by A W Hartoin
“Not too much. I’ve seen worse.” I’d caused worse. The picture of Richard Costilla falling down the stairs in New Orleans, his face exploding and spraying blood up the wall, bloomed in my mind.
“Mercy?” He squatted next to my chair and tentatively put his hand on my knee. “Okay?”
I took a breath, using the calming techniques I’d been taught. It worked, but I hated that I still needed them. “I’m fine and it’s good that you’re bothered. This should never be easy.”
“I’m glad Barney didn’t get a picture of the body.”
“It would’ve been extremely helpful.”
He nodded. “She probably wasn’t killed in the woods, right? He just dumped her there.”
“I think so, but that whole reference to the body being abused is bothering me.”
“Me, too, but probably not for the same reason.”
I patted his hand. “So where’s the area we’re looking at on your map?”
Tank got a red felt tip marker out and circled a wooded area and then put a dot in the center. “That’s the woods on the Snider land and the dot is where the memorial used to be.”
“There was a memorial?” I asked. “What happened to it?”
“I have no idea. I never thought about it.”
“You might want to.”
“Then you do believe that it’s Sister Maggie that’s haunting the school,” said Tank.
I leaned over and looked at the picture of her body under that sheet. “I believe that people had a place to remember what happened to her and now they don’t.”
“I’ll find out what happened to that memorial.” He got out a green felt tip and drew on a road next to the Snider property. “That’s the road in Barney’s pictures. I recognize the trees.” He picked up the pictures of the tire tracks, looking at them from all angles. “I want to say that the tracks are here.” He drew two short parallel lines near the dot.
I got down on my knees and ran my finger from St. Seb down the road to the tire tracks. “It’s not that close to the body. Why stop there?”
Tank showed me a picture of the woods where you could see the body in the distance. It wasn’t apparent from close up, but there were rocks to climb over from that angle and they were reasonably steep. I took a blue pen from him and made dots on the map. “So rocks here. Surrounding the area?”
“Yes, unless you approach from the creek on the other side.”
“That doesn’t make sense. It would be really far out of the way,” I said.
“Right. I think this picture was taken from the walking path. It wasn’t an official trail, just a path that everyone naturally used over the years.” He pointed at an area a ways away on the map. “I used to park here. There’s a dirt area next to the road with space for a few cars. We’d just park there and party back in high school.”
“That’s where the path started?” I asked.
He drew a line from the parking spot through the woods, sort of around Maggie’s area in a big circle. “That’s a rough guess. It was probably around three miles all told. The views over Indian Creek were beautiful. Will and I used to camp there with the kids when they were little. The school built a parking lot.”
“That sucks.”
“It does. They really ruined it.”
I looked back and forth between the pictures and the map. I imagined just the body, no sheet, in that dense woods. There was quite a bit of undergrowth and rocks.
“If you were just walking on the path, how close would you get to the body?” I asked.
“On the path? Oh, I’d say no closer than fifty yards. Why?”
I traced my finger over the trail. “He put her in the center of the walking path loop. People were out there, walking around her, but nobody noticed until he removed the brush.”
“What are you getting at?” Tank asked.
“It was very deliberate and it took effort,” I said. “These rocks. Hard to climb?”
He frowned. “Not real bad. I did it plenty of times.”
“Could you get to the memorial without climbing over at least some rocks if you’re coming from the road?” I asked.
Tank looked through the photos and thought about it for a minute. “I don’t think so, but like I said, it wasn’t hard, not a cliff or anything.”
“Did you ever carry your kid up there?”
“Sure.”
“How?”
A look of frustration passed over Tank’s thin face and he said, “I don’t know. In a kid backpack. I’m telling you it wasn’t hard.”
“How big was the kid?”
“Jesus, I don’t know. I probably carried them both at one time or another. They were fat kids. Thirty or forty pounds maybe. I didn’t carry them after they turned three. So flipping heavy.”
“So he leaves the road and the tire tracks stop here.” I pointed at the lines and then the body dot. “And Maggie was found here.”
“Yes,” said Tank, getting thoughtful.
“He stopped driving, presumably because there were rocks in the way. How’d he get her to where he left her?” I asked.
Tank threw up his hands. “He obviously carried her.”
“For a minimum of fifty yards, over a good amount of rocks, and at night because nobody saw it happen.”
“Where there’s a will there’s a way.”
I shook my head. “I don’t think there was a way. I’ve seen pictures of Maggie. She was tall, well-built, and not a swizzle stick. I’d guess she weighed at least 130, more like 140. Can you imagine carrying 140 pounds of dead weight? According to my dad, corpses are hard to carry. I tried to haul a kid I was babysitting out of a playground sandpit when she was trying passive resistance. It was exhausting and she was seven.”
“But you did it,” said Tank slowly.
“I didn’t do it. A mom took pity on me and helped.”
Tank ran his hands over his face. “He had help.”
“I think so.”
“Maybe he was just really strong.”
“You look fit. Could you carry me that distance? I’m short, but I weigh about the same.”
“No, not over those rocks. I’d have to drag you. Maybe that’s what Desmond Shipley meant by ‘abused.’”
We went through the pictures again, looking closely for signs that something had been dragged. Tank broke out a little magnifying glass he used for tying fishing flies when work was slow and we couldn’t find that the moss on the rocks was disturbed enough to make it plausible. There certainly wasn’t any flattened area around the tire tracks. Plenty of what was probably footprints, but we didn’t have a close up, so they weren’t distinguishable. Could’ve been one set of shoes or five.
“So two guys, at least.” Tank was visibly sad and I was about to make it worse.
I pointed at the dot. “And this isn’t an accident.”
“Huh?”
“This road? Where does it go? St. Seb to where?”
“It’s kind of a back way to Hermann. Lots of farms out there.”
“Not a main road? Not even back then?”
He got to his feet, knees creaking, and sat on the folding chair. “100 is direct and it’s been there all my life.”
“These guys knew the area and they knew it well,” I said.
“Locals. Chief Lucas lied.”
I picked up the tire track photo. “With access to a truck.”
“Is that important?” Tank asked. “Everyone has a truck out here. It’s farm country.”
“I can tell you who didn’t have access to a truck and didn’t know where to put a body where people would be walking around it and never see it until he wanted them to.”
“The priest?”
“Bingo.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
I DON’T KNOW when the Sentinel bought the printer photocopier combo that Tank showed me how to use, but I’d seen Smart cars that were smaller and they made less noise, too. I did get the hang of that monster and printed out all the art
icles on the murder, break-ins, and the arsons back then and the recent ones, too. I copied the photos and tried calling Uncle Morty for a third time. I knew he was distracted, but this was getting ridiculous. One minute it was all about getting to Greece and the next he was mooning over pictures and not getting my info. I had to know about Bertram Stott. That guy fit the profile so hard, murderer, teenager then, and in town when Tank’s fires happened. But I needed to place him in St. Seb in 1965. The cops weren’t going to help me, especially since I’d have to show them the connections that said a local killed Maggie. Stratton wasn’t stupid. She’d know the old chief would’ve seen it, if he’d been doing his job instead of drinking his ass off.
To be fair, I guess my idea that it was a couple of teenaged boys wasn’t a lock. They could conceivably be unconnected and back then people didn’t think kids did serious crimes. Arson wasn’t connected to serial killers like it was now. That wasn’t the old chief’s fault.
“You know what I didn’t look at?” I asked, mostly to myself.
“I’m afraid to ask.” Tank looked up from labeling my articles.
“Really?”
“My Great Aunt Patsy lives in Shady Glen.”
I wrinkled my nose. “Well, we don’t know it’s Stott and he is pretty sick.”
“That’s the only thing keeping me from taking her home tonight.”
“Would she go?”
“It’d be a fight. All her friends are there. It’s perpetual coffee klatch. She loves it.”
“She’s probably fine.”
“Probably.” Tank was not convinced.
“Ten years and no bodies. I think she’s fine,” I said.
“Would you leave your Aunt Miriam in there?”
I pictured Aunt Miriam and her lethal purse with the brick inside. “Yes. He’d be in more danger than her.”
“I thought you said she was a nun.”
“Yes, but a dangerous one. You want to hear what I didn’t look up or not?”
He grimaced, but I told him anyway.
“Dead or missing pets,” I said.
“Now?”
“Then. Serial killers sometimes start with animals. The state stats wouldn’t keep track of that and nothing popped out in the articles I read. Nothing in the town meeting.”
“Who said anything about a serial killer?” asked Tank, stepping back like I was contagious.
“Oh, well, there might be a reason to think that,” I said.
“Because Bertram killed that woman in Tennessee? That’s only one.”
That we know of.
“Because we have arson, a dead nun with some kind of disturbing abuse to the body, and a good amount of planning.” And her medal in a serial killer graveyard, but we won’t talk about that.
“This just keeps getting worse.”
“It usually does,” I said. “Can you look that up? I’d like to get out of here. Anything from Lefty?”
Tank checked his phone. “Heading back now. He pulled six people out of ditches and plowed half of downtown. Irene is never getting rid of that Gator.”
I laughed. “I guess not.”
“When will you get that information on Bertram Stott?”
I glanced at my phone in case I missed something. “I should’ve had it already. Usually, he’s lightning fast.”
“Maybe he can’t find anything,” said Tank.
“Oh, he’ll find something. There is no way that guy stalked women, killed one, and never ever committed another crime. That just isn’t a thing that happens.”
He tucked my photocopies in a folder and said, “I should stop talking to you.”
“It’s not me,” I said.
“You’re like a harbinger of doom. I was happy this morning. Nothing but this storm was happening. Our last crime was a purse snatching at Walmart and Mallory was making Italian beef for dinner. My favorite. Now I don’t have an appetite or Tylenol PM in the house. I think I need both.”
“But you have the exclusive.”
“Exclusives don’t put a guy like me to sleep at night.” His phone buzzed and he said, “Lefty found another person stuck in the Frick’s parking lot. It’ll be a little longer. You want to look for dead animals?”
“I really don’t,” I said. “How about more tea?”
“Done.”
We took my research upstairs and my phone went off. Destiny’s Child blared out of my phone, bouncing off the walls as I scrambled to mute it. “Wishin’ you the best, pray that you are blessed.”
“What was that?” asked Tank.
“My mom, I hope,” I said.
“You hope?”
“Sometimes my dad uses her phone so I’ll answer.”
We went back to Tank’s desk and he refilled our mugs before popping them into the microwave. “You don’t like your dad? He’s a pretty amazing dude.”
“He’s amazing alright.”
Tank grinned at me. “Not easy to live up to him, I guess.”
“And even harder, if you don’t try.”
“Are you telling me that you haven’t been trying?”
I sat down and kicked my feet up on his desk. “I have not. I’ve been trying to be left alone. It hasn’t worked out for me.”
“That’s an understatement.”
“It was inevitable that I would be sitting here with you, I guess. I’ve been going to crime scenes since I was a baby,” I said.
Tank tilted his head to the side and I could see that he was trying to work out how that happened.
I laughed and said, “My mom was getting her hair done and Dad had me, which was rare. There was some murder and he took me to the scene in a backpack.”
“He adapts and overcomes,” said Tank. “Your dad’s a character.”
“It wasn’t even a kid backpack. He stuffed me in a hiking pack and zipped me in. There’s a picture of me looking around with blood spatter in the background and Dad taking pictures.”
“Nobody stopped him?”
“Are you kidding? Tommy Watts? Not gonna happen,” I said with a snort.
“So you aren’t going to call—”
My phone went off again and against my better judgement, I swiped the green button.
“Don’t panic!” said Mom.
“What?”
“I said not to panic.” She went on to lecture me for a minute about panic. I don’t know about anyone else, but if someone says not to panic, it totally means there is something to panic about. Don’t panic is the sister of calm down. Each has the opposite effect and both pissed me off.
“Mom, for God’s sake!” I said, trying not to yell and failing a bit. “Just tell me what happened.”
“We can’t get there. We’re snowed in.” Mom was slurring hard. The more she talked the worse it got.
“What happened?”
“Your father is talking to John, but he says there’s no way.”
Breathe. Do not yell at the mother.
“Mom, can you hear me?” I asked.
“Of course, I can hear you. I’m talking to you. Now call Fats and take her truck. I’m sure you can make it.”
“Make it where?”
Mom took a breath and said, “On second thought, have Fats drive. She’s good in a crisis.”
I’m not?
Tank dropped a tea bag in my mug and sat down behind his desk, checking his computer. “44 is still shutdown.”
I nodded. “Mom, listen, I’m in St. Sebastian.”
“What in the world are you doing out there?” she asked.
“Um…wineries.”
“In the winter?” Her voice went high and I imagined her on the edge of tears. “You have to get back.”
“Give Dad the phone.”
“He’s out. Nobody’s there, Mercy. I can’t call Aunt Miriam. She can’t go out in this weather. She’s old. She could break a hip.”
So not Aunt Miriam. Can’t be Grandad and Grandma. Oh, no.
“Is it Uncle Morty?” I asked.
&n
bsp; “Aren’t you listening?” asked Mom.
“You didn’t tell me, Mom. You’re panicking.”
She went quiet and I could hear her taking a calming breath.
“It’s Morty. They’ve taken him to the hospital, but they won’t tell us anything. We’re not actually family.”
Say he wasn’t at the gym.
“Mercy, he was at a gym. What was he doing at a gym?”
Dammit.
“Did he have a heart attack?” My heart wasn’t in my throat. I felt like it wasn’t anywhere in my body.
“I don’t know. He was on a treadmill and he went down. They called me because I’m his emergency contact. Why would he be on a treadmill?”
“Well…”
“Mercy?”
“He’s upset that Nikki’s living the high life with hot guys and he’s fat,” I said. “I told him not to do it.”
“You knew about this?”
And so did Dad.
“I did, Mom. I tried to talk to him, but he’s freaking out.”
“And you left him? You know he’s a big baby,” said Mom. “What are we going to do? His mother and brother can’t get there. The airport’s shut down.”
“What about Chuck?” I asked.
“He’s working.”
“Screw that!”
“Mercy!” exclaimed Mom.
“We’re not doing Dad all over again. This is more important than work.”
“What are you doing in St. Seb then? Hanging out with the ghosts, I suppose.”
“I’m trying to get Uncle Morty to Greece.”
“I don’t see how,” she said.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Is he at SLU?”
“Yes, he is.”
“Okay. That’s good. You call Chuck and tell him to go.”
“Mercy, we don’t know what case he’s on,” said Mom.
I balled up my fists and said, “I don’t give a crap if it’s the Kennedy assassination. Tell Chuck to go. I’m calling Pete. He’s always at work.”
“Chuck won’t like that,” said Mom.
“Not important.”
Mom agreed and I hung up. I told Tank what happened and called Pete. He didn’t answer, but he was in the hospital, so I had him paged. Tank made me more tea, even though I’d barely touched the mug I had, and called Lefty who was still MIA.
After a few tense minutes, my phone played the Scrubs theme song.