by Dan Padavona
Bell’s elbows rested on her knees, head tilted at the floor.
“We’re like firemen, Gardy. We save lives when the smoke detector goes off and do our best to save the home. But sometimes the fire is out of control before we arrive.”
“There has to be a better way. I didn’t get into this racket to mitigate damage.”
A female orderly in a ponytail interrupted Bell’s reply. It was time to take Gardy’s blood pressure. He’d pumped himself up with frustration and seemed to deflate as the test progressed. Bell was surprised his pressure was normal.
“Where to now?” he asked.
“Megan is taking me to some mall in LA. Supposedly they filmed a scene from Melrose Place there.”
His eyes dropped to his chest.
“Have fun. But hey, don’t hang around California on my account. I know you miss the condo.”
“We’re a team, Gardy. We leave together. Besides, if it was me in that bed, you’d stay.”
He looked at her and nodded.
“Have a good time at the mall. Bring me one of those cinnamon pretzels.”
“All that butter?” She tutted. “You’ll wreck your exemplary blood pressure.”
He grinned, the first real smile she’d seen on him in days.
“Then I’ll take a smoothie instead.”
She rose off the chair, and trepidation touched his eyes.
“Wait a minute. What about Logan Wolf?”
“Megan’s a cop, Gardy. Relax. Nobody’s gonna mess with us. Anyhow, I’m starting to doubt I saw him at all. It’s like you said. He was in my head after the letter, and my mind saw what it wanted me to see.”
Nurse Ratched returned, a one-woman force of nature.
“Don’t tell me there are more shots.”
“Just need to take a little blood.”
The syringe looked like a jousting lance from a Renaissance festival.
“A little blood? That’s ten gallon’s worth.”
“Calm down, Mr. Gardy. This will only take a minute.”
Bell smirked and moved for the door.
“That’s my cue to leave. He’s in your hands, Nurse.”
Ratched grinned.
“I’ll return him to you in one piece.”
CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT
A few hundred people crowded the mall food court where Bell and Megan picked at mediocre sushi. A Gap shopping bag was tucked beneath Megan’s chair.
Megan brought a hand to her mouth.
“I can’t eat another bite.”
“Thank you. I thought it was just me.”
“No, this is irrefutably terrible.”
They shared a laugh, and Bell tossed the remains in the garbage. Megan grabbed her bag, and they rode the escalator down to the main floor.
A mix of families and teenagers swarmed the corridor, the storefronts filled with bright colors and clothes which made Bell feel self-conscious. When had this happened? Yesterday she'd been a teenager a step ahead of the latest fashion trends, and suddenly she was thirty-two and a fish out of water. Most of the store names were alien to her, and the clothing these kids wore confused her and made her feel old.
Bell’s phone buzzed as a text came in. She gave it a glance and felt a hitch when she saw the message was from her mother. Stuffing the phone into her pocket, Bell swallowed the indignation. It settled in her stomach as sorrow.
Megan looked at her with inquisitive concern.
“Everything okay?”
“It's my mother.”
Before she knew what she was doing, Bell opened up to Megan about her parents, the fight, and the cold, dead months of silence that withered between them.
“So write her back. You can't fight the ones you love for the rest of your life.”
Bell sighed and sat down on a bench. Megan slid beside her.
“I don't know how to start.”
“Look, kids put their parents on pedestals and turn them into Gods. We expect them to be infallible, but they're exactly the same as us. Imperfect, insecure, trying to figure things out on the fly. And no matter how much bullshit we face every day, they've dealt with the same issues for a few decades longer. It doesn't mean they're always right, but they do their best.”
Bell propped her chin on her palm and watched the shoppers pass in an endless stream, and she wondered if she'd made a terrible mistake. This wasn't about modern women thriving in fields traditionally dominated by men. No, this was about love and worry. To her parents, Bell would always be their little girl.
“Okay, you convinced me. I'll write them tonight.”
“Why wait? I'm not going anywhere.”
“No, it's better this way. Gives me a chance to get the words right.”
They gathered their belongings when Megan giggled.
“I think you found yourself a new boyfriend.”
“What?”
“Mr. Dark and Mysterious over there. He's checking you out.”
Ice filled Bell’s legs. She stood and looked over the crowd.
“What man?”
Megan scrunched her brow.
“That's funny. He was right there a second ago.”
Bell scanned the corridor, the sea of shoppers.
When she stood on the bench, Megan’s face creased in worry.
“What's wrong, Bell?”
Bell saw the back of his jet black hair a moment before he turned into a store and vanished. Knew the black would match the deep set of his eyes.
She ran to the storefront, Megan trailing behind and firing questions. Bell was too late.
Logan Wolf was gone.
THE BONE WHISPERER
CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE
The old farmhouse juts from the earth on a lonely road outside of Pronti, Kansas. The two-story is more gray than white, its exterior paint chipped and stained by time and the unrelenting wind that scours the prairie. The front steps squeal like a gutted animal, and if you stand too long on the second board, the wood will snap and swallow your ankle.
Above the stairs is a long, warped porch. Most of the balusters are crooked or missing. The filthy windows which front the home are longer than a man is tall and consume all but the strongest midday sun rays. But the sun rarely shines upon this house. The wind blows and blows, and when it does, the chill runs amok through the home’s corridors, halls that would scream if they could speak.
The Skinner calls the farmhouse his home. People don’t come out this far. Only the mailman, and the box is set along a dirt road which floods when the monstrous spring storms roll across the plains.
The Skinner’s real name is Lucas Hunt. He has lived here since the day he was born, two months after his father guzzled a bottle of Jack Daniels and chased it with both barrels of a shotgun. The Skinner’s mother was an alcoholic who took to burning young Lucas with a lit cigarette when the boy needed a whooping. She died and left him the farmhouse when Lucas was nineteen. Sixteen years later, he is still here and will never leave.
He walks the long hall from the kitchen to the living room. Slumps into the chair and studies the plaster crumbling off the cracked ceiling. A brown water stain runs across the ceiling toward the corner where it blackens and slumps like a distended beast.
He rubs his knees. The Skinner does this when he is nervous, and he is always anxious before he stalks.
His first victim was a prostitute in Kansas City, Kansas. She was young and brunette, probably not of legal age, he thought at the time. He rarely craved sex and never considered propositioning a hooker, yet he was drawn to the black heels and shapely legs, the pale, alabaster flesh. And the frightened eyes. The eyes of a neophyte in a cold and dangerous world. She was new to this, probably on the run. Lucas promised he’d pay for a hotel room. Instead, he drove the girl to an empty lot behind an abandoned building and choked her until her fish eyes bulged from their sockets.
When he finished, Hunt pulled the girl from the vehicle and beat her with his fists. Bloodied and bruised the young prostitute. He
threw her in the trunk and drove around the city until nightfall, when he dumped her body in an alley a block from where he’d picked up the girl. Her street corner. The police arrested the girl’s pimp, who eventually walked after the police failed to prove he was the murderer.
Hunt was twenty-three then. He immediately got a taste for killing.
He killed again two years later. Another prostitute, this time in Oklahoma City.
The police believe he murdered eight women over the last five years. They are mistaken. The real number is twenty-three, most of which the authorities never uncovered.
Some he abducted from small towns in Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Texas. He brought them to the farmhouse. Played with them until he grew bored. Afterward, he dumped the bodies on open farmland far from home, places where the bodies might go undetected for weeks. Enough time for the insects and animals to pick the flesh clean.
He likes to keep his trophies near. A few bones are tossed into the hay inside the dilapidated barn. Many more are buried a few feet into the earth where the soil is as soft as a mother’s belly. It excites him to keep the remains close.
The newspapers started calling him The Skinner because of his proclivity to butcher his victims. When he is bored, he reads the so-called experts’ psychological profiles. To the police, Hunt is an enigma. They search for a discernible pattern, attempt to link the victims and find the overlap in the Venn diagram. There is none. He is undetectable. No man can find him.
Though Hunt never graduated high school, he is of above-average intelligence. Hunt regularly studies serial killers and how they were eventually caught. He kills no one he knows, and to this point, he hasn’t murdered a woman from Pronti.
Don’t shit where you sleep.
That is about to change.
He knew Marianne Garza was the one the first time he saw her outside Delbert’s bar on the east end of town. Caught her scent the way a lion does injured prey upwind. Hunt can’t say why she draws him, only that her death at his hands is as inevitable as the setting sun and the icy breath of winter.
The time has come. He walks to the stairway. If hell exists, it surely resides up this flight of stairs. The steps creak as he climbs, one hand running along the dusty, splintered banister. Slashes of window light are harsh across the hallway floor. Inside the master bedroom, the ceiling joists are exposed. Pink insulation bleeds through the joists and makes his throat itch. He has taken to sleeping in his mother’s room while he procrastinates the repair.
He grabs his gloves and keys from the nightstand and peers through the window at the old barn. Toward the graveyard of hidden bones. Soon there will be more.
CHAPTER SEVENTY
Special Agent Scarlett Bell was too frightened to stay angry with her partner, Neil Gardy. She felt certain she was lost as darkness settled over the lonely country road, then the sign sprang out of the deadwood and weeds.
Welcome to Pronti, Kansas
Population 726
Why Bell was there was a larger mystery. Gardy’s message was vague and only requested she assist him on a case. Funny that no case officially existed. She wondered if Deputy Director Weber knew either of them was here, wherever here was.
The weather was cold for late-October, a different world from the warmth she left behind in Virginia. The clouds hung low and ominous from the airport to the Kansas border, and now the night thickened as a gusting wind rocked the rental car across the road. Something pinged across the windshield as though the heavens hurled pebbles at the vehicle. Sleet.
One traffic light swung at the edge of town. Bell waited at the red light, no sign of another car in either direction. Pronti reminded her of old spaghetti westerns in which the bad guy rode into town on a black horse. A row of brick-faced stores stood off to her right—a five and dime store and a small grocery market. To the left was a barbershop with the iconic red-and-blue striped pole, and next stood a bar called Delbert’s.
All of this consumed two short blocks, and then she was out of town and back in God’s country.
It wasn’t like Gardy to be clandestine and keep her out of the loop. He’d acted strangely since he learned Logan Wolf, the feared at-large serial killer and former Behavior Analysis Unit agent, had obtained Bell’s address and sent her a letter. Then a bullet grazed Gardy’s shoulder while they took down a shooter outside of Los Angeles, and while he recovered in the hospital, Wolf followed Bell into a shopping mall. Did the current case have something to do with Logan Wolf? Her instinct said this was something huge.
Gardy wasn’t supposed to put himself in harm’s way while his shoulder healed. All the more reason to keep Weber out of the loop, especially if Logan Wolf was involved. But why would Wolf be in the middle of Kansas?
She bit her tongue. Not knowing made her edgy, half-crazy. Gardy should have told her why she needed to come to Pronti.
The storm intensified as she searched for the motel. Rain and sleet fell in sheets and caused a headache-inducing racket inside the car.
She felt the back end fishtail as the road turned slick. Heart pumping, she turned into the skid and straightened the car. She’d grown up in Virginia, where the rare winter storm meant you holed up indoors until the snow and ice melted a day later. The one time she drove on snow-covered roads, she was visiting family in New York. Bell hit a patch of ice and put the car into a ditch. That split-second of losing control, feeling the car skid toward across the road with no way to stop, never left her. Even driving in the rain made Bell anxious the tires might hydroplane or a tractor-trailer would jackknife in front of her.
She needed to get off this road.
A sheet of paper with the motel’s name and address lay on the seat. She reached for the paper, and it fell on the floor.
Bell cursed and brought the car onto the soft shoulder. Rocks peppered the undercarriage as she came to a stop. The storm grew loud while the engine idled. Black night engulfed the plains.
She caught hold of the paper between the tips of her fingers, and as she lifted it, something brushed the window and made her jump. Just tall grass whipped by the wind. The dark and vast nothingness unsettled her, made the world seem too large, too barren. She thought this was a good place to disappear. One could meet her fate on these roads and simply vanish.
The name of the motel was the Pronti Inn, located just outside of town on County Route 36. Which meant she should have passed the inn a mile back. Was this the correct road?
Bell checked her phone but couldn’t raise a signal. Google Maps wouldn’t save her tonight.
She noticed the voicemail from her mother and tapped the phone on her thigh in consideration. Last week, the doctor removed a tumor from her father’s colon, and she’d been on pins-and-needles awaiting the test results. The message had arrived before her plane departed Dulles, and throughout the flight, the fear of not knowing chewed at her gut. She promised herself she’d listen to the message when the plane touched down, but she hadn’t. Instead, she stuffed the phone into her bag as it incessantly flashed notification of the waiting message.
Bell swiped to the message and put her finger over the green play icon. Almost pressed play but couldn’t.
She threw her head against the seat back and drummed her fingers on the steering wheel.
Then she shoved the phone back into her bag and put off the inevitable.
Damn Gardy and his secrets. She wheeled the car around and headed back to town.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-ONE
The sky took on a bruised look at sunset, an angry color that reminded Marianne Garza of tornadoes. It was too cold for severe thunderstorms, she thought as she went about her chores outside. When the night snuffed out the last bit of daylight, a winter wind screamed across the plains and sent the bluestem into a frenzy.
Marianne couldn’t believe how cold it was as she closed the gate on the goat pen and huddled inside her jacket. For goodness’ sake, it wasn’t yet Halloween. If this was a sign of things to come, this winter would cut to the bone.
She wrapped her arms around her chest and ran with her head lowered until she reached the back door. Inside, she needed to tug against the wind to force the door closed. She could still hear the gale whistling around the eaves as though she’d angered the sky.
Marianne sighed at the mess of plates in the sink. It seemed impossible for one person to dirty this many dishes.
She got the water running and wrote a memo to herself while the bubbles mushroomed. Scott, who owned the next farm over, had agreed to take care of the goats while Marianne was in Orlando, but Scott was painting the church in Solom and might forget the goats if she didn’t remind him.
The hot water made her jump when she reached her hands in. As she whittled away at the backlog of dishes, she caught her reflection in the window. Dark hair tied back in a ponytail, reading glasses perched on top of her head, eyes wary at the thought of seeing her daughter and ex-husband again. It had been five months since she’d last seen them, and that had been a disaster, Marianne drunk and belligerent during the weekend they’d spent in Pronti.
Her lip quivered, and sadness welled into her throat.
She inhaled and held her breath. Closed her eyes as the faucet dripped.
There. That was better.
The window rattled and pulled her back to the present, and the memories of five months ago induced the old cravings. She wandered to the cupboard and stared at the half-empty bottle of Jack Daniels. There were two schools of thought regarding alcoholism. The first school, also known as conventional wisdom, stated all alcohol needed to be purged from the home. Remove temptation. That was great if Marianne locked herself away for days on end. But what happened when she stopped at Delbert’s with the after work crew or went to a restaurant? Hell, temptation lived everywhere, and she was smart enough to know you could shun sin and still dance with the devil.