“One of the things you want to do if you’re a criminal is you want to avoid jails,” Letty said. “If you get caught, pretend you didn’t know what was happening. You know, ‘I saw the door was open, I went in to see if anyone was hurt.’ Play it stupid.”
* * *
Letty called Grimes, told him that they’d found a key and a security code in Blackburn’s desk and that they’d entered the house. “They’re probably dead,” she said.
“What? What? Why do you think that?”
She told him about the purse and the broken phones, and that they’d been gone several days but hadn’t set the alarm. “We need to get the cops over here.”
“Did you . . . see blood or anything?”
“Nothing like that. The place feels like they just left . . . Didn’t even bother to empty the garbage.” Letty pressed the edge of her phone against her forehead, working through a thought.
“Do you want me to call? I know some people over at Midland police . . .”
“Dick, stay by the phone. Don’t call anybody yet. I have to do something . . . only take a minute or two. I’ll call you back.”
* * *
She rang off, turned to Kaiser. “The garbage didn’t stink.”
“Because it was sixty fuckin’ degrees . . . Oh.”
“Yes. If somebody had made a check in the first day or two, and the air-conditioning had been set at seventy-two or something reasonable . . .”
“It would have begun to stink. We really didn’t spend any time in the guest bedrooms, we didn’t check under the beds. If they’re here, that’s where they’d be,” Kaiser said. He led the way through the house to the first guest bedroom with two king-sized beds.
They got down on their knees, next to separate beds, and Kaiser said, “I got a shoe. Shit, I got a leg. There’s a woman under here. It’s gotta be Marcia.”
Letty could see a dark shape pressed against the wall, and then, like Kaiser, picked out a shoe, saw the leg and the hips and an odd rectangular shape at the head. “Another one here,” she said. “It’s a man.”
Kaiser walked back through the house to one of the storage cupboards where he’d seen a Maglite. They both got on their knees again to look at the bodies, and found the same thing with each. The victims had been bound with duct tape and then smothered with plastic bags tied around their necks.
“Cruel motherfuckers,” Kaiser said. “Cruel motherfuckers.”
* * *
Letty called Grimes first. “We found their bodies under the beds in a guest room.” She told him what they’d seen and about the temperature in the house.
“Ah, no. Ah, no . . . I got to get over there.”
“The police will probably want you to do the identification. So . . . come on over. I’ll call nine-one-one. We’ll wait here.”
Grimes said, “I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die; and whoever lives by believing in me will never die. John 11:25.”
Letty had seen that Bible in his office. To the Bible verse, he added, “We gotta get the goddamn crazies who did this.”
SEVEN
Before she called the police, Letty went out to the garage door, picked up the key safe where she’d dropped it, wiped it off, carried it back into the garage, wiped it again with a shop towel, and stuck it under a miscellaneous pile of tools and bits and pieces of unused junk in the bottom drawer of a tool chest. As she did that, she briefed Kaiser, talking steadily.
“The cops will separate us. I got the key and the security code from Blackburn’s desk, where he’d left them in case of emergency. We walked through the house, we looked in the master bedroom and kitchen, checked closets, you looked in the garage and the loft or the attic or whatever it is. Then I called Grimes and something he said reminded us of the cold. We didn’t find the telephones in the garbage, the cops will do that . . . We did see the purse.”