Stay Close (36 page)

She moved back down toward the giant boulder where she’d found the blood. Broome followed. Bajraktari got down on her hands and knees now, moving her face to within an inch of the dirt like a tracker in an old Western. She started crawling around, moving faster now.

“What?” Broome asked.

“Do you see this?”

She pointed to the ground.

“Barely.”

“It’s an indentation. There are four of them, making a rectangle. I’d estimate it being about two feet by four.”

“And what does that mean?”

“If you wanted to get the body on a hand truck, you’d lay the truck down on all fours. When the body was initially dropped on
it, that would be the heaviest point.” She looked up at him. “In short, it would make indentations like this.”

“Whoa.”

“Yep.”

“Will you be able to, I don’t know, follow the tracks?”

“I don’t think so,” she said. “The ground is pretty hard, but…” Her voice trailed off. She turned her head and, now like a tracking dog, she started back up the path. She stopped and bent down.

“It went that way?” Broome asked.

“Nothing conclusive, but look at the way this shrub is broken.”

Broome came over. He squatted down. It did indeed appear as though something heavy, perhaps a body-laden hand truck, had run over the area. He tried to find a trail, but there wasn’t one. “Where could he have gone?”

“Maybe not that far. Maybe to bury the body.”

Broome shook his head. “It’s been too cold the past few weeks.”

“There are broken branches over here. Let’s follow them.”

They did. They were getting deeper into the woods, farther off the path. They started down a hill. Now, in an area where no one would have any reason to roam, they found even more broken branches, more signs that something substantial had, if not bulldozed, gone through at a faster pace.

The sun was setting, the night growing cold. Broome zipped up his Windbreaker and kept moving.

The brush thickened, making it more and more evident that someone had come this way. Broome knew that he should slow down, that he should be careful not to trample a potential crime scene, but his legs kept moving. He took the lead now. His pulse quickened. The hairs on the back of his neck stood up.

He knew. He just knew.

“Slow down, Broome.”

He didn’t. If anything he moved faster now, pushing the branches to the side, nearly tripping on the thick roots. Finally, less than a full minute after starting down the hill, Broome broke through to a small opening and stopped short.

Samantha Bajraktari came up behind him. “Broome?”

He stared at the broken structure in front of him. It was a low wall, no more than three feet high, nearly covered with vines. That was how it worked out. When man abandoned, nature moved in and took back what was rightfully hers.

“What is that?” Bajraktari asked.

Broome swallowed. “A well.”

He hurried over and looked down into the hole. Blackness.

“Do you have a flashlight?”

The echo of his voice told him that the hole was deep. A knot formed in his stomach.

“Here,” she said.

Broome took the flashlight and flicked it on. When he aimed it straight down the hole—when the beam first hit—the sight stopped Broome’s heart for a second. He may have made a sound, some kind of groaning, but he couldn’t be sure. Samantha came up next to him, looked down, and gasped.

K
EN SAT ON THE LAST
stool and watched the barmaid.

Her name was Lorraine, and she was good at her job. She laughed a lot. She touched the men on the arm. She smiled, and if it was an act, if underneath it all she detested what she was doing, you
never saw it. The other girls, yes, they tried. They smiled but it never reached beyond the lips and often, too often, you could see the blankness on their faces and the hate in their eyes.

The regulars called the older barmaid Lorraine. Regulars at a strip club—Ken tried to imagine anything more pitiable. And yet he understood. We all do, really. We all feel the pull. Sex, of course, had one of the biggest. It didn’t hold a candle to control, but most of these men would never know that. They’d never get to experience it and so they’d remain naïve to what could really tear at a man’s soul.

But Ken had learned that the secret to combat anything that pulled you like this was to understand that you really could not stop it. Ken considered himself a disciplined man, but the truth was, human beings were not built for self-denial. It was why diets rarely worked in the long run. Or abstinence.

The only way to beat it was to accept that it was there and thus channel it. He looked at Lorraine. She would leave eventually. He would follow her and get her alone and then… well, channel.

He swiveled on the stool and leaned his back against the bar. The girls were ugly. You could almost feel the diseases emanating from their very pores. None of them, of course, held a candle to Barbie. He thought about that house on the end of a cul-de-sac, about children and backyard barbecues and teaching his kid to catch a baseball and spreading out the blanket for July Fourth fireworks. He knew that Barbie had serious reservations. He understood her pessimism all too well, but again there was the unmistakable draw. Why, he wondered, if that family life leads to unhappiness, are we all still drawn to it? He had thought about that and realized that it wasn’t the dream that had gone wrong but the
dreamers. Barbie often claimed that they were different and thus not meant for that life. But in truth, she was only half right. They were different, yes, but that gave them a chance to have that life. They wouldn’t enter that domestic world like mindless drones.

It wasn’t that the life people longed for was inherently bad or unworthy—it was that the life for most of them was unobtainable.

“What can I get you, handsome?”

He spun around. Lorraine was standing there. A beer rag was draped over her shoulder. She had dangling earrings. Her hair had the consistency and color of hay. Her lips looked as though there should be a cigarette dangling from them. She wore a white blouse intentionally buttoned too low.

“Oh, I think I’ve had enough,” Ken said.

Lorraine shot him the same half-smile he’d seen her give the regulars. “You’re at a bar, handsome. Gotta drink something. How about a Coke at least?”

“Sure, that’d be great.”

Without taking her eyes off him, Lorraine threw some ice in a glass, picked up a soda gun dispenser, and pressed one of the buttons. “So why are you here, handsome?”

“Same as any guy.”

“Really?”

She handed him the Coke. He took a sip.

“Sure. Don’t I look like I belong?”

“You look like my ex—too damn good-looking for your own good.” Lorraine leaned in as if she wanted to share a secret. “And you want to know something? Guys who look like they don’t belong,” she said, “are our best customers.”

His eyes had been drawn to the cleavage. When he looked back
up, she met his eye. He didn’t like what he saw, like this old barmaid was somehow able to read him or something. He thought about her tied down and in pain, and the familiar stirring came back to him. He maintained eye contact and tried something.

“I guess you’re right about me,” he said.

“Come again.”

“About my belonging. I came here, I guess, to reflect. And maybe to mourn.”

Lorraine said, “Oh?”

“My friend used to come here. You probably read about him in the paper. His name is Carlton Flynn.”

The flick in her eyes told him that she knew. Oh my, oh my, she knew. Yes, now it was his turn to look at her as though he could see inside and read her every thought.

She knew something valuable.

M
EGAN SAW THE KNIFE ARCHING
toward her.

She didn’t have any martial arts training, and even if she had, it probably wouldn’t have helped. There was no time to duck out of the way or block the wrist or whatever would be appropriate for a situation like this.

They say that in moments like this, when violence and destruction are upon you, that time slows down. That wasn’t really true. For that brief moment, as the point of the blade got closer to the hollow of her throat, Megan became something other than an evolved human. Her brain suddenly worked at only its most base. Even an ant, if you step near it, somehow knows to run the other way. We are, at our core, all about survival.

That was what was working here. The primordial part of Megan, the part that existed long before cognitive thought, took over. She didn’t really think or plan or any of that. There was no conscious thought, not at first, but certain defense mechanisms come prebaked into our nervous systems.

She snapped her arm up toward her neck in an attempt to stop the blade from penetrating her throat and ending her life.

The blade sliced deep into her forearm, traveling freely through the flesh until it banged up against the bone.

Megan cried out.

Somewhere again in the deep recesses of her brain, Megan could actually hear the grating sound of metal scraping bone, but it meant nothing to her. Not now anyway.

It was all about survival.

Everything else, including reason, was taking a backseat to man’s most primitive instinct. She was literally fighting for her life, and so one calculation dominated all others: If the attacker pulled the knife free, Megan would end up dead.

All her focus now was on that knife, but somewhere, in the corner of her mind, Megan spotted the blond hair and realized that her attacker was the same woman who’d killed Harry Sutton. She didn’t bother wondering why—that, if she lived, would come later—but there was a fresh surge of anger now mixed in with the fear and panic.

Do not let her get the knife back.

No, time still hadn’t slowed down. Only a second, maybe two, had passed since Megan first caught sight of the knife heading toward her. Again, working purely on instinct, with the blade deeply embedded in her muscle tissue, Megan did something that would normally be unthinkable. She used her free hand to cover the knife, slapping her palm against her own forearm—trapping the razor-sharp blade in her own flesh.

She didn’t think about this—about how she was actually trying to
keep
a knife in her arm. She only knew that whatever happened, whatever hell or fury was about to rain down on her, there was no way she could let this woman have the knife back.

When the blonde tried to pull the blade free, the blade running against the bone, a searing pain shot through Megan, nearly buckling her knees.

Nearly.

That was the thing with pain. Part of you wants to stop, but if you care about your life—and what person doesn’t?—then that desire can override the network that controls your behavior. It may be something chemical, like adrenaline. It may be something more abstract like will.

But the pain meant nothing to Megan right now.

Survival and rage—they were all that mattered now. Survival, well, that was obvious, but she was also pissed off at everything—at this killer who harmed poor Harry, at Dave for abandoning her, at Ray for giving up on everything. She was furious at whatever deity decided that old people like Agnes should be rewarded at the end of their lives with the torture and indignity of losing their minds. She was livid with herself for not appreciating what she had, for needing to poke at the past, for not understanding that a certain amount of dissatisfaction was part of the human experience—and mostly, she was pissed off that this stupid blond bitch wanted to kill her.

Well, screw that.

Megan let out a scream—an unnerving, primordial, high-pitched shriek. With the blade still trapped in the meat of her forearm, she twisted hard at the waist. The blonde made the mistake of trying to maintain her grip, but Megan’s sudden move knocked her off balance. Just a little.

Just enough to make her stumble forward.

Megan snapped her elbow straight up. The pointy bone landed
square on the bottom of the blonde’s nose, jamming it up toward the forehead. There was a cracking sound. Blood spilled down the blonde’s face.

But that didn’t end it.

The blonde, now in pain too, found new strength. She got her balance back and pulled at the blade with all her might. The blade scraped along the bone as though it were whittling it down. Megan still tried to stop it, but the blonde had the momentum now. The blade slid out, popping free from the muscle with an audible, wet sucking sound.

Blood poured from the wound, bubbling out geyserlike.

Megan had always been squeamish. When she was eight, one of her “stepfathers” wanted to see the latest installment of
Friday the 13th
, and since he couldn’t find a babysitter, he dragged Megan with him. The experience had been scarring. Since then—even now—she had trouble sitting through any R-rated film that contained violence.