Black Water (5 page)

Plus, and more to the point, she thought, Wildcraft was one of us
Us.
We protect and serve. We do what's required. We kick ass and take names.

We don't kill our mates, then ourselves.

"I know you are, Merci. I know."

At nine that night, Merci returned to the Wildcraft home. She had had dinner with her son and her father, played with Tim Jr., read him three of his favorite books, then tucked him in.

She was tired by then but she had to find out one thing. She wouldn't be able to sleep until she knew. She parked shy of the driveway and walked in, flashlight in hand just in case. When she got up near the garage the lights went on, big floods—one angled right and one left. It was nine-twelve and eight seconds, by her watch. She turned toward the house, following the walkway that would lead to the front porch and door, then around to the back, where Archie's blood marked the concrete.

But she stopped about halfway to the door, turned around to see if the driveway lights were still on. They were. So she backed off into the bushes and stood in the darkness under a big sycamore.

She listened to the crickets, and a far-off barking dog. From here, she couldn't see any other houses. Out in front of her, over the roof of the garage, there was a section of darkness and a few stars. It had irked Merci for almost ten years that she could only identify one star: the north. She'd promised herself to take a junior college class in basic astronomy someday, one of many such promises not yet kept. Rayborn put herself far down on the list of people for whom she'd do something pleasing.

At exactly nine-seventeen the lights went off. She stepped from the darkness and walked back to the driveway, forcing them on again. The motion zone was wide—from the middle of the drive all the way to the start of the walkway.

She tried the garage door, got resistance, didn't want to force it. Around the side was a convenience door but it was locked. She shined her light through the small window. Hard to see with the light bouncing off the glass, but there were two cars. One was an SUV of some kind, the other was small and low and hidden beneath a fabric cover.

She went back to her car, ran the beam of her flashlight along the back seats before getting in. Just a habit by now. She listened to the police radio turned down low, thought about Tim Hess and Tim Jr., dangled her arm into the darkness behind her seat.

The lights stayed on for exactly five minutes again. The timer was perfect. And the motion detector was good enough to sense human movement twenty feet away.

_J
ust after six the next morning Archie woke up. He'd felt himself swimming upward for a long time, but he had no way of telling hours from years. All he knew was he was rising through water and stars, earth and fire, toward something necessary and far away, woman's voice told him:

Swim. Breathe. Rest. Swim. Breathe. Rest.

And that was what he did.

He broke the surface and looked up to an intensely red ceiling with bright blue lights. Quivering air, shadows forming and vanishing. Space collapsing. Space expanding. Sounds, too, punishingly loud: mechanical, electronic, pneumatic, ethereal.

"Unbelievable
, " said a voice.

"Hello, Archie, "
said another.

"I'll get Dr. Stebbins. "

The conversation was much too fast and complex for Archie to follow. He understood two things. One was that he was terrified.
The
other was that he had lost something huge and it would never come back.

He looked and saw monsters over him: eyes, nostrils, teeth. He tried to open his mouth but his will gave way before it could happen. His lips burned and his throat burned and the ferocious colors mage him close his eyes and settle back down into where he'd been for so long, hovering just below the surface, protected, safe in his river.

Swim. Breathe. Rest.

_W
ildcraft's fingerprints are on the Smith nine. His right index finger, thumb and web were marked with barium, antimony, copper and lead. With corroborating evidence you can make a very strong case for him having fired the weapon. We do it all the time in court, as you know."

James Gilliam, director of the Sheriff-Coroner Forensic Services Department, looked at Merci over his glasses, then at Zamorra leaning against the back wall of Gilliam's office. He was a quiet, scholarly man until you got to know him.

It was eight the next morning. Merci had already talked to Sheriff Vince Abelera, who had talked to a neurologist at UCI Med Center. Archie Wildcraft had made it through the night. He had opened his eyes for approximately fifteen seconds. X rays had shown a small object lodged deep in his brain, smaller fragments throughout. The doctors would not let anyone interview the patient at this time. The man's life was in the balance. Merci had begged Sheriff Abelera to make the doctors tell them what caliber bullet was inside Archie's brain. But the x ray wasn't clear enough to measure fractions of millimeters, and the object, apparently, had fragmented.

"I can't tell you what he shot with that gun," Gilliam continued. "Until we finish with the bullets from his wife. And unless they retrieve the bullet from his head."

Rayborn felt her stomach sink: Gilliam was already believing that Wildcraft had done it. Plus she'd had her usual big-eaters' breakfast which her father cooked every morning for her, Tim Jr. and himself. She ate a lot, burned it off in the gym. But now it felt like she'd eaten nails and washed them down with battery acid.

She tried to fight her dread with details. "How many microgram of lead in the residue, James?"

"Point six five. After two hours, that's the persistence level you'd expect to find from a discharged nine-millimeter autoloader. Like the one they found next to him. Good thing they hadn't washed him up at the medical center yet."

"Good thing," she said. "What about the blood on his robe?"

"We're still cooking it to check against his wife's DNA. Give me a day or two."

"Okay, I'm ready for Mrs. Wildcraft now."

"I figured you would want to see her."

"Absolutely."

"Because it will make you angry and make you work harder."

"Make me angrier."

Gilliam smiled, then colored slightly and stood. A year ago he would not have smiled. That was back when he had a schoolboy crush on her and didn't know what to do with it. At first, Merci had been too obtuse and inexperienced to know what it was. Then, one day, right out of the blue, he just told her. It seemed noble but comic, Gilliam confessed that even his wife was teasing him about her. Things got better. It was further proof that she understood men poorly.

"Ready, Paul?" she asked.

Zamorra nodded and eased himself away from the wall with a little shrug of his back.

Merci hated the autopsy room. Its stink of formaldehyde, bleach and blood. The hard edges of drains and blades, saws and suctions, scalpel and scales. The stainless steel and chrome and plastic. And those bright overhead lights that presented this torture chamber as just science. But most of all she hated it for the lightness it always brought to her head, for the cold sweat it brought to her temples, for the way it made her want to throw up, then sleep.

Gwen Wildcraft was still tabled, but there was a sheet over her. All Merci could see were her feet—small and stiff and white as fence pickets.

Gilliam lifted the sheet from Mrs. Wildcraft's face and pulled it down to just below her chin. Her skin was gray white and her eyes were closed. From the left side of her head they'd shaved a large patch of wavy dark hair. The shorn skin surrounded a small hole with ridges swollen around it. Above the hole was a brief vertical dash, like the top of an exclamation mark.

"Don't be fooled by the skin blowback," said Gilliam. "That's the entry point."

As always, Merci found it hard to fathom that a body without life had once been so full of it. Such an immensity of difference. It was like standing in a desert while the sun beat down on you—how could you believe it was once underwater? She noted with rising anger that even dead and mutilated, Gwen Wildcraft was almost beautiful.

"Now, two gunshots," said Gilliam. "One to the heart and one to the head. Both
apparently
nine millimeter, fired from up close. We recovered both bullets, and Buckley's working them up with the crime scene gun. The one here in the brain was a real mess, I can tell you. Mushrooming, fragmentation. Heads are hard, thank God."

Not hard enough, thought Rayborn.

Late yesterday afternoon she had run the serial number of the weapon found beside Wildcraft, confirming its registered owner as Archibald Franklin Wildcraft.

"Excuse me," muttered Gilliam, pulling the sheet down to the waist. Merci swallowed hard when she looked at the inverted Y incision, obscenely large, loosely stitched back together. The final insult, she thought.

"The other shot," Gilliam continued, "bounced off a rib and stopped inside her heart—back in the right atrium. It cut the pulmonary artery on its way by. Cause of death was coronary failure. Hard to tell whether it stopped because a bullet tore through, or because her brain was ruined. Either shot would have been fatal—the heart certainly, and the brain almost certainly. The shots came very close together in time. She died quickly, that from the histamine level and the blood loss. She still had almost four liters of blood."

"How close was the shooter?" asked Zamorra.

"Very. The heart was a Zone Four—the barrel was somewhere from six inches to two feet away. From the powder particles on her robe I'd put it at the closer end, but there still isn't any sooting. I think the heart shot occurred first—farther out, bigger target, gave the shooter a chance to get even closer for the next. The head shot was Zone One, direct contact, significant blast destruction. There's even front sight impression above the flesh tear, caused by the flesh to looning back against the barrel. The gun you got at the scene did have
a very small particle of bloody flesh stuck to the top of the front sight. And the barrel is heavy with blood and flesh particles. DNA to come. She might have been supine by then, and he just pushed the barrel right down against her head. There was some powder driven into the wound. We're running the same DNA comparison for Mr. Wildcraft, also."

Merci stared and let the ugliness fuel her. The waste. The arrogance. The sickness of spirit that it takes to regard another life as cheap and disposable. The fact that he would do
this
to another body, while his was still out there, alive and eating and smiling and sleeping and shitting like the rest of us.

She nodded almost imperceptibly, eyes steady and unblinking, lips pressed in tight between her teeth.

"You personally removed both the bullets, right, James?"

"Yes."

"Then are they nines or not?—God knows you've seen enough them."

"I'm almost sure they are, but Buckley's the man for that."

"Okay, James—you figure Wildcraft is good for her, then himself. His gun, his prints. Is that what you're seeing?"

"It fits, so far. But I wouldn't presume to do your job, Merci. Mime is enough for me."

"Paul?"

Zamorra hesitated. Merci saw that he was looking at Gwen Wildcraft's face too, with an expression that looked like hers felt.

"I talked to a couple of Wildcraft's friends last night on the phone."

He held her gaze and she knew this meant more bad news, news that Zamorra didn't want to give her in front of Gilliam.

Fucking great.

She felt her anger coming but couldn't stop it. Didn't want to. It wasn't sharp and clean like they tried to say in the books, wasn't purifying. It was heavy and cumbersome as a wagon full of rocks. Like once you pointed it in one direction and let go, you'd never get it back, never change its course. She wanted to point it at Wildcraft, for making her suspect him. She wanted to point it at Gilliam and Zamorra, for smugly assuming the worst about a fellow deputy. She wanted to point it at Mike McNally, for helping her make the worst judgment of her life, a judgment that kept on judging.

Most of all she wanted to point it at the killer of Gwen Wildcraft, but she didn't know who that was.

Yet.

"Give the woman some privacy," she said. "We'll finish in your office."

"Whatever you want," said Gilliam.

"Whatever I want is not a guilty deputy."

"I understand."

"Since the last one I arrested for murder was totally goddamned innocent."

"I do understand," said Gilliam.

"I know you do."

With two hands he replaced the sheet over Gwen Wildcraft, looking at Merci, the gleam in his eyes lost in the glare of the lights overhead.

Back in Gilliam's office Merci stood against one wall and Zamorra another. She felt anxious and nervy and physical, like she wanted to kick somebody. "Was she raped?"