Blind Rage (39 page)

“What?” whispered Garcia, standing behind her and sharing her view through the window.

“The sedan and the wagon belong to Luke.”

“So he’s home.”

Training the beam on the sports car, she said, “But that silver bullet is Little Brother’s ride.”

“They’re both here.”

She clicked off the light and looked over her shoulder at Garcia. “Which means if there’s a body in the foyer, they’re both culpable.”

While the carriage house had no outside lighting, the neighbors on both sides had bright lights mounted on their garages, making it easy to read the concern on Garcia’s face. “Time to call for backup,” he said, slipping his hand inside his trench coat.

“Not yet. Let’s keep looking around.”

He paused. “Fine.”

Reaching inside her jacket, she unsnapped her holster and took out her Glock. “You stay here in case they try to slip out the back.”

Nodding in agreement, he took out his weapon.

She left Garcia in the backyard and went around to the side of the house. Bernadette ran her eyes up and down the sidewalk and street that ran past the front of the house. There were a few parked vehicles on both sides of the street, but no traffic from cars or pedestrians. It was a quiet residential neighborhood that wouldn’t see any action until dawn. That was good. She had a feeling this saga wasn’t going to have a tidy ending.

She entered the front yard and squatted behind one of the marble lions. Looking up, she noticed a light in a second-story window over the porch. Had they missed it? Didn’t matter. Someone was up and about. Bernadette wanted to confront whoever it was before Garcia called the cavalry. As she was contemplating her next move, her cell vibrated. She fished it out. “What?” she whispered.

Garcia said, “I see a light upstairs.”

“Me, too.”

“Now what?”

A light downstairs flicked on.

After a long silence on his end, Garcia said, “Someone’s in the kitchen. I can see their silhouette through the curtains. I think it’s a guy. Big guy.”

She hoped they stayed there for a while. “I’m going onto the front porch. Call if the kitchen light goes off or you see him leave the room.”

“Careful.”

“Right,” she said, readjusting her grip on her gun. She closed the phone and dropped it into her pocket. Leaving the lions, she tiptoed up the front steps and put her hand on the porch door. It was unlocked. She went inside, closing the door carefully. She eyed the statues crowding the floor space. The collection of stone figures reminded her of a New Orleans cemetery, with its aboveground tombs. “Cities of the Dead,” the graveyards were called. The VonHaders had a Porch of the Dead. She paid no mind to the camera, confident the thing was as dead as during her previous visit.

She went over to the windows and peeked inside. There was a fire going in the fireplace. A man in a robe was bending down in front of the blaze; Bernadette couldn’t make out his face. She went back to the door and tried to peer inside through the small window but couldn’t see a thing. She put her gun in her jacket and raised her fist to knock. The porch light flicked on; the security camera had been working after all.

Bernadette felt her phone vibrate again. She quickly took it out, flipped it open, shut it off, and dropped it back in her pocket. Hands folded demurely in front of her, she stood before the door waiting for someone to appear. Behind her, the screen door creaked open. She spun around and saw Garcia. His eyes went to the porch light above her head, then to the security camera mounted on the wall. Taking his cue from her, he pocketed his gun and stood next to her, facing the door.

They heard a deadbolt crack and then the door opened.

Standing shoulder to shoulder were the two brothers, the younger one dressed in a bathrobe. His hair was damp, and he had a glass of whiskey in his hand. His eyes were bloodshot. “We need to talk,” she said to the pair.

“This was a long time coming,” said the older man. He stepped back and opened the door wider for the two agents.

Garcia extended his hand to the doctor, who was dressed in khakis and a sweater but had slippers on his feet. “Assistant Special Agent in Charge Anthony Garcia.”

Luke VonHader gave Garcia a firm handshake and turned around. “Let’s take this into the kitchen.”

While Garcia and the brothers went ahead, Bernadette stalled to scrutinize the foyer and the base of the stairs. The wooden floors were spotless, with no signs of blood. She eyed the staircase leading to the second floor. It was long, wide, and ornate, with carved spindles and a glossy banister. It was similar to what she’d observed with her sight, but the doctor’s staircase seemed to have no landing. She needed to be sure. “May I use the restroom?” she asked as she trailed behind the three men.

Matthew set his glass on a foyer table. “Go on ahead, gentlemen. I’ll show the lady to the facilities.”

Garcia and Luke disappeared into the back of the house. Being separated from her boss gave Bernadette a twinge of discomfort. The doctor was taller than both his drunken sibling and Garcia, and he was stone sober. She reassured herself that Garcia was more muscular than either man and carried a big gun.

Matthew headed for the stairs. “This way, Agent Scully.”

She gave one last glance to the lighted room in back of the house and followed the tipsy smartass up the steps. “If you point me in the right direction, I’m sure I can find it all by my lonesome,” she said to his back.

Without turning around, he responded, “That would leave you free to snoop around, wouldn’t it?”

“Exactly,” she said as she scouted the steps for blood.

He hiccupped a laugh. “At least you’re being honest this time.”

She took notice of the artwork lining the staircase wall. The signature on the rendition of a dusty cowboy ranch looked familiar. “Is that an authentic Remington?”

“Frederic Remington, James Edward Buttersworth, George Henry Durrie,” he said, waving his arm. He could have been ticking off the cereal selection in his kitchen cupboard.

Though Bernadette had snoozed through most of college art history, she recognized those names as important American painters. “Your brother is quite a collector.”

“My parents were the collectors,” he said as they reached the second-floor hallway. “My brother and I are stuck being the curators.”

She remembered that Luke had had a similar complaint. “Most people would kill to inherit such treasures,” she said.

“In a sense, we did,” he said ominously.

Her eyes widened. “Is there something you want to tell me?”

More art hung from the hallway walls, and he ignored her question to point out the pieces. “Here we have a hand-signed print by Marc Chagall. That’s hand-colored lithography by Currier and Ives. Those are all numbered and signed artist proofs by Norman Rockwell. A little too Main Street for my palate, but Mother and Father liked that sort of thing. They were all about the wholesome American family.”

His voice carried a bitterness that alarmed her. “Matt, maybe we could talk. Just the two of us.”

He stopped in front of a door in the middle of the hall and pushed it open. “I’ll leave you to whatever it is you want to do up here. Wash your hands. Powder your nose. Dust for prints. I’ll be downstairs with the menfolk.”

She watched him head down the hall, his shoulders sagging, his gait unsteady. She found him more pathetic than menacing.

Scanning the second floor, she saw it wasn’t anything like what she’d observed through her sight. The entire upstairs was ringed by railing, allowing all the rooms to look down onto the first floor. The corridor traveled by the killer had solid walls on both sides.

She walked into the hallway bathroom. She knew it wouldn’t be the one she’d observed. For starters, the bathroom from which the young woman had fled had emptied into a bedroom, not a hall. Instead of a claw-foot tub, the doctor had a modern Jacuzzi. Instead of white walls, Luke VonHader had ornate wallpaper hung with framed art. She scanned the bottom of the tub, but found nothing more suspicious than a collection of children’s toys: headless Barbie dolls, beach buckets, sand shovels, rubber ducks. The surface of the tub looked bone dry. She went over to a stall with a glass door—the only feature even remotely similar to what she’d conjured through her sight—and popped it open. The floor was wet. Not a surprise. The robed Matthew had probably just used the shower. Was there a chance he’d been washing off blood? She studied the tiles on the floor and the grout between them and found no stains.

Bernadette opened the medicine cabinet and surveyed the contents. Tylenol and sinus tablets and bars of soap and shaving cream and a disposable razor. A few of the wife’s cosmetics and perfumes. She took down the sole prescription bottle: amoxicillin, for the girls’ ear infections. She put the bottle back and closed the cabinet, another fixture that wasn’t in the killer’s bathroom. He’d had only an oval mirror over the sink. Encased in dry cleaner’s plastic, a set of the doctor’s shirts hung from the back of the bathroom door. This was a messy family bathroom, not a murder site.

She quickly made the circuit around the second floor, poking her head inside one bedroom after another. None of them matched the sparsely furnished one Bernadette had seen during her first round with the scarf. The sleeping quarters were filled with dressers and nightstands and blanket chests. Armoires and tallboys and lowboys and vanities. Perched atop the tables and chests and dressers were vases and statues and linens and quilts.

The only things distinguishing the little girls’ room from the other antique parlors were the mermaid spreads on the matching twin beds. Shuddering, she tried to imagine a childhood spent suffocating in this sea of old stuff. It all felt like a heavy weight pressing down on her, and she was only a visitor. She was starting to understand the brothers’ resentment toward their parents.

The largest bedroom—it had to be the master—was the most jammed of all. Two veneered chests stood next to each other. A dark old armchair was parked in front of a cherrywood dressing table. On each side of the bed was a marble-topped nightstand. Nearly every inch of wall space was plastered with framed art. Taking up the center of one wall was a massive fireplace, its mantel crowded with old oil lanterns like the fireplace mantel downstairs.

Poking her head inside the master bathroom, she spotted another Jacuzzi tub, plus a marble-topped vanity with two modern sinks. Satisfied that the doctor’s home wasn’t the killing ground, Bernadette started for the stairs, wondering how much she’d gotten wrong over the past week. But a woman had been kidnapped, and they had to find her.

When she walked into the kitchen, she saw Luke and Matthew VonHader seated on the same side of the table. The brothers were in handcuffs. Her boss stood across from them, holding his gun on the pair.

“Call the police, Agent Saint Clare,” said Garcia.

“Yes, sir.” Bernadette retrieved her cell with one hand and took her gun out of her pocket with the other.

While she punched the numbers on her phone, Bernadette’s eyes went from one brother to the other. The expressions on their faces were calm, almost relieved. While she spoke into the cell, the room was silent. She noticed it was a small but bright kitchen, so unlike the rest of the house.

When she was finished with the dispatcher, she closed the phone and asked the question she’d been asking herself from the minute she stepped inside. “Where’s the body?”

“In the ground,” Garcia said grimly.

“So they killed—”

“Their father,” said Garcia.

Chapter 38

THE BROTHERS TOOK TURNS RECOUNTING THE STORY. IT WAS
a smooth retelling, almost practiced. Bernadette wondered how many times one had talked the other out of going to the authorities with it.

“Our parents were good people,” said Luke VonHader, his voice a monotone and his eyes fixed at some invisible target beyond the agents. “They went to church. Made sure we went.”

“Ten o’clock mass every Sunday,” said Matthew, his lids lowered as if he were nodding off.

“They put us in Catholic school,” Luke continued. “We had golf lessons. Tennis lessons. Piano. Growing up, we had everything.”

“All three of us, nothing but the best,” said Matthew.