Ernie Hoval opened the front door of a thirty-thousand dollar
three-bedroom ranch house in a pleasant middle-class development between
Cambridge and Cadiz, Ohio, just off Route 22, and stepped into an
entrance foyer which was liberally splashed with blood. Long red stains
smeared the walls on both sides where desperate hands had slid down the
plaster. Thick droplets of blood spotted the beige carpet and the
yellow-brocade loveseat by the coat closet.
Hoval closed the door and walked into the living room, where a dead
woman lay half on the sofa and half on the floor. She had been in her
late forties, rather handsome if not pretty, tall and dark. She had
taken a shotgun blast in the stomach.
Newspaper reporters and lab photographers circled her like wolves.
Four lab technicians, as silent as a quartet of deaf-mutes, crawled all
over the big room on their hands and knees, measuring and charting the
spray patterns of the blood, which seemed to have reached into every
nook and cranny. They were most likely fighting to keep from being
sick.
“Christ,” Hoval said.
He went through the living room and down the narrow hall to the first
bathroom, where there was an extremely pretty teenage girl sprawled at
the foot of a bloodstained commode. She was wearing skimpy blue
panties, nothing else, and had been shot once in the back of the head.
The bathroom was even bloodier than the foyer and the living room
combined.
In the smallest bedroom, a good-looking, long-haired bearded boy in his
early twenties was lying on his back in bed, covers drawn up to his
chin, his hands folded peacefully on his chest. The pastel blanket was
soaked with blood and shredded in the center by .
. I shotgun pellets. The poster of the Rolling Stones stapled to the
wall above the bed was streaked with red and curled damply at the edges.
“I thought you were only working on the Pulham case.”
Hoval turned to see who had spoken and confronted the
ineffectual-looking lab man who had lifted the killer’s fingerprints
from Rich Pulham’s squad car. “I heard the report of the initial find
and thought maybe this was tied in. It is kind of similar.”
“It was a family thing,” the lab man said.
“They already have a suspect?”
“They already have a confession,” the technician said, glancing
uninterestedly at the dead boy on the bed.
“Who? ”
“Husband and father.”
“He killed his own family?” This was not the first time Hoval had
encountered a thing like that, but it never failed to shock him. His
own wife and kids meant too much to him, were too intricate a part of
his life for him to ever understand how another man could bring himself
to slaughter his own flesh and blood.
“He was waiting for the arresting officers,” the technician said.
“He was the one who telephoned for them.”
Hoval felt ill.
“Anything on the Pulham situation?”
Hoval leaned against the wall, remembered the blood, pulled away and
checked for stains. But the wall here was clean. He leaned back again,
uneasy, a chill coursing along his spine. “We think we have something,”
he told the technician. “It might have started at Breen’s Cafe back at
the interchange.” He summarized what they had learned from Janet
Kinder, the waitress who had served an unnamed oddball his lunch Monday
afternoon. “If Pulham went after the man-and it looks more and more
like he did-then our killer is driving a rented van on his way to
California.”
“Hardly enough data for you to put out an APB, is there?”
Hoval nodded glumly. “Must be a thousand Automovers going west on I-70.
It’ll take weeks to go through them all, trace the drivers, winnow it
down to the bastard that did it.”
“This waitress give a description?” the lab man asked.
“Yeah. She’s man-crazy, so she remembers these things well.” He
repeated the description they had gotten from the waitress.
“He doesn’t sound like a left-wing revolutionary to me,” the lab man
said. “More like an ex-marine.”
“There’s no way to tell these days,” Ernie Hoval said. “The SDS and
some of these other crazies are cutting their hair, shaving, bathing,