“Lucy?” Brenda called in a quiet, worried voice as she peered into the kitchen, then walked hesitantly through the living room and back towards the bedroom. What she saw next burned into her brain forever, an image that would haunt her nightmare-plagued sleep for months.
Lucy’s bed was crimson. And propped in the middle, lying on her back as if on display, was Lucy. Mechanically, Brenda focused first on the source of the blood, the gaping hole across the throat where flesh and tissue had been sliced clean through. Her eyes moved next to Lucy’s face. The poor girl appeared to have died screaming.
When her mind registered what her eyes had taken in, Brenda Carrero started screaming herself. She ran out of the trailer as if death itself were chasing her, stumbling down the street until a neighbor, Hector Aviles, stopped her.
“What, what? What are you yelling for? Calm down!” Brenda tried to pull away but she couldn’t, so she tried to get it out of her-away from her.
“She’s dead! She’s dead! Blood everywhere. Oh my God! Lucy!” She was screaming and flailing her arms against Hector’s efforts to hold her and calm her down. Then she sank to the ground, whimpering and muttering Lucy’s name over and over again. Hector’s wife had rushed out of their trailer when she heard the commotion and now bent down to Brenda, whispering to her softly, “It’s all right, it’s all right” She looked up with worried eyes at her husband, who set off at a trot down the street towards Lucy’s trailer. His jog slowed to a walk and then he stopped, staring blankly at the trailer’s open door, and the dogs sniffing at the entrance.
The police force of Bass Creek numbered seven officers in total, including the chief. There was no homicide division, just two detectives: Del Shorter, who was assigned to collect forensic evidence, and Sergeant Wesley Brume, who was assigned to direct him in that endeavor. Brume ran the show at every crime scene.
There were several constants in Wesley Brume’s life. He had always been short and fat, and he had lived his whole life in Bass Creek. The only time he had ever left the town for an extended period was when he joined the Marines for four years after high school. In high school, Wes never conformed to the limitations nature had imposed on him. He tried out for the football, basketball and baseball teams, never getting past the first cut. But his determination was monumental. Whether attempting to throw a block, make a layup, or hit a curveball, Wes gave it his all, heaving and grunting as he missed each time. His classmates were so amused by the noise he made in his efforts to become an athlete that they called him “the Grunt.” It was meant to be derisive and funny, but Wes wore it as a badge of honor and aspired to be just what he was labeled, a “grunt” in the marines.
He served two years in Vietnam, receiving a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star for bravery. When he came home, the police department was the perfect fit for him. Wes had learned that if you carried a gun and were not afraid to shoot or be shot at, you could command respect even if you were short and fat.
Although many of the citizens of Bass Creek were poor and there was a large transient population, there wasn’t a great deal of crime-a smattering of robberies, burglaries, drugs and domestic stuff. Most of the department’s time was spent catching speeders racing for the new bridge and the big cities beyond. In his twenty-two years on the force, Wes had only investigated seven murders, and in five of those cases, the identity and whereabouts of the murdering husband were hardly a mystery.
Nonetheless, Wes and Del were well versed in forensic techniques, having been all too eager to spend the taxpayers’ money on any and every seminar addressing the subject, whether it was in San Francisco or Scotland Yard. Unfortunately, book training was no substitute for experience.
When the two men walked into Lucy’s trailer and saw her corpse immersed in her own blood, Del’s first reaction was to follow Brenda Carrero down the street. The throng of locals outside nixed that option, so his second choice was to head for the john and puke his guts out. The Grunt held his ground. He’d seen worse in ’Nam.
After Del emerged chalk-faced, they started their investigation, donning their plastic gloves. Contamination had been drilled into their heads by the experts. Wes sent two uniforms to canvass the neighborhood and find out if any of the neighbors had seen or heard anything unusual in the last few days. At that point, they had no idea when the death had occurred.
“Write down everything they tell you verbatim,” Wes told them, mimicking the words of one of his seminar teachers. “You never know what might be important.”
Next, Del took pictures-pictures of the body, the bedroom, every inch of the trailer. They searched for evidence of a break-in or robbery but found nothing. The house was in perfect order except for the body and the blood on and around the bed, and a bloodstain on the living room carpet. Wes walked around the body looking for obvious clues like a knife or footprints or handprints in the blood, but there was nothing he could see with the naked eye. He didn’t want to touch the corpse. Let the coroner handle that, he told himself. It was Del who searched the garbage and found the broken mug with bloodstains on the glass. It was the only clue they had besides the bloodstain on the carpet and, of course, the blood on and around Lucy’s corpse.
Harry Tuthill, the coroner, arrived a half hour later. Harry had been the medical examiner of Cobb County for twenty-five years, but even he was overcome at the sight of Lucy’s body.
“Holy Jesus!” he exclaimed to Wes. “Who the hell would do something like this?”
“I don’t know, Doc. We’ve got nothing.” Harry had relaxed by then-it never took him long-and he considered it time to break the tension with a little humor.
“Let me see, I’d say death was caused by a knife wound to the throat.”
“No shit, Doc. Tell me something I don’t know.”
Harry gave up. He hated working with dumb cops.
Three
1957, NEW YORK CITY
Summer in the city was hot and muggy and sometimes downright intolerable, but not for a seven-year-old kid with places to go. Johnny was up and out of the house every morning at nine on his way to summer school at P.S. 6 with his buddy Mikey, who lived upstairs in the same tenement building off Third Avenue. Patty, another neighbor, sometimes went with them but only when Johnny’s mother gave him strict instructions to call on her and walk with her over to school. He and Mikey didn’t like girls, period, although if he was pushed he’d have had to admit that Patty was different than most. She didn’t wear dresses and walk slow and whine to them to wait for her. She was right there with them stride for stride in blue jeans or shorts, and she had her own Spalding that she bounced and caught as she walked. Mikey liked her more than he did, always picked her on his teams and with good reason-she was a better athlete than most of the boys.
They usually started the day inside with a game of Ping-Pong, knock-hockey or checkers before the big kids came. The big kids never came early but when they arrived they took over everything, pushing the younger kids out of the way. They didn’t push Mikey, though. Paulie Cane tried it once. Mikey pushed him right back. When Paulie went to push him again, Mikey punched him in the face and jumped on him, knocking him to the ground before a counselor broke it up. Paulie was twelve at the time, Mikey just eight.
“I’m going to get you for this, Kelly,” Paulie yelled.