by Susan Dunlap
As she neared the cafe/motel, she eyed the parking lot. Yellow light paled down on the barren macadam. But patrol cars can be parked behind buildings. She checked the far side of the road. Nothing there. Dragging her attention from the seductive thought of food, she reached for the radio knob and had the power on before she realized what she was doing—mental wandering from exhaustion. If Tchernak were here, he’d have caught that mental disarray way before she admitted it. “You’re too tired to decide to stop,” he would say. Moving inertia, he’d labeled it. The last time had been heading home from L.A after a long day following a lead that dead-ended and a longer evening explaining to the client. Tchernak had been driving. “Come on,” Tchernak had said as he stretched his long arm across the back of the seat, “think with your eyes closed for a minute.” Her head had nested so easily in the pocket of his shoulder, her own shoulder wedged against the cushioning muscles of his chest, her hand flopped comfortably on his thigh; the fresh smell of wintergreen he’d been using on a strained muscle soothed her, and the sound of her breathing—or was it his?—sucked her into sleep.
She shook off the memory. Maybe she was too tired back then, but now she was just fine. She was almost abreast of the yellow lights of the cafe. She slowed slightly—anyone would do that—and eyed the cafe for a telltale hood or fender poking out from behind. There was only one vehicle, too big and bright for a law enforcement vehicle, and it was parked not outside the cafe but by a motel door.
Reluctantly she stepped harder on the gas. She checked the rearview mirror for sudden headlights and a flashing red bar above. But all she saw were the tan buildings and yellow lights shrinking farther away until there was nothing but shapes and colors, tan and yellow and the dot of gold from the vehicle by the motel, till the whole oasis was a tiny amber bead on a black velvet table.
She crested a rise and it was gone.
CHAPTER 42
TCHERNAK HEARD THE WHOOSH of a car on the interstate. In the stone-still air of the motel room, it sounded like an eighteen-wheeler … driving through his head.
He forced himself to focus. He should do something. He had seen blood, plenty of it on the field. He’d seen legs broken, jagged ends of bone snapped through the skin. He’d been there when the whistle blew, the pile unpiled, and a body was left lying on the AstroTurf dead-still, and the coach and the trainer and the medical crew rushed on and hovered, and every player on either team and all seventy thousand fans in the stands remembered guys who had snapped their necks or smashed their skulls so hard that their brains tore loose. Those guys were friends a helluva lot closer than Grady Hummacher. But they hadn’t been dead. And Grady Hummacher sure as hell was. Tchernak didn’t need to get any nearer to his body to know that. He couldn’t get nearer; his legs felt like they were wrapped in cement. Like they were dead.
God, and the smell! He had to get out of here.
But he couldn’t do that. Not with Grady lying there. From the looks of the room, Grady’d be lucky to have any blood left in him. Tchernak stared at Grady’s back. He knew he should turn him over, check his face. But he just couldn’t.
He’d check out the room first.
He stuck his hands in his pockets, safe from the danger of leaving fingerprints, and lumbered to the far side of the bed, running his gaze over the floor, the chair, the walls—anything but Grady Hummacher, who had been sitting in the airport bar with him talking about the girlfriend who was no longer a girlfriend and the teenaged boys he’d plopped on her.
Tchernak froze. The boys. Where were they? Teenagers? Thirteen years old, or nineteen? He was breathing through his mouth now, teeth together as if they could fence out the smell. He moved slowly across the room, keeping his back to the wall. There were no bodies on the far side of the bed. The bathroom door was open. Tchernak pushed it hard against the wall. Nothing behind it. He flicked on the light before he thought about it. And flicked it off as soon as he eyed the whole room. The boys were not here. Water gurgled in the sink.
Tchernak turned off the water and stood in the bathroom doorway. Last night Louisa swore Grady had plucked the boys from her office. That had to be true. No one else would have bothered with them. It had to be Grady who’d taken them. They trusted Grady.
Or so Grady had intimated.
Tchernak surveyed the swirl of blood and sheets one more time. Maybe these boys weren’t so trusting. Maybe they got fed up with Grady coming and going, leaving them in a barrio apartment with neighbors they couldn’t hear. They were boys used to fending for themselves in the jungle; given the alienation and frustration of their lives, the two of them could have snapped and beaten Grady till he stopped moving.
And then run off into the dark.
Or they could be lurking within, spitting distance, panicked out of their minds, ready to lash out at anyone in the world they couldn’t understand.
It was stupid to stay here at the death scene, Tchernak knew that. He had to get out. But he couldn’t do that without checking out the body. He was a detective, after all. And he owed that much to Grady.
He swallowed hard, walked over to the body, and grabbed its shoulders. God, it was still warm. Still soft, like Grady was just sleeping. Like he wasn’t covered with blood. Tchernak cut off all thought, all emotion, all urge to drop the body and run like mad.
His face was matted with blood. Even his eyes were bloody.
Tchernak dropped him so fast, he bounced. Then he ran outside away from the room and threw up his guts.
CHAPTER 43
KIERNAN SCREECHED INTO A U and headed back north on Route 93 and into the cafe parking lot. The gold Jeep Grand Cherokee Laredo had Nevada plates but no rental sticker. The Jeep could belong to anyone. Still, she couldn’t ignore it.
She knocked on the motel room door. It swung open. The room was dark, but the outside light sent an ever paler trapezoid across the floor and onto the bed. She could see the jumble of dark blankets and sheets clumped together on the far bed. The air coming out of the room was hot. And the smell. Jesus, she knew the smell of bowels released, of urine shot in fear, of blood spurted and pooled. Of death.
Feet. Jean-clad legs. “Oh, God, Tchernak! No!” Her throat swelled closed; her eyes stung. She was shaking so hard she couldn’t move. She didn’t hear any sound till the door creaked behind her.
“Kiernan? What’re—”
“Tchernak?” She looked from him to the body on the bed and back at him. Her throat tightened, but the knot inside evaporated. In two steps she was wrapping her arms around him, squeezing hard. He squeezed back. She could barely breathe. She pushed her head away from his chest, but he was still holding her like a football he was afraid of fumbling. “Jesus, Tchernak, you scared me. I was so worried about you. If you’d been dead … I can’t even think .…You are alive!”
Tchernak was saying something, but his words didn’t penetrate. He was shaking. She pressed tighter against him. But he didn’t grow still, and the initial relief she felt gave way to the smell of death. Now she did push free and turned to the beds. Both were caked with blood. On the nearer one, the body lay facedown. “If that’s not you there, Tchernak, who—”
“Grady Hummacher.” Tchernak left his hand on her shoulder. It was a big, meaty hand; his thumb rested on her clavicle. “Grady Hummacher, the guy—”
“I know, the one Reston Adcock hired you to find.”
“Adcock’s flying up here. But how’d you know I—”
She turned to face him. “Adcock left a message for—Oh my God, the blood! Did you touch anything?”
“Of course not.”
“Blood, did you get it on your hands, even a speck?”
“No.”
“Liar! Idiot! Look at your hands. They’re covered in blood. Wash them. Wash every part of you. Oh, God, Tchernak get in there. Get the water running.”
“Why? Is he infected?”
“He could be. A woman has already died, almost certainly of hemorrhagic fever. I’ve got Clorox in my pack.” She
ran for her truck and grabbed the small pack she’d brought in case of just this kind of emergency. She had figured it would take place in Jeff Tremaine’s morgue with the dead body, not here in a motel room with Brad Tchernak. Clorox was the staple coroners used to clean their autopsy rooms. It was the best she could do.
Tchernak was scrubbing his hands in the sink. She turned off the water, jammed the stopper in the drain, and poured in the Clorox. “Is the blood just on your hands?”
“Yeah. I turned the body over—”
“Did you touch anything else?”
“No. Well, only the door as I was running out to barf. And—oh, no, Kiernan—you. Look at your shoulder; there’s blood all over it.”
For the first time she eyed herself. Her right shoulder was stained from Tchernak’s hand. “Let me see your shirt, Tchernak, where my face was when you hugged me.” The shirt looked clear. She eyed his back where her hands had clutched him. “No sign of blood. But it takes so little, one drop in a cut …” She looked down at her hands in horror. They were still scraped from climbing in the morgue window. She stuck them Wrist-deep in the Clorox. At least with the Clorox the bathroom smelled better than the death scene.
“Hey, this stings like crazy, Kiernan. You sure it’s going to protect us? You sure Grady had a fever?”
“No and no.”
Tchernak shook his head. “I touched him. His body was still hot. And his eyes, they were covered in blood. Whatever this fever is, he had it, didn’t he?”
“I don’t know. Hey, keep your hands in here!” She could hear the panic in her voice. “He could have what the dead woman had. Or it could be something different.”
“But common sense says it’s the same, right?”
“Tchernak, whatever it is, we’re doing all we can. Okay, take your hands out. Wash them good. Shake them dry. Don’t touch anything.” She had never told Tchernak about those days in Africa, every time she swallowed watching for signs her throat was closing, checking her face every few minutes for hints of edema, waiting for fever and bleeding and death. At least then she knew it was Lassa fever that might kill her and that treatment was on the way. This was many times worse. All she knew was she and Tchernak could end up lying on beds with their eyes covered in blood.
“We’re probably okay,” she said with more certainty than she felt. “Viruses don’t survive well in the air. If Grady had a virus. Whatever, we need to find out what he had and where he contracted it and if it’s the same thing the woman in Gattozzi had.”
Tchernak gave his hands a last shake. “Think like detectives, huh?”
“Right. Did anyone see you come in? Anyone follow you?”
“No.”
“You’re sure?”
Tchernak jolted up to his full six foot four. “Come on, it’s pitch-black out there. How could I miss headlights?”
“Did you see anyone in the parking lot?”
“Yeah, but the car shot out of here so fast, I couldn’t make out anything but speed. So that’s good as nothing, right?”
“Damned suspicious, and useless, right.”
“Did you notify anyone?”
“Not yet.”
“But two strange vehicles in an empty parking lot, next to the room of a stranger …We might as well be advertising a circus in here. Watch the door.” She turned on the light and started toward the body.
“The overhead? Do you want to announce us to the world? Don’t you have a flashlight?”
“Right, Tchernak. It’d be so much better to be discovered lurking in here like burglars. If they’re going to spot us, they’ve already done it. Now’s the time for speed.”
Blood was matted into the orange plaid bedspread all around Grady Hummacher’s body. His was the outside bed nearest the door. She moved between it and its twin. “Tchernak, the blood’s not just on his bed. It’s all over the other one, much thicker there. Strange.”
“Maybe not. He had two boys with him, Panamanians—”
“The seismic aides?”
“Two tribesmen he passed off as seismic aides. Adcock thinks they knew enough about his oil exploration that he didn’t want to leave them behind. The boys are deaf and mute. He brought them back from Panama, stashed them in an apartment in the barrio, and when they got sick, his doctor friend, Louisa Larson, took them to her office and Grady snatched them out of there and disappeared.”
“Wha … ?” Her head was swimming. She eyed the bloodstained bed. “Sick? Feverish, bleeding out?”
“The doc, Louisa, didn’t say.”
“You didn’t touch anything of theirs, did you?” She could hear the alarm in her voice and felt him stiffening behind her. “Did you?”
“No. Probably not.”
Again, fear spiked through her. How had the virus gotten here? Did it come from the boys? Could Grady Hummacher have been in contact with the dead woman? Or was this an epidemic much worse than she had imagined?
“Kiernan, we need to call the cops.”
“In a minute.” She turned from the bloody sheets to Grady Hummacher lying on his stomach, his face into the pillow. It was too late to worry about preserving the scene. The scene was already compromised, the body already moved. She bent over, looking closely at Grady’s arm. No visible bleeding through the skin. But his head was a different story. The bush of sandy hair was caked with blood in the area of the right rear parietal bone just above and behind the ear.
She didn’t move his head. Instead she took off her jacket, wrapped it around her hand, and pushed the pillow down until she could see what she knew was there: the entrance hole in his left eyebrow. She had been ready to discover him dead of disease, but this—a gunshot wound—took things to a different level of desperation. “He didn’t die of virus. Grady was shot.”
“Shot?”
“In the face.”
Tchernak’s “Oh” was so soft, she could barely hear it.
Tchernak needed time to recover from this second shock. But they had no time. “You haven’t found the gun, right?”
“No. But listen”—Tchernak pulled himself up straight—” like I said, he had to have brought the boys up here. He snatched them out of Panama, brought them to Vegas, left them, then snatched them out of there and brought them here to this miserable motel room in the middle of nowhere. It was probably his gun. They probably shot him.”
She shook her head. “Doesn’t feel right.”
“Why not?”
“That would be spur-of-the-moment. But Adcock was already worried two days ago. He had some reason for worrying about Grady.”
Tchernak strode to the door. “This is insane, us standing here in a death scene. I’m going to call the cops.”
“No! The local sheriff is in this neck-deep. He’s the last man to call. The only people we can trust are ourselves.”
“You’re planning to leave the scene of the murder? How will that make you look to this sheriff?”
“The gun, Tchernak. Check the bathroom. I’ll explain the rest later.” She looked under the bed, under the table, in the dresser drawers. “Nothing.”
“Same in here. Look, you go out of your way to spite authority, but not me. I’m making a report—”
“Fine, you just stay right here and do that.” Before she could move, the door burst open.
CHAPTER 44
“WHO ARE YOU? AND what the hell are you doing in my building?” The woman’s accent was local, her body tall and buxom in lime-green short-sleeved waitress blouse and black slacks. Her hair was short, wiry, apricot-colored, her square face set into an expression that said “Don’t make me ask again.” She was pointing a nine-millimeter automatic.
Kiernan planted herself in the doorway. “This man is dead. I was just coming to the cafe to call the sheriff.” She was holding her bloodstained jacket in her hand. The wind had died down a bit in the few minutes she’d been in the room, and the air was colder. But it was fresh, and it felt good. “Are you Doll?”
“ ’S no Doll. Ca
fe’s ‘Doll’s House,’ see, like ‘dollhouse.’ Husband figured this place for a hobby when I bought it. Supported him for twenty years now. Not that I hear, ‘You were right, Faye.’” Her words had grown almost toneless in the retelling, and nothing in her tough-set face suggested she had any idea how inappropriate the anecdote was to the situation. She started forward.
“Don’t come in here!”
“Hey, lady, don’t you go telling me what to do in my own motel.”
“Wait. The room’s covered in blood. The man looks like he had hemorrhagic fever and bled out, though that’s not enough to explain all that blood. But he didn’t die of it, Faye. He was shot.”
The woman’s feet stopped; she had the look of a car idling, ready to charge forward.
Kiernan let a beat pass. “If you think there’s anything I haven’t told you, worth the chance of your contracting his virus, come on in.”
The gun was loose in Faye’s hand. I could kick it, Kiernan thought. Maybe.
“Were they contagious?” Faye asked.
“They?”
“Those boys of his, who else? He didn’t have the woman with him this time. I believed him, dammit. I’m not one to be taken in. I know people, got to in this business. But this guy, Grady, I trusted him when he said the kids picked up the flu and could he stay till Monday when they’d be fit to travel. I figured what the hell, it’s not like this is the height of tourist season. But I didn’t give him the weekly rate,” she added with a nod of approval, as if her decision restored her to commercial respectability.
Behind Kiernan the door opened. Faye had the gun aimed before Kiernan could say, “My, uh, colleague, Brad Tchernak. Grady went missing a few days ago. We were hired to find him.”
