“I don’t like where either of those options lead,” John said.
They reached the sedan, and the police radio crackled with static, followed by a call for John to meet with the lieutenant.
“Margolis already made good on her threat to call the chief,” John said.
“Such a bitch.”
“Such an elected bitch with control over the department’s budget.”
“Still, where does she get off acting like that?” she said.
John pulled out his cell phone and called Lieutenant Barnes. While he waited for a connection, he said, “You didn’t have to poke her like that either. You practically begged her to call the boss.”
Paula clamped her arms across her chest and stared out the window at the concert crowd.
“Lieutenant, Penley here,” John said into the phone. After listening for a moment, he closed his eyes and rested his head on the seat back.
“Yes. I understand. Won’t be a problem. Yes, I will pass that on to my partner.”
John disconnected the call and pocketed his phone. He fished in his pocket for a piece of nicotine gum, but all he had was an empty foil pack. He balled it up and tossed it on the floor. “Dammit.”
“All right, let me have it,” said Paula.
“Margolis must have had the chief on speed dial. She already called him; he called the A chief, who chewed out Lieutenant Barnes . . .”
“Yeah, I know how shit flows downhill.”
“Anyway, the lieutenant says we are to stay away from city hall, Margolis, and Winnow.”
Paula pounded the dash with a tight fist. “They always do this! They circle up and protect the old boys’ club. They can’t make us stay away from Winnow. He had a hand in Zack Weber’s death, and he’s up to his ass in all this organ business.”
“You done throwing your little tantrum?”
“It’s not right.”
“Is this why you got the boot from internal affairs? Your shitty attitude?”
Paula’s complexion reddened. “So it’s my shitty attitude when the brass turns the other way and ignores what’s going on in their own evidence room?”
“Carson.”
“Yeah, Carson. You were probably buddies with him too. I get it. It’s my fault . . .”
“I never said—”
“I had all the logs, I turned three junkies who bought the shit. That wasn’t enough for them. They just wanted to make it go away.”
“Who’s ‘they’?”
“All you—his buddies. I had all the documentation, and the brass wouldn’t approve the video surveillance. They said they didn’t want to open a can of worms involving the handling of evidence.”
“Yeah, it kind of hit the fan when that broke. The DA had to drop a half dozen cases because the evidence weight didn’t match or the dope came up missing.”
“It was a small price to pay for what Carson was doing,” she said.
“Wait. Are you saying you pulled off the video surveillance without authorization?”
She turned in the seat and faced John. “What was I supposed to do, let him keep selling drugs from our evidence room? No one would listen. I had to show them proof, hard proof.”
John started the engine and pulled into a gap in the traffic. “Damn, Paula, that was pretty stupid. What were you thinking?”
“We have rules—a standard of conduct, and nobody cared what Carson was doing—nobody.”
“Don’t we have rules about warrantless surveillance of other cops?” John said.
Paula slumped in her seat. “You sound just like them. The rules don’t apply equally to everyone. You can bet your ass they can’t wait until I make a mistake.”
“That’s what all your by-the-book rules and procedure are about? You’re simply covering your ass?”
“It’s called survival,” Paula said.
“You can’t work like that.”
“Where we going?” she said. They headed south on Franklin, well past the office.
“I’m waiting until the chief cools off before I hit the bureau,” he said. John handed Paula his notebook. “What was the address for the burglary? The one your gun came from?”
“Donovan Layton, off Grant Line in Wilton. You think we can get anything from him on a two-year-old burglary?”
“That pistol is the only thing we have right now, since we can’t go near Winnow.”
The Layton residence was hard to find. At first, John drove past the driveway because there was no address marker and the narrow drive was overgrown with vines and tree branches. The gnarled plants gave the appearance of a once-exclusive, lush enclave, now brown, entangled, and abandoned. Two jagged ruts in a broken, paved road marked the entrance to the property.
A main house sat a few hundred yards back from the access road. Tree limbs and debris littered the grounds, and deep mounds of rotting leaves hadn’t been attended to in years. The rusted hulk of a farm truck deteriorated in its last resting place next to a barn. The truck bed held amorphous, moldy lumps, hay bales in a previous life.
“Big place,” John said.
“Is anybody living here? The place looks abandoned,” Paula responded.
“It ain’t on the home-tour list.” John pulled the sedan to a stop in front of the two-story ranch house. A thick film of dust clung to the windowpanes in the places where the glass remained unbroken. “Let’s go see if Mr. Layton’s home.”
John opened his car door, and a sour smell assaulted them, a rancid mix of wet grain, manure, and uncooked meat.
“Oh man, that’s awful,” John said.
“City boy,” she said. Paula pointed at the barn and several large pigs in a twenty-foot square pen. The pen allowed the animals to go in and out of a side barn door on their own.
“If this is country living at its best, you can have it.” John went to the front door and found it ajar, open nearly six inches on a sagging frame.
“Mr. Layton? Police department,” John called through the crack in the door.
Paula wiped a swath of dust off a window and pressed her face close.
“Doesn’t look like anybody lives here,” she said.
John needed to use his shoulder on the warped door, opening it a foot wide. “Mr. Layton? Are you in here?” He bumped the door farther open with his hip, and the dust swept back like a snowdrift against the rotting wood. “I think you’re right. I don’t think anybody’s been in the place for a while.”
A white pickup truck turned onto the driveway and carved a course down the path, missing every large pothole. The truck was at least two decades old and looked like it hadn’t been scrubbed since it left the dealer’s lot. A wiry, balding man with a gray complexion, sunken hollows in his cheeks, and a permanent sneer formed by sagging facial muscles stepped from the cab of the truck. The gun rack in the rear window held a cattle prod and a walking cane. The man grabbed the latter and shuffled his left leg toward the truck’s front bumper.
“Who the hell are you?” the man asked. He spit a brown wad of chewing tobacco and saliva on the ground; some of the discharge dribbled down the paralyzed left side of his mouth.
John fished out his badge. “Police. You Donovan Layton?”
“What if I am? What business do you have busting inta my place?”
“We need to talk to you about a burglary a couple years back.”
“Shut that door. You got no call to go in there,” Layton said.
John pulled the handle, and the door rubbed against the wooden floorboards until the bottom of the door hit the frame. The warp in the old door wouldn’t let it close all the way. “Sorry, sir. We were looking for you.”
“Well, now you found me. Say what ya gotta say an’ let me be.”
Paula left the porch and stood across from Layton. “Do you live here, Mr. Layton?”
He shifted his eyes, one milky with cataracts, toward the house, then back to Paula.
“No. Not no more.”
From behind the old man, one of the h
ogs squealed. The sound jarred Layton back to the present. “I come out here and tend to my hogs, is all.”
“When did you move away from here?” Paula asked.
“A bit over two years ago, after my wife died.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“She was always better than me. This here was her place. Too many memories here for me,” Layton said.
“How long did you two live out here?”
“We married about twenty years ago. She had a kid from another marriage, and we lived here till she . . .”
“So it was just the three of you?”
“Just her and me, really. Her boy went away to school years ago. He and I didn’t really see eye to eye on much. Me and her were gonna retire out here.”
“You remember filing a report about a burglary and a stolen gun?”
“I may be old, but I ain’t stupid. Yeah, I remember.”
John came down from the front door and joined his partner.
Layton pointed the tip of his cane at John. “Someone pushed the front door in, like sonny-boy here, and walked away with my pistol.”
“Any idea who would have done it?” John said.
“If I had, I’d’ve taken care of it.”
“You don’t remember seeing anybody hanging around your place?”
“It happened a few days after my wife passed. I wasn’t here when it was stolen,” Layton said.
The hogs grunted and squealed in the pen near the barn.
“They sound hungry,” Paula said.
“Damn things are always hungry.”
“How many do you have?” she asked.
Layton turned to his truck and steadied his gait with the side of the vehicle. “I got fifteen left. I don’t have my stepson for help, and I can’t butcher them as quickly no more.” He gestured to his limp left side.
The old man reached into the back of the pickup and grabbed a grain bucket. He glanced at John. “You mind grabbing that sack of feed? I’d ’preciate it.”
John hefted the fifty-pound sack out of the truck and followed Layton to the barn door. For an old, half-lame man, he cut a quick path to the barn. The smell was stronger and made the bile bubble in John’s stomach.
“They always smell this bad?” John asked.
“They’re a bit ripe today. You get used to it. Probably need to slop out the pens.”
Layton unlocked the barn door and shoved it aside with his good arm. He shuffled into the murky barn. John followed with his grain bag while Paula held the door open.
The interior of the dark barn was difficult for John to negotiate, so he followed Layton’s path. He banged into a line of chains that hung from the rafters. The links rattled and clacked together as they swayed.
“Watch out for them hooks,” Layton said.
His eyes adjusting to the dim light, John saw the outline of iron meat hooks hanging from the chains at chin level. Dark spots on the wooden planks marked where an untold number of pigs had bled out. Rough-hewn fencing, constructed from wood scraps, held the hogs to half of the barn space. Their hooves trod deep ruts and tracks in the soil, where the big hogs pushed their weight around for the first feeding. They paced while Layton set up his grain bucket.
“You can drop that grain here,” he said to John.
The pigs shrieked and squealed. Two of the larger hogs pushed at one another in the back of the barn. The struggle turned serious, and the larger of the two shoved his rival into the wood siding.
“What the hell got into you two?” Layton said.
“They always act like that?” John asked.
“They’re usually pissy, but not this bad.” Layton emptied some of the grain into his bucket and shook it, getting all of the hogs’ attention. “Come on, boys.”
The two distracted hogs dropped their interest in whatever kept them from the grain and trotted toward the fence in a pair of three-hundred-pound struts. The largest sniffed the grain, rejected it, and returned to rooting around in the back area of the pen.
The more the hogs moved, the stronger the rancid smell grew. It thickened within the stale barn air. A pang of recognition hit John seconds before he saw the source. The thing that preoccupied the large hog was a long, whitish bone and a mottled, yellow hunk of flesh—human flesh.
Layton dropped the grain bucket and staggered to the fence. The old man blinked, trying to register the gruesome vision.
“Oh my God!” Paula said, pointing at the exposed flesh.
“Mr. Layton,” John called out.
The old man braced himself with the fence and stared at a tattoo on the exposed flesh. It writhed with each clamp of the hog’s powerful jaw.
“Mr. Layton, can we get these animals out of here?” John said.
Layton nodded while the bone snapped and small shards fell from the hog’s mouth. The old man moved in measured steps to the edge of the pen and whacked the flank of one of the hogs with his cane. The beast barely recognized the tap through its huge rib cage.
“Missy, could you get me the cattle prod from my truck?” Layton asked.
Paula trotted out to the vehicle and pulled the electric cattle prod from the gun rack. It had electrodes attached to a red plastic paddle and sounded like a stun gun when she fingered the trigger.
“When’s the last time you came out here, Mr. Layton?” John said.
“Yesterday morning. I feed ’em every morning.”
Paula returned with the prod, and Layton said, “Hit that one in the ass with it.”
She laid the paddle on the designated pork rump. High-pitched squeals burst from the beast the moment she flicked the trigger.
“I didn’t mean to hurt it,” she said.
“They’ll get over it,” Layton said.
The hogs followed the shocked pig out of the side door to the pen, leaving the exposed chunk of leg behind in the sloppy barn mud.
John hopped over the fence and regretted his decision the moment his foot touched down in a pile of warm, loose pig crap. Working his way through the organic minefield, John got a closer look.
“Looks like a West Block Norteños tattoo.”
“Want me to go get an evidence bag?” Paula said.
John paused, squinted in the dim light, and bent to get a better view. “Forget it. We gotta call this one in. I see a couple more bones over here.”
Paula followed his gaze and noticed a gnarled hunk of bone embedded in the muck.
“Mr. Layton, why don’t you come outside with me,” she said.
The pig farmer was breathing hard and leaning over his cane.
John dropped a plywood barrier to keep the hogs outside, backed out of the pigsty, and shook the muck off his shoe; clumps of manure and mud clung to the soles.
“Ya just gotta let it dry,” Layton said.
Paula led the old man to the front seat of his truck and got him a bottle of water from their sedan. Layton started to settle but kept shaking his head and mouthing a low moan with each breath.
John called in for a crime-scene tech unit and an ambulance to check out Layton.
“The EMTs will be here in a couple of minutes,” John said.
“I don’t need no EMT. I’m fine.”
“Anyone else have access to your place?”
“I don’t know. It ain’t exactly Fort Knox.”
“The name Cardozo mean anything to you? Daniel Cardozo?” John asked.
The farmer shook his head.
“Why would someone dump a body all the way out here?” Paula said.
“Them hogs would eat ’em all up, that’s why,” Layton said.
While they waited for the ambulance, John used the pause to call Melissa for an update on Tommy. She was tight with the response, still feeling the aftermath of the blowout in the hospital waiting room. Tommy was still getting his dialysis. When John hung up, an ambulance rolled up the drive, red lights flashing. A minute later, Layton was propped up on a gurney, an oxygen tube in his nostrils, and an EMT took his blo
od pressure.
John motioned Paula away from the ambulance. “That answers our question about what the Outcast Killer does with the leftover body parts.”
Paula kicked a pebble and looked at the dilapidated farmhouse. “Why here? There’s a hundred places more convenient to dump his extras.”
“The barn was locked, so whoever accessed it had the keys.”
A white panel van with the crime-scene techs pulled up the drive, and Paula waved them toward the barn. “I’ll go get them started.”
John walked back to the ambulance. Layton’s face was a healthier shade of gray.
“Mr. Layton? Anybody have a key to the barn?”
“I don’t think so. I’ve had that lock on there for five-plus years.”
“Have a spare key?”
He thought for a moment and then bobbed his head. “Yeah, in the house.”
An old Cadillac sped up the drive and skidded to a stop near the ambulance. A spry old woman in a housecoat unfolded from the front seat and propped her rail-thin torso on the driver’s door. “Donovan? Is he okay?”
“Oh, crap, it’s Ilene Watkins. Nosy old cow,” Layton grumbled.
“He’s doing just fine,” John answered.
“He’s getting too old to be handing those animals. Especially after his stroke last year,” she scolded.
“You live nearby, ma’am?”
“Over there.” She jutted a bony finger across the main road.
“You seen anything unusual going on out here? Someone who doesn’t belong maybe?”
“Only Donovan and his boy,” she said.
“Boy?”
“Yeah, his boy—well, stepson, truth be told.”
“You sure about that?” John asked.
Layton tried to sit up, and the EMT held him back down. “Patrick ain’t been around here since that drunk bastard killed Marsha.”
An electric charge pricked the back of John’s neck as the name fell into place. “Who?”
“My wife, Marsha.”
“Marsha Layton?”
“She kept her old name, Horn. Marsha Horn.”
TWENTY-SIX
After the EMTs checked Layton over, he refused any further medical treatment, and Ilene was more than willing to fawn over the old man. He blustered about her hovering but let her drive him home.
At What Cost Page 17
