Husk (23 page)

Melissa leveled her weapon. She edged to the right, looking to the opposite end of the room.

Where a figure stood by the stairs.

“
Freeze,” she shouted, transforming her cry of surprise into a demand. She put the person in her gun sight. “I’m a police officer and I’m armed. Put your hands above your head.”

The lights continued to flash in erratic bursts, shrouding the person in the pulsing display. She couldn’t tell if he—the shape looked like a man—had a weapon or not, but now that she looked for his hands, she noticed his arms hung at his sides, unmoving.

So, who’s working the lights?

The bulbs over the suspect burst, hailing sparks and shards of glass. The suspect instantly vanished in the darkness.

Melissa flinched, her eyes wide.

More bulbs exploded: two went out over the garage sale boxes, three others ruptured from behind her.

She opened her mouth to shout a warning at the person when the sound of crackling glass emanated to her left. She pivoted toward the noise, and two powerful hands clamped down on her shoulders. They pushed her away, shoving her off her feet and into a metal storage shelf.

The impact jarred her to the bone. She spilled to the floor with half the items on the shelves, hearing dozens of things clatter and break.

She slumped to her knees, only to be seized by her clothing and hauled upward again. Her attacker spun her around, hurling her with unimaginable strength into the cinderblock wall opposite the freezer. She hit shoulder-first, saving her from a skull fracture. Bright fairies of light capered across her vision.

She fired her weapon blind, having somehow held onto it, but only wounded the floor.

Something flew out of the flickering darkness and clubbed her arm, striking the gun out of her grasp. She tried to stand and defend herself, but another blow caught her jaw and whirled her back into the wall. Hands of ice clamped down on the back of her neck and the waist of her pants. A frantic scream escaped from her throat, then choked off to a gasp when the attacker lifted her off her feet and over his head, ramming her into the lights. Glass shattered. Jagged metal corners tore through her clothes, raking flesh. Then down she went, body-slammed face-first onto something hard and cold. An icy chill molested her body.

Oh, God. The freezer!

She struggled to get up before another assault caught her in the back. Revulsion gave her the strength to ignore the pain in her limbs and push away from the frozen cadaver, but as she did, the barrel of a gun pressed against the base of her skull.

She went rigid, not moving a muscle. She clenched her eyes shut, saving herself from having to stare into the face of a corpse.

The attacker remained silent and slowly pushed her head down with the gun.

“
Don’t do this,” Melissa finally said. Her voice cracked from lack of saliva. When no reprisal followed her remark, she added, “Like I said, I’m a cop. If you let me, I can help you. You’re only making things worse for yourself by doing this.”

“
Need you,” a voice replied.

The sound of it spilled into her ears like poison from an assassin’s flask. Her body went rigid, paralyzed with the comprehension that her future now lay in the hands of someone who’d patterned their life after the atrocities of a madman.

“
Y-yes,” she answered, choking on her aversion. “I can help—”

But before she could finish, the gun withdrew and the freezer’s lid slammed down over her head, covering her in absolute darkness.

She pushed off the shoulders of the frozen body beneath her, trying to force the freezer’s top open with her back.

The cover wouldn’t budge.

A grating sound penetrated the compartment, first at her feet, then again, closer to her head. It sounded like a power drill … or a screw gun.

He’s sealing me in!

She pushed up again and again, straining every muscle, but the cover wouldn’t give.

Silence enveloped her, broken only by her labored breathing.

She had to stop, had to calm down before she used up all her air.

Her mind hunted for a way to break free, but the more she thought about it, the worse her predicament appeared. She didn’t have her gun, so she couldn’t shoot an air hole through the cover. How long would the air last: ten, fifteen minutes? Sandwiched atop the dead body, with the freezer door at her back, she obviously didn’t have enough leverage to break whatever appliance her attacker had sealed her in with. Her only other hope, her phone, had died. No one would even know she was missing until she failed to show up for work the next morning.

The deepening cold embraced her, triggering a shiver, and she bit down on her lower lip to keep from screaming.

She couldn’t afford to waste the air.

CHAPTER 29

Lori sat on the Wiesses’ living room couch, a protective pillow held across her chest while she used the television remote to flip through the cable channels. Upstairs, she hadn’t heard a word from BJ since putting him to bed, which she took to mean he’d sleep peacefully through the night.

Their talk about creatures lurking in the darkness had gotten to her more so than she’d known, however. With the kid in bed, sitting there alone, the house seemed eerily large and unsafe. There were so many rooms, so many windows for a prowler to sneak in through. She kept thinking about the noise she’d heard earlier, behind the attic door, and she imagined that whatever made it had slipped out of sight before she turned on the light, slinking within the walls to emerge somewhere else in the house.

“
Some hero,” she thought aloud, thinking of the bravery she’d tried to display earlier.

Thud!

She stopped channel-surfing and looked to the ceiling.

Thud!

Lori sprang to her feet. The muffled noise came again, the sound of a door slamming shut.

Clicking off the television, she hurried to the foyer and looked up from the foot of the stairs to the second floor landing. She should’ve been able to see the glow of BJ’s lamp from where she stood, but the hallway appeared dark.

The only light where Lori stood came from the outside lamp over the front steps. Its whitish gleam shone in through the sectioned windows lining each side of the main door and cast bar-like shadows over the floor and steps. In this strange setting, the entry seemed murky and uninviting, specifically designed to repel guests rather than to welcome them. She flipped on the entry light to dispel the mood.

“
BJ? Are you all right up there?”

When no answer came, she mounted the steps two at a time, now fearing that what she’d heard could’ve been the sound of the boy falling out of bed, possibly injuring himself and breaking the lamp in the process.

“
BJ?”

From the landing she could see through the crack in BJ’s door, and even in the dark she could tell he wasn’t in bed. The noise thumped again, closer this time. She spun to face the other half of the hallway.

Stepping into the lesser gloom below one of the hallway’s two skylights, she said, “For someone who was so afraid of going to bed earlier, you sure don’t seem too scared of playing hide-and-seek in the dark.”

He didn’t answer.

Of course not
, she thought.
That would ruin the fun
.

She sighed and began moving from room to room, flipping on lights along the way. She reached BJ’s sister’s room at the opposite end of the hall with no sign of the boy.

“
Come on, BJ,” she said, adding force to her tone. “Enough is enough.”

Every light on the second floor went out with a snap.

Lori backed up and groped for the nearest light switch, sweeping the wall with her hand faster and faster with each unsuccessful pass. Then she had it.

Click, click, click.
The switch didn’t work.

“
Shit.”

“
Lori,” the boy called from his room.

She stumbled into the hall and took three steps toward the boy’s door, ready for an explanation, when that heavy thump came yet again, this time much louder. She stopped in her tracks.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the window in Mr. Wiesses’ study slammed shut. Before she had a chance to question what closed it, the air darkened around her. She snapped her head up, looking to the skylight overhead.

And saw the silhouette of man peering down at her.

CHAPTER 30

Melissa shook her head in the darkness of the box freezer, casting off another bout of weariness that strove to drag her into sleep.

Her teeth clattered together.

She shivered uncontrollably.

Numbness had changed to pain in the bare portions of her skin that contacted the frozen corpse beneath her and no matter how often she shifted position she couldn’t escape it.

Death seemed inevitable now, and the realization came to her with a greater measure of acceptance than panic. She wondered how long it would be before anyone discovered her body, what speculations the papers would report on her disappearance.

Her head dipped down when she began to nod off again, and it took a few seconds to comprehend that she’d laid one cheek upon the dead person’s parted mouth.

She jerked away, hitting her head on the freezer’s cover.

Was her life meant to end this way? It didn’t seem right, not after a lifetime of striving to protect others. And with that thought in mind, she began praying for the first time since childhood, begging for God’s assistance with her hopeless situation.

At any other time she would’ve argued the question of why God should spare her when so many others died daily, from soldiers in battle, to the innocent bystanders killed in high school shootings, to the victims of accidents and natural disasters. In her line of work the contemplation of death followed her like a shadow, but she’d always avoided discussing it with fellow officers, much the same way she’d avoided the consideration of whatever came next, if anything. Now, however, with her end in sight, she let go of her disbelief and pleaded for her life and soul.

Her head was floating down toward the corpse’s mouth again when a ticking sound guided her back from sleep. She perked up and listened, hearing what could’ve been somebody testing the freezer’s door handle.

“
Help,” she shouted. “If someone’s there, help me!”

After a short pause, there came the muffled reply of, “Hang on. I’ll get you out.”

Melissa exhaled a breath of shock, accompanied by an inner shiver of wonderment.

Metal grated on metal, chased by a piercing snap and the
whoosh
of rushing air when the lid finally burst open. Melissa breathed in one lungful after another, unable to recognize the man who helped her up until she’d had a few seconds to catch her breath and focus.

“
Frank!”

With the overhead bulbs destroyed, darkness filled the basement. The only illumination came from Frank’s flashlight, which he tucked under one arm as he helped her out of the freezer. Even behind the shadows streaked across his face it was clear he shared her surprise.

“
Detective Humble,” he said. “What are you doing here? Are you all right? I saw the blood.”

“
It’s not mine,” Melissa cut in. She steadied herself, letting the chill ebb from her flesh. “What are
you
doing here, Frank? How did you find me?”

Frank grimaced at the curtness of her inquiry, then traced her line of sight to the pistol clutched in his right hand.

“
Here, this must be yours,” he said, offering up the weapon. “I found it on the freezer top.”

She took the gun, hefting it in her hand, but didn’t put it away.

“
Are you sure you’re okay?” Frank asked.

“
Do I look okay to you?” she fired back.

She’d smacked her head against the frozen corpse when she’d been hurled into the freezer, and her jaw still ached from the punch that had nearly knocked her unconscious. Ironically, her time spent in the cold seemed to have kept the swelling down, and when she ran her free hand across her cheek and mouth, the lumps didn’t feel too bad.

“
I’ll be fine,” she said in a less defensive tone. “Just tell me what you’re doing here.”

The look of worry vanished from Frank’s face, replaced by an expression of dismay. “I didn’t put you in that box, if that’s what you mean. I’ve been driving around the area, looking for Kane’s gravesite.”

He told her about the discovery he’d made upon locating Judge Anderson’s home, how the surrounding area had once been the Kane family’s orchards, and why he believed Kane’s body must be nearby. She didn’t understand his obsession with locating the dead man’s remains, but she had to agree, if the Andersons’ neighborhood had been the killer’s old home, then the vicinity of the copycat murders might not be a coincidence.

“
I was about out of places to look,” he continued. “But then, when I was coming back from the Saint Thomas Church near Corcoran City Hall, the geomagnetic field meter on my truck picked up a huge electromagnetic discharge in this area. I would’ve been here sooner, but it took me a while to pinpoint the—”