Two more bodies have been found since I’ve been gone, both of them in the same grave. There seems to be no pattern as to where the bodies have been laid out, probably because the people doing the digging were crazy. Nobody gives me so much as a second glance as I walk over to take a closer look. The two bodies are fresh-looking, lots of skin slippage, dark veins protrude from underneath their skin as if they are worms feeding and burrowing their way beneath the blotchy surfaces. My stomach turns for the second time tonight. One man is wearing jeans and one is wearing shorts and they’re both wearing T-shirts that are stained with fluids that have seeped from their bodies.
One of the medical examiners, a woman by the name of Tracey Walter, comes over. Last time I saw her was when I was working on the Burial Killer case. Back then she had black hair tied into a ponytail, now it’s been dyed blond but the style is the same. She always has an athletic look about her, as if she might break into a jog at any time.
“Who let you in?” she asks, at least grinning as she says it.
“Schroder asked for my help.”
She offers me her hand. “It’s clean,” she says, then seems to struggle holding it there as I shake it. Last year she was pretty angry with me and I don’t blame her. I almost got her fired when I stole evidence from her morgue.
“So what can you tell me about these guys?” I ask.
“Nothing,” she says. “No way in hell Schroder asked you for an opinion.”
“He did. Just not on this case,” I admit. “Come on, Tracey, I’m trying to find Emma Green.”
“And you’ll stop at nothing.”
“Is that such a bad thing?”
“It is for the people who get in your way, even the innocent ones.” “Any idea who they are?” I ask, nodding down toward the two men.
“Not yet,” she says. “Bodies haven’t been touched yet.”
“Then let’s touch them,” I say. I crouch down on the side of the grave and tug sideways at the shorts on the closest victim, twisting them until I can get to the back pocket.
“What the hell, Tate?”
I come up with a wallet and hand it to her probably an hour or two earlier than the plan, but there’s no time to mess around with protocol. There’s no cash, and there are no credit cards and no license. I reach into the second grave. Same tug on the pants. Same trick. The back pocket comes around the same way and a wallet with the same amount of nothing inside it comes free.
“Great,” she says. “Thanks for being so helpful.”
Close to the side of the grave, I take a better look at the bodies. “You notice how similar they look?” I ask.
“In what way?”
“Same height, same hair color, same bone structure,” I say. Rot and decay has taken some of the details away, but there’s plenty of skin and flesh left to see the similarities. Tracey crouches down and shines a flashlight into the face of one, then the face of the other. The eyes are milky white with dark brown centers.
“It’s hard to tell right now,” she says, “but they certainly do look alike. They could be brothers.”
“Brothers?”
“Yes. Related.”
“I know what you mean,” I say, getting back up. Brothers. Twins. Orderlies. “How long have they been in the ground?”
“No longer than a week,” she says. “Why, does that mean something to you?”
“Possibly. I gotta go.”
“You know who they are, don’t you?”
“I’m working on it,” I say, but I’m not sure she hears me because I’m already racing off looking for a car I can borrow.
chapter forty-eight
The cell door is open and the air coming in is slightly cooler than that already in the room. In the doorway is Adrian, he’s holding a gun and a Taser, and standing next to Cooper is Cooper’s mother. Cooper can see the corridor behind Adrian and this isn’t Sunnyview or Eastlake, he doesn’t know where in the hell this is.
“What is he talking about?” his mother asks him.
He turns toward her. There is enough artificial light coming from the corridor behind Adrian to see her clearly. Wherever they are, they have power. This could be a house. In town somewhere? No way of knowing.
“I don’t know,” Cooper answers, and his mother, aside from looking scared, is suddenly looking every one of her seventy-nine years, plus some. For the last few years she has had a look on her face as if she’s been sucking on a lemon, now she looks like that entire lemon has been jammed into her mouth. Her gray hair is a tangled mess, and even if Adrian Tasered her he’s still surprised he got her out of the house without her clawing her way back in for a comb and lipstick. She’s wearing a nightgown that has all the shape of a rectangle that he gave her two years ago for Christmas because he found it on sale for ten bucks. “You can’t listen to anything he says. He’s completely crazy.”
“I’m not crazy,” Adrian says. “Look, look at the blood on him. He’s a killer.”
“I’m not a killer,” Cooper says. Two minutes ago his mother was led into his cell at gunpoint and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it except stand at the back and watch unless he wanted to get shot. She came running toward him and almost rolled both of her ankles on the padded floor and he caught her before she fell. He hugged her hard, he didn’t want her being here but he was grateful to see her in a way, which made him feel immediately guilty, and she was grateful to see him too, to see he was still alive. Somehow Adrian has upgraded from a Taser to a gun. A Taser wasn’t great against two people, but a gun was. A gun could be good up against ten people if none of them had guns either. So Cooper stood back as the cell door was opened and in came his mother. He loves his mother but having her here has complicated things. A lot.
“Why continue to lie? You don’t need to anymore,” Adrian says. “This is your chance to unburden yourself of all that hate, that hate that made you go and kill other people. Seven now.”
Two, Cooper thinks, and even then it was really only one. But it will certainly be two once he gets out of this cell. Damn it, the sick fuck is even wearing some of his dad’s clothes, clothes that his mum should have thrown out nearly forty years ago when he walked out on them, but for some reason she kept. “I’m not a killer.”
“Nice people don’t raise serial killers,” Adrian says, looking at Cooper’s mother. “So why care about trying to keep her happy by lying? She isn’t a nice person.”
“Young man, you really need some serious help,” his mother says, and it’s the same tone she used to use on Cooper when he was a young boy and he wouldn’t finish his dinner or mow the lawn or was mean to his sister. The same tone she used on him when he stole the car. He’s half expecting her to make Adrian write a letter to his future self. “I don’t know what game you’re playing at here, but somebody is going to get seriously hurt.”
“I can prove your son’s a killer,” Adrian says.
“That’s bullshit,” Cooper says. “Don’t listen to him.”
“He was driving girls out to Sunnyview. It’s a closed down mental hospital and it’s abandoned, and he’d keep them there for. .”
“You’re crazy,” Cooper says to him, cutting him off. “Don’t listen to him, Mum. He’s an escaped mental patient. I used to interview him a few years ago for my book. He killed his family with an ax. He bit off their fingers and used them to draw pictures on the walls.”
“Oh my God, that’s awful!” his mother says.
“Wh. . what? I did no such thing,” Adrian shouts. “Tell her, tell her the truth!”
“The police found him wearing a dress.”
“You’re lying!”
“It was his sister’s dress and it was too small for him but he wore it anyway.”