Supposing these were the kidnappers, they must have been part of a larger conspiracy. Evidently the plan called for the children to be stashed here for a while, on the outskirts of town, whereafter others—including the rhinestone cowboy—would arrive to take custody of them and move them elsewhere.
If these two dead men had been discovered drunk and asleep in the lawn chairs, or merely drunk, other members of the conspiracy might have decided to execute them rather than to trust them further.
Although that might be the most likely explanation, the torture seemed illogical, especially the extent and cruelty of it. With three hostages to manage and with the need to spirit them out of the area while local and perhaps federal authorities were searching for them, the killers should have opted for quick mob-style executions. Taking time to carve their victims extensively, slowly bleeding them almost to death before administering the killing shot, seemed as reckless as it was savage.
From their perspective, however, torture might make a sort of cockeyed sense if it was ritualistic, part of a ceremony that this fraternity of the demented required of themselves when they murdered one of their own. I didn’t want to believe that was true, because it made them crazier, more vicious, and more dangerous than I previously assumed that they were. The quickest review of the bodies suggested there were similar, patterned wounds on each, but I didn’t have the stomach to conduct a thorough analytic review of them.
Most of the blood had soaked into the concrete floor, but one pool remained on which a thin film had formed, suggesting that the victims might have been murdered within the past couple of hours. I stooped to touch the shoulder of the nearest corpse, and though the flesh was cool, it still held some body heat.
Two dead men … but not one soul beseeching me for justice. I have observed before that lingering spirits are nearly always those of people who led largely good and admirable lives. Rare is the deeply wicked soul that does not cross over after death. I suspect that for their kind, a debt collector—one with a legendary name and no patience for tardy debtors—insists on payment immediately after the heart has struck its last beat and even as the final exhalation withers in the throat.
I climbed the steps two at a time, and as I drew near the top, I called out, “It’s only me.”
Mrs. Fischer said, “Only you is exactly what I hoped for, dear.”
As we made our way through the building toward the daylight at the roll-up doors, I told her what I had found, though I left out the most disturbing details.
Whoever Mrs. Edie Fischer might be and whatever secrets she might be keeping, I could tell by her calm reaction that she had not led a sheltered life defined only by home, hearth, family, church, and bingo on Saturday night.
Halfway toward the doors, we heard the rustling again, but this time I found the source almost at once. Curved dead leaves like an infestation of hard-shelled brown beetles skittering this way and that, twists of foil and scraps of cellophane spraying up as bright as hot sparks in the reflected flashlight, brittle sheets of crumpled notepad paper crackling, rusted bottle caps clicking-clinking: All were lashed into action by the scrabbling feet and the scaly whipping tails of a flurry of rats. There might have been eight, ten, twelve of the foot-long specimens with coarse brown coats and bristling whiskers and long pale toes. Their eyes were black beads that flared red when the white light caught them at a certain angle, and though the pack curved past us, I felt that I was the primary object of their attention, every ratty stare meeting mine before they swarmed away toward the back of the building, perhaps enticed here by the scent of blood, confused about the source until the metal door had stood open long enough to allow the odor of carnage to rise from the basement.
The moment wasn’t melodramatic. I didn’t expect them to attack. They were rats, not wolves. But the sight of them oppressed me. Death was always terrible, even when the dead were people who had served as agents of pain and ruin all their lives, but death was made worse by the consideration of these omnivores descending upon the murdered pair. Bodies are in a sense sacred, having been the vessels that carried souls through the world, and that they should ever become mere carrion sickens me.
Mrs. Fischer and I hurried out of the abandoned building, into the late-afternoon light, which was too cool to melt away the chill that prickled through me.
She said she’d drive, and that was all right with me because I felt that we weren’t yet done in Barstow. I sensed that the cowboy had been somewhere else in town, no doubt before he came here to collect the children. I was hoping psychic magnetism could lead me not yet to where my quarry was this moment, but first to where he had been earlier, which required a concentration that wouldn’t be possible if I were driving.