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CHAPTER 11
Lydia Prentiss was staring at the single Marlboro 100. It beckoned her, like lust. Rather symbolically, it stood on end.
“Sladder’s not the perp,” she said. “I’ve told you ten times.”
Chief White had put her up in an empty lab at the sciences center. Yesterday she’d made a breakdown of the agro site as fast as she could. Department of agriculture officers had swarmed in just as she finished. They’d sealed the site “pending investigation.”
“You know what I think?” White said. “You’re grabbin’ for shit.”
All Lydia wanted was her cigarette and some sleep. She didn’t want to argue. “Chief, just look at the plain facts.”
“The plain facts are that Sladder was packin’ an illegal gun!”
“Illegally carried, but legally owned. Wake up, Chief. Security guards are notorious for carrying pocket pieces like this.”
“And I suppose you know exactly what kind of gun it was.”
“Sure, a Raven Arms Model P25. Costs about eighty bucks. Don’t they teach your men anything in the academy? All I had to do was call State Handgun Records and ask. Sladder bought the piece, legally, in 1981 from a local gun shop. The guy’s got no rap sheet at all. He’s never even had a traffic ticket.”
“Neither did the Boston Fuckin’ Strangler. He was still a nut.”
“Sladder had forty years of steady employment; his only black marks were a few reprimands for booze. He won medals in World War II.”
“I don’t give a shit. He was a rummy who carried an illegal handgun. That’s good enough for me.”
“Fine, Chief. Think what you want.”
White rolled a King Edward cigar in his mouth. “Just give me your technical conclusions, Prentiss, not lip service.”
The cigarette would be good now, real good. “My conclusions are as follows. Two or more perpetrators entered the agro site shortly after the power failure, about midnight. The girl, Penelope, was with him; several girls on the hall said she often visited the site at odd hours, to see the horses. In the horse stalls, she and Sladder stumbled onto one of the perps, the one with the ax. Here, Sladder sustained a serious injury to his right arm. I believe his arm was completely severed, judging by the trajectory of the bloodfall.”
White was shaking his head. Lydia continued, “At this point, Sladder and the girl retreated to the stablemaster’s office. They managed to dress Sladder’s wound. He tried to call for help but the phone box had already been destroyed. Shortly thereafter, the perpetrator’s attack continued. Sladder responded by firing six shots from the .25 pistol. I recovered five bullets from the stable floor. The sixth bullet hit one of the perps at the far exit. There’s bloodfall of a different type to verify this.”
White was rubbing his brow now, still shaking his head.
“At this point Sladder and the girl attempted to escape via the front exit. Less than ten feet from the door, Sladder was murdered. The amount of blood on the floor makes this obvious.”
White could brew no longer. He…blew up. “Arms cut off! Murder! That’s the fucked uppest bunch of shit I ever heard! We don’t even know that the blood is Sladder’s! We don’t even know he was the one who fired the gun!”
“The large bleeds are all A positive, Sladder’s type according to his health insurance forms. As for who fired the gun, Sladder’s partials are all over the dead brass. I ID’d his prints from his print card from the security office, and I got comparison prints of the girl by dusting common areas of her dorm room. They both left prints on the fence that was cut down, on the utility shed door, on the flashlights. I got their prints on baseboards, Chief, and the lower edge of the stable door. These people were on the floor—they were hiding from something.”
White tapped his cigar, trying to calm down. “Okay, Prentiss. If Sladder was murdered, where’s his body?”
“The perpetrators removed it.”
“And the girl? I suppose she was murdered too.”
“Maybe, but I don’t think so. There’s none of her blood on the site. My guess is she was abducted.”