The First Commandment

CHAPTER 22

Harvath felt like throwing up as he listened to the details of his mother’s assault. When the police arrived at her home on Encino Lane they could hear her screaming.

They kicked in the front door and followed the sound of her voice to the bathroom at the back of the house. It took two officers several minutes to break down the door, which had been screwed shut.

They found her in her bathtub, naked and covered with locusts. The insects, most of them several inches in length, appeared to have been feeding off her. One of the forensics people at the scene later identified the substance Maureen Harvath had been covered with as “bug grub,” a product available in many pet stores for feeding locusts.

She had no idea what the objects swarming over her body were, because she couldn’t see them. She had been blinded. Her eyes had been painted over with black ink, and the doctors at the hospital still were not sure if she would ever fully regain her eyesight. She had been incredibly traumatized and was under heavy sedation.

With the last piece of information from the crime scene, Harvath’s feelings of anguish turned to rage. A note had been found scribbled in red on the bottom of one of the buckets they believed the attacker had used to carry the locusts into the house. The note read: That which has been taken in blood, can only be answered in blood.

From watching Harvath’s face and hearing only his side of the conversation, Finney and Parker assumed Tracy had taken a turn for the worst. When they heard that Harvath’s mother had been attacked, they said the only thing that good friends can and should say in such a situation, “What do you need?”

What Harvath needed was the resort’s jet, and Finney was on his radio arranging it before he even finished asking.

Parker had friends in the San Diego Police Department who could liaise with the Coronado cops, so he headed for Sargasso to get the intel ball rolling.

They had every reason to believe that the man who had attacked Maureen Harvath was the same person who had shot Tracy.

Harvath had been right. This was personal.