Chapter 31
CHAPTER
Weeds for grass. several crooked apple trees in desperate need of pruning. The farmhouse stood to the right of the trees, its once white walls now begrimed with time, paint peeling off the clapboard siding.
The windows appeared intact, but the roof sagged and shingles were missing. A gutter dangled, creaking in the breeze.
A local farmer leased and tilled the fields beyond the pines, but no one had lived in the house since elderly LeeAnne Lawton had died there five years back. Eamon Diggs, her grandson, inherited the land but had shown no interest in selling it, living there, or renting it.
Soneji knew all that for certain. A few years back, he’d read an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer about Diggs, who’d been released from prison after doing ten years for the rape and attempted rape of several young women.
The story had noted Diggs’s inheritance and current employment in a granite quarry along with several other ex-cons.
Soneji had been intrigued by the serial rapist and was drawn to find the farm.
On that first trip, he’d discovered little to explain Diggs’s hatred of women, but he did find things that intrigued him even more, things that set his imagination free with possibility, things that caused him to return to the abandoned farm with increasing frequency.
Finally satisfied that he was alone and that nothing had changed since his last visit, Soneji moved quickly, staying in the weeds, not wanting to be anywhere near mud as he traversed the yard heading for the long, low, three-sided shed connected to an old workshop with cinder-block walls.
He ignored the workshop and halted where the weeds gave way to the shed’s dirt floor.
The shed was divided into six bays. Four were filled with rusting farm equipment. One was largely empty. A filthy beat-up white panel van was backed into the nearest bay, an old tarp over the front end. Soneji studied the dirt around it, saw no prints in the lightly raked soil.
Emboldened, he put on latex gloves and pulled back the tarp, revealing the broken headlight and turn signal. Soneji put down his pack and took out a new headlight, a new bulb for the turn signal, and new covers for both.
He put on reading glasses to make sure he was seeing everything clearly and in the minutest detail. Kneeling, he studied the bumper and saw a little blood spattered there; a ragged strip of stretchy black fabric was stuck in the cavity of the broken headlight.
Soneji removed the fabric, set it aside, and installed the new bulbs. Before he put the replacement covers on, he worked the fabric into a gap in the upper right corner of the grille.
Satisfied, he went to the rear of the van and looked at the smears in the dirt where the bicyclist’s message had been written across the double doors. Then he reached up to a shelf behind the vehicle, moved a coffee can filled with wood screws, and found the key.
The rear of the van’s interior was a mess, just as he’d found it the first time, strewn with empty beer cans, old nudie magazines, newspapers, trash, papers, leaves, and everything else that belonged in a dump.
From his pack, Soneji fished out a baggie holding the piece of hair and scalp he’d torn off the dead woman after the second shooting. Another baggie held the Bulldog pistol. A third held the latex gloves he’d worn last night, fingertips covered in dried blood.
He opened the driver’s-side door, got out the pistol, set it aside, and turned the plastic bag upside down. He shook it out over the console between the two bucket seats and on the dash.
Then he opened the cylinder and extracted two of the four spent rounds. Soneji crouched down and carefully pushed the bullet casings into a frayed and separated seam in what was left of the van’s floor fabric.
Soneji closed the driver’s door and locked it, then returned to the rear of the van and opened the baggie containing the latex gloves.
He’d worn two layers of gloves on his gun hand that night, and now he carefully separated the inner glove from the one with gunshot residue and blood from the dead passenger.
He lobbed the contaminated glove into the mess, then opened the baggie with the bloody hair, scalp, and flesh in it.
He flicked the treasure into the trash heap in the van’s rear, closed the van’s door, and locked it.
He returned the key to the shelf and set the coffee can on top of the key, put the pieces of the headlight and turn signal into his pack, then shut the door. He picked up the rake and gently stirred the dirt behind him as he backed out.
He threw the tarp over the front end and raked everywhere he’d been on the shed floor. When his boots reached weeds, where he would no longer leave tracks, he leaned over and placed the rake against the wall.
The air still stank of woodsmoke. It made Soneji’s eyes sting as he set off on the path through the bramble, toward the Saab and a dreaded, dutiful long weekend with Missy and Roni.