CHAPTER FOUR

Detective Gibson, a few creases appearing on his brow, asked the same thing. “This uncle of yours was murdered?”

“Yes.”

“How was he killed?” Detective Sanders asked.

Kate lifted a hand in a weak gesture. “I’m not sure of the circumstances. An Esmeralda County sheriff, out in Nevada, called to tell me that Everett had been killed in the course of a robbery. It didn’t make a lot of sense. Everett didn’t have much worth stealing, at least not from what I knew of him.”

“Did they say how he was murdered? Any specifics?”

Kate shook her head. “No. Just that he’d been killed in the course of a robbery. I assumed that he’d been shot. But now that you ask, I guess I don’t know that for a fact.

“I only met Everett once when I was a girl and don’t really know much about him. The sheriff gave me the number of Everett’s lawyer and suggested I call him. When I did, the lawyer told me that John and I had been named in Everett’s will because we were the only next of kin. I thought Everett would have left his things to a friend, or someone he knew out there, but he didn’t. Whatever he has, he left it to us.

“The lawyer said that Everett had long ago made arrangements for his burial—one of those payment plans—so he had already been laid to rest as per his wishes. The lawyer said that John and I now owned the trailer Everett lived in, his pickup, and his personal effects. I’m supposed to go out there and see to them as soon as it’s convenient. But now …” She gestured helplessly toward the house.

She felt stupid for not having asked such a basic question as how a relative had been murdered. It wasn’t like her not to ask questions. In fact, her job was to investigate, ask questions, get to the bottom of things.

But it had been such an unexpected call, and such unexpected news, that she hadn’t thought to ask how he had been killed. That, and the sheriff had been rather terse in a way that didn’t invite questions. She thought that with a murder on his hands he must have been busy.

With a thumb, Kate smoothed down creases on the leg of her jeans as she watched another man wearing latex gloves carry a black plastic bag out of the house, then slide open the door of a white police van and put the bag inside.

Kate didn’t really even know Everett. He was a hermit of sorts and virtually a stranger to her. Needing to handle his estate had seemed like it was going to be a nuisance she really didn’t need. After the call it had occurred to her that maybe she could tell the lawyer to simply donate everything to a charity.

Detective Gibson started back toward his car. “I’ll go check it out,” he said over his shoulder to Detective Sanders. As she watched him walking away, Kate noticed the female detective still standing close, listening, watching her.

“Did your brother have any … disagreements with anyone at his job?” Detective Sanders asked.

Kate glanced up at the frown on his pockmarked face. “I don’t think so. John always told me about what was happening in his life. He never mentioned anything like that. He was upset a while back because some kids called him names when he was walking home from the bus. Once he told me about it he seemed to feel better. I think he’d forgotten all about it by the next day.

“He liked his job. He always said that the people there were nice. John depended on me to protect him when he was afraid. I think he would have told me if he was having any kind of trouble at work.”

With the notepad in one hand and his pen in the other, Detective Sanders hiked up his pants as he eyed a group of men leaving the house with boxes and metal cases. Each person took off blue paper booties and put them in a sack on the porch.

“Miss Bishop, would you be willing to go in with us? They haven’t cleaned up anything, except for removing your brother, but it would be a big help if maybe you could explain a few things for us. But if you don’t feel comfortable—”

“Is there still … blood? Has the blood been cleaned up?”

The woman detective, surveying the darkness and the spectators, turned away and stepped closer to Kate to explain.

“I’m afraid that we have to leave everything as is until the investigation is complete. We can recommend a couple of companies that are licensed and bonded to clean up crime scenes. When the investigation is finished in a few days they can come in and take care of everything for you. They have the proper experience. It’s better to let them handle it.

“We’d just like you to take a quick look around, now, if you feel up to it.”

The woman put out a hand to steady Kate when she stood, but Kate didn’t need the hand.

“I’m Detective Janek, by the way,” the woman said as she shook Kate’s hand. “I’ll go with you if you’re willing to go inside and maybe help us answer a few questions.”

If she was willing? For hours, Kate had been asking them to let her go in. Instead of reminding them of that fact, she forced a brief smile.

“I’m fine. Really. It’s just such a shock. I can’t believe that someone would want to hurt John. He was like a kid—you know, innocently happy most of the time. I just can’t believe that anyone would want to hurt him.” She thought again about her mother’s half brother, Everett. “Was John killed in a robbery? Was someone robbing the house and they killed John?”

The detectives shared a look.

Detective Janek leaned in a little. “Listen, Miss Bishop—”

“Please, call me Kate?”

“Miss Bishop” was what people working for KDEX Systems always called her when she showed up unexpectedly from the home office.

Detective Janek smiled. Kate thought it looked genuine. “Kate, we need to tell you about a few things before you hear them in the press. And then after we go inside we’d like you to identify your brother while the coroner’s van is still here. It will save you from having to go down to the morgue. But we want you to be prepared, first.”

Prepared? Kate swallowed. “All right.”

Detective Janek glanced around to check if anyone was close, then looked back to search Kate’s eyes. “Whoever did this was pretty sick.”

“What do you mean?”

“He … removed your brother’s eyes.”

“Removed his eyes?” Kate blinked. “Why?”

“We haven’t determined that. One of them was missing. The other was lying beside the body. It appears to have been partially eaten.”

Kate’s brain seemed to go blank.

She usually had command of matters that needed figuring out. She usually knew just what to ask to get to the bottom of things.

But now she couldn’t seem to make her mind work. She felt numb with anger at someone hurting John and doing such a thing to him. She knew John’s fears well. She tried not to imagine his cries of terror and pain. She felt a hot wave of guilt for not being there to protect him.

“Who could do such a thing?”

“That’s what we’re going to try to find out,” Detective Sanders said.

“Take me in there,” Kate said, her anger rising. “Show me what you need me to explain.”

Detectives Sanders and Janek shared a look at her determined tone, at the simmering rage it carried.

When they started for the house, Kate followed close on Detective Sanders’s heels. Detective Janek stayed protectively at her side. When they reached the steps, they put on blue paper booties and asked Kate to do the same.

On the porch outside, a numbered yellow tag stood beside what looked like a bloody footprint. As she stepped into the living room, where there was more light, she saw a smear of blood at about eye level on the inside of the oak door.

The blood in the living room didn’t look the way Kate had imagined it. She thought it would be mostly soaked into the wood floor or dried up. Instead, not far inside the door, there was a horrific, vast pool of it that they had to skirt.

Kate was shocked to see blood splattered everywhere in the living room. Besides what was on the floor, the violence of the attack had left strings and splatters of blood on the walls, the couch, the lampshades, even the drapes.

Some dim, analytical part of her brain said, So this is what a murder scene looks like.

Kate saw smeared, bloody footprints in a twisting path. At the far edge of the pool of blood was a crooked smear that looked like it might have been where her brother’s arm lay sprawled across the floor. There seemed little doubt that John had tried desperately to get away. He had not gone down easily. He had struggled for his life.

“Why is that up here?” Kate asked, pointing.

A rusty, four-tined garden fork lay on the floor near the pool of blood. A yellow plastic tag with the black number “6” stood beside it. She was beginning to see why they had questions.

“My father used that fork to till a small garden in the backyard,” she said. “In the fall he dug potatoes with it.”

Kate frowned as she leaned down a little for a better look. “The tines have been sharpened. My father just turned dirt over with it. It was rusty and it wasn’t sharp. The tips look like they’ve been filed.”

Before they could answer, Kate pointed to four splintered holes in the pine floor, amid a broad area of blood. “It looks like someone stuck it in the floor, right there.”

Detective Sanders nodded. “I’m afraid that the killer used it to pin the deceased’s feet to the floor, probably to prevent him from escaping.”

Kate’s jaw hung in stunned surprise. “Why not just hit him over the head?”

“We don’t know the answer to that,” Detective Janek said. “Sometimes it’s simply an act of blind rage, sometimes they have a reason. When I find him, I’ll ask.”

By the woman’s icy, controlled expression, Kate knew that Detective Janek fully intended to keep that promise.

Kate finally had to break her gaze with the woman to instead look around. By the way blood was splattered everywhere, she thought it looked like an act of blind rage.

“Do you know where the gardening fork was kept?” Detective Sanders asked.

Kate nodded. “In the basement.”

He turned to one of the forensic team and waggled his pen down at the floor as he spoke in a low voice. “You can take it, now.”

The balding man wearing blue latex gloves squatted down and carefully fed the garden fork into a long cardboard box.

Detective Janek gently took Kate’s elbow, turning her away. “What we’d really like to show you is in the basement.”

“The basement?” Kate couldn’t imagine what was in the basement, but she followed behind Detective Sanders as the man headed in that direction once Detective Janek gave him a nod.

Unlike the living room, the short hall didn’t have blood on the walls. Kate paused in the kitchen. Dirty forks and spoons stood up in a green plastic tumbler in the sink.

“John always washed the dishes after using them. I don’t remember ever seeing him leave dirty dishes like that. Washing the dishes after he ate was part of his compulsive routine.”

“Anything else that you notice out of the ordinary?” Detective Janek asked.

“My pictures,” Kate said, gesturing. “John kept pictures of me on the refrigerator. All the corners were folded over. Sometimes he took the photos down and put them in his pocket for safekeeping, otherwise they were there, on the refrigerator.”

There were other pictures still there on the refrigerator—one of the bushes in the backyard in full bloom, an old one of their parents—but most of the rest were newspaper clippings.

She looked back at the detectives. “Did John have my pictures with him?”

Detective Sanders shook his head as he started writing a note in his pad. “There weren’t any pictures in his pockets.”

Kate wondered where they were.

“Those magnets on the floor, then, were what he used to hold the photos of you on the refrigerator?” Detective Janek asked.

It sounded more like a statement than a question. Kate confirmed it with a nod.

It felt so odd being in the house. She had grown up in the place and had always felt safe there, but now it felt alien. It felt violated. It felt … dangerous.

Kate followed the heavyset Detective Sanders across the kitchen and down the plank steps into the musty basement. Detective Janek followed Kate down. Both of the bare-bulb lights were on, casting harsh shadows.

At the bottom, Kate was dumbfounded by what she saw.

“We suspect,” Detective Sanders said, choosing his words carefully, “that your brother had someone chained down here.”

A heavy chain was padlocked to a large loop in the concrete floor. The iron ring had once been used as an anchor point to help straighten out a foundation wall. She had been little at the time but she vaguely remembered men working in the basement, and she remembered a chain running through that heavy iron ring.

Broken bits of metal lay at the end of the chain snaked across the floor. To the side, against a foundation wall made of mortared brick, was a wastebasket overflowing with used paper plates. Other plates lay randomly scattered around on the floor as if they had simply been flicked aside. Smears of dried food covered most of them.

“The chain could just reach the toilet and sink in that corner,” Detective Sanders said, gesturing with his pen, “but not this other side of the room.”

The side of the room out of reach of the chain was stacked with years of dusty, collected junk. There was everything from an old water heater that her father had meant to have hauled out, to boxes of outdoor Christmas decorations, to window screens, to broken chairs. In the corner stood a rake, a hoe, and a variety of shovels. The metal on all of them was rusty.

“The garden fork used to be over there,” Kate told them, pointing at the collection of tools standing in the corner. “Just as rusty as the rest of them.”

Detective Sanders glanced at the tools and nodded. “It appears that someone was chained down here for a few weeks.”

Kate gestured to a screwdriver, pliers, and file on the floor. “He must have used his clothes, maybe his belt, to finally snag some of the tools kept off on the other side of the room and then pull them closer. It looks like he used the tools to break the chain.”

“That’s our assumption as well,” Detective Sanders said.

Kate saw a pile of rusty iron filings. “It looks like he used a file to sharpen the garden fork over there.”

Detective Sanders tilted his head around at the dirty paper plates ringing the room. “Have you ever known your brother to do anything like this before?”

“No, never,” Kate said without hesitation as she gazed around at the scene. “I can’t explain any of this.”

“Has your brother ever acted violently?” he asked.

Kate was shaking her head even as he was asking the question. “No,” she insisted. “No. It wasn’t in his nature. I mean, I know how this looks, but I simply can’t imagine John doing such a thing. He was shy. If someone called him names he ran away. He never got in fights. I never once knew him to fight back, even if someone shoved him. The most he would ever do was to sit in his bedroom and brood.”

Detective Sanders glanced around again. “It appears that he moved beyond the brooding stage.”

Kate lifted her arms in exasperation. “And what?” She let her hands flop down at her sides. “A retarded man with the mind of a child overpowered a homicidal maniac who eats human eyeballs and kept him chained up down here?”

Detective Sanders arched an eyebrow.

“So it would appear.”