Pious Deception (32 page)

But now it was too late to leave. She longed for ten minutes in Zekk’s shower. She yearned for a cool spot, even a merely
cooler
spot, to wait in.

It had been morning when she was inside the dome yesterday. Maybe it was cooler in there in the afternoon. She didn’t believe it, but after eight hours of waiting, any diversion had its merits. From there she could hear Zekk’s truck approaching.

She drove to the far side of the high adobe wall, walked to the gate, opened it with one of the keys on Vanderhooven’s ring, and walked inside the enclosure.

The stench was overwhelming! How had she not smelled it outside? Maybe the air flowed up from inside the walls. Maybe …

She stared slowly around the garden. Cacti, succulents, hard red dirt. Even more slowly, she walked toward the dome itself.

The door stood open. On the floor, a triangle of light from the skylight stood out against the darkness. It took a moment for her eyes to adjust. She stepped closer, into the doorway. The first thing she spotted was the blowflies, hundreds of them. Then she saw Zekk. She jammed her teeth together and swallowed hard.

Joe Zekk lay on his side. The back of his head had been blown away. Blood and brain and skin and hair stuck to the dome walls, the floor, the sheets on Vanderhooven’s mat.

She spun around and raced outside, swatting at the flies as they buzzed around her nose and mouth. Through her teeth, she breathed in, pulling the fresher air into her lungs. It wasn’t like the autopsy table here. There you knew it was coming. Here … Christ! What kind of gun had the velocity to blow the back of a man’s head off?

The bullet that did that kind of damage had to have been hollow-tipped, a shell that would explode on impact and break through the brains like an electric mixer blade. Or a thin-jacketed shell, the type used in high-velocity rifles. Varmint rifles. Rifles like those the McKinleys carried.

She shivered at the thought. A wave of sorrow shook her as she remembered Zekk, sitting amid the piles of clutter on his sofa, his short dark hair swept so carefully back and the corners of his mouth quivering under his baby-fat cheeks because she’d hurt his feelings. Would she be the only one to feel a stab of grief for his wasted life?

The blowflies kept after her. As she fanned them away from her face, she recalled the fly-ridden animal carcass she had seen on the dead tree below the cliff edge. The blowflies had had a short trip to Zekk’s body.

She hesitated, letting herself wonder what had happened after Joe Zekk called Bishop Dowd at nine-thirty the previous night. Who had had enough of his threats? Or who decided he knew too much? Had that person banged on Zekk’s door as he hung up the receiver? Or had he, or she, waited till the early hours of the morning to kill him?

She swatted at the blowflies. She knew she was putting off what had to be done. Taking a last breath in the outside air, she covered her nose with her hand and made her way carefully into the dome.

The blowflies completely masked large portions of Zekk’s head. They buzzed in flight and resettled. The smell of death filled the room. Zekk lay on his right side. He was wearing the same teal polo shirt and blue deck pants he had had on yesterday afternoon. Now they were flecked with bits of his head.

Swatting the flies away with her left hand, she bent down and felt Zekk’s arm with her right. Cold. Not cool, but cold. She wished she had a thermometer and was simultaneously relieved she didn’t. She tried to flex his elbow. Solid.

On his face there was already a white caking in the blood. The first stage of maggot eggs.

The flies were all around her nose. She swatted with both hands. Stooping quickly, she looked at Zekk’s abdomen. The first hint of green was visible. Decomposition. Already. Probably accelerated by the heat?

She stood. The flies buzzed madly then reclaimed the body. Kiernan moved away and looked quickly at the top of the wooden chest. Nothing there at all. With a cloth she lifted the lid. Books inside, still lying there as they had been the last time she looked. No clock beside the bed. On the floor, no footprints in the blood. The killer must have stood in the doorway.

She turned and walked outside, forcing herself to make a slow circle around the courtyard, checking for threads caught on cacti, for vomit, for any clue.

When she found none, she went back in and looked at Zekk’s body again. Things didn’t add up right. But she could worry about that outside. She glanced up through the pink skylight. Zekk had thought that light was blue, of course, because he had seen it only from the outside. Had he looked up before he was shot and seen it was pink? Or were she and Beth the only ones still alive who shared that small secret?

But, of course, they weren’t.

Aware of the shakiness of her arms and the queasiness in her stomach, she walked out, relocked the gate, and gratefully inhaled the clean, death-free air.

She moved slowly around the high wall, for the moment concentrating only on placing one foot in front of other. What was it that didn’t fit? She passed the Jeep and kept on, walking out along the rocky forearm that hung over the valley. There was something comforting about its presence there, despite its precarious position, as if it had maintained itself by will alone. She walked toward the fist of red rock, staring at the dead tree in front of it. Dead as Zekk, dead as Vanderhooven, but somehow, not so dead. Dirt skidded across the yard-wide peninsula of land and dropped off the edge. Despite her years of training in the gym, practicing balance day after day, she felt a shot of terror. She grabbed the dead tree and shut her eyes against the fear.

She shook her head sharply, and opened her eyes. She took a breath and forced herself to look down at the rocky peninsula on which she stood, down over the side, down the side of the sheer cliff. The remains of the dead animal that she had seen there the previous day were almost gone. Most of the flies had deserted it. Deserted it for the more appetizing banquet of Joe Zekk.

She let go of the tree and walked back, carefully, across the rocky forearm to the Jeep, climbed in, and sat.

Joe Zekk had called Bishop Dowd at nine-thirty. Sometime after that he came to the dome and was killed. That just did not fit.

Zekk’s skin was cool for a hot place like this. He had not been killed this morning—he wouldn’t have cooled that quickly in the daytime heat. He had to already have been dead in the night when the temperature was thirty degrees lower. “Not enough,” she muttered. Body temperature was notoriously unreliable as an indicator of time of death.

Rigor was set. All that that told her was that Zekk had been killed before she set herself up outside his house this morning.

But the maggot eggs. She had seen flies laying their eggs, she’d seen that white crusty material spread hour by hour. She’d seen it on training films, in lab tests, on bodies left outside. The flies wouldn’t have laid eggs till daylight. The crust of maggot eggs on Zekk’s face was too great to have formed in a mere nine hours’ time. But if the flies had laid those eggs before dusk, a full ten hours earlier …

Still not enough. Not if she had to go to court with it.

But add the decomposition that was starting in the abdomen. That discoloration would not have been noticeable only fourteen or fifteen hours after death. It took longer.

Enough? Maybe not enough to go to court with. Still, it did explain why Zekk’s house had looked the same as it had the previous afternoon. It explained why that steak that he would logically have cooked for dinner last night was still thawing in his refrigerator. It explained his wearing the same clothes. It explained the drop in body temp.

It said that Joe Zekk had been killed not this morning, not late last night, but before dusk. He was dead before Bishop Dowd got his long-distance call. Someone else had used Zekk’s phone to call Bishop Dowd last night. Someone, not Zekk, had dragged the bishop into the church, hauled him up on the altar, and left him to hang. And that person had attacked her there.

She thought of the skylight. She recalled someone mentioning Vanderhooven’s
pink
skylight. The village boy considered it blue. Only someone who had been
inside
would see it as pink. The killer. Now the pieces of the puzzle did fit together.

Kiernan looked down over the cliffside and shivered. How many rifles were there down there? High-velocity varmint rifles. The will was down there. There was no way to avoid going down there again.

K
IERNAN DROVE THE
J
EEP
back by Zekk’s house. As she had learned to do in the autopsy room, she pushed from her mind the grief she had felt for Zekk and concentrated on working out her plan. The killer would arrive after dark, intending to sneak into Rattlesnake, get the will, and destroy it. The sight of her Jeep abandoned at the top of the road would only increase the pressure to rush down there. And down there she’d be waiting, with the McKinleys and their rifles to back her up. They
should
help her. They benefited from protecting the old man’s will. But how to get to them, convince them, without getting shot first—that was the question.

The sky darkened from khaki to brown. The wind picked up. Dust began to swirl. She closed the vents but there was no way to keep out the gritty dust. Choosing the lesser of evils she headed into Joe Zekk’s house to wait out the storm. The one last night had been over in half an hour.

Briefly she had wondered if the killer knew the will was down there. But one look around Zekk’s house reminded her that the house had not been searched. The killer had not bothered to root around there for the will; pointing a rifle at Zekk and demanding the information had been easier. She didn’t waste time debating whether Zekk had talked. In those circumstances anyone would talk, and Zekk faster than most.

Had the killer gone down into Rattlesnake last night to get the will? Not after driving to Zekk’s with the lights on, which would have alerted the villagers. No one would venture down there without the element of surprise.

She herself would have just a few minutes at dusk to get down into Rattlesnake and ready the trap. Any earlier and she would make a clear target for the McKinleys as she moved back and forth across the switchback road, like one of those metal silhouettes in a boardwalk sharpshooting concession. After sunset it would be too late.

Wind smacked hard against the windows. It spit dirt across the mesa. The sky grew darker by the minute, the air thicker. It masked the Jeep outside. She looked at her watch—4:41. Plenty of time …

The sky flashed white, and thunder broke over the mesa. It echoed back from the far cliffs. Rain, thick as the dust had been, filled the air. Kiernan stood by the window, watching it bounce off the hard-baked dirt.

She could convince Frank McKinley to help, she assured herself. She had done the McKinleys a favor already, showing Frank how to give his father the shot. She would remind him of that,
if
she had the chance to talk.

The sky grew darker still; rain slashed down in sheets.

After half an hour she accepted the conclusion she had been avoiding. This might not be a passing thunderstorm. It could rain all night. It might not stop for days.

After dark, in the rain, the switchback road would be too treacherous.
The killer wouldn’t dare wait till nightfall.
Neither could she.

Lightning spiked the sky and thunder rattled the windows again and again. She thought fondly of the Jeep. A Jeep could make it down that switchback road. What would Rattlesnake be like, down at the bottom of the gorge? Stu Wiggins hadn’t been exaggerating, she knew, when he talked about sudden walls of water.

But those little wooden houses in Rattlesnake had withstood many years of monsoons. No flash floods had washed them away.

She looked out at the Jeep. She could barely see it through the rain. The Jeep probably would make it down the hill to Rattlesnake. But it would never make it back up the hill.

With a last look back at the dry, safe house, she stepped out the front door and ran. Rain slapped her head, pressing her thick short hair against her skull, pulling the curls straight.

The road looked like an amusement park water slide. A channel of mud ran down the center, rounding each cutback and heading down the next straightaway with renewed force. At the bottom, lights were on in houses and the street was empty. The swollen Rattlesnake River flowed fast, bubbling into whitecaps, rushing over its banks. No wonder they had flash floods here when rivers swelled this fast.

She pushed off and headed down the steep, muddy road. She tried to hug the inside walls, but it was impossible to stay out of the growing stream of mud. Rain slapped in from the north; water streamed down the hillside, swelling the stream in the roadbed. A few yards ahead lightning cracked the air. Almost immediately thunder reverberated off the sides of the canyon. By the second switchback, she was soaked. Her running shoes felt like cement boots. She wiped the rain from her eyes and rushed on, leaping foot to foot, squishing into the mud, smacking the hard surface beneath.

Another flash of lightning seared the color from the road and the cacti and the tombstones. Everything looked dead. Thunder shook the hillside.

At the bottom of the road, she looked toward the village. The river had leapt its banks; it fanned over the village street, gathering broken branches and debris; it lapped at the steps of the houses. On his porch stood Frank McKinley, rifle pointed.

She started into the street toward him. Water rushed over her ankles. An ocotillo branch slapped against her shin. The air was almost too thick to breath. She was halfway across when Frank stepped to the edge of his porch.

“Pa died last night,” he yelled. The cold fury in his voice cut through the drumming of the rain. “I gave him the shot, and he died!”

Despite the steamy rain, she shivered. No men came toward her this time.
Because
no one was going to haul her into the house this time. Because Frank was going to shoot her. Frantically, Kiernan sought for questions—keep him talking. The will? But of course the old man had signed it. That’s what the two witnesses Frank had called were for. Frank gave him the shot only after he’d signed the will.