So now Chang had a partial time line, and he knew that with Lauralie wearing the gardener's clothes and hat, discarded at the steps, the missing Howard Kemper was dis-patched sometime before the two boys were gunned down. Prior to this, across the lake, Lauralie had apparently killed the Brodys sometime during the early morning, after which she'd exchanged her viper's nest at the Brody home for her sniper's nest at Meredyth's bedroom window.
From bullet holes peppered into an upturned rowboat found on the lake, it had been surmised that Lucas and Meredyth had been fired on while out on the lake, unprotected, unarmed, helpless. Firearms experts had assured Chang that a child using the Remington and its scope could not miss a target as large as Lucas Stonecoat out on the lake, but neither he nor Meredyth were hit while in the bullet-riddled boat.
A broken table leg was found very near where Lucas had been gunned down, and early reports from the Brody kitchen spoke of a table that had been upended and scav-enged for its legs.
How had Lucas and Meredyth gotten to the Brody home alive under the crosshairs of that bolt-action, high- powered Remington? And once in the Brody house, why had they chosen to return here, crossing the lake and painting themselves with muck in a vain attempt at getting the horses from the stable? All questions he wanted to put to Meredyth, but she was, for the time being, unavailable to him.
Why didn't Stonecoat simply wait it out across the river? Why didn't he walk out? Why come back in the face of overwhelming firepower when he was unarmed? Macho shit-head fool, Chang summed up, what did his Cherokee bravura get him?
From where she stood in hip-deep lake water, Dr. Lynn Nielsen watched the skittish unmanned rowboat and its contents as it was guided to her by the divers. They'd had to swim out to the center of the lake to fetch it; there it had bobbed in their wake, eluding touch, acting like a shy cat, not wishing to be cornered. Finally, the two swimmers took hold of the gunwales and guided it into the shallows and an increasingly anxious Dr. Nielsen.
A third wet-suited diver stood alongside Nielsen in the shallows, and he now lifted his water-proof camera and began taking shots of the unholy sight at the bottom of the floating coffin, gagging at what his lens and his eye reported to his brain.
From the safe distance of thirty or so feet, a news camera in a helicopter overhead focused in on the activity at the lake. A dead man lay in the flat pool of water in the bot-tom of the boat, covered in worms, his throat a jagged mass of blood where his jugular had been severed, his lips moving with worm activity, and the soft tissue of his eyes, already eaten away, had sunk into their sockets, the worms finding a home in the collapsed orbs. Nielsen imagined these news camera pictures would not be finding their way into American living rooms, at least not until some money- crazed TV producer somehow created a reality show forum for crime-scene and autopsy photos. Newsroom vaults were crammed full with video deemed unfit for public con-sumption and viewing. Still, pretty soon nothing would be unfit, she told herself, if these Americans continued on their present course.
The diver with the camera, Bert Quinn, continued to snap shots in such a way as to not again look into the dead man's missing eyes.
"Jesus, damn most horrible thing I've ever seen," said Bert's partner, going for shore, anxious to distance himself from the floating coffin.
The third diver kept one hand on the gunwale, steadying the boat for Dr. Nielsen, his attention on her. "How'd you ever decide-ta become a coroner, Dr. Nielsen?" he asked, staring across the boat and into her eyes. "I mean, didya just wake up one morning and say to yourself I wanna work with stiffs, or what?"
"I went to med school to become a physician, and I somehow wound up working under an extraordinary man in forensic pathology who gave me great respect and from whom I could learn….A too good chance to pass up."
"Everybody over in Norway talk so cute?"
She felt uncomfortable now at his attention. "I am from Sweden, not Norway, and I do not have the time to teach you the difference."
"Maybe over dinner sometime?"
The cameraman looked over his lens to see her reaction to the other man's pass.
"I don't think this is the right place to talk of such matters."
"That's why I'm saying we ought to continue this over dinner, maybe some wine?"
"No, no, thank you. I don't date men outside my profession," she lied. "Still, your offer is a…a compliment. Thank you, but no, thank you."
Nielsen had begun to work as she spoke, pushing aside worm colonies from the nude body of the middle-aged gardener, searching with her gloved fingers and her sharp eye for any obvious wounds other than the enormous one at the throat. She immediately isolated a smaller curious puncture wound also in the throat, one masked by the larger wound. She ran her gloved hands down the torso, her eyes following, searching for any contusions, bruises, anomalies, or irregularities.
"This guy was hung like a thumb tack, like the size of an earplug, that thing," said the police diver who'd propositioned her over the body.
"Agent, if you're trying to embarrass me, you can 7, and if you're simply being rude because I said no to you, then I have to suspect you are hung like an earplug as well. Now please, allow me to do my job."
Both Bert the cameraman and his friend on the FBI dive team laughed at their colleague, Bert saying, "She got you good, Al."
She continued to survey the nude corpse, her gloved hand and eye now down to his scarred knees-recent bruising-and next she noticed the deep brown, tobaccolike stains under all his toenails. She took scrapings and efficiently put these into a vial, safely tucking them into a valise on a strap she'd placed around her neck. Finally, she said, "All right…we're needing to come at this in a fresh venue."
"Whataya make of what happened to this guy, Doc?" asked the third diver from shore now.
"Obviously, someone's cut his throat. Presumably Blodgett."
"That little woman?" erupted one of the divers, and this started a cacophony of disagreement.
"I saw her pictures! You're right. Skinny as a coyote."
"No bigger than a hen."
"The guy had almost two hundred pounds on her."
"Okay, gentlemen. I want the boat upended like the one we dragged into shore already, one with all the bullet holes." This boat had already been examined and photographed.
"Why're we turning the boat over with him in it?" asked the one named Al.
"I don't need or want the worms in the body bag, gentlemen, so let's upend the boat and feed the fish, shall we? We'll then float the man to the pier and lift him out there. I can better examine him once he's been…ahhh, baptized."
They reluctantly did as instructed, flipping the rowboat after some effort and spilling its contents out into the lake. The divers gently guided Kemper's floating body, facedown, to the pier. His plunge and short swim to the pier had dispersed the worms, and it had the added virtue of cleansing the wound that had killed him.
They lifted Kemper's body from the water, as the news chopper did another flyby, further grating on Nielsen's nerves. Kemper lay now faceup on the weathered dock, but the body bag, so patiently awaiting his arrival till now, suddenly flew off and into the lake on the other side of the berth, caught up in the whirlwind of the chopper as Nielsen climbed the ladder from water to platform.
"Kee-rist!" she shouted up at the chopper pilot, waving him off. "In Sweden we'd have shot those fools from the sky by now."
The body bag was retrieved, and the 2NEWS bird backed off while Lynn Nielsen leaned in over Kemper's throat for a closer look. She was unaware that the newsman overhead was shooting close-up footage of her lanky, curvaceous body now, and the divers too sat back and appreciated her statuesque beauty kneeling in over the corpse, the wet suit stretched to its limit. Nielsen's own attention was on the remaining, clinging worms that had stubbornly come along for the ride, burrowed as they were in the eye sockets and the gaping neck wound.