The last item in the jewelry box was a pair of silver-toned hockey sticks, a pin Dylan’s fourth-grade team had won. Between ages seven and ten, he’d had a passion for hockey. The Fighting Marmots-a name as inexplicable as it was hard to chant-had taken first at state. He was way too cool to wear the pin, but he’d liked to look at it when Rich wasn’t around to rag him.
Never a sentimentalist-his life had not been the kind Hallmark wrote cards about-Marshall was taken aback at how much he wanted to hold on to these keepsakes.
It was foolish to believe their owners lived on through them. Foolish to believe. To feel it was a different thing.
Again he lifted out his mother’s cross, supporting it by the slender broken chain.
It must have been taken from her body before the burial and given to Rich. Marshall thought about that, as he watched the golden cross turning hypnotically.
Mr. Kroger, their dad’s partner, had made all the arrangements. Rich told him that the first time he’d visited him in Drummond. There was no funeral-Mr. Kroger had the bodies interred as soon as the autopsies were completed-but they were going to have a memorial service when the news people quit dogging everybody concerned.
Marshall tried to picture their dad’s rough-voiced partner. He’d seemed like such a big man and so old, but he couldn’t have been more than forty-five. He’d liked Dylan, and used to growl at him, and act like he ate children. It would sound sinister to tell but it wasn’t. It was fun.
The forensic pathologist must have removed the wedding ring and the necklace. Marshall couldn’t picture Mr. Kroger prying his dad’s wedding ring off. No one would pry off a man’s wedding ring before burying him next to his wife. At least no man from Minnesota. The same went for the gold crosses. The undertaker, the pathologist, the preacher, Mr. Kroger, all would have sent them to God with their bearers.
Closing his hand on the shards of his boyhood, Marshall felt the points of the cross and the hockey sticks pushing into the flesh of palm and fingers. This was all that remained of who he had been before he was Butcher Boy.
The round smoothness of his father’s wedding ring clicked against the gold of Marshall ’s own wedding band, and he wondered why his mother’s ring hadn’t been in the jewelry box as well.
With that thought, the warm and fuzzy memories blasted out of his mind.
One ring had been taken and one left on its finger. Because Dylan had his mother’s cross for a souvenir and didn’t need anything else.
Dylan had taken the jewelry from the corpses after he killed them, and Rich had kept it for him. Kept it from the cops, more likely.
Who the fuck do you think you are, Psycho Boy? The Beaver? Dennis the Menace? Some cute little boy, prone to mischief? You fucking butchered everybody.
“I was eleven years old, for God’s sake,” Marshall whispered. “I was a little boy.”
The necklaces, Lena ’s and his mother’s, would have been drowned in their blood. Marshall was shaking his head, trying to see himself digging through matted hair and brains to steal away the last glitter of their lives.
“No,” he cried out and opened his hand: the crosses, the ring, the hockey pin, the brass tag.
There was nothing there of Rich’s. Dylan’s pin was there, in the box with the things taken from that night. Dylan. Mom. Dad. Lena. Even Ginger the cat.
Rich wasn’t there. If Dylan took them, why would he keep a memento of himself and not of his brother, another of his intended victims?
34
The emergency gas can Danny carried up the narrow stairs didn’t have more than a gallon in it, and the fuel was several years old, but from what he’d seen of the rat’s nest upstairs, it should suffice.
He was fairly sure Polly had no idea who’d attacked her, but she had to suspect it was Marshall. There was enough evidence Marsh could end up in prison-grown-up prison-for the rest of his life. Kicking the door open, he picked his way through the dark rooms using the flashlight he’d taken from the trunk when he’d retrieved the gasoline. The narrow beam played across the unmade bed, the littered floor, Vondra’s scrapbook.
He wondered if Marshall was featured in it, if the trial or Rochester was mentioned. There was no time to look. He followed his light into the bathroom and directed the beam into the tub.
“God, but you’re disgusting,” he said as he stared down at the plastic-and-blood-wrapped woman. “You ever see The Blob, Vondra? You could have played the title role.” Grabbing the shower curtain with both hands, he braced himself against the side of the old claw-foot tub and heaved. The plastic tore away, and the corpse flopped back the few inches he’d managed to raise it.
Peeling away the curtain, he looked for something to grab onto that wouldn’t give. The creepy drape she wore was already half torn from the body. Holding his breath, he fished out a fat hand. Red acrylic nails clattered against the side of the tub, and he jumped.
With a grunt, he pulled the body over the rim of the tub and staggered back as the wad of limbs and curtain slapped to the floor. Distorted like those of a drowned woman, Vondra’s dead eyes peered at him through a film of plastic.
Debris was plowed aside as he dragged her to the bed and propped her against it. It would have to do; he wasn’t going to throw his back out trying to lift her onto the mattress. Sparingly, he sloshed gasoline on the bedding. There were enough cigarette packs and matches around for it to look like she’d fallen asleep with a lit cigarette.
Maybe the investigators would look past the obvious; maybe they wouldn’t. Since Katrina, the building had had no insurance. There would be no monetary gain to the owner. New Orleans was filled with derelict buildings. There wasn’t a lot of interest in those the insurance companies didn’t have to fork out cash for. It was a risk he’d have to take.
“A scrapbook!” he said as he struck a match from one of the thousands of matchbooks lying about. “Photos, newspaper articles. I think your killer is off the hook; I think you died of stupidity,” he said. He tossed the match, heard it fizzle out, and struck another.
Fumes. It was the fumes that lit, not the gasoline itself. Danny took a few steps back from the bed, waited a minute for the fumes to build up, then struck another match and tossed it onto the pyre. A thin, blue tongue licked out, liked what it tasted, and flowed rapidly over the cloth and paper.
“Bingo,” he said and watched the rapidly growing fire for a second or two.