once-long and loud and piercingly shrill. Then he lapsed into a silence so absolute that Riehmann wondered for a second time if he weren’t dead.
“Get him out of here,” Riehmann instructed softly. “Quick.” As soon as the other officer disappeared into the hall, Riehmann knelt beside McCall’s corpse. The face was distorted with pain and fury. Even after fifteen years witnessing death and destruction in all of their guises, Riehmann knew that this one was different. He trembled when his light played across the tight, drawn features
And the blood.
There couldn’t be a pint left in the guy, Riehmann thought, not with what’s spattered all over the walls and the carpet and the ceiling, not with the fact that the front of McCall’s clothing was stiff with it. Not given the fact that his chest and belly and groin and thighs were slashed and that a wickedly sharp, massive shiver of glass was still embedded in his throat.
Homicide, Riehmann decided almost immediately. And he was rarely wrong. But this time, as the evidence unraveled, he seemed to be. True, it looked impossible for it to have been suicide, for McCall to have inflicted some of the gaping wounds-at least impossible for any man in a healthy state of mind.
But the crumpled newspapers and the documents locked in the briefcase ultimately suggested that McCall might not have been quite sane. He could easily have been on the edge of desperation, seeing the company he had built on the verge of total collapse with himself the sole responsible agent for what eventually amounted to millions of dollars in alleged fraud. Beyond that, much of the money involved was linked to individuals and organizations whose financial dealings were at best questionable. It looked increasingly as if Ace McCall had swum too far beyond his depth, discovered that he was doomed, and instead of struggling to get back, simply took a deep breath and sank beneath the waves. Figuratively speaking, of course.
In addition, an examination of the room-especially the blood-splattered door jamb, the razor-sharp shards of glass, the small red and silver flashlight found beneath the Wilton boy-revealed three sets of finger prints…and only three. Brady Wilton’s. Kyle Jantzen’s. And Ace McCall’s.
Of course it was possible that the killer or killers might have protected themselves by wearing gloves. But as the days became weeks and the weeks turned into months, the County investigation team could not discover one shred of evidence that anyone else had been in that room for at least a month before McCall died.
Riehmann kept up with the case as much as he could. He read reports and followed up leads. But everything led to the same conclusion. There was no evidence that McCall had died at the hands of another person. And, given the at best ambiguous nature of his wounds, it was just possible that he did kill himself.
Just barely possible.
10
The house was barricaded until well past Thanksgiving, its front yard fenced off by a strip of yellow warning tape. The Lincoln remained on the front driveway. It grew dustier and dustier; an early November rainstorm transformed the grainy dust to grey-black muck, and by the time it was hauled away behind a Bingham Boulevard Shell towing truck, it no longer gleamed white. No one had bothered writing “wash me” on any of the windows so thickly caked with grime that the interior had long since become entirely obscured. Perhaps no one had dared. A large oil spot on the driveway marked where the car had been sitting.
By mid-December, the yellow tape had disappeared as well. The week after Christmas, a work crew appeared early one morning and silently disappeared into the bowels of the house. Ladders and tarps and rolls of carpeting and cans of paint and panes of glass disappeared into the house as well.
The neighbors on both sides of Oleander were curious, of course. After all, how often does one get to live right next to an honest-to-God murder house. But none of them ventured up to the front door. None rapped lightly on the wooden doorjamb where, for a long time, a bloody, smudged handprint had lingered untouched until one kid on the crew, a part-time helper from the High School, couldn’t stand it any longer and washed the whole doorway down. No one asked what was going on inside.
But by the end of January, it was pretty evident. The construction truck disappeared, replaced the next day by a landscaping truck. Over the next weeks, a deep-pile green lawn appeared, along with a line of yew trees along the eastern edge of the property and a similar row of hibiscus along the western. The sidewalk leading from the drive to the front door was bordered with annuals that by the middle of May would become a solid bed of scarlet and pink and purple and yellow and blue-petunias, pansies, puffs of sky-blue ageratum, masses of purple and white Royal alyssum.
“Alyssum,” the woman next door snorted when a weekend visitor from San Francisco later commented on the vibrant white mounds blooming in the yard at the top of the hill.
“Alyssum! That’s called madwort where I come from-and rightly so!” And then she invited her visitor to share a cup of tea and began telling the story of the Murder House.
By April, shiny new cars with magnetized realtors’ signs on the doors began parking on the drive. Couples, occasionally accompanied by a child or two, would get out, survey the view from the top of Oleander, then disappear into the house. It might have seemed unusual that none of the families were ever outside without a realtor hovering around as well…that none of the prospective buyers ever actually talked to the neighbors on either side.
It might have seemed unusual, except for the fact that no one really wanted the house left empty. Things happened in empty houses. So the neighbors peeped from behind drawn curtains at bright shiny faces that entered the house. The realtors spoke persuasively of increasing property values and spectacular views and convenient schools and the brand-new shopping center going up not half a mile away.
And on a bright sunny day during the first week in May, 1992, almost three years after the house at 1066 Oleander was begun, the For Sale sign stuck in the front lawn was plastered over with another sign that simply read “Sold.”
From the Tamarind Valley Times, 1 November 1991:
SAFE HALLOWEEN REPORTED
Tamarind Valley safety officials announced today that yesterday a long-standing record was not just broken but shattered-Halloween, 1991, was the safest in Valley history.
At a time when pranks can sometimes get out of hand, when so many little ghosties and beasties are on the streets, when parents are urged to accompany their children as they Trick-or-Treat just to be on the safe side, last night was exceptional in the few number of incidents responded to by the TVPD.
No injuries, other than tummy-aches from too much candy, were reported, and no significant property damage resulting from over-enthusiastic revelers…
Chapter Five
The Huntleys, January 2010
Settling In (Cont’d.)
1
It took more than an hour for everyone to settle down. By the time Willard looked at the children with his unmistakable “time to get to bed” expression, even Will, Jr., was red-eyed and nodding. Sams had fallen asleep curled against his mother’s shoulder. Willard roused the older children and herded them shuffling and sleepy down the hall, waiting to tuck in Will and Burt in spite of Will’s muffled objections that he was too old for baby things like that. Suze was already asleep when Willard slipped into her darkened room and looked down at her. He returned to the living room and picked Sams up out of Catherine’s lap. He grunted at the sudden weight.
