Page 83 of The Devil's Advocate

There had been no conscious thought process. These movements happened almost independently. A mix of instinct and training. She moved to her left, pushed up from her knees and stole a glance through the window. She saw a modern kitchen, again rendered in the old style of country kitchens, but with a black marble worktop and cream cupboards. No one in sight. She tried the next window and saw a lounge. Lomax was on the couch, his head thrown back over the upright cushion, so she couldn’t see his face.

She didn’t need to. The bright red patch on the couch said it all. Lomax had taken a round to the head.

Dropping back into a crouch, Bloch moved toward the front door again, staying low. As she reached it, she heard the low murmur of an engine coming to life. It was coming from behind the house. Edging along the wall, she heard the pitch of the engine change as the revs grew higher, and yet the sound grew fainter as the vehicle drew further away.

Bloch peered around the house and saw another track. A back road. And on this road she saw tail lights, two hundred yards distant, moving swiftly away. Instantly, her gun came up. Bloch had to develop a vice grip on the gun, so most of the pressure on the weapon came from her right index finger pad, and her left thumb pad, using her forearms to squeeze those pressure points together. Her feet were shoulder-width apart, knees slightly bent, and leaning forward a touch. Arms bent. When she first shot Maggie she’d used a standard pistol grip, right arm locked, left arm bent, and almost broke her wrist and her shoulder. The Magnum was going to kick, no matter what. The only thing Bloch could do was manage that recoil by using her forearm and shoulder muscles as shock absorbers.

She exhaled, found the center sight with her dominant right eye.

Hitting the car from this distance was not a problem for Bloch. Not even with a weapon that wasn’t designed for long-distance accuracy. The only question was what part of the car she would hit. At this distance, Bloch was reasonably certain she could still punch a hole through the engine block and stop the car. The round would go through the trunk, the back seat, front seat, dash and into the target. But a gust of wind, or too much tension in her trigger finger could mean the difference between that shot, and the round going through the trunk, back seat, front seat,the driver, the dash and the engine. She didn’t know who was driving. It didn’t seem fair to put a hole the size of a basketball in someone without being introduced first.

She let Maggie drop by her side.

Narrowed her eyes. The shape of tail lights were quite distinctive. She’d seen those same lights recently.

On Randal Korn’s Jaguar.

Bloch swore as the car disappeared into the trees, then returned to the house.

Before doing anything else, Bloch fished in her pocket and drew out a pair of latex gloves. She put these on and wiped at the spot on the door where she had knocked. Next, she tried the front door. It was open. If anyone else was in the house then they weren’t going to be friendly. The Magnum slipped out of its holster on her waist, and she held it low as she checked first the lounge, the kitchen, and then every room in the house.

Clear.

She didn’t touch anything, moved slow and silent. The rooms were neat and tidy, nothing out of place. Except the master bedroom. A letter lay on the pillow. She read it and then returned it to the bed. A letter from Lomax’s deceased wife, Lucy. Something like that is bound to hit a grieving spouse in the gut with a steel girder. She didn’t know Lucy or Lomax, and Lomax was pretty low in her estimations, yet Bloch felt herself moved by the letter.

When she returned downstairs she stood in the doorway of the lounge, taking her time. She would hear any cars approaching. This was worth the risk.

Lomax had been sitting on the couch when he died. A gun lay beside his right hand on the couch. The grip just a few inches from his fingers. As if he had simply opened his hand and let it fall on the cushion beside him. Bloch leaned over the gun, took a sharp sniff of air at the muzzle. It had recently been fired.

Standing over Lomax, she looked down behind him, at the couch. There was blood and matter not just on the wall behind him, but on the couch. In fact, most of the spatter was at the base of Lomax’s neck. There was an entry wound in the center of his forehead.

To anyone coming to this scene it was a suicide. He’d just lost his wife and he’d found a letter from her. It was not a good letter. A cop would put two and two together and wrap up the case as suicide. A lot of cops ended up eating a bullet from their own gun. This was just another one of those stories. That’s what it looked like.

Even if Bloch didn’t know that there had probably been someone else in the house when the shot was fired, and that someone had driven away fast, she still would’ve found the scene bogus.

The bullet entered the body at the forehead and came out at the base of the neck. Intercranial ballistics is not rocket science. Bullets generally take a certain path unless deviated by something very hard and tough.

Bloch took hold of Lomax by the shoulders, slowly drew his body forward. Among dark matter on the couch was also a hole, which was parallel to the exit wound at the back of the neck.

If Lomax blew his own brains out, then he had leaned back in the seat, tilted his head to look at the ceiling, put the gun to this forehead and then pulled the trigger.

No.

Didn’t happen that way. Lomax was looking up at the gun pointed down at him when someone else pulled the trigger. If it had been Korn who pulled the trigger, then he was intimately familiar with the work of the local crime lab and he would’ve wiped the weapon clean before tossing it onto the couch beside Lomax.

Bloch returned the body to the couch, stepped back and made her way to the door.

She stopped at the front door, her grip on the handle.

The letter upstairs. She thought it might be useful. She turned and went upstairs to take a picture of it on her phone.

When she came back down, she closed the front door carefully, then turned her attention to the outbuildings. A large one, like a work shed, and a smaller one. She chose the larger of the two to start with.

Her search didn’t take long. Even though the work shed was padlocked shut, there was a small window. Using her flashlight she picked out what looked at first glance like a coffin in the corner, with the lid up. Of course, it wasn’t a coffin. It was a chest freezer. And the layer of ice on the lid had a patch of red staining.

This is where Cody Warren had been hidden. Probably his SUV would’ve been hidden in here too.

Any sympathy Bloch felt for Lomax slipped away quickly as she got into the car, fired the engine and drove away fast.