Devoted(38)
Rosa owed her good fortune to the golden retriever. Although Dorothy was fond of Rosa, she would not have left the entire estate to her caregiver if Kipp hadn’t existed. A generous measure might have been bequeathed to Rosa, but the larger portion would have gone to charities that Dorothy had long supported.
Now Rosa Leon set the alarm and locked the house and departed in Dorothy’s Lincoln MKX. She steered the vehicle slowly through a forbidding fog like one of those in which sailors on a blinded sea sometimes glimpsed ancient ghost ships with torn sails or legendary monsters of the deep that breached, glaring with glowing eyes, only to dive beneath the waves, never to be seen again.
With visibility reduced to twenty feet, she took almost fifteen minutes to follow surface streets to State Route 89, which was no more than a four-or five-minute drive on a clear evening. She went north on highway 89, hoping that the fog would lift or at least thin out. If it remained as it was, the forty-minute trip to Olympic Valley might take two hours or longer, with the constant risk that some damn fool, trusting to wits he didn’t possess, would crash into her at the posted speed limit.
The blinking red signifier on the navigation map, presented on the smartphone screen, indicated that Kipp hadn’t moved since she’d located him. Wherever he might be, with whomever, he apparently had settled down at least for the night.
Like the probing beams of a bathysphere exploring a murky oceanic trench, headlights of an oncoming vehicle appeared at first hazy and dim but swelled in brightness. Southbound on the undivided highway, the vehicle itself was invisible until it swept past, a crew-cab pickup, as white as the fog from which it manifested. The driver carved through the night at perhaps half the speed limit, but that was still too fast in these conditions.
In his wake, Rosa slowed further. The primary pattern of this momentous day unnerved her. She had lost her dearest—her only—friend, she had inherited a fortune, she had sat through a long and dispiriting cremation, she had learned a miraculous and uplifting secret about Kipp, the dog had gone missing, and then she seemed to have located him by extraordinary means . . . A loss followed by a blessing, followed by a loss, followed by a blessing. A hard life had prepared her to expect that nothing good could last.
36
Everyone who was murdered in Pinehaven County or died by accident received the personal attention of Carson Conroy, who had come here to escape the senseless violence of the city. But first:
Having been discovered by a deputy sheriff on regular patrol, the bodies of Painton Spader and Justine Klineman were extensively photographed in situ and removed in such a manner as to disturb the scene as little as possible. Rural law enforcement did not always show such respect for potential evidence.
Because the deep overcast throttled the afternoon light, and because there was a 60 percent chance of rain that, if it came, might erase evidence, a generator and klieg lights were brought to the scene in an expeditious manner and judiciously positioned an hour and a half before nightfall. Under the direction of a deputy with special training in the discovery and handling of forensic evidence, a crew of the sheriff’s men searched the graveled shoulder of the highway, the slope beyond, and the swale at the foot of the slope in which the victims had been found.
The perpetrator had not returned directly to his vehicle after killing the woman, but had angled through the meadow to a stream, trampling the tall grass and leaving drops of blood on some of those flattened green blades. They found his discarded bloodstained shirt, plus a shoulder holster without a firearm.
The bodies were taken to the county morgue.
A tow-truck operator who had a contract with the county loaded the Shelby Super Snake onto a flatbed and, always in the company of a supervising deputy who could testify that the chain of evidence had not been broken, conveyed the vehicle to an impound garage in the same complex as the sheriff’s department HQ and the morgue.
The bloody shirt and the shoulder rig were brought to Carson Conroy in a brown paper shopping bag.
At forty-two, after he’d risen through the ranks of the medical examiner’s office in Chicago, murder capital of the nation, Carson had become dispirited because homicides so often went unsolved. Most of the murders were gang related, and the city’s governing elite had proved unable or unwilling to deal with the gangs.
The violence became as personal as it could get when his wife, Lissa, was killed in a drive-by shooting that had all the signs of a gangbanger initiation, some wannabe thug offing a civilian to prove that his balls were big and his heart was too small ever to trouble him with doubt. That was the hardest kind of case to solve, because no rational motive existed, no provable cause and effect. Carson knew Lissa’s killer would never be found, and he couldn’t live in a city where the triggerman who took her life still enjoyed a life of his own.
That was five years earlier, and still her murder had not been solved. Some nights, in canyons of restless sleep, Carson sought the satisfaction of bloody vengeance, scenarios in which he prowled mean streets, as though he were Denzel Washington in an Equalizer movie, found the shooter by dream logic, and cut him down dead. However, he had zero expectation of justice in the waking world.
Four years ago, having moved from an elected-coroner system to the establishment of a medical examiner’s office, Pinehaven County had hired Carson from a wide field of applicants. His task had been not merely to do professional forensic autopsies, the discoveries of which would stand up in court, but also to establish an adequate crime lab that would free the sheriff’s department from the need to farm out aspects of its investigations to state-level authorities. The county’s coroners had nearly always been retired doctors or active morticians who did their best, although none of them had sufficient training to understand the precise procedures necessary to avoid contaminating evidence derived from an autopsy.