Fortunes of the Dead (37 page)

“Shouldn't one of us stay here?”

“Yeah, but I don't want to and I bet you don't either.”

“I'm cold,” Lena said.

Her voice sounded funny, Wilson thought. “Are you sure you're okay?”

“Maybe a little shook up.”

“You and me both. Come here.”

She moved down the path toward him and he took her hand. His leg hurt with an intensity that guaranteed he would not sleep for nights to come.

“Look,” she said.

There were lights, down on the road, and the wail of sirens that meant help on the way. Wilson hugged her, for no particular reason, and she slowed her pace to his.

“Here,” she said, draping his arm around her shoulders for support. “It's not all that far.”

They came out of the woods at the halfway mark on the driveway, where the land flattened, and the pond waters looked black in the dark. The barn was lit, and there was a small checkerboard of emergency units—cops, paramedics, the sheriff's department.

Halfway up the drive they can see the lights in the barn.

Wilson felt a prickle on the back of his neck.

“Stop back here,” he told her.

“No.”

He wanted so badly to get the weight off his leg. It was a tedious thing, throb throb throb, he couldn't think of anything else.

“Maybe you should stay here and let me go,” Lena said. But they both continued up the hill and were sweating by the time they made it to the barn. Wilson was leaning harder and harder on Lena's shoulder and she staggered under his weight. Wilson heard the murmur of voices, mostly men.
Mayhem
, Wilson thought, his mind adrift.

Wilson saw Kate Edgers first. She was on the ground in a pool of blood so thick and large he could not believe she was alive. But she must have been, because someone had hooked her up to an IV drip and she was being loaded onto a stretcher. He blinked, trying to take it all in. A little dark-haired boy, face stark white, was held by a middle-aged woman who was sitting on the hood of a pickup truck that has inexplicably come up that mountain drive with a horse trailer. A man, probably her husband, brought a cup of something hot to the woman and the boy, though the man looked like he could use something himself. He leaned inside the window to stroke the head of a large black dog. All of them watched the stretcher as Kate was loaded into the van. The man kissed the woman, gave her his jacket, and took the boy from her arms. She got into the back of the van—one of the medics gave her a hand. The lights flashed, and the unit pulled tamely away in a crunch of gravel.

He saw Mendez, just as the detective turned and spotted the two of them, and his leg gave out as Lena surged toward Mendez. Wilson landed with no dignity and great annoyance on his rear.

Mendez headed for him, but Wilson waved him off.

“I'll stay down here, if you don't mind.”

Mendez grinned, looked over his shoulder, and saw two paramedics running toward them. “You hurt bad?”

“Nothing a cold beer won't help.”

Joel put his arms around Lena and held her and Wilson watched them with open and vulgar curiosity. He missed Sel.

“Wilson?” A car door slammed and Wilson looked between the two medics. The S.A. from Nashville. She was wearing low heels and a skirt and a long coat, and was already giving orders.

“I want overtime for this,” Wilson said, when she came close.

“Dammit to hell, it's been a long night.” she said. But she sounded confident and Wilson heard car doors, heard her start giving orders, and he closed his eyes, relieved, and finally off duty.

He knew that the minute he got back to California and put his arms around Sel, his world would quit spinning out of control, and he would be able to center, and be steady. But he had much to do before he could go home.

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTY
-
ONE

Two days after Wilson McCoy brought down the Rodeo assassin, Joel asked me to accompany him back to the mountain were Cory Edgers used to live. Miranda and Edgers were still in the custody of the morgue, and Kate Edgers was still listed as critical in ICU.

The Andersonville sheriff's department, in a joint operation with the Knoxville office of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, was providing the equipment and manpower, if not the budget, to drain the pond where Kate Edgers saw Cory Edgers sink Cheryl Dunkirk's bloodstained sweater. As ponds go, this one was man-made and small, no more than twenty feet across.

I sat on the dock, leaning up against Joel, who had wisely left his suits behind and dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt. The jeans were very clean and neat, and the sweatshirt was almost new, but there was mud crusting the edges of Joel's hiking boots, and with that I had to be content.

“When are you going to throw this shirt away?” Joel asked me, plucking at the sleeve of my most comfortable denim.

“Throw it away? Feel how soft this is, Joel. Do you know how long it takes to break a shirt in this good?”

“Ten years?”

“Good guess.”

He kissed the side of my neck, which surprised me, because he is rarely demonstrative in public. I was feeling quite daring as it was to lean up against him while we sat on the dock in the midst of an official police operation.

I turned sideways so I could see his face. “Thanks for inviting me.”

“You're easy to please, Lena. Most women want expensive bistros, wine, a dozen roses. Tickets to the opera from time to time.”

“You know what I mean.”

He didn't say anything.

“I'm sorry, Joel. About the way things have been between us over this whole thing.”

“Do you wish you hadn't taken the job?”

I thought about it. “No, not really. How long are you going to hold a grudge?”

“About as long as it took you to break in that shirt.”

The noise of the pump had run most of the crew away. There was nothing to do but wait, and pretty much everyone except me and Joel was taking a long lunch at someplace called Golden Girls.

“I was kidding, Lena. About holding a grudge. It's not that I don't think you have the right to do your job. I just felt betrayed.”

“Betrayed?”

“I'd been trying to find Cheryl Dunkirk and getting nowhere for two months. I was failing not just locally, but on a national level, including sound bites on CNN where retired cops critiqued the whole investigation.” He shrugged, then smiled. “Some of what they said made good sense—for some reason that was even worse. Then you get hired by the family, and blithely inform me that you're on the case, and it's clear you expect to breeze in with your good old girl network and save the day.”

“Joel, how can you say that?”

“I'm not saying that's necessarily the way it was. I'm saying that's the way it felt.”

I looked over at the pond. The water level was down by a third. The water looked murkier, and seemed to be draining at about the rate of evaporation.

“Lena? Don't you have a comment or something?”

“Yes, but you actually expressed a feeling, and I'm afraid to say anything negative, because if I do you may never express another one.”

He rubbed my shoulders. “Tell me. You'll spontaneously combust if you don't.”

“You make me feel like I have to apologize because I had the confidence to go into the investigation. But Joel, you have to realize that one, I don't work in the public eye, and two, I knew the groundwork. Although, I have to tell you that even if I did work in the public eye and even if you hadn't laid the groundwork, I wouldn't have been afraid to take it on.”

“I'm not supposed to be surprised, am I?”

“But to be fair, I did find myself feeling competitive. When you talk to me about investigations, including this one, you always dismiss my opinion like it was nothing. It gets under my skin. I wanted to beat you on this one. I wanted to win.”

“Win?”

“Yes, I know, poor choice of words.”

I closed my eyes and turned my face to the sun while Joel absorbed my last remark. I knew that in less than a year he'd respond. I looked out at the pond, and watched the water ripple toward the pump.

“Joel?” I looked at him over my shoulder. His eyes were closed. “Joel, are you asleep?”

“Almost.”

“So what do we do now?”

“Nothing.”

“But how do we resolve this?”

“We don't. We communicated.”

“Is that all there is to it?”

“I think so.”

“Oh. Do you feel better?”

“I don't know. Maybe. You?”

I closed my eyes, thinking. “Yeah, I do.”

“Lena, do you see the way the water is rippling there, right dead center.”

I looked to where Joel was pointing. “There's something there. What do you think it is?”

Joel squeezed my shoulder. “Hard to tell at this point. The crew should be back soon.”

“Is it Cheryl?” I asked.

“I think it might be.”

The crew straggled back within the hour, and we waited for the water to drain. A sodden rag rug, tightly bound with duct tape, lay in the mud in the center of the pond floor. I stayed on the dock while Joel took off his shoes, rolled up his jeans, and squelched through the mud. He had a utility knife, and slit one band of duct tape. He was bent almost double, and he straightened suddenly, and nodded. He glanced at a deputy sheriff.

“That her?” the man asked.

“I think so.”

“I'll get a van out, sir.”

“Thanks,” Joel said.

Dusk was falling by the time Cheryl was brought up from the pond and loaded into a mortuary van. The duct tape had been slit, the rug unrolled, and the body identified. Cheryl could not be lifted from the rug due to skin slippage. It surprised me that the body had stayed down on the bottom of the pond, but Joel said that a corpse wrapped and taped in a rug would be so heavy with water that it would sink and stay put.

And so we found Cheryl Dunkirk at last, Joel and I, as well as a measure of peace to calm the upheaval in our relationship. As it turned out, Joel and I were a little more human than we'd realized, and neither of us held the moral high ground.

It strikes me, sometimes, that Cheryl and Miranda shared a temporary burial spot there at the pond on the mountain. Sometimes I wonder if a certain restlessness of spirit remains, or if the older spirit forgave the younger, and somehow helped her along.

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTY
-
TWO

The ATF office in Nashville was starting to feel too familiar, I Wilson thought. It was past time for him to go home. Sel had sensed a change in him, though he did not think he acted any differently. Now she was entirely upbeat, full of good news and reassuring tidbits, and comforting reassurances that she missed him and would welcome him back whenever he got home. No guilt, no pressure, no worries. A part of him was gratified by the kid gloves and supersensitivity, but the rest of him felt sidelined.

He had gone through all the motions of wrapping the case, filling out the paperwork, answering question after question from the investigative team. Nothing was like he thought it would be, not the least of which was the way he felt, which was so detached that he had the sensation he was watching a movie of himself rather than being himself.

He checked his watch. In fifteen minutes there would be a forensic post mortem of Janis Winters's life and motivations. Wilson would be there, as well as the assistant S.A., the local forensic psychologist, and the forensic autopsy tech. The post mortem was officially a committee, and would generate an official report, based on their findings and conclusions. The report would be disseminated to appropriate parties throughout the agency and considering the nature of the case, read again and again through the years. The rumor mill had it that someone from Winters's family would be making an appearance but Wilson hoped the rumor was crap. Most families of serial killers liked to be left alone.

Just the remote possibility that someone from the family would be there made Wilson dread going into that conference room. But he was interested in meeting the forensic psychologist, as they had had many conversations on the phone. The man with the voice, Wilson called him. In Wilson's imagination he was short and cuddly like a teddy bear, with a thick mop of curly brown hair.

He heard footsteps outside the little cubicle the Nashville office had hospitably made available for his use, and the S.A. of the entire Tennessee and Kentucky office wandered through the door.

Wilson finally felt something. He felt nervous. But the S.A., tall and slender and confident, was also as friendly as hell.

“Wilson McCoy, good, I was hoping to catch you before the meeting. Thought I'd let you know that the evaluation of the shoot came through okay. I'm sure you had no doubt that it would turn out, but it always feels better when it's confirmed. They'll get to you in writing on this pretty quick here.” The man winked. “I've got enough pull to get the word early, so I thought I'd pass it along to you.”

Wilson stood up and shook the man's hand. “Thank you, sir. Much appreciated. Will you be sitting in on the meeting?”

“Nope, I wish I could, but I have a flight to catch, so I'll have to wait for the report. And I've been briefed already.”

Of course
, Wilson thought. Nothing would go on in that committee today that this man didn't already know.

“Just wanted to make sure everything was cleared up on your account before I hit the road.”

“I appreciate that.”

“Good job, McCoy,” the man said, slapping Wilson's shoulder. He nodded, then headed at a good clip down the hall.

Wilson looked at his watch. Plenty of time, except he was pretty slow on his feet right now, so he might as well go. The ATF conclusion that the shooting of Janis Winters was justified was a relief for a lot of reasons.