The Secrets We Bury

by Debra Webb

  He studied her a moment, his expression closed. “She stands by her assertion that she’s had no contact with her ex-husband since their daughter disappeared.”

  Rowan had her doubts on the matter.

  “As for the search, there is nothing new beyond his possible appearance here, in your charming little town.”

  Rowan had her doubts about that, too. She waffled a bit on the idea, but she couldn’t see Julian taking that level of risk just to be near her.

  “We’ve set up a second special task force,” Dressler went on. “This one is working specifically to tie all the murders to the souvenirs we found in his home in Hendersonville. Then, of course, we have the one focused solely on finding him and bringing him in, to which Chief Brannigan and I are both are assigned.”

  “So you actually have nothing as of yet,” Rowan surmised. Whenever someone evaded the question by providing detailed answers to other aspects of the subject, then he had nothing relevant to share.

  Dressler gave a quick nod. “We have nothing beyond his call to you and the gift he left you.”

  “He’s here or he’s been here.” Billy was adamant on the matter.

  “We believe so, as well,” Dressler granted, “but we can’t confirm his movements. We have a lot of theories about where he might be and what he’s doing but we have no—zero—proof of any of it. We’re learning he has a history of using puppets.”

  Outrage flashed inside her when his gaze rested on Rowan as he said the last. The words made her want to launch a protest, but the agent already knew how she felt. Initiating that debate with him wouldn’t accomplish anything. More likely it would expose her emotions to him. Julian had not used her to harm anyone. Not until the past two months, anyway, and then he hadn’t used her for an aspect of his kills. She had only been the motive.

  Which was bad enough.

  “He has considerable resources,” she reminded the agent. “If he wanted to disappear and never be found, he could.”

  “Which is exactly why we believe he’s still close,” Dressler said. “It’s clear he isn’t finished taunting you, Dr. DuPont. This is why your cooperation and protection are essential.”

  Before Billy could grab that ball and run with it, Rowan asked, “What about this ex-wife who has suddenly stepped into the picture? Are you really going to accept her word that the two of them have had no contact?” She still couldn’t get right with the idea that Julian had never once mentioned a wife or a daughter.

  Then again, he didn’t tell you about all the people he had murdered, either.

  “We can’t find a single connection between the two of them beyond the marriage license they obtained in Mexico and the subsequent divorce. We’ve checked cell phone records, computer histories, friends, colleagues, neighbors. According to his wife they had a difference of opinion on raising their daughter and when she disappeared, that ended any connection between them.”

  Rowan tried hard to imagine Alisha as part of her and her family’s past, but she could not dig up a single memory.

  “So what now?” she asked. “Where are your vast powers of analysis leading you at this point, considering his call to me and the message left on my mother’s mirror?”

  “To some finale with you,” Dressler said bluntly. “We believe you are the answer to finding him.”

  Finally, someone who agreed with her.

  “I don’t like the sound of that, Agent Dressler,” Billy argued.

  “Dr. DuPont is familiar with the tactic,” he assured Billy, which would not make him feel the slightest bit better. “She has served on numerous joint task forces in the past.”

  Billy turned to the man then. “Playing a role on a task force and putting herself in the crosshairs of a killer as bait are two very different things.”

  “We have a new plan, Chief,” Dressler stated, not put off at all by Billy’s distrust. “We have reason to believe Dr. DuPont is not someone Addington is willing to leave behind. If Dr. DuPont will cooperate, I am confident we will catch him.”

  “Have you found evidence to confirm that conclusion?” Rowan watched his face for tells. He certainly sounded sure of himself but he would, without question, inflate the truth if it served his purpose. The end justified the means.

  Dressler nodded. “We have. We found videos of you going back to the first time he saw you as a patient.”

  “That’s no surprise.” Rowan didn’t see this revelation as a game changer at all. The sessions of patients were often recorded.

  “There are others,” Dressler went on. “Videos that are obviously from well before you were in college. He’s been watching you for a very long time, Rowan. The man is and has been utterly obsessed with you for longer than you know.”

  “What sort of videos?”

  The agent shrugged. “Videos of you walking to school when you were a teenager, maybe fifteen or sixteen Standing outside the school gym on prom night when you were a senior. Dozens of candid moments in your life.”

  His words sliced through Rowan. Somehow she had hoped whatever news the agent had would help solve the mystery of Julian Addington, but all he’d done so far was add another cryptic layer to a history of which she had no recall.

  Still, considering this new evidence, Rowan could no longer deny the facts. Julian had been somehow connected to her family well before she’d met him.

  Thirteen

  Billy stood in an exam room in the ER, his hands on his hips, shaking his head. “Do we know what the hell happened?”

  Juanita Wilburn lay on the exam table, her skin gray, eyes open and her mouth slack.

  Officer Lebron White shrugged. “Dr. Walker said they’re running a tox screen to confirm what’s in her system, but he’s guessing, based on her medical records and the blood pressure medication she was prescribed—I think he called it a beta-blocker—that she swallowed, like, a whole prescription of the pills. The empty bottle was lying next to her. They tried real hard to save her but they couldn’t get her heart to start beating again.”

  Damn it all to hell. He’d had more questions for Juanita but he’d wanted to give her time to pull herself together. “Are the evidence techs at her home?”

  White nodded. “Soon as I saw the words on her wall, I called them.” He held up a plastic evidence bag. “And the folks working to resuscitate her found this in her throat. The note’s inside a plastic sandwich baggy and I placed the whole thing in this bag to preserve any possible trace evidence.”

  Billy took the evidence bag and read the note through the layers of plastic.

  You should have watched this one more closely, Rowan.

  “This is what’s written on her wall.” White held up his cell phone.

  On the screen was an image of the woman lying in her bed, words painted in red—maybe blood, according to White—scrawled across the wall above her: They’re all going to know what you did.

  Billy heaved a sigh. “All right. Go back to her place and make sure they don’t miss anything. I want to know if the blood on her wall is her brother’s. I’ll call Burt. We’ll need to send both her and her brother to the state lab for autopsies.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Billy made the necessary call and headed out to his truck as he listened to three rings. One of the techs at the vet clinic answered, and Billy heard dogs barking in the background as he waited for Burt to pick up. Burt didn’t actually handle the patients at his two veterinarian clinics anymore; he mostly oversaw the operations. After all, the man was pushing eighty.

  “I take it we’re going to need autopsies,” the older man said in lieu of a greeting. “Louis Walker told me about the note they found.”

  “Yep,” Billy confirmed. “We’ll need one on the brother and the sister.”

  “All right, well, I’m about to make your day a little worse.”

  Billy started his
truck. “I’m listening.”

  “After I heard about the note, I took another look at Damon Miller. He had a note tucked into his throat, too. Damned thing was in there so deep I didn’t see it the first time.”

  Son of a bitch. It wasn’t that the identity of his officer’s murderer was news to Billy. He’d known it was Addington. But to hear that the bastard used him, as he had Juanita Wilburn, as a messenger made Billy sick and mad as hell at the same time. Son of a bitch!

  “Can you read it to me?”

  “Sure. Sure. Hold on a minute.” Burt fumbled around on his desk and then said, “‘Who’s going to protect you, Rowan, while he sleeps?’”

  Fury ignited anew inside Billy. “Thanks, Burt. Don’t let anyone else see or touch it. I’ll get a tech over there ASAP.”

  Billy tossed his phone onto the seat and reached for the gearshift. Maybe he’d just go by Burt’s office and pick up that note himself. As he shifted into Drive, a gurney being rolled out the doors distracted him. The patient had been bagged and was being carted toward the waiting van with Gardner’s Funeral Home emblazoned across the side. He might not have paid much attention except the man pushing the gurney was Woody Holder. The Woody Holder who was employed by DuPont’s. The same one who was supposed to be on vacation this week.

  Billy decided not to say anything to the guy but he would damned sure be letting Rowan know. If Woody was picking up extra work here and there, she might not mind, but if he’d quit and just hadn’t told her, that was a whole other story.

  Before the day was done he wanted to ensure the protection detail he’d assigned was in place. From now on, the detail would work in pairs. He wasn’t giving Addington a chance to murder another of his officers. And he intended to have a very long talk with Rowan about anything else Addington might have said to her. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust her to tell him everything—wait, no that was wrong. He did not trust her to tell him what she didn’t want him to know. She had his best interest at heart. The trouble was she wasn’t thinking of her own. Dressler had warned Billy that he’d better be keeping an eye on her. Billy had figured Dressler was more concerned about the case than Rowan’s welfare, but the way the agent had looked at her today, Billy wasn’t so sure.

  He’d first met Dressler after Rowan’s father was murdered. At the time Billy had been too worried about her to notice much about the man, but there was no missing the fact that the agent in the high-end suit had a thing for her. As hard as Billy tried to dismiss the idea as none of his business, he wondered if the two had been an item at one time. She’d lived in Nashville for more than twenty years. He couldn’t expect that she’d had no relationships. But whenever she visited she never mentioned a boyfriend, and her father had never said anything about one, so he’d assumed there were no serious relationships in her life. He’d concluded that she was like him, too busy to bother with a real relationship.

  “None of my business,” he muttered aloud this time in hopes the words would actually sink in.

  Bottom line, she was finally home again and he wasn’t exactly happy about the idea that someone might swoop in and try to lure her away.

  Including this insane serial killer who had been her good friend all those years.

  Frustrated now, as much at himself as anyone else, he drove across town. The town and the people strolling along the sidewalks all looked exactly as they had a month ago or a year ago. And yet, somehow, everything had changed. Billy had been chief of police for four years now. He’d served the department for more than a decade before that. Not once in all that time had so many bizarre cases suddenly cropped up.

  First it was the bones in the basement of the Gazette building. Then it was the bones out by the lake. Add to that the unsolved murder of Geneva Phillips, and the macabre killings of Damon Miller and the Wilburns, and things were getting a whole lot crazier.

  The very strong possibility that a serial killer was responsible for at least three of those murders just made bad matters worse. One of the things Dressler had mentioned to Billy before leaving was another press conference to warn the community about Addington. Billy was all for that. He’d put out the word on his own when Rowan’s father was murdered. But they had proof now that Addington had either been here or had someone in the area watching Rowan and presenting a danger to the community at large. He had Audrey Anderson over at the Gazette as well as Christina Cortland from Channel Fourteen working on messages for the community that would start running on the evening news tonight.

  As for Rowan, however much she protested, Billy wasn’t letting that guy get close to her, and the only way to ensure that did not happen was to keep her under watch—whether she liked it or not.

  He parked in front of the funeral home and climbed out of his truck. When he reached the door he was pleased to find it locked. The front entrance generally stayed unlocked but he’d warned Rowan not to leave it that way anymore. With her working in the basement it was far too easy for someone to come in and trap her down there. He pushed the doorbell. It rang in the living quarters and in the basement so it wasn’t as if she was going to miss a visit by anyone needing her service.

  A minute or so later she appeared at the door and unlocked it. As soon as it was open she frowned at him. “This is annoying. You have a key. Why didn’t you just come on in?”

  He removed his hat, stepped inside and locked the door behind him. “Get used to it or I’ll post a protection detail in the lobby, too.”

  She rolled her eyes and walked away.

  He followed.

  “If you want to talk we’ll have to do it while I work. Charlie Hall’s family wants to do a viewing tomorrow at two and then the funeral over at the Baptist church. They’re interring him in the cemetery next to the church and apparently he asked to be buried at sundown. With no one but me here, I have to stay ahead of things.”

  “Charlie Hall died?” Billy followed her past the elevator to the stairs at the end of the corridor. The basement stairs were right under the rear stairs leading up to the living quarters. “How did I not know this?”

  “Heart attack.” Rowan glanced over her shoulder. “I guess you’ve been a little busy.”

  “Damn.” Billy frowned. “I suppose that’s not so bad since he was ninety-two.”

  “His daughter said he was working in his garden when it happened. He sat down on a bench under a shade tree to rest, fell asleep and never got up again.” Rowan rounded the rear staircase and headed down to the basement.

  Billy did the same, ducking his head as they descended into the basement area. The stairs were narrow and cramped. Frankly, he preferred the elevator, but he could see how having the stairs would be good if the power went out or the elevator broke down.

  “Well, if you’ve gotta go, that’s the way to do it. Doing something he loved and then taking a nap.”

  Rowan pulled on an apron, gloves and then a face shield. “We all have to go sometime. There are certainly better ways than others.”

  He gave a nod, not exactly a pleasant thought. Old Charlie lay on the table as naked as the day he was born—except for the white sheet lying across his privates—and considerably more wrinkled.

  Billy walked around to the other side of the mortuary table so he could see her responses. He kept his gaze on her face as she reached for an instrument on the tray. He had never watched this process and wasn’t sure he actually wanted to. She’d already set Charlie’s face. When they were teenagers she’d told him about that part. He spotted the photo provided by the family on the instrument tray. His jaw would have been wired shut, his lips sealed with glue or sutures, and then some sort of adhesive was used to make his smile look like the one in the photo as best possible. His eyes were sealed closed.

  As he watched, Rowan used a scalpel to make an incision in the carotid artery and then the jugular vein. He clenched his jaw as she inserted the arterial tubes.


  Finally, she looked up at him. “I’m guessing Dressler reiterated that I should be very careful and report any contact to you so that you can report directly to him.”

  Billy nodded, his gaze on her face again rather than the corpse on the table. “I have reservations about where his loyalties lie. We all want to stop Addington, but there are some risks I’m not willing to take.”

  “His loyalties lie with closing the case.” She shook her head. “You know as well as I do that you can’t track a killer who doesn’t leave a trail. Dressler is well aware. He has an obligation to avoid collateral damage—particularly that of civilians—but, more than anything, he wants to close the case. He needs me to do it.”

  Billy gritted his teeth for a moment to restrain what he had to say about what Dressler wanted. “All the more reason for me to make sure you’re kept safe. We know what Addington is capable of. Why pretend baiting him isn’t a risk? It is. A big one. We need to keep that in mind, Ro.”

  “I’m about to turn on the pump,” she said, changing the subject. “Why don’t you go up and let Freud out for me. We can talk over a late lunch when I’m finished here.”

  “I’ll do that.” Billy gave the dead man a nod and walked out of the room. He’d just as soon break the news about Juanita Wilburn and the messages from Addington when Rowan wasn’t standing over a corpse. Or maybe it was because he’d rather not stand over one and have the conversation. He was all the way on the second floor via the stairs before he’d cleared the smell of embalming chemicals from his lungs.

  The door to the living quarters was unlocked. He frowned. “Damn it, Ro.” Freud wasn’t waiting for him on the other side of the door as Billy had expected.

  “Freud! Hey, boy, where are you?”

  The dog whimpered. Worry stirring, Billy followed the sound. The door to Edward’s bedroom stood open. Billy had been in Rowan’s parents’ bedroom a couple of times over the years, most recently when he helped her pick out the suit for her father’s funeral.