by Dan Wells
“Good afternoon,” said a woman’s voice, “and thank you for calling Cochran Mortuary. How may I help you?”
“I need to talk to Mr. Cochran,” I said. Like most mortuaries, this was a family business. We’d talked to Rudolfo Cochran before, in our official capacity as FBI; he knew we were investigating something, but he didn’t know it was an employee. He’d promised not to tell anyone, thinking it was a matter of high security, and I hoped he’d kept that promise—if Elijah got word that we were investigating him at all, and especially if he knew we were this close, he might run. We didn’t want to lose him. A minute later the call transferred to another line, and rang a few more times before Cochran picked it up.
“This is Rudolfo Cochran speaking.”
“This is John Cleaver from the FBI, we spoke last week.”
“Yes,” he said, “you were the young man?”
“Yes. We have some follow-up questions if you don’t mind, and I remind you that this is of the utmost secrecy.” Potash handed me his list, scrawled on the back of one of his hospital release forms. I read the names in order. “Have you had any business lately with a Delaney Anderson?”
“Let me pull up my records,” he said. I heard a few mouse clicks through the phone, and some tapping of keys on a keyboard. “Delaney?”
“Correct.”
“Nothing,” he said.
“How about Jude Feldman?”
More keyboard clicks. “We have a Feldman in our system from two years ago, but it’s not Jude.”
That might mean something. “How about Rose Chapman?”
Click click click. I heard a soft musical beep as the search command was sent, and then Cochran gave a small “Oh.” His voice grew more distant as he read the data. “Yes, we did a funeral about six weeks ago for a William Chapman, and Rose is on file as his wife. All the sales transactions were conducted through her.”
I felt a surge of excitement. I was right. “Can you give me her contact information?” He read it off and I copied it down, and then, just to be thorough, I had him search for the last two names on the list as well. There was another almost match, from nearly ten years earlier, but that was it. I thanked him and hung up. “He was there to see Rose Chapman,” I told the others. “He has her husband’s memories.” I gave Diana the address, and she changed course immediately. I did a search on my phone, finding a massive list of Rose Chapmans, and slowly narrowed it down to the one in Fort Bruce. I found her Facebook page and swore when I saw it.
“What’s wrong?” asked Diana.
I showed her the screen, but she glanced at it only for a second before shaking her head and looking back at the road. “I can’t look, just tell me.”
“Let me see,” said Potash.
I held the phone toward him. “I recognize her,” I said. “She showed up in our surveillance photos, in the set we shot at the grocery store.”
“The woman by the produce,” said Potash.
“Exactly,” I said. “He doesn’t talk to anyone, ever, but he had a three-minute conversation with Rose Chapman in the produce section.”
“He’s stalking her,” said Potash.
“He has her husband’s memories,” I said. “For all we know he thinks he is her husband.”
“If he stalks dead people’s families, why has that never shown up in our surveillance before?” Diana demanded. “This is the kind of thing that we’re supposed to catch, dammit.”
“Maybe it’s new,” I said. “Maybe he … I don’t know. Maybe he has rules.”
“Hurry,” said Potash, and started another phone call.
“What do you mean, ‘rules’?” asked Diana. “That doesn’t have anything to do with it.”
“Rules to keep himself from hurting anyone.” I said. Did it really make as much sense as I thought it did, or was I seeing reflections of myself where there weren’t any? “After fifteen-something years at the mortuary, taking a new corpse’s memories every I-don’t-know-how-often, he’s bound to have personal connections to half this town—he’s somebody’s father, he’s somebody’s mother, he’s somebody’s brother and son and best friend. He’s literally surrounded by people he remembers being close to. But we’ve never seen him stalking anyone, except maybe Merrill, depending on your definition, and I guarantee that’s because he makes rules for himself to avoid contact with people he knows.” I thought about Marci, and what I’d do if some random person claimed to be her, returned from the grave. “He can’t talk to those people without freaking them out, so he keeps a night shift and never talks to anyone.”
“We need to check on Merrill,” said Diana. “Maybe Merrill had a father or a brother or something who died right before Elijah started visiting him. But … why Merrill and Rose and nobody else? Why are they worth breaking the rules for?”
“I … don’t know,” I said. “Something’s still not fitting.” I closed my eyes, trying to remember as much of our surveillance info as I could. “We’ve never seen him hurt anyone. We’ve never seen him attack anyone, we’ve never found a body or a crime scene we can connect him to, we’ve never found anything ‘bad.’”
“He gets his memories from dead bodies,” said Diana. “If we’re right.”
“If,” I said. I thought for a moment, listening as Potash gave the police Rose’s address. We’re still missing something important. I looked at Diana. “So what does Elijah do that he doesn’t have to do?”
“You mean the grief counseling?”
“I mean everything. Like how his powers work. If we’re right, he gets his memories from the corpses in the mortuary, but why?”
“Because he has to,” said Diana. “Getting your memories from dead people means you’d be constantly filling up on the memories of actual death. He’d remember dying of old age, dying of cancer, dying in car accidents. If they’ve been around for ten thousand years he might remember dying a hundred thousand times—why put yourself through that if you don’t have to?”
I hadn’t thought of that, and it disturbed me that I hadn’t. “That makes sense,” I said slowly, “but that’s still something he has to do. The question is what does he not have to do? Needing corpses isn’t the same as needing the mortuary, because let’s be honest: corpses are pretty easy to make. But he goes out of his way to use bodies that are already dead. He doesn’t kill.”
“Neither did Cody French,” said Diana. “He was still a monster.”
“Cody French drove girls insane,” I said. “Elijah Sexton doesn’t hurt anyone at all.”
“He’s not a good guy,” said Diana. “He’s a Withered—we kill the Withered, John, that’s our whole job. It’s our whole life.”
“What if he’s different?”
“He’s not,” she said harshly. “You heard Ostler: don’t get soft. You’re talking about a creature who’s preyed on humanity for ten thousand years—”
“You don’t know that.”
“We don’t know anything!” she said. “We’re blind, even more so than when we hit Mary Gardner, and she killed Kelly because of it. If you go after Elijah Sexton with anything less than straight-up hatred you’ll be dead, okay? He’ll kill you and probably the rest of us with you, just like every other Withered has killed every other person they’ve ever messed with.”
“Not everyone is evil,” I said, almost irrationally desperate to convince her—or myself. “Just because you think someone’s bad doesn’t mean they are. And even if he was bad he could change.”
“You’re wrong, John,” said Potash, hanging up his phone. His voice was cold and hard. “I just talked to the police, and when they put her name in her system they instantly hit a flag: her sister filed a missing-person report this morning. Rose Chapman’s disappeared.”
* * *
We were already most of the way to Rose Chapman’s house, and thus arrived before anyone else. A car was in the driveway, though it and the sidewalk were covered with about an inch of snow; that was probably just from the previous night’s storm,
and it was far from the only snow-covered car on the block. More telling were the footprints leading from the curb to the porch—someone had pulled up, walked to the front door, then walked back out and driven away. I wasn’t a good enough tracker to tell if the prints leading from the house were any different than the prints leading to it—like if the person was carrying a body, for example—but I was fairly certain there was only one set. Had Elijah come here, and kidnapped the woman he thought was his wife? I wanted to believe it wasn’t him—that it was the three mystery Withered—but then why only one set of prints? I made a careful footprint of my own in the snow next to them, studying the comparison as Potash and Diana walked past me toward the door. The footprints were small—maybe it wasn’t a Withered at all, but the sister who’d reported Rose as missing?
I want you to be good, Elijah. Please be good.
“Whoever walked up here went inside,” said Potash, squatting by the front door. “They stomped the snow off their shoes onto the welcome mat, and then stepped in the pile on the way back out.”
“How can you tell?”
He shrugged. “You get a feel for these things.”
Diana rang the doorbell, and I trudged up the porch steps to join them. We waited a moment, rang again, then banged loudly on the door. Nothing.
“I’m declaring probable cause,” said Diana, drawing her sidearm. Potash already had his out. I put my hand in my coat pocket, feeling the grip of the knife handle; I hadn’t been without it in weeks. Diana looked at us, nodded, and kicked the door in.
The entryway showed no sign of a struggle, though it did have a few wet patches where someone had tracked in snow. The door didn’t show any sign of forced entry, beyond Diana’s kick. Whoever had come here had let themselves in peacefully, which meant they’d had a key. That implied it was the sister, and the condition of the tracks suggested she had come this morning, after the snow. The lack of any other prints meant Rose Chapman had disappeared before the snow, and without her car; probably a day or more before the snow, since the police didn’t usually accept a missing-person report within the first twenty-four hours.
If the sister had been here and found nothing, we could probably move through the house safely, but after our experience with Mary Gardner not one of us dropped our guard; Diana and Potash kept their guns up, and I pulled my knife silently from the sheath as we moved deeper into the house. I felt better with a knife in my hand, as if my hand had always been incomplete without it, and I’d only just now become whole. The front door opened directly into a living room, where the walls were hung with landscape paintings and a photo of what I assumed were Rose and William Chapman. Had she joined him in death? Was Elijah Sexton remembering both of their lives now?
Beyond the living room was a kitchen, and a short hall leading back into the rest of the house. We walked through each room slowly, checking behind doors and furniture, clearing each space as we went. A bathroom. A laundry room. A hall closet full of musty cardboard boxes. A master bedroom on one side of the hall, and a guest room on the other. There was no one in any of the rooms, living or dead. The master bedroom had a large sliding door leading out to the backyard: a small lawn on one side and an extended driveway on the other, leading back to a garage—but the snow back there was far deeper than in front and completely devoid of prints. It looked like no one had been back there all winter. Potash checked the last closet and shook his head.
“Nothing.”
“Most houses in this town have a basement,” said Diana, “but I didn’t see an entrance anywhere. Maybe it’s outside?”
“We would have seen tracks in the snow if anyone had used it recently,” said Potash. He glanced outside, breathing heavily. “It’s worth checking out, though.” He unlocked the sliding door, but Diana put a hand on his arm.
“I’ll go, you just got out of the hospital.” She opened the door and stepped out. “I’ll call you if it looks sketchy. See what else you can find, but don’t leave any fingerprints.” She closed the door behind her.
“Of course I’m not going to leave fingerprints,” Potash grumbled. “Am I an idiot?”
I ignored him and started looking through the piles of stuff on the nightstands and dresser, using the knife to move things without touching them directly. People who were kidnapped tended to leave key personal items behind, the kind of things they were usually never without: keys, wallets, purses, phones. If we could find one of those, we might also find some personal info we could use, like a schedule or a contact list of people she’d talked to recently. A smartphone would be a gold mine—depending on what settings she’d turned on or off, we could know not just who she’d called, but when she’d done it and where she was standing at the time. I found a few papers that might be useful later, funeral receipts and so on, but nothing that helped me now. I turned to go down the hallway, heading back to the living room to continue the search, when Potash’s phone rang. I turned back to listen.
“This is Potash.” Pause. “We’re inside now; there’s no direct evidence of kidnapping, but the car’s in the driveway and it’s pretty clear nobody slept here last night. That’s not damning, but it’s definitely suspicious.”
Diana opened the back door, kicking the snow off her feet before coming inside. “Nothing in the basement but a furnace and some storage.” She batted at her hair with a grimace. “And every spider within ten miles.”
I nodded at Potash. “He’s on the phone with Ostler, I think.”
“Bad news?” asked Diana.
“Do we ever get good news?”
“We’ll be right there,” said Potash. He hung up and looked at us. “Cops’ll be here in about five minutes; we’ll let them take over the crime scene while we head back to the morgue.”
“Rose?” asked Diana.
Potash shook his head. “No, but still bad. Another cannibal attack.” He looked at me. “And another letter for John.”
To Mr. John Wayne Cleaver, and his Esteemed Colleagues,
Hello again. It is, as always, a pleasure to write to you, though I admit I haven’t given you much of a chance to respond since my previous letter. Worse still, I haven’t given you the means to respond, and for this I am truly sorry. Only a churl would be content with a one-sided conversation, and I assure you that I am not such a boor as to talk and talk about myself without ever letting you respond.
In light of that, let me suggest a number of options that might facilitate a more interactive discussion. The option you are considering first is simply to capture me, but I assure you that this is ridiculous. You will neither catch me nor even find me. Option number two is equally unlikely, but in the opposite direction: you could simply communicate in kind by killing a victim of your own and leaving a note pinned for me to find. While I can promise you I would find such a note, I imagine your superiors would be displeased with the manner of its delivery. Until such time as you no longer care what they think, we must find another way of communicating.
Option three, then, might be one to consider: you could publish a letter in the newspaper. It would not be the first time the police have sent messages this way. This method has some sub-options, as you could choose to be brazen about the message—my unfinished meals are already headline news, after all—or you could couch it in secrecy, burying it in a coded letter to the editor in which only every second word counts. Title it something about lions and antelopes, if you do, so I’ll know where to look.
But in the end, why bother with all of this rigmarole? If you’ve been paying attention, you know who I’m going to kill next. Slip a note in his pocket, and I’ll have something to read while I eat.
Yours,
The Hunter
P.S.—I was extremely gratified to learn that Mr. Potash is recovering so quickly. May his restored health bring him as much happiness as possible before the end.
“Dios mio,” said Dr. Trujillo.
“Where’s the body?” I asked.
“Still in the autopsy,” said Ostler,
gesturing at the police station’s examination room behind us. “Barring any shocking discoveries, though, the story’s the same as last time: a middle-aged person, female this time, found mostly naked with her body covered in bite wounds. Head and neck undamaged. The note was pinned to her chest.”
“Pinned?” asked Nathan.
“With a safety pin,” said Ostler. “Keep in mind, she wasn’t wearing a shirt.”
“The weirdest part of this job,” said Diana, “is that none of that counts as a shocking discovery.”
Potash sat down, breathing in slow, controlled breaths.
“Why does he keep addressing them to John?” asked Nathan. “I want to know what that’s all about.”
“He mentioned Potash, too,” I said.
“But they’re to you,” said Nathan. “When he said he wanted to start a conversation, he was talking to you specifically. When he suggested that we murder somebody, that was also to you.”
I looked at Potash, and found him staring at me. He was still the only one who knew about my brutal stabbing of Mary Gardner.
He didn’t say anything.
“He used John’s name because he was trying to show off,” said Trujillo. “Everything about these letters—the tone, the vocabulary, even the message itself—is a deliberate attempt to exert control over us by showing his superiority. Not just showing it, but hammering it home with all the subtlety of an oversized cartoon mallet. He wants us to be afraid of him, and part of that is showing what he knows about us: John’s name and Potash’s health.”
“Well it’s working,” said Nathan. “Once again, I humbly request that we pack the hell up and leave this town ASAP.”
“You’ve never done anything humbly in your life,” said Diana.
“All he’s really showing us are his limits,” I said. “He knows my name because my picture was on the Internet, and he put it together and knows who I am. He knows Potash’s name because it’s on record at the hospital. Those are the only two members of our team with an easily researched identity—even Brooke is registered under an alias at Whiteflower. The only things he knows about us are the things anyone could know about us.”
