Horns of the Devil - Jeff Trask [02] (10 page)

“You better get dressed,” she said. “Crime scene and everybody in the free world will be here in about a minute.”

“I need a shower.” He stood up, looking at the red and gray stains splattered on his chest.

“Later, Jeff. They’ll need to take some pictures. Just throw something over your underwear for now.”

“I’ll have to redo the whole damned room. Carpet’s ruined.”

“It’s OK. We have insurance.”

“I need to call them.”

“Just sit down for now.” She put her arm around his shoulders and kissed his cheek. He was shuddering involuntarily, as if a large spider had just crawled up his leg. “You gave me time to get the gun,” she said. “You did good.”

“I’m glad we bought that gun.”

“So am I.”

“I’m glad you can shoot it.”

“Me, too. I love you.”

His breathing was slowing. “I love you, too.” He kissed her on the forehead.

She held his face. He pulled her close and held her as tightly as he could. Swirling red lights were coming through the bedroom window. The doorbell rang. The adrenaline and fury were leaving him. He was back in the present now.

“Can you answer the door while I find some pants?” he asked.

.

Chapter Eleven

August 19, 8:15 a.m.

L
ynn made it a point to be early to the office, even after the long night in Waldorf. She’d been through it all once before, and beating the crowd to the office would mean avoiding the grand entrance. There’d be those like Barry and Carter—the ones who’d been through it themselves. Just a pat on the back or even a hug.
Way to go lady, you did your job when you had to. We understand.
But there would also be the looks from the new kids, the question on all their faces about the event that would turn them all into stupid TV reporters wanting to ask the same stupid question. “How did it
feel
to kill someone?” None of them would ever really ask it that way, of course, unless he or she truly
was
an idiot. They’d try to mask it, try to paraphrase it. “You OK?” would be the usual version, but they’d want more answers than the one that responded to their question. They’d want the sordid details. Over and over and over again.

Yeah, I’m the LIVE one. I’m OK. The guys I shot and killed are not OK. That’s how this
works. Maybe I should feel guilty about whacking those assholes, but they came into my house—
MY HOUSE—hell-bent on killing my husband and probably me with him. The truth is that I’ll
never lose a minute of sleep over them or even their souls. Maybe I should, but I won’t. They gave
me no choice. It’s all on them.

Dixon Carter was already there when she walked in. Otherwise, the squad room was empty. He saw her, stood up, and came over to her desk. He offered her his hand. She shook it, and he put his other huge dark hand over hers.

“You OK?” he asked, raising an eyebrow and grinning slyly.

She cracked up giggling. “Yeah, Dix, I’m fine.”

“Jeff?”

“He’s got a bruise on his abdomen the size of a cantaloupe. Other than that, he’s good.”

“Great. Nice work. Maybe not nice, but good work. Necessary work.”

“I know. It’s cool, really.”

“We’re all glad you were there. Otherwise we might have lost our favorite prosecutor.”

“He’s a lot more than that to me, but I know what you mean. We did some cases together, once upon a time.”

“That’s what I heard.”

“You know, when I saw him fighting those guys, I had the weirdest thoughts. I mean, I know I was protecting the guy I love, but I also thought about what he means to you guys. Like you said, your favorite prosecutor. I remember working cases before I met him, busting my ass on an investigation and then handing it to some jerk who treated it like just another file. He’s never done that.”

Carter nodded. “He cares, he’s good in court, and he’s a hell of an investigator himself. Smart as a whip.”

“You have no idea.” She regretted saying it for a moment, but then she didn’t. She was talking to Dix, the lead detective on Jeff ’s case. He needed to know. There could be a time when it mattered.

“How’s that?”

“When I first met Jeff ’s mom after we got married, we talked about what kind of kid he’d been. You know, just girl talk. She said he was always two things as a boy: sick and smart. Nearly died a couple of times from fevers. Pulled through, of course.”

She looked at Carter and put a finger over her lips. She read his eyes, and he understood. Don’t pass this on to anyone else.

“They had his IQ tested a couple of times when he was a kid. One test came back over 200. The other one couldn’t even be scored it was so high. They never told him, and they made me swear not to ever tell him. She thought it might me too much of a burden on him. She wanted me to know because we really hit it off…anyway, she said my biggest challenge would be to keep him from getting bored. She was right. I’ve seen it happen.”

“With you?”

“No, not yet. Not that I could tell, anyway. We used to be in a winter bowling league. Just something we decided to try for fun. He studied the hell out of the game, like he does everything else. He figured out the right ball to buy for the lane surfaces, the oil patterns, and he practiced like crazy. He got really good. Averaged 210 in one league, then he finally rolled a perfect game and just walked away from it. We’ve never been back.”

“Maybe he’s found the perfect job then,” Carter said. “Every case a new sport?”

“I think so,” she said. “It’s the people problems that seem to interest him. He always hated math, even though he can do it all when he needs it. I think he’s bored to death by the fact that two and two always equal four.”

“Not when you’re dealing with the devious human elements.”

“Exactly. He loves the human variables, thinks of them as puzzles. It makes him great at his work.”

“That all makes sense,” Carter said. “When I did my first stint in Homicide, I got real interested in profiling. You know, serial killers, criminal masterminds, that sort of thing. Went to a couple of seminars put on by the leading profilers. I cornered one guy after one of the lectures and asked if he had any tips on how to get started. He told me just to read a lot—biographies as well as case files.”

Lynn wrinkled her forehead. “OK…and this has to do with Jeff…?

Carter laughed. “I know he’s not a serial killer. No, what interested me is the sickly kid and fever part tied to the super-smart adult. When I was reading all the bios, that was a very common theme, for both the suspects and for some very famous non-crooks.”

“Really, like who?”

“Let’s see. Scientists and math wizards? Isaac Newton, James Watt the steam engine inventor, Edison, Nikola Tesla. Writers? Robert Louis Stevenson. Politicians? Teddy Roosevelt. Even athletes like Bobby Jones, the great golf pro. Several more, but I wasn’t a sickly kid, so I can’t remember ’em all.”

She smiled. “Who were some of the killers?”

“John Wayne Gacy, Patrick Kearney, the LA freeway killer, a serial killer from Cleveland named Eric Olson, Adolf Hitler.”

“Gacy and Hitler?”

“Yeah. The health battles seemed to make them more determined to succeed in something later in life, good or bad. Anyway, they were all sickly kids with amazing minds in one way or another. Tesla said he kept seeing images in his mind throughout his lifetime; he called it ‘picture thinking.’ I’m no doctor or shrink, but I always had a theory that some of those with the childhood fevers may have had their brains locked open in some fashion by the high temps. Maybe they kept a creative or memory function that the rest of us lost as we got older. I do know that some of the literature on super-memories said that some children who have it seem to lose it as they mature. It also said that some kids get diagnosed with autism or other problems.”

“Jeff ’s mom said the shrinks wanted to medicate him while he was in grade school. She wouldn’t let them.”

“I love her for that. I also love the fact that he’s on this case, and I love the fact that his wife can shoot like Annie Oakley.”

Doroz walked in and was surprised to see he was not the first in the office.

“You—” he said, pointing to Carter, “ought to still be asleep. And
you
—” he pointed at Lynn. “What the hell are you doing here at all?” He paused. “You OK?”

“I’m good, Bear,” she said, laughing. “Really.”

“Here’s your vest.” The deputy United States marshal handed Trask the new black body armor, still wrapped in plastic. “Wear it to and from the building, and while driving. You’re required to go through our firearms training course in order to carry a weapon on your person.”

“We’ve got a .45 at home,” Trask said.

“Can’t use it. The regs say you have to carry what we carry. We’ll issue you a Glock .40 cal after you go through the training.”

“We’ve done the paperwork on that already, Jeff,” Patrick said from behind his desk. “Main Justice has the application, and it’s approved.”

“Am I still on the case?” Trask asked, wincing as he shifted in the chair. The bruise on his abdomen made sitting uncomfortable.

“Yep. I had a long talk with Ross this morning. I’m not sure he’s gotten used to you and your bride whacking bad guys on an annual basis, but he said he’d rather see
them
in the morgue than you, and he’s not sure any other of his assistants would have survived the attack. We also agree with FBI’s assessment that this wasn’t an attempted gang hit, so no conflict of interest.”

“I’m still sorting all this out myself.”

“That’s natural,” the marshal said. “I’m on our SWAT and fugitive apprehension teams. I’ve had to take subjects down the hard way three times. You wonder why you were the one who had to deal with it at all. You didn’t ask for the dirty work. You have to realize that they gave you no choice.”

“I figured
that
out last night about the time I ducked under a machete.”

“Two recommendations,” the marshal continued. “One, get a house alarm.”

“OK.”

“And get a dog.”

“That sounds redundant, and expensive.”

“They
are
redundant to a point, but alarms don’t have incredible senses of smell, hearing, and loyalty, and dogs can’t get taken out with one snip of a pair of wire cutters. If you have to pick one, get the dog. A big one, preferably.”

“Right. Anything else?”

“We don’t have the manpower to watch your residence 24/7, but between our guys, the FBI, the Maryland State Police, and the Saint Charles County Sheriff ’s Office, we’ll be doing enough spot checks on your house to make people
think
we’re there all the time.” He handed Trask a sheet of paper. “Here’s a list of all the phone numbers you need. Call the Saint Charles County guys first if there’s any more trouble. It’s their beat, and they’re closer.”

Trask nodded.

“Now get out of here,” Patrick said. “Take the rest of the day off, and don’t argue about it.”

Same orders Lynn got from Barry this morning. She’ll be home when I get there.

Trask went back to his office to get his sport coat, but sat down at his computer before leaving. He remembered seeing the website for a pet rescue center in southern Maryland. He also remembered the conversations he’d had with Lynn on the dog issue. She’d always had them, loved them, wanted one. Make that two.
“Separation anxiety,” she’d called it. “Make sure there are two so they’ll have company while
we’re at work. They won’t tear too many things up that way. And no expensive breeds from some
puppy mill. Give a couple of pound puppies a good home.”

He found the website and wrote down the phone and address. He made the call and said he’d be there in twenty minutes or so. After fiddling with what seemed like five square yards of Velcro and straps, he got the vest on and headed for the Jeep.

The drive down the Indian Head Highway was wide open since it was the middle of the day and between rush hours. He turned east on 227 and found the farmhouse, which was surrounded by a grassy field with a wire fence to keep in the pack of dogs that followed the Jeep up the gravel road drive. A woman with a weathered face came out of the house and walked toward the gate as he parked and shed the body armor.

He told her that he and his wife had been talking about adopting a couple of dogs for weeks and that he wanted to surprise her.

“I just have mixed breed rescues here,” the woman said. “No purebreds.”

“That’s what we want,” Trask said. “My wife wanted rescues. She said they’re the best dogs she’s had. What do I do, just pick a couple out?”

The woman pointed to a wooden picnic table and benches a few yards away. “Go sit over there a spell. Let
them
pick
you
out.”

He did as instructed, and watched as the pack—about twenty-five in all, ranging from a litter of tiny Jack Russell puppies to a couple of very large dogs—milled about in the grass.

Lynn wanted a “cuddle puppy.” The marshal told me to get a big one.

He was admiring a shepherd-mix pup when he noticed that one strange-looking little dog was slowly walking toward him.

She was small—about twenty-five pounds—and reddish blond, with a small white spot on her chest and a face that reminded him of a fox. She seemed to have an excess of long hair about her shoulders, and a long, bushy tail that curved up and over her back. She hopped up on the bench beside him and held up her paw like she was waving at him.

“This is Nikki,” the old woman said. “She’s half Shiba Inu and half Whippet. I knew when you called that she would pick you. She’s been waiting for you.”

Shiba Inu
, Trask thought, trying to ignore the supernatural implications of being pre-selected, sight unseen, by an animal. An old Redbone song started playing in his head. “The Witch Queen of New Orleans.” The pages of a book he’d read on dog breeds flashed through his memory.
Shiba Inu
:
a Japanese breed, like
a smaller version of an Akita, but a lot smarter.

“There’s a special condition with Nikki, though, if you want her.”

“Is she sick or something?” Trask asked.

“Oh no. Healthy as can be. She’s one of a pair.”

Trask scanned the other dogs and saw none that looked like the little dog that was now sitting beside him on the bench, leaning in so her head was resting on his shoulder. He patted her head, and she licked his face.