Someone was screaming. Not surprising, of course. The horror of the demonstration, the shock of the blast, and now a body in an alleyway. Who wouldn’t scream?
What surprised Sally was that the person screaming was, evidently, she.
“Sally! Don’t. Don’t look. We’ll get the police. Come over here, honey, just come with me. Come on, Sally. Come on, sweetie. Oh fuck. Stop it!” said Hawk.
Somebody was shaking her, and hugging her tight, and shaking her some more.
Her ears were still ringing from the blast at the doctor’s office.
God, there was so much blood.
Demons were loose in the town of Laramie.
They needed the police, right away.
Like the police had nothing else going on at the moment.
“I saw you put your phone in your pocket,” said Hawk. “Come on, girl. Get it out.”
With hands that shook until she felt her elbows rattle, she dug into her pocket and found her cell phone. Managed to punch in 911.
Got a busy signal.
“K-keep trying,” said Hawk, rubbing her back, his own teeth chattering.
Sally kept hitting redial until the operator answered. All available officers, she said, were currently on emergency call.
“I know,” Sally said. “I was at the demonstration. But we’re standing here in an alley, looking at a person who appears to be, erk, dead.”
That got the operator’s attention. She told Sally to wait there for an officer.
Sally felt the cold gale, heard the scream of police sirens, the honking of fire engine klaxons. Every detail of the scene sharpened, in surreal focus: the weathered plank fences that lined the alley, the bare branches of cottonwoods peeking above the fence tops, flapping in the keening wind, the garbage cans, chained down to board boxes to keep them from blowing away, the clattering sound of dust and gravel flung against hard surfaces.
And the body on the ground. Now she looked at him. Blue pinstripe suit, black wingtip shoes. Not, Sally thought with an unbelievably inappropriate giggle, a Laramie look. He lay in a twisted heap, facedown, head covered with blood. She could only glance at his head for a moment. Someone had bashed his skull to pieces.
A brown Toyota 4Runner pulled into the alley, and Detective Scotty Atkins, chief investigator of the Albany County Sheriff’s Department, got out.
Ever a man of few words, Scotty merely nodded at them and went to check the body. Sally and Hawk stood waiting. Finally he turned to them.
“You didn’t touch anything?” he asked.
“No,” Sally said. “Of course not.”
Scotty pursed his lips. “You recognize this man?”
They both shook their heads.
“Well,” he said, “I do.”
They waited. Finally Hawk asked, “Are you going to tell us who he is?”
Scotty took a deep breath, expelled air out his nose. “His name is Bradley Preston. He’s an attorney.”
“Sweet Jesus,” said Sally.
“Your student’s father,” Hawk said, moving to hold her up when her knees buckled.
“Take it easy,” said Scotty. “I’ll get the sheriff. He’s pretty tied up, but he’ll want to take a look. Don’t go anywhere.”
“Why don’t we sit down,” said Hawk, walking Sally over to a pile of cinder blocks stacked against a leaning fence. The blocks had evidently been there for some time. Weeds had grown up around them, crackling against Sally’s legs as she found her way to take a seat.
She didn’t know how long they sat side by side on the cinder blocks. Scotty Atkins’s voice, calling in the sheriff and crime scene team, registered dimly above the moan and rattle of the wind. Sally leaned back against the fence and looked off to one side, the better to use the fence to support a head grown suddenly too weighty to bear.
And then she saw it. There, in a tangled patch of dried weeds, amid back-alley litter that hadn’t quite made it to the garbage cans. A faded and flattened cardboard beer carton, soda cans and broken bottles, a disposable diaper improperly disposed of. And a long, thin metal tube, bent at one end, fitted with a socket fixture of some kind.
No bigger around than her thumb, except for the socket. Crusted with drying blood and some kind of gelatinous substance Sally didn’t want to name.
“Do you see that?” she asked Hawk.
With great effort, he turned to look. His eyes narrowed, then opened wide. “Oh God.”
“What do you call that?” she asked, fatigue and shock washing away on a wave of bright awareness. “A tire iron?”
“Lug wrench,” said Hawk, leaning forward for a better look. “Some kind of fancy one. See how it’s jointed there? It telescopes. Compacts down to fit in the tool compartment of even a little car.”
“Like a Mazda Miata?” Sally asked, feeling sick all over again.
“Yeah,” said Hawk. “Maybe. But it wouldn’t be standard equipment. You’d go out and buy yourself something like that if you wanted a little extra leverage.”
“For example, let’s say you were a girl,” said Sally, “and you wanted to be able to change tires yourself, without having to ask some guy for help.”
“For example,” Hawk agreed.
“Detective!” Sally called. “Come here. You need to see this.”
Atkins, talking on his cell phone, held up one finger.
“No,” Sally insisted, “really! Really, Scotty, right now!”
He said something more into the phone, clicked off, walked their way.
“Look at that,” she told the detective, pointing into the weeds.
Atkins looked. His mouth hardened. He glared at Sally, closed his eyes tightly, shook his head hard, and opened his eyes. “Let me think a minute about the facts I know as of this moment,” he began. “Bradley Preston”—he nodded in the direction of the body—“is dead, by all appearances, victim of a very recent assault.”
“An assault with a blunt instrument, it looks like,” said Sally, pointing at the object in the weeds.
“You’re getting ahead of me. The guys will be here soon enough to make that determination.”
“But much as you hate to admit it,” Sally put in, “that’s what probably happened.”
Scotty continued as if she hadn’t spoken. “This same Bradley Preston’s daughter has disappeared. Gone, who knows where, and it seems she herself had been assaulted at the time she took off. Meanwhile, this very morning, the man’s wife is involved in a demonstration at an abortion clinic, and for the first time in the history of the state of Wyoming, there’s a car bombing.”
“Beatrice Preston? Is she blond, pretty in a sort of permanently blow-dried, network anchorwoman way? Prays a lot and acts like she’s not trying to attract attention, when she is?”
Scotty winced, scrubbing his palm across his forehead. “May I ask what you know about Mrs. Preston, Sally?” he asked.
“We went down to the demonstration,” said Hawk. “Just getting our fair share of abuse.”
At that moment, Sheriff Langham peeled into the alley, the tires of his Blazer spitting gravel. An Albany County patrol car was right behind.
“What’s going on over there?” Atkins asked Dickie.
“FBI’s on the scene,” he told Scotty. “Guess they headed over from Cheyenne the minute they heard about the demonstration at the clinic. ATF will be here within the hour. We’ve got a half-dozen people heading for the hospital with cuts and bruises, but nobody seriously hurt. It’s a fucking miracle.” Dickie glanced over at the body in the alley. “What the hell’s happened here?” he asked of no one in particular.
“We were down there at the doctor’s office,” said Sally. “When that car blew, we just started running this way. That’s how we found him,” she finished, tipping her head in the direction of the body.
Dickie walked over to the deputies pulling crime scene kits out of their vehicle. Atkins followed him, Sally and Hawk trailing behind. “I know things are a little crazy right now,” he told the deputies, “but take your time here. Do this right. Pretty soon every investigator within a four-hundred-mile radius will be stomping all over that doctor’s office, treating the incident like the federal case it is. In other words, not the county’s case. Our job over there is to render assistance as requested. But over here,” he continued, “looks like we’ve got a murder on our hands.”