“God have mercy on me,” I said as I slipped the gun back under the bed. As I did so, my telephone began to ring in the living room.
I opened the door to the bedroom, walked over, and picked the phone up from its cradle. I cleared my throat.
“Hello?”
No response. Just breathing.
“Hello?” I said again.
The line went dead.
Evelyn had suffered two losses inside of a week. That should have been bad enough, but it wasn’t. Things were about to get much worse.
THIRTEEN
Pearce—or at least what was left of him—was buried several days later. I woke up real early that morning so I could get dressed for his funeral without having to be in a hurry. I put on my cheap brown suit—the same one I had worn to the little girl’s service—and put on the same black shoes. I would have worn the suit to Gloria Shaw’s funeral, which was two days before Pearce’s, but I didn’t go. I wouldn’t have felt comfortable being there without him. I knew the federales would be there with their cameras, and I didn’t want to be the weirdo that stood out. I combed my hair back and put it in a ponytail. After that I sat down on the couch and watched the television with a cup of coffee. The news station was doing a retrospective of the man’s life. Following that was yet another report of a local man putting a bullet in a stray dog.
Because of that fucking sergeant at the botched press conference, dogs were becoming an endangered species in our little town. Every once in a while I heard a shot in the distance. It was like being overseas, hearing shots in the night, and I didn’t like it.
The night before, the FBI had taken over the network and put on an hourlong show about the Rose Killer. It had broadcast nationally from right there in Evelyn, the middle of nowhere, to every corner of the country. All during the show an 800 number scrolled along the bottom of the screen. For anyone who had information, operators were standing by, eager to talk.
The program gave a time line of the events in the case going all the way back to California, and all the victims got their fifteen minutes of fame. I suppose this was a technique to humanize the girls, to try to inspire crippling guilt in the killer.
One of the agents read off a laundry list of evidence they had gathered from all the crime scenes: semen, which I knew about, a hair, and a fingerprint, which I didn’t know about. I wondered if they were lying to make the killer think it was only a matter of time. I also had to wonder what they were holding back.
Halfway through the program, another agent described the FBI profile of the killer. He was supposed to be a white male. He wasn’t supposed to have a regional accent, and if he did, it would be very faint. He was high school educated, but in all likelihood didn’t graduate. They were presuming the lack of job opportunities that came along with a poor education would have made it easier for the killer to wander. Either that or he was a trucker.
I immediately thought of the goon who had been beating on Alice’s mother. He had blown into town from God knows where, and clearly wasn’t a people person. I had his knife in my kitchen. Maybe, I thought, I should track the fucker down and see what he knows.
According to the FBI, the killer had no visible scars, mutations, or defects. He was a normal-looking man, which was why he was always able to blend into his environments without being noticed. He was a chameleon. A guy with a peg leg and an eye patch would have stuck out. However, they did believe he either had a stutter or was missing toes or something. Something for the man to feel insecure about without it showing for all the world to see.
They believed the killer’s mother was abusive, perhaps overly promiscuous, and the killer maybe even had an aunt or a sister who didn’t do too good by him either. They believed that there was some cataclysmic event that touched off the murders in the first place, something like the killer losing his job, or finding out his old lady was cheating on him, or that she was pregnant. Something stressful to drive him over the edge. The FBI man explained that whatever it was, specifically, it would surely be something that they had come across before, and they understood. There were people out there who cared about the killer, and they knew he needed someone to talk to. It would be better for everyone involved—both the FBI and the killer—if he came to them before they dragged him out of whatever bed he was sleeping in, and whether it was tomorrow, next week, or next month, they would find him.
They said he should turn himself in. Even if the killer didn’t think so, there were people out there who cared about him and didn’t want to see him get hurt. This was something they had seen a thousand times. They said that once he was apprehended, the people who cared would pop up like flowers to comfort him. The reference to flowers was obvious, and was clearly another attempt to connect to the man.
I don’t know if the FBI program was always scheduled to take place when it did, or if they bumped it up so there was a potential for good news on the day of a fellow lawman’s funeral.
I was nervous about going to the funeral. More than anything I was dreading seeing Martha. I couldn’t bear to see her in pain. There was a part of me that was now a home for Danny Pearce. Because of that, I knew her likes, her dislikes. I knew what she tasted like, what her bathroom habits were. I knew how much she loved him, and what she looked like naked. I could never make those images go away no matter how much I wanted to. They just happened.
The phone rang. I broke into a cold sweat and reached for it.
“Hello?”
A shallow breath on the other end of the line.
“When I find out who this is …” I said, and then the line went dead.
I had been getting the hang-up calls since the day Pearce died. They were relentless. Somehow, whoever was behind it always knew when I was home, when I was awake. I didn’t like it one bit. I had enough to worry about as it was—I didn’t need a fucking stalker making me look over my shoulder. I felt like I was being targeted.
I polished off my cup of coffee and headed out the door.
Wild Oaks Cemetery was about a hundred and fifty years old. There was a large area of Civil War burials that took up a good quarter of the land space. Off to one side of the grounds was a narrow pond, like a cascading teardrop on the ground, and scattered about were mangled trees consumed by foot-high patches of ivy. Some of the older graves were buried by the stuff, and no one ever bothered to clear it away. That’s how you knew the families of the deceased weren’t around anymore—no one looked after the final resting places of the ancestors.
The feds’ forensic team had retrieved all the information they could from the detective’s body, but the question still remained: What had killed him?
No one knew. The scientists wanted to have the burial postponed as long as possible to do their tests, especially after word filtered through to them from local law enforcement regarding the slew of similarly disposed-of bodies in the area surrounding Evelyn over the last few years. However, the pressure was on to have the service, both from the wife and from Pearce’s friends on the force.
“Shouldn’t have to keep the man on ice like that,” I heard some black-clad cop say before the service.
“Fuckin’ A, man,” said another. “Unless it’s a rape.”