Bone Orchard (14 page)

“Have a good one, Dylan!” Clive called down from the truck as they passed by again.

“Aye!” Lazarus shot back. It was a pitiful imitation of Dylan’s voice, but it was met with a chorus of hoots and hollers from Clive’s mates.

Lazarus watched the truck in his rearview one more time. No brake lights this time. He caught a glimpse of Kitty smiling at him. He smiled back.

They found a suitable spot to ditch the car off another, even less frequented road that was a fair trek from the manor house. It was carved into a hillside. Parts of it had even been washed away by runoff. 

Lazarus stopped in the middle of the road and Kitty rolled up behind him. She pulled the handbrake and waited for Lazarus to get out. Under the eerie light of the Aston’s single working headlamp, he put the Fiat’s transmission in neutral and rocked the car to get it moving. It rolled off the low side of the road and gently crept through waist-high grass until it wanted to go no further. Lazarus tossed the baseball cap back through the window onto the front seat and started walking back.

Kitty watched incredulously.
That’s it?
She was expecting something a little more dramatic. Who would hide a car in plain sight like this? She rightly supposed that was the point.

She reached for the handbrake, but Lazarus darted around to the driver’s side door and pulled it open. Startled, Kitty’s hands jerked back to the steering wheel.

“Move over,” Lazarus said.

“I can drive.”

“That door’s stuck, remember?”

She did remember, but it also felt as if she was relinquishing control. There was suddenly something quite reassuring about the fact that he still thought she had a working stun gun at her fingertips. She crawled over to the passenger seat and Lazarus slipped behind the wheel.

They rode in silence for what seemed a very long while, and the lull in action was a welcome respite for them both. Kitty had killed another human being, and the gravity of that fact had begun to creep over her conscious thoughts like a veil. She couldn’t identify any dominant feeling attached to it though, not any that was familiar to her at least. It wasn’t that she felt nothing, but rather as if she felt
everything
in small portions. It was emotional dim sum. Kitty stared out into the darkness. It occurred to her that she had absolutely no idea where they were.

“I have to say, of all the girls, Kitty… you’ve got to be my favorite.”

Kitty turned to him and snorted. “Seriously?”

“I mean it. It gets so repetitive. The spark goes. It gets harder and harder to get that thrill.”

She turned her gaze back out the window. A minute passed.

“Did you kill Lacey? I need to know.”

“Honestly? No idea. I wasn’t lying when I said I couldn’t remember her.”

It was a disgusting revelation, but Kitty breathed a sigh of relief as the manor house lights came twinkling into view ahead.

“There were so many girls. So many cities… and they made it so easy.”

They pulled around the circular driveway and the single headlight swept across the stone garden wall where they’d met that afternoon, but of course, that was a hundred years ago.

“Here were are,” Lazarus said. He smiled at Kitty. “Home sweet home.”

CHAPTER 16

Lazarus swung the carriage house doors shut and looped the chain through the handles. He fed the padlock shackle through the links and locked it with a snick.

Kitty stepped away but kept her eyes on him.
Two can keep a secret if one of them is dead.

Lazarus turned to face her. “Want to learn how to clean up a murder scene?”

It was such a surreal question that Kitty wasn’t entirely sure he was serious.

“Sure.”

Dylan Daly might have made something of himself had he spent more time practicing and less time pouring lager and grease down his gullet at the pub and chip house. Well, maybe that was giving too much credit, but it certainly would have made the task-at-hand considerably easier.

Lazarus grunted as he dragged Dylan’s dead body into the basement kitchen, and for some reason started wondering what the poor chuffer’s music was like. Probably rubbish. After all, it had been Sian who’d been the Black Ryder fan, hadn’t it? Lazarus couldn’t quite remember at this point. It had been one hell of a long day.

“Help!” Kitty called from the hallway. “She fell on me!”

Lazarus dropped Dylan with a chunky thud and hurried out the door. Kitty sat at the bottom of the servants’ stairwell with Sian lying on top of her. Her face was turned sideways and resting on Kitty’s stomach as if she were listening to some fetal heartbeat inside. Sian’s legs were bent backwards over her own shoulders like a circus contortionist, though. In fact, Lazarus thought she looked quite like a human “at” symbol.

Together, they carried Sian’s limp body down the hall into the kitchen. Carrying was always better than dragging if it could be managed. No clothing fibers to worry about scraping along the floor.

“How much further?” Kitty asked exhausted.

“Just to the island.”

With one final, cooperative grunt, they heaved the body onto the long, wooden prep table.  The poor slag couldn’t have weighed more than nine or ten stone, but it always felt like more.

“All right,” Lazarus said. “Strip.”

No rest for the wicked,
Kitty thought. She reached down and started to unbutton Sian’s top.

“No,” he clarified. “You.”

Lazarus pulled his tee shirt off over his head. Kitty’s eyes darted around the room. The roll of knives was back and lay at the other end of the table. Dylan sat propped against the wall with his head slumped down into his chest. Very polite, considering.

She started to undress and Lazarus handed her a square, plastic packet about the size of a magazine. “We have to burn your clothes. Put that on.”

Inside was a disposable, plastic coverall suit. The plastic wasn’t quite see-thru, but it was definitely
see-enough.

Lazarus dropped his pants.

With a cleaning caddy in one hand and an abrasive pad in the other, Lazarus lectured Kitty on the art of crime scene cleanup. This wasn’t about traipsing through with a mop. Behind goggles and respirators, they removed all visible traces of blood from the walls and baseboards. Kitty was their spotter and wiper, Lazarus the spritzer and scrubber.

The floor was another story entirely. The porosity of stone made it ridiculously susceptible to stains, and the limestone in the entry hall was an especially phenomenal bitch to clean once any foreign material had time to absorb. Procrastinating with stone was not advisable.

That porosity was also the reason stains can be removed from stone, however. You don’t scrub limestone clean. You have to reverse the staining process by re-absorbing it into another material. That other material was called a poultice, a paste blended of powdered whiting and hydrogen peroxide that was spread over the offensive stain and allowed to work its magic overnight. It was a bit like applying calamine lotion to a poison ivy rash, or using wads of napkins to soak up excess pizza grease.

“Remove, absorb, clean and sanitize,” he preached. “In that order.”

The addition of oxalic acid to a poultice was especially effective at removing blood, and through trial and error, Lazarus had discovered his favorite source of it to be a powdered cleaning product called “Bartender’s Friend.” He’d stumbled upon it after one of his early plucks while on tour in the States, and what a find it had been! The best part about it was that its purchase aroused no undue attention. In fact, he always stored several canisters under the kitchen sink alongside the drain-cleaning crystals.

“Avoid buying anything in bulk,” he told Kitty. She listened with rapt attention as Lazarus went on and on. “Use cold water instead of hot to avoid setting the stain… bring a putty knife for the jellied bits, an enzyme solvent for the crusties… and for fuck’s sake, never mix bleach and ammonia.”

Luck had been on their side. Nearly all of the blood spilled in the vestibule had been absorbed by the large Tabriz rug there, and the thick jute felt pad beneath it had been all the extra barrier they’d needed to avoid an entire day of cleanup. The rug was now trash of course, but sometimes expediency trumped economy. Lazarus
never
did any wet work in the entry hall. He knew better, and now Kitty knew it too. She was an enthusiastic student with no fear of hard work. In fact, she seemed to Lazarus downright earnest.

He snapped off his respirator and cringed at the smell of the solution in his spray bottle. “I’ll never get used to the bleach,” he said. In point of fact, the bleach was not a detergent but a disinfectant. This was his home, after all. He wanted it not only clean, but sanitized.

Kitty took offher respirator and goggles to inspect their work.

“So did we miss anything?” he asked.

She looked all around. “Nope. Spotless.”

Lazarus picked up a small, garden pump sprayer and wet one of the wainscoting panels that Kitty had wiped down, but Lazarus hadn’t yet scrubbed. He dimmed the chandeliers and a scene worthy of an abattoir fluoresced with a striking blue glow over the wood. Trace dots and splatters appeared, even handprints of smeared blood trailing along the wall like streak-tailed comets.

“Even when the blood’s gone, it’s still there. You must be vigilant.”

Duly noted,
she thought.

The cutting jaws of the pruning loppers had a three-inch cutting capacity that was perfect for most dismembering tasks, especially considering the petite victims Lazarus most often chose. Professional tools were always worth the investment.

The extra-long handles provided superior leverage, and when Lazarus squeezed them, the clean cut made by the radial-arc bypass blades splattered him with a fine mist of blood. That crisp apple bite was music to his ears.

Kitty stood with her back to him, heart pounding so hard in her ears that the sound of the loppers was nothing but a murmur in a maelstrom. She mindlessly slipped a fillet knife from the table. The dazed and terrified expression on Sian’s face sketched itself over and over in her mind like the scrawls in her binder. 

“No, the cleaver,” Lazarus said. 

Kitty jumped, startled back to reality. “Sorry?”

“Put the knife back. You need a cleaver. Let me show you.”

Lazarus picked up the lamb splitter from the cutlery roll and Kitty placed the fillet knife back on the table, trying to remember when exactly she’d even picked it up. She turned and watched him grasp Sian’s pale, severed arm and position it palm-up before laying the blade on the inner side of the elbow joint. He raised the shark-head to his temple then brought it whizzing back down with a self-assured thwack. The blade neatly severed the arm and buried itself in the thick wooden tabletop.

“Always go for the joint. Makes it easier.”

He rocked the blade from the table, squeaking back and forth between the bones until it released. He handed it to Kitty, who quickly realized it would be a two-handed endeavor. She gripped the long, wooden handle and placed the edge of the blade against the ball of Sian’s kneecap.

“No, roll it over.”

Kitty did as she was instructed. She flipped the leg, heel-up and used the foot as a sort of kickstand. The blade rested on the tendons behind the knee. She entertained no second thoughts. Once Katherine Van Winkle put her mind to something… that was it.

She raised the lamb splitter over her head and brought it down like a seasoned headsman’s axe. There was a moment of silence as the two of them just stood there in amazement staring at the leg pieces that lay there like sausage links.

Then she laughed.

“I knew it!” Lazarus cried out. “The moment I saw the glee in your eyes when you tazed me, I knew.”

“What?”

“You like it.”

“No I don’t”

Lazarus nodded as he slid the leg sections aside and positioned Sian’s other arm. “You do.”

Kitty smirked as she freed the blade from the wood. “Okay. Maybe a little.” She brought the heavy splitter up over her head and dropped it on its mark, chopping the arm in two.

“You are a truly special girl. It almost makes me sorry.”

Kitty set the cleaver down and turned toward him in profile. It wasn’t unintentional. The frosted plastic suit clung to the sweat on the curves of her body. It was like he was seeing her through shower steam. Her face glowed with a crimson flush, and Lazarus felt his pulse race.

Pretty poison,
he thought again.

“What does?” she asked. A wicked smile curled across her blood red lips. She knew he wanted her now… and truth be told, she wanted him too. Right there on the table.

When she turned to him, Lazarus swooped a clear plastic bag over her head and with astonishing speed, secured it with a zip tie around her neck. Less than a second later, Kitty’s wrists were shackled in her own handcuffs, and she was kicking and clawing to drag out the final moments of her life.