“So what did happen?” asked Trout.
“The remains were shipped to his family.”
“Uh-uh. He didn’t have any family. I did the background on Gibbon.”
“I know, right? You wanted to do one of those bullshit human interest things. ‘What’s the cost to the family of the killer?’ or ‘The victims aren’t the only victims.’ Some crap like that.”
“I’m so glad you respect my work.”
“C’mon, Trout, let’s be real here. I lock shit up and you shovel it onto the headlines. Neither of us is doing any great humanitarian good here. Best-case scenario for me is I make life hell for the baby-rapers while they’re waiting for the system to put them back into the community; and maybe you write a piece once every ten years that has more genuine heart than exploitive bullshit. Tell me I’m wrong.”
Trout was impressed. Schlunke was an insect but apparently not as stupid a creepy-crawly as previously thought. Trout filed that away.
“The family,” he prompted, swinging back to that. “The court records said he had no family.”
“Court records were wrong. Some old broad stepped up after the last appeal. Said that she was his aunt and apparently produced enough proof to convince the judge and the warden. Point is, she petitioned to claim the body for burial. All last minute, all hush-hush.”
Trout was genuinely interested now. “An aunt, huh? How old?”
“’Bout two years older than dirt. She arranged to have his body shipped back and to have a mortician tidy Gibbon up before they put him in a pine box.”
“What cemetery would allow—”
“No … She wanted to bury him on the family estate. Well … farm. Used to be an estate but there isn’t much of it left. Few dozen acres that have been left to grow wild. There’s a family cemetery behind the house, and she wants Homer Gibbon buried there.”
“Why? She trying to ruin the property value?” asked Trout, but he was already seeing it. Old lady who’s only relative is a serial murderer. Maybe she knew him as a kid and wants to honor the child he’d been rather than the man he’d become. Classic stuff. Or, maybe she really believed in the defense’s theory that Gibbon suffered from a chemical imbalance. Was that the tether she used to cling to her self-respect and the family name?
“Are you even fucking listening to me?” growled Schlunke.
“Sure, sure,” Trout lied, thinking that the story might actually have legs. Could be a feature piece. A heartbreaker. Might even be something that could be squeezed into a Lifetime movie if the aunt was a Betty White type. “You were saying … aunt, burial prep…”
“When she petitioned the judge to receive the body, she requested that the information not be released to the press. She was afraid that his grave would be desecrated by friends and family of Gibbon’s victims, or by kids. Thrill seekers and stuff.”
“Yeah, yeah,” said Trout. He was casting the rest of the movie in his head. Maybe go with Kristen Bell as the waitress who gets killed. “But I need that address. Story’s dead without it.”
“I know. So … we’re absolutely clear on the hundred-twenty-five percent?”
“You’re on the wrong side of those bars, Schlunke.”
“Yes or no?”
“Yes, yes, yes. Now where’s the fucking aunt li—”
“Stebbins.”
Trout missed a beat, then said, “What?”
“Stebbins. The aunt … She lives in Stebbins.”
“But … I live in…”
“Yeah,” said Schlunke, “the old broad lives in your town.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
HARTNUP’S TRANSITION ESTATE
“Find him!” bellowed Chief Goss. “Doc Hartnup’s injured and probably in shock.”
“Going to rain soon,” said one of the officers.
“Then hustle your ass. If he’s hurt then he can’t have gotten far.”
“He’s not injured, Chief, he’s fucking dead. Somebody stole his body,” Dez said, but her voice was small. JT looked at her and gave a small shake of his head.
Officers ran in all directions, plunging into the woods, banging open doors on the outbuildings, shining lights into corners and under parked cars. Goss called the news in for the officers already combing the woods for the killer. They were working the far side of the mortuary.
“Here!” yelled an officer from Nesbitt who had been working his way across the lawn toward the woods. Dez ran toward him. For a fat man, Goss could move fast, and he was only a step behind JT. The Nesbitt officer—a black-haired kid named Diviny who was one year out of the academy—knelt on the grass on the forest side of the property. He pointed at a scuff of blood on the pea gravel and the streaks of red on bent blades of grass. “Looks like he went into the woods.”
JT bent and peered at the blood trail and then began following it, keeping to one side to protect the evidence. Dez flanked him on the other side of the trail. The smears of blood faded from bright wetness to faint touches to nothing forty yards from the wall of trees.
“Lost it,” said Diviny, who was dogging JT and, Dez thought, clearly avoiding her. All of the cops were giving her strange looks.
Fuck ’em, she thought. Her nerves were still jangling and the skepticism of Goss and the other officers was doing nothing to take her blood pressure off the burner. If this had been a UFO sighting or if she’d seen Bigfoot poking through her garbage can, then maybe she’d give some weight to JT’s unspoken assumption that her perceptions were still being filtered through a mix of Jack Daniels and Yuengling lager. But what happened back in the mortuary office was no visual hallucination, and it wasn’t pink fucking elephants. The woman had been dead. And then she had gotten up and gone apeshit. That was fact. Dez could still feel the slack weight of the woman bearing her down to the ground and her cold fingers trying to grab Dez’s hair.
She hunkered down and peered at the grass. “No … look at the grass.”
Diviny and JT bent low and looked where she was pointing. The grass was short and springy, resistant to footfall impressions, but as the law of forensics goes, every contact leaves a trace. Some of the grass, though unbroken, was pushed down and was still in the process of standing up.
“Nice catch,” said Goss, but there was a strong reserve in his voice. “Diviny, see if you can find this asshole. If you spot him, don’t engage—call for backup.” Goss gestured to an officer from Nesbitt. “Natalie—go with him, okay? No heroes.”
They nodded and moved off toward the trees.
“Where do you want JT and me?” ask Dez.
Goss sucked his teeth for a moment. “I want you to go sit in your unit and write me up a report I can live with. No, don’t look at me like that, it’s not a request.”
“Why?” asked JT. “This is an active crime scene and—”
“—and it appears that a victim of a violent attack got up and waltzed right out of your crime scene.”
Dez cursed silently. She wanted to get away, go home.
“No way,” insisted JT. “Doc Hartnup did not get up and walk away. No sir.”
“Then pitch me another scenario, Officer Hammond.” Goss pointed to the trail they had followed from the mortuary. “We followed shoe prints coming out of the building. That trail starts right where you said Doc was killed. I’ll bet those shoe impressions are going to match those of the victim. Are you suggesting, officers, that someone entered the crime scene while you were engaged in your violent struggle with the cleaning woman, took the time to put the dead man’s shoes on his own feet, then picked up the body and carried it into the woods? Take your time; think it through before you answer.”
JT clamped his jaw shut so firmly Dez thought his teeth were going to crack.
The chief’s eyes flicked back and forth between the two of them. “We called in for a shitload of backup. If Diviny and Natalie come up dry, we’ll start a proper search of the woods, and our people are already checking the buildings.”
Dez pointed to the gables of a whitewashed Victorian barely visible beyond the Grove. “At least let us check Doc’s old house.”
“I thought it was empty,” said Goss.
“It’s up for sale, yes, but it’s not empty,” corrected Dez. “Doc’s sister, April, and her two little kids, Tommy and Gail, have been living there while her divorce is being finalized. Been there two weeks. We didn’t get a chance to check on them, so let us—”
“No,” Goss said firmly. “I’ll send someone else. You go work on that report. Give me something that doesn’t sound like science-fucking-fiction.”
Dez turned away to keep the hurt she was feeling from showing. JT sighed heavily. They watched officers Ken Gunther and Dana Howard vanish into a path that wound through the Grove to the old Hartnup house. Without turning, Dez said, “This was a righteous shooting, Chief.”
When the chief did not answer, Dez turned and locked eyes with him for several silent seconds. Gradually, the stern line of Goss’s mouth softened a little and he sighed. “Christ, I hope so, Dez.”
JT said, “Are we going to need a lawyer?”
Goss sighed. “Not with me. But the state’s going to come in on this, no question about it. Talk to the union rep, get their lawyers on standby.”
They turned suddenly as the forensic officer, Scott, came hurrying out of the mortuary, waving a clipboard at them. As he closed in on them he said, “JT, Dez … what happened to the third body?”
JT and Dez stared blankly at him.
“Which third body?” asked Goss.
“The dead one,” said Scott.
“You trying to be funny?” barked JT.
“No,” said Scott, “I mean the body from the morgue. The one that Doc Hartnup was here to work on. What happened to it?”
