“So whoever did this wanted to make sure he didn’t have to handle Ben in a fair fight?” I asked. Baker nodded.
“Me neither,” I added. “Ben Weston would have swept the floor with me if I’d ever given him a reason.”
“Probably some cowardly little shit Ben could have beaten the crap out of if he’d been awake,” Big Al added bitterly.
Baker gave Big Al a sidelong glance. “You two were friends?”
Al glared down at his shoe. “You could say that,” he said.
Officer Dunn continued to stare at Ben Weston’s still body. “I never heard of screamless kills before,” he mumbled softly.
Doc Baker stood towering beside the bed, with his shock of white hair standing on end, in a stance designed to strike terror in the hearts of the inexperienced. He resembled nothing so much as a demented polar bear, and I knew he was enjoying Officer Dunn’s discomfort.
“Then obviously you’ve never been in the Marines,” Doc Baker observed condescendingly.
“You’re right,” Officer Dunn returned shakily. “I never was, and I don’t think I want to be, either. Mind if I step outside?”
With that, he and his partner left the room. Big Al, too, seemed shaken. Turning away from the bed, he faced the bathroom doorway, but that door only opened onto further evidence of the brutal carnage, for the bathroom was where the killer had left his final victim-Shiree Weston.
“From the looks of it,” Baker said, moving in beside him, “the woman must have had some advance warning of her danger. I believe she may have emerged from taking a shower and encountered the intruder, caught him in the act of murdering her husband and tried to stop him. I’ll say this much for her. She put up one hell of a fight.”
No doubt a fierce battle had been waged all over the demolished bedroom, but inarguably the final confrontation had occurred in the bathroom, where the doorjamb had been splintered around the lock. An examination of the doorknob itself revealed that the lock was still engaged although the door stood wide open.
“She locked herself in trying to get away?” I asked.
Baker shrugged. “Maybe. My guess is she hoped to summon help through the open bathroom window, but it didn’t work. He mowed right through the door and got to her before she had a chance.”
I stood over a naked Shiree Weston and looked down with a real sense of sadness at a woman I had never met during her lifetime. I knew from Big Al that younger than her husband by a good fifteen years, she had been a vital, vibrant woman, one who had taken a widowed and grieving Ben Weston in hand. She had showed him a way to go on living in the aftermath of his first wife’s death.
“Look at her hand,” Big Al said quietly, nudging me out of my reverie.
I looked. Her doubled fist was rolled into a solid ball with tufts of hair sticking out between her tightly gripped fingers.
“DNA fingerprints are going to nail this bastard,” Big Al vowed, “or I’ll know the reason why. Let’s get out of here,” he added. “I need some air.”
With that, he stalked out of the room. I followed him into the hallway. Outside the bedroom, Big Al’s slim margin of control evaporated. He covered his eyes with both hands as if to shut out the horror we had both just witnessed.
“I can’t believe it,” he mumbled, shaking his head. “With Ben and Shiree, it’s bad enough, but at least the two of them had a chance at life. They were happy together, but the kids…My God, those poor little kids…”
He stopped talking then and stood there gulping air like some kind of huge landed fish. A stranger might have thought he was witnessing a heart attack in progress. Instead, it was only Big Al Lindstrom, one of the world’s original cool macho dudes, doing his level best not to cry in public.
“Look, fella,” I said sympathetically. “Captain Powell was right. These people were all your friends. This is too hard on you. Get your ass back home to Molly and let somebody else handle this case. You don’t have to.”
“I sure as hell do,” Big Al returned in a strangled whisper. “And that’s why- because he was my friend. I owe him.”
We were standing in the hallway near a pocket door that seemed to cover a linen closet. Just then, there was a distinct scratching from somewhere near the base of the other side of that door.
I don’t know if the same thing happened to Big Al, but I can tell you, the hair on the back of my neck stood straight up. We both jumped as though we’d been shot, but the scratching came again, followed by a small, whimpering voice.
“Can I come out now? Is the bad man gone?”
If I hadn’t seen it myself, I wouldn’t have believed Big Al Lindstrom capable of that kind of lightning movement. He spun around and grabbed for the finger hole. For a moment, he struggled, trying to open it, but the door had apparently fallen off its track. He had to lift the door and drop it back into place before he could finally slide it open. When it did, a small, pajama-clad child tumbled out into the hallway.
“Junior!” Big Al croaked as soon as he caught sight of the boy. “What in the world are you doing in there?”
The little kid took one look at Big Al and held out his short arms to be picked up. Obviously they knew each other.
“Where’s my daddy?” Junior Weston asked, snuggling close to Big Al’s thick neck “Where’s my mommy? Why wouldn’t they come let me out? The door got stuck. I had to go to the bathroom, but they didn’t come when I called. I think I wet my pants.”
You hardly ever consider the possibility of someone like Big Al Lindstrom being radiant. Brides are radiant. Mothers of newborns are radiant. Men aren’t supposed to look that way, but the exultant joy on Detective Lindstrom’s face was amazing to behold as he clutched Benjamin Harrison Weston, Jr., in a fierce, breath-crushing bear hug.
“Hey, you guys,” he crowed, laughing and crying at the same time, shouting to anyone who cared to listen. “Come see what I found!”
The narrow hallway immediately filled with people, although not one of them stepped on the trail of bloody footprints that marred the carpeting. They all wanted to know what was going on, but no one wanted to risk screwing up the evidence.
“Look here,” Big Al gloated. “Here’s Junior-Junior Weston, and he’s all right, by God. There’s not a scratch on him!”
“So who’s the other kid?”
I asked the question of the world in general rather than anyone in particular, but it turned out that no one was listening and nobody else answered my question. I myself had seen those two dead boys lying on the bunk beds in that first bedroom, but at that precise moment in time, everyone within earshot was focused on the miracle that Junior Weston was still alive, that at least one member of Ben Weston’s family had escaped the scourge. No one else had time to think about that other unfortunate child and his soon-to-be-grieving family.
For a moment, we were all too stunned to do anything, but finally my brain slipped out of neutral. “I’ll be right back,” I told Al. I fought my way down the crowded hallway, through the living room, and out the front door.
“Hey, Detective Beaumont,” Captain Powell yelled after me as I vaulted past him down the steps. “Where the hell do you think you’re going? You can’t be finished in there already.”
“I’m going after the teddy bear,” I called back over my shoulder, “and there by God better be one out in the car!”
Years earlier, a local radio station had sponsored a program called the Teddy Bear Patrol. The idea was to put donated teddy bears in all local emergency vehicles-law enforcement, fire, and Medic One-in both the city and county. When confronted with traumatized children, emergency personnel and police officers would then have something besides mere words with which to comfort injured or frightened kids.
At the time I first heard about it, I confess it struck me as a pretty dumb idea. The idea of men getting ready to go on shift and making sure they had their weapon, their cuffs, their bulletproof vest, and their teddy bear seemed a little ridiculous. After all, real men don’t eat quiche, and they don’t pack teddy bears either. Over the years, however, I’ve been forced to change my mind, having heard enough secondhand, heart-rending stories to see the error of my ways. That April night, though, was the first time I personally had need of one of those damned bears.