Third Grave Dead Ahead

“Oh, then you need to ask Miss Faye for sure. She used to run the place. Still thinks she does.”

  In a flash, I realized who Miss Faye had to be. The landlady’s name all those years ago had been Faye. “I think I remember her.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Bleached blond hair? Resembles death warmed over?”

  She chuckled again. “That’s her. You go on about your knocking, now. I could use me a good laugh.”

  That didn’t sound promising, but the thought of actually talking to that landlady again had my pulse racing in anticipation. Maybe she knew where Earl Walker had moved off to after he left here. She hadn’t been much help when I was fifteen, but the possibility was worth a shot. I raised my hand to the door, and the woman started cackling in excitement, apparently readying herself to be entertained. How bad could Miss Faye be? She’d had one foot in the grave the first time I’d spoken to her, and that was over ten years ago. Surely, with a little luck, I could take her.

  About half a second after my knuckles made first contact, something crashed against the door, loud enough to startle the bejesus out of me. I ducked and stumbled back before raising the light first to the door, then back to the woman.

  “What the hell was that?”

  She laughed some more, holding on to her sides, then managed to say, “Soup, sounded like.”

  I frowned and glanced back at the door. “That didn’t sound like soup to me, unless it was a few weeks old.”

  “In the can. You know, ’fore it’s made.”

  “Oh, right, a can of soup. Wonderful,” I said, complaining. “This place is like crazy on crackers.”

  The woman rolled onto her side with laughter. Normally, I liked making people laugh, but all I could seem to muster was a look of concern as I stepped back to the door and tried the knob.

  “You still going in there?” she asked, her astonishment cutting the cackle-fest short.

  “That’s the plan.” I turned back to her. “What do you think my chances are?”

  She waved a hand. “She just likes to throw things. Her aim’s wretched. Likely, she won’t hit you if you run fast enough.”

  “Her aim sounded pretty good from here.”

  “Yeah, well, she gets lucky sometimes.”

  “Great.”

  Surprisingly, the door was unlocked. I raised one arm to cover my face, then cracked the door open. “Miss Faye?” I said through the opening.

  Another can crashed against the door, slamming it shut, and the cackling started again. I’d have to make a run for it, possibly do a zigzag sprint until I found cover inside. I turned back to the woman and offered a sympathetic smile.

  “What’s your name?” I asked her.

  “Tennessee,” she said, pride brightening her aura.

  “Okay.” That was an odd name for a woman if ever I heard one. “Well, Tennessee, you can cross through me if you’d like.”

  A toothless grin flashed across her face. “I think I’ll stay a bit. I’m waiting on Miss Faye. I reckon she won’t be much longer.”

  “I understand. Wish me luck,” I said.

  She chortled. “You’ll need it. I was lying about her aim.”

  “Thanks,” I said with a final wave before bursting through the door. Something flew past my head. I stumbled over piles of junk and dived behind a decrepit couch just as another can was launched across the room. It crashed through the drywall and into the next room. “Miss Faye, damn it,” I called out from behind the arms covering my head as I cowered behind the couch. “Don’t make me call the police. I’m a friend. We met a few years ago.”

  The aerial assault stopped, and I peeked over my elbows. Then I heard a creaking sound along the floor as she drew closer and I suddenly felt like I’d landed in a horror movie, waiting to be pummeled to death by soup cans.

  “I don’t know you.”

  I jumped and raised both the flashlight and the tire iron to defend myself. Considering she only had a flyswatter, I figured my chances were pretty freaking good.

  “How do you know my name?” Her voice was a cross between a bulldog and a cement mixer. She’d clearly led a rough life.

  “Tennessee told me.”

  She frowned and studied me. I kept the light just close enough to her face to see her without blinding her. Since Miss Faye was still alive, I needed some kind of illumination to make out her features, unlike Tennessee.

  “What’s your name?” she asked, turning toward a kerosene lamp and lighting it.

  I switched off my flashlight when a soft glow filled a room that smelled like dirty ashtrays and mold. “Charley,” I said, glancing around at the piles and piles of magazines, old newspapers, books, and other nonessential paraphernalia. The place defined use extreme caution when lighting a cigarette.

  “She never mentioned you,” Faye said. She stepped to an aging recliner and crouched into it.

  “I remember your hair.” I searched for a place to sit and decided on a stable-looking stack of newspapers—thank god I didn’t wear white—before turning back to her in all her bleached-blond glory. “I met you a few years ago.”

  “You don’t look familiar,” she said, lighting a cigarette.

  I cringed. It was a wonder the place still stood at all. “I was here about ten years ago, looking for a family that had moved out during the night. They’d stiffed you for two months’ rent and a broken window.” I turned toward it. Its replacement now stood cracked, taped, and boarded.

  “That was you?” she asked.

  In shock, I refocused on her. “You remember me?”

  “I remember the family. You, not so much, but I do remember a kid coming the next day. I had a migraine, and you wouldn’t leave me alone.”

  Oops. “I’m sorry. I thought you had a hangover.”

  “I did have a hangover. Hence the migraine.” Her tone softened as she thought back. “Did you ever find them?”

  “No. Not back then.”

  She nodded, then turned her attention to the window. “I was hoping you would. I was hoping anyone would.”

  I sat my weapons on another stack of papers and asked, “Do you know what happened to them? Where they went?” When she took another draw off her cigarette and shook her head, I added, “I need to find the man, Earl Walker. It’s terribly important.”

  The pleading tone of my voice must have convinced her to at least try to offer more. “I don’t know where they went, but I remember those kids. Like it was yesterday. The girl so thin, I worried she’d break in a soft breeze. The boy so beaten, so hardened and fierce.”

  My chest tightened, and I shut my eyes a moment to get the image her words had instilled in my mind.

  When I opened them again, she turned a passionate gaze to me. “That wasn’t no man. That was a monster through and through.”

  I inched closer, sat on a stack of magazines a few feet from her. The low light cast hard shadows over her features, but the wetness shimmering in her eyes was unmistakable. Her empathy surprised me more than I would’ve liked to admit. I expected a stereotype. I did not get one.

  “Miss Faye—”

  “Nobody calls me Miss Faye but Tennessee,” she said, interrupting, “so she must’ve sent you. That’s the only reason you ain’t bleeding to death from a head wound right now.”

  “Fair enough.” I wiped my palms on my pants, wondering if she knew Tennessee had passed, and wondering how far to push her. “Ma’am, do you have anything at all that might help me find Earl Walker? I know this is asking a lot, but did they leave anything behind? A suitcase or possibly—”

  “He left stuff in the walls.”

  I blinked in surprise. “Earl Walker?”

  After an almost imperceptible nod, she said, “Harold, Earl, John … take your pick.”

  Earl had assumed several identities. She obviously knew a few. “What did he leave in the walls?”

  She pressed her mouth together hard. Her breath caught in her chest. “Pictures.”

  I stilled. Kim had
said that very thing, that Earl had left pictures in the walls. “Pictures of what?”

  She shook her head, refusing to answer.

  “Were they of Reyes? Were they of his boy?”

  Her chin rose visibly, and I knew I’d nailed it. Why would Earl do that? What would he have to gain? The idea was utterly foreign to me, and I quickly scanned through the massive amounts of information I’d gleaned in college for an answer. Or at least, as much as I could recall offhand. Oftentimes criminals liked to keep trophies. Did the pictures represent trophies to Earl? And if they did, wouldn’t he have kept them?

  He was all about control. Maybe they were a way to control Reyes, to keep him under his thumb. Still, I just couldn’t grasp why Earl would leave them. Kim had said there were pictures in the walls all over. Did she mean all the places they’d lived? They’d moved from place to place all over New Mexico, Texas, and Oklahoma, or so the police reports had said.

  As bad as I hated to ask, I asked. “Faye, do you still have them?”

  She wiped her eyes with the fingertips of one hand.

  “They could have a clue. Something. Anything. I must find him.” My mind conjured scenes from a murder mystery where something seemingly mundane in the background of a picture offered the clue that solved the case. Like I could get so lucky.

  I felt heartbreak rush through Faye as she considered my request, and I realized she must still have them. After drawing in a deep breath, she stood and shuffled to a sideboard, barely recognizable under the weight of clutter.

  “I only kept one,” she said, her voice saturated with sadness. “I burned the others and kept the only one I could stomach to look at.” She pulled a Polaroid out of a crippled drawer but kept her gaze averted. “Not that I look at it. It’s just, the others were so much worse, I couldn’t fathom having them in my house. I figured this way, if the police ever needed evidence as to what that man did to that boy, I’d have it.”

  Her words caused my heart to contract in dread and apprehension. She held out the picture, and I took it with a shaking hand, turned toward the light, braced myself, and glanced down.

  Maybe it was my diet of coffee and more coffee. Maybe it was the fifteen days without sleep. Maybe it was the odor that hung like a heavy fog around me, making it difficult to breathe. Whatever it was, I took one look at that picture and the world slipped out from under me and disappeared.

  21

  I chose the road less traveled. Now I’m lost.

  —T-SHIRT

  I pulled Misery to a stop in front of my apartment building at half past three, my eyes so swollen, I could barely drive home. Faye had revived me and offered me some water after I blacked out. Blacked out! I’d actually fainted when I saw that picture. The same picture I now clutched to my chest. I couldn’t look at it. Never again. Not that it mattered. The image had been emblazoned onto my corneas, and I knew I’d never be able to un-see what had been seen.

  After stumbling up the stairs, I went straight to my dresser and stashed the picture facedown in my lingerie drawer without so much as another glance.

  The ropes. The cuts and bruises. The shame. I almost felt like that was the worst part of it. How Earl seemed to purposely shame Reyes by taking that picture. He’d tied him up, the rope biting into his flesh, reopening wounds that appeared to have been healing. I recognized Reyes instantly despite the blindfold, his mussed dark hair, his smooth, fluidly mechanical tattoos along his shoulders and arms, his full mouth. He looked about sixteen in the picture, his face turned away, his lips pressed together in humiliation. Huge patches of black bruises marred his neck and ribs. Long garish cuts, some fresh, some half-healed, streaked along his arms and torso.

  The mere thought of the picture made me cry, which was exactly what I did at Faye’s place. I’d cried for over an hour. We talked. I cried some more. I wondered what the other pictures were like, the ones Faye had burned that were worse than the one I now had. Swallowing hard, I forced the image out of my mind and focused on my client, on finding Teresa Yost.

  With a good three hours to dawn, I decided to take a shower and put some fresh clothes on along with a pair of hiking boots, since I was probably going to do some hiking. It would take me an hour and a half to get to Pecos. If I timed it right, I could arrive at sunrise and set out on my search for Teresa early.

  * * *

  “Left?”

  “Right.”

  “Right?”

  “No, you’re right, turn left.”

  “Cookie, really?” I asked into the phone. Yost’s property was proving much harder to find than I’d originally thought, even with Cookie on Google Maps back on her home computer pointing the way, since I kept losing the GPS signal on my phone.

  When I’d left my apartment, Garrett’s guy was there, and for once, he was awake. I had to sneak around to Cookie’s silver Taurus and take it instead, a move that I informed her of when I called and woke her up at five thirty to let her know. Naturally I explained how I’d been forced to take her car as a ploy to sneak past my tail. Plus I was out of gas.

  Thinking back, I realized I could’ve waited until I actually got to Pecos to tell her I’d committed a felony in the pursuit of justice, since I really hadn’t needed her help until I actually arrived in Pecos over an hour later. But waking her up was fun. And I needed to think about something other than the picture that had been scorched into my mind.

  “Sorry,” she said, still a bit groggy even after her shower. “No right, just left.”

  “Then I should be there, but I don’t see a cabin.” At this point, I was so tired, I was seeing two of everything except a cabin. I fought to stay focused with a hard blink. “These trees all look alike. I think they’re twins or quadruplets or something.”

  “Is there a trail of any kind?” she asked.

  I pulled her car into a small clearing just off a side road, rubbed my eyes, then looked around. “Well, yeah, it doesn’t look like much, though. And I don’t know if your car will make it through the brush.”

  She gasped. “Don’t you dare take my car down a mountain trail.”

  “Really? Because it did great on the first one, aside from that rear axle thing.”

  “Charley Davidson!”

  “Just kidding, for crying out loud.” Geez, she was touchy about her car.

  I wondered if I should tell her about the picture and decided abso-freaking-lutely. If I had to be haunted for the rest of my days, then by golly, she did, too. No idea why. Misery loves company, I guess. The emotion, not the Jeep. I missed it dearly, but now was hardly the time to dwell on it.

  “Maybe you should wait for Garrett,” she said. “Where the hell is he?”

  “He wasn’t on duty when I left, remember? And since I ditched his phone, we have no way to get ahold of him that I know of.”

  “What about Angel?”

  “I told him to stick to the doctor like green on guacamole. He won’t be showing up anytime soon.”

  “Damn. You need to figure out a way to summon that kid.”

  “I know.” I folded out of her Taurus’s hard vinyl seat, still trying to shake off the layer of sorrow that’d enveloped me the instant I saw Reyes bound and blindfolded. “Maybe I shouldn’t have thrown Garrett’s phone in the pond.”

  “Ya think?”

  I sighed. Nothing I could do about it now. “Okay, I’m heading that way. I’ll call if I break a leg or get eaten by a bear.”

  “Play like a rock.”

  “Now?”

  “No, if a bear starts eating you.”

  I thought a moment before replying. “Do they have screaming, sobbing rocks, ’cause that’s probably what I’ll be doing if a bear is gnawing my arm off.”

  “It would be difficult to just lay there and be eaten alive, huh?”

  “Ya think?”

  I stumbled up the trail and found a rustic hunting cabin with a carved sign that read YOST. After trying the door and finding it locked, naturally, I accidently broke a window. I
had neither the time nor the inclination for locksmithing. A woman’s life was at stake. Dr. Yost could bill me.

  Finding nothing out of the ordinary inside, I walked the perimeter of the house, searching for a basement or other underground structure while the little girl with the kitchen knife followed me. She was a curious lot. I turned to her and knelt down, hoping I wouldn’t inadvertently get stabbed in the eye.

  “Wednesday … do you mind if I call you Wednesday?” Receiving no answer, I asked, “Do you see any kind of an underground structure?” Her arms hung rigid at her sides, one hand clutching on to the knife like her life depended on it, and she stared straight past me, her ashen face almost afraid. I decided to make physical contact, but when I went to touch her shoulder, she disappeared. Naturally. She reappeared on the hood of a four-wheeler, standing at attention, staring into nothing.

  I stepped over to study it just as my phone rang. It was Nathan Yost.

  “Hello, Ms. Davidson?” he asked when I answered.

  “This is Charley.”

  The ATV looked pretty beat up, but most four-wheelers did. This one was a utility ATV with an electric winch and cable on the back.

  “This is Nathan Yost. I was just wondering if you’ve had a chance to look over my wife’s case.”

  While the winch looked relatively new, the part of the ATV it was attached to was broken, like the doctor had used it on something really heavy. Unless he was trying to pull trees out by the roots, I couldn’t imagine what he’d need a winch for. But, admittedly, I wasn’t a guy. Winching was apparently a guy thing. As was wenching.

  “I’m looking into it right now, Doctor.” I scanned the area again.

  “So, you’ll take the case?” he asked, trying really hard to sound excited.

  “Absolutely.”

  Nothing else on the property seemed out of the ordinary. It was a nondescript cabin, and though it had electricity and running water, it was actually a little lower key than what I’d expected the billionaire doctor to have. Inside was a variety of camping paraphernalia, lanterns, sleeping bags, climbing equipment, rope.