his car and drove to the farm. Just north of Bel Arbre, he stopped, threw the spare tire into the irrigation ditch by the side of the road, hid the money in the tire well, then laid the carpet back down on top of it.

A
t the farm, it was pandemonium. Jenner parked on the bridge over the mangroves and stared out over the fields at the burned wreckage of the distant farmhouse. The approach road was clotted with rescue vehicles, fire trucks, ambulances and patrol cars from as far away as Fort Myers, and white news vans, their microwave antennas red and blue in the turret lights. They were already live, the on-air talent standing in isolated pockets of white light in the dark, sharing with the nation rumors of the carnage gleaned from returning paramedics and firemen.

Jenner drove on, parked at the mouth of the approach road, and walked the rest of the way, passing unrecognized through the throngs of emergency personnel and news people. Parked up near the white gate was a furniture van: the DEA response team, he figured. A young uniformed deputy stopped him at the gate; he identified himself, and she pulled up the sheriff on the radio, then let Jenner through.

The sheriff stood in the middle of the slope, surrounded by a knot of SWAT cops in black uniforms and body armor. The bodies of his men had been cleared from the field; those who hadn't been removed by ambulances lay in a row of body bags at the foot of the rise, two uniformed officers standing watch.

The stand lights turned the slope into a floodlit nightmare, strewn with the battered and burned bodies of men and pigs. Anders had sent an officer around to put the wounded animals out of their misery; periodically, a gunshot rang out as he came across another.

The sheriff was pale and sweaty, juggling priorities as fast as he could. When he asked what Jenner was doing there, desperation had driven the animosity out of his voice. Jenner suggested they speak privately; the
sheriff followed him across the field, relieved to be out of the spotlight, if only for a moment.

“The Miami pathologists are on their way, Dr. Jenner. I think it's best we just let them get on with it, keep it local.”

“I was here.”

“What?”

“I was here when this happened. With Deb Putnam, from the Park Rangers.”

“Why were you here?”

“I was looking for Lucy Craine; her mother called me after Chip Craine took her without permission.”

“Just what the hell happened here?”

“What do you have so far?”

“Nothing. Zero. Fire got called in by a motorist who saw it from I-55. It's an underserved rural area, so both Douglas and Lee County FD respond. They find multiple fatalities, evidence of multiple explosions, and dozens of dead or wounded pigs. Just after we get here, a DEA response team shows up; they're not saying anything about who put them into this, or why they responded.”

Anders squinted at Jenner, noticing for the first time the state of his clothes, soiled and bloody.

He said, “Drugs, right? It's drugs if the DEA's here.”

Jenner nodded wearily. “I'll fill you in on it as much as I can in a second, but first there's something else I have to tell you.”

The sheriff said, “I'm listening. What is it?”

“Sheriff, I'm sorry I have to tell you this, but…Maggie Craine is dead.”

“Dead?”
Anders looked like a Clydesdale had put a hoof through his chest.

“Yes. And Chip Craine. She killed her father, then she killed herself. I was there in the room at Stella Maris, I saw it all.”

The sheriff bent forward, then sat down heavily. His legs dangled down the slope like a little boy's; he rubbed his eyes, then looked down over the slope, toward the dock and the water and the mangroves.

“Why? For God's sake,
why
?” He said it not so much with surprise that it had happened, but that it had finally happened that day—why now?

Jenner sat next to him. “She was angry because Chip had taken Lucy without her permission. When we got out of the farm, I went back to find Craine and to tell Maggie—I was here when they blew up the buildings, and I knew Lucy was in the farmhouse when it burned.”

The sheriff started to interrupt urgently, but Jenner cut him off. “Sheriff, let me get this out. You need to understand all of it.”

And Jenner laid everything out for Anders—Craine's rape of Maggie, his ritual abuse of his granddaughter. His involvement in the Mexican drug ring, Marty's death. The bodies stuffed with methamphetamine. The hanged men. The murder of Adam Weiss.

The man was crying now. Jenner put a hand on his shoulder. “Listen. You can't beat yourself up about this. She had a rough deal, and she played it out.”

Anders wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. He pulled himself awkwardly to his feet. “No. You don't understand.”

Jenner said, “What do you mean?”

“Maggie—she…Lucy Craine's
fine.
About a half an hour ago, we found her alive and well, some guy named Brodie put her in the piglet shed at the bottom of the ranch before everything happened.”

“She's
alive
?” The pit dropped out of Jenner's stomach.

“Not a scratch. The shed got dinged up a bit, but it's corrugated metal wrapped around stacks of feedbags—it was basically a bomb shelter. She stayed there, didn't make a peep until the DEA team went in. She's just fine.”

“Oh Christ.” Jenner's eyes burned.

They sat in silence for a minute. On the slope, two officers, stumbling and slipping on the wet grass, maneuvered a bodybag on a stretcher down to a waiting ambulance, past a line of cops and firefighters standing at attention.

When the ambulance doors slammed shut, the firemen returned to rolling up their hoses.

Jenner turned to Anders. “What will happen to her now?”

Anders raised his eyebrows. “Well, she's one rich little girl. Even if the state attorney goes ahead with asset forfeitures, she'll inherit her mom's property, and will get Chip Craine's share of Stella Maris, as well as this farm. Plus any shielded accounts, insurance policies, annuities.”

“I meant more the next few days and weeks.”

“She's being checked out at Port Fontaine General as we speak. I guess I should call Gabe Craine.”

Someone called Anders's name. Two fire marshals with clipboards were comparing notes by Bunkhouse A, now just a tangled heap of siding and soot-covered cinder blocks, with a deep chasm gaping between the bunkhouse foundations and the farmhouse. One of the fire marshals was waving the sheriff over.

Anders put a hand to his forehead. “I don't know how I'm going to do all this. We lost almost our entire SWAT team tonight. I don't even know what they were doing here.”

“Some of your men were on the take. Tom Nash took me and Deb Putnam to the farm at gunpoint on Chip Craine's orders; one of Brodie's men shot him.”

“Oh Jesus.”

“There may have been others, I don't know. The DEA operation was mobilized by a friend of mine, a New York City cop. I saw the SWAT attack, but I don't know who notified them. Nash, maybe, or maybe they had someone inside. And I don't know if they were trying to save Nash, doing a straight raid, or looking for cash.”

There was a loud crack as someone shot another hog.

Anders looked over the field, up toward the smoldering rubble, down at the jam of journalists beyond the gate. He looked at Jenner.

“I don't know what to do, doctor. I don't even have anyone left to send to the Craine house.”

“Listen to me: the forensics here aren't going to be as big a deal as they will be at Stella Maris. Ask the feds to bring in the FBI here. Send someone good to Craine's place. It's going to take days to process this scene, but the Craine deaths will be huge—this is one of America's Blue Chip families. You can't afford to screw up either investigation. Also, I don't want to get jammed up for something I didn't do.

“I have a weapon on me; it's my own personal sidearm, a 9-mm Beretta. It's not been fired since my last visit to the range a few weeks ago. Marty Roburn submitted my carry permit; it's still processing. I'll surrender my weapon willingly, but I want it back when you're finished with it. Also, I'm prepared to speak to your investigators without a lawyer present, with the condition that the entire interview is videotaped and I can retain a copy of the recording. I consent to a DNA sample, and I am willing to take a polygraph.”

Anders's face was wide and empty as a field of winter wheat. “A polygraph?”

“I'm saying I'll comply with whatever investigational procedures you use. I didn't shoot Chip Craine and I didn't shoot Maggie, and I need your office to understand that from the get-go—it'll save us all a lot of time and hassle.”

Anders jumped as another shot cracked across the field.

He turned to Jenner and said, “We better get this started.”