It reminded him of the way the nuns at his grammar school used to line up the kids in the schoolyard after recess, in size order, from the shortest to the tallest, before marching them back into the building. He found the thought, like most of his childhood memories, unpleasant.
He turned his attention back to the matter at hand, noting that the only empty space on the pegboard occurred near the larger end of the row of clamps. The missing clamp triggered the memory of his conversation with Paul Aziz and the photos of the crime-scene ropes showing flattened spots consistent with the use of a clamp.
Against the opposite wall he saw a stack of two-by-four framing studs. He walked slowly around the cellar, making sure he wasn’t missing anything significant. He checked the floor, the concrete-block walls, the spaces between the joists above his head. He found nothing unusual, other than the remarkable orderliness of the place and the absence of dust.
When he came to one end of the stack of studs he noted that it was twelve studs high by twelve deep. The ends on that side were aligned perfectly with each other, no stud even a millimeter out of place. It occurred to him that such an obsessive concern for symmetry could be the basis of a clinical diagnosis.
As he was moving past the perfect eight-foot-long stack, however, his eye was caught by an irregular shadow at its opposite end. He stopped, aimed his beam of light across that end of the stack, and saw that one stud was sticking out about a quarter of an inch, noticeable only because of the faultless alignment of the others.
It seemed unlikely that a factory-cut stud could have emerged from the process a quarter inch longer than others in the same batch. He laid his phone-flashlight on a stair tread, the beam aimed at the stack. He began to disassemble the stack, one row at a time.
When he reached the level of the protruding stud, he felt, for the second time since he’d become involved in the case, an unmistakable frisson.
The center sections of four studs in the middle of the stack had been cut away, leaving only about two feet at each end. The result was a concealed compartment two studs wide, two studs deep, and four feet long. The ends of the cut studs had been lined up with the ends of the intact studs—with the exception of that one stud end that stuck out.
He saw the reason for it. The end was kept from being aligned with its neighbors by the contents of the hidden compartment: a classic Winchester Model 70 bolt-action rifle, emitting the distinctive odor of a recently fired weapon; a red-dot laser scope; a muzzle-blast suppressor; and a box of 30-06 full-metal-jacket cartridges.
Gurney gingerly made his way back up the stairs. As he stepped up through the open trapdoor into the main room of the cabin, Hardwick came in the front door. In the pale light Gurney could see that he’d removed the sunglasses, hat, and scarf that were supposed to be hiding his identity from possible security cameras.
“No need for that ski mask,” he said to Gurney. “We’ve got what we need to go public.”
“You found something?”
“A used branding iron.” He inserted a small dramatic pause. “How do I know it was used? Because there appears to be burned skin stuck to the letters on the end of it. The letters, by the way, are KRS.”
“Jesus.”
“That’s not all. There’s also a red motocross bike. Like the one that was seen zipping away from Poulter Street. You find anything in here?”
“A rifle. Probably the rifle. Hidden in a pile of lumber in the cellar.”
“Is it possible we’ve got these evil bastards by the balls?” Hardwick’s innate skepticism appeared to be battling with the satisfaction of a successful hunt. He looked around suspiciously, his flashlight beam stopping at the loft. “What’s up there?”
“Let’s find out.” Gurney led the way up the ladder and stepped into an open-ended room above the kitchen. The underside of the steeply pitched roof was paneled with pine boards, and their distinctive scent was strong. There were two beds, one on each side of the space, made up in crisp military style. There was a low bench at the foot of each and a rectangular rug on the floor between them. The loft reflected the obsessive orderliness apparent everywhere in the cabin—all straight lines, right angles, and not a speck of dirt.
Gurney began checking one of the beds and Hardwick the other. Feeling under the mattress, he soon came upon something cold, smooth, and metallic. He lifted the mattress out of the way, revealing a slim notebook-style computer. Almost simultaneously Hardwick pointed to a cell phone taped to the bottom of the footboard of the other bed.
“Leave everything where it is,” said Gurney. “We need to call this in, get an evidence team out here.”
“Who are you going to call it in to?”
“The DA. Kline can get Torres reassigned to him on a temporary basis, along with the evidence techs, but that’ll be his call. The key thing going forward will be for the investigation and the personnel working on it to be controlled by an agency outside the WRPD.”
“Another option would be the sheriff’s department.”
The thought of Goodson Cloutz gave Gurney a touch of nausea. “I’d vote for Kline.”
Hardwick’s icy grin appeared. “Sheridan will have a hard time with this—having been such a huge fan of Beckert. Going to be tough for him to see the big shit getting sucked down the drain. How you think he’s going to deal with that?”
“We’ll find out.”
Hardwick’s eyes narrowed. “You think the little creep’ll try to pull off an end run around the branding iron and rifle to keep from admitting he was wrong?”
“We’ll find out.” Gurney switched his phone from Flashlight to Call mode.
In the middle of entering Kline’s number, he was stopped cold by a burst of canine howling and snarling. It sounded like a crazed pack of—of what? Wolves? Coyotes? Whatever they were, there were a lot of them, they were in full attack mode, and they were coming closer.
In a matter of seconds the chilling sound had reached a wild intensity—and it seemed to be concentrated directly in front of the cabin.
The frenzy of the sound was raising gooseflesh on Gurney’s arms.
He and Hardwick reached for their weapons in unison, flicked off the safeties, and moved to the open edge of the loft where they had clear lines of sight down to the windows and door.
A high-pitched whistling sound pierced the din, and as suddenly as the savage uproar began, it stopped.
Cautiously they descended the ladder, Gurney first. He moved quietly to the front of the cabin and peered out through one of the windows. At first he saw nothing but the dark, drooping shapes of the hemlocks surrounding the clearing. The grass, which in the beam of his phone light had been a deep green, was in the dawn mist a featureless gray.
But not entirely featureless. He noted a patch of darker gray, perhaps thirty feet out from the window. He switched his phone back to Flashlight mode, but its beam only created a glare in the fog.
He gradually eased the front door open.
All he could hear was the slow dripping of water from the roof.
“The fuck are you doing?” whispered Hardwick.
“Cover me. And hold the door open in case I need to come back in a hurry.”
He stepped quietly out of the cabin, Beretta in a ready-to-fire two-handed grip, and advanced toward the dark shape on the ground.
As he drew nearer, he realized he was looking at a body . . . a body that was somehow contorted, twisted into an odd position, as if it had been thrown there by a violent gust of wind. After moving a few steps closer, he stopped, amazed by the amount of blood glistening in the wet grass. Still closer, he could see that much of the clothing on the body was shredded, exposing ripped and gouged flesh. The left hand was mangled, the fingers crushed together. The right hand was missing, the wrist a grisly red stump with splintered bones sticking out of it. The victim’s throat had been lacerated, the carotid arteries and windpipe literally torn to pieces. Less than half of the face was intact, giving it a hideous expression.