The Taint (18 page)

SIXTY-THREE

Joyce Callan was waiting in the office when Jon arrived shortly after ten a.m. and Andy was looking slightly overwhelmed.

“I’m glad you’re here,” Andy said, following him into his office. “Things are going crazy.”

“Had any action on the APB?”

“No. No one’s seen Tony Buono or Jennifer Rogers, alone or together, and her parents have been calling every half hour. But that’s nothing. We’re swamped with calls about suspicious men lurking in the bushes . . .”

“Is that why Joyce is here?”

“No, she’s come to file a missing persons report, but I’ve been too busy to get to her.” He sighed. “I’m afraid, with everybody jumping out of their skins, that somebody’s gonna get shot.”

“Anything else?”

“I called the guys who were in the search party, to try and organize for this afternoon, and none of them were willing to go. They want to be at home with their families.”

“I guess we really can’t blame them for that.”

“And I talked to Malloy; he says the campers are leaving in droves.”

“I’m surprised they waited this long. Why don’t you go on home and get some rest. I’ll take the missing persons report.”

Andy nodded and turned to the door.

“You know,” he said, his hand on the doorknob, “I was scared stiff being in here last night. Even with my gun and the doors locked, and the dispatcher ten feet away. I was
scared.”

“Joyce, come in, have a seat.”

She came into the office and perched nervously on the edge of the chair.

“I don’t know where to start,” she said in a soft voice.

“Andy said you wanted to report a missing person.”

“Yes. One of the nurses I work with, Laura Gentry.”

“Why don’t you just tell me about it?” He leaned back in his chair, hoping she would relax if he appeared at ease.

“I . . . last saw her at work on Saturday. The next day Emma Sutter worked for her, and she had Monday and Tuesday off. And no one has seen her.”

“You don’t think she went away on her days off?”

“No . . . not without telling someone.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Well, she has a cat, and whenever she’s going away, I take care of it for her.”

“You don’t think she might have asked someone else?”

“I don’t think so.” She hesitated. “I have a key to her house. I went over there this morning after I finished work. Her cat was crying at the door, and obviously hadn’t been fed. And her luggage was still in the hall closet.”

“I see.”

“If something has happened to her . . . all of these awful killings . . .”

He nodded and opened his desk drawer, searching for the form.

“And one other thing . . .” Joyce frowned.

“Yes?” He could see she was uncomfortable about what she was going to say, much more than anything else.

“On Saturday, when I saw Laura at work . . . she had injured herself.” When he didn’t comment she continued: “She had slit her wrists. The wounds were superficial, but she was quite shaken. Disturbed.”

“Do you think she might have run off to avoid having to face you again?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so, really. It’s not something I can put my finger on, but she didn’t strike me as being someone who would run . . .”

“All right. I’ll need to get a description of her.”

“Here.” Joyce handed him a small framed picture. “I took this from her house.”

He looked at the photograph, into the eyes of a sensible young woman. Everything about her said practical and levelheaded.

After Joyce Callan left he sat back down with a pad and began to list events. Five unexplained deaths, a vagrant dead of natural causes, and the growing list of the missing. Panic was building and the quiet little town of Crestview was under siege.

The evidence that he had collected was being analyzed but was essentially useless without a suspect.

Tony Buono was beginning to look interesting. A run through the computer by the state had shown a trail of minor offenses and, surprisingly, a charge of statutory rape. It was a charge he hadn’t seen in a while, probably because the kids were better at hiding their sexual experience, or the parents were more lenient in their retribution.

In any case, Buono was not the perfect man that his wife seemed to think he was. Mrs. Buono was more upset about her husband’s disappearance than the death of her daughter.

So much for mother love, he thought.

A knock at the door and Calvin Price stuck his head in.

“Got a minute?”

“Come on in.” He tossed Buono’s record face down on the desk.

Calvin moved the chair closer to the desk and once seated, he leaned forward.

“What’s on your mind Calvin?”

“We’ve got to do something.”

“We’re doing a lot of things . . .”

“I want you to block the roads going out of town. Set up a barricade, tell the people that no one’s allowed to leave until they’re questioned.” He nodded once to emphasize his point.

“I can’t do that.”

“You’ve got to. Business has been slow, but if all those tourists leave, it’ll be dead.”

“Calvin . . .”

“No, I mean it. Next, the summer people’ll leave, just watch, and the rest of us . . . huh! Eighty percent of my sales are to outsiders.”

“It’s unlawful detainment.”

“You have the right to question them.”

“The most I could do would be to conduct short interviews and maybe search a car or two if there’s reasonable cause.”

“But this is an emergency. You might be letting a killer go.”

“I can’t violate everyone’s rights. Not even for eighty percent of your profit.”

“Sheriff, be reasonable . . .”

“I’m sorry Calvin.” He watched as Calvin stood and went through the door, slamming it behind him.

At noon he drove out to the main road and watched a steady line of cars head down the hill. He parked along the side and got out.

Most of the cars carried families, a few were couples. He wasn’t sure whether he would stop a lone man, or even two men. He had so little to go on still and anyway, names and license numbers were on record at the park.

Besides that he had a gut feeling that whoever it was who was committing these murders was from around here. It had to be someone who knew the forest very well, someone familiar with places to hide. Someone quick.

He could eliminate the men on the search party since all had been under someone else’s eye during the time the last killing was done.

There really weren’t that many others to consider.

He got into the Bronco and headed for the hospital. Nathan had promised him the Davis autopsy and although he didn’t expect any surprises, he wanted to see the report before he went back to the cabin for a final run-through.

SIXTY-FOUR

Amanda Frey watched the children at the table eating their French lunch. She sat off to the side drinking cold tea, cold because they had upset the tureen of vichyssoise and she had had to clean it up, including a fresh table cloth and place settings.

Little pigs, she thought.

The class was smaller than yesterday, with several parents calling to say that they were returning to the city. Some just preferred to keep the children home.

When the phone had started ringing, at six a.m. that morning, she’d had a momentary hope that they all would stay away, and that she could relax in her bed. But the calls tapered off by seven-thirty and she reluctantly began the preparations for the day.

She took another sip of the tea, her eyes watching the little faces, ferret-like in their cunning. Tiny hands, always clutching, grabbing. Selfish, self-centered little beasts.

She wondered why she’d never noticed it before.

One of them was looking at her, a new one, a girl of nine. When their eyes met the girl smiled, her teeth buried in a slice of bread.

Amanda did not return the smile.

SIXTY-FIVE

“Well?”

“Ah,” Nathan sighed. “I can’t get used to this . . .”

Jon waited, respecting Nathan’s need to organize his thoughts.

“Of course, the cause of death was the wound in the throat. Her windpipe was severed, and blood loss from the jugular . . . it was fairly quick, but she knew what had happened to her.” He sat down heavily.

“Anything else?”

“She’d had intercourse shortly before death, her first time. She hadn’t eaten a meal in four to six hours, before death. Otherwise, she was a perfectly healthy normal female. Fourteen years old.”

“Nathan, I don’t mind telling you, I’m running out of time on this. This whole town could erupt into a shooting match if I don’t come up with a suspect.”

“Have you heard anything about the other girl you saw with . . . Melissa?”

“We’ve got an APB out, but no sign of her yet. She could be dead somewhere . . .”

“God, I hope not.”

“And now this thing with Laura Gentry.”

“Emma told me about that.” His eyes narrowed slightly. “I’ve always had a high regard for Laura; she’s an excellent nurse.”

“Which makes it a little unlikely that she’d just disappear.”

Nathan looked closely at Jon, considering. “I want to tell you something, off the record.”

“About Miss Gentry?”

“No, but it might be related. I know Joyce probably told you about her . . . accident.”

“That she slit her wrists? Yes, she told me.”

“Well, the night that Laura cut herself, Franklin Dunn was brought to the hospital after a suicide attempt.”

“Before or after?”

“Before. Laura assisted me when I sutured his wounds. She was very much in control, not depressed, certainly not obviously suicidal. And Joyce tells me that Laura had no idea why she cut her own wrists.”

“How does this relate to Dunn?”

“I’m not sure I know. Except he indicated to me that he was likewise not thinking of suicide. I think that he suffered a dissociative episode, from what he told me, and I think that’s what happened to Laura.”

“You don’t think she was copying him, that something triggered her attempt? I’ve seen some very calm people who all of a sudden lost control.”

“I agree, it can happen without warning. But there’s something more . . . both Franklin and Laura are extraordinarily controlled people. Franklin recalls seeing himself do it, but Laura told Joyce that she couldn’t remember a thing. In either instance, it takes even a determined suicidal individual some conscious effort to actually cut themselves.”

“I can understand that.”

“But neither of them suffered the type of incident shock which I would expect from the act. Even if they felt nothing up to the moment when they . . . sliced their wrists, there should be some strong emotional response to the wound. Franklin thought it was interesting. But only mildly. There was no revulsion, no nausea, which often occurs in these types of injuries, and, no fear.”

“Fear of what?”

“Often it’s fear of more pain. If the first wounds aren’t deep enough, they might have to make another cut. The usual pattern is to make new marks, above or below the original wound. But both of them did make second cuts, and both right on the original. That kind of . . . sawing away at their wrists is very indicative of a major dissociative event. I cannot believe that within the space of a few hours, a highly respected attorney and an extremely competent nurse would both suffer such an attack.” He paused. “Unless . . . something drove them to it.”

After Jon left, Nathan went to the lab, taking the cultures out of the incubator and checking the rate of growth. It was phenomenal, beyond anything he had ever seen before, beyond anything he had read about.

All of them had it, probably Rachel as well, and soon he would too. He had taken fresh blood samples from Tyler and spun the tubes in the centrifuge, until the blood serum separated from the platelets, and now he had a ten cc syringe full of a potential serum.

Inject it into himself? The idea was to give the person receiving the serum a mild case of the disease but at the same time, the antibodies which had already built up in an earlier victim. It would have a high degree of success, but he was beginning to suspect that the disease, while being mild physiologically, might somehow be acting on the mind.

Things he’d read and forgotten. His own belief about the chemical make-up of insanity.

It was an interesting supposition.

But with Rachel ill, he could not risk becoming ill himself. The town was in danger of an epidemic, and medical care was of primary concern.

As soon as Rachel was recovered he would experiment on himself. He gathered up all of the culture dishes and carried them down to the incinerator.

SIXTY-SIX

He put the Bronco in four-wheel drive and turned up the overgrown dirt road leading to the cabin, driving slowly, his eyes searching along the underbrush, half expecting to see the body of Jennifer Rogers, and grateful when he didn’t.

The cabin did not appear to have been disturbed, and he unlocked the front door to go in. The windows were all secured and he figured he had overestimated the public’s curiosity about murder scenes.

He removed the tape sealing the bedroom door and rolled it up, noticing flakes of paint adhering to the adhesive. The flakes crackled when he squeezed the tape into a small, hard ball.

There was nothing else to keep him from going into the room.

All Earl had brought was pink chalk and it looked frivolous and out of place but he knew it didn’t matter. It wasn’t meant to last, and it would look white in the black and white photographs of the scene.

Still . . .

He surveyed the room. The girl’s clothes had all been bagged and blood samples taken off the floor. The prints, what there were of them, were lifted, and the mattress ticking had been carefully removed.

There was nothing left in the room to tell him what had happened. Nothing more to show for the violent death of a young girl.

He stepped by the outline and looked out the small window at the rear of the room. White curtains beginning to lose their shape, stretching under their own weight. Yellowing. Giving off a stale odor.

There was only a small distance between the cabin and the mountain behind and he looked down at the earth beneath the window, hoping for a footprint in the dark soil.

That would be too easy, he thought.

The earth was packed solid. Even if someone had stood outside and looked in on the girl, there would be no prints.

Unless?

He knelt in front of the window, trying to see if there were fingerprints on the glass. It was grimy with dirt, both inside and out, but the dirt was undisturbed. Again, too easy.

What happened in here?

He stood, trying to get a feel for the place. Melissa Davis had come in here willingly, undressed willingly, as evidenced by her carefully folded pants, the bra tucked in one pocket. It was not the sort of a thing that a man would do. She was waiting, standing at the foot of the bed. For Tony?

There were no answers in this room. He turned to leave and stopped, his eyes resting on the open closet door. It looked wrong to him; he was sure that it had been closed.

He walked to the closet and examined the door latch. It was not worn or loose and when he closed the door the catch held fast.

He was almost certain that the door had been closed. Still, maybe it hadn’t been shut tight and during the night the weight of the door had pulled it loose. The fine dusting powder was still on the knob.

With one final look at the room he turned and left. He had requested the records clerk to look up the owner of the property and when the information came through he would notify them. From the looks of things, it had been a while since anyone had stayed in the cabin; it might even have been abandoned and forgotten, an unclaimed refuge. To him it was one more detail.

The radio was spewing static and it wasn’t until he reached the main road that he could pick up dispatch.

“I have something on your missing person,” Jean Sykes, the day dispatcher said, and the static returned.

“Which one?”

The reception was weak. “. . . Gentry . . . can you hear me?”

“You’re breaking, I’m on my way in.”