Lampley gave him a look.
“Let’s go to the videotape! You know, it’s what Warner Wolf always says.”
She shrugged and opened Unit 12 for visual inspection.
“The sportscaster?” Clint said.
Vanessa shrugged again. “Sorry. Must be before my time.”
Clint thought that was bizarre, Warner Wolf was a legend, but he dropped it so he could study the screen. Kitty was in a fetal position, face twisted down into her arms. “Seen anything out of line?”
Lampley shook her head. She’d come in at seven and McDavid had been snoozing the entire time.
That didn’t surprise Clint. Haldol was powerful stuff. He was worried about Kitty, though, a mother of two who had been convicted of forging prescriptions. In an ideal world, Kitty would never have been put in a correctional facility in the first place. She was a bipolar drug addict with a junior high school education.
The surprise was how her bipolarity had manifested on this occasion. In the past, she had withdrawn. Last night’s outburst of violent raving was unprecedented in her history. Clint had been fairly confident that the course of lithium he had prescribed for her was working. For over half a year Kitty had been levelheaded, generally upbeat—no sizable peaks or valleys. And she’d made the decision to testify for the prosecution in the Griner brothers case, which was not only courageous, but had a strong potential for advancing her own cause. There was every reason to believe that she could be paroled soon after the trial. The two of them had started to discuss the halfway house environment, what Kitty would do the first time that she became aware that someone was holding, how she would reintroduce herself to her children. Had it all started to look too rosy for her?
Lampley must have read his concern. “She’ll be all right, Doc. It was a one-off, that’s what I think. The full moon, probably. Everything else is screwy, you know.”
The stocky veteran was pragmatic but conscientious, exactly what you wanted in a head officer. It also didn’t hurt that Van Lampley was a competitive arm wrestler of some renown. Her biceps swelled the gray sleeves of her uniform.
“Oh, yeah,” Clint said, remembering the highway smash-up that Lila had mentioned. A couple of times he had attended Van’s birthday party; she lived on the back of the mountain. “You must have had to come to work the long way. Lila told me about the truck that crashed. Had to bulldoze the whole heap, she said.”
“Huh,” Van said. “I didn’t see any of that. Must’ve got it cleaned up before I left. I meant West and Ryckman.” Jodi West and Claire Ryckman were the regular day PAs. Like Clint they were nine-to-fivers. “They never showed. So we got no one on medical. Coates is pissed. Says she’s going to—”
“You didn’t see anything on Mountain?” Hadn’t Lila said that it was Mountain Rest Road? Clint was sure—almost sure, anyhow—she had.
Van shook her head. “Wouldn’t be the first time, though.” She grinned, displaying a big set of yellowing choppers. “There was a truck that flipped on that road last fall. What a disaster. It was from PetSmart, you know? Cat litter and dog food all over the road.”
The trailer belonging to the late Truman Mayweather had not looked good the last time Terry Coombs was out here (to cool down a domestic disturbance involving one of Truman’s many “sisters,” who had vacated the residence shortly thereafter), but this morning it looked like high tea in hell. Mayweather was sprawled beneath the eating table with some of his brains on his bare chest. The furniture (mostly purchased at roadside rummage sales, Dollar Discount, or Chapter 11, Terry guessed) was scattered everywhere. The television was upside down in the rust-scaled shower stall. In the sink a toaster was making friends with a Converse sneaker mended with friction tape. Blood was splashed all over the walls. Plus, of course, there was a hunched-over body with his head sticking out through the side of the trailer and his plumber’s crack showing above his beltless jeans. A wallet on the floor of the trailer contained an ID for Mr. Jacob Pyle, of Little Rock, Arkansas.
How much strength did it take to pound a man’s head through a wall like that? Terry wondered. The trailer walls were thin, granted, but still.
He duly photographed everything, then did a three-sixty panning shot with one of the department’s iPads. He stood just inside the door long enough to send the photographic evidence to Linny Mars at the station. She would print off a set of pics for Lila and start two files, one digital and one hard copy. To Lila, Terry texted a brief message.
Know you’re tired, but you better get out here.
Faint but approaching came the recognizable sound of St. Theresa’s one and only fully equipped ambulance, not a full-throated WHOOP-WHOOP-WHOOP, but a somehow prissy whink-whink-whink.
Roger Elway was stringing yellow CRIME SCENE DO NOT CROSS tape with a cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth. Terry called to him from the trailer’s steps.
“If Lila finds out you’ve been smoking at a crime scene, she’ll tear you a new one.”
Roger removed the cigarette from his mouth, examined it as if he’d never seen such a thing before, put it out on the sole of his shoe, and tucked the butt into his shirt pocket. “Where is Lila, anyway? Assistant DA’s on his way, he’ll expect her.”
The ambo pulled up, the doors sprang open, and Dick Bartlett and Andy Emerson, two EMTs that Terry had worked with before, got out fast, already gloving up. One carried a backboard, the other toted the portable hospital they called First In Bag.
Terry grunted. “Only the Assistant Duck’s Ass, huh? Two dead and we still don’t rate the top guy.”
Roger shrugged. Bartlett and Emerson, meanwhile, after the initial hustle, had come to a halt beside the trailer, where the head stuck out of the wall.
Emerson said, “I don’t think that gentleman is going to benefit too much from our services.”
Bartlett was pointing a rubber-gloved finger at the place where the neck protruded. “I believe he’s got Mr. Hankey tattooed on his neck.”
“The talking turd from South Park? Seriously?” Emerson came around to look. “Oh, yeah. So he does.”
“Howdy-ho!” Bartlett sang.
“Hey,” Terry said. “That’s great, guys. Someday you should put your routine on YouTube. Right now we got another corpse inside, and there’s a woman in our cruiser who could use a little help.”
Roger said, “You sure you want to wake her up?” He jerked his head at Unit Four. A swatch of lank, dirty hair was plastered against the rear window. “Girlfriend be crashing. Christ knows what she’s been on.”
Bartlett and Emerson came across the junked-out yard to the cruiser, and Bartlett knocked on the window. “Ma’am? Miss?” Nothing. He knocked harder. “Come on, wakey-wakey.” Still nothing. He tried the doorhandle, and looked back at Terry and Roger when it didn’t give. “I need you to unlock it.”
“Oh,” Roger said. “Right.” He thumbed the unlock button on his key fob. Dick Bartlett opened the back door, and Tiffany Jones spilled out like a load of dirty laundry. Bartlett grabbed her just in time to keep the top half of her body from hitting the weedy gravel.
Emerson sprang forward to help. Roger stayed put, looking vaguely irked. “If she eighty-sixed on us, Lila’s gonna be pissed like a bear. She’s the only wit—”
“Where’s her face?” Emerson asked. His voice was shocked. “Where’s her goddam face?”