Ли Чайлд - "Этаж смерти" with W_cat
[1324] “I was the first one there,” he said. “About ten this morning. I hadn’t seen Morrison since Friday and I needed to update the guy, but I couldn’t get him on the phone. It was middle of the morning on a Monday and we hadn’t done anything worth a damn about a double homicide from last Thursday night. We needed to get our asses in gear. So I went up to his house to start looking for him.”
[1325] He went quiet and walked on. Revisiting in his mind the scene he’d found.
[1326] “Front door was standing open,” he said. “Maybe a half inch. It had a bad feel. I went in, found them upstairs in the master bedroom. It was like a butcher’s shop. Blood everywhere. He was nailed to the wall, sort of hanging off. Both of them sliced up, him and his wife. It was terrible. About twenty-four hours of decomposition. Warm weather. Very unpleasant. So I called in the whole crew and we went over every inch and pieced it all together. Literally, I’m afraid.”
[1327] He trailed off again. Just went quiet.
[1328] “So it happened Sunday morning?” I said.
[1329] He nodded.
[1330] “Sunday papers on the kitchen table,” he said. “Couple of sections opened out and the rest untouched. Breakfast things on the table. Medical examiner says about ten o’clock Sunday morning.”
[1331] “Any physical evidence left behind?” I asked him.
[1332] He nodded again. Grimly.
[1333] “Footprints in the blood,” he said. “The place was a lake of blood. Gallons of it. Partly dried up now, of course. They left footprints all over. But they were wearing rubber overshoes, you know? Like you get for the winter up north? No chance of tracing them. They must sell millions every year.”
[1334] They had come prepared. They’d known there was going to be a lot of blood. They’d brought overshoes. They must have brought overalls. Like the nylon bodysuits they wear in the slaughterhouse. On the killing floor. Big white nylon suits, hooded, the white nylon splashed and smeared with bright red blood.
[1335] “They wore gloves, too,” he said. “There are rubbery smears in the blood on the walls.”
[1336] “How many people?” I asked him. I was trying to build up a picture.
[1337] “Four,” he said. “The footprints are confused, but I think I can see four.”
[1338] I nodded. Four sounded right. About the minimum, I reckoned. Morrison and his wife would have been fighting for their lives. It would take four of them, at least. Four out of the ten Hubble had mentioned.
[1339] “Transport?” I said.
[1340] “Can’t really tell,” Finlay said. “Gravel driveway, washed into ruts here and there. I saw some wide ruts which look new, maybe. Could have been wide tires. Maybe a big four-wheel-drive or a small truck.”
[1341] We were a couple of hundred yards south of where Main Street had petered out. We turned west up a gravel driveway which must have been just about parallel with Beckman Drive. At the end of the driveway was Morrison’s house. It was a big formal place, white columns at the front, symmetrical evergreen trees dotted about. There was a new Lincoln parked near the door and a lot of police tape strung at waist height between the columns.
[1342] “We going in?” Finlay asked.
[1343] “May as well,” I said.
[1344] WE DUCKED UNDER THE TAPE AND PUSHED IN THROUGH Morrison’s front door. The house was a wreck. Gray metallic fingerprint powder everywhere. Everything tossed and searched and photographed.
[1345] “You won’t find anything,” Finlay said. “We went over the whole place.”
[1346] I nodded and headed for the staircase. Went up and found the master bedroom. Stopped at the door and peered in. There was nothing to see except the ragged outline of the nail holes in the wall and the massive bloodstains. The blood was turning black. It looked like somebody had flung buckets of tar around. The carpet was crusty with it. On the parquet in the doorway I could see the footprints from the overshoes. I could make out the intricate pattern of the treads. I headed back downstairs and found Finlay leaning on a porch column out front.
[1347] “OK?” he asked me.
[1348] “Terrific,” I said. “You search the car?”
[1349] He shook his head.
[1350] “That’s Morrison’s,” he said. “We just looked for stuff the intruders might have left behind.”
[1351] I stepped over to the Lincoln and tried the door. Unlocked. Inside, there was a strong new-car smell and not much else. This was a chief’s car. It wasn’t going to be full of cheeseburger wrappings and soda cans like a patrolman’s would be. But I checked it out. Poked around in the door pockets and under the seats. Found nothing at all. Then I opened the glovebox and found something. There was a switchblade in there. It was a handsome thing. Ebony handle with Morrison’s name in gold-filled engraving. I popped the blade. Double edged, seven inches, Japanese surgical steel. Looked good. Brand-new, never been used. I closed it up and slipped it into my pocket. I was unarmed and facing big trouble. Morrison’s switchblade might make a difference. I slid out of the Lincoln and rejoined Finlay on the gravel.
[1352] “Find anything?” he asked.
[1353] “No,” I said. “Let’s go.”
[1354] We crunched back down the driveway together and turned north on the county road. Headed back to town. I could see the church steeple and the bronze statue in the distance, waiting for us.
13
[1355] “SOMETHING I NEED TO CHECK WITH YOU,” I SAID.
[1356] Finlay’s patience was running thin. He looked at his watch.
[1357] “You better not be wasting my time, Reacher,” he said.
[1358] We walked on north. The sun was dropping away from overhead, but the heat was still fierce. I didn’t know how Finlay could wear a tweed jacket. And a moleskin vest. I led him over to the village green. We crossed the grass and leaned up on the statue of old Caspar Teale, side by side.
[1359] “They cut his balls off, right?” I said.
[1360] He nodded. Looked at me, waiting.
[1361] “OK,” I said. “So the question is this: did you find his balls?”
[1362] He shook his head.
[1363] “No,” he said. “We went over the whole place. Ourselves and the medical examiner. They weren’t there. His testicles are missing.”
[1364] He smiled as he said it. He was recovering his cop’s sense of humor.
[1365] “OK,” I said. “That’s what I needed to know.”
[1366] His smile widened. Reached his eyes.
[1367] “Why?” he said. “Do you know where they are?”
[1368] “When’s the autopsy?” I asked him.
[1369] He was still smiling.
[1370] “His autopsy won’t help,” he said. “They were cut off. They’re not connected to him anymore. They weren’t there. They’re missing. So how can they find them at his autopsy?”
[1371] “Not his autopsy,” I said. “Her autopsy. His wife’s. When they check what she ate.”
[1372] Finlay stopped smiling. Went quiet. Just looked at me.
[1373] “Talk, Reacher,” he said.
[1374] “OK,” I said. “That’s why we came out here, remember? So answer another question for me. How many homicides have they had in Margrave?”
[1375] He thought about it. Shrugged.
[1376] “None,” he said. “At least, not for maybe thirty years or so. Not since voter registration days, I guess.”
[1377] “And now you’ve had four in four days,” I said. “And pretty soon you’ll find the fifth.”
[1378] “Fifth?” he said. “Who’s the fifth?”
[1379] “Hubble,” I said. “My brother, this Sherman Stoller guy, the two Morrisons and Hubble makes five. No homicides in thirty years and now you’ve got five all at once. That can’t be any kind of a coincidence, right?”
[1380] “No way,” he said. “Of course not. They’re linked.”
[1381] “Right,” I said. “Now I’ll tell you some more links. But first of all, you got to understand something, right? I was just passing through here. On Friday and Saturday and Sunday right up to the time those prints came through on my brother, I wasn’t paying the slightest bit of attention to anything at all. I was just figuring I’d wait around and get the hell out of here as soon as possible.”
[1382] “So?” he said.
[1383] “So I was told stuff,” I said. “Hubble told me things in Warburton, but I didn’t pay a lot of attention. I wasn’t interested in him, OK? He told me things, and I didn’t follow them up with him and I probably don’t recall some of them.”
[1384] “Like what things?” Finlay said.
[1385] So I told him the things I remembered. I started the same way Hubble had started. Trapped inside some kind of a racket, terrorized by a threat against himself and his wife. A threat consisting of the same things, word for word, that Finlay had just seen for himself that morning.
[1386] “You sure about that?” he said. “Exactly the same?”
[1387] “Word for word,” I said. “Totally identical. Nailed to the wall, balls cut off, the wife forced to eat the balls, then they get their throats cut. Word-for-word identical, Finlay. So unless we got two threateners at the same time in the same place making the exact same threat, that’s another link.”
[1388] “So Morrison was inside the same scam as Hubble?” he said.
[1389] “Owned and operated by the same people,” I said.
[1390] Then I told him Hubble had been talking to an investigator. And I told him the investigator had been talking to Sherman Stoller, whoever he had been.
[1391] “Who was the investigator?” he asked. “And where does Joe fit in?”
[1392] “Joe was the investigator,” I said. “Hubble told me the tall guy with the shaved head was an investigator, trying to get him free.”
[1393] “What sort of an investigator was your brother?” Finlay said. “Who the hell was he working for?”
[1394] “Don’t know,” I said. “Last I heard he was working for the Treasury Department.”
[1395] Finlay pushed off the statue and started walking back north.
[1396] “I got to make some calls,” he said. “Time to go to work on this thing.”
[1397] “Walk slow,” I said. “I haven’t finished yet.”
[1398] FINLAY WAS ON THE SIDEWALK. I WAS IN THE ROAD, STAYING clear of the low awnings in front of every store. There was no traffic on the street to worry about. Monday, two o’clock in the afternoon, and the town was deserted.
[1399] “How do you know Hubble’s dead?” Finlay asked me.
So I told him how I knew. He thought about it. He agreed with me.
[1400] “Because he was talking to an investigator?” he said.
I shook my head. Stopped outside the barbershop.
[1401] “No,” I said. “They didn’t know about that. If they had, they’d have got to him much earlier. Thursday at the latest. I figure they made the decision to waste him Friday, about five o’clock. Because you pulled him in with the phone number in Joe’s shoe. They figured he couldn’t be allowed to talk to cops or prison guards. So they set it up with Spivey. But Spivey’s boys blew it, so they tried over again. His wife said he got a call to wait at home today. They were setting him up for a second attempt. Looks like it worked.”
[1402] Finlay nodded slowly.
[1403] “Shit,” he said. “He was the only link we had to exactly what the hell is going on here. You should have hit on him while you had the chance, Reacher.”
[1404] “Thanks, Finlay,” I said. “If I’d known the dead guy was Joe, I’d have hit on him so hard, you’d have heard him yelling all the way over here.”
[1405] He just grunted. We moved over and sat together on the bench under the barbershop window.
[1406] “I asked him what Pluribus was,” I said. “He wouldn’t answer. He said there were ten local people involved in the scam, plus hired help in from the outside when necessary. And he said the scam is vulnerable until something happens on Sunday. Exposed, somehow.”
[1407] “What happens on Sunday?” Finlay asked.
[1408] “He didn’t tell me,” I said.
[1409] “And you didn’t press him?” he asked.
[1410] “I wasn’t very interested,” I said. “I told you that.”
[1411] “And he gave you no idea what the scam is all about?” he asked.
