Authors: Robert W. Walker
Lillian Weist, an evidence tech intern, had come bounding down from the house. "I got some info on the guy in the boat."
"Kemper, yeah," replied Nielsen.
"How'd you know his name?" Lillian asked, clutching the form in her hand, all the blanks filled in. "It took me all morning to get all these facts."
"His truck. It's on his truck, Lil."
She scrunched up her nose and face in the universal facial expression that asked others to agree with the idiocy of its owner. "Duhhh," she said. "I got most of this from papers in his glove compartment, but didn't think to read the truck logo. Anyway...talk about being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Kemper normally arrived and did his work in the A.M., but yesterday he came in the P.M. He'd visited a family friend in hospital and had lunch with his wife at the hospital cafeteria before arriving here. Had he been on his usual schedule, he'd've been long gone before this lunatic's arrival."
Nielsen began verbalizing her theory of precisely how Howard Kemper met his end, telling Lillian, but also gathering the interest of Bert and Al. Young Lillian and the two men listened to her story with skeptical silence, Lillian nodding and struggling to stay with her, while the nodding of the men implied a condescending unwillingness to believe she could possibly know such details.
Nielsen stared up the lawn toward the mower. She could prove her theory at the mower. There she would find the evidence of the man's blood in the well of the mower bed. Evidence only inches from one FBI man who this moment stood leaning up against the Toro, blissfully unaware of its importance.
"What about his clothes?" asked Bert.
"Yeah, what became of his clothes, Dr. Nielsen?" asked Al.
Lillian provided the answer, pointing to the form in her hand. "Clothes were found beside the front exterior steps leading up to the Sanger home, discarded and bloody— particularly the lap area and the pants legs."
Dr. Nielsen had their rapt attention as she detailed her theory, anxious to air it, to test its validity in her own ear. When she finished, Bert, busy putting his camera and lenses away, replied, "All right, say you're right about the clothes, the mower ride onto the pier, dumping his body from mower direct to boat without tipping the damn thing over..." Al and the others leaned in to hear this. "It still doesn't explain how the damn worms got into the freaking boat with him, does it?"
Al jumped in, still smarting from having been burned by her. "Yeah, how do you explain the worms?"
She breathed deeply, shaking her head. "I don't know yet."
"They didn't just jump in on their own," added Bert, snapping his camera case closed. "Must've been hundreds of them," he told Lillian.
"A thousand or more," said Al to the intern. "You had to see it to believe it. Feeding on his eyes and inside his wounds."
"The worms were night crawlers, big reds," said Bert. "Good for fishing."
Al agreed. "Kind you buy at the bait and tackle."
"That's it, bait," said Dr. Nielsen. "Explains the water at the bottom of the canoe too."
"I don't follow you," replied Lillian.
"Someone's cooler fuU of frozed worms," she said, her accent showing doubly on the misspoken word for "frozen."
"Frozed? Frozed?" asked Al, poking Bert, and together they laughed.
Ignoring the men, Nielsen stepped to the boathouse door and scanned the interior. Lillian trailed curiously after. The two women had stepped inside just as the van carrying Kemper's body backed over the mower trail Nielsen had earlier photographed. She pointed out the wall of rods and reels hanging in the boathouse, and below it an empty Styrofoam cooler lying on its side, the lid inches away. A discarded blanket lay half in the water off the litde boardwalk. The motorboat that filled most of the space was up out of the water on davits.
"No expense spared here," said Lillian, lifting the lid of an electrically powered metal icebox, the wall unit. A handful of dead, dried-up earthworms lay at their feet.
The men poked their heads into the boathouse just in time to see Lillian drop the Styrofoam cooler down into the wall unit, a perfect fit. "This is a storage cooler for bait— worms," she said.
"Now we know where the night crawlers came from," said Nielsen.
"Yeah, they were frozed in here and thawed out in the boat," joked Al badly. "So, you saying she threw in the worms for sport?"
"Explains how they got there."
Nielsen now glanced across the lake at the activity of men and women going in and out of the Brody house. She wondered how Dr. Frank Patterson was doing there. It had irked her that Patterson should get the plum assignment, the house with three bodies to grid, while she was put on a dead gardener in the boat. After all, she had been on the Post-it Ripper case with Leonard from the "get-go," as the Americans liked to say, but when push came to shove, seniority had won out. Still, even though Frank was the As-sociate M.E., and she was a mere Assistant M.E., Patterson, unlike her, had not been involved on the case from the "get-go." No matter how she turned it in her mind, Lynn felt cheated.
Bide your time, she kept telling herself. Your time will come.
She then chided herself for daring to think she had problems; her problems were small potatoes compared to what Meredyth Sanger must be going through right now. She allowed a silent prayer to escape her for Meredyth, and for Lucas, one that would also suffice for his departed soul, should that be the case. Aside from being colleagues in a sense, the pair had become her new friends as well. How was Meredyth to cope? Lynn knew how desperately the woman loved Lucas. It must be so hard on her.
She started up the incline toward the house, working her way toward Leonard Chang even as she put her cell phone to her ear, having dialed him, but her eyes remained fixed on the mower. The Blodgett body apparently had been successfully plucked from the windmill by the cherry picker, and Chang was escorting the body, now on a stretcher, toward an ambulance. Nielsen didn't want to be distracted, but Lillian, trailing after her, still waved the form she'd come with originally. "You'll need this for your final report, Dr. Nielsen."
Nielsen had already filled a spiral book with observations, comments, notes, measured distances, maps, thumbnail sketches of the pier in relation to the boat, and an explanation on how it was impossible to get a true triangu- lation of where the body was discovered since there was no fixed position, the boat having wandered about on the lake. What had alerted authorities in the first place were the birds coming and going from the boat, their beaks full with what Bert called red beauties. Still, she knew about the thousand and one trivial little details needed to fill in all the blanks on all the damn forms waiting back at the office, and even inconsequential items—say a victim's Social Security number or his mother's maiden name—would be called for, delaying the proceedings unless the information was accessible.
At such a time she'd be thanking God for Lil's standard form. She thanked Lillian and took her report, laying it into her notebook just as Chang came on the line.
"Lynn, good! You've finished up with the Kemper body, have you?"
"And you with the Blodgett body?"
"Some truly curious details forming up here at the house. Meredyth tried to save Blodgett's life even after all this."
She countered, "I am dying to hear all about it, but it doesn't compare to the bizarre story I have for you, Leonard."
"Then you have answers, good!"
"Answers, yes. Meet me at the lawn mower."
"The lawn mower? All right...on my way down."
Reaching the driveway and the mower, she saw Chang rounding the back of the ambulance where he'd left Blodgett's body in its black bag. After the niceties, and questions about where they might find a bite to eat, she laid out how the gardener had died, and she walked him over to the mower, and pointing, showed him the coagulated blood at the bottom of the well beneath the wheel. It was there, and so were some distinctive shoe prints—small, feminine ones. "She drove the mower back to here, her feet wading in Kemper's blood. By time he was bleeding out, he was barefoot. The first giveaway was the dried blood I found under his toenails but nowhere else."
"Impressive," he replied. "Perelli! Got any film left in that camera?" Chang pointed to the blood pool imprinted by a pair of unique shoe prints, while Nielsen went to the ambulance and tore away one of Lauralie's shoes from her feet. She returned with it, and the match was clearly visible. "A matched pair," she said.
"A match made in blood," Chang replied.
Lil stood staring, learning, soaking up things, and realizing she wanted very much to work more closely with Dr. Nielsen.
Chang suggested they retire to the Brody house. They took the road that meandered around the lake, disappearing amid the tall sentinels of the pine forest. Along their way, they passed the spot where men in FBI and ATF wind- breakers dealt with the BMW found nestled in the trees just beyond the Brody house.
DR. FRANK PATTERSON. in white shirt and tie, stood now over the bodies at the foot of the basement stairs in the Brody home, his gloved hands going to his aching back. He'd been bending over the dead family for forty minutes now, assessing how each had died, their relative positions, relative ages, and searching for any additional bruises or obvious marks. Hands tied, the three bodies had been dumped here in the basement as if hurled down the stairs, but the gunshots had all occurred at the top of the stairwell. There the blood spatters, along with brain matter, along with gunshot residue, painted the unfinished wall with enough crazy art to call it a Jackson Pollock painting.
His assistant revved up a small rotary saw and went to work removing the section of wall in question. He'd take it back to the lab with him, study it in detail. Under the right light, and with the help of blood-spatter specialists, he would be able to tell in which order each of the Brodys were killed—father-mother-daughter, mother-father- daughter, or some other variation. The crime would be recreated down to its last detail. If it proved interesting enough, he could write it up in the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Examiner. They paid well in both cash and cachet.
The sound of the saw ended, and Patterson looked up to the top of the stairs, thinking Jennings an efficient man to finish with the wall so quickly, but Jennings hadn't finished. He'd merely stopped to allow Dr. Chang and Dr. Nielsen the right-of-way. They came down the stairwell now for a look at the cruel massacre here. "Anything I ought to know here, Frank?" asked Chang.
"Dunno... little soon to tell, but it's pretty clear the victims were forced to tie one 'nother up. Probably with assurances nothing would happen if they cooperated. Looks like a page out of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. They cooperate and he—ahhh, she, if it proves to've been Blodgett, she blows their brains out anyway, all in the same manner, right here." He put an index finger behind Lynn Nielsen's ear to demonstrate the location of each entry wound, and said, "Pow! Just like a professional or someone familiar with the Godfather films."
Nielsen pulled away, annoyed he'd chosen her head to demonstrate on, his finger jabbing into her head. "It does appear to be her work," she said.
"And how would you know that from what little we have?" challenged Patterson, as had been his habit with her.
"She wasn't a big woman, only one hundred ten pounds at most. She wisely used her victims' weight against them here, as with getting Kemper off the mower and into the boat."
"What mower?"
"It's why they were shot at the top of the stairs and allowed to tumble down. She didn't have to drag, carry, or push them here."
"Good point," said Chang.
"Of course it is," said Patterson. "It's why I'm having the wall removed. They were shot at the top of the stairs and their bodies came tumbling down."
"What about the upstairs, the girl's room?" asked Chang. "Your guys finished there?"
"Finishing, yes."
"The other half of Mira Lourdes is on ice?" he asked.
"Well, no, not that far along yet, but it'll get done."
Chang gave a little nod to Nielsen. "Get up there and see to it Miss Lourdes's parts are bagged and put in the refrigeration van, Dr. Nielsen."
"I can handle it, Leonard," said Patterson.
"You've got your hands full here, Frank. Trust me, we've got enough autopsies to go around."
With Nielsen gone and the saw renewing its work at the top of the stairs, Chang stepped over the bodies and surveyed the basement—-a lovely rec room with a Ping Pong table, a bar with a neon Coor's sign over it, lit and blinking, and on the bar a family photo of the Brodys on holiday in a snowy Christmas scene with skis—Aspen, Colorado, Chang guessed.
He continued examining the basement area. A washer- and-dryer unit at one end, little windows high overhead looking out on the earth. One comer sported a lounging area and a reading nook, with a bookshelf filled with dogeared paperbacks, assorted magazines, and a hardcover crime novel entitled Unnatural Instinct lying on one chair, a marker indicating the reader was halfway through the book. When Chang slipped it open, he saw the expensive bookmark was engraved with the name of Candice, the daughter.
Patterson had shadowed Chang. "Frank, life is too short. I came down here from upstairs, from Candice's room. I saw what's been hanging there all this time."
"What's the big deal, Leonard? I made the call. Priority one, the basement, two, the sweep of the kitchen—lotta things disturbed in the kitchen. Didya see that overturned, broken dining room table? And three, the upstairs rooms— not just Candice's but the master bedroom too. One that looks out on the forest out back."
"You lied to me, Frank, and you didn't follow my orders either. Look, we both know you're unhappy working under someone you feel superior to, Frank—a slant-eyed Chink."
"I never said anything of the kind. Who told you that?"
"You tell me that, Frank, every day."
The silence between them was rocklike. Chang broke it. "Look, I don't want to argue this here, not now. When this case settles, once all the reports are in, all the dots dotted and Ts crossed, you can defend your actions involving this case in a full rebuttal, okay? But Frank, I say it's time you started floating your resume."