Thicker Than Blood - The Complete Andrew Z. Thomas Trilogy (44 page)

Violet did not speculate or theorize. With the investigation only in its infancy it wasn’t useful to do so. All she knew was that a family of four had been slain in that brick ranch forty yards down the street. Coupled with the other murders—the clerk knifed to death in a Rocky Mount Wal-Mart and the woman hanged from the
Bodie
Island Lighthouse—this had been one of the bloodiest weeks in North Carolina since the Civil War.
   

As she opened the door and stepped out into the autumn evening she couldn’t help thinking,
Most investigators never encounter anything like this
. And then:
You are not equipped to handle it
.

Her legs gave out and she leaned against the Jeep.

Closing her eyes, she took a long calming breath, whispered a prayer, and started walking toward the flashing blue lights.

The perimeter of the
Worthingtons
’ half-acre lot had already been roped off with crime scene tape. Violet counted three police cruisers, an ambulance, a van, and two unmarked cars parked along the curb across the street.

A uniformed patrolman stood at the foot of the driveway, guarding the perimeter.

"Hi, Reuben," she said.

"Viking?
You
were on-call for this one?"

"Yep."

"Lucky you. That house next door is where we had the kidnapping on Monday. These are the neighbors we could never get to answer the door or the phone."

"You’re kidding me. You were first car?"

"No, Bruce was. He’s over talking to Barry."

Violet stepped under the tape and walked down the driveway toward her sergeant, a wide massive man with the girth of an oak tree and a voice as deep as her daddy’s. He was talking to a patrolman when she walked up between them.

"Hey, guys."

Her sergeant looked down at her and shook his head.

"You sure caught it this time, Viking," he said as though it were her fault. "I’m gonna go talk with Chip and the boys. Bruce can tell you what you got."

"You been in yet, Barry?" she asked.

"No. We just got the search warrant. Bobby’s executing it right now."

"CSI ready to start videotaping?"

"I think so."

"Would you ask them to hold off a sec? After I talk with Bruce, I’d like to do a quick walkthrough."

Sgt. Mullins gazed down at her for a moment. He rarely smiled. Standing under his undecipherable scowl always made her feel eight years old again. She knew exactly what he was thinking because she’d thought it too: she was incapable of handling this.

As Sgt. Mullins lumbered off toward the white-jacketed CSI techs, Violet glanced over her shoulder at a woman who stood weeping in the street at the edge of the
Worthingtons
’ lawn.

She turned back to Bruce.

He was a year younger than Violet, just a year out of the academy on uniformed patrol. They’d attended the same high school though they hadn’t known each other then. But Violet remembered him. He looked much the same—tall, slender, slightly
bugeyed
, with a fearful nervous mien.

She pulled a notepad and pencil from her purse as Bruce stared at the woman crying in the street.

"Bruce?" His large eyes came to Violet. "You all right?" Bruce took a deep breath. "Tell me what I got." They were standing by the
Worthingtons
’ minivan and Bruce leaned against the back hatch. "No, Bruce, don’t."

He stood back up, pointed toward the street, said, "That woman up there crying—name’s Brenda Moorefield. She lives three houses down. Earlier this afternoon—"

"’Bout what time?"

"Between three-thirty and four. She came over and knocked on the
Worthingtons
’ door. Apparently their children play together, and Mrs. Moorefield hadn’t seen the Worthington kids in two days. She had a key to the house and since their cars were in the driveway but they weren’t answering the phone or getting the mail, she decided to go in.

"She was halfway through the foyer when she smelled them. Came right out, called nine-one-one. I arrived a little after five.

"You’ve got one boy under the breakfast table in the kitchen. The other kid’s in his bed. I didn’t see any blood near the children. Zach and Theresa Worthington are in their bed…it’s bad. I couldn’t stay in that room very long, Vi. I’m sorry, I just—"

"It’s okay, Bruce. Not your job. What are the kids’ names?"

"Hank and Ben. They were eleven and seven. Ben’s the one under the table."

"Okay, mobile command should be here any minute. Reuben’s got the perimeter. I want you to go over and calm Mrs. Moorefield down. I’m gonna go in, see what I got before CSI starts taping. I’d like to talk with Mrs. Moorefield while they’re doing their thing, so make sure she doesn’t leave."

As Bruce headed back up the driveway, Violet rubbed her arms. She’d left her Barbour coat in the fellowship hall at church and a chilly breeze was blowing in off the lake, dislodging dead leaves from the enormous oaks in the front yard.

She took a moment to gather herself, then started toward the front porch where a gaggle of noisy lawmen awaited her on the steps. They intimidated her but she could handle them.

What troubled her more was what waited for her inside the house.

22

VIOLET kicked off her heels and slipped her tiny feet into the cloth bootees. Then she squeezed her hands into a pair of latex gloves and stood up.

Standing by the
Worthingtons
’ front door, the officer in charge of the scribe list wrote down her name and time of entry. Since this would be a cursory walkthrough she was going in alone. A crime scene is a delicate ecosystem and the more people come and go, the more evidence they disturb.

"I’ll be quick, guys," she said.

"Hey, Viking, want some Vicks?" one of the techs asked her. "From what Bruce says, they’re pretty juicy in there."

"No, I’ll be fine."

Sgt. Mullins said, "I’ve called Rick and Don. They’re gonna come out first thing in the morning."

"Good. That’ll move things along. We can each take a room."

Armed only with a flashlight, a notepad, and a pencil, Vi entered the home of Zach, Theresa, Hank, and Ben Worthington and closed the door behind her. Standing in the foyer, she noted two sounds: the rush of central heating and the voices of the lawmen standing on the front porch. It felt good to be out of the cold though she knew the warm air would only magnify the smell.

The house was dark, in the exact condition Bruce had found it.

Vi walked into the dining room. She hadn’t breathed yet and her eyes made slow progress adjusting to the darkness. At the dining room table she stopped, letting form and detail vivify in the shadows.

Then she took an unflinching breath.
  

Sweet. Rich. Rot.

Some putrid aberration of macaroni and cheese.

So keen she could taste it.

She sniffed again, letting the scent of decay engulf her. During her second month in Criminal Investigations Division she’d caught her first suicide—two summers ago on a sweltering July afternoon, a seventy-four-year-old man suffering with Alzheimer’s had put a twelve gauge under his chin. He was found a week later in a small trailer without air-conditioning. Though his smell was horrific, she discovered surprisingly that she couldn’t shun it, that she would accept, possibly embrace that awful stench out of reverence and compassion for her dead. The visceral intimacy of it inexplicably bound her first to the victim, then to the decoding of their murder.

A bright waning moon was rising over Lake Norman, its light spilling across the linoleum floor of the
Worthingtons
’ kitchen.

When Vi saw the little boy under the breakfast table something twitched inside of her. She walked into the moonlit kitchen, knelt down by the table, and brushed her bangs out of her eyes. Turning on the flashlight, she shined it in the boy’s face, then down the length of his small body. There were no visible ligature marks or bruises but his head rested awkwardly on the floor.

Broken neck
.

The flashlight beam passed slowly down his right arm and stopped at his hand, the fingers drawn into a tight fist. She shined the beam onto his other hand. Those fingers were loose, clutching what looked like a battery.

Vi walked to the backdoor and peered through glass panes into the moony backyard, taking in the oak, its tree house, the rope swing, the pier, the lake. Cutting off the flashlight, she walked back through the dining room into the den, her eyes now where she wanted them, accustomed to the shadows. She could’ve turned on the lights but she needed to encounter the house as
he
had encountered it.

The smell sharpened in the den. She stopped and looked down at a bowl of popcorn on the floor. A videotape case sat empty on top of the television. Movie night. She walked over, glanced at the title:
Where the Red Fern Grows.

When the telephone rang, Vi drew a sudden breath.

The answering machine picked up after two rings: "This is Theresa."

"Zack, too."

"Hank!"

"And Ben!"

Familial laughter.

A boy’s voice continued: "We aren’t here. Leave a message if you want."

After the beep: "Hey ya’ll. It’s Janet. Hadn’t heard from you yet about next weekend, so I’m just calling to bug
ya
. Really hope you can make it. Jack and Susie send their love. Talk to you soon."

The silence resumed.

Stepping into the hallway, Vi glanced in the bathroom, then continued to the doorway of the older boy’s room. She saw Hank Worthington in bed under the covers. He only looked asleep and she thought,
This house would feel so normal if you couldn’t smell the death.

At the end of the hall, the door to Zach and Theresa’s bedroom stood wide open. Vi approached carefully, as though she might wake them, pulse racing, a pounding in the side of her neck.

She did not deny or curse the fear. Squatting down, she prayed,
I don’t feel You in this house. Go with me into that bedroom.
She rose, felt just as alone, but walked on until she stood in the threshold of the master bedroom, eyes watering from the smell.

Vi had no tricks for steeling herself up to see innocence eviscerated. It punched the wind out of you and then you carried on or you quit. Sgt. Mullins had told her that early on. He’d been right.
      

With the tip of her pencil, she flicked the light switch.

The room shrieked at her and she let slip a bated whimper. Her stomach fluttered as she took three steps forward and looked straight into the worst of it.

Mr. and Mrs. Worthington stared back at her, despoiled of any scintilla of dignity.

Vi jotted on her notepad, relieved to look away.

When she finished she walked back down the hall into the foyer and opened the front door.

It felt so good to breathe fresh air again. She wanted to wash her hands for an hour.

As she stepped onto the front porch and pulled the door closed after her, she felt Sgt. Mullins and the CSI techs studying her, reading the abhorrence on her face, reflecting it in their own.

"The parents are torn up," she said to everyone. "May be a ritual-type thing. And the boy under the table is holding something in his right hand."

One of the techs said, "You know Andrew Thomas used to live just across the lake. Bet you ten beers this was him. He’s come back out of hiding. Wanted to do it with a flourish."

As Vi stepped across the sidewalk into the grass, she saw a local news van parking in the cul-de-sac.

The patrolman stood in the street with his arm around Brenda Moorefield and as Vi walked toward them, cold again, she called her husband and told him not to wait up.

23

ON the day he planned to interview Andrew Thomas, Horace Boone woke to the frozen pitiless darkness of his singlewide shithole on the outskirts of Haines Junction. The kerosene heater had gone out again during the night and despite five layers of quilts and blankets he lay on the mattress on the floor, shivering uncontrollably. Having woken cold for the last two weeks he was beginning to realize that he would not survive a Yukon winter in this rundown shelter, when the temperature fell to minus forty and the wind howled through the thin walls.