“So you don’t know of anyone who’d have this much of a grudge against one or more of the family?”
“I sure don’t. Cops asked me that, too. Beats the hell out of me.”
“Whoever did it had to have come here at least once and probably two or three times,” Runyon said. “Pinpoint the location, figure out how to find his way in the dark.”
“Sounds reasonable.”
“You see anybody in this vicinity before it happened? At any time?”
“No, nobody,” Sobolewsky said. “Frank, neither, he’s my assistant there on the forklift. But I work all over these grounds-maintenance, landscaping, grave-digging. People come and go, put down flowers, pay their respects. Me and Frank, we’re both too busy to pay much attention unless somebody does something, you know, out of the ordinary.”
“And nobody did.”
“If somebody had, we’d’ve sure told the cops when they asked.”
A s much as he hated hospitals, after all the time he’d spent in Seattle General watching Colleen waste away to a morphined husk, Runyon seemed to find himself in one too damned often since he’d moved down here. Once in Red Bluff as a patient, the mild concussion on the firebug business last September. As a visitor when his son’s boyfriend had been mugged and badly beaten in the city, twice more in Red Bluff, and now again in Los Alegres.
They were all the same. Same sounds, same smells, same palpable aura of sickness and death. Took a special kind of person to be a doctor or a nurse or any other kind of hospital worker, people with systems immune to the stifling atmosphere-total opposites of a man like him, who needed to be outdoors and moving. Walls, particularly hospital walls, had a way of closing in on him after a while. As soon as he walked through the main entrance of Los Alegres Valley Hospital, he felt his stomach contract and his gorge rise, and the images of Colleen shriveled in that white bed in that white room came flooding back with an impact that was almost physical. Not as intense a reaction now as it had been, but bad enough.
A woman on the reception desk told him where to find Damon Henderson. He rode an elevator up to the second floor, followed directions to the south wing. It was an old building with three or four wings, a couple of them probably add-ons, surrounded by medical offices, shopping centers, older east-side tracts. Everything was clean, reasonably well maintained, but faintly shabby, and the equipment struck him as borderline obsolete. The hospital stink seemed stronger up here; tightening his nasal passages and breathing through his mouth didn’t block it out. There was muscle tension all through him by the time he got to the semiprivate room where Damon Henderson lay and a woman sat in a chair at his bedside, holding his hand.
The man-early to mid-thirties, slight, balding like his brother-was in rough shape. Facial bruises and contusions, right arm and shoulder in a cast. Doped to relieve his pain, apparently, but alert enough to talk. The thin-faced, scared-looking woman was his wife, Samantha. They were expecting him; Cliff had called her from San Francisco, she said, then stopped in at the hospital after he got back to tell Damon.
Runyon asked the same questions he’d asked Lieutenant St. John, got pretty much the same answers. All except one. When he asked Damon Henderson if he’d had any aural or olfactory impressions of his attacker, the man said, “I’ve been thinking about that. Yes. Soap.”
“How do you mean exactly? His body, his clothing?”
“Everything about him. One of his hands, on my neck… gloved, but the soap smell was still strong.”
“As if he’d scrubbed up recently.”
“Yes. His hair… shampoo. And his clothes… freshly washed. Heavy, sweetish smell.”
“Dryer sheets?” his wife said.
“That’s it. All the odors were so strong it was almost… I don’t know, I was in so much pain…”
What kind of man washes himself, shampoos his hair, and puts on clean clothes to break into a garage in the middle of the night? Somebody with OCD, maybe. Compulsive hand washer, cleanliness freak. That might explain the wet ground under the cemetery water tap, too.
Runyon said as much and then asked, “Do you know anyone who fits that description? Obsessive-compulsive about cleanliness?”
“I can’t… no, I don’t think so.”
“Mrs. Henderson?”
“No. No one.”
“Just a few more questions. Did you have an impression of the man’s age?”
“… Well, youngish, I think. From the sound of his voice.”
“Twenties? Thirties?”
“I’m not sure-twenties, I guess.”
“Anything distinctive about the voice?”
“Not that I can remember. The pain… it was right after he clubbed me.”
“Any idea of what he was doing in your garage?”
Henderson was tiring. His eyelids drooped, and when he tried to shift position, hurt twisted his mouth out of shape. “Sabotage my car again, I suppose.”
“He’d already done that once?”
“In my office parking lot, one night when I was working late. Threw acid on the tires, all four of them.”
“Was there any damage to anything in the garage?”
“No. He didn’t have time… I was out there pretty fast after I heard him break in.”
“Where did he come from when he hit you?”
“Where? I’m not… My left, over by my workbench.”
“Keep anything flammable in that area? Paint thinner, gasoline?”
“No flammable liquids, but there’s a lot of cardboard and paper-I store my old business files in the garage.”
“Near the workbench.”
“No, along the wall on the other side.”
“My God,” Mrs. Henderson said, “are you suggesting he might’ve been planning to set fire to our garage?”
“I’m not suggesting anything. Just asking questions. Would you mind if I had a look around the garage? The rest of your property?”
“The police have already been over everything…”
“I’d like to see it for myself.”
“Go ahead,” Henderson said. “Anything you need.”
“I’ll be home in an hour or so,” his wife said. “Unless you’d like to go there now…”
“No hurry. Later this afternoon is fine.”
She drew a heavy breath. “Mr. Runyon, we have a twelve-year-old son. Cliff and Tracy have two young daughters. You have to find this man, find out who he is and why he’s doing this to us, stop him before he…” The rest of it seemed to stick in her throat.
Runyon didn’t believe in offering false assurances. But these were desperate people. He said, “I’ll do everything I can,” and left them with that thin little thread of hope.
P erp possibly in his twenties, possibly with an obsessive-compulsive disorder. Not much to go on, without some idea of why he’d targeted the Hendersons. A man with a real or imagined hate-on for both of the brothers, or for the Henderson family. The father had been dead for five years, so it didn’t figure to be him.
Still, the first act of aggression had been to burn Lloyd Henderson’s ashes and the words off his monument with acid. Vicious and personal act. Everything else he’d done, with the exception of the assault on Damon Henderson, and that hadn’t been planned, was mild by comparison.
Something to do with the father after all?
4
JAKE RUNYON
