Nothing Stays Buried

by P. J. Tracy

  “Jacob?”

  “Is everything okay here, Walt?” he asked, swiping one cheek, then the other, wiping away mud streaked with the white lines sweat had cleared.

  “There’s some damage, but nothing that can’t be set right in a day or two. But from the looks of you, I’d say I’m one of the lucky ones.”

  “It’s bad out there. Two fatalities reported already, roads all over the county are blocked by fallen trees and downed power lines, and a lot of homes in East Grant got leveled.”

  “I’m very sorry to hear that. What about your men in the field, looking for a killer?”

  “I’ve lost a lot of them to emergency calls, and a few have family they haven’t been able to reach, so it’s a skeleton crew now. The Minneapolis detectives are out there now, helping.”

  “I’ll give you a hand . . .”

  “No, Walt, you stay and take care of things here. This is a law enforcement issue.”

  “If there’s a killer on my property, then it’s my issue. I know these woods better than anybody, and I’ve hunted all my life. As far as I’m concerned, there’s probably no real difference between hunting a human or an animal, except for the fact that humans are generally dumber than animals, at least when it comes to hiding. But that’s not what’s stuck in your craw right now, so tell me straight up.”

  Jacob let out a tortured sigh, something that sounded more like a cry of grief to Walt. “Vince and Karl stumbled across a graveyard out in your woods. The storm stripped a hill and all the bodies slid down in a gully washer.”

  Walt nodded. “The goat cemetery.”

  “No. No.” He looked down and cleared his throat. “Not goats, people. Four of them so far. We don’t know how many more and . . .” He raised his head and looked directly at Walt. “I can’t help thinking . . .”

  Walt started twisting the simple gold band on his left hand that he hadn’t taken off in fifty years. “Is Marla there? In that godforsaken graveyard?”

  Jacob looked away and saw three of the Monkeewrench people and their dog coming down the field road. “We won’t know until the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension gets down here. We can’t touch the scene, do you understand that, Walt? If we go poking and prodding, we could destroy critical evidence.”

  Walt looked up at the sky and saw the rainbow fading, disappearing into blue sky, gone just like that. He couldn’t help equating that with Marla, thinking it was some heavenly pronouncement of an end to things, which was stupid nonsense. Rainbows didn’t last, he knew that.

  And neither do people.

  “Dammit, I can’t just sit here and fix my fence when Marla might be rotting away in that graveyard.”

  Jacob winced. “I know. Let’s go up to the house and sit for a while.”

  “No, Jacob, you have a job to do, and I’d be grateful if you let me tag along, because I don’t know what else to do with myself.”

  “You know I can’t allow that, Walt. Besides, the BCA is going to be coming here—it’s the fastest way for them to get to the site, and I can’t stay here to wait for them. I was hoping you could give me a call when they arrive and direct them down the field road so I can meet them there.”

  Walt nodded. He knew damn well that Jacob was giving him make-work, something purposeful to keep him occupied, and right at this moment, he was okay with that. He glanced up as Grace, Harley, Roadrunner, and Charlie approached.

  “Sheriff, Walt,” Harley greeted them. “We came to see if you need help with anything around the farm.”

  “That’s kind of you. Just got some trees and a fence down, nothing more than that. Is your rig okay?”

  “Some cosmetic issues, but that’s about it. I guess we all got lucky.” He looked at the broken fence. “Let Roadrunner and I give you a hand with that.”

  “I’d appreciate that. Normally, I wouldn’t ask for help, but I’d like to get this fence fixed up so I can let the herd out. They’re panicky and they need to get outside and figure out the world hasn’t ended. That’s the funny thing about animals—they’d rather be outside in a damn tornado than confined inside. They don’t always know what’s best for them, but I guess that’s instinct.”

  “Tell me what tools we need and Roadrunner and I are on it. I’ve got everything but a backhoe in the Chariot.”

  “Got all the tools we need right here in the barn.” Walt crouched down when Charlie started whining and straining at his leash. “Hey, boy, what’s the matter?”

  Grace gave the leash some slack and watched Charlie trot up to Walt and start licking his hands. She’d known something was wrong the minute she’d gotten close enough to see the somber expressions. Apparently, Charlie knew it, too.

  “Good boy,” he murmured, scrubbing the ruff of Charlie’s neck for a long time before nodding to Grace and the sheriff, then leading Harley and Roadrunner to the barn.

  “What’s wrong, Sheriff?” Grace asked as soon as Walt was out of earshot.

  “We found some bodies in the woods near that abandoned camp. Some of them have been there awhile. Your Minneapolis detective friends think it might be connected to their serial killer.”

  Grace felt a dark pall of sadness settle over her. “Is Marla one of them?”

  “Don’t know yet. BCA is on the way, just so you know to expect them.”

  Without any cognitive thought, Grace placed a hand on her belly, once again feeling the comfort of movement within. Life and death, coexisting just as they always had, just like Walt had said. “Thank you for telling me, Sheriff.”

  “Thank you for being here. Whether you know it or not, you’re all going to help Walt get through the worst few hours of misery he’s known since the night Marla disappeared.”

  Grace nodded solemnly, knowing that Sheriff Emmet wasn’t just speaking for Walt.

  FIFTY-SIX

  Magozzi and Gino were absolutely silent as they coursed the section of woods Sheriff Emmet had assigned them to cover, their heads pivoting back and forth as they looked and listened hard. Every crack of a twig or wet rustle of leaves sent them into adrenaline overdrive, intensifying their senses and making the world around them seem even more surreal than it already was.

  Magozzi felt like he was walking in a post-nuclear wasteland. Fallen trees were everywhere, their monstrous rootballs poking up from the sodden earth; runnels of brown water poured through shredded foliage on the forest floor; water dripped off the leaves and made gentle plopping sounds that somehow seemed ominous.

  Occasionally, a weary tree the tornado hadn’t quite managed to vanquish would creak and groan, then tumble down with a crash as its loosened roots finally gave up. Magozzi had channeled Gino’s thoughts the first time it happened, just ten feet from them.

  Jesus Christ, it’s bad enough worrying about getting ambushed by a vicious sociopath and now we have to worry about getting crushed by a fucking tree?

  Suddenly, Gino stopped and cupped his hand to his ear.

  Magozzi stopped and listened. He heard the plop-plop-plop of raindrops falling from the tree canopy, the distant wail of sirens, but nothing more. He upturned his hands in question.

  Gino shook his head. “Thought I heard a voice,” he whispered.

  It wasn’t unusual to hear or see things in these types of circumstances, when you were straining so hard to watch and listen. That’s when your mind started playing tricks on you. Magozzi had learned that on his first stakeout. He gestured to Gino to keep moving.

  —

  Angel wasn’t afraid of much in this world. Every year, he fully expected to die before his next birthday, so fear of death didn’t hold him back. Life expectancy in his line of work was short, and when you promised your services and your life to a cartel, you knew that. He’d lasted longer than most because of his unique talents, devotion, and tireless work over the years, and he’d risen through the ranks, had earned the trust of so
me very important people. That had kept him alive so far, but things were starting to unravel now. How in the hell had it gone so wrong, so fast?

  It was the women’s fault, he decided—the stupid bitch at Global Foods, the stupid bitch on Pike Island who’d gotten away and had obviously given the police a description, since he’d seen a sketch of himself on the TV at the gas station. He hadn’t really wanted to kill the kid, there was no fun there, but he’d had no choice. And then there were the cops, crawling everywhere after this fucking tornado, in the one place he’d always considered a sanctuary. At least he was safe out here in the woods.

  Women will always be the death of you, his father had told him with a bloodied face and a grim smile, his hand still on the knife he had driven into Angel’s mother’s chest again and again. So you kill them before they kill you. Kill them over and over again. Remember that.

  He leaned against a tree trunk to rest, thinking his father hadn’t known everything. There were exceptions to every rule and not all women were bad. Most of them, but not all.

  “Freeze! Police!” He heard a voice shouting behind him, which was troubling. Why was there a cop in the woods when the whole county had probably been leveled? And why would he threaten a man from behind, walking through the woods after a disaster? He could have been a stranded traveler, injured in the storm, looking for help. He could have been a property owner assessing damage or looking for lost family or friends.

  It took his mind only a split second to run a litany of possible scenarios before coming to a conclusion and making a choice. Without hesitation, he turned around calmly with a smile, then fired his gun and watched the man drop. It wasn’t particularly satisfying, but it served its purpose. He spun and started jogging farther into the woods toward his backup car, waiting for him just a half mile away. As he cleared a fallen tree, he was startled by an answering gunshot and felt a searing pain in his leg as he crashed down into the muddy mire of the forest floor.

  —

  Gino and Magozzi crouched and froze when they heard gunfire. Magozzi listened to the echo and pointed south. “Not far,” he whispered, and Gino nodded.

  They couldn’t run full-out in the woods, but they moved as fast as they could without breaking an ankle or twisting a knee, dodging underbrush, branches, and downed trees.

  Gino was the first to see the fallen deputy and dropped to his knees beside him. He tore off his suit jacket and fashioned a makeshift tourniquet, tying it around the man’s bloody upper arm.

  Magozzi was already on his borrowed shoulder unit, putting out an “All units, officer down.” He didn’t like the pallor of the deputy’s skin, and he hoped like hell the bullet hadn’t hit his brachial artery.

  “Deputy . . .” Gino looked at his name plate. “Deputy Nagle. Help is on the way, stay with us.”

  “I think I hit him . . .” Deputy Nagle said weakly, and his good arm flailed, trying to point. “Ran . . . north . . . toward Walt’s. . . .”

  “Stay with him until help gets here, Gino,” Magozzi barked, then took a northerly route, heading into the woods, gun drawn.

  FIFTY-SEVEN

  Grace and Sheriff Emmet jumped when they heard gunshots, and a split second later, the sheriff was on his radio reporting shots fired. Harley, Roadrunner, and Walt came running out of the barn. “That was close,” Walt said breathlessly. “You folks get to your rig and stay put.”

  “Come with us, Walt,” Grace said.

  “I’ll just go to the house, my shotgun’s there.”

  “We’ve got plenty of weapons in the Chariot.”

  The sheriff got off his radio. “Walt, she’s right, go with them. I want to keep you all together and out of harm’s way.”

  Suddenly, Grace heard Magozzi’s voice coming from the speaker on the sheriff’s shoulder. “All units, officer down!”

  She looked at Harley and Roadrunner, whose expressions mirrored her own fear, offering no solace.

  “All of you, go!” the sheriff commanded, then started running toward the woods.

  —

  Magozzi’s pulse started pounding in his ears when he saw blood. There was a lot of it. If Deputy Nagle had hit an artery, then the killer wouldn’t get far. He paused and listened. The woods were silent. That meant the son of a bitch was probably hiding because he couldn’t run anymore. He swiveled his head around and every tree was suddenly a mortal enemy, potentially hiding a monster with a gun.

  He followed the trail of blood, all the muscles in his body taut to the point of physical pain.

  Then he heard it—a faint moaning just ahead. He crouched behind a tree, his eyes scanning the woods, his ears straining, then he crab-walked to the next tree, swallowing his heart, which had somehow climbed up into his throat. The moaning grew louder, then he heard a weak, raspy voice.

  “Help me.”

  Magozzi pressed his back against the tree. Would a brutal killer who was possibly mortally wounded want to take out one last person before he met his maker? It was a valid assumption, so before he moved forward, he thought of Grace, thought about their baby, because if things didn’t go well here in these woods, he wanted those to be his final thoughts.

  He peered around the tree trunk and saw more blood, then crept forward on his belly and saw a motionless man on the forest floor through a tangle of brambles. He waited for any movement and saw none, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t an ambush. “Don’t move!” he shouted, then clambered through the cover of the brambles, head low, waiting for a reaction. When it didn’t come, he cleared the brush and came face-to-face with a monster.

  Magozzi felt his stomach cramp when he saw the tattoos on his bare arms. Do you believe in evil? Amanda White’s voice echoed in his head.

  But he didn’t look so evil now. His eyes were glassy and his skin was a dreadful shade of gray. Magozzi kicked away the gun on the ground next to him, then got down on his knees, stripped off his suit coat and tied it around the gaping wound in the man’s thigh to staunch the gout of blood.

  And that was the great irony and torment of his job—he couldn’t calculate the many ways he’d imagined killing this man with his own bare hands over the past couple of days, and yet here he was, trying to save him in the hopes he would live to face justice.

  He reached up and felt his neck. The man’s carotid pulse was barely there and Magozzi knew he was looking at a dying man.

  “Angel Cruz?”

  The man’s eyes fluttered open in surprise, then closed again. “Marla,” he whispered.

  Magozzi caught his breath. “What about Marla?”

  “Four-fifteen . . .” The man retched, then went still as his eyes closed.

  “Angel! What about Marla?!”

  “Four-fifteen . . . Lilydale Way . . .” Then the man let out a final, shuddering breath.

  Magozzi checked for a pulse, but it was no longer there. Neither was the low-level current of electricity that every living creature emitted. Most people didn’t know they could sense it unless they’d been with a person as they died. Angel Cruz was definitely dead, and if he even had a soul, it was on its way straight to hell.

  He stared down at the man’s fully inked arms, exposed by a short-sleeved T-shirt; it was a chronology of wickedness, at least the spades were. If there were indeed bodies to go with the other suits on his arms, then there were a lot of dead people unaccounted for somewhere out there, maybe even at 415 Lilydale Way.

  Thirteen cards to a suit, four suits in a deck, do the math, that’s fifty-two.

  Magozzi let out a sharp breath, feeling something tightly coiled inside loosen, then stood and called it in. Immediately after that, he called McLaren.

  FIFTY-EIGHT

  Shock and exhaustion had drained all the adrenaline out of Magozzi and Gino, and that was before they’d had to tie up their most recent scenes with the injured deputy and their dead serial killer. They were
damn near lobotomized at this point, completely mute as they trudged in surreal silence up Walt’s mucky, rutted field road in filthy wet suits that were now splashed with other people’s blood.

  Magozzi wasn’t used to Gino’s silence under any circumstances, but today was different, and they were both privately replaying the day’s horrors and anticipating the new horrors to come. It wasn’t over, not by a long shot. They still hadn’t seen the graveyard in the woods, still hadn’t heard from McLaren about what he and Freedman had found at 415 Lilydale Way.

  They saw the jumble of BCA vehicles and squad cars as they approached Walt’s yard and a garage beyond, where the Chariot was parked. A rotund BCA tech was trotting awkwardly toward them with a kit in his hand, having obvious difficulty negotiating the inhospitable terrain.

  “Hell’s bells, Jimmy Grimm?” Gino finally broke the silence.

  Jimmy stopped in his tracks, his eyes traveling up and down their gory attire. “Oh my God, are you two okay?”

  “We’re fine, a couple others aren’t.”

  “I’d ask what you’re doing down here, but I already know. Sheriff Emmet said you pulled some things together. I was going to call you the first chance I got, but now I can tell you to your faces—when we started excavating in the woods, we found cards, including the missing two of spades. I’m thinking, you’ve got your guy, right? But what doesn’t sync is that the two of spades is a male, and there are at least three other vics with cards who are male, which doesn’t jibe with your serial.”

  “Actually, it does. We think he was a cartel heavy sent up to clean shop at Global Foods. The men were business, the women were pleasure.”

  Jimmy grimaced. “So you’re thinking he stashed his hits down here to protect operations up in the city?”

  “Makes sense. How long has the two of spades been in the ground?”

  “By my estimate, a couple months.”

  He looked at Gino. “Diego Sanchez?”