An Ice Cold Grave (Harper Connelly #3) 0

"At least we could go sit out in our car. That would be better."

"We can do that."

We washed the coffee mugs we'd used earlier and put them in the dish drainer. We pulled on our outer gear. As quietly as though we were burglars, we stepped out of the kitchen door into the carport, and got in our car. A big pickup was parked behind Twyla's Cadillac, and I was relieved we weren't blocked in. Tolliver turned on the engine, and the temperature was barely tolerable after five minutes. It wasn't getting any warmer as the day wore on, and the sky was looking grayer and grayer.

After ten minutes, without us exchanging a word, Tolliver backed out of the driveway and we went back to the motel.

Our room was blessedly warm. I fixed us some hot chocolate, and we sat with our hands around the hot mugs, drinking the watery stuff. I got the book I was reading, and stretched out on my bed to try to get lost in it, but it was impossible to get away from the dead boys.

"Eight of them," Tolliver said. He was sitting in one of the chairs, his feet propped on his bed.

"Yeah," I said. "It was really, really awful."

"Do you want to tell me about it?"

"It's almost too bad to talk about, Tolliver. They were tortured with knives and beatings and all sorts of stuff. They were raped. They were killed slowly. It took a while. I got the impression that there was more than one person there."

Tolliver looked sick.

"I'm sorry for Twyla, then," he said. "This will be worse than just finding him as a skeleton with a broken leg at the bottom of a steep slope."

"It's going to get even worse before it gets better." We'd found plenty of accidental deaths - particularly in the mountains. Most people didn't understand that the terrain could kill you, or perhaps they became complacent in a familiar environment. Hunters, especially, grew so used to carrying guns outdoors that they grew lax about the basic safety rules. They carried their rifles carelessly. They let their cell phone batteries die out. They didn't tell anyone where they were going to hunt. They didn't carry any first aid equipment. They didn't have a hunting buddy. They forgot to wear orange.

But these deaths were far from accidental.

"Yes, it'll be a lot worse," I said again. "And there'll be someone to blame. Someone around here did this."

Tolliver stared at me for a minute. "Right," he said finally. "No one but someone local would bury the bodies there. All together."

"Yeah, no one from out of town would make a trip back to that site to bury a body eight times." That seemed like a reasonable assumption to me.

"Were they killed there? Do you know?"

"I didn't read all of them," I said. "The first one, the first grave - yeah, he died in the old house, or in the shed. Without looking inside, I can't be sure which."

"He took them in there, did everything?"

I puzzled through the rush of impressions I'd gotten. "Yeah, I think so," I said doubtfully. There was something about the feeling of the deaths, something a little off.

"Definitely someone local," my brother said.

"In a small community like this, how is that possible?" I asked.

"You mean, how could a man conceal from other people the fact that he wanted to torture and kill boys?"

I nodded. "And how come the people around here haven't been up in arms about the fact that so many boys are missing?"

"I guess, if no bodies are found, it's a little easier to explain away," Tolliver said.

And then we sat, thinking dark but separate thoughts, pretending from time to time to read, until the early darkness fell. Then Sheriff Rockwell knocked on our door. Tolliver ushered her in. Her dark green uniform pants were covered with stains, and her heavy jacket was smudged, too. "Me and the SBI guys, we've been digging," she said. "You were right. All our boys are there, and even a couple extra."

Chapter 5

SHE sat in one of the two chairs. Tolliver and I sat on the side of his bed facing her. She was already holding a cup of steaming coffee from McDonald's, so I didn't offer her hot chocolate. She didn't bring up our departure from Twyla's. She looked exhausted but wired up.

She said, "We're going to get a lot of attention in the next few days. The TV stations are already calling the office. They'll be sending crews. The State Bureau of Investigation has taken charge, but they're letting me stay in it. They want me to liaise with you two, since I brought you in. The supervising agent, Pell Klavin, and Special Agent Max Stuart will want to talk to you.

"You know what I wish?" she said, when we didn't speak. "I wish I could write you your check, and you could just leave town. This thing is going to focus attention on Doraville.... Well, I guess you-all know what it's like. Not only are we going to look like we were so uncaring we let some maniac kill eight boys before we noticed, but we're going to look credulous in the extreme."

If the shoe fits, I thought.

"We'd leave now if we could," Tolliver said, and I nodded. "We don't want to be around for the circus." Some media attention was good for my business; a lot of media attention was not.

Sheriff Rockwell sat back in the motel chair, a sudden motion that made us look at her. She was giving us a strange look.

"What?" Tolliver asked.

"I'd never have believed you two'd pass at the chance for free publicity," she said. "I think the better of you for it. Are you really ready to go? Maybe I can ask the SBI boys to drive to the next town to talk to you, if you want to switch motels tonight."

"We'll leave Doraville tonight," I said. I felt like a huge weight had been shifted off my shoulders. I'd been sure the sheriff would insist we stay. I hate police cases. I like the cemetery bookings. Get to the town, drive out to the cemetery, meet the survivors, stand on the grave, tell the survivors what you saw. Cash the check and leave the town. Sheriff Rockwell was at least allowing us to get out of the immediate vicinity.

"Let's wait until morning," Tolliver said. "You're still pretty shaky."

"I can rest in the car," I said. I felt like a rabbit one jump ahead of the greyhounds.

"Okay," Tolliver said. He looked at me doubtfully. But he was picking up on my almost frantic anxiety to leave Doraville.

"Good," said the sheriff. She still sounded faintly surprised at our agreement. "I'm sure Twyla will want to give you a check and talk to you again."

"We'll talk to her before we leave the area for good. How's the work at the scene going?" he asked as the sheriff pulled herself wearily from the chair and walked to the door.

She had mentally shoved us aside, so she turned back with reluctance. "We've dug just enough at all the spots to confirm that there are remains there," she said. "Tomorrow morning, when the light is good, the forensic guys will be here to supervise the digging. I'm guessing my deputies will do most of the preliminary heavy work. Klavin and Stuart are supposed to keep me in the loop." She seemed pretty dubious about that.

"That's a good thing, right?" I said, almost babbling in my rush of relief. "Having the forensic guys in? They'll know how to dig the bodies up without losing any evidence that's there to be found."

"Yeah, we don't like admitting we need help, but we do." Sandra Rockwell looked down at her hands for a minute, as if making sure they were her own. "I've personally gotten phone calls from CNN and two other networks. So you should leave really early in the morning, or take off right now. And call me when you check into another motel. Don't leave the state or anything. Don't forget that you'll have to talk to the SBI guys."

"We'll do that," Tolliver said.

She left without further advice, and I grabbed my suitcase. It would take me less than ten minutes to be out of there.

Tolliver got up, too, and began sticking his razor and shaving cream into his valet kit. "Why are you so anxious to go?" he asked. "I think you need to sleep."

"It was so bad, what I saw," I said. I paused in my packing, a folded sweater in my hands. "The last thing in the world I want to do is get sucked into this investigation. I'll get the atlas. We better decide which way we want to go."

Though I was still a little unsteady on my feet, I grabbed our keys off the top of the TV. While Tolliver checked the stock in our ice chest, I stepped out into the dark to open the car. I shut the door behind me. The night was cold and silent. There were lots of lights on in Doraville, including the one right above my head, but that still didn't amount to much. I pulled on my heavy jacket while I looked up at the sky. Though the night was cloudy, I could see the distant glitter of a scattering of stars. I like to look at them, especially when my job gets me down. They're vast and cold and far away; my problems are insignificant compared to their brilliance.

Sometime soon, it would snow. I could almost smell it coming in the air.

I shook off the spell of the night sky, and thought about my more immediate concerns. I clicked the car's keyless entry pad and stepped off the little sidewalk that ran outside our door. Something moved in my peripheral vision and I began to turn my head.

A crushing blow struck my arm just below my elbow. The pain was immediate and intense. I shouted, wordless with alarm, and pressed the panic button on the keypad. The horn began to blare, though in the next instant the keys fell from my numb fingers. I tried to turn to face the danger, trying to throw my hands up to protect myself. The left arm would not obey. I could only make out a man clad in black with a knit hood over his head, and a second blow was already arcing toward the side of my head. Though I launched myself sideways to avoid the full force of the impact, I thought my head would fly off my shoulders when the shovel grazed my skull. I started down to the sidewalk. The last thing I remember is trying to throw my hands out to break my fall, but only one of them answered my command.

"SHE'LL be okay, right?" I heard Tolliver's voice, but it was louder and sharper than usual. "Harper, Harper, talk to me!"

"She's going to come around in a minute," said a calm voice. Older man.

"It's cold out here," Tolliver shouted. "Get her into the ambulance."

Oh, shit, we couldn't afford that. Or at least, we shouldn't spend our money this way. "No," I said, but it didn't come out coherently.

"Yes," he said. He'd understood me; God bless Tolliver. What if I were by myself in this world? What if he decided...Oh, Jesus, my head hurt. Was that blood on my hand?

"Who hit me?" I asked, and Tolliver said, "Someone hit you? I thought you fainted! Someone hit her! Call the police."

"Okay, buddy, they'll meet us at the hospital," said the calm voice again.

My arm hurt worse than anything I'd ever felt. But then, just about every part of my body hurt. I wanted someone to knock me out. This was awful.

"Ready?" asked a new voice.

"One, two, three," said the calm one, and I was on a gurney and choking on a shriek at the pain of being moved.

"That shouldn't have hurt so much," New Voice said. New Voice was a woman. "Does she have another injury? Besides the head?"

"Arm," I tried to say.

"Maybe you shouldn't move her," my brother said.

"We've already moved her," Calm Voice pointed out.

"Is she all right?" asked still another voice. That was a really stupid question, in my opinion.

Then they rolled me to the ambulance; I opened my eyes again, just a crack, to see the flashing red lights. I had another pang of dismay about the money this was going to cost; but then when they slid me in, I had no pangs about anything for a while.

I fluttered up to awareness in the hospital. I saw a man leaning over me, a man with clipped gray hair and gleaming wire-rimmed glasses. His face looked serious but benevolent. Exactly the way a doctor ought to look. I hoped he was a doctor.

"Do you understand me?" he said. "Can you count my fingers?"

That was two questions. I tried to nod to show I could understand him. That was a big mistake. What fingers?

The next thing I knew, I was in a dim warm room, and I had the impression I was wrapped in swaddling clothes. No room at the inn? I opened my eyes. I appeared to be in a bed, and very snugly wrapped in white cotton blankets. There was a light on over my bed, but it was on low, and there was a hush that told me the night was in its small hours, its weak hours...probably about three a.m. There was an orange recliner by the bed, and it was as stretched out as it could get. Tolliver was asleep on it, wrapped in another hospital blanket. There was blood on his shirt. Mine?

I was very thirsty.

A nurse padded in, took my pulse, checked my temperature. She smiled when she saw I was awake and looking at her, but she didn't speak until her tasks were complete.

"Can I get you anything?" she asked in a low voice.

"Water," I said, hopefully.

She held a straw to my lips and I took a tug or two on the cup of water. I hadn't realized how dry my mouth was until it filled with the refreshing coldness. I was on an IV. I needed to pee.

"I need to go to the bathroom," I whispered.

"Okay. You can get up, if I help you. We'll take it real slow," she said.

She let down the side of the bed, and I began to swing upright. That was a real bad idea, and I held still as my head swam. She put an arm around me. Very slowly, I finished straightening. While her arm continued to support me, she spared a hand to lower the bed. I slid off slowly and carefully until my bare feet touched the chilly linoleum, and we shuffled over to the bathroom, rolling the IV along. Getting down on the toilet was tricky, but the relief that followed made the trip worthwhile.