Snow Creek(38)

She nods.

“Mrs. Wheaton was found rolled up in carpet. Looks like that space had something covering it.”

“All right,” Mindy says. “I’ll spray here around the workbench. We’ll see what we get and then move over to the section where you think the carpet was. I’ll spray. You’ll shut the door. I’ll photograph whatever turns up. Remember, we’ll only have twenty or thirty seconds.”

Mindy motions for me to stand back and she starts spraying the area where the hammer was found. She’s not a tall woman with long arms, but somehow, she manages to sweep in very large, even movements, depositing the misty chemical that reacts to iron in blood.

“This being a working space,” she says, “we might get a lot of false positives.”

“Metals?” I ask.

“Who knows what they did in here.”

She looks at me, picks up her camera and I shut the door.

Blue glows in the shape of an arc, revealing a couple of smears and some spatter freckles: errant castoff from what I’m sure is the hammer, on the lower half of the workbench.

The camera’s digital and set on a slow speed. Even so, Mindy’s emits the clicking sound of an SLR.

“I’d say you found your crime scene,” she says.

I drop markers in the areas that reacted with the Luminol and we move to the space on the floor.

I turn on my flashlight app and direct its soft beam to the floor. Mindy starts spraying, so evenly, so precisely that I wonder if she should have become an airbrush artist instead of a florist. There is no overlap. No place where her spray isn’t anything but perfect. I turn off my phone’s flashlight.

Right away a pale blue line appears on the edge of the rectangle closest to the front of the hut.

“Good eye, Megan,” she says as she photographs the space.

I set a marker.

“I’ll collect samples,” she goes on.

“I’ll tell Sheriff.”

I find him standing outside with Bernie.

We don’t need to speak. He can read my face.

“Oh shit,” he says.

“I’ll go inside and check on Joshua and Sarah,” Bernie says, disappearing through the front door, the screen door screeching like a bird of prey.

“It’s like we thought,” I say as we walk toward the barn, where Mindy is now collecting samples for the lab. “The Luminol lit up that workshop like the Fourth of July. Seriously. Spatter and castoff are clear as could be. Merritt hit his wife with the hammer. He dragged her over to the carpet and rolled her up.”

“Things like that don’t happen around here,” Sheriff says. “Not on my watch, anyway.”

I know he wants to believe that, of course. Truth is, places like the woods around Jefferson County are full of nefarious doings. We just don’t hear about them. Nobody calls in their neighbor to find out if something bad happened.

I think I heard a shot.

Someone screamed in the middle of the night next door. Bloody murder scream.

Haven’t seen anyone at their place for months.

Mindy is finishing up.

“What happened here was brutal,” she says. “The velocity and trajectory of the spatter shows some major rage.”

“Kids say their father was very demanding, even cruel to his wife,” Sheriff says.

“Let’s be direct,” I say. “He cut off one of her toes as punishment for some made-up infraction.”

“Infraction? Was he running a prison camp here?” Mindy asks as she continues to record samples for chain of custody. Her writing is precise, somewhere between cursive and printed. Everything about Mindy is precise. Even the way she arranges flowers. No loosey goosey English Garden bouquets with a sprig of this and bunch of that. Hers are always perfectly proportioned, symmetric and, very often, single-hued.

“You could call it that,” I say. “Family is a mix of doomsday preppers, cult-like religion and prison camp. Very little contact with the outside world.”

“Sheriff, this is going to hit the news. I need to call Ida’s sister, Ruth.”

He gives me a knowing look. He hates making family notifications. No one likes to. It’s the worst part of the job. But one of the most important parts.



I get back to the office. It’s stone cold quiet, except for the hum of our relic of a refrigerator—Harvest Gold—which is like an outboard motor on the other side of a lake. You don’t hear it unless you mistakenly hear it, and then, it’s all you hear. I settle in at my desk and once more dial Ruth Turner, on a number that she doesn’t want me to use.

Unless I really have to.

Her sister being murdered by her husband qualifies in anyone’s book.

There is no local police station or sheriff department in 150 miles. I can’t send an officer in time to tell her in person, as customary in cases like this, as it will be picked up by the media pretty soon.

I dial the 208 number she gave me.

A man answers. “Who gave you this number?”

I’d have preferred hello. The man’s voice is gruff and dismissive. I’m thinking that Ruth might have the same issue with her hand-picked husband as Ida. I decide not to tell him that Ruth had come out to Port Townsend to see me. Maybe he didn’t know.

Like the way she hid wearing mascara.