Mortal Fear

I follow him up the hall with Mayeux at my heels. The sheriff pauses before my office door and turns to me. I hear the voices of men on the porch. Someone laughs, then cuts it off.

“Ever see anything like this before?” Buckner asks.

“I worked in an emergency room one summer.”

“Good.”

“How bad is it?”

Mayeux takes my arm from behind, squeezes it, and says, “Hang tough, cher. It ain’t good.”

And Sheriff Buckner opens the door to hell.

CHAPTER 38

The instant Buckner opened the door I saw blood. You couldn’t enter the room without walking through it. Not unless you used a window, which I saw evidence technicians doing. From the doorway to about five feet into the room the floor was a sticky puddle, with five or six pairs of shoeprints tracked through it.

“Your wife’s,” Buckner said, pointing to the smallest prints. “Couple of deputies and fire department people walked through here, trying to see whether anything could be done, but they were too late.”

There was more blood deeper in the office, splashed high on the walls, but before I could focus on it I saw the “foreign” woman Buckner had talked about. She was lying on her side about six feet inside the door, facing away from me. A zippered black body bag lay unrolled at her feet. A gleaming sword blade protruded from her back. Walking forward, I saw that it had been stuck through her abdomen. With horror I recognized the brass hilt of the Civil War sword that usually hung on my wall beside my far window. The dead woman wore a yellow sari, but one of her arms was exposed. It had been slashed several times, to the bone.

“What happened?” I said.

“You know her?” asked Buckner.

Kali’s face was beautiful even in death. A perfect oval, with strong planes and sculpted ridges covered by nutmeg skin. Her eyes were open, the sclera like old ivory framing fixed onyx irises. There were lines in the skin at the corners of her eyes and lips, some wrinkles gathered at her throat, but few other signs of age. As I studied her face, I noticed something small and bright against the skin just below the jawline. I started to crouch and look, then realized that I was looking at the feathers of a tranquilizer dart.

“Well?” grunted Buckner.

“I’ve never seen her before in my life.”

“Ever talk to her on EROS?” asked Mayeux.

“How would I know that?”

“Take a look at the rest,” said Buckner.

“You don’t have to,” Mayeux said. “Your wife ID’ed the other body.”

I moved forward anyway, propelled by something deeper than thought. The center of the room was a circus of small red footprints, as though a dance had been held for bleeding women. The walls and everything hanging on them were spattered with blood. Flung drops on a framed print. A large splash near the baseboard. A fine spray across the faces of two guitars.

“Where is she?”

“Behind the headboard of the bed,” Buckner said.

I took the required steps and stopped near the head of my twin bed. There, propped low against the wall, sat Erin’s nude body. If her eyes had been open, I probably could not have stood to look, so heavily did the responsibility for her death crash down upon me in that moment. Her dark hair hung mercifully over her breasts, but her legs were splayed grotesquely apart, as though she were a mannequin laid out for an anatomy lesson. I wanted to shout at Buckner to cover up her nakedness, but something caught my attention and held it with paralyzing power.

Cut into Erin’s tanned abdomen, just above her pubic hair, was a vertical incision about three inches long. There was very little blood, just enough to define the wound. “Is that what killed her?”

“No,” said Buckner from just behind me. “She’s got a big knife wound in her back, above her kidneys. Probably hit the heart. See the blood?”

Then I did see. Erin was propped in a black pool of blood. I hadn’t noticed because the headboard made a shadow there. As I stared, one question filled my mind. “Does she have any head wounds?”

“No,” Mayeux answered. “I checked.”

I looked back at him. Both of us were asking the same silent question. Why not?

“We found the murder weapon,” said Buckner. “Under the bed. It’s some kind of curved dagger. Looks like a movie prop.”

For the Thugs, murder was a holy sacrament…. I gazed around the room, looking at the overturned furniture and scattered papers and drying blood, trying to fathom what had happened, what could possibly have brought Erin here so soon after our confrontation at her house.

“Best we can figure,” Buckner said, “is one or more persons surprised your sister-in-law here in the house. She may have been in this room, she may not. Maybe she fled here. Your telephone lines were cut….”

Maybe she fled here-

“… got a deputy out back fixing them up for you. He’s handy with that stuff. Take it easy, Detective, he’s saving the cut ends for the crime-lab boys. Anyway, I’d say Mrs. Graham did something very unexpected in here. She snatched that sword off the wall-that is your sword, right?”

“Yes.”

“And she defended her life as best she could. She did a pretty good job of it, too. She hit that foreign woman at least five times on the arms, then ran her through like a pig on a spit. Of course by doing that she lost her weapon. At that point, I figure a second assailant got her.”

“What makes you think there was another person here?”

“Footprints. We found a pair of size-nine Reeboks that didn’t match the shoes of anybody working the scene.”

Brahma wears Reeboks? “Oh.”

“Found the actual shoes right in the middle of the floor. The perp obviously knew we could track him that way, so he walked through the puddle at the door, then tossed the shoes back in. He’s running barefoot now. That’s tough going in fields and woods, especially at night.”

“How do you know he didn’t take a pair of shoes from my closet and put them on in the hall?”

Buckner stared blankly at me for a moment. Then anger clouded his eyes. “Would you know if a pair was missing?”

“Let me look.”

One glance into the closet told me a pair of Nikes were gone. “Air Jordans. White with blue trim.”

“Shit,” Buckner muttered, writing on a pad he produced from his khaki shirt pocket. “What size?”

“Twelve.”

“Well, that should slow him down a little.”

Feeling a strangely protective urge, I moved back toward Erin’s body.

“Your buddy Turner wear a nine?” Buckner asked sharply.

“I don’t know what size he wears. But bigger than a nine. He’s skinny, but he’s well over six feet. Probably a twelve.”

“What I can’t figure,” said Buckner, “is why one of the perps didn’t just shoot Mrs. Graham.”

“They shot her with the dart gun,” Mayeux said. “In the shoulder,” he added, looking at me.

“I meant a real gun.”

“Maybe they didn’t have one.”

Buckner shook his head. “That’s a pretty risky way to break into a house. Especially in Mississippi.”

“I told you they’re not from Mississippi,” Mayeux said.