The one door was still open, canted at an angle on its weak hinges. I went through the opening. The sour odor was the same — or maybe it wasn’t, maybe it was stronger. I breathed through my mouth so I wouldn’t have to smell it. The shadows in the corners, under the hayloft, up around the eaves seemed denser today because of the heavy overcast outside. I switched on the flashlight and played its powerful beam over the stack of lumber, the carpentering tools scattered nearby. Then, slowly, I made my way toward the rear, to where the horse stalls were.
The second stack of lumber still stood in the one on the far left. I moved that way, put the light on the two-by-fours and sheets of plywood piled haphazardly along the back wall. Not much, really. Just enough to cover about a third of the packed-earth floor.
What was it doing here? That was the question I should have asked myself last Friday, just as I should have asked myself why the crucifixes and the photograph of Roberto were still in the house. Nothing back here but the otherwise empty stalls; nothing that needed repair; nothing that would warrant lugging two-by-fours and plywood sheets from the front of the barn all the way back here.
Only one reason for the lumber in this stall, then: to hide something underneath it.
I let the light slither over the bare earth. It was marked, chewed up here and there by shoes or boots, by pieces of lumber, maybe by a tool of some kind. Yeah. But the marks and gouges didn’t look fresh. Nor did the lumber seem to have been disturbed since my first visit. They hadn’t been back in here; that seemed certain.
I had no stomach for the rest of it, and I was afraid of the exertion. But I had to do it, I had to be sure. I wedged the flash into a crack in the boards separating the stall from its neighbor, positioning it so that it illuminated the lumber. There were three of the plywood sheets on top; I tackled those first, carried them out one at a time and dropped them back a ways. The two-by-fours were next: same thing, one at a time. The first few trips weren’t too bad, but then I lifted one of the pieces wrong, even though I was bending and lifting in slow motion. The pain cut through my side, made it difficult for me to breathe for a few seconds. Started my head aching again, too. I rested for a time, but the pain lingered and so did the shortness of breath. Live with it, I told myself, you’ve lived with worse. Don’t think about it. Don’t think about anything.
It took me more than twenty minutes to clear the stall, double the time it would have taken if I’d been healthy. Wrapped in the heavy overcoat, I was drenched in oily sweat by the time I finished; but I hadn’t dared take the coat off, not as cold as it was in here. My knees felt shaky and I had to sit down for a couple of minutes before I did anything else. But not there in the stall; not anywhere close to it. Not with the smell that came from the spaded-up earth under the last two sections of plywood.
There was an old three-legged kitchen stool near the workbench; I sat on that, breathing through my mouth, not thinking about anything. When my legs felt all right I got up again, found a shovel among the tools near the main stack of lumber, took it back to the stall. And began to dig.
The earth was soft, moist; the work would not have been hard except for the constant bending and straightening that aggravated each stiffened joint, worsened the pain in my side and the dull pounding in my head. During the next ten minutes I had to stop and rest three times. If the body had been down deep I might have had to give up the job altogether. But it wasn’t down deep; it was buried a little more than twelve inches below the surface.
The shovel blade bit into something yielding and the poisonous, gaseous stench of decay spurted up at me. I recoiled, gagging. When I turned back finally, reluctantly, I was looking at an arm — a man’s bloated arm, blackened fingers acrawl with bugs, bulging out of the remnants of a blue chambray shirt.
I had finally found Danny Martinez.
I could not have faced any more digging, even if it had been necessary; the stench was sickening enough as it was. Ben Klein on the phone last Friday: We didn’t even get a smell of this guy Martinez. Jesus Christ!
Shaking a little, I threw the shovel down and pulled the flashlight out of the crack in the boards. The beam slithered sideways, made something gleam in the mound of dirt I’d created-something red and shiny. I leaned over that way, trying not to gag again, and held the light on it up close.
Part of a fingernail, torn raggedly on one end: a woman’s long fingernail painted a bright crimson.
I left it where it was; no point in removing incriminating evidence. I had to get out of there. The stench was so bad it made me feel as if I were suffocating. I followed the light across the barn, shut it off when I got outside. Stood in the chill wind with my head back, sucking air until my chest cleared and the nausea was gone. Then I went to the car and got inside and started the engine and sat huddled and shivering, waiting for the heater to fill up the space with warm air. Thinking again. Remembering.
Elisabeth Summerhayes: I hate women who mark men, the ones with claws like cats. She had been talking about Alicia Purcell. But Mrs. Purcell had short fingernails now, short and painted a bright bloody crimson. Why would a woman who habitually wore her nails long cut them short? A whim, maybe. Or maybe she’d had no other choice; maybe she’d torn one of them off, damaged others, doing manual labor of some kind. Like digging. Like burying the body of a man she’d just murdered.
You don’t like to think about women having the physical and mental capacity for digging graves, for lugging heavy plywood sheets and two-by-fours to cover one up; you can get so mired in the weak-sex-fair-sex myth that you lose sight of the fact that a woman, given the proper impetus, can pretty much do any job a man can do. Alicia Purcell was wiry, strong. And determined. And as cold-blooded as any black widow spider making dinner out of one of her mates.
She’d killed and buried Danny Martinez, all right. The broken fingernail in there proved that. She hadn’t had any help with that part of it; the help had come later, in making it look as though Martinez had pulled up stakes and disappeared to parts unknown. She’d needed somebody to pack up all his belongings, load them into Martinez’s pickup, drive the truck away somewhere and get rid of it. That was where Richie Dessault came in.
It had to be Dessault. From all indications he hadn’t known Martinez personally; so how had he known it was Martinez I was talking about-I hadn’t even known it myself at the time-when I asked Melanie if she knew anyone who spoke with a Latin accent? My visit last Thursday, my investigation, was what had sent him out here the following afternoon. He’d come skulking through the woods because he hadn’t wanted to be seen driving into the farm, hadn’t wanted his car out in plain sight if anybody showed up. His purpose: either to make sure he hadn’t left any traces of himself when he’d done Alicia’s bidding, or to see if he could find out just what had been going on between her and Martinez. She wouldn’t have told him about the murder, the body buried in the barn, any of the rest of it; she was cunning and he wasn’t and she would not have left herself wide open to any more blackmail. No, she’d have made up some plausible-sounding story, something quasi-legitimate at the worst, to explain the need to get rid of Martinez’s belongings and truck. Dessault hadn’t questioned her at that point, if he’d ever questioned her. She’d have had him hooked by then, with sex as the bait. She’d have seduced him just as she had Summerhayes and countless others.
Just as she had Leonard.
That was the key to the whole thing, not Danny Martinez. Once you realized that Leonard had to have also been one of her conquests, you understood everything else that had followed. Seduction was not only a weapon with her, not only a means to an end, it was a motivating force in her life. All men were fair game-all men. And homosexuals were right up there at the top of the list because they presented the greatest challenge. She’d tried to seduce Alex Ozimas, hadn’t she? Ozimas: Not that I’m irresistible, of course; it was merely that she considered seducing a man of my tastes a stimulating challenge. Sure. So why not her husband’s brother, too?