Committed (17 page)

The man left Nick alone in the garage and walked toward the house. He returned a minute later, spinning a pair of keys on a keyring around his finger. “Get a load of this,” the old man said. He opened the driver’s door of the Corvette and took a seat behind the wheel.

The starter cranked, followed by the thunderous exhaust of the car. Nick looked in at the old man behind the wheel—he had a look of pride all across his face. The car roared twice when the man tapped the gas. Then he clicked it off and used the car’s door to pull himself back out.

Nick whistled. “Sounds like she’s got some power.”

“Oh yeah, this thing will leave two black stripes a mile long if you stay on the gas.” The man swung the driver’s door closed and walked toward Nick, who was standing at the Corvette’s front. “Ready to go have a look at the boat?” the old man asked.

“Nah,” Nick said. He pulled his gun from his waistline and fired twice into the old man’s chest.

The man dropped to his knees. Nick looked around, spotting no one. He reached into his pocket, pulled out his garrote, and wrapped it around the man’s neck. He used the garrote’s handles to drag the man back into the garage. Nick positioned the man facedown on the floor, mounted his back, and yanked back on the handles with all he had until the old man was dead. Nick pulled off the garrote and rushed to the open garage door to look around. No one was in sight anywhere—the gunshots had gone unnoticed.

Nick took a seat behind the wheel of the Corvette. The old man had left the keys in the ignition. Nick fired up the motor and pulled the vehicle from the garage and off to the side of the driveway. He shut it off, stepped out, and walked to the truck. After pulling the truck into the garage and closing the door, Nick hopped back into the Corvette and pulled out from the driveway. He traveled back toward the freeway, the way he’d come. A mile and a half up the road, he spotted Molly walking toward him. Nick stopped alongside her and lowered his window.

“Hey baby, need a lift?” he asked.

Molly stopped walking and looked over at him. She crossed the street and leaned into his window with a smile on her face. “Didn’t anyone ever tell you to not pick up hitchhikers?” she asked.

“I like to live dangerous,” Nick said.

“What if I’m some deranged killer?” she asked.

“What if
I
am?” he asked.

Molly reached in and grabbed Nick by the back of the head, and the two shared a kiss.

“I’m sorry for everything I said,” Molly said. “I didn’t mean any of it. I was just being emotional. Can you forgive me?”

“I forgive you. Now, get in,” Nick said.

Molly rounded the car and got in on the passenger side.

We asked Lieutenant Hampton what he could do about finding someone in the boy’s family that we could turn him over to—as far as I heard a few minutes prior, they were still looking. The lieutenant had called someone from child services to attend to the boy, which left a bad feeling in my gut—I didn’t like the thought of the boy possibly spending the next fourteen or fifteen years in the foster system if a family member didn’t claim him. Beth had been sitting with the boy in the back of Agent Gents and Makara’s fed-issued cruiser, which they’d pulled up nearer the house. The last time I’d walked over to them, he seemed to be responding to Beth as she tried to talk to him.

I stood on the porch of the home with Bill and Scott.

“Again, birds are in the air,” Scott said. “The vehicle make, model, and description has been circulated. No sightings so far.”

“This is becoming a habit,” Bill said.

“Yeah, one I’d like to break,” I said. “Neither of you two saw anything out of the ordinary inside of the house?”

“Nothing that was really ringing a bell,” Bill said. “The same forensics guys from Omaha should be here any minute. There’s a resident agency in Sioux Falls, but seeing as how the Omaha guys have been working the rest of the investigation, I figured it better to leave this to them. They’re going to give the place a good once-over before the bodies and scene are handed off to the locals. I’m assuming they’ll be headed off to the superstore after that to deal with the RV.”

I called for Gents and Makara, who were speaking with some of the officers that had arrived. The pair walked up.

“See anything that resembled a clue as to where these two were headed in that RV when you guys were over there?” I asked.

Makara shook his head. “Nothing there, aside from two bodies being stuffed into the storage compartments and the firearms. Everything else looked like it belonged to the owners. If I had to guess, the firearms probably belonged to a prior victim. We’ll run the numbers on all of them either way.”

“Okay. Let’s have a quick little look around inside until those forensics guys get here,” I said.

“It should just be a few minutes or so,” Gents said. “I just spoke with Mike Halsey. He’s the lead on the forensics team that has been on the last few scenes. He said they were close.”

“All right.” I turned toward the front door.

Bill, Scott, and I walked into the house, and I heard Agents Gents and Makara climbing the front porch and entering behind us.

“Spread out. Let’s find something,” I said.

Scott disappeared up the steps to the second floor, and Agents Makara and Gents followed him. Bill went left into the living room. I walked forward to the kitchen area. The knife I’d seen upstairs had to have come from the house.

I stopped at the hallway’s end and looked into the kitchen area. Directly before me was a cream-colored wall with a single window looking back into the trees behind the home—a small kitchen table and four chairs stood below the window. To the right of the kitchen set was a patio door leading out to a small wooden deck. Farther right was a pair of open doors leading to what I assumed to be the bathroom and laundry room Beth had cleared earlier. I looked left into the kitchen itself taking up the far corner of the room. A small island sat in the center of the room. To the left of the island were the refrigerator and an opening leading out into the dining room. The cabinets of the kitchen were all white—they were broken up above the kitchen sink with another window looking out to the back of the property. I quickly looked over the items sitting on the countertops—a coffee maker and some miscellaneous coffees in bags sitting beside it. My line of sight continued to the right, past the kitchen sink and a cookie jar. I spotted a knife block near the edge of the counter nearest the kitchen table set. I walked to it and confirmed a single knife missing. Between where the cabinets ended and the window above the kitchen table began was a green, corded telephone hanging on the wall. I looked farther down the cream-colored wall and spotted what looked like a single drop of blood.

I took a few steps back and tried to figure out how the blood could have gotten there. We’d seen the knife still upstairs—no one replaced it. That left someone who had blood on them prior to getting the knife or came back to the area after killing the couple. I stared at the phone.

The sound of movement at my back caught my attention and broke my train of thought. I turned to look. Agents Gents and Makara had come back downstairs and were standing with a pair of guys at the farmhouse’s front door. I recognized both men as members of the Omaha forensics team. Makara walked the two guys to me.

“Forensics is here. Where do we want them first?” Makara asked.

“Well,” I said, “I guess first things first. I’ve seen you guys, what, three times now, and I don’t think I’ve caught your names.”

“Mike Halsey, lead for the Omaha forensics division,” the one on the left said. The man appeared in his late forties from the gray in his hair. He held a plastic box in his right hand and had a pair of white throwaway coveralls draped over his left arm. He set the box down on the wood floor of the house and held out his stubby right arm for a handshake.

I took it. “Agent Hank Rawlings,” I said.

His associate introduced himself as Randy Simmons when I shook his hand. He was a bit thinner and at least ten years younger than Mike.

I waved the pair to follow me to the telephone area, and they did.

I put my back to the kitchen countertop and pointed to the blood. “Looks like we have a drip of blood on the wall there, which seems a bit out of place. We have a knife from the block here upstairs, which is the scene of our bodies.”

“Made a call after the killing, you’re thinking,” Mike said.

“It’s a thought,” I said. “Let’s get the phone here printed. I haven’t touched it.”

“It would be nice if it was digital and could show us the last call made,” Randy said.

“Well, we can get that either way,” I said.

“Okay,” Mike said. He looked at Randy. “Why don’t you get started upstairs, and I’ll dig in here.”

“Sure,” Randy said.

“I’ll lead you there,” Agent Makara said. He walked back toward the front of the house with Randy following.

I watched as Mike set his coveralls and box down on the kitchen table. He cracked open the box’s top, pulled out a pair of latex gloves, and put them on. “We’re going to have to confirm that we’re looking at blood here first. If I dust above it, we’ll get some contamination.”

“Sure,” I said.

Bill and Scott walked into the kitchen. “Something going on with the phone?” Scott asked.

“The couple might have made a call,” I said. “We have a blood drip over here. Thinking it came after the murders.”

“No screen on the phone?” Bill asked.

“We haven’t pulled it off the receiver yet, but I’m betting not,” I said. “The phone looks like it’s from the nineteen eighties, maybe older.”

“Let me call back to the office and see if we can get someone on outbound phone records from here,” Scott said. He pulled his phone from his pocket.

Bill came and stood beside me at the counter. We watched Mike go about photographing the blood drip before he set his camera down and pulled a couple items from his box.

Beside me, Bill was looking at his watch every minute or so. He glanced over at me. “We’re burning time.”

I didn’t have a response for him.

“I’m going to go see if we got anything from upstairs.” Bill left my side and walked toward the front door and staircase.

I continued to watch Mike as he confirmed that the substance was indeed blood and collected a sample. He first placed some of the wet blood in a separate container and then cut out the section of wall containing the drip and placed it in another evidence container. The process took him the better part of ten minutes.

“On to the phone,” Mike said. He pulled a brush and some dusting powder from the box and stepped to the phone. He unscrewed the lid on the dusting-powder container and dipped the brush inside. “You said you didn’t touch it?”

“Correct,” I said.

Mike started sprinkling the dust onto the receiver from the brush.

I pulled up the sleeve on my suit jacket and looked at my watch. We had another two hours of daylight before we’d have to suspend the search from our air support. Bill was right—we were burning time.

“It’s clean,” Mike said.

I pulled my sleeve back down over my watch and looked at him. “Clean?”

“Wiped down. Not a single print on the receiver or base. Hold on, people always forget to wipe down the buttons.” He pulled the phone from the receiver and stared at it. He held it up toward me. “This thing is a dinosaur,” he said.

I stared at the yellowed plastic rotary dial attached to the receiver.

“I can probably get prints from between the holes on the dial. Um, as far as getting last number called, I think you can still redial from a rotary with a four digit code.”

“Does it give you the number that was dialed or put you directly through?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Probably directly through like a normal redial would do.”

I shook my head. “I don’t think we want to make a direct call to whoever they did, but let me double check,” I said.

I walked from the kitchen and out the front door to Scott standing on the porch. He clicked off from his phone call and slipped his cell phone back into his pocket. “The twins are on it. We should have the records soon,” he said.

“Okay. I just wanted to let you know that if needed, we could redial from the phone, but that’s going to alert whoever they called.”

“We don’t want to do that. This might be an opportunity. Let’s just see who the number belongs to,” Scott said. “The twins are putting a rush on it.”

“Okay.”

I noticed a blue sedan parked in the gravel driveway behind Agents Gents and Makara’s cruiser that Beth and the boy, Mark, had been in. A woman dressed in business casual was standing and talking with Beth at the trunk of the agents’ car. She looked like someone from social services. I walked down the front steps of the porch and headed over.

Mike and Randy from the forensics team walked from the front of the house. Both men had blood on their coveralls from helping the coroner to remove the bodies from the home.

“Are we ready to head over to the RV at the store?” Mike asked. “The coroner said he’d meet us there.”

“Yeah, I think we’re just about set,” I said.

“All right, we’ll see you guys over there.” Mike headed for his car.

I walked across the front yard to Beth, standing at the side of Agents Gents and Makara’s car.

“Done in the house?” Agent Gents asked.

“Looks like it, yeah. Bill and Scott?” I asked.

“They walked the path into the other neighborhood to get their car,” Beth said. “They’re going to meet us back at the RV.”

“Okay,” I said. “Did anyone talk to the locals here and tell them we’re leaving the scene to them?” I asked.

“I did,” Makara said. “I don’t know what else they plan on doing with it other than closing it up, but Lieutenant Hampton said he’d handle it.”

“Sure,” I said.

Over at his car, Mike pulled off his coveralls and jammed them into a plastic bag. Then he loaded it into his trunk and sat behind the wheel.

“Do you guys mind giving Agent Harper and me a lift back over to the store?” I asked.

“Not at all. Hop in,” Makara said.