by Alex Grecian
“It’s hard to spot,” Iversen said. “This poor man. But if you know what you’re looking for, and I was curious after looking at the X-rays, right in here you can see it. A puckering of the flesh along the temple. There was a recent wound; you can see the indication of stitches all along here.”
“You’re saying that surgery on his head”—Skottie looked away toward the X-rays—“he had that done right before he died?”
“I’m certain of it.”
“So maybe he was confused. He drove that tractor out there when he shouldn’t have been driving at all, and something went wrong.”
“I can’t speak to his state of mind,” Iversen said. “That’s outside my job description. But between this and those fractures he’s suffered to the proximal third of his right ulna, I think he’ll be very easy to identify, even without DNA testing.”
“That’s great news.”
“Like I said, I’m waiting on an e-mail from the hospital, but I wouldn’t expect anything for a few days yet. A lot of the older files haven’t been computerized yet, so the victim’s childhood injuries might not be readily available. And it’s very possible he didn’t grow up around here. If he came here from Wichita—or New York or Russia or something—it’s going to take a lot more digging. But I’m optimistic.”
He rolled the body back into the cabinet and went to the light box, turned it off, and took down the X-rays. He put them back in the file and returned it to the rack on the counter.
“I’ll get a look inside as soon as possible tomorrow,” he said. “Could be we’ll find something more to go on. It’s hard to think of a better example than this one, in terms of being able to identify a body this far gone. We’ll figure him out.”
Skottie’s excitement at the possibility of progress was tempered by the realization that she might not have a job by the time the burn victim was identified. She might never get the chance to follow up, to help solve the case. And there was a possibility the dead man had nothing to do with any of this. She was far out on the ice and no longer knew how to get back to shore. She wasn’t sure she wanted to.
Dr. Iversen took a step back and tapped his chin with an index finger. “Come to think of it, why did you say Ryan needed this information tonight? If he’s working on something else, why couldn’t this wait?”
“You know how it is,” Skottie said. “Curiosity. It’s hard to sleep when you’ve got something gnawing away at you.”
“So he sent you.”
Skottie shrugged.
“And you were looking at Sarakay’s computer when I came in. What did you think you would find there?”
“I just thought maybe there was a file on the case. Maybe you’d found some identification.”
Dr. Iversen walked over to the desks and glanced down at his assistant’s computer. He tapped the space bar, just like Skottie had done, and seemed satisfied when the gray box popped up prompting him for a password. He turned and went to the other desk and sat down. He entered his own password and nodded at the monitor.
“No harm done, I guess,” he said.
The computer chimed, and Iversen rocked back in his chair. His eyebrows shot up.
“Well, what do you know?” He looked up at Skottie, his suspicion of her dissolving in the face of a new discovery. “An e-mail from the hospital. Might be what you’re looking for.”
He moved the mouse and clicked it, studying the screen, while Skottie moved closer to the desk, holding her breath. Iversen spent a long minute reading the e-mail, then looked up at her with a smile.
“They got a match already,” he said. “For the arm fractures, not the damage to the victim’s skull, but it seems to me that matching those three breaks makes it fairly conclusive. Especially if the surgery to the skull is as recent as I think it is.”
“Are you sure it’s a match? I mean, wouldn’t the hospital have a record of brain surgery?”
Dr. Iversen gave her a grim look. “If it was done at a hospital. That cut looked ragged to me. Like I say, I’ll know more tomorrow when I can get a closer look at the actual work done.”
“So what’s his name?”
“Wes Weber,” Iversen said. “Thirty-three years old. Unmarried. As of six months ago, a resident of Hays.”
“Weber,” Skottie said. “I’ve heard that name before.”
“Yes …” Dr. Iversen stood, sending his chair rolling backward to the wall behind him. He strode to the refrigerated cabinets and bent forward, pulled his glasses down on his nose while he read the cards on the three occupied drawers. He reached over and grabbed another file from the rack and held it up.
“Same last name as our other mysterious victim,” he said. “Margaret Weber. Drowned at Kirwin Lake. Coincidence?”
Skottie shook her head. And then she remembered the other place she’d heard Wes Weber’s name. On Monday she had found his abandoned green pickup truck at a rest stop and had arranged for it to be towed.
Except now she was certain he hadn’t meant to abandon it.
4
“She’s back!”
The man in the back seat awoke with a start and wiped his mouth. His left shoulder was wet with drool. “Huh?”
“The statie,” said the man in the driver’s seat. “She just got home.”
The man in the passenger seat was snoring softly.
“Don’t wake him up,” said the man in the back seat. “We got a while. Might as well let him rest. Me too. Wake me up a half hour after the lights go out in there.”
He flopped back and was breathing deeply within seconds.
“Right,” said the driver. “Yeah, you guys rest while I sit here and watch a house. Jackasses.”
“What?” The man in the back seat was only half-awake, his voice thick and drowsy.
“Nothing,” the driver said. “I didn’t say a damn thing.”
5
Maddy was a light sleeper. She had been living in her grandmother’s house for nearly six months, but she was still waking up every night, lying in the dark, staring up at nothing and listening for her parents’ angry voices. Her father wasn’t around anymore to argue with her mother, but that was disturbing in a different way, and she hadn’t decided which was worse, the constant fighting or the quiet Kansas nights.
So at first she wasn’t surprised when she woke and heard people whispering in the living room. She checked the clock next to her bed and saw it was after midnight. Sometime during the night, while she was asleep, the rain had stopped. Now there was only the steady plink of water falling off the roof and hitting the lawn chairs on the patio outside her bedroom window.
She slid from under her blanket to the floor and waited for her eyes to adjust to the dark. Bear was standing at her bedroom door and Maddy tiptoed over to him. He looked at her when she patted his head, but he didn’t move from his post, and it occurred to Maddy that the big dog was blocking the doorway, protecting her from whoever was out there.
At the same time, it occurred to her that the people talking didn’t sound like her mother and her father, or her grandma Emmaline. There were strangers in the house.
“It’s okay, boy,” she said in a low voice even she could barely hear. “You stay here. I’ll check it out.”
She slipped out into the hallway. Her mother’s door was open, and she was softly snoring. The voices coming from the front of the house were louder now, and Maddy could make out isolated words.
“… got a gun?”
“Hurry, I …”
“… trash it first, make it look …”
She snuck across the hall and up to her mother’s bed, reached out and touched her on the shoulder. Skottie came awake right away, squinting and reaching out to stroke Maddy’s hair.
“What’s wrong, baby?” Skottie’s voice was soft and hoarse, trying not to wake Grandma Emmaline in the next room.
“There’s people in the house, Mama.”
Soft light from a streetlight outside stretched across the blankets and made Maddy
’s T-shirt glow pink. Bear’s shadow moved across the wall as he padded around to the other side of the bed.
“You’re having a bad dream,” Skottie said. “It’s just the rain. Let me—”
“There’s two men. Maybe three. They’re in the living room.”
Skottie sat up and swung her legs over the side of the bed, frowning now, concern creasing her forehead and digging grooves alongside her mouth. “You sure, Maddy?”
Maddy nodded and pointed at the open door and they both held still, their eyes wide as they strained to hear. Again, snippets of sound drifted through the air, the low rumble of faraway thunder, the whistle of a distant train, and low male voices in another part of the house. Maddy could no longer make out whole words, but there were at least two people out there.
Skottie was out of bed in an instant and she crossed the room to her gun safe in two long strides.
“Take Bear with you and go to your room. Get under the bed.”
“What about your bed?” Maddy cast a suspicious eye at the shadowy space beneath the edge of the bed skirt.
Skottie crouched in front of the safe and looked up at her with a grimace. “No room. Grandma’s stuff is under there, remember?”
Maddy recalled the day they had moved in, the two of them shoving boxes of her grandmother’s clothing and linens under the bed in order to make room for their own things. She instinctively glanced at the tiny closet. It was so full the door didn’t close properly. For the first time it occurred to her that they had imposed themselves on Emmaline.
“Hide under your own bed, Maddy,” Skottie said. “Hurry up. Don’t try to get the dog to go under there with you, and don’t come out until I come for you.”
Skottie worked the dial on the safe’s door, and Maddy backed up, then turned and crept out into the hallway again. She glanced at her own door, but the thought of hiding under her bed like a helpless kid held no appeal. Which left her with two options: she could wake her grandmother or she could scout the situation in the living room. There was no one else there to help them. Her mother had a gun, but if the men were armed, too, Skottie would need to know that. And she would need to know where the men were. Someone was going to have to call the police, and Maddy wanted to call her father. There was a lot to be done, and her mother already had her hands full.
Maddy made up her mind and snuck down the hall to where it widened out into the big communal space where they ate breakfast. She felt a soft presence and reached out, twined her fingers in the fur at Bear’s throat. She could see three figures, all in dark clothing, moving slowly through the living room, in and out of shadows. But they weren’t paying attention to the television or Emmaline’s antique vase or even the spare change in the jar by the front door.
Maddy couldn’t tell whether they had guns. She moved to her right and into the kitchen and Bear followed her, massive yet insubstantial as a ghost. The back door was standing ajar, the tiny window above the dead bolt broken, glass and ice dusting the linoleum. Cold air blew hard against Maddy’s legs. Light from a street lamp pushed through the kitchen window, silhouetting a wooden knife block on the counter. Maddy reached out for a butcher knife, then pulled her hand back. She could barely breathe and her pulse drummed against her skull. Stabbing a grown man wasn’t something she could do, and she knew it.
Then a creak in the hallway. Someone moving toward the front of the house. Her mother had a gun and was going alone against three burglars.
Maddy saw her phone on the little table where her mother sat to pay the bills. She unplugged it and swept the phone’s home screen up, ducked and yelled “Hey, you guys!” Then she thrust the phone high above her head, aimed it at the pass-through above the counter, and snapped a picture.
She ducked down and crawled toward the living room, hoping the flash had distracted the men long enough to give her mother an advantage.
She could hear male voices shouting behind her, heard an earthshaking crash, and then Bear had the back of her pajama top in his teeth and she was off her feet, carried across the kitchen, over the threshold, and deposited on the frozen grass outside.
6
First, the temperature in the house had suddenly plummeted. Then there had been a flash of light and the sound of glass breaking. Skottie heard Maddy yell and she stood frozen in place, trying to pinpoint the sound. She couldn’t fire without knowing where Maddy was. She was carrying her shotgun, a Mossberg 500, which held five rounds, and her Glock was in the waistband of her yoga pants, at the back, giving her another seventeen shots if she needed them. There were two rifles in the open gun safe if she had to retreat to her bedroom. Unless an army had broken into the house, Skottie felt confident she could protect herself and her family. But the element of surprise would be useful. If she could get to the living room quickly and quietly, she might be able to get the intruders to stand down and end the situation peacefully. Unless they had Maddy. Maddy was supposed to be under her bed, out of harm’s way. But of course she wasn’t. Skottie silently cursed herself for letting the girl out of her sight.
Skottie wished she could move her ears independently, the way Bear did. There were too many ambient sounds, and it was hard to pick out the exact location of the intruders.
A shadow materialized at the end of the hallway and lunged at her, too tall to be Maddy or Emmaline. Skottie didn’t hesitate. She raised her gun and slammed it butt-first into the intruder’s gut.
The shadow hollered and dropped, hit the floor hard. Behind Skottie, Emmaline’s bedroom door opened.
“What’s going on out here?”
“Get back in your room, Mom. Go!” Skottie jumped over the writhing shape on the floor and left the hallway in a crouch. To her right, across the kitchen, the back door was wide open and banging into the wall. She couldn’t see Maddy anywhere. She put her back to the end of the counter and poked her head low around the side. The dining room was empty. There was a short wall in front of her where the end of the hallway extended into the living room, making room for her own bedroom on the other side. Skottie crossed to it and flattened herself out, then snuck a look into the living room. The big picture window was broken and two figures stood beside the front door, in the act of pulling it open, their backs to her.
She stepped out and pumped the shotgun to get their attention.
“Step back from the door and raise your—”
But she was too late. The door was open and the two men were through it before she could finish her sentence. She chased after them, across the living room and out onto the porch, the shotgun resting on her shoulder. She flicked on the light above the door with her free hand, knowing it would make her more visible to them, but wanting them to see that she was armed. She considered chasing them down, but halted on the top step. Maddy and Emmaline were still in the house with one of the intruders.
Somewhere out in the darkness an engine started. Two car doors slammed shut and a vehicle squealed past her with its lights off. She saw a red streak on silver paint as the car turned the corner and fog swallowed it up.
She went inside and closed the door, locked it and switched off the porch light, then turned on the lamp next to Emmaline’s favorite chair. Curtains billowed in the cold air from the broken window, but she didn’t see a lot of glass on the floor. She went through the kitchen to the back door and glanced outside, but the yard was empty. She closed the door and threw the bolt and walked back through the kitchen, turning on lights as she went.
“Maddy?”
No answer.
“Maddy, you can come out now, baby.”
Emmaline was kneeling at the near end of the hallway, holding one of the rifles from the safe. When she saw Skottie, she used it to push herself up from the floor and stand.
“I took care of this one,” Emmaline said.
The man Skottie had hit was lying on the floor in a fetal position. His wrists and ankles had been tied together behind him with a long orange extension cord, and he was grunting in pain, shouting into t
he throw rug beneath him.
“Police,” he said. “I’m police!”
“Deputy Puckett,” Skottie said, “what the hell are you doing in my house?”
7
Donnie saw the girl and he slowed the car, followed her at a walking pace down the street with the headlights off. They were a block over from the trooper’s house and there wasn’t a light on anywhere. He figured she heard the car, but she didn’t look up.
“That’s the statie’s kid.”
“Go,” Lance said. “Just get out of here.”
“No,” Donnie said. “If we got her kid, we got the upper hand.”
“Fuck you, that’s federal. Besides, my arm hurts, man.”
Donnie knew what he meant. So far, they were guilty of breaking and entering, probably a home invasion. If they got caught, kidnapping would carry a much higher sentence. But playing it out in his head, Donnie thought they could get away with it.
“Get me to the hospital, Donnie,” Lance said.
“It’s not that bad. If you didn’t stick your arm through the window—”
“I got startled.”
“One thing at a time,” Donnie said. “If we got her kid, the statie’s not gonna call the cops,” he said.
“Hell she won’t. She is a cop. They look after their own.”
“She’s a state trooper. They got their own territory out on the highway, not here in town. Hell, they don’t even know the regular cops, the ones who respond to 911 calls.” Donnie wasn’t sure this was correct, but he needed Lance to calm down long enough to listen to his newly hatched plan. “Anyway, she won’t call the cops because she’s gonna get fired if she causes any more trouble. The reverend’s lawyers made sure of it.”
“This is us causing her trouble. Why wouldn’t she call for help?”
“Well, she won’t call right away. She’s gonna wanna see what we have to say first.”
