Killer (9 page)

Nothing but ghosts here, Katherine thought to herself, and she zipped her collar up tight and headed back to Shannon Belson’s final resting place and went to work.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

I stop reading after I’ve read the name
Shannon Belson
for the fourth time. It is haunting me.

I click on my browser at the bottom of the screen and I am online. I type in “Shannon Belson St. Stephen Missouri” and get garbage. I try several variations on the name and finally I type Sharon Belson and I am prompted:
DID YOU MEAN “SHARON BELTON?”
I click on “Sharon Belton” and my screen fills with horror.

The first thing I see is an image of Sharon Belton and my breath catches because here she is: a pretty young woman with long, silky hair and brown almond eyes and oval face, smiling for her senior picture. And once again I feel the prickly hot panic that comes with the recognition of her face.

I know this picture, just like I knew Beverly Grace’s picture. I have seen it.

But where?

The picture is from an item in the St. Stephen
News
from October 5, 2003:

Sharon Belton, a graduate of St. Stephen High School, has been identified as the woman found buried in a shallow grave off Rt. 90 last Saturday, according to Buck County Sheriff Ansel Cord. The Sheriff’s Department discovered the body when two boys came upon the shallow grave near the woods next to Rt. 90. Missouri State police and Buck County Sheriff’s officials are asking anyone with any information that might be relevant to the case to contact them…

I read the rest of the article with my fingers pressed against my temples.

Sharon Belton was reported missing on August 14, 2002,
two years before
Killer At Large
was published.
I scroll down to the bottom of the page and see another, smaller photograph.

I stand up and stare at the picture, my fingers pressed against my now-throbbing temples.

The small photograph is a grainy shot taken by a local news photographer. It is blurry and indistinct, showing mostly the backs of Sheriff’s deputies and police. But I can clearly see the shallow grave in the foreground, and in the middle distance I see a few headstones from the church cemetery, and beyond that is the ramshackle frame of the church itself—an abandoned structure, its windows boarded up, its steeple slanted, eaves sagging under the weight of time, and in front of the church is a weathered sign which reads
“Calvary Assembly of God Chapel.”

Just as I had invented it.

I stand there for a long time, frozen, my mind reeling.

I do not know this poor young woman. I do not know this grave, this church…

And yet, again, I must know them.

I pick up the phone on my desk.

Call Joel—or Nicki…

And say what?

I can already hear Nicki’s reaction.
You saw a picture online and now you want to take her on, too?

I put the phone down. I walk out of my office and into the living room and stare out the window at the gathering gloom of an early winter evening.

I have to do something.

I go back to my desk and pick up the phone and call the airlines and ask for the next flight to Kansas City.

THINGS PAST

He stopped beating the Witch when his body and his rage had been exhausted. She was dead—long dead—and now he sat next to the Witch’s body on the floor, numb, his breathing hard. When he got his strength back, he crawled over to the smashed Angel on the floor. He tried for a few minutes to put her back together but it was hopeless. A hundred tiny pieces of porcelain that could never be put back together again. He wept. His hands were bloody from the Witch, and from his torn knuckles. When his tears subsided, he got up and washed his hands clean in the kitchen, then returned to the pile of porcelain shards and picked each one up and examined it for something, anything he could take with him.

And then, another miracle. In the pile of shattered porcelain he found two perfect, china blue pieces.

The eyes of the Angel.

The porcelain ovals had chipped off perfectly. He held her eyes in his palm and looked into them and, as he did, he realized what he had to do.

He went to the kitchen and found a bread knife—long, with a serrated blade. He carried the knife back to the Witch and began to cut.

An hour or so of messy work, then he carried the head and hands to the kitchen and placed them in the dish drainer in the sink.

After the blood had drained, the careful work began. He took the porcelain eyes of the Angel and, with infinite care, he tucked them under the lids of the Witch’s eyes. Then he went to the bathroom and dug through the Witch’s cluttered drawers of cosmetics and returned to the kitchen. He covered the bruises and lacerations with makeup, the swollen lips with a faint coat of pink lipstick, and, finally, a meticulous application of mascara to replicate the fine lashes. He brushed the hair into a proper facsimile of the Angel’s, then placed the hands together in prayer in front of the face. It took a while to figure out how to keep them in place, but the careful placement of tiny rolls of duct tape between the palms eventually did the trick. He stepped back, drew the curtains to darken the kitchen, and looked at his work. With the blood drained, the skin was properly pale, if still somewhat swollen. But it wasn’t right yet. It looked like a doll—the china blue eyes staring up at nothing.

He carefully placed the head and hands on a bread board and carried them to the closet, where he put them on the shelf, exactly where the Angel had been. He drew all the blinds in the bedroom, tucked blankets into the cracks where the sun shone through, then he climbed into the closet and closed the door and closed his eyes.

He waited, eyes closed, breathless with anticipation.
Please, please, come back, let this work…

Then he opened his eyes. Only darkness.

Then, slowly, the pale face of the Angel came into view, hovering in the darkness.

She was reborn.

Tears ran down his face as the Angel began to speak to him once again. Like David, he had slain the giant, but far more, far better—he had transformed the Witch into the Angel.

He stayed in the closet with her for three days. He lost all track of time as they went to special new places—places he never dreamed of—places where the Angel praised his new power and exalted him and filled him with unimaginable pleasure.

* * *

On the evening of the fifth day he stayed up until three a.m., then took what was left of the Witch from the house in a duffel bag one of the men had left. He put it in a shopping cart he had dumped in a ravine, and rolled it to a vacant lot he had passed many times on the way to Ralph’s. He had dug the shallow hole the night before, so all he had to do was dump it in and cover it with dirt.

On the sixth day he stole a taxidermy book from the local library, along with a textbook on police procedure. He read the taxidermy book in one day, and all night that night he worked carefully, meticulously, on his new Angel. A plan was forming. It had been forming since he first looked at the china blue ovals in his hand. He would take his Angel in a small piece of soft luggage lined with plastic wrap inside, and he would leave this place forever. There was a truck stop a mile or so away. He would go there with his Angel and catch a ride with a trucker, paying him, if necessary, from the cash he found in the Witch’s purse. He would forget this place—the Witch was already fading from memory. He was focused entirely on his new life, on his plans. So much to do…

And on the seventh day he rested.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

St. Stephen, Missouri, has been slowly dying for a century. Its population peaked one hundred years ago, at around eighty thousand souls. Since then its youth had been sucked away by the industrial revolution, wars, and Eisenhower’s highways. Now its population is less than half its peak and its roads and buildings are aging gracelessly.
Going the way of the buggy-whip
, I think as I drive up Rt. 90 and St. Stephen first comes into view.

It is just after 2:00 a.m. and the clear Gibbous moon is slanting its half-light across the prairie landscape surrounding the town. All I know about St. Stephen is what I have learned while researching it for
Killer At Large.
I never bothered to come here. And as I enter the dark little town on the deserted main drag I think,
Who would?

After reading about Sharon Belton’s murder I booked the next flight I could get from Burlington to Boston and then to Kansas City, paying full fare, and once in Kansas City I picked up my rental car and now here I am, fourteen hours later, pulling into St. Stephen on the dark, lonely highway.

I have no map of the town, no idea where I’m going, but I know the church is on Route 90, so I proceed through the town, past the hair salons and gas stations and ratty bars, all the way through the main drag in two minutes and then I’m back in the darkness and the road gets rougher and I see a sign that tells me I’m on Rt. 90. I slow down, looking left and right as I continue north, past mile after mile of rusted barbed-wire fence and the barren hollows of a place no one wants to be.

I nearly pass right by it, but out of the corner of my eye I catch a glimpse of the canted steeple of Calvary Assembly of God Chapel and I stop in the middle of the road. I look back over my shoulder and there it is.

I back up slowly, watching the church come into view. It is even more dilapidated than I had imagined or the newspaper photos had revealed. There is a rutted gravel drive leading up beside the church and I turn the steering wheel toward it and the tires of my rental car crunch up the rough, rocky rise as I approach the broken-down sanctuary. I park in the church lot, which is clotted with generations of tall weeds and trash.

How long since anyone worshipped here?

I get out of the car and the cold bites at my throat. I tug my coat tight around me and walk over to the sign on the dirt lawn in front of the church, just to be sure I am at the right place, even though I know I am.

Calvary Ass of Go ape,
the sign reads in ready-to-apply plastic letters, the victim of time and bored kids. I look up at the church. It is a gothic horror in its own right: a sagging prairie chapel with a broken-back roof and two large, peaked openings—former stained glass windows—now empty, arched black frames flanking the front doors, staring out at nothing like the eyes of the dead. The smaller windows along the side of the church are boarded up, and the coat of white paint is fighting a losing battle with the elements to protect the weathered gray clapboard underneath.

I walk around the side of the church, looking for the cemetery, and after a minute I see it in the moonlight. I walk to it. It is smaller than I had thought it would be, thirty or forty foot square by my guess, its borders ragged and unclear in the shadows near the woods. I glance down at the headstones and recognize none of the names. The mossy grave markers are cold and silent; they tell me nothing except that once there were living people here and now they are rotting beneath my feet. I clench my teeth and move on, toward the woods that border the dark side of the graveyard.

The woods are thick and black as tar. The trees seem ancient, their bare branches claw at the clear winter stars. I step into the brush, edging my way into the shadows until I see a shaft of weak moonlight ahead, illuminating a small clearing, deeper inside the woods. I move toward it, my heart already gearing up for what I might find.

I duck and dodge and stumble through the bramble and spider webs and tree roots and finally stand up straight and see what I have been looking for: a rectangular hole in the forest floor. I turn back and see the church, over the headstones, the same angle the photographer took for the
News.

This is it
.

I look down at Sharon Belton’s grave. This time my recognition of the grave is less shocking than that of Beverly Grace’s grave at Temescal. I have already seen the photograph of this place, and my own imaginings of it have blurred with the photograph and I don’t know where one leaves off and the other begins. But the sight and smell of the woods are real, the dirt beneath my feet is cold and hard.

Now what, dumbshit?

I walk around the grave, looking down at it. I have come all this way and I realize I have no idea what to do next. What is here for me?

Something out of the corner of my eye causes me to look up. Movement. My own shadow, probably. I ball my fists in my coat pockets.

What the hell am I doing here?

I look down at the grave and realize Sharon Belton must have thought the same thing as the end came for her.

I linger for a moment out of some misplaced sense of propriety, then I shift my feet to head back to the car, and the next thing I see is a flash of brilliant, blinding white light and the world and its sights and sounds and smells gives way to nothingness.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

I dream of something choking me. I fight but it pushes deeper into my mouth and as I wake I taste mold and soil and I try to open my eyes but they are pushed down by something. Dirt in my eyes. I cough and sneeze and try to reach up to clear whatever is choking me but my arms are held down by something. I feel dirt in my hands and now I realize that I am buried.

I struggle harder, panic pushing my arms and legs up, pushing against the avalanche of soil that is suffocating me. I am drowning in dirt. My lungs are on fire and I tuck my chin down to find a pocket of air and I suck the pocket empty and then dive up, choking and coughing, lifting my arms with every ounce of strength I have. I smell earth and damp and I feel something crawl across my left eye and I yell and spit and plow through an endless mass of grit and my right hand finds a space to move in and I twist and scratch my hand up until I feel cold air on my index finger and it gives me hope. I hold my breath and push the pressing avalanche away; now with one hand, now with the other, and I realize I have forgotten my legs and I kick and squall and claw my way up until both hands feel the cold air and I turn my hands back toward my suffocating mouth and I dig and throw dirt away and finally I can lift my head and my left eye opens and I can see the Gibbous moon and it spurs me to fight upward until my face is clear and I can breathe again and I suck the cold air into my aching lungs with the greedy passion of the living.