Deadly Harvest (31 page)

She turned the page to see a sketch, rude, poorly crafted, hundreds of years old, of a red devil seated upon a high throne, horned and stroking his goatlike beard. His feet were cloven hooves, and his tail—with an arrow-shaped spike at the end—protruded from beneath him.

His other arm was stretched out, his fingers sporting ridiculously long talons and curling around the throat of a woman wearing a crown of leaves and a golden cloak with vines growing from it. The devil's head was cast back; he was strangling her with one hand alone.

In front of him, upon a black altar, in sheer white gowns, their eyes and mouths opened in their final terror, six young women lay slaughtered, blood pooling around them. The caption beneath the picture read, He must come to know them, and to love them. And so shall he be fed to new life by the blood of the seven he has cherished and taken. Seven, and he will reign over all, for all time, the God of Fornication.

She pushed the book away, feeling ill. This was the New World. This was the here and now. But it didn't matter.

They might not have found them yet, but there were more bodies out there.

And more to come.

The Harvest Man believed that he had to sacrifice seven women to the earth, to nature, to ensure the harvest and his own eternal power.

And he needed to complete his bloody work before Thanksgiving Day.

T
he road that led northwest of the MacElroy house was in bad shape, forcing Jeremy to drive slowly. Not that he had planned to speed, since he and Brad needed to look carefully at everything they passed, looking for anything suspicious.

All he knew for sure was that if the killer was seizing women and keeping them somewhere, it had to be a quiet somewhere. And if Ginny MacElroy was seeing lights where there shouldn't be lights…

They had passed miles of cornfields before finally reaching the empty scrubland where the ground was too thin and rocky to support corn or any other crop. He had noted that the barren lands began when they made a turn less than half a mile past Eric Rolfe's house, which indeed seemed like the beginning of the end of the world. There was one small cornfield, and then, for miles and miles, nothing but bracken-filled land, with occasional outcroppings of granite.

He stopped the car when the road ahead narrowed and turned to rutted dirt, and sat for a long minute staring out at the desolation surrounding them.

“What are you doing?” Brad asked.

Jeremy left the car, walking to the edge of the broken pavement, where the high grass, thorns and brush began. He shaded his eyes with his hand and stared toward the fields and the houses to the southeast. The dirt road meandered on, disappearing in the distance. He started walking, his eyes scanning from side to side.

“I'll walk back the way we came and see if I can find anything we missed,” Brad said.

Jeremy nodded and kept going.

A needle in a haystack, Jeremy thought. Hell, that sounded easy, compared to what he was trying to find.

It was so overgrown and wild here that any sign of a body, a shack, an old cellar, would be almost impossible to find. But he moved doggedly forward anyway, searching the brush nearest the road for any sign that it had been trampled or otherwise disturbed. At first he couldn't find so much as a bent leaf or a cracked twig. He felt the hard-packed dirt of the road beneath his feet, and despite the coming winter, the sun beating down on him was hot, burning. It was already beginning its descent, but here, away from tall trees and taller buildings, its rays were still strong.

“Hey!” Brad called out to him excitedly, his voice barely carrying from the distance.

“What?” he shouted back.

“Come here!”

He turned and ran back to Brad, who didn't say a word, only pointed.

Brad had found a place along the road where a wild cherry bush had been all but flattened, though clearly the damage had happened some time ago. The bush was struggling to straighten itself, but it still grew at a slant—like a palm caught in a hurricane and bending to its will.

Any footprints in the area were long gone, erased by rain and wind, so Jeremy didn't worry about obliterating evidence as he followed the trail marked by damaged brush, as if someone had dragged a wagon or a wheelbarrow through at some point.

The trail kept leading them back.

Back to the edge of the last cornfield.

 

The door to the library opened. Rowenna looked up, expecting Daniel.

She was stunned to see Adam standing there.

“Adam!” she said, surprise quickly succeeded by alarm. “Is something wrong? Is Eve all right?”

For a moment he didn't speak or move. He just stared at the table, at the books, his eyes empty, as if he had blacked out while standing.

“Adam?”

She felt her skin crawling, because there was something so odd about his eyes—and the situation didn't help. She was alone with him in the back of a museum, with a wax murderers' row just beyond the door.

And Adam—her friend whom she had once thought she knew so well—was reading books on Satanism and spells to let the Devil into his own flesh, so he could become immortal through the blood sacrifice of women.

Atmosphere and Adam were kicking in. Goose bumps began to form on her flesh.

She longed to jump up and run, but he was blocking the door.

“Adam?” she said quietly, reassuringly. “Let's go outside. I've been in here too long—I need a break.”

Should she scream? Maybe someone would hear and come help her. Was there anything here she could use as a weapon?

Books. All she had were books. She almost laughed as she supposed she could do her best to beat him over the head with a priceless volume on Satanic ritual. At least there would be a certain poetic justice in that, she thought.

He seemed to snap back to the present. His eyes cleared and focused on her. “I came for you,” he said.

“What?” she breathed.

He shook his head. “I mean I came to see you. I…I haven't been completely honest with you.”

“You don't always have to be completely honest with people,” she said uneasily.

He didn't seem to hear her. “I told you I love Eve, and I do. But something's wrong, really wrong. She's afraid of me.” He moved farther into the room. She shrank back, and he paused, frowning. “You're afraid of me, too,” he said bitterly, then pulled out a chair opposite her at the table and sank into it, looking worn and dejected.

He wasn't going to hurt her, Rowenna realized.

Not there and not now, anyway.

“Adam, go on. Talk to me,” she said.

“Blackouts.”

“What?”

He shook his head, then looked at her, his eyes bleak. “Rowenna, I'm having blackouts. I'll find myself standing somewhere, and I won't have any idea how I got there. And then Eve gets mad at me for taking off. Ro, I'm afraid.”

You're
afraid? she thought.

Could a man kidnap, rape, torture and then murder a woman in the midst of a blackout? Or was this just a clever act?

“Adam, if you're having blackouts, you need to see a doctor,” she said.

He looked at her and shuddered. “I don't like doctors,” he told her.

“Adam, no one likes going to the doctor, but if you're sick, you don't have a choice.”

“What if…what if I've done something horrible in the middle of a blackout?” he asked, his eyes and voice filled with torment. He reached into his jacket pocket for gum, started to open the pack, then looked at it in confusion, as if he'd completely forgotten what he was doing.

“Let's just deal with the blackouts,” Rowenna said. “You have to get help. I think you should go to an emergency room right away, before you get hurt or…or something.” She just couldn't bring herself to upset him any more than he already was by saying
or hurt anyone else
. She looked at him with more confidence than she felt and said, “Come on. We'll go tell Eve together.”

Adam was still for a minute. “She'll leave me,” he whispered. “If something is really wrong, she'll leave me.”

“She loves you, Adam. She always has, since we were kids. She won't leave you.” Unless you're a killer, a little voice inside her brain pointed out.

He was very still for a long moment, his expression thoughtful, and then he rose slowly.

“I'm going to tell her myself. I
need
to tell her myself. Now. I'll put the Closed sign on the door and tell her. And we'll make arrangements. Then we'll call you,” he said gravely.

“It will be okay,” Rowenna said, mentally crossing her fingers in the hope that she was right.

He breathed a thank-you and left.

With trembling fingers, she reached for her cell phone. She had to call Jeremy. Or maybe she should call Joe; he was the real cop. No, she would call Jeremy, and have
him
call Joe, assuming there was a need to call Joe at all. Because if there really was something wrong with Adam, that could explain everything that was worrying Eve and prove that he wasn't a killer after all.

She snapped her phone closed when the door opened. This time, it
was
Daniel. Luckily, he didn't notice her panic, because he was staring back over his shoulder as he came in. “That was nice. I haven't seen Adam in here in, well, forever.”

She stood. “That's great, but listen, I've got to run…. I'll be back later. See you.”

She fled past him, anxious to get Jeremy on the phone and tell him everything that was going on.

Alone.

 

“Oh, God,” Brad breathed, then buckled over, shaking.

The remains were just inside the first ragged row of corn, the one so far to the rear that the farmer would be unlikely to inspect it often. It was almost like a buffer row, the one in which he would expect some loss. It was also clearly a row the searchers hadn't yet reached.

There was very little left of the body. The elements, rodents and crows had seen to that.

It had been there some time. At least a month, maybe two, Jeremy thought. He wasn't an M.E., but he'd seen enough bodies. This much decomposition didn't happen in a matter of weeks. The face was mostly gone, the white of the skull gleaming in the sun. The flesh of the body had been so consumed that the clothing was only a dirty, matted tangle, and the bones of the arms and legs lay at strange angles, disarticulated by the attentions of the carrion eaters.

Brad was on his knees by then, sobbing.

Jeremy set a hand on his shoulder. “It's not Mary, Brad. It's not Mary,” he repeated.

Reason would take over, Jeremy knew. Brad had seen the ravages of time and the elements on the human body at least as often as he had. As soon as he got over the shock of their discovery, he would realize that these sad remnants couldn't be his wife.

Brad gasped, drawing a long, cleansing breath, then stared at Jeremy.

“But she's gone. Mary is gone. And now we've found two…”

“We don't know that Mary was taken by this man,” Jeremy said, but even as he spoke, he knew the words were patronizing. Brad wasn't stupid. The truth was becoming more and more obvious. “Mary is strong, and smart. If he has her, she's found a way to stay alive,” he said.

“But for how much longer?” Brad whispered. “This woman, oh, God, this poor woman! Someone thought she was just missing. They've been hoping all this time. And here she is.”

“Maybe he made mistakes this time, Brad. Maybe the crime-scene unit can find something. And now that it's a serial case, the FBI will come in on it. We're going to find Mary, Brad. Let's back up and not contaminate the scene any more than we already have.”

He took Brad by the arm and dragged him away. He didn't think they could contaminate the scene much more than nature had already managed to do, but he wanted to get Brad away from there, and any excuse would do.

He called Joe Brentwood and tensely informed him of what he had found. Joe told him to stay put, he would get cars out there immediately. Then he said something else, but Jeremy didn't hear it, because his phone went suddenly dead.

“What the hell?” Jeremy muttered.

He looked at his phone. Searching for Service was streaking across the screen. He swore.

“What?” Brad said.

Jeremy showed him. “At least I got through first,” he said.

Brad pulled out his phone, but it was showing the same message.

“What'll we do while we wait?” he asked.

“Keep looking,” Jeremy said.

“For what?”

“I'm not even sure.”

“Well,” Brad pointed out, “we already know that Ginny was right. There
were
lights out here. Someone was dumping a body,” he added bitterly.

“Yeah, but there's more,” Jeremy said.

“More what?”

“I don't know, but it's nagging at my mind, and we have to figure it out. Let's keep searching.”

Brad nodded, his constant struggle evident in his face. He was trying to be strong, but it was impossible for him
not
to be afraid that they would find Mary's body out there in the corn.

The sun was slipping farther down in the sky, the air shifting from warmth to the chill of late afternoon. Jeremy raised the collar of his jacket and, hands in his pockets, walked along the rows, his eyes searching the ground.

“Holy shit!” Brad called.

Jeremy swore and turned, then raced back toward Brad.

Brad had gone a fair distance from the first corpse. He had moved to an area that was bordered by a thicket of trees, an area where the neat rows were out of kilter. The corn there had grown from seeds that had fallen off the back of a seeder, and it was tangled in with brush and trees.

Brad was staring between two trees at a tall stake standing with a straw hat caught on it.

The body it had once held was so badly decomposed that it had fallen from the wood, the bleached bones lying below it on the earth.

This time Brad knew that the bones couldn't be Mary's without Jeremy telling him.