Brad Thor - The Lions Of Lucerne

“Good man. Where are the victims?”

“Master bedroom. Second floor, down the hall on the left. Do me a favor and wear these. We want to keep the crime scene as uncontaminated as possible,” said the deputy, pulling out a pair of paper surgical booties from a box in the backseat of his truck.

“Thanks,” said Scot, accepting the paper booties and a pair of latex surgical gloves while walking up the steps of the house. “I meant what I said. You guys are pretty impressive.”

A piece of plastic had been laid in front of the storm door, and Scot stood on it while he took his Timberlands off and slipped on the booties. Snapping on the rubber gloves, he opened the double doors.

As a nonsmoker, Scot immediately detected the lingering odors of cigarette smoke. The smell grew stronger as Scot neared the family room. He quickly turned and walked back to the front door.

Catching the attention of one of the Wasatch County officers, he asked, “Officer, do you know if Mr. and Mrs. Maddux are Mormon-” Scot noticed a slight change in the face of the officer and, catching his faux pas, switched to the more politically correct term preferred these days by the Mormons. “I’m sorry. I mean were they members of the LDS church?”

Pleased that an outsider would show such respect for their faith, the officer responded, “Yes, sir. Mr. Maddux had been our bishop for a long time. He retired a ways back, but we still saw him at church and all the functions.”

“I see,” replied Scot. “I take it by your answer that you are a member of the Church as well?”

“Yes, I am.”

“And you abide by all of the Church’s covenants?”

“I certainly do.”

“So you don’t smoke?”

“No, sir. Never.”

“How about Mr. and Mrs. Maddux. Did either of them smoke?”

“No, sir. I can tell you as sure as I am standing here that they were perfect examples of what members of the Church of Latter Day Saints should be.”

Harvath turned his attention back to Deputy MacIntyre. “Ben, could there have been any of your guys smoking in here?”

“No way. Why?”

“How about near the front door at all?”

“Not a one. What are you getting at?”

Without answering, Harvath turned back inside, closing both doors behind him.

He needed to see the bodies. How they were killed and how they were placed would hopefully tell him something about the killers. The scenic route Scot had asked the Deer Valley helicopter pilot to take would delay the FBI for only so long. With his eyes wide open and all of his senses operating at their peak, he climbed the creaking stairs to the second floor.

Talk about a time warp, Scot thought as he looked down the hallway at the green shag carpeting. At what point in the aging process do people just give up and let time pass them by?

At the top of the stairs, he’d noticed a door ajar directly in front of him. Walking over to it, he pushed it the rest of the way open with his foot. It smelled of strongly perfumed soap, exactly the way a bathroom in a grandmother’s house should smell. Everything was neatly in place, except for a towel that appeared to have been hung hastily back on the rack next to its neatly folded twin.

Scot looked into the tub, which was perfectly dry. Next he checked the washbasin, and it too was dry except for a little pool of moisture around the drain. He noticed that the faucet had a very slow drip. Scot tightened the handle and the dripping stopped. Judging from the little bit he had already seen of the place, he knew the Madduxes kept one neat and clean house. Someone other than the Madduxes had used this sink recently and had been careless both with turning off the water and with hanging the towel.

Leaving the bathroom, Scot made his way down the hall toward where the deputy had said the master bedroom was. He passed rows and rows of photographs of family vacations, picnics, weddings, and posed Kmart shots of what must have been the grandchildren. The whole array was hung in chronological order. What he assumed were pictures of Mr. and Mrs. Maddux in their youth were at the beginning of the hall, and the display transitioned into their later years as one got closer to the master bedroom. Each night they would have actually relived their lives on the way to bed. It gave Scot an eerie chill to think that the final posing of the two would be at the very end of the hallway, where they lay in death.

And posing was a perfect word for it. Scot entered the room and saw the couple laid out on their bed. The killer hadn’t surprised them in bed, because they were both fully clothed and were lying on a white chenille bedspread now puddled with patches of rusty brown. There were also marks along the floor, undoubtedly caused when one of them had fallen and been dragged and then slung onto the bed.

The damage to Mr. Maddux was consistent with a professional hit: concise, cold, and accurate. Mrs. Maddux’s injuries were anything but. With half her nose blown away and additional gunshot wounds to her neck, chest, head, and face, it looked as if someone had lost control or was in a complete and total rage. The gruesome scene was going to keep the police, the sheriff, and the FBI busy for a while.

As Scot had been flown from Deer Valley to Midway, a theory had formed in his mind. One of the biggest questions he had, outside of how the kidnappers had been able to ambush and take out the president’s detail, was how they had got away. Everything he had seen so far served to reinforce that these people were absolute professionals. Each precise detail had been planned and probably practiced until it was perfect. Aside from assaulting a structure like the White House or Fort Knox, it was hard to think of a more daring, more dangerous, or more difficult undertaking than this. Yet, the kidnappers had succeeded.

The FBI would sweep the room for hair, fibers, and prints and would also look to see if the killer had left any other sort of clue, such as a note or a distinctive marking. Scot was positive they wouldn’t find any notes. Psychos who wanted to get caught left notes, taunting the police and Feds. While Scot couldn’t pass judgment on how psychotic this killer was, he knew one thing for sure-he was professional.

Scot tried to put the killings in context. If the FBI was on their way here, chances were pretty good that they were thinking the same thing he was. The kidnappers would have needed a base. The only way off Death Chute was by foot or helicopter. With the weather the way it had been yesterday, there was no way a chopper would have been able to get there. Plus, a helicopter would have made too much noise. The surrounding mountains acted as one big echo chamber. Only a craft with supersilent capabilities would have been quiet enough to get in there undetected.

Harvath thought about that for a second, not yet ready to rule it out. Flying low enough, a stealth helicopter could have evaded the radar monitored by the Secret Service agents who had been posted with the FAA in the Tower and Approach Control at Salt Lake International Airport and breached the protective “No Fly Zone” over Deer Valley. The sophistication of the jamming device Hollenbeck had found demonstrated loud and clear that the kidnappers had access to some very high-tech equipment. But the one element that didn’t fit was the human element-the pilots.

Even U.S. Night Stalker pilots, the best in the world, couldn’t have tackled that storm last night. In normal conditions, the downdrafts around the valley were amazingly tough to handle. As Scot thought further, assembling a mental picture of the area where the bodies of the president’s detail were found, he realized there wasn’t enough room to land any sort of helicopter. Scot ran down how it might have happened. What if the kidnappers were able to get their hands on a helicopter with stealth capabilities, and what if they could find a pilot crazy enough to tackle the downdrafts, and what if the pilot was good enough to do it in a raging snowstorm, and what if he could land in a heavily treed area that didn’t provide enough space? Would it have been possible? Absolutely not, thought Scot. That was too many “what-ifs.”