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In the pre-dawn hours of August 28, the four members of the Mayser family were the first victims: Melinda, John, and their two children, Carrie and Billy They had perished in a house fire, which the authorities later attributed to Billy playing with matches The four bodies were so badly burned that identification could befinished his first bottle of Guinness, Sam reached for a second but hesitated He had work to do yet tonight Sometimes, when he was in a particularly dourshort of unconsciousness
Holding the e started a fire, would not cry out for help and wake his parents when he saw the blaze was beyond control Why would the boy not run before being overcome with sasoline or another volatile fluid (of which there was no indication in official reports), would spread so fast that none of the family could escape and would reduce the house--and the bodies therein--to heaps of ashes before fireain The bodies were so consumed by fla if the blaze had been started not by Billy but by someone anted to conceal the true causes of death At the suggestion of the funeral director--as the owner of Callan’s Funeral Home and also the assistant coroner, therefore a suspect in any official cover-up--the Maysers’ next of kin, Melinda Mayser’s mother, authorized cremation of the reinal fire was thus obliterated
"How tidy," Saht-backed chair "How splendidly clean and tidy"
Body count: four
Then the Bustamantes and Sanchez on September 5 Another fire Followed by more speedy cremations
Body count: seven
On September 7, while trace vapors of the Bustaered in the air above Moonlight Cove, a twenty-year resident of the town, Jim Armes put to sea in his thirty-foot boat, the Mary Leandra, for an early h he was an experienced seah the day was clear and the ocean calone down in an outbound tide, for no identifiable wreckage had washed up on local beaches
Body count: eight
On Septe on Armes’s drowned body, Paula Parkins was torn apart by five Dober alone, raising and training guard dogs, on a two-acre property near the edge of town Evidently one of her Doberainst her, and the others flew into a frenzy at the scent of her blood Paula’s savaged re, had been sent in a sealed casket to her fas were shot, tested for rabies, and cre the Bustamante-Sanchez case, on October 2, the FBI had exhurave in Denver An autopsy revealed that the woman indeed had been bitten and clawed to death by multiple ani part of that autopsy report word for word: … however, bite marks, lacerations, tears in the body cavity, and specific dans are not entirely consistent with canine attack The teeth pattern and size of bite do not fit the dental profile of the average Doberressive and capable of successfully attacking an adult And later in the sa to the specific nature of Parkins’s assailants: Species unknown
How had Paula Parkins really died?
What terror and agony had she known?
Who was trying to blaht the Dobermans’ bodies have provided about the nature of their own deaths and, therefore, the truthfulness of the police story?
Saht--like that of a coyote but not a coyote, like that of a cat but not a cat And he thought also of the eerie, frantic voices of the kids who had pursued him Somehow it all fit Bureau Instinct
Species unknown
Unsettled, Sam tried to soothe his nerves with Guinness The bottle was still eainst his teeth
Six days after Parkins’s death and long before the exhumation of her body in Denver, two ht Cove Steve Heinz and Laura Dalcoe, unether, were found dead in their house on Iceberry Way Heinz left a typed, incoherent, unsigned suicide note, then killed Laura with a shotgun while she slept, and took his own life Dr Ian Fitzgerald’s report was estion, the Dalcoe and Heinz farisly reodly a on in this town," Sam said aloud, and turned the empty beer bottle around in his hands
Most people still preferred to have themselves and their loved ones eardless of the condition of the body In most towns cremations accounted for perhaps one in four or one in five dispositions of cadavers
Finally, while investigating the Bustamante-Sanchez case, the FBI team from San Francisco found that Janice Capshaas listed as a Valiued body had washed up on the beach two days after she disappeared, three days before the agents arrived to launch their investigation into the deaths of the union organizers
Julio Bustamante, Maria Bustamante, Ramon Sanchez, the four Maysers, Jim Armes, Paula Parkins, Steven Heinz, Laura Dalcoe, Janice Capshaw: a body count of twelve in less than a month--exactly twelve tiht Cove during the previous twenty-three months Out of a population of just three thousand, twelve violent deaths in little more than three weeks was one hell of a mortality rate
Queried about his reaction to this astonishing chain of deadly events, Chief Loman Watkins had said, "It’s horrible, yes And it’s sort of frightening Things were so caluess, statistically, ere just overdue"
But in a town that size, even spread over two years, twelve such violent deaths went off the top of the statisticians’ charts
The six-man Bureau team was unable to find one shred of evidence of any local authorities’ coraph was not an entirely dependable detery was not so unreliable that Loman Watkins, his officers, the coroner, and the coroner’s assistant could all pass the exale indication of deception if in fact they were guilty
Yet …