Too Far Gone (16 page)

She blinked her eyes slowly, stunned. She knew, lying there, unsure whether she was seriously injured, that Fugate or Sibby must have been hiding in the pantry or broom closet, and she cursed herself for not looking inside them. She had driven that person to the kitchen, where there was no escape without the back door key, so they had shut the basement door and had hidden in one of the tiny spaces.

Lying there dazed, Alexa distinctly heard the skeleton key turning—the door into the basement being locked.

She listened to footsteps moving out of the kitchen and down the hallway. When the front door slammed shut, it sounded a million miles away.

Alexa rolled her head and saw the flashlight a few feet away from her, illuminating a circle of brick wall next to the base of an old furnace. Flies swarmed in the beam. There was an odor of blood and decomposition down here that wasn't coming from a pile of shrimp.

Lying still for a few seconds taking inventory, Alexa moved her arm at the shoulder, then the elbow, the wrist, and finished by wiggling her fingers and making a fist. It was painful, but nothing was broken except her self-respect.

She sat up slowly, wincing. Her head was sore, bruised, but not wet, so she wasn't bleeding. Her hip felt numb and she knew that she was going to be bruised from her ankle to her shoulder.

Alexa crawled over to the flashlight, and picking it up, she swung the circle of light around to locate her handgun, illuminating as she did a shelf where ancient spiderwebs covered dust-caked jars of canned fruit and pickles so old the tin lids were painted with the white powder of oxidation.

She shifted the light and saw a single, unlaced white orthopedic shoe with a brick-colored sole, and beyond it the foot it belonged to, looking like an overstuffed sausage. The skin on the leg looked like sun-dried earth. The other shoe was still on its owner's other foot.

Alexa steeled herself before raising the circle of light.

A female corpse sat on the concrete floor, her shoulders against the wall, legs splayed open. Her open left hand rested beside her leg as though positioned to catch a flipped coin. Her right hand gripped an unusually large aluminum meat-tenderizing hammer that was caked with dried blood, bone chips, hairs, and blackened brain tissue.

Alexa had seen all manner of dead bodies in various stages of mutilation and decomposition, but nothing more horrific than what she was sharing the small basement with.

She raised the beam, whimpered involuntarily, as tears filled her eyes.

The woman's head had been smashed in with such force that the top of her skull was indented in the way of a rotten rubber doll's head that some child had pushed her thumbs into and peeled open like an orange. The froglike eyes appeared to be coming out of her cheeks. The open mouth was so completely filled with blackened tongue and animated larvae that the jaw was resting against her chest.

Alexa scooted back against the furnace and, using it for support, made it to her feet.

Based on the shoes, Alexa assumed that this horror was what remained of Dorothy Fugate, since the alternative was that the nurse had gone crazy and beat Sibby to death with a meat hammer, which seemed highly unlikely. Although why Sibby would have positioned the corpse that way was a mystery best left to psychiatrists. Maybe it was some sort of humor springing from an insane brain.

Using the flashlight, Alexa located and tugged on the string to turn on the overhead bulb. Flies reacting to the sudden light filled the room like a cloud. Alexa located her gun and stuck it into her purse's holster compartment.

Alexa was trembling. She wanted only to get out of there, into breathable air, away from the corpse. She heard a noise and realized that it was the sound of her own whimpering as she moved as quickly as she could up the narrow stairs. Peering into the keyhole, she saw that the key was no longer in the lock. Her flashlight caught a glint of the skeleton key, which had been pushed under the door.

Sibby knocks me down into hell and then is thoughtful enough to leave me the key before she flees the house?

Alexa opened the door and after she slammed it shut she leaned with her back against it and took her first deep breaths since she'd been pitched down the steps. Then she started crying, overwhelmed by the embarrassment of being taken by surprise, the pain of the fall, what she had seen. Her whole body was racked by the sobs as she fought to regain her composure.

Her crying turned into the hysterical laughter of someone who understood, at a whole new level, what a blessing life was. She wiped her eyes and headed for the front door.

         

37

If she had been a smoker, Alexa would have lit up and gone through an entire pack. At the gate, she looked in both directions down the still street. Sibby Danielson was gone.

Reaching into her purse, Alexa found her cell phone.

“Yeah,” Manseur answered.

“I'm at Fugate's.”

“She know where Sibby is?”

“I couldn't ask. She's dead.”

“You sure it's her?”

“Reasonably. I mean, the corpse is a bottle blonde, and I don't have the slightest idea what Sibby looks like.”

“How did she die?”

“Somebody played patty-whack on her skull. Best I can tell from looking at her and based on the odor and the insects' labors, she's been dead a few days. But Sibby was here until a few minutes ago.”

“Danielson did it?”

“She didn't type out a confession, but based on the fact that it's pretty clear she's been staying here in the house, and given her track record for anti-social and impulsive behavior, it's a good bet it wasn't the mailman.”

“Don't do anything. I'm on my way.”

“I think I've done quite enough for the time being,” Alexa said after she hung up.

It appeared to Alexa that Sibby Danielson had killed her jailer and then stayed in the house. Maybe, Alexa thought, the woman hadn't had any place to go. Most people, even insane ones, would have left the scene of their crime before now, especially considering the smell.

Alexa decided that while she was waiting for Manseur, she would take a look around and see what she could discover about Sibby. She was no longer worried about not having a search warrant to enter—the odor of decaying flesh wafting through the open front door had given her enough probable cause. Manseur could collect evidence since it was a homicide.

The pill bottles that had been with the steel box on the bed were gone, but the box was where it had been earlier. Had Sibby stopped escaping long enough to pick up the bottles because she needed to take the medication? If she'd been medicated, would she have killed Fugate?

In the drawer in Fugate's bedside table, Alexa found a polished wooden box with delicate ivory inlay work on its lid, which she opened, to discover a stack of snapshots. She flipped up the prints by their edges so she wouldn't disturb the existing fingerprints, or make new ones. Despite the very heavy makeup and teased blond hair, the buxom Dorothy Fugate had been attractive in her younger years. In a picture probably taken at her graduation from nursing school, she looked more like Jayne Mansfield playing a nurse than a real one. As time had passed she had become somewhat pudgy, and, though still attractive, her features had softened with age, her body rounding itself off. The hellish effigy in the basement bore no resemblance to the woman in the pictures, but Alexa had no doubt this was Sibby Danielson's keeper.

Alexa lifted the mattress and found nothing. There was nothing of interest in the drawers but a few pieces of fairly expensive-looking gold jewelry.

Looking into Fugate's closet, she lifted the fallen nurse uniforms and noticed that one of the wide floorboards wasn't flush. She raised it, to find a secret compartment, within which was a lone wooden cigar box. Inside, there were more pictures. Again being careful in handling them, she flipped through them one by one.

There was a snapshot of a small boy and a young girl attempting to pull a red wagon with an adult laughing man seated in it. Another seemed to be a fairly recent shot of Dorothy and the same grown man, whose hair had turned gray. There was such a marked similarity in their features, Alexa thought he was a relative of Fugate's.

Another picture showed a stern-faced Dorothy standing beside a short male teenager dressed in a military school's uniform who stared blankly at the camera. The young man could be a relative or a friend's child and he might even be the wagon-pulling child. He had a round face, which matched his body, small eyes, and his fat lips added to the smirk he wore.

The other snapshots were of Nurse Fugate with hospital staff or civilians, taken at various times over the years. There were several shots of small groups that included Dorothy, some of which also contained Dr. William LePointe. The next-to-last photo in the stack was of Dorothy in her starched uniform standing alone with LePointe at a party. It was a recent photo, and Alexa thought it might have been her or his going-away party, because there was a partially disassembled slab cake on a table in the background. Dorothy was smiling broadly, while Dr. LePointe looked like he was about to have a tooth extracted instead of his picture taken. In the background, Veronica Malouf was in profile and was obviously talking to someone out of frame.

The final shot was the stunner. It was a Polaroid taken from the hallway into the bedroom through a partly opened door. The image showed a naked man with wet and carefully combed silver hair standing in front of a full-length mirror, obviously admiring his body, which was nothing to write home about. Well, he was naked but for the black socks held up by elastic bands. “Jesus,” Alexa murmured. Dr. William LePointe's appearance, aside from being naked in Dorothy Fugate's bedroom, might be the key to some answers. Unless he had been showering at Fugate's house for some innocent reason, Fugate and LePointe appeared to be more than coworkers.

Alexa put the cigar box on the dresser and replaced the board in the closet floor. She noticed that there was a smudge on the outside of the box, and it appeared to have been made by a bloody finger.

She sat in the living room to wait for Manseur. She had no physical description of Sibby nor any idea how she was dressed.
Let Manseur's locals handle this.
She pictured LePointe's smug face and felt a flush of anger.
Controlled through modern medicine,
she thought to herself.
You really flubbed this one, Doctor. Now Dorothy Fugate is dead and Sibby killed her for some reason we'll probably never know. I guess they'll round her up and send her back to River Run.

When Manseur came in, Alexa led him back to the kitchen, letting him stamp alone down the stairs. She'd already seen more than enough of the basement.

Manseur spent five minutes downstairs, and when he re-emerged he was holding a handkerchief to his nose.

“I'll never get used to that smell,” he declared. “You okay?”

“Sibby shoved me down those stairs,” Alexa snapped. “Can we go outside before I faint?”

“Tell me everything,” he said as they walked.

“I knocked and got no answer. I tried the door and it opened. I smelled decomposition and entered to investigate. While searching for the source of the odor, I heard a door closing. I came into the kitchen, and the basement door was the only one that was closed. While I was shining my light down there, somebody—whom I assume was Sibby—knocked me down the steps.”

“Solid statement. Did you get a good look at her?”

“No. The basement door was between us.”

“How do you know it was her?”

“I'm just assuming it, based on the fact that she's been staying in Nurse Fugate's guest cell,” Alexa said.

“Christ,” Manseur said. “This is a grand mess.”

“There's a cigar box with a bloody fingerprint on it that was under the closet floor in Fugate's room. Sibby might have taken something of hers out of it at some point. There's a metal lockbox on Fugate's bed that was full of tranquilizers and anti-psychotic drugs prescribed to Fugate by Dr. LePointe. Sibby took them when she split.”

“Alexa. Only you saw them, but she took them. Maybe she'll have them with her when we find her and we can use them somehow to question LePointe. We have to be damn sure of something before we accuse him of anything. Very, very damn sure.”

Alexa nodded.

“You're lucky she just pushed you down the stairs,” he said. “That sure isn't the worst she's capable of.”

“Obviously not.”

Manseur said, “Here's the deal. I'll handle this as an anonymous-reported death and keep you out of it. So, how do you think it went down?”

“I think Fugate was attacked in the kitchen probably with that meat hammer and dragged down to the basement, because the kitchen and the stairs were cleaned up. You know, something about Sibby doing this doesn't quite make sense,” Alexa said.

“Since when do crazy people make sense?” he asked.

“Okay, she loses it, beats Fugate to death, then drags the body down there to keep it from being found, which means she knew killing her was wrong. I wouldn't imagine an inner-voice-minding psychopath would bother to mop up. And there's no blood spatter on the walls and ceiling. That would seem to indicate Fugate was first assaulted upstairs, maybe was struck just hard enough to knock her out. Sibby calmly drags her down the stairs, props her against the wall, and then does the real damage with the mallet and puts it in her hand for some reason.”

“Maybe her rage grew as it went on,” Manseur conjectured. “Or she was staging it as a suicide.”

“Funny. To be released by the committee, Sibby had to be cured. Twenty-six years rocking away and suddenly she does this. It doesn't feel right. And why would she mop up?” Alexa asked.

“Maybe she
was
crazy enough to kill her, but cured enough to realize she screwed up and, filled with remorse, cleaned up as best she could. Or maybe she just straightened up because she planned to stay here and didn't want to stumble over the corpse every day when she was cooking her breakfast.”

Alexa was silent.

“So, where's Danielson now? I have to get an updated description of her.” Manseur nodded solemnly. “I'll see if that young woman at the hospital can give me one. You suppose Fugate's tied into the West thing?” he asked. “I didn't see a car in the driveway. Maybe Sibby took her car and went after Gary West?”

Alexa shrugged, which made her shoulder ache. “I only know that the only common thread in both is Dr. LePointe,” she said.

“I'll assign two of my detectives to this scene. Find anything on Fugate's next of kin?”

“I found papers and pictures. If she has kin, I don't know who they are or where. Somebody took the answering machine's outgoing and incoming voice tapes out. The machine showed there were eighteen new messages, though. We need her phone records.”

“I spoke to Jackson Evans about the letter from Gary West. I asked to see it and Evans thanked us for trying to help. I'm not sure how to handle it to get a look at the letter. He's made it clear the case is closed.”

“You could push it,” Alexa said.

“How?”

“You'd have to bring in this murder.”

“Not unless I have cause,” Manseur said. “I don't think this is enough as it stands.”

“Maybe when you process this place, you'll get something. Check the toilet for prints. I think a man was here recently. He might have left something of himself. Fingerprint, DNA in the bowl.”

“I'll tell Cooley to check.”

“Come take a look at something I found,” she said, leading Manseur to the cigar box. Carefully she sifted through the pictures until she got to the money shot of LePointe.

He whistled softly. “I could have gone the rest of my life without seeing that. I think I should take that one out.”

“Send it to
Playgirl
magazine,” Alexa said. “It's evidence.”

“Maybe. I'm not sure of anything other than the doctor's obvious suntan deficiency,” Manseur said.

“I'll figure it out.” Alexa picked up her purse, wincing. “First thing I'm going to do is run by the hotel and take a hot shower and change clothes. Then I'm going to have a talk with Casey West.”

“Remember that the letter means it's not a kidnapping,” Manseur reminded her, shrugging.

“Even if Gary West did send LePointe a letter, it doesn't mean he wasn't abducted after that. Gary West was the victim of foul play. Only question is who's behind it and what the reason was. Maybe West will show up, but he'll have a bad knot on his head and hopefully he'll tell us what happened and who abducted him.”

“This is your field, but if he knows who abducted him, will they let him live?”

“That's not how it normally goes, unless the abductor used a third party, or Gary has a reason
not
to tell anybody. I'm going.”

“Like they know if he tells he'll have more to explain. Maybe Gary West has a secret he doesn't want anybody to know. Think Gary has secrets he doesn't want Casey to know? West could have staged this.”

“Why?”

“To get his wife wet for him. I don't know. The way this is shaking out, nothing would surprise me. Rich people like them live in a different universe than we do.”

“And
who
makes that possible?” Alexa asked, waving good-bye as she left.