Both the agents froze. Klavin had been messing with a tiny digital camera, and Stuart had been loading some small machine into the back of their rented SUV. "Why?" Stuart asked, after they'd resumed moving. "Why do you want to know that, Ms. Connelly?"
"I wonder if there was more than one person involved in torturing these boys," I said. "Because I really suspect that Tom Almand wasn't working alone, that he had a killing buddy who helped subdue the poor boys. Some of them were big boys, you know. Tom Almand was a little man. So, did he have some story that made them trust him enough to put themselves into a situation they couldn't get out of? Or did he have a strong right arm that would be sure they got that way?"
The two men looked at each other, and that was enough.
"You gotta tell people," I said. "They all think they're safe, and they're not."
"Look, Ms. Connelly," Stuart said, "we got half the team in jail. We got their killing floor. We got their dump site. We got their survivor, safe and guarded. We even got their backup place for stashing victims, for whatever reason they had it: maybe they prepared it in case they heard this place was being sold, maybe they realized the road up here might become difficult in the winter. Then they'd use the place in the Almand barn. We figure this because there aren't as many bloodstains at the barn. There isn't all the paraphernalia we found in there." He nodded toward the old shed to the left of the Davey house.
"We want to catch this other bastard real bad, Harper," said Klavin. "You don't know how bad. But we don't figure he's going to be grabbing anyone anytime soon. You see what we're saying?"
No, I was too dumb to understand. "Yes," I said, "I see. And to a certain extent, I agree. It would be crazy for him to grab anyone else. But you see what I'm saying? He is crazy."
"But so far, he's managed to maintain a perfect façade," Stuart said. "He's clever enough, got enough sense of self-preservation, to keep on doing that."
"Are you sure about that? Sure enough to risk some boy's life?"
"Listen, the fact is, you don't have anything else to do with this investigation," Klavin said. He'd reached the end of his patience.
"I know I'm not a cop," I said. "I know I usually just come in to a town, do a job, and leave. And I like it that way. If I have to stick around, worse stuff happens. And then we have to stay longer. We want to drive out of Doraville. But we don't want anyone else to die. And until you catch this other killer, there's that possibility."
"But what can you do to stop it?" Klavin asked reasonably. "So far as we're concerned, after you give your statement about yesterday, you and your brother can leave. We have your cell phone number, and we know your home address."
"He's not my brother," I said. If Tolliver could tell people, I could, too.
"Whatever," Klavin said. "Hey, Lang, did you know your dad was in jail in Arizona?"
"No," Tolliver said. "I had heard he got out of jail in Texas, though." If they'd been trying to upset Tolliver, they had gone about it the wrong way.
"You two really got shanked in the parent department," Klavin said.
"No doubt about it," I said. He couldn't make me angry like that, either.
He looked a little surprised, maybe a little abashed.
"I can't figure you out," I said. "You can be decent when you want to be. But this shit about our parents, you think we haven't heard all this before? You think we don't remember what it was like?"
He hadn't expected me to clear the decks. Klavin clearly had issues.
"You two go on," he said, while Stuart watched him, a certain guarded look on his face. "Go back to town. Get your statements entered. Then leave. This case has too much cluttering it up. The psychic. You. Now that you've seen Tom Almand swing a shovel, I guess you know who attacked you. You gonna file charges?"
Oddly enough, I hadn't even thought about it. So much had happened since I'd been attacked that it had been low on my list of mysteries to solve. I took a moment to think about it. Theoretically, I was all in favor of Tom paying for the attack on me. But thinking realistically, how could we prove it was Tom? The only evidence against him was that he'd been known to hit someone else with a shovel, and he'd had reason to want to hit me—if you count the fact that I'd found his victims a reason, and I reckoned it was. I'd stopped his fun. At least, I'd thought so, until the trapdoor had swung open. I saw those boys' faces every time I thought about the trapdoor: the one face covered with blood and lifeless, and the other just as bloody and full of fear and a terrible knowledge.
I'd have to come back here to testify, and there really wasn't any more concrete evidence than there had been.
"No," I said. "Is Almand talking?"
"He's not saying one damn word," Klavin said. "He was actually pretty shocked about his son, I think, but he kind of shook it off and said the boy had always been weak."
"That's someone else's influence," I said. "Someone else's words."
"I think so, too," Stuart told us. He turned his back to us to look out over the acre of land that had yielded such a strange crop. "He's not going to talk in case he might trip up and expose his fuck buddy."
I was a little startled at Stuart going crude on us. But if I'd looked at those bodies and examined the inside of that shack as often as Stuart had, I might be pretty deeply upset…well, even more upset than I was already.
I wasn't sure why I was here. There were no ghosts, there were no souls, there was nothing left of the bones of the eight young men who had been put in the ground here. There was only the cold air, the gusting wind, and the two angry men who'd spent too much time observing too closely what horrors people could wreak on each other.
"What will you do with the shack?" I asked. Tolliver turned to look at it, along with Stuart.
"We'll have to dismantle it completely and remove it," Klavin said. "Otherwise, souvenir hunters will rip it to shreds. You can see the lab techs have removed the most heavily bloodstained areas for the lab's use. And all the instruments that were in there—the manacles, the branding iron, the pincers, the sex toys—they've gone to the lab, too. We brought a bunch of people up here."
Tolliver's mouth twisted in disgust. "How could he look in the mirror?" Tolliver said. It was rare for Tolliver to speak when we were in a professional situation like this. But men are less used to the idea of being raped than women are, and it strikes them with a fresh horror. With women, that horror comes right along with the female genitals.
"Because he was enjoying himself," I said. "It's easy to look in the mirror when life is fun."
Stuart turned to look at me, surprised. "Yes," he said. "He was probably happy every morning. Tom Almand pulled the wool over the eyes of almost every member of this community, for years. He's surely been pleased with himself every day of that time. The only person he couldn't fool, eventually, was his own son."
"So, he fooled everyone else?" I asked.
Tolliver gripped my hand. I squeezed his.
"His colleagues who have worked with him at the mental health center all say they've gotten along with him fine, that he was always on time, conscientious about keeping his appointments, fairly intelligent with his recommendations and referrals, and had only minor complaints by patients in the eight years he's been here."
I was impressed that they'd gotten together that much information in the limited time they'd had. I wondered if he'd been under suspicion from the beginning. Perhaps they'd gotten a head start on him, from a profile or something similar.