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Chapter33
MARS WAS SOUND ASLEEPon the bed in Decker’s room. It was past two in the morning and yet Decker was wide awake sitting in a chair and studying his laptop. He was scrolling through all the information that had been on the thumb drive Brimmer had given him.
He had taken off his belt holster with his new pistol to replace the old one damaged in the fight in the alley and laid it on the nightstand. He was still upset that he had let the shooter get away.
He and Mars had been at this for hours, until Mars had grown exhausted and collapsed on Decker’s bed instead of going to his own room. The rain was pouring outside, and Decker could hear the drops ramming his window like thrown handfuls of gravel. It was one of those Ohio Valley storms that sprang up out of nowhere and pounded the entire state for a while.
But right now, he had tuned out the storm and homed in on the critical facts of his case from over thirteen years ago.
The 911 call had come in at 9:35 about a disturbance at the Richardses’house. That should have been a red flag for him, as should many things, in retrospect.
Who made the call? And what was the disturbance?
Not even the neighbors had noticed anything unusual that night. And there were no tracks of any other car coming to the house that night, just David Katz’s. With the rain and mud, there would have been fresh tire tracks. So no other car had been there.
And here was the kicker. Decker was looking at the times of death provided by the medical examiner who had done the posts on the four bodies. The ME had said that all four victims had been killed close to eight-thirty. The records showed that he had based his conclusion on several indicators, one being the temperature of the bodies when they were discovered. Although Decker knew that was very tricky and could be affected by numerous factors. But a one-and-a-half-degree Fahrenheit drop in body temperature per hour after death was the standard rule.
But principally the ME had based his conclusion on the contents of the Richards family’s stomachs. Susan Richards had testified that she had made dinner for the family and then left it in the oven before she went out. She said the family usually ate dinner at around six. The autopsies of the Richardses had revealed that if they had indeed eaten around six, the state of digestion of their food demonstrated that around two and a half hours had passed between their eating the food and being killed. It was not an exact time, the ME had been careful to stress, but he felt confident. And he could not possibly have been off by a full hour, he said.
Katz had shown up around six-thirty, according to Mrs. DeAngelo’s testimony. The meal presumably had been finished and the kitchen had been cleaned up by then. Decker had even checked the dishwasher and seen the three empty plates and accompanying glasses and utensils inside. That probably confirmed that the Richardses had indeed eaten at around six. If they had still been eating when Katz had shown up, they might have invited him to join them, but the contents of the dishwasher demonstrated this had not been the case. He had probably arrived when they were cleaning up after finishing dinner.
Richards had offered him a beer and the kids had gone upstairs. And then someone had come and killed them all.
But that’s when things got weird.
Because that meant that four people lay dead in the house for a little over an hour before someone called 911, citing a disturbance. And they had called from a phone that no one had been able to trace.
Now that Decker was looking at all of this with a detached, objective eye, the holes in the story seemed obvious. He actually groaned at his ineptitude.
Okay, time of death does not jibe with the 911 call citing a disturbance. Four dead bodies could hardly cause a disturbance an hour after they died.
An alternative theory occurred to him suddenly. Had someone entered the house and stumbled upon the four bodies an hour later and that person had been the one to call 911? And had that person been Meryl Hawkins? That might explain how his fingerprints had been found on a light switch. But that could not explain his DNA ending up under Abigail Richards’s fingernails. And how could Hawkins possess a phone that couldn’t be traced?
Decker put those difficulties aside and focused on another. They really didn’t know the order in which the victims had died. They had just assumed that the bodies on the first floor had been dealt with before the killer had gone upstairs to dispatch the two children.
That was problematic, Decker knew. And he had thought so all those years ago too, though he had finally discounted the significance of it. You shoot two people on the first floor, there’s going to be some noise, and not just the gunshots. There will be people shouting, presumably, or a scuffle. The house was not that large. Those sounds would surely have carried upstairs.
There was one landline phone upstairs, in the parents’ bedroom, and they had determined that neither of the Richards kids had cell phones. But still, they could have tried to reach the phone in the bedroom and call the police, then hide, or escape out a window. But they hadn’t.
He could imagine the older Frankie Richards being a little more able to react to something like that than his younger sister. The kid was a drug user and also a small-time dealer, and was thus used to being around potentially bad actors and some level of risk. He kept cash and product at his house, they had found. He had to know that someone might come and try to take either one or both. Back in those days, you didn’t have to have thousands of dollars or bricks of coke to warrant a theft like that. People would kill you for fifty bucks and a bag of weed.
Had the sounds of the storm covered the two deaths downstairs? And had the children not known what was happening until it was too late?
Decker passed on to his next question as the rain continued to pound outside. Why had Abigail been strangled when all the other victims had been shot? Decker thought he knew the answer to that one.
But as his eyes hovered over the screen, his mind suddenly filled up with so many blinding images that he almost felt like he would vomit.
In his mind’s eye he was at his house the night he’d found his family dead. Electric blue sensations were pounding him from all corners. He had always been able to push, or at least diminish, this memory by banishing it to a far recess of his mind. But now, stunningly enough, he was unable to do so. It was as if he was no longer in control of his own mind. It was like a spontaneous, uncontrolled data dump from a computer.
He stood on shaky legs and wondered whether he could make it to the bathroom before he threw up. But then his stomach cleared, yet his mind did not.
He glanced over at Mars, who was still sound asleep on the bed.
Part of Decker wanted to wake his friend, explain what was happening to him, and ask for help. But what sort of help could Mars possibly give him? And Decker would feel embarrassed even asking.
Instead, he stumbled out of the room, down the hall, and then down the stairs. He used the rear exit door that he had told Lancaster about. He lurched outside where the trash and recycling Dumpsters were located. The rain was still pouring, and in just a few seconds Decker was soaked to the skin.
He finally hunched down under a metal roof that covered part of the rear of the inn. Over and over in his mind he saw himself going through his old house, the one now occupied by the Hendersons. Step by step.
