The Reckoning (7 page)

First thing that hit Nick and Mavis when they came in the front door at 1329 Palisade was the smell. It wasn't meat or blood or fluids, although that was all there. It was the air in the house. It was
hot
and it smelled…baked.

There was a body in the front door, a round little guy, down on his back, his arms splayed out. His pants were down around his ankles. His legs were rubbery blue and covered in fine brown hairs. He had a black handle sticking out of his right eye socket. It took a second for Nick to get that it was the sort of handle you'd find on a round file or an ice pick. It was jammed up to the hilt in the victim's eye. There wasn't a lot of blood, so Nick figured it had gone all the way back to the guy's cortex and just shut him off like a switch. A hit like that wasn't an easy thing to do. It required arm strength and commitment. A whole lot of commitment.

There was a CSI tech in a white jumpsuit, a woman, she looked maybe twelve, doing something unseemly inside the guy's shorts and Mavis, who hated that sort of thing, looked away at the rest of the ground floor and then moved out into the main room, taking it in. Nick didn't know the tech's name and since she was wearing those all-white head-to-toe sperm suits the CSI people have to wear, all he had to go on was her face, a sort of cute cheerleader face, except for the sad eyes. She looked up at Nick, sat back on her heels, glanced at the readout on a digital thermometer. “Body temp is still too warm for a time of death, Detective.”

Nick shrugged his suit jacket off, put it over his arm. “It's this heat. Maybe the killer ran the furnace setting way up to make the TOD impossible.”

She shook her head. “Furnace wasn't on. This heat came in with the killer or killers. We have no idea how it was done, but for a while it was hot enough in here to melt the candles on their dining room table. And this handle, stuck in the vic's eye there, that grip isn't painted black, it's burnt black. It was red hot when it went into the guy's eye. Roasted his brain like a red-hot poker.”

She said this with a degree of professional appreciation. Nick realized that CSI work could get pretty damn dull. At least this was…
interesting.

“What have we got here, Miss…”

She stood up, a lithe lift only the young can pull off, removed her latex glove, offered Nick her hand. “I'm Sergeant Dakota Riley, Detective Kavanaugh. I've heard good things about you. Nice to finally meet you.”

Nick shook her hand, thinking
Dear God, a sergeant at twelve years old.

“Good to meet you, Sergeant. I'm surprised we haven't met before.”

“I've only been on the force for six months.”

“You made sergeant in six months?”

She smiled, shook her head. “I was with the state patrol in Alabama for ten years, based in Montgomery. I wanted to live in a sleepy southern town with live oaks and Spanish moss. Niceville offered me a job, said I could keep my rank, so here I am.”

“What'd you do in Alabama?”

“Pretty much what I'm doing here. I trained at Quantico. Agency offered me a job, but I didn't want to be just another dweeb lawyer with a gun. I like forensic work.”

“Even this?”

Something moved across her face, sadness, regret, and Nick got the idea that there had been some kind of loss, something bad had happened, and she had come to Niceville to forget it.

“It is what it is. Once guys like you catch the bastard, we can help you send him to hell.”

“Lot of younger people think the death penalty is too harsh.”

She got a flat-eyed look. “For what was done in this house, strapping the guy down on a board and slowly skinning him alive would not be harsh enough.”

Nick could see she meant it. “I guess I'd better see it for myself. Can you lay this out for me?”

She stepped away from the corpse, led Nick into the living room, where Mavis was standing, looking hot and sick. The main floor was open plan. No vestibule. No foyer. If you were through the front door, you were in the house. A very nice house, with a big green leather sofa and love seat, a large oriental carpet in jewel tones, soft lighting, real oils on the walls, a huge Samsung flat-screen, the silky feel of ready money and lots of it.

Now all in ruins and everybody dead.

Mavis had loosened her coat, shrugged it off. She nodded as Sergeant Riley came up. The CSI tech pulled her hoodie back, showing a crown of golden curls, slick with sweat.

She took a breath, organizing. “Okay. We have four people in the house. Doug Morrison, the father, he's the guy in the hall, he went first, we're thinking, because from a tactical point of view in a home invasion—which this feels like—you take out the guy first. You're making a point, you're dominating the situation, showing you mean business. Next vic was the kid, Jared, he's over there by the wall. Every bone in his body has been broken. Not just broken. Crushed. Pulverized. When we rolled him it was like rolling a bag of jelly. I think he was just…thrown. You can see the impact where he hit the wall. Here, take a look.”

She led them over to a corner of the living room. There was a little kid. His body was in a crumpled heap, back twisted into a sickeningly wrong angle. He might have been a cute kid. It was hard to tell without a face. A CSI tech was bagging the kid's hands. He looked up at them, sweat streaming down his forehead, his eyes buggy under his horn-rimmed specs. He pulled his mask down.

It was Dave Seth, a young Niceville patrol guy who'd gone over to Crime Scene after watching too many episodes of
CSI Miami
. It had come as a big shock to him when he found out that the CSI guys didn't even have guns and were generally considered hapless weenie losers by all the real cops.

“Hey, Sarge, you believe this shit?”

Mavis was trying to. “What happened to the kid?”

Seth looked at Sergeant Riley, who ranked him. This was her scene.

“Fill 'em in, Dave,” she said.

Seth looked down at the body, still holding one of the kid's hands. He lifted the kid's arm and the way it hung there, limp, like a stuffed sock, told them a lot. “Whole body's like that. One way or the other, every bone in this boy's body has been broken.”

He pointed to the wall above the kid. It was a hard corner, the wall made of brick, painted a soft creamy white. You could see the impact point where the kid had struck the wall, and the blood and tissue train as he slid down it, leaving a trail.

“He was thrown across the room, far as we can tell. Picked up and hurled. By somebody so strong that if I ever meet him, I want to be in a Humvee when I do. The face hit first, which pretty much destroyed it. Some of his face is still on that wall. What's here, still in his skull, that's all orbital process, teeth, tongue, jawbone, what's left of it—”

Nick, sensing a lecture, cut in. “You figure the bones went then?”

Seth shook his head. “Nope.” He touched the bloody ruin where the kid's face used to be. “See the way the blood spray works, on the floor here. Kid's heart was still going a mile a minute when he bounced off that wall. What I mean, he was still alive. Broken neck, maybe, but still alive.”

“So…then what?” asked Mavis, trying to keep her last meal where it was. Seth deferred to Riley, who seemed to know her stuff.

She bent down, tapped the kid's bloody body. “See these indents? These impact points? There are literally hundreds of them, all over his body. Somebody stood over him and beat him into a pulp with some kind of tool. I'm thinking, from the rounded pattern of the impact, something like a ball peen hammer or the kind of tool you use on sheet metal—”

“Like car-body repair tools,” said Nick.

“Yes. They would work. You can see the spatter pattern all over here, and up there.” She stood up, pointed to the ceiling. There were long sweeping trails of blood spray in a feathery pattern radiating outward, maybe fifteen or twenty different streaks. The same blood-spray pattern was on the walls and on the carpeting. They could all see it in their minds, the hammer coming down, the frenzy of the attack, the hammer coming back up, soaked in blood, the spray flying off as the hammer came back down again…and again…and again.

“Jesus,” said Mavis. “The guy must have got it all over himself. He would have looked like a Jackson Pollock painting.”

Seth and Riley were looking at her. She looked back at them.

“Okay.
Insensitive
,” she said, doing the ironic air-quote thing. Nick had to grin in spite of, maybe because of, the horror.

“You said four?”

“Yes. The mom, Ellen, she's down the hall.”

They left Seth to his work and followed Riley out of the living room and down a short hallway lined with paintings—oils, the Southwest mainly, all of them well done, full of light and the sweep of desert and high plains.

At the end of the hall a female was lying faceup, fully clothed, in mom jeans and a blousy pink calico shirt. She was laid out on the terra-cotta tiles, her eyes black pools of bloody tissue. The skin of her face looked roasted. She lay at the entrance to a large well-appointed kitchen, stainless steel and copper and oak and brass, and beyond that a door into what might have been a sunroom or a lanai. It was dark, but they could see ferns and palms in the light from a backyard lamp.

Riley stopped at the woman's body, knelt down beside it, pointed to the knees of the woman's jeans, and then to a trail of bloody streaks that ran down the hallway from the living room. “She has blood in her hair, but it's not hers, I don't think. I think she came down the hall from the kitchen—the dishwasher is still open; maybe she was putting dishes away—when she heard what was going on in the living room. She came down the hall, saw what was happening. She turns, runs, but she only gets this far when whoever, whatever, came through that front door—it caught up to her, grabbed her by the hair. Fingers bloody from what he was doing to the kid, that's the blood in her hair, he brought her to her knees and then he…dragged her back out to the living room. There's fibers from the living room carpet embedded in the jean fabric here and on her shoe tips, her calves, and the blood trails out there back up this…scenario. We think the guy dragged her around to look at the bodies…and then he brought her back here.”

“Her eyes?” said Mavis.

“Gone. No tool marks around the orbits. If I had to testify—and I sure hope I get to, 'cause this guy really needs to get caught and tried and executed—I'd say the guy used his thumbs. You can see bloody fingertip marks on her temples, so he would have held her head with his fingers and used his thumbs to—”

Mavis said, “Got it, okay?” and looked away, swallowing hard.

Riley watched her, cool but sympathetic. In a chilling way.

Nick got the feeling that
feeling
wasn't something Riley did too much of. Considering her work, that would be an asset.

“Her skin looks…burned,” he said.

“Yes. You feel how hot the whole house is? Whatever was used to make it hot—maybe some kind of portable propane heater, maybe a really big ceramic coil—whatever it was, she was held up close enough to the heat source for her skin to start to fry. This was done before the eyes were taken out. We think the eyes would have popped, exploded, from the heat. There would have been a lot of pain. The eyes pop or melt, whatever, and then what was left in the socket was gouged out. I'm sorry to say she was probably still alive when this was done.”

“So what killed her?” asked Mavis in a hoarse tone, wishing with all her heart that she had taken the vacation time that was due her—
overdue
to her—and gone up to her cabin in the Belfair Range to watch Turner Classic Movies and drink a case or two of Stella.

“Can't be sure without an autopsy,” said Riley in that cool clinical tone, “but my money is on a heart attack. She's a bit overweight, a smoker, from the nicotine stains on her index and second fingers. Shock, terror, pain. Heart going like a hummingbird in a bell jar. Infarct of some sort, a defect, blows an artery or something. Or maybe we'll find an aneurysm.”

A pause, while everybody absorbed that.

“Okay,” said Nick. “The fourth?”

“Yes,” said Riley, a different tone in her voice, less cool, more cold. She had turned up her chill. “The daughter, Ava. Fifteen. She's upstairs, in the back bedroom.”

She stood up, walked to the bottom of the wide wooden staircase that curved up to the second-floor landing, stopped there, turned to look at them.

“You know, we're going to do a pretty thorough job here, all of us CSI people. Before we move anything, we'll do video, take shots, measure everything down to a micron, and it will all go on the computer, where you can see it all. See
everything
. I personally guarantee it, and I'm the best there is at this.”

Mavis listened, getting a bit edgy. “Your point, Sergeant?”

“You don't really need to go up there.”

“Yes we do,” said Mavis, stiffening.

Riley shook her head, her sad eyes darkening. “No, you don't. And I really think you shouldn't. You just don't need to see it, have it in your heads forever. The pictures are enough for you to testify on. There's lots of precedent for this. We studied it at UV law. In
State vs.
—”

Nick cut her off.

“Enough. Let's go.”

Danziger hadn't found car keys or a parking chit in his pocket, so he didn't bother looking for a car. He came down the front steps of the MountRoyal, feeling the mist on his cheeks, cool and sort of nice. The rain had stopped, but there was a lot of water in the air and everything on the Mile was soft-focus. He stood at the bottom, patting his pockets out of habit, realized he was looking for his cigarettes, which he now remembered smoking all the time.

There was a magazine stand across the street, still open at this unholy hour. The traffic had died off and the nightlife shut down. There were only a few people on the streets: a couple of shadows in the dark of an empty parking lot, a drug deal of some kind: an elderly hooker standing by a beat-up lime-green Camaro, cigarette hanging from her lips, eyes scanning the street, fumbling for her car keys with one hand, a chrome-plated Llama .32 in the other.

Music was coming from one of the biker bars—overamped headbanger howling with a crystal meth backbeat that made Danziger feel like going over that way and starting a fight.

But he didn't.

The news guy in the booth was asleep and Danziger woke him up with a tap-tap on a pile of
Vanity Fair
s. He was a tiny monkey-faced guy with no legs and thick-lensed glasses that made his eyes look like raw oysters. He was propped up on a high chair and had his hands folded on a stainless steel Colt .380.

“Smokes,” said Danziger, looking right and left, feeling eyes on the back of his neck.

“Brand, sir?” said Monkey Guy.

Danziger had to think about that. “Camels,” he said, and the guy flipped him a pack, along with a folder of matches with a logo on the front.

BLUE BIRD BUS LINES

IF YOU DON'T KNOW WHERE YOU'RE GOING

WE KNOW HOW TO GET YOU THERE

A phone number and an address: The Button Gwinnett Bus Terminal, 1745 Forsythia, at Tulip Landing. Danziger paid the guy, stripped the cellophane off the pack, extracted a Camel, lit it with ceremonial care, feeling a twinge in his chest as he pulled in the smoke, Monkey Guy watching him carefully all the while, as if he expected Danziger to burst into flames.

“Quieter now,” said Danziger, making small talk.

Monkey Guy showed a set of teeth that would have looked right at home in a macaque. “Busy night,” he said in a high thready hiss that had more air than voice in it. “Cave-in down in the sewers. Some guy got himself cut in half by a rockfall.”

“I heard the sirens,” said Danziger, aware of the two bulky shapes gliding down the Mile toward him and spreading out a bit to give themselves some room. Room for what?

Monkey Guy was nodding in jerky flinches. He held up a portable scanner. Danziger heard laconic cross talk coming from the speaker.

“I listen to the cops. They got a bad one up in The Glades. Four people killed. Makes six, on account of the two yesterday. Bad times in Niceville, sir, very bad times. Yes, sir.”

Danziger was going to ask him some more questions but then he heard a voice coming out of the darkness between two streetlamps.

“Hey there, huckleberry.” A young voice, but not a small one. Lot of cracks in it, like ice in the spring, and an undertone that sounded like fear mixed with anger.

Danziger turned and saw two large young men standing apart, maybe fifteen feet away. He turned back to Monkey Guy. “Better button up.”

Monkey Guy nodded, reached for the steel shutter that protected his roost, saying, as it clattered down, “They're Dark Boys, mister. All wrong in the head. Not allowed in Tin Town. I'm calling the cops.”

Danziger heard the lock click on from inside and Monkey Guy's reedy voice on a cell phone.

He stepped away from the booth, coming up the street toward the two men and stopping in front of a shuttered storefront, getting his back near it, feeling the weight of the Colt Anaconda in his jacket pocket.

The two guys moved in closer, each to a side, until they had Danziger in the pointy end of a triangle. They looked like Midwestern farm boys, big fat-faced pale-skinned kids with small stupid eyes and girly lips. Brothers, Danziger figured, sizing them up, maybe even twins, and a good illustration of what you end up with when your ancestors go to family reunions to pick up chicks. But big, damn big, and muscular, six feet four and better, round-shouldered, thick-necked, and long-armed. He didn't see a weapon but figured he would pretty soon.

“You a
real
cowboy?” said the one on Danziger's right. He was wearing a black basketball shirt with the number six on it. Lebron. His arms were bared, tattoos coating both of them from his biceps to his wrists. Danziger said nothing, just waited.

He knew where this was going. Everybody did. Talk just gave them a better idea of who he was.

The other one, wearing a stained tee and black jeans and shitkicker boots that were probably steel-toed, had full-arm tattoos as well, and Danziger remembered that they were called
sleeve tats.

This one made a noise like a cross between a grunt and a cough, stepped in closer, stopping about eight feet away, and now there was something in his hand, a nasty curved blade that shimmered as the guy moved it back and forth.

“Give it up, huckleberry,” said Basketball Boy, “and we'll go easy on you. Only fuck you up a little.”

Danziger sighed and pulled out the Colt, cocking the hammer back as the revolver came on point, aimed it straight at Shitkicker's left eye.

There was a definite alteration in the general mood. Shitkicker opened his mouth, closed it again, and backed away quickly, shaking his head. “Don't, mister…don't,” he said, in a higher voice than the one he'd been using a minute ago. “We were just kidding with you.”

“Yeah,” said the other one, Basketball Boy. “We didn't mean nothing. Look. We're just gonna walk away, okay? Just going to…walk away.”

“Move an eyelash and I'll kill you both.”

They didn't move an eyelash.

Danziger let the moment ride, feeling a strong urge to kill them where they stood, or should he just let them wander off to fuck up somebody else's life?

The
snickety-snick
sound of a shotgun being pumped and racked came as clear as castanets across the misty air. A spotlight hit them and the
blip-blip
of a siren, and then a hard-edged command in classic cop tones. “On the ground, assholes.
On. The. Ground.”

Danziger didn't move, and he kept the Colt right on Shitkicker's eye. A Niceville PD cruiser was stopped twenty yards away, and the cop was out, his shotgun braced on the roof of the cruiser. The cop was Frank Barbetta.

Basketball Boy and Shitkicker hesitated for just a moment, no longer—two heartbeats maybe. Shitkicker was about to drop his knife—Danziger saw the surrender, the defeat, the fear in his piggish eyes—but at that point Barbetta said, in a teasing singsong voice right out of the schoolyard, “Oh, Olll-iiieee, sweetheart, look at me, Ollie. Look at me.”

Ollie turned enough to look at Barbetta, the cop rock steady, elbows braced on the roof of the cruiser, his shotgun centered on Ollie's head.

“What did I
say
, Ollie? What did I
specifically
say?”

“Sir,” said Ollie, his voice trembling, “ahh, you said, ahh, we should…not come down…me and Gordon should not come down to the Mile.”

“But here you are,” said Barbetta.

“Yeah, Frank…well, yeah,” said Ollie, his voice a choking squeak. “We thought you went off duty at midnight. Me and Gordon, we were just—”

“Well, I
didn't
go off duty, did I? I'm right here, looking at you two pieces of shit. And I am…
disappointed
.”

Ollie dropped the knife and lifted his hands up, palms out. Maybe he heard something new in Barbetta's voice, the way he had drawn out the last word. Dis-
appoint
-ed.

“Frank, please—please don't—”

“Nighty-night, asshole,” Barbetta said, and triggered the shotgun—a crack of sky-ripping thunder, short and deafening, a sheet of blue flame flashing out of the muzzle, the recoil pushing Barbetta's shoulder back six inches.

Ollie's head disappeared with a thwacking sound and turned into a cloud of pink mist. Danziger felt the pitter-patter of blood spray and bone bits hitting his jacket.

Ollie stood for a second or two longer, headless, pink rain drifting down in an arc around him. His legs buckled and he collapsed, hit on his knees, wavered there for a moment, and then toppled forward onto his belly.

Barbetta had already switched to Basketball Boy, Gordon, who was standing about ten feet away from what was left of his brother, dappled with blood and skull bits.

He was staring bug-eyed at Barbetta. “You can't—”

“I just did, Gordon” said Barbetta in a patient fatherly tone. “I
told
you, next time. Told you, and I told Ollie there. You didn't
listen
. You two never do. And now your poor brother Oliver is two hundred and fifty pounds of bad meat and it's your own damn fault. Get on your knees, Gordon.”

Gordon got down on his knees.

He looked at his brother's body and started to cry, and got bigger at it and louder, accelerating into a chest-heaving, howling wail.

Barbetta walked over to him, smiled briefly at Danziger, and gun-butted Gordon in the temple, a quick snapping strike and Gordon went sideways and lay still. Barbetta turned to Danziger.

“Hey, Charlie, you good? Nice to see you. Put that fucking cannon away. This dance is over.”

Danziger could feel something stuck into his cheek, a sliver of skull. He plucked it out with his left hand while he uncocked the Colt and put it away slowly, making an inner wish that Ollie didn't have anything communicable.

He was thinking
that was not a righteous kill
and in no way typical of Frank Barbetta, who, if he remembered correctly, had never fired his duty weapon—other than at the range—in over thirty years of hard service. And now, after thirty years, he does this?

Another silvery shimmer in Danziger's memory pool: a flashing image of a navy blue pursuit car in his side mirror—
OBJECTS IN THE MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR
—lights and sirens—the pursuit car is climbing right up his tailgate, so close Danziger can see the cop's face…he looks over and the guy he shot, Merle Zane, is at the wheel and Merle's talking into a cell phone or a radio…the voice at the other end comes back—Merle is talking to Coker…and now Charlie is shooting at the pursuit car…he's
shooting
at a police car…

And the memory is gone.

That's it.

Like a video clip, a few seconds and then gone, and Danziger is back in the here and now, with Frank Barbetta kneeling by the corpse of the man he had just killed.

“Ollie, you dumb, stupid fuck,” Barbetta said, picking Ollie's knife up and slipping it into his jacket pocket. He was patting the headless corpse on the shoulder. “How many times have I told you, stay off my mile.”

Danziger, shaking himself clear, looked around him and realized that the Mile was now empty and dark from one end to the other. The fog and mist hung in the air like shotgun smoke.

He looked back at Barbetta, who was kneeling by Oliver's body, smiling down upon him like a new daddy at his firstborn. Gordon, a few feet away, was snuffling and jerking, coming around.

Barbetta stood up, his gun belt creaking. “Come on, Charlie. Help me get this sack of shit into the car.”

“
Which
sack of shit?”

Barbetta laughed. “Yeah, I forgot. You state guys require specific instructions for everything, probably need a laminated card with cartoon drawings on it shows you how to pee. The live one goes in the back of the cruiser,” said Barbetta, his grin a bit wild. “Got a body bag for Ollie here. We'll get him in the trunk, drive on over to the bridge and dump him into the Tulip. The rain will take care of all the blood and the rats will get the nibbly bits.”

“It's not raining,” Danziger said.

Barbetta looked up, then gave Danziger a Coker-like grin. “It will, Charlie. It will.”