Time of Death (17 page)

PJ, still heated from their earlier discussion, left a rather snotty note for Schultz, propping it up on the steering wheel. The path through the woods beckoned.

It actually felt good getting out in the fresh air and walking. She ached in more places than she could count, but as her muscles warmed to the task, it was almost a good ache. Her sore but working body was a reminder that the outcome of the attempt on her life could have been very different.

The first building, larger than she’d originally thought, contained chickens. It was an old-fashioned chicken coop, with a roosting area indoors and a fenced yard for chickens to scratch. The yard was relatively quiet, since most of the hens were dozing in the sun. There was a substantial buffer zone between the coop and the surrounding homes. The woods didn’t continue far past the buildings, but beyond them was a pasture area that had probably held cattle in years past.

The barn had a feeling of abandonment about it. If the farmhouse was a tired, old woman, then the barn was a corpse long buried. There was an oversized door, wide enough to admit cattle. She went to the door and tugged on it. It swung open on creaky hinges.

It wasn’t pitch black inside because the old roof had gaps that let in the sun. Shafts of light fell to the floor, filled with motes that looked more substantial than dust. There were massive beams far above her head, stained with what she assumed was pigeon shit.

The smell of rotten blood hit her nose, strong enough that she reeled back from it. PJ wondered if Old Hank killed chickens there. She pushed herself forward, remembering the little jab from Schultz about her staying in the car.

If chickens had been killed here, it must have been poultry’s equivalent of Custer’s Last Stand. There was a workbench near the center of the open space that was stained with blood. The dirt floor around the bench was churned up and reddish. Sluggish flies crawled across the surface of the workbench on the far end. It was December, after all, and while she might see an occasional fly indoors, there were more here than she would have expected.

Giving the bench a wide berth, PJ followed the wall of the barn, stepping on straw that at one time must have filled the barn with a clean, earthy scent. She didn’t want to contaminate the place, but she had to see what the attraction was for the flies on the workbench.

Moldy chicken heads, no doubt.

PJ had to detour around a six-foot-high compost pile that smelled strongly of ammonia. Light wisps of steam rose from the decomposition process of the chicken manure. Hank had probably gotten complaints about outdoor composting, so he would keep enough manure to use on a garden and have the rest hauled away. Flies must love it. For them it would be like living in a sauna that was simultaneously a buffet. Old Hank was growing flies as well as chickens.

She was almost there. The air was still and heavy, and she was reminded of her image of the barn as a corpse long buried. She was breathing the kind of air she imagined would be in an old wooden casket. The barn creaked in a hundred places, weathered wood rubbing against itself, as the wind blew outside. The air inside resisted or absorbed the wind’s motion, so that she stood below the groaning rafters with not the slightest air movement at ground level, other than the wings of the flies, to stir the straw.

As she walked, new angles of the workbench and its surroundings opened up to her. Stainless steel basins littered the floor, some blood spattered, some containing odd-shaped chunks that didn’t look like chicken heads. The closer she got the more activity she saw from the flies. A few more steps and she had a clear view of the end of the workbench. There was something nailed there, several somethings, with nails that were decades newer than the wood into which they were pounded. A scream built in her belly and was working its way toward her mouth when she heard Schultz’s voice.

“There you are. … Holy shit! I think we found where Arlan Merrett was killed.”

PJ swallowed her scream. “I think we found Arlan Merrett’s missing parts, too,” she said.

P
J SAT AT HER
desk, aching. She’d like to go home, soak in a hot bath, and put her sore body to bed. She was caught up, though, in the drama of having found the place where Arlan was murdered and the prospect of finally putting together a complete virtual reality re-creation. She’d left Schultz, Dave, and Anita at the scene and gotten a ride back to Headquarters. She needed to do what she did best, and let them do the same.

The stale air in her office didn’t seem nearly as oppressive as it usually did, in comparison to the air in the barn.

Her riverfront scenario had yielded a potentially valuable insight. Maneuvering the solidly built Arlan to the dump site would at least be possible for women as well as men. That included petite females such as Fredericka and males working at a disadvantage, such as Frank.

Frank! There had hardly been a minute to absorb the fact of his murder and to fit it into theories she’d been tossing around. The husbands of two sisters dying violent deaths within such a short time cried out for connecting the dots, but PJ was missing some of the dots. And how did Marilee Baines’s brutal murder fit in?

Three deaths in three days, followed by a likely attempt on her life. It was shaping up to be a week for the record books in both her professional and private lives. Her relationship with Schultz was like background music to everything she did, except she couldn’t figure out if it was harmony or discordance.

Who had tried to kill her?

The car that made contact with hers had left trace evidence, a scrape on her bumper, with paint embedded in it. Forensics identified the paint as belonging to a blue 1991 Chevrolet Lumina. A car matching that description had been stolen the day before from a commuter parking lot in St. Charles. The stolen vehicle belonged to a construction worker named Antoine Card. Having no transportation since his car was stolen, Card hitched a ride with friends. He was at the site of a new subdivision development moving earth with a backhoe loader at the time his car, if it was his, was used to push PJ into traffic. The stolen car hadn’t turned up yet.

The person who’d tried to harm her was still out there, maybe planning another attempt. Was it even connected with this case? It might be a relative or friend of someone she’d help put away for murder, or even something further back in her life. Perhaps evil Carla the home wrecker was after her for some demented reason. Taking away PJ’s husband wasn’t enough. PJ admonished herself for that little twinge of paranoia.

Take it one thing at a time.

Focusing on the first murder, she started making notes on a profile of the killer or killers. She still favored a team theory. The profile was a description of personality and lifestyle that can help narrow an investigation but never dictated it. A behavioral fingerprint. The place to start was looking at what the killer chose to do and what not to do.

Arlan disappeared sometime after four in the afternoon last Wednesday. He was killed Saturday night in Hank’s barn, and dumped at the edge of the Mississippi in time to be spotted by a Sunday morning dog walker. He’d never made it to Chicago to meet with clients, and his car had never been found. Where had he been until the time of his death?

Arlan was involved with some shady real estate developers in Chicago, maybe the type who might arrange a murder if cheated or if there was a monetary advantage to having an associate out of the picture. In that case the killing would have been cold and efficient, a garroting or slit throat or bullet in the head, with no wasted effort. Certainly not the elaborate setup in Hank’s barn. There was something very personal about that.

Someone watched those tears, with hatred or satisfaction.

Unless the whole setup was a ruse to make the police think a psycho killer was on the loose. She decided to set aside that consideration for now. If she was falling into the killer’s diversionary trap, she’d have to extricate herself later.

The killer had to be organized and confident enough to abduct in daylight, emotionally involved enough to take out anger in the flesh. That pointed to a love affair, a marriage, a soured business relationship, a dysfunctional family. The problem was the killer could be experiencing any or all of those things with someone other than his victim. Some murderers can’t bring themselves to attack the true target, and take it out instead on strangers carefully selected because they invoke the same sick feelings. The son whose mother sexually abused him and warped him for life kills wanton, dirty women—prostitutes—but not his mother, for whom he still has a sharply conflicted love.

The killer could be a stranger who chose Arlan for some twisted reason, and the swirl of suspects her team had been considering could have nothing to do with it.

Look-alike Marilee could have been chosen as the permissible target by someone who despises June, but couldn’t attack her directly.

Frank, whose killing was straightforward and toward the impersonal end of the spectrum, could have been done by a killer who just wanted him out of the way for monetary reasons.

Focus! One thing at a time.

Spread out on her desk were photographs of the barn, sketches she’d made showing dimensions and relative locations of items, riverfront photos, and Arlan’s autopsy report.

What was done to Arlan that wasn’t needed in the killing, but provided some twisted, personal satisfaction to the killer?

That was easy. Practically everything about his murder wasn’t needed to kill him. Keep him captive for four days and then stage an elaborate operating room scene. Cut off his male equipment, his fingertips, his mouth, dig through his flesh to stab him in the heart up close and personal. Continue the mutilation by nailing the severed parts to the workbench.

Yet once the killer was finished with that ritual, Arlan’s body was left at the waterfront like a dead fish. There was no attempt to care for him after death, like a mother who strangles her newborn but puts a nice outfit on the baby, booties on his cold, dead feet, and wraps him in a quilt. Two behaviors. Two killers?

So what would the killer’s unique signature be?

Take your pick of half a dozen behaviors that weren’t necessary.

Fingers, mouth, penis, heart. All components of expressing love. The killer could be taking away Arlan’s capacity to love. Maybe two jilted lovers cooperating to get their vengeance. June and Fredericka? June did the mutilating of the second man who’d betrayed her, and Fredericka handled the dead fish disposal to get her hands on Green Vista. It made as much sense as anything else she’d come up with.

The ring of the phone startled her out of deep concentration. It was Schultz.

“Dave and Anita are still at the barn. I imagine they’ll be there a while. Place is an evidence tech’s nightmare. Or dream come true, if you think of it in terms of the challenge. Forensics is finally hoping they’ll get a break. I’m at the Simmons home.”

An idea popped into PJ’s mind. “Leo, do you think the barn could be where Arlan was held those four days?”

Schultz gave it some thought. “Nah. Hank was in there last Friday, adding shit to his compost pile. Even he would have noticed a man tied up in there. There’s no place to hide.”

“Well, it was a thought. How’s May handling her husband’s death?”

“She seems more worried about how the children are taking it.”

“The selfless mom act,” PJ said. “I thought she left most of the child rearing to the nanny.”

“May talks a good show, that’s all. She wasn’t even the one who told the kids that Daddy was dead. Can you believe that? Delegated it to the nanny.”

“How does Frank’s death leave her financially?” PJ asked.

“With twenty million dollar trust funds for each of the kids and fifty million for her.”

“Makes you wonder whether she’s better off with or without him. She’s a climber. She might think of it as an opportunity to move up a rung or two with an advantageous remarriage. I’ll bet she’s not devastated.”

“She’s been using that baby shampoo,” Schultz said. “No more tears.”

“She was with you at the time of the murder, but do you think she could have hired it done?” PJ said.

“Yeah. It could have been someone with free access to the house, and I don’t just mean the Christmas open house guest list.”

“You mean like the cook? The cook in the study with the revolver?”

“Ha, ha,” said Schultz. There was a brittle tone to his voice. She was pushing too hard with her smart remarks. Neither of them had gotten a lot of sleep. Things were fraying around the edges.

“You said the maid didn’t want to stay a maid all her life, right?” Schultz said. “Wanted to be an interior designer? We’ve confirmed the alarm system was off. Maybe she let in the killer for the price of a little shop in West County.”

“I didn’t read her that way.”

“Oh, and I guess that my thirty years of reading people gets brushed aside just like that.”

“Take it easy, Leo. You’re under a lot of stress. Stress makes people leap to conclusions.”

“Stress, bullshit. That’s not a strong enough word for it. These people are dying right in front of our eyes. We missed Shower Woman’s killer by minutes. Five minutes earlier, and I might have shot the motherfucker who got Frank Simmons.”

“You’re the one who always tells me it isn’t good to dwell on the what ifs.”

“Yeah, well, that advice was for you.”

There it was again. The implication that she was a
non-cop
and had to be babied. Like being told for the umpteenth time not to touch things at a crime scene or to stay in the car.

She forced herself not to react. This wasn’t the time to be working out their relationship. She had a job to do, and so did he.

“I’ve got something I want to bounce off you,” she said, her voice level.

A bowling ball to the skull, maybe.

She told him about the theory she’d just come up with, about the killer wanting to wipe out Arlan’s ability to love by taking away his fingers, mouth, penis, and heart.

“Christ, Doc, this isn’t the Land of Oz. Next it’ll be a search for a heart, a brain, and courage. Maybe I’d better put out an APB for the Wicked Witch of the West.”