7th Heaven

Chapter 120

CONKLIN AND I had scrubbed at our faces with damp paper towels, but the stench of fire and death clung to us. Jacobi stood upwind and said, “You two smell like you’ve been wading through a sewer.”

I thanked him, but my mind was churning.

Two blocks away, a raging fire was burning the Vetter house to the ground. There might have been evidence inside that house, something that would have tied Hans Vetter and Brett Atkinson to the arson murders.

Now all of that was gone.

We stood in front of the house where the dead boy, Brett Atkinson, had lived with his parents. It was a soaring contemporary with cantilevered decks and hundred-mile views. Very, very wealthy people lived here.

Hawk’s parents, the Atkinsons, hadn’t answered repeated knocks by patrolmen, never returned our calls, and their son’s body was still lying unclaimed in the morgue. A canvass of the neighborhood had confirmed their absence. No one had seen or heard from the Atkinsons in days, and they hadn’t told anyone they were leaving home.

The engines on the Atkinsons’ cars were cold. There was mail in the mailbox a couple of days old, and the fellow who’d stopped mowing the lawn when we arrived said he hadn’t seen Perry or Moira Atkinson all week.

While Vetter’s house was a total loss, I still had hope that the Atkinsons’ house might hold evidence of the horrific killings the boys had done. Thirty-five minutes had passed since Jacobi phoned Tracchio for a search warrant.

Meanwhile, Cindy had called me, saying that she and a handful of TV news vans were parked behind the barricade at the top of the street. Conklin pushed a bloody clump of his hair away from his eyes, said to Jacobi, “If this isn’t ‘exigent circumstances,’ I don’t know what is.”

Jacobi growled, “Cool it, Conklin. Understand? If we blow this, we’re freakin’ buried. I’ll be retired, and you two will be working for Brink’s Security. If you’re lucky.”

Fifteen more minutes crawled by.

I was about to lie and say I smelled decomp when an intern from the district attorney’s office arrived in a Chevy junker. She sprinted up the front walk a half second before Conklin caved in the front window of the Atkinson house with a tire iron.

Chapter 121

THE INSIDE OF the Atkinson house was like a museum. Miles of glossy hardwood floors, large modern canvases hung on two-story-high white walls. Lights came on when we stepped into a room.

It was like a museum after hours: no one was home.

And it was creepy. No pets, no newspapers or magazines, no dishes in the sink, and except for the food in the refrigerator and a precise lineup of clothing in each closet, there was little sign that anyone had ever lived in this place.

That is, until we reached Hawk’s room in a wing far from the master suite.

Hawk’s roost was large and bright, the windows looking west over the mountains. The bed was the least of the room. It was single, with a plain blue bedspread, speakers on each side, and a headset plugged into a CD player. One long side of the room was lined with a built-in Formica desk. Several computers and monitors and high-tech laser printers were set up there and the adjacent wall was lined with thick corkboard.

Pidge’s drawings, many of which I recognized from 7th Heaven, were pi

“I’m thinking that this was their workshop,” I said to Conklin. “That they cooked it all up in here.”

Conklin took a seat at the desktop, and I examined the corkboard. “Book number two,” I said to Conklin. “Lux et Veritas. Got any idea what that means?”

“Easy one,” Rich said, lowering the seat of the hydraulic chair. “Light and truth.”

“Catchy. Sounds like more fires in the making -”

Rich called out, “Hawk’s got a journal. I touched the mouse and it came up on the screen.”

“Fantastic!”

As Rich scrolled through Brett Atkinson’s journal, I continued my study of the drawings on the wall. One of them nailed me as if I, too, were pi

I recognized the handwriting.

It was the same as the printing we’d seen on the title pages of the books left at the houses of the arson victims.

“Requiescat in leguminibus,” I said, sounding out the syllables. “Rest in what?”

Rich wasn’t listening to me.

“This map on Atkinson’s computer,” he said. “He’s starred San Francisco, Palo Alto, Monterey. Unreal. Look at this! Photos of the houses they burned down. This is evidence, Lindsay. This is frickin’ evidence.”

It was.

I peered over Conklin’s shoulders as he opened Web pages, sca

“Requiescat in leguminibus,” I said again.

Rich came over to the wall and looked at the drawing of a couple who might be the Atkinsons. He read the caption.

“Leguminibus,” Rich said. “Means legumes, I think. Aren’t they a kind of vegetable? Like beans and peas?”

“Peas?” I yelled. “Jesus Christ! Jesus Christ!”

“What?” Conklin asked me. “What is it?”

I hollered out to Jacobi, who was working the rest of the house with the sheriff’s department. With Conklin and Jacobi behind me, I found the stairs to the basement. The freezer was of the trunk variety, extra large.

I opened the lid and cool air puffed out.

“Requiescat in leguminibus,” I said. “Rest in peas.”

I started moving the bags of frozen vegetables aside until I saw a woman’s face.

“This freezer is deep enough for two,” Jacobi muttered.

I said, “Uh-huh,” and stopped digging.

From her approximate age, I was pretty sure I was looking at Moira Atkinson, dressed in her finest, frozen to death.

Chapter 122

I WAS WEARING my new blue uniform, and I’d washed my hair thirteen times and once more for good luck when I walked into the autopsy suite the next day. Claire was standing at the top of a six-foot ladder, her Minolta focused down on Mieke Vetter’s decapitated and naked body. Claire looked huge and wobbly up there.

“Can’t someone else do that?” I asked her.

“I’m done,” she said. She climbed down the ladder, one ponderous step at a time.

I gestured to the woman on the table. “I can save you some time,” I said to Claire. “I happen to know this victim’s cause and ma

“You know, Lindsay, I still have to do this for evidentiary purposes.”

“Okay, but just so you know. Yesterday, your patient sprayed me with blood, bone fragments, hair, not to mention brains. You have any idea what dripping brains feel like?”

“Warm gummy bears? Am I right?” Claire said, gri

“Uh. Yeah. Exactly.”

“One of my first cases was a suicide,” Claire said, getting on with her work, drawing a Y incision with her scalpel from each of Ms. Vetter’s clavicles to her pubis.

“This old soldier ends it all with a twelve-gauge shotgun under his chin. So I come into his RV, fresh out of training, ya know? And I’m leaning over his body in the La-Z-Boy, taking photos, and the cops are yukking it up.”

“Because?”

“I had no idea. You see, that’s the point, girlfriend.”

I started laughing for the first time in a long while.

“So as I’m leaning over the body, about a quarter of the guy’s brain has been slowly peeling off the ceiling – it falls and smacks me right behind my ear.”