Death Notice

Death Notice Todd Ritter Perry Hollow, Pennsylvania, has never had a murder. At least not as long as Kat Campbell has been police chief. And the first is brutal. George Winnick, a farmer in his sixties, is found in a homemade coffin on the side of the highway with his lips sewn shut and his veins and arteries drained of blood and filled with embalming fluid. Chilling as that is, it becomes even more so when Kat finds that the Perry Hollow Gazette obituary writer, Henry Goll, received a death notice for Winnick before he was killed.Soon after, the task force from the Pennsylvania Bureau of Investigation shows up and everything takes an irreversible turn for the worse. Nick Donnelly, head of the task force, has been chasing the “Betsy Ross Killer,” so named because he’s handy with a needle and thread, for more than a year. Winnick seems to be his fourth victim. Or is he?Kat has never handled a murder case before, but she’s not about to sit by while someone terrorizes her sleepy little town or her own son. But will her efforts be enough to stop a killer and bring calm to Perry Hollow?A portrait of a small town in turmoil, where residents fear for their lives, Todd Ritter’s Death Notice is a gripping debut from a terrific new talent in crime fiction. TODD RITTER Death Notice Copyright Avon An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London, SE1 9GF www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk) This paperback edition 2011 First published by Minotaur Books, an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Ltd., New York, 2010 Copyright © Todd Ritter 2010. Todd Ritter asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books. Source ISBN: 9781847562951 Ebook Edition © OCTOBER 2011 ISBN: 9781847562968 Version: 2014–12–16 Dedication To Mike, for everything Table of Contents Title Page (#u754c558f-c7d6-5983-ae9e-efbf70d9edb2) Copyright (#ucb19b1ff-390f-5979-bba1-4bdae0a85aeb) Dedication (#u1661b595-7e0f-51e4-ab37-acd95de1094f) Prologue (#ua4fe25d7-55a9-53ba-bec0-0c44857409d5) March (#u3927d1d0-2fad-56cc-a3c0-2790a84524f3) One (#u3e2a479f-2cab-504b-8477-a7c2e6f7eb37) Two (#ud06f0a5a-ddcd-5458-a221-dffe3b40175f) Three (#ua66007c6-7c73-517c-8f14-1c14df71b7bb) Four (#u73c1bdd8-41ad-5461-88a6-8a53a58c00d4) Five (#u0505e06b-6b41-545f-a6ba-b624c924ef12) Six (#uccacb227-6fae-5480-8cc1-1e6de51db52a) Seven (#ubc118106-51b3-5bc6-b1a8-20abdebfbfd7) Eight (#u2d4a6aa8-677a-5442-8247-24fc98747e4f) Nine (#u92e248a2-84f7-59d8-ac47-181b8949fcfc) Ten (#u5f914b5f-abb2-56d4-9283-54a4edf0fb40) Eleven (#litres_trial_promo) Twelve (#litres_trial_promo) Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo) July (#litres_trial_promo) Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo) Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo) Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo) Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo) Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo) Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo) Twenty (#litres_trial_promo) Twenty-One (#litres_trial_promo) Twenty-Two (#litres_trial_promo) Twenty-Three (#litres_trial_promo) Twenty-Four (#litres_trial_promo) Twenty-Five (#litres_trial_promo) Twenty-Six (#litres_trial_promo) October (#litres_trial_promo) Twenty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo) Twenty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo) Twenty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo) Thirty (#litres_trial_promo) Thirty-One (#litres_trial_promo) Thirty-Two (#litres_trial_promo) Thirty-Three (#litres_trial_promo) Thirty-Four (#litres_trial_promo) Thirty-Five (#litres_trial_promo) Thirty-Six (#litres_trial_promo) Thirty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo) Thirty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo) Thirty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo) Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo) Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo) Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo) About the Author (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) PROLOGUE The pain snapped him into consciousness. A sharp, steady throbbing, it began at his mouth and pulsed down his jaw and neck. He tried to moan—it was the kind of pain that made men moan—but couldn’t. The pain flared so badly after each attempt that he stopped trying. He stayed quiet, listening to the ragged streams of air rushing through his nostrils. When he opened his eyes, he saw only darkness as something brushed against his lashes. Cloth. Heavy and rough. He was blindfolded. His face felt damp. He wasn’t sure, but he thought it was blood, smeared across his chin. A thin line slipped down his cheek. The liquid was inside his mouth, too. On his tongue. Pooling in the crevices between his teeth. Blood. He was certain now. He could taste it. He lay flat on his back, his body stretched taut, arms at his sides. When he tried to move them, they wouldn’t budge. Rope was wrapped across his arms, legs, torso, and head, binding him tight. The pressure flattened him, ironing out the stooped shoulders that fifty years on the farm had given him. He began to panic, breathing faster through his nostrils, a locomotive picking up speed. He tried to yell for help, parting his lips to scream. But his mouth wouldn’t open. His lips refused to separate, the pain there growing more extreme. He tried two more times, the hurt so bad it formed deep grunts in the back of his throat. Since the grunts had no way of escaping, he was forced to choke them back. On his last attempt to scream, he realized what had happened. The pain brought clarity, sharpening his mind so that he understood the situation fully. Someone had sealed his mouth shut. He tried to scream once more, hoping the sheer strength of the sound would blast through the barrier his lips now created. The noise that emerged was familiar to him. He heard it all the time on the farm—the high-pitched squeal made just before the slaughter. Only this time the sound was coming from him. He heard another noise, audible beneath his own desperate attempts to cry out. Footsteps. Someone else was there. “It won’t be as bad if you hold still,” a voice in the darkness said. The owner of the voice stood just behind his head. He felt warm breath on his ear. Fingers crawled along his chin and held his head in place. Something pressed against his neck. Cold. Sharp. There was a moment of pressure, an unsettling suspense. Then the cold, sharp something pushed through his skin, entering his body, dividing flesh from flesh. Blood poured out of him, spilling onto his shoulders, dampening his hair. He lay there helpless, feeling like a freshly gutted animal. Each beat of his heart sent another wave of blood coursing out of his body. This time, the pain was unbearable. It wasn’t just at his mouth anymore. It was inside him. It was everywhere. He began to scream. Not out loud, but in his head, the desperate sirens of noise ricocheting off the inside of his skull. The cold, sharp something remained in his neck, wriggling. The pain was so overwhelming it erased his thoughts, his silent screams. It kept erasing until there was nothing left in his head but pain. And fear. And, finally, darkness. MARCH ONE “Chief Campbell!” Kat’s name rattled up Main Street as soon as she set foot on the sidewalk. She had just stepped out of Big Joe’s, a Starbucks wannabe, carrying an extra-large coffee, for which she had paid Starbucks’ prices. Normally, the concept of four-dollar java would have annoyed her. But it was a gray and frigid morning, and she needed the heat and clarity that coffee provided. Unfortunately, the sound of her name, now being shouted a second time, prevented her from taking that first, precious sip. “Hey, Chief!” The source of the yell was Jasper Fox, owner of a flower shop burdened with the name Awesome Blossoms. Despite the cold, perspiration glistened on his face as he barreled up the sidewalk. Huffing and puffing, he waited until he reached Kat to finish his sentence. “I’ve been robbed.” Kat, coffee cup suspended in front of her mouth, blinked with disbelief. In Perry Hollow, robberies happened about as often as solar eclipses. Its pine-dotted streets and exhaustingly quaint storefronts were mostly trouble-free. “Robbed? Are you sure?” Jasper had an absurd mustache that dripped from his face like two dirty icicles. Whenever Kat saw him, she thought of a walrus. That morning, the mustache drooped even lower than normal. “I think I’d know,” Jasper said. His hangdog expression told her he had been expecting a different response. Something action-packed and decisive. Maybe Kat could have lived up to his expectations had she been given a chance to take a sip of her coffee. Instead, she could only lower the cup and watch Jasper as he watched her. She knew what he was thinking. She read it in his eyes. He saw a woman five feet tall, ten pounds overweight, and six years shy of middle age. A woman who darkened her blond hair in order to be taken seriously. A woman who had bags under her eyes because the boiler was on the fritz and her son was up half the night with a cough. Most of all, he saw a woman—with a badge pinned to her uniform—idling on the sidewalk when she should have been investigating the town’s first theft in more than a year. Knowing all of this was going through Jasper’s brain, Kat asked, “What was stolen?” “I’ll show you.” She followed him down Main Street, which was waking up faster than she was. She spotted Lisa Gunzelman unlocking her antiques store and Adrienne Wellington adjusting a floral-print frock in the window of her dress shop. Similar activity took place on the other side of the street as store owners got ready for another day of commerce in Perry Hollow, Pennsylvania. Their efforts were in vain. The town had seen few visitors since the Christmas rush, simply because January and February were too cold for shopping. Now it was the middle of March, and although store windows showed off shorts, sunglasses, and tank tops, the scene outside was anything but springlike. Just two days earlier, a nor’easter had dumped six inches of snow on the roads. That was followed by an arctic chill that froze the plowed snow into miniature icebergs against the sidewalks. Kat stepped around one as she followed Jasper into his own store, two doors down from the dress shop. Once inside Awesome Blossoms, Jasper made a beeline to the rear of the store and pushed open a door that led back outside. Kat followed him through it, finding herself in the center of a vacant parking lot covered with a thin sheet of ice. Only then did she begin to understand the situation. Jasper’s delivery van—a ubiquitous white Ford with the store’s name painted across its sides—had been taken during the night. The realization gave her an inappropriate kick. At last, something to investigate. “Are you positive this is where you parked it last night?” “Of course.” “I know you think I’m asking the obvious,” Kat said. “But these are the things I need to know if you want me to find your van.” Jasper pointed to an empty patch of gravel. “I parked it right there.” “Are you the only person with a set of keys?” “I keep a spare set in the glove compartment in case someone else needs to make a delivery.” “Let me guess. You leave the van’s door unlocked, too.” Jasper didn’t need to speak. His mustache did the talking for him. And when it sagged sadly, Kat knew the answer was yes. As stupid as his actions sounded, Kat couldn’t hold it against him. Perry Hollow was the kind of town where you could leave your car unlocked with the keys in the ignition and know it would be safe. Until now, apparently. “Don’t worry,” she said. “We’ll find the van. Everyone in town knows what it looks like. Some kids probably took it for a joyride and left it behind the Shop and Save.” Kat assumed this theory would relieve Jasper in some small way. Instead, the florist’s face scrunched with worry. “There was something else in that glove compartment, Chief.” “What?” Jasper hesitated, just for a moment. “A pistol.” Kat groaned. It wasn’t the best thing to do in front of Jasper, but it was better than her first instinct, which was to throttle him. How could he be so stupid as to leave his van unlocked with a gun in the glove compartment? And why did he have a gun in there to begin with? “I had it for safety reasons,” Jasper said, sensing the unspoken question that hung like a clothesline between them. “I had a permit for it and everything. I just kept it there in case I got carjacked.” Unless he made regular deliveries to West Philadelphia, Jasper had no reason to worry about a carjacking. “Was it loaded?” Kat said. A sad nod from the florist told her this was a bigger problem than she had first suspected. She needed to find that van. Pronto. And when she did, hopefully the gun would still be there. Quickly, she made her way back through the store and onto Main Street. When she reached her black-and-white Crown Vic—still parked in front of Big Joe’s, thank God—Kat heard Deputy Carl Bauersox trying to reach her on the radio. “Chief?” his voice squawked as Kat slid behind the wheel. “You there?” Carl, her sole deputy, worked the night shift. Kat was usually in the station by that hour to relieve him of duty. But she had been sidetracked by Jasper’s van troubles, and now Carl was probably wondering when he could go home. Kat grabbed the radio. “I’m on my way, Carl.” “We have a big problem, Chief.” Kat doubted that. Two crimes taking place on the same day would be some sort of record for Perry Hollow. It was probably more like a cat in a tree, which in Carl’s world did amount to a big deal. “What kind of problem?” “A truck driver called. Said there’s a wooden box sitting on the side of Old Mill Road.” As Carl spoke, Kat realized she was still carrying her neglected Big Joe’s house blend. She raised the cup to her lips and, just before getting to that long-delayed first sip, said, “Why didn’t you go out there and move it?” “Because it’s more than a box.” Kat stopped herself mid-sip. Again. “More than a box how?” “Well, Chief, the trucker swears up and down that it’s a coffin.” A coffin. On the side of the road. The idea was so preposterous Kat knew it couldn’t be true. The truck driver was mistaken. It was simply a box. And now her job was to move it before some distracted driver smashed into it, possibly necessitating the use of a real coffin. “I’ll check it out,” she said. “In the meantime, do me a favor and put out a countywide APB on Jasper Fox’s delivery van. It was stolen last night.” She didn’t mention the gun. It would have been a good idea with anyone but Carl, who flapped his gums faster than a hummingbird worked its wings. If he knew about the gun, the news would be all over Perry Hollow within an hour. Carl signed off with a chipper “Righto, Chief,” leaving Kat to reluctantly lower her coffee, start the Crown Vic, and head out to whatever awaited her on Old Mill Road. When Kat found the box, it was indeed sitting on the side of the road, resting on a patch of frozen snow. Although the truck driver who spotted it called it a coffin, Kat, in true police chief fashion, refused to speculate on the matter. Squinting against the sun’s reflection on the snow, she peered through the windshield at the box sitting a few yards away. Rectangular in shape, it looked to be made of untreated wood. Probably pine, if Kat cared to guess. Which she didn’t. She climbed out of the car, her breath forming a brief ghost of vapor that floated away in the frigid breeze. It was too damn cold for March, which Kat thought was bad news in several ways. For one, the prolonged winter depressed her. Second, the cold had kept the tourists away for too long. And most folks in Perry Hollow depended on them for their livelihoods. Finally, the cold seemed to Kat a shivery warning of impending danger. It was too sharp, too unnatural. When she finally got around to taking that first sip of coffee, it was in a vain attempt to steel herself against the chill. But the java itself had already succumbed to the cold, not helping her one bit. Kat instead had to rely on her parka, which she zipped up to her chin. When she reached the box, Kat understood why someone passing by could think it was a coffin. It certainly looked casketlike. More than six feet long, three feet wide, and about two feet deep, it was definitely big enough to hold a body. Kneeling next to it, she inspected the box for signs of where it had come from and, hopefully, where it was supposed to go. She looked for an invoice stapled to the side or a company’s logo branded into the wood. She found neither. As she ran a hand across the box’s top and along its sides, the rough wood scraped her palm. Whatever its intended use, the box was definitely homemade, most likely by an amateur. Any craftsman worth his salt would have subjected the wood to at least some form of sanding. Leaning in close, Kat sniffed deeply, detecting a faint trace of pitch. Pine. Just as she had suspected. She wanted to believe the box had simply landed there after falling off a truck, but instinct told her otherwise. It was in perfect condition. No scratches or scuff marks. No signs of impact with the road. The way it sat—on its back, stretched tidily across the ditch—also raised suspicion. No box tumbling from a truck could have landed so perfectly without some assistance. Its location was no accident. Someone had placed it there. Someone had wanted it to be found. Finished with her examination, Kat saw no point in delaying the inevitable. Coffin or not, the box needed to be opened. Tugging on the lid, she noticed it was nailed shut at the corners and at two points along each side. She marched back to her patrol car and grabbed a crowbar from the trunk before returning to the box. With the crowbar’s help, the nails barely resisted when she pried the lid open and yanked it away. The first thing she saw was a pair of wheat-colored work boots. Next was a pair of mud-streaked overalls that continued over a red flannel shirt. Finally, framed by the shirt’s collar, was the face of a man in his late sixties. The full picture sent Kat scrambling backward. Standing halfway between the box and her car, she turned away and clamped one hand over her mouth to calm her gasping. She pressed the other hand against her right side, where a sudden fear jabbed at her ribs. When a minute passed, Kat willed herself to look at the coffin again. The second glance was accompanied by the sad, stomach-sinking realization that she knew who the corpse was. His name was George Winnick, and until this morning he had been a farmer who tended fifty acres on the outskirts of Perry Hollow. Kat didn’t know him well. Other than exchanging greetings at the Shop and Save or in passing on the street, they had barely spoken. But he was enough of a fixture in town for her to know he had been a decent man—hardworking and dependable. She also knew there was no reason he should be lying dead in a pine box on Old Mill Road. “George,” she whispered as she unsteadily approached the body again. “What happened to you?” His corpse had been crammed inside the coffin like a doll stuffed into a shoe box. His arms were folded across his chest, each open hand resting against the opposite shoulder. The ashen shade of his hair matched the pale flesh on his hands, neck, and face. Two polished pennies sat atop each of his eyes, hugged by bushy, gray-studded eyebrows. Both coins had been placed heads up, Abe Lincoln’s profile glinting in Kat’s direction. The effect was eerie, the pennies looking like eyes themselves—dead and unblinking. A wound marred the right side of his neck, partially hidden by his shirt collar. Pushing the fabric out of the way, Kat examined the gash. About three inches long, it had been stitched shut with black thread. Beads of blood had frozen to the thread, like raindrops in a spiderweb. Similar ice crystals could be seen on George’s lips, which were coated with rust-colored flecks of dirt. That’s when Kat realized it wasn’t dirt she saw. It was dried blood. Lots of it, crusted around more black thread that crisscrossed his lips. George Winnick’s mouth had been sewn shut. Kat gasped again as the pain in her ribs deepened. It was an overwhelming sensation—part nausea, part horror. Still, she managed to make it back to her patrol car and radio Carl. “I need you to listen closely,” she said. “Call the EMS squad. Tell them to get here immediately.” “There’s someone inside the box?” “Yes. George Winnick.” Carl reacted the way Kat had expected him to—he prayed. She waited as he murmured a quick prayer for George’s soul. After the amen, he asked, “How did he die?” Kat told him she didn’t know. “What I do know is that you need to get on the horn and call the county sheriff. Tell him to bring the medical examiner. We’re going to need some help, because this—” She stopped speaking when she realized she had no idea what this was. Nor did she have the first clue how to handle it. All she knew was that she had been right about the relentless chill. The cold was a bad omen. Very bad. TWO It’s called a death sentence—that single line in an obituary detailing who died, how, and when. Henry Goll, who wrote them on a daily basis, enjoyed the nickname. He liked its sly wordplay, its mordant wit. Plus, he appreciated how the name hinted at a deeper, darker truth just below its surface: from the moment we are born, we are sentenced to death. Part of Henry’s job was to make sure every obituary printed in the Perry Hollow Gazette contained a death sentence. For the most part, it was easy. A grieving family gave the information to the county’s only funeral home, which in turn faxed it to Henry. Using that as a guide, he sat in his cupboard-sized office and wrote a respectful overview of the deceased’s life. The death sentence always came first. It was the meat of the obituary, the only thing readers really wanted to know. The rest—family, work histories, achievements—were just side dishes to be consumed later. Henry knew the obituary for George Winnick was a fake because it wasn’t a complete death sentence. Other than a name and a time of death, it contained barely any information at all. George Winnick, 67, of Perry Hollow, Pa., died at 10:45 P.M. on March 14. Five years of being the obituary writer at the Gazette had made Henry an expert at spotting fakes, which arrived with alarming frequency. He had no idea how anyone could see humor in that kind of prank, but many did. The worst offenders were teenagers, who often sent in fake death notices of much-reviled teachers. Others were sent by the alleged corpse’s friends, usually during a milestone birthday. Under Henry’s watch, none had managed to sneak into the paper. Whenever he saw an obituary claiming someone had died on his fiftieth birthday, he automatically threw it away. He was close to doing the same with George Winnick’s, which had been sitting in the fax machine when he entered his office that morning. But because there was nothing suspicious about the age and date listed, he figured it was best to at least confirm it was a fake before relegating it to the trash. Henry’s first and only call was to the McNeil Funeral Home. Tucked away on the far end of Oak Street, McNeil was a father and son outfit that had a monopoly on Perry Hollow’s dead. If someone in town passed away, the folks at McNeil knew about it. Deana Swan, the funeral home’s receptionist, answered the phone after a single ring. “McNeil Funeral Home,” she said in a bored voice. “This is Deana. How may I help you?” Henry cleared his throat before speaking. “This is Henry Goll from the Perry Hollow Gazette.” Deana interrupted him with a pert “Hey, Henry.” “I have a question about a fax I received.” “Why don’t you ever say hello to me?” Taken aback, Henry replied with a confused “Pardon?” “You call here, like, every day. And you just get straight to the point. No hello. No chitchat. Why is that?” Henry was at a loss for words. “I don’t know. Maybe I’m not that interesting.” Deana’s response of “That’s not what I heard” surprised him, mainly because she offered no follow-up. Henry didn’t find himself interesting in the least, so he doubted Deana’s mysterious source. “Trust me,” he said. “I’m not.” Henry wasn’t lying. He might have been interesting once, but his life in the past five years was a strict schedule of work and solitude. Every morning he arrived at his third-floor office by nine. He worked until six, taking an hour to eat lunch at his desk. When he left for the day, it was via the back stairs, where he could bypass the prying eyes in the main newsroom. Once home, Henry exercised for precisely an hour. After that, he prepared dinner, watched an old movie on TV, then read a book until he grew tired. In the morning, he had breakfast, made his lunch, and repeated the routine. His unbending schedule, coupled with the fact that he rarely showed his pale face in the newsroom, had earned him a nickname among the reporters—Henry Ghoul. No one suspected Henry knew about the nickname. But he did. And he thought it amusingly appropriate, just like death sentence. He was the phantom of the newsroom, the odd duck writing about dead people. Sometimes he went out of his way to act accordingly, sweeping ghostlike up the back steps and making sure moody music emanated from his office under the eaves. As for the other, crueler reason they called him Ghoul, Henry tried not to think about it. He couldn’t change the way he looked. Not now, anyway. “Well, interesting or not, you should visit me sometime,” Deana said. “We can go to lunch.” Her suggestion was the biggest surprise in a conversation filled with them. “That’s probably not a good idea,” Henry said. “Why? I don’t even know what you look like.” Henry touched his face before he spoke, his fingertips running along the scar that started at his left ear, sliced through the corners of both lips, and ended in the center of his chin. Moving upward, his hand slid across the mottled skin above his left eye. Although he couldn’t see it, he knew the large burn mark retained a dark redness against the white of his flesh. It was usually darker in the morning, only fading as the day progressed. “We should get back to the fax,” he said. Deana didn’t bother to hide the disappointment in her voice. “Of course. What’s the name?” “George Winnick. I can’t tell if it’s legitimate or not.” Henry heard the rustling of paper on Deana’s desk, followed by a few taps on a keyboard. “There’s no sign of him in our records,” she eventually said. “Did the fax come from us?” Henry told her the fax didn’t seem to have come from any funeral home—another sign of its impostor status. Having nothing else to add, he thanked Deana for her help and hung up before she had another chance to invite him to lunch. He then grabbed the obituary for George Winnick, crumpled it into a tight ball, and dropped it into the trash. Henry spent the rest of the morning writing obituaries for people who actually were dead. There were four of them altogether, two coming from funeral homes outside of the county and two faxed to him by Deana Swan. On the second fax, just beneath the funeral home’s letterhead, she had scrawled, “Sorry if I made you uncomfortable.” She had, mostly because Henry had been momentarily detoured from his usual routine. He worked in the same manner he lived: without spontaneity. Everything in his impeccably organized office had its place and its purpose. The lamp on his desk illuminated the cramped and windowless room. The bookshelf bulged with reference materials. The fax machine, exactly an arm’s length away, provided grist for the mill. While writing, he played one of the many tragic operas downloaded onto his computer. That morning, he listened to Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde. Instead of a distraction, the swelling music, soaring arias, and tale of doomed love served Henry well. It helped him concentrate, allowing him to sustain the somber mood necessary to write about those who had shuffled off this mortal coil. And by the time poor Isolde died of heartbreak, he had finished his work for the morning. Lunchtime was promptly at noon. Henry ate the same meal every day—turkey on wheat, small salad, bottle of water. He brought everything from home except the water, which was purchased from the vending machine downstairs. In the break room, a lone reporter stood in front of the snack machine, mulling over his options. He offered a forced smile, which Henry refused to return. Henry Ghoul didn’t smile. The reporter’s name was Martin Swan. Blandly handsome, he had the look of a former football star going to seed in the working world. His white shirt fit tightly, and his silk tie trickled down a broad chest and the beginnings of a beer gut. Henry knew nothing about him other than the fact that he was Deana’s brother. In a town as small as Perry Hollow, coincidences like that were common. Because of this tenuous link between them, Martin always felt compelled to talk to Henry, even though his voice was usually poised somewhere between sincerity and indifference. Today was no different. “You’ll be getting an obituary from my sister soon,” Martin said flatly. Henry stood at the machine next to him, fishing in his pocket for change. “What makes you think that?” Martin’s voice suddenly became animated. “You didn’t hear the big news?” “Hear what?” “Someone was murdered this morning. Chief Campbell found him in a coffin on the side of Old Mill Road. It’s creepy as hell. Poor George.” The name made Henry freeze. “George Winnick?” Martin nodded. “Did you know him?” A chill shot up Henry’s spine. He felt surprise. And fear. The coincidence was too great to not cause at least some bit of fear. “What time was he found?” “I think eight or so,” Martin said. “Have you heard something about it? I’m working the story, so tell me if you have.” Henry left the break room without saying another word. Taking the back steps two at a time, he rushed into his office, streaked to the garbage can, and rustled through its contents until he found the balled-up sheet of paper. He smoothed the fax out on his desk, scanning the single sentence typed across the page. George Winnick, 67, of Perry Hollow, Pa., died at 10:45 P.M. on March 14. In the top left corner of the page was a series of small numbers printed in black. A time stamp of when the fax was sent. Henry read it three times, disbelief growing with each pass. Another chill galloped up his spine. Unlike the first, it stayed there, refusing to be thrown off even as he scooped up the fax, grabbed his coat, and sprinted out the door. THREE The man sitting opposite Nick Donnelly was ugly. There was no doubt about it, no eye-of-the-beholder bullshit. He was ass-ugly, yet Nick couldn’t stop looking at him. He was fascinated by the man’s pockmarked cheeks, greasy hair, and teeth that resembled half-nibbled corn on the cob. Nick bet it was torture to be that unattractive. Thank God he’d never know. The Donnellys were a good-looking, strong-bodied clan. Black Irish, with faces that could have been carved by Michelangelo himself. Add in the rogue’s smile inherited from his father, and Nick knew he was one handsome devil. But this other guy—this Edgar Sewell sitting a table’s length away—he’d had a hard life. Nick was sure of it. Being taunted. Being called names. Heart sinking every time he looked in the mirror. It still didn’t excuse what he did. Nothing could, no matter how ugly he was. “So, Edgar,” Nick said. “Why did you do it?” Dressed in an orange jumpsuit, the man lowered his eyes to the handcuffs at his wrists and said uncomfortably, “I told you already.” Edgar’s voice matched his looks—unbearable. High-pitched and wavering, it made Nick’s ears hurt. “Tell me again.” “Why do you need to hear it again?” “Because I want to help you.” It was a lie. Edgar Sewell, the killer of three little girls, was a lost cause. He would spend the rest of his life in this shithole prison outside Philadelphia. Nick’s true goal was to crawl inside his mind and figure out what drove him to commit his unspeakable acts. Understanding that could possibly help Nick stop the killers who were still out there, still preying on the innocent and unsuspecting. That’s why Nick wanted to know. “They told me to do it,” Edgar said. “Who?” “The voices.” It was the old voices-in-my-head-made-me-kill excuse. Nick had interviewed four killers in the past week, and Edgar Sewell was the third person to use it. But it was a bullshit excuse, used to hide their true motivations. People like Edgar killed not at the behest of ominous voices. They killed because they wanted to. “What did these voices sound like?” “I can’t remember.” Nick leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms. “That’s interesting. If voices in my head told me to butcher little girls, I’d remember what they sounded like.” That made Edgar change his tune. “I do remember.” “Then tell me.” Edgar stalled by putting his left thumb to his lips and licking it, his tongue a flash of pink poking around the thumbnail. Nick had seen two other killers do the same thing. It was a trait that signaled maternal issues. When Edgar became aware of Nick watching him, he jerked his thumb away and said, “Elvis.” Nick had to give Edgar credit for originality. The others had simply said Satan. But the lie also pissed him off. After an hour, he had learned nothing new about Edgar Sewell. But now it was time to put him on the spot and, hopefully, get some real answers out of him. Nick reached down and opened the briefcase sitting next to his chair. He pulled out a manila folder that contained three photographs. The first one showed a brown-haired girl who smiled shyly for the camera. Nick slapped it onto the table and slid it toward Edgar. “This is Lainie Hamilton. Do you remember her?” Edgar refused to look at the photograph, turning his head until he faced the wall. “I know you do,” Nick said. “She was eight and lived downstairs from you. Her mother, Ronette, was a prostitute, just like yours was. And on June 1, 1980, you offered Ronette twenty dollars to have sex with you. Any of this ring a bell?” Edgar popped his thumb into his mouth and shook his head. “She refused, didn’t she? She laughed at you. Maybe called you ugly. You went back upstairs to your apartment and stewed. Later that night, when Ronette was walking the street, you snuck downstairs, broke in, and killed Lainie.” The thumb popped out long enough for Edgar to say, “The voices told me to.” “There were no voices,” Nick said, his own voice growing angry. “It was only you. And you killed little eight-year-old Lainie of your own free will. You even liked it so much that you did it again six months later to the daughter of another prostitute.” Nick tossed a second photo onto the table. “Then you did it again.” A third photo. All three of Edgar Sewell’s victims—the youngest six, the oldest eleven—looked up at their killer with innocent eyes. Forced to face their stares, Edgar said, “They deserved it.” “Who? The girls?” “The mothers. Those dirty, filthy whores. They thought they were better than me. They were rotten sluts who were mean to me and made fun of me and called me ugly, just like—” Nick finished the confession for him. “Your mother?” Edgar nodded so vigorously that Nick was afraid he’d bite off part of his thumb, which was shoved fully between his lips. Then, to Nick’s surprise, Edgar Sewell did what none of the other killers he interviewed had done. He cried. The tears signaled that the interview was over. Nick knew he’d get no more information out of Edgar. Which meant it was on to the next prison—this one in Centre County—and maybe two more after that, if Nick had the time. Before leaving, he stopped by the prison’s public restroom, which was one step above a gas station’s. One toilet. One urinal. Permanent grime coated the sink’s basin. Nick tried not to touch it as he splashed cold water onto his face. In the mirror, a hollow-eyed man stared back at him. Christ, he was exhausted. This was the start of his second week interviewing killers, and all that talk and travel had taken its toll. But it would be worth it in the end, he hoped. After drying his face, Nick exited the bathroom and then the prison itself, relieved to be free of its walls, its bars, its unrelenting grimness. His mood brightened enough that he could muster a whistle. A little “Folsom Prison Blues” in honor of his location. The good mood—and the whistling—lasted only until he reached the parking lot, where an unexpected visitor waited for him. Captain Gloria Ambrose, his boss at the Pennsylvania State Police Bureau of Criminal Investigation, leaned against the unmarked car that had shuttled her there. She hugged herself for warmth until she caught sight of Nick. Then her arms dropped to her sides. The move was vintage Gloria—always trying to look tougher than she really was. “How did you find me?” “You made an official request to speak to a prisoner of the state,” Gloria replied. “So finding you was easy. I should be asking you why you’re interviewing prisoners when you’re supposed to be on vacation.” Nick was on vacation. At least officially. And what he did during his time off was his own business. “Just tell me what’s going on,” he said irritably. “I know there’s a reason you’re here.” Even more, he knew what that reason was. Gloria didn’t even need to tell him. Her presence alone spoke volumes. “He struck again.” “Where?” “A town called Perry Hollow. It’s about forty-five minutes from here. The rest of your team is already there.” “I assume you want me to join them,” Nick said. Gloria, who was done with being cold, opened the car’s rear door and slipped inside. “That’s entirely up to you,” she said, sneaking a glance at the gray-walled prison rising behind Nick. “You are still on vacation.” She closed the door, leaving Nick alone in the frigid wind with one question still unspoken. He was about to rap on the car’s window, but it lowered before he had the chance, revealing Gloria’s stern gaze. “And no,” she said. “I won’t tell anyone about your extracurricular activities. But next time you say you’re taking a vacation, do it. You can’t keep pushing yourself like this, Donnelly. It’s not healthy. You really need to learn how to let go.” Nick drove to Perry Hollow in the company of the Rolling Stones. Nothing was better for a road trip than Jagger’s tremulous voice and the band’s relentless sound. Nick propelled himself along the highway to the strains of “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” “Gimme Shelter,” and “Brown Sugar.” By the time the band was showing some sympathy for the devil, he had reached Perry Hollow, where a devil of a different stripe had just claimed one of its residents. He found the crime scene easily enough. On the outskirts of town, it was the place with the most people gathered there. The entire road was closed, forcing Nick to stop his car on the hard shoulder. Sitting in his car, he surveyed the scene. On one side of the barricade was a crowd of curious onlookers. They craned their necks and talked among themselves, their faces all displaying the same shell-shocked look. On the other side of the police tape was a mix of sheriff’s officers and state troopers. They, too, stood around and chatted while looking as stunned as the bystanders. The only people in the crowd unfazed by the situation were the only three faces Nick recognized. And that was because they worked for him. Tony Vasquez was the first to spot Nick as he flashed his credentials and ducked under the police tape. “You made it,” he said, lifting the brim of his campaign hat. A full-time state trooper and part-time bodybuilder, he was the only task force member who wore a uniform. It sure as hell made him look intimidating, which Nick knew Tony liked. But he also wore it with a certain amount of pride. Only 2 percent of the state’s troopers were Hispanic. And Tony was one of the best. With stats like that, he had every reason to be proud. “We placed bets on if you’d show up or not,” he said. “I won.” “How much?” “Twenty bucks from Cassie and the chance to bench-press Rudy.” “Well done, Vasquez.” Rudy Taylor, the bench pressee, was nearby, kneeling before a patch of ice on the side of the road. “Is this where he was found?” Nick asked. Rudy nodded. “But he didn’t die here.” “How can you tell?” “No blood. No struggle. Just the box he was dumped in.” Stump short and toothpick thin, Rudy Taylor was considered the odd duck of the team. His size didn’t help. Neither did the bowl haircut that made him look like a grade-school science club president. But he was the best crime scene technician they had. Rudy could survey a scene for five minutes and find ten things a whole team had missed after looking for an hour. “What about tire marks or footprints?” Nick asked. Rudy stood and stomped the frozen ground for effect. “There’s not too much of that on this ice. I did find something in the snow over there.” He pointed to a footprint a few feet away. It was marked with a yellow evidence tag. “You wax it?” Nick was referring to impression wax. Sprayed from a can, it let them make impressions in the snow without destroying the footprint itself. “Yeah,” Rudy said. “It belongs to the first responder.” “Where’s the body?” “The medical examiner took it away fifteen minutes ago.” The answer came from the last member of Nick’s team—Cassie Lieberfarb. She stood behind him, a state police baseball cap pressed onto her frizzy orange hair. On her feet were the bright green galoshes she always wore in the field. She called them her profiler boots. “How was Florida?” she asked, her eyes zeroing in on Nick’s face. “Hot and sunny.” “Then where’s your tan?” Nick shrugged. “I used sunblock. Now back to the murder—who’s the victim?” “Caucasian male,” Tony said. “Mid-sixties.” “Just what our guy likes,” Cassie added. “When is the autopsy?” “At four.” Nick compiled a list of things that needed to be done that day. He and Cassie had to examine the corpse before the autopsy started. While they did that, Rudy would supervise the collection and examination of evidence. Tony would wrangle up the best sheriff’s officers he could find and start the legwork. When they met up again eight hours later, they’d hopefully have a time of death, a cause, and enough evidence to point to a suspect. Only Nick and the rest of them already had an idea who the killer was. As for why he killed, none of them could begin to guess. “Has the victim been identified?” he asked. “The first responder did an ID,” Tony said. “Who was that?” “The police chief.” “Let me talk to him.” Cassie pointed to the crowd, picking out a woman in uniform who was dwarfed by the other cops around her. “She is right there,” she said with sisterly pride. “Her name is Kat Campbell.” Nick took a moment to size up the chief. She looked exhausted. Her kind eyes were dimmed by the dark circles sagging beneath them, and she moved in the weary, slump-shouldered way of someone carrying a heavy load on her back. Discovering a murder in your own backyard would do that. “Are you Chief Campbell?” Nick asked as he approached. The chief nodded. “Are you in charge of the task force?” “I am,” he responded, shaking her hand. “Nick Donnelly. BCI, the Bureau of Criminal Investigations.” She eyed his civilian clothes, hoping in vain to find something that indicated his rank and position. Since there wasn’t, Nick volunteered the information. “I’m a lieutenant,” he said. “But in rank only. In reality, I’m just part of a team trying to catch bad guys.” “We thank you for the help.” “Just so we’re clear, the county sheriff has turned the case over to us. So the state police, specifically the BCI, is in charge of the investigation. I hope that sits well with you.” Kat responded tersely. “Understood.” “Good. I heard you were first on the scene.” The chief briefly described everything she had seen and done that morning. It was all by the book, from finding the box to forming a perimeter around the crime scene. That made Nick happy. Sometimes local cops did more harm than good. “I was told you knew the victim.” “Only by sight. Perry Hollow’s a small town. After a while, you know everyone.” Her voice caught on the last word, and for a second, Nick worried that the chief was going to start crying. But she swallowed hard and kept her emotions in check. “I’m sorry,” she said. “We’ve never had a murder before. So it’s been a bad day.” Nick had no doubt. For Chief Campbell, it was probably the mother of all bad days. And she didn’t know the half of it yet. Once she did, her day was going to go from bad to downright miserable. FOUR Kat understood the situation perfectly. She knew the limitations of Perry Hollow’s police force. Between her and Carl, they barely had enough manpower to write speeding tickets, let alone investigate a homicide. She knew the chain of command in such a situation. If the local cops couldn’t handle a case, jurisdiction moved to the county sheriff. And the sheriff, who was busy running for re-election in the fall, didn’t want to get his hands dirty in a homicide that—if unsolved—could sully his reputation. So he had called in the big guns—the state police. They had the manpower and equipment and a special investigative task force led by lieutenant-in-rank-only Nick Donnelly. Most of all, Kat knew that she needed them more than they needed her, which is why she vowed to do anything that was asked of her. So, when Nick asked if there was a place his team could work out of, she offered her office. When he wondered if they could make full use of her police force, she introduced him to Carl Bauersox, his eager baby face poking out of his too-tight jacket. And when Nick sought a private place where they could talk, she led him to her patrol car. And there they sat, the heater cranked on high while the slowly fogging windshield painted the action outside a gauzy gray. “So why do we need to speak in private?” Kat asked. Nick answered with a question of his own. “Have you ever heard of the Betsy Ross Killer?” “No. Interesting nickname, though.” “I hate it,” Nick said. “But you can thank The Philadelphia Inquirer for it.” “Why do they call him that?” “Because like Betsy, he’s good with a needle and thread. His victims had their wounds sewn shut postmortem. Then they were dumped in a public place.” “How many victims are we talking about?” “Three so far. The first was found in a park in Philadelphia last year. Another washed up on the shore of Lake Erie nine months ago. The third was found up north in November at World’s End State Park.” “And you and your task force have been leading the investigation?” “We have. Three murders. All across the state. And now it might be four.” It was obvious what Nick was implying, and the thought of it made Kat’s spine stiffen. “This Betsy Ross Killer—you think he’s the one who murdered George?” “Perhaps.” A strong, primal fear pinned Kat to her seat. A murder taking place in Perry Hollow was bad enough. But knowing it could be the work of a serial killer made it all the more horrible. What if he was still in her town? Or worse, what if he lived there, blending in with everyone else? “Will you be able to confirm that?” “I hope so,” Nick said. “I need to examine the body. See if there’s a similarity in the stitches and the wounds. Maybe my guys will be able to pick up something from the evidence. So far, Betsy Ross hasn’t left a lot of it behind.” “And what can I do?” “Just sit tight,” Nick told her. “If we find something, you’ll be the first to hear about it.” Even as fear held her in place, Kat felt a new emotion tugging her body. It was the urge to protect, and it was stronger than fright. “That’s not good enough,” she said. “I have to do more than sit tight.” Perry Hollow was her town. It was where she grew up. It was the town her father swore to protect and serve decades before Kat swore to do the same thing. And while she appreciated all the help she could get, she wasn’t going to just stand by and hope others caught a killer for her. “I understand your position,” Nick said in a voice that veered perilously close to patronizing. “But you need to let us do what we’re trained to do.” “This isn’t a turf fight,” Kat said. “Or some jurisdiction bullshit in which I can’t get along with outside cops. Men care about that stuff. Women don’t. We just want to get the job done.” She watched as Nick considered her policemen are from Mars, policewomen are from Venus argument. Eventually, he asked, “What did you have in mind?” “George Winnick’s wife, Alma, reported him missing this morning, at about the same time I found his body. Now, I know that when a married person is murdered, the spouse is automatically the main suspect. But Alma didn’t do this. She’s just not physically capable. But she might have heard something or seen something. And I’m the best person to talk to her. She’s old-school. She won’t trust you or someone from your team.” The man sitting next to Kat clasped his hands together, extended his index fingers, and placed them against his lips. Then he nodded. “I like the way you think, Chief,” he said. Kat nodded back. She was still frightened. And still exhausted. But she was also pleased with herself. Because for the first time since meeting him, she had finally impressed Nick Donnelly. When Kat entered the police station a half hour later, Louella van Sickle was waiting for her. Lou, who had been the department’s dispatcher since before Kat’s father was chief, was a grandmother of twelve and looked after Kat like she was one of her own. “I got you lunch,” she said, holding up a burger and fries from the Perry Hollow Diner. “You need to eat something.” Kat should have been starving. Other than her lone sip of coffee, she had consumed nothing all day. But eyeing the burger and fries, she knew she wouldn’t be able to eat a thing. Seeing George Winnick’s corpse hours earlier and then hearing about the Betsy Ross Killer’s crimes left her stomach feeling nothing but queasy. “I’m not hungry.” Lou gave her a disapproving look. “The crime scene diet never works.” “This is the overwhelmed single mother diet,” Kat said. “I heard it works really well.” “Speaking of that,” Lou said, biting into one of the rejected fries, “do you need me to pick James up from school?” Kat, who had been steadily working her way to her office, froze in the hallway. “What time is it?” “Two thirty.” School let out at three, and no matter how hectic her day was, she made it a priority to be waiting at the curb when class was dismissed. It was her sole routine. If she didn’t show up, it would throw her son’s whole day out of whack. “I’ll get him,” she said. “But it would be a huge help if you could call Mrs. Lefferts and see if Amber is able to watch James after school.” Lou cocked an eyebrow. “Amber Lefferts is still your babysitter?” “I know what you’re thinking,” Kat said. “Trust me, I’ve thought it myself.” “At least you know what you’re getting yourself into.” Kat reversed direction and headed back the way she came. As she neared the front door, she asked, “Is there anything else before I go?” Lou’s expression—a combination of knowledge and regret—told her there was. “Someone from the Gazette is here,” she announced. “I put him in the break room. He’s been waiting for almost two hours. Says he needs to talk to you about George Winnick.” Kat sighed. “If it’s Martin Swan, tell him I don’t have time to make a statement. I’ll give him something as soon as I get a chance.” “It’s not Martin, Chief. It’s Henry Goll. The obituary writer.” The name sounded familiar to Kat, although she couldn’t come up with a face to match it, which bothered her. Perry Hollow was a small town, and although she didn’t personally know all of its residents, she at least had an idea of what most of them looked like. “He said it was important,” Lou added. Kat switched directions again and marched into the break room. Seeing her, Henry Goll stood rigidly, arms folded across his sizable chest. “Henry? I’m Chief Campbell.” The reason Kat couldn’t match Henry Goll’s name with a face was because she had never laid eyes on him before. She would have remembered it if she had. He was tall—over six feet—and powerfully built. When he stepped toward her, his muscles moved smoothly beneath his khaki pants and black polo shirt. His facial features were strong, too—square chin, Mediterranean nose, a thick head of black hair. He could have been a real looker, Kat thought, it if wasn’t for the massive scar that sliced diagonally across the lower half of his face. The upper part was also marred, dominated by a large burn mark covering his left temple and most of his forehead. His skin was pale—startlingly so—making the defects stand out all the more. Kat extended a hand. When Henry shook it, she willed herself to look him directly in the eye and act as if everything about him was normal. Because of James, she understood the importance of treating someone different just like everyone else. She smiled when she spoke. “I hear you have something that might interest me.” Henry didn’t smile back. “Is there someplace private we can talk?” Kat glanced at her watch and saw that she had five minutes. She needed to keep the conversation short, but Henry Goll appeared to be in no rush. “I apologize,” she said, “but I need to run out for a little bit. Family matter. Could this wait until later?” Henry pulled a creased sheet of paper from his pocket and thrust it into her hand. Kat scanned the page, seeing George Winnick’s name and little else. “Is this his obituary? It’s pretty skimpy.” “It’s a death notice,” Henry said. “Not an obituary.” “What’s the difference?” “An obituary contains details—the person’s family, his career, his hobbies. A death notice is exactly what it sounds like. It’s a notification to the world that someone just died.” Kat glanced from the paper to Henry and back again. “So this is George’s death notice. I’m still not sure what the issue is here.” “The issue,” Henry said with maddening calmness, “is that it’s a fake.” “How do you know that?” “Just read it again.” Kat obliged, eyes sliding across the humble sentence. When she got to the mention of George’s time of death, her heart skipped a beat. “Now look at the top left corner,” Henry instructed. Her gaze drifted to the top of the page. There, she saw what Henry was referring to—a time and date printed in minuscule letters. She had discovered George’s body at about eight that morning. The time printed on his death notice said he died at quarter to eleven the night before. Yet the time stamp on the fax indicated it had been sent at ten fifteen—thirty minutes before his death. “This is impossible.” “I told you it was important.” Kat eyed her watch again. She needed to leave immediately, and there was only one solution she could think of. “Do you feel like going for a drive?” she asked. “I need to pick my son up from school. On the way there, you can tell me everything you know.” FIVE Henry didn’t know where to begin. It wasn’t easy sounding sane while telling someone a killer faxed you his victim’s death notice before the murder occurred. But he was determined to try. He also didn’t know what to make of the woman sitting next to him. Kat Campbell seemed to inject everything she did with relentless drive, whether it was marching out to her patrol car or buckling her seat belt. That quest for efficiency extended to her facial features. Her sharp chin jutted forward while her lips formed a grimace. Yet Henry noticed small attempts at femininity peeking through her determined personality. Light pink gloss coated her lips. Tiny gold hoops hung from her ears. And some salon-produced highlights colored her obviously darkened hair. All that, coupled with shapely curves that couldn’t be erased by a severely starched uniform, made her look both tough and vulnerable—a soccer mom heading into battle. And she drove like a maniac. Careening out of the station’s parking lot, they barely missed hitting a fire hydrant and had to swerve out of the way of an approaching car. “First thing,” Kat said, steering through an alley that would take them onto Main Street, “when did you receive the death notice?” “It was sitting in the fax machine when I got to my office this morning.” “And what time was that?” Henry clutched the dashboard as Kat jerked the steering wheel, making a sharp right onto Main Street. “Nine.” “I found the body just after eight. I’m certain word trickled out to enough people for someone to send it before you got to work.” “That doesn’t explain the time stamp,” Henry said. “And before you ask, yes, I already checked the fax machine to see if its date and time are set correctly. They are.” “What about the fax number it was sent from?” Henry knew what she was talking about. On every fax, the sending number appeared next to the time stamp. “I don’t recognize it. Which means it wasn’t sent by a funeral home I regularly deal with. Or even by a funeral home at all.” “So who do you think sent it?” “If I had to guess,” Henry said, “I’d say it was sent by whoever killed George Winnick.” On Main Street, traffic was plentiful. A UPS truck idled in the middle of the road, forcing all vehicles behind it to inch their way past. Kat huffed in frustration, her knuckles turning white as she tightened her grip on the steering wheel. “Have you told anyone else about this?” she asked. “No. I thought it was best to keep something like this quiet.” Kat no longer appeared to be listening. Instead, she glanced in her rearview mirror before snapping her head toward the window, her hair whipping across her cheek. With her jaw set and the nostrils of her pert nose flaring, she said, “Hold on.” She flicked on the car’s lights and siren before swinging the vehicle around the car in front of them and into the left lane. Without slowing, she continued on the wrong side of the road until they were past the UPS truck. “Did you get a look at that truck’s plates?” she asked. “I should ticket him.” A shaken Henry, who figured Chief Campbell should ticket herself first, shook his head. Kat shrugged and veered left, bouncing them through another alley until they were on Baker Street, home of the elementary school. “Let’s say the fax really was sent at ten fifteen last night,” she said, resuming their conversation. “Now, assuming it is from the killer, that means he would have sent it almost immediately before George Winnick died. But why would he do that?” “I have no idea,” Henry said. “Maybe it was a warning.” Kat sighed. “Or else a taunt.” As she spoke, the school edged into view. Kat steered the patrol car into a line of sedans and SUVs waiting at the curb. She put the car in park just as the school’s front doors flew open, depositing a wave of children onto the sidewalk. “I have a favor to ask,” Kat said, her eyes glued to the school doors. “Don’t tell anyone about this. Not your editor. Not any of the reporters. Not even Martin Swan.” “Agreed.” The chief glanced away from the school long enough to flash him a look of pleased surprise. “Not a very devoted employee, are you?” “My loyalty lies with the people I write about,” Henry said. “Nothing else is my concern, so I don’t bother with it.” “That’s a good attitude to have.” “I think so.” Among the last students out of the school were two boys. One of them was a small child with ebony skin, thin limbs, and a pair of glasses balanced on his nose. The other was larger but slower, and he broke into a smile when he saw the patrol car. From where he sat, Henry could tell that the boy had Down’s Syndrome. “Hey there, Little Bear,” Kat said as she jumped out of the car and planted a sloppy kiss on the boy’s cheek. He ran the back of his hand across his face, wiping the kiss away. “Mom, not in front of Jeremy.” The boy’s voice was thick and halting, though not as bad as most other cases of Down’s that Henry had seen. The clothes he wore—jeans and an oversized Philadelphia Eagles jersey—made it clear Kat wanted him to be treated like any other boy. “How’s your cough?” she asked him. “Better?” The boy nodded. “I only coughed eleven times today.” “Eleven? I guess that’s better than twelve.” When the police chief smiled this time, Henry noted it wasn’t a forced grin like the one she had offered him in the police station. It was natural and maternal, spreading across her face with unconscious joy. Much more attractive than the pinched expression she had worn during the drive there. Kat opened the patrol car’s back door to let both boys climb inside. When he saw Henry, the chief’s son held out a pudgy hand. “Hi. I’m James.” “My name’s Henry.” The other boy crinkled his nose at Henry, a gesture that made his glasses rise and fall. “What happened to your face?” James swatted him lightly on the shoulder. “Don’t be rude.” “I was just asking,” the other boy said. “This is Jeremy,” James told Henry. “He’s a stupid head.” Jeremy scowled. “You’re a stupid head.” Kat slid behind the wheel and admonished the pair with a stern glance in the rearview mirror. “You’re both stupid heads. End of discussion.” That sent the boys into hysterics. “Mom called us stupid heads,” James said through a torrent of giggles. “That’s funny.” Henry should have found it funny, too. Yet the presence of the boys made him so uncomfortable it eclipsed all amusement. He wasn’t good with kids. Not anymore. And although he could normally bear brief moments of contact with them, this was too much to handle. He had to get out of the car. “I need to go,” he mumbled. “But we’re not finished,” Kat said, baffled by his sudden change in mood. “You need to come back to the station and make an official statement.” Henry shook his head, feeling tears form at the corners of his eyes. He didn’t want anyone to see him crying. Henry Ghoul didn’t cry. Especially in front of children. “I can’t right now,” he said, opening the door and stepping out onto the street. “If you need me, you know where to find me.” Kat was left with no choice but to drive away. As the patrol car departed, James and Jeremy pressed their faces to the window and waved. Henry mustered a small wave in return. Then, once they were gone, his anger and sorrow took over. These feelings were difficult to control, even after five years. Still, Henry tried. And as he breathed deeply, the rage flaring in his chest, only one tear leaked out. It caught on his scar and followed its path down the entire length of his face. SIX Kat and James arrived home after school to find Amber Lefferts waiting on the front porch. She wasn’t alone. A tall, young man with a shock of black hair and an intimidating build leaned against the railing next to her. One of his huge arms was propped over the babysitter’s shoulders. He had the other wrapped around her waist, hand sneaking upward toward her right breast. The youth immediately stopped pawing Amber when the patrol car turned into the driveway. Despite his speed, Kat saw it all. And when she got out of the car, the groper offered a sheepish grin. Kat knew his name. Everyone in the county knew Troy Gunzelman, the star quarterback for the Perry Hollow Cougars. He was as good as any player his age in the state, and the town expected big things from him. There were rumors Penn State was trying to recruit him, a big deal for a place as smalltime as Perry Hollow. “Afternoon, Mrs. Campbell,” Troy said in his best suck-up voice. “How are you today?” “It’s Chief Campbell. And I’m not married.” She eyed Troy warily. He wasn’t merely good-looking. With his chiseled features, he was movie-star handsome. Kat didn’t know exactly why he was hanging out with Amber, but she had a pretty good idea. “Troy gave me a ride from school,” the babysitter said. “He was just leaving.” That was news to Troy, who shot Amber a disappointed look. She apparently forgot to tell him about Kat’s strict no-boys-allowed policy. “Whatever,” he said. “I’ve got to hit the gym anyway.” “See ya, Troy.” Kat patted him on the back as he stomped down the porch steps. “Hit it hard.” She remembered Lou’s earlier comment about Amber as she watched Troy cross the yard to his vintage green Mustang. Yes, she knew what she was getting herself into. The babysitter came from one of the most respected families in town. Reverend Lefferts was pastor of the First Presbyterian Church. His wife volunteered with every organization in town, despite having to raise seven children, all of them blond, pale-skinned, and squeaky-clean. They were Perry Hollow’s own von Trapp family, only without the lederhosen. Except for Amber. Barely fifteen, the youngest of the Lefferts children was by far the wildest. She smoked behind the high school, stayed out after curfew, and altered her clothing to reveal as much as she could get away with. In spite of the winter weather, that afternoon she sported a pink T-shirt, white Keds, and a denim skirt so short it might as well have been a belt. Despite being a natural blonde, she had put streaks in her hair that were practically white. Combined with her porcelain-doll skin tone, it almost made her look like an albino. No one had high hopes for Amber, including Kat, but she was an angel with James. Unlike other sitters, Amber talked to James and not at him. Since she showed no signs of being uncomfortable around him, James responded in kind. Amber was the only babysitter he looked forward to spending time with. For that reason, she was always the first person Kat called. When he got out of the car, James bolted onto the porch and gave Amber a hug. “Do you wanna play Wii with me?” he asked. “I got a new dog game.” “Sure,” Amber said, shaking off the sting of Troy’s abrupt departure. “We’ll do whatever you want.” Kat opened her wallet and took out a twenty. “This is for pizza. I have no idea what time I’ll be home. If it’s past ten, I’ll pay you overtime.” Amber accepted the money with a shrug and tucked it into a fake Gucci purse slung over her shoulder. “It’s cool.” Before leaving, Kat pulled James aside. Although she knew what his answer would be, she asked, “Are you going to behave for Amber?” “Yes, Mom,” he said, his voice tinged with the sarcasm he was just beginning to learn. For that, Kat blamed Jeremy. “Now, on the hug scale, how much do you love me?” When James wrapped his arms around her and squeezed, Kat felt overwhelmed with love. Moments like that made all the hard work it took to raise him worthwhile. Moments like that made Kat realize she would do anything for her son. “Go have fun with Amber,” she said, reluctant to let him go. “I’ll be home as soon as I can.” James smiled and waved before running inside the house. Kat trudged back to the car, dreading the long evening ahead and wanting only to stay home with her son. Ten years ago, while still a rookie officer with everything to prove, Kat never thought she would one day feel this way. At the time, she considered her pregnancy to be an unwanted burden. So did the father. His name was Jackson Moore—Jack, for short—formerly the other half of Perry Hollow’s two-person police force. Back then, he and Kat considered themselves a couple, although not a serious one. Kat’s focus was on her career, and she knew that when the time came to settle down, it wouldn’t be with someone as undependable as Jack. Despite a killer smile, a quick wit, and being an animal in bed, he wasn’t husband or father material. Then Kat got pregnant, forcing both of them to make major decisions. The first was whether to keep the baby, a question Kat wrestled with more than she cared to admit. When she told Jack she’d decided to have his child, he did the honorable thing and proposed. Kat said yes, not because she wanted to be his wife but because she felt it was the right thing to do. The wedding ceremony lasted ten minutes and was followed by beer, chips, and a cake Lou had baked the night before. Their honeymoon trip consisted of moving Kat’s belongings from her mother’s house to Jack’s apartment. They pretended to be happy while waiting out the remainder of her pregnancy. But the fact Kat kept her maiden name should have been a signal to everyone that she assumed it wouldn’t last. When James was born with Down’s Syndrome, Kat vowed to love and protect her son for the rest of her life. Jack assured her he was also up to the challenge of raising a child with special needs, and Kat wanted to believe him. But deep down, she couldn’t. She expected the marriage to last at least a year. She got ten months. Kat felt no anger when Jack filed for divorce, quit the force, and moved to Montana. Nor did she harbor any bitterness toward him after he abandoned all contact by the time James turned three. Jack was weak, and she forgave him for that. Besides, she knew her love for James would get them through whatever difficulties they faced. That love, so strong it sometimes frightened her, prompted her to pursue the job of police chief when James was seven. As a mother, it was her duty to protect her child. And like her father before her, Kat thought protecting the entire town was the best way to go about it. If Perry Hollow remained safe, then so did James. Other than a few adult variations of the Amber Lefferts model, Perry Hollow was a cinch to monitor. It was small, sleepy, dull. Until today. Driving up Main Street, Kat wondered how the town would handle something as disturbing as George Winnick’s death. It left her rattled and uncertain. She assumed the town felt the same way. Tucked among the mountains of southeastern Pennsylvania, the town bore the name of Mr. Irwin R. Perry, who had deemed the area a worthy enough place to build a lumber mill. Fueled by abundant forests of pine, the mill prospered and the town grew. Perry Hollow was never large; nor was it ever rich. But it was comfortable, which was good enough for the folks who lived there. The whole town had revolved around Perry Mill, which stood at the far end of Lake Squall. Homes were built to house the mill’s workers, who frequented stores that kept track of every mill payday. Even Kat was a product of the mill—her grandparents met while working there. The first blow came in the sixties, when demand for lumber faltered. It only got worse in the ensuing decades. When the mill closed in 1990, Perry Hollow shuttered itself along with it. Residents left in droves, and a drive through town was a depressing tour of vacant storefronts and crumbling homes. In 2000, when a restaurateur from New York City chose Perry Hollow as the location for a fancy French bistro, no one thought it would last very long. The food was so expensive that no one in town could actually afford to eat there. But out-of-towners could, and the restaurant thrived. “Destination dining” it was called, and it worked. For the first time in years, people actually stopped in Perry Hollow instead of cutting through it on their way to the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Other businesses eventually followed. A gourmet bakery opened next to a bed-and-breakfast. An art gallery specializing in modern painting moved in, along with several upscale dress shops. Longtime residents such as Kat suddenly and surreally found themselves living in an arts community. No one who lived there could have predicted that the town would experience such a rebirth. But whether one liked it or not—and Kat did—it looked like Perry Hollow was there to stay. While she drove up Main Street, Kat scanned the thoroughfare. There was Big Joe’s, doing steady business both day and night. Beyond it sat Awesome Blossoms, where Jasper Fox probably still waited in vain for his missing delivery van, Gunzelman Antiques, and Wellington’s, the dress shop. The other side of the street boasted a bakery called Neverland Cakes and a store specializing in designer handbags. Each storefront was decked out oh-so-tastefully for the upcoming Spring Fling, one of Perry Hollow’s numerous festivals designed to bring in day-trippers from Philadelphia and New Jersey. The festivals worked. Last year’s Spring Fling, with its flower sales and Ferris wheel, had drawn thousands of visitors. Attendance for that was surpassed only by July’s Independence Day street fair, which advertised food, fun, and fireworks, and October’s Halloween Festival, which lured tourists with the promise of fall foliage and hot apple cider. How much of a draw the events would be now that Perry Hollow was the location of a brutal murder remained to be seen. As Kat drove, every pedestrian on Main Street glanced at the Crown Vic. When she looked into their eyes, Kat saw fear reflected back at her. Every man, woman, and child in town had by now heard about the murder. Kat was certain those staring bystanders on Main Street wondered where she was heading—all the while hoping it would be to catch a killer. Only one person didn’t pause when Kat passed. Dressed in a shirt and tie, he sprinted off the sidewalk and into the street in front of her so fast she had to slam on her brakes to avoid hitting him. The man hurried to the car and gestured for Kat to roll down her window. “Afternoon, Martin,” she said. Like Kat herself, Martin Swan was one of those people who never got around to getting out of town. To his credit, Martin made it farther than Kat had, getting all the way to Temple University. Then his mother died, forcing him to come back home with only three years of journalism school under his belt. It was enough for the Gazette, which hired him as a reporter, and it seemed to be enough for Martin himself. “You got a minute, Chief?” he asked. “I wanted to ask you a few questions about George Winnick.” “The investigation is still ongoing,” Kat said. “So I don’t have much information to give. When I have something, I’ll tell you.” Her statement—or lack of one—didn’t deter the reporter. Whipping a pen and small notebook out of his shirt pocket, he asked, “Was George murdered?” The answer was yes. George didn’t sew his own mouth shut before he died. Nor did he deposit his corpse on the side of the road. Yet she wasn’t going to tell Martin that until there was an official cause of death. “I don’t know yet,” she said. “We’ll have a better picture after the autopsy is conducted.” “Is it true he was found in a homemade coffin?” Unfortunately, Kat couldn’t lie about that. A truck driver saw it. So did several dozen cops. “It was a wooden box, not a coffin,” she said, not even convincing herself. She expected Martin to bring up the premature death notice that had been faxed to his own newsroom. When he didn’t, Kat realized Henry Goll was telling the truth. He hadn’t informed anyone at the Gazette about it. Thinking about the obituary writer created a question of her own, which she immediately posed to Martin. “How much do you know about Henry Goll?” Martin gave her a sly smile. “You’re the second person to ask me that today.” “Who was the first?” “My sister,” he replied. “She said he had a cute phone voice and wanted to know if the rest of him matched it.” “What did you tell her?” “Yes, but only if his voice cracked.” Kat frowned at his cruel reference to Henry’s scar. Martin noticed and quickly apologized. “That was mean of me. The guy can’t help how he looks.” “Do you know what happened to him?” Martin shook his head. “No idea. Henry Goll is pretty much a closed book.” “I thought that was the case,” Kat said. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to get moving.” She shifted the Crown Vic into gear and started to slowly pull away. Martin followed next to the open window, keeping pace with the car. “Come on, Chief,” he begged. “I have to file a story by seven and I have nothing to go on.” “I have nothing to tell you. I wish I knew more.” Martin had fallen behind. He was now beside the patrol car’s back window, but Kat could still hear him call out, “Are there any suspects?” Kat called back: “We’re looking at all possibilities.” Although the reporter tried, he couldn’t keep up anymore. He stopped in the middle of the street and, with labored breath, yelled, “Tell me as soon as you find something!” Kat stuck her arm out the still-open window and gave him a thumbs-up sign before speeding up the street. In the rearview mirror, she watched his retreating figure return to the sidewalk, shoulders slumped in disappointment. At the end of Main Street, Kat turned onto Old Mill Road, which ran as far as Lake Squall. Perry Mill still stood there, now only a shadow of its former glory. Despite the town’s revitalization, no one had thought to restore the one thing that had led to its formation in the first place. So the mill was left in ruins. Its crumbling outbuildings had collapsed into piles of rotted wood. Its roads became pockmarked with gullies and potholes. Its long dormant railroad tracks vanished into the weeds. All that remained of the compound was the mill building itself, a formidable structure that measured seven stories from base to rooftop. It hovered over the trees in the distance, the muted sun slipping behind its angled roof. At one point, hundreds of people worked there. Now it was a ghost from the past, shrouded in the fog that rose off the lake. Although Kat had never stepped foot inside the mill, it had haunted her imagination ever since she was a little girl. When she was growing up, her father would occasionally come home and announce that another accident had happened there. He never filled in the grisly details, which made Kat’s imagination spin madly. Late at night, hunkered down beneath her covers, she pictured a mill full of deformed men working the same saws that had snatched their limbs. She had quickly grown out of that phase, thank God. But now the horrors of her youthful imagination had come to life in adulthood. Only George Winnick’s murder was more disturbing than anything she could have come up with as a girl. Kat shuddered as she drove past the area where she had found George’s body, still marked by a banner of police tape. Although the coffin and its grisly contents had been hauled away, she could still see them there, lying in the snow. She hoped the image would fade with time and that eventually she could drive Old Mill Road in peace. Yet she suspected the image would be like Perry Mill—always present, unchanging, and waiting to be revisited. SEVEN That afternoon, Nick drove to the county morgue. Cassie Lieberfarb rode with him, fiddling with the radio. Flitting from station to station, she found nothing to satisfy either of them. “We’ve got country, country, Muzak, and more country.” “No classic rock?” Nick asked. “No, but if you’d like, I could sing ‘Stairway to Heaven.’ I learned it in the girls chorus at Temple Beth El.” “As tempting as that sounds, I’ll pass.” “Then instead of singing,” Cassie said, “how about you tell me why you lied about going to Florida on vacation.” She was using her analyst’s voice, which contained no judgment, no amusement. It was a flat, neutral tone that Nick had heard hundreds of times. Although normally when he heard it, the voice was directed at suspects, not him. “I didn’t lie,” Nick said. “Did you go to Florida?” Eventually he shook his head. “And was it really a vacation?” Another more reluctant shake. “See,” Cassie said, “that means it’s a lie.” Caught in her inquisitive gaze, Nick felt like a specimen beneath a microscope, wriggling and defenseless. He straightened his spine in a show of strength. It didn’t work. “I was interviewing killers,” he said. “Who?” “Edgar Sewell. Mitchell Ramsey. Frank Paul Steel.” Cassie processed the names a moment, matching them to the unspeakable crimes they had committed. “Those cases are thirty years old,” she said. “Why were you talking to them?” But she knew the answer. And Nick knew that she knew. But Cassie wasn’t going to let him off the hook. She thought it helped to talk about his past, that it was therapeutic. Nick disagreed, so he said nothing. After a full minute of silent d?tente, Cassie declared defeat. “We won’t talk about it anymore,” she said. “But you know how I feel about this. I understand it’s hard for you to deal with, but digging into your past like that won’t—” Nick stopped her with an upraised hand. “I thought we weren’t talking about it.” “We’re not,” Cassie said with a shrug. “We’re traveling in silence.” Fortunately for Nick, they didn’t have to travel much farther. They had reached their destination. Once they were parked, it took them no time to find the medical examiner. He was a squat and gray-faced man, having a cigarette outside the equally squat and gray-faced county morgue. “Lieutenant Donnelly?” he asked, eyeing Nick through a haze of smoke. “In the flesh.” The medical examiner extended the hand that didn’t contain a Pall Mall. “I’m Wallace Noble. Any trouble getting here?” Instead of waiting for an answer, Wallace Noble let out a hacking cough that emerged from deep within his chest. “Goddamn these cigarettes,” he muttered before taking a hearty drag. “Things are going to kill me soon.” “Why don’t you quit?” Cassie asked. Wallace exhaled twin streams of smoke through his nostrils, like an angry bull in a Bugs Bunny cartoon. “I’ve spent almost forty years looking at dead folks and determining their cause of death. Frankly, it gives me comfort already knowing the cause of mine.” With a half cough, half chuckle, he dropped the cigarette and ground it into the sidewalk with the toe of a wingtip. “Now let’s go take a look at poor George.” Nick and Cassie followed him inside, where they passed a small waiting area before entering a long hallway painted the same color as pea soup. At the end of the hall, they made a right and stopped at the door to the autopsy suite. There they wrangled into autopsy gowns and slipped shoe covers over their feet. Then it was into the autopsy suite itself. George Winnick’s corpse was already out and lying uncovered on a stainless steel table in the center of the room. The halogen lamp hanging over it cast a wide halo of light onto the skin, turning it a shade of white so bright Nick had to look away until his eyes adjusted. “Is there an obvious cause of death?” he asked. “Nothing jumped out at me so far,” Wallace said. “When I cleaned him up a bit, I found marks on his arms, legs, and forehead.” “What kind of marks?” Wallace shrugged. “Off the top of my head, I’d say they were rope burns.” Nick shot a sidelong glance to Cassie, who was already taking notes. Since killers who bind their victims are usually smart and organized, the rope burns suggested a high level of planning. Right away, both of them knew this murder wasn’t a spontaneous act. “As for what killed George,” Wallace continued, “I don’t think we’ll know that until we open him up.” He handed Nick and Cassie latex gloves before snapping a pair onto his own hands. “What are you guys looking for anyway?” “The stitches,” Nick said as he put on the gloves and approached the table. “We need to see if it resembles the handiwork of another killer who sews up his victims.” “The Betsy Ross Killer, right?” “He’s the one.” “Why does he sew them up?” Wallace asked, both fascinated and repelled at the same time. “I’ll get back to you after I catch him and ask him.” Wallace and Cassie joined him at the examination table. “I only found stitches on two places,” the medical examiner said. “One’s at the neck. The other spot was the lips.” Nick saw both areas. The lips had been sewn shut in a wide cross-stitch pattern. On the neck, the stitches were close together, sealing up a small gash. “What do you think?” he asked Cassie. She gingerly placed a finger at the wound and ran it along the thread. “At first glance, it certainly looks like the work of our guy,” she said. “But the lips—that’s unusual.” The Betsy Ross Killer had never gone for them before. Until Mr. Winnick, he had stayed away from the face entirely. Nick reached into his jacket and removed a small digital camera. When he bought it, the clerk at Radio Shack told him about all the “awesome” vacation photos he’d be able to take with it. That was a year ago, and so far, corpses were the only things the camera’s lens had seen. Leaning over George’s body, he took a picture of the lips, the flash from the camera filling the room in a quick burst. Nick took five more shots from various angles, as the medical examiner watched. Each flash of the camera caused him to flinch. “What happened to his eyes?” Cassie asked. Nick stopped taking pictures long enough to look at George Winnick’s eyes, where a small line of red circled each socket. “That’s where the pennies were,” Wallace said. “Placed right over the eyes.” “But why the red marks?” “The coins were frozen to the skin. I had to use hot water to pry them off.” “Do you still have them?” Cassie asked. The medical examiner nodded. “They’re in my office. Tagged and bagged and ready to be examined.” Nick raised his camera again and moved on to the neck. He crouched down next to the table and snapped off another five shots. “I need you to remove the thread,” he told Wallace. “And save it. We’ll need to examine that, too.” Wallace obliged by picking up a pair of suture scissors and carefully slicing through the thread, one stitch at a time. The gash widened, although no blood dripped out of it. The blood had all settled by that point. “Here you go,” Wallace said, tugging the thread from the skin and dropping it into an evidence bag that Cassie had waiting for him. He then moved out of the way, letting Nick and his partner get an unobstructed view of the wound. It was a clean cut, smooth along the edges. There was no hesitation involved. The killer had done it in one careful slice. “I’m thinking scalpel,” Cassie said. “That incision is too clean for a knife, no matter how sharp it is.” “That’s a change,” Nick added. “The Betsy Ross victims had ragged wounds.” Cassie nodded in agreement. “That’s because there was rage involved. He was angry when he did the cutting. But this wound is different. It’s clinical. Detached.” Nick had a better word to describe the wound. Precise. Who ever had caused it chose that spot for a reason. Free of the stitches, the incision widened like a toothless smile. Nick raised his camera and fired off a few shots. He zoomed in. On the camera’s display screen, the depths of the wound came into sudden, startling focus. Nick saw an artery—most likely the carotid—bulging just beyond the parted curtain of flesh and fat. Colored a pale purple, it was marred by tiny lines of black. Nick lowered the camera. “I think there’s more stitches.” He backed away as Wallace Noble swooped in. Using a small hook, the medical examiner gently tugged the artery until it emerged from the open wound. In the harsh light of the examination room, it was clear that Nick was right. The artery had been sliced open as cleanly as George Winnick’s neck had been. And just like the neck, the wound had been sewn shut with tight loops of black thread. “I’ll be damned,” Wallace said, shock setting off his smoker’s cough. “Now I know what killed poor old George.” EIGHT “George wasn’t a great man. But he was a good one. And he did right by me.” Alma Winnick, a potato sack of a woman in a powder blue house dress, gave her stunted eulogy from an armchair covered in cat fur. Kat knew it was an act and that Alma mourned her husband. But the widow refused to show her grief while a stranger was in the house. “I think he knew death was coming for him,” she said flatly. “How so?” “My brother died last month. Car accident. You probably read about it in the paper.” “My condolences,” Kat said, feeling even more sorry for the woman sitting across from her. So much loss in such a short period. Kat’s own family had spread it out. Her father died suddenly when she was eighteen, killed by a heart attack. Her mother stuck around for two more decades, succumbing to cancer the previous summer. Losing them separately had been hard enough. Losing them both within a month of each other would have been too much to bear. “At my brother’s funeral, George was the first person to sign the condolence book. As he wrote his name down, he said, ‘Alma, dying is a terrible thing.’ He never talked that way before. Never mentioned death. That’s what makes me think he knew his time had come.” Kat, who didn’t put much faith in premonitions, doubted George Winnick knew he was about to die. If he did, his death surely ended up being far worse than he ever imagined. “I told him not to worry,” Alma continued, eyes cast down. At her feet lay a calico with a milky eye and only three legs, and Kat couldn’t tell if the widow was addressing her or the calico. “He was strong. And tall. Do you know how tall he was?” “No idea.” “Six feet, two inches.” Alma said it with a mixture of admiration and awe that made Kat’s heart break just a little. “I come from a short family. So when I first laid eyes on George, he looked like the tallest man in the world.” “Do you know of anyone who might have wanted to harm your husband? Any enemies? Grudges?” Alma shook her head at each suggestion Kat threw out. “I don’t understand why someone would want to hurt my George. He was a good man. People liked him. He worked this land a long time. His folks were here before the mill. That’s a good number of years, and people respected that. Even the boys he had out here in the summer respected that.” Kat’s ears perked up. “Boys?” “Every summer, George would hire a couple boys from the junior high to help out on the farm. It took some of the load off his back and it did the boys some good, too. Taught them the value of hard work.” Kat asked Alma if she remembered the names of some of the summer employees. “Troy Gunzelman,” she said. “Him, I remember.” That was no surprise. Troy’s notoriety extended beyond Perry Hollow and into the next county. Even a woman as sheltered as Alma would know about his exploits on the field. “Any others?” Alma shrugged. It was obvious she was getting tired of being peppered with questions. Kat was tired of doing the peppering. But both of them had to continue. “When was the last time you saw your husband?” Kat asked. “Last night. I thought he would have come to bed after checking out the noise, so I went to sleep. When I woke up, his side of the bed was untouched.” “Is his truck missing?” “No,” Alma said. “It’s parked in the same place it was last night, so I assume he didn’t drive it.” “You mentioned a noise. What did it sound like?” “Animals.” Alma turned to look out the window next to her chair. Kat followed her gaze across the snow-covered yard and past a John Deere tractor old enough to be in a museum. Beyond it was the barn, where several more cats and a handful of chickens loitered outside. Kat heard the whinny of horses from within, followed by the sharp bark of a dog. “It was a racket,” the widow said. “They were making noise something fierce. George thought it might be a bear or a mountain lion. They’re rare, but they’re still out there, believe you me. Saw a bear out on Old Mill Road once. Scared the Lord out of me.” Kat saw Alma’s dead husband on Old Mill Road, and it scared the Lord out of her. “What time did the noise start?” “About ten thirty.” A cold bomb of fear exploded in Kat’s chest. If Alma was correct, then the fake obituary had indeed been sent before George Winnick died. “You’re certain of that?” “Fairly sure,” Alma said. “I remember looking at the clock when George left to go check on the barn.” Kat jerked her head in the direction of the barnyard. “Do you mind if I poke around out there a bit?” When Alma shrugged again, the hopeless lift of her shoulders said, Sure, go out there. Find your clues. But it won’t bring my husband back. He’s gone forever. After thanking Mrs. Winnick for her time and patience, and after offering her condolences once again, Kat left. Outside, she tramped across the yard toward the barn. The sun was still out, thanks to daylight saving time, which had gone into effect the previous morning. The newfound brightness allowed her to look for footprints in the snow. She saw dozens of them—from Alma, from George, even from the stray cats that seemed to roam everywhere. If the killer had crept through the yard the night before, it would be impossible to trace his steps. Inside the barn, Kat found herself confronted by a surly Rottweiler chained in a far corner. It barked ferociously as soon as she entered. When it lunged in her direction, the chain hooked to its collar stretched so tight she thought the animal was going to choke itself to death. The noise from the dog set off the horses housed in stalls along the barn’s right wall. There were three of them in total, their heads shaking in agitation at the presence of a stranger. The only animal not perturbed was a black cat sleeping in a square of fading sunlight that slanted in through a cracked window. Unlike the other animals, it didn’t move a muscle. Kat surveyed the cluttered barn, the scent of hay and manure stinging her nostrils. In addition to the animals, the barn housed a tractor, a riding mower, and a plow. A pyramid of hay bales sat near the horse stalls. This was where the farmer first encountered his killer. She was certain of it. The killer had most likely entered the barn not long after faxing the death notice to Henry Goll. His presence there had irritated the animals, which in turn roused George. Kat put herself in the place of George Winnick, standing in front of the open barn door in about the same spot where he would have entered. She saw what he would have seen—a barn full of shadows. She took a few steps forward. Cautious ones. Like what George might have taken. Because there were no signs of a struggle in the barn, her assumption was that the farmer didn’t notice his stalker until it was too late. Perhaps he didn’t see him at all. The killer could have snuck up on George, creeping up quietly behind him. Looking around for hiding places, Kat saw the possibilities were endless. Behind the barn door, for one, or in the shadow of the tractor. Near the sleeping cat was a small alcove, no larger than a broom closet. The killer easily could have hidden there, eyes adjusting to the darkness as he waited for his victim. Kat crossed the barn and peeked inside the alcove. She saw a modest nook consisting of a clean concrete floor and plank walls. Her view from the threshold gave her no reason to enter the alcove outright. Besides, if George’s killer hid there the night before, then a tech team needed to do a thorough scan of it. Maybe it would turn up something. A footprint. A stray fiber. Perhaps a hair. Anything would help because at this point they had nothing but a corpse, two pennies, and a wooden box. Leaving the alcove, she gazed at the cat lying a few feet away. It hadn’t moved the entire time she was there. Not once. She watched for the tiniest of movements—an ear wiggle, the idle sway of a tail—but saw nothing. Approaching the animal, Kat nudged it with the toe of her boot. It was as still as a brick and just as heavy. The cat was dead. Kat bent down to examine the animal further, noticing a small pile of sawdust around its hind legs. When she nudged it again, more sawdust trickled from a gash in the animal’s stomach. The cat had been cut open, a long incision across its stomach showing where the knife had sliced. In place of its organs, someone had filled it with sawdust, which explained the heaviness. An unruly pattern of fur-obscured thread crisscrossed the incision. Stitches, used to sew the cat back up. Kat inched away from the dead animal. What it meant to the case, she didn’t know. But staring at the poor creature sprawled on the ground, she clearly understood that despite her theories and best guesses, she didn’t have a handle on the situation at all. Tony Vasquez was the first member of Nick Donnelly’s team to reach the barn. With him were a half dozen other state troopers. Tony stretched police tape across the gaping barn door. He then ordered two troopers to go on the other side of it and stand guard while the rest went to work. Not wanting to get in the way—and not wanting to destroy any evidence in the process—Kat retreated to an empty corner of the barn and parked herself on a bale of hay. From her itchy perch, she watched as Rudy Taylor arrived, armed with enough evidence bags to seal up every strand of hay she sat upon. Nick Donnelly and Cassie Lieberfarb showed up five minutes later. While Cassie joined her coworkers, Nick made a beeline to the bale of hay. “I need to talk to you,” he said. “That’s good,” Kat replied, “because I have to talk to you.” Nick plopped down on the bale next to her. “You first.” Kat took a deep breath and began. She told Nick about the death notice faxed to the Gazette newsroom before George Winnick died. She then moved on to what Alma Winnick had said about George investigating noises coming from the barn. That led to the search of the barn itself, where she found the dead cat stuffed with sawdust. “That confirms my theory,” Nick said, once she had finished. “And what’s that?” “That it might not be the Betsy Ross Killer we’re dealing with.” It wasn’t what Kat wanted to hear. Strange as it seemed, she had been hoping that all of this was the work of Betsy Ross. It’s easier to face the devil you know than the devil you don’t. And whoever killed George Winnick was one sick devil. “All of this—the fax, the dead animal—sounds far different from what Betsy Ross does,” Nick said. “Serial killers like him do sometimes change their MO, but not as extreme as this. And George’s wounds were different from the ones on the Betsy Ross victims.” “How did he die?” “He bled to death.” “From the cut on his neck? That was barely three inches long.” “Three and one-fifth inches long,” Nick clarified. “Wallace Noble measured it. And it was more than just the cut that caused him to bleed out.” “I don’t understand.” Nick leaned forward. “Do you know what the carotid artery is?” “Sure. It’s where the nurse checks your neck for a pulse. What does this have to do with George Winnick?” “His right carotid was sliced open,” Nick said. “It’s difficult but doable. Whoever did this most likely reached through the cut in his neck and pulled the artery out of the body. One careful incision later and you have a blood geyser on your hands.” Kat felt a stress headache coming on, signaling her brain was getting overloaded. The slight pain began just behind her eyes, ready to spread to her temples. Considering the circumstances, she was surprised the headache had taken so long to arrive. “It’s a horrible way to die,” Nick said. Kat couldn’t agree more. Perry Hollow had experienced its share of tragic deaths. Accidents. Brutal falls. But what Nick described seemed so cruel and hateful that she couldn’t quite believe it. Making someone bleed to death implied premeditation and planning. You needed to be prepared to do it. “It gets worse,” Nick warned. “Do you want me to go on?” Kat didn’t, but it was her job to say yes. “The killer did more to George after he was dead.” “The lips,” Kat said. “They were sewn shut.” “That’s not what I was talking about.” “What do you mean?” “When you cut open a corpse, there’s very little bleeding because circulation has stopped and most of the blood has settled. There’s some leakage, but it’s minor. Wallace said there was an unusually large amount of blood on George Winnick’s lips.” “There was,” Kat replied. If she closed her eyes, she could easily picture the reddish ice crystals that had coated his lips. It was the first time she had ever seen frozen blood, and she hoped to God she’d never see it again. “That means,” Nick said, “that George was still alive when his lips were sewn shut.” Kat’s mind whirled, imagining what such an act sounded like to the victim. Was it silent? Or could George hear the thread slipping through his skin, his flesh pulling together as it did so? If Kat concentrated, she could hear it, something not unlike the sound of a shoelace passing through the eyelet of a sneaker. Trying to force the sound from her head, she asked, “Then what was the time of death?” “That’s the problem. Wallace couldn’t tell for certain. It was definitely within twelve hours before you found him, but he couldn’t pinpoint it more than that.” “Why not?” “After George bled out,” Nick said, “the killer pumped liquid into his body.” “Jesus,” Kat muttered. “What kind?” “Part water, part formaldehyde.” “Formaldehyde? Are you sure?” “His body was filled with it. That’s why Wallace can’t pinpoint an exact time of death. The mixture killed off the microorganisms that cause decomposition. It slowed down rigor mortis. The right carotid was engorged, although that could have been from the tube.” Kat’s voice rose with disbelief. “There was a tube?” “Not when you found him, but the incision in the artery had been widened by something. The assumption is that the killer inserted a tube into it. That’s how he was able to get the formaldehyde and water mixture into the circulatory system. It got the job done, but it was pretty rough. Not at all like the professionals.” “Professional who?” “Morticians,” Nick said. “After George Winnick bled to death, the killer tried to embalm him.” NINE Henry lay on his weight bench, grunting against the 250-pound barbell he pushed away from his chest. The muscles in his arms tightened as he held the weight aloft for three seconds. When he lowered it, the tension eased, flooding his muscles with a satisfying warmth. “One,” he said. He raised the barbell again. He paused three more seconds. He lowered it. “Two.” Henry’s routine included a workout in a corner of his apartment filled with exercise equipment. One hour of each day was devoted to honing his body to its full potential. Although pushing forty, he possessed the strength and agility of a much younger man. “Three.” With his face looking the way it did, Henry knew peak physical prowess was the only thing that kept people from pitying him completely. “Four.” And he didn’t want pity. “Five.” He wanted to be left alone. While he worked out, music blasted from a CD player against the wall. Puccini’s Tosca, one of his favorites. Opera was still relatively new to Henry. It was only in the past five years that he had become obsessed with it. Now it was the only music he listened to. Especially the tragedies. What he heard in the music, other people missed. The tales of doomed love, mistaken identity, and broken hearts of epic proportions were melodramatic, yes. But they were also true. You could love someone so much you would kill for them. Your love could be so strong that if they died, a large part of you died with them. Opera was tragic. So was life. Finishing another set of reps, Henry lowered the weights and—breath heavy, heart thumping—paused to listen to the music. It was “E lucevan le stelle,” Cavaradossi’s third-act aria in which the doomed painter recalled memories of his lover, Tosca. The aria was sung in Italian, and Henry knew every word. He was fluent in Italian, having learned it in his old life. Before the accident. Before Henry Ghoul. E lucevan le stelle. Henry repeated it in English, like a prayer. “How the stars seemed to shimmer.” Closing his eyes, he focused on the music, on the lyrics, on the perfect voice singing them. It reminded him of Gia. Sweet Gia. His Italian rose. The aria could have been written about her. Entrava ella, fragrante. “How she then entered, so fragrant, and then fell into my arms.” Usually, he would have been enthralled, swept up in the aria’s embrace. But that day was different. The aria—and thoughts of Gia—put him in a dark mood, which was accompanied by an itching restlessness. L’ora ? fuggita … e muoio disperato. “My last hour has flown and I die hopeless.” E non ho amato mai tanto la vita. “And never have I loved life more.” Henry left the room without bothering to turn off the CD player. His apartment, located above a used-book store on the end of Main Street, was large by modern standards. But that evening, the place felt absolutely tiny. As he roamed restlessly inside it, the walls seemed to constrict around him. He had to get out. Just for a little bit. His steps quickened in the hallway as he headed for the front door. By the time he was outside, he was at a full jog—legs churning, arms pumping. He picked up speed to tackle the slight incline of north Main Street. When it flattened out at the end of the street, he kept the same pace, streaking over the sidewalk. The stares of strangers confronted him as he passed. Blurs of faces trying to get a good look at him. Henry ignored them, soon becoming unaware of how many people he flew by or if they were staring. He also ignored the cold, which his flimsy workout clothes did nothing to ward off. He focused only on the steady exhalation of his breath and the rhythmic slapping of his feet on the pavement. The sadness that overcame him in his apartment dissipated outdoors. He knew the melancholy would wash over him again at some point. No matter how fast he ran, Henry knew he couldn’t outrun his pain. After he had sprinted at full speed for about fifteen minutes, a cramp stabbed his midsection. He slowed himself, legs winding down until eventually he came to a stop at the corner of Maple and Oak streets. Bent forward in exhaustion, palms resting on his knees, he noticed a large Victorian mansion dominating the corner. McNeil Funeral Home. Henry had never been inside, but the exterior impressed the hell out of him. Three stories tall with white siding, it boasted a green gabled roof, wraparound front porch, and Tiffany accents in the tall windows. Pretty fancy for a stopping place on the way to the afterlife. Once he regained control of his breathing, Henry stepped onto the walkway that cut through the property’s expansive front yard. Without fully comprehending what he was doing, he trotted toward the front door. Not hesitating, he pushed inside, entering a tastefully appointed room dominated by a large mahogany desk. An attractive young woman sat behind it. She smiled at him when he entered. “Hello, Henry,” she said. He halted in the doorway. “How did you know it was me?” “Because you look uncertain.” Henry imagined he looked more than uncertain. He probably looked ghastly in his sweat-drenched T-shirt and running shorts, his flushed face making its flaws stand out even more. Deana Swan, however, looked better than expected. Years of speaking to her on the phone had created a mental picture that wasn’t flattering. In Henry’s imagination, she was a female version of her brother, with chipmunk cheeks and oversized sweaters. That was the type of woman who spent her whole day in a funeral home. The real Deana couldn’t have been further from the image created in his head. In her early thirties, she was slim, well proportioned, and modestly stylish in a black skirt and lavender blouse. She wore her strawberry blond hair pulled back, revealing razor-thin cheekbones, and startling, sparkling blue eyes. “What brings you here today?” she asked. Henry didn’t know, which was made obvious by his refusal to take one more step inside. “I was jogging,” he said. Deana ran her gaze up and down his body, lingering on his chest, his stomach, his crotch. The boldness of her stare made Henry pulse with excitement, as did the sultry tone of her voice when she said, “I can see that.” “When I passed by, I thought I would stop in and say hello. Since you’ve told me I never do that.” “You don’t,” Deana said. “And thanks. That was sweet of you.” Oddly, Henry felt more awkward chatting with Deana than he did telling Chief Campbell about George Winnick’s death notice. That was being helpful, a good citizen. This was something entirely different. This was, Henry guessed, flirting. “I just want you to know,” Deana said, her smile radiating a kind patience, “that my offer is still on the table.” “What offer?” “Lunch. I think it might be fun, since we’re coworkers in a weird way.” That was true. Henry talked to Deana more than anyone at the Gazette. And she seemed friendly enough, with no hidden agenda except to get to know him better. Plus, he thought it would be nice just once to break out of his safe routine. “A great sushi place just opened up on Main,” Deana said. “We could try it out one day.” Henry was on the verge of saying yes. He felt the muscles in the back of his neck loosen, preparing for the nod to follow. But then something on the wall caught his eye. It was a mirror—large and gilded—and framed in its center was his reflection. Staring at his own image, Henry suddenly felt foolish. He was in excellent shape, yes. But his face—that was unacceptable. And the more that Deana smiled benevolently at him, the more Henry became convinced that her motives were suspect. She wasn’t interested in him. Just like the patrons of a freak show, she was interested in his face. Its lines and scars and deformities. “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Henry said, breaking his gaze from the mirror. “But thank you for the invitation.” He regretted stepping foot into the funeral home. It was a bad idea, he realized. And now he was eager to leave. He turned and reached for the door, surprised to see it was already halfway open. Someone was on the other side, pushing the door so forcefully Henry had to hop backward to avoid being struck by it. That’s when Kat Campbell burst inside, riding a gust of frigid air. With her was a man Henry had never seen before. Although he was dressed in civilian clothes, Henry assumed he was a cop of some sort. He and the chief shared identical scowls as they passed, barely noticing his presence. Henry nodded a wordless greeting and exited the funeral home. Crossing the front porch, he heard Kat through the open door ask, “Are Art and Bob here?” “Arthur is,” Deana told her. “Is something wrong?” Henry paused at the top of the porch steps, waiting for the chief’s response. When it came, he was surprised, intrigued, and more than a little fearful. “I need to know,” Kat said, “how to go about embalming someone.” TEN In Kat’s mind, few places on earth were as depressing as McNeil Funeral Home. Arthur McNeil, the owner, tried hard to make it as calm and comforting as possible. Beige walls, classic furnishings, fresh flowers on a side table by the front door. Yet the sterile perfection of the place always unsettled Kat. The d?cor felt to her just like the corpses on display there—posed, painted, lifeless. Her opinion of the place was colored by the terrible hours spent there during her parents’ funerals. Too uncomfortable to take a seat, she waited with Nick just inside the door. The position gave her a glimpse into the empty viewing room where her mother’s body was laid out eight months earlier. Memories of that time rushed into her head. Seeing James cry. Weeping herself. Sitting next to her mother’s casket, trying not to break down completely. The recollections were so painful that Kat sighed with relief when Art McNeil finally appeared. “I’m sorry to keep you waiting,” he said, taking one of Kat’s hands in both of his. “Deana told me it sounded important.” He was dressed in light blue scrubs, with a paper cap on his head and a surgical mask lowered to beneath his chin. Even out of street clothes, Art projected a benevolent calmness that was one of the tools of his trade. When Kat introduced Nick Donnelly, Art flashed him the smile of a favorite uncle. “It’s wonderful to meet you, Lieutenant Donnelly.” “We hate to bother you like this,” Nick said. “But there are some things we need to learn in order to investigate a recent crime.” Art shook his head sadly. “Let me guess—George Winnick. Wallace Noble told me everything when I made arrangements to pick the body up from the morgue.” On the one hand, Kat was annoyed that Wallace felt free to talk so openly about the case. But on the other, she was glad Art already knew the gory details of the situation. Since she still barely comprehended it herself, she had no idea how to go about explaining it to someone else. “As you know,” she said, “whoever killed George also tried to embalm him. In order to understand how and why, we need to see the whole embalming process. From start to finish.” She knew it was an odd request. So odd, in fact, she wouldn’t have been surprised if Art flatly refused. But he seemed to understand the strangeness of the situation. Without thinking it over, he said, “Certainly.” He led them to the funeral home’s basement, guiding them to a small changing room under the steps. Kat went first, stripping down to her T-shirt and trousers and slipping on surgical scrubs that matched Art’s own. She topped off the absurd outfit with a blue cap over her hair and paper booties on her shoes. As Kat left the changing area open for Nick, Art called to her from the embalming room, which sat to her immediate left. “Come right on in.” Kat wanted to leave the embalming room as soon as she entered it. The white-tiled space was cold, for one thing, the chill instantly forming goose bumps on her arms. It also was eerily immaculate, as clean and sterile as an operating room. As she looked around, the scent of ammonia and formaldehyde tickled her nose and stuck to the back of her throat. In the center of the room was a body lying on a stainless steel table. Large lights hung over the corpse, casting a brutal, white glow onto it. Beneath the table, the concrete floor gently slanted to a conspicuous drain. “This is where we do it,” Art said, standing next to the table. Kat couldn’t take her eyes off the body. It belonged to an elderly woman with a white sheet draped over everything but her head and bare feet. It took Kat a moment to realize she knew the woman, causing her to gasp when recognition hit. “That’s Barbara Hanover.” Art confirmed it with a solemn nod. “She died in her sleep during the night.” As a little girl, Kat had purchased candy from Mrs. Hanover every Saturday at the store she ran with her husband. She had been a jovial woman, quick with a smile and a free Jolly Rancher. Standing in the same room as her corpse, Kat felt like she was violating the woman in unspeakable ways. She was grateful when Nick finally entered the embalming room. His new uniform of crisp scrubs gave her something other than Mrs. Hanover’s body to look at. “I’m assuming both of you know very little about the embalming process,” Art said. “Nothing at all,” Nick said, answering for both of them. “But I understand it’s very important.” The mortician beamed. “Oh, it is. The most important aspect of my job is creating a memory picture for the family of the deceased to take with them. They find it helps with the grieving process.” Kat recalled the way both her mother and father had looked in their caskets. Contrary to what Arthur McNeil thought, it didn’t help her one bit. The images were something she wished she could forget. The door to the embalming room opened and Art’s son, Robert, emerged, also dressed in scrubs. Unlike the rest of them, he wore a rubber apron tight around his torso. “What are they doing here?” he asked, his voice harsh in the hushed atmosphere of the embalming room. Kat graduated high school a class behind Bob, and the intervening years hadn’t changed him one bit. The polar opposite of his father, he was without manners of any stripe. Kat knew part of Bob’s rudeness stemmed from his lifelong outcast status. He was an ungainly, unattractive boy, whose social life didn’t benefit any from living above a funeral home. Things only got worse for Bob when he turned ten, the year his mother, no longer able to live among the dead, decided to become one of them. Wearing three layers of heavy clothes, a brick shoved into every pocket, she threw herself into Lake Squall, the water quickly consuming her. Leota McNeil stayed underwater for three days. When she finally floated to the surface, Kat’s father was unlucky enough to find her. Kat vividly remembered the conversation that took place that night at the dinner table. Her father doled out details to her mother, who clucked with sympathy. He then turned to Kat and said, “Be nice to Robert McNeil the next time you see him at school. Give him a little smile in the halls.” The next day, to everyone’s surprise, Bob showed up at school, thudding through the halls with the same old chip on his shoulder. When he neared her, Kat recalled her father’s words and forced a smile. Bob ignored it, giving her a withering glance as he barreled on by. It surprised no one when he went into the family business after high school. The general thinking was that Bob McNeil had to work with the dead because he didn’t know how to act among the living. They also suspected that he continued to reside with his father because Art was the only person who could tolerate him. “Chief Campbell and Lieutenant Donnelly are here to observe the embalming process,” Art said, as his son moved deeper into the embalming room. “You will extend them every courtesy, understand?” He then turned to Kat. “Despite his ornery mood, I know Robert will be a huge help. He always is. I’ve found that children of single parents are especially attuned to the needs of the remaining parent. Like your son, for instance. How is James?” “He’s doing great,” Kat said. Art seemed pleased by the news. “I’m happy to hear that. James is such a good boy. Very special. You should be proud of him.” She assured him she was, which satisfied Art. With a smile and a wave, he said, “It was a pleasure seeing you again, Kat. And very nice meeting you, Lieutenant. Be sure to ask Robert any question you want.” “You’re leaving?” The nervousness in Kat’s voice was obvious to both father and son, but she couldn’t help it. Bob McNeil was the last person she wanted to be with in an embalming room. “Unfortunately, yes,” Art said. “I work days. Robert works nights. But truth be told, he’s a better embalmer than I’ve ever been. You’re in good hands.” Arthur departed, leaving Kat and Nick alone with one corpse and one mortician. It was like school all over again, with the mere presence of Bob McNeil creeping her out. “How have you been, Bob?” she asked, trying to make an effort to sound casual and friendly. The mortician wasn’t buying any of it. Slipping a surgical mask over his nose and mouth, he said, “You ready?” With the mask and cap on, the only part of Bob’s face still visible were his too-large eyes. They were exaggerated further by the pair of Coke-bottle glasses he was forced to wear beginning in junior high. The lenses caused his eyes to look positively huge, which always made Kat think of a deranged Muppet. “I guess we are,” she said. “How long do you think this will take?” “Not long. This one should be pretty easy. She’s in good shape. Bodies that are really banged up or autopsied like George take much longer.” Bob whipped off the white sheet, leaving the body of Barbara Hanover fully exposed, with every wrinkle and sag on her chalk-colored skin visible. Nearby sat a stainless steel tray on wheeled legs, which he pulled to his side. Arranged on the tray were plastic bottles, a few folded towels, and medical instruments of various shapes and sizes. Within seconds, Bob was dipping a sponge attached to a wooden stick into a sudsy fluid. He then used it to swab the body. “What are you doing?” Kat asked, oddly fascinated by the way Bob efficiently wiped down the body. “Cleaning her,” he replied, the sponge sliding over the corpse’s drooping breasts. “I’m using a germicide. Kills off bacteria.” When he finished with the skin, Bob dipped a smaller sponge attached to a longer stick into the cleaning solution. This he used to swab first inside the corpse’s mouth and then in each nostril. With the cleaning over, he began to knead the body, his hands working down its arms and legs. “This loosens things up,” he said, moving to the shoulders. “Rigor mortis makes the corpse tight.” “Is this done to all the bodies?” Nick asked. Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/todd-ritter-2/death-notice/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.