Once Buried

by Blake Pierce

  Goddamn it!

  It was Silas’s own service medal, awarded to him for his tour in Iraq.

  What the hell did this guy think he was doing with it?

  The man waved it back and forth in front of Silas’s eyes.

  “You seem to have dropped this earlier,” he said.

  Silas knew perfectly well that he hadn’t dropped it. He always carried it buttoned safely in his shirt pocket—a reminder of a long-ago time when he’d felt that his life had been of use to anybody.

  This bastard had been poking around in his pockets while he’d been unconscious.

  Still waving the medal, the man said, “So which war did they give this to you for? Operation Iraqi Freedom? No, you look too old to have served in that one. Must’ve been Desert Storm. Am I right?”

  Silas gritted his teeth.

  Now he was getting mad.

  “Get your hands off of that,” Silas said. “Give it back.”

  The man kept smiling, unperturbed.

  He said, “Anyway, I want to thank you for your service. I mean that, really. Those of us who stayed home ought to be ashamed of ourselves. We don’t appreciate you vets enough. And we’ve got no idea what you went through to defend the freedoms we take for granted. I can’t even begin to imagine. So thank you. From the bottom of my heart. I hope you don’t mind if I ask one question. If it’s none of my business, just tell me to shove it.”

  The man peered closely into Silas’s eyes.

  “Were you scared? When you were in combat, I mean? Because I don’t know whether I’d have the courage to do what you guys did, to face that kind of danger. I’m afraid I’d turn tail and run. But I guess you find the courage when you need it, right? I wouldn’t know. But you do. And I can’t help but wonder … were you scared?”

  Silas felt his face twist into an expression of sneering anger.

  He’d be damned if he’d answer this bastard’s questions.

  Even so, this question pushed his buttons.

  He sure as hell had been scared in Iraq. And he couldn’t help but feel some of that same fear all over again right now. It wasn’t just that he was mostly buried and completely immobilized.

  It was the soil itself—he’d become keenly aware of its grittiness all over him.

  Sand, he thought. I’m half-buried in sand.

  It was the sand that was getting to him most, bringing back terrible memories. His first firefight in the Iraqi desert had been terrifying in ways he couldn’t possibly have anticipated.

  Before he’d been in combat, he’d expected to be terrified by fierce explosions, muzzle flashes, and blasts of noise from enemy weapons.

  But in the thick of gunfire, he’d barely noticed any of those things.

  Instead had come the dull, rapid, eerily soft plop-plop-plop of bullets hitting the ground all around him, stirring up tiny bursts of sand in the air.

  It had almost seemed harmless at first—until, right next to him, his buddy Asher’s body erupted with spurts of blood from gunshots that Silas couldn’t even hear, the bullets making that same plop-plop-plop noise in Asher’s flesh.

  Damn right, I was scared, he thought.

  And it really pissed him off that this goon had the gall to stir up that fear all over again.

  “Get me out of here,” he hissed.

  The man who called himself Felix looked all around with mock concern.

  “Yeah, you are in an interesting situation here,” he said. “And it looks like somebody left this job unfinished. Somebody stopped in the middle of filling up this hole. He’s liable to get in trouble if it doesn’t get done. I guess it’s up to me.”

  Now the face disappeared from sight. Then the man appeared again, standing at the edge of the hole. He had a shovel in his hand.

  The man shoveled a heap of dirt that barely missed Silas’s face.

  Silas yelled, “Hey, what the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  “Somebody else’s job, it looks like,” the man said, scooping up another shovelful of dirt from a nearby pile. “No need for you to worry about it. You’re pretty inconvenienced at the moment, I can see that, so don’t even bother trying to help. I’ll take care of everything.”

  Silas was seized with real terror now—the kind of terror he often experienced in nightmares, and which he tried for many years to drown out during his waking hours with alcohol.

  He was helpless—truly helpless.

  His very immobility triggered psychic echoes of that first firefight.

  His body had been free then, but even so he’d felt paralyzed, because there was no safe place to move to. There wasn’t anywhere to run from the plop-plop-plop of bullets in the sand.

  But right now he could do one thing he hadn’t been able to do in Iraq.

  He could scream his head off.

  He screamed at the top of his lungs.

  “Help! Somebody help!”

  The man threw another shovelful of dirt into the hole, then looked around.

  “Odd that somebody bothered taping your mouth shut,” he said. “I can see taping your wrists and ankles to keep you from getting too wiggly, but what was the point of taping your mouth? I mean, who’s going to hear you? The night watchman maybe?”

  With a chuckle, he lifted up another shovelful of dirt.

  “Oh, right,” he added. “You are the night watchman!”

  Silas screamed so loud that the inside of his throat felt like it was getting scraped with sandpaper.

  “Help! Help!”

  But this time he was silenced by a shovelful of sandy dirt right in his face, filling his mouth and making him gag. He coughed and choked and tried to spit it out.

  The man above him was loading another shovel full, still smiling as agreeably as ever.

  He said, “You just keep right on yelling, if it makes you feel better. It’ll help you pass the time.”

  Silas managed to force a sound out of his throat.

  But it wasn’t a scream this time.

  He couldn’t scream now.

  Instead of a scream came a horrid, hollow, belching sound.

  A resignation started to kick in—a lie-down-and-die response he also remembered from combat when death had seemed a certainty.

  There really was no point in screaming.

  He only wanted his killer to finish the job quickly. But the man seemed to be taking his good sweet time.

  As inevitable as Silas knew death would be, it seemed to be an eternity away.

  CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN

  Riley found herself walking along the waterline of a beach.

  She was barefoot, and her pants legs were rolled up, and she might have enjoyed the walk if the sea air and the damp sand under her feet weren’t so cold.

  The sky was dusky, but she saw a glimmer of light out over the water.

  Sunset? she wondered.

  But no—the view from the nearest beach was to the east.

  Sunrise, then.

  It would be dawn before long. The thought filled her with alarm. She was dimly aware of something terrible about to happen. But for a few moments, she couldn’t quite bring to mind just what it was.

  Then it came to her …

  Someone is going to die before the sun comes up.

  And it was up to her to stop it from happening.

  But she couldn’t stop the sun.

  How could she stop death?

  She looked down at her feet as she walked, observing the ripples the retreating tide left in the sand.

  It means something, she thought.

  Indeed, the ripples kept seeming on the verge of taking the shapes of letters. She felt as though, if she could only read the ripples, she’d find out what she needed to know to save somebody’s life. But each little ebb of saltwater washed those shapes away before they became fully legible.

  She quickened her footsteps as she walked.

  Soon her eye was caught by something farther down the beach.

  It was a little makeshift wi
gwam surrounded by a crazy collection of objects of one kind or another … seashells, vases, driftwood, old toasters, broken lamps …

  It’s where Rags Tucker lives, she realized.

  She felt strangely relieved.

  Perhaps Rags Tucker could tell her what she needed to know.

  She walked up to the wigwam and pulled back the flap that hung over the opening and ducked inside.

  To her surprise, she wasn’t in Rags Tucker’s tent. Instead, she found herself inside a prison cell.

  Sitting on the edge of a hard narrow bed was a muscular African-American man wearing a prison jumpsuit.

  Shane Hatcher, Riley realized with a shudder.

  It was the brilliant but dangerous man who had for too long been both her mentor and her nemesis.

  In the past, he’d helped her understand the minds of some of the most evil killers she’d ever faced.

  He could help her now, surely.

  But did she dare ask for his help?

  Did she want to renew her connection with him—that terrible bond that had caused her so much guilt and shame?

  What choice to I have? she asked herself.

  She crouched down in front of him.

  “Hatcher, I need your help,” she said. “There’s a killer out there, and he’s going to take a victim in just a very little while, and I’ve got to find him and stop him. What can you tell me? What do I need to do?”

  Hatcher didn’t answer. He just sat there staring blankly at the wall in front of him, seemingly unaware of her presence.

  Then she remembered …

  She’d been told that Hatcher hadn’t spoken a word to a single soul since she’d found him and arrested him.

  It was as if he’d taken some kind of private vow of silence.

  As she crouched there looking at him, he reached out and touched the cell wall with his finger. He idly began to make scribbles on the wall with his finger—completely meaningless, random scribbles, not even patterned like the ripples in ocean sand or on the tops of the timers.

  The scribbles he was drawing were bright red.

  Blood, Riley realized.

  Hatcher’s fingers and hand were covered with blood.

  The blood of his victims? Riley wondered.

  After all, Shane Hatcher had brutally slain many people.

  But then she noticed that his other hand was bloody also—and it was clutching a bleeding wound in his belly. He was also bleeding from his shoulder.

  Riley recognized the wounds.

  She hadn’t caused those wounds—hadn’t shot Hatcher.

  Blaine had done that while courageously defending Riley’s family.

  But by the time she had tracked Hatcher down afterward, he’d been dying from those wounds—and he’d wanted to die.

  But Riley wouldn’t let him.

  Against his own wishes, she had saved his life.

  And so she knew what those wounds represented to Hatcher.

  They were symbols and reminders of Riley’s betrayal—not just how she’d betrayed his trust and brought him to justice, but how she’d denied him his ultimate wish.

  As his finger kept making those pointless scribbles, Riley realized …

  That’s all he’s got to say to me.

  Scribbling like this was all he was going to do from now on.

  He wanted nothing more to do with Riley.

  She felt a terrible surge of sorrow and loss.

  But why?

  Why did she even want the friendship of this bloodthirsty monster?

  She didn’t know—and she didn’t think she could ever possibly understand.

  But she did know that she needed his help right now.

  “Help me, Hatcher,” she said. “I don’t know what to do.”

  But Hatcher sat staring with glazed eyes, scribbling meaningless shapes in his own blood.

  Riley’s eyes snapped open at the sound of her phone ringing.

  Suddenly she was wide awake, although her dream still tugged at her consciousness.

  She remembered Shane Hatcher’s silence—and before that, walking on the beach, dreading the approaching dawn.

  And now she saw morning sunlight pouring in through her window.

  She sighed with despair.

  Together, the sunlight and the ringing phone could only mean one thing.

  Someone else had been killed.

  CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT

  Riley turned over on her bed to look at the ringing phone. Sure enough, the call was from Brent Meredith.

  “What’s happened?” she asked when she picked up the call.

  “Another murder,” Meredith said. “Not in the Belle Terre Nature Preserve, though. This time it was in the town of Lorneville.”

  Riley remembered that Lorneville was not far north of Sattler and Belle Terre. Although the killer had moved away from his expected turf, he was staying in the general area. But any hopes she and her colleagues had of stopping his grim murders by closing off Belle Terre were now crushed.

  Riley had feared this all along.

  Meredith added, “The body was found buried in an abandoned storage building in the marina there.”

  “And there was also a sand timer at the scene?” Riley asked.

  “Yeah, right beside the hole—and it’s running right now.”

  Riley suppressed a groan of despair.

  She thought of the two sand timers currently in the hands of Sam Flores’s team—the one that had emptied and the one that had still been running when they’d found it. Of course that second one had run out of sand a short while ago—with predictably fatal consequences.

  It’s starting all over again, she thought. We have less than twenty-four hours to stop another murder.

  Meredith said, “I’ve already called Agent Jeffreys. He says he’ll get in touch with you and Agent Roston and drive you to Lorneville.”

  Sure enough, as soon as she ended the call, Riley saw that she’d gotten a text message from Bill …

  On my way. Will pick you up in 20 minutes.

  Riley typed back …

  OK

  She felt stiff as she scrambled to her feet. She worried that neither her reflexes nor her thinking was sharp. She knew she had to pull herself together. She and her colleagues were most likely in for another long, brutal day.

  She headed to the bathroom and washed her face, then stripped off the clothes she’d slept in and put on fresh slacks and a shirt.

  Then she rushed downstairs, where she found her whole household up and around, the kids getting ready for school.

  Gabriela was fixing breakfast, and Liam was cheerfully helping her. The girls were at the table finishing their homework. Everybody looked perfectly alert and happy, as if last night’s drama had never happened.

  Resilient, Riley thought.

  The kids were definitely resilient, and so was Gabriela.

  Riley herself didn’t feel so resilient at the moment. She felt tired and discouraged. None of their efforts yesterday had done any good. They had failed to prevent another death.

  Gabriela asked, “Will you have breakfast with us, Señora Riley?”

  “I’m afraid not,” Riley said. “I’ve got to leave in just a few minutes.”

  Jilly looked at Riley and grinned eagerly.

  “Catching bad guys today?” Jilly asked.

  Even though both girls often asked her that question, Riley felt slightly jarred by it. It always sounded as though they thought Riley’s life was an adventure, like some cop show on TV. She also realized that she hadn’t told anybody in the house about her current case. She certainly didn’t want to try to explain it right now.

  With a forced smile, Riley said to Jilly, “I’ll do my best.”

  “Go get ’em, Mom,” April said.

  Gabriela handed Riley a bagel and a cup of coffee, which she carried with her outside the front door. She sat down on the stoop and downed as much of it as she could while she waited for her partners to show up.


  When Bill pulled up in front of her townhouse moments later, she was surprised to see that he was alone in the SUV. Riley took a final gulp of coffee and left the dishes on the stoop, knowing that the kids or Gabriela would collect them for her.

  “Haven’t you picked up Jenn yet?” Riley asked as she climbed into the passenger seat.

  “I tried,” Bill said, starting to drive. “I messaged her, and the messages were marked ‘read,’ but she didn’t answer them. Then I tried to call her, but she didn’t answer. After that I drove to her apartment, but when I knocked, nobody answered. So I came on here. I didn’t know what else to do.”

  Riley felt a rush of worry. This didn’t sound like Jenn at all.

  She asked Bill, “Do you think she’s already on her way to the crime scene?”

  “I don’t see how she’d know where to go. I didn’t tell her anything specific. Should we let Meredith know she won’t be joining us?”

  Riley thought for a moment. Meredith would surely be furious that Jenn hadn’t been readily available.

  “Bill, I suppose we ought to, but …”

  Her voice trailed off.

  “But what?” Bill asked.

  Riley was remembering the case she had recently worked on with Jenn in Iowa, and the terrifying text she’d gotten from Bill during that time …

  “Been sitting here with a gun in my mouth.”

  Riley hated to remind Bill about that, but she had no choice.

  She said cautiously, “Bill, do you remember when you had that suicidal spell?

  She could see Bill cringe.

  “Yeah, I remember,” he said.

  “When I flew back from Iowa to help you, I went AWOL from the case Jenn and I were working on. Jenn covered for me—lied for me, even. I don’t know what she’s doing right now or why. But I think I owe it to her to cover for her this time.”

  Bill nodded grimly.

  “I guess we both owe it to her,” he said.

  As Bill kept driving, Riley was still worrying. She took out her cell phone and called Jenn’s number. When she got her voicemail, she said, “Jenn, this is Riley. Where are you?”

  Riley waited a moment, hoping that Jenn would simply pick up the call.