Lisa rubbed her hands briskly up and down her arms, trying to generate some heat. Her face was waxen in the yellowish glow of the nearest streetlamp. She seemed years older than fourteen. Terror had matured her.
The girl said, “No signs of a struggle, either.”
Jenny frowned. “That's right; there weren't.”
“I noticed it right away,” Lisa said, “It seemed so odd. They don't seem to've fought back. Nothing thrown. Nothing broken. The rolling pin would've made a pretty good weapon, wouldn't it? But he didn't use it. Nothing was knocked over, either.”
“It's as if they didn't resist at all. As if they… willingly put their heads on the chopping block.”
“But why would they do that?”
Why
Jenny stared up Skyline Road toward her house, which was less than three blocks away, then looked down toward Ye Olde Towne Tavern, Big Nickle Variety Shop, Patterson's Ice Cream Parlor, and Mario's Pizza.
There are silences and silences. No one of them is quite like another. There is the silence of death, found in tombs and deserted graveyards and in the cold-storage room in a city morgue and in hospital rooms on occasion; it is a flawless silence, not merely a hush but a void. As a physician who had treated her share of terminally ill patients, Jenny was familiar with that special, grim silence.
This was it. This was the silence of death.
She hadn't wanted to admit it. That was why she had not yet shouted “hello?” into the funereal streets. She had been afraid no one
At last she had no choice but to accept the facts. Snowfield was indisputably dead. It wasn't really a town any more; it was a cemetery, an elaborate collection of stone-timber-shingle-brick-gabled-balconied tombs, a graveyard fashioned in the image of a quaint alpine village.
The wind picked up again, whistling under the caves of the buildings. It sounded like eternity.
Chapter 7
The County Sheriff
County authorities, headquartered in Santa Mira, were not yet aware of the Snowfield crisis. They had their own problems.
Lieutenant Talbert Whitman entered the interrogation room just as Sheriff Bryce Hammond switched on the tape recorder and started informing the suspect of his constitutional rights. Tal closed the door without making a sound. Not wanting to interrupt just as the questioning was about to get underway, he didn't take a chair at the big table, where the other three men were seated. Instead, he went to the big window, the only window, in the oblong room.
The Santa Mira County Sheriff's Department occupied a Spanish-style structure that had been erected in the late 1930s. The doors were all solid and solid-sounding when you closed them, and the walls were thick enough to provide eighteen-inch-deep windowsills like the one on which Tal Whitman settled himself.
Beyond the window lay Santa Mira, the county seat, with a population of eighteen thousand. In the mornings, when the sun at last topped the Sierras and burned away the mountain shadows, Tal found himself looking around in amazement and delight at the gentle, foothills on which Santa Mira rose, for it was an exceptionally neat, clean city that had put down its concrete and iron roots with some respect for the natural beauty in which it had grown. Now night was settled in. Thousands of lights sparkled on the rolling hills below the mountains, and it looked as if the stars had fallen here.
For a child of Harlem, black as a sharp-edged winter shadow, born in poverty and ignorance, Tal Whitman had wound up at the age of nine, in a most unexpected place. Unexpected but wonderful.
On
At the conference table in the center of the room, the current occupant of the suspect's chair was a tall, good-looking, twenty-six-year-old real estate agent named Fletcher Kale. He was working himself into an impressive state of righteous indignation.
“Listen, Sheriff,” Kale said, “can we just cut this crap? You don't have to read me my rights
Bob Robine, Kale's attorney, quickly patted his client's arm to make him be quiet. Robine was pudgy, round- faced, with a sweet smile but with the hard eyes of a casino pit boss.
“Fletch,” Robine said, “Sheriff Hammond knows he's held you on suspicion just about as long as the law allows, and he knows that I know it, too. So what he's going to do — he's going to settle this one way or the other within the next hour.”
Kale blinked, nodded, and changed his tactics. He slumped in his chair as if a great weight of grief lay on his shoulders. When he spoke, there was a — faint tremor in his voice. “I'm sorry if I sort of lost my head there for a minute, Sheriff. I shouldn't have snapped at you like that. But it's so hard… so very, very hard for me.” His face appeared to cave in, and the tremor in his voice became more pronounced. “I mean, for God's sake, I've lost my family. My wife… my son… both gone.”
Bryce Hammond said, “I'm sorry if you think I've treated you unfairly, Mr. Kale. I only try to do what I think is best. Sometimes, I'm right. Maybe I'm wrong this time.”
Apparently deciding that he wasn't in too much trouble after all, and that he could afford to be magnanimous now, Fletcher Kale dabbed at the tears on his face, sat up straighter in his chair, and said, “Yeah… well, uh… I guess I can see your position, Sheriff.”
Kale was underestimating Bryce Hammond.
Bob Robine knew the sheriff better than his client did. He frowned, glanced at Tal, then stared hard at Bryce.
In Tal Whitman's experience, most people who dealt with the sheriff underestimated him, just as Fletcher Kale had done. It was an easy thing to do. Bryce didn't look impressive. He was thirty-nine, but he seemed a lot younger than that. His thick sandy hair fell across his forehead, giving him a mussed, boyish appearance. He had a pug nose with a spatter of freckles across the bridge of it and across both cheeks. His blue eyes were clear and sharp, but they were hooded with heavy lids that made him seem bored, sleepy, maybe even a little bit dullwitted. His voice was misleading, too. It was soft, melodic, gentle. Furthermore, he spoke slowly at times, and always with measured deliberation, and some people took his careful speech to mean that he had difficulty forming his thoughts. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Bryce Hammond was acutely aware of how others perceived him, and when it was to his advantage, he reinforced their misconceptions with an ingratiating manner, with an almost witless smile, and with a further softening of speech that made him seem like the classic hayseed cop.
Only one thing kept Tal from fully enjoying this confrontation: He knew the Kale investigation had affected Bryce Hammond on a deep, personal level. Bryce was hurting, sick at heart about the pointless deaths of Joanna and Danny Kale, because in a curious way this case echoed events in his own life. Like Fletcher Kale, the sheriff had lost a wife and a son, although the circumstances of his loss were considerably different from Kale's.
A year ago, Ellen Hammond had died instantly in a car crash. Seven-year-old Timmy, sitting on the front seat beside his mother, had suffered serious head injuries and had been in a coma for the past twelve months. The doctors didn't give Timmy much chance of regaining consciousness.
Bryce had nearly been destroyed by the tragedy. Only recently had Tal Whitman begun to feel that his friend was moving away from the abyss of despair.
The Kale case had opened Bryce Hammond's wounds again, but he hadn't allowed grief to dull his senses; it hadn't caused him to overlook anything. Tal Whitman had known the precise moment, last Thursday evening, when Bryce had begun to suspect that Fletcher Kale was guilty of two premeditated murders, for suddenly something cold and implacable had come into Bryce's heavy-lidded eyes.
