The Body Keeper

by Anne Frasier

  It was dark out, but it didn’t feel as cold as it had a couple of hours ago. Glancing up at the light near the barn, she spotted a few snowflakes. Getting back to work, she wrapped ratchet straps around the detective’s ankles and tied an end to the snowmobile. Thankfully, the machine started right away. Like last time, Nan drove slowly along the edge of a cornfield, resisting the urge to give the machine more gas, the twin headlights so close they seemed like one beam cutting through the dark.

  At the unloading point, Nan loosened the straps, dragged the body to the silage pit, and rolled it over the side. Easy. It hit bottom with a soft but satisfying thud. Nan limped to the snowmobile, settled herself on the wide seat, and rode back across the field. It was snowing seriously now, and, as often happened when snow fell, the temperature had risen. It felt almost balmy after the bitter cold.

  Snow was good. It would hide many things.

  Back home, she began tossing clothes in a suitcase, pausing long enough to make a call to Gail Ford.

  Not even a hello. “You’re never supposed to call me,” Gail said.

  “Nice to hear your voice too.” Nan filled her in on her shitty luck. “Just wanted to tell you I’m getting the hell out of here as soon as the snow lets up.” Nan zipped her suitcase and dragged it off the bed. “I’d advise you to do the same.”

  “I’m not scared of the cops.”

  “Me either. I’m scared of somebody else.” What the hell was she going to do with the boy?

  Leave him. Just leave him.

  “You’re overreacting,” Gail said. “Besides, he’s not even around here.”

  “You sure about that? He was in my hospital room last week. Almost killed me. He’s going to be after both of us. If you don’t plan to mobilize, you’d better hope the cops get to you first.”

  “He’s been calling, asking questions about the bodies in the lake. And you,” Gail admitted, her voice shaking. “He said he was in California.”

  Good chance he was lying.

  In the kitchen, Nan turned on all four stove burners, then blew out the flames. The gas made a hissing sound. “You’d better run.”

  Five minutes later, as snow fell thick as a curtain, Nan tossed her suitcase into the detective’s car and slid into the driver’s seat. A turn of the key was met by a series of clicks. Another twist, and the engine caught and died. Jesus. Not again.

  Why in the hell didn’t a cop have a decent vehicle? And one that didn’t smell like mothballs? Another attempt, and the engine rumbled to life. She wasn’t taking any chances, and she sure as hell wasn’t going to drive off in a junker. Before it could die again, she drove it into the barn. She’d take the social worker’s car. It was almost new.

  Then she remembered the keys were in the house.

  CHAPTER 50

  The MRI machine went silent, and a disembodied voice told Uriah they were done. A whir, followed by a series of jerks and he was staring up at the ceiling, pulling the foam earplugs from his ears.

  “Drink plenty of fluids to flush out the toxic dye,” the technician said as she removed the needle from the back of his hand. He was told to go home. Take it easy.

  Once he was dressed, he called Jude to give her a medical update. His attempt went straight to voicemail. He tucked the phone away and left the clinic, pointing his key fob at his car, unlocking the door. Nausea was still a problem, and the MRI machine and contrast agent seemed to aggravate it. But he’d taken the anti-nausea meds, so hopefully he could circumvent any severe side effects. He had a headache, but it was different from the headaches caused by the tumor.

  He’d spent the afternoon trying to keep up with work through emails and by logging into their private network. He’d done a lot of behind-the-scenes research on everybody in the orbit of recent events. Over the past several hours, he’d been especially focused on Gail Ford. Right now, Molly, his information expert at the police department, was doing some deep digging for him. He planned to go home and sleep, hoping he wouldn’t feel too bad in the morning and could hit the ground if not running at least strolling. When he got back to his apartment, he tried Jude again. Same result. So he called Elliot, who answered on the second ring. Uriah hadn’t talked to him since the revelation of his shocking identity. This wasn’t the time to bring it up.

  “Have you seen Jude? I can’t reach her by phone.”

  “Said she was going to the Perkins farm to check on the little dude. I offered to go with her, but she seemed to want to go by herself. That was hours ago. She should be home by now. I’ll run upstairs and see if I can rouse her.” Uriah heard feet on the stairs and a loud knock, followed by Elliot’s report of no answer.

  Uriah checked with a few people in the police department. No one had seen or heard from her in several hours, and she hadn’t logged into their VPN recently. He got a text from Molly.

  Check your email.

  He pulled up Molly’s correspondence. A JPEG. He opened it. A blurry photo of two women standing on a street corner next to a telephone pole, one woman light-haired, the other dark. Judging by their clothing and nearby cars, he guessed the photo to be about twenty years old. He checked the email again. No explanation, but Molly liked putting a personal flourish on her discoveries. He called.

  “I give up. Who are they?”

  “You can’t tell?”

  He looked again. “No.”

  “This is going to blow your mind.”

  “I’m sitting down.”

  “Gail Ford and Nanette Perkins.”

  He let that sink in. “So they knew each other.”

  “Yep. Perkins helped Ford put up missing-person flyers after Ford’s son went missing.”

  “You’re invaluable, Molly.”

  “Just a geek who somehow managed to find a job I love. Oh, and Detective? I’m sorry to hear about your illness.”

  “I’m not dead yet.” He hung up and called the number they had on file for Nanette Perkins. No answer.

  Then he called the tail he’d put on Ford. “How’s everything going?”

  “She’s been in and out. Trip to the grocery store, back home. Nothing that isn’t boring as hell.”

  “Are you sure it was her? The person who returned?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “Was she ever out of your sight?”

  “At the grocery store part of the time.”

  “Go knock on the door.”

  “But I’m supposed to be undercover.”

  “Just do it. Don’t hang up. Put your phone in your pocket.”

  Uriah heard a door slam, then footsteps crunching across frozen snow before hitting bare sidewalk. A knock, a span of a few seconds, then the sound of a door opening.

  “Is Gail Ford here?”

  A female replied. She sounded fairly young, with a sweet voice. “No, I’m watching her house for her.”

  “Do you know where she went?”

  Long pause. “Hopefully where you can’t find her. You newspeople are terrible. Can’t you leave a grieving mother alone?”

  “I’m not the news—”

  The door slammed.

  Ford had found some sympathetic person to switch places with her in the grocery store. Uriah called Headquarters and ordered a BOLO. Then he disconnected, grabbed a caffeine drink from the refrigerator, and headed to the elevator and parking garage. He needed to find Jude.

  CHAPTER 51

  Jude was dreaming about being cold. She really should get her car’s heater looked at. That thought morphed into something else, and she was suddenly sitting in a car-repair waiting room. But she was still cold. Even stranger, it was dark.

  Maybe she could just fly out of the repair shop, float away and find a warm room, drift skyward through the roof and past the streetlight and electrical lines, all the way to the stars. But something was nagging at her. She heard breathing very near and felt something moist against her nose and mouth. With a sucking gasp, she was out of the dream. The breathing was her own.

  Between the
cold and numbness and a body that felt raw and on fire at the same time, it was hard to pinpoint the source of another agony that went beyond physical. And then she remembered.

  The house. The boy. Nanette Perkins.

  Jude’s eyes were open, but she couldn’t see anything. She tried to lift her hand to feel her face and realized her arms were squeezed against her sides, so tightly she couldn’t move them. She panicked and began to thrash around, her breathing coming faster, the damp warmth she’d felt in the half dream more apparent now. It took a moment longer to understand that she was bound and wrapped in plastic—she could hear it crackling.

  And she was outside.

  Panic bloomed. She couldn’t keep it at bay. The plastic slammed against her nose and mouth with each breath, cutting off what little air she had. She was a crime scene. She was the body wrapped in plastic. She was the sorrow.

  Heart thundering, she struggled to get her physical responses under control. She could do this. She knew how to do this. How to relax, how to slow her pulse and remove the terror from her mind.

  Lying on her back, she quieted herself, relaxing each muscle, slowly, from head to toe. She was getting air, which meant she wasn’t wrapped that well. Perkins, thinking she was dead, or maybe thinking she wasn’t dead but would die of exposure soon, had rushed to dispose of her. Either way, she figured Jude was gone.

  If you can’t do something right, don’t do it at all.

  Calmed, her panic almost under control for the time being, Jude wriggled her arms, trying to loosen her bindings. It didn’t take long to create enough of a gap to work one hand up her body in an attempt to reach her face. The tightness of the binding around her elbow stopped her. She ducked her head and maneuvered her fingers enough to grasp the plastic and pull it down, away from her nose and mouth—and felt a blast of cold air.

  She gulped and blinked as snow fell against her face. She marveled at the magical beauty of the night, and she might have let out a sob of admiration. If this was where and how she died, it would be okay. Lying outside, snow falling, the sound of the flakes pattering against the plastic that still encased her. She sighed, lost in the wonder of it all, and let her eyes drift closed.

  How nice to let go. Just give herself permission to say good-bye. To the pain. Not the physical pain, which was lessening, but the pain of living.

  Life hurt. Living hurt. Memories hurt.

  She’d tried; she’d really tried. Tried to go back to the world. It wasn’t working, not when her choices were pain or nothing. She’d chosen nothing. But here now, lying by herself in the middle of nowhere, she acknowledged what she’d known all along. Nothing hurt too.

  CHAPTER 52

  It was snowing hard by the time Uriah left the city to head south on Interstate 35. Traffic was sparse, and what cars were on the road were moving slowly. An occasional semi passed him, stirring up a tornado of white, blasting the road clear behind it for a moment before vanishing into the darkness beyond Uriah’s headlights.

  Forty minutes into his drive, the GPS on his phone told him to turn left. He couldn’t see a road, so he took it slow, squinting through the windshield while his wiper blades smacked loudly with every downward sweep. A mile later, he dropped to a crawl and spotted a rusty, slanted mailbox and a wooden fence that had seen better days.

  The two-story farmhouse was dark, the only light in the entire area coming from a single bulb high on a nearby barn. No sign of Jude’s car. No tracks, but the snow was getting deep.

  He tugged on gloves and a knit cap and got out of the car. Wind bit his exposed skin, and the snow clung to his boots and jeans. He knocked on the door and wasn’t surprised when no one answered. He briefly thought about entering, knew better, tested the knob anyway. The door was locked. He circled the house but saw no signs of life. Back in his car, he tried Jude’s phone again. Got her voicemail. Then he called Elliot.

  “Still not home,” Elliot said.

  Uriah told him where he was.

  “You better get back. I just heard they’re closing I-35 because of drifting snow.”

  Uriah started his car. “Leaving now.”

  CHAPTER 53

  Jude heard coyotes howling but couldn’t tell if they were near or far. The sound echoed and didn’t seem of this world. Trying to lock in a location was impossible. The cries seemed to come from everywhere. And there was something else, something close, a constant rustling. That sound had been enough to rouse her.

  With stiff fingers, she brushed snow from her face and eyes and thought about the boy in the cage. He was her only regret in this scenario. Yes, there was Octavia and also Uriah, maybe even Elliot. But they’d be fine without her. They’d forget her existence soon; Elliot would take in Roof Cat, but the boy still needed someone to let him out, to rescue him from Perkins and that life. She had to hope it wasn’t too late for him. With the right guidance, he might be only slightly damaged. Or he might never recover. But she’d sensed a sweetness in him. As long as he had that . . . And right now, here, lying cold on the ground, she might be the only person who could help him.

  Body numb, unable to feel much of anything anymore, she forced herself to squirm within the plastic wrap, tugging at the heavy film, finally pulling it over one shoulder, freeing one arm.

  The frozen surface beneath her was sloped, and the movement pitched her forward until she was lying facedown. She placed a hand on the ground, in the deep snow. And felt something unexpected.

  Blindly, she felt the form beside her. Human. A thigh. A forearm. A face, half gone, probably eaten by the coyotes. She jerked away and rolled to her back.

  Teeth chattering, trying to forget about the body, trying to focus on one task, she resumed her squirming, like a creature emerging from a cocoon. Surely not a butterfly, but rather some alien birth, strange and bloody.

  She heard a rip. Her confinement loosened and she sat up, groped in the darkness. As she suspected, duct tape had been used to secure her. She tore the tape from her ankles, freeing her legs. Remembering her phone, she dug in her coat pocket. Empty.

  She rolled to her knees and slowly pushed herself upright enough to stumble forward, hands extended in front of her, until she touched a concrete wall. She followed it, the ground rising with each step until she was out of the pit.

  The rustling was louder now, and she realized she was standing in a field of corn that hadn’t been picked. She felt the wind, and, beyond the blowing snow, saw a faint light in the distance. She knew nothing of farming, but suspected she’d just escaped something with an agricultural purpose. She wondered what the temperature was, wondered about frostbite. But she was feeling warmer now—probably a bad sign—and her teeth were no longer chattering.

  She walked toward the light even though she knew it could be the light of the enemy. But it might also be the light that would lead her to the boy.

  She found a trough between the corn rows and followed it, not moving fast enough for her satisfaction, the falling snow a distraction, the stalks snagging the plastic still clinging to her for some indiscernible reason. Her body felt heavy, each step clumsier, the light not appearing to grow any closer.

  The wind howled, and the snow changed in tempo and sound and weight. It pelted her peculiar cape, and the pieces striking her face felt like shards of glass. She forgot what she was doing, where she was going, why she was going, and dropped to her knees. Ice was falling from the sky, yet the snow beneath her was deep and soft. Like a bed.

  CHAPTER 54

  Uriah had told Elliot he was leaving, but he’d started feeling nauseous and had decided to drink some water and close his eyes for a little while. In the short time he’d been parked at the farmhouse, the snow depth had increased. Now it was turning to freezing rain, the sound loud against his car even though the wipers were on high, competing for his attention.

  Squinting through the windshield, he drove toward the barn and an open area where he planned to swing the car around. Front-wheel drive, fairly new tires, but this w
as getting into chain territory, although now that the snow had transitioned to freezing rain, visibility was a little better. His headlights weren’t reflecting back at him any longer.

  As he completed the three-point turn, something moved across his headlights, or rather his headlights moved across an object in the field beyond the farmhouse. He paused to stare as far as the headlights allowed but was unable to lock in on any movement. He hit the high beams, clicking them back and forth in an attempt to re-create the movement.

  Nothing. Probably a visual distortion caused by the headlights and the freezing rain on the windshield. He was poised to drive off when he saw something again out of the corner of his eye. A flash of white.

  He turned his focus back to the landscape. A field of unpicked corn, the yellow stalks bent and broken by wind and snow, some of them folded to the ground, the ears no longer visible. Often an unpicked field was a sign of an owner’s illness or sometimes death. An unpicked field also represented a loss of income and could result in total crop failure. Not something to take lightly. A single year could break an independent farmer. It might be picked in the spring, but the law of diminishing returns came into play and profit would be so low it was often better to plow it under and start over. If there was any money left to buy seed and fuel.

  There.

  A blur of movement.

  Leaving the car running and headlights on, he grabbed a flashlight from the glove box and tucked it in his coat pocket. Out of the car, not taking his eyes from the apparition, he crept toward the house, bringing him closer to his subject and closer to cover. Maybe it was something blowing, possibly a piece of large plastic used to wrap hay bales, caught on a cornstalk. But the longer he watched, the more he was convinced it was an animal or a human. Doing what? He didn’t know.

  And then it vanished.

  Seconds later, it rose from the ground, not tall, not like a person walking upright.

  Someone crawling?

  No longer concerned for his own safety, he pulled out the flashlight and turned it on, pointing it in the direction of the object in the field. Hampered by drifts up to his knees, he lumbered through the snow while continuing to bear down on his target. The freezing rain had stopped and it was snowing again. Big wet flakes that stuck to his lashes, further hindering his vision. He wiped at his face with the sleeve of his coat and continued forward.