Primal Fear (6 page)

From his vantage point, he could only make out a few snatches of words, a phrase here and there, and he decided that would have to suffice until Charlie arrived to photograph the crime scene.

“. . . never meant to let this . . .” one part of the note said, as well as “. . . and I pray that God will . . .”  The paper had been too badly crumpled to make out much more.

In the distance, Harry heard the approaching wail of a siren, growing steadily louder as a squad car topped the hill and made its way towards Slater’s house.  In a moment, the room would be abuzz with activity as his deputies assisted him in trying to piece together the clues that would help them understand what had happened here.  For now, the silence hung over Slater’s home like a leaden blanket, shrouding his body in an almost numbing tranquility.

Harry wished he could cover Slater, provide him with at least a shred of dignity through the simple act of draping a blanket over his remains.  But he couldn’t.  Procedure would not allow such kindness.

And so he remained crouched beside Slater’s unmoving form, listening to the scream of the siren and the howl of the wind through the stand of trees that lined his property.

Chapter Four

“Never would’ve expected anything like this from Marty Slater, of all people.”  Delbert Hughes drew in a long breath and glanced once more over his shoulder at the body on the floor.  “Never even would have thought it.”

He snapped his medical bag shut and motioned for his two assistants to tend to Slater’s remains, moving into a corner of the kitchen to share his findings with Harry. 

As County Coroner, Hughes had insisted that nothing be touched until his arrival, a condition Harry had attended to completely.  Though they’d had relatively few dealings with each other over the years, Harry had learned long ago that Hughes was adamant in regards to observing proper procedure, and his outbursts in the past when his guidelines where not strictly adhered to were well known throughout the county.  Besides, Harry had a great amount of respect for the man, and knew for a fact the feeling was mutual.

Hughes had worked closely with Harry’s father during Arthur Cronin’s long career with the Glen Forest Police Department.  Tales of Hughes’ expertise and professionalism had made an impression on Harry even before he’d decided to follow in his father’s footsteps and apply to the academy.

Now, as Hughes’ assistants silently wheeled the body past them, Harry watched the coroner closely for the familiar frown that would signal suspicion.  He was not quite ready to rule out foul play himself, and any misgivings expressed by Hughes would greatly affect his own gut feelings about the case.

“So what do you say, Del?  What is it we’re looking at here?”

Hughes scratched at his chin.  “I wish I could tell you more, but from where I’m standing, and considering everything I saw when I looked him over, I’d say things are pretty cut and dried.  Doesn’t make a whole bunch of sense, like I said, but still, looks like suicide to me.  But Marty Slater?  Maybe his lay off from the Stratham hurt him more than he let on?”

Harry frowned.  “I don’t know.  That was what, going on three years now?  And he was talking about taking early retirement anyway.  No, if this was how he felt about it, we would have been standing here years ago.”  He paused, trying to look at it from a new angle.  “No chance the gun could have been put in his hands later?”

Hughes thought about this for a moment, but dispelled it with another short shrug.  “I don’t think so.  The way the gun’s laid out in his hands, the angle of the exit wound . . . it’s all just too perfect.  Someone throwing down a gun would never have been able to get it in his hands just so like that.”  He narrowed his eyes, peered up at Harry over the top of his glasses.  “Something telling you otherwise?”

“No.  Nothing other than a gut feeling.  It’s like you said: it doesn’t add up.  For starters, Marty hated guns.  I can’t even imagine him letting one in his house, let alone him bringing one in himself.  I’ll have to do some checking around, see if I can turn up anything in town.  If he bought it locally, there aren’t too many places he could have picked it up.  Shouldn’t be too hard to find out where.”

“Yeah, but it’s the
why
of the matter that’s got me.”

“I hear you, Del.”  Harry let his gaze wander about the room, checking on the progress of each of his deputies in turn.  He’d given Charlie Sandler and Ben Dugan the task of taking a quick walk through Slater’s life, looking around the house for any sign of his day to day activities, and perhaps for any hint that those activities had been somehow thrown off course.  Such indications in the days leading up to a man’s suicide might shed some light on why he’d chosen to end his own life. 

They had the note, of course, the one they’d found beside Slater’s body, but unfortunately, it didn’t have a lot to say.  It seemed to be little more than a plea for forgiveness, but as far as offering a reason for his decision to take his own life, it revealed nothing at all.

“Could be he was facing some kind of terminal illness,” Hughes offered.  “Maybe he wanted to go out on his own time rather than let some . . . tumor or whatnot get the better of him later.  I won’t know that until I get him back to the morgue, though, so don’t take what I’m saying now as gospel.  Just trying to make some sort of sense out of all this.”

“Hey, it’s a theory, right?” Harry asked.  “And it’s more than I got.  But that note of his doesn’t come off like a goodbye to friends and family.  Sounds more like a man trying to get on the good side of his maker, if you ask me.  And other than being a bit rough around the edges, I don’t know what it is Marty Slater had to be so guilty about.”

Hughes reflected on this, watching in silence as Charlie and Ben made their way slowly down the cellar stairs at the far end of the kitchen.

“Careful down there, guys,” Harry called out, and then, more softly, he said to Hughes, “I don’t think Marty ever threw anything out in his life.  Can only imagine what his basement looks like.”

Hughes reached out and gave Harry a slap on the shoulder.  “Got your work cut out for you on this one, friend.  Come to think of it, I guess we both do.  I’ll let you know what I come up with, just as soon as I can.”

“Ditto,” Harry said, his eyes falling to the track of dirt on the kitchen floor.  “I’ll relay whatever we find here over to you.  Maybe between the two of us, this thing will start to fall into place a little easier.”

“Yeah, maybe,” Hughes said, but his tone didn’t carry much hope.  What a dead man couldn’t tell him on the autopsy table, he’d once confessed to Harry, would never be known.  “Well, gotta clear out of here.  Take care, Harry.”

“Will do.  I’ll talk to you later.”

Hughes made his way slowly out the back door and closed it behind him, cutting off the cold bite of the wind.

Harry crouched beside the trail of dirt, reaching down to run his gloved fingers through one of the smudges.  It was still slightly tacky, not yet completely dried, and his fingertip came away dirty, caked with the grayish-brown mud.  Whoever had left the trail, they had done so recently, most likely that very morning.

Thinking back, Harry recalled seeing the same shade of mud caked onto the bottom of Slater’s boots, indicating that it had been the home-owner himself that had marked up his kitchen floor.  But where had Marty gone so early in the morning?  The ground in his backyard was frozen solid; this mud was fresh.

He lifted his fingers to his nose, slowly ground the dirt between them as he sniffed at the sample.  It smelled chalky, more like the residue of cement than of mud; its texture confirmed this, rolling like grit between his fingers.

Rising, Harry brushed his hands on the leg of his pants, letting the mud flake off and fall to the floor.  Could this be a hint to Slater’s demise?  Was it possible that this pre-dawn stroll could have something to do with his eventual suicide?

He was about to move back into the living room to see what he might have missed upon his first investigation, when Charlie’s voice reached him from the open cellar doorway.

“Hey, Harry?  Shit, I think you’d better come and have a look at this.”

He descended the cellar steps carefully, not at all encouraged by the creaks and moans that punctuated every step.  They were steep and narrow, and his wide shoulders brushed the walls on both sides until he reached the bottom.

Dimly lit, the air musty and smelling of stagnant water, the cellar was even worse than Harry had first imagined.  Every available space seemed to be filled with junk, from broken furniture to stack after stack of water-logged magazines.  One long set of shelves opposite the stairs was filled to bursting with what seemed to be a complete back-issue collection of the local
Glen Forest Weekly News
.

“Jesus,” Harry murmured, stifling a cough.  The bare soil of the floor crunched beneath his feet as he negotiated his way cautiously along the narrow path that wound its way in the direction of the basement’s far end.

“Back here, Harry,” Ben called out, and the beam of a flashlight cut through the gloom ahead.  Dust motes swam in the light, hanging in the air like moths around a lamp-post.  “Watch your step.”

“Yeah, thanks,” he called back, “I’ll do my best.  You guys are still wearing your gloves, right?  I don’t need anything that might be evidence contaminated here.”

Charlie’s voice floated back to him.  “Yeah, we got it covered.”

“Glad to hear it.”  A long row of boxes lined the wall to Harry’s right, stacked from floor to ceiling in haphazardly placed piles.  He stopped and peered into two or three of them at random, peeling back the damp cardboard to reveal their contents.

Kindling.  Box after box of scrap wood, scavenged, he assumed, from the wood bins of a hundred different lumber yards.  When Slater had planned to use this much kindling, Harry had no idea, but he was certain Marty would have never run out.

Ben had called out to him from what appeared to be a small alcove set into the eastern wall of the stone foundation, somewhere ahead and off to Harry’s left.  “I always knew Marty was one hell of a pack-rat,” he called out, “but I never knew he was this bad.  Looks to me like he held onto everything he ever laid his hands—”

Harry broke off as he rounded the corner of the alcove and found himself facing another stone wall.  The tight passageway broke off again to the left, doubling back on itself before spilling out into what Harry assumed to be a separate storage area.  Five concrete steps descended from where he stood and he moved down them slowly.        

Something didn’t feel right about the layout.  The wall at his right was the foundation wall.  Another area beyond that wall would have to have been dug out underground.

As if to confirm this, Charlie leaned out into the narrow passage and waved Harry towards him.  “Looks like Marty had himself a little bomb shelter hidden away down here, Chief.”

Harry ran his right hand along the cold stones of the foundation wall.  “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

Marty had been a pack-rat and—after his wife had left him—a loner.  Was it possible he’d seen himself as something of a survivalist as well?  And now that Harry thought about it, the eastern wall of Slater’s house lay lower to the earth than the rest, the ground sloping away steeply from the high mound that comprised his side yard.  It was conceivable that a bomb shelter could have been carved out somewhere beneath that huge mound.

Harry was struck by the absurdity of the situation, but any hint of a smile that might have risen on his face was swept away by Ben’s grim voice from within the shelter.

“Holy shit.”  The words had only been muttered, but it didn’t make any difference.  There was no mistaking the fear in them.

Ben stumbled out of the shelter to stand behind Charlie.  His face was very pale, twisted into a grimace that Harry didn’t like at all.

“What’s wrong?”

Ben swallowed hard.  “I think you’d better see for yourself, Harry.”  He was leaning on a rusted iron door, what would have been, many years ago, the secure entrance to the bomb shelter.  It stood against the wall now, twisted on its hinges, the intervening years and its own weight conspiring to leave it hanging at an odd angle, one which would never again allow the door to close completely.

Harry could see a trace of horror in Ben’s eyes now as he quickened his pace to squeeze past him into the shelter.  It was brighter here, illuminated not only by Charlie’s flashlight but also by a small lamp that had been set up in the far corner of the room.  Its shade removed, it had been placed on top of an overturned milk crate, and by its garish light, Harry examined the strange interior of the tiny secret room.

The shelter had been constructed of cinder blocks, its area roughly twelve feet long and ten feet wide, its ceiling only six feet high.  Harry had to crouch to enter, the top of his head grazing the door frame as he pushed his way inside.

Along one wall, a low table had been set up, a single battered chair placed before it.  A tiny bookshelf stood alongside, its three available shelves crammed with ancient canned foods and supplies.  Most disturbing, though, were the walls themselves.  They had been literally covered with pornographic photos.

From floor to ceiling and from end to end, each wall was filled with them, an X-rated collage of naked women, their images torn from countless adult magazines throughout the years and taped helter-skelter into place.  Many of them were curling and tattered, but some—presumably those that had been hung more recently—stood out as bright and glossy newcomers amid the sea of flesh.  Some of the pages had been applied in layers, four or five thick in some places before the wall behind them could be glimpsed through some tear or fold in the paper.

He let his eyes wander aimlessly over the immense collection of photographs, taking note that the majority of them seemed harmless enough—the same sort of photo you could tear out of a girlie magazine that any convenience store in the county would sell you over the counter.  There were also a great number of them that had clearly been purchased from an adult bookstore.  These were much more graphic, depicting their subjects in all manner of actual sexual activity.

Harry was on the verge of wondering aloud how many years it would have taken Marty to amass such a huge collection of images, but the words stuck in his throat.  Because his eye suddenly detected a sudden similarity in all of the photos, a single bit of connective tissue in the wide varieties of positions and activities.