An Unquiet Grave (Louis Kincaid Mysteries)

by P J Parrish

  Louis spun back.

  Where the hell was she?

  He trained the light into the tunnel, the beam stretching long and deep into the blackness.

  Where the hell was he?

  CHAPTER 38

  He couldn’t remember ever being so cold. The noises were all different now, the walls alive with scratching, like they were filled with a million rats he couldn’t see. And water seemed to ooze from the tile.

  The flashlight was off now to save the battery. As he stood in the darkness leaning against the wall, he tried not to think about the dampness between his toes or what was dripping on his head.

  The screaming had stopped an hour ago.

  He wanted to know what time it was. He clicked on the flashlight. It was after 7:00 P.M. Dark outside now. He turned off the flashlight.

  He slid slowly down the wall, hoping the floor was dry. It was, but it was cold. He sat anyway, drawing his knees up and leaning his forehead against them.

  He heard the squeak of a rat, but he didn’t move. It struck him how weird that was. Four hours in here and suddenly rats were nothing. But maybe they’d always been nothing. Maybe now he knew rats better than he knew the smell of clean sheets fresh from Frances’s dr yer.

  Mississippi had rats. They had been all over the junk-yard and the dump. And sometimes they’d crept up to the house, looking for something better maybe. Something fresher to eat. Or flesh to gnaw at.

  You bit again, Louis?

  Yes, ma’am.

  You been playing in the dump?

  No, ma’am.

  Louis lifted his head, not liking this memory, trying to focus on something to clear it away, but there was nothing to see. He knew he should get up, knew he should keep walking because it would help his mind work. But he was going to give himself a few more minutes.

  Our childhood, be it good or bad, makes us what we are, Mr. Kincaid.

  “Well, Doc, you might be right about that.”

  Shit. Now he was talking to himself. But maybe that wasn’t so bad either. Talking kept the mind alert.

  A scream came from the darkness, but unlike the others, it was weak and pitiful. It kicked at his heart, and he found himself on his feet, moving again down the tunnel, pushing into the blackness.

  The scream came again, louder now, and laced with whimpering and words. He could make out words now. Real words.

  “Please . . . please stop . . . please don’t hurt me anymore . . .”

  He started running.

  “Oh God! God, help me. I want to die!”

  An intersection again. The corners marked with his pen, but it didn’t matter now. The screams were all that mattered, and he could hear her close now. He was close.

  “Help me! Help me!”

  She had to be right ahead. He slowed his steps, turning on the flashlight, sweeping it across the floor. He was afraid Ives would see him coming, but he needed to see where he was.

  But then it was quiet again.

  “Are you there?” he called. “Tell me where you are!”

  A muffled sob, fading whimpers, and the sound of something being dragged. Ahead. They were up ahead. He moved forward. He had gone on almost fifty feet when he realized he hadn’t heard another sound.

  He stopped, silence filling his ears. He pulled in some air to steady himself, and kept going, his eyes watching the beam on the concrete floor. It was clean here. Just roaches running along the edge of the wall.

  Then the beam caught something wet and dark.

  Blood was pooled at his feet. More blood streaked the floor ahead, disappearing into the darkness. And on the wall, about three feet up, scrawled in blood the word BITCH. And the handprint again.

  He spun to the darkness. “You fucking bastard!” he shouted. “Where the hell are you?”

  His words hung in the damp air until the tunnel sucked them up. He looked back at the blood, holding the flashlight steady on it. Then he knelt, feeling a strange urge to touch it. Still warm.

  His eyes jerked to the smear of blood across the floor and he rose quickly, following it. Ives was dragging her, and she was still bleeding, leaving the floor streaked red and wet. It went on and on, across an intersection.

  Why wasn’t he hearing anything? Where were they?

  The smears were fading but he moved forward, straining to see some drop or smudge that told him he was still going in the right direction. But suddenly, the blood trail was gone.

  He looked up. In front of him was another cinder-block wall.

  It had been quiet for a while now. Last time he had checked his watch it was 8:10. He guessed that was an hour ago. But he didn’t check now. He needed to save the light.

  He was sitting on the cold floor again. He felt something on his hands and he wiped them on his jeans, staring again down the tunnel.

  His mind had started to drift the last few minutes. Back to things he hadn’t thought about in years. He knew what it was, knew what isolation did to people. He had seen it in jails and prisons and in this hospital.

  “Get up, get up,” he whispered.

  But he didn’t. He worked his head back to Ives and the handprint he slapped on walls and the word BITCH he had painted just for Dr. Seraphin.

  Why did he hate her so much? Because she was a woman? Because she had been his doctor? Because she hadn’t been able to help him?

  Her words came back to him.

  Your man is impotent. In the sixties he was young and healthy . . . .He’s changed since then . . . grown angrier and if he’s become impotent recently his anger is magnified by his inability to perform. . . .a man who lost the last few years, no job, no contact with his family . . . who came to Hidden Lake at a young, impressionable age.

  “Nice profile, Doctor,” Louis said. “You nailed him.”

  Louis let his own words echo, trying to find the rest of it, knowing something else was there that he wasn’t getting. Then it came to him.

  “You nailed him because you knew all along who he was, didn’t you?” he said.

  Louis lowered his head, fingers on the bridge of his nose, something else in his head now.

  “You knew he was a rapist then,” he said. “You knew what he did in here and you kept it a secret and then, years later, you released him into the world.”

  Louis didn’t move, his mind filled with Millie Reuben’s strange story and the vacant look in Claudia DeFoe’s eyes, and he tried to imagine them tied to a bed, Buddy Ives standing at the foot of it, a cigarette in his fingers, smoke curling from his lips. The image started to crystalize into something else, as more of Seraphin’s words came back to him.

  Something new I was trying with the patients . . . isolating them to gain their dependency . . . we treated them with various stimuli.

  Louis shut his eyes, trying to make sense of his thoughts, knowing that what he was thinking was so crazy it had to be impossible, but he didn’t think it was.

  Something new I was trying . . .

  Was it possible it had been some kind of therapy? A physical kind that involved sexual pain and pleasure? Acted out in rapes that Dr. Seraphin not only knew about, but arranged and condoned?

  God. He was right. He knew he was.

  Louis pushed himself to his feet, taking a second to steady himself, surprised his legs were so cramped and weak. But the idea about Seraphin gave him a surge of energy and he wanted to use it to move, afraid that if he stayed on the ground much longer, he wouldn’t get up. He moved forward in the darkness.

  There was something that came in total darkness, he thought. An unsettling kind of awareness that allowed people to hear even the faintest sound. Like a rat breathing. Or the grass growing. Or a heart beating in a tunnel a hundred feet away. Like the heart in that Edgar Allan Poe story . . . the heart under the floor that beat and beat and beat.

  His body was trembling with a cold he couldn’t feel anymore. Sometimes he thought the numbness was death setting in and he’d put a hand over his heart to make sure it was still b
eating.

  No more walking now. He was too cold. He was on the floor, his legs drawn in, his hands shoved into his armpits.

  In the last few hours, the screams had come and gone. He had been trying to keep track of them, but he had lost count a long time ago, sometimes wondering in the quiet whether he had heard them at all.

  He had lost an hour or more somewhere. Part of him thought he had slept it away, but he didn’t think he could sleep, although he knew he should. Sleep was essential to alertness. That’s what they taught in the police academy. Cops needed to stay alert or they died.

  He rested his head back against the wall, watching the darkness shift from gray to black to sometimes even flashes of white, when he blinked.

  His partner Ollie had died. But it wasn’t because he wasn’t alert. It was because the bullet had been an inch high, hitting him above the vest in the neck. He hadn’t been able to save Ollie, couldn’t stop the blood pouring from his neck.

  Louis glanced at his feet, watching a rat. It stopped and he could make out its eyes, like they could somehow find a reflection of light where there was none. Louis moved his feet and the rat ran off.

  Get up. Get up and walk. You’re drifting. You’re back to things you haven’t thought about for years. You’ll freeze to death if you sit here. And she’ll die. The woman will die.

  She was already dead. Like Ollie was. Like Zeke was. And Rebecca Gruber. He had done nothing for them, just like he had done nothing for Phillip, except be ungrateful and give him grief. And just like he had done nothing for Kyla.

  Get rid of it. I don’t want to screw up my life.

  Are you sure she had an abortion, Louis?

  What if she didn’t? What if you have a kid out there and its mother is too ashamed of you to tell the kid about you?

  No, don’t go there. Not now. Not with this. Think about anything but this.

  Louis struggled to his feet, and started to walk. He turned on the flashlight, using the little sliver of light to provide some sense of reality. But the light was growing weak, and he clicked it off.

  You’re no better than him.

  That man you keep in the drawer in your bedroom. That picture you keep of that white man who wasn’t there for you. That man ran out on his son, ran out on you. But you are no better. No better than the man who slept with your mother and then walked away, ashamed of his black woman and his black child.

  Something hard grabbed at his gut and he felt his whole body tighten. He stopped walking.

  Don’t you cry, boy. Don’t you cry or I’ll whip you twice as hard and twice as long.

  He was seeing things now, seeing that old picture of himself as a boy, the one Phillip had given him at the kitchen table.

  Then you stay in that closet, you sorry little bastard. Stay there until you starve for all I care.

  Louis pressed the heel of his palm to his forehead.

  It was after 1:00 A.M. He had no idea where he was now, if he was anywhere near the lift entrance. He had walked everywhere, met with cinder-block walls or more tunnels. He could no longer remember the layout of the hospital or what the map looked like that Spera had given him.

  One thing was clear right now. He might die in here. Slip into a coma and freeze to death. And it struck him how sad that was. No one wanted to die, but wasn’t there something about some professions, some lives, that dictated a person should die in a dignified fashion? Soldiers . . . cops.

  Not that he even was a cop now.

  He reached back and pulled his wallet out his pocket, flipping it open to the Ardmore P.D. badge. He wanted to look at it, but he didn’t want to waste the light. So he ran his fingers over the embossing.

  Not the Detroit badge he once wanted.

  Not the Miami-Dade badge he could have had.

  Joe . . .

  My God. Joe.

  For an instant, he could see her. Hear her. Touch her. Then she was gone, her face fading as quickly as it had come. He was going to die and he had never told her things. Never told her that one thing.

  He lifted the wallet back to his face, his numb fingers clumsily flipping the plastic sleeves to find her picture, but he couldn’t remember which was hers and he couldn’t see them, not even if he held it right in front of his eyes.

  He groped in the dark for the flashlight, struggling to angle it toward the open wallet. He clicked it on.

  Nothing happened. The batteries were dead.

  CHAPTER 39

  Somewhere in the darkness, a baby was crying. It wasn’t an angry cry so much as an exhausted one, the tiny voice breaking with each gulp of air, like babies did when they still had hope someone would come to them.

  No. Not a baby. It was the woman.

  He knew that. She was dying now. He could hear it in her voice, feel it in the air because the air was so cold.

  Ives had abandoned her, leaving her alone in the darkness to die. Leaving them both to die.

  The crying stopped. He waited, hoping he would hear it again but praying he didn’t, praying now that she would die so she wouldn’t hurt anymore. So he couldn’t hear her anymore.

  What time was it? He took out his pocketknife and started picking at the watch’s crystal, thinking if he could pry it off he could feel the hands and know. It would be the only thing he might be able to know.

  Images were playing on the dark screen of his mind, images of what Ives had done to her. Ripping out her insides with some piece of metal. Then burning her. He could smell the cigarette smoke now, too. Sometimes it was just around the corner. Other times, it was a faint whiff that disappeared as quick as it had come, like the smoke had inside E Building.

  He went back to working the crystal. Finally it popped free, and he heard it hit the concrete floor. Carefully, he put his fingers on the exposed watch face, trying to feel the hands without moving them. But his fingers were numb, so he blew on them a few times before trying again.

  Two-twenty. In the morning?

  He put the pocketknife away and he started to walk. He walked slowly now because without the flashlight, he couldn’t see where he was going. He walked slowly now because he knew she wouldn’t be there. He didn’t call to her. His throat was raw from his own shouts that were never answered.

  The echoing whimpers grew softer, like a baby crying itself out before sleep.

  Like an apple baby . . .

  Louis stopped. Where had that come from? The apple babies weren’t down here. They were in orchards and cider mills and baskets that were taken away in apple trucks. Right, Charlie, right.

  The crying sounded now like it was underwater and he closed his eyes again, wishing her dead. Wishing the baby dead.

  “Stop!” he screamed.

  Silence. It settled around him like a thick black blanket. And he welcomed it.

  He pressed his forehead against the cold tile. He was losing it. He had to stay focused. But on what?

  Ives . . . Seraphin. Stay with what you know is real.

  But what did he know? Everything was one black tangle in his mind. What did he know?

  That Seraphin knew Ives raped patients. No, more than that, she let it happen. She condoned it.

  Why? Why? Think! Therapy . . . she was using rape as some perverse sexual therapy?

  The tile was cold and wet beneath his forehead, but he didn’t lift his head. Didn’t even open his eyes because it was almost like he could see now with them closed.

  Ives . . . Seraphin.

  Why did she give him those other three suspects?

  Why did she let Ives leave Hidden Lake? Why did she set a rapist free?

  A sound. Whimpering. He opened his eyes. No, it was his mind playing tricks. There was no crying anymore.

  He shut his eyes. Stay focused on what is real!

  Babies . . . they were real. Charlie had seen one, and he believed him.

  Women patients locked away in isolation. Why? Pregnant from the rapes? Charlie saw babies. But where did the babies go? Maybe they weren’t normal
because of all the drugs. Maybe they were aborted, their remains cremated and abandoned with all the others in the mortuary? Or . . . or taken away in baskets so no one would see?

  Claudia?

  She had been isolated. Did she have a baby? Where was it? Where was Claudia?

  In the dark, her face came to him, the face in the photograph from her patient file. Claudia’s face came to him and it was as real as his own thoughts.

  His fingers were shaking as he touched the tiny hands on the watch face. Three . . . and six. Three-thirty? He stuck his hands back under his armpits. He hadn’t moved in the last hour. He was still huddled on the floor, knees pulled in against the cold. He couldn’t feel his feet anymore.

  It was so quiet now. No crying, no sounds at all.

  No one was coming.

  He took the pen from his pocket and felt along on the tile for a smooth spot.

  What to write? And to who?

  He had things he needed to say, things he had never said. To Phillip. And Kyla. To his sister and his brother. To a little boy named Ben. To Mel and to Sam Dodie and to Jesse . . . Jesse. God, he couldn’t even remember his last name.

  His fingers were so cold he could barely grip the pen. And worse, he was starting to feel sleepy.

  Stay awake . . .

  He turned back to the wall, uncapping the pen.

  He didn’t know what to say to her.

  They never had to say much to each other. And it didn’t seem right now, especially now, to write something Joe would know was fake. There was something about her that kept him strong and he didn’t want not to be strong here. It was important what he wrote to her now. It would be what she would remember after all else was gone.

  He turned slowly, his fingers finding the wall. He tried to spit on it but he had no saliva, so he just wiped it with his sleeve. Then in slow, careful strokes, he moved the pen across the tile.

  JOE

  He set the pen on the floor and closed his eyes.