The_Amazing_Mr._Howard (16 page)

She hurried to the fence and rested a hand on top of a post. She looked up and down the fence line and started north. After traveling a few yards, she stopped. “That’s how he did it,” she said, pointing to a spot where the fence gaped.

Willard switched on his flashlight and tromped to the opening. He touched the wire. “It’s been cut.”

She brushed past, pushing the wire aside. Her path was direct and without hesitation. She stopped walking and sank to her knees. A long, pitiful moan rose from her chest. The detectives hurried to join her.

“What is it?” Killgood asked. His flashlight cast a circle of soft light on the ground.

She motioned with her chin. “He buried her here. She’s alone, so alone, and frightened. Stephanie doesn’t like it here.”

“Look,” Willard said, swinging the beam of his light from side to side, “the ground is sunken over here.”

Killgood nodded. “Like on a grave.” He started toward the car.

“Where are you going?” Willard asked.

“I’ve got a shovel in the trunk.”

The girl now hugged herself and rocked back and forth, tears glistening on her cheeks. She looked at Willard. “He loved her… like a daughter.”

“A loving father doesn’t kill their daughter.”

“It’s his curse. He must kill to live.”

“Yeah… well, most serial killers feel that way.”

She pushed off the ground and brushed off the front of her skirt. “He doesn’t consider himself a killer.”

“Neither did Ted Bundy.”

“This man… he needs something from his victims…to live. It’s not sexual… and he wasn’t abused as a child… no, they give him life. He dies without their sacrifice. Do you understand?”

“Yeah, sure,” he said, while all the time thinking she was as cuckoo as Mr. Howard. The only thing Killgood would dig up was dirt.

Killgood returned with a shovel. He turned off his flashlight and jammed it into a back pocket. “Mind giving me some light? If there is anything here, I don’t want to destroy evidence.”

Willard aimed his light at the spot on the ground and Killgood gently sunk the blade of the shovel into the earth.

“The soil is soft beneath the surface as if it’s been recently turned,” Killgood said over his shoulder. He carefully placed the dirt in a pile and scooped out another spade full.

The girl’s breathing became rapid. She worked her fingers through the sides of her hair, over and over. “Hold on, Stephanie. We’re almost there.”

Killgood continued to work, the pile of dirt growing taller. He paused to wipe off his brow. “Holy shit,” he said.

“What is it?” Willard asked.

Killgood gestured toward the hole. “Something pale. I think its skin.”

Willard stepped closer and shined the flashlight at the spot. His stomach ached as if he’d been punched. “I see it.”

Killgood dropped to his knees. He cautiously moved the tip of the blade around, lifting out small quantities of dirt. Tossing aside the shovel he used his hands to brush away loose soil. He looked up with a stricken expression on his face. “Fingers.”

Alicia covered her face and sobbed.

The energy drained out of Willard and his shoulders sagged. “I reckon we’d better call this in.”

Killgood stood, hands on his hips, and took a deep breath, which he exhaled with a puff. “Do you still think psychics are full of crap?”

“Not all of them,” Willard replied.

Mr. Howard awoke shortly after noon, long before his usual waking time of four o’clock. Restless, he’d tossed and turned in bed, anxiety nagging at him, flickering through the corridors of his mind like a candle flame inside a dark room. Something was wrong. Could it be the problem with Killgood? Perhaps it was a mistake to kill Ryan. No, he deserved his fate. Even the penis chopping felt like justice. He should have considered the complications for Killgood, who had enough to worry about working with Willard on the Coldstone case. Pushy bastard. Willard was probably the first in line every day at school with an apple in hand to impress the teacher. Make the grade, go to college, and for what, to be a cop?

Ludicrous.

He strolled over to his writing desk and turned on a lamp. He blinked several times while scanning the room. Where was Stephanie? Her spirit typically was there to greet him whenever he awoke. He shrugged off her absence and dialed Killgood’s cell phone. Killgood answered after one ring.

“Homicide, Killgood.”

He noted stress in the detective’s voice and assumed it was due to Ryan’s disappearance. “Chandler, I have been thinking about your problem with Ryan, and I was—”

“Mr. Howard, this isn’t the best time.”

“You sound tired.”

“Yeah, well, I’ve been up all night at a crime scene, getting my blood drained by a bunch of goddamn mosquitoes.”

“Has there been a homicide?”

Several seconds passed. “We found Stephanie Coldstone.”

The room started to spin. Blood rushed from his head. Mr. Howard grabbed the desk for support and eased onto a chair. “How?”

“Another psychic led us to her body.”

“A psychic you say?” The only well-known psychic in town was Susan Tate and having met her, he quickly came to the conclusion she was as phony as he was. “Susan Tate?”

“No, a young woman, her name’s Alicia Whitmore. Claims her mother and grandmother were both psychics, but doesn’t consider herself one. Guess she’ll need to reconsider that now. I’m surprised she found the body before you did. You must be getting rusty.”

Mr. Howard massaged his brow as he thought.
Too early, it is way too early for them to find the body.

“I did have a vision of Stephanie a couple nights ago, but did not consider it useful.”

“Oh, what kind of vision?”

“I saw Stephanie in a dark place. The land was flat. There was a tree and a fence near the tree. It is not much.”

“All right… well, at least we’ll have some evidence this time. Maybe, we’ll catch the scumbag who killed her.”

In his mind, Mr. Howard envisioned himself racing down a bright tunnel toward a spot of darkness—a reversal of a near-death experience. There wouldn’t be a rebirth for his soul when everything was said and done. “Has this psychic provided information about a suspect?”

“Nothing much in the way of a physical description, but she said he drives a dark colored van.”

His left hand curled into a fist. “Damn it.”

“Something wrong?”

Mr. Howard took a deep breath to calm his nerves. “No, no, I dropped something. That is fantastic news, yes. Perhaps I will get an opportunity to meet Alicia? Who knows, we might even work together on this case.” He flattened his hand on the desktop. Under the light, his skin appeared translucent, his veins purple and swollen with blood—Stephanie’s blood. If the cops needed evidence all they had to do was draw his blood for DNA testing. “Is Doctor Allen performing the autopsy?”

“No, the state’s doctor will be handling it. This entire case is fucked. No one knows who has jurisdiction. The Feds showed up at the crime scene and demanded to be in charge.”

“The FBI is involved?” he said, feigning ignorance.

“The grasslands are a national park.”

Of course, I knew that
, he wanted to say.
The more agencies involved the better.
He envisioned further interrogation from FBI profilers who would try to understand his role in this little drama. He didn’t find them particularly intimidating, unlike Willard, who seemed to see beyond his false persona. The FBI would thwart Willard’s efforts to find the real killer. With any luck, Willard would be off the case entirely.

“Oh, yes, I seem to remember that. I have never been to the park myself, but several of my students go camping there.”

“The son of a bitch drove a long way to get rid of her body.”

“He did indeed.” He pictured the van in his garage. He’d wisely purchased the van out of state and registered it using false identification; still all it would take is someone like Willard snooping around to confirm it belonged to him. But he would need a warrant for that and what judge in his right mind would issue one with no more evidence than Willard had. But what if this psychic provided information that led to him?

“I’d better let you go. I’m tired as hell and can’t wait to get home.”

“Yes, I am sure you are. I will call if I come up with anything else.”

“You do that.”

After hanging up the phone, Mr. Howard sat for a long time staring straight ahead, his mind in a fog. Never before had he felt this vulnerable, not even when the body of Cynthia Rhodes turned up sooner than expected. It was Willard. He didn’t like him from the moment he first saw him.

Mr. Howard left the master bedroom and walked into his office. He logged on to his computer, typed the name Alicia Whitmore, and did a search. The picture on her Facebook page showed a young woman with a fair complexion and long black hair. Her dark eyes betrayed sadness. She listed no one as her friends, which made him wonder why she felt the need to create a page on the social network. He studied her profile: single, born and raised in Colorado, college educated, lived in town, only a few miles from him, self-employed as a web designer.

He scrolled down the page to find her interests: favorite bands were 10 Years and Big Country; favorite books
The Grapes of Wrath
,
To Kill a Mockingbird
, and
Twilight
, favorite movies
Let the Right One In
, Bram Stoker’s
Dracula
, and
Twilight
. Mr. Howard sighed.
So, Alicia has a thing for vampires. I wonder if she would like to meet a real one
.

He leaned closer to the screen to study her face in more detail. “I find you somewhat attractive, which is probably most unfortunate for you.” He tapped his chin. “Poor, Alicia. Why now of all times did you have to discover your gift? You could have read palms at the fair and made a fortune instead of assisting that bastard Willard. This is not good, Alicia. Definitely not good.”

Doris sat at the kitchen table behind several empty Ding Dong boxes. She’d taken the foil wrappers from the cakes, wadded them into balls, and arranged them to spell out “Fuck You.” Willard almost laughed at her ingenuity. She glared at him with tiny pig eyes as he walked to the refrigerator and grabbed a beer. He unscrewed the top and sank onto a chair at the far end of the table. Looking at her made him sick to his stomach. She had always been on the plump side, even when they first met, but back then he considered her ass a nice soft pillow for his thighs. Now every time she sat down, somewhere in the world a tsunami rolled toward shore.

He swigged his beer. “Nice to see you too.”

“Do you realize how long it’s been since I last heard from you?”

He took another drink. “Should I?”

“Twenty-eight hours.”

“Yeah, well, time flies when you’re having fun.”

She slammed a fist onto the table and the foil balls leaped into the air. “Who is she?”

Someone needs to shove an apple in her mouth and serve her on a big silver platter
. He smirked behind the raised bottle. “Stephanie Coldstone.”

“That’s the bitch you’re screwing?”

“She’s the girl we just dug out of the ground.”

Her expression softened. “She’s the one who went missing.”

“That’s right,” he said. “She ain’t missing no more.”

Several seconds of awkward silence passed between them. “You still should have called. I was worried sick.”

“Yeah, well, you had your Ding Dongs to keep you company.”

She pushed back her chair, the metal legs screeching over the tile floor, and struggled to stand, her body shaking, and blood rushing into her chubby cheeks. Air whistled from her lungs when she finally straightened. “You’re a sorry piece of shit.”

“I’ll drink to that.”

“Aren’t you the least bit interested in how your daughter is doing?”

“I’m more interested in the kid she nearly killed. I hope you looked up lawyers in the phone book.”

“Fuck you!” She grabbed a loaf of bread off the counter and hurled it at him.

He ducked and waited until she was gone to get up and walk into the office. At his desk, he leaned forward and rested his head in his hands. He should sleep, but there were too many thoughts in his brain to let that happen. An image of Stephanie’s corpse appeared. She’d been a looker all right. While staring at her nude body, he became aroused. What it would be like to have sex with the dead? He quickly put this notion out of his mind. Necrophilia was too bizarre even by his standards.

Whoever killed you is a clever SOB. A goddamn phantom that doesn’t attract attention.

He recalled his discussion with the FBI profilers and their assessment of the killer. Well organized, older man, not insane, who might have taken jewelry from his victims. Willard tapped his knuckles against his forehead. “What else did they say… think, think.” And then it all came back to him, normal or high IQ, socially adequate, possibly married or involved with someone.

What else, what else?

Probably drives a flashy car, keeps himself clean. He opened his briefcase and rifled through the contents for a photograph he’d taken. He placed the picture on the desk in front of him and stared at the smirking face.
You drive a flashy car, don’t you? And you’re older, well organized, with a high IQ. And as I recall, Hartley said you’d like to contact the police to play mind games. I’d say those things pretty much describe you, Mr. Howard. Don’t you agree?

Could Mr. Howard be a serial killer? Even if he was a killer, how to prove it? Willard’s entire body tingled at the idea of going after Mr. Howard, as if he were a hunter venturing into tall grass in pursuit of a lion.

“Let’s see what the autopsy reveals,” he said, turning his attention to the computer. He opened up Google and typed in Alicia Whitmore. He checked her Facebook page. “I see you’ve cut your hair.” Leaning forward, he gazed into her dark eyes.
Why so sad? Is it because you’ve listed no one as your friend? You and I could be friends. Very close friends. Let’s take a look at your profile. Hmm, you’re a college grad, no surprise, and a web designer, good for you.
He checked her interests and groaned upon seeing she had a fascination with vampires. “Why does everyone find vampires so…” He studied Mr. Howard’s picture. “…fascinating?” He rolled his tongue against the sides of his mouth.