Ultimate Thriller Box Set - Crouch Blake (лучшие книги без регистрации txt) 📗

“What do you want to do?” Redbone asked Laura quietly.

“I want to make sure we don’t have any surprises." So far, Lundy had been full of surprises. “I want us to make sure we have cover and do this right. We might need assistance from Hazardous Devices.”

“Good enough for me.” Redbone looked at Oliver and nodded to the door. “You mark the evidence I pointed out in the living room yet?”

Oliver stared at him, fuming, before brushing past them without a word. Redbone followed him out, ostensibly to make sure he did what he was told.

Laura looked at Descartes, who had witnessed the exchange from the hallway. “Andrew, wait a minute.”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Keep an eye on Oliver for me, would you? Under no circumstances is he to open that trapdoor. It’s a safety issue.”

“I’ll make sure, you better believe it, ma’am.”

Laura got Victor on the phone and gave him a rundown of what they had found. She read off Lundy’s credit card numbers and gave him a detailed description of the motor home he was driving, the 1987 Fleetwood Pace Arrow.

Victor broke in. “Chuck Lehman confessed—“

“What?”

“But not to killing Parris. He was sleeping with her.”

The moment Victor said it, all Lehman’s actions, his evasions, made sense. Hanging out with Cary and Cary’s girlfriend, the falling-out between them.

“It would explain a lot. The lipstick, for one. He’s gonna plead to the probation violation and to contributing to the delinquency of a minor. That’ll put him away for a while.”

“So you believe him?” Laura asked.

Victor sighed. “I believe it. Especially after I looked at the time line and it didn’t fit with the Burns killing. Do me a favor and don’t say you told me so.”

They talked about Lehman, but Laura’s mind was still on Dale Lundy and his cross-country adventure. The idea that he was looking for someone like Misty de Seroux was, in a way, a hopeful sign. He was looking for an emotional connection. That might mean the difference between life and death for the next girl he took.

He’d kept Alison Burns for five days. Most sexual predators who murdered their victims killed them within the first few hours.

“… with this?” Victor was asking.

“What?”

“You want us to go to the media?”

“No. I think we should keep it within law enforcement agencies for now. Put out an Attempt to Locate, make sure everybody gets pictures of him, the motor home, the credit card numbers. We don’t want to scare him out of the area. This weekend, he’s supposed to play at the Copper Queen Hotel.”

“We might get lucky if he used his credit cards, too. Find a paper trail.”

“I’m hoping.”

After he hung up she said into the phone: “I told you so.”

She started photographing the bedroom, paying particular attention to the evidence she had marked: the scrapbook, the wall of photos, the contents of the closet. Chief Redbone had gone back to the evidence room at the PD to pick up more evidence bags—they’d need them.

She had just walked into the master bathroom when the roar of a shotgun blast reverberated through the cheap wallboard, stunning the air into silence.

39

In the first few moments after the blast, Laura heard nothing. She ran to the kitchen like she was running through a dream. Like those movies where the woman runs from her pursuer, the soundtrack screeching and thrumming along with her thoughts, tracking her with a shaking hand-held camera as she blunders through tilting corridors and jack-in-the-box shadows before stumbling onto a scene of unrelenting horror.

She knew it would be bad.

Two men down. One breathing, one not. Laura radioed Apalachicola PD, got no one. No one minding the store—the chief en route? Shit shit shit! She called 911. The phone still cradled between her shoulder and her ear as she dropped to her knees beside Andrew Descartes, compressing the carotid, her mind ticking between clinical observation and a panicked string of thoughts, just a kitchen towel and the gloves between her and his blood—unlikely he had AIDS, but you never knew—his life leaking out, the phone slipping out from under her chin and dropping to the floor. The air was bright, every airborne fiber, every dust mote, every speck of blood delineated, every sound magnified. Knowing it was hopeless, but unable to stop trying.

Descartes. Jesus.

Oliver moaning, then screaming, like a stuck pig.

Looking at Descartes, knowing he was finished. One shot to the carotid. Gone.

Let him go.

Move on to Oliver—more wounds. Find the worst one and compress that.

Later.

More sounds. Radio static, a paramedic talking into his shoulder. Ripping sensors, snatching bandages, and sucking oxygen. The pneumatic wheeze of the gurney bearing Jerry Oliver down the steps to the waiting ambulance, a few blocks to Weems Memorial Hospital, and from there a Medevac to Tallahassee Memorial—if he didn’t die before he got to Weems.

Jerry Oliver had been shot in the cheek, eye, left shoulder, and upper right chest. Oliver, whom Laura was sure had been the one to open the trapdoor, was going to Weems and, if he was lucky, on to Tallahassee. Andrew Descartes, who had tried to stop him, was going nowhere—not for another couple of hours at least. First he would lie in his own blood while he was photographed from every angle. Then he would be transported to the morgue, evidence tweezered from his wound, his statistics read into a recorder, his organs weighed and measured, his skull sawed in half.

Andrew Descartes was now evidence in a crime.

The responding officer—a sheriff’s deputy—looked sheepish after yorking his guts out on the linoleum floor. Uniforms coming, but where the hell were they?

Where were the techs from the Hazardous Devices unit?

They would be the ones to handle the 12-gauge, sawed-off shotgun still resting in its brackets on the underside of the trapdoor, everything but the muzzle concealed by a homemade plywood box. This she saw with brilliant clarity; her clinical mind divided right down the middle from her more emotional side, the emotional side lagging behind, still in shock. A simple principle. When the trapdoor opens, the shotgun fires: Chief Redbone’s police force wiped out in an instant.

Laura stood in the torn, blood-spattered kitchen, hands tucked up under her arms from long practice.

She would not touch anything.

A paramedic entered the room, pulling another gurney bearing a body bag.

“You can’t do that,” Laura said.

“Who are you?”

I’m the person who caused all this. She held up her shield and gave him her name and rank. “He’s not going anywhere.”

“The chief—“

“This is a crime scene. He’s staying here.”

The sheriff deputy stepped up. “She’s right, man, we have charge of this scene now.”

Only then did the paramedic leave.

The room narrowed down to just Laura and the body of Andrew Descartes. She made herself look at him. She was used to looking at the dead, but this was different. She knew him. She’d shared a joke with him not an hour ago. She saw his promise—a good cop who might have grown into an exceptional cop.

I wonder who will tell his wife.

She should be the one to do it because she felt responsible. If she hadn’t come here, none of this would have happened. He’d still be at home, getting over strep throat, his new wife babying him with chicken soup…

The thought suddenly occurred to her: Where was Chief Redbone? She didn’t remember him being around here. Had he already gone to tell Descartes’s wife?

She wondered how it felt to have your whole police force devastated in the course of a split second. She thought of how his life had been laid out just the way he liked it—his teenage daughters, his sleepy town, dispensing his good ol’ boy wisdom.