by Lisa Jackson
“Just call! Now!” he ordered, reaching what appeared to be a woman.
Remmi was already punching in the numbers, her fingers shaking.
“Get to the car! Lock the doors!” He was bending over the woman, while the dog, crouched in the shrubbery, howled mournfully.
Neither of the two people were moving, not an inch, and there was blood, on the grass, on their clothes, every damned where. Remmi thought she might be sick. She didn’t recognize the couple in the dark, but they had to be . . . Oh. God. Oh. God. Ned? And Trudie? Oh dear—
“9-1-1,” a female voice said, bringing her out of her panic. “What is the nature of your emergen—?”
“We need help! There are two people injured here. Badly. We need an ambulance! Do you hear me? An ambulance. EMTs!”
“Please identify yourself and give me the address.”
“Yes. Oh. My name is Remmi Storm and . . . and . . . Oh, God, um, we’re at the Ned Crenshaw place, about four or five miles outside of Sacramento.” She blurted out the address and the fact that two people appeared dead or near dead. When the operator told her to stay on the line, that an officer was being dispatched, Remmi clung to the phone and, on shaking legs, hurried closer.
“Stay back. Crime scene!” Noah barked as the officer on the line said something Remmi didn’t comprehend. It, along with the dog’s yowling, was just noise in a shrinking, horrible world. Her gaze was riveted to the bodies. Unmoving. Close together. On the ground where they’d been attacked. Her heart twisted painfully.
“Didn’t I tell you to get into the car?” he demanded, startling her back to the present. “Whoever did this could still be here.”
Remmi couldn’t stand it. She had to know for certain. She turned on her flashlight with her free hand, and the blood-soaked yard was instantly illuminated. Her worst fears were confirmed as she saw, first, Ned’s upturned face, his eyes closed, his body battered and bruised, his clothes soaked with blood.
Nearby, Trudie was lying prone, except her neck had twisted, her pale profile visible against the grass. Her eyes seemed fixed, her face ghostly pale, the blood showing through her blouse, a large, dark, and spreading stain. Noah caught Remmi staring down at the body. He’d been feeling for a pulse, listening for a breath, while still holding the gun in his free hand. He shook his head. “Gone,” he said quietly, and she heard the operator squawking, hadn’t even realized she’d let her hand slide away from her ear.
Disbelief nearly strangled her. She remembered Trudie’s laughter with her mother, Ned telling her to trust a rambunctious colt in a dusty paddock.
“Turn it off!” Noah ordered, hurtling her back to the here and now. “Remmi! Can you hear me? Turn the damned thing off! The killer could be in the barn or anywhere around here. Jesus! Don’t make us an easier target than we already are.”
She clicked off the high beam.
Remmi thought she’d prepared herself, but as she looked down at the still form of Trudie Melborn, she knew she’d been kidding herself. From a distance, it seemed a woman was talking to her.
The 9-1-1 operator was speaking though the phone. Trying to clear her head, she brought the cell back to her ear.
“Still here.”
“An officer has been dispatched. He should be there within three minutes.”
Remmi barely noticed as Noah moved on his knees to the next body. Ned. Lying still. So close to his wife. But no movement.
Please, let him be alive . . . But there was so much blood. Too much. Pooling beneath the bodies, staining their clothing, and trailing off through the grass toward the back of the large building, where now she heard the sounds of horses.
The dog had finally given up barking, was whining as he lay in a fringe of trees near a fence line surrounding the property.
She surveyed the scene. Why was the trail of blood leading behind the stable? Obviously, Ned and Trudie had fallen here, where they lay, where most of the blood had collected. Unless one, or both, of them had been shot farther away, run, then been shot again, and finally dropped to the ground? Or was it someone else’s? She heard the first siren wailing far in the distance, and then, within seconds, a second, lower siren, bleating through the night.
“He’s still with us,” Noah said, a little hope in his voice and once again bringing her back to the present. She looked down and met his gaze. “Just barely. He’s the one who’s been moaning, but . . .”
“He stopped.” Remmi’s heart felt as heavy as if it were made of stone. Ned’s face, like that of his wife, was colorless, not a hint of movement. Remmi felt tears in her eyes and fought them.
Ignoring Noah’s warning about the crime scene, she walked forward and dropped to her knees, grabbed Ned’s hand in her own. “Hang in there,” she whispered. “No matter what happened, you hang in there.” His hand was still warm and smeared with blood.
“Remmi, don’t,” Noah said, but she twined her fingers through Ned’s. This was the man who had once shown her how to load a shotgun and saddle and ride a horse, told corny jokes, and swore that he could make the best chili “north of Texas.” He’d probably been right. And now . . .
“Stay with me, Ned,” she whispered, “You just stay with me.”
The sirens screamed louder. Looking past the house, she saw flashing lights as emergency vehicles raced ever closer, but they were still far away. She silently prayed that they would make it in time to save Ned Crenshaw’s life.
* * *
What a mess!
Settler surveyed the scene at the Crenshaw farm, now illuminated by temporary lamps as well as exterior lights they’d turned on from switches inside the back door of the house. The victims, identified as Ned Crenshaw and his wife, Gertrude or “Trudie,” had been carted off, she to the county morgue, he to the nearest hospital. His life was hanging by a thread, but Settler hoped to high heaven he hung in there, survived, and was able to tell his story. To her. She planned to head to the hospital the second they were finished here, and she’d cut with a razor through whatever red tape might surround the victims.
Settler didn’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to know that the carnage here was somehow linked to Didi Storm. The two people who found the bodies, Remmi Storm and Noah Effin’ Scott, one of the myriad of people missing from Las Vegas twenty years before, assured her of that. Now, not long out of the army, Scott had apparently become a frickin’ P.I. in Los Angeles.
Just what she didn’t need.
She’d already given them the talk about the attack being police business and warned them to “let the police handle this.” She’d also reminded each of them that they could inadvertently screw up a case, destroy evidence, but judging from their reactions, she figured they’d each heard the spiel before, maybe multiple times, and most likely had ignored it in the past.
They would again.
She’d read it in their gazes.
Great. Just frickin’ great.
Now Storm and Scott were in separate squad cars, being interviewed by different officers who were taking their preliminary statements. Though she’d been fooled before, Settler didn’t think either one had actually fired the missing rifle. No, she believed their story that they’d come here when they’d figured out that Trudie Melborn was not only Mrs. Ned Crenshaw but also the fictitious Maryanne Osgoode. Even so, there was a chance that they knew more than they were telling or were, in some way, even unintentionally, complicit.
They’d already screwed up the crime scene, whether inadvertently or intentionally. Settler was betting on inadvertently as Remmi Storm appeared shell-shocked. Noah Scott, not so much. But he’d had a lot of time in the military, had served in war zones. He’d seen it all.
“The blood trail ended at an access road just on the other side of the Crenshaw property, where it butts up to federal land,” Martinez informed her. “Crime guys are typing the blood on the ground, making matches to the victims and taking tire prints.”
“Any good ones?”
“Too many. Looks like
it’s a place kids might go from the trash littering the area. Broken beer bottles, condoms, sacks from McDonald’s and In-N-Out and Burger King, and all the rest.”
“Wash your Big Mac down with a Coors Light.”
“Bud,” he corrected. “Bud seemed to be the beer of choice.”
“Okay.”
“Anything else up there?”
“Not that I can see, but it’s dark; they’re putting up lights, going over everything with a fine-tooth comb. And the lead—you’ve met her, Anna Lee? She’s pissed, says the whole scene’s compromised by Scott and Storm trying to revive the victims.”
“What were they supposed to do, just stand in the driveway and wait?”
“She would have preferred they stay off the property altogether. Maybe park on the road. Or in the next county.”
Settler nodded. Anna Lee was precise and good at her job, but she was intense, and if anyone screwed up, or made her job harder, they heard about it. “Well, too bad. It is what it is.”
“God, I hate that saying. It’s almost worse than ‘What goes around, comes around.’”
“No, that’s worse,” Settler thought as she studied the Crenshaws’ backyard and noticed the strips of crime-scene tape that roped off the killing area and what was assumed to be the escape route of the wounded killer. That was a bonus. The fact that the murder had occurred here, in the county, not her jurisdiction, wasn’t. But the detective in charge, Brian Ladlow, was efficient and, rather than look at Settler and Martinez as adversaries who were butting in to his case, actually welcomed them.
He was approaching now, a big man who had played pro football for one season before an ankle injury had taken him out permanently. He was a foot taller than Settler, probably double her weight, and everything about him, from his close-cropped hair to his perma-press clothes, screamed efficiency, no nonsense, and definitely no frills.
“Getting anything from the witnesses?” she asked, hitching her chin toward the two squad cars where Remmi Storm and Noah Scott were giving their preliminary statements.
“Not so far.” His voice was deep, rough from a cigarette habit, judging from the pack visible in his shirt pocket and the slight scent of smoke not quite covered by a breath mint. “Just what you’d expect. And they jibe. They’re clean.”
“But connected,” Settler reminded him.
“Uh-huh. That business about the woman who jumped from the Montmort? Heard all about it. But I gotta tell you, I don’t see how. So this guy, Crenshaw, was married to Didi Storm for what? Like two minutes? I think it’s stranger that these two”—he motioned toward the squad cars—“show up here like minutes after the attack went down.”
They’d found rifle shells here, near the victims, and some farther away, near a large eucalyptus tree in the yard between the stable and the house. It appeared that Crenshaw and his wife had been in the stable and had come out, most likely with a pitchfork that had been found discarded in the bushes surrounding the house, its long wooden handle smeared with blood. Had the killer been hiding behind the tree and ambushed them as they left the stable, or had the victims been chased from the building and the killer, behind them, taken cover by the tree and fired?
Still unknown.
“They showed up pretty damned quick after the vics were shot,” Ladlow said, the fingers of his right hand delving into his shirt pocket and extracting a cigarette. “Kind of a coincidence, if you believe them.”
Settler nodded. “Lucky for the Crenshaws they got here when they did.”
“Not so much. She’s dead. He will be soon if he isn’t already.” Ladlow fiddled with the cigarette, didn’t light up.
Settler said, “Let’s hope not. I want to hear what he has to say.”
“You and me both.” Ladlow stared at the bloody ground, watched the techs for a second. “Helluva thing. Double murder.”
“Not yet.” He was starting to irritate her by writing off Crenshaw when Settler felt talking to the rancher would be key to the investigation. Sure, they could analyze phone records, computer data, e-mail accounts, and the like, but that would take time and wouldn’t fill in all the blanks. Hopefully, Ned Crenshaw, if and when he regained consciousness, would be able to complete some of the missing pieces that linked this attack to the woman who had jumped from the Montmort and, yes, back to what happened to Didi Storm.
From the corner of her eye, she witnessed the interior light of one of the squad cars wink on, and Remmi Storm got out, slamming the door shut behind her. She was still talking to the officer who’d been interviewing her and now appeared to be waiting for Noah Scott.
What was their deal?
When she’d talked to Remmi the other day, Settler had gotten the impression she hadn’t seen him since leaving Las Vegas. She made a note to check that out, if the officer interviewing her hadn’t already gotten a satisfactory answer.
In the other car, Noah Scott was still being interviewed. That was going to take a while. There was a lot more to question him about—if not this case, then the other one, when he’d walked away from the hospital in Las Vegas as a kid. For the first time, the police could question him about what had happened in the desert that night, see if he could ID the would-be assassin who had shot him in the neck and left him for dead. Or possibly the man who’d died in the Mustang, even whether he’d seen a baby exchange or whatever the hell it had been.
Las Vegas PD had been notified. They’d want to talk to Scott as well as Ms. Storm about each of their parts in that very old, very cold case.
So far, the two seemed to be cooperating, and Settler’s first instinct was to think neither of them was the murderer. But you never knew. She’d learned that sometimes the least likely suspect was a stone-cold killer—the most boring guy who was forever mowing his lawn or walking his dog or helping a neighbor fix his fence. Once in a while, behind an everyday mask was the face of a monster. How many times had she heard shocked statements from those who had known a killer—a man who lived in the neighborhood. The remarks had varied from “Helluva nice guy” to “He kept to himself most of the time, but he was friendly enough” or “I can’t believe it; he seemed so normal.” There were the crazies who went on killing sprees, of course, the killer everyone knew was “a little off ” or “odd” or “a loner,” the one about whom someone always said, “I always wondered about him.” But, often as not, a killer turned out to be the guy in the neighborhood who was least expected to be so violent.
Settler eyed the crime scene once more. Blood still everywhere on the grass, the house itself spotless—or it had been before they’d arrived and started dusting for fingerprints and searching for evidence. Then there was the stable, with its three horses, and the barn where twenty or so head of cattle came and went. The animal control people would see that the animals were cared for through a neighbor they’d interviewed; Joe Pastiche had come to the scene out of curiosity and, realizing what had happened, had been shocked and distraught and then offered to see to the stock and the dog. Animal control was considering letting Pastiche take the job once he was checked out and it was determined he was in the clear, hadn’t been a part of the attack.
Good.
She watched as the techs went over the ground, taking pictures, covering the area in the grid, looking for the tiniest bit of trace evidence. The blood, though, if any of it was from the killer rather than the victims, that would be the best. If the killer was in the system. If not . . . well, first things first, and what she wanted to do was interview Ned Crenshaw if he ever regained consciousness. She was heading to the hospital as soon as she was done here. Already, she’d ordered a comparison between the bullets from the body of Mrs. Crenshaw and those extracted from Noah Scott twenty years earlier, as well as the one found in the dead John Doe who had been burned beyond recognition in the rented Mustang in the desert.
Maybe, just maybe, the two cases could be linked, and she would find some clue to what happened and the reason Karen Upgarde had jumped and Didi Storm had disap
peared.
* * *
He was fucked.
Big-time.
The Marksman had left the Crenshaw place in a hurry, nearly peeling out. He’d been parked on the access road facing out, for a quick exit, but that’s about the only part of his plan that had worked as it was supposed to. He’d been bleeding like a stuck pig from the wound in his leg and knew he’d left a trail of blood. That wasn’t supposed to have happened.
He’d gotten too close, wanted to taunt the cocksucker.
He checked his face in the rearview mirror once he’d put Sacramento behind him and didn’t like what he saw. His visage spoke of violence. It looked like he’d gone ten rounds with a damned grizzly bear and lost. How the hell was he supposed to hide that? Wear a mask? That fuckin’ son of a bitch, Ned Crenshaw!
Driving, mindful of keeping his speedometer right at the speed limit, he rethought the plan and decided he’d underestimated Crenshaw. The killer should have expected that the cowboy wouldn’t die like a normal human being. The Marksman had been a fool to let himself get so close, to taunt the man. He knew better, damn it. Shoot from a distance. Hit in the heart or the head and get the hell out. That was his forte. He was good at long distance—the best, he’d told himself; it was the very reason he’d been hired in the first place, back when this all started so long ago. And tonight he’d fucked up. He had the pistol, here in the Explorer, locked in its case, and he hadn’t even taken it with him to the killing site to finish the job. All in all, the job had been a major cluster-fuck, and ultimately, he could blame no one but himself.
He pounded the steering wheel. Why the hell had he gotten so sloppy? Why the hell had he let his emotions get the better of him? Why the hell had he let Ned Crenshaw take a damned pitchfork to his face and a pair of wire clippers to his thigh?
Because you’d wanted to gloat. Don’t you know that pride goeth before a fall? He heard the words as if Granny were speaking directly to him, as if her damned ghost were seated in the passenger seat, lighting a Pall Mall cigarette, the black kind that she’d smoked on the sly. Pride is a sin, you know. One of the seven. And so is murder, but there’s no talkin’ you outta that. I know. I saw how you were, even at ten, maybe eight, how you loved to hunt. To kill. Why do you think I tried so hard for you to find the Lord? Do you remember your Latin? Do you? Do you remember how to atone? God will catch up with you, boy. You know he will.
