by SM Reine
I turned back. Tabby was continuing her slow-motion creep down the hallway. She kept her knees bent and her arms straight out in front of her. The iron ore smell was segueing into another smell. Meat. Old meat. Maybe human bacon. That thought alone was enough to turn my stomach.
Tabby reached the end of the hall, at a point where she had a wide view into the kitchen. I heard a creak in the wood above me and glanced up.
What if Gerda—or, heaven forbid, Max—was up there and would be coming down the steps while Tabby was blissfully tip-toeing through the Twilight Zone? I tried to remember if Max Richter had made any sound when he’d breezed by me after murdering Nana. A heavy clay husk of a man would make lots of noise, right?
I craned my neck and dared a step until I could see into the kitchen. A clock with unmoving, dead hands hung on the cream-colored wall.
The moment Tabby reached the counter, her mouth fell open. She released her left hand from the pistol grip and used it to cover her mouth. A second later, she composed herself and swept the room carefully, both hands once again on the gun. The room was apparently clean. She looked back and motioned me forward.
Her face was pale white now. Even from here, I could see that her lower lip was trembling.
Ah, shit.
Do I really want to make that walk? What did you see?
Tabby gestured urgently, prodding me forward. I took quicker steps than she did, aware that the coast was clear and I didn’t have to be as cautious. However, as I neared the corner of the hallway, the pungent smell of iron and copper, pennies and rust, meat and rot, was almost overwhelming. My pace slowed as if my own legs were turning to clay.
When I reached the corner, just before I turned to look around the edge, Tabby put a hand on my chest. “It’s bad,” she whispered.
So much for clean.
She didn’t look at me, but kept her eyes on the kitchen, her left hand holding the pistol up.
Then she dropped her hand, and I moved forward, around the hallway corner, and took in the entire kitchen.
She was wrong.
It wasn’t bad.
It was horrible. The most horrible thing I have ever seen in my entire life. Worse than the mice. Worse than Max Richter’s cold face. Worse than seeing Amanda’s smiling face in that picture with Petey. I turned back around the corner and heaved out my entire lunch, doing my best to do so as quietly as possible.
You try seeing what I saw, then having to puke up a peanut butter sandwich sliding on a cognac rainbow.
34
There was blood everywhere. On everything.
But at the moment, I was looking down into a pool of my own vomit, my recently eaten lunch hardly digested at all. Tabby was kneeling next to me. She patted me on the back.
“Pull it together, Shipway.”
“You need to call backup,” I managed to say.
“I already did, while you were throwing up.”
“How long was I throwing up?”
“Long enough for me to call backup.” She straightened and stepped into the kitchen. She had gotten over her own case of the shakes, and some color had returned to her face. Even with her training, a nightmare was still a nightmare. “Get up, Al. This is some serious shit.”
I didn’t want to get up. I wanted to run back the way I had come.
But there was a killer here in this house, and this was no time to be a pussy. In fact, it was damn well time I quit being one. In fact, I could think of no better time for me to not be one.
And every nerve in my body screamed at me to scramble away, dash back through the house, say “Nice hanging with you” to that damned elk, and tear away in the Jag.
And because that was my first instinct, I knew it was wrong.
I stood. My legs were shaky. I braced myself on the wall. In the near distance I heard more digging, more sounds of a shovel scraping hard into dirt. I turned and headed toward Tabby’s side.
Before me was a rather small and rustic kitchen. The walls were painted prison white, with half a dozen country paintings of roosters and hens and other farm-type animals. It looked like rent-some-art that had come with the house purchase, because I couldn’t see Gerda ever selecting such paintings, much less taking the time to arrange them along the walls.
There was a round kitchen table with two red candles knocked over. Next to one of the candles, cut neatly below the second knuckle, was a human finger. The blood had drained and pooled around the digit, and the bone gleamed shockingly white.
The gorge started to rise again, though I didn’t have anything left. I fought the rising with everything I had, shoving my fist into my mouth. I used my other hand to cover my nose, to filter air—anything to arrest the warm, penny-like smell of fresh blood.
It didn’t work. The smell was all-pervasive, even over my own acidic stench.
Covering everything on one side of the room, from the kitchen table to the small dinette, to the ceiling and walls, to the stove and microwave, was fresh blood. Some if it, where it had splattered the thickest, was still sliding down vertical walls and doors, leaving behind coagulating trails that looked like Jackson Pollock’s most demented wet dream.
“Do you think it’s the baby?” I asked, my voice barely above a whisper.
She shook her head. “Too much blood. Keep quiet.”
I nodded. Maybe not scientific, but it made sense. I didn’t know how much blood a body could hold, but this one looked like a couple of five-gallon buckets’ worth.
There were a few other things on the table—an open book with frayed edges, a pair of scissors, needle and thread, and a pile of cloth. It looked like someone had been making a little puppet.
A plaything for Petey, or a death doll?
Tabby moved again, and I followed, shaky but alert. I could almost make it through without stepping on blood, but it required ballet moves. I imagined the blood would have been quite slippery, but we were moving carefully enough not to lose our balance.
We eased across the linoleum where great puddles of the stuff had pooled in the floor’s slight indentations. Streams and splotches of it were crisscrossed across the refrigerator. A fine mist of blood had swept across the cabinets. Two huge, gooey lines ran parallel together up a cupboard, as if jetting from twin arteries.
I tried not to imagine the condition of the vessel that had once housed the fluid. I swallowed hard and glanced at the fridge door, wondering what was behind it.
Jeffrey Dahmer, eat your heart out.
I followed Tabitha through the kitchen of horror, picking my way over the bloody floor. Behind me, I left macabre footprints. The soles of my boots sometimes stuck and sometimes squelched. A sickening sound, one that grated on my nerves like few sounds ever had, perhaps even the worst part of this whole kitchen experience.
Spluch spluch spluch.
Finally, thankfully, we stepped through a sort of squared arch and into the dining room. There was carpet here, and a thick trail of red footprints and a bloody smear ran across the carpet before us and hung a right down the stairs that must lead to the back yard. Something big and bloody had been dragged out of the room and down the stairs.
Tabby did her thing, swinging her pistol around corners. I guess that’s how you had to do it, expecting the worst, then feeling a little relieved and silly to find yet another empty room after all that build-up.
No one was waiting for us in the dining room.
The digging was louder, sharper, more distinct. It was coming up through the stairwell. The house was built against a side of a hill. Although we were on the first floor, the stairs down would have been needed to reach the backyard beyond.
Despite it all, the blood, the digging, everything, Tabby had the wherewithal to pause next to a stack of papers on the dining room table. There was a suitcase on the floor and a purse on its side in a chair. It looked like someone was ready for a trip.
Keeping her gun trained on the stairwell, she rifled through the papers and produced a passport booklet. Sh
e flipped it open. She glanced at it and tossed it to me. I promptly dropped it. It landed on a clean section of carpet. Thank God. I wondered how the hell Gerda was going to clean this place, but then again, she probably had learned some pretty good pointers from her serial-killing father. And resale value seemed the least of her concerns at the moment.
I plucked the passport up and looked inside. Gerda’s unsmiling mug glared back. Her normally brunette hair was dyed platinum blonde now and was pulled back perhaps a little too tightly. Her lips were tight and hard. When she was drunk, and feeling a little horny, those tight buds would blossom into the softest of flowers. Reason enough to get her liquored up.
That’s what I thought. That’s just how my mind works. So shoot me.
The name, according to the passport, was Sabrina Lynn Butcher. A sense of humor. I always dug that in a psychopathic murderer.
Tabby picked up another passport, looked at it, and audibly gasped, unconsciously lowering her gun. I set down Gerda’s fake passport and gently took the second one from her hand.
There he was, the poor little tyke. But according to the passport his name was Charles Lane Butcher.
One other thing: Petey’s fine, curly hair was now dyed blond.
Very disturbing.
Even more so because now he looked a lot more like Amanda than he did me.
Tabby was shaking again, perhaps with a combination of emotions. If so, the most prevalent was rage. Tears welled up in her eyes. She didn’t look like a hard-nosed detective. She looked like a very wounded sister and aunt and granddaughter. Probably why detectives never worked on personal cases.
There were other documents there as well, one of them a visa to South Africa. Gerda had done some business in South Africa, and had traveled there at least two times. With the visa were credit cards and a driver’s license, all with her fake name. There was even a fake birth certificate with Petey’s fake name. All of which could be obtained if you knew the right people and had enough time and money. And being the daughter of a serial killer probably carried a little extra clout in the criminal underground.
Tabby was taking deep, shuddering breaths. She had lowered her gun and was staring down at the carpet. Tears ran down her cheeks.
I put a hand on her shoulder, and she spun around and swung the gun up to my face. Her lower lip was quivering. Tears and saliva pooled between her lips and teeth. Her eyes were red and wild, filled with heartbreaking pain.
“My grandmother was right,” she hissed, grabbing the passport out of my hand. “You brought this on Amanda, you asshole. You couldn’t keep your rotten goddamned rodent in your pants, and now look what you’ve done!”
She waved Petey’s fake passport in my face, then threw it back down onto the dining table. It landed hard, skidded, and toppled onto a seat cushion, where it lay accusingly open.
I wanted to wet myself. In fact, I had to make a pointed effort to control my bladder. I mean, that would have really caused one hell of a cleaning job on that carpet.
“Easy, Tabby. I never meant for this to happen. We’re on the same side. We’re beyond that now. Just move the gun away and let’s get Petey. This means he’s alive.”
She held the gun unwaveringly, inches in front of my forehead. She wasn’t entirely there. Her eyes shifted crazily for a moment, but then she blinked hard and lowered the gun.
“Oh, God. I’m sorry,” she said.
I was about to reach out and pat her shoulder, but then remembered she had been about to kill me three seconds earlier, and thought better of it, since touching her had started this in the first place. Don’t ever test a woman’s mood swings while she’s armed.
“Look, it’s all my fault, okay? Kill me later. You have my full permission. But later, okay?”
“Yeah. You sure do say you’re sorry a lot.”
“Had a hell of a lot of practice.”
When we fell silent, I realized how loudly we’d been talking, almost shouting. I heard a jay chattering from outside a nearby window, in one of the surrounding pines.
But that’s all I heard.
The digging had stopped.
35
Tabby ducked into the stairwell and headed down, less cautious now. The stairwell must have been clean, because when she reached the downstairs she then moved over to a little French door that opened onto a back patio deck. She slithered next to it and peered cautiously out. Then rose to her tip toes. She looked at me and shook her head
I didn’t know if that meant she couldn’t see or if the coast was clear.
And as she shifted her weight to step away from the door, the wood flooring beneath her creaked. No, popped, like an old man’s knees. It was a horrendously loud sound from someone trying to remain silent. The groaning wood seemed to echo down through the house, reverberating along its sister planks of wood. Anyone even mildly alert for trouble would surely come to investigate the sound.
Maybe with a shovel, maybe with a machete, maybe with an army of golems.
Tabby pressed herself against the wall. Standing at the head of the stairs, I had nothing to press myself against. I held my breath until the ground started to shift under my feet. Then I took little gasps through the corner of my mouth, the hot air whispering along my cheeks. Sweat poured down my brow, into my eyes, and down into my shirt collar. The taste of peanut-butter bile was strong in my mouth. I needed a drink, something to cut the cloying mucous and dull all those troublesome senses.
We waited a full minute, or perhaps it was a few minutes. I wasn’t exactly looking at my watch. At any rate, the angle of the sun barely changed as it splashed through the open French door and spread in bright splotches across the Berber carpet, catching some of the blood and illuminating it like fresh ribbons. As if a flesh parade had come through there, and the bloody ribbons were the aftermath.
Tabby and I watched each other, although she occasionally flicked her gaze toward the door. But there was nothing coming toward it. Then again, someone could have come up through the side gate and in through the front door. I peered back through the kitchen of horror, but my angle was limited. Still, there didn’t seem to be anyone coming from that direction.
And then the digging resumed. But the digging sounded softer somehow, less of the harsh cutting of metal through hard-packed dirt and more of the softer hiss of metal meeting less resistance.
Tabby gestured with her head and put her hand on the elegant handle to the French door. I hurried down the stairs, not wanting to be left alone.
Wanting in on the action, I mean.
36
I kicked something on the final step, and it flopped with a moist, leathery sound. I cringed, expecting a flap of scalp or maybe a human glove.
Tabby paused, bent over, and plucked up a battered and bloodied wallet. She flipped it open with one hand, keeping her gun trained on the door, and held the wallet up for my viewing, her intentions obvious enough: Do you know this guy?
A California State driver’s license was in a clear plastic sleeve. A man named Duncan Smith, middle-aged, a little poochy looking, the kind who’d probably be easy prey for a woman’s smile and tale of woe. Broken-down dishwasher, TV remote acting up, you name it. He’d probably seen it play out in a porn movie once and thought it was real life. That was dangerous, especially in California.
I noted with chagrin that he was a certified organ donor. It looked like Gerda had fulfilled his final wish.
Even poochy, even gullible, he didn’t deserve to be slaughtered.
And neither did Amanda.
“Born victim,” I said.
“We all are,” Tabby said.
We listened. More sounds of soft scooping. The thud of dirt landing.
Tabby raised a finger and began counting down from three.
What the hell was she doing?
I dared not say anything. Her fingers showed two, then one. I needed to use the bathroom or the bar or anything except this door.
She took a deep breath, yanked down on the
handle, flung the door outward, and jumped onto the patio, gun pointed with both hands. “Freeze, bitch!”
I’m not sure if that particular maneuver was in the hostage handbook.
37
The hunched figure, back to us, was alone in the yard. The yard was fenced in, meaning no neighbors were likely to see us. At the rear of the yard was a gardening shed, opened so that tools showed.
Next to the pit was a small mound of freshly turned dirt, and next to the mound was a baby seat. The seat was turned around, its back to us.
“Your hands,” Tabby shouted, with enough authority that I started to raise mine before I remembered whose side I was on. “I want to see your hands or you take a bullet in the back of the head.”
The figure with its back to us, draped in a multicolored woolen overcoat, raised both hands. In the left hand was a shovel. I noticed the predominant color on the multi-colored overcoat was red. Blood red.
“Drop the shovel!” Tabby’s voice nearly cracked with huskiness.
The person dropped the shovel, which landed in the pit, and then raised both hands again.
Mirroring the movement of the person standing next to it, the baby raised its two tiny little fists in the air. It would have been cute if it hadn’t been so horrific.
Petey....
I also noticed something else. From my angle—and I was a tall guy—I could see down into the pit. And I could see the back of a hand slumped up against the dirt wall. The hand was missing an index finger.
“Turn around,” said Tabby. Although she barked the order, she had lowered her voice once she saw that the person outside the pit had cooperated so far. It looked like this was going to end peacefully.
The figure standing before the pit turned slowly around. I first recognized the sharp profile, the hard-set jaw, and then the fresh platinum hair.
I was relieved that it was Gerda, but I also felt a rush of heartburn that made the peanut-butter barf seem smooth by comparison. God, the bitch was still beautiful, even after the long absence, and the changes, and the fact that she’d kidnapped my baby and embarked on a killing spree.
