Last to Know: A Novel(75)

This time the door was not closed. It swung open on its hinges. Ten feet away from it, Squeeze stopped dead. Ears flattened, he took a couple of paces back. Harry caught up to him, put his hand on the dog’s neck.

“What’s the matter, my friend. What’s wrong?”

The door creaked, swinging gently back and forth.

Harry looked at Rossetti. He was right there, Sig Sauer already cocked.

“I f*ckin’ hate this place,” Rossetti was muttering. “Gives me the f*ckin’ creeps.”

Harry said, “What do you think we’re gonna find in there?”

“I hate to think.”

“Come on, Squeeze, let’s go take a look,” Harry said, but the dog backed away. It gave a long howl.

Harry looked at Rossetti again. “It’s gonna be bad,” he said. Rossetti nodded and the two walked together to the shed.

Harry opened the door, they looked inside, then stepped back. Rossetti walked round the side of the shed and vomited into the bushes. The dog hunkered, way back, near the car. It was the first time Harry had seen his dog afraid.

He had to go in. Into that dreadful place. Check it all out. It was his duty. He was the cop.

He propped open the door with a couple of large stones and called to Rossetti. “You don’t have to go inside,” he said. “Just take a look from here.”

Tethered to the cross beams of the ceiling swung the eviscerated carcasses of several dead animals. Their pelts gleamed, their teeth shone yellow-white, their eyes were stitched shut.

Behind them dangled the naked body of Bea Havnel, strapped by her hands and feet, slit from belly to throat. She too had been eviscerated. Her entrails smoldered in a bucket in the corner. Her eyes had not been stitched shut though. They were wide open and seemed to Harry to be gazing straight into his. He was looking into the pale blue eyes of pure evil.

He went back outside, got his emotions together, his thoughts organized. He had never seen anything as macabre, as horrifying. Then he remembered Jemima with her throat cut, and Lacey Havnel with the knife sticking out of her right eye, and he thought whoever did this removed evil from this earth, by his own act of evil. He knew it was Len. What he didn’t know was where Len was.

*

Within half an hour the place was surrounded by cops. Forensics were there again, “Having a field day,” Rossetti muttered darkly. Photographers took their own pictures, detectives took their own pictures, videos were being taken, the ground searched inch by inch for evidence, for the knife, for blood. And the search was on for Len.

They soon found him, lying in his small boat, drifting across the lake. Dead from a shot wound to the chest. Right where his heart must once have been.

It was over.





57


Rose looked around, at the people sitting at her kitchen table, mugs of coffee, glasses of wine, bowls of her leftovers soup in front of them. Tonight it tasted strongly of basil because the plant outside the back door had suddenly gone into overdrive, sprouting all over the place so she’d had to put it to good use. Rossetti, the good-looking homicide detective who looked more like an Italian male model, told her it was as good as his mother’s. “Better, even,” he’d added with a grin that she knew he hoped would make her feel better about everything she had just gone through; she and her entire family, who were all also at the table.

Roman sat next to Diz, offering more soup, more bread, more Coke. The big brother was taking what had happened hard, having trouble keeping his emotions under control, while the girls, of course, did not even bother to try. They ate their soup silently, reluctantly, not seeming to notice when the odd tear rolled into their spoons. They ate only because Rose had told them they had to, adding with a smile the childish threat that otherwise there would be no ice cream.

Wally was another matter. Rose had thought Wally would die when she had told him what happened to Diz, the whole terrible story of Bea, and the well. They were in their bedroom, the French doors were open onto the porch with the view over the lake, so tranquil it seemed nothing could ever ruffle its timeless surface. Rose had read stories where people’s faces “turned white with shock.” This was the only time she ever experienced it. The blood seemed to drain from Wally’s summer-tanned face and his eyes went blank, dark as though he were looking into that well, could see his boy there.

Wally sank onto the bed, put his head in his hands. “How could I have allowed this to happen?” he said. “Diz could have been killed and it was my fault.”

Rose went and sat next to him. She put her arm around his shoulders. Her husband was crying. “It was no one’s fault,” she’d said quietly. “No one is responsible for a madwoman like that. That’s what she was, who she was. If it had not been us she targeted it would have been some other family. It’s over. Diz is safe, that’s all that matters now.”

Even as she said it, Rose knew Wally would always feel responsible for allowing Bea into his home, into his family. Rose was very glad Bea was dead.

Now her husband sat in his usual place at the head of the table, his notebook and pen at hand as always, in case he was struck by an idea for a location, a character, a twist in the plot. She thought, though, even Wally could never have figured out the twist in this plot. The next morning Wally was to leave for a place somewhere in Arizona that took care of people with his kind of problem. Not that Wally was “using” anymore, but he had been more than a “recreational user,” as the euphemism went, of cocaine. It was his own choice to take this course, to be reindoctrinated into the world of normal living. “To become myself again,” was what he said to Rose, and she agreed. She was no longer that young girl in the white bathing suit leaping into the lake, into his arms, thrilled with the very idea of “love,” but she loved Wally. Always would. She was his and he was hers. The day they had made those vows still stuck in Rose’s mind. She, and, she also believed, Wally, had made them till death did they part—and they would keep them. Rose was very glad of that.