The Debt Collector (4 page)

“A mess.” Sonora felt the level of tension rising in her stomach, neck, and shoulders. Crick always had that effect on her. But she was glad he was here. Crick was nothing if not solid.

Sam stepped out of the closet. “Blood trail here, one in the bathroom. Specs in the hallway.”

“Any problems I let some techs in?”

Sam shook his head. Sonora said no, but she felt rushed. She was still making notes.

Crick rubbed his chin. “Uniform gave me a body count of one adult male, mid thirties, one adolescent female, one male toddler. We got an adult female, mid thirties, and an infant, female, unaccounted for.”

“That plus your assorted blood trails about sums it up,” Sam said. “Somebody lost a tooth in the bathroom.”

“It wasn't the girl.” Sonora moved so Crick could go past her and into the bedroom. She glanced back at the bullet hole in the mirror, noted the bloody thumbprint, wondered, victim or perpetrator? It looked like a couple of the pictures that had been tucked into the seams along the edge were missing. There were gaps.

She took a closer look. A mix of black-and-white photos from the sixties, some new ones in brilliant Kodak color. A baby in a high chair dribbling cereal down its chin, a chubby longhaired girl holding a cocker spaniel that looked to be older than God. A woman in a wheelchair, hair gray and curly, wearing a Grateful Dead T-shirt and a big grin, one of a little boy with a Roy Rogers lunch box—this one in black and white. The man of the house, Sonora wondered, during his cowboy phase?

Happy trails.

Crick scooted past her, heavy on his feet, going the other way this time. “Neighbors say the LeBaron in the driveway belongs to the mom, Joy Stinnet. Dad's a paint contractor, owns a Jeep Cherokee, which seems to be missing along with the mother and the child. I've got uniforms looking around the backyard, but the initial check didn't turn up anything much. Kid's toys. I put the word out on the mother and the infant, and on the Jeep. Find me a checkbook or a bank statement so we can grab that end of it. They may be using the mom to access the money.”

“What we thought,” Sam said.

Crick was walking away from them, his voice overloud in the hallway. “Got to be
something
, 'cause we got a head-count problem here.”

6

Sonora, writing in her notebook, stopped to shake her pen, which was almost but not quite out of ink. Sam was in the closet. Maybe he had a pen. She took a step forward, then stopped, tilted her head to one side, listening. There it was again, the whisper. Had someone left a radio on? She looked over her shoulder, thinking it wasn't likely to be one of her coworkers. Nobody in the cop business whispered, and the house had ignited with noise as soon as Crick gave the order for the invasion of techs.

There were too many people. Fear could saturate a room, and this crime scene was talking to her.

The techs were everywhere, their voices making a matter-of-fact, low-key rumble that was a comfort somehow. It gave her a solid feeling, familiar white-noise safety, an antidote to black lonely feelings.

She glanced at the closet. Saw Crick, elbow braced against the doorjamb, talking to Sam, neither of them whispering either. Still, with all of them, crime-scene guys included, there was an almost hushed quality to their work, be it shock or respect or a mix thereof. You did not come across this kind of carnage every day in Cincinnati.

Sonora went back to the dresser. Wild English Garden lotion from Victoria's Secret, mascara, toner, eye gel, and shadow from Merle Norman. Something from Estée Lauder, in a pretty yellow case that glittered with a spray of broken glass from the bullet-shattered mirror.

She saw a boom box on the floor in the far left corner, near the edge of the dresser. Maybe that was where the noise was coming from. The woman had probably been listening to the radio. Sonora crouched close to the floor, right hand, safely gloved, hanging on to the edge of the dresser. She could feel a gouge in the wood with the ball of her thumb, like someone had landed a hammer there.

A pinpoint of red light glowed by the switch. So the boom box was on. Sonora bent close, heard nothing. The switch was set on CD, and the program light blinked. Had the music been playing when the killer or killers arrived? Sonora pictured the mom in the bedroom, music masking the noise of intruders.

She'd check it out later, when the techs were done.

She looked over her shoulder at the bed. A jumbled pile of clean towels sat on the right, a neat pile of folded towels on the left. If the mom—give the woman a name—if Joy Stinnet was right-handed, that would have put her with her back to the bedroom door.

Sonora went to the bed, sniffed one of the towels. The scent of clean, dryer-fresh cotton was unmistakable. Laundry in progress.

Why, though, was the woman's back to the door when there was a toddler in the house? Sonora would have expected her to be facing the hallway.

The bedspread was creased and bunched, towels closer together than she would have thought. The crime-scene guys would look for semen and blood traces on the bedspread, but there was nothing visible.

She lifted a pillow at the top of the bed. Found a tiny yellow pacifier and an empty bottle—a Playtex Nurser, the plastic bag streaked with the heavy white residue of baby formula—tucked into the crease under the pillows.

So Joy Stinnet was folding laundry, stopping to give the baby a bottle, music loud on the boom box.

Sonora headed for the closet as she watched Sam and Crick, who were on their hands and knees studying splatter like engineers designing a bridge.

A huge amount of blood had pooled on the closet floor, leaking onto scuffed blue bunny slippers, flip-flops, gray polyester snow boots. Someone had gone down in a pile of jeans—maybe thirty pair in various stages of wear, jeans for whatever weight you were, it was a girl thing, your ego dependent upon what size you could fasten without passing out.

Whose blood? she wondered.

Not the father. He'd been shot sitting in the chair. And it wasn't the daughter's blood, her throat had been slit at the primary, right on the bed.

Which left the mother and child.

A stack of washrags had tumbled to the floor, as if they had been folded and dropped. Was Joy Stinnet holding them when she was attacked? Had the woman gone into that walk-in closet, been attacked there, and crawled to the bed? Lots of blood in the closet, and the pooling meant she had lain there awhile. Left for dead? Which made no sense, if she'd been kidnapped.

In her mind, Sonora followed the trail of blood back to the bed. Why the bed? Was that where the baby was—still on the bed?

She shoved past Sam and Crick. The dust ruffle on the bed hung low, skirting the floor, as if someone had dragged it or yanked it down. Blood trail led right to it.

Sonora, down on her hands and knees, lifted the dust ruffle, exposing darkness and the smell of dust and the iron-flake odor of blood. She sensed it before she saw it, heard the whispering for sure this time.

The woman's head was close enough that Sonora's foot might have brushed the flushed and tearstained cheek. Joy Stinnet's eyes were open and her mouth moved.

“…
hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee, blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Hail Mary, full of grace
…”

Sonora took it all in in a heartbeat—the woman's pain-glazed eyes, her stomach ripped wide, left hand covering the long brutal gash, belly to rib, exposing a ripple of gray and pinkish-white blue-veined intestine, globs of yellow fat. And in her right arm, a bundle, quiet but breathing, a china-doll baby, eyes shut tight, chest rising with every small breath.

The whispers. This was what she'd been hearing.

7

It was the closest Sonora had come to losing it in her entire career as a detective, and the steady sound of her own voice calling for Sam, shouting for someone to round up the EMTs, was at odds with the pulse in her throat and the tremors of her heart.

Sam was quick. He lifted one end of the bed while Sonora ran to the other side, and they slid it up and over, bedclothes dragging. The woman under the bed began to scream.

It did not add up in Sonora's head, how one human being could lose that much blood and still have the strength to scream like that. The hair on the backs of her arms rose, and she went to the woman and crouched by her side.

“I'm a police officer, ma'am, you're safe now. We have an ambulance standing by, you're going to be okay.”

The woman turned her head and her eyes caught Sonora's, and the intensity of that look made her flinch.

The woman stopped screaming, and Sonora could hear the baby crying. “Thank God,” she heard Sam say, saw him reach for the child, who was slick with blood, the mother's or the child's, Sonora could not tell. Joy Stinnet reached for Sonora with her left hand, letting her stomach wound gape. Her hand was cold and slick and sticky. Sonora winced and held tight.

“Men—” Her breath was coming quickly, in short gasps, like she'd been running, running, running.

“One man? More than one?”

“The Angel came. He gave me the baby and told me don't come out.” The woman gulped and squeezed Sonora's hand. Something bit into Sonora's palm like wire, and she felt the leak of blood from slashed palms lacing their entwined fingers. She noted the slices of open skin on Joy Stinnet's forearms, felt a weird tingle in the small of her back. Defense wounds always got to her.

“I heard my husband coming home, I heard him—”

“Can you tell me what the men looked like? Did you hear a name? Did—”

“My little Rusty was barking.” Tears flowed down Joy Stinnet's cheeks. “And they shot him, I heard him yelp.”

The EMTs came through the door like a crack of lightning, the marines of 911, heavy black boxes snapping open. A portly man with close-cropped red hair crouched next to Sonora, gave her a nod, smiled at the woman.

“My name is Chris, ma'am, you're going to be all right, you hear? Can you tell me your name?”

“It's Joy,” Sonora said. She moved back, waiting to be pushed aside, but Chris shook his head.

“Okay, Joy, you hang on, now. I just took a look at that pretty little baby girl of yours and she hasn't got a scratch on her. Detective Blair is going to hold your hand and talk to you, okay, Joy, so me and my partners here can get you a look.”

Sonora wondered how he knew her name, felt a tiny pang of disappointment that she knew, to her shame, was cowardice. She wasn't off the hook yet. She could not back away and let someone else take over.

“Joy? Joy, do you know who did this, did you recognize anyone? Can you tell me how many—”

The woman's eyelids fluttered, her breathing shallow and fast. She had black hair, Sonora noticed, shoulder length, matted behind her head. Her mascara-streaked face was dead white, with a haunted look of darkness around her eyes that Sonora had seen before, in other victims edging close to death.

The hand spasmed on Sonora's.

“Two men,” Sonora prompted.

“Two. And the Angel.”

Another EMT, name tag of Hodges, stood next to Chris and pulled a radio out of his belt. “Closest hospital, with that south exit closed, is—”

“Gillane's on duty at Jewish.” This from the young one, black hair gelled in place, working a blood-pressure cuff.

Sonora felt odd hearing the name, odd but comforted. Gillane.

“We'll go to Jewish,” the EMT named Chris said. Good choice, Sonora thought. “Get a large-bore IV so we can get some fluid pumped into her.”

Sonora wondered what the hell Joy Stinnet meant by “the Angel.” People said all kinds of things when they took that final walk.

“Tell me,” Joy Stinnet said, just as the young paramedic slid an oxygen mask over her face. Sonora knew what she wanted to know.

She heard a burst of static as the redheaded medic grabbed the radio from his belt, heard the note of fierceness in his voice. “I've got a female, mid thirties, laceration from the umbilicus to the right costal margin. We got liver, we got bowel, we got major blood loss. O
₂
mask at ten liters a minute, BP eighty palp, heart rate one twenty.”

Sonora clasped the woman's blood-drenched hands between both of hers, saw what looked like IV fluid leaking from the wound. Whatever they were pumping into her was coming right back out.

She looked Joy Stinnet in the eye, wondered, just for a moment, how long she had lain under the bed clutching the baby. “Joy, your husband got home in time.”

The woman watched her. Sobbed deep in her chest.

“Hell of a guy, your husband. Him and that dog of yours.” Sonora smiled, a stiff smile. “I won't say they're not hurt, but it looks like they're going to be okay. Your little boy and your daughter, Tammy I think she told me her name was, is it Tammy?”

The woman was watching her, watching her face.

“Tammy has your little boy, she just now carried him outside, and he's fine—scared, though, but they're all fine, ma'am. Rusty will have to spend a night or two at the vet, but he and your husband really saved the day.”

Joy Stinnet turned her head sideways and tears leaked from the edges of the oxygen mask. The hands, clutched between Sonora's, were going icy. Joy Stinnet's sobs softened and faded and her eyes lost focus. Chris jerked his head, and Sonora, at last, stood up and out of the way.

8

There was a certain beauty in watching someone do something well, something they cared about. If you looked at it right, you could see the restrained intensity in Gillane's fingers, conducting the symphony of life over the woman on the narrow metal pallet.

Joy Stinnet's heart had stopped in her bedroom. The EMTs had not been able to start it back up, not with electric shock, fluids, or prayers. Gillane was having no better luck. The woman was gone, Sonora had no doubt, she was just waiting for everyone else to catch up.