An Ice Cold Grave

Manfred and his grandmother would go back to their home in Tennessee. Sometime in the next few months, Xylda would die. Manfred would be on his own, begin his own career of providing psychic insights to the ignorant and the educated. Sometimes he'd be sincere, and sometimes he wouldn't. I thought about Tolliver's surprising paranoia concerning Manfred. I smiled to myself. It was true I found Manfred intriguing, if he wasn't exactly my inner pinup poster. His confidence that he could please me, and his conviction that I was desirable...well, what woman doesn't enjoy that? That's pretty potent. But as far as actually following through on it...it was probably more fun to flirt with Manfred than actually carry the attraction to the next level. Though I wasn't much older than him in years, in other ways I felt I was way too much his senior.



I really needed to get up to visit the bathroom. With a reluctant sigh, I worked my way out of the covers and sat up. This low bed was not good for such maneuvering, and it was hard keeping quiet, but I wanted to let Tolliver sleep as long as he could. He'd had the harder row to hoe the day before, having to take care of me.



Finally, I was on my feet and heading to the bathroom. That necessary task done, I brushed my hair one-handed, with a very lopsided result, and brushed my teeth a bit more efficiently. I felt better immediately. When I opened the door as quietly as possible, I saw that Tolliver wasn't moving, so I padded over to the fireplace and eyed the remaining embers. Carefully, I added more wood, trying to keep the arrangement tight but with ventilation as Tolliver had done. To my gratification, the fire picked right up. Hah!



"Good job," said Tolliver, his voice heavy with sleep. I eased into one of the two ancient wooden chairs he'd arranged in front of the fire. Its faded cushion smelled of damp and some long-ago dog. Of course the family would put their castoffs out here. No point buying special furniture for a place where they came to relax, where they'd be coming in wet from swimming. Also, the cabin was pretty vulnerable to theft, and who wants to tempt thieves with something valuable? I told myself how grateful I was to Twyla for letting us stay here, for free and away from the reporters. But at the same time, I admitted to myself that I'd much rather be in the motel, at least from a comfort standpoint.



Tolliver had his cell phone plugged in and charging, and now it rang.



"Crap," he said, and I agreed with the sentiment. The last thing I wanted to do was talk to anyone.



"Hello," he said, and after that all I heard was, "I guess we can," and "Okay," very noncommittal stuff. He hung up and groaned.



"That was the SBI agent, Klavin. He wants us to come into the station in an hour."



"I have to have coffee before I face any cops," I said.



"Yeah, no shit." He got out of bed and stretched. "You sleep okay?"



"Yeah, I don't think I moved all night." I did some stretching myself.



"I'll go shower. What are you going to do about that?"



"I'll have to take a sort of sponge bath, I guess. I can't get these bandages wet." That was another thing that was going to grow old very quickly.



"Okay, I'll hurry." Tolliver can take the quickest showers of anyone I know, and he was out and toweling his hair while I was still trying to assemble a set of clothes for the day. I managed to get my pajamas off by myself, and I managed to clean myself - more or less - but getting dressed was a real ordeal. I was trying to balance modesty with need, and it wasn't an easy achievement. Putting on my underwear turned out to be literally a pain in the butt, and I had to maneuver endlessly to get my bra up my arms and get my boobs in the cups so Tolliver could hook it.



"Geez, I'm glad I don't have to wear one of these things," he grumbled. "Why don't they fasten in front? That would make more sense."



"There are some that hook in front. I just don't have any."



"You give me your size, I'll get you some for your birthday."



"I'd like to see you shopping in Victoria's Secret."



He grinned.



We had a few extra minutes to go into McDonald's for their alleged pancakes. I pay lip service to hating McDonald's, but the pancakes were good and so was the coffee. And God, it was so warm in there. The windows were steamed up. The place was full of burly men in bulky jackets, mostly in camo patterns. They all wore big boots and had freshly shaved faces. Some of them would be going to work out at the crime scene, and some of them would be going about their usual business. Even the presence of death wouldn't stop life as usual in Doraville. That was a comforting thought, if one I'd had about a million times before. A job like mine makes you a big "river of life" person.



I hated to leave the homey atmosphere of McDonald's - okay, I guess it's pretty bad if you think McDonald's is homey - for the unpleasant interview ahead. But we wanted to be on time, and we hoped they would let us leave town after. Tolliver had left our stuff at the cabin, though. He said it wouldn't take long to swing back by and throw our stuff into the suitcases if we were allowed to leave. And we'd have to straighten up the cabin a little and return the key.



We ran the gauntlet of the press since we had to park in front that day. There wasn't a friendly officer at the gate to the rear parking lot to let us through, and we hadn't thought about calling ahead. The ranks of the fourth estate seemed a little thin today, and I wondered if the forensic people were still digging at the barn. I got through the remaining light crowd with a few "No comment" s, and they didn't dare follow us into the station.



When we were settled at the table in a conference room, carefully nursing our extra cups of coffee we'd brought with us, we had quite a little wait. Spread out on the table was a big map marked "Don Davey Property." The drawing was liberally marked up. From where we sat, Tolliver had a hard time reading the print, but I gave him a superior sneer and read the labels.



"The first grave is marked 'Jeff McGraw,' and all the others are marked with the name of the boy that was in there," I said. I caught myself talking in a very low voice, as if I could disturb the dead. "The two graves where the boys weren't local, they have names on them, too. Maybe there was ID on the bodies. The northernmost one reads 'Chad Turner,' and the other one is 'James Ray Pettijean.'" I scooted my chair a little closer to Tolliver's. "I guess they're all being autopsied now," I said. It really didn't make any difference what happened to the body after the soul was gone; it was dross. Somehow, there being so many of them gave me the cold grue.



"There wasn't anything remaining at the grave site?" Tolliver asked, careful of the fact that ears might be listening.



"No," I said, just as carefully. No souls, no ghosts; and there's a big difference. I've seen souls lingering around fairly fresh bodies every now and then. I've only seen one ghost.



Pell Klavin and Max Stuart came in just then. The two SBI agents looked very tired. I wondered if there were more agents coming to help them. The two men dragged out chairs and slumped in them, right across from us; between us lay the map.



"What can you tell us that we don't already know?" Stuart said.



I was irritated that he didn't even try to observe a common courtesy, but then I thought of poring over the dead boys' biographies all night, and I excused the two agents. I wouldn't have been inclined to offer meaningless courtesies, either.



"Probably nothing," I said. "All I do is find bodies. I'm good at that, but I'm not a detective."



"We can't keep finding them like this."



"That's all of them, I think. That's surely all the dead on that piece of property."



"How do you know he hasn't buried a few somewhere else?"



"I don't. But there's no cutoff date."



They both leaned forward, eager for an explanation.



"There's a wide spread of death dates," I said. "There's years' worth of killing, at least six. And the McGraw boy's only been dead three months. Unless the killer's been active for a very long time, chances seem good that all his victims are there together. He may have an earlier burial ground. He'll start a new one, for sure. But I'm thinking that one probably has all the past few years' victims in it." I shrugged. Just my opinion.



Stuart and Klavin exchanged glances.



"Oh, and all the ones that are there, they were all killed in the same place," I said. "So it seems to me if that's the favored killing spot, all the bodies are there."



Stuart looked pleased. "Yes, we think they all died in the old shed there on the property."



I was glad we hadn't opened the sagging doors while we were there. I didn't want to know what it looked like inside. From my moments with the dead, I had too clear an idea as it was.



"Is...is there another site you'd like me to check?" I dreaded them saying yes - but Max Stuart shook his head.



"We don't know how you do what you do," he said. "If we hadn't seen the results, we'd never believe you. But we've seen all the bodies, and we've heard how you found them, and no amount of investigation can find any link you ever had with any living soul here. So we have to believe you actually have some uncanny ability. We don't know its dimensions or its limits. Is there anything you can tell us about these boys?"



That must have been incredibly hard for him to say. I started to deny it automatically, but then I thought again. I'd explain as closely as I could. "I see the moment of death," I said. "I see their bodies in the grave. Hold on," I said, and I shut my eyes, gripping the arm of my chair with my good hand and hugging the bad arm close to me. The clothes had been thrown down into the grave....



"Most of them had crosses, right?" I said. Klavin started. Stuart glanced back at the board, as though this was printed right above the boys' names. "But this is a religious community, and that may be a coincidence." I looked back at the bodies, staring down into the earth in my memory. Oh, there. "Broken bones," I said. "Some of them have broken bones."



"Not from the torture?" Tolliver asked me.



"Well, yeah, some fresh ones from the torture. But at some time in the past, at least four of them had broken a bone." I shrugged.



"Does that mean they were all abused as children? Is that the common thread?" Agent Stuart bent forward, as if he could pull the answer out of my head. "What did these boys have in common? Why were they picked?"



"I don't know. I see what I see in a total flash: body, emotions, the situation. Once I saw the dead guy's pet, or maybe I just picked up on that from the dying person's thoughts. I don't see the person who caused that death."



"Just tell us everything you do know," Klavin said.



I looked from one to the other, suspiciously. They would listen, sure, and then give me those long-suffering looks that said they didn't believe a word I'd said. I'd had investigators tell me that before. "Oh, please, any little detail will help...." Then it was like, "Oh, that's all you can do? What good is that?"



"We promise we'll be respectful," Klavin said, interpreting my look correctly. "We realize you've had trouble with law enforcement agents in the past."



I thought about it. I thought about the check Twyla Cotton had tucked into my hand the night before, the check that was over and above the amount we'd agreed upon for finding her grandson. I thought about the families crowded into the church, the grief and fear. Balanced against ridicule from men I'd never see again, that ridicule seemed like nothing.



So I took a deep breath, closed my eyes to help me concentrate, and looked into one of the graves again. I picked the one closest to the road. I pointed at it on the drawing. "This is Tyler," I said. "He's been tortured. His skin was cut off in strips. He was raped. Clamps were put on his testicles. He was ready to die and welcomed death, because he knew no help was coming. The cause of death was strangulation. Some time in the recent past, he'd broken his leg."



There was a quick intake of breath from one of the agents. I didn't open my eyes to see which one. Tolliver took my hand, and I gripped his hard. In my mind, I walked to the next grave. "Hunter," I said. "Whipped, fucked, branded. He thought someone would come, right until the end. Lived for two days. Hypothermia." Hunter had died in weather like this, cold and damp. The November abduction, I guessed. "No broken bones. He had...scoliosis." I saw the curve of his spine, shining below me.



It went on, the litany of torture and death. Sex and pain. Young men, used up and discarded. The two transient boys had had no particular bone problems, but the locals had...except for Jeff McGraw and Aaron Robertson. So that was fifty percent. The broken bones were a dead end.



They'd died of a variety of reasons. Most of the reasons were oddly passive, like the strangling and hypothermia that had killed Tyler and Hunter.



"Passive?" Klavin sounded indignant. He pulled a white handkerchief out of his pocket and patted his nose. He'd caught a cold probing around the killing site. "Abducted, tortured, raped. That sounds pretty damn active to me."



"That's not what I'm trying to express," I said. "They were let to die. They weren't stabbed or shot or poisoned, something that would cause instant, sure death. Hunter was just left there, and he died. Maybe weather interfered with their visits, maybe he - the killer - was bored with him. The strangulation - well, you can change your mind at the last few seconds on that, too."



"I see what you mean," said Stuart. "Like the death was kind of an afterthought, or an experiment."