Deadly Grace

Still, Jillian thought, she would have given anything, just for once, not to hear the note of hopelessness that always accompanied her mother’s chirpy words of encouragement. “Well, we just have to work with what we’ve been given, don’t we, dear?”

“What do you think, Jillian? Wouldn’t it feel good to get up and take a hot shower? Have a little lunch, maybe sit and talk awhile?”

It was the doctor again, Jillian realized with a start, not her mother. She opened her eyes. She was trying to please, but this was about as much as she could manage. Her mother would definitely have disapproved. Grace was unfailingly poised and polite in any public venue, no matter how trying the circumstances. She would have at least sat up when the doctor came in. But, frankly, Jillian thought, she just couldn’t be bothered. She didn’t mean to be rude, but she had nothing to say to this woman.

The doctor, in any case, seemed content to wait her out. The minutes ticked by. Jillian could feel her presence, but she remained silent—watching, perhaps. Observing. And what does she see? Jillian wondered. What kind of monster is this before her?

Suddenly, she felt the bed vibrate. She cringed as a hand reached across her, a hand at the end of a white sleeve. A soft gust of air brushed her cheek as the doctor laid something on the mattress next to her head. It was a notebook, Jillian saw. A thick notebook with a stiff, nubbled black cardboard cover. Then, the white-coated arm withdrew again and the bed was still.

“If you’re not ready to talk yet, Jillian, it’s all right. I’ll be here when you are. But I’m told you’re a writer and historian,” the doctor added—unnecessarily, Jillian thought. She wasn’t that far gone. She knew who she was. That was the problem, wasn’t it? “You know how to arrange facts into an understandable flow. I know you feel confused right now, but maybe it would help to sort out your thoughts if you wrote down what’s going through your mind.”

Oh, God…what’s going through my mind?

Jillian’s eyes closed once more, shutting out the light, praying for a miracle to shut out the sound of that woman’s voice and, mostly, to drown out the screaming of her own guilty thoughts.

What does she want me to say? That I’m haunted by the memory of my mother, her lifeless blue eyes staring up at me from the kitchen floor, as accusatory in death as they were in the moments before it arrived? That I don’t want to be alive anymore? That I don’t deserve to be? My mother won’t let me be. Her beautiful, dreadful face is an image I’ll carry to my death—which will come soon, if courage doesn’t fail me again.

62

CHAPTER 6

Havenwood, Minnesota

Thursday, January 11, 1979

Deputy Chief of Police Nils Berglund turned out to be one of those massively built Scandinavians who makes every man around him feel puny. From the moment Berglund finally showed up at headquarters and extended a reluctant hand, Cruz felt inclined to keep his distance, less out of intimidation (he hoped) than for a clearer view of this human mountain. He himself was five-eleven, but Berglund both overshadowed and outweighed him by quite a bit. Nor did anything about the deputy’s taciturn manner spell welcome, despite the easy goodwill Cruz had sensed over the phone from the chief of police. Berglund’s square features seemed permanently corrugated into a frown, and his pale, icy eyes defied reading.

“Guess we’ll use the chief’s office,” he grunted, directing Cruz around the reception desk and through the door that led into the squad room beyond.

“Verna here tells me he’s in the hospital,” Cruz said.

Berglund was holding the door open, but his gaze shifted to the reception desk, where Verna had gone back to squinting at her mystery novel. His frown deepened, and it was impossible to tell which annoyed him more, her on-the-job reading or the fact that she’d been gossiping with a stranger. Verna, in any case, seemed oblivious. Cruz had a feeling she was more than capable of handling Deputy Berglund and anything else that came her way.

The deputy waved him into a corner office, then shut the door behind them. Shrugging out of his green nylon bomber jacket, he flung it over a chair. “Take your coat?”

“I’m okay, thanks.”

“Suit yourself. Have a seat.” Berglund moved around behind the big steel desk and settled into a brown, imitation leather chair that squeaked in protest at the sudden load.

“What happened?” Cruz asked. “To the chief, I mean.”

“He’s been feeling rough for a while, having tests. Doc called him last night, told him to check into hospital first thing this morning.”

“Which hospital?” Cruz asked, remembering how the chief had ranked the area’s medical options according to the severity of the patient’s condition.

“The Mayo Clinic in Minneapolis.” From that news and from Berglund’s tone, there wasn’t much doubt the diagnosis was serious, the prognosis iffy, and the deputy looking at imminent promotion.

“Sorry to hear it,” Cruz said. “He sounds like a good man.”

“Yeah, he is. Anyway,” Berglund said, “he told me you called. He also told me it was you who arranged for that arson team that’s crawling around over there at the fire scene.”

“They’re in town right now?”

“Working the scene as we speak. That’s where I was when Verna called up on the radio.”

“Maybe we should head over,” Cruz said. “I wouldn’t mind taking a look myself before I talk to Jillian Meade. I’d like to hear what those guys have to say about the cause of the fire.”

“Just hold on a minute,” Berglund said as Cruz made moves to get up. “We can do that, but first, I want to know why you called them in, to begin with, and why it is you flew out here all the way from Washington.”

Cruz settled back into his chair. “I’d been trying to track down Jillian Meade back in D.C. when I heard she was here visiting her mother. I tried to phone but the line was down. That’s when I put in the call to Chief Lunders.”

“Who told you she was at her mother’s?”

“Her boss at the Smithsonian.”

“And why are you looking for her?”

“Her name came up in an alert from Scotland Yard. I work in a section of the Bureau that liaises with foreign police forces on cross-border criminal investigations.”

“And…what? You think Jillian Meade’s some kind of international jewel thief or something?” Berglund snorted. “Get serious.”

“You know her well, do you?”

Berglund shrugged. “She grew up here. It’s a small town. Everybody knows everybody. So what is Scotland Yard claiming she did?”

“I don’t know that they necessarily think she’s done anything at all. She was over in England last month around the time some stuff went down, and—”

“What kind of ‘stuff’?” Berglund interrupted.

“A couple of homicides, as a matter of fact.”

“And they think Jillian had something to do with them?” The deputy’s expression was so incredulous that Cruz was beginning to feel a little foolish for even suggesting it, except that Jillian Meade’s mother had now turned up dead, too. At the very least, the woman was in danger of turning into the human equivalent of the Black Death, given the pernicious effect she seemed to have on those she visited. Berglund appeared intent on giving her the benefit of the doubt, however, and Cruz decided he could do the same, at least until he’d gotten the lay of the land.

“They’re not necessarily saying she had anything to do with the murders, but Miss Meade was in the vicinity at the time and had apparently been in contact with the victims. Scotland Yard was thinking she might have seen or heard something that would bear on their investigation. As far as I know, they simply see her as a potential witness at this point.”

“So you’re looking to ask her some questions, nothing more?”

“That’s right.”

“If that’s the case, how come you arranged for this arson team to come out? And,” Berglund added, “how come you asked Chief Lunders if he thought Jillian had murdered her mother?”

“I guess because it’s in my nature to play devil’s advocate. It may be coincidence, but there were fires set after those murders in the U.K., too. Look at it from my perspective. I talk to her boss, he tells me she’s here in Havenwood, then I talk to your boss, and he tells me about the fire. It does tend to raise a few questions in a person’s mind, you have to admit.”

“Humph.”

“So can you tell me exactly what happened here?”

Berglund threw open his hands in a “why not” gesture. “Tuesday night, we got a call about a fire out at Grace Meade’s place. I was the first to arrive on the scene, ahead of the fire trucks. The fire was going strong by then. I found Mrs. Meade and Jillian still inside the house, although Grace was already dead. I got Jillian out, but then the fire spread so fast we couldn’t get her mother’s body out till yesterday.”

“The Chief said you examined Mrs. Meade’s body at the scene before you took the daughter out.”

“Uh-huh. I found it lying in the hall, just outside the kitchen.”

“What did you see as far as signs of trauma, anything like that?”

“There was a fair amount of blood on the front of her sweater, but that was about it. No bruising or any other sign of battery that I could see, although it was pretty dark in there, so I wouldn’t swear to anything. The only light I had to go by was the fire burning in the living room, which was pretty much out of control by then.”

“What was the source of the blood?”

“It looked like she’d taken a wound to the chest. Like I say, it was dark, so I was going half by feel. I noticed her sweater had a tear in it, just here.” Berglund put his fingertips to his furnacesized chest, high and just off-center. “The tear was right in the middle of the blood stain, which I could see clearly because she had on a light-colored sweater and the blood showed up dark.”

“So she was down for pretty much the whole time she bled,” Cruz said, thinking aloud. “If she’d been upright, the entry wound, if that’s what it was, would have been at the top of the stain and the blood would have run down. Was it an entry wound, by the way? Did you turn her over?”

Berglund nodded. “Sort of. The fire was spreading fast, and I knew I needed to get her out of there, so I picked her up and put her over my shoulder to carry her out. Her back was soaked with blood, and when I put my hand there to steady the body, it felt pretty pulpy. Her sweater back was also shredded.” Berglund seemed to shudder at the memory.

Poor guy, Cruz thought. His actions had been pretty heroic, when you came down to it, going into the burning house like that to rescue the women. Like most heroes, he’d probably acted on sheer instinct and adrenaline, revulsion at the ugliness of what he’d found only hitting him afterward, when the initial shock wore off.

“Chief Lunders told me you weren’t able to get the body out, in the end, though.”

“No. I’d already left Jill on the porch when I went back inside to look for Grace. I was trying to get a closer look at the wound when I realized Jill was back and standing right behind me. I didn’t want her to see her mother like that.” Cruz was startled by Berglund’s fist suddenly smacking his thigh. “I had her, dammit! I’d picked her up and I had her. She was sixty-years old, for chrissake, and just a little thing. Even with Jillian to worry about, I could have gotten her out. I could have managed them both.”

Cruz had no doubt the deputy could have easily carried two women out of a burning building. “So what happened?”

“Jillian wouldn’t leave! I tried to drag her out with my free hand, but she kept fighting me. She was disoriented—she’d taken a blow to the head herself, we found out later. And she was half crazy with panic and grief, screaming for her mother.”

“But the mother was definitely dead?”

“Yeah, I’m pretty sure she was. I didn’t have time to try for a pulse before Jill came back in and flipped out on me, but by the way Grace looked…” His cropped blond head gave a grim shake. “As it was, I had to put her down again and leave her there while I dragged Jillian out a second time. By the time I handed her off to the paramedics, the fire had gotten out of control and I couldn’t get back inside the house. It was only when the ashes finally cooled down that we were able to get in and locate the body. It was in the rubble just off the kitchen, right where I’d left her.”

“Chief Lunders said there was going to be an autopsy.”

Berglund nodded. “It was this morning. County coroner took the body over to Montrose yesterday, but given how badly charred it was, he decided to call in a medical examiner from the State Bureau of Investigation. They’ve got more experience dealing with cases like this.”

“Were they able to determine a cause of death?”

Berglund shook his head. “Not with any degree of certainty. All the flesh and most of the organs were toast.”

“What about all the blood you’d found, and the entry and exit wounds? That would suggest a gunshot wound, wouldn’t it?”

“Yeah, although, like I said, the body was burned beyond recognition, and they couldn’t find much trajectory evidence. A couple of the interior organs were partly intact—the collapse of the roof eventually smothered some of the fire—but it wasn’t enough to get a clear picture of whether or not she’d been shot. We haven’t found any bullets or spent cartridges at the scene, although your arson guys are keeping an eye out for them. The ME did find a fracture on the breastbone, though, and taken together with what I was able to tell them about the holes in her sweater, he thought it was consistent with the theory that she’d been shot, probably with a fairly large caliber weapon.”

“That would also explain the injury on her back, larger than the entry, which is what you’d expect to find with an exit wound,” Cruz pointed out.

Berglund nodded. “The medical examiner said the position of the fracture on her breastbone was such that the bullet probably hit her left lung, maybe even the heart, although I doubt it, personally.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because there was a hell of a lot of blood. I would have thought that if she’d taken it in the heart, it would have stopped pumping and she wouldn’t have bled out like she did.”

“Not necessarily,” Cruz said. “It would depend on the damage. It might take a few seconds or even minutes for her heart to stop beating completely. And if a bullet’s large caliber, it’ll often make a bloody mess regardless of whether or not the victim dies instantly.” He watched Berglund’s dour expression as the deputy scraped a smear of mud off his pant leg. “Are you beating yourself up here because you think you could have saved Mrs. Meade?” Cruz asked him.

Berglund looked up, then away, self-consciously. “Yeah, maybe, although I guess I knew there wasn’t really a hope in hell. At the autopsy, the ME found that part of the right lung was more or less intact, and he said there was no sign of smoke inhalation in the air sacs.”

“All right then, that’s something, isn’t it? It means Grace Meade had drawn her last breath before the fire even started.”

Berglund frowned. “Yeah, I suppose.”

“And that being the case, it wouldn’t have made any difference whether or not you’d gotten her out.”

Berglund seemed unconvinced. “Maybe. But there’s no saying how long she’d been down. Maybe she could’ve been revived…or something. I don’t know. It just feels like I could’ve handled it better.”

Cruz shifted forward in his seat, elbows on his knees. “Look, Deputy, it seems to me you did plenty. You went into that house and you saved Jillian Meade’s life—not once, but twice. I think you should let yourself off the hook and just focus on your investigation. If Grace Meade was dead before the fire broke out, it means she was murdered and the fire was probably set to cover tracks. I imagine this has to be tough on a lot of people around here, but the evidence is what you need to be focusing on. And it’s your investigation, obviously. I don’t mean to come riding in like some bounty hunter, okay? I asked for the arson team to look things over to make sure there was no confusion about what went down, but I’m not here to step on your toes. All I really want to do is speak to Jillian Meade and clear up some questions about what happened while she was over in England. She gives me her statement, I’m outta here. I’ll send it off to the Brits and that’ll probably be that. Is that okay with you?”

Berglund nodded wearily, like a man who was both exhausted and in over his head. How many murder investigations had he even handled? Cruz wondered. In a town this size, it was a distinct possibility this was his first.

“Talking to Jillian, though,” Berglund said, “that could be a problem.”

“How so? She’s in the hospital here in town, right?”

“Not anymore. They moved her to the regional hospital over in Montrose. The local clinic isn’t equipped to handle a case like hers.”

“I thought she wasn’t that badly hurt.”

“She had a concussion, like I said, but it wasn’t too bad. Mostly it was smoke inhalation they were worried about, but they figured she’d recover fully from that, too. Her mental state is something else, though.”

“What do you mean?”

“She tried to kill herself in the ER in Havenwood.”

Cruz pulled up short. “Chief Lunders never mentioned that.”

“He hadn’t heard about it yet when you talked to him yesterday. Happened early Wednesday morning. The chief was under the weather, and he didn’t get in till after noon. Jill had spent the night in the ER here so they could keep an eye on her breathing. I was there myself till around four in the morning, but she seemed to be resting comfortably. Sometime around dawn, though, when nobody was watching, she apparently woke up and found a syringe in a drawer or something. They said she had it in an artery with her thumb on the plunger when an orderly happened to walk by and spot her. The guy thought fast, luckily. If he hadn’t tackled her, she’d be dead.”

“And now?” Cruz asked.

Berglund’s big hands rubbed his face wearily. “Now they’ve got her locked down on twenty-four-hour suicide watch in the psych ward at Montrose. They kept her heavily sedated for the first twenty-four hours, but they’re trying to back her off the meds now. We can go over later, after we check back with the arson guys, but I wouldn’t count on getting much out of her today if I were you. They say she hasn’t said a word since all this happened.”

Evil never sleeps. It creeps in the night, appearing where it’s least expected, Cruz thought. There’s no sanctuary behind locked doors or the solid edifice of the law. Sooner or later, it finds the vulnerability in any hiding place and worms its way in. All it takes is a small point of weakness, a tiny chink in the wall of social order, a minuscule tear in the fabric of human decency. Even in a small prairie town that dared to tempt the gods and call itself Havenwood, there was no refuge.

“This is it.” Berglund rolled the police cruiser to a stop before the blackened remains of what must have been, if neighboring houses were any indication, a pleasant family home in an pretty neighborhood before it had been put to the torch two nights earlier. Another black-and-white cruiser and a beige Ford Fairlane with the Minnesota state crest on the door were parked in the wide, sweeping driveway.

“I don’t know as you’ll see much,” Berglund said. “Things are pretty raked over by now, but this gives you an idea of how bad the fire was.”

The sour odor of soot was already insinuating its way in through the car’s air vents. Cruz climbed out of the cruiser, moving off to the side, out of the direct path of the sunlight to get a better view of the burned-out shell. He cupped a hand over his eyes, squinting against the sun that was beginning to sink toward the western horizon, setting up a blinding glare of ice and snow on Lost Arrow Lake. From this vantage point, he could see little except the uneven silhouette of what remained of the Meade home.

The scene looked as the fire had rendered it, for the most part, bordered and contained by a band of yellow plastic crime scene tape. The house had mostly collapsed in on itself. All that remained standing were the sooty red bricks of a large hearth and chimney, rising like a sentinel above the cracked and blackened cement foundation. A few charred timbers lay tipped at odd angles, crusted over with a thick layer of ice from the soaking of the fire hoses.

The yard sloped down to a wooden dock that extended out to the frozen lake. On the opposite shore, a few snow-capped cottages and a dense line of pine trees stood in stark relief against the brilliant sky. The view was impressive, Cruz thought, like a Currier and Ives Christmas fantasy. In summer, the place would no doubt be a water sport paradise. Right now, he could make out the tracks of dozens of skis and snowmobiles crisscrossing the lake’s frozen surface. Out in the middle of it, narrow gray plumes rose from makeshift chimneys poking through the roofs of small plywood huts, evidence of heartier souls than he sport fishing through the thick ice.

The cruiser rocked as Berglund climbed out on his side and slammed the door. His green nylon police parka was unzipped, despite the frigid temperature, and the brass buttons of his khaki uniform strained across his chest as he came around the car to join Cruz. Like many very large men, Berglund moved slowly and with great precision, as if worried about accidentally bowling someone over.

Two men wearing orange coveralls over their clothing were poking around the site, taking measurements by the look of it. A couple of local cops in uniforms like Berglund’s stood just outside the tape, watching them work and standing guard over a large, articulated metal toolbox and what looked to be a pile of plastic and paper evidence bags.

“Pretty bad,” Cruz observed, as they watched the men working over the grim scene.

“Pretty bad,” the deputy agreed—both of them masters at understatement.

A silence settled over them, a quiet more profound than any Cruz could remember for a very long time. There were no automobile noises, no commuter planes, no traffic helicopters droning overhead. No hum of the heavy machinery that is a city’s living, beating heart. He might have expected a few chirping birds, at least, but any that were wintering here had obviously had the sense to flee this place of death.

Cruz would have welcomed the opportunity to fly away himself. His stomach turned at the acrid odor of wet, charred wood and the toxic stench of melted plastic, rubber and paint.

He took a step forward and heard a brittle crunching sound under his shoe. He looked down to see that he was standing on broken shards of glass, maybe a piece of shattered window pane. He kicked it aside, then stopped to pick out a small fragment that had become wedged into the hard rubber of his left heel.

“Winds were high the night of the fire,” Berglund said. “Flames jumped from treetop to treetop, and it looked like they might cross the lot line. We were worried we’d lose half the street.”

Cruz followed the direction of the burly man’s cocked thumb to the white birch and silver maples standing between the destroyed house and the property to the north of it. Several were scorched and fire-capped. On the neighbor’s garage, maybe sixty feet away, the wood siding was visibly blistered and peeling in a couple of spots, mute testimony to the intensity of the blaze.

“We’ve only got two pumper trucks,” Berglund said. His deep voice doled out words sparingly, Cruz noted, like someone unaccustomed to strangers or long explanations. “It’s just a volunteer force, and fighting the wind like we were…” The frown deepened on his square face and his white-blond eyebrows were almost linked now by the two vertical creases above his nose. “If it hadn’t been for the wind, we might have been able to get it under control, save more evidence. Once we realized there was no way of saving the house or pulling Mrs. Meade out, though, we made the decision to save the neighbor’s place.”