Snake Skin (37 page)

More snakes than she had bullets.

Chapter 31

Sunday 6:18 pm

Lucy's pulse hammered a jungle rhythm. She
scuffed her shoes along the floor, kicking away any snakes that
crossed her path until she reached the metal pole. At its base lay
a thick, vinyl-coated cable ending in a padlock.

He kept her here. With all these snakes. She
swallowed, it was hard work with her throat closed tight against
the stench of decomp. Talk about a living hell.

She squatted, examining the cable and the
overturned bucket without touching them. Why would Fletcher torture
Ashley like that when he kept saying he wanted to save her?

Stretching her jaw, she popped her ears and
thought hard. Was she wrong in her profile of Fletcher? Was he
really just another sick sadist like Ivan, the Canadian? Or that
other lover of snakes, Pastor Walter?

The padlock was closed, attached to a piece
of metal that had once clamped a loop of cable. It was the cable
itself that was cut. Fletcher wouldn't need to do that, he'd have
the key.

Unless...Someone else had rescued
Ashley?

No. They would have triggered Fletcher's
traps. It had to be Fletcher playing at being Ashley's knight in
shining armor. Subjecting her to torture, then swooping in for the
rescue. Just like his father.

If so, then not only was Ashley still alive,
she'd be indebted to him, ready to do anything he asked.

Aw hell, she did not like where this was
heading. She stood, swept the area with her light and saw the
outline of a portable commode to one side and layers of hay bales
arranged like steps on the other. Strange shapes reflected the
high-powered beam of light, dark yet shiny. Carefully, she
approached the large objects.

The smell of decomp was stronger here,
strong enough to gag her.

Wrapped in sheets of clear plastic like
mummies, sitting side by side on the hay bales as if they were
spectators at a Steelers' game, were two women and a man. Their
mouths gaped open in death grins, their eyes bulged out, and they
had a front row seat to Ashley Yeager's suffering.

Puddles of body fluids covered their feet,
but the plastic kept it contained. No flies or insects had
penetrated the coverings; the decomposition had come from their own
bodies' bacteria, eventually bloating their abdomens with gas until
the intestines and skin ruptured.

Thank God they were fully clothed, sparing
Lucy that sight. She backed away, retracing her steps until finally
she stood outside once more.

Night had fallen quickly, it was now as dark
outside as it had been inside the barn. Walden waited at the
Blazer, standing at the bumper, jogging forward as soon as she left
the barn.

"You okay?"

"Boy are you glad I outrank you," she said,
drinking the cool, crisp air as if she'd been holding her breath
for too long. Not far from the truth. "How do you feel about
snakes?"

He looked at her sharply. "Hate 'em."

"I used to not mind them." She leaned
against the car door, trying to hide the sudden wobble in her legs.
"Even played with them when I was a kid." She shook her head and
glanced back at the barn, now just a pale blob shadowed against the
trees beyond. "Not any more."

"What the hell happened in there?"

It didn't take long for the pristine and
silent farm to morph into a cacophony of light and noise. The area
was taped off, everyone held back while the EOD guys walked their
bomb-sniffing dogs around first the barn, then the house. The dogs
alerted at both sites.

Which meant more men and equipment and
lights and crackling radios, ribald jokes as two bomb squad members
squeezed into their bulky suits, followed by several turf battles
that Lucy was forced to referee.

ERT wanted to photograph the barn crime
scene prior to the EOD squad searching for the bombs—just in
case.

EOD wanted to get the hell in and out again
before the heat made them pass out while confined to the
self-contained suits that weighed eighty-some pounds and reached
temperatures of over a hundred degrees when sealed.

The ME wanted no one to touch anything until
they got to the bodies—which may or may not be sitting on top of a
bomb.

The Staties groused against the inclusion of
Allegheny County's bomb squad since apparently the Moore homestead
was just over the Butler county line, making it their jurisdiction.
They kept insisting that they could have flown their EOD team in
from Harrisburg if they'd been given enough advance notice. Like
Lucy had begun her day planning to find a few homemade incendiary
devices.

Grimwald showed up, trying to spin-doctor
the fact that Fletcher was a bad guy and in his direct chain of
command.

Local police and fire turned out in force,
acting like it was a fall carnival, wandering over the scene,
taking photos with their camera-phones.

Then, just when things were starting to get
under control, the media flocked to the site like carrion-eaters to
road-kill.

Until the Staties finally had them corralled
behind the perimeter, they plowed past crime scene tape, stomped
through the woods, blinded hard-working cops with their spotlights
and interrupted every conversation with inane questions bellowed in
self-righteous voices.

"Agent Guardino, did you see Ashley Yeager?
Is it true the perpetrator turned her into a mummy?"

"Agent Guardino, is it true a rattle snake
bit you when you rushed in to save the girl?"

"Agent Guardino, how does it feel to be a
woman working with all these men?"

The last was especially a puzzle seeing as
it came from the only female reporter present—not Cindy Ames, thank
God—and since there were three other females working the scene in
addition to Lucy.

She shielded her face from camera flashes,
rustled up reps from ERT, EOD and the ME and shepherded them to the
relative peace of the mobile evidence recovery unit, a large black
RV parked in the field beside the lane.

"Anyone got an Advil?" she asked, massaging
her jaw joints, feeling them crackle and pop. Never mind her
shoulder. It was frozen in place, pain using it as its own command
center, hurling new waves of agony whenever she dared to forget
about it. "Or six or seven?"

The ERT squad leader, a guy named Jiminez,
found her a sample pack containing two Aleeve. Lucy dry-swallowed
them and spread out a rough sketch of the property on the counter.
The three men clustered around her, jostling racks of CSI
paraphernalia.

"Okay, here's where the dog alerted, right?"
She pointed to both doors of the house and the rear of the
barn.

"A definite on the house," Donohue, the EOD
tech confirmed. He was wearing the bulky pants of his bomb suit,
held up by wide suspenders over a plain white T-shirt. "The barn
she was a bit vague—definitely explosives there but either they're
spread out over a fairly wide area or maybe they were moved several
times, leaving residue behind."

"Could the smell of decomp have thrown her
off?" Curtis, the ME guy asked.

Donohue shook his head. "No way. Cookie's
the best at what she does. The decomp disturbed her a little, but
as soon as she focused, she was good to go."

"Here's my problem, gentlemen." Lucy
re-directed their attention. "I have no evidence to help me save a
young girl's life except what is in this barn and maybe in the
house. What's the best way to maximize evidence collection and
minimize the danger to our people?"

"I could go in and photograph, video the
interior of the barn since we have an entry there," Jiminez
volunteered. "Maybe even collect the items in the center of the
barn?"

"But she's going to get most of her evidence
from the bodies," Curtis argued. "And the bodies are sitting right
where the dog said there were explosives."

"That might be why Cookie alerted to such a
large area," Donohue said. "If he had the explosives sitting near
the bodies, then moved the bodies to booby-trap them and finally
returned them to that location."

"So the bodies are probably rigged." Lucy
gnawed the inside of her cheek. "Donohue, could you start your guys
working on the two IED's at the house while we document and collect
evidence from the front of the barn? We won't disturb the bodies,
only photograph them in situ."

Donohue frowned, his two shaggy eyebrows
meeting in the middle of his forehead. Obviously a by-the-book kind
of guy. Which probably explained why he still had all his fingers
and toes. By-the-book was not a bad thing when you dealt with
unstable explosives on a daily basis.

"If time is that vital, yeah, we could go
that route," he finally conceded. "But I want one of my guys with
them, make sure they don't touch the wrong thing."

"Sounds like a plan. Let's get to work. I
need to see the photos of the bodies asap. I might have an ID on
one of them." It had been too dark in the barn for her to tell for
sure, but she had a sinking feeling that one of the women was Vera
Tzasiris.

Which meant Lucy's promise to her that the
bad part was over had been a big, fat lie.

On that less than cheerful note, she waved
them on their way. The EOD guys had what looked like a miniature
cement mixer on wheels—their explosive containment device. They
also had a neat looking robot she knew they were just itching to
play with once they made sure the windows were safe to breach and
could maneuver it inside the house.

Jiminez and his crew were busy dragging
lighting equipment to supplement their camera flashes. Curtis
trudged behind them, carrying only two cameras and looking
disgruntled that he was going to have to let the EOD guys touch his
bodies before he did.

Medical examiners got that way, very
territorial. Nobody touched their bodies unless they said so. And
usually they didn't. You told them what you needed: an ID from a
victim's wallet, the cell phone shoved into their pocket, the
locket with the perpetrator's fingerprints on it. They would
fastidiously document it, remove it and allow you to examine it.
But the bodies were their domain.

Speaking of people guarding their domain,
behind her she could hear Grimwald barking at Walden. She turned to
intervene but her cell rang.

"Guardino."

"Hey, it's Burroughs. I've a situation
here."

"I kind of have my hands full myself," she
replied, wondering what kind of trouble the detective could have
gotten himself into. She'd pretty much sidelined him—diplomatically
of course. "Where's here?"

"Three Rivers Medical Center."

Lucy's breath caught, a tight knot of fear
that seized her chest and wouldn't let go. "Wh-what happened? Is
Megan—"

Her voice broke. She turned away from the
scattered clusters of law enforcement, hunched her shoulders as she
pinched the bridge of her nose, willing back tears.

"No. Shit, I'm sorry. She's fine. Megan's
fine," Burroughs' voice finally broke through the vise grip of
terror that held her hostage. "No, that's not it. I'm here with
Cindy Ames."

Able to fill her lungs again, Lucy
straightened, hand clenched around her phone, wringing the life
from it and wishing it was Burroughs' neck. Or better yet, a
certain TV reporter's. "Surely I misheard you, Detective
Burroughs."

"Look, don't get like that. It's not my
fault." His voice dropped, became rushed, earnest. "I'm trying to
help you out here. Would you at least give me a chance?"

"Go ahead, I'm listening."

"Cindy and her cameraman were at your house
this morning. Shot some film of it and your husband and daughter
going to Church, the ambulance coming—"

"You've got to be kidding me. That bitch!
Endangering an undercover federal agent's identity is a felony. Go
ahead, take her into custody. I warned her. Did she think I was
playing?"

"All Cindy ever thinks about is the story.
And she got one. She also has pictures taken with camera phones of
you in the ER this morning. And eye-witness accounts of how you
terrorized the hospital."

"I did no such thing."

"All I can say is, it looks bad. Real bad.
Anyway, I was thinking we could maybe make a deal with her. Instead
of arresting her, maybe we can get her to lose this story in
exchange for a bigger one, a better one." He paused. "One that
might help us nail Fletcher."

"What did you have in mind?"

"We let her air an interview with Fletcher's
mom. One that implies that you're considering arresting the old
lady as an accessory or something nasty like that. Something bad
enough to draw Fletcher back to town. You said he was obsessed by
his mom. We'll give him a chance to play hero."

"Just like his father." She considered it.
"It will take some finessing. No way Alicia Fletcher will
cooperate."

"Cindy says she won't have to. Her computer
guys can digitally edit things so we can make her say almost
anything we want. And most of it will be in the way Cindy sells it
on air."

"Start working on a script. I'm on my
way."

Chapter 32

Sunday 8:02 pm

Of course it wasn't as easy as merely
writing a script. By the time she reached the Golden Years nursing
home to meet Burroughs and Ames, Lucy had spoken with John Greally,
the WDDE station manager, the nursing home administrator, legal
affairs—three times—Burroughs' zone commander, the Pittsburgh
Police Bureau's media information officer, and the Assistant Chief
of Police.

After assuring everyone that they were not
setting up a trap at Golden Years, that they'd arrange the leak to
draw Fletcher elsewhere to a secure location, that they would in no
way endanger Alicia's health or trample over her rights, that the
proper releases would be signed by all, that no monetary
compensation was changing hands, and that anything Ames reported
would be unbiased—a statement that made Lucy gag, but satisfied the
TV station's lawyer—and that all standards of Bureau ethical and
moral conduct would be met at all times during the encounter,
permission was finally, officially, irrevocably, denied.