The Restorer (35 page)

Ethan came out to greet me at MUSC. As we rode the elevator down to the morgue, I could feel his inquisitive gaze on me. He must have wondered about my appearance, but was too much of a gentleman to ask. One glance in the mirror after my shower had confirmed a cold suspicion. My eyes were sunken, my cheeks hollow. Already I had assumed the gaunt visage of the haunted.

“Are you sure you’re up for this?” Ethan asked as we walked down a short hallway.

I offered him the first excuse I could think of. “I’m just feeling a little under the weather today. It’s nothing serious.”

“If you have a weak stomach, this probably isn’t the place for you,” he warned.

“No, I’m okay.”

Famous last words.

He pulled open a door and we were met with a swoosh of cold air and the pungent aroma of antiseptic layered over the putrid, slightly sweet scent of death. My stomach recoiled as he led me into the locker room of the autopsy suites. He handed me a set of scrubs and then disappeared while I changed out of my street clothes. After a few minutes, he came back to collect me and we went into one of the rooms where the skeletal remains had been placed on a stainless-steel table.

“He’s just a number right now,” Ethan said. “No name, no face, but we actually know quite a bit about him.”

“Him?”

“The shape of the hip bone tells us the remains are those of a male.”

The other victims were female. The pattern had changed yet again. If there was a pattern. “Does Devlin know?” Ethan nodded.

“What did he say?”

“You know John. He doesn’t give a lot away.”

I thought it odd that even here, Devlin’s presence was with us.

Ethan walked around the table as we talked, but I stood in one place, not wanting to jostle my stomach, though there wasn’t much smell in here and the bones looked scrubbed and disinfected. Still, we were dealing with human remains.

“The skull indicates that he was Caucasoid. Around five-ten, stocky build. He was young—between eighteen and twenty-five. His bones were still growing.” Ethan traced a finger along the collarbone. “The raised ridges indicate a young adult. You can feel them if you like.”

“No, that’s okay. I’ll take your word for it.”

He flashed a grin. “Some of the teeth are still in their sockets, but in poor condition. We can’t identify him that way.”

“How long was he in that chamber?”

“Going by the lack of articulation and the gnawing—”

“The what?”

“Rats,” he said. “Over time, they can do a lot of damage. I’ve noted tooth marks on the ribs, pelvis, carpals and meta-carpal bases…” He gestured toward the skeleton. “There’s also a hole in the skull, probably made by rodents or insects, and a good amount of bone and cartilage rot. He had to have been down there at least a decade.”

“That long?”

“Maybe longer.”

I went over the kills in my head. Afton Delacourt was murdered fifteen years ago, this unknown male at least ten years ago, Jane Rice nine years ago, and Hannah Fischer and Camille Ashby mere weeks ago. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to the timeline. No continuity to the killer’s victims or methods, although such a large gap might indicate he’d been out of commission for whatever reason until recently. It might also mean all the bodies had yet to be discovered.

“Do you think more bodies will turn up?”

“John seems to think so.”

“How do we find them?” I murmured. “A combination of electrical resistivity and terrain conductivity? Ground penetrating radar? It would take forever to check every grave.”

“I imagine the simplest way is to find the killer,” Ethan said.

My gaze dropped to the skeleton. “He must have family, friends. Someone who’s been missing him all this time.”

“One would think.”

I studied the remains, a tightness in my chest. He’d been left in that chamber to be forgotten. “You said last night you’d identified some interesting characteristics.”

“Yes. I can’t tell you who he is, but I can tell you how he died. The breastbone is punctured and cuts in the ribs indicate wounds to both sides of the front chest and two more in the upper back. Seven major wounds altogether. And more could have penetrated the soft tissue without touching bone. It was a vicious kill.” He noticed my grimace and said, “Let’s move on to something a little less gruesome.”

I nodded.

He opened a black plastic bag and displayed the contents. “Interestingly enough, the clothing that was found with the remains may be our best hope of identification.”

“Really? I only saw bits of fabric. Hardly anything.”

“On the body, yes, but some other items were found nearby. Shoes, belt and, more important, a leather letterman jacket. The rats didn’t leave us much—”

“Wait a minute.” The room started to spin. I put a hand on the wall to steady myself. “Did you say a letterman jacket?”

“Maroon with a gold letter, possibly a V or W.” He glanced at me in concern, then closed the bag. “Come on, let’s get you out of here. You’ve gone as white as that sheet.”

It was a gold W, in fact. I knew because I’d seen that jacket on a ghost lurking in the garden at Rapture and again last night as he’d leered at me through the shackle that dangled from his wrist.

THIRTY-NINE

A
simple Google search led me to the library at Westbury High School, located north of the Crosstown, in an area that had languished for years but was now on the upswing. A pretty librarian named Emery Snow showed me to a room where all the yearbooks were stored.

“They go all the way back to 1975,” she said, running a finger along the maroon-and-gold volumes. “That’s when Westbury opened.”

Since Ethan estimated the skeleton had been in the chamber for at least ten years, I used that as my reference point and worked back. It was a tedious task. After a few books, all those bright, shiny smiles melded together. I started to wonder if I would even recognize the face of that ghost.

And then I found him.

His name was Clayton Masterson and I experienced the blackest mood as I stared down at his picture. His mouth curled in that same sneer I’d seen last night, his eyes gleamed with the same cunning cruelty. Shivering, I glanced over my shoulder to see if someone—some
thing
—had crept up behind me.

No one was there, thank goodness. I could hear Emery humming behind the desk. I took comfort at her nearness, her normalcy.

I glanced back down at the photo and tried to muster up something akin to pity. As a young man, he’d been viciously murdered, his body hidden away all these years. I should feel
something.
But I did not. I could see only hate in his eyes, an emotion that seemed to ooze from his very soul. Little wonder that he’d met a violent end.

Suppressing a shudder, I carried the yearbook out to Emery’s desk. Since it was summer, the library was mostly empty and eerily silent. I resisted the urge to glance over my shoulder yet again as I spread the pages open before her.

“Did you find who you were looking for?” she asked. I’d told her very little about my search, only that I was trying to locate a former Westbury student who had disappeared over ten years ago.

“I think so. Now I’m wondering if anyone might still be around who was here when he attended.”

“I graduated from Westbury. So depending on the year…” She turned the yearbook over and glanced at the front. “I was a freshman. The student body was pretty small back then so it’s possible I can help you. I have to say, though, that I don’t remember hearing anything about a missing student.”

I pointed to Clayton Masterson’s photograph. “Do you remember him?”

She seemed to recoil exactly the same way that I had. “Vaguely. He was a few years ahead of me, but I seem to recall some scandal. My aunt mentioned something once. An arrest maybe. He and his mother lived in her neighborhood.”

“Do you think your aunt would be willing to talk to me?”

Emery smiled. “Oh, Tula will talk to just about anyone. The trick is getting her to shut up.”

Tula Mackey waited for me on the front porch of her tiny Craftsman-style cottage on Huger. As her niece predicted, the woman started talking the minute I walked up and didn’t stop to draw a breath as she led me into the house and down a small hallway to a sunny, yellow kitchen, where she offered me sweet tea and cookies. I accepted the tea because it was rather warm in her house and holding the glass gave me something to do with my hands.

Finally, she sat down across from me at the dinette, her eyes bird-bright and avid as she watched me sip the tea. “Emery says you’re looking for that Masterson boy.”

“I’m not looking for him so much as I’m trying to find out what happened to him,” I explained. “I can’t say much more than that, but anything you can tell me about him would be a big help.”

She tucked her gray hair behind both ears. “He and his mama lived a few houses down from me in that blue two-story on the corner. So I have a lot of memories of that boy, none of them good.”

“Can you elaborate?”

“He was a bully,” she said. “The meanest one I ever saw. I’m not talking malicious in the way kids can be to one another, but so cruel and sadistic his own mama was afraid of him.”

“Can you describe his physical appearance?”

“Average height, I would say, with a stout build. Not fat, mind you, but solid muscle. Wide shoulders, big arms. Hands the size of hams. He looked liked he could pick up a car if he had a mind to. He played football for a time, but he was too vicious even for that. Hurt another boy so bad they had to kick him off the team. I reckon that set him off. Sports was about the only thing he ever took any pride in. You never saw him without that jacket, even when the weather was warm.”

“You say he was a bully. What kind of things did he do?”

“He murdered my poor little Isabelle.” She picked at the neck of her blue-flowered housedress. “Prettiest white Persian you ever laid eyes on, with a real sweet disposition. She was a house cat, but she got out one day and I must have walked the neighborhood a dozen times over until I finally found her hanging from a tree in my own backyard. He’d strung her up like a deer waiting to be gutted.”

My stomach churned at the picture. Strung her up…like Hannah Fischer and Afton Delacourt. But at the time of Hannah’s murder, Clayton Masterson had already been dead for years, viciously murdered, his body left to rot down in that chamber.

“The way he tortured that poor creature…” Tula broke off, tears pooling in her eyes as she touched a napkin to her nose. “I never got over it. I still can’t go out in the backyard without seeing that sweet little kitty hanging from that tree.”

I murmured my sympathies and gave her a moment while I mulled everything over. The more I learned, the more confused I became. Who had carried on Clayton’s legacy? “How did you know he was responsible?”

“He had the nerve to brag about it,” Tula said angrily. “He killed Myrtle Wilson’s little Pekingese, too. She found him just like poor Isabelle. And there were other animals. Squirrels, rabbits, even possums. It got so you hated to go outside because you didn’t know what you might find hanging from the trees.”

The grotesque imagery made me shudder. “Did anyone ever call the police?”

“That boy was far too clever for the law. Even when he was little he knew how to hide his tracks. And by the time he was grown, people around here were too afraid to call the authorities, afraid he’d burn their houses down around them while they slept. Then that little girl on Halstead went missing. A couple of detectives showed up and took him in for questioning. They never could prove he had anything to do with her disappearance, but I think they must have found something on him. They sent him to one of those detention halls for juvenile delinquents. Or maybe it was a mental hospital. His mama moved away while he was gone. I never saw her or the boy again. Or the other one, either, come to think of it.”

“The other one?”

Her face softened. “He was a quiet, scrawny little thing. He and his mama lived in a rental house a few blocks over. From everything I heard, she wasn’t much of a mother. A drinker, they said. Always bringing strange men home with her. Some example she set for her boy. He never stood a chance. I used to see him out wandering the streets at all hours. Or just sitting alone on the front porch. I guess that’s why he took up with Clayton Masterson. Poor kid was lonely. The two of them were inseparable for a while, but I don’t think he had anything to do with killing those animals. Not by choice, anyway.”

“What do you mean, not by choice?”

She leaned forward, her eyes clouded. “Used to be a vacant lot by the river. A lot of kids played over there. One of the neighborhood boys claimed he saw Clayton and the other kid back up in the woods one day. Clayton had strung up an old mangy dog and he tried to get the other boy to kill it. When the little one refused, Clayton bound their wrists together and forced the knife into the kid’s hand. Forced him to plunge the blade into that poor dog’s heart.” She leaned back, hand clasped to her throat. “Can you even imagine such a thing? You know what I call somebody like that? A natural-born killer, is what.”

I was afraid she might be right. “What was the other boy’s name?”

“I don’t think I ever knew. He and his mama kept mostly to themselves. I did hear rumors that she was from a well-to-do family and they’d disowned her years ago.” Tula paused with a pensive frown. “They said she was a Delacourt. But you know how people love to talk.”

As I drove away from Tula Mackey’s house, my first instinct was to call Devlin. I’d made an important discovery, but revealing it could be tricky. How could I explain that Clayton Masterson’s ghost—and that letterman’s jacket—had led me to him?

I’d have to give the matter careful consideration, and in the meantime, I decided to go see Tom Gerrity. He was the one who had sent me to Ethan Shaw in the first place, and it was apparent to me now that he’d known all along what I would find there.

I used my phone to look up the address of Gerrity Investigations. The office was located north of Calhoun not far from where I found myself now. The area had once been residential, but most of the original houses had long since been converted into apartments and offices or torn down to make room for ugly brick commercial buildings that housed a variety of businesses.