Dead Demon Walking (17 page)

Tall, mid-thirties, short dark-brown
hair, a square rugged face and pale-blue eyes, one guy wore a white
long-sleeved shirt tucked in his blue jeans, alligator boots and a
brown bullhide cowboy hat. His silver and onyx bolo tie matched his
big, chunky belt buckle. His chest and arms filled his shirt nicely
and the jeans hugged lean hips and solid thighs as he lounged on
the car’s hood. The other man was older by a decade, with a head of
thick gingery hair, a pale face and shades protecting his eyes.
What could be a mayo stain decorated the lapel of his crumpled
dark-gray suit, splotched the edge of his blue tie and slid over on
his white shirt.

Vanderkamp got in front us. “Sergeant
Wesson?” he asked as with legs apart and hands on his hips he
stopped before the two men. They eyed him up and down and from
their lack of expression, I don’t think they were impressed by the
aggressive stance.

After a three-second silence, the
older guy presented his hand. “Grant Wesson.” He angled his head at
his companion. “Detective Sam Gold.”

Vanderkamp introduced Gunn then swung
his hand at me and Royal. “Our profiler Tiffany Banks and her
associate Royal Mortensen.”

Profiler?

Royal twitched his eyebrows. I bit
down on a grin. Profiler. Maybe I should use that in future. It
sounded more credible than psychic detective.

“
It’s Tiff Banks,” I told
Gold.

He smiled and nodded. “Miz Banks.” His
gaze slid over Royal as if an afterthought, “Mortensen,” then back
to me.

Wesson shook our hands. Vanderkamp
opened the rear door of the cop car and gestured. “Miss
Banks?”

“
We ride with Gold,” Gunn
told Royal.

This insistence on separating me and
Royal pissed me off something terrible, but I got in back of the
cruiser as Royal, Gunn and Gold went to the pickup.

We pulled away from the curb and
minutes later merged with the I-80 which bypasses North Platte.
Then we took the I-83 and headed for the boonies. I looked through
the window at farmland and grassy hillsides, barns, silos and
cattle pens. The road narrowed and twisted. We passed a large lake
with a campground. Then we hit the dirt roads.

There must be thousands of miles of
dirt roads in Nebraska. It certainly seemed that way. The car’s
rear wheels spun an obscuring sheet of dust high in the air. Fences
lined the roads, and now and then I spotted small farmhouses, barns
and wells amid trees well back from the road. Low hills mounded
farmland covered in long grass and crops. We took turn after turn,
fork after fork.

We drove toward the setting sun. A
sheriff’s pickup straddled the road on the brow of a low hill
ahead. Two officers stood in front, one holding a shotgun pointed
at the ground. The other officer hopped in the truck and moved it
to the verge when they saw us coming. After we passed, I turned my
head to watch the pickup block the road again before the dust
raised by our passing hid it.

The road got rougher and we bumped
along as we drove down the other side of the hill. A small white
farmhouse huddled in a basin at the bottom, a large barn and stable
on its east side and low outbuilding on the west. A water well
towered above the roof of the house and another hill rose behind
that. A propane tank bigger than any I’d seen sat near the house
behind what could be a vegetable garden.

Like every property we’d passed, the
farm was a small fenced enclosure in a vast sea of fields. Tall bur
oak and cottonwood provided partial shade to the house and
outbuildings. A stand of ponderosa pine at the rear gave some
protection from the wind. A few apple trees clustered on a
patchwork strip of grass and dirt facing the farmhouse.

The sun dropped below the horizon. It
looked as if every inside light glowed through the farmhouse
windows. Bright white security lights glared from the walls, and
one shone like a beacon from atop a post tall as a steeple. We
drove onto hard-packed dirt in front of the house and wove between
cars, a pickup, North Platte police and county sheriff’s vehicles
which nearly filled the yard. The paramedics and county coroner
were still there. Officers with flashlights walked between trees
and a blur of wild shrubbery.

We found a space to park and everyone
got out. We met between vehicles, then Vanderkamp led us to a
short, dour, white-haired man with bristling white eyebrows
startling in a walnut-colored face. On the far side of fifty, he
dressed neatly in black slacks, boots and a cream long-sleeved
shirt open at the neck. The badge pinned to his snakeskin belt
identified him as County Sheriff.

“
Sheriff Simons?”
Vanderkamp asked. They shook hands. “Is the crime scene
clear?”

Simons had a walkie-talkie in his
hand. He pressed a button and spoke into it. “Everybody
out.”

“
I’d like to wrap this up
before morning,” he told Vanderkamp.

Vanderkamp nodded. “You can bring me
up to date while Agent Gunn and Miss Banks are in
there.”

Me and Gunn?

I twisted my mouth into a sour moue
before saying, “Didn’t we go over this before? I work
alone.”

Gunn discretely motioned for us to
move away from Simons. We strolled to the small orchard, leaving
the sheriff and Vanderkamp chatting. Gunn raised his palms to me.
“Miss Banks, I heard you speak to Miss Hulme. Why can’t I do the
same here?”

I didn’t want to tell him what first
came to mind: I don’t know what I look like if I see a shade’s
death through their eyes. I see it as if I watch a movie behind my
eyelids, but for all I know, I may look like a freaking maniac
having a psychotic episode.

“
You’ll distract me, throw
me off focus.”

“
I’ll listen and observe,
nothing more.”

I turned my eyes heavenward as I
thought. I could dig in my heels again, and as the agents wanted me
here, surely they’d cave? But how long would we stand out here
arguing? I was desperate for privacy with Royal so I could tell him
about Rio Borrego and that would not happen till we finished
here.

I swung on Gunn. “What can I expect to
see in there?”

I didn’t like his smile. “Nothing
pleasant.”

Thanks a lot.

I glanced at Royal and saw his concern
in his ridged brow and taut jaw. I tried to smile. “I’ll see you in
a minute.”

So off I trotted with Gunn at my side.
He pulled plastic gloves and footies from his jacket pocket and
handed them to me when we reached the backdoor. I leaned on the
clapboard wall and slipped the footies over my shoes. I didn’t need
the gloves, I wouldn’t touch a thing, but our audience in the yard
didn’t know that. I gave Gunn a wry look. “Profiler,
huh?”

He shrugged both shoulders. “Easier
that way.”

I looked back. Royal stood near the
orchard, his hair a glimmer in the lights from the house. An
officer turned on a flashlight; the beam washed over Royal,
creating sparkling threads in his copper-gold hair, making him a
beacon in the rapidly gathering gloom.

“
Agent,” I said as Gunn
opened the door, “whatever I do and say, you do and say nothing. If
I look like I’m about to pass out, you don’t touch me.”

“
If you do pass out, I let
you go down?”

“
I won’t, but you may think
I’m going to.” I remained on the step. “I want your word before we
go in there.”

He stepped inside. “You have
it.”

I followed him in.

***

They were remodeling. Fresh, pale
terracotta paint on the walls, shining new linoleum in marbled
shades of beige and cream. New cabinets and countertops and a shiny
beige ceramic sink sat under the window facing the yard. Cabinets
along the north wall still lacked countertops. Cartons containing
cabinets and a dishwasher were stacked against the south wall. An
open door gave to a living room, but Gunn led me along a short
passage to a tiny hall paneled in oak, barely wide enough for two
people, with two open doors leading off. I glanced inside a bedroom
where I saw the foot of a queen-size bed and corner of a dresser,
and followed Gunn through the other door. I smelled the strong
metallic tang of blood, but not rotting like in the Fensham
house.

A short staircase went down to an
office. With off-white walls and a mulberry carpet, the room was
neat and just big enough for an oak wall unit holding books and a
few bowling trophies, and a small desk loaded with books and papers
which stood under a narrow window high on the west wall. A tall man
clad in a black T-shirt, faded blue jeans and scuffed white
sneakers stood at the desk with his back to me, a wad of papers
crumpled in one hand. His smooth, shining black hair reached his
waistband.

He whirled, hair flaying out, hand
clenching on the papers. Brown skin, the glint of a slanting black
eye.

“
Miss Banks?” Gunn asked. I
felt his hand on my shoulder as I opened my eyes on
reality.

Disoriented, I shook off his
hand.

The den didn’t look neat now. White
sheets covered two bodies. One lay at the bottom of the stairs, the
other between the stairs and desk. Blood spatters fanned from the
bodies on the floor, over the carpet and up the wall like a huge
red spider web. Blood discolored the desk and splotched a laptop,
books and papers, and more which littered the floor.

The forensics team had positioned
yellow cards with large numbers on them all over the room and
upended, transparent plastic cups covered small objects they wanted
to protect from contamination. Some could be tiny specs of bloody
matter on the carpet. The team had already packed some removable
items in sealable plastic bags stacked in a corner.

A woman with long black hair in a
ponytail knelt facing me on the other side of the body near the
desk, a body clearing lying prone. Her left hand hovered above the
outline of a shoulder, her right a hairsbreadth from his lax
fingers which stuck from beneath the sheet. Her head came up as
Gunn and I went on down the steps. I didn’t see a mark on her. Her
expression made me think she was surprised at the moment of death,
but not alarmed.

I had a hunch she didn’t have time to
be afraid. The killer was extraordinarily fast.

“
Watch where you put your
feet,” Gunn warned.

He need not have bothered. I refused
to step in any blood. I stopped on the bottom step.

“
Are you getting anything?”
Gunn asked.

I held onto the banister so hard my
knuckles were white. That the bodies would still be here did not
occur to me. What I saw seemed surreal: the shade of a woman
kneeling near her mortal remains and those of her husband. How do
you open a conversation with a person when their body lies between
you?

Nothing for it. . . .

“
Hello, Gwen,” I said
softly.

She stared at me for a few seconds,
then her hands went to her mouth. In the room as it swarmed with
police, ignored by them, she worked out what happened to her and
David. Now I troop in and speak to her. Poor woman, she didn’t know
what to think.

“
Where’s David? Why am I
here and he’s not?”

I made my hand relax. “He hasn’t . . .
risen, yet. Don’t worry, he will get here.”

“
But where is he
now?”

“
I don’t know, Gwen. I
think it’s . . . like he’s asleep. Some people take longer to wake
than others.”

I looked back over my shoulder at
Gunn. His face seemed paler, the scars standing out as white
slashes. So he was not as blasé with this as he
pretended.

As I had too many times before, I
explained everything to Gwen, how I could talk to the lingering
dead, that she and David would remain in their home until their
killer died.

I let my gaze settle on her husband
while she digested that. If I stayed long enough, would I see David
materialize? Would he blink into being, or rise up from his dead
body?

“
I saw myself on the
floor,” Gwen said. “I guessed what happened when all those officers
came in and ignored me. I yelled at everyone. I tried to touch one
and my hand went through him. I was terrified.”

She looked down at herself. “But you
know what? I feel fine. How can I be dead when I feel no
different?”

I didn’t have an explanation for her.
“Gwen, who did this? What did you see?”

“
I came down to use the
computer and found a man here.” She rose to her feet and turned
away. “He stood over there, at the desk.”

Something hit me hard in the chest and
I realized it was my heart thumping in objection to what my eyes
saw. I’ve seen a few badly torn-up victims, including the Fenshams,
but Gwen Welsh took me by surprise, I think because she seemed
untouched until she turned away and I saw her from the
rear.

Imagine a woman whose back has been
opened along the spine from nape to buttocks. Imagine a broken
vertebrae sticking from that horrible, bloody, gaping fissure just
above her hips. I can’t go into more detail, my brain won’t let me.
The gruesome factor wanted to ride up my throat and spew. The
killer ripped half her spine out.