Blood. He had lots of blood in those coolers. He’d locked them up in the big safe his granddaddy had kept for important documents. It was in the basement next to the old clattering furnace that was rarely needed in this part of the country. The safe had a spin dial that as a child he’d whirled as hard as he could, hoping it would land on the right numbers and reveal its contents. It never had. His father’s last will and testament had finally given Quarry the proper numerical sequence. The thrill just hadn’t been the same.
The fire building up fine, he took the poker, dipped it into the flames, and got it good and hot. He sat back in his chair, rolled up his sleeve, and placed the reddened metal against his skin. He did not cry out, but just about bit through his lower lip. He dropped the poker and looked down at his throbbing arm. Gasping with the pain, he bent his mind to studying the mark the heated metal had left behind. He had made one line with it, a long one. He had three more to go.
He unscrewed a bottle of gin he kept on his desk and drank from it. He poured some on the mark. The blistered skin seemed to swell more with the bite of the alcohol. It looked like a tiny mountain ridge forming after a million-years-ago hiccup of the earth’s bowels. The gin was cheap, all he drank anymore, mostly grain with other crap piled in, locally bottled. That’s all he did anymore: local.
He hadn’t been lying to poor Kurt. There was madness in his family. His daddy clearly had it, and his daddy before him too. Both men had ended up in the state mental hospital where’d they’d finished their days babbling about stuff nobody wanted to hear. The last time Quarry had seen his father alive the man was sitting naked on the dirty floor of a room, smelling worse than an outhouse in August and jabbering on and on about damn LBJ the traitor, and the coloreds, though he had not used such a polite term. It was right then that Quarry had decided his father was not insane, just evil.
He sat back in his chair and studied the flames popping and hissing back at him.
I might be some sorry-ass redneck from nowhere, but I’m gonna get this done. I’m sorry, Kurt. I’m truly sorry, son. One thing I promise you, you won’t die in vain. None of us are gonna die in vain.
CHAPTER 13
THEY TRAVELED to Tuck’s sister-in-law’s house in Bethesda, Maryland, where the kids were staying. John and Colleen Dutton were still in shock and knew very little. Michelle had sat with seven-year-old Colleen and tried her best to coax something out of the girl, but mostly to no avail. She’d been in bed in her room that night. The door had opened, but before she could look, someone grabbed her and then she felt something on her face.
“Like a hand or a cloth?” said Michelle.
“Both,” said Colleen. Tears welled up in her eyes when she said this and Michelle decided not to push it. Both children had been given a relaxant to help keep them calm, but it was obvious that the kids were still in the grips of numbing grief.
Ten-year-old John Dutton had been sleeping in his room too. He had awoken when he felt something near him, but that was all he could remember.
“A smell? A sound?” Sean had suggested.
The boy shook his head.
Neither of them knew for sure where Willa had been in the house. John thought with his mother downstairs. His little sister believed she remembered hearing Willa on the steps going to the second floor a few minutes before Colleen was attacked.
Sean showed them a copy of the markings that had been on their mother’s body but neither of them knew what they meant.
The usual questions of strangers lurking around, odd letters in the mail, or weird telephone calls had gotten them nowhere.
“Would either of you have any idea why your mom might want to see me? Did she talk to you about that?”
They both shook their heads.
“How about your dad? Did either of you see him last night?”
“Daddy was out of town,” said Colleen.
“But he came back last night,” noted Michelle.
“I didn’t see him,” said John and Colleen at the same time.
The little girl desperately wanted to know if they would get Willa back.
“We’ll do everything we can,” Michelle said. “And we’re pretty good at what we do.”
“Now what?” said Michelle as they drove away from the stricken family.
“I got a message from Jane. Tuck will see us.”
“We can talk to everybody, but i
f we don’t have access to the crime scene and the forensics we don’t have much of a shot at this thing.”
“What happened to my little miss sunshine?”
Michelle glanced in the rearview mirror. “It got burned off back at that house. Those kids are devastated.”