The Killing Vision (2 page)

Wade reached up to scratch underneath his cap. 
“Probably this weekend.  Joel’s gonna help.”

Derek looked at Joel and smiled.  “Cool.”

“Derek!” came a voice from the side door of the
house. 

Derek blew out a breath.  “Guess I’d better go.”

Before he could hit the open door, Wade’s wife
appeared in the driveway.  Marla’s soft blonde hair was loose and flying about
her head.  Even so, Joel still thought she was beautiful.  He always had.  It
was her eyes.  They were dark and haunted, as though she had endured a great
amount of tragedy.  But if she had, it had not touched her loveliness.  It was
almost as if the more she had been tortured, the more beautiful she had become,
as if God were overcompensating for her pain.  Joel had never touched her, so
he wasn’t sure if what he believed was true, but he had never failed to be awed
in her presence.

This morning, however, anger flashed in her eyes. 
“Derek!”

Derek slunk out of the barn toward her.  “I’m
coming.  Jesus.”

“You don’t even have your shirt and shoes on. 
You’re gonna be late for work!”  Derek was working in town this summer at Dairy
Queen, and Joel wondered if the boy was as lazy at work as he seemed to be at
home.  Marla glanced at Joel and nodded in greeting.

“Morning, Marla,” he said as she slipped out of
sight.

“Marla, lay off the boy for five minutes,” Wade
called after her.  “Goddammit.”

Joel looked at his watch again.  “We’ve gotta go.”

* * *

On the short drive into town, passing the plows
working desperately in the fields before the rain came, Joel turned down the
radio and took a quick glance at his brother.  Wade sat on the passenger side,
staring out at the passing land, chewing his thumbnail.  “So, what did Marla
say?” Joel asked.

“About what?”

“The car.”

“Oh.”  Even though the day was dark, Wade was
wearing sunglasses, which made it impossible for Joel to read his eyes when he
said, “She didn’t put up much of a fight.”

Joel pondered this for a moment, then turned his
attention back to the road.  “They found that girl’s body.”

“Who?”

“You know.  The McElvoy girl.  The one that’s been
missing so long.”

Wade nodded.  “I’d forgot about her.”

“They said her throat had been cut.”

Beside him, Wade said, “Turn up the radio.”

* * *

As they walked through the front door of the cable
office, Betsy, the office manager, stood behind the counter with her arms
crossed, several files in one hand.  “Well,” she said, “if it isn’t the Roberts
boys.”  Betsy was good at intimidating people, which was one reason she was
successful in her job; in the two years since she had started, overdue accounts
were down by sixty percent and employee absenteeism was almost nil.  “I was
wondering about you two,” she said, tossing her blonde hair, which really
meant,
You’re late. 
 “Got several orders for you in the box,” she
said.  “The other guys are already out.”  She headed off toward her office.

At the other end of the service counter, Rhonda
Rose, the billing clerk, suppressed a snicker.  All the guys in the office
thought Rhonda was hot.  Though only a couple of years out of high school, she
possessed the confidence and aloofness of someone much older, someone who was
aware of her sensuality but not driven by it.  Wade talked about her sometimes,
especially after he had had a few beers, going into detail about what the two
of them would do in his bed if Marla wasn’t around.

“You guys are in trouble,” Rhonda said, stretching
out the last word as if singing it.

Wade sauntered to the counter and leaned over it,
propped on one elbow.  “Just how much trouble are we in?” he asked, grinning.

She smiled back at him.  “Plenty.”

“Then you may have to punish me,” he said.  “Joel’s
on his own.”

Rhonda rolled her eyes.  “Whatever.”

Outside, as they climbed back in the truck with
their work orders, Wade whistled through his teeth.  “God
damn
, she’s
sexy.  Man, wouldn’t you like to have some of that?”

Joel looked away, feeling his face turn hot.  “She’s
pretty.”

Wade shook his head.  “Pretty.  Yeah.”  He slugged
Joel in the arm.  “You fuckin’ faggot.  You could probably go out with her if
you wanted to.”

Joel snorted.  “Right.  I’m every woman’s dream
date.”

“You could clean up a little better, you know.  Get
a decent haircut.  Shave off that fuckin’ goatee.”  He grabbed Joel’s dark
whiskers and tugged.  Joel shoved Wade’s arm away, catching a fragment of
thought from Wade’s head.

(fat ugly)

Joel started the truck and pulled out of the parking
lot.  He hated Wade when he got on these personal trainer kicks.  It was bad
enough knowing how unattractive you were without having your own brother
reiterate it.  Besides, Joel knew better than to try to get involved with
anyone; he understood that when he touched someone, when he was able
see
them,
they ceased to be appealing to him.  There was something both sickening and
frightening about being in another person’s head.  But of course, that was not
anything he could tell Wade.

* * *

8:23 PM

Lieutenant Mike Halloran was standing in the city
hospital morgue, watching with sickening fascination as the county medical
examiner unzipped the black bag containing what remained of Sarah Jo McElvoy. 
Her face, the color of rotten egg yolk, was framed with matted, dirty blonde
hair that brushed against the gaping, puckered tear in her throat.  One eye was
gone, its socket sunken and shriveled; the other gazed blankly at the ceiling,
white and clouded.  Her lips hung open to reveal a mouth blackened inside with
river silt.  But it was the stench that got him, the smell of putrefying flesh
and the fishy smell of the river.  The smell of death.

Halloran pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and
covered his nose and mouth.  He glanced across the table at his partner,
Detective John Chapman, a big strapping guy with short red hair and freckled
skin.  Together the two of them made up the tiny investigations unit of the
Cedar Hill police department.  Right now Chapman looked pale and grim as he
watched the preparations for the autopsy. 

The examiner, Carl Scott, whom everyone referred to
as “Scotty,” was a grizzled little butterball with a gray mustache, and
Halloran had dealt with him often. Scotty was cutting away the remnants of
Sarah Jo’s t-shirt, purple with a pink cat on it, what she had been wearing
when she disappeared.  He pulled the cloth back to reveal the blotchy skin
beneath.  “She’s quite bruised up,” he said.  He turned and scribbled some
notes on a pad beside the table.  “Lots of decay.”

Halloran looked away.  “Well, she’s probably been
dead three months, Scotty.”

The examiner looked at him over the rims of his
glasses.  “Not that long.”

“You sure?”

“Yep.”  He continued to strip away the cloth,
revealing Sarah Jo’s pitiful, barely developed breasts.  “If she had, she’d
look worse than this.”

“How long, then, you think?” asked Halloran.

Scotty shrugged.  “A few days.  Hard to say.”

Below the scraps of the t-shirt, Sarah Jo was
naked.  When the body had been pulled from the river, there was no sign of her
jeans or underwear.  Her vulva was purple and swollen, sagging open.  Scotty
was bent over her now, probing with his instruments and speaking into a
ceiling-mounted microphone attached to a recording device.  “Some bruising and
tearing around the vaginal opening,” he announced.  “Some massive trauma to the
whole area.”  He placed his scalpel gently on the side of the table.  “She was
raped,” he said without emotion.  “Very violently.”

Halloran looked from Scotty to the body splayed out
before them.  He pressed the handkerchief tighter across his nose and blew out
a disgusted breath.  He had had all he could stand.  He motioned to Chapman. 
“Let’s get out of here,” he said.  “You call us if you find anything.”

Scotty didn’t look up.  “Will do.”

Outside, the evening had descended with suddenness,
and the rain that had threatened all day pelted the sidewalks.  Halloran and
Chapman trotted to the unmarked sedan and slid inside.  The air in the car was
hot and thick.  Halloran started the engine and put the air conditioner on full
blast.  They both sat there, drained, listening to the rain hammer the roof.

“I hate that,” Chapman said, not looking at him.  “I
figured she’d been raped.”

Halloran nodded.  He’d expected it, too.  More often
than not, young teenagers who disappeared fell victim to sexual predators who
regarded them as living toys to be tortured and discarded.  He had hoped that
Cedar Hill wasn’t harboring such a beast.  Even in the early stages, when it
was still a missing persons case, he had told himself that that kind of thing
didn’t exist out here, not in such a small community. 

Two days after Sarah Jo’s disappearance, Halloran
and Chapman were working with other law enforcement agencies (including the
Lake County sheriff’s department and the FBI) and volunteers, to launch a
massive search operation.  In addition to combing the residential and
commercial districts, they had questioned a couple dozen or so kids on the
Cedar Hill College campus, searched every building.  It had taken weeks.  Hardly
any of the students at the college were commuters; most either lived in town or
in the one dormitory.  The college was a private school, which meant it was
expensive, and most of these kids were from upscale families in this part of
the state.  The idea that a student (or anyone else for that matter) could have
committed such an atrocious act sickened Halloran beyond words.

After a while Sarah Jo had melted into the list of
missing and runaway teens, her face plastered on posters in bus stations and
truck stops across the country along with countless others.

Beside him, Chapman continued to stare at the
rain-washed windshield.  Halloran knew Chapman had a daughter of his own, a
cute little bug about two, and he wondered if he was thinking about her now, imagining
her broken, lifeless body lying on a stainless steel table under the cold
lights of the morgue.  Halloran reached over and slapped him on the thigh. 
“Let’s go home.”

* * *

By the time Halloran reached his apartment building,
the storm had intensified.  Streaks of lightning illuminated the sky as the
fireworks had the night before.  Just inside the foyer, he wriggled out of his
sopping sports jacket and grabbed his mail from the box, then trudged up the
stairs toward home. 

Mel was meowing on the other side of the door before
the key was even in the lock.  “Hey, you stupid cat,” Halloran said, scooping
him up.  “Past dinner time, huh?”  He threw his coat and the mail onto the
couch and carried Mel into the kitchen, setting him on the counter.  The overhead
fluorescent flickered to life and Halloran pulled a can of 9 Lives from the
cabinet.  Mrs. Donovan, his cleaning lady, had stocked up at the grocery today,
but she’d apparently forgotten to feed the cat.  Mel began to purr, rubbing
against Halloran’s arm, then greedily dived into his dinner. 

There were some Mexican leftovers in the
refrigerator from Tuesday, but he didn’t think he could stomach that tonight. 
Nothing really sounded appealing.  He opened a beer and swallowed a third of it
in one drink, then pulled a cigarette from the pack in his shirt pocket.

He loosened his tie as he shuffled down the hall,
the unlit cigarette dangling from his lips.  In the dark bedroom, he stepped
out of his shoes and stretched out on the bed, wriggling his toes.  He reached
for his lighter and lit his cigarette.  What a terrible twenty-four hours this
had been.

He tried to imagine Chapman at home with his wife
and kid across town.  There he was at thirty with everything Halloran still
wanted at forty.  A family.  A house.  Someone to come home to. Chapman had
joined the department right after high school.  His father had been a cop in a
neighboring county, so Chapman had practically grown up in the force.  It had
seemed to be his destiny.

Halloran on the other hand had knocked about for a
couple of years after graduating from college, first working as a manager for a
firm that owned several convenience stores before joining the police department
in Cedar Hill.  He’d truly enjoyed most of the work he did as a cop, though he
had to admit there were some rough moments.  He had been shot at, spat on,
kicked, slapped, punched, and called everything imaginable.  After a couple of
years he had been promoted to detective.  His first partner was a mean
son-of-a-bitch named Logan who retired a year later and was replaced with Mark
Miller.  Miller was a guy just a couple of years older than Halloran, and the
two of them had formed an instant bond; in fact, they often hung out together
outside work, even taking a couple of weekend fishing trips over at the lakes. 
But last year Miller had decided to move out west—big-sky country. Halloran,
now a lieutenant, was placed in charge of investigations and Chapman had been
brought up from the ranks to fill his old slot.  Although they got along well,
Chapman wasn’t the kind of guy to hang around after quitting time.  Chapman had
his little family to go home to, and he wasn’t interested in kicking back for
an after-work beer or taking off for a long weekend.  Marriage certainly changed
things, and in spite of his loneliness sometimes, Halloran was grateful to not
have that baggage on him.