Everyone Dies (10 page)

“If you don’t mind me asking, Chief, first I get a call from your wife about a dead rat, and now you want to know about a lost dog. Does all this have something to do with Potter’s murder?”

“You’ll read about it in the papers soon enough,” Kerney said. “Thanks.”

Jack Potter’s house sat on a hill above the Casa Solana neighborhood, once the site of a World War II Japanese-American internment camp. A newer adobe structure with large glass windows, the house commanded a view of the mountains and downtown Santa Fe.

He could see headlights of cars traveling on Paseo de Peralta, a street that looped around the historical core of the city, and a few of the traffic lights along Saint Francis Drive, the state road that led north to Taos. Behind the city the mountains were soft, obscure shapes in a star-filled night sky, and the semicircular sliver of the moon looked like the cutting edge of an old-fashioned sickle suspended in the air.

Kerney didn’t bother ringing the doorbell; Norman Kaplan was still on a plane flying home from England. He walked around the darkened house and encountered a high six-foot fence and a locked wooden gate that enclosed the backyard. Kerney wondered how Potter’s mixed-breed collie, which wasn’t a big dog, could have jumped the fence. It didn’t seem likely.

The closest house was about a hundred yards away. Kerney spoke to Potter’s neighbors, a younger couple who were surprised to find him at their doorstep. He showed his shield and explained the reason for his visit.

“What does Mandy have to do with Jack’s murder?” the man asked. A chocolate-colored Labrador padded to the open door and sniffed at Kerney’s knee.

“Behave, Herschel,” the man said.

The dog sat and smiled up at Kerney.

“I’m just wondering how Mandy managed to go missing from the backyard,” Kerney said. “I didn’t see any evidence that she’d dug her way out under the fence. Was the gate left unlocked?”

“Mandy isn’t a digger, and Jack always kept the gate locked when he wasn’t home and Mandy was outside,” the woman replied.

“We don’t know how she got out,” the man said. “It’s never happened before, and we’ve been Jack and Norm’s neighbors for three years.”

“I think Mandy was stolen,” the woman said.

“What makes you say that?” Kerney asked.

“How else can you explain it? Mandy is an absolutely beautiful dog, very well behaved, and has a large, secure backyard to romp in when Jack and Norman are at work.”

“Did he search the neighborhood for the dog?”

“Yes, along with Norman and the two of us,” the woman said. “We went house to house, passed out posters, and even walked through the arroyos.”

“I think a coyote got her,” the man said.

“Perhaps,” Kerney said, doubting it. Coyotes rarely took down large prey, unless it was sick or wounded.

“Do you think whoever took Mandy killed Jack?” the woman asked.

“Anything’s possible.”

Kerney thanked the couple and went home, where he found Sara asleep in the bedroom and two uniformed officers on duty. After being assured that the house was secure and all windows were closed and locked, he released them to return to patrol.

Unwilling to risk waking Sara, he sat quietly on the living room couch and mulled over the pattern that seemed to be developing in the cases: dead kangaroo rats delivered to doorsteps, a prized horse killed, a cherished dog stolen. All seemed acts intended to intimidate, to create a climate of fear, and demonstrate the killer’s superiority and intelligence.

The threatening note left on his door announcing two more deaths before his own meant that he was supposed to be the final target. Did it also mean the killer wanted Kerney to lose Sara and the baby before he died himself? Or was it a ploy to throw him off?

He used the cell phone and called Larry Otero, who was still at the Manning crime scene.

“Jack Potter had his dog stolen three days ago,” he said. “Have the detectives find out if Manning had a pet, was a recent crime victim, or had suffered any kind of personal or family loss.”

“Will do,” Otero said. “She didn’t have any pets, so that’s one thing we can forget about. How far back do you want them to go?”

“Six months, for now,” Kerney said. “Do we have flight information on Norman Kaplan?”

“Nothing specific, just that he’s on his way.”

“Put someone on it,” Kerney said. “I want him met at the Albuquerque airport, accompanied home, and given protection.”

“I’ll see that it’s taken care of,” Otero replied.

“Where are you with the crime scene?”

“Molina and his people are still gathering evidence and talking to neighbors. You were right about the time of death; Manning was killed before Potter was shot.”

“I’ll see you in the morning.”

He checked the lock on the front door one more time, pulled off his boots, and stretched out on the couch. With all that had happened, with all there was still to face, he wondered if he could sleep. It didn’t seem possible.

When the nurse brought the sleeping medication, Mary Beth kept her mutilated arm under the covers, tucked the pill under her tongue and pretended to swallow it. She spit it out as soon as the nurse left the room, her mind racing with images of Kurt dead, all cut up and bleeding. He was dead, dead, dead.

Had she killed Kurt? She decided no one else could have done it. But how and when?

For hours, she moaned quietly into the pillow, stuffing it in her mouth, covering her face. But she still kept breathing, kept thinking, kept seeing Kurt standing naked like a statue with his arms at his sides, bleeding from every pore of his body with a sickly smile on his face until he disappeared behind a creamy red shroud.

Her visions never lied. She needed to stop her mind from remembering how she’d killed her Kurt.

She waited until the nurse made a late-night round, then got out of bed and went to the bathroom. The mirror was metal and fixed to the wall. The toilet had no tank, just a flush valve. The light fixture had a plastic cover screwed in place over the flourescent tube. There was nothing around she could use to stop the bad vision of Kurt and the terrible thoughts about herself.

She opened the venetian blind next to the bed and looked out the window into the dark night, running her finger along the sharp edge of a plastic slat. With both hands, she bent the brittle slat until it snapped, and then broke it once more to free it from the cord that held it in place.

In the bathroom with the door closed, she pressed down hard, drawing the sharpest point of the slat up the length of her arm, cutting deeper than her fingernails ever could. The pain felt so good it made her shiver.

She did the other arm, and then her thighs. Lovely red blood stained her gown. She took the gown off and cut into the soft flesh under her breasts and watched red droplets course down to her belly button.

She put her hands together and looked at her wrists. The veins were right at the surface. She dug the slat into the fattest one, gritting her teeth until she broke through and blood squirted out in pulses. She clenched her fist, gouged between two tendons, popped open the other vein, and watched the blood flow freely into the sink.

She switched hands to repeat the process, her fingers shaking as she tried to stab into the vein. She punched repeatedly until the slat pierced it. Then she sawed the last one open, her blood lubricating every cutting stroke.

She dropped her hands to her sides, smiled at herself in the metal mirror, and saw Kurt smiling back at her. She could feel the blood draining from her body, her head becoming light and empty of bad thoughts. It felt so very, very dreamy.

Now she could sleep. She sank to the floor and closed her eyes.

The telephone rang and instinctively Kerney reached for it on the bedside table, his hand grabbing empty air. Groggily, he got up from the couch, hurried to the kitchen, and picked up on the third ring. The stove clock read 4:00 A.M.

“What is it?” he asked.

The third-shift dispatcher told him Mary Beth Patterson had been found dead in her psych-unit hospital room.

“How did it happen?”

“An apparent suicide, Chief. She cut her veins open with a piece of a venetian blind.”

“Who’s on it?”

“Lieutenant Molina and Detective Pino.”

“Have them call me back when they know something,” Kerney said.

“Ten-four.”

Kerney dropped the phone in the cradle. Day two of his vacation had just begun and it had already gone from bad to worse.

I n the early morning light, Detective Ramona Pino walked slowly down the street where Jack Potter had been killed. Yesterday’s search by the crime scene techs for the spent bullet had been unsuccessful, and Ramona wanted to look for it on her own before starting her normal shift.

But more than that, Ramona wanted a break from the biting anguish she felt about the deaths of Larsen and Patterson. If she’d handled the investigation differently both of them would be alive. For the first time in her career as a cop, she had to seriously question her abilities and judgment. She knew Lieutenant Casados was doing the same, and she fully expected that he would drop Patterson’s suicide on her as part of his IA investigation.

Yesterday’s session with Casados had been grueling enough with only one innocent person’s death to account for. Maybe she should just turn in her shield and walk away from it all.

She rejected the idea with an unconscious shake of her head. There was important work to do. Chief Kerney and his family were at risk, apparently targeted by a revenge killer, who could easily be someone unknown to the chief with a motive that was equally unclear, which meant finding the link between the perp, the chief, and the two victims might not be an easy task.

Beyond that, there were aspects of the perp’s MO that didn’t fit the typical pattern of revenge killers. Usually, such homicides were planned blitz attacks against unsuspecting victims that occurred with no forewarning, or were impulsive murders of opportunity that happened in public view, often without any thought given to escape.

But this perp wasn’t playing by the rules. In the Manning homicide, he’d alerted his victim of his intentions with a dead rat in her driveway and, according to information received overnight from the Taos Police Department, was most likely the unknown subject who had broken into an art gallery a month ago and stolen twelve of Manning’s paintings by cutting them out of their frames.

He’d followed the same MO with Kerney by first destroying the chief’s horse and then leaving two dead rats at his house. Additionally, his messages, left at the Manning crime scene and tacked to the chief’s front door, made it clear that there were more killings to come, which wasn’t something a revenge killer would ordinarily do.

In an attempt to confirm part of the killer’s MO, Chief Otero had officers searching Potter’s neighborhood in the hopes of finding the carcass of the missing Border collie. If they came up empty, Ramona still thought it highly probable that the killer had an agenda for the dog.

Pino ran down two other possible types of multiple killers worth considering. Spree killers didn’t fit because the perp had planned and carried out his attacks methodically. A serial killer didn’t work because there appeared to be no sexual component to the crimes. That left vengeance as the motive, which brought her back to the still unanswered questions, who and why.

She continued down the street, inspecting anything that might have stopped the bullet. Somehow, without willing it, her mind had erased the image of Patterson’s naked, mutilated body. All that floated through her head was the face of the hysterical psych-unit nurse who’d found Mary Beth lying in a pool of blood on the bathroom floor.

She stopped to inspect a tree trunk. There was no traffic, no people were out and about, and the only sound came from a singing towhee who ended a long series of clinking sounds with a trill. It cut short a repeat of its refrain, flew out of the high branches above Ramona’s head, and perched on the roof of the elementary school a half-block away.

The last of the old downtown schools, the building had been saved because of community protests to keep it open. Two rows of high, old-style windows, designed to let as much sunlight as possible into the classrooms, ran across the front of the building. A small street-side playground enclosed by a low wall served kindergarten students. It contained new, brightly colored slides and play equipment. Just beyond, steps led up to a formal portico entrance. Jutting out from the rear of the building was what Ramona guessed to be either an assembly hall or the school gym. Behind the gym was a dirt-packed playground for the older children enclosed by a chain-link fence.

Ramona climbed the low wall and inspected the street-side playground equipment before moving on to the portico, where she stood on the top step trying to remember the good times of her early school days in Albuquerque. But her mind kept going back to the face of the hysterical psych-unit nurse.

She examined the large square-beam columns and the gray plastered walls for any sign of recent damage. The initial autopsy report indicated the round had clipped Potter’s sternum before passing through his chest cavity and out his back. That could have changed the trajectory of the bullet.

Ramona also knew from the pathologist’s findings that the muzzle-to-target distance was less than three inches, which meant that the killer had made sure Jack Potter knew he was about to die. Additionally, the diameter of the entry wound suggested that the killer had used a large-caliber handgun.

She looked both high and low. Finding nothing, she reached the intersection where Griffin Street and Paseo de Peralta met just as the traffic light changed and the DON’T WALK sign started flashing. Part of the glass looked broken. She crossed the empty street, looked up, and saw a small hole at the bottom of the sign with spider-like cracks radiating out in random directions.