“Why’s that?”
“Created this place and then let it go to hell, that’s why. That man sits in that big house on the hill and looks down on all of us. Son of a bitch!”
“John Baron, you mean?”
“Asshole.”
“But you earned a good living, right? You said you did.”
“Well, I worked for it. Nobody ever gave me a damn thing. Worked my hands to the bone. Sure, I made money, but they made a helluva lot more.”
“Do you have any family?”
“One son who never comes to see the man what brought him into this world. Screw him.”
Decker eyed the wheelchair. “What happened to you?”
Behind the glass lenses Ross’s eyes seemed to shrink to the size of black pellets. “What happened to me? Hell, life happened to me, all you need to know.”
“Okay. Did you ever see anyone around that house?”
“You say you’re a cop? How do I know that? I’m old, so I’m skeptical of everything and everybody.”
Decker approached him and held out his creds.
“FBI, huh?” said Ross, his small eyes gazing from puckered sockets over the identification card. He looked down the street. “Feds all over the place. Why’s that? Two dead bodies in that house, the TV said. Why’s that federal stuff, I wonder?”
“Lots of stuff is federal stuff,” replied Decker.
“Too much,” snapped Ross with another dollop of spit delivered to his porch. “Government is into every damn thing we do. I’m sick of it.”
“So you’re into every person for themselves?”
“I’m into keeping the government outta my business. And I’m into the government stop taking sides of folks that don’t need no help. Look at me, I got nothing. You don’t see me crying about it. You don’t see me asking for handouts because I got some problem, or because I feel like somebody didn’t give me a fair shot. Hell, nothing about life is fair. You don’t like it, go back to where you come from, is what I say, and don’t let the American flag hit you on the ass on your way out.”
“Interesting philosophy,” noted Decker.
“Hell, I don’t know nothing about philosophy. I just see the world with my own two eyes. For what it really is.”
“And what is the world, really?”
“Not nearly as good as it used to be for people like me.”
Decker decided to shift the discussion. “So, you maybe saw people around that house, you said?”
“I forget now.”
“Mr. Ross, if you know something you really need to tell me.”
“Why’s that, I wonder? ’Cause you’re a Fed? That supposed to be some magic word or something?”
“No, I’m a cop trying to find out the truth.”
Ross grinned maliciously. “That’s what they say on TV too. I didn’t believe it then, don’t believe it now.”
“If you saw something and don’t tell us, the people who killed those men might come to the same realization. That you might have seen something. You could be in danger.”
In answer, Ross lifted the blanket covering his withered legs to reveal a sawed-off shotgun. He lifted the muzzle in Decker’s general direction.
“Had this baby a long time. Remington double ought Magnum load. Locked and loaded. Anybody comes after me, they’re in danger. Including Feds. And I don’t fire no warning shots. Never saw the need.”
Decker took a step back. “Just so you know, threatening a federal officer is a crime. And if you fire that kind of load with a shortened barrel it’ll knock you and your wheelchair right through a wall with the recoil and dislodge any fillings you might have. And your chances for a second shot are nil because you’ll probably have a concussion.”
“Who gives a damn about a concussion if whatever I’m firing at looks like a piece of Swiss cheese?”
“And I’m pretty sure sawed-off shotguns are illegal in Pennsylvania. I could arrest you for possessing one.”
The old man leaned forward. “Maybe you’ll learn this, Amos, while you’re here, and maybe you won’t.”
“What’s that?”
“There ain’t nothing really illegal in Baronville.”
Chapter 22
DECKER!”
Decker had just passed by the Murder House when the person called out.
It was Kate Kemper. She was standing in the front doorway.
Decker stopped and turned to look at her.
“What are you doing here?” she asked, coming toward him.
“Just out for a walk,” he said.
She checked her watch. “And your walk just happens to take you past here at four o’clock in the morning?”
She came to stand in front of him, while he looked over her shoulder at the house.
“Just itching to get back inside there, aren’t you?” she said.
He focused on her. “Wouldn’t you be too, if you were me?”
She looked at his sticking-up hair. “I meant to ask you about your hairdo when we first met, but I figured maybe it was just the way you wore it.”
“I had a head injury.”
“How’d you get that?”
“An exploding trailer.”
She gaped. “What? How did that happen?”
“We were checking out a mobile home trailer when someone decided to turn it into an oven with me and my partner inside. We got out before we got barbecued, but the thing went boom when the propane tank ignited, and part of the boom hit me in the head.”
“Do you know who did it?”
“Not yet. But I’m working on it. I take it personally when someone tries to kill me.”
“I would too.” She studied him. “I checked you out since our last meeting. The Bureau speaks incredibly highly of you.”
“Uh-huh. Find anything interesting inside?”
She cocked her head. “Not into flattery?”
“I never really saw its value.”
“Okay,” she said, looking at him appraisingly. “I guess the answer to your question depends on how you define ‘interesting.’”
“How would you define it?”
“How about forensically? The ME got back to us with some more information. Care to hear it?”
“I didn’t think you wanted us involved.”
“I just said things had to run through me.”
“I’m listening.”
“The man in the basement overdosed on carfentanil. It’s an anesthetic used for large animals, like elephants. It’s about the strongest commercial opiate out there. The Russians use it as a weapon of assassination.”
“That would account for the foam on his lips.”
Kemper smiled strangely at this, but continued, “The guy you found hanging died by strangulation.”
“But it couldn’t be from the hanging.”
Kemper hiked her eyebrows. “So you knew that already?”
Decker nodded. “And I hope you’re not relying on the local ME, because he also royally screwed up the time of death. I know more about forensics than he does.”
Kemper looked at him curiously. “How do you know he screwed up the TOD?”
“He completely missed obvious red flags in the evidence. And by your look, you know that to be the case. So tell me what else you found.”
“How do you know I found out anything else?”
“Because you strike me as someone who likes to do things her way, and not rely on the locals to spoon-feed you information.”
She smiled. “I’m beginning to see another side of you, Decker.”
“I’ve got a lot of them. So what did you learn?”
“You’re right. I brought in my own medical examiner. She looked over the bodies and the test results and came to certain conclusions that were not exactly in line with the local ME’s results. But let me hear your analysis of the TOD first.”
“Rigor starts about two hours after death, beginning in the small muscles, face, neck, and moves outward to the larger muscle groups
in the body’s extremities. The process then reverses itself. Full rigor is typically reached around twelve to eighteen hours after death. The body can remain stiff for a similar time range. Then rigor begins to reverse and completely resolves itself after anywhere from thirty-six to forty-eight hours, depending on certain factors, including environmental, and the body eventually becomes flaccid.” He paused before continuing. “Now, let’s apply that here. Vics dead twenty hours or longer in an abandoned house and one of them in a moldy basement? They’d be covered in insects and eggs, along with the beginnings of body decomp. And the limbs of the guy in the basement didn’t feel stiff in the way that people in rigor usually do. They were off somehow, at least to my touch. And they were way too cold for the ambient temp of that place. The ME should have seen that from his core temp test, but he just assumed his thermometer was broken.”
Kemper was nodding the whole time he was talking. “Now let me tell you what my person thinks. She thinks the vics were killed around the time the local ME thought, but under a very different scenario.” She stopped and studied him. “Care to think how that’s possible, taking into account what you know?”
He looked at the house again and said slowly, as though thinking out loud, “The only thing that would explain the facts is if they were killed somewhere else twenty hours or more before they were discovered by me, and kept in extremely cold conditions in an enclosed container, like a freezer, so the bodies wouldn’t commence undergoing rigor and the insects couldn’t get to them. Once the bodies were taken out of that enclosed environment the process of rigor would begin. And that would also account for why the local ME’s body temp gauge was throwing off wacky numbers, and also the peculiar stiffness of the limbs. It wouldn’t be due to the chemical reaction of dead muscles in rigor, but a frozen body thawing out. And the blowflies detect dead bodies based on things like scents from the corpse’s release of fluid and gases. If the bodies were frozen, that might have inhibited those scents from being released. And if the bodies were only there for a short while, the insect infestation wouldn’t have been all that much, which matches the facts of the crime scene.” He paused. “But if that was the case there wouldn’t have been foam on the guy’s lips. It would have long since disappeared.”
“Not if they placed a concocted residue there when they laid the body out, because they knew the tox tests would show the drugs in his system and that the foaming would probably be present if he’d just been left there right after he died.”
“Does your ME think the bodies were moved after death?”
“She knows at least one of them was. The livor mortis staining showed that.”
“The guy hanging, right?” Decker nodded. “I saw that the staining was on his back. No way that could have happened if he’d been strung up and left there.”
“Exactly what my ME said,” noted Kemper. “And there were actually two sets of ligature marks. The local ME either missed that or just didn’t note or understand the difference. The marks made by the rope were clearly done postmortem.”
“So whoever did this was sweating the details and maybe hoping for a less than crackerjack medical examiner doing the posts. And they almost got their wish. How’d your person figure the freezer scenario?”
“It was really the only way to explain the forensic inconsistencies. And there was evidence of an abrasion on the shoulder of one of the vics.”
“We saw that. They were speculating it might have been from a medical patch of some kind.”
“My ME believes it was a freezer burn on the skin from where it was left exposed. She said she was pretty certain it occurred postmortem. But she made a point of telling me that her TOD was a guess, really, because if the bodies were placed in a freezer right after death and then put in that house, that precludes making an accurate calculation for the time of death.”
“So whoever did this wanted to make sure that we would not be able to show precisely when the guys really died.”
“And by doing that they take away a key tool of any homicide investigation.”
“Alibis or a lack thereof become pretty much meaningless,” said Decker thoughtfully.
“Exactly.”
“The bodies had to be transported here at some point, relatively close to the time that I discovered them. There was no deep freezer in that house, so the bodies were kept on ice somewhere else before being brought here.”
“You said you heard a car?”
“I did. I also heard a noise.”
“What kind of noise?”
“It was more like a series of sounds. Scraping and clunks.”
“Nothing else?”
“A plane flying over. Other than that, nothing. So how does someone carry two corpses into that house and no one sees a thing?”
“Well, I understand there aren’t many people left in this neighborhood.”
“But the killers couldn’t be sure a car wouldn’t drive down the street. Or someone wouldn’t look out their window. I mean, it only takes one pair of eyes.” He fell silent for a moment. “Now, do you want to tell me what your men were doing here? And why they were undercover? If they were hanging out with a bad crowd, I think we can narrow our list of suspects, especially in a place like this.”
She pursed her lips and stared at him. “This goes no farther.”
“No farther,” repeated Decker.
“Will Beatty and Doug Smith, they were the two dead men in that house. Beatty was in the basement. Smith was the one hanging.”
“And they worked undercover for the DEA?”
“Yes and no,” was her surprising reply.
“How exactly is that possible?” asked Decker.
“They did work undercover for us. And then they went rogue.”
“How do you know they went rogue? Maybe their cover just got blown.”
“We entertained that possibility until something happened to disabuse us of that notion.”
“What was that?”
“They were working with a guy named Randy Haas.”
“Was he DEA too?”
“No. He was a bad guy who we had on a short leash feeding us info. He was working with Beatty and Smith. If he screwed us, he was going to prison for life.”
“What happened with Haas?”
“He was given a fatal dose of morphine. But with his dying breath, he pointed the finger at Beatty and Smith as his killers.”
“Did he say why?”
“No. Just that it was them.”
“Why would they kill him?”
“Don’t know.”
“And you believe Haas’s statement?”
“Dying declaration. What reason would he have to lie? And on top of that we’d been unable to get hold of Beatty or Smith.”
“Whoever killed Beatty and Smith knew they were cops. They dressed one as a cop and poured pig’s blood around the other one.”
“But the fact is, they’d gone over to the dark side.”
“Well, some folks just aren’t very forgiving,” said Decker. “Especially those already on the dark side.”
Chapter 23
AFTER ONLY THREE hours of sleep, Decker went downstairs to find Zoe finishing her breakfast in the kitchen before going to school.
He poured himself a cup of coffee and accepted a toasted bagel from Amber, who was rushing around the kitchen packing Zoe’s lunch and also handling the laundry in a small room adjacent to it. Frank, he was told, had already left for work.
Decker wearily sat down across from Zoe and drank his coffee and munched on his bagel while she spooned cereal into her mouth.
When he looked over at her, he found the little girl staring at him.
“You went out last night,” she said. “I saw you from my window.”
“I couldn’t sleep, like I told you. But why were you still up? I thought you went back to bed?”
Zoe shrugged and tapped her spoon against her bowl.
“Zoe, hurry up,” said her mother from the laundry room
. “We have to leave in five minutes and you still need to brush your teeth and comb your hair. And do you have your book bag, young lady? And your flute?”
Zoe rolled her eyes and took another mouthful of cereal, her gaze still on Decker. “Have you found the bad people yet?” she asked.
“Not yet, no. Still working on it.”
“Your hair looks funny.”
“It usually does.”
“No, I mean it’s all stuck up in the middle.”
“I, uh, accidentally got some glue there.”
Zoe perked up at this. “I put glue in my hair one time. But it wasn’t an accident. Mom was really mad. She had to use scissors to cut it out. Want me to cut it out for you?” She lowered her voice. “Mom doesn’t really like me to use scissors when she’s not around, but we don’t have to tell her.”
“Thanks, but I think I’ll just let it grow out.”
Zoe returned to her cereal, clearly disappointed.
Amber burst into the kitchen. “Okay, are you ready?” she asked her daughter.
“I still have to brush my teeth and hair. And I couldn’t find my flute.”
“I know today’s your birthday, but get going, young lady.”
Zoe held up her half-empty bowl. “But, Mom,” she began.
“Oh, no, you’re not pulling that again. You can finish it in the car. Now, go! And don’t come downstairs without your flute. I saw it on your dresser last night.”
Zoe slowly rose, and weakly waved goodbye to Decker.
“Happy Birthday, Zoe,” said Decker.
After she left the room, Amber took a few deep breaths. “Kids.”
“Yeah,” said Decker.
“I’ve never had a son but they can’t be harder than girls.”
“I never had a son,” said Decker. “Just a daughter.”
Amber stiffened and slowly sat down across from Decker.
She said nervously, “Alex told me about…”
“Yeah,” said Decker.
“I’m so sorry.”
“Yeah,” said Decker.
When he said nothing else, Amber rose and said awkwardly, “I…um, I have to get Zoe to school.”
“Yeah,” said Decker, staring down at the table.
* * *
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