(2012) Colder Than Death (29 page)

Nolan nudged me in the back with his gun, almost knocking me down the stairs. “Why is she in that room?”

“She's too skinny. Needs some fattening up. The best preservation is done with bodies who have some meat on them. That's why I've always had such a hard time making them damn anorexics look good. I never kill them right away. I want them to look just right when they die, especially their faces, since that's the area of the body I'm primarily interested in. The girls I pick usually need to be a tad fleshier, considering all the experimentation and work I do on their faces, so I fatten them up a little.”

I was getting sick to my stomach as we walked through the den, into the dining room, then past the kitchen and out the back door, but I was compelled to keep asking questions.

“Wasn't it taking a big risk to leave them alive? Didn't they try to escape?”

“They're not alive for long. A week tops. And I let them think I won't be hurting them. A real trust thing happens quickly. By the time they're ready to die I think it's fair to say we've bonded. And when they die they feel no pain. I give them an injection. Puts them to sleep. That's when I begin the embalming.”

“Tell me you wait until they're dead.”

He shook his head. “Del, you know from basic embalming classes that the ideal body state for more perfect preservation is as soon after death as possible. Keep walking.”

“I can't see,” I said. “It's pitch black out here.”

“Your eyes will adjust in a few seconds. Move in a straight line. There's nothing in my back yard to bump into.”

“Where are you taking me?”

“You've got to die, Del.” The words stung. I was feeling scared in a way I'd never experienced before. He had murdered five women and was ready to kill a sixth. I knew he would have no qualms about killing me.

“You could do this to me, Nolan, after all these years?”

“This really pains me, Del, because I like you a lot. This might sound corny, but you were like a son to me. I enjoyed teaching you the trade when you first started with us. But you know the truth now. What I am supposed to do, let you live if you promise you won't tell?”

I said nothing. The only thing running through my head was how he was going to do it. “How?” I asked.

“Hold on a second,” he said as we stopped by a small shed about twenty yards from the rear of his house. I assumed it was where he kept his power mower. “Open the door.” I tugged at the door and it creaked open. “Now step back and get down on the ground spread-eagled.” I did. Quickly, Nolan reached into the shed and came back with a shovel. “Alright. Get up and keep walking.”

“What are you gonna do with the shovel, Nolan?”

“I'm not gonna do anything with it. But you're gonna dig a hole, then you're gonna lay in it, then I'm gonna cover you up.”

“You're gonna bury me alive?”

“Hell no. That'd be cruel. You'll be dead before the first pile of dirt gets dumped on you. Veer to the left.”

Chapter 24

I veered to the left. My eyes were now adjusted to the dark. Whether Nolan lived on a cul de sac or a dead end, what concerned me most was the gully about fifty yards behind his house that we were headed to. If his plan was to kill me and hide my body in a shallow grave in the gully he could rest assured I would never be found.

“Are there any other bodies buried back here, Nolan? People who stumbled onto your little secret?”

“Matter of fact, there are two.”

“My God,” I thought to myself.

“Two girls who didn't work out. One from about eight or nine years ago, and another from, oh, about fifteen.”

The time frame piqued my interest.

“You killed Alyssa fifteen years ago,” I said. “Why did you need another girl?”

“Alyssa was my second choice. The first one was sick. I didn't know it until I started working on her.”

“She was going to be dead because you were gonna kill her. So what if she was sick?”

“I wanted perfection. Keeping a body a long time means starting with a body in perfect condition. That's why I never went for the older ones.”

“What about Brandy Parker? Why didn't you bury her in the gully with the other two?”

“That was a miscalculation,” he said. “Once a year, on the anniversary of the death of my great grandfather, Angus Oberfuolner, I go to the cemetery to pay respects, just as my father and his father did. Nine years ago it was Brandy Parker's misfortune to be there on the day I went. She had come to the cemetery to make tracings of old headstones. Somehow she had made her way to the Section where my family's plot is located. She was there, making a tracing, when I arrived. At first, the idea of her being my next challenge hadn't even entered my mind. I was at the cemetery to do my annual duty. It was something that I took seriously. I'd been mulling over the fact that finding another girl was something I had to start thinking about again...and that meant planning. When you kidnap someone it has to be thought out for weeks, sometimes months in advance. Why do you think I was able to get away with taking Virginia and Alyssa and the others? Planning, Del. Meticulous planning. With Brandy Parker I acted spontaneously, but only because everything seemed to be in my favor...everything fell into place.”

“How do you mean?”

“To kidnap someone there can't be any trace of them. Their families have to be convinced that they ran away. It's easy to dispose of purses and handbags and such, but what do you do with a car? Every woman I ever took was kidnapped when they were in a situation where they had left their home or place of work on foot.”

“What did it matter?”

“I didn't have to worry about disposing of their vehicles. That, more than anything, was what made me act so quickly with Brandy Parker. In the few minutes we spent talking she let it slip that she'd been in an accident and that her car had been totaled. As yet, she hadn't gotten a new one. She was hitchhiking everywhere. Guess what, Del? She hitchhiked to the cemetery that day. Hearing that, I began formulating a plan. I knew she was there alone. Not a soul was near us. I could knock her out, put her in the trunk of my car and have her home in fifteen minutes.

“What went wrong?”

“Knocking her out was easy. From all my years working on bodies I knew the exact location of the right nerves to hit...like when you see people in movies render someone unconscious with the touch of a hand. She was out like a light and didn't even know what hit her. It was while I was about to pick her up and carry her to my car that I saw it.”

“What?”

“She had a hideous scar on her face.” As he pointed at the right side of his face the photograph I'd seen of Brandy flashed before my eyes.

“So?”

“I didn't want to work with a built-in imperfection. Maintaining the bodies for perpetual preservation was difficult enough. I didn't want to have to work on a body with such a problematic scar.”

“That still doesn't tell me why you had to kill her.”

“I had no choice. If I left her there unconscious she would've come to and known who I was. Sooner or later she might've seen me. She had to die. I thought about putting her in the car and bringing her back here and putting her in the ground in the gully, but it was daytime and I didn't like doing my dirty work in the daylight. I had to think fast, so I dragged her body behind one of the mausoleums...only for the purpose of figuring out what to do. It was while I was behind that mausoleum that I noticed one of the bricks in the back was loose. I loosened it some more, then loosened another and another until there was a big enough space for me to slide the body inside. Before I did it, I took one of the bricks and hit her on the head. Again, because of my knowledge of the body, I knew exactly where to place the blow. For what it's worth, she was unconscious when I hit her so she didn't feel a thing.”

When we reached the edge of the gully I stopped and looked down. It sloped at an incline that would be easy to walk up or down on and was filled with wild weeds, grass and an occasional shrub. “Now where?” I asked.

“Down. Just keep moving.”

“So you started with your wife,” I said. “Why all the others?”

“It's kind of like dating, Del. You go out with one girl for awhile and you get tired of her, so you find someone else. That was part of it. The other part was the challenge of preservation. Over the years there've been such advancements in chemicals and whatnot I decided to try different experiments in the treatments. I know this isn't going to make you feel any better, but I've been keeping a detailed journal of all my experiments... obviously not to be released to the world until after my death, but I wanted some good to come out of this, other than my own personal pleasure and satisfaction. To the left past this tree coming up.”

“Why Alyssa, Nolan?”

“She was perfect. I would see you with her around town. I couldn't wait to get at her. Imagine, to preserve that kind of beauty forever.”

“So
you
sent the letter and the postcard.”

“Yes. But she wrote them. It was her handwriting. All part of the plan. I mailed them when I was out of town at conventions. It had to look like she had run off.”

“That was a mistake, Nolan. What you didn't know is that Alyssa ended our relationship.” He looked at me with an odd expression. “I was too embarrassed to tell you or Lew. The letter came three weeks after she dumped me. It never made sense as to why she would've sent it.”

“No matter,” said Nolan. “But I'm glad you told me this. I don't feel as bad now. She was already out of your life.”

“Not really. She's been in my heart ever since. I could never feel anything for another woman...or trust one because I was afraid she'd take off. You killed a part of me, Nolan. I feel like this is the second time I died.”

“What do you want me to say, I'm sorry? You made a choice to hang on to a fantasy. You ruined your life, not me. Go past that tree stump.”

“What kind of pleasure did you get doing this for all these years? Jesus, Nolan.”

“You have every right to ask that question, Del. But when you look at the nature of our business, especially my end of it, there isn't much difference between a beautiful young woman if she's alive and sleeping or dead and appears to be sleeping. Over the years, I've come to think of myself as a man with five wives who never grow old and fat, who never cheat on me or talk back or make me hate myself. My women never go out and buy expensive dresses or run up credit cards or get wrapped up in their own careers. My wives stay home. I always know where they are. Okay. Stop here. Turn around.”

Nolan handed me the shovel.

“Start digging, Del.”

Chapter 25

The dirt piled high and thick upon me. The deafening silence of the grave was all I had left. I heard the pounding sounds of what was unmistakably the shovel smoothing out the dirt three feet above me. He was done.

I knew it would only be a matter of seconds before whatever air was filtering through the dirt and somehow making its way into my lungs would stop. I didn't understand why I was still breathing, but I didn't waste a moment dwelling on it. In
his
mind, I was dead or would be shortly.

I wondered if he was getting nervous or anxious about getting caught, or if he had enough of a conscience to feel any sadness or guilt over what he had done. But there was no time to waste on what was going on in
his
mind. Breathing was uppermost in mine.

My nose was now completely plugged with dirt. I knew that trying to inhale one more time would be foolish. I also knew that my only chance to keep breathing would be to somehow get the duct tape off of my mouth and there was only one way to accomplish that. I would have to chew through it from the inside and I'd have to do it fast. The problem was getting my teeth in a position in which they could start tearing away. To accomplish this I had to use my tongue as if it were a crowbar, pushing against the tape and trying to make enough of an indentation for my teeth to have a shot.

I couldn't do that. He had applied the tape so tightly that I couldn't even force my lips apart. This time for sure I thought death would come and something inside of me welcomed it. I was tired of fighting. But some other mechanism within, maybe the survivor instinct we all have locked away, wouldn't let me give up. Almost as if it had a will of its own, my right arm began to lift its way up through the dirt that was still being shoveled onto me.

It inched along slowly. Too slowly. I wanted to help it along, but I was petrified that any kind of sudden movement might disrupt the manner in which the dirt was settling. My lungs ached. I strained for air. There was none left. I could feel myself blacking out. My arm made its way from my side to my lower abdomen, then in jerky, half-inch-at-a-time movements that made me feel like a mime, across my stomach and chest, up to my mouth where my fingers took over and with an unsteady motion carefully peeled back enough tape to enable me to breathe, barely.

I was careful not to open my mouth completely. Before I did, I turned my head to the left, hoping there would be less of a chance for dirt to slip in. I didn't waste a second wondering if it was safe to breathe. I just did it. And I was alright. Where seconds before I was welcoming death, I suddenly welcomed life, even if only for the next few minutes. Or seconds.

I felt something on my right cheek. It was moving slowly. Something small and round. And cold. Not so much cold, but...wet. And it was moving, no...slithering at a painstakingly slow pace across my skin. It didn't take long for me to realize that it was a worm.

A grub. Probably no bigger than a nickel. I wasn't even dead and the elements were already after me.

There were two overriding questions on my mind: would I have the strength to dig my way out and, if I so, how long should I wait before trying? What if Nolan was still there?

I knew that the longer I waited the greater the risk that the air filtering through the dirt to my nose would be cut off. My only hope was to get out fast and the only way to accomplish this was to muster up every ounce of strength and in one frenzied effort, dig my way out.

I raised my right hand and began clawing. I could feel some of the dirt that was on top of me slide under my back, creating a kind of cushion. The sensation was much like being buried in the sand. If I hadn't been so weakened from the beating he'd given me, I might've had a better chance. And if there was more air I might've had the strength to give it a couple of more shots.