To the two deputies who’d searched the house with him, Max said, “Go outside. Help the others clear the barn and any outbuildings. Additional backup is on the way. Tell headquarters to dispatch the CSI unit and the ME.”
The deputies sprinted off, following orders.
Alone in the room, Max took another look at Laurel Johansson, thinking again about the painful moment Jeff Mullins would face when he heard his daughter was dead. Max focused on the angry red slit across Laurel’s neck, ear to ear, and thought about Jacob on the kitchen floor, still alive but his throat cut as well. It struck Max as nearly biblical to kill in such a fashion.
In contrast, from the look of it, the woman and children under the sheet had all been shot.
As Max walked down the stairs, he realized that the sheer carnage rivaled anything he’d witnessed in all his years in law enforcement, the bulk of it spent not working for a rural sheriff’s office but Salt Lake PD. As a big-city cop, Max had investigated gang killings and been part of major drug busts. Despite its squeaky-clean image, Salt Lake shared the problems common to all cities: robberies, sex crimes, gun violence and murders. Yet never had Max walked into such a shocking scene. The bodies of the woman and two children under the sheet sickened him. And Max had a hard time wrapping his mind around the scene in the upstairs bedroom.
Two EMTs rushed in nearly simultaneously as Max reached the first floor. “Did you assess the victims outside?” he asked. “Under the sheet.”
“All three dead,” an EMT confirmed as they hurtled toward the kitchen.
Max walked outside to check on Naomi in the car and saw that she’d disobeyed him and gotten out. She still held the baby, but now she talked to a new arrival. Naomi appeared deep in conversation, bouncing the baby nervously on her hip. He approached, his eyes fixed on the newcomer’s black hair, pulled into a familiar bun at the nape of her neck.
When Clara turned toward him, Max looked into her wide, dark eyes, the deep brown of strong coffee. He noticed her mud-caked jeans, her dirt-covered boots and immediately understood where she had been—out digging, looking for bodies in the woods. Once again, he thought about how this was a woman who didn’t understand the concept of ever giving up.
“Chief Jefferies,” Max said. He thought about how eager he’d been to see her again, but not this way. Never this way. “You got our message?”
“I did.” All business, she asked, “What do we know?”
Four
Mother Naomi jumped out of Max’s squad car and came running toward me the moment I climbed out of the black Suburban. I put my hand on her shoulder, hoping to calm her. The baby let loose a torrent of screams from within his blue blanket, I thought perhaps picking up on Naomi’s agitation as she fidgeted while she tried to quiet him. “You’re frightening the child,” I said, trying to be as soothing as I could. “Mother Naomi, you need to calm down and tell me what’s happened.”
Our family lost one mother, Constance, years earlier to breast cancer. Of my three surviving mothers, Naomi had always been the most excitable. During prayer service, she was the one who more often than not shouted praise to the heavens as her face glowed with an exuberant love. Emotions rarely bottled up inside her, since she so enjoyed releasing them out into the world. When she didn’t stop juddering the child, I put my hand on her cheek and looked into her eyes as I ordered, “Stop bouncing. Please.”
Gradually, she reined her emotions in. The terror drained from her face and she stilled. As she did, the baby quieted. “That’s better,” I said. “Now tell me, what’s going on here?”
“Someone’s killed them all,” Naomi said, each word drawn out like a full sentence.
“Killed who?”
“The Johanssons. All dead, I think, except Jeremy and maybe Jacob.”
I remembered Jacob, the oldest of Michael and Reba Johansson’s sons, from my childhood. I’d lost touch with everyone during the ten years I lived in Dallas, where I trained to become a cop, eventually working homicides. But I’d heard that Jacob had left Alber not long after I did and only returned about a year earlier to take over the bison ranch so his father could retire. Once Jacob and his family moved onto the ranch, the elder Johanssons had