The Investigator (Letty Davenport, #1) (25)

“Do you want me to call? I know some people over at Midland police . . .”

“Dick, stay by the phone. Don’t call anybody yet. I have to do something . . . only take a minute or two. I’ll call you back.”



* * *





She rang off, turned to Kaiser. “The garbage didn’t stink.”

“Because it was sixty fuckin’ degrees . . . Oh.”

“Yes. If somebody had made a check in the first day or two, and the air-conditioning had been set at seventy-two or something reasonable . . .”

“It would have begun to stink. We really didn’t spend any time in the guest bedrooms, we didn’t check under the beds. If they’re here, that’s where they’d be,” Kaiser said. He led the way through the house to the first guest bedroom with two king-sized beds.

They got down on their knees, next to separate beds, and Kaiser said, “I got a shoe. Shit, I got a leg. There’s a woman under here. It’s gotta be Marcia.”

Letty could see a dark shape pressed against the wall, and then, like Kaiser, picked out a shoe, saw the leg and the hips and an odd rectangular shape at the head. “Another one here,” she said. “It’s a man.”

Kaiser walked back through the house to one of the storage cupboards where he’d seen a Maglite. They both got on their knees again to look at the bodies, and found the same thing with each. The victims had been bound with duct tape and then smothered with plastic bags tied around their necks.

“Cruel motherfuckers,” Kaiser said. “Cruel motherfuckers.”



* * *





Letty called Grimes first. “We found their bodies under the beds in a guest room.” She told him what they’d seen and about the temperature in the house.

“Ah, no. Ah, no . . . I got to get over there.”

“The police will probably want you to do the identification. So . . . come on over. I’ll call nine-one-one. We’ll wait here.”

Grimes said, “I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die; and whoever lives by believing in me will never die. John 11:25.”

Letty had seen that Bible in his office. To the Bible verse, he added, “We gotta get the goddamn crazies who did this.”





SEVEN




Before she called the police, Letty went out to the garage door, picked up the key safe where she’d dropped it, wiped it off, carried it back into the garage, wiped it again with a shop towel, and stuck it under a miscellaneous pile of tools and bits and pieces of unused junk in the bottom drawer of a tool chest. As she did that, she briefed Kaiser, talking steadily.

“The cops will separate us. I got the key and the security code from Blackburn’s desk, where he’d left them in case of emergency. We walked through the house, we looked in the master bedroom and kitchen, checked closets, you looked in the garage and the loft or the attic or whatever it is. Then I called Grimes and something he said reminded us of the cold. We didn’t find the telephones in the garbage, the cops will do that . . . We did see the purse.”

She went on for a full minute, Kaiser listening intently, nodding, as they walked around to the front of the house. Letty had Kaiser lock his sidearm in the truck’s glove compartment, and she put her Sig in her briefcase on the floor of the backseat.

“You know, we’re allowed to carry these—” Kaiser began.

Letty interrupted. “Cops don’t like other people to have guns. What they don’t know won’t hurt either them or us.”

Then she called 911, and told the woman who answered about the bodies under the bed. Five minutes later, the first cop car turned a corner a couple of blocks away.



* * *





The Midland cops had gotten there in a hurry, two white SUVs, sirens, flashing lights. One car turned into the driveway, while the other stopped in the street. The first cop out, name tag Frisch, a short man with a brush haircut, hurried up to Kaiser and Letty and asked, “You made the report?”

Kaiser looked at Letty, who said, “Yes. We both work with the Department of Homeland Security. Mr. Blackburn worked for Hughes-Wright Petroleum. When he didn’t show up for two days, Hughes-Wright notified you folks. Your officers checked the house but didn’t go inside.” She nodded at Kaiser. “John and I are doing research that may involve Hughes-Wright. We arrived in Midland last night, and this morning discussed the situation with the local vice president for Hughes-Wright. He permitted us to check Mr. Blackburn’s office, where Mr. Blackburn had left a key to his house along with the alarm code for his security system, in case of emergency. We decided to come out and look at the house. We found two bodies under the beds in the guest room. We believe they are Mr. Blackburn and his wife, Marcia. We don’t know them personally, so we’re not sure.”

A brown sedan was coming fast down the street, showing flashing lights on the grille, and the two cops turned to it and one of them said, “Danny.” To Letty and Kaiser he said, “Sergeant Tanner—he’ll be running the show. Crime scene’ll be next . . .”

The sedan turned into the driveway and stopped next to the patrol car, and a plainclothes cop got out. He nodded at Frisch and asked Letty, “You’re the woman who made the report?”