Once Buried

by Blake Pierce

  She peered more closely and saw that the flash was caused by a flaw in the glass—a tiny imperfection of some sort.

  She gasped aloud.

  The flaw looked and seemed insignificant, and yet …

  It’s important, she thought.

  And she had seen that little flash of light from a glass globe before.

  Then she remembered exactly where.

  CHAPTER THIRTY TWO

  As Riley peered at the flaw in the glass timer, the memory came back to her clearly.

  She’d seen a tiny flash of light like this from glass globes lined up on a shelf. Of course, she’d thought nothing of it at the time. But those glass globes had been in the workshop of a man who made sand timers. Otis Redlich.

  Bill called out to her from the driver’s seat.

  “Hey, Riley—what are you doing back there?”

  Riley could see Bill through the glass, his face almost comically distorted.

  “Give me just a minute,” she said.

  She brought her face to within inches of the glass. Now she could see what the flaw was.

  It was a tiny bubble, so small that it didn’t make a bulge. But when the sunlight came in at a certain angle, that made it glisten.

  Riley thought hard for a moment.

  She couldn’t remember seeing any such similar flashes among the many timers in Ellery Kuhl’s shop, The Sands of Time.

  Is there a difference? she wondered.

  Of course, she realized, it could be that the light had to hit just right. It could be purely accidental that she’d noticed the bubbles in this glass and at Redlich’s, but not in the earlier ones.

  She walked back around to the front of the car and sat in the seat next to Bill again. She took out her cell phone and punched in the number for Sam Flores at the BAU in Quantico.

  “What’s going on?” Bill asked.

  “I’m not sure yet,” Riley said. “Just bear with me.”

  When Flores answered, Riley put the call on speakerphone so Bill could listen in.

  Riley said, “Flores, I assume that you and your team have gone over every square inch of those two timers that were left at the murder scenes.”

  Flores chuckled.

  “Every square millimeter is more like it.”

  “And you’ve been doing a lot of research into timers in general?” Riley added.

  “Lots,” Flores said. “What do you want to know?”

  Bill was looking at Riley with a very curious expression now.

  Riley asked, “Do either of those timers have flaws in the glass?”

  “Do you mean occasional tiny bubbles or something larger?”

  Riley’s heart quickened with excitement.

  “Bubbles,” she said. “The one I’ve got here has some bubbles.”

  “Sure, the ones here have got bubbles too. I don’t know why that’s especially interesting. Bubbles in that kind of glass aren’t unusual, and they’re not really considered flaws. It’s called an ‘included bubble,’ because it’s one hundred percent below the surface of the glass. It’s also sometimes called a ‘seed.’”

  A handful of words caught Riley’s attention.

  “You said bubbles in that kind of glass,” she said. “What kind of glass do you mean?”

  “Hand-blown glass. Meaning blown by mouth, of course. They’re often seen in antique glass, and they can show up in hand-blown glass that’s made today. Bubbles can appear just occasionally and randomly, like they do in the timers here. But some craftspeople like to create clusters of them for decorative effect. Ours aren’t like that.”

  Riley’s brain clicked away as she put her thoughts together.

  She remembered seeing glassblowers at work, heating glass tubes and blowing hot glass into forms for wine bottles, pitchers, and candleholders. That had been years ago, at Jamestown, where actors portrayed characters in settlers’ costumes. There had been a glasshouse, the kind that settlers had used to create glass in the 1600s. Now some modern artisans learned their trade and worked there.

  So was a killer now creating glass globes in that same way, blowing tubes of glass into just the right size and shape to mark upcoming murders?

  She remembered what Ellery Kuhl had said to them during their visit.

  “I order the glass bulbs I use from China.”

  Riley’s breath quickened as she asked Flores, “What about timers made from manufactured glass? Would they have the same sorts of flaws?”

  “Probably not,” Flores said. “The ones we’ve been looking at are made by individual craftspeople. The others would be mass produced, machine blown, and they’d be more uniform. Not that there’d be any difference in the glass itself. There’s nothing exotic about the material involved, not even in the hand-blown specimens.”

  Riley knew that the information she was getting was important. She wasn’t sure yet just how or why. But there was a difference. The sand timers that Redlich had were not the same as those used by Kuhl.

  Flores asked, “Is there anything else you need me to do?”

  Riley thought for a moment.

  She remembered her discussion with Bill just a little while ago about the killer—how he might be acting out of long-suppressed rage over a long-suppressed trauma.

  Yes, there might be something Flores could do.

  She said, “Flores, I need for you to run a search for me. It’s liable to be difficult, and I’m afraid I can’t be very specific.”

  “Difficult suits me fine,” Flores said. “What do you have in mind?”

  Riley stopped to think for a moment.

  How old is the killer? she asked herself.

  The composite sketch had portrayed him as a younger man. But of course, the composite sketch had turned out to be useless because of the witness’s early onset dementia. Whoever the killer was, this submerged rage had been building up in him for quite a few years now.

  But not for too many years, she thought.

  If he were well into middle age or older, that rage would have boiled over before now.

  Her gut now told her that the killer was somewhere around thirty-five years old.

  She said to Flores, “I want you to search events dating back between twenty-five and thirty years ago. Focus on this Tidewater area. I’m looking for a case of a child between five and ten years old experiencing some terrible trauma. A trauma involving sand. It would have been caused by somebody else—I don’t know whether deliberately or accidentally.”

  Riley briefly worried that Flores would balk at such a vague search.

  Instead he chuckled, sounding quite eager to take up the challenge.

  “I’m on it,” he said.

  Riley added, “Work fast. We’re running way short on time.”

  Riley ended the call.

  Bill had been listening to the call with extreme interest.

  “What do you expect Flores to find?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” Riley said. “Maybe nothing. Or maybe everything.”

  “What about this whole business of hand-blown glass? What are we supposed to make of that?”

  Riley squinted as she thought.

  “I’m not sure,” she said. “But it seems likely that the killer is making the timers himself. If so, he’s making more than just the frames. He’s blowing the glass too. And now we know that Otis Redlich’s timers were made from blown glass.”

  “So?” Bill asked.

  Riley hesitated, then said, “So—we need to go talk to Redlich again.”

  Bill’s mouth dropped open.

  He said, “Do you think Redlich might be our killer after all? Just because he uses hand-blown glass? Isn’t that more than a bit of a stretch?”

  Riley fidgeted nervously. Her instincts were starting to kick in—but she wasn’t yet sure what they were trying to tell her.

  She said, “He could be our killer, but I doubt it. My sense of the killer is that he comes across as pleasant and friendly. I don’t think Redlich could pul
l that off. He’d have to be one hell of an actor. Even so, I’ve got a hunch he can tell us something he didn’t tell us before. Something very important. About the sand timers, and where they came from.”

  Bill shook his head.

  He said, “You know I’ve always trusted your hunches, Riley. But …”

  “But what?”

  “I’m not sure I like this. We’re running way short on time. But you want to drive all the way to Williamsburg to re-interview a guy who’s a proven bullshit artist.”

  Riley gritted her teeth. It was true that Redlich had been uncooperative and downright unpleasant.

  “Oh, he’ll talk all right,” she said. “We won’t give him any choice. Now let’s get going. We don’t have a minute to lose.”

  Bill started the car and began to drive.

  CHAPTER THIRTY THREE

  Felix Harrington stood looking proudly into the large pit he’d dug in his backyard on the sandy river shore.

  I’m anything but predictable, he thought.

  This murder was going to be very different from the others—and more satisfying, he felt quite sure.

  He’d been preparing this pit for weeks now. It was twelve by twelve feet square, its sides braced by wooden supports of his own building. He could bury more than one victim here—just how many he didn’t yet know.

  His newest victim was lying unconscious at his feet at the edge of the pit.

  She’d wandered into his trap randomly, just like the others. He’d pulled into a gas station across the river, and she walked right up to his pickup truck asking for a ride. He knew that his charming smile had drawn her to him—although once she was in the car, she had made sure that he saw that she was carrying a pepper spray canister.

  At a stoplight, he’d knocked her out with a sharp blow from his leather-covered billy club. She’d been unconscious ever since.

  She was a petite young woman, and carrying her all the way out here to the pit had been easy. But he was a little worried that she hadn’t yet regained consciousness. Had the blow been too hard? She simply had to be awake when he carried out his plan. It wouldn’t work any other way.

  He was relieved to hear her whimper.

  “Where am I?”

  She lifted her head and looked all around.

  When she turned her head and saw him, he gave her a sharp kick that sent her backward into the pit. She let out a loud, wordless yelp of protest.

  Felix smiled.

  The excitement was about to begin.

  The pit looked like it was only three feet deep, with a sand bottom.

  But as the young woman scrambled to get to her feet, her trouble began in earnest.

  The solid-looking sand started to give under her feet—sponge-like at first. But then it swallowed up her sneakers and her ankles and her shins …

  “Hey!” she yelled up at Felix.

  His smile widened. The quicksand was working perfectly.

  He’d worked very hard, getting exactly the right balance of sand and clay and water so that it would look solid but trap whatever or whoever fell into it. So far, it had just taken a couple of small animals—a rabbit and a stray cat.

  The quicksand struck Felix as quite beautiful. Left alone, it thickened and looked solid. But once disturbed, it became more like a living thing, grasping and holding whatever had fallen into it.

  As he had with the other victims, he addressed the girl in a friendly manner.

  “Hey, looks like you’re in a bit of trouble.”

  Right now she looked more angry than scared.

  That didn’t bother him. He knew the fear would kick in soon enough.

  “What is this, some kind of joke?” she yelled.

  He shook his head and clucked his tongue as he crouched beside the pit.

  “Wow, that stuff looks sticky. You’re going to have to really twist and pull to get out of it.”

  Of course he knew that struggling was the last thing the girl ought to do. The more frantically she moved, the deeper she sank. But although the quicksand went very deep, he knew that she wasn’t going to vanish underneath it.

  After all, that would spoil everything!

  He knew that quicksand didn’t work like it did in the movies, swallowing people whole. In fact, anyone who really knew what they were doing could get out of it. He’d tried it himself. It required just the right kind of wiggling to create a space between the legs to let water flow in and loosen the sand’s grip.

  But the girl didn’t know that—and he wasn’t going to tell her.

  She would only sink just so deep, because human bodies had less density than quicksand.

  But that would be enough.

  She’d be here all night, helpless and immobilized and terrified, until the time came for him to finish burying her the rest of the way with ordinary sand.

  Meanwhile, he could entertain himself with her terror to his heart’s content.

  She was up to her waist now—probably about as deep as she was going to get. She pulled her hands free of the grasping sand and fumbled desperately around her shirt pocket.

  He held up her cell phone in his hand.

  “Looking for this?” he asked.

  Her eyes widened.

  Of course, he’d snatched it out of her pocket while she’d been unconscious. He’d also turned it off so that nobody could track or call her.

  “Give me that!” she yelled.

  Still smiling, he shoved it into his own pocket.

  The woman seemed to be swept by the full horror of her situation. She began to scream and babble, begging for mercy.

  Her shrill voice was music to his ears, a delight to his soul.

  In fact, it calmed and soothed him—relieved him of the strange, nameless terror that he always carried inside himself.

  Why is that? he wondered.

  He didn’t know, but he was proud of the many years of sheer creativity—even artistry—that he’d put into coping with that terror.

  He closed his eyes and let the screaming take him back through the years.

  He couldn’t remember how it had started—all that pain and terror.

  In fact, he couldn’t remember much about his life before age eight.

  But he did remember how it had begun as a deathly fear of sand, and also of people.

  He’d conquered his fear of sand by learning to control it. And he’d found that the best way to control it was to channel it to a useful purpose—to tell time. So he’d learned to make sand timers.

  As for his fear of people—well, he had as little to do with them as possible. But now the lonely, isolated little house he had inherited from his parents was in danger of being encroached upon by development and construction. New houses were springing up just a mile away, so he knew that his days as a solitary hermit were numbered.

  But he’d learned that he could conquer his fear of people by making them afraid. He struck fear not just in his victims, but in the thousands of other people who had no idea where or how he was going to strike next.

  Yes, he was a true artist, and his house was filled with beautiful pieces of craftsmanship.

  Still, like all creative people, he yearned for some impossible perfection.

  For example, he was sorry that the tides here on this brackish river weren’t extreme enough to drown the girl. In some places near the sea, a person stuck in quicksand could drown at high tide.

  Of course, it was a foolish wish.

  He couldn’t control the tides, after all—couldn’t synchronize them to drown his victims at exactly the right moment.

  He really was exercising the best artistry he possibly could.

  And yes, he was unpredictable.

  He’d meant for the other bodies to be found, and the sand timers with them.

  But nobody would find this girl’s body—or any of the other bodies he wound up burying here.

  Nevertheless, the world would know she was dead.

  As soon as he finished burying this girl,
he’d start another timer running. He’d take it into some small town early in the morning when few people were up and around and leave it in some prominent place—maybe even in front of the courthouse.

  And he’d leave the girl’s cell phone with the timer.

  Everybody would know that she was dead, and that somebody else would die when the new timer ran out.

  Meanwhile, the girl’s screaming had waned to more of a whimper. He opened his eyes and saw that she looked tired. Perhaps her voice had grown tired from screaming.

  He hoped she would rally soon and start screaming again.

  It would be a shame if she stopped.

  She had such a lovely voice.

  CHAPTER THIRTY FOUR

  As Bill parked the SUV in front of Otis Redlich’s two-story brick house in Williamsburg, Riley keenly remembered the spiteful mind games the man had played with them when they’d been here yesterday.

  Redlich had known nothing about the murders except what he’d picked up from the media, but he’d taken delight in wasting their time. He’d even taunted them with the possibility that he himself was the murderer.

  He was, as Bill had said, “a proven bullshit artist.” And he played his games for no apparent purpose at all, just out of a deep-seated anger with life.

  Riley was determined not to let him play her and Bill like that again.

  And she had a trick up her sleeve. She knew how to thwart him.

  All the same, she was apprehensive about paying him another visit. Redlich had had a way of getting under her skin with his wry, bitter eloquence. She had remembered how his words had nagged at her …

  “Time always wins the battle.”

  She told herself sternly …

  Don’t let him get to you.

  Riley and Bill strode toward the house and knocked sharply on the door. Redlich opened the door and greeted them with his reptilian smile.

  “Well, isn’t this a surprise?” he said. “I didn’t expect the two of you back. I’d been afraid that we hadn’t hit it off, and you didn’t exactly like me. Of course, you already know that I do business by appointment only. But in your case, I’ll make an exception. Come on in.”

  He escorted them into the living room filled with museum-quality furniture.