Midnight (10 page)

20

After a couple of hours in the storm drain under the sloping meadow, Chrissie Foster was troubled by claustrophobia. She had been locked in the kitchen pantry a great deal longer than she had been in the drain, and the pantry had been smaller, yet the grave-black concrete culvert was by far the worse of the two. Maybe she began to feel caged and smothered because of the cumulative effect of spending all day and most of the evening in cramped places.

From the superhighway far above, where the drainage system began, the heavy roar of trucks echoed down through the tunnels, giving rise in her mind to images of growling dragons. She put her hands over her ears to block out the noise. Sometimes the trucks were widely spaced, but on occasion they came in trains of six or eight or a dozen, and the continuous rumble became oppressive, maddening.

Or maybe her desire to get out of the culvert had something to do with the fact that she was underground. Lying in the dark, listening to the trucks, searching the intervening silences for the return of her parents and Tucker, Chrissie began to feel she was in a concrete coffin, a victim of premature burial.

Reading aloud from the imaginary book of her own adventures, she said, “Little did young Chrissie know that the culvert was about to collapse and fill with earth, squishing her as if she were a bug and trapping her forever.”

She knew she should stay where she was. They might still be prowling the meadow and woods in search of her. She was safer in the culvert than out of it.

But she was cursed with a vivid imagination. Although she was no doubt the only occupant of the lightless passageway in which she sprawled, she envisioned unwanted company in countless grisly forms slithering snakes; spiders by the hundreds; cockroaches; rats; colonies of blood-drinking bats. eventual she began to wonder if over the years a child might have crawled into the tunnels to play and, getting lost in the branching culverts, might have died there, undiscovered. His soul, of course, would have remained restless and earthbound, for his death had been unjustly premature and there had been no proper burial service to free his spirit. Now perhaps that ghost, sensing her presence, was animating those hideous skeletal remains, dragging the decomposed and age-dried corpse toward her, scraping off pieces of leathery and half-petrified flesh as it came. Chrissie was eleven years old and level-headed for her age, and she repeatedly told herself that there were no such things as ghosts, but then she thought of her parents and Tucker, who seemed to be some kind of werewolves, for God’s sake, and when the big trucks passed on the interstate, she was afraid to cover her ears with her hands for fear that the dead child was using the cover of that noise to creep closer, closer.

She had to get out.

21

When he left the dark garage where he had taken refuge from the pack of drugged-out delinquents (which is what he had to believe they were; he knew no other way to explain them), Sam Booker went straight to Ocean Avenue and stopped in Knight’s Bridge Tavern just long enough to buy a six-pack of Guinness Stout to go.

Later, in his room at Cove Lodge, he sat at the small table and drank beer while he pored over the facts of the case. On September 5, three National Farmworkers Union organizers: Julio Bustamante, his sister Maria Bustamante, and Maria’s fiance, Ramon Sanchez—were driving south from the wine country, where they had been conducting discussions with vineyard owners about the upcoming harvest. They were in a four-year-old, tan Chevy van. They stopped for dinner in Moonlight Cove. They’d eaten at the Perez Family Restaurant and had drunk too many margaritas (according to witnesses among the waiters and customers at Perezs that night), and on their way back to the interstate, they’d taken a dangerous curve too fast; their van had rolled and caught fire. None of the three had survived.

That story might have held up and the FBI might never have been drawn into the case, but for a few inconsistencies. For one thing, according to the Moonlight Cove police department’s official report, Julio Bustamante had been driving. But Julio had never driven a car in his life; furthermore, he was unlikely to do so after dark, for he suffered from a form of night blindness. Furthermore, according to witnesses quoted in the police report, Julio and Maria and Ramon were
all
intoxicated, but no one who knew Julio or Ramon had ever seen them drunk before; Maria was a lifelong teetotaler.

The Sanchez and Bustamante families, of San Francisco, also were made suspicious by the behavior of the Moonlight Cove authorities. None of them were told of the three deaths until September 10, five days after the accident. Police chief Loman Watkins had explained that Julio’s, Maria’s, and Ramon’s paper IDs had been destroyed in the intense fire and that their bodies had been too completely burned to allow swift identification by fingerprints. What of the van’s license plates? Curiously, Loman had not found any on the vehicle or torn loose and lying in the vicinity of the crash. Therefore, with three badly mangled and burned bodies to deal with and no way to locate next of kin on a timely basis, he had authorized the coroner, Dr. Ian Fitzgerald, to fill out death certificates and thereafter dispose of the bodies by cremation.

“We don’t have the facilities of a big-city morgue, you understand,” Watkins had explained.

“We just can’t keep cadavers long term, and we had no way of knowing how much time we’d need to identify these people. We thought they might be itinerants or even illegals, in which case we might never be able to ID them.”

Neat, Sam thought grimly, as he leaned back in his chair and took a long swallow of Guinness.

Three people had died violent deaths, been certified victims of an accident, and cremated before their relatives were notified, before any other authorities could step in to verify, through the application of modern forensic medicine, whether the death certificates and police report in fact contained the whole story.

The Bustamantes and Sanchezes were suspicious of foul play, but the National Farmworkers Union was convinced of it. On September 12, the union’s president sought the intervention of the Federal Bureau of Investigation on the grounds that anti-union forces were responsible for the deaths of Bustamante, Bustamante, and Sanchez. Generally, the crime of murder fell into the FBI’s jurisdiction only if the suspected killer had crossed state borders either to commit the act, or during its commission, or to escape retribution subsequent to the act; or, as in this case, if federal authorities had reason to believe that murder had been committed as a consequence of the willful violation of the victims’ civil rights.

On September 26, after the absurd if standard delays associated with government bureaucracy and the federal judiciary, a team of six FBI agents—including three men from the Scientific Investigation Division—moved into picturesque Moonlight Cove for ten days. They interviewed police officers, examined police and coroner files, took statements from witnesses who were at the Perez Family Restaurant on the night of September 5, sifted through the wreckage of the Chevy van at the junkyard, and sought whatever meager clues might remain at the accident site itself. Because Moonlight Cove had no agricultural industry, they could find no one interested in the farm-union issue let alone angered by it, which left them short of people motivated to kill union organizers.

Throughout their investigation, they received the full and cordial cooperation of the local police and coroner. Loman Watkins and his men went so far as to volunteer to submit to lie-detector tests, which subsequently were administered, and all of them passed without a hint of deception. The coroner also took the tests and proved to be a man of unfailing honesty.

Nevertheless, something about it reeked.

The local officials were almost too eager to cooperate. And all six of the FBI agents came to feel that they were objects of scorn and derision when their backs were turned—though they never saw any of the police so much as raise an eyebrow or smirk or share a knowing look with another local. Call it Bureau Instinct, which Sam knew was at least as reliable as that of any creature in the wild.

Then the
other
deaths had to be considered.

While investigating the Sanchez-Bustamante case, the agents had reviewed police and coroner records for the past couple of years to ascertain the usual routine with which sudden deaths—accidental and otherwise—were handled in Moonlight Cove, in order to determine if local authorities had dealt with this recent case differently from previous ones, which would be an indication of police complicity in a cover-up. What they discovered was puzzling and disturbing—but not like anything they had expected to find. Except for one spectacular car crash involving a teenage boy in an extensively souped-up Dodge, Moonlight Cove had been a singularly safe place to live. During that time, its residents were untroubled by violent death—until August 28, eight days before the deaths of Sanchez and the Bustamantes, when an unusual series of mortalities began to show up on the public records.

In the pre-dawn hours of August 28, the four members of the Mayser family were the first victims: Melinda, John, and their two children, Carrie and Billy. They had perished in a house fire, which the authorities later attributed to Billy playing with matches. The four bodies were so badly burned that identification could be made only from dental records.

Having finished his first bottle of Guinness, Sam reached for a second but hesitated. He had work to do yet tonight. Sometimes, when he was in a particularly dour mood and started drinking stout, he had trouble stopping short of unconsciousness.

Holding the empty bottle for comfort, Sam wondered why a boy, having started a fire, would not cry out for help and wake his parents when he saw the blaze was beyond control. Why would the boy not run before being overcome with smoke9 And just what kind of fire, except one fueled by gasoline or another volatile fluid (of which there was no indication in official reports), would spread so fast that none of the family could escape and would reduce the house—and the bodies therein—to heaps of ashes before firemen could arrive and quench it?

Neat again. The bodies were so consumed by flames that autopsies would be of little use in determining if the blaze had been started not by Billy but by someone who wanted to conceal the true causes of death. At the suggestion of the funeral director—who was the owner of Callan’s Funeral Home and also the assistant coroner, therefore a suspect in any official cover-up—the Maysers’ next of kin, Melinda Mayser’s mother, authorized cremation of the remains. Potential evidence not destroyed by the original fire was thus obliterated.

“How tidy,” Sam said aloud, putting his feet up on the other straight-backed chair. “How splendidly clean and tidy.”

Body count: four.

Then the Bustamantes and Sanchez on September 5. Another fire. Followed by more speedy cremations.

Body count: seven.

On September 7, while trace vapors of the Bustamante and Sanchez remains might still have lingered in the air above Moonlight Cove, a twenty-year resident of the town, Jim Armes put to sea in his thirty-foot boat, the
Mary Leandra
, for an early morning sail—and was never seen again. Though he was an experienced seaman, though the day was clear and the ocean calm, he’d apparently gone down in an outbound tide, for no identifiable wreckage had washed up on local beaches.

Body count: eight.

On September 9, while fish presumably were nibbling on Armes’s drowned body, Paula Parkins was torn apart by five Dobermans. She was a twenty-nine-year-old woman living alone, raising and training guard dogs, on a two-acre property near the edge of town. Evidently one of her Dobermans turned against her, and the others flew into a frenzy at the scent of her blood. Paula’s savaged remains, unfit for viewing, had been sent in a sealed casket to her family in Denver. The dogs were shot, tested for rabies, and cremated.

Body count: nine.

Six days after entering the Bustamante-Sanchez case, on October 2, the FBI had exhumed Paula Parkins’s body from a grave in Denver. An autopsy revealed that the woman indeed had been bitten and clawed to death by multiple animal assailants.

Sam remembered the most interesting part of that autopsy report word for word:
… however, bite marks, lacerations, tears in the body cavity, and specific damage to breasts and sex organs are not entirely consistent with canine attack. The teeth pattern and size of bite do not fit the dental profile of the average Doberman or other animals known to be aggressive and capable of successfully attacking an adult.
And later in the same report, when referring to the specific nature of Parkins’s assailants:
Species unknown.

How had Paula Parkins really died?

What terror and agony had she known?

Who was trying to blame it on the Dobermans?

And in fact what evidence might the Dobermans’ bodies have provided about the nature of their own deaths and, therefore, the truthfulness of the police story?

Sam thought of the strange, distant cry he had heard tonight—like that of a coyote but not a coyote, like that of a cat but not a cat. And he thought also of the eerie, frantic voices of the kids who had pursued him. Somehow it all fit. Bureau Instinct.

Species unknown.

Unsettled, Sam tried to soothe his nerves with Guinness. The bottle was still empty. He clinked it thoughtfully against his teeth.

Six days after Parkins’s death and long before the exhumation of her body in Denver, two more people met untimely ends in Moonlight Cove. Steve Heinz and Laura Dalcoe, unmarried but living together, were found dead in their house on Iceberry Way. Heinz left a typed, incoherent, unsigned suicide note, then killed Laura with a shotgun while she slept, and took his own life. Dr. Ian Fitzgerald’s report was murder-suicide, case closed. At the coroner’s suggestion, the Dalcoe and Heinz families authorized cremation of the grisly remains.

Body count: eleven.

“There’s an ungodly amount of cremation going on in this town,” Sam said aloud, and turned the empty beer bottle around in his hands.

Most people still preferred to have themselves and their loved ones embalmed and buried in a casket, regardless of the condition of the body. In most towns cremations accounted for perhaps one in four or one in five dispositions of cadavers.

Finally, while investigating the Bustamante-Sanchez case, the FBI team from San Francisco found that Janice Capshaw was listed as a Valium suicide. Her sea-ravaged body had washed up on the beach two days after she disappeared, three days before the agents arrived to launch their investigation into the deaths of the union organizers.

Julio Bustamante, Maria Bustamante, Ramon Sanchez, the four Maysers, Jim Armes, Paula Parkins, Steven Heinz, Laura Dalcoe, Janice Capshaw: a body count of twelve in less than a month—exactly twelve times the number of violent deaths that had occurred in Moonlight Cove during the previous
twenty-three months
. Out of a population of just three thousand, twelve violent deaths in little more than three weeks was one hell of a mortality rate.

Queried about his reaction to this astonishing chain of deadly events, Chief Loman Watkins had said, “It’s horrible, yes. And it’s sort of frightening. Things were so calm for so long that I guess, statistically, we were just overdue.”

But in a town that size, even spread over two years, twelve such violent deaths went off the top of the statisticians’ charts.

The six-man Bureau team was unable to find one shred of evidence of any local authorities’ complicity in those cases. And although a polygraph was not an entirely dependable determiner of truth, the technology was not so unreliable that Loman Watkins, his officers, the coroner, and the coroner’s assistant could all pass the examination without a single indication of deception if in fact they were guilty.

Yet …

Twelve deaths. Four cremated in a house fire. Three cremated in a demolished Chevy van. Three suicides, two by shotgun and one by Valium, all subsequently cremated at Callan’s Funeral Home. One lost at sea—no body at all. And the only victim available for autopsy appeared not to have been killed by dogs, as the coroner’s report claimed, though she had been bitten and clawed by something, dammit.

It was enough to keep the Bureau’s file open. By the ninth of October, four days after the San Francisco team departed Moonlight Cove, a decision was made to send in an undercover operative to have a look at certain aspects of the case that might be more fruitfully explored by a man who was not being watched.

One day after that decision, on October 10, a letter arrived in the San Francisco office that clinched the Bureau’s determination to maintain involvement. Sam had that note committed to memory as well: