From a Dead Sleep (20 page)

“Toby?” she said in a stern voice. “Toby!”

When no sound could be heard from inside, she slowly pushed the door open. Its dry hinges whined in dissent. She poked her head inside. “Toby?”

The headlights from her car had lit up the entranceway from a favorable angle but did practically nothing to shed clarity on whatever was inside. A chill in the air forced her to raise her shoulders to protect her neck under the thin collar of her jacket. She pushed the door open until it was wide and reached along the inside wall, fumbling for a light switch. She found it, and her howling scream quickly funneled its way up through the small canyon surrounding the house.

Cries of her son’s name bounced off every corner of Sean’s small apartment as Joan frantically searched through each room, flipping up more light switches and swinging open closet doors. She staggered back outside to the porch step and held onto the wooden railing to keep from collapsing. She raised her head and screamed her son’s name again in utter desperation and helplessness, not knowing what fate had befallen him.

She carried no cellphone. They rarely worked in the mountains of Winston so few of the residents owned them. After overcoming the invisible barrier that was averting her from stepping over the wide-eyed, pale, and bloody body of Zed Hansen on the floor, she managed to steady her hands long enough to poke the number for the police station into a wall-mounted phone she’d spotted near the kitchen. When no sound came out of the receiver, she frantically pounded the hook switch, to no avail. Her mind leapt to Zed’s truck parked outside and the large, trademark antenna stuck to its roof.

Joan was back out the door in seconds, running in and out of the beams of light cast by the Maverick’s headlights. As she got to the truck she raised her hand toward where she believed the handle was, but suddenly felt her legs being swept out from under her by an unseen, large object lying across her path. She fell on top of it, nearly cracking her head against the partially open driver’s side door. Her glasses had fallen from her face but she didn’t need them to know that the weight and shape of the object below her was a body. Her heart stopped.

“No! No!” she tried to scream out, but the words left her mouth in more of a whimper.

Her hands feverishly followed the body up to its face as tears spewed down her own. Her fingertips searched for Toby’s dimples but instead found a coat of coarse whiskers and a bald head that made her snort in alleviated relief in an otherwise horrific situation. Her head bent down to the man’s chest as she nearly passed out from the frenzy of emotions that pumped rapidly through her body.

When the brights from Chief Lumbergh’s Jeep lit up the teetering outline of Joan Parker’s dainty frame, she resembled a zombie from a horror film with her drained, emotionless eyes and colorless skin. Her arm was raised to capture the attention of the oncoming vehicle. The chief ’s eye quickly detected a streak of what appeared to be blood along her chin. He began flicking brass switches that commanded the rack of lights mounted along the roof. They flashed on and illuminated the entire area. A spotlight above his side mirror came on too. His teeth were already pounding a stick of gum.

Out of breath from the moment he’d received Joan’s distressed and disjointed broadcast from the dispatch speaker hooked under the dashboard of his Jeep, the chief turned to his wife in the seat and told her to stay put until he checked things out. He’d been halfway up the dirt driveway to his own home when the call began. He’d planned to take Diana out to catch dinner in town. He’d even changed clothes before he left work. Never could he have imagined the night would have taken such a harrowing, life-altering turn.

Diana wasn’t about to sit still. Her uncle was dead and only God knew where her brother was. With eye shadow and lipstick decorating her attractive face, she looked more like she was arriving at an awards banquet than a crime scene.

The Jeep skidded to a halt and when both doors flew open, the cold night air poured in. The dome light exposed Lumbergh was in civilian garb—plaid shirt and khakis with brown leather dress shoes. His Glock was drawn from the brown, leather side-holster he’d strapped below his ribcage on the drive over.

“Where is he?” Joan shouted as she quickly approached them. “What’s that bastard done to my son?”

She sounded so exhausted that Diana could barely make out her words. When they neared, the chief ’s wife threw her arms around the distraught mother’s shoulders and pulled her into a tight embrace. Joan’s arms went straight down to her sides like a puppet that’d had its strings cut. Though showing indifference to the support offered by the sister of the man she blamed for her torment, she didn’t adamantly reject it. Tears welled up in her eyes again.

Lumbergh was all business, directing both of them to the side of his Jeep. He told them that Jefferson would be there soon and to stay where they were until he got there. The area was not secure. With his eyes shifting back and forth from the front door to the corners of the house, he cautiously moved in, his gun out in front of him and his other hand clenching the upper neck of a Mag light in case he needed to club someone dashing out from the night. His instincts, however, told him that the action was long over.

As expected from the details of Joan’s broadcast, he spotted Bailey first. A clump of brown camo with dried blood splattered thoroughly along his chest and some on the ground beside him. Lumbergh didn’t bother to take a pulse. He’d seen enough dead bodies in his time to know not to bother. Bailey’s shotgun was off to his side and next to it there was a spent shell. Gary wondered if the strong, stout Marine had gotten a clean round off at the assailant. Also beside the body was a large, brown burlap bag that also appeared to have blood on it. Against his professional crime scene judgment, Gary gave the bag a nudge with the outside of his foot. A couple of rabbit carcasses poured out through the opening, with the promise of others inside.
All of those rabbits’ feet but no luck for Bailey
, Lumbergh thought with irony.

It was a challenge for him to keep his mind focused on the task at hand with the stakes so personal.
My God
, he thought,
what part did
Sean play in this?
He knew his brother-in-law had serious problems. He’d even speculated, on occasion, that he might be mentally ill. But he couldn’t fathom the notion that Sean Coleman would harm his own uncle, or shoot
anyone
, for that matter. He couldn’t have been behind the morbid scene, but it had to come back to him somehow. Ideas flashed through his mind: Maybe Sean owed someone money and the person who did this was a lender. Maybe Zed showed up at the wrong time, a confrontation ensued, and all hell broke loose. Was that why Sean had skipped town? To avoid collection?

Joan’s bellowing forced the investigation to the back of the chief ’s mind. First things first. With his gun at his side, he slid inside through the open door and into the lit room. There, he saw Zed’s body among overturned furniture, a broken chair, and shattered glass—some brown, probably from beer bottles, and some clear chards that he couldn’t place the source of. It had been one hell of a struggle. Scuff marks and scratches marked the wood floor. He was thankful that Diana was outside. Zed had been shot through the throat. The bullet looked to have exited out the back of his head and probably came to a stop somewhere in the wall or floor. His eyes, still exuding a sense of kindness, were left in a gaze aimed up at the ceiling. Lumbergh fought the urge to choke up. Zed was a good man. He was family.

A separate, thin trail of blood led Lumbergh around the edge of Sean’s kitchen counter. There he found the crimson-laced carcass of Rocco. Gary’s face twisted in puzzlement at the site.
What kind of sick
person would do that? Why would he bother?

He quickly checked out the rest of the house. He found nothing of note. The place wasn’t ransacked, just messy by nature because of Sean’s chosen lifestyle. A burglary didn’t appear to be the motivation.

When he saw the flashing, colorful lights of Jefferson’s cruiser beaming through the curtains, he stepped outside and yelled to the officer to call in the county medical examiner before bringing in the cameras.

Gary walked down around the corner of the house to Bailey’s side. His door was locked, which wasn’t a surprise. Bailey’s clothes suggested that he’d been outside when the attack started. He sent an elbow through a glass pane on the door, then reached around and unlocked it from the inside. It didn’t take him long to secure the living quarters.

As he began to make his way back up to the vehicles, a partially open steel telephone box on the side of the building stole his attention. He narrowed the beam of his flashlight through it and saw that the phone wires had been yanked.

“Jesus,” he muttered before recording a mental note that fingerprints should be taken there first due to the smooth surface of the box.

When he got back to the vehicles, Gary pulled Diana aside after briefly eavesdropping on Jefferson’s radio conversation to make sure correct requests were being made. With his lips close to his wife’s ear, he spoke softly and calmly of the scene inside. He excluded the gory details but provided enough information to answer the questions she surely had. Her strong-scented perfume, which he normally found alluring, tickled his nose and provided a stark contrast between what the evening should have been and what it had become. He felt her body tense up when he spoke of Rocco.

While riding quietly over from her house alongside her husband, Diana had prepared herself for the impending specifics on her uncle, but a thought hadn’t crossed her mind about the beloved pet she’d rescued from an animal shelter in Denver over a decade ago. The composure she’d admirably shown since their arrival suddenly dissipated like the warm, visible breaths that left her mouth. She buried her head in Gary’s shoulder where her eyes soaked through his shirt. She felt the palm of her husband’s thin hand along the back of her head.

She sensed a pair of eyes beaming down on her and she turned to meet Joan’s lost, sunken gaze. The befuddled mother’s mute demeanor was a disjointed blend of anger and helplessness. Diana knew she blamed Sean for the carnage and her son’s disappearance. Joan had made that quite clear while Gary was checking out the house. There was nothing Diana could do to lessen her pain.

“We’re going to find your son,” Diana heard her husband say with a level of confidence that was so direly needed.

Joan’s unchanged expression proved that she didn’t believe him. Everyone knew her son was her life. Without him, she couldn’t imagine a reason for continuing to live.

Regret for not pressing Toby for Sean’s whereabouts the other day at the bridge left an uneasy feeling in Gary’s gut. Sean didn’t carry a cellphone and he wasn’t one to check in with family or anyone else.

“I’ve got a shoe over here,” Jefferson reported loudly from the far side of the house.

All heads spun in the direction of the officer’s voice. None of them had noticed his meandering away from the police cruiser. With all attention now on him, his sneer dampened; this was no time to gloat in the knowledge that he’d found something important—something that would surely impress his boss. He kept his flashlight trained on a black high-top shoe that was largely concealed by tall grass and other groundcover. It looked too small to belong to an adult.

Once close enough, Joan excitedly identified it as Toby’s.

“What does it mean?” asked Diana of her husband.

She peered down along his face as he gazed out at the dense hillside beyond the winding, slow-moving creek just outside the perimeters of Bailey’s property. She could almost hear the turning of gears in his head under the hurried gnawing from his jaw. The chief slowly raised his flashlight out at the vast layer of evergreens. Taking his boss’s queue, Jefferson did the same.

Chapter 21

“I
t sounds like it’s working, Mrs. Kimble,” a friendly male voice acknowledged through the speaker with a chuckle.

“Thanks, Marty,” answered Lisa with a hint of embarrassment in her voice. “I’m sorry to bother you.”

“It’s no bother at all. Are you expecting Mr. Kimble tonight?”

Lisa’s shoulders drooped. “Tonight and the two nights before that.”

Silence on the other end.

“Mr. Kimble has a very imposing and unpredictable work schedule, Marty,” she explained. “It’s not uncommon for days to go by without us talking.”

Her elbows lowered to the flat face of the marble bar counter resting in front of her. An audible sigh dropped from her lips. She glanced out the large kitchen window that overlooked the winding driveway which was dimly lit by staggered accent lamps. “We planned this trip some time ago. I was hoping that his job wouldn’t interfere this time, but it did. He promised it wouldn’t take more than a day or two, and then he’d meet me out here.”

“You haven’t heard from him at all?” asked Marty.

“No. No phone calls at all since I got here. That’s why I thought I’d have someone call me back to make sure this thing is even working. Again, I appreciate you doing me the favor.”