Chapter Seven
The rain hit while Buck Shelton was walking the Lavenders’ acreage, searching for any sign of Lulu. The barn hadn’t offered any clues. He checked the pigs and cows in case they had been drawn to a body, but they scattered at his approach, revealing nothing.
As he wandered the brush-choked slopes, dodging the piercing thorns of mesquite, occasionally snagging his boots on long vines of desert gourds or clumps of thick grass, thunder roared overhead, lightning strobed the sky like paparazzi at a celebrity sighting, the wind picked up, and the first heavy drops thudded into earth that had already dried and cracked since yesterday’s storm.
He had left Scoot to take casts, photos, and measurements—the young man seemed incapable of moving more than ten yards from his SUV—and gone on the walkabout himself. He hadn’t expected to find anything. There would have been no reason to kill everyone else inside the house and take Lulu out to murder her. If she had been killed here, she would be in her room like the rest of the family.
Buck tried to run down the sequence of events in his own mind. The killer or killers had entered through the front door. He hadn’t seen any sign of forced entry, but many people around here never locked their doors at night. No way to tell how the dogs had reacted, if at all. Chances are they’d been away from the house, hunting rabbits or doing whatever it was country dogs did at night. The killer or killers entered the boys’ room first, stabbing them quickly and quietly. Then he—Buck couldn’t help feeling this had been a one-man job—went into the master bedroom and shot Manuela and Hugh.
The gunshots must have wakened Lulu, unless she was asleep with earbuds plugged into her ears or something. Had she tried to run away, or hid under her covers? The killer couldn’t have waited long after shooting her parents before he charged into her room. The condition of her bed made it look as if she might have been there when he came in. He grabbed her and wrestled her out of bed, perhaps. Or he threw back the covers and showed her the gun.
Still, Buck believed the killer had taken the time to wash his hands in the bathroom. Had he taken Lulu out to a truck or van, bound her or worse, then gone back into the house to clean up? That would take a degree of coolness few people possessed. But he couldn’t have done it while Lulu slumbered unknowingly in her room. So she was out of the house altogether, or the killer had restrained her outside somehow and gone back in.
When the rain hit, Buck ran for the house. By the time he reached it, his shirt was glued to his skin and water ran off the brim of his hat as if from a downspout. Scoot was nowhere to be seen, so Buck went inside.
“Scoot!”
“Right here, Buck!” Scoot came down the hallway carrying the department’s digital camera, which recorded time, date, and exposure information onto its files so that they couldn’t be manipulated on a computer without leaving evidence. “Find anything?”
“No sign of her,” Buck admitted. “I’m calling Ed.”
The Lavenders had a phone mounted on the wall in their kitchen, beneath a shelf of patron saint candles in tall glass containers. Buck’s cell had no signal here, so used his Motorola portable to call the sheriff. After being transferred three times, he had Ed Gatlin—astonishingly, not doing a stand-up in front of cameras, but in his own office—on the line. “Sheriff Gatlin,” he said, scooting back a chair and sitting down at the kitchen table. “It’s Buck Shelton.”
“Yes, Buck.” Impatience in his voice. Patience had never been the man’s strong suit, and now that he had an emergency situation on his hands—and omnipresent media coverage—he was even worse.
Buck got to the point. “We have a problem out here,” he said. “Four people dead, murdered, out between McNeal and Douglas. Their teenage daughter is missing.”
“Oh, Christ, don’t tell me that,” Ed said. “That’s all I need right now.”
“I’m going to need some help out here, Ed.”
“I don’t have it to give you,” Ed said without hesitation. “I don’t know if you’ve been keeping up, but we’ve got some major developments going on. We just found out there’s a boyfriend no one knew about, and the Lippincott girl snuck out of the house to hook up with him. Which means the house isn’t our crime scene after all. The boyfriend says she never showed up, so now we aren’t sure where the hell she was snatched. Every fucking eyeball in the country is on us and suddenly we look like we’ve been walking around with our dicks in our hands for two weeks.”
“I understand that’s a priority, Ed. But I’ve got four actual bodies and another missing girl here. Could be the same guy that got Elayne took her, too.”
“Or it could be that she’s out of town on a school trip. Or maybe there’s a copycat, in which case we should try to keep the media away from that one. Once he realizes he’s not drawing the attention the Lippincott snatcher is, maybe he’ll give her up.”
“Or kill her,” Buck pointed out. “I’m just saying the five of us aren’t really a full-fledged investigative unit. I need forensics, I need detectives, maybe even a full-on task force.”
Ed gave a bitter laugh. “You mistaking me for someone with a budget? Some big city police force, maybe? You can have the forensics team for a while. Until we can figure out where our real crime scene is, I don’t have any use for them. Beyond that, if I can free up any resources for you, I will. Don’t hold your breath, though.”
“Whatever you can do, Ed. Anything will help.” Buck clicked off the radio, disappointment swamping him like the rain outside had. With twenty-two years on the job, he had at least twice as much experience as anyone else at the Elfrida substation. Scoot Brown had worked for the state prison for a couple of years and for the sheriff’s department for three. Raul Bermudez had been around for nine, Carmela Lindo for five. Donna Gonzales ran dispatch, answered phones, made copies, but she was office help, not a cop.
And they were supposed to solve a multiple homicide and kidnapping?
At least, he thought, if it could be confirmed that Lulu had been kidnapped, they could ask the FBI for help. His feelings were mixed on that score—they were far more practiced at this sort of crime than he was. But he worried they might cut him out of the loop altogether, and that was the last thing he wanted. So far the feds had waited in the wings on the Lippincott case because there had been no ransom demands or other evidence pointing to a kidnapping, which made her just a missing person.
The phone rang before Buck could leave the kitchen. Ordinarily he’d let it go to voice mail or an answering machine, but he didn’t see the latter and didn’t know if the Lavenders had the former. Anyway, little about this case was ordinary, and if a ghost of a chance existed that whoever had called could be helpful, he thought he needed to grab for it. He took a handkerchief from his pocket and draped it over the handset from the Lavenders’ phone. Pinching the receiver near the top, trying not to obscure or smudge any prints that might have been left by the murderer—who, he reasoned, would have held it toward the middle—he lifted it from the phone. As he did, he reflected that none of the saints lined up on the shelf had done the family much good in the long run. “Lieutenant Shelton.”
“Maybe I misdialed,” a man’s voice said. “I’m looking for Lulu Lavender.”