The Debt Collector (3 page)

She looked away. And everywhere at once.

It was a nice house, cleaner than most, under normal circumstances anyway, which these were not.

The bookshelves in the corner were built-in, painted with white enamel, liberally speckled with blood and another thin dark substance. Coffee? There were glass fragments and the base of what looked like a shattered coffeepot. Brown liquid had soaked into volume G of a set of the
World Book Encyclopedia
and some scattered issues of
Scientific American
. A Pottery Barn catalog had been ripped in half and tossed on the floor.

The VCR was on, the television screen static, on mute. An empty case, open on top of the television, said
Wallace & Gromit and the Wrong Trousers
. Cartoon puppets. A dog on the cover, grinning.

Was it Wallace, Sonora wondered, or Gromit?

The carpet was fairly new, a color called Irish Linen. She knew it from the swatches she had looked at when the desire for new carpet had been overwhelming enough to make her at least pick some out.

It would need to be replaced.

Sonora noticed drapes hanging loose over the picture window. The gold tasseled cord had come from there.

Opportunistic, then. Whoever it was had not brought his own rope.

She moved back to the father, squatted next to Sam, who was lifting the man's hands, still bound, as high as the cords would allow. A strip of white flesh on the left wrist looked stark against the deep brown of the forearm. Which told Sonora that this man spent time outdoors and that his watch had been stolen.

It was hard to tell from the battered face, but she would guess him to have been handsome. He wore loose tan chinos, bibbed with blood, and a polo shirt, open at the throat, which was open itself where a bullet had entered the Adam's apple dead center.

She wondered what he had looked like yesterday. She would have to check the family pictures.

His left eye was swollen shut, and dried blood streaked from his nose, also swollen. There was vomit on the shirt, dry now, a yellow brown crust.

Sam turned the hands from side to side, gave a low whistle. If force of will could have freed Carl Stinnet, he'd have been up and off that chair, but the thick polyester cord, a good three-quarter-inch across, had proved impossible.

The man's right eye was open and unmarked, cool gray and bloodshot. Sonora looked at his right leg. A bullet had shattered the shinbone and exited through the back of the calf, the same bullet that had smashed the leg of the chair.

“Watch is missing.” Sam checked the man's trouser pockets. “No wallet.”

Sonora bent closer in to the body. “Sam, you got some tweezers or something?”

He raised an eyebrow, which annoyed her.

“Don't do that, Sam.”

“Do what?” He handed her a pair of red-handled needle-nose pliers.

“Raise your eyebrows at me like that.”

“Why not?”

“I don't like it, that's why not. Here, look at this.”

“What is it?”

“I don't know, that's why I'm asking you. It looks like a little pebble or something, but I found one just like it in the mailbox, and this one was stuck in this guy's hair.”

Sam took the pliers. Gave the pebble the sniff test, shrugged, pulled an evidence bag out of his pocket. The bag stuck, bringing out a train of three little bags. Sonora separated them and opened one up.

“What is it?” she said.

“A thingie, hell, I don't know. We'll send it to the lab. Probably just a rock.”

“But there was one in the mailbox, Sam, were you paying attention?”

“A rock?”

“Yeah, just like this one. I think that's weird.”

Sam squatted on his haunches. Gave her a heavy look. “Don't get stuck on this, Sonora. There's lots of other stuff here to be looking at.”

“You think?”

Sonora heard voices, heavy footsteps on the porch, men in boots. Waiting. Crime-scene techs.

Sam stood up, and she glanced back across the room to the dog. Something there, behind the couch, a bit of blue denim against the Irish Linen carpet. She didn't bother to stand up but went toward the swatch of blue on all fours.

She saw it as she rounded the corner of the couch—a tiny little fist, chubby, nestled in a blue cotton sleeve. A small boy, two or three, lay curled next to the tail of the dog. The child's eyes were half lidded, like a coma patient's, cheeks showing tear tracks that had long since dried. Sonora checked the soft, china-pale skin at the base of the neck, which, she could see, was broken.

A quick death. She glanced up the wall at the fan of blood spray left by the dog. Saw a dent in the drywall that looked like the mark of an errant baseball. The child had been thrown up against the wall, she decided, which likely made the dog go nuts.

“Baby's behind the couch,” Sonora said. She put a feather-light finger on the top of the child's head, noted the thickness of a diaper beneath the OshKosh overalls, the little blue cotton turtleneck with Winnie the Pooh on the left shoulder. Young for the tricycle. Perhaps a hand-me-down, taken out of a corner in the garage as the weather turned nice?

“Quick, though—neck broken.” Is that my voice? Sonora thought. That cool professional woman is me? She stood up, knees rubbery.

“Got a blood trail,” Sam said, and she followed him to the hallway.

“Is it from the father?”

“What?” Sam asked.

“The blood trail. From the dad?”

“No, Sonora, see? It comes from the hall, stops there by the television, heads out to the kitchen.”

“
Wallace and Gromit,
” Sonora said, following the red and brown smear down the narrow hallway. Something gave beneath her feet and squeaked. She froze, stomach jumping. Sam clicked on his flashlight. Looked down.

A plastic hamburger.

“Dog toy,” Sonora said.

Sam nodded. “Wallace and what?”

“Never mind.”

A strip of light blazed across the carpet. The bathroom door was open. The blood trail led from the carpeted hallway onto the yellow-gold tile. Sam took a step inside.

“Move over,” Sonora said.

The shower curtain had been torn from the blue plastic rings and left in a blood-smeared bunch in the corner. Sonora looked carefully. Nothing there but shower curtain, no hidden surprises.

Blood smeared the outside of the toilet bowl. One platform tennis shoe, hot-pink and stained, laces still knotted in a double bow, sat atop a hunter-green towel, bloody and wet, wadded on the back of the tank. Sam crouched on his hands and knees.

“We've got a tooth here, looks like somebody got a fist in the face. And a strand of long brown hair.”

“Note it, will you?” Sonora headed down the hall. She stopped by a room on the right, door open. Canopy bed, pink bedspread. Clothes in neat little piles as if someone had been sorting the laundry. Sonora walked in, stood in the center of the room. Saw in a glance a white and rose picture frame that showed the pretty and still-childish face of the girl who lay on the ruffled pink bedspread, hands folded on her chest, a gash zigzagging across her throat like black, bloody lightning. She wore one pink platform tennis shoe, a match to the one in the bathroom, a sagging white cotton sock on the other foot. Her shell-pink sweater was ripped at the shoulder, exposing a beige bra strap, but her jeans, baggy and low on the narrow, boyish hips, were still neatly bound by a thin leather belt.

Sonora put a gloved finger to the child's chin, touching the delicate, lifeless face, noting the bruising and swelling coming up under the jawline. Not right for postmortem pooling, the girl had been hit. Her hands were not tied. She looked as if she had been placed on the bed and arranged by loving hands. A remorseful killer? No one had felt remorse over the baby and the father in the living room. Had the killer run out of time? And yet. Bullets and cold carelessness for the living-room victims, knives and remorse for the girl in the bedroom.

Two predators?

Sonora crouched close to the bed. The spread beneath the child's neck was drenched red with blood, enough to soak through to the mattress. So she had been killed on the bed and left there.

Sonora wondered who had bled so badly in the bathroom.

She took a penlight from her blazer pocket, shone it in the girl's mouth. Braces—white ones, not the clanky metal ones she remembered from her own childhood—but no missing tooth. And yet she would bet the long brown hair would match the strand Sam found in the bathroom.

Sonora looked back at the photograph. What had the uniform said her name was? Tammy?

She'd had prominent, heavy-lidded eyes, thin, sandy-brown hair, and a wide, happy smile. In the picture, she stood with her arms over the shoulders of two girlfriends, all in red suits that said
Brill High Swim Team
. The three girls looked giddy, wet, and a little cold.

Sonora stood up, glanced around the room, which was immaculate except for the pizza crust on a paper plate on the windowsill. The desk, a maze of papers and books, was dust-free. Blue and yellow ribbons were tied to the bedpost. Sonora fingered them softly with the gloved hand that was free of blood. Swim meets.

She went back into the hallway, saw Sam in the next room, which was awkwardly overfurnished with a brand-new juvie twin bed on one side and a crib on the other. Two babies in one room—a full house. The room was blue, the domain for a little boy and Tonka trucks. Blocks were everywhere. A tiny soccer ball had rolled to the foot of the bed. A pile of Legos sat next to an empty bin. They would have made a hell of a racket when they were dumped, Sonora thought.

She stepped over Legos and Lincoln Logs. Saw the white wicker bassinet hidden by the crib's headboard. It was lined with ruffled yellow gingham, made up with a fresh cotton sheet that sported tiny little bears. A rainbow-striped blanket lay neatly folded at the end, yellow pacifier on the sheet.

There was a changing table next to the bassinet, lined with Johnson's baby powder, A&D Ointment, Baby Fresh wet wipes, and a bottle of dark brown liquid with an orange stopper. Vitamins.

Sonora had given her children exactly those vitamins, and she remembered that they smelled harshly of iron and stained everything rusty brown. She looked into the diaper stacker. Disposables, small ones. Took a last look around the room, inhaling the soft scent of powder that brought back a million and one images of her own children—late nights, early mornings, snugging up a diaper while their little legs cycled, kissing the bottoms of those tiny pink feet. Sonora wrote quickly and meticulously in her notebook.

She looked across the room at Sam. “Anything?”

“No blood trails from this room, thank God. You?”

She pointed. “The daughter's on her bed, throat cut.” She stepped backward, letting him go ahead. Was it her imagination, could she smell blood? “You been in the master yet?”

“Not yet.”

“From the looks of this place, I don't much rate the chances of that mom and baby.”

Sam gave her a sideways look. “They may have grabbed the mother to access the ATM. Took the baby along to keep the mother under control.”

“You ask the uniform who called this in?”

“Next-door neighbor. Saw the car door open on the LeBaron when she came home from work. Didn't think a whole lot about it. Came out after supper to take her baby for a walk. Saw it was still open. Tried to call. No answer. The front door was shut, and locked.

“So. The husband comes home, she tells him about it. He looks in the living-room window. Curtains closed. Gets a creepy feeling. Starts wondering why the dog isn't barking with him looking in the window. Decides to call the cops.

“Uniforms go around back to the kitchen, see a broken windowpane, blood trail, they go in.”

“And no sign of the mom or baby?”

“Nope. But a major blood trail in the master.”

“After you.”

Sonora paused at the doorway, noted the rumpled bedspread covered in towels, some folded, some wadded. The bed was at an odd angle, and there were indentations in the carpet, so someone had shoved it sideways. The lamp from the bedside table had crashed to the floor, shattering the lightbulb and bending the frilled paisley lamp shade that nicely matched the bedspread and curtains.

A battered antique walnut dresser took up the entire far wall. A small rosewood crucifix hung over a bevel-edged mirror that had splintered and cracked from the impact of a bullet, which left a hole on the right side, near the top. A bloody thumbprint streaked the glass next to a lineup of pictures that were tucked into the edges of the wood frame.

Sonora frowned. Looked at Sam. “What?”

“What what?”

“I thought I heard you say something. Did you say something?”

“No.” He headed for the walk-in closet. “Man oh man.”

“What now?”

“Closet looks like World War Three. Or the closet in your bedroom, if you minus the blood.”

“There's blood?”

“
Oh
yeah.”

Sonora heard footsteps, saw a shadow in the hallway from the corner of her eye. “Blair?”

She recognized the voice instantly. Deep, edgy, and harsh. “Crick's here,” she said.

“About time.” Sam looked at her over his shoulder. “How many guys you thinking?”

“Two makes the most sense to me. We've got the girl in the bedroom like she was placed, clothes intact, and her throat slit. Like the killer felt remorse.”

“He cover her up?”

“No, but her hands were folded over her chest.”

“Didn't look like remorse in that living room.”

“Different guy. Maybe there were two of them, egging each other on.”

“A couple-a team players in a psychotic pissing contest?”

“Something like that.”

“Blair? Delarosa?”

“In here,” Sam and Sonora said together.

Crick's bulk made the hallway shrink. “You guys been working together too long, you're worse than married. What you got in here?”