Coven (13 page)

White was shaking his head. Lydia continued,
“At this point, Sladder and the girl retreated to the
stablemaster’s office. They managed to dress Sladder’s wound. He
tried to call for help but the phone box had already been
destroyed. Shortly thereafter, the perpetrator’s attack continued.
Sladder responded by firing six shots from the .25 pistol. I
recovered five bullets from the stable floor. The sixth bullet hit
one of the perps at the far exit. There’s bloodfall of a different
type to verify this.”

White was rubbing his brow now, still
shaking his head.

“
At this point Sladder and
the girl attempted to escape via the front exit. Less than ten feet
from the door, Sladder was murdered. The amount of blood on the
floor makes this obvious.”

White could brew no longer. He…blew up.
“Arms cut off! Murder! That’s the fucked uppest bunch of shit
I ever heard! We don’t even know that the blood is Sladder’s! We
don’t even know he was the one who fired the gun!”

“
The large bleeds are all A
positive, Sladder’s type according to his health insurance forms.
As for who fired the gun, Sladder’s partials are all over the dead
brass. I ID’d his prints from his print card from the security
office, and I got comparison prints of the girl by dusting common
areas of her dorm room. They both left prints on the fence that was
cut down, on the utility shed door, on the flashlights. I got their
prints on
baseboards,
Chief, and the lower edge of the stable door. These people
were on the
floor
—they were hiding from something.”

White tapped his cigar, trying to calm down.
“Okay, Prentiss. If Sladder was murdered, where’s his body?”

“
The perpetrators removed
it.”

“
And the girl? I suppose
she was murdered too.”

“
Maybe, but I don’t think
so. There’s none of her blood on the site. My guess is she was
abducted.”

“
Abducted,” White repeated.
“Umm hmm.”

“
It’s a setup, Chief.
There’s no sign of their bodies. Their vehicles were removed from
the property. The girl’s purse and Sladder’s wallet were left
behind—deliberately.”

“
Why? Why go to all that
trouble?”

“
To keep us off track. They
want to convince you that Sladder was the perp instead of the
victim, and it looks like they’re doing a pretty good job.
Fortunately, though, the real perps were careless. They took the
gun but not the empty brass. They didn’t cover their footprints
very well. They left ridge smears on the wallet and purse, proving
that those objects were touched, wiped down, and
replaced.”

White had inadvertently
snapped his King Edward. “And you say Sladder’s
arm
was cut off? Where’d you come up
with shit like that?”

“
The fall patterns in the
stable are literally textbook perfect.” She laid out snapshots of
Sladder’s fall, then slid an opened book across the desk. The book
was titled
The Investigator’s Guide to
Bloodfall: Drop Spread Pattern Analysis.
The picture she opened to (labeled “Ambulatory dismemberment:
right arm”) was almost identical to Lydia’s Polaroids. “See?
Sladder’s fall is the same. His right prints are on the pitchfork
in the tool stall; that’s what he was reaching for when the perp
dropped the ax. He didn’t have time to get his piece out. You can
even see the point angles exactly where he changed direction. And
from this point on, Sladder stops leaving right hand
prints.”

“
I’m supposed to believe a
sixty five year old rummy tied off his own stump
without going into shock?”

“
Guys slap tourniquets on
themselves all the time. Humans do amazing things in
life threatening situations. The girl probably helped him.
Besides, Sladder was a marine infantry medic in the
war.”

“
So where’s the arm?” White
asked.

“
Probably buried in the
woods, with the rest of him.”

“
And where’s the
car?”

“
Probably buried under
brush twenty miles away. The girl’s ZX, too.”

White let some time pass to cool off. He
picked through her latent photos. “How the hell’d you get prints
this clean? Most of the stables are whitewashed or bare wood.”

“
Bare wood’s easy,” she
said, unenthused. “I fumed the logical areas with iodine sulfate.
The tougher ones I jobbed with mercuric oxide. Then I photographed
everything with a Kodak 1x1. Each print is labeled and marked.”
Actually this job had been easy. At D.C. she’d gotten admissible
prints off of human breasts, crumpled paper bags, even chunks of
crack. Once she’d sent a multiple rapo up for fifty years by
getting his prints off a pair of a victim’s panties with a
scanning electron microscope. The agro site had been cake.
“This isn’t the stone age, you know,” she finally got around to
saying,

White didn’t like that. He snorted smoke.
“You show me a few pictures in some A hole textbook, some
prints, and some blood types, and now you think you’ve got all the
answers.”

“
I don’t have anything
close to all the answers, Chief. But I reconstructed the steps of
the crime, which is what you told me to do. Could your men do
better? Shit, Chief, those rednecks don’t know the difference
between a fingerprint and a floral print. They think bloodfall is a
town in Alabama.”

White didn’t like that either. His temper
ticked. “You’re grabbin’ for shit, Prentiss. And if any of this
winds up in the papers, you’re gonna be one sorry little girl.”

Lydia was drooping now at
the lab table. “I’m not your enemy, Chief. I
work
for you, remember? Anyhow, I
don’t know what you’re getting all whipped up about. The whole case
revolves around the one thing we don’t have access to—the agro
animals. Until the state finds out what happened to them, we have
to tinker with every detail we can. That’s what a police
investigation is.”

White toked a new cigar, smirking. “I don’t
need you to tell me how to run a police investigation. Leave the
concludin’ to me and we’ll get along fine. Go home now, get some
sleep.”

It was a good idea; she’d been up
twenty four hours now. White was going to believe what he
wanted to believe. But there was still one thing… “I need your
permission for something first. I want to try to get a line on the
ax.”

White squinted. “The
ax
? You can’t run a make
on an ax, girl. Everybody’s got axes.”

“
I know, but this ax is
different. The line of the blade is straight, and the left hone is
planar. There was rust in the initial impactations.”

“
Prentiss, what the fuck
are you talkin’ about?”

“
A rust deposit left by an
edged weapon can be analyzed. Different grades of steel are used in
different tools and weapons. In other words, by analyzing the rust,
you can sometimes determine the ductility and grade of the steel
and possibly locate the manufacturer. But I’d need a good crime
lab—”

“
No,” Chief White
said.

“
Chief, this ax is so
unique I might be able to match the steel grade to a manufacturer
and locate the dealer who sold it.”

“
No,” Chief White said.
“You gotta be outta your mind. I’m not gonna authorize department
time so you can run some silly test on a bunch of
rust
you found in a
fence. It’s a dead end, Prentiss. It ain’t nothin’ but a
fuckin’
ax.”

“
Come on, Chief. I’ve got a
hunch—”

“
Go home,” White said. That
was the final word. “Take tomorrow off. You been up so long you’re
numb in the head.” White walked out, drawing a sheen of cigar smoke
with him.

Lydia rubbed her
eyes.
Go home?
she
thought.
What for?
All that waited for her at home was her own
loneliness.

The rust,
she thought desperately. Yesterday she’d coped out
the major impactations. Under the Braun microscope, the rust
shimmered up at her, actually metallic at 75x. Maybe White was
right; maybe the rust was a dead end.

Then again, maybe it wasn’t.

««—»»

“
GODDAMN!”
Wade shouted.

He stood frozen in his
shorts. This morning’s
Exham
Sentinel
shook in his hand. The headline
read: “Wade Burned Again.”

The front page picture showed Wade
shamefacedly signing tickets, while Officer Lydia Prentiss smiled
aside.

Famed campus womanizer, scofflaw, and B.S.
artist Wade St. John, above, learns the hard way that Exham police
mean business with their new crackdown against drinking and
speeding on campus roads. Chief H. C. White told reporters, “A
college like Exham, kids tend to take things for granted.
Responsible driving habits are part of being an adult, and if
students ain’t gonna act like adults, then, by golly, they’re gonna
pay. As for Wade St. John, we want to make an example of him
whenever we can, since he represents the exact opposite of adult
behavior.” Wade, now in his sixth year at Exham but with only a
junior standing, averages ten traffic citations per semester, a
campus record. It is rumored that Wade was forced by his father to
take summer classes as punishment for low marks. A reliable yet
undisclosed source stated that an additional punishment was
initiated—that Wade has been forced to do something as yet
unheard-of in his life: work a job.

“
God
damn!”
Wade shouted again. This had
to be illegal. Everyone on campus would read this!

Wade is reportedly working
as part of the maintenance staff at Exham’s Crawford T. Sciences
Center.
Sentinel
reporters set out to verify this rumor, at the office of Dean
C. F. Saltenstall himself, where he was more than happy to address
the question of the day. “Oh, it’s quite true. Wade is indeed
working at the sciences center, cleaning toilets for minimum
wage.”

Wade threw the paper out the window and
cursed. The clock only compounded his humiliation; it was time for
work.

He felt idiotic in his smock and rubber
gloves. It took him two hours to clean the toilets on the first
floor. His head ached, his throat was parched. Two hours was
enough; he needed a break.

He staggered into the dark
hall. There was a Coke machine around here somewhere. He tried to
get his mind off the newspaper article but couldn’t. His reputation
was ruined now, for good. But as he mused upon his anger, images of
Officer Prentiss kept popping up.
Don’t be
a shithead,
he thought.
Why bother thinking of her?
To her,
he was a symbol of antithesis. Perhaps that explained his
attraction to her; Wade liked a challenge. He’d had plenty of
challenges in his life, and he’d melted a lot of feminine ice in
his time. Yes, Wade the Conqueror.

Ooops. There he went again, violating the
warning of last night’s dream. The pier girls would haunt him for a
long time. Was it in his genes to view women as objects, as
trophies for his social and sexual hunting board?

Behind him a door pulled open. Wade turned.
A figure advanced from the doorway and nearly walked into him.

“
Jesus!” they both said.
The figure was Officer Prentiss.

“
I was just thinking about
you,” Wade enthused. “Just now.”

Lydia Prentiss winced. “You again,” she
muttered. She slipped past him down the hall. Wade scampered to
follow.

“
What are you doing here?”
he jabbered, keeping up.

“
Police business, which
means none of yours.”

Police business? In the
sciences center?
She walked on, ignoring
him. Wade couldn’t fix a good look at her. She was about to drop
money in the Coke machine, then she turned. “Please don’t stand so
close, Mr. St. John. You smell like mop water.”

This pricked him. “You would, too, if you’d
just cleaned as many toilets as I have. Oh, and thanks for
spreading my personal business all over the front page of the
paper.” His eyes scanned down her back. Long legs, trim waist. Her
beautiful bright blond hair hung unbound to her neckline. But her
face remained unseen.

I’ve…got to see her
face,
Wade reflected.

“
I was just giving you the
tickets you rightfully deserved,” she said. “It’s not my fault
the
Sentinel
was
around.” Then she took her Diet Coke from the machine’s mouth and
went back down the hall.

Wade followed her, like a puppy. She was
working in one of the 400 level bio labs, at a counter full of
books, snapshots, and unidentifiable kits, containing brushes, and
bottles. Something like a tensor lamp with a carrying handle arched
up on its stem. An odd blue light bulb filled its head. What was
all this stuff?

She turned and frowned. “You’re still
here?”

And that’s when Wade got his look at her
face. Officer Prentiss’ beauty glared at him like a bright light,
and it was not in any way akin to the brainwashing,
socio high fashion beauty that he, as well as the rest of
the Western world, had been taught to glorify. This was far more
complex than high cheekbones, eye makeup, and vulpine sneers. Too
many elements poured into its enigma. Stark yet deeply fluid. Hard
yet soft. Cool blue yet fringed with sweetness, which hid searing
heat. She was a car crash of contradiction reassembled—like the
women in the dream? Her eyes were fine etched, liquid
gray.