Damaged Goods (22 page)

“Carl seems like a generous person.”

Hershel appeared to be completely lost in thought. “I should give him a raise, or something. Carl took care of things while I was … you know … recovering.” Hershel sent Silvie a furtive glance before looking away again. “I’ve never been able to figure out why he lives like he does. I used to think he was a loser.” He paused to press his fingers to his scar, absently, as he often did.

“That’s pretty harsh judgment.”

“Maybe. He lives in a migrant camp in a one-room shack, shoulder to shoulder with people who don’t even speak English. He’s got no plumbing. Just a woodstove and a shared latrine.”

“I guess you
should
give him a raise.”

“I doubt he’d move even if I did.”

“What happened to his face yesterday?”

“Didn’t say, exactly.”

She scowled. Didn’t he have some idea or opinion about what might have happened? Why didn’t he find out? Had a friend of hers shown up with a battered face, she’d have gotten the story. Or … maybe Carl came to work looking like that all the time. How many times had she arrived bruised before Laree stopped interrogating her? After a while nothing needed saying. It was the same story, but at least her friend
knew
it.

“Is Carl married?”

Hershel looked surprised. “I don’t think so.”

“You don’t know? How long has this guy been working for you? And you don’t know if he’s married?”

“It never came up.”

She snorted.

“Why all the questions about Carl, anyway?”

“Just curious about him. Maybe his wife did that to his face.”

“Maybe. Do you think he’s married?”

“I don’t know.”

“Anything is possible.”

Silvie pressed her head back against the chair and rolled her eyes. “Men are so strange.”

Hershel reached between the chairs and took her hand. She hesitated.

“Kyrellis said something when he came by the South Store.” She ran her finger lightly over his thumbnail, smoothing it, polishing it. “He told me … to ask you where you were coming from the night of your accident.”

Hershel pulled his hand away and rested it in his lap, staring off at the northern horizon.

“He hinted that—” She waited through long seconds of agonizing silence. He didn’t even move. She glanced over to see if he still breathed. “He’ll say anything to get the information he wants, I suppose.”

Hershel opened his mouth as if to speak but closed it again.
His eyes seemed fixed on a growing bank of dark thunderheads tinged purple at their base.

“He told you that I killed a man,” he said finally.

“Not in so many words.”

“Do you believe him?”

She shook her head, but he wouldn’t look at her. “No.”

He leaned forward and pressed his palms to his thighs, as if ready to get up. Then he turned his head and studied her. “I don’t think I killed anyone.”

It was a strange answer, she thought. Wouldn’t you know? Even if you
had
suffered a brain injury, wouldn’t you know in your gut?

“Look, Silvie. I’m not going to lie to you. I don’t know where I was coming from the night I crashed my car. I’ve been trying to work out the days leading up to that wreck since I woke up in the hospital.”

Silvie ran her hand down his arm, and he took her fingers in his.

“I don’t think I killed anyone. And I don’t trust Kyrellis to say what really happened.”

“I’m sorry I brought it up.”

“Don’t be. I like the idea of not having any secrets between us. This is not easy. I’ve never been this open with anyone. But … your company—your trust—has become very important to me.” He pressed her hand to his lips and brushed them lightly back and forth. “I won’t hide anything from you.”

Kyrellis carefully wiped up all the blood, then walked out and found a plastic tarp in his storage shed. He spread it across the kitchen floor, lifted Carl off the chair, and dragged his limp body onto the plastic, marveling at how thin and light the man was even as deadweight. He arranged Carl’s skinny limbs into a straight line and gathered the tarp at the top, dragging it through the open patio door, across the cement, and out onto the gravel pathway
that led between his greenhouses. The idea of leaving his kitchen with any traces of blood nagged him like an unanswered itch. He preferred to do this in stages, but he was gripped by the idea that maybe Carl had told someone where he was going. Had he shared his mission with Silvie? Would someone come looking for him? How long?

Kyrellis was breathless, and his fingers were cramping by the time he reached the pole barn at the back of his property. “Almost there,” he said to the dead man, and gave the tarp a few hard tugs onto the top of the compost heap. He rolled Carl out onto the soil, where he dumped the spent potting dirt and turned under the rose clippings.

He returned with a common handsaw and a pair of sharp branch cutters and set to work removing Carl’s head. Blood soaked into the rich ferment, and when he was finished Kyrellis used a pitchfork to churn it under for the worms.

By dark he’d scrubbed the kitchen with bleach, taking extra care with the tabletop. The saw and the clippers were returned to the shed, dipped in alcohol, and lightly oiled. The patio had been pressure-washed. He showered and bundled his clothing into the bottom of his burn barrel, covering it with a thick layer of dead brush, but he didn’t light it. That would have to wait until the body, again wrapped in the tarp and waiting in the bed of his truck, was fully gone from here. He surveyed the scene where he’d murdered Carl Abernathy, looking for anything he might have missed.

Rain was both help and hindrance as Kyrellis backed his pickup down the narrow boat ramp along the Tualatin River, not a mile from the migrant camp. He was careful to stay on the gravel path and not to leave muddy footprints. His pulse raced and his chest ached as he climbed into the bed and dragged the headless body, stripped of any personal effects, down to the water. It would likely be found; Kyrellis knew that. Better to make it look like a hate
crime and divert attention. He rolled the partially submerged corpse out into the scant current with his foot. The Tualatin was a silty river, opaque and dirty-looking year-round. It was littered with tree branches and debris, and Carl’s body wouldn’t float far before catching on something. But it would be difficult to find, nonetheless. Through the darkness Kyrellis watched the body disappear into the narrow channel.

It was just after one in the morning. The boat launch was far from farms or other signs of civilization, and not even an animal stirred tonight. A steady rain cleansed the landscape. When his breath had returned, he drove slowly up the ramp again, shifting as quietly as possible through the gears, and pulled onto the empty highway. He drove south toward the Willamette River, where he would drop Carl’s head, now wrapped in a black garbage sack weighted with a cinder block, off the bridge near St. Paul. Carl had had ample opportunity to show his hand. Years of opportunity. Kyrellis questioned whether he’d murdered the man for something so harmless, a foolishly noble attempt to help a girl he barely knew. Kyrellis could see how a man might be talked into helping her. She had a look about her, helpless and in need, wrapped in a sexy package. Carl might have been more stupid than cunning. Still, Kyrellis told himself as the head made a faint splash, there was no way to know for sure. He had no choice but to protect himself.

Everyone knew too much. Carl knew about the guns, he knew about Silvie. How much had that girl shared with Carl? Did Hershel have any idea about her? In one of the photos she was tightly bound, hands and feet, with a gag in her mouth. A cascade of dark bruises showed along her hips and thighs. Someone had worked her over, and it looked to him like more than once. Kyrellis had separated the cache into categories. Photos of Silvie in sexy poses—poses that could arouse any man, which he arranged along the mirror above his bureau. The disturbing photos of abuse, which were few but stunning, he bound together with a rubber
band and placed in the bottom of the box. These were the ones that the pervert who’d taken them would pay a premium for. There were three photos where the man had been careless. In one, Kyrellis could see his law-enforcement badge on the dresser. In the other two, he’d gotten vain and held the camera at arm’s length and captured the child and himself together. It wasn’t Silvie in both pictures. One of them was a dark-haired girl, much younger. Six, maybe. Those Kyrellis locked in his safe and took out only to examine with a magnifying glass, looking for clues to the man’s identity. And the rest—the photos of assorted other girls ranging in age, printed on photo paper suggesting a span of decades—he set aside.

The way Kyrellis saw it, he stood to make money four ways: from the man in the photos—once for his identity and a second time for the bondage shots; from Hershel for Silvie’s pictures; and from the perverts he could sell the others to. Kyrellis lit a cigarette, cracked the window, and blew the smoke out through the gap.

The sound of ringing on the other end of the line startled Silvie, and she almost hung up. She pressed the receiver to her ear and leaned against the wall between Hershel’s kitchen and the dining room.

“Hello?”

“It’s me,” she said quietly.

“Silvie?” Her mother’s voice came through now, urgent and awake. “Silvie, is that you?”

“Yes.”

“Where are you? Oh God. I’ve been so worried.”

Silvie sobbed quietly.

“Silvie, please. Where are you?”

“I’m okay,” she squeaked.

“Please, baby. Tell me where you are—”

Silvie placed the receiver back on the phone dock and slid down the wall until she rested on the floor, her knees pulled tightly against her chest.

Hershel tried his keys in the door to the storage area under the bleachers. Turning each one back, inserting the next, feeling the
barrier. His cheeks burned, and he kept an ear tuned for Carl. He had expected to spend the day restoring his office. What kind of man loses his temper and destroys his own business? And what would he say to Carl, who had cleaned up the mess?

He was down to two keys. Maybe he didn’t have one for this door. What was in here? Finally, the lock snapped and he pushed the knob away. He was greeted by the musty smell of a long-sealed space and his heart leaped unexpectedly. New prospects? New clues? Had he hidden something here that would help him understand who he was?

He paused at the door, though. Would he find Albert Darling here? Or damning evidence to confirm Kyrellis’s claim? He found the light switch. But, illuminated, the storage area was disappointingly empty. A sprung mousetrap in the corner and a box of
National Geographic
magazines. Hershel kicked it over, letting them spill out in the unlikely event he’d missed something. He closed the door, not bothering to lock it again.

The streets of Hillsboro were thick and congested, and Hershel cursed the way his fellow Oregonians dealt with water on the road. “It rains nine months out of the damn year,” he shouted at the car in front of him, which had slowed to twenty, its wipers maniacally slapping away at the sudden downpour. “Learn to drive in it or move back to where you came from.”