Blood Of Angels (29 page)

He didn't seem to hear, and I realized he was looking for Karen, the daughter abducted by the Upright Man on 15
^th
May 2000 and never seen again in one piece. She would have been about nineteen by now, had she not been murdered. The oldest kids we could see were maybe sixteen, seventeen, and so Karen would have been too old to be emerging with them this morning: unless perhaps she had simply been held up inside for a long, long time, getting some piece of classwork just right, talking to a teacher about costumes for the school play, taking a couple of years out to help a fellow pupil who wasn't quite as smart as she was. Being in all things and all ways the perfect person she was free to be, since she was not alive any more.

'You okay?'

'Fine,' he said, and looked away as he drove past the school.

===OO=OOO=OO===

John told me where he wanted to go and I directed us as far as I could remember. Then Zandt got on the phone, called the Thornton sheriff's office and impersonated an FBI agent. He had been in law enforcement before, a homicide detective in Los Angeles, and he knew the language and protocols far better than I did: but I was still intrigued by the ease with which he assumed the role.

'Been doing that kind of thing often, have you?'

He didn't answer. He kept driving north-west. Eventually we hit the long straight road out into the wet woods, and I started recognizing things.

'What are we doing here?'

'Something you said when you told me about the second victim,' he said. 'What were the forensics on the body?'

'I don't know any more than what I saw on the night,' I said. 'I was only there on sufferance. Nina didn't have a chance to update me the next day because the Gulicks thing went wide. Forensics may not even be back yet. They probably switched to examining what was left of Reidel.'

I saw a stretch of gravel by the side of the road that looked sort of familiar, and I told Zandt we were getting close. A hundred yards later I told him to stop.

I got out the car and looked out into the damp forest. 'This is it,' I said. 'It's in there.'

He got out and went around the back of the car. He opened the trunk and reached for something inside.

I looked back along the way we'd come. 'Anything strike you about the drive we just made?'

'Not really,' he said. 'Other than I felt no real pang in leaving that town behind.'

'We didn't get stopped.'

I called Monroe again. He had neither the time nor the inclination to talk but I wouldn't go away until he'd got the message. If the town was supposed to have been secured, it wasn't working. He put the phone down in the end.

Zandt shut the trunk. A long canvas bag was slung over his shoulder.

'What's in there?'

'Tools,' he said. 'Which way now?'

I set off into the woods. The going got boggy real soon, the previous night's rain having turned the ground even more mushy. I wasn't too sure of where I was going but just when I was beginning to doubt myself I caught sight of incident tape in the distance. I walked us to the point where the boards had been laid to create a bridge onto the little island. One of them was now broken. We got ourselves across without incident.

John stood a moment, looking around.

'Shirt was over there,' I said, pointing. I led him to where it had been, and turned him round to see what I'd shown the others the night before last. 'It's hard to get the picture now, but it seemed pretty clear at the time.'

'I believe you,' he said. 'It was hung out over these branches?'

'Yeah. Facing back that way.'

John looked out over the rear end of the semi-island. All you could see was more trees marching up a hill, though in the distance they seemed to thin.

'What's that way?'

'Some small town, I think someone said.'

'The cops went through all possible exits from this position?'

'I assume. But as I said — I heard nothing on this yesterday. And if they didn't get it done then or that first night, it's not going to happen. All available manpower is otherwise engaged. Seriously, why are we here, John? I don't care how the dead guy got on this island. I care about where Nina is and I feel like I have spiders under my skin.'

'I know you do. But you were right. Putting that shirt there was not an accident. The killer was making a point about something. Why here?'

He walked back to where the defleshed body had been found. The area had been largely cleared of undergrowth, and the ground was uneven where shallow soil samples had been taken in a vain attempt to establish where the body had been kept previously.

I watched as he unslung the bag from his shoulder and pulled the long zip which ran along its side.

'So what's your theory?'

He put his hand in the bag and pulled out a shovel.

'John, if we screw up this crime scene they'll throw us in jail.'

He started digging.

===OO=OOO=OO===

The ground was very soft and within fifteen minutes he'd made a complete mess.

'Cool,' I said. 'So, underneath the mud you've found a bunch more mud. I'm out of here. This is a waste of time and…'

'And Nina's out there somewhere.' He kept digging, like a machine. 'I really do get it, okay? I came a long way this morning and not because of you.'

'If this is such a good idea, why didn't the cops do it?'

'Because they had no reason to.'

'So why do we? If the ground looked like it had been disturbed recently, they would have dug it up. They didn't, so it can't have looked that way.'

He straightened, and perhaps saw that I was a beat from walking away from him. He spoke patiently.

'This is how investigations work. You do what you can and hope that eventually it takes you where you want to be. If you're going to go, just go. Otherwise you can either stand there going insane over a problem you
cannot solve right now
or you can grab another shovel and help.'

This derailed me. 'You've got another shovel in there?'

He started digging again. 'Of course.'

'Why would you have two shovels?'

'I've got two of everything, Ward. I've got two shovels and two cameras and two of most types of gun. I've got two maps and two laptops and a lot more than two sets of ID.'

'I asked why, not for a stock list.'

'Because if you're out by yourself the one thing you
cannot
afford is not having the thing you need. You have two of everything to make up for there only being one of you.'

The set of his shoulders spoke of too much time spent in an empty car, of evenings in chairs outside silent rooms in cheap motels, of dark hours lost in contemplation. I didn't know him well but it was obvious he had changed: as if he had been through his soul and thrown out everything that didn't help lead him where he needed to go. He looked like a one-man patrol unit, the lone mercenary of his own lost cause.

'You didn't have to be out there on your own.'

'How have you spent the last six months?'

'Hiding. In a borrowed cabin up near where we saw you last.'

'I guessed it would be something like that. Did you need me as a neighbour, someone guilty of three homicides?'

'I thought it was two.'

'You remember Dravecky, the real estate developer?'

'The one you sold out to, for information on where Paul might be?'

'I didn't sell out. I made him think I had. I went back for him later.'

'And killed him.'

'He was a very bad man.'

'I wonder whether you're in a position to make that kind of call any more.'

'I believe I am.' He stopped, looked up at me. 'Three is a lie too. There have been another four since.'

'Jesus, John. Why don't you just apply to
join
the Straw Men? You must about qualify by now, right? Seven murders? These are decent numbers.'

'These people
were
Straw Men. When I took out Dravecky I left with a stack of his computer records. Each of those four guys was in the organization, and also someone very evil. And yes, I do mean "evil" — murderous and deranged but too rich or powerful for the law to ever touch. So I did it. I'll likely do it some more.'

'They probably want to kill you pretty bad by now.'

'My point exactly. You didn't need me around.'

'We tried to call you, regardless.'

'Yeah. The woman I used to live with called me. The man who didn't kill my daughter's murderer called me. Some days you're just not in the mood to take those kind of calls.'

He turned away and kept on digging. I took some deep, even breaths, then went and got the second shovel.

Another twenty minutes turned the scene into even more of a mess without revealing anything useful. The mud was wet and sticky and heavy and shovelling it got increasingly hard.

I looked up from my section of the landscaping carnage to see John had stopped digging. 'There's nothing here,' he said.

I was reminded of the time the two of us had walked out onto a high, desolate plain south of Yakima and found a cabin which had been used as a storehouse for the dead, and used that way for many years. It was John who'd taken us out there looking, on a tip I wouldn't even have listened to. But it was me who'd kept us going. I have a certain lazy doggedness: sticking to the task in hand saves you the work of deciding what else to do instead. Right now I was warm despite the cold, and the rhythmic movements of the shovel had helped blank my mind of other things.

I moved six feet away and started digging a new hole.

After a moment, he went back to work.

===OO=OOO=OO===

'Ward,' he said, suddenly. 'Come here.'

We were fifteen feet apart by then, and had been digging for over an hour. I walked over to where he was standing.

He was maybe nine feet from the point at which he'd started. At his feet was a hole about two feet deep. The bottom had an inch of water in it already. But you could see there was something in there.

I bent over and looked more closely. Looked up at him. 'What the hell is that?'

We both started digging, much more quickly. Water seeped in through the sides of the hole almost as fast as you could slush it out, but after only a few more minutes it was obvious we'd found something sizable. John went to his bag and got out a pair of trowels and we both went down on our knees and spent another ten minutes clearing material away. The nature of our discovery became hard to deny. We stopped and stared down at it.

'Is that what I think it is?'

'Yes,' he said. 'That would be a ribcage.'

'Christ. Human?'

'Looks like.'

I oriented myself in relation to the body by the direction of curve in the revealed sections of seven ribs. I started digging with the trowel again, moving to an area two feet to the left.

'What are you doing?'

I didn't answer but kept going until I found the upper arm. I moved further left and found the bones of the lower arm. These ended in a pair of jagged lines.

Then nothing.

'Okay,' I said. 'No hand.'

He got the connection. We stood up.

'Christ, John — what's going on here?'

'I don't know,' he said. 'But check this — there's no smell. At all. And you see the colour of the bones, their texture?'

'Stained brown. Porous-looking. Which means this has been here a while, right?'

'At least ten or twelve years, maybe a few more. How old is this suspect they got for the other two bodies? The red-haired woman?'

'Twenty-five.'

We both stood there quietly, and did the math.

Lee was sitting in his kitchen. It was as clean as it was going to get. The reason his house always looked spruce — and he knew that this mildly freaked Brad out — was simple. He spent a lot of time cleaning it. First week he moved into his own house, Lee realized it was going to have to be that way. All his life there had been a maid or two around: he had never seen his mother do anything more strenuous than rinse out a martini glass, and that had been desultory and
in extremis.
But he didn't want a maid. He was twenty years old. It would be ridiculous — not to mention there were sometimes things in his house you wouldn't want a nosy Mexican to lay her hands on, maybe start thinking she could parley the information into a favour with the immigration services.

So he cleaned it himself. He soon found he was good at it. Liked it, even. Kind of a gay thing to get into, maybe, but if you did it yourself, you knew it was done. Nowadays, whenever he needed to think properly about something, he cleaned. It was his guilty secret. He guessed everybody had one.

The house was absolutely quiet. He liked it that way too. A lot of his friends — their parents too, and younger sisters especially — seemed incapable of spending time without aural wallpaper. Had to have the TV on, or the radio. Failing all that, conversation. Something. Anything. Lee was not that way, just as he was not someone who had to take drugs to go out and party. He took a line of coke every now and then, to show willing. Otherwise, he stayed away and stayed clean. You needed to be sharp in this life. You needed to be together. You needed to have your ducks in a row.

Boy, but he was going to be happier when he heard the Pete thing was dusted away. Then everything would be in profit, that stupid evening nothing more than an event which had brought him a lot closer to the guys that mattered, and which had — by happy accident — also got rid of Hernandez. This evening should be a time for celebration. He wondered what he'd do. Maybe give Brad a call, though the guy had been unusually flaky that morning. Problem with getting close to people, chicks in particular, is it gave them the power to rock your boat. First your boat, then your world.

Lee thought maybe he'd get a piece of paper and make notes about stuff to talk to Paul about next time. Get the Plan moving into higher gear, now things were getting back to normal. He stood up to go fetch some from the right side of the second drawer under the silverware — everything had a place — and realized a car was driving
fast
along the road towards the house.

He recognized the car.