The Body Keeper

by Anne Frasier

  “Just tryin’ to help.”

  “What do you say to those people who call you morbid?”

  He shrugged. “Don’t matter to me. I’m retired, and it gives me somethin’ to do. It’s kinda fun.”

  People in the bar laughed. Alan laughed too, but his heart wasn’t in it.

  The camera returned to the woman with the mic and her uneasy expression. Not the interview she was hoping for.

  He had to get some air.

  He pushed himself off his stool and grabbed his cigarettes. Outside, he lit up with shaky hands, exhaled, and looked at the Oklahoma sky. His childhood, for the most part, was a blank. But occasionally something would pass by—an image, an odor—that nagged at his brain and tried to get him to remember things too painful to recall. Yet most of the time the past was the past. Nothing he could do about anything except forget and move forward, no looking back, no going back. And he really couldn’t, not after all he’d done and all that had been done to him. A person couldn’t go back from that.

  He jumped, realizing his cigarette was a long hot ash, so hot it burned his fingers. He’d been sucking on it like a fiend and hadn’t even noticed. He shook it to the ground and went inside.

  The damn news. It was still on. Why didn’t somebody change the channel? He was about to suggest just that or find the remote and do it himself, when a new interview launched.

  This one was with a woman with brown hair, some gray strands in it, looked about sixty, maybe a little older. Her name was Gail Ford.

  “Want another beer?” someone shouted to him.

  Transfixed, he waved the words away with one hand as he stared at the screen. She talked about how her son had vanished one day.

  “He just never came home from school.”

  His head roared, and he felt like he might throw up. It took a lot for him to focus on the rest of her words. He didn’t catch them all, but she talked about how she’d searched, and it wasn’t until hours later that she’d started to worry something had really happened to him. And it wasn’t until then she got the police involved.

  “If I’d called them sooner, maybe we could have found him.”

  “Hey, bud.” An arm went around his shoulder. Alan looked up with confusion, like waking from a bad dream. “You ready to go?”

  Near the door, two others waited.

  This was his tribe. These were his people now. A pack of criminals, bound by the things they’d done. But no matter how bad those things were, they would never compare to what he’d lived through before meeting them.

  “I’ve scoped out a job,” his friend said. “A house with an alarm system but no cameras. We get in, we get out before the cops even know we’ve been there.”

  As far as he knew, he was the only one of the bunch who’d never killed anybody. But it was just a matter of time. If the right circumstances came up and it was him or someone else, he’d kill.

  He glanced at the screen again. The woman was still talking, crying now, thinking about an innocent eleven-year-old boy, not the man he’d be today.

  “And since we’ve got a crew here in Minneapolis, we thought we’d break new information in another strange case,” the reporter said. “We’ve been following the story of the young boy found on a doorstep. Well today, just hours ago, we got word that his mother has been found. Her name is Nanette Perkins.”

  Another face filled the screen. He must have been losing his mind, because damn if she didn’t look familiar too.

  Call me Nan.

  “She’s a little old for you, isn’t she?” one of his friends said with a laugh.

  A tug on his arm, and Alan began walking backward toward the door, unable to tear his eyes from the photo on the screen.

  CHAPTER 28

  Four years earlier . . .

  After Lyle died and left his shocking deathbed revelation, Nan fell into a deep depression. She had trouble doing anything but sleeping, even though sleep brought dreams of bodies stacked in a meat locker like firewood. She started drinking more, hanging out with the wrong people, Lyle’s brother for one, and the months just became a sleep- and drug- and alcohol-induced blur until a contact in their old trafficking business called and asked if she’d be interested in taking in an infant, a boy, from a past client.

  “We’ll pay you,” her contact said. “A clearinghouse job, like the stuff you used to do, but this is a baby, two weeks old. You can take care of a baby, can’t you?”

  Nan didn’t know anything about babies. “Sure I can.”

  She was to ask no questions and keep him hidden until someone came for him.

  “We’ll give you a heads-up.”

  So easy. They delivered him to her house. They would eventually take him away. She needed the money.

  The arrival was romantic, really. Like a fairy tale. A baby, delivered to her around two a.m. one summer night, arriving in a black SUV, her contact scurrying to the door with the bundled child in her arms. Leaving diapers and formula on the kitchen counter. Inside, under the dangling table lamp, Nan signed a nondisclosure agreement, only slightly alarmed at some of the wording, like, at risk of death. She’d seen forms like this before.

  They’d chosen her because of her past child-trafficking experience. They knew she would feel no moral outrage at the idea of holding a mysterious baby for a few days. And they knew she could keep her mouth shut. It was probably a kidnapped child, probably being sold on the black market to a couple desperate for a little one of their own. He would make somebody happy.

  Even though she wasn’t supposed to ask questions or have any knowledge of where the baby had come from, she couldn’t help but peek through a slit in the curtains once the kitchen door was closed and her contact had stepped outside. Nan squinted, watching as the woman opened the car door, the dome illuminating a passenger in the back seat. Nan caught a glimpse of a well-groomed man she thought she recognized. But it was so fast. Before her brain could sort the features and confirm, the door closed and the light faded.

  She waited for them to pick up the kid. She waited months, then years. By that time, she’d been calling him Boy so long it was too late to change it, to give him a real name. But the money kept coming, like clockwork, the first of every month, deposited into her bank account.

  Enough to live on.

  But then one day it stopped. Her contact person didn’t return her calls. And she began to worry about everything. The bodies still in the locker. The boy who wasn’t hers.

  Her contact finally reached out from a number Nan didn’t recognize, probably a burner phone. “This is just a courtesy call to let you know there’ll be no more money coming from my employer for the kid.” There was more to the conversation. Quick alarming words, spoken in a whisper, filling Nan in on things she’d suspected, like the identity of the man in the car.

  “What am I supposed to do with him?”

  “Kill him.” A pause. “You’re pretty good at killing kids, right?”

  Nan disconnected and tossed the phone.

  Kill him. You’re pretty good at killing kids, right?

  Bitch.

  It took her a while, but money got alarmingly low, and she finally made the decision to run. She had to tie up loose ends first. Getting rid of the bodies, then getting rid of the kid. Even though temps were dropping, it was still early in the season and the ground wasn’t frozen deep. She could drive a tractor with a front-end loader. No reason why she couldn’t carry out their original plan.

  Bury them.

  If you want a job done right, do it yourself.

  She left the boy home alone, locking him in the dog kennel, where he’d be safe, giving him snacks and telling him he had to play the quiet game. “I’ll be back in a little while.”

  He was a good kid, and he nodded without even glancing up. Sitting cross-legged in the dog kennel, he was looking at his favorite volume of the encyclopedia. He particularly loved the pages with the transparencies of the human body. Maybe he could have been a doctor in another
life. But knowing who his dad was, probably more like a murderer. She sort of wished he could run away with her, but questions would be asked that could lead people back to the farm. And it was time for them to go their own ways, time for her to be free of him and start over somewhere else, without a kid.

  In the kitchen next to the door were the keys she’d hung almost twenty years ago. Two of them, one smaller, for a padlock, both on a chain attached to a worn leather fob.

  “For summer,” Lyle had said.

  Had he really planned to go back? Or had leaving the bodies always been his intention? Knowing Lyle, she was going to guess he’d left them out of laziness. Out of sight, out of mind.

  The delivery truck they’d used that day was long gone, probably passed through several hands over the years, maybe crushed in some junkyard by now. Funny to think someone had driven it around, never knowing it had hauled the bodies of ten boys. She and Lyle had gotten a good laugh out of that.

  They’d traded the truck in on something more suitable for farming, a bare-bones cargo van, a rattling tin can with 150,000 miles on it. Inside, there were two torn seats, the back unfinished, just a metal floor and metal walls. The interior smelled like fertilizer, the odor forcing her to roll down her window even though it was close to zero out.

  She’d driven past the Minneapolis warehouse where the bodies were many times over the years. Never much activity at the building even as the structures around it had changed: some were torn down while newer, taller ones went up. Maybe the warehouse would be next. It looked old next to the new.

  The key worked.

  That surprised her.

  She slid a giant metal door until it was open wide enough to drive through, closing it behind her. In the cavernous space, she backed up to the locker located in the far corner and opened the padlock with the other key.

  They were still there. That surprised her too.

  She’d really expected them to be gone. Gone where, she didn’t know, but twenty years was a long time. And they were still frozen. The motor for the unit was external. Someone, a maintenance person, must have kept it running. Lyle’s brother had probably made sure of that.

  Four bodies to start with. That was her plan. She could easily drive four bodies back to the farm and bury them. Once the boy had arrived in her life, there was no more allowing anyone to help out. The few friends she’d made at church were no longer invited to her house, but going it alone had made her physically stronger and more independent.

  She could do this.

  Luckily, frozen bodies were easier to move than fresh ones because they could be levered and didn’t feel as much like dead weight. Put one on a plastic tarp and drag it across the cement to the back of the van, prop it against the bumper designed specifically for loading and unloading. Breathing hard, she clambered into the cargo area and tugged the frozen carcass the rest of the way in, rolled it off the tarp, and returned to the locker for the next one. Hard, but not as hard as she’d expected.

  Bodies loaded, she slid into the driver’s seat, turned the ignition key—and heard nothing but a terrifying click.

  CHAPTER 29

  Something woke her. Out of habit, Lori checked the digital clock by the bed. The illuminated numbers read four a.m. Some people said four a.m. was the time spirits were most active. Ridiculous, but now that she was fully awake, she heard someone talking in a strange and throaty voice. Not her husband, who was asleep beside her. This was coming from down the hall.

  Their house was a three-bedroom, all on the second floor. It was a layout that worked well for fostering. Her two children were in one room, and Michael in another by himself. She’d struggled with that decision. Sometimes she put boys with her son and girls with her daughter, but when they knew so little about this child, and whether he might be violent, putting him by himself had seemed the wise choice. And she’d felt backed up by that decision after talking to Detective Fontaine.

  She checked on her children first. Quiet, sound asleep. The voices were coming from Michael’s room. Low, growly, conversational. Without stepping inside, she peered around the corner. In the glow of the hallway night-light, she made out the silhouette of the boy. He was sitting on the floor, holding the two stuffed animals he’d arrived with: a panda and a striped cat. He was playing with them, making them talk to each other.

  She relaxed. Normal child’s play, although unsettling that it was taking place in the middle of the night, and yet he was dealing with a lot of change. He might have lived with no kind of schedule, and he and his mother might have been active at night. Maybe darkness was more familiar to him. His drawings would certainly indicate that. She was about to enter the room and suggest he get back into bed when his next words and actions stopped her cold.

  CHAPTER 30

  Jude’s phone rang.

  She used to hate sleep because it brought nightmares she couldn’t remember after she was awake. But the nightmares hadn’t visited for a while, maybe months, and Elliot hadn’t had to knock a broom handle against his ceiling to get her to stop screaming. Both pluses. Neither of them had ever mentioned the screams, and Jude felt it was best that way. But she wondered why they were gone. It seemed to have coincided with the demolition of the house where she’d been tortured. Like an exorcism.

  In the dark, she squinted against the brightness of her cell phone. A number she didn’t recognize. She gave out her card to a lot of people, telling them to call her day or night. It was her thing, and Uriah nagged her about it, saying it was a bad idea. The call could be from anybody. Someone in need, someone with information.

  She answered.

  It was Lori, the foster mother. She should have been informed about Ms. Perkins by now, hopefully before it had hit the news outlets.

  “You told me to call you anytime,” the woman said as a way of apologizing for the late hour. “I tried my contact at Child Protection Services, and she said no one could come until morning since this is not really an emergency.”

  Jude sat up straighter in bed. “What’s going on?”

  “I’m in the kitchen,” the woman whispered, “because I don’t want to wake anybody, and I don’t want the boy to hear me. Sorry for whispering.”

  He was “the boy” now. Not Michael.

  “I heard someone talking. Just a low conversational but creepy voice. So I walked down the hall and saw the boy sitting on the floor in the corner of the bedroom. He was holding two stuffed animals. The other kids, they sleep in another room.” Unspoken was that she didn’t trust the child alone with her children while they slept.

  “Understandable.”

  “He was just sitting in the dark. And if you know kids, they don’t like to be in the dark. It was a long time before my kids were okay with no light in their room. But anyway, he was making the stuffed animals talk, the way kids do, playing both parts.” She pulled in a shaky breath. “The animals were fighting. One was scolding the other, calling him bad. And Detective, the panda was holding the cat down, threatening to smother it with a pillow.”

  Jude made a sound of dismay and thought about the boy’s reaction to the tub. He might have been displaying murderous tendencies, but he could also have been reenacting a trauma from his own past. “That would have been disturbing to witness.”

  “I can’t have him here. What if he did that to one of my children? While they were sleeping? He has to go. Now. Tonight. And you said to give you a call if I needed you. Well, I do.”

  Jude checked the time. Four-fifteen a.m. “I’ll be there in thirty minutes.”

  She got dressed and bundled up. Heavy wool socks, a hooded sweatshirt under her down jacket. As she headed for the underground garage, she wondered how low the temperature had dipped and how unresponsive her heater would be. At least her car wasn’t sitting outside in below-zero weather. When she got in, the windshield was clear. But a few minutes after pulling from the garage, the glass started to frost over again on the inside. As she drove, she swiped at the buildup with her glove
s and tried to redirect her breath. Not that easy.

  At the house, Lori was waiting for her.

  Porch light on, the door opening before Jude knocked, the foster mom standing with her hands on the boy’s shoulders. He was ready to go, his coat zipped, mittens and knit cap on. The whole family was up, clustered behind Lori like they’d been arranged for a portrait, the kids sleepy and confused, the dad looking sheepish and awkward in his pajamas.

  Jude crouched to pick up the boy, lifting him into her arms. He was tired, his body weighted and heavy rather than wiry. Funny how limp bodies always seemed to weigh more. But he was alert enough to pat her cheek with a mitten. Lori’s eyes welled up.

  Sorry, she mouthed, handing Jude his backpack of belongings, the two stuffed animals, perpetrator and victim, sticking out of the top.

  “Not a problem,” Jude said. “Better that you listened to your gut. Better that you called.”

  “I don’t know.” Lori was having second thoughts. Jude could see it. Before she could voice a change of mind, Jude turned and carried the boy down the front steps, pausing long enough to say good-bye. Then he was in her vehicle. She didn’t have a car seat. At what age did kids stop using car seats? She had no idea.

  She tucked him in on the passenger side and fastened the safety belt. “I know it’s cold in here.”

  He didn’t seem to mind and was asleep before she pulled from the curb. Twenty minutes later, they were in the parking garage of her apartment building, where the canned air was warmer than the air in her car.

  She packed him up.

  With the boy balanced on her arm, his head against her shoulder, she climbed the metal stairs from the parking area to the first floor. Jude winced as the thick metal fire door slammed behind them. Elliot must have heard the noise. As she passed his apartment, he peeked his head out.

  “Sorry about the door,” she whispered.

  “Oh wow.” His eyes widened when he saw the bundle in her arms. “What’s going on?”