Once Dormant

“It’s going to be OK,” she said. “You did the right thing, calling the police. Now you wait right here.”

Wyatt looked at his bag. “But these papers—I’ve still got to deliver them.”

Poor kid, Sam thought.

He was obviously terribly confused. On top of that, some kind of misplaced guilt seemed to be kicking in as well. Sam guessed that this was a natural reaction.

“You don’t have to do anything,” she said. “You’re not in trouble. Everything’s going to be OK. Now just wait here, like I said.”

She got up from the step and looked for Dominic, who was still standing dumbly in the yard with his mouth hanging open.

Sam was starting to feel a little angry.

Doesn’t he know he’s supposed to be a cop?

She said to him, “Dom, come on. We’ve got to go up there and have a look at things.”

Dom just stood there as if he were deaf and had no idea that she’d spoken.

She spoke more sharply. “Dominic, come with me, damn it.”

Dominic nodded dumbly, then followed her up the stairs and across the porch into the house.

Gareth Ogden was lying spread-eagle on the floor, wearing sandals and shorts and a T-shirt. The wound in his forehead looked strangely precise and symmetrical. Sam stooped down to get a better look.

Still standing, Dominic stammered, “D-don’t touch anything.”

Sam almost growled …

“What do you think I am, an idiot?”

What kind of cop didn’t know better than to be careful around this kind of a crime scene?

But she looked up at Dominic and saw that he was still pale and trembling.

What if he faints? she thought.

She pointed to a nearby armchair and said, “Sit down, Dom.”

Dominic mutely did as he was told.

Sam wondered …

Has he ever seen a dead body before?

Her own experiences were limited to the open-casket funerals of her grandparents. Of course, this was completely different. Even so, Sam felt strangely calm and under control—almost as if she’d been preparing to deal with something like this for a long time.

Dominic obviously wasn’t feeling the same way.

She peered closely at the wound in Ogden’s forehead. It looked a little bit like that big sinkhole that had collapsed under a country road near Rushville last year—a weird, gaping cavity that didn’t belong there.

Weirder still, the skin seemed to be intact—not torn, but stretched into the exact shape of the object that had bashed against it.

It took only a moment for Sam to realize what that object must have been.

She said to Dominic, “Somebody hit him with a hammer.”

Apparently feeling less squeamish now, Dominic got up from the chair and knelt beside Sam and looked closely at the corpse.

“How do you know it was a hammer?” he asked.

Half-realizing it sounded like a sick joke, Sam said …

“I know my tools.”

In fact, it was true. When she was a little girl, her dad taught her more about tools than most of the boys in town learned in their whole lives. And the indentation of Ogden’s wound was the exact shape of the round tip of a perfectly ordinary hammer.

The wound was too big to be made by, say, a ball peen hammer.

Besides, it would have taken a heavier hammer to strike such a deadly single blow.

A claw hammer or a rip hammer, she figured. One or the other.

She said to Dominic, “I wonder how the killer got in here.”

“Oh, I can tell you that,” Dominic said. “Ogden didn’t bother to lock his front door much, even when he was gone. He sometimes left it wide open at nights. You know how the folks who live here along the waterfront drive are—dumb and trusting.”

Sam found it sad to hear the words “dumb” and “trusting” in the same sentence like that.

Why shouldn’t folks be able to leave their houses unlocked in a town like Rushville?

There’d been no violent crime here for years.

Well, they won’t be so trusting now, she thought.

Sam said, “The question is, who did this?”

Dominic shrugged and said, “Whoever it was, Ogden sure as hell looks like he was taken by surprise.”

Studying the wild look on the corpse’s face, Sam silently agreed.

Dominic added, “My guess is it was a total stranger, not somebody from around here. I mean, Ogden was mean, but nobody in town hated him that much. And nobody around here’s got the makings of a killer. It was probably some drifter who’s already come and gone. We’ll be damned lucky to catch him.”

The thought made Sam’s stomach sink.

They couldn’t let something like this just happen right here in Rushville.

We just can’t.