Authors: Robert W. Walker
From bullet holes peppered into an upturned rowboat found on the lake, it had been surmised that Lucas and Meredyth had been fired on while out on the lake, unprotected, unarmed, helpless. Firearms experts had assured Chang that a child using the Remington and its scope could not miss a target as large as Lucas Stonecoat out on the lake, but neither he nor Meredyth were hit while in the bullet-riddled boat.
A broken table leg was found very near where Lucas had been gunned down, and early reports from the Brody kitchen spoke of a table that had been upended and scav-enged for its legs.
How had Lucas and Meredyth gotten to the Brody home alive under the crosshairs of that bolt-action, high- powered Remington? And once in the Brody house, why had they chosen to return here, crossing the lake and painting themselves with muck in a vain attempt at getting the horses from the stable? All questions he wanted to put to Meredyth, but she was, for the time being, unavailable to him.
Why didn't Stonecoat simply wait it out across the river? Why didn't he walk out? Why come back in the face of overwhelming firepower when he was unarmed? Macho shit-head fool, Chang summed up, what did his Cherokee bravura get him?
FROM WHERE SHE stood in hip-deep lake water, Dr. Lynn Nielsen watched the skittish unmanned rowboat and its contents as it was guided to her by the divers. They'd had to swim out to the center of the lake to fetch it; there it had bobbed in their wake, eluding touch, acting like a shy cat, not wishing to be cornered. Finally, the two swimmers took hold of the gunwales and guided it into the shallows and an increasingly anxious Dr. Nielsen.
A third wet-suited diver stood alongside Nielsen in the shallows, and he now lifted his water-proof camera and began taking shots of the unholy sight at the bottom of the floating coffin, gagging at what his lens and his eye reported to his brain.
From the safe distance of thirty or so feet, a news camera in a helicopter overhead focused in on the activity at the lake. A dead man lay in the flat pool of water in the bot-tom of the boat, covered in worms, his throat a jagged mass of blood where his jugular had been severed, his lips moving with worm activity, and the soft tissue of his eyes, already eaten away, had sunk into their sockets, the worms finding a home in the collapsed orbs. Nielsen imagined these news camera pictures would not be finding their way into American living rooms, at least not until some money- crazed TV producer somehow created a reality show forum for crime-scene and autopsy photos. Newsroom vaults were crammed full with video deemed unfit for public con-sumption and viewing. Still, pretty soon nothing would be unfit, she told herself, if these Americans continued on their present course.
The diver with the camera, Bert Quinn, continued to snap shots in such a way as to not again look into the dead man's missing eyes.
"Jesus, damn most horrible thing I've ever seen," said Bert's partner, going for shore, anxious to distance himself from the floating coffin.
The third diver kept one hand on the gunwale, steadying the boat for Dr. Nielsen, his attention on her. "How'd you ever decide-ta become a coroner, Dr. Nielsen?" he asked, staring across the boat and into her eyes. "I mean, didya just wake up one morning and say to yourself I wanna work with stiffs, or what?"
"I went to med school to become a physician, and I somehow wound up working under an extraordinary man in forensic pathology who gave me great respect and from whom I could learn....A too good chance to pass up."
"Everybody over in Norway talk so cute?"
She felt uncomfortable now at his attention. "I am from Sweden, not Norway, and I do not have the time to teach you the difference."
"Maybe over dinner sometime?"
The cameraman looked over his lens to see her reaction to the other man's pass.
"I don't think this is the right place to talk of such matters."
"That's why I'm saying we ought to continue this over dinner, maybe some wine?"
"No, no, thank you. I don't date men outside my profession," she lied. "Still, your offer is a...a compliment. Thank you, but no, thank you."
Nielsen had begun to work as she spoke, pushing aside worm colonies from the nude body of the middle-aged gardener, searching with her gloved fingers and her sharp eye for any obvious wounds other than the enormous one at the throat. She immediately isolated a smaller curious puncture wound also in the throat, one masked by the larger wound. She ran her gloved hands down the torso, her eyes following, searching for any contusions, bruises, anomalies, or irregularities.
"This guy was hung like a thumb tack, like the size of an earplug, that thing," said the police diver who'd propositioned her over the body.
"Agent, if you're trying to embarrass me, you can 7, and if you're simply being rude because I said no to you, then I have to suspect you are hung like an earplug as well. Now please, allow me to do my job."
Both Bert the cameraman and his friend on the FBI dive team laughed at their colleague, Bert saying, "She got you good, Al."
She continued to survey the nude corpse, her gloved hand and eye now down to his scarred knees—recent bruising—and next she noticed the deep brown, tobaccolike stains under all his toenails. She took scrapings and efficiently put these into a vial, safely tucking them into a valise on a strap she'd placed around her neck. Finally, she said, "All right...we're needing to come at this in a fresh venue."
"Whataya make of what happened to this guy, Doc?" asked the third diver from shore now.
"Obviously, someone's cut his throat. Presumably Blodgett."
"That little woman?" erupted one of the divers, and this started a cacophony of disagreement.
"I saw her pictures! You're right. Skinny as a coyote."
"No bigger than a hen."
"The guy had almost two hundred pounds on her."
"Okay, gentlemen. I want the boat upended like the one we dragged into shore already, one with all the bullet holes." This boat had already been examined and photographed.
"Why're we turning the boat over with him in it?" asked the one named Al.
"I don't need or want the worms in the body bag, gentlemen, so let's upend the boat and feed the fish, shall we? We'll then float the man to the pier and lift him out there. I can better examine him once he's been...ahhh, baptized."
They reluctantly did as instructed, flipping the rowboat after some effort and spilling its contents out into the lake. The divers gently guided Kemper's floating body, facedown, to the pier. His plunge and short swim to the pier had dispersed the worms, and it had the added virtue of cleansing the wound that had killed him.
They lifted Kemper's body from the water, as the news chopper did another flyby, further grating on Nielsen's nerves. Kemper lay now faceup on the weathered dock, but the body bag, so patiently awaiting his arrival till now, suddenly flew off and into the lake on the other side of the berth, caught up in the whirlwind of the chopper as Nielsen climbed the ladder from water to platform.
"Kee-rist!" she shouted up at the chopper pilot, waving him off. "In Sweden we'd have shot those fools from the sky by now."
The body bag was retrieved, and the 2NEWS bird backed off while Lynn Nielsen leaned in over Kemper's throat for a closer look. She was unaware that the newsman overhead was shooting close-up footage of her lanky, curvaceous body now, and the divers too sat back and appreciated her statuesque beauty kneeling in over the corpse, the wet suit stretched to its limit. Nielsen's own attention was on the remaining, clinging worms that had stubbornly come along for the ride, burrowed as they were in the eye sockets and the gaping neck wound.
She again identified a small but deep gouge at the center of the throat other than the critical wound that had emptied the man's blood. There'd been no blood in the bottom of the boat, curiously enough, only cold, clear water, and of course the feasting worms. He'd been killed elsewhere and dumped in the green boat crudely carved with the Brody names— Myron, Lorene, Candice. The worms remained a mystery.
From the angle of the deadly jugular slash, Nielsen surmised that the killer was perhaps two and a half to three feet taller than Kemper—impossible, she could hear Chang saying—unless Kemper was kneeling at the time he was caught from behind and his throat cut right to left. Was he made to grovel on his knees perhaps?
There were other questions as well. For the slight Lauralie to have attacked so large a man and gotten his inert body down to the lake, she'd have had to have some sort of help, but Belkvin was out of the picture, long since dead. Had she lured a new boyfriend into her web, some local dupe she'd met at the M&M Cafe perhaps, to do her bidding? Had one of the Farnsworth boys fallen under her charms, only then to be murdered along with his brother? Perhaps she had even tempted both young men. She seemed to have an uncanny, near-supernormal power over men.
"Bag 'im, gentlemen." Nielsen stood and turned to face the lawn and the driveway, the house on the knoll. She saw Chang directing some guy in a cherry picker from his standing position atop the shed. She lifted a perfunctory wave in his direction, seeing that he was staring back at her now. Her eyes then went to the lawn, where the unevenly cut grass had been trampled by officers from the county, ATF, and FBI. She saw men smoking cigarettes, leaning against trees, cowboy boots resting on black valises, men and women in ball caps and Stetsons, some in uniform, others in jackets pulled over white shirts and ties. The overall effect was of a bizarre Norman Rockwell painting: a crowd of picnickers stepping over a pair of corpses, the bodies acting as focal point in the composition. Other than gabbing and biting on pipes, cigars, and cigarettes, these people on the lawn and standing around the vehicles in the drive looked as if they were doing nothing. She guessed most were standing about discussing the weekend college ball games. These thoughts wafted through her head, when suddenly it struck her. She knew how Lauralie had killed Kemper.
The lay of the grass coming toward her, creating a near- imperceptible path, screamed in her head; the lawnmower had made this errant path down to the docks. The more she stared at it, the clearer the picture came into edgy focus. She now recognized the faint little dirt and mud trail along the pier boardwalk, a trail they'd managed to trample over—the evidence that the mower had been guided with Kemper still sitting astride the cushion, with her knife at his throat while she straddled the back.
She heard the unmistakable sound of the body bag zipper closing on Kemper, plunging the body into darkness. "Hold on a minute." She returned to the body and slipped the zipper down far enough to investigate the neck wounds once again, zeroing in on the more tentative jab that had aroused her curiosity; seeing it again, almost lost in the puckering folds of the larger tear, she knew what it meant.
She closed Kemper from her sight again. "Okay, thanks. You can get that waiting van down here and put him aboard for the trip back to Houston."
She walked out to the end of the pier and back, giving her theories time to percolate in her head. Once Lauralie had forced Kemper down to the pier, she had him flank the boat she'd come across the lake in. Once the mower was aligned alongside the boat, she slit his throat, and he bled out over the wheel of the mower. The pool of blood would be found on the floorboard of the same big red Toro that everyone had treated as an obstacle, stepping around it all morning long up at the house where Lauralie had left it beside the lawn truck.
Nielsen pictured the events in her mind. Lauralie didn't want to shoot the gardener, knowing she'd never be able to drag his body from sight, and she didn't have to leap from the bushes to take him by surprise. With the noise of the mower, she might easily have stalked up from behind and stabbed him in the back, but as it was, she had to completely reach around him to cut his throat from left to right, and besides, she wanted him to strip, she wanted his clothes. Of course, it was an easy matter to cut the hefty man's throat after charming him out of his pants and into giving her a ride on his great big red mower. She had simply presented herself to him in those same tight-fitting jeans and that low-cut blouse she'd died in, the same outfit that had perhaps charmed the Farnsworth boys into dropping their guard as well...maybe...
Lauralie had stepped up to Kemper as he was mowing the grass, introduced herself as someone visiting from across the lake, and seductively talked him into a ride into the trees, where she convinced him to make love to her. Once she'd gotten him to drop his uniform, she showed her true colors, likely pulling a gun on him, the one used at the cafe. She ordered him back onto his mower in the buff. Once at his rear, Kemper no longer enjoying his luck, she suddenly put the knife to his throat and dug it in deeply— the initial wound—making certain he knew she meant business. She then ordered him to drive down to the pier. When he hesitated, she pierced his skin even deeper with the first cut, drawing blood.
After this, Kemper played along, doing as instructed, pleading for his life perhaps, wondering what she wanted perhaps. On stopping the mower halfway down the pier as ordered, he had no idea what she wanted. She stood up on the back of the mower guard, and keeping the razor-sharp knife at his throat, with the extra strength that standing over him provided, Lauralie thrust the knife into his jugular and dragged it across his throat.
Kemper immediately slumped forward over the wheel, his blood flowing down into the mower well at his feet, much of it soaking into his toenails. It was no simple matter, but from there, she managed to push his body from its sitting position on the mower to roll onto the dock and into the boat—surely almost toppling it over given his size and girth. He landed faceup to the heavens, his surprised eyes open along with his mouth and the gaping wound in his throat.
Nielsen began peeling off the wet suit, garnering stares from the men again. As she did so, she watched the body of the hapless, unlucky gardener, who had succumbed to Lauralie's lies and wiles, being carried unceremoniously to the waiting coroner's van.