An Ice Cold Grave (15 page)

“Probably nothing,” I said. “All I do is find bodies. I'm good at that, but I'm not a detective.”

“We can't keep finding them like this.”

“That's all of them, I think. That's surely all the dead on that piece of property.”

“How do you know he hasn't buried a few somewhere else?”

“I don't. But there's no cutoff date.”

They both leaned forward, eager for an explanation.

“There's a wide spread of death dates,” I said. “There's years' worth of killing, at least six. And the McGraw boy's only been dead three months. Unless the killer's been active for a very long time, chances seem good that all his victims are there together. He may have an earlier burial ground. He'll start a new one, for sure. But I'm thinking that one probably has all the past few years' victims in it.” I shrugged. Just my opinion.

Stuart and Klavin exchanged glances.

“Oh, and all the ones that are there, they were all killed in the same place,” I said. “So it seems to me if that's the favored killing spot, all the bodies are there.”

Stuart looked pleased. “Yes, we think they all died in the old shed there on the property.”

I was glad we hadn't opened the sagging doors while we were there. I didn't want to know what it looked like inside. From my moments with the dead, I had too clear an idea as it was.

“Is…is there another site you'd like me to check?” I dreaded them saying yes—but Max Stuart shook his head.

“We don't know how you do what you do,” he said. “If we hadn't seen the results, we'd never believe you. But we've seen all the bodies, and we've heard how you found them, and no amount of investigation can find any link you ever had with any living soul here. So we have to believe you actually have some uncanny ability. We don't know its dimensions or its limits. Is there anything you can tell us about these boys?”

That must have been incredibly hard for him to say. I started to deny it automatically, but then I thought again. I'd explain as closely as I could. “I see the moment of death,” I said. “I see their bodies in the grave. Hold on,” I said, and I shut my eyes, gripping the arm of my chair with my good hand and hugging the bad arm close to me. The clothes had been thrown down into the grave….

“Most of them had crosses, right?” I said. Klavin started. Stuart glanced back at the board, as though this was printed right above the boys' names. “But this is a religious community, and that may be a coincidence.” I looked back at the bodies, staring down into the earth in my memory. Oh, there. “Broken bones,” I said. “Some of them have broken bones.”

“Not from the torture?” Tolliver asked me.

“Well, yeah, some fresh ones from the torture. But at some time in the past, at least four of them had broken a bone.” I shrugged.

“Does that mean they were all abused as children? Is that the common thread?” Agent Stuart bent forward, as if he could pull the answer out of my head. “What did these boys have in common? Why were they picked?”

“I don't know. I see what I see in a total flash: body, emotions, the situation. Once I saw the dead guy's pet, or maybe I just picked up on that from the dying person's thoughts. I don't see the person who caused that death.”

“Just tell us everything you do know,” Klavin said.

I looked from one to the other, suspiciously. They would listen, sure, and then give me those long-suffering looks that said they didn't believe a word I'd said. I'd had investigators tell me that before. “Oh, please, any little detail will help….” Then it was like, “Oh, that's all you can do? What good is that?”

“We promise we'll be respectful,” Klavin said, interpreting my look correctly. “We realize you've had trouble with law enforcement agents in the past.”

I thought about it. I thought about the check Twyla Cotton had tucked into my hand the night before, the check that was over and above the amount we'd agreed upon for finding her grandson. I thought about the families crowded into the church, the grief and fear. Balanced against ridicule from men I'd never see again, that ridicule seemed like nothing.

So I took a deep breath, closed my eyes to help me concentrate, and looked into one of the graves again. I picked the one closest to the road. I pointed at it on the drawing. “This is Tyler,” I said. “He's been tortured. His skin was cut off in strips. He was raped. Clamps were put on his testicles. He was ready to die and welcomed death, because he knew no help was coming. The cause of death was strangulation. Some time in the recent past, he'd broken his leg.”

There was a quick intake of breath from one of the agents. I didn't open my eyes to see which one. Tolliver took my hand, and I gripped his hard. In my mind, I walked to the next grave. “Hunter,” I said. “Whipped, fucked, branded. He thought someone would come, right until the end. Lived for two days. Hypothermia.” Hunter had died in weather like this, cold and damp. The November abduction, I guessed. “No broken bones. He had…scoliosis.” I saw the curve of his spine, shining below me.

It went on, the litany of torture and death. Sex and pain. Young men, used up and discarded. The two transient boys had had no particular bone problems, but the locals had…except for Jeff McGraw and Aaron Robertson. So that was fifty percent. The broken bones were a dead end.

They'd died of a variety of reasons. Most of the reasons were oddly passive, like the strangling and hypothermia that had killed Tyler and Hunter.

“Passive?” Klavin sounded indignant. He pulled a white handkerchief out of his pocket and patted his nose. He'd caught a cold probing around the killing site. “Abducted, tortured, raped. That sounds pretty damn active to me.”

“That's not what I'm trying to express,” I said. “They were let to die. They weren't stabbed or shot or poisoned, something that would cause instant, sure death. Hunter was just left there, and he died. Maybe weather interfered with their visits, maybe he—the killer—was bored with him. The strangulation—well, you can change your mind at the last few seconds on that, too.”

“I see what you mean,” said Stuart. “Like the death was kind of an afterthought, or an experiment.”

“Like the pleasure didn't come with the death, but with what lay before,” I said. “The pain was the attraction. And once they were all used up, and there wouldn't be any more reaction from them, they were no good anymore.” But that wasn't quite right. Stuart's comment about it being an experiment was closer to the thought I was trying to express.

Tolliver looked nauseated.

“That's not what we're getting from the other psychic,” Klavin said in challenge. “She says that the killer sat and watched for the moment of death, taking an ‘orgasmic' pleasure from it.”

“Then Xylda's probably right,” I said instantly. “I'm not a psychic, and she is. Or maybe…” But then I stopped. Both the agents were looking at me with that expression I knew so well. It said, as clearly as if they'd spoken out loud:
Watch her. She's going to back and fill and try to dovetail her imaginings with the story the other freak told us.

“Did you ever think,” I said very slowly, very reluctantly, “that there might be two killers?”

They were both goggling at me. I can't interpret the living nearly as well as I can the dead. I'd done well with the two state agents so far, but I had no idea what their faces were saying now.

“That's all I can tell you,” I said, and I got up to leave. Tolliver hastily got to his feet, too. “Can we leave town?” I asked. “Whenever we choose?”

“As long as you let us know how to reach you, you and your brother can hit the road,” Stuart said, in a tone that implied he'd be glad to see the back of us.

“I'm
not
her brother,” Tolliver said. He sounded as angry as if they'd been arguing about it for the previous hour.

Stuart looked surprised. “All right, then. Whatever,” he said, shrugging. “You two can go.”

I was so astonished by Tolliver's outburst that I had to fumble to gather up my purse and follow him out. He almost left me in his cloud of dust. He proceeded clear on out of the station, with me trailing behind. With a little awkwardness with the doors, I was slowed down enough that I just reached him when he got to our car. He was standing with his hands on the hood, glaring down at the gray paint. The remaining newspeople were shouting at us, but we completely ignored them.

I had no idea what to say. I just stood there and waited. I would have gotten in the car, but he had the keys in his hand. The mist in the air began to get heavier, become almost-rain. I was miserable.

Finally he straightened up, and without a word to me, he clicked the doors open. I stepped down from the curb to the door on the passenger side, opened it and got in, pulled it closed. Thank God it was my left arm that was out of whack. Still silently, Tolliver leaned over me to pull my seat belt around and click it shut.

“Where?” he said.

“The doctor's office.”

“You hurting?”

“Yes.”

He took a deep breath. He held it for a minute. Let it out. “I'm sorry,” he said, leaving it open as to what he was sorry about.

“Okay,” I said, not really sure what ground we were walking on. I had a few ideas. Some of them were more frightening than others.

Tolliver had pinpointed the location of the doctor's office earlier on one of his drives to and from the hospital. Dr. Thomason's red brick office was small, but the parking lot contained at least six cars. When I went in, I anticipated a long wait. The man who was not my brother went up to the window, told the woman behind it who I was and that I'd seen the doctor at the emergency room.

“We'll have to work her in, hon, it may take a little bit,” she said, reaching up to push her glasses back on her nose. Then she patted her helmet of sprayed hair lightly, to make sure it was still in good shape, I guess. Tolliver was working his old magic. He brought back a clipboard with forms to fill out.

“Apparently, we'll have plenty of time to do this,” he said, for my benefit. I was in a blue molded plastic chair against the far wall, and he came to join me. In the waiting room with us were a young mother and her baby, who was blessedly asleep, an elderly man with a walker parked in front of him, and a very nervous teenage boy, who was one of the tribe of foot jigglers.

A nurse in teal came to the door and called, “Sallie and Laperla!” The young mother, hardly more than a teenager herself, got up with the infant carrier cradled in her arms.

“I wonder if she knows La Perla is a brand of underwear,” I murmured to Tolliver, but that barely got a smile from him.

The boy scooted down the line of chairs until he was within conversational distance of us. “You the one found the bodies,” he said.

We both looked at him. I nodded.

Now that he'd told me who I was, he was stumped to think of something else to tell me. “I knew all them,” he said finally. “They was good boys. Well, maybe Tyler got into a little trouble now and then. And Chester, he wrecked his dad's new Impala. But we went to youth group together, at Mount Ida.”

“All of you?”

“'Cept Dylan, he's a Catholic. They got their own youth group. But the rest of the churches, they all go together at Mount Ida.”

Ordinarily, I'd be bored stiff by this conversation, but I wasn't today.

“Did you read the stories in the paper today?” I asked.

“Yep.”

“You ever met those two boys from out of town?”

He looked surprised. “No, never,” he said. “I never heard of 'em. I think they were hitching or something. They were from way far away.”

I hadn't read the whole story. “Way far away” to this boy might mean Kentucky or Ohio. He meant only that the two out-of-towners weren't from North Carolina.

The young mother came out, her baby crying now. They stopped at the window for a minute, then went out the front door. I could see the rain increasing. She would have to run for her car. The nurse called the old man, who got slowly and carefully to his feet. He shuffled through the door to the inner sanctum preceded by his walker, which had sliced-open tennis balls fixed on the front feet. It gave the walker a jaunty air. As soon as he was through the door, the nurse also called, “Rory!” Our companion jumped to his feet and hurried back.

Now that we were by ourselves, I thought Tolliver would talk to me, but he leaned back and closed his eyes. He was shutting me out on purpose, and I didn't know what to make of it. If he was just in a snit over some unknown issue, then I could be in a snit right back. If I'd hurt him somehow, or he was harboring some personal grief unknown to me, then I wanted to help him. But if he persisted in being a butt-head, then he could just stew in his own juice.

I leaned my own head against the wall, closed my own eyes.

We probably looked like prize idiots.

After about ten minutes of this, the old man made his way out, and Rory sped past him to hold the door open. “Allergy shot!” he called to us cheerfully as the old man shuffled past. I didn't know if he was explaining about his own visit or the old man's, but I nodded in acknowledgment.