The Body Keeper

by Anne Frasier

  “Let go.” He squeezed hard.

  Nan let go.

  He unclipped the remote from the bed and pulled it out of her reach, placing it quietly on the floor. “It’s nice they gave you a private room. I was a little concerned about that.”

  Her mouth went dry and she began talking fast. “You’re right. It was stupid. I don’t know what I was thinking. I liked the kid. I guess that’s it. But I don’t know what you’re worried about. He had nothing to do with the business.” A business they’d closed down after the kids died.

  “He draws attention to you. And you’ll draw attention to me. He can lead people right to your place.”

  “He can’t. He never went outside. He wouldn’t be able to describe where he was living.” Not quite the truth. Nan didn’t mention the few times she’d taken the boy out at night. “He never saw anybody. There’s no way he can tell them anything important.”

  “He can identify me.”

  True. The child wouldn’t forget the man who’d burned and broken his little body.

  “I’m sorry,” Nan whispered. It would have all been okay if she hadn’t blown it by saying the boy’s name while she was in a morphine haze. “There was no more money. I needed to get out of here, out of Minnesota, and I couldn’t bring the kid with me.” Everything would have been fine if Lyle had disposed of the bodies years ago the way he was supposed to. Even after death, he was still screwing up. She wouldn’t mention the six bodies still in the warehouse. She’d never gone back for them. After having the van towed to a shop and discovering the engine was shot, she sold it to a junk dealer. But she wasn’t sure she could have made herself return to the warehouse anyway, after the close call with the cop.

  “Where’s the boy now?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. With someone in Child Protection Services.” Nan started crying. “Don’t hurt him. Please.”

  “That’s where you screwed up to begin with. You started caring about these kids. Even years ago, mothering them, baking them cookies, talking to them when they were scared and crying. You should never have been in the business in the first place.”

  “I helped them. I helped them transition. I wasn’t just doing it for them. I was doing it for all of us. So they’d cooperate. I made it easier for you. You’re just too much of an ass to see it.”

  Calling him an ass was a mistake.

  She knew it before his fist hit her face. Her sight blinded by pain, her nose bleeding, she reached for the call button but remembered he’d pulled it off the bed. And really, how many times had she pressed it only to have no one come?

  His knee pushed down hard against her wrist. Nan opened her mouth to scream. Not fast enough. The pillow was jerked from behind her head and shoved against her face. She waved her free hand, trying to find a pair of eyes to poke or hair to grab.

  It was true your life flashed before you moments before you died. She wished she could tell someone, Lyle maybe. She saw them together that morning on the farm when their lives had changed. Young, healthy, making sandwiches, Lyle’s return to the house with his ashen face, her opening the door of the addition to see the bodies belonging to ten beautiful boys.

  Suddenly the pressure was gone and she was gasping for air. She knocked the pillow away as the darkness at the edges of her vision cleared. Nobody in the room. Had he come to threaten but not kill her? Had someone scared him away? Like Jenny Hill from CPS, who’d been by earlier. She’d been surprisingly understanding as she’d taken saliva for a DNA test, saying the results could take days or weeks.

  Nan knew what she had to do. Get the boy back. Hide him. Run away with him. Or if it came down to it—kill him.

  CHAPTER 26

  Four thirty and already dark when Jude got a text from Uriah asking how the meeting had gone, letting her know he was back at Homicide. She was tired, but she wanted to catch him up before heading home. She especially wanted to let him know Billy Nelson was ready for autopsy.

  Rush hour was bad. A drive that should have taken twenty minutes stretched to forty. Traffic on I-35 was at a standstill, red taillights snaking to a vanishing point in the distance. It was so cold in her car that frost had built up on the inside of the windows. She fiddled with the heat settings, directing all the air to the upper vents even though her toes were aching. Traffic inched forward. She removed her gloves and scraped at the frost with her fingernails.

  Finally in the underground parking ramp, she shut off the ignition, anxious to get inside the building to warm up. A car horn echoed in the distance, and someone hit a lock button on a vehicle, the sounds distorted in the enclosed area. Tucking the file Savoy had given her into her messenger bag, she headed for the stairwell.

  Normally she was vigilant in garages, any garage, even a restricted one like this, but she was thinking about the case and Savoy’s behavior. On top of that, she couldn’t stop rerunning her visit with the boy. Crouching down, giving him a cookie. How glad he’d been to see her. Despite the warnings she’d given the foster mom, Jude sensed he was good at his core. Hopefully it wasn’t too late for him.

  She was almost to the elevator entry when her brain tripped, causing her to come to an abrupt halt. She’d passed an unmarked car, the only one in the designated area. Someone had been sitting inside. Not normal.

  She retraced her steps. The vehicle wasn’t running. No sound, no radio, no conversation coming from the interior. Approaching it from behind, moving along the driver’s side, she noted that the back seat was empty. Then she spotted Uriah sitting behind the wheel, eyes closed, head back. Cops were known to exhaust themselves and fall asleep in odd places. Desks, toilets, standing against a wall. This felt different.

  The parking area was dark, and the poor lighting gave his skin a green cast, but there was a pallor to it that seemed true. He was so washed out, his face almost glowed. Normally he was clean-shaven, but it looked like he might have forgotten to shave that morning. The curly hair on his forehead was damp or recently damp, and his tie had been tossed to the seat beside him, the throat of his white dress shirt open a couple of buttons as if he’d tugged it in a need to cool off in a hurry.

  She tapped lightly on the window. No response, so she tried again, a little harder this time. He jerked awake, sat up straight, then tried to act alert as he lowered the window. He was pale. And he’d been sweating.

  “Just a little cat nap.” He rubbed his face. “Thanks for waking me.”

  He fumbled about, found his tie, slipped it around his neck, and got out of the car, locking the door with the fob and pocketing the keys. Then he buttoned his shirt and slung one end of the tie over his hand to begin the knot. “Even though we had a good match, I wanted to run the DNA profile of our first body,” he said. “You know how it is with prints. I’m okay with twelve, especially in a case like this where we have other clues, but some people might balk at that number.”

  “And?”

  “It matched the mother’s and sister’s mitochondrial DNA.”

  She told him about the Nelson body being ready for autopsy, then asked, “What’s going on?”

  He began walking, strides long as he tightened the knot at his throat. “You mean back there? I fell asleep.” At the elevator, he pushed the button for their floor and rolled his shoulders, obviously still trying to wake up. The door opened with a ding.

  “Don’t keep secrets from me,” she said as they stepped inside.

  “Not sure what you’re talking about.”

  She noted a breathy weakness in his voice.

  “I just need some coffee.”

  The elevator stopped, the doors opened, he exited and walked straight for the break room. Jude followed, glad to see it was empty. She closed the door behind them. If she’d been able to lock it, she would have.

  She picked up a mug and filled it with coffee, replacing the carafe with a clatter. Handed him the cup. “Are you drinking?” She almost hoped that was it. “I’m not making accusations. I just want to know what’s going on.”<
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  He lifted the mug, poised to take a sip. His face went pale again, and he set the drink aside and moved to the corner of the room to drop down on a couch. “I’ve just been a little off lately.”

  “I’m fine with keeping my distance from everybody else in the building and beyond,” Jude said. “I prefer it because, let’s face it, people have a way of being less than I want them to be. But we’re partners. So anything that’s going on with you affects me and could even put my life in danger.”

  Neither of them needed to point out that she didn’t seem to have much interest in her safety, but the statement drove her point home. Something was going on that he didn’t want her or anybody else to know.

  He got up, dumped the coffee, rinsed the mug in the sink, and filled it with water. He took a cautious sip, then another. She considered pulling out a chair to sit down but changed her mind.

  Leaning against the counter, he said, “Remember a few months back when I passed out at that crime scene?”

  “Not easily forgotten.” She’d called 911 and had ridden to the hospital in an ambulance with him.

  “And I had some tests run?”

  She remembered that too.

  “And I told you everything was fine?”

  Her heart began to pound. “Yes.”

  “I lied.”

  She wished she’d sat down. To do so now would underscore her shock at his revelation, and she didn’t want him to see any response at all.

  He took another small sip of water. “The MRI revealed a tumor.”

  For someone who’d been denying any and all feelings ever since her escape from captivity, today had been a challenge. First the boy, and now Uriah. She gave up and pulled out the nearest chair, dropping down hard. “I suspected something the day you told me the tests were fine.” But she’d moved past her suspicion. She’d wanted him to be okay. She’d needed him to be okay, and so she’d believed him, even when deep down she’d known something wasn’t right.

  His cancer must have returned. His father had told her about Uriah’s childhood leukemia. “You shouldn’t even be here,” she said. “You should be resting. You should be home in bed. You should be vacationing in Florida. You should be . . . What are they doing about it? Surgery? Chemo? Radiation?”

  “Maybe all of those things. The good news is that it’s benign. But it’s growing, and it’s not in an optimal area for surgery.”

  “You should go somewhere else. Get a second opinion. That’s always good. Go to Mayo Clinic, a research hospital.” She was talking fast, but she couldn’t slow down. “I can start working on that. Find the best place.”

  “Whoa. Stop right there. This is exactly the reason I didn’t tell anybody.”

  “Do your parents know?” Of course not. They’d seemed too happy the couple of times she’d seen them recently.

  “I don’t want people fussing over me. You’re fussing over me. They would fuss over me. I’m doing everything I’m supposed to do.”

  She got to her feet. “What is that? Working late? Not getting enough sleep? Probably eating poorly.”

  “I’m getting chemo. They’re hoping to shrink the tumor enough to operate on it.” He let out a breath, seeming relieved to have gotten rid of his secret. “I’d been told the chemo might not cause side effects. It’s a limited dose that only seems to negatively impact about twenty percent of patients. I was hoping to be in the eighty percent. Well, that didn’t work out, but I’m taking something that helps with the nausea and fatigue. I had the third and final treatment this morning—that’s why I missed the press conference—so I’ve been a little off today.”

  Holy hell. “Tired?”

  “Yeah. And unable to be around food sometimes, especially hot food, just cooked, with a strong odor.”

  Another reason for not meeting Savoy. He started looking queasy just talking about it.

  “You should be home.”

  “I don’t want to be home.”

  “You could work from there.”

  “I don’t want anybody to know.”

  “Why?”

  “You’re going to have to keep my secret. You’re going to have to help me with it, cover for me when I need you to.”

  “Did you hear me? Why? Do you think you’re too tough?” Tough. That was so far from who Uriah was. No, that wasn’t it.

  He laughed. “If you think that, then you don’t know me very well.”

  “Sorry. Okay, I’ll take a shot at it. You’ve been through this before, and you want to keep things normal. You don’t like the attention, and you don’t like people treating you any differently. And this—this is the most important part: you don’t want it to interfere with your job.”

  “You got it. Especially the last bit. Once people know, they’ll go easy on me, maybe not fill me in on important information, not call when we have a crime scene I need to see. There might be a time when all of that behavior will be necessary, but until then, I want to keep things the way they are. And I want you to help me do that.”

  She picked up an orange from a bowl, considered peeling it, not because she wanted to eat it, but because it would give her something deliberate to do. The smell might bother him. She put the orange down. “Are you in danger from it? Right now?”

  “It’s possible. A blood vessel in my brain could break without any warning, and I could bleed out.”

  “And stress could cause that.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. There’s no way of knowing. I should probably tell somebody this, but I had a will drawn up last week. It’s in my apartment. You know. Just in case.”

  She turned her back to him and pressed shaking fingers to her lips in a there, there patting motion. She squeezed her eyes closed, opened them, blinked fast.

  “Think of it this way,” he said, sounding way too calm for the heaviness of the situation. “We see death all the time. You and I. And our lives are in danger more than the average person. This is just another thing.” He was the one with a damn tumor, yet he was comforting her.

  She heard footsteps behind her, and then his hands were on her arms turning her around. They were almost the same height, and she couldn’t avoid looking into his eyes. “I don’t want you to die.” Her mouth shook.

  He pulled her close and held her.

  She knew his scent—the shampoo he used, the deodorant. She knew his gestures, large and small, the eyebrow lifts, the twists of his mouth that could mean many different things depending upon the situation, but the sensation of being so physically close to him was new, chest to chest, his arms around her. She would have expected it to be unpleasant, maybe even have expected to flip out because she didn’t think she liked to be touched. But even though it felt foreign, it also felt okay. Tolerable.

  “I’m going to try not to die,” he said. He didn’t tell her everything would be okay. He didn’t promise her things he couldn’t promise.

  “Good.”

  He stepped back. “I want to hear about your meeting with Savoy. Then let’s get a press release written for tomorrow morning. This will go global, so be prepared for cameras in your face again.”

  “We need the press involved,” she said. “We’ve been focusing on missing children from Minnesota and nearby states when we should be focusing on the entire nation.” That took her back to what she’d proposed to Savoy, that this was bigger than they’d first thought. He’d dismissed the idea, but she wasn’t convinced they weren’t dealing with something organized.

  CHAPTER 27

  Alan Reed, along with everybody else in the dark Oklahoma bar, was watching the flat-screen television high on the wall. National news, and a woman with a logo attached to her mic stood in the middle of a frozen lake, wind howling. She wore a giant hat, probably fake fur, and she was talking about two bodies that had been found in the ice. Hard to imagine a place so cold somebody could freeze like that.

  “One of the bodies has been identified using fingerprints and DNA. The victim? A boy named Billy Nelson who disappeare
d twenty years ago.”

  A murmur of surprise passed through the bar patrons as an old photo appeared at the bottom corner of the TV screen. A blond kid in a red shirt looking straight at the camera. One of those school photos they made you take. Did they do that anymore? Seemed outdated with digital phones and all.

  The reporter was still talking. “The other body remains a John Doe.”

  Cut to a woman at a news desk, the frame of the exterior shot shrinking to a small square. “Do police think there’s any connection between the two bodies?” the woman at the desk asked.

  “It’s too early to speculate,” said the on-site reporter, “but the unidentified child’s clothing appears to be from the same time period. Unfortunately, due to details too disturbing to delve into here, an approximate year might be impossible to determine from the autopsy. We can’t show you an image of the John Doe’s face; that would be too upsetting for some viewers, but the Minneapolis Police Department has supplied us with a sketch.”

  Another face appeared at the side of the screen. “If you have any information about this case, or if the person in the artist’s rendering looks familiar, please give the number on the screen a call.”

  They broke away from the live shot to recorded footage. Suddenly Alan was looking at a view taken from a helicopter or drone. The clip moved fast, the camera sweeping across the landscape of the Twin Cities, flying low over lakes dotted with people. The woman’s voice continued even though she was no longer on-screen. “In the meantime, the entire city of Minneapolis is on high alert. Typically, at this time of year, the lakes are full of colorful fishing shacks. Now they’re packed with people hoping to find more bodies. Like a sick sport, some people come out every day to search.”

  The frame went full-screen again as they cut back to the reporter in the fur hat. “We’re here with someone who’s been at the lake daily since the first body was found. That’s quite an accomplishment because the temperature is almost zero right now. What drives you?” Her mic and the camera shifted to the guy on her left, a bearded man in brown canvas overalls. “Are you looking for someone you lost?”