Prey (17 page)

Winter crouched down and pressed his fingers against Clarke’s neck, searching for a pulse. Nothing. His skin was cold, his face bloodless. Those rheumy blue eyes that had been so alive and full of stories were staring blankly at the ceiling. Winter straightened up and stepped back into the doorway so he could get a different perspective. The scene was peaceful. There were no signs of a struggle. Clarke was lying sprawled out in a way that was natural rather than posed. One second he’d been upright, the next he was down on the ground, dead. Whatever happened, it had happened quickly.

Winter knelt beside the body and lifted the arms one at a time, testing for rigor mortis. There was some stiffness. At a rough guess he’d been dead for six hours. Full rigor mortis occurred after twelve hours and things hadn’t progressed that far yet. It was nine-thirty now, so he’d died sometime around three-thirty this morning. Which was around the time he’d been speaking to Amelia. On the slim chance that he was wrong about this being natural causes, that gave her a potential alibi.

He took out his cell phone and checked the call log. The missed call from Clarke had come in at ten after three. His last conversation had been with a machine and that didn’t seem right. Even though logic dictated that death was the end of everything, Winter wondered if he might be wrong about that. Maybe there was a hereafter, and maybe Clarke was there now, reunited with Jocelyn. Maybe, but Winter wasn’t convinced. When Jim Morrison sang that this is the end, he’d been bang on the money. There were few happy-ever-afters in this world, so what was the chance of getting a happy hereafter?

The sound of Mendoza yelling pulled him from his thoughts. Judging by the choice of words, and the timbre of her voice, she was standing at the bottom of the stairs shouting up to the second floor.

‘What the hell are you doing up there, Winter! Your minute’s up. We need to get going.’

‘I’m in the records room,’ he called back.

Footsteps in the corridor. Cursing and questions. The footsteps stopped in the doorway. So did the cursing and the questions.

‘It’s natural causes, in case you’re wondering,’ he told her. ‘My guess is a heart attack or a stroke.’

Mendoza was looking around the room, taking it all in. ‘You sure about that? There’s no way it could have been Amelia?’

Winter shook his head. ‘Griffin will need to confirm the time of death, but if my estimate’s right then Amelia was with me when this happened. That aside, the sense of drama’s missing. Look what she did to Omar. That wasn’t just a murder, it was a statement. What statement is being made here?’

Mendoza took another look around the room, then nodded down at the body. ‘We still need to call this in.’

‘We do.’

‘You really liked the old guy, didn’t you?’

‘Yes I did.’

Clarke’s notepad was lying on the table next to one of the ledgers. Winter picked it up and flicked through it. The pad contained page after page of shorthand, but without Clarke it was no use to them. Given enough time Winter reckoned he might have been able to decipher the symbols. Maybe. The problem was that Clarke had been a journalist for most of his life. Over the decades he would have developed his own form of code, and the chances were those symbols wouldn’t have made sense to anyone except him.

‘Looks like Greek to me,’ Mendoza said at his shoulder. ‘Does it mean anything to you?’

‘Unfortunately no.’

He put the notepad back on the table and looked down at the ledger. It was open to the front page of the edition that had come out the week after the Reed murders. He scanned the lead story. There were two main differences between this story and the one that had appeared the previous week. First, it was more detailed. There was less speculation and more fact. The prose had been calmed down, too, and was less inflammatory. The second difference was that Nelson Price had been mentioned in connection with the crime.

‘Anything interesting?’ Mendoza asked.

‘Only that it’s like I thought, the Reed murders happened right on the paper’s deadline. It might have even happened close enough to the deadline for Clarke to stop the presses. A story this big in a place this small, it would merit that. If he was that close to the deadline, it would explain why there was no mention of Nelson Price in the original story. Everything would have been chaos when the crime occurred and Clarke would have been battling to discern fact from fiction. Chances were that he knew Nelson did it but didn’t have enough time to get confirmation.’

Winter turned the page and felt the air catch in his lungs. Amelia Price was staring back at him from an old black-and-white high school photo. This was her in her natural form. No wigs, no contact lenses, no disguises. Her hair was a light colour that brought to mind Clarke saying that she had mousy brown hair. As for her eyes, it was impossible to tell. Maybe they were blue like her father’s, but they could just as easily be brown or green.

‘What?’ said Mendoza.

Winter tapped the picture. ‘You wanted irrefutable proof that Amelia Price is our mystery woman? There’s your proof.’

It was after ten by the time Peterson arrived to process Granville Clarke’s death. Birch was nowhere to be seen. According to the deputy, Birch had insisted on heading over to the Price house to secure the scene, which led Winter to wonder why. Perhaps Birch saw himself stopping Amelia single handed. If that was the case then he was going to be seriously disappointed. Amelia wouldn’t be going anywhere near her old home today. Then again, that was probably a blessing. If Birch tried to arrest her he’d probably end up as dead as Omar.

Mendoza tapped Winter on the shoulder. ‘We need to get going.’

Winter took one last look at Clarke then headed for the door. Leaving him in Peterson’s hands felt like a betrayal, but Mendoza was right. Fifteen minutes later they arrived at the Price’s house. Mendoza parked in the same spot as yesterday and reached over to open the glove box. She removed the yellow rubber gloves she’d got from Jerry Barnes and held a pair out to Winter.

‘Do I have to? They make my hands sweat.’

‘The alternative is that you stay here in the car and I go in alone.’

Winter gave her a pleading look and she shook her head.

‘Okay, give me the damn gloves.’

She handed them over and he put them on and they got out of the car. Their doors closed one after the other in quick succession.
Bang bang
. There was no sign of Birch. No sign of the Hartwood PD’s battered old police cruiser.

‘So much for Birch securing the scene,’ said Mendoza. ‘Do you think he stopped off somewhere for doughnuts?’

‘That would be my guess.’

Winter stood next to the car, waiting for something to happen, but nothing did. No lights came on, and Amelia didn’t come screaming out on to the porch waving a gun at them. The house looked as still and deserted as it had done when they were here last. Mendoza took her cell phone out and called the sheriff’s department again. Winter was able to hear enough to get the gist of the conversation. The standoff was over and the kid was okay. Unfortunately, the father was, too. Mendoza hung up with a promise that they were going to get someone over to the Price place as soon as possible.

‘Did you get all that?’ she asked as she put her cell away.

‘It sounded like you were getting palmed off.’

‘Yeah, that’s my take. You can’t blame them, though. I’m sure they’ve got better things to do than look into a six-year-old murder case that they’ve already signed off on.’ She added a brisk ‘Shall we?’ then walked off towards the house without waiting for a reply.

Winter caught up with her at the bottom of the porch steps and they climbed them one at a time again. This time he went first. Mendoza caught up with him at the door and knocked hard. She stepped back and waited. No response. The house was so quiet Winter was beginning to wonder when it had last been inhabited. A year ago? Six years? Mendoza stepped forward and thumped the door again.
Bang bang bang.
She hit it even harder this time, hard enough for the vibrations to rattle through the brittle porch floor and into their feet. He stepped back and they waited some more.

Still nothing.

‘Looks like no one’s in again,’ Mendoza said.

‘Looks that way.’

Winter removed his right glove and stuffed it into his jacket pocket, then took out the leather wrap containing his lock picks and held it up for Mendoza to see. She nodded for him to go ahead and he went to work. The lock was old and stiff and in need of oil, and it took a bit of persuasion, but he got there in the end. He put the picks away, pulled the glove back on, then opened the door and motioned for her to go in. Mendoza didn’t move.

‘When we arrived we found the door open,’ she told him. ‘Amelia Price was supposed to be in, but she wasn’t answering. Naturally, we were concerned about her safety so we went inside to make sure she was all right. How does that sound?’

‘It sounds like you’re a natural born storyteller.’

‘I’m serious, Winter. I’m a cop. I can’t just break into someone’s home.’

‘Technically, I’m the one who’s broken in so you’re off the hook.’

She gave him a look that said she wasn’t convinced, then followed him through the door. The inside of the house was as tired and old as the wood stretching around the outside of the building. It smelled stale, like all the air had been used up long ago. The carpets were threadbare, the wall coverings jaded. There were dark rectangular marks on the walls where pictures had once hung.

Four doors led off the hall and a flight of stairs disappeared up into the gloom. The first door they tried opened into the dining room. Winter went in first. Behind him, Mendoza let out a whispered elongated ‘Shit’. Winter knew exactly where she was coming from.

The first thing that caught his eye was the table. Like the table at the Reed’s house, it was big enough for four. For some reason, though, it had been laid for two. The white tablecloth had turned grey with age, as had the napkins. The place mats had faded from red to pink. There were wine glasses and water tumblers, and silverware for three courses. Starter, main, dessert. A three-arm candelabra sat in the midpoint between the two place settings. There was melted wax around the bases of the red candles. All three had blackened wicks. Everything was covered with a layer of dust and cobwebs. Six years’ worth, at a guess.

The second thing that caught his eye was the portable record player on the credenza. It was covered in red vinyl and looked like it dated back to the sixties. Winter walked over to get a better look. The LP on the turntable was old. Strauss performed by the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. He picked it up, blew the dust away, put it back down. Then he turned the record player on and placed the needle at the start of the disk. The gloves made this tricky but he got there in the end. There was a series of crackles then the unmistakeable sound of the
Blue Danube
filled the room.

Mendoza appeared at his shoulder. ‘That thing looks ancient. I’m surprised it still works.’

‘I’m not.’ He lifted the needle up and turned the record player off.

Mendoza nodded towards the table. ‘Why are there only two places set? Why not four?’

‘A better question is who are those places set for?’

‘Mom and dad?’

‘I don’t think so. The mom would have been long dead before this table was laid. I’m thinking it’s for Amelia and her father.’

‘This would have been before Nelson died. So where did he eat?’

Winter shrugged.

‘What are you thinking?’

‘I’m thinking that we’ve got one very screwed-up family here. An abusive father, a mother who hung herself in the barn, a son who brutally murdered two innocent people, and a daughter who stood by watching while it happened.’

‘And turned into a killer herself. Let’s not forget that.’

Winter nodded. ‘Okay, let’s back up a second. One day, the Prices up sticks and move to Hartwood. Why? What does this place offer?’

‘Anonymity.’

‘Exactly. According to both Clarke and Hailey Reed, the Prices kept to themselves. Nobody really knew them. Remember what Hailey said about Nelson and Amelia. She described them as ghosts. So where did they come from? And why did they move? In this case the why is easier than the where. If they changed their names, which is a distinct possibility, then that’s going to make it harder to work out where they came from.’

Winter paused for a second then added, ‘The reason they moved here is because life became uncomfortable for Eugene Price. Maybe the kids were turning up to school with bruises and questions were being asked. Maybe the mother walked into one door too many.’

‘So they move here,’ continued Mendoza, ‘a smallholding in the middle of nowhere, and Eugene wises up and makes sure the bruises don’t show. The abuse gets worse because that’s the way it works.’

‘And the mother is the first casualty,’ Winter added. ‘Maybe Eugene murdered her or maybe it was suicide. Whichever way it played out the end result was the same. And who becomes the substitute mother and wife? Amelia does. She more or less told me as much last night. We were talking about why she’d set the table after the Reed murders and she said that she got to “play mother”. At the time I thought she was making a joke, but I think she was being literal. She didn’t just play mother, there were times when she
became
her mother.’

Winter fell quiet again, thinking this over, rearranging the pieces in his head. He glanced over at the table and saw the ghostly figures of Amelia and her father sitting down to eat. Amelia was dressed in clothes that were a couple of sizes too big and a couple of decades too old for her, clothes that had once belonged to her mother. She was awkwardly filling the space in their lives that had been created when her mother died. Strauss was playing gently in the background, creating an illusion of civility that was light years from the truth.

‘After the mother hung herself, that’s when Amelia’s nightmare really began. However bad it had been for her mother, it would have been infinitely worse for Amelia since she would have been dealing with the fallout from her mother’s death. Eugene Price needed someone to blame, and that someone was Amelia. Every time he looked at her he would have been reminded of what happened. He would have been filled with guilt, hate and self-loathing, and Amelia would have borne the brunt.’

‘And she was just a kid.’ Mendoza was shaking her head. ‘You know something, Winter? I could almost feel sorry for her.’