Killer Weekend

Walt waited a moment uncomfortably. “When?” he said. “When might we get to that?”

Holms looked away at a piece of the sky. “When I feel up to it, Sheriff. And not a minute sooner.”

Twelve

I t was difficult for Walt to think of a meeting as clandestine when the sun shone so brightly and a pair of yellow warblers darted branch to branch in play. The Warm Springs tributary to the Big Wood slipped past beneath the concrete bridge co

Dick O’Brien had no place here. He was dressed like a man heading to lunch at Yale: khakis, blue blazer, white button-down shirt. Thankfully he’d eschewed the tie. It was the man’s shoes that Walt paid the most attention to: office shoes, with heels. His mind filled briefly with an image of the dissolving, muddy impressions he’d followed up the Hill Trail at Adam’s Gulch. He swallowed dryly.

O’Brien leaned against the bridge’s wide, concrete rail. He placed a manila envelope between them.

“Sorry for making the meet out here,” he said. “Just a precaution is all.”

“This is?” Walt asked, indicating the envelope.

“A DVD. Cutter’s home security. I helped design it. We’ve got eyes on the gate, exterior doors, the garages. He put half a mil into security on that place. This camera is an interior look at the front door. From yesterday morning…Friday morning, in case you’ve lost track. I have one of my guys assigned to monitoring the cameras twenty-four/ seven. He pointed this…incident…out to me yesterday. We dump anything like this to DVD for safekeeping.”

“Anything like what?” Walt asked.

“The Escalade’s got a DVD player, if you want it sooner than later,” O’Brien said. “And air-conditioning. And an electric cooler in the back. Pop. Bottled water.”

“You can’t just tell me?”

“Worth a thousand words. Right?”

“If you say so.”

A few minutes later O’Brien and Walt occupied the Escalade’s two leather captain’s chairs that made up the car’s middle row of seats. The DVD panel was flipped down and glowing blue. Walt had a cold ginger ale in hand. “What? No popcorn?”

“We got Snickers in the cooler,” O’Brien said in all seriousness. “Peanuts. Potato chips.”

“I was kidding.”

The DVD played. Walt watched as a sweating Da

O’Brien narrated. “Once we heard about her out Adam’s Gulch, I showed this to the boss. He took her death real hard, I might add. And we had a very short discussion about sharing this with you. Just for the record, the boss never suggested blocking it.”

On the screen the discussion grew heated between Da

O’Brien stopped the playback. The screen went blue again.

“Those are the same clothes we found her in,” Walt told O’Brien.

“It’s yours to do with whatever.”

“It’s not that I’m complaining, but would you turn this over if it was your brother?”

“It’s complicated between them-the brothers. Very competitive.” He paused and said, “In all sorts of things.” Then he met eyes with Walt, clearly wanting to drive home this last statement.

“It’s a big help,” Walt said, “and I appreciate it.”

“No problem.”

“It may be for Da

“We all like Da

“Does that include Patrick?”

“Like I said: It’s complicated.”

“Yes, it is.” As they were climbing out of the car, Walt couldn’t resist. “Nice shoes,” he said.

Thirteen

T he hospital morgue was located down a subterranean hallway, wedged between a door marked DANGER-HIGH VOLTAGE and another unmarked room used for storage.

Ailia Holms lay faceup on a textured stainless steel morgue table with drain slits around its perimeter and hoses coming out the bottom.

McClure pulled off the blue rip-stop nylon dropcloth, exposing her chalk white skin torn by cougar’s claws. Lacerations and puncture wounds covered her torso like unfamiliar constellations. Her pubis was shaved into a short, vertical column of red tangled hair. Walt looked away and recomposed himself. McClure had already done some cutting on her.

“You asked about any bruising,” McClure said.

“I did.”

“You know about lividity: The blood settles into the lowest part of the body an hour or two after death. It fixes, in six to eight hours.” He directed Walt’s attention to some dark bruises. “You’ll recall that we found her partially rolled up on her left side.” He pointed. “This area is an example of fixed hypostasis-lividity. Certainly six to eight hours after she was killed she was in this position.” He nodded toward the sink. “Grab a set of gloves.”

Together, he and Walt lifted and rolled the cadaver just high enough to get a look at her buttocks.

“See that discoloring?” McClure asked. “The right gluteous?”

“Yes.”

“No proof. But it suggests early lividity.”

“So she rolled and landed partially down the hill, and what…a couple hours later a coyote pulled her over, and she rolled some more?”

“Could explain it.”

“What’s the timing?”

“Eight to twelve hours ahead of discovery. Perhaps coincidental with her death.”

“May I?” Walt asked, reaching for Ailia’s left arm.

“Of course.”

Walt lifted the arm. An obvious bruise, shaped like a mitten.

“This is antemortem?” Walt asked.

“Yes. Well ahead of the attack. Maybe as much as a day or more.”

“It was early yesterday morning,” Walt told him. “That’s consistent.”

McClure lifted the cadaver’s head. He pulled back a flap of skin, exposing tissue, pink muscle, and white vertebrae. “She has a fracture to cervical number seven, just above the facet for the first rib. Another to cervical three. The tissue at seven reveals edema consistent with an earlier trauma.”

“The cat broke her neck,” Walt said. “It’s what cats do.”

“Fractures her neck,” McClure said. “She’s alive but paralyzed. Toys with her for a while.”

“For how long?”

“This trauma to the neck occurred an hour or more before the cat mauled her.”

“Good God.”

“Most, if not all, of the lacerations inflicted by the cat were post- mortem.”

“Excuse me?”

McClure met eyes with Walt and just stared. “Cause of death is heart failure: She bled out. But the timing of all this is speculative.”

“My guys are out looking for the original crime scene-the location of the attack. All the blood.”

“You may not find it,” McClure said. He answered Walt’s puzzled expression by explaining, “We luminoled her.” He picked up a tube light from a workstation. “Get the lights,” he said.

Walt cut the lights. McClure waved a short black light over the body. Beneath the neck, the stainless steel showed a luminous green, indicating blood. The body itself showed very little green.

“You cleaned her?” Walt asked. “I hope you checked for prints first.”

“That’s just the thing,” McClure said. “I haven’t washed her. There’s very little blood and there’s a reason for that: The dead don’t bleed.”

Walt thought back to the shoe prints in the mud and Da