Rain on the roof of the Cherokee woke Pete. He looked out and saw it blowing across the lake in sheets in the dawn light. It was going to be a miserable trip across and back—the kids would have to bail the whole way—but there was enough light to see by, no one would drown.
He quickly drank some coffee from the thermos, gobbled two of Bessie’s sweet biscuits, then pulled on his poncho and stuck his head out and saw an arrangement of dark lumps was coming toward him through the curtain of rain. He hallooooed and Dave halloooed back.
Dave was bringing the kids in before this crap turned to sleet, as it would if the temperature dropped half a degree. Pete pulled the poncho hood up and jumped out in the rain to help beach the dinghy.
Meers pulled out a ring of keys with a purple rabbit’s foot that Latovsky had seen in Riley’s hands a thousand times. He looked away to get it out of his sight and saw the impatiens Barb must’ve just planted poking through the wet dirt. Then he didn’t know where to look and kept his eyes trained on his feet on the stone stoop.
Meers broke the crime scene seal and opened the door. A draft of steamy air blew out at them and Meers said, “Jesus, we left the heat on.” He crossed the foyer to an old-fashioned dial thermostat. “We were all pretty rattled,” he explained, “even Rule.”
He turned the dial and the furnace stopped rumbling.
“They were in the kitchen.” Meers nodded down a short carpeted hall to a closed swing door. “The bodies’re gone of course, but I had them leave the rest intact so you can get oriented before you see the photos.
“People next door heard shots last night, but thought it was truck backfire on the Northway, which is about a half a mile away. Then, about noon, a neighbor lady came over, saw the bodies through the window in the back door, and understandably had hysterics. It took her a while to calm down enough to make sense and by the time her husband called in, and the locals figured that they couldn’t handle double murder and called us, it was almost four.”
He led the way down the hall and stopped with his hand on the door. “It’s a mess, Dave—I’m really sorry.”
“You didn’t make it, Lem.”
“I know.”
Meers pushed open the door and a stench of baked blood and spoiled meat rolled at them. “Shit.” Meers ripped his handkerchief out of his pocket and put it over his nose and mouth. “Shouldn’t be this bad,” he said, his voice muffled by the cloth. “Wouldn’t be if we’d turned the heat off.”
Latovsky breathed through his mouth and looked past Meers into the Rileys’ kitchen. One side of the room was covered with blood, with coin-sized wafers of putrid flesh glued to the surfaces.
He choked and turned his head; then he took a deep breath and rushed across the room, sidestepping a big tacky puddle around a chair set in the middle of the floor. He tore open the back door and waved it back and forth to clear the air. But it had been warm and still since the rain stopped; the sun was a silver smear behind a glaze of white cloud cover and nothing stirred except the drip of water from the porch rail and Riley’s kettle barbecue.
Latovsky remembered Riley broiling steaks on it last summer.
The possessions of the dead were always sadder than the repulsive corpse, he thought. And he was hugely glad that his last memory of Riley would be the fair, red-faced man raising his hand to make a vow in Casey’s bar and grill.
He left the door open and turned back into the room.
The slugs had gone through the Rileys and still had enough firepower to splinter doors of three cabinets; two on the wall, one under the sink.
“What’d he use?” he asked.
“Big-mother gun,” Rule said.
Bunner’s killer had used a big-mother gun, but there was more to it that Latovsky couldn’t get hold of. He tried for a second, then gave up and opened the splintered cabinet under the sink. It contained cleaning supplies. The bullet had nicked a bottle of Dawn and it lay on its side leaking green goo. The fresh smell fought the miasma in the room, making it worse by contrast, and Latovsky was suddenly a hair from being violently sick. He pulled out his handkerchief and plastered it over his face. It had been in his pocket two days and smelled of fish and wet wool, but that was infinitely better than the reek around him.
He reached past the detergents, furniture polish, and scouring powder and touched the back wall of the cabinet, which was the outer wall of the house. He found the hole in the plasterboard, but no slug.
“He dug them out,” Meers said. “All of them.”
Latovsky stood up and looked around. Three shots; two for the Rileys...
“What was the third shot?” he asked.
“I’ll tell you when we get out of here and breathe, and it better be soon.”
Meers’s eyes were calm above the handkerchief but his forehead was shiny greenish white and his eyebrows looked like blackbird wings against it.
Latovsky’s gag reflex was also getting out of hand and he took a fast, last look around the room.
The chair surrounded by the pool of tacky blood had a blood-encrusted clothesline drooped around it and a lump of cloth stiff with blood on the seat. One side of the room was an abattoir, the other was clean; two of the shots had been fired from more or less the same angle, almost the same height, but the third, the one that hit the cabinet under the sink, was much lower and on a totally different trajectory. Yellow tape marked a body against the wall near the door and the outline of what looked like a foot at the base of the chair.
“What about the other foot?” Latovsky asked, and Meers got even greener.
“Later.”
“Okay, let’s get out of here.”
They rushed through the door, uncovered their faces and breathed. “Jesus!... Let’s sit down,” Meers said, and they went into the Rileys’ den.
It was a pleasant room, with a patterned rug and a wall of built-in shelves. The bottom shelves were taken up with a fairly new 27-inch TV, a hi-tech-looking VCR, and a compact disc player. Riley’s PC sat on a desk near a window that let in the silvery, misty sunlight.
“He didn’t get much,” Latovsky said.
“He didn’t get anything.” Meers sat in a chair next to a modest brick mantel that made Latovsky think of the marble mantel at Tilden House... then of Eve.
“The wife had three hundred in cash in her nightie drawer, where I guess a lot of women keep emergency money. Joan does,” Meers said.
Allison too, Latovsky thought. Her fuck-off fund she called it, to keep him off balance. It had never occurred to her that he’d do the fucking off.
“And there was an antique pocket watch in Riley’s dresser,” Meers went on, “a real golden oldie worth more than everything in the house. Also, the wife was wearing a gold chain and her engagement ring. Hardly the Hope diamond, but still worth something. He didn’t get any of it.”
“Maybe they came home early and surprised him.”
“So he tied the wife to the chair? Then kneecapped her—that was the off-angle shot, by the way.”
“Kneecapped!” Latovsky sat down hard on the chair across from Meers. “What the fuck for?” he asked sickly.
“That’s the question, and the obvious answer is the Rileys were dealing and the killer was trying to find out where they kept the stuff.”
“Shit, no!”
“He’d hardly tell you if he was... you’re a cop.”
“Lem, I never even saw Riley smoke a joint.”
“What about the wife?”
“She was an English teacher at Oneida High, a neat, sweet little woman who loved to cook. She’d no more sell, snort or smoke shit than my mother would.”
“I was afraid you’d say that.” Meers sank back in the chair. “Then there was no stash and the kneecapping’s a mystery.”