Читать книгу Deadly Grace - Taylor Smith - Страница 13

Havenwood, Minnesota

Thursday, January 11, 1979

Deputy Chief of Police Nils Berglund turned out to be one of those massively built Scandinavians who makes every man around him feel puny. From the moment Berglund finally showed up at headquarters and extended a reluctant hand, Cruz felt inclined to keep his distance, less out of intimidation (he hoped) than for a clearer view of this human mountain. He himself was five-eleven, but Berglund both overshadowed and outweighed him by quite a bit. Nor did anything about the deputy’s taciturn manner spell welcome, despite the easy goodwill Cruz had sensed over the phone from the chief of police. Berglund’s square features seemed permanently corrugated into a frown, and his pale, icy eyes defied reading.

“Guess we’ll use the chief’s office,” he grunted, directing Cruz around the reception desk and through the door that led into the squad room beyond.

“Verna here tells me he’s in the hospital,” Cruz said.

Berglund was holding the door open, but his gaze shifted to the reception desk, where Verna had gone back to squinting at her mystery novel. His frown deepened, and it was impossible to tell which annoyed him more, her on-the-job reading or the fact that she’d been gossiping with a stranger. Verna, in any case, seemed oblivious. Cruz had a feeling she was more than capable of handling Deputy Berglund and anything else that came her way.

The deputy waved him into a corner office, then shut the door behind them. Shrugging out of his green nylon bomber jacket, he flung it over a chair. “Take your coat?”

“I’m okay, thanks.”

“Suit yourself. Have a seat.” Berglund moved around behind the big steel desk and settled into a brown, imitation leather chair that squeaked in protest at the sudden load.

“What happened?” Cruz asked. “To the chief, I mean.”

“He’s been feeling rough for a while, having tests. Doc called him last night, told him to check into hospital first thing this morning.”

“Which hospital?” Cruz asked, remembering how the chief had ranked the area’s medical options according to the severity of the patient’s condition.

“The Mayo Clinic in Minneapolis.” From that news and from Berglund’s tone, there wasn’t much doubt the diagnosis was serious, the prognosis iffy, and the deputy looking at imminent promotion.

“Sorry to hear it,” Cruz said. “He sounds like a good man.”

“Yeah, he is. Anyway,” Berglund said, “he told me you called. He also told me it was you who arranged for that arson team that’s crawling around over there at the fire scene.”

“They’re in town right now?”

“Working the scene as we speak. That’s where I was when Verna called up on the radio.”

“Maybe we should head over,” Cruz said. “I wouldn’t mind taking a look myself before I talk to Jillian Meade. I’d like to hear what those guys have to say about the cause of the fire.”

“Just hold on a minute,” Berglund said as Cruz made moves to get up. “We can do that, but first, I want to know why you called them in, to begin with, and why it is you flew out here all the way from Washington.”

Cruz settled back into his chair. “I’d been trying to track down Jillian Meade back in D.C. when I heard she was here visiting her mother. I tried to phone but the line was down. That’s when I put in the call to Chief Lunders.”

“Who told you she was at her mother’s?”

“Her boss at the Smithsonian.”

“And why are you looking for her?”

“Her name came up in an alert from Scotland Yard. I work in a section of the Bureau that liaises with foreign police forces on cross-border criminal investigations.”

“And…what? You think Jillian Meade’s some kind of international jewel thief or something?” Berglund snorted. “Get serious.”

“You know her well, do you?”

Berglund shrugged. “She grew up here. It’s a small town. Everybody knows everybody. So what is Scotland Yard claiming she did?”

“I don’t know that they necessarily think she’s done anything at all. She was over in England last month around the time some stuff went down, and—”

“What kind of ‘stuff’?” Berglund interrupted.

“A couple of homicides, as a matter of fact.”

“And they think Jillian had something to do with them?” The deputy’s expression was so incredulous that Cruz was beginning to feel a little foolish for even suggesting it, except that Jillian Meade’s mother had now turned up dead, too. At the very least, the woman was in danger of turning into the human equivalent of the Black Death, given the pernicious effect she seemed to have on those she visited. Berglund appeared intent on giving her the benefit of the doubt, however, and Cruz decided he could do the same, at least until he’d gotten the lay of the land.

“They’re not necessarily saying she had anything to do with the murders, but Miss Meade was in the vicinity at the time and had apparently been in contact with the victims. Scotland Yard was thinking she might have seen or heard something that would bear on their investigation. As far as I know, they simply see her as a potential witness at this point.”

“So you’re looking to ask her some questions, nothing more?”

“That’s right.”

“If that’s the case, how come you arranged for this arson team to come out? And,” Berglund added, “how come you asked Chief Lunders if he thought Jillian had murdered her mother?”

“I guess because it’s in my nature to play devil’s advocate. It may be coincidence, but there were fires set after those murders in the U.K., too. Look at it from my perspective. I talk to her boss, he tells me she’s here in Havenwood, then I talk to your boss, and he tells me about the fire. It does tend to raise a few questions in a person’s mind, you have to admit.”

“Humph.”

“So can you tell me exactly what happened here?”

Berglund threw open his hands in a “why not” gesture. “Tuesday night, we got a call about a fire out at Grace Meade’s place. I was the first to arrive on the scene, ahead of the fire trucks. The fire was going strong by then. I found Mrs. Meade and Jillian still inside the house, although Grace was already dead. I got Jillian out, but then the fire spread so fast we couldn’t get her mother’s body out till yesterday.”

“The Chief said you examined Mrs. Meade’s body at the scene before you took the daughter out.”

“Uh-huh. I found it lying in the hall, just outside the kitchen.”

“What did you see as far as signs of trauma, anything like that?”

“There was a fair amount of blood on the front of her sweater, but that was about it. No bruising or any other sign of battery that I could see, although it was pretty dark in there, so I wouldn’t swear to anything. The only light I had to go by was the fire burning in the living room, which was pretty much out of control by then.”

“What was the source of the blood?”

“It looked like she’d taken a wound to the chest. Like I say, it was dark, so I was going half by feel. I noticed her sweater had a tear in it, just here.” Berglund put his fingertips to his furnacesized chest, high and just off-center. “The tear was right in the middle of the blood stain, which I could see clearly because she had on a light-colored sweater and the blood showed up dark.”

“So she was down for pretty much the whole time she bled,” Cruz said, thinking aloud. “If she’d been upright, the entry wound, if that’s what it was, would have been at the top of the stain and the blood would have run down. Was it an entry wound, by the way? Did you turn her over?”

Berglund nodded. “Sort of. The fire was spreading fast, and I knew I needed to get her out of there, so I picked her up and put her over my shoulder to carry her out. Her back was soaked with blood, and when I put my hand there to steady the body, it felt pretty pulpy. Her sweater back was also shredded.” Berglund seemed to shudder at the memory.

Poor guy, Cruz thought. His actions had been pretty heroic, when you came down to it, going into the burning house like that to rescue the women. Like most heroes, he’d probably acted on sheer instinct and adrenaline, revulsion at the ugliness of what he’d found only hitting him afterward, when the initial shock wore off.

“Chief Lunders told me you weren’t able to get the body out, in the end, though.”

“No. I’d already left Jill on the porch when I went back inside to look for Grace. I was trying to get a closer look at the wound when I realized Jill was back and standing right behind me. I didn’t want her to see her mother like that.” Cruz was startled by Berglund’s fist suddenly smacking his thigh. “I had her, dammit! I’d picked her up and I had her. She was sixty-years old, for chrissake, and just a little thing. Even with Jillian to worry about, I could have gotten her out. I could have managed them both.”

Cruz had no doubt the deputy could have easily carried two women out of a burning building. “So what happened?”

“Jillian wouldn’t leave! I tried to drag her out with my free hand, but she kept fighting me. She was disoriented—she’d taken a blow to the head herself, we found out later. And she was half crazy with panic and grief, screaming for her mother.”

“But the mother was definitely dead?”

“Yeah, I’m pretty sure she was. I didn’t have time to try for a pulse before Jill came back in and flipped out on me, but by the way Grace looked…” His cropped blond head gave a grim shake. “As it was, I had to put her down again and leave her there while I dragged Jillian out a second time. By the time I handed her off to the paramedics, the fire had gotten out of control and I couldn’t get back inside the house. It was only when the ashes finally cooled down that we were able to get in and locate the body. It was in the rubble just off the kitchen, right where I’d left her.”

“Chief Lunders said there was going to be an autopsy.”

Berglund nodded. “It was this morning. County coroner took the body over to Montrose yesterday, but given how badly charred it was, he decided to call in a medical examiner from the State Bureau of Investigation. They’ve got more experience dealing with cases like this.”

“Were they able to determine a cause of death?”

Berglund shook his head. “Not with any degree of certainty. All the flesh and most of the organs were toast.”

“What about all the blood you’d found, and the entry and exit wounds? That would suggest a gunshot wound, wouldn’t it?”

“Yeah, although, like I said, the body was burned beyond recognition, and they couldn’t find much trajectory evidence. A couple of the interior organs were partly intact—the collapse of the roof eventually smothered some of the fire—but it wasn’t enough to get a clear picture of whether or not she’d been shot. We haven’t found any bullets or spent cartridges at the scene, although your arson guys are keeping an eye out for them. The ME did find a fracture on the breastbone, though, and taken together with what I was able to tell them about the holes in her sweater, he thought it was consistent with the theory that she’d been shot, probably with a fairly large caliber weapon.”

“That would also explain the injury on her back, larger than the entry, which is what you’d expect to find with an exit wound,” Cruz pointed out.

Berglund nodded. “The medical examiner said the position of the fracture on her breastbone was such that the bullet probably hit her left lung, maybe even the heart, although I doubt it, personally.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because there was a hell of a lot of blood. I would have thought that if she’d taken it in the heart, it would have stopped pumping and she wouldn’t have bled out like she did.”

“Not necessarily,” Cruz said. “It would depend on the damage. It might take a few seconds or even minutes for her heart to stop beating completely. And if a bullet’s large caliber, it’ll often make a bloody mess regardless of whether or not the victim dies instantly.” He watched Berglund’s dour expression as the deputy scraped a smear of mud off his pant leg. “Are you beating yourself up here because you think you could have saved Mrs. Meade?” Cruz asked him.

Berglund looked up, then away, self-consciously. “Yeah, maybe, although I guess I knew there wasn’t really a hope in hell. At the autopsy, the ME found that part of the right lung was more or less intact, and he said there was no sign of smoke inhalation in the air sacs.”

“All right then, that’s something, isn’t it? It means Grace Meade had drawn her last breath before the fire even started.”

Berglund frowned. “Yeah, I suppose.”

“And that being the case, it wouldn’t have made any difference whether or not you’d gotten her out.”

Berglund seemed unconvinced. “Maybe. But there’s no saying how long she’d been down. Maybe she could’ve been revived…or something. I don’t know. It just feels like I could’ve handled it better.”

Cruz shifted forward in his seat, elbows on his knees. “Look, Deputy, it seems to me you did plenty. You went into that house and you saved Jillian Meade’s life—not once, but twice. I think you should let yourself off the hook and just focus on your investigation. If Grace Meade was dead before the fire broke out, it means she was murdered and the fire was probably set to cover tracks. I imagine this has to be tough on a lot of people around here, but the evidence is what you need to be focusing on. And it’s your investigation, obviously. I don’t mean to come riding in like some bounty hunter, okay? I asked for the arson team to look things over to make sure there was no confusion about what went down, but I’m not here to step on your toes. All I really want to do is speak to Jillian Meade and clear up some questions about what happened while she was over in England. She gives me her statement, I’m outta here. I’ll send it off to the Brits and that’ll probably be that. Is that okay with you?”

Berglund nodded wearily, like a man who was both exhausted and in over his head. How many murder investigations had he even handled? Cruz wondered. In a town this size, it was a distinct possibility this was his first.

“Talking to Jillian, though,” Berglund said, “that could be a problem.”

“How so? She’s in the hospital here in town, right?”

“Not anymore. They moved her to the regional hospital over in Montrose. The local clinic isn’t equipped to handle a case like hers.”

“I thought she wasn’t that badly hurt.”

“She had a concussion, like I said, but it wasn’t too bad. Mostly it was smoke inhalation they were worried about, but they figured she’d recover fully from that, too. Her mental state is something else, though.”

“What do you mean?”

“She tried to kill herself in the ER in Havenwood.”

Cruz pulled up short. “Chief Lunders never mentioned that.”

“He hadn’t heard about it yet when you talked to him yesterday. Happened early Wednesday morning. The chief was under the weather, and he didn’t get in till after noon. Jill had spent the night in the ER here so they could keep an eye on her breathing. I was there myself till around four in the morning, but she seemed to be resting comfortably. Sometime around dawn, though, when nobody was watching, she apparently woke up and found a syringe in a drawer or something. They said she had it in an artery with her thumb on the plunger when an orderly happened to walk by and spot her. The guy thought fast, luckily. If he hadn’t tackled her, she’d be dead.”

“And now?” Cruz asked.

Berglund’s big hands rubbed his face wearily. “Now they’ve got her locked down on twenty-four-hour suicide watch in the psych ward at Montrose. They kept her heavily sedated for the first twenty-four hours, but they’re trying to back her off the meds now. We can go over later, after we check back with the arson guys, but I wouldn’t count on getting much out of her today if I were you. They say she hasn’t said a word since all this happened.”

Evil never sleeps. It creeps in the night, appearing where it’s least expected, Cruz thought. There’s no sanctuary behind locked doors or the solid edifice of the law. Sooner or later, it finds the vulnerability in any hiding place and worms its way in. All it takes is a small point of weakness, a tiny chink in the wall of social order, a minuscule tear in the fabric of human decency. Even in a small prairie town that dared to tempt the gods and call itself Havenwood, there was no refuge.

“This is it.” Berglund rolled the police cruiser to a stop before the blackened remains of what must have been, if neighboring houses were any indication, a pleasant family home in an pretty neighborhood before it had been put to the torch two nights earlier. Another black-and-white cruiser and a beige Ford Fairlane with the Minnesota state crest on the door were parked in the wide, sweeping driveway.

“I don’t know as you’ll see much,” Berglund said. “Things are pretty raked over by now, but this gives you an idea of how bad the fire was.”

The sour odor of soot was already insinuating its way in through the car’s air vents. Cruz climbed out of the cruiser, moving off to the side, out of the direct path of the sunlight to get a better view of the burned-out shell. He cupped a hand over his eyes, squinting against the sun that was beginning to sink toward the western horizon, setting up a blinding glare of ice and snow on Lost Arrow Lake. From this vantage point, he could see little except the uneven silhouette of what remained of the Meade home.

The scene looked as the fire had rendered it, for the most part, bordered and contained by a band of yellow plastic crime scene tape. The house had mostly collapsed in on itself. All that remained standing were the sooty red bricks of a large hearth and chimney, rising like a sentinel above the cracked and blackened cement foundation. A few charred timbers lay tipped at odd angles, crusted over with a thick layer of ice from the soaking of the fire hoses.

The yard sloped down to a wooden dock that extended out to the frozen lake. On the opposite shore, a few snow-capped cottages and a dense line of pine trees stood in stark relief against the brilliant sky. The view was impressive, Cruz thought, like a Currier and Ives Christmas fantasy. In summer, the place would no doubt be a water sport paradise. Right now, he could make out the tracks of dozens of skis and snowmobiles crisscrossing the lake’s frozen surface. Out in the middle of it, narrow gray plumes rose from makeshift chimneys poking through the roofs of small plywood huts, evidence of heartier souls than he sport fishing through the thick ice.

The cruiser rocked as Berglund climbed out on his side and slammed the door. His green nylon police parka was unzipped, despite the frigid temperature, and the brass buttons of his khaki uniform strained across his chest as he came around the car to join Cruz. Like many very large men, Berglund moved slowly and with great precision, as if worried about accidentally bowling someone over.

Two men wearing orange coveralls over their clothing were poking around the site, taking measurements by the look of it. A couple of local cops in uniforms like Berglund’s stood just outside the tape, watching them work and standing guard over a large, articulated metal toolbox and what looked to be a pile of plastic and paper evidence bags.

“Pretty bad,” Cruz observed, as they watched the men working over the grim scene.

“Pretty bad,” the deputy agreed—both of them masters at understatement.

A silence settled over them, a quiet more profound than any Cruz could remember for a very long time. There were no automobile noises, no commuter planes, no traffic helicopters droning overhead. No hum of the heavy machinery that is a city’s living, beating heart. He might have expected a few chirping birds, at least, but any that were wintering here had obviously had the sense to flee this place of death.

Cruz would have welcomed the opportunity to fly away himself. His stomach turned at the acrid odor of wet, charred wood and the toxic stench of melted plastic, rubber and paint.

He took a step forward and heard a brittle crunching sound under his shoe. He looked down to see that he was standing on broken shards of glass, maybe a piece of shattered window pane. He kicked it aside, then stopped to pick out a small fragment that had become wedged into the hard rubber of his left heel.

“Winds were high the night of the fire,” Berglund said. “Flames jumped from treetop to treetop, and it looked like they might cross the lot line. We were worried we’d lose half the street.”

Cruz followed the direction of the burly man’s cocked thumb to the white birch and silver maples standing between the destroyed house and the property to the north of it. Several were scorched and fire-capped. On the neighbor’s garage, maybe sixty feet away, the wood siding was visibly blistered and peeling in a couple of spots, mute testimony to the intensity of the blaze.

“We’ve only got two pumper trucks,” Berglund said. His deep voice doled out words sparingly, Cruz noted, like someone unaccustomed to strangers or long explanations. “It’s just a volunteer force, and fighting the wind like we were…” The frown deepened on his square face and his white-blond eyebrows were almost linked now by the two vertical creases above his nose. “If it hadn’t been for the wind, we might have been able to get it under control, save more evidence. Once we realized there was no way of saving the house or pulling Mrs. Meade out, though, we made the decision to save the neighbor’s place.”

He said it defensively, Cruz noted, like he thought this D.C. hotshot might be getting ready to ream out the locals for their ineptitude. “Makes sense,” he agreed.

A cold wind blew up off the lake and Cruz felt the damp cut through him. He turned up the collar of his overcoat, wishing once again that he’d worn something warmer. Back in D.C., they were just weeks away from cherry blossom time, when the air would turn humid and ripe, but that kind of weather was a long way off here. There was no point in looking for warmth in these ice-crusted coals, either.

Suddenly, he recoiled, picking up a trace scent through the pervasive stink of charred wood, a smell that was both familiar and unforgettable—the terrifying odor of roasted human flesh. It was just his imagination messing with his head, he tried to tell himself. Grace Meade’s charred body had long since been removed.

Logic carried no weight, however, because what he was seeing in his mind’s eye was not this scene, but another fire long ago—another murder victim’s body torched in a deliberate bid to destroy evidence, only this victim hadn’t been a stranger, and Cruz hadn’t been some impartial investigator arriving after the fact.

“You want to take a closer look?” Berglund asked, stepping up to the ribbon of yellow plastic crime scene tape that circumnavigated the lot. He reached out and lifted it, holding it up for Cruz to pass under. All the professional courtesies.

God almighty, no, he didn’t want to get any closer, Cruz thought, revulsion springing from the deepest recesses of his brain, that primitive part that deals in instinctive fear and the impulse to flee. He managed to hold his ground—just.

“I can see all I need to from here,” he said. “I’ll just wait till those guys get done. I don’t want to be trampling over evidence.”

He turned his back to the site, looking up and down the road as if recreating in his mind the scenario as it had played out two nights earlier. All along the curving lakefront road, well-tended houses with two-car garages nestled into wooded lots that flowed, unfenced and unbroken, from one into the other. They were a custom-built mix of ranch-style bunga lows, Cape Cod salt boxes and sprawling split-levels with sand-colored prairie limestone facades. The lots were large, none smaller than a half acre, Cruz estimated, space beyond the reach of all but the wealthiest of urban dwellers. Even in a small town, this had to be prime real estate. Cruz saw snowmobiles parked in several of the driveways, and a couple of tarp-covered powerboats jacked up on trailers for the winter.

When his heartbeat had finally slowed to a normal pace, he allowed himself to turn back toward the destroyed house, where the two jumpsuited investigators seemed to be finishing their work. They picked their way across the rubble, stopping to lay down a few evidence bags in the tool case. One of the men was carrying a long-handled spade, and he jammed it upright in a pile of ash. Clapping the dust off their hands, they ducked under the tape and walked over to where Cruz and Berglund were standing. One was gray-haired, balding, but fit-looking under his orange jumpsuit. The other was younger, heavyset and perspiring, despite the cold, so that his black-framed glasses kept slipping down the slick incline of his nose, which was black from the repetition of his sooty hand pushing them back.

“This is Agent Cruz from the FBI,” Berglund told them.

They nodded, and the older of the two men held out a dirty hand. He then thought better of it and transformed the shake to a quick wave. “I don’t think you want to touch this hand,” he said. “I’m Don Beadle from the State Bureau of Investigation. This is Bill Oppenhalt from the Arson Investigation Unit. I guess it was you who originated the request for us to come out here and take a look, Agent Cruz?”

Cruz nodded. “That’s right. Appreciate the cooperation.”

“No problem. That’s why we’re here.”

“So, how does it look? Do you think this was deliberately set?”

Beadle deferred to Oppenhalt, who pushed his heavy glasses up his nose once more and nodded. “Oh, yeah, not much question of that, I’d say. Things were a little stirred around before we got here, mind you, but we were able to spot a fair number of physical indicators just the same.”

“Like what?” Berglund asked.

“Well, you got your multiple high burn points and several localized heavy burn patterns indicating that there was more than one point of origin. Some spalling in the concrete foundation, too, which some would say indicates an accelerant, although it’s not a real reliable indicator, in my experience. We took some carpet and underpad samples, though, and those were a little more conclusive. I’ll want to run them through a gas chromatograph back at the lab just to be sure, but in the end,” he said, tapping the side of his blackened nose before pushing his glasses up yet again, “the nose knows.”

“What do you mean?”

Oppenhalt grunted as he bent to scoop a sample of dirt, which he rubbed between his fingers, then held under his nostrils. “Gasoline,” he said. “On a cold day like this, it’s real easy to pick it up. You guys don’t smell it? It’s all over the place here.”

Berglund shook his head. “I can’t smell anything except charcoal, and that’s been stuck in my nostrils since the night of the fire. And anyway,” he added, nodding to the gravel driveway beneath their feet, “what you’re smelling here is probably several years worth of dripping oil from all the cars that have been parked in this drive.”

“Well, sure, but it’s not just in the drive, Deputy,” Beadle said, cocking his thumb back over his shoulder. “It’s all over the scene. Really strong in the carpet samples we found, like Bill here said. Even I picked it up, and my nose isn’t nearly as well trained as his is.”

The broad shoulders of Berglund’s green parka hefted, sending a shower of what looked at first glance to be dandruff flying to the ground, until Cruz realized it was actually a fine layer of ash that was still settling almost forty-eight hours after the blaze.

“You guys happen to come across any spent cartridges or slugs while you were sifting through the ash?” Cruz asked. “Deputy Berglund says the autopsy on the lady who died here indicates she may have taken a shot to the chest from a fairly large-caliber weapon, like maybe a forty-five or a nine millimeter.”

Beadle shook his head. “No, we were on the lookout for it, but nothing showed up. If your killer was the careful sort, he might have picked up his spent cartridges before he left the scene.”

“That would make him one very careful drug-crazed hippie drifter looking for a quick score,” Cruz said dryly, glancing at Berglund.

“I never said that was the only explanation for what went down here,” the deputy said irritably. “That was the chief’s thought, and it’s as good as any other at the moment. On the other hand, somebody that calculating…” His voice drifted off.

Berglund’s face was drawn and showing signs of weariness and strain. It was obvious he was also ticked off at being second-guessed by meddling strangers. Fair enough, Cruz thought. If it was him in the deputy’s place and some stranger had dropped into the middle of one if his cases, pulling rank and calling in outside investigators, he’d probably be just as pissed. But that didn’t change the fact that, frankly, the guy needed the help.

“You seen all you need to here?” Berglund asked.

Cruz glanced back at the rubble and nodded. “I guess I have. You guys?”

Beadle also nodded. “We’ll get our preliminary report out to you both within a couple of days. Final has to wait for the chemical tests on the samples we took, but like Bill said, our view is that you’ve definitely got an arson case on your hands here, guys, so you’ll want to bear that in mind as your investigation proceeds. Anything else you need from us?”

“Not for now. I’ll let you know if I do,” Berglund said glumly.