Killman Creek (Stillhouse Lake Series Book 2) Page 14

  The floor is thick with old blood, long ago clotted and dried to a rough, flaky crust of black. Still some flies, but nowhere near as many as would have stormed this place when the gore was fresh. I’m trying not to feel anything, but the door I’ve shut on my fear is breaking under the strain. I’m sweating, shaking, and I feel like I can’t breathe. I’m a second away from hyperventilating, and I know I need to calm down.

  Focus, I tell myself. Lock it up. Don’t think about it. I know why I’m freaking out. It’s too similar to what I saw in my husband’s garage, even down to the smell. I’m having flashbacks, and I just want to leave here.

  But I can’t.

  “Gwen,” Sam says. He isn’t bothering to be quiet this time. When I turn, he’s crouching over the pile of clothes, and I move to join him.

  The smell of decomposition hits me within one step, far worse now, and I know what I’m going to see before I make it out in the dim light.

  The body’s been here a long time, long enough to have been reduced to ragged, chewed meat by scavengers. About half skeletonized. What skin remains on him—I assume it’s the same man we saw on that video—is thin and dry as wax paper, and the maggots are long gone. They’ve left their pupa casings in a scatter like dropped rice.

  “How long—” My voice isn’t steady. I stop talking. Sam looks up at me.

  “The weather’s cold now, but it was probably still warm when he was killed. So maybe a couple of months.” Sam is silent a moment, head bowed, and then he gets up. “Look around. If there’s anything else here—”

  I try to ignore the corpse, but it’s difficult. I feel it constantly, as if its dead, empty eye sockets are tracking me. The rest of this part of the warehouse consists of a pile of old desks that yield nothing but rat droppings and a curling, ancient stack of forgotten invoices twenty years old, and probably of no interest.

  But there’s an office at the far end, and as Sam checks his side of the room, I head for it. There’s a metal door with a wide glass panel, reinforced with wire mesh; it’s been pocked and cracked, but it’s still holding firm. I try the door handle.

  Locked. But the lock looks old, original to the door, and a few solid kicks bust it wide open. One of the hinges pops free at the bottom, and the door lists drunkenly and scrapes the floor for balance.

  Someone was using this place. It’s still dilapidated and dusty, and spiders have claimed the filing cabinets along the back wall as their hunting ground, but on the other end of the room, an old-fashioned desk with the clunky, functional lines of World War II surplus is relatively clean. There are scuffs in the dirt on the floor, but no meaningful footprints.

  There’s some paper stacked on one corner—plain copy paper, no watermarks, no writing. I try a trick I learned from old Nancy Drew novels; I gather up a handful of the fine, powdery dust and sift it onto the top sheet, then gently slide it around to see if it will reveal any hidden depressions.

  Nothing.

  I start pulling open drawers. I startle some spiders, and am startled in turn, but eight-legged predators are the last thing I’m afraid of right now.

  In the next-to-last drawer, I find a man’s wallet. It’s well worn, shaped to someone’s rear, and I put it on the desk surface and open it up carefully. No spiders erupt from it, but I see a bristle of cash in the back divider. Plenty of cash, at least two or three hundred. I don’t count it. I look at the license that’s slotted into the plastic case in front on the left side. It’s a Louisiana driver’s license for a man named Rodney Sauer. I take a cell phone picture of the address on the license; it’s in New Orleans. Behind the license are the usual mundane plastic squares of modern life: debit cards, credit cards, a couple of loyalty cards for supermarkets and big-box stores.

  On the right, I find a picture of a plump, contented blonde woman cuddling two adorable kids. On the back, it says, in childishly awkward cursive, Love to Daddy from Mommy, Kat, and Benny.

  I have to catch my breath against the pain in my chest. Does this pretty, happy woman know he’s dead? Did he just vanish into thin air one bright summer day? Do the kids still ask when he’s coming home?

  I slip the picture back in and keep looking. I find a small stash of business cards marked with Rodney Sauer’s name and what looks like an official law-enforcement star embossed in thick black ink.

  He’s not a cop. He’s a private investigator. I pull one of the cards free and put it in my pocket.

  There’s nothing else of any use in the wallet. If Rodney had a notepad, voice recorder—anything like that—it’s not here.

  They left everything that wasn’t useful to them, including Rodney.

  “Gwen?” Sam asks quietly from the door. I nod and drop the wallet back in the drawer, shut it, and leave.

  We go past the body, through the other room, out the side door and into the cloudy afternoon, which is the brightest, friendliest thing I’ve ever seen. I feel sickly dizzy, and I gulp in air to steady myself. My adrenaline level is toxic, and now that I’m out of there, I’m shaking all over.

  Lustig’s waiting for us at the fence. I still have my weapon out, I realize, and I put it back in the holster. Lustig holds the links back for us as we climb out, then carefully fastens them back with the paper clips.

  We tell him. The only thing we’ve left is boot prints, and our path is clearly new, not contemporary to the horror show that played out in that place. We make our way back to the car—which is, thankfully, still intact, though the locks have been jimmied, and the radio’s been jacked right out of the console—and at a pay phone halfway across the city, I make a phone call to report a body.

  “Thanks,” Lustig says, as I hang up. “Now, call me.” He reads his number off to me, and I put in another handful of quarters for that call, too. I leave him the same message, and tell him there’s some link to an ongoing FBI case. I hang up and look at him questioningly, and he gives me a thumbs-up. Since his phone is still off, he can’t be tied to this location. He’s now covered on receiving an anonymous tip.

  Back in the car, on the way to the coffee shop, I begin to feel a little better. My skin feels warmer, my nerves less jangled. I know I’ll dream about the dreadful stillness of that place, the way that it masqueraded as peace. By tonight there’ll be police tape up, and crime scene investigators, and Mike Lustig will be whipping up a reason for local FBI involvement. Maybe they can track the ownership of the building, but I doubt it will lead anywhere significant. Absalom doesn’t own that place. They probably don’t even have any ties to it, beyond using it when the owners aren’t looking. Corporations aren’t great at checking over dilapidated buildings. If someone did inspect, they’d see the fresh signs, the new fencing, the new padlocks, and assume someone else in the company had taken care of it already. Bureaucracy at work.

  Absalom lives in the cracks. Like cockroaches, and Melvin.

  “So what now?” I ask, turning to look at Sam. He glances at Mike.

  “We drop him off,” Sam says. “And then we pay a visit to Ballantine Rivard.”

  “What makes you think he’ll see you two?” Lustig asks.

  “We’re going to tell him what happened to his guy.”

  10

  CONNOR

  The Rice Krispies treats truce between me and my sister lasts until afternoon, and then I screw it up. By then, Lanny’s already moody and grumpy and snapping at me every time I breathe. Glaring at me like I’m personally to blame for the fact she’s stuck here in this cabin without much to do. I’d try to get her to read, but the last time I did, she threw the book at me and called me a nerd, which is a name I usually don’t mind, but not the way she said it.

  She begs, seriously begs, for Internet permission, which Mr. Esparza finally, reluctantly grants, but only for thirty minutes, and he warns her he’s set up the parental controls just the way Mom requested. Not surprised; Mom’s serious about that stuff, and she has good reason.

  I drift over and watch what she’s doing, because Lanny’s in a
weird mood, and I don’t know why.

  She just pulls up pictures, that’s all. School pictures of her friends, out of her secret cloud account Mom doesn’t know about. After about two minutes of staring, I realize every picture has the same person in it.

  I lean over her chair and say, “Are you crushing on your best friend?”

  Lanny goes nuclear. Her face turns streaky scarlet, she shoves me back against the counter, she yells, “Leave me alone,” then flees into her bedroom and slams the door hard enough that the pictures flap on the walls.

  I look at the picture of Dahlia Brown. She’s pretty. I always thought she was. “Totally crushing on you,” I tell the picture. No wonder Lanny was so crazy. She probably didn’t want anybody to know, and here I was, knowing.

  The front door opens, and Mr. Esparza looks in, sees me, and says, “What was that?”

  I shrug. “Nothing.” He knows it isn’t nothing, but I clear the browser and shut the laptop and pick up my book instead of telling him anything else, and he finally shuts the door. He’s cleaning a gun out on the porch, all the parts laid out on a clean towel, and I can smell the oil he uses from in here.

  Lanny’s got a secret. I feel a surge of glee about that, but I won’t tell. We don’t do that. We don’t spill on each other, not unless it’s life or death. This isn’t, but she probably feels like it is. I feel kind of bad about embarrassing her. And she made me Rice Krispies treats.

  I go back and open the laptop, find the pictures again, and print one out. I write on the back of it: It’s okay if you like her, you know. I slide it under my sister’s door, close down the computer again (because if I didn’t, I might sit down and look up stuff I know I shouldn’t, like news about the search for Dad), and step outside onto the porch. Mr. Esparza’s bent over working on the barrel of a shotgun, but when he sees me, he straightens up and groans a little. “Getting colder out here,” he says. “She all right?”

  I nod. I don’t tell him she’s got a secret girlfriend. “She’s in her room,” I tell him.

  He gives me a long look, and I make sure I’m staring somewhere else. “And you? You all right, Connor?”

  I shrug. I don’t know how to answer that. What does all right look like?

  “You know you can talk to me if you need to.”

  I settle onto the steps, and Boot the dog comes and flops next to me. I stroke his head, and he licks his chops and rests his head on my leg. It’s heavy. I’ve never seen him really mad, but I can imagine it’s pretty scary.

  “You know about my dad,” I say. I’m staring at the trees beyond the fence. They’re rustling and swaying in the wind, and overhead the clouds look like moving metal.

  “Yeah, a little bit.” Mr. Esparza’s being careful about that. He probably knows a lot more than a little. “Doesn’t feel good, does it?”

  “What?” I know what he means. But I don’t want to let him think that.

  “Thinking your dad’s done something terrible.”

  I shake my head. I don’t know if I’m just generally saying It doesn’t feel good, or rejecting something else. I don’t know how I feel anymore. “Mom doesn’t talk about it.”

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “No.”

  Mr. Esparza nods and goes back to working on his gun. It’s familiar. I remember Mom doing that same thing, carefully breaking the guns apart, cleaning and oiling and putting them back together. He’s neater about it than Mom. Everything’s lined up straight on the cloth. “You mind if I talk about it?”

  I shrug again. Can’t stop adults from doing what they want. And I’m curious, anyway.

  “I know about what he did. They had it in the papers, online, on the news. Not that I was following the story, but I couldn’t avoid it. Everybody said it had to be some kind of monster to do things like that. You hear people say that?”

  I nod this time. I heard it. Lots.

  “He’s not a monster,” Mr. Esparza says. “He has a monster inside him.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “It’s still okay to think of him as a person, if you want to. But just don’t forget: he’s still got the monster.”

  “Like he’s possessed,” I say. “Like in the horror movies.” Not that Mom lets us watch horror movies. But I sometimes watch them with my friends, when she doesn’t know.

  “Not exactly. Possessed people can’t help what they do. Your dad made choices.” Mr. Esparza hesitates, and I can tell he has to choose his words carefully. “You know I used to be a marine, right? A soldier?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ve seen people make those choices. Maybe they love their families. Love their pets. But that doesn’t stop them from being monsters when they get the chance. People are complicated. It’d be easy to call your dad a monster, because then it’s easy to talk about killing him, because we kill monsters, right? But he wasn’t always a monster to you. I get that. And it shouldn’t be easy to kill. Ever.”

  I finally look at him. “You killed people, though.”

  Mr. Esparza’s hands are steady when he picks up another part and cleans it, but he’s looking at me. I can only stand a second of that, and I watch his hands instead. “Yeah,” he says. “Es verdad. You know what that means?”

  “It’s true.”

  “Right. I killed people. And I’ll kill again if I have to, to protect others. But having that ability, that’s a responsibility, and I can’t take it lightly.”

  “But it’s not that way for my dad.”

  “No,” he agreed. “It’s not. For him, it’s fun. He likes it. And that’s why your mom is so careful with you. Understand?”

  “He wouldn’t kill me, though.”

  Mr. Esparza doesn’t say anything to that. He lets me think about it. Everything he’s said makes sense. I know he’s right. But at the same time, it’s not what I feel. I feel like Dad . . . cares.

  “How long do you think we’re going to have to stay here?” I ask. That makes his smooth, practiced motions hesitate for a second. He’s done cleaning now. He’s starting to put the gun back together.

  “I don’t know.” At least he’s honest about it. “But however long it is, you’re going to be safe here. I promise.”

  “Who’s the better shot, you or Ms. Claremont?”

  “I am. It’s my job. Hers is solving crimes. But she’s pretty good.”

  “Will you teach us to shoot? Me and Lanny?”

  “If your mom agrees,” he says. “And if you want to learn.”

  I nod, and I think for a couple of seconds. Then I stand up, dislodging Boot’s head from my leg. “Can I just walk around in the yard? I don’t want to be inside all the time.”

  “Sure, just don’t go outside the fence without me, okay?”

  I nod. “Me and Lanny need to have something to do that isn’t just . . .”

  “Sitting around inside? Yeah, I know that,” Mr. Esparza says. When he sighs, it comes out in a thick, misty plume. “I’m working on it. Maybe we’ll do some camping, fishing, that stuff. What do you think?”

  I think it sounds cold and lonely, but he’s trying, and I nod. “Maybe we can go to another town and see movies sometime? Like, Knoxville?”

  “Maybe,” he says. “Hey, if you’re staying out here, put your coat on. Gloves, too. I don’t want you catching cold.”

  “That’s not how you catch cold,” I tell him, very seriously. “You have to get a virus.”

  He laughs. “I know. But it’s still good advice.”

  I go back inside, put on my coat and gloves, and when I go out, Mr. Esparza is done reassembling the shotgun, and heads back inside to get warm. Boot doesn’t seem bothered at all by the chill, but then, he’s wearing fur. He happily jumps off the porch and runs around with me. We play fetch for a while, and then I sit down on the far side of a tree trunk. I pick the side of the house that has the fewest windows. Boot paces around, looking at me. I guess other people find him scary—I know Lanny does—but to me he’s com
fort. He doesn’t look at me like I’m a bomb about to go off, or somebody about to break like a soap bubble. He thinks I’m normal.

  It’s good to have some privacy. No one looking at me, monitoring how I’m feeling. They all want to help, I know that. But I don’t want it. Not right now.

  I’m far enough from the cabin that nobody can hear me with the windows closed. With the tree at my back, they can’t stare at me, either. Boot flops down beside me and puts his head on my leg again, and I pet him for a few minutes.

  I finally slip my hand in my pocket and take out the phone and the battery. I turn it over and over in my fingers. I know it’s bad. Real bad.

  But I’m half-bad anyway, right? My dad’s half of me. He has a monster inside.

  Having a phone that connects me directly to Dad is a little like playing with matches. It’s thrilling and scary at the same time, and yet once you start, you can’t stop yourself.

  Until you get burned.

  I’ve thought about what would happen if I called him. I’ve imagined what he’s going to say to me. How his voice will sound. How surprised and pleased he’ll be to know I kept the phone. Hello, son, he’ll say to me. I knew you could do it.

  I still remember him saying that to me—I knew you could do it—when he taught me to swim at the local pool. I was scared to death, but he stayed with me. Held me up while I thrashed at the water until I could stay up by myself. He taught me how to float on my back.

  He also took me swimming out at one of the lakes where they later said he put dead people. I know I should hate that, but I remember what a good day it was, how happy he was to take me out on the boat, how we’d do backflips off into the cold, murky water and race each other in laps around the boat. He let me win. He always let me win.