Phil left and headed straight for the Rose to get a scotch and a beer chaser. He half hoped to run into Boog DeKlerk, even if the South African was a pain in the ass. Boog would bitch and argue, but he would finally support Phil’s radical plan. Hell, Phil would barely be able to keep him from riding along.
Tonight.
Phil Mohlman intended to press Jerry Proffet hard, just one step short of arresting him; two steps, actually, since Phil had neither a search warrant nor an arrest warrant, and little prospect of talking a judge into authorizing either kind at eight o’clock in the evening. He had a scotch at the bar, ordered a second. Persuasion was the key. That would be ideal: talk the Proffets into a look around the house, casual, maybe lie a little bit and say he wanted to familiarize himself with the layout of the two-storey model on the street. Find a reason to examine the garage. Look for the blood Theresa imagined everywhere. Then give the impression he was wrapping up details. Come back to Jerry and Selma’s living room and less gently ask how the conflict between Tom Watson and the ex-executives had come to this pretty pass. “Pretty pass” was a phrase Phil’s mother often used.
He had floated the plan, without specifics, with his partner before leaving Coppermount Drive. Henry had promised to come along in support, but the moment he acquiesced, Theresa’s flaring cough distracted him, and they had no time to work out the details.
Phil stepped out of the Rose to call Henry, but when he reached the empty parking lot, he speed-dialed Jerry Proffet by accident.
“Yes?” Jerry answered with military gruffness. Phil could sense Selma in the background. Maybe it was the scotch, but the fact that he had Jerry on speed-dial seemed portentous. He recovered quickly.
“I’ll be by at nine.”
“But why?” Jerry said, more fear in his voice than Phil expected.
“We’ve pretty much interviewed everyone about everything,” Phil stated. “But the details don’t add up in a few areas. Nothing serious, Mr. Proffet.”
“What does that mean?”
“Nine sharp.”
Now he stabbed the correct number, and for once the connection to the desert was clear. Theresa was feeling fine, and Henry cheerfully echoed Phil’s own words to Proffet: “Nine sharp. I’ll be at the gates.”
Phil drank alone in the bar. Boog hadn’t been there and wasn’t expected, and nobody else from the West Valley precinct entered. He ordered a third scotch. He had the paradoxical feeling that he had been plodding for weeks but now he might be moving too fast. Frustration will give you that feeling, he observed. He wondered about Theresa Pastern and what had made her so … psychic. Her preoccupation with blood was an amateur’s obsession, and morbid, too, yet she had convinced him that the blood spillage contained the signature of the killer’s rage. Proffet had panicked and let his full fury spray across the rooms of both murder sites and, as Theresa had reasoned, generated a flood of malice along Hollis Street, house to house, up to its dead end.
The killer had driven into the hillside fog with Tom Watson’s last fluids seeping into the spools of wire. In his own gruesome mood, Phil imagined blood raining down on the forest and river world of the Wasatch. He was a city boy, and he worked to envision the exhausted executioner hoisting a blood-sodden body by flashlight to the river cliff. The scotch was getting to Phil. Was Jerry Proffet a woodsman? He was military, but what difference did that make? Never mind, there were bound to be outdoorsmen among the neighbours. That guy next door to Proffet, Ronald Devereau? Jake Wazinski? That loner Henry interviewed, Davis? Which one had volunteered to help?
Phil’s thoughts remained with Theresa. He found her beautiful, special, and a prize for his partner, Henry. She was more than that, for her illness had turned her otherworldly in an enchanting way. Her failing lungs forced her to disburse short sentences and, he had noticed tonight, often these swathed pearls of insight. She was radiant, with shining alabaster skin, but as his mother would say, she was a consumptive beauty. Of course he would obey her insights — he longed to be in her thrall.
The Rose was still, the bartender having retreated to the back. The silence rushed over Phil, and the recollection of Theresa’s smoky voice beguiled him again.
A revelation came raw-edged from her to him: he must go searching for blood, literally.
He stayed patient as long as he could. He skipped a fourth scotch, went out to his plain sedan, and began to drive in the direction of Hollis Street, but then slowed to keep from arriving more than five minutes early. The plan was to rendezvous with Henry out on the avenue in front of the stone pillars at 8:55.
Henry was late. Phil held back at the false gate until 9:05 and eased onto the street, halting in front of Maude’s bungalow at Number 4. He had tried to keep away in recent days, so as not to further alienate the residents; he didn’t need Chief Grady getting complaints of harassment by his Homicide detectives. Now, with the low-angled summer sun fixing the street in amber, the ranks of silent houses spooked him. Susan Powell haunted him, too. Had the killer of Tom Watson tried to play off that tragedy by removing Tom’s body with a sleight-of-hand flourish, convinced he could make the corpse disappear forever, like Susan?
He moved on to the bottom of the cul-de-sac and parked. The garage door at Number 11 was up, but dusk concealed much of the interior. He identified the trunk of a shiny white Toyota Corolla parked on the left side of the wood structure. Did the Proffets have two cars, or merely a two-car garage, the spare half a man-cave? No, this had to be Selma’s vehicle.
Lights glowed in two rooms of the house, one up, one down, but the front door and garage lamps hadn’t been switched on. Solar-powered bulbs lined the front flower beds but had barely begun to glimmer. The post light on the lawn was off. Next door, a single orange desk lamp glowed from a window of the Devereau house. All this oblique under-lighting made Phil suspicious, but still he kept his Glock holstered. He glanced back up the road. The air was fusty and Hollis Street began to close in on him, as if it were producing its own weather system. He looked around for something reassuring and glimpsed Jerry Proffet’s pinyon tree in the easement near the house. It was the only sign of natural life on Hollis Street.
The garage gaped, beckoning the veteran detective. The warm night and the booze he had put back made him sweat, and he thought of Jerry Proffet shivering somewhere nearby.
Why was the garage door open?
Phil was known to be a little slack about his equipment, forgetting extra ammo clips when he went out on a Code Delta or leaving his vest at the precinct. Tonight he was armed with his Glock 17 and reloads but lacked a flashlight. He tapped his mobile and held it up, creating a torch and, bonus, giving him access to speed-dial. A quick scan of the garage and he would knock on the front door, pretending that he had freshly arrived.
He paused at the opening. No stained sink or bloody mop waited, and no sticky lake of blood coated the cement floor, but what did he expect? He flanked the white car and padded to the back wall, making sure not to bump against a ceiling-high rack of rakes and tools. Even in the shadows he noted the perfection of the storage array, all the handles of the rakes and garden implements aligned plumb vertical. He paused. The screen of his mobile cast only diffuse light onto the floor, and he knelt down for a closer view.
In spite of his offhand prediction to Henry, Phil did not really expect to find blood traces in the concrete, but there they were, five or six drops of red spoiling Jerry Proffet’s perfect suburban pastiche. Phil somehow knew that this was Jerry’s own blood; it was too fresh to be Tom Watson’s. It was all happening again. Theresa Pastern had asked, “What’s the one thing that’s hard to believe about this madman?” Now Phil knew: that the lunatic was willing to spread so much blood around. And what was her last admonition? He should search for the source of the killer’s anger.
Phil killed the phone and took out his weapon. He considered texting Henry to warn him, but the blood on the cement changed his plan.
He eased around the grill of the Corolla and managed to miss all the hanging tools. Looking back into the garage, he fathomed the obvious: Selma had parked her car hard by the left wall of the garage to leave room for Jerry to pull in. But where was the husband’s ride? Phil had a vision of the killer fleeing up into the Wasatch Mountains in Jerry’s tidy SUV, a body or two oozing in the back.
Looking down, he found a red smear on his pants. Blood had transferred from the bumper of the Corolla onto his knee. He was confused. What had happened here, and was he heading into another living room slaughterhouse? The killer had likely taken Jerry prisoner and forced him inside from the garage, where he planned to do … what?
The garage connected to the house by what in the East was called a breezeway. In this configuration, the walk-through ended at the kitchen entrance. To knock, or not to knock? Phil thought again of calling Henry. He turned back to the garage and noiselessly took an old-fashioned garden spade from the punchboard rack. He laid the shovel on the hood of the white car so that it became an arrow for Henry to follow down the passage to the kitchen.
He opened the kitchen door.
The antechamber offered two ways to go, a short hallway off to the right into the entertainment den, or the full kitchen straight ahead. He could make out a giant television in the den. He paused, evaluating the danger, but quickly saw that the kitchen was unoccupied, and so he went that way. It was almost a relief not to find bodies on the floor or blood smeared on the cupboards. The closed-in humidity of Jerry Proffet’s home got to him. He regretted that third glass of scotch.
The main rooms on the ground level lay beyond the next doorway; this route would take him full-circle through the living and dining rooms to the den and its flat-screen monster. In the heart of the kitchen now, he tiptoed around the chopping-block island in order to advance on the main corridor. The front door off to his left was deadbolted; far to the right, sliding doors exited to the backyard, and they appeared to be locked, too.
He circled right, coming to the entertainment room. The TV — it had to be a sixty-inch — loomed at an angle across one corner, and although the space was in heavy shadow, he could make out a boat-size couch facing the television. The den was large, but the furniture, including a La-Z-Boy chair, filled it. When did they start making everything so big?
Phil’s eyes adjusted to the gloom, allowing him to make out the bodies of Jerry and Selma Proffet on the carpet before the La-Z-Boy. He tiptoed forward and knelt down. Both were dead, though only Jerry displayed a wound, a deep hole in his throat. Phil had the feeling of being watched and held his gun higher.
The watcher moved out from behind the flat-screen. He halted in the silence, waiting. Fifteen seconds. Twenty. Thirty. Ronald Devereau, one-term president of the Hollis Street executive committee, pointed the gun-shaped Taser at Phil Mohlman’s back. The detective spun about, a quarter turn only, but enough to recognize his attacker. Fifty thousand volts launched Detective Mohlman face-first into the rug. Before passing into darkness, he remembered something Theresa had said to him: What’s the one thing you can’t believe?
Devereau wasn’t intent on killing the policeman with the Taser, but he was perfectly willing to jolt him again if he somehow came awake. Devereau’s thoughts drifted, bright pictures splaying out from his memory. Watson had needed two jolts to keep him down. Maybe the sight of his wife’s head had made him brave. Whatever it took.
The detective didn’t move, and Devereau was content to stare down at the grouping, fortuitously arrayed, in his fierce view, like icons of a triptych, two dead flanking one unconscious.
He considered restaging the room to make it appear that the cop had killed the others, but none of these scenarios played persuasively. How could anyone reasonably interpret the flight of Jerry Proffet from the garage (screwdriver in the neck) to the den (boot heel on the throat), and Selma’s demise (choking in front of Antiques Roadshow) so as to incriminate the cop?
He stuck to his initial plan, though he had to hurry now, for others were coming. He dragged the detective by the heels from between the Proffets to the dining room. As Devereau reached to slide open the patio door, the cop moaned and began to revive. His captor dropped his feet and took a stride back into the room. Phil turned his head to one side and spat a gout of blood, thick as phlegm, onto the rug. Devereau drove a foot into his face and then stomped on his left knee joint.
Ronald Devereau credited his survival in this world in equal parts to shrewd planning and benevolent forces outside his control. It was his version of humility. He’d been blessed. Never arrested, let alone charged. Never fingerprinted. Never wounded in battle, though most of his life had unfurled around guns and explosives. His good fortune was bolstered by the precautions he took. Most important, he declared to himself, he possessed Luck. He had endured for twenty years in anonymity because he made smart decisions and Fate rewarded him.
Until now. With these rash killings he had set his course for the Void (he loved to put capital letters on big-concept words). Rather than castigating himself, he asked: can the Void, Destiny, and Luck merge? He paused in the silence by the sliding doors and looked at the side of his house at 13 Hollis. His plan had been in place for years, and now he stood at the cliff edge of freedom. Reconciled to his own extinction, he drew strength from the certainty of his Fate and savoured the potential gifts of Luck.
As he dragged Detective Mohlman from the patio to the lawn (bump, bump, bump), he amused himself by counting his lucky moments that evening. Benighted Jerry Proffet had come to see him, all clammy-skinned and worried. How fortunate that it was Antiques Roadshow night and Selma was guaranteed to be in the TV room, just waiting for him after he dispatched her husband. Blessed, certainly, that the older detective, the one he had met three times, had dropped by alone. And lucky that had been ready with the whole neat plan, a full can of gasoline waiting in his own garage.
A pair of headlights sweeping across the lawn between his house and the Proffets broke his reverie. Caught out in the open like an escaping jailbird, he looked away to avoid the blinding beams. But he didn’t drop the detective’s body, and certainly didn’t panic. He knew who was coming to get him.