Unearthed (33 page)

Brian felt that resentment boil and bubble again, and he had an answer for that, too. “Maybe it’s because I haven’t met a whole lot of serial killers before, but I’ve damned sure met enough judgmental Christians.”

“Judgmental isn’t strictly a Christian attribute,” his father said, “but you go on thinking that.”

“Always got to have the last word, don’t you?” Brian asked and realized once again that he’d folded his arms. They were tight against his chest, suffocating, like this conversation.

“You learned it from me,” Bill said softly. “Take your time. I’m still here, and I’m sure you’ll come up with something by the time we get home.”

Brian racked his brain for the next few miles, but every answer he came up with he passed on, because every single one of them was so far over the line even he didn’t want to use them like the knives they were.

Reeve came in with a cup of coffee in hand, taking his time, almost sauntering to where Arch was locked up with his cuffs strung through a steel table in the interrogation room. Reeve wasn’t exactly a master at this, because most of the time when he was in this room, it was pretty much petty shit he was dealing with. It wasn’t exactly hard to roll a teen on possession with intent when they were staring down the barrel of juvie. Well, not most of the time, anyway. Some of them didn’t, of course, but it wasn’t like he was talking them into taking the rap for a murder beef.

He pulled out the chair across from Arch, set his coffee on the table and watched the dark contents ripple within the Styrofoam cup. He’d thought about washing out one of his own mugs from his office, but he’d have had to walk across the station to do that, and he wanted to get right to it. He scooted his chair in, heard the scrape of wood against concrete, that shriek to the ears as the noise hit the high frequency range for a second.

Reeve stared at the man across from him. Arch had his big hands together, fingers interlaced. His head was down, like he was shamed. Reeve gave about zero fucks. His former deputy’s jeans and shirt were crusted with dirt from where he’d been lying on the ground when Reeve had found him. Arch’s short hair was looking a little longer than when Reeve had last seen him. Probably hadn’t had time for a haircut. The man had a decent beard going, too—not like he’d grown it the whole time, but more like he was only shaving once a week or so. He looked rough, his eyes were downcast. He knew he’d been beaten, but he wasn’t quite ready to throw in the towel and tell all just yet. Reeve had to admit, he hadn’t been far off in the car; trusting anything Arch said was gonna be difficult at this point.

“So,” Reeve started, injecting a little sunshine into his voice. “Here we are.”

Arch just glanced at him for a minute, rolling his eyes up to take in Reeve, then letting them fall back down to his cuffed hands and the steel table. “I suppose so.”

“I told you I was gonna get you,” Reeve said.

“So you did.” A grudging admission at best.

“I would have thought you’d leave town,” Reeve said, settling back in his chair. He propped one leg across the corner of the table and picked up his coffee. “Smart money would be on you getting as far away from here as possible, knowing that what we had on you wouldn’t be the sort of thing police in—oh, I dunno—L.A. would care much about. Hell, I don’t even have the budget to send someone out to retrieve you if they caught you anywhere outside of a day’s drive. You could have been scot free.” Arch looked up at him, said nothing.

Reeve pulled his leg down and scooted the chair forward again. It made another hellacious scream that bothered his ears, but he tried to ignore it. “You remember that old saw about the criminal always returning to the scene of the crime?”

Arch just looked at him tiredly. “You want to accuse me of everything going on in town, go ahead and do it. But you’ll have a hell of a time proving it.”

“I don’t think you murdered people beyond the counting, Arch,” Reeve said. “But I think you know who did. I think you’ve known all along what’s going on here, and you’ve just been sitting on it for your own reasons. Money, maybe. Because you know them and you’re drawn in somehow. Blackmail? I got a lot of puzzle pieces lying around and it’s not enough to put together the picture, but the parts I can see don’t exactly look like a field of yellow flowers with a mountain in the background, if you know what I mean.” Arch just cocked his head at him. “Donna does a lot of jigsaw puzzles,” Reeve explained, almost a little embarrassed. “Or used to, before crap got all serious around here.”

“I don’t know what I could tell you that could help you see any clearer,” Arch said, studying his hands. “You’ve got more pieces than you think you do, you’re just trying to put them together wrong, got the wrong picture in your head, maybe.”

Reeve paused, though that one over. “So what’s the right picture?”

Arch just eyed him. “Like I said before and you agreed with me … you wouldn’t believe me anyway.”

Reeve leaned closer, aware of a little coffee spilling over the rim of the white cup. “Try me. You have no other options.”

“I could just sit here,” Arch said, now leaning back himself. The cuffs rattled as he moved, the tinkle of steel on steel. “Wait for the charges to come through, get my lawyer—”

“You want a public defender?” Reeve asked. “Because I know what you made, and I know you don’t have the money for a real lawyer. We both know the criminal justice system ain’t cheap to oppose.”

“I think I’d be better off representing myself than have Chad Lamb walk me out to the gallows,” Arch said. Lamb was the Calhoun County public defender. It was a long running joke among the deputies that Lamb had probably gotten his law degree from one of those claw-grab toy machines at Chuck-E-Cheese. Luck of the draw, too, because he probably would have been going for a plush bear to cuddle with.

“We don’t really use gallows anymore,” Reeve said, more for having a repartee than because it needed to be said to the man across from him. “But I think a long stay in NECX could be a nice incentive for you to start talking.”

“I find I just don’t have much to say.” Arch leaned back in his chair, but it stubbornly refused to move because it was bolted down.

Reeve was about to throw something unpleasant at that, something which would probably start a heated volley back and forth, when there was a knock and the door opened. His wife was there, and her lips were tight, face still. He knew that look, and it wasn’t good. “What?” he asked.

“His lawyer’s here,” Donna said, lips so tight they almost didn’t move.

“What?” Reeve stood, almost spilling his coffee with the abruptness of his motion. “He hasn’t even had his phone call yet.”

Donna shrugged, face still as if she’d put on that green cream mask she used at night. That stuff was like goddamned Loctite superglue. “Well, she’s here.”

Reeve just froze. Lady lawyers probably weren’t an uncommon thing, not even the kind that specialized in criminal defense. There were surely dozens of them down in Chattanooga, up in Knoxville, maybe even a few in Cleveland and Athens. Still, the idea that it was a her, and that she’d gotten here this quickly sent a little goosing up and down Reeve’s spine, made him pucker his ass just a little tighter. “‘She’?”

“She,” came the voice from behind Donna, as she shouldered her way through in a pantsuit that probably cost more than Reeve made in a month. She had that smile, that fucking gawdawful irritating smile. Her blond hair was long and straight, hanging down to her shoulders. Reeve had never struck a woman in his life, but if he’d had a gun held to his head and been told, “Hit a woman or you die,” Lex Deivrel would have been his ‘Get Out of Death Free’ card. He probably would have felt bad about it afterward, though. Probably.

“Sheriff Reeve,” Lex said, grinning at him, “I need to confer with my client.” She made a shooing gesture that raised his blood pressure by a hundred points. “Go on. We’ll call you when we’re ready for you.”

Reeve started to say something, started to protest, and then he remembered that he had Archibald Stan cold on at least a few things. By the book, that was how this had to go. “He’s all yours, counselor,” he said and went to pick up his coffee cup.

“I’ll take some of that,” Deivrel said as she headed straight for his seat, not even waiting for him to clear the area before sitting down, slapping her red leather briefcase on the floor at his feet.

Reeve made for the door under his own steam before he got any ideas about someone holding a gun to his head right now, forcing him to make choices. “Coffee’s for deputies only,” he said and slammed the door on his way out. He didn’t even look at Donna as he steamed down the hall, afraid that the uncivilized things he was thinking about that lawyer woman might ooze out in the presence of his wife.

The cowboy had the better part of two toes remaining on his left foot when Kitty sighed, dropped her crotch back on his chest and started rubbing against him. It wasn’t personal; there was nothing at all she found appealing about him, really; she just liked rubbing herself on things, liked breaking the tiny little wills of these insignificant people. He might as well have been a rock or a feather bed save for his ability to resist, to scream, to bleed. That was all that was intriguing about these sacks of meat and soul, really. That, and their capacity for hilariously bad decisions and hurting one another.

“You’re surprisingly, annoyingly resistant thus far,” she pronounced, a little bored. She stared down at him, but his eyes were a little dull. There was a little spirit there, though, him with his gritted teeth. She raised herself up and then dropped her crotch on his face hard enough to jar him good. “Go ahead and get mad, take a bite if you want. It’ll be like a tender caress from your weak little mouth, a little more foreplay until you figure out that you’re going to do what I ask you to do anyway, given time.”

He made a grunting sound, and she levered off of him. Human bites really weren’t all that impressive, not against a shell. She preferred the caress of the tongue, but biting could be a little fun sometimes. Not enough to get her across the finish line, but enough to keep her in the race. “What?” she asked.

“Not … gonna …” he was fighting for breath; she had just covered his mouth for a few seconds, after all.

“Don’t be an idiot,” she said. “You don’t have to hurt like this. It can all be over. All you have to do … is lick me until I cum. Then, I’ll let you die in peace instead of in pieces.”

“I don’t … believe you.” His eyes were almost rolling back in his head now.

She laughed, a rueful sound even to her. “Sweetie, when it comes to pain, you should believe my every word.”

He had no reaction to that. Shock had set in; there was some serious bleeding from the toes. She’d need to deal with that, she supposed. At least it would go nicely along with what she’d just suggested. She closed her eyes for a moment, brought the dagger to her lips, and this time she exhaled. She could feel the heat as she drew it up from within. Some of their kind had other forms of breath—toxic, corrosive acid, ice, some had none at all—but the most common seemed to be fire, naturally. She ran a hot breath across the blade until it glowed, and then she turned, rubbing herself against him as she did so, and pressed the searing metal against the blood gashes where his toes had been, cauterizing them.

He screamed and screamed, and she relished the sounds while twitching idly on him. It wasn’t exciting, exactly, but it was kind of fun in an offhand sort of way. The screaming was an eight, the sensation a mere three at best, but it kept her going, kept her anticipating how much fun it was going to be when he finally broke down. That was all part of the game, though, the fun, feeling someone wilt a little at a time until they just cracked. One little hole in the will and it was over; they could never rebuild the wall again.

Of course, they got sort of boring after that, but she didn’t need them for very long anyway, so it all worked out.

When she turned back around, she found his face slack, his muscles utterly relaxed, and she frowned. It wasn’t unexpected, him passing out; she had just applied hot metal to fresh wounds and tender skin, after all. He’d probably screamed until he had no more air in his lungs. She’d barely noticed; the screams were nice and all, but she’d heard screams before that were louder and more voluminous. More pitiful, too.

There was a knock at the door and Kitty straightened, brushing the hair out of her eyes. “Rousseau, you know not to interrupt me when I’m in the middle of—”

“My apologies, madam,” Rousseau called from outside, his voice muffled by the door between them, “but I have retrieved what you asked from Trinculo’s home, and Mr. Bardsley and Mr. Lawrence have arrived—”

“Good call,” she said, standing up. She stretched, putting her hands above her head. It wasn’t that she had muscles that needed to be worked; it just allowed the essence that had been pooling in her legs to escape. She looked down and saw the veiny surfaces, places where the essence had pooled a little too close the surface, like cracks running across her, watched them disappear back to puckered flesh.

Kitty walked to the corner where her pants hung and put them back on. “Be out in a second,” she said and did not acknowledge nor care when Rousseau replied. She had other thoughts on her mind; if he had retrieved Trinculo’s part of the Rog’tausch and Bardsley brought another, that was four out of six accounted for. She was in the middle of trying to decode a complex bit of writing and couldn’t even remember which primitive language she was having to recall in order to figure it out. She was lucky in that she remembered it at all; they were doubtless one of the groups of little significance who had bitten the dust in the wars, anyway.

She paused at the shed doors while putting her blouse on and looked back at the form of the man chained to the floor. He was really quite sad, just a pathetic little lump. The sooner he saw it that way and stopped resisting her, the more likely he’d be to die with a little of his dignity remaining. Only once had a man failed to relent before she’d cut him bad enough to kill him. She hadn’t even gotten one lick from him. A few she’d gotten close to—they’d died after their surrender, giving her at least a little bit before croaking. That was uncommon. Most were like the thief in New York the night before she left: protest in the chains, give it up when she threatened their main vein.