WMC - First to Die

Chapter36

"CARETAKER DISCOVERED THEM," Hartwig muttered with a grim shake of his head. We were walking up a dirt path leading to a small Napa winery. "I hope you're ready for this. It's the worst thing I've ever seen. They were killed making love." Raleigh and I had rushed up to St. Helena, turning east off 29, "the wine road," onto Hawk Crest Road until it wound high into the mountains, no longer paved. We had finally come upon an obscure wooden sign: Sparrow Ridge. "Caretaker comes up here twice a week. Found them at seven this morning. The place's no longer in regular use," Hartwig continued. I could tell he was nervous, shook up. The winery was barely more than a large corrugated shed filled with shiny, state-of-the-art equipment: crushers, fermenting tanks, staggered rows of stacked, aging barrels. "You're probably used to this sort of homicide," Hartwig said as we walked in. The sharp, rancid smell hit our nostrils. My stomach rolled. You never get used to homicide scenes. They were killed making love. Several members of the local SCU team were huddled over the open bay of a large, stainless grape presser. They were inspecting two splattered mounds. The mounds were the bodies of Michael and Becky De George "Awhh, shit, Lindsay" Raleigh muttered. The husband, in a blazer and khakis, stared up at us. A dime-sized penetration cut the center of his forehead. His wife, whose black dress was pushed up to her neck, was on top of him. White-eyed fear was frozen on her face. Her bra was pulled down to her waist, and I could see blood-spattered breasts. Her panties were down to her knees. It was an ugly, nauseating sight. "You have an approximate time?" I asked Hartwig. He looked close to being sick. "From the degeneration of the wounds, the M.E. thinks they've been dead twenty-four to thirty-six hours. They were killed the same night they disappeared. Jesus, they were just kids." I stared at the sad, bloodied body of the wife, and my eyes fell to her hands. Nothing there. No wedding band. "You said they were killed in the act?" I asked. "You're sure about that?" Hartwig nodded to the assistant medical examiner. He gently rolled Becky De George body off her husband's. Sticking out of Michael De George unfastened khakis was the perfectly preserved remainder of his final erection. A smoldering rage ripped through me. The De Georges were just kids. Both were in their twenties, like the Brandts. Who would do such a terrible thing? "You can see over here how they were dragged," Hartwig said, pointing to smears of dried blood visible on the pitched concrete floor. The smears led to car tracks that were clearly delineated in the sparsely traveled soil. A couple of sheriff's men were marking off the tracks in yellow tape. Raleigh bent down and studied them. "Wide wheel base, but fourteen-inch tires. The tread is good, kept up. An SUV would have sixteen-inch wheels. I would guess some kind of large luxury sedan." "I thought you were just a desk cop," I said to him. He grinned. "I spent a summer in college working in the pit crew on the NAS CAR circuit. I can change a tire faster than a beer man at 3Com can change a twenty. My guess would be a Caddy. Or a Lincoln." Lima, his eyes were saying. My own mind was racing through something Claire had once said. Link the crimes. It was uncommon for a pattern killer to switch methods. Sexual killers liked closeness to their victims: strangulation, bludgeoning, knives. They wanted to feel their victims struggle, expire. They liked to invade a victim's home. Shooting was detached, clinical. It provided no thrill. For a moment, I wondered if there were two murderers. Copycat killers. It couldn't be. No one else knew about the rings. I went over to Becky De George as the doctor was zipping her into a body bag. I gazed down into her eyes. They were making love. Did he force them? Did he surprise them? A sexual psycho who changes his methods. A killer who leaves clues. What did he leave here? What were we missing?