Dead Man's Song (Pine Deep 2)

Coming home to the farm was the hardest thing Val Guthrie had ever done, and Crow knew it. The place wasn’t hers anymore—Ruger had made it his that night—and now she would have to reclaim it.

When Sarah’s Humvee crunched to a slow stop on the gravel in the half-circle drive in front of the big porch, Val’s hand closed around Crow’s thigh and squeezed. It wasn’t tight at first, but by the time the engine stopped and the silence of the late October morning settled over them, it felt to him as if she had diamond-tipped drills on the end of each fingertip. He didn’t let on, though, either in expression or word; if it would help her deal with the moment, Crow would have given her a saw and let her cut the damn leg off. Sarah seemed to sense it, too, and sat there behind the wheel, door closed, hands resting quietly in her lap.

Eventually Val’s grip eased and Crow took her hand in his. “Whenever you’re ready, baby. No rush. ”

The house was huge, gabled, recently painted white with dark green window trimming and shutters. Gigantic oaks stood like brooding sentinels on either corner of the house, and smaller arborvitae flanked the broad front stairs. The porch was also painted green and there was a porch swing that Henry had made by hand for his wife fifteen years ago. Crow saw that all of the crime scene tape had been removed. Score one for Diego.

“I guess I can’t sit out here forever,” Val said.

Sarah turned in her seat. “Honey, you can sit there until the cows come home and the national budget is balanced. In fact, I can turn this puppy around and you guys can come back home with me, which would make a lot more sense. ” It was the third time Sarah had made the suggestion.

Val reached out and gave Sarah’s forearm a squeeze. “Thanks, sweetie,” Val said, “I’ll be fine. ” She absently touched her silver cross, tracing the shape of it over her heart.

“We could do a hotel,” Crow said.

She shook her head, took a breath, jerked the handle up and, with slow care for her aches, got out. Crow got out on his side and walked around to stand beside her. Above them the house was immense and filled with ghosts.

“Damn,” she breathed, and then walked toward the front door, chin down, jaw set, as if she were wading through waist-deep water. When they got to the front door, though, Val stopped. The door was new and still smelled of fresh paint. Val reached out to touch the new door, then turned to Crow. “You?”

“Diego. I called him, asked if he would tidy things up a bit. ”

Val kissed him and there was a single glittering tear in her left eye. “Thank you,” she said. Taking a long, deep breath, she reached out and opened the door, hesitated one last moment, and went inside. Crow glanced at Sarah, eyebrows raised, and followed.

That was just before noon. Now it was midafternoon, and Val was asleep on her father’s bed. She had gone in there to be among his things, not even wanting Crow’s company. He heard her crying a few minutes later and every atom in him burned to go in and hold her, but he knew that it was the wrong thing to do. Sometimes grief should be private.

The interior of the house was spotless. Diego, as usual, had been better than his word and his promise to “tidy up a bit” had resulted in a house that fairly gleamed from polish and soap. There was no trace of the violence of that night, and none of the leavings of the army of cops that had passed through since. Sarah and Crow had a quick lunch and then she left, and ten minutes later Val drifted downstairs and silently came to sit on Crow’s lap at the kitchen table. Her eyes were puffy from crying, and when he wrapped his arms around her and held her close, she started crying again. Not the heavy sobs of earlier, but softer tears. He stroked her hair and held his tongue.

(4)

The lab work from the autopsies had come back and was spread across his desk, but Saul Weinstock was staring through it as if he couldn’t see it. He held a tumbler of Glenfiddich in his hands, the level having dropped over the last half hour from six fingers to two. Weinstock’s eyes were red-rimmed and bright, as if he had a fever. The flush in his cheeks supported that look, but Weinstock was not sick, nor was he drunk. What he felt was a shock so profound that it reverberated through his chest like the echo of a gunshot.

He was mortally afraid; and the thing that had really driven a wire right into Weinstock’s brain—and that had moved him from coffee to Scotch—was the lab report on the scrapings taken from beneath Nels Cowan’s fingernails. Apparently the officer had fought back pretty hard, and during that struggle he’d raked his fingernails across his attacker’s exposed skin. Weinstock had gotten good scrapings, more than enough for lab purposes. The report on them had come back with a handwritten note from Dr. Ito, the senior technician, paperclipped to it:

Saul

Not sure how these samples got contaminated, but the tissue scrapings you sent me are probably not from the crime scene, as you’ll see in my report. It’s that or someone’s playing a pretty sick joke. Personally I find this kind of joke fairly inappropriate considering the circumstances. When you find the prankster, kick his ass for me.

Don

There hadn’t been any prankster. Weinstock had taken those samples himself, and had personally dropped them off at Ito’s lab. He sipped his Scotch and picked up the lab report on the skin samples, reading and rereading the line that was already burned into his eyes. “The tissue samples are in an advanced state of necrosis consistent with decomposition of 48 to 72 hours duration. ” Nineteen little words that had hammered a crack in Saul Weinstock’s version of the world. It made LaMastra’s comment about how Boyd looked on the video echo like thunder in his head.

Weinstock went back to the morgue and took a fresh set of samples from under each man’s fingernails, and walked them again to Ito’s office. Ito was out, but his assistant promised to have the new set of labs back tomorrow. Until then, Saul Weinstock could do nothing, so he walked thoughtfully back to his office. He closed the door and walked to the window. It was already dark and he felt a cold itch at the base of his spine.

“You’re being childish,” he told himself, saying it out loud in hopes it sounded better. It didn’t. He looked down at the parking lot, at the long shadows cast by cars and SUVs, calculating how long it would take him to get from the lighted entrance of the hospital to his car. How long it would take him to unlock the doors, get in, reset the locks, start up, and get the hell out of the shadowy lot. “Now that’s just silly,” he breathed. His workday was over, he should be heading home to Rachel and the kids.

Instead he drew the blinds, turned on the desk lamp as well to add more light to his already bright office, and then took the Scotch bottle from his desk drawer and poured two fingers into his coffee cup. He wondered how much Scotch he’d have to drink before he felt brave enough to simply walk out of the hospital and get into his car. He hated himself for his cowardice because none of what he was thinking about the physical evidence of the case could be right. He had to be reading it wrong. Too much work, not enough sleep, and the stress of so much violence in town. Just a stress thing, that’s all.

Weinstock sipped his Scotch and in his mind the seeds of some very dreadful thoughts were beginning to take root.

(5)

Through the window they could see the stars shimmering like embers. The fingers of an old tree scratched the attic shingles. Pale clouds drifted like faint ghosts across the sky, sometimes covering everything with darkness, sometimes invisible, always riding the easterly wind. It was October 5 and midnight was newly laid to rest. Everything looked and felt the way it should in October—blustery and mysterious. With the storm shutters thrown wide and the curtains pegged back, Crow and Val could see the night sky from her bed. She lay with her head on his chest, and he had his arms around her, and around them both was a thick patchwork quilt her mother had made years ago.

“You sure everything’s locked up?” she asked, and Crow nodded.

“Did I hear you on the phone when I was downstairs?”

“Uh-huh. I called Connie. ”