CHAPTER NINETEEN
W
hile she was on the highway headed north, Bernadette’s cell rang. It was Garcia calling. She picked up and asked, “Did you get the bastard?”
“Too late.”
She pounded the steering wheel. “Fuck!”
“Seth said you sent him over there based on a bad feeling.”
“My sight.”
“I figured.”
She steered around a slow-moving minivan. The weather and the traffic were both bad, but she was making good time. Flying in the monster truck. “So Wharten is the one who found her.”
“Boyfriend found her, hanging from a beam in the barn. Lowered her to the floor. Called the sheriff just as Seth was pulling in. I’m on my way over there now.”
“I tried calling you as soon as I saw.”
“What did you see?”
“I saw the star being painted on Ashe’s forehead.” Before he could ask about identifying marks, she added, “The painter wore gloves.”
“Obviously we can’t tell them what you saw,” said Garcia. “We’ll be tap-dancing as it is trying to explain how you’ve got this great gut.”
“I don’t want that poor man thinking his girlfriend killed herself, but I don’t want my sight outed, either.”
Garcia assured her that she wouldn’t have to reveal anything about her abilities. The inverted pentagram alone convinced Vizner that his girlfriend hadn’t committed suicide: a Wiccan wouldn’t have painted a satanic symbol on herself as one of her final acts. The sheriff agreed that it was a murder set up to look like a suicide. The ERT guys, already at the scene, concurred. The Ramsey County ME had agreed to do the autopsy and was sending a wagon up north. Again.
“Why was she killed, Tony? You think she knew something? Was someone afraid she was going to give up and spill it to us?”
“That’s what I’m thinking.”
“Did the boyfriend name any names for the sheriff? What’d he tell Wharten?”
“Seth found him awfully fucking reticent for a guy who’d just discovered the love of his life dangling from the end of a clothesline. Wharten doesn’t believe Vizner did it, but he thinks the guy knows something. Afraid to open his mouth about it.”
“Scared it will implicate him in something?”
“Scared period,” said Garcia. “When they got to the place, he was holed up in the barn with the door locked and a shotgun in his hands.”
“Thought he was a big guy,” said Bernadette. “Plus, they have all those dogs. Why didn’t the dogs protect Ashe?”
“Might have gotten preoccupied with some wild animal. Seth said they were all clawed up.”
“Have a hard time believing those dogs just happened to come across a raccoon at the same time their owner was being attacked,” said Bernadette. “Somebody baited them. Got them away from the barn.”
“We could have B.K. check the perimeter of the property. That’d be a good job for him.”
“Tony, something else.”
“Yeah.”
“When I used my sight this last time, I wasn’t holding that scrap from Lydia’s gown. I … borrowed something from the files of that old case.”
“What are you saying?”
He was having trouble processing this. She was having difficulty herself. She spoke more slowly. “I found a hunk of yarn in the old file, in an evidence bag. I took it.”
“Illegal, but keep going.”
“When I held on to it, it took me to the eyes of Ashe’s murderer.”
“A
piece of string from the Wisconsin murder case took you to Minnesota,” he said.
“Right.”
“So that seals it.”
“Exactly,” she said. “The two cases
are
connected.”
“Doesn’t rule out my two-note serial-killer theory,” he said.
“Let’s go over that goofy scenario. The maniac kills a pregnant woman and her fetus in Brule. Sees Lydia in Brule years later. Follows her to Walker and kills her. Goes back to Brule. Tries to scare me off when I get there. Goes back to Walker and kills Ashe.”
“It’s only a three-hour drive or so between the two towns. Plenty of time.”
“Why kill Ashe?”
“My serial-killer guy could have found out she was a witch. She was famous around these parts. Killing Ashe was a red herring, like Lydia’s pentagram.”
“Your theory sucks,” she said. “The randomness of it pisses me off.”
“Come up with your own theory, then.”
“We still need to know what was in those letters Lydia found. We still need to find her backpack.”
“Then hurry and get your ass up here.”
“I will,” she said, and hung up to concentrate on her driving.
About three hours later, she reached the turnoff leading to Ashe’s place. Wharten’s deputies lifted the yellow tape and let the truck through. She bumped past the bureau’s ERT van, a white monolith parked to one side of the narrow road. The back end was sticking out, forcing any vehicle going in either direction to swerve into a snowbank to get around the van.
The lights of the Nissan shined down the driveway leading to the barn, illuminating a plastic evidence bag being held up by one of the crime-scene guys. Whatever was inside the bag used to be covered in striped orange fur and wear a collar with tags. Another crime-scene guy came up with a second sack; the contents were similar.
The pit-bull bait, she thought.
As she hopped out of the truck and headed for the barn, Bernadette noticed Cahill standing on one side of the building, next to the woodpile. Another agent from Minneapolis was facing him, and they were both shaking their heads. Bernadette wondered if B.K. was the one who’d made the bloody find. She suddenly remembered that he liked cats—he owned two or three of them—and she felt bad for him. She clung to the possibility that the evidence bags contained the remains of some woodland creatures. Mutant raccoons with striped orange fur, collars, and nametags.
Garcia was standing outside the barn, talking to a tall, slender man with a thick mane of white hair and a white mustache. He wore a sheriff’s jacket and heavy leather gloves, but he had pulled off one glove and his cap and was vigorously scratching his head with the tips of his bare fingers.
Hat hair
. In Minnesota in the winter, everybody had it. When she came up to them, they were taking a break from crime talk.
“So how’s the fishing been up here?” asked Garcia.
“Crappies have been good on shiners, mostly late afternoon,” said Wharten, still scratching his scalp. “Northerns have been hitting steady on sucker minnows.”
“I gotta get out with you,” said Garcia.
“Yeah, you do,” said Wharten, pulling his hat and glove back on.
“I’ll call you,” Garcia said.
“Don’t be making promises you can’t keep, Antonia. Don’t be breaking my heart.” Wharten looked at Bernadette and winked. “He’s always breaking my heart, this one.”
“My agent, Bernadette Saint Clare,” said Garcia.
Wharten shook Bernadette’s hand. “Quite a hunch you had today. What precipitated it?”
At that instant, two ERT guys exited the barn, slamming the door loudly after them. They were talking and laughing. One of the pair spotted Garcia and nudged his partner. They stopped yapping. “Sir,” one of them said to Garcia.
“Agent,” Garcia responded stiffly. As the pair headed for the ERT van down the road, Garcia glared at them.
Bernadette smiled pleasantly at the sheriff. “Thanks for putting up with us, sir.”
Wharten grinned, revealing straight teeth as white as his hair. “Are you kidding me? I’m happy as hell the bureau is taking the lead on this quagmire. I got plenty else to do that doesn’t involve a politician’s dead daughter, a dead witch, and a sack of dead cats.”
“A
sack?” Bernadette asked with a curled lip.
“Makes me sick,” said Wharten. “Don’t get me wrong. I’m a dog man all the way. But this was so barbaric.”
“Do we know where the cats might have come from?” asked Bernadette.
“Was just telling Antonia here that hardly anybody up here puts collars and ID on their felines,” said Wharten. “But these tabbies were special. They belonged to a particular elderly woman in town who treated them like … well… this is gonna put her straight in the grave. Deputies did rock, paper, scissors to see who had to go to her house and break the news.”
“I wonder if she saw someone skulking around, waiting to take them,” said Bernadette.
“As much as she doted on them, she did let them run around outside at all hours,” said Wharten. “She had one of those pet doors on her back door.”
“So anyone could have snatched them,” said Garcia.
“Who found them?” asked Bernadette.
Wharten looked toward the woodpile. “Your guy. The young fella. Carson. He found a bloody shredded gunnysack tied to the back fence and the carcasses nearby. More of your crew is working on getting footprints. Didn’t have a chance, the poor kitties. Fucking dogs must have had a field day ripping open the bag and having at them. A couple of the mutts did have scratches and bites, but for all I know they did it to each other in the frenzy. Entire breed should be eradicated, if you ask me.”
Bernadette looked over the sheriff’s shoulder toward the closed barn door. “Ashe liked the dogs enough to rescue them.”
“They sure as shit didn’t do anything to rescue
her
, now did they?” asked Wharten, following Bernadette’s gaze to the barn. “Imagine that: a pack of these brutes between her and whoever killed her. Didn’t do her a damn bit of good. All the murderer had to do was distract the four-legged morons with a sack of cats. It’s a cliché, for Christ’s sake. Pit bulls and a sack of cats.”
A wary Bernadette ran her eyes around the yard. “Where are the four-legged morons right now?”
“They’ve been hauled away to a veterinarian. He’ll tend to their wounds and keep them caged until we figure all this out.” Wharten pointed a finger at Garcia. “Correction: until
you
figure this out, Antonia.”
“And the boyfriend isn’t talking?” asked Bernadette.
“Not yet,” said Wharten. “He’s in the house with a couple of my men. They had to pry his hands off the barn door, he was so afraid to move. I suppose he’s thinking whoever did this to her is coming back for him.”
“Why’d he come home in the first place?” asked Bernadette. “With all the plowing he had to do tonight—”
“He kept calling her and getting no answer,” said Wharten.
“Did you know her at all?” Bernadette asked.
Wharten shrugged. “Him more than her. She was odd, even without the witch business.”
“This star stuff—first on the dead girl and now on Ashe—what do you make of it?” asked Garcia.
“I think I could do without it,” said Wharten. “I could do without some Satanist running around, trying to start trouble with our law-abiding witches.”
Garcia and Bernadette looked at each other. Garcia said, “You used the plural, Seth.”
“Yes, I did, Antonia. They sure teach you good at that fancy FBI training academy.”
Bernadette’s brows arched. “How many witches are we talking?”
“Loads,” Wharten said.
This was a revelation. Not one or two.
Loads
. “Does the general population know?” she asked.
“Not if I can help it,” said Wharten.
“Why?” asked Garcia.
“Persecution,” said Wharten.
The pagan landscape was suddenly changing. “Do you think this is about Satanists versus Wiccans?” asked Bernadette.
“I don’t know if it’s Devil worshippers versus witches, witches versus witches, or a pack of foaming-at-the-mouth Lutherans trying to pin something on an outsider,” said the sheriff, adjusting his brimmed hat so that it sat lower on his head. “What I do know is the murder rate in my county has shot up by about a billion percent since New Year’s Eve and you need to do something about it. You need to solve this, and quickly.”
“We’re working on it,” said Garcia.
“Did you know Dunton’s people called me today? You think I need that?”
“I didn’t know,” said Garcia.
Each man’s voice suddenly carried an edge that cut through the buddy-buddy fishing banter, and Bernadette instinctively took one step back. As the two men continued, the steam pouring out of their mouths made them appear even angrier.
Wharten thumbed over his shoulder toward the barn. “You’ve got an army of men and piles of equipment that most of us in law enforcement only dream about. Your budget for paper clips is fatter than my annual payroll.”
Garcia’s jaw tensed. “We’re making progress. You’ve gotta give us a chance.”
“You’re sucking air.” The sheriff pointed a fat gloved finger at Bernadette. “And what about her? I’ve been told she’s one of your big deals. How about getting one of those hunches
before
my people are killed?”
“This is a federal investigation. We’ll conduct it the way we see fit. How we utilize Agent Saint Clare or any of our other personnel is our call.”
“Sheriff?” somebody called from the darkness.
“Pardon me,” Wharten said stiffly, and left to talk to someone down the driveway.
Bernadette whistled. “Man.”
“I don’t blame him,” said Garcia.
“I guess,” she said.
“Loads of witches,” said Garcia, opening the barn door. “How does that change things?”
“I’m not sure,” said Bernadette.
The barn was thick with crime-scene guys dressed in identical dark blue hooded jackets and latex gloves. Emblazoned on the back of each jacket in huge yellow letters:
FBI EVIDENCE RESPONSE TEAM
. For the heck of it, she’d love to go up to one of them and ask, “Is there anyone here from the FBI Evidence Response Team?”
Garcia and Bernadette both stayed where they were, just inside the door. They didn’t want to mess up the crime scene. One of the blue men was bent over the body. When he looked up and saw Garcia, he waved the boss over. “No, it’s okay. You’re good.”
“Let’s see what you got there, Tuckert,” said Garcia, stuffing his leather drivers into one pocket and pulling his work gloves out of the other.
Also exchanging the leather for latex, Bernadette followed at Garcia’s heels. A couple of the blue men stopped what they were doing to gawk at the newcomers. A tired-looking young guy with a camera lifted his right hand, and she returned the greeting. He’d been at the New Year’s Eve party. In fact, he might have been the one distributing the Jell-O shooters. For every two he’d given out, he’d downed one. No wonder he still looked beat-up.