The Storm Murders (6 page)

“Okay,” he said.

“Okay what?” Mathers asked.

“It’s not a grow-op.” Indoor operations to grow marijuana were common in the area, but these rooms in his visual range were tidy.

“No indication, according to the SQ, that the victims were anything but legit. They weren’t real farmers though. They didn’t work the land themselves. They rented it out. They just lived on it.”

“What about the victims’ families?” Cinq-Mars inquired.

“Childless,” Dreher told him. “As far as we know. Old enough in their fifties not to have parents who are still alive, that can be expected, but no siblings have shown up either. No family pictures were found on the premises. The thing is, not much is known about these two. They seem to have come from the Maritimes originally, according to neighbors, about four years ago. The SQ is trying to track down their histories. We don’t know where they came from exactly.”

“Or why,” Cinq-Mars noted.

“Excuse me?”

“Why come here? Nobody—I mean nobody—leaves the Maritimes to live on a farm in Quebec. Not with our taxes. To go to the big city, sure, it’s exciting. But here? When there’s other places? Why would anyone do that?”

“Peace and quiet,” Dreher suggested.

“Who wants that? Most people only think they want it until they get it. But the point is, they could have found peace and quiet in the Maritimes. Besides, look what it bought these two.”

Glancing into small, main-level rooms, the three men slowly made their way to the front of the house. In the living room they came upon a chalk mark that outlined the position of one victim.

“This is a key to the killer’s modus operandi south of the border. It’s what caught the attention of my people,” Dreher revealed.

Cinq-Mars silently studied the outline as though he wasn’t listening, then asked, “What is? What’s his MO?”

“The husband or the boyfriend is always shot or knifed to death downstairs. That happens first. Then the wife or the girlfriend is killed upstairs.”

Cinq-Mars stared at the scene awhile. “What was his name?”

“Morris Lumen,” Mathers told him.

“Morris. Like Maurice, but English?”

“That’s right. His wife’s name was Adele.”

“Morris and Adele. That sounds quaint. So there’s always a dead guy?” Cinq-Mars asked Agent Dreher.

“And a dead woman.”

“Always two floors?”

“Every time. Male victim downstairs, the woman on the second floor.”

“Sometimes shot. Sometimes knifed. That doesn’t sound like the same MO.”

“In certain circumstances, the killer may have needed to be quiet.”

“How many murders?” Cinq-Mars looked directly at him. “On your side of the border?”

“Can’t tell you that yet,
É
mile.”

“Right. I haven’t indicated if I’ll be, as you say,
involved.
I find it curious.”

“Excuse me?”

“Your reticence,” Cinq-Mars told him. “It’s curious.”

“This is the way it has to be, that’s all,” Dreher confirmed.

Testy for the first time on this trip, Cinq-Mars replied, “Oh, I doubt that.”

Dreher looked angry, but said nothing.

As if trying to break that rising tension, Mathers suggested they go upstairs.

“You go,” Cinq-Mars directed them both. “I want to hang back a minute.”

Both Mathers and Dreher thought that odd. The crime scene was cold, they couldn’t imagine what might be gleaned from a chalk mark on the floor of an empty room, but dutifully they lumbered up the stairs to the second story.

Cinq-Mars kneeled over the outline of the dead body. More than anything, he wanted a moment in the quiet of this house. To soak in the atmosphere, to feel what that might tell him. He wasn’t going to explain the method to anyone, as he could scarcely explain it to himself, but in his estimation investigating officers talked too much and thought too much and never allowed the environment to have its say.

Nor did they give the mind a chance to truly think.

He couldn’t stay crouched for too long though. His knees and fragile back. Straightening, he stood still. The premises were astonishingly quiet, and somehow that felt significant. He gazed out the window at the snow, and at the adjacent barn. What was wrong with all this peacefulness? The loudest sound proved to be the footsteps of the two detectives overhead and their muffled voices, and even that was intermittent.

Cinq-Mars regarded the chalk mark again. Then the sofa took up his attention. He examined it up close, picking at the fabric. He returned to the kitchen and checked the cupboards and the pantry. Around about this time the heating system came on and he went down into the basement. He found what he was looking for beyond the oil tank, then climbed the stairs again to the first floor. He checked the TV room and another small alcove downstairs, then joined the two officers up above.

“So what did you discover?” Dreher inquired. If he had been hopeful of this partnership ahead of time, his confidence now appeared to be waning.

“Where are the animals?” Cinq-Mars asked.

“What do you mean? Horses, cows? They didn’t have any.”

“Cats, dogs. It’s a farm. What farmhouse isn’t overrun with mice without a cat or two? Where are they?”

“The reports don’t mention animals,” Mathers pointed out to him.

Dreher picked that up. “No cats. No dogs. No pigs. No hens. What does it matter? No nothing. There are no animals.”

“Then why does the living room sofa have claw marks where it’s been used as a scratching post? Why do the floors show nicks like those my dog makes when her nails have grown too long? Why do we find dog hairs and cat hairs or some kind of hair on the carpets? Why is there a full kitty-litter box in the basement, with some old droppings, if a cat hasn’t lived here? And why keep a dog’s cushion on the floor of the TV room if no dog lies on it? I suppose Morris and Adele kept cat and dog food, both, in the pantry for an occasional late-night snack on their own?”

“Holy shit,” Mathers exclaimed. “Where are the animals?”

Cinq-Mars glanced at him. “That’s
my
question,” he said.

Mathers held up his hands.

Agent Rand Dreher, in the meantime, appeared to be consumed by thought.

Cinq-Mars examined the chalk lines that demarcated where the policemen and the woman of the house met their fate. He could tell which represented the officers as the artist had carefully drawn the pistols found in each man’s hand. “Ask the SQ to bring in their canine squad, Bill.”

“The trail’s shit-cold,
É
mile. You know that.”

“The animals, Bill. You’ll find them dead in the snow somewhere nearby. If they were in the house, we’d be smelling them by now. I’m not counting on it, but their collars might relinquish a thumb print. Or something. Maybe they managed to get in a bite of flesh. Maybe a nail scratched our killer.”

“How do you know for sure they’re out there?”

“Where else would they be? The killer didn’t dig them cute little graves in the frozen ground. If he tried he’d still be digging. He just dropped them in the snow. He doesn’t expect them to be found until it melts. By then, Mother Nature will deal with the carcasses before anyone finds them in the tall spring grass. Whoever does, the assumption will be that wild animals did them in, or exposure. Nobody will care or think twice, and anyway there might be nothing left. Thinking that way, maybe our guy allowed himself to be careless. So, canine squad, Bill. Worth a shot.”

“Okay, but if he dropped them in the snow,” Mathers argued, “why can’t we just follow his steps right to them? Oh. Right. His footprints are invisible somehow.”

“He killed the animals first, Bill. That tells us that he was here a while. Perhaps waiting for his victims to show up. He killed them during, or perhaps before, the storm.”

Dreher was nodding. He finally seemed impressed. “What does this bedroom tell you?” he asked, and Mathers noticed that the man’s tone now conveyed a smidgen of respect rather than mere guarded judgment.

Cinq-Mars was looking around the space. The silence, even with the heating system engaged, kept getting to him, speaking to him, in a way. As below, the floor was stained by the mopped-up blood of the victims.

“One man was shot through the back of his head,” Mathers offered. “The other, straight through the top of his forehead.”

“The woman,” Cinq-Mars inquired. “Adele. Any signs of sexual assault?”

“Both victims had the ring fingers of their left hands severed,” Dreher replied. “Both the rings and the fingers are missing. That’s always true south of the border as well. The women, here and in the States, are found naked, but their ordeals do not include rape or any apparent sign of sexual transgression. Except, I guess, for the nudity.”

The very strangeness of all that kept the three men quiet awhile and studying the floor. Then Cinq-Mars asked, “Any surprises with the autopsies?”

No one said anything so he looked up.

Mathers seemed to be hesitating about something.

“What?” Cinq-Mars encouraged him.

“A discrepancy,” Mathers said. “At least, it felt like that to me.” By the way Dreher’s head elevated, the senior cop assumed that this was coming as news to him also, which meant that the pair had not thoroughly debriefed one another.

“Go on.”

“Something weird. The officers, the ones who got shot, they phoned in that the woman was still alive. They requested an ambulance. Yet the autopsy showed that the female victim had
two
gunshot wounds. Both to the head. One entered under the chin and exited out the top of her skull, which, the pathologist stated, did so much damage it could only have killed her instantly. If that is so, why did the cops call-in to say that she was still breathing?”

The three men surrounded the lines on the floor in the shape of the woman’s form. Dreher at her head, Mathers at the base of her spine, with Cinq-Mars on the opposite side of the body’s outline standing by her knees and thighs. The retired cop was the first to do so, but then each man followed suit, tucking his hands into the front pockets of his trousers and dwelling on all this.

Cinq-Mars answered, “Because she was still alive then, Bill. The fatal bullet occurred after the officers called to say that she was still alive. That’s why the officers were killed.”

“Excuse me?” queried Dreher. “How the hell do you know that?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” Cinq-Mars appeared to be speaking to the sketch of the woman’s shape on the hardwood floor. “What other explanation is there? The officers radioed that she was still alive. The killer overheard that conversation. At that moment their fates were sealed. He could not allow the woman to remain alive and possibly recover and identify him—or for other reasons—but in order to kill her, he had to get to her, and that meant killing the officers first, and with some haste, since an ambulance and other police were on the way.”

“Okay,” Mathers allowed. He got that much. “But how?”

Cinq-Mars gazed between the two men a moment, then looked behind him. Next, he turned back and pulled his hands from his pockets as he stepped over behind Bill Mathers. Before him stood a pair of Queen Anne chairs and between them a sturdy table which held magazines in its base and a pair of coffee coasters on its mahogany surface. “There’s your footprints in the snow,” he pointed out. Both Dreher and Mathers leaned in closer. “Only they’re in the rug.” The pale, soft-pile, oval rug that covered the surface around the chairs showed indentations the table had made in its original location. The table’s feet now stood slightly to the side of those twin marks.

“Okay, the table’s been moved slightly,” Mathers noted. “So? Are you saying that it got bumped during a struggle?”

Cinq-Mars ignored him. He returned to the hallway. Mathers followed closely behind but Dreher seemed to hold himself back. Cinq-Mars pointed up. To a trapdoor. “He stood on the table to get into the attic. He could push open the trapdoor standing on the table, and a strong man can pull himself up from there. Notice the hall runner.” He pointed to spots between his feet. “It also has slight indentations which match the table legs from when he put his weight on it. Up he goes. When the first cop poked his head out, and when he happened to look down, he was shot through the back of his skull from above. When the second cop peeked around the corner, wondering where that shot had come from, he heard something—the trapdoor being opened ajar, perhaps—and glanced up. Either that or he figured out the first bullet’s trajectory. His last split-second alive. Shot through the forehead. He jolts back, his head hits the doorjamb at this blood mark, then pitches forward.”

Mathers’s focus repeatedly swung between the chalk marks representing the two dead cops and the trapdoor in the hall ceiling. “Son of a bitch,” he said.

Cinq-Mars maintained a deliberately blithe tone when he said, “Our killer could still be up there, Bill.”

Mathers didn’t bite, but he did catch on to what transpired next.

“That means—No shit.”

“Exactly. He was up there the whole time the SQ was scouring the place looking for clues. He got to listen in to everything they said. But a word of caution, Bill, he could
still
be up there, listening in to us.”

“You’re not serious.”

“I’m not, truth be told. But I’m not a cop anymore. You are. What does correct procedure require of you?” As Mathers was looking around for a prop and seemed to be considering the same table the killer had used, Cinq-Mars helped him out. “I saw a stepladder in the basement.”

Mathers went down to fetch it, which made him feel somewhat like a junior detective again, a gofer, but in the company he was keeping his sergeant-detective status didn’t carry much weight. On the upper landing, Dreher sidled up next to Cinq-Mars and spoke softly.

“So the killer pulls himself into the attic. Doesn’t that leave the table underneath the trapdoor? Wouldn’t the first responders discover it when they came on the scene?”

“He has his methods. But why don’t you tell me what they are?”

“How do you suppose I can tell you that?” He wore a slight smile, and Cinq-Mars determined that he could get along with this guy if circumstances ever required him to do so. He sensed that he was no dummy, and not an FBI robot either.