This one ended prematurely. She’d been decapitated. Not a neat incision. The head lay on the floor, several feet from her chair. Nearby was a butcher knife still flecked with cabbage. Another knife from the same cutlery set-heavier, larger- had been removed from the rack.
Bloody sneaker prints led to a service staircase. On the third floor of the house, the young rancher and his wife lay in bed, covers tossed aside, embracing. Their heads had been left on, though severed jugulars and tracheas said it wasn’t for lack of effort. The big knife had seared through flesh but failed at bone. Facial crush wounds compounded the horror.
A gore-encrusted baseball bat lay on the floor in front of the footboard. The husband’s bat; he’d been a high school slugger, a champ.
The papers made a big deal about how good-looking the couple had been in life-what was their name… Ardullo. Mr. and Mrs. Ardullo. Golden couple, everything to live for. Their faces had been obliterated.
Down the hall, the children’s bedrooms. The older one, a five-year-old girl, was found in her closet. The coroner guessed she’d heard something and hid. The big knife, badly bent but intact, had been used on her. The papers spared its readers further details.
A playroom separated her room from the baby’s. Toys were strewn everywhere.
The baby was an eight-month-old boy. His crib was empty.
Fading sneaker prints led back down to the laundry room and out a rear door, where the trail lightened to specks along a winding stone path and disappeared in the dirt bordering the kitchen garden.
Ardis Peake was found in his shack-a wood-slat and tar-paper thing rancid with the stink of a thousand dogs. But no animals lived there, just Peake, naked, unconscious on a cot, surrounded by empty paint cans and glue tubes, flasks bearing the label of a cheap Mexican vodka, an empty filled with urine. A plastic packet frosted with white crystal residue was found under the cot. Methamphetamine.
Blood smeared the rat catcher’s mouth. His arms were red-drenched to the elbows, his hair and bedding burgundy. Gray-white specks in his hair were found to be human cerebral tissue. At first he was thought to be another victim.
But he stirred when prodded. Later, everything washed off.
Fast asleep.
A scorching smell compounded the reek.
No stove in the shack, just a hot plate powered by an old car battery. A tin wastebasket serving as a saucepan had been left on the heat. The metal was too thin; the bottom was starting to burn through, and the stench of charring tin lent a bitter overlay to the reek of offal, putrid food, unwashed clothes.
Something else. Heady. A stew. The baby’s pajamas on the floor, covered by flies.
Ardis Peake had never been one for cooking. His mother had always taken care of that. This morning, he’d tried.
Heidi Ott said, “I never heard of him till I came to Starkweather. Way before my time.”
“So you know what he did,” said Milo.
“Killed a family. It’s in his chart. Claire told me about it before she asked me to work with him, said he’d been non-violent since commitment but I should know what I was dealing with. I said fine. What he did was horrible, but you don’t end up at
Starkweather for shoplifting. I took the job in the first place because I was interested in the endpoint.”
“The endpoint?”
“The extreme-how low people can go.”
She turned to me, as if seeking approval.
I said, “Extremes interest you?”
“I think extremes can teach us a lot. What I’m trying to say is, I wanted to see if
I was really cut out for mental-health work, figured if I could handle Starkweather,
I could cope with anything.”
Milo said, “But the job ended up being repetitious.”
“There’s a lot of routine. I guess I was naive, thinking I was going to see fascinating things. Between their medication and their disabilities, most of the guys are pretty knocked out-passive. That’s what I meant by baby-sitting. We make sure they get fed and stay reasonably clean, keep them out of trouble, give them time out when they pull tantrums, the same as you’d do with a little kid. Same thing over and over, shift after shift.”