“Did he search the neighborhood for the dog?”
“Yes, along with Norman and the two of us,” the woman said. “We went house to house, passed out posters, and even walked through the arroyos.”
“I think a coyote got her,” the man said.
“Perhaps,” Kerney said, doubting it. Coyotes rarely took down large prey, unless it was sick or wounded.
“Do you think whoever took Mandy killed Jack?” the woman asked.
“Anything’s possible.”
Kerney thanked the couple and went home, where he found Sara asleep in the bedroom and two uniformed officers on duty. After being assured that the house was secure and all windows were closed and locked, he released them to return to patrol.
Unwilling to risk waking Sara, he sat quietly on the living room couch and mulled over the pattern that seemed to be developing in the cases: dead kangaroo rats delivered to doorsteps, a prized horse killed, a cherished dog stolen. All seemed acts intended to intimidate, to create a climate of fear, and demonstrate the killer’s superiority and intelligence.
The threatening note left on his door announcing two more deaths before his own meant that he was supposed to be the final target. Did it also mean the killer wanted Kerney to lose Sara and the baby before he died himself? Or was it a ploy to throw him off?
He used the cell phone and called Larry Otero, who was still at the Manning crime scene.
“Jack Potter had his dog stolen three days ago,” he said. “Have the detectives find out if Manning had a pet, was a recent crime victim, or had suffered any kind of personal or family loss.”
“Will do,” Otero said. “She didn’t have any pets, so that’s one thing we can forget about. How far back do you want them to go?”
“Six months, for now,” Kerney said. “Do we have flight information on Norman Kaplan?”
“Nothing specific, just that he’s on his way.”
“Put someone on it,” Kerney said. “I want him met at the Albuquerque airport, accompanied home, and given protection.”
“I’ll see that it’s taken care of,” Otero replied.
“Where are you with the crime scene?”
“Molina and his people are still gathering evidence and talking to neighbors. You were right about the time of death; Manning was killed before Potter was shot.”
“I’ll see you in the morning.”
He checked the lock on the front door one more time, pulled off his boots, and stretched out on the couch. With all that had happened, with all there was still to face, he wondered if he could sleep. It didn’t seem possible.
When the nurse brought the sleeping medication, Mary Beth kept her mutilated arm under the covers, tucked the pill under her tongue and pretended to swallow it. She spit it out as soon as the nurse left the room, her mind racing with images of Kurt dead, all cut up and bleeding. He was dead, dead, dead.
Had she killed Kurt? She decided no one else could have done it. But how and when?
For hours, she moaned quietly into the pillow, stuffing it in her mouth, covering her face. But she still kept breathing, kept thinking, kept seeing Kurt standing naked like a statue with his arms at his sides, bleeding from every pore of his body with a sickly smile on his face until he disappeared behind a creamy red shroud.
Her visions never lied. She needed to stop her mind from remembering how she’d killed her Kurt.
She waited until the nurse made a late-night round, then got out of bed and went to the bathroom. The mirror was metal and fixed to the wall. The toilet had no tank, just a flush valve. The light fixture had a plastic cover screwed in place over the flourescent tube. There was nothing around she could use to stop the bad vision of Kurt and the terrible thoughts about herself.
She opened the venetian blind next to the bed and looked out the window into the dark night, running her finger along the sharp edge of a plastic slat. With both hands, she bent the brittle slat until it snapped, and then broke it once more to free it from the cord that held it in place.
In the bathroom with the door closed, she pressed down hard, drawing the sharpest point of the slat up the length of her arm, cutting deeper than her fingernails ever could. The pain felt so good it made her shiver.
She did the other arm, and then her thighs. Lovely red blood stained her gown. She took the gown off and cut into the soft flesh under her breasts and watched red droplets course down to her belly button.
She put her hands together and looked at her wrists. The veins were right at the surface. She dug the slat into the fattest one, gritting her teeth until she broke through and blood squirted out in pulses. She clenched her fist, gouged between two tendons, popped open the other vein, and watched the blood flow freely into the sink.
She switched hands to repeat the process, her fingers shaking as she tried to stab into the vein. She punched repeatedly until the slat pierced it. Then she sawed the last one open, her blood lubricating every cutting stroke.
She dropped her hands to her sides, smiled at herself in the metal mirror, and saw Kurt smiling back at her. She could feel the blood draining from her body, her head becoming light and empty of bad thoughts. It felt so very, very dreamy.
Now she could sleep. She sank to the floor and closed her eyes.
The telephone rang and instinctively Kerney reached for it on the bedside table, his hand grabbing empty air. Groggily, he got up from the couch, hurried to the kitchen, and picked up on the third ring. The stove clock read 4:00 A.M.
“What is it?” he asked.
The third-shift dispatcher told him Mary Beth Patterson had been found dead in her psych-unit hospital room.
“How did it happen?”
“An apparent suicide, Chief. She cut her veins open with a piece of a venetian blind.”
“Who’s on it?”
“Lieutenant Molina and Detective Pino.”
“Have them call me back when they know something,” Kerney said.
“Ten-four.”
Kerney dropped the phone in the cradle. Day two of his vacation had just begun and it had already gone from bad to worse.
Chapter 5
I n the early morning light, Detective Ramona Pino walked slowly down the street where Jack Potter had been killed. Yesterday’s search by the crime scene techs for the spent bullet had been unsuccessful, and Ramona wanted to look for it on her own before starting her normal shift.
But more than that, Ramona wanted a break from the biting anguish she felt about the deaths of Larsen and Patterson. If she’d handled the investigation differently both of them would be alive. For the first time in her career as a cop, she had to seriously question her abilities and judgment. She knew Lieutenant Casados was doing the same, and she fully expected that he would drop Patterson’s suicide on her as part of his IA investigation.
Yesterday’s session with Casados had been grueling enough with only one innocent person’s death to account for. Maybe she should just turn in her shield and walk away from it all.
She rejected the idea with an unconscious shake of her head. There was important work to do. Chief Kerney and his family were at risk, apparently targeted by a revenge killer, who could easily be someone unknown to the chief with a motive that was equally unclear, which meant finding the link between the perp, the chief, and the two victims might not be an easy task.
Beyond that, there were aspects of the perp’s MO that didn’t fit the typical pattern of revenge killers. Usually, such homicides were planned blitz attacks against unsuspecting victims that occurred with no forewarning, or were impulsive murders of opportunity that happened in public view, often without any thought given to escape.
But this perp wasn’t playing by the rules. In the Manning homicide, he’d alerted his victim of his intentions with a dead rat in her driveway and, according to information received overnight from the Taos Police Department, was most likely the unknown subject who had broken into an art gallery a month ago and stolen twelve of Manning’s paintings by cutting them out of their frames.