The Widow's Revenge (16 page)

SCOTT PARRIS
parked his sleek black-and-white Chevrolet patrol car beside McTeague’s rental car and went stomping across the headquarters yard.

Tears streaming down her face, Sarah Frank was barely aware of her leaden feet descending the stairway when Parris banged his big fist on the door and boomed out, “Hey—lemme in!”

After hurriedly wiping her eyes, Sarah opened the front door.

His face about as cheerful as warmed-over oatmeal, Parris tipped his hat at the sad-faced girl. “Where are those two?”

The Ute-Papago girl pointed at the ceiling.

The chief of police looked up. Seeing no one hanging from the chandelier, he picked up right away on the meaning of her gesture. The quick-witted fellow muttered a perfunctory “thanks” before bounding up the stairway three steps at a stride.

As was her habit at such emotion-charged moments, Daisy Perika appeared, leaning against her walking stick. “What in the world’s going on?”

Sarah mumbled that she did not know.
And I don’t care.

But she did, poor kid. And sooner or later, caring too much would prove to be—

But we must not anticipate.

SCOTT PARRIS CLOMPED HIS BIG BOOTS ALONG THE UPSTAIRS HALLWAY
, jerked Moon’s office door open, and barged into the rancher’s private sanctum like a man looking for a knock-down, drag-out brawl with anyone who crossed his path. Without so much as a “hello,” the chief of police tossed his old-fashioned felt fedora onto Moon’s desk and fell heavily onto the leather couch. “What a day,” he growled. “I don’t know how things could get worse.” But the gloomy cop harbored a suspicion that one way or another, things would.

Moon frowned at his friend, who seemed to have aged a decade since yesterday. “What’s happened?”

The fed seated herself beside the chief of police and shot a glance at him. “You want me to tell him?”

The cop rubbed a stubby thumbnail over the couch arm, making a deep crease in the soft leather. “No, I’ll do it.” He looked up at Charlie Moon. “You’d better sit down for this.”

“Bad as all that?”

“Worse.” Parris crossed the crease to make an X. “If this business was only ‘bad,’ I’d be tickled half to death.”

Moon pulled up an armchair to face his guests. As he eased himself into it, his knees brushed McTeague’s, and he caught a hint of a scent of expensive perfume. It was enough to make a man dizzy.

Oblivious to such hormonal distractions, Parris thumbed a lopsided circle around the X. “Last night, a person or persons unknown entered the ICU at Snyder Memorial and killed everybody on the floor.”

Moon’s eyes narrowed to slits. “
Everybody?
”

“Every living soul.” The lawman inspected the circled X with a critic’s hard eye, then rubbed it out. “Except for the two survivors of the
hardware-story robbery.” Parris was experiencing a peculiar sense of detachment from reality; even his spoken words seemed to be coming from somewhere outside himself. When a sharp pain surged in his chest, he took a deep breath and gritted his teeth until it passed. “Those bastards are gone with the wind.” He gave McTeague a sideways glance. “They were snatched by that gang of lowlife murderers the FBI calls ‘the Family.’ ”

The tribal investigator was also feeling pain, but of the psychic kind. “How many dead altogether?”

“Sixteen.” A burning sensation seared Parris’s left arm.
Go ahead. Kill me. I don’t give a hot damn!
“Two night nurses. A state cop—some new guy I didn’t know. They tell me he had a wife and twin baby girls.” For the longest time, the lawman was unable to speak. He tried vainly to swallow the lump in his throat. Coughed. Swallowed again. Finally, he croaked, “And thirteen patients.”

“That’s an awful lot of killing,” Moon whispered.

Parris opened his mouth. Shut it. He put his hands over his eyes and wept silently while his massive shoulders shook.

Lila Mae McTeague wanted to hug the big man. Tell him not to worry. By and by, everything would be all right. She resisted the motherly urge.

Moon tried to think of some comforting words. Came up empty.

At a loss for what to say or do, the FBI agent and the tribal investigator stared at the floor.

After making a peculiar choking sound, the hard-boiled lawman got up, stalked into the hallway, and shut the door behind himself. Softly.

A crotchety old clock on the office wall tickety-tocked precious seconds away, perhaps to be deposited in some hidden cache of time that would be recycled one fine day.

The Ute addressed his former girlfriend. “Anybody see the killers?”

Fighting off the urge to snap,
Only the dead,
McTeague shook her black mane. “So far, we haven’t located a witness who saw anyone.”

“Somebody must’ve heard something.” Moon glared at the closed office door. “Screams in the night. Somebody putting up a fight.”

“Yes, one would think so.” The woman’s tone was even, almost
detached
—as if they were discussing the likelihood of rain tomorrow or
how best to skin a channel catfish. “Evidently, the thing was done very quietly.”

“So how’d these people die?”

The lady admired the expertly lacquered fingernails on her left hand. “The medical examiner’s preliminary findings—and this was based upon the four corpses that had been examined when I received the oral report—is that the victims’ brains were penetrated by a slender, pointed instrument.” Apparently satisfied with her expensive manicure, the federal cop licked her tastefully tinted lips to savor the bittersweet flavor of a lipstick called Raspberry Sunset. She had left a slight trace of this concoction on Moon’s mouth. “The working portion of the weapon was no less than eight centimeters long and approximately four millimeters in diameter.” She cocked her head, as if to mull this data over. “A common ice pick, I should think.” Anticipating Moon’s next question, Lila Mae McTeague touched a pointy crimson fingernail to a cultured pearl on her earlobe. “The wound entry point was in the victim’s left ear canal.”

Charlie Moon experienced a sudden earache. Absurdly, this sympathetic response was followed instantly by recollection of the phrase
better than a sharp stick in the eye.

The office was suddenly uncomfortably warm. Oppressively stuffy.

At a rumble of distant thunder over the Misery Range, the rancher got up to open a window.

Wearing a sheepish smile, Scott Parris opened the door, thereby providing a path for a pleasant draft. The fresh breeze lifted a pair of gauzy window curtains that a long-dead occupant of the Columbine had crocheted more than eighty years ago. Parris explained his absence in this manner: “I asked Sarah to make us a pot of coffee.”

“Good idea.” Moon was unable to return his friend’s strained smile. “We’re going to need it.”

McTeague, who seemed to require no audience, might have been talking to herself. “The working hypothesis is that a person posing as a qualified nurse gained access to the ICU.” Before Moon could ask why, she explained. “The LPN who was scheduled to work the graveyard shift didn’t show up, but a substitute apparently did. We found an unintelligible scrawl on the night-duty log that is evidently the sub’s signature. After
performing some routine duties and gaining the confidence of the state-police officer who was guarding the hospitalized felons, the phony stand-in probably murdered the officer first, then ice-picked the two nurses. The next step would have been to unlock the ground-floor door below the ICU and let in the Family members who would assist their hospitalized comrades in their escape. While that was happening, the counterfeit nurse would have had sufficient time to murder all of the ICU’s thirteen other patients.”

Moon tried without success to avoid visualizing the cold-blooded massacre. His mind’s eye watched a wild-eyed, white-frocked nurse dash from room to room, stabbing a bloody ice pick deep into the brains of terrified sick folk who were too weak to defend themselves. “Have you located the nurse who didn’t show up for work?”

Already the color of slate, Parris’s face faded a shade grayer. He had forgotten to add that grisly statistic, which raised the body count to seventeen.

“I regret to say—yes.” McTeague had fixed her gaze on a Cattleman’s Bank calendar on the office wall, which featured an oil painting of a purebred Hereford bull. “Just before dawn, the victim’s corpse was discovered in the trunk of her 1992 Mercury sedan, which was parked behind the hospital.”

Parris groaned. “Killing a cop who’s guarding their buddies, even murdering the nurses—that’s bad enough.” He balled his right hand into a big fist that he wanted to
hit something with
. “But only a criminal lunatic would kill all those sick people
just for the hell of it.
”

Despite her cool exterior, McTeague was beginning to feel the strain. “The hospital murders were not committed by a lunatic, or ‘just for the hell of it.’ ” As she turned her head to glare at Parris, the fed’s tone was icy. “The helpless victims were killed with definite and practical goals in mind—the most obvious being to eliminate any possibility of leaving a witness behind. Even a seemingly comatose survivor might have seen or heard something that would help us identify one or more members of the Family.” She eyed the disheveled town cop with distaste, like an epicure who has discovered a dung beetle in her cream-of-mushroom soup. “And
there was a secondary objective to the mass murder, which was at least as important as rescuing two of their injured comrades.”

Parris set his formidable jaw bulldog-fashion. “And what might that be?”

He is almost cute.
“The members of the Family consider themselves to be a pretty tough bunch of hombres. And like all of their ilk, they have their pride.”

Mr. Bulldog goggled at the woman. “Pride?”

“Well of course.” Explaining the obvious to dimwits was so very tedious. “Try to view the situation from their perspective. When a local cowboy just happens to wander by the hardware store and manhandles their team of four”—she shot a sharp look at Moon—“they end up looking like a bunch of bumbling amateurs. And in addition to suffering acute embarrassment, the Family ends up with two men stone cold dead, and two more seriously injured.” McTeague enjoyed provoking the angry chief of police. “I am firmly convinced that the hospital massacre was a sort of in-your-face method of making a point.” She waited for the hoped-for response.

Parris did not disappoint. “Point?”

“Certainly.”

“With who?”

“The local chief of police, of course.”

He jabbed his chest with a thumb. “Me?”

“Who else?” McTeague plunged her verbal dagger deep into his ego. “Until the Bureau assumed jurisdiction, you represented the legally constituted authority.” She twisted it. “And while being interviewed by the news media, you referred to the Family as ‘a bunch of cowardly bums, who like to beat up on old women.’ ”

Oblivious to this attack, Parris didn’t blink. “Well, they are—cowardly murderous bums, who ought to be strung up on the nearest cottonwood and their bodies left to rot in the sun!”

Left with no other weapon, the fed resorted to a disdainful sniff. “A very evocative picture, and you are entitled to your point of view.”

Evocative, indeed. The picture of hanging bodies rotting in the sun
reminded Scott Parris of something. An execution he could not quite call to mind; a death sentence carried out a long time ago.
Must’ve been an old photograph I saw in one of my Western-lore magazines
. But it felt more like a scene from a nightmarish dream.

McTeague’s reply was icy. “The point the Family made was simply this—that despite your best efforts, they are still in business.”

“Not for long,” Parris said.

This was McTeague’s setup for the cheap shot. “I agree. Now that the Bureau has jurisdiction, with almost a hundred agents on the case.”

The local cop rolled his eyes, barely contained a derisive snort.

The FBI agent turned her head to regard the craggy-faced Indian. A romantic of sorts, she imagined Charlie Moon living in those days before the Shining Mountains were overrun by mountain men, explorers, prospectors, soldiers, ranchers, cowboys, various categories of land-grabbers, and finally farmers, merchants, and poor families desperate for a home nearer to that far horizon where the sun went down.
Charlie is quite civilized. But a hundred and fifty years ago, he’d have been a bloodthirsty savage wearing scalps on his belt and committing unspeakable atrocities against the settlers.
Miss McTeague had the benefit of a fine liberal education with three degrees from two of the finest Ivy League universities—but history was not her strong suit.

The object of her lurid imagery was lost in Lila Mae McTeague’s enormous eyes.

He’s so sweet.
Somewhere deep inside, the lady sighed.
Perhaps I should consider rekindling our relationship.
She recalled what had happened last year.
No. I could never forgive him for that. Not even if he was innocent.
Like the members of the Family, Lila Mae also had her pride. “Well, Charlie, you always manage to find trouble.”

Mr. So Sweet felt warmed by his old flame. “I don’t go looking for it.”
Trouble seems to have a way of finding me.
Just like Aunt Daisy.
Maybe it’s in our blood.

As it happened, the aforesaid aunt was approaching.

Bam!
(This was Daisy kicking the office door.)

“Open up!” (Also Moon’s irascible auntie.)

Why did she not merely rap a knuckle lightly on the door and ask
politely whether her nephew and his guests would mind being disturbed for a moment? Because Daisy did not have a free hand. Her sturdy oak staff was grasped in one, a hot pot of coffee in the other. Nevertheless, with the assistance of her walking stick, the tribal elder could stand briefly on one foot, which left the other appendage free to kick with.

Now, the matter of her snappish command. The old war horse was winded from climbing the Columbine headquarters stairs and in no mood for wasting precious breath on superfluous words.