Read Online The Reckoning by Carsten Stroud - Free Book Online Page B

flying off as the hammer came back down again…and again…and again.
    “Jesus,” said Mavis. “The guy must have got it all over himself. He would have looked like a Jackson Pollock painting.”
    Seth and Riley were looking at her. She looked back at them.
    “Okay.
Insensitive
,” she said, doing the ironic air-quote thing. Nick had to grin in spite of, maybe because of, the horror.
    “You said four?”
    “Yes. The mom, Ellen, she’s down the hall.”
    They left Seth to his work and followed Riley out of the living room and down a short hallway lined with paintings—oils, the Southwest mainly, all of them well done, full of light and the sweep of desert and high plains.
    At the end of the hall a female was lying faceup, fully clothed, in mom jeans and a blousy pink calico shirt. She was laid out on the terra-cotta tiles, her eyes black pools of bloody tissue. The skin of her face looked roasted. She lay at the entrance to a large well-appointed kitchen, stainless steel and copper and oak and brass, and beyond that a door into what might have been a sunroom or a lanai. It was dark, but they could see ferns and palms in the light from a backyard lamp.
    Riley stopped at the woman’s body, knelt down beside it, pointed to the knees of the woman’s jeans, and then to a trail of bloody streaks that ran down the hallway from the living room. “She has blood in her hair, but it’s not hers, I don’t think. I think she came down the hall from the kitchen—the dishwasher is still open; maybe she was putting dishes away—when she heard what was going on in the living room. She came down the hall, saw what was happening. She turns, runs, but she only gets this far when whoever, whatever, came through that front door—it caught up to her, grabbed her by the hair. Fingers bloody from what he was doing to the kid, that’s the blood in her hair, he brought her to her knees and then he…dragged her back out to the living room. There’s fibers from the living room carpet embedded in the jean fabric here and on her shoe tips, her calves, and the blood trails out there back up this…scenario. We think the guy dragged her around to look at the bodies…and then he brought her back here.”
    “Her eyes?” said Mavis.
    “Gone. No tool marks around the orbits. If I had to testify—and I sure hope I get to, ’cause this guy really needs to get caught and tried and executed—I’d say the guy used his thumbs. You can see bloody fingertip marks on her temples, so he would have held her head with his fingers and used his thumbs to—”
    Mavis said, “Got it, okay?” and looked away, swallowing hard.
    Riley watched her, cool but sympathetic. In a chilling way.
    Nick got the feeling that
feeling
wasn’t something Riley did too much of. Considering her work, that would be an asset.
    “Her skin looks…burned,” he said.
    “Yes. You feel how hot the whole house is? Whatever was used to make it hot—maybe some kind of portable propane heater, maybe a really big ceramic coil—whatever it was, she was held up close enough to the heat source for her skin to start to fry. This was done before the eyes were taken out. We think the eyes would have popped, exploded, from the heat. There would have been a lot of pain. The eyes pop or melt, whatever, and then what was left in the socket was gouged out. I’m sorry to say she was probably still alive when this was done.”
    “So what killed her?” asked Mavis in a hoarse tone, wishing with all her heart that she had taken the vacation time that was due her—
overdue
to her—and gone up to her cabin in the Belfair Range to watch Turner Classic Movies and drink a case or two of Stella.
    “Can’t be sure without an autopsy,” said Riley in that cool clinical tone, “but my money is on a heart attack. She’s a bit overweight, a smoker, from the nicotine stains on her index and second fingers. Shock, terror, pain. Heart going like a hummingbird in a bell jar. Infarct of some