Bob Oz was pulling on his coat as he ran down the steps and out into the street with his phone pressed hard to his ear.
“Pick up,” he whispered as he headed for the Volvo parked up the street. “Pick up, damn you.”
Searching online for the murder he had gotten at least a dozen hits, most with the headline “McDeath.” He’d scrolled his way through them.
Family celebrating birthday at McDonald’s killed in gang shootout.
Mother and two children killed, father only survivor.
Still no arrests in McDeath massacre.
“Kari.”
“There you are! Sorry for calling you on a Saturday, Kari, but I need the address of a Mike Lunde, he lives somewhere in Chanhassen. I’m going to give you a phone number, are you ready?”
“We’re in the middle of lunch here, Bob, can this wait?”
“No. Oh fuck!”
“I’m sorry?”
“My apologies. Someone’s broken the side mirror on my car. No, it can’t wait. I’ve got…I know who he is.”
“Who who is?”
“The killer, Kari.” Bob had fished his keys out with his free hand but then dropped them on the road. “I thought he was telling me a story he heard from one of his customers. But it was his own story. Mike Lunde told me everything exactly like it was, in detail. He confessed, Kari! And I didn’t realize.”
42
The House of Horrors, October 2016
“I saw this Gomez come walking along the road there,” the old woman said, pointing.
She and Kay Myers were standing on the upper floor of a fine old timber-framed house that lay on a rise above the otherwise flat landscape of Cedar Creek. From here Kay looked out over dense forest, swamps, meadows and plowed land. On her drive out Kay had gathered from the signs that this was a protected area for ecological research.
Kay peered in the direction of the narrow, twisting road almost a hundred yards away from the house.
“How can you be sure it was Tomás Gomez, Mrs. Holte?”
“Because I’ve seen him on the TV, of course. That he’s a wanted man.”
“Yes, but what I mean is, that’s quite a long way away. I don’t think even I could see so clearly who someone down there was.”
“Ah, but the older you get, the better your sight gets, I can assure you.”
For a moment the two just looked at each other, then Mrs. Holte began laughing, a funny, clucking, little old woman laugh. It made Kay think of a cocoon, shrunken and dried up, with silver-gray hair and dry as an old spider’s web. She’d been standing waiting at the door as Kay parked in front of the house and invited her in without even asking what this was about. Once Kay told her, Mrs. Holte explained that she hadn’t answered the calls because she turned her phone off when she wasn’t making a call, because the only calls she ever got anyway were from telemarketers.
“I’m just kidding, honey,” said the woman. Then she suddenly reached for something next to the window behind the drape and pulled out a rifle. Kay froze, and before she had time to act the woman had lifted the weapon to her cheek. “Like this,” she said.
She closed one eye and with the other peered through the telescopic sights. The barrel was pointed toward the window. Then she lowered the rifle. And laughed that clucking laugh of hers again when she saw the look on Kay’s face. “I just used the telescopic sights. I took this over after my husband died.”
Kay shivered at the thought that she and her car had probably been in that viewfinder as she drove up toward the house.
“So you saw a person you believe to have been Tomás Gomez pass here yesterday morning.”
“Yes. He parked in the passing lane down there.”
Kay took out her notebook.
