Читать книгу Vendetta - Meredith Fletcher - Страница 11

Kellogg Motel

Off I-17

Outside Phoenix, Arizona

Thursday, May 16, 1968

The Past

The smell of death slammed into Marion as soon as she crossed the threshold. She opened her mouth and started breathing that way. It helped—a little. The nauseating odor still hung in the air.

Marion froze as her stomach tried to rebel. In front of her, a powerfully built man with coal-black hair lay sprawled on the dark green carpet. Blood threaded the man’s hair and pooled out around him. The bullets had nearly destroyed his face.

Without warning, Marion’s legs turned rubbery. Her stomach lurched and the sour taste of bile filled the back of her throat. She swallowed and forced herself to remain standing.

Three other men stood in the room. Two of them were deputies. Another wore a plain black suit and a white beard. All of them watched Marion with bright interest.

Since she’d been with the D.A.’s office, Marion had seen the violence people could do to each other. She’d taken statements from families who had lost loved ones in an altercation and from rape victims and domestic abuse victims in the local E.R.s. The hardest investigations had been those involving children. Those still haunted Marion.

“Are you all right, ma’am?” Keller’s voice was quiet and controlled.

Marion started to reply, then thought maybe her voice wasn’t up to the task. She nodded contritely. Even that made her head swim.

The bearded man in the suit studied Marion. He took a cigar from inside his jacket and lit up. He waved the smoke out of his face.

“You runnin’ sightseein’ tours now, Frank?” the man asked.

“Not hardly, Doc. This is Assistant District Attorney Marion Hart. Turnbull sent her over to cover tonight’s festivities.”

“Oh.” The man’s eyebrows rose in surprise. “He sent a woman to something like this?”

Resenting the man’s question and his attitude, Marion took a breath to keep herself in check.

Be calm, Marion told herself. “Who are you?” she asked the man pointedly.

The man smiled. “Takes her job seriously, doesn’t she?”

Marion waited but made no comment.

“I’m Dr. Benjamin Shetterly. I serve as medical examiner for the state of Arizona. I’m here to assume custody of the body.”

Marion wrote the information down. “You were called out to the murder scene?”

“I don’t rely on a crystal ball, if that’s what you mean.”

The two deputies in the background laughed out loud.

Ignoring the sarcasm, Marion asked, “Who called you?”

“Sheriff Keller. He usually does for one of these. And sometimes he calls me for poker night if he’s got an empty chair.”

“You’ve worked murders before?”

“Of course. I’ve logged plenty of court hours on the witness stand.”

Marion wrote that down. Turnbull would probably already be familiar with Doc Shetterly.

“Dr. Shetterly,” Marion said.

“Call me Doc,” the man requested. “Everybody does.”

“Thank you. What can you tell me about the victim?”

Doc flicked ash from his cigarette into a plastic bag in his pocket. “He was shot to death. Close range.”

“How do you know that?”

Shetterly regarded her thoughtfully. “How strong is your stomach?”

“Strong enough.”

A smile thinned Shetterly’s lips. “I guess we could test it then. If you really want to know the answer to that question, come here.”

That’s a challenge. Marion knew the invitation for what it was. Swallowing the lump in her throat, she tried to ignore the stench of fresh death in the room and crossed over to Shetterly’s side. This is what you signed on to do. Get it done.

The coroner took an ink pen from his pocket. Leaning over the dead body, he pointed toward black spots on what was left of the dead man’s face.

“Do you see this?” Shetterly asked.

Marion had a hard time discerning the black spots at first. All she could see was the gory ruin of Marker’s face. Broken ivory bone showed through the crimson pulp. Blood covered the bed sheets.

Not trusting her voice, Marion nodded.

“Those are tiny burns from the muzzleflashes of the murder weapon. When you hold a firearm close enough, when you shoot, it’ll cause those.”

“I’ve seen them before,” Marion said hoarsely.

“Really? Where?” Shetterly seemed immediately interested.

“In classes on physical evidence. Never—” Marion’s voice broke. She sipped a quick breath. “Never in person before.”

Shetterly nodded. “Burns like these generally mean the murder was personal.”

Marion seized on that. “You think Marker knew his killer?”

“I’ve got near a lifetime spent working things like this,” Shetterly said. “Somebody kills this close up, it’s because there’s a lot of emotion involved.”

“It also means the killer wanted to make sure the job was done,” Keller added.

“Was Marker awake when she killed him?” Marion asked.

“That’s hard to answer.” Shetterly moved his face within inches of the dead man’s. He used a stainless steel forceps to sift through the wreckage. The physician breathed out smoke and the gray vapor flushed across the torn and broken flesh. “If he was awake, she didn’t allow him to sit up.”

“How do you know?”

Shetterly slid the dead man’s head over to reveal the ragged mattress below. “I expect we’ll find the bullets in the floor below.”

Marion’s stomach flipped a little. “How many times did she shoot him?”

Keller answered that. “When we took the .357 Magnum off her, all the rounds had been fired.”

Grateful for the chance to turn away from the corpse, Marion looked at the sheriff. “How many rounds does the pistol hold?” She thought she knew, but she wasn’t certain. She didn’t like to assume.

“Six.”

She fired six rounds into a man’s face at point-blank range. Marion tried to imagine what would drive someone to do something like that. She had no idea.

“I think he was awake for a moment,” Shetterly said. “But only just.”

Marion swiveled back to the physician. “Why?”

Lifting the dead man’s left arm, Shetterly indicated the torn flesh across the knuckles. “Those tears are fresh. I think he managed to hit his killer before she killed him.”

Leaning down, Marion took pictures of the damage that showed on the knuckles. Light glinted from the military ring the dead man wore. “You’re sure this is recent?”

“Yeah. There’s no sign of clotting or scabs. He hit her, then she killed him. There was no time for the healing to begin.”

Marion shifted her attention back to Keller. “Does the woman have any marks to corroborate this?”

Keller touched his left temple. “Here. You can see the bruising and scratches. Probably from the ring.”

“There’s something else,” Shetterly said.

“What?”

Shetterly pointed to the dead man’s chest. Marker had gone to bed shirtless. The physician traced a muddy print on the lifeless flesh with his forefinger. “It was raining when the woman arrived.”

“What is that?” Marion asked. Then, just before Shetterly answered, she recognized it.

“That,” Shetterly said, “is a muddy footprint.” He looked up at Keller, who had come over to join them. “I spotted this after you went outside. Thought you’d like to see it.”

“Can we get a print off it?” Keller asked.

“Take pictures of this,” Shetterly said. “Then take pictures of the bottom of the shoes that woman has on. It’s almost as good as fingerprints.”

“She put her foot on him?” Marion asked.

Shetterly nodded. “I think so.”

“Why?”

The medical examiner took glasses from a shirt pocket, slipped them on and examined the muddy print. “Looks like she used her foot to hold Marker down while she shot him. He knew it was coming. She made sure of that.”

“Do we know what Marker was doing here?” Marion stood outside the motel room while Shetterly and his assistant took care of the body.

“No.” Keller smoked and watched the rain pouring from the eave.

Marion glanced at her wristwatch. Almost an hour had passed since her arrival. It had only seemed like minutes. The death smell clung to her and she couldn’t wait to get home to shampoo the stench out of her hair.

“There is the connection to the Ellis family,” she said. “We could follow up on that.”

Keller nodded. “Got that penciled in. But folks like the Ellises don’t live the same lives you and I do, Counselor. The air’s a mite more rarified where they are.”

Marion knew that. Phoenix tended toward a city of absolutes. Rich and poor families lived there, but they seldom interacted.

“Even if we do get a chance to interview them, they’re not going to tell us any more than they want us to know.”

“Personal experience, Sheriff?” Marion asked.

“Yes, ma’am.” Keller hesitated a moment. “Brian Ellis may have come home from Vietnam as a returning prisoner of war and a military hero of sorts, but he didn’t leave here that way.”

“What do you mean?”

Keller shook his head. “I already said too much. I shouldn’t have said what I did.”

Marion decided to let the comment pass but she made a mental note to have a look at whatever the D.A.’s office had on Brian Ellis. “Where’s the woman?”

Keller nodded toward the sheriff’s office cars. “I’ve got her in one of the cars. Maybe Marker got lucky with that punch before she blasted him. She was out on her feet, more or less. She was walking back along the parking lot when the first cars arrived. If we’d been another couple minutes later—” He lifted his shoulders and dropped them. “We might have missed her.”

“I want to see her.”

Marion followed Keller’s broad back to one of the nearest sheriff’s cruisers. Rain pelted her in fat drops. The rainfall was abnormal for the time of year, but the weather sometimes did strange things due to the White Tank mountain range.

They stopped at the car and Keller nodded to the deputies standing guard. The man put his hand on his sidearm and gingerly opened the door.

“You’ll want to be careful, Cap’n,” the young deputy said. “She fights something fierce. Jonesy is at the hospital getting his ear stitched up where she bit him. Got to wonder if he needs his rabies vaccination, too.”

They’re afraid of her, Marion realized. That surprised her. She hadn’t seen men afraid of women very often. Or if they were, they’d given no indication of it.

The woman sat in the backseat with her hands cuffed behind her back. Her dark chestnut hair cascaded across her shoulders. Her profile was strong. Pale skin picked up the lights from the motel parking lot. Even seated she looked taller than average and extremely athletic.

She ignored them as they stared at her. The effort reminded Marion of the wild animals that had gotten trapped in the attic of her family home. She and her dad had once had to relocate a whole family of raccoons. They’d used live cages to capture them. While caged, the raccoons had pointedly ignored them in the same manner as this woman. But when the cage was rattled, they attacked immediately. Marion suspected the same would hold true of the woman in the back of the sheriff’s car.

“I’m Marion Hart,” Marion said. She felt guilty simply staring at the woman. Despite what she’d done, she wasn’t a zoo animal.

The woman ignored Marion and kept her gaze locked on the front windshield.

“I’m with the district attorney’s office,” Marion said.

Slowly the woman turned her head and looked at Marion. Deep blue eyes gleamed like daggers in the pale light waxing over the motel parking lot. They were cold and devoid of emotion.

“Prove it,” the woman challenged. Her voice was flat and harsh. There was a nasal quality that made Marion immediately think she was from somewhere back East.

Taken aback by the woman’s decision to speak and the unflinching challenge that had rung out in her voice, Marion opened her purse and removed her identification. She started to lean in with it but Keller intercepted her hand.

“She’s who she says she is,” Keller said.

Resentment flashed over Marion. “I’m quite capable of—”

“Capable of getting yourself killed,” Keller growled. “This woman does things with her fists and feet that I haven’t ever seen done before.” He handed Marion her identification back.

“A woman,” the woman mused. “Interesting.”

“I have some questions,” Marion said.

“I don’t care.” The woman turned and went back to staring through the windshield.

Despite repeated attempts to get the woman to talk, Marion finally gave up in disgust. The newspaper people were pressing forward as well. Keller shut the door on the cruiser and ordered the driver to take the prisoner to jail.

“We’re not going to get anything out of her,” Keller said as the departing car’s taillights flared red.

“She has to talk,” Marion said. “What kind of woman would walk into a man’s motel room, shoot him dead and then show no emotion?”

“She’s already shown emotion,” Keller commented. “That was the part where she put all six rounds through Marker’s head.”

They watched in silence as Doc Shetterly and his team brought the body from the motel room on a gurney. White sheets covered the dead man, but blood soaked through and turned the material dark.

Bulbs from the reporters’ cameras flashed. Marion was also certain she heard someone cheering. She tried not to think about how quickly a person went from living to being a temporary news sensation.

Life had to be worth more than that.

Back at the Maricopa County Jail, Marion watched as the jailer matron, a hefty dishwater blonde named Whitten, forced the woman to strip and subject herself to the obligatory shower to kill possible lice infestation. The prisoner stood arrogant and proud before the stares of the other women.

Her body was a work of art. Hard, lean muscle created dynamic curves. She was a woman, Marion realized, that would turn men’s heads no matter where she was or what she wore.

But the beauty was marred. Several scars—bullet, knife and burns—marked the prisoner. Miraculously nothing had touched that gorgeous face.

However, the bruising from the blow they suspected Marker had delivered before he’d died was starting to darken. The prisoner’s left cheek was puffy from it. A long scratch held blood crust. Due to the darkness in the cruiser, Marion hadn’t noticed the damage.

Marion made a note to have a medical doctor take a look at the woman. She didn’t want charges of law enforcement abuse or coercion to taint the case.

Staring at the signs of present and past violence, Marion couldn’t help wondering what kind of life the woman had lived. If she was a product of abuse, how accountable could she be held for her actions?

Domestic abuse had always been something practiced behind closed doors, but cases were being brought out of the homes into the courts these days. When she’d grown up, Marion had lived next door to a family where a woman had been abused.

Marion’s father had intervened on more than on occasion. He’d grown more and more frustrated with his helplessness. The neighbor had been a long-haul trucker and the beatings had been as regular as the work that had taken the man out of town.

Marion’s mother had advised the woman to leave her husband one night while tending the bruises and cuts the man’s fists had left. The whole time, the women’s two young children had clung to Marion and quivered. In the end, the woman had cried pathetically and told them that she couldn’t leave her husband because she wouldn’t be able to care for her children.

Immediately following one late-night episode, Marion’s father had called the police. Marion had been frightened for her father because the trucker’s rage had been dark and out of control. He had threatened to kill Marion’s father.

In the end, though, the police had done nothing. The woman had sworn she’d fallen down the stairs. One of the policemen stated that she must have fallen up the stairs as well to do all the damage they’d seen. She’d refused their offer to take her to the hospital and asked them to leave. Without testimony, the officers hadn’t been able to act.

That experience remained within Marion’s mind. Women sometimes ended up helpless not because they lacked the will or ambition to take care of themselves. Many of them ended up victimized by men and life simply because they lacked options.

Marion hadn’t wanted to be that helpless. But there were several women who still were. Someday, somehow, she wished she could help them realize their potential instead of accepting a secondary citizenship role. She also wanted to change the law so police officers could act to protect the welfare of a family without testimony.

Marion had taken the job as an assistant district attorney not just because she loved the work, but because she’d wanted to show other women that they could succeed outside the home, too.

That hadn’t worked out as well as Marion had hoped. Most of the wives of the men in the D.A.’s office resented her because they viewed her as a threat, not a role model. Some disliked her because she spent more time with their husbands than they did.

Marion had always heard that nothing worth having ever came easily. She tried to remember that to convince herself she had made the right choices, but it was hard.

Once the shower was over, the woman stepped into a pair of white cotton panties, a bra and pulled on the jumpsuit Whitten issued her. She pulled her wet hair back into a ponytail and secured it with a rubber band. During the whole process, she never once acknowledged anyone else in the room.

Marion felt sorry for the woman. During her time with the D.A.’s office, Marion had never watched anyone processed through an arrest. The whole experience seemed demeaning.

Like dealing with cattle, Marion couldn’t help thinking. But then she focused on what the corpse had looked like in the motel room. Whatever family Colonel Thomas Marker had left behind couldn’t even have an open casket service. No one would be able to replace what the woman’s bullets had taken away.

But thinking like that only raised the question of the woman’s motivation in Marion’s mind again. She really wanted to know what had happened in that motel room.

They stood the prisoner against one wall and took pictures of her right profile and full face. She was booked under the name Jane Doe.

A few moments later, Whitten looked at Marion curiously. “Where do you want her?” the matron asked.

“Put her in interview room D,” Marion responded. “I’ll be along shortly.”

The jailer nodded. She took the woman by the arm and guided her through the door. Before they’d gone three steps, the woman slid into sudden movement as graceful as a dancer’s choreography.

The woman lifted her captured arm, folded it, then rammed it into the matron’s face. The meaty impact filled Marion’s ears. Blood gushed from the matron’s mouth, but she was a big woman and used to dealing with violent prisoners. The matron reached for the woman.

The prisoner ducked beneath Whitten’s arms. She turned and spun on one foot. The other leg folded then snapped forward like a coiled spring. The prisoner’s bare foot caught Whitten in the throat with enough force to lift her from her feet.

The matron stumbled backward and crashed to the floor. The other two female jailers rushed forward and tried to grab the prisoner.

The prisoner grabbed the outstretched arm of one jailer as she sidestepped. She whirled and maintained her grip on the jailer’s arm. Something snapped with a sickening crunch. The jailer flipped and landed flat on her back. Her breath left her lungs in a rush.

The other jailer slid her nightstick from her belt and swung at the prisoner’s head. In a blur of movement, the prisoner lifted her left arm, trapped the jailer’s arm under it, then spun back outside of the jailer’s reach. The prisoner delivered two punishing elbows to the jailer’s temple. The jailer crumpled but the prisoner stripped the nightstick from her hand before the woman collapsed.

Marion stepped forward but wasn’t certain what she was going to do. Before she reached the prisoner, the woman whirled and smashed the nightstick across Marion’s forearm.

Pain ignited in Marion’s head. Her senses screamed. Driven more by instinct than any planning, she tried to step back. But it was too late. The prisoner circled behind her and slid the nightstick across her throat.

“Okay, muffin,” the prisoner said in that nasal accent. “It’s just you and me now.”