by Milk;Honey
Marge said, “I’ll drive you to your place. We’ll pick up the veils, gloves, and the smokers, you show us how to use everything.”
Byron didn’t answer right away, but Decker pressed him, and the beekeeper eventually agreed. He added, “Darlene’s gonna want to come.”
“Let me handle your wife,” Marge said. “You just handle the bees…and the identification of the bodies, Byron.”
“The bodies first,” Decker said. “I hate to do this to you, Byron, but…well, to put it bluntly, I don’t want any further decomposition.” Decker got out of the car, grasped Byron’s shoulder, and gently led him in the direction of the house. “I know this is hard for you, but you can do it.”
Byron wiped a thin sheen of perspiration off his nude scalp with his shirtsleeve. He coughed up a phlegm ball and spat. Great, Decker thought. Something else to confuse Forensics. He’d remember to point it out to the lab boys later.
The beekeeper’s steps toward the house were tentative, his breath sour and shallow. Decker felt sorry for him—he was shaking—but also reserved judgment on his guilt or innocence. He’d seen too many murderers crying bitterly at the sight of their victims floating in blood.
Once inside the Darcys’ kitchen, Byron broke down—dry sobs coughed up from his chest, guttural groans emanating from his throat.
“It’s…it’s Linda Darcy, over there,” Byron said. He pointed to the middle of the room, his lower lip trembling now. “Other one’s…Dear God…other woman’s Carla Darcy…the man on the Frigidaire is Luke…dear Jesus, have mercy on their souls.”
“How about the other man?” Decker said softly.
“Huh?”
Byron seemed dazed. Decker spoke quickly. “The other man, Mr. Howard, in the pile with the women. Do you know him?”
Byron shook his head, his skin as gray as gunmetal. The Linda mantra tape was playing again, speaking her name as if he were in prayer. His eyes had begun to roll backward. Before the beekeeper went under, Decker escorted him outside and handed him to Marge, waiting by the unmarked. Byron allowed himself to be transferred as if he were a baby swaddled in bunting.
Decker pulled Marge aside and ID’d the bodies for her, explaining that there was still one unaccountable John Doe. Marge listened, then asked if Decker thought bee smoke would muck up evidence.
“I hadn’t thought about that,” Decker said. “You take Byron back to his farm, I’ll ask the techs. Cameraman and the meat wagon should be here soon. Like to debug the bodies before we cart them down to the morgue.”
“Be back in about a half hour,” Marge said. She slid into the driver’s seat of the unmarked, and was off.
Decker took the time to sort out the mess. Part of the Darcy family—Luke, his wife, Linda, and his sister, Carla—lay dead in the kitchen. Decker was curious about the part of the family that was missing. A set of parents, a sister named Sue Beth, and her husband and kids. Then there was the retarded brother named Earl.
According to Annette Howard, they were at a bee convention in Fall Springs. First thing to do was notify kinfolk and find out everyone’s exact whereabouts for the last week.
Then, he thought, at least Katie has relatives.
Katie. The kid wasn’t wandering around the Manfred development when all this went down. She was probably in the house, and someone couldn’t stand the thought of her rotting with the others. Someone deliberately dropped her off at the Manfred development, hoping that she’d be found and cared for.
So what did that mean?
Decker tapped his pencil against the tablet, put aside his speculations for now. He began combing the outside area for evidence. In the front, he found dried spots of brown gook. Could be blood, could be anything. He swung around back. The rear side of the house faced a two-story redwood barn, weathered dusty gray. Next to the barn was a hundred feet worth of fenced corral, stacked bales of hay, and a 40' × 40' lot of yellowed weeds stained by oil and crushed by tire prints. Probably where the Darcys parked their cars. But it never hurt to have too much physical evidence. He’d point it out to Sheriff’s Homicide, request a tire imprint and lab work on the oil.
Automatically, Decker pulled out a handkerchief, placed it over the knob, and tried the barn door. Locked, but at least no odor seemed to be coming from the threshold. He peeked through the window. Dark, the sun doing little to illuminate the interior, but Decker made out an empty cordoned-off area to the left, that portion of the ground covered with hay. The rest of the floor space was taken up with machinery—big metal cylinders, other pieces of brushed steel and chromium he couldn’t identify.
He saw Tommy Chin come around back.
Chin said, “Arnie real mad about bees.”
“Take a break,” Decker said. “It shouldn’t be much longer. I’m trying to get someone over here to get rid of the bugs. We’re going to try to smoke them out. Will that ruin forensic evidence?”
Thinking a moment, Tommy rubbed his eye with his shoulder—his hands were gloved—then answered that the smoke might mix with some of the body gases, but the bees had to go. No one could work with thousands of things buzzing around. Arnie had already got stung on his hand right through the plastic glove. He was ready to claim disability. Decker asked him if Arnie was still inside.
“Arnie, he’s a trouper,” Tommy said. “We do as much as we can before you smoke the bugs. Scrapings, tissue samples, fluid samples…anything that might be affected by smoke. With the insects, I collect some maggots and put them in KAAD. I collect a few bees, ants, and beetles, too. And live bugs for control. Then that’s all the bugs I need. You get rid of the rest, so we can work without getting stung.”
Decker nodded. “Seen Detective Crandal around?”
Tommy said, “He was in the house, now he out of the house. Think now he’s in the car.”
Super, Decker thought. Just what he needed. A goldbrick on his team. He forced himself to jog over to Crandal’s car. The old man was sitting in the driver’s seat, windows rolled up, motor running. No doubt he had the air-conditioning on full blast. Decker knocked on the driver’s window, the motor died, and Crandal came out of his cocoon.
“Just taking a break,” Crandal explained.
Sure, Decker thought. He said, “Look, if we’re going to be doing something joint, maybe we should talk about a division of labor?”
Crandal didn’t answer.
Decker said, “I’ll do the mop-up over here. I’ll also handle all the background checks on the victims. We’ve still got one unidentified body. How about you going down to Fall Springs to notify and interview the surviving family? It would sure take a load off of my shoulders.”
“Heaven forbid your shoulders should get too heavy,” Crandal answered.
“Look, this isn’t even my jurisdiction,” Decker said. “It certainly ain’t my idea of a good time. But I found the kid, I’d like to see this through, and it’s what I’m paid to do.” He calmed his nerves. “I’ll tell Forensics to forward us both copies of what they found. You send me your notes, I’ll send you mine.”
Crandal sighed, then nodded agreement.
“I’ll finish up on the outside,” Decker said. “You do a grid search on the living room, I’ll do the kitchen.”
Crandal gave him an unhappy look, but went inside the house. The sheriff didn’t seem too hepped up on working, but Decker went easy with the critical judgment. If it hadn’t been for Katie, Decker would have passed on this one—would have been easy since he was in Sex Crimes, not Homicide, and had a truckload of back cases already crowding his desk. But for some reason, he felt obligated to the little girl. Change a diaper, the kid owns you for life, he laughed to himself. Ah, the hell with it, the kid deserved closure on her parents, facts she could tell the inevitable shrink when she was older. And Decker had done a six-year stint with Homicide way back when. It wasn’t as though stiffs were foreign to him.
The sound of straining engines filled the static air. Cars—Byron in a wood-sided Ford pickup, Marge in t
he unmarked. Inside the Ford’s bed were three shopping bags, a 3' × 3' portable smoker leaking charcoal fumes, and over a dozen pine boxes. Decker instructed Marge to help Crandal out with the grid in the living room, and he’d help Byron unload the truck. The smoker was heavy and hot, Decker almost burned his arms. The bags were filled with protective garb and three steel bellows.
Decker said to Byron, “I noticed a bunch of machinery in the barn. What’s all the stuff in there?”
Byron held up his hand and ticked off his fingers. “Extractors, drums, dry-heat cabinets, strainers—” He stopped himself. “Machinery for processing honey.”
“Processing the honey here?”
“Yes, sir, we can do it all.” Byron lifted a pine box from the bed. “Shame to let all them bees inside go to waste. Might as well hive them. I’ll give them back to the Darcys, if they want ’em when they come back.”
He looked at Decker, his skin shaded pea green. “They don’t know, do they?”
“I haven’t told them,” Decker said. He asked Byron to give the directions on how to suit up. It took Byron a moment to regain his color, to find his voice. Finally, he explained the procedure and told Decker not to make any sudden moves. Bees get nervous, same as people, he lectured.
Wide-brimmed hat, long steel veil, thick gloves, rubber boots, Decker was drenched in sweat before he took a step. Looking through the wire mesh, he felt as if he were in jail.
Byron took the lead, Decker followed. Inside, Arnie was scraping blood off the living-room floor. Marge was scribbling in her notepad, Ozzie Crandal was examining a footprint on the floor.
“Did anyone order an impression of this?” he asked.
Decker said, “Not yet.”
“Then I’ll order an impression of it,” Crandal said.
“Good idea,” said Marge. She’d almost managed to keep the acerbic edge out of her voice, but Ozzie picked it up.
He added, “Someone was walking out of the scene, not in. The toe directed to the front.”
Marge said, “How come there’s only one print?”
Crandal seemed stumped. Decker said, “There’s a bunch of prints in the kitchen. Maybe someone realized he was tracking blood into the living room and took his shoes off.”
“That’s the way I see it, too,” Crandal added.
“Way I see it, too,” Marge aped him.
Crandal said, “Look, lady—”
“Everyone cool it,” Decker said. “I’m as hot as hell in this getup, and my patience is about to snap, too. So how about we all keep our mouths shut, okay?”
“Fine by me,” Marge said, between clenched teeth.
Crandal muttered something, then went back to work.
Decker knew Crandal had done a lulu to unglue Marge, but now was not the time to ask her about it. Instead, he steered Byron toward the kitchen. Dressed in his work garb, doing what he knew best, Byron was no longer the broken-up man Decker had witnessed a half hour ago. He was the consummate professional, blowing soft puffs of smoke on sections of bees, then gently pushing them into his pine boxes with gloved hands. He worked slowly, and it took around an hour and a half, Decker constantly reminding him to watch his hands and feet so as not to mess up evidence. When Byron was done, almost all the bees and wasps were boxed, the corpses for the most part denuded of the winged creatures. Marge was right. With the bees gone, Decker could see the heinousness of the crime in all its glory—yards of bloodless entrails, open shotgun blasts in the abdominal and thoracic regions, half a heart dangling out of one of the women’s chests. The faces had become blackened with exposure, maggots crawling out of noses and eye sockets.
Decker felt his head go light, and looked down for a moment. By the time he felt his breath coming back, Byron had left. Decker thought about running after him, questioning him on the spot, but squelched the notion. Unless he was prepared to grill him hard, use all the authoritative muscle he had, Byron would keep quiet. It seemed more logical to pry information from the loquacious women of the Howard household or catch the beekeeper when he was off-guard.
Decker kept on the hat, but removed the veil and thick gloves and stuffed them in his shoulder harness. He slipped on a pair of thin surgical gloves, then began the arduous search for evidence, scanning the dead for shotgun wadding, spent shells, evidence from any other weapons that might have been used. He pulled out evidence bags and slipped them over the corpses’ hands—those that still had intact digits. He felt his insides kicking up, anger brewing and boiling deep within him. But his overwhelming emotion was sadness.
Poor, poor Katie.
14
At the top of the hill, just as the unmarked was about to descend into LAPD territory, Decker turned to Marge and said, “Are you going to tell me about Crandal, or are you still too pissed off to talk?”
Marge gripped the wheel, stared out the windshield, the late afternoon sun still a hot spot in the asphalt. The tar seemed to bake before her eyes, the mountains flanking the road quivering in the heat. A depressing fact since once the car hit bottom, the temperature would rise ten degrees. She’d turned off the air-conditioning twenty minutes ago; the car had begun to overheat as they had climbed out of Sagebrush Canyon. Hot wind blew across her face. Marge sighed, wished she’d called in sick this morning.
She said, “He addressed me as ‘little lady.’”
“And that set you off?” Decker asked.
“I’m not little, Pete.”
“And you certainly ain’t no lady.”
Marge laughed hollowly.
“Well, bless my soul,” Decker said. “A seasoned detective like yourself. This one really got to you.”
Marge didn’t answer. A moment later, she said, “You know what pisses me off about cop films?”
“What?”
“Those cutesey ones where there’s all this calm, witty banter around stiffs. Know which ones I’m talking about?”
Decker nodded. Marge threw the car out of low gear as the hillside inclines began to level. The overgrown canary shrubbery had thinned out, replaced by fields of crabgrass and dandelion weeds. Houses could be seen about five hundred yards up.
“Crandal was doing that,” she said. “Making jokes. I didn’t like it.”
“Not that I’m sticking up for the guy, Marge, but he might have been doing that as a defense.”
“Yeah,” Marge said. “I know. And maybe I am acting a little weepy. But seeing it that close, that putrid. I don’t know, I’m not used to working Homicide, and I didn’t care for Crandal’s attitude.”
“Understandable,” Decker said.
“So how’d you manage to live with corpses in your dreams for six years?”
“I thought I was managing just fine until Jan asked me for a divorce.”
Marge laughed, genuinely this time. “So let me ask you this, Mr. Experienced Homicide Dick, what do you think? A family thing, or a burglary that went afoul?”
Decker didn’t answer right away. Then he said, “I’ll tell you what I don’t think. I don’t think it was a psycho case—another Manson gang hacking up the family and loving every minute of it. No smeared blood, no satanic signs. The homicides, as horrible as they were, seemed like an impulsive thing. Three in one pile, probably murdered where they stood. Luke pushed up against the fridge. Know what impressed me?”
“What?”
“All that spilt milk, the scattered bottles. Someone actually seemed to take time out to prepare bottles for Katie. Someone was planning on taking her, then changed his or her mind.”
“Or maybe someone interrupted Linda when she was making bottles.”
“Linda was trying to split with Katie and someone stopped her?” Decker asked.
“Just throwing out a thought,” Marge said.
“Lots of possibilities with a family affair,” Decker said. “Someone plugged them all, then impulsively decided to rescue Katie. Or someone saw what had happened, rescued the kid, and dropped her off at Manfred, not wanting to call the polic
e. Family protecting one another.”
“Or Byron Howard,” Marge said. “I bet he’d be as protective as family. He doesn’t cotton to strangers.”
“Yeah,” Decker said. “Think he was faking his reaction?”
“I think the reaction was real,” Marge said. “But that doesn’t mean anything. He could have done it in a fit of madness, then been truly shocked when he saw what he had actually done.”
Decker nodded.
Marge passed six blocks of tract homes, then turned right onto Foothill Boulevard, back to civilization—fast-food stands, wholesale outlets, and shoddily built apartment housing, the plaster already cracking in the hot sun. Two blocks later, she hooked a right onto the 210 Freeway west, the traffic thick with rush-hour mob. They sat in silence, battling the stop-and-go rhythm for a quarter hour. As soon as traffic eased a bit, Marge asked, “What about Darlene as a suspect?”
“She certainly hated Linda.”
“And if she did it,” Marge said, “Byron would definitely be protective of her. Maybe even feel he caused Linda’s murder indirectly because of his affair.”
“The logic is there,” said Decker. “The jealous-wife angle. But can you picture Darlene using a shotgun?”
“I’ve seen stranger things,” Marge said.
So had Decker. He said, “Know what occurred to me a minute ago?”
“What?”
“Luke might have killed the others, then turned the gun on himself.”
“No weapon was found at the scene, Pete. And we’ve got all these different bloody footprints in the kitchen. If everyone was dead, who made the footprints?”
“I don’t know. Maybe somebody walked into the kitchen after the fact, and took the gun and Katie away.”
“More than one person to justify all those footprints.”
“Some of the footprints are bound to match some of the victims,” Decker said. “Someone might have stepped in blood before he or she was gunned down.”
