“Husband,” Reba called out, letting go of Carl and trailing after him. “Don’t run off. Jacob needs us. Come here.”
After they left, I took out my ID and showed it to the physician. “Has Jacob been conscious at all? Has he said anything, maybe on the ambulance? Or here in the room, to one of the nurses, to anyone on the staff?”
“No,” the doctor said. “Although even if he did regain consciousness, speaking would be impossible with the injury to his trachea. We can’t repair it until we’re sure he didn’t suffer damage to his airway. Right now, that opening is keeping him alive.”
“But has he communicated or tried to communicate in any way?” I asked.
“Not that I know of,” the doctor said. “My understanding is that he’s been unconscious since shortly after he was found.”
I thanked him, the doctor left, and I was suddenly alone with Carl, who held his friend’s hand and stared down at him with a forlorn look.
“Tell me about the tree and the ornaments,” I said. “A bit unusual in these parts, don’t you think?”
At first Carl gave me a suspicious glance, as if he wasn’t sure how to respond, but then let loose a rousing laugh that seemed out of place with his best friend beside him, hovering somewhere between life and death. “That’s what you want to know?” he jeered. “Really, Chief. You’re worried about my little bit of fun in the woods?”
“It’s rather an odd thing to run into while executing a search warrant,” I said. “And yes, I’m curious. Why did you do it? What does it represent?”
Carl snickered and stood straighter, ignoring the bursts of foaming blood bubbling from Jacob’s throat each time he took a breath. “So what? I brought a few mementoes from Mexico, and I like having fun, enjoy the idea that someone might see it and wonder, what the heck,” he said. “Jacob and me lived there a long time, and Anna, too. I got into the culture. They aren’t as afraid of death as we are. I admire that.”
“That’s all?” I asked. He nodded and I added, “Looks fairly fresh, not like it’s been there for a long time. I’d guess that you just put it up in the past few weeks?”
“A couple of weeks ago,” he said. “Around Día de Muertos. Why?”
“No reason,” I said. “But it seems like an odd coincidence to cover a tree with skeletons and skulls just before your friend’s family is slaughtered.”
At that, Carl swallowed, hard, and this time he didn’t laugh. “Listen, you’re making a molehill into a mountain. It’s nothing,” he said. “Just a little fun.”
I nodded and took out my phone, checked to make sure I had Max’s text. Watching his face, I asked, “Then let’s move on, Carl. Did Jacob know that you were stalking Laurel?”
Except for squeezing Jacob’s hand tighter, Carl didn’t react. Instead he leaned over, rubbed his other hand over the dark blond stubble on Jacob’s cheek and said, “I didn’t do any such thing. I respected Laurel. She was Jacob’s wife.”
“Did you take pictures of her?” I asked.
He glanced over at me, and I saw a flash of anger in his eyes. “Yes,” he said, his voice defiant. “I like to take photos. I take a lot of them. Of a lot of people. And I did take some of her.”
“You have an entire album of photographs of Laurel, most of which look like she didn’t know you were taking them.” I turned my phone around and showed him the screen with the photo of Laurel nursing Jeremy.
“It’s a beautiful photo.” If he was shocked that we’d found the album hidden in his trailer, he didn’t show it. “Why wouldn’t I take that?”
“You climbed a tree, cut down a limb and took this one through the window,” I pointed out, as I flipped to the photo of the tree with the missing branch. “Why would you do that?”
Carl turned away from the image on my phone and stared down at Jacob’s expressionless face, then glanced over at me and sneered. “Because I wanted to, and because I knew Jacob wouldn’t mind. We did everything together,” he said. “We were closer than blood. Closer than brothers. He knew I would do anything for him. And he always backed me up. He was always there for me.”
“You two are that close?” I asked. “Tell me about what he did for you, how he backed you up.”