but also abraded his nerves, as did the memory of Justine Klineman’s ravaged face, as did Thad Fenton’s blood on the pavement below that third-story window. He began to think he had made a mistake when he’d closed his law office. He had needed three attempts to pass his bar exam, and he’d been little more than a slip-and-fall personal-injury shakedown artist, and his income had been limited by the frequency with which his own clients took him to arbitration and won a refiguring of his fees. But at least none of them ever bit him in the face or anywhere else.
In cascades of red and blue pulsations, but without a siren, the expected patrol car arrived. Two men clambered out, fresh-faced and lanky and, in spite of their shotguns, about as reassuring as a couple of Hollywood’s more callow young actors playing at being real men. They were among the hires that Eckman had made, chosen in part because they seemed too slow-witted ever to notice or even suspect their boss might be corrupt. They looked like potential fodder waiting to be mulched.
The sheriff instructed one of them to lead the way, the other to bring up the rear, and he patiently, repeatedly stressed that they were to take special care not to discharge their 12-gauge semiautos if any of their own people were within the arc of fire. He could only assume that their solemn nods meant they understood and were not merely the organic equivalent of the mechanical action of bobblehead dolls.
The small parking area that served the heating-cooling plant contained not a single vehicle, though it seemed there ought to be one belonging to Eric Norseman, graveyard-shift maintenance man.
As a first sign that something might be amiss, the main door to the plant stood open, held that way by the wind, which caused it to thump softly against the exterior wall.
The lighted vestibule offered three doors.
A deputy opened the one on the right and cleared the threshold. Beyond lay a large chamber with boilers, chillers, holding tanks, pumps, a maze of machinery the sheriff couldn’t identify, and a labyrinth of PVC pipes of various sizes running both vertically and horizontally. The room resonated with the humming, throbbing, ticking of exquisitely coordinated machines and with the susurration of rushing water under pressure. The place resembled the set for an action scene in a James Bond film, with too many blind corners to turn, too many hulking objects to look behind.
Sheriff Eckman didn’t want to have to search there unless absolutely necessary, and they wouldn’t know if it was necessary until they checked behind the remaining two doors.
He felt as if he desperately needed to pee. He told himself that the urge was entirely psychological. It had better be if any hope remained for him to one day become state attorney general.
The door on the left of the vestibule opened onto a balcony overlooking the twin stacks of the immense cooling tower. This construct of sheet steel, condensation coils, and drum fans stood three stories high, the first third of it below the ground-level balcony, and was serviced from catwalks at various levels. It, too, looked like the set in a James Bond film and was no less daunting than the first chamber.
The third door, directly opposite the front entrance, opened into the plant manager’s office. In addition to the main desk, two smaller workstations were provided. A refrigerator. A microwave. Two filing cabinets. At the back of the room, the door to a bathroom stood open, no one in the small space beyond. Another door, closed, might have led to a supply closet.
Because he was all but certain that Lee Shacket wasn’t lurking in the supply closet, that the killer fled in Eric Norseman’s vehicle, Sheriff Eckman followed a deputy into the office, another man close behind him. His confidence—and a diminishment in his need to urinate—resulted from the fact that the body of Thad Fenton lay facedown on the floor to the right of the door and the corpse of another man was sprawled across the desk, each cadaver in a condition suggesting Shacket thought of them as trash that he’d discarded during his flight from the premises.
Bristling with blood-clotted hair, pieces of Thad’s broken skull lay separate from his body. His brain appeared to be missing.
The body of the man on the desk, approximately the size of Shacket, had been stripped of everything, including his shoes.