All That Remains - Cornwell Patricia (серия книг TXT) 📗

"Let's accept as a given that we're dealing with one killer," I said to Marino.

"Okay, I'm listening."

He wiped his damp forehead on his coat sleeve.

"If you were the killer and had abducted two people and then forced them, perhaps at gunpoint, to come out here, who would you kill first?"

"The guy's going to be a bigger problem," he said without pause. "Me, I'm going to take him out first and save the little girl for last."

It was still difficult to imagine. When I tried to envision one person forcing two hostages to walk through these woods after dark, I continued to draw a blank. Did the killer have a flashlight? Did he know this area so well he could find the clearing blindfolded? I voiced these questions aloud to Marino.

"I've been trying to see the same thing," he said. "A couple ideas come to mind. First, he probably restrained them, tied their hands behind their back. Second, if it was me, I'd hold on to the girl, have the gun to her ribs while we're walking through the woods. This would make the boyfriend as gentle as a lamb. One false move, and his girl gets blown away. As for a flashlight? He had to have had some way of seeing out here."

"How are you going to hold a gun, a flashlight, and the girl at the same time?" I asked.

"Easy. Want me to show you?"

"Not particularly."

I backed away as he reached toward me.

"The rake. Geez, Doc. Don't be so damn jumpy."

He handed me the metal detector and I gave him the rake.

"Pretend the rake's Deborah, okay? I'm yoking her around the neck with my left arm, the flashlight in my left hand, like this."

He demonstrated. "In my right hand I've got the gun, which is stuck against her ribs. No problem. Fred's gonna be a couple feet in front of us, following the beam of the flashlight while I watch him like a hawk."

Pausing, Marino stared down the path. "They're not going to be moving very fast."

"Especially if they're barefoot," I pointed out.

"Yeah, and I'm thinking they were. He can't tie up their feet if he's going to walk them out here. But if he makes them take off their shoes, then that's going to slow them down, make it harder for them to run. Maybe after he whacks them, he keeps the shoes as souvenirs."

"Maybe."

I was thinking about Deborah's purse again.

I said, "If Deborah's hands were bound behind her back, then how did her purse get out here? It didn't have a strap, no way to loop it over her arm or shoulder. It wasn't attached to a belt, in fact it doesn't appear she was wearing a belt. And if someone were forcing you out into the woods at gunpoint, why would you take your purse with you?"

"Got no idea. That's been bothering me from the start."

"Let's give it one last try," I said.

"Oh, shit."

By the time we got back to the clearing, clouds had passed over the sun and it was getting windy, making it seem that the temperature had dropped ten degrees. Damp beneath my coat from exertion, I was cold, the muscles in my arms trembling from raking. Moving to the perimeter farthest from the path, 1 studied an area beyond which stretched a terrain so uninviting that 1 doubted even hunters ventured there. The police had dug and sifted maybe ten feet in this direction before running into an infestation of kudzu that had metastasized over the better part of an acre. Trees covered in the vine's green mail looked like prehistoric dinosaurs rearing up over a solid green sea. Every living bush, pine, and plant was slowly being strangled to death.

"Good God," Marino said as I waded out with my rake. "You're not serious."

"We won't go very far," I promised.

We did not have to.

The metal detector responded almost immediately The tone got louder and higher pitched as Marino positioned the scanner over an area of kudzu less than fifteen feet from where the bodies had been found. I discovered that raking kudzu was worse than combing snarled hair and finally resorted to dropping to my knees and ripping off leaves and feeling around roots with fingers sheathed in surgical gloves until I felt something cold and hard that I knew wasn't what I was hoping for.

"Save it for the tollbooth," I said dejectedly, tossing Mao a dirty quarter.

Several feet away the metal detector signaled us again, and this time my rooting around on hands and knees paid off. When I felt the unmistakable hard, cylindrical shape, I gently parted kudzu until I saw the gleam of stainless steel, a cartridge case still as shiny as polished silver. I gingerly plucked it out, touching as little of its surface as possible, while Marino bent over and held open a plastic evidence bag.

"Nine-millimeter, Federal," he said, reading the head stamp through plastic. "I'll be damned."

"He was standing right around here when he shot her," I muttered, a strange sensation running along my nerves as I recalled what Hilda had said about Deborah's being in a place "crowded" with things "grabbing" at her. Kudzu.

"If she was shot at close range," Marco said, then she went down not too far from here."

Wading out a little farther as he followed me with the metal detector, I said, "How the hell did he see to shoot her, Marino? Lord. Can you imagine this place at night?"

"The moon was out."

"But it wasn't full," I said.

"Full enough so it wouldn't have been pitch-dark."

The weather had been checked months ago. The Friday night of August thirty-first when the couple had disappeared, the temperature had been in the upper sixties, the moon three-quarters full, the sky clear. Even if the killer had been armed with a powerful flashlight, I still could not understand how he could force two hostages out here at night without being as disoriented and vulnerable as they were. All I could imagine was confusion, a lot of 'stumbling about.

Why didn't he just kill them on the logging road, drag their bodies several yards into the woods, and then drive away? Why did he want to bring them out here? And yet the pattern was the same with the other couples. Their bodies also had been found in remote, wooded areas like this.

Looking around at the kudzu, an unpleasant expression on his face, Marino said, "Glad as hell this ain't snake weather."

"That's a lovely thought," I said, unnerved.

"You want to keep going?"

he asked in a tone that told me he had no interest in venturing an inch farther into this gothic wasteland.

"I think we've had enough for one day."

I waded out of the kudzu as quickly as possible, my flesh crawling. The mention of snakes had done me in. I was on the verge of a full-blown anxiety attack.

It was almost five, the woods gloomy with shadows as we headed back to the car. Every time a twig snapped beneath Marino's feet, my heart jumped. Squirrels scampering up trees and birds flying off branches were startling intrusions upon the eerie silence.

"I'll drop this off at the lab first thing in the morning," he said. "Then I gotta be in court. Great way to spend your day off."

"Which case?"

"The case of Bubba shot by his friend named Bubba, the only witness was another drone named Bubba."

"You're not serious."

"Hey," he said, unlocking the car doors, "I'm as serious as a sawed-off shotgun."

Starting the engine, he muttered, "I'm starting to hate this job, Doc. I swear, I really am."

"At the moment you hate the whole world, Marino."

"No, I don't," he said, and he actually laughed. "I like you all right."

The last day of January began when the morning's mail brought an official communication from Pat Harvey. Brief and to the point, it stated that if copies of her daughter's autopsy and toxicology reports were not received by the end of the following week, she would get a court order. A copy of the letter had been sent to my immediate boss, the Commissioner of Health and Human Services, whose secretary was on the phone within the hour summoning me to his office.