V
According to Dylan, the cleaner my father used lived off grid, which was why it had taken so long to track him down.
“You don’t have to come,” I told Nicole.
“There’s no way I’m staying here alone after that,” she said. “I’m coming with you.”
I didn’t blame her. I hoped the other members of the Blood Legion would decide we were too much trouble and leave us alone, but nothing was ever guaranteed.
Dylan drove, with me in the passenger seat and Nicole in the back. I was nervous about what we would find. If the cleaner denied all knowledge of working with my father, or if Harvey Baglione’s body was completely destroyed, we’d have to rely on the lawyer Joseph Monroe to get X acquitted in court. I hoped he’d be able to do it, but I didn’t want to take any chances.
We left the city behind us, heading north. I hadn’t eaten or drunk anything since waking up, so we stopped at a roadside café to grab coffee and a couple of breakfast sandwiches. Back on the road, we left the I-87 and took a smaller road, which then narrowed again. The traffic had already thinned out, but after a while we stopped seeing other cars altogether. Trees towered on either side of the road, reaching across as though to form a tunnel, or perhaps claim the road altogether.
“You sure you know where you’re going?” I asked Dylan, my anxiety increasing.
“Yeah, he lives off grid, remember.”
Nicole peered through the rear windows. “I guess there’s plenty of places to hide a body out here.”
Dylan glanced back at her with a smile. “Exactly.” He leaned forward, peering to the right. “I think the turnoff is around here somewhere.”
We all fell quiet, watching out for the turning.
I spotted a fence and a sign. “There,” I pointed.
Dylan pulled in. The property wasn’t immediately visible between the trees, but as we drove up, I could see the wooden boards of an unpainted, small house appear between the trunks. A beat-up truck sat outside the front, and I spotted a well in the grounds. That must be the only means of water. There was no electricity out here either, so I assumed the place must run on a generator.
“I hope not too many people get killed in the middle of winter,” I thought out loud, “’cause this place must be a nightmare to get to and from in the snow.”
Dylan chuckled. “I think he has an apartment in the city, but prefers it out here.”
Nicole leaned forward. “I don’t blame him. Less chance of psychopaths turning up on your doorstep.”
“What, like us, you mean?” I joked.
She laughed, and the sound made me smile.
The man I so far only knew as ‘the cleaner’ must have heard Dylan’s car, and stepped out of the front door and onto the porch to watch us approach, finishing off a cigarette as he did so. He was a slender man in his forties, I guessed, with wire framed glasses and a receding hairline. If it wasn’t for the shotgun held at his side, I’d have taken him for an accountant rather than a man who was paid to make bodies disappear.
Dylan stopped the car and we climbed out.
“Can I help you, folks?” he called out. “Are you lost?”
He must have taken us in more clearly, his eyes narrowing at Dylan and then coming to rest on me.
“You know who I am?” I asked him.
He looked me up and down. I did my best to lean forward to try to hide my every growing bump. “Yeah,” He sucked on the remains of his cigarette and threw it to the ground. “You’re Mickey Five Fingers’ daughter. Where’s the old man been these days?”
“He’s away on business. There’s something I need to talk to you about.”
“Oh, yeah, what’s that?”
“We’re looking for a body, and we think you might know where it is.”
He burst out laughing. “You’re looking for a body? Normally, when people come to see me, they’re trying to lose a body, not find one.”
“Yeah, I know. It’s a little unorthodox, but we need it to prove someone’s innocence.”
His eyebrows lifted and he snorted laughter again. “That’s not something I’ve ever heard either. I normally get rid of them to stop the cops proving someone is guilty.”
I ignored the comment. “The body is of a man called Harvey Baglione. My father would have asked you to get rid of it, but he wasn’t the one responsible for killing him.”
The laughter fell from the man’s face and his eyes narrowed in concentration, his lips twisting. “Hmm, yeah, I think I know who you mean. This was a while ago, though, right?”
“Yeah, it was.”
“The body isn’t going to be pretty.”
“But it’s still in one piece,” I said hopefully.
“Meh.” He shrugged and waved a hand. “Not one piece, exactly.”
“Right?” I thought I could figure out what this meant, but I wanted him to elaborate.
“He’s kind of in pieces, buried all over. An arm in one place, a leg in another. It’s pretty wild out here, so there’s not much chance of anyone coming across them. I put them pretty deep, but if anything is dug up, it’s normally by an animal and eaten, which solves a problem in itself.”
I had a strong stomach, though my pregnancy had weakened it. My mouth flooded with a sudden rush of saliva and I swallowed against my nausea. I couldn’t turn into one of those women who threw up at the slightest mention of anything gross.
“I don’t need the whole body,” I managed to say when the feeling subsided. “He was shot in the chest, so I only need that part.”
“You realize if I find the torso, it’s going to be missing a head, and it’s been beneath the ground for a long time now. The decomposition will already have started.” He shook his head, like a mechanic looking at a faulty engine and about to deliver bad news. “Honestly, I wouldn’t want to be the one to move it, and this is my business.”
“I don’t care. If the bullet is still in his body, it’ll prove he wasn’t run down and killed.”
“I trust you’re going to pay me for my time?” said the cleaner.
Dylan reached into his back pocket and pulled out a folded wedge of bills. “This should just about cover it.”
The cleaner walked forward and took the money. He flipped through the bills and nodded. “Right, then. Let’s see if I can remember where I buried the poor bastard. Oh, and we’re going to need a shovel or two.” He glanced at Nicole. “The little lady’s coming, too?”
“Yeah, we’re all sticking together.”
“Sure thing. But don’t go puking on the body, okay?”
Nicole had paled, but she nodded.
The cleaner glanced down at our feet. “I hope you’re all prepared for a hike.”
We weren’t, really. Dylan wore dress pants and shoes, and a shirt. Nicole and I were more casual, but we both wore sneakers, not hiking boots. I had a bottle of water in the car, so brought that with us.
The cleaner handed Dylan a shovel and carried one himself. He also located a roll of tarp and tucked it under his other arm. He gave Dylan a set of surgical gloves.
“You’re going to need these.”
Dylan raised his eyebrows. “Thanks, I guess.”
Together, we set off, the two men leading the way. Within ten minutes, my breathing grew labored. I knew I’d struggle to keep up, but I’d do my best.
“You okay walking a distance?” Nicole asked me under her breath.
“I’m sure I’ll be fine.”
“Just say if you need to sit down. Don’t go pushing yourself.”
I gave her a stern look. “I’ll be fine, Nickie. Don’t fuss.”
Dylan glanced back. “You ladies all right back there?”
I forced a smile. “Just gossiping.” Dylan didn’t know about the pregnancy yet. I wasn’t sure I wanted him to know, though he was bound to find out eventually. Dylan had proven himself to be less of an asshole than I’d first thought him to be, but at the end of the day he was still only in this for my father’s business, and I needed to remember that.
My feet, legs, and back were aching by the time the cleaner motioned for us to stop.
“If I remember correctly, the guy’s torso should be around here.” He straightened and looked around, his fingers pressed to his lips as he thought. “His left arm would be about fifty paces in that direction, and his right arm the same distance to the east.”
“That’s okay,” I interrupted. “We only need the torso. They’ll be able to do a DNA match to get his identity.”
“That’s all right, then,” he said, and struck the sharp edge of the shovel into the ground.
I found a fallen tree trunk covered in moss to sit down on, and watched the men get to work. Nicole sat beside me, though she deliberately looked away. I was relieved to take the weight off my feet, and I rubbed at my lower back, massaging the tight knots of muscle. Birds tweeted brightly in the trees above my head, the breeze swaying the branches. A small bunch of pink flowers I thought might be foxgloves grew in a cluster not far from my feet. It was a tranquil scene, if not for the two men currently digging up a piece of a man’s body not far ahead.
Dylan and the cleaner worked hard, hauling up shovel after shovel full of dirt. They made the hole bigger and deeper, and I watched with my heart in my throat, worried the body would no longer be there or something else had happened to it. Twin piles of dirt grew higher the deeper the men dug.
The cleaner put out a hand and stopped Dylan just as he was about to plunge his shovel back into the ground. “I think we’re there.”
I got to my feet and approached the hole. Nicole lurked behind me. The smell hit me first, the unmistakable stench of death. I put my hand over my mouth and nose to try to protect my overly sensitive sense of smell. Getting the body back in the car wasn’t going to be much fun.
I leaned over the hole, looking into it. What had once, I assumed, been a white sheet, was dark with blood stains and dirt. The whole thing hadn’t been fully excavated yet, but I could see the sheet was wrapped around something.
Dylan stabbed the shovel into the ground beside where he was standing and wrinkled his nose. “Okay, let’s get it out of there.”
I deliberately tried not to think of the chunk of body currently being relieved from the ground as being a person once upon a time. I hadn’t known Harvey Baglione, but I felt bad he’d ended up in such a way. He’d helped X, and he hadn’t deserved this. Still, he was a dead man, and nothing I could do would change that. What I could change, however, was the wrong man going down for his murder.
The two men wrestled the wrapped torso out of the dirt. They hauled it up, the stink of rotting flesh instantly growing stronger, and dumped it on the tarp.
“Wrap it up again,” said the cleaner. “It’ll help with the smell.”
Dylan and the cleaner wrapped the body in the tarp together. I felt bad standing back, but I didn’t want to get near the body. I was pregnant and I couldn’t even imagine what kind of bacteria would be on it by now.
With the body wrapped, the smell faded a little. The men set to work filling in the hole again, and then the cleaner dragged some grass and moss over the dirt so it didn’t look so obvious.
We set off back the way we’d come, with the cleaner and Dylan dragging the tarp covered torso along behind them, me and my sister following. Nicole and I shared a look, her turning up her nose, and I knew what she was thinking. Neither of us wanted to follow the body for the next hour or so during the hike back, but we didn’t have any choice. Only the cleaner knew the way.
My back and hips were screaming in protest by the time we reached the cleaner’s off-grid home. I did my best not to limp or hobble, but I could feel Nickie giving me concerned, disapproving looks.
“I trust you folks will make sure this doesn’t come back on me in any way,” the cleaner said when we reached the car.
Dylan lifted the body into the trunk and slammed the lid down on it.
“I’m my father’s daughter,” I told him. “You can trust me.”
“I figured as much. Hope it all works out for you.”
“Thanks.”
We rode the whole way back to the city with all four windows down, the wind blowing our hair and clothing. I didn’t care if I was going to look like I’d been dragged through a hedge by the time we got there. Anything was better than that smell. I wondered how we were going to do this without looking guilty. Dylan’s pant-legs and shoes were caked with mud, and if anyone saw him hauling around a tarp covered bundle, they were bound to get suspicious. We’d have to wait until it got dark, which wouldn’t be long now.
We didn’t need to take the body right into the city. We just needed to leave it somewhere it could be found. I wanted to be close enough to the city for it not to take the police long to find, however. The sooner it was analyzed and X was freed, the better. I wanted him back.
As dusk was falling, we pulled into a quiet street alongside a park. Trees planted along the sidewalk meant the car was hidden from an aerial view by overhanging branches, and I checked around for any sign of surveillance cameras. I didn’t want some innocent jogger or dog walker to stumble across the gruesome body either, but I hoped the cops would find it before morning arrived.
We waited until dark had fully descended on the city. Nicole napped in the back, and my eyelids grew heavy with exhaustion. All the windows were down, but that didn’t stop the smell permeating into the body of the car. I hoped no one walked by, or they were sure to notice.
Dylan turned to me. “I think we can get on with it now. I need to get that thing out of the car.”
While I didn’t like him referring to poor Harvey’s body as ‘that thing,’ I couldn’t help but agree with him. “What do you need me to do?”
“Just keep an eye out. I should be able to handle things.”
“If you’re sure?”
His gaze drifted down to my stomach then back up at me. “I don’t think you’re supposed to be doing any heavy lifting, Verity.”
My cheeks colored. He’d noticed my pregnancy. My secret was out.
His eyes narrowed, a line forming between his eyebrows. “Is the father the guy we’re doing all of this for?”
“Yeah, it is.”
“I sure hope he’s worth it. Tell him if he doesn’t stick around for the baby, I’m going to kick his ass, okay?”
I couldn’t help but laugh. There was no chance X wouldn’t stay around for his child and for me, too. Even so, I agreed. “I’ll tell him.”
Dylan opened the driver’s door and climbed out. I got out with him, looking up and down the street for anyone coming. This was a quiet neighborhood, and it was late, but there was still a chance of a dog walker or someone driving by.
He cracked the trunk and we both reared back, our hands over our noses.
“Fucking hell,” gasped Dylan.
“That’s not good.”
“Let’s get this over with,” he said, snatching a breath. “Where do you want him?”
“Make it close, so you don’t have to drag him too far.” I nodded to a clump of bushes. “Think you can shove him under there?”
“Yeah, I can manage that.” Dylan had put the gloves back on, and then he hauled the tarp covered torso out of the trunk. His face had paled, and he twisted his neck, so he wasn’t in direct line with the body. I was tempted to leave the trunk open a little longer to air it out, but it looked more suspicious standing wide, so I slammed it shut. Dylan had already wrestled the body into the park, his shoulders hunched as he part dragged, part carried the bundle over to the clump of bushes I’d pointed out.
I watched out for anyone coming, but everything remained quiet. In less than a minute, Dylan returned, tugging off the surgical gloves he wore.
“Remind me to burn these,” he said, dangling them from pinched fingers.
I nodded. “Let’s put some distance between us and the body, and then make the call.”
We climbed back in the car. It was a relief to no longer have to suffer the smell, though the tang of decomposition still clung to the air. Dylan drove a couple of blocks and pulled over again.
Dylan’s voice wouldn’t be overly familiar, so he placed the call to the number Detective Caraway had given me. In our business, there was never any concern about him having anything other than a disposable cell on his person.
Nicole and I remained silent as he dialed the number. He’d put the phone on speaker so we could hear.
It rang twice and then he answered, “Detective Caraway.”
Dylan made his voice gravely. “Part of the body of Harvey Baglione is hidden under the bushes on the south-east corner of Irvington Park.”
And he hung up.