vehicle was locked. Boldt shined the light into the backseat: no body. “Force the trunk,” he instructed. LaMoia searched out his scrap-metal pry bar while Boldt fully circled the vehicle, ending up at the trunk.
Boldt said, “Clean. Too clean for all this mud. He wiped it down.” His heart pounded painfully in his chest. Dead. He had sent Sheriff Turner Bramm here, had berated him until he accepted the job. He felt that he, and he alone, was responsible for whatever had happened here.
“Maybe he just parked it here so it wouldn’t be seen,” LaMoia said, reading his thoughts, working the pry bar. “The sheriff, I’m talking about. Maybe he and some farm girl are shacked up in the house, doing the business.”
“Is that all you ever think of?” Boldt said a little too harshly.
LaMoia did not answer. He caught the lip well, put his weight behind the effort, and popped the trunk.
“No body,” LaMoia said, relieved.
“No vest, either. And there’s a shotgun clip on the dash. Empty. And no police radio,” he said. “Torn right out from under the dash.”
“We gonna kick it now?” LaMoia asked of the farmhouse.
“You bet we are,” Boldt replied. The flashlight strayed to the cement floor and caught a blend of yellow, blue, and red spray paint, edged by a hard line where a drop cloth had been. LaMoia went down on one knee. He sniffed the paint closely. “There’s the source of the smell.”
Boldt followed the paint with the light. It formed a large empty rectangle on the cement floor.
“Spray-painted a car,” LaMoia said.
“A truck,” Boldt corrected. “With these three colors.”
LaMoia put his shoulder into it for a third time, and the kitchen door came open.
The air smelled of food gone bad and windows left shut. The kitchen was small and tidy, dishes drying in a rack and dry, fresh fruit in a bowl-slightly withered. A door immediately in front of them, perhaps leading to the basement, was padlocked shut with new hardware. Using hand signals, Boldt indicated for LaMoia to search the first floor. He, Boldt, would take the upstairs.
The sergeant passed through a musty-smelling living room and climbed a flight of creaky stairs.
“Police,” he warned. “We have a warrant to search these premises.”
He continued his ascent, flashlight in his left hand, his right hand hovering cautiously near the stock of his weapon. Below him something moved. LaMoia slinked silently past, disappearing into a different room. The unusually white light of the farmyard mercury lamp played against the downstairs walls. Boldt ascended, unknowingly holding his breath.
The staircase led up the center of the house, leaving rooms ahead of him and to either side. “Police,” he called out again, though with less authority. He passed through a pocket of foul odor and stopped dead still, his neck and arms alive with goose bumps. He knew that odor, and he identified its source as the room to his right.
His senses warned him again that this was indeed the home of the Tin Man. The closer he drew to that door, the greater his apprehension. “Police,” he repeated, his weapon already in hand. “I’m coming in.” Not wanting to make a target of himself, he shut off the flashlight and pocketed it.
He gently rotated the bedroom doorknob and toed the door open cautiously, greeted by a darkened room.
“Police,” he repeated yet again, reaching for the light switch.
An empty room.
The room had been recently lived in. He smelled dirty laundry mixed with that same odor of spray paint. Once again he was struck by the incredible neatness of the room. That neatness troubled him: an ordered mind, compulsively neat. He was afraid, despite his training. He wanted out of here.
A noise, like a tiny bell. He knew that sound: hangers banging together.
As he turned to call for LaMoia, a rustling sound came from the closet, preempting him.
He leapt forward and yanked the closet door open.
The hangers rang again. A cat leapt off the shelf and onto Boldt’s shoulder, so quickly that Boldt went down with the contact.
Empty. The closet, the other rooms-by the last of which LaMoia had joined him.
“Nothing,” the detective said.
“There’s that smell in the hall,” Boldt said, leading LaMoia back to the top of the stairs. Any homicide cop knew that smell.
They both spotted the laundry chute at the same time. “That would be the basement,” LaMoia said.
“The padlock,” Boldt reminded him, and the look they shared silenced them as they hurried back down the stairs and into the kitchen.
Using a butter knife that he broke twice in the process, LaMoia removed the hinge pins to the basement door before Boldt had thought how to deal with the padlock. The door came open backward, and LaMoia tore away the lock, doorjamb and all, and deposited it in a crash to the floor. It was dark inside, and it smelled of death.
LaMoia reached for the light switch. Boldt caught his arm, shook his head no, electing the flashlight instead, wanting control over the environment.
Darkness closed in around them as they descended the steep stairs. Boldt’s flashlight beam directed his attention. A washer and dryer. A soapstone sink. A laundry line. A pottery kiln. Otherwise, it was black down here- the windows boarded up and painted shut.
They moved slowly through the laundry room and into another musty-smelling room formed of concrete-and- rock walls, a room stacked high with secondhand furniture and rusted gardening equipment. Rocking chairs, baby’s toys, pine dressers, clothes inside clear vinyl hanging bags, mattresses, and headboards. It smelled faintly of mothballs and cat urine. A hard box of white light framed the edges of a crude door leading into another room. The closer they drew to this door, the more pungent the feculent odors.
Boldt drew a box with his finger. He and LaMoia carefully searched the door frame with their gloved hands. LaMoia said, “Got it,” and pointed to a delicate stretch of monofilament that crossed the gap in the door frame just above the rusted hinge. The trip wire was not entirely taut. LaMoia peered inside. “Ceiling balloons,” he announced. “It’s rigged for arson.”
“We back out slowly, John.
It came from behind them, drawn by the fetid odors of early decomposition. It came hungry, and it wanted through that door. Both cops understood the threat it represented without a word between them. Boldt stooped and said, “Here, kitty,” as LaMoia groaned, “Oh, shit!” maneuvering to box it between them. “Good kitty,” Boldt tried.
It stopped and stared up at them-a mangy cat with a curiously distant look in its eye. It meowed yet again and LaMoia, creeping up on it, said to Boldt, “Blind it.” It shied away from both, and Boldt could feel the tension set into its hind legs as it hunkered down prepared to spring.
“Ready?” Boldt asked, the flashlight held tightly in his sweaty hand.
“Ready,” LaMoia echoed.
“Go!” Boldt aimed the beam of the light as he would the bead on a barrel, directly into its eyes. It froze. LaMoia took one long stride, hands outstretched, and the cat sprang through them like a bar of wet soap.
Fast little silent footsteps. Before either man could react, the wooden door creaked open as the kitty nosed and nudged it. LaMoia dove and snagged the cat, but his shoulder brushed the door and threw it fully open.
Sheriff Turner Bramm hung suspended by his wrists from an overhead pipe. His uniform seemed moth-eaten with holes where his captor had burned him with cigarettes. His shoes were off and his ankles wired to his thighs so that the full weight of him fell to the wire wrapped like bleeding bracelets around his wrists. His death mask was one of pure horror, frozen in a wretched spasm of agony.
There was a workbench, its surface clean and neat. Boxes stood beneath it.
A string of as many as twenty balloons-all sagging, filled with gasoline-was suspended in rows from the ceiling. As the detonator took, in an extreme slow motion, bright orange-and-blue flames chased through the string
