The Keepsake

by Tess Gerritsen

  She did not move, even as he bent down and stroked her shorn scalp.

  “Doesn’t she love you? Doesn’t she want to save you? Why doesn’t she come?”

  Don’t say a word. Don’t move a muscle. Make him lean closer.

  “All these years she’s managed to hide from me. Now if she doesn’t come out, then she’s a coward. Only a coward would let her daughter die.”

  She felt the mattress sag as he knelt beside her.

  “Where is she?” he asked. “Where is Medea?”

  Her silence frustrated him. He grasped her wrist and said, “Maybe the hair wasn’t enough. Maybe it’s time to send them another souvenir. Do you think a finger would do?”

  No. God, no. Panic was screaming at her to wrench her hand away, to kick and shriek, anything to escape the ordeal to come. But she remained frozen, still playing the victim paralyzed by despair. He shone the flashlight directly in her face and, blinded by the light, she could not read his expression, could not see anything in the black hollows of his eyes. He was so focused on provoking a response from her that he did not notice what she held in her free hand. He did not notice her muscles snap as tense as a bowstring.

  “Maybe if I start cutting,” he said, “you’ll start talking.” He pulled out a knife.

  She thrust her hand upward and blindly drove the spike of the high-heeled shoe into his face. She heard the heel thud into flesh and he fell backward, shrieking.

  She snatched up the flashlight and slammed it against the floor, smashing the bulb. The room went black. Darkness is my friend. She rolled away and scrambled to her feet. She could hear him a few feet away, groveling on the floor, but she could not see him, and he could not see her. They were equally blind.

  Only I know how to find the door in the dark.

  All the rehearsals, all the preparation, had seared the next moves into her brain. From the edge of the mattress, it was three paces to the wall. Follow the wall seven more steps and she’d reach the door. Though the cast on her leg slowed her down, she wasted no time navigating through the darkness. She paced out seven steps. Eight steps. Nine…

  Where is the damn door?

  She could hear him breathing hard, grunting in frustration as he struggled to get his bearings, to locate her in that pitch-black room.

  Don’t make a sound. Don’t let him know where you are.

  She backed up slowly, scarcely daring to breathe, each step placed with delicate care so she would not give away her position. Her hand slid across smooth concrete, then her fingers brushed across wood.

  The door.

  She turned the knob and pushed. The sudden squeal of hinges seemed deafening.

  Move!

  Already she heard him lunging toward her, noisy as a bull. She stumbled through and swung the door shut. Just as he slammed against it, she slid the bolt home.

  “You can’t escape, Josephine!” he yelled.

  She laughed and it sounded like a stranger’s, a wild and reckless bark of triumph. “Well I just did, asshole!” she shouted back.

  “You’ll be sorry! We were going to let you live, but not now! Not now!”

  He began screaming, battering the door in impotent fury as she slowly felt her way up a dark stairway. Her cast set off thuds on the wooden steps. She did not know where the stairs led, and it was almost as dark in here as it had been in her concrete bunker. But with each step she climbed, the stairway seemed to brighten. With each step, she repeated the mantra: I am my mother’s daughter. I am my mother’s daughter.

  Halfway up the stairs, she saw cracks of light shining around a closed door at the top of the steps. Only as she neared that door did she suddenly focus on what he’d said only a moment before.

  We were going to let you live.

  We.

  The door ahead suddenly swung open and the glare of light was painful. She blinked as her eyes adjusted, as she tried to focus on the figure that loomed in the bright rectangle of the doorway.

  A figure that she recognized.

  THIRTY-TWO

  Twenty years of neglect and hard winters and frost heaves had reduced the Hilzbrich Institute’s private road to broken blacktop rippling with invading tree roots. Jane paused at the PROPERTY FOR SALE sign, her Subaru idling as she debated whether to drive down that ruined road. No chain blocked the entrance; anyone could enter the property.

  Anyone could be waiting there.

  She pulled out her cell phone and saw that she still had reception. She considered calling for a little local backup, then decided it would be a humiliatingly bad idea. She didn’t want the town cops laughing about the big-city detective who needed an escort just to deal with the scary Maine woods. Yeah, Detective, those skunks and porcupines can be deadly.

  She started down the road.

  Her Subaru slowly bumped along the fractured pavement, and encroaching shrubs clawed at her doors. Rolling down her window, she smelled the scent of decomposing leaves and damp earth. The road grew even rougher, and as she steered around potholes, she worried about broken axles and being stranded alone in the woods. That thought made her more uneasy than the far more dangerous prospect of walking down the street of any major city. The city she understood, and she could deal with its dangers.

  The woods were alien territory.

  At last the trees gave way to a clearing, and she pulled to a stop in an overgrown parking area. Jane stepped out of her car and stared at the abandoned Hilzbrich Institute, which loomed ahead. It looked exactly like the institutional facility it once was, made of stern concrete softened only by landscape shrubbery now surrendering to weedy invaders. She imagined the effect this fortress-like building would have on any family arriving here with a troublesome son. This looked like just the place where a boy would get straightened out once and for all, where there’d be no kid gloves, no half measures. This building promised tough love and firm limits. Desperate parents looking up at that unyielding façade would have seen hope.

  But now the building revealed just how hollow those hopes had been. Boards covered most of the windows. Piles of dead leaves had drifted up against the front entrance, and brown stains streaked the walls where rusty water had dripped from clogged roof gutters. It was no wonder that Dr. Hilzbrich had been unable to sell this property: The building was a monstrosity.

  Standing in the parking lot, she listened to the wind in the trees, the hum of insects. She heard nothing out of the ordinary, just the sounds of a summer afternoon in the woods. She took out the keys that Dr. Hilzbrich had lent her and walked to the front entrance. But when she saw the door, she abruptly halted.

  The lock was broken.

  She reached for her weapon and gave the door a gentle nudge with her foot. It swung open, admitting a wedge of light into the darkness beyond. Aiming the beam of her pocket Maglite into the room, she saw empty beer cans and cigarette butts littering the floor. Flies buzzed in the darkness. Her pulse kicked into a fast gallop and her hands were suddenly chilled. She smelled the ripe stench of something dead, something already decaying.

  Let it not be Josephine.

  She stepped into the building and her shoes crunched across broken glass. Slowly she swept her flashlight around the room and glimpsed graffiti scrawled on the walls. GREG AND ME 4EVAH! KARI SUCKS COCK! It was just typical high school crap, and she moved past it, turning her flashlight toward the far corner. There, her beam froze.

  Something dark lay huddled on the floor.

  As she crossed toward it, the stench of decaying flesh became overpowering. Staring down at the dead raccoon, she saw maggots wriggling, and she thought of rabies. Wondered if bats lurked in the building.

  Gagging on the smell, she fled back outside to the parking lot and desperately washed out her lungs with deep breaths of air. Only then, as she stood facing the trees, did she notice the tire tracks. They led from the paved parking lot into the woods, where twin ruts cut across the soft forest floor. Crushed twigs and broken branches told her the damage to the vege
tation was recent.

  Following the ruts, she walked a short distance into the woods, where the tracks stopped at the beginning of a hiking path that was too narrow for any car. The trailhead sign was still posted, nailed to a tree.

  THE CIRCLE TRAIL

  It was one of the institute’s old hiking paths. Bradley loved the outdoors, Dr. Hilzbrich had told her. Years ago, the boy had probably walked this trail. The prospect of walking into those woods made her pulse quicken. She glanced down at the tire tracks. Whoever had been here was now gone, but he could return at any time. She could feel the weight of the gun on her hip, but she patted the holster anyway, a reflexive check to reassure herself that her weapon was there.

  She started down the path, which was so overgrown in spots that occasionally she found she’d veered off and had to backtrack to find the trail again. The canopy of trees thickened, cutting off the sunlight. She glanced at her cell phone and was dismayed to find that she’d lost the signal. Glancing back, she found that the trees had closed in behind her. But ahead, the woods seemed to open up, and she saw sunlight streaming in.

  She started toward the clearing, past trees that were dying or already dead, their trunks reduced to hollow stumps. Suddenly the ground gave way and she sank ankle-deep into muck. Pulling her foot out, she almost lost her shoe. In disgust she looked down at her muddied pant cuffs and thought: I hate the woods. I hate the outdoors. I’m a cop, not a forest ranger.

  Then she spotted the shoe print: a man’s, size nine or ten.

  Every rustle, every whine of a bug, seemed magnified. She saw other prints leading away from the trail, and she followed them, past a clump of cattails. No longer did it matter that her shoes were soaked, her pant legs soiled with mud. All she focused on were those footprints, leading her deeper into the bog. By now she’d completely lost track of where she’d left the main trail. Overhead, the sun told her it was now well past noon, and the woods had gone strangely silent. No birdsong, no wind, only the buzz of mosquitoes around her face.

  The footprints turned and veered up the bank, toward dry land.

  She paused, bewildered by the change in direction, until she noticed the tree. Encircling its trunk was a loop of nylon rope. The other end of the rope trailed into the bog and vanished beneath the surface of the tea-colored water.

  She tested the rope and felt resistance as she tugged. Slowly the length began to emerge from the muck. She was pulling hard now, leaning back with all her weight as more and more rope emerged, tangled with vegetation. Abruptly something broke the surface, something that made her scream and stumble backward in shock. She caught a glimpse of a hollow-eyed face peering at her like a grotesque water nymph.

  Then it slowly sank back into the bog.

  THIRTY-THREE

  It was dusk by the time the Maine State Police divers finished their search of the bog. The water had been only chest-deep; standing on the dry bank, Jane had watched the divers’ heads frequently popping up as they surfaced to get their bearings or to bring up some new object for closer inspection. The water was too murky for a visual search, so they had been forced to rake through the slime and decaying vegetation with their hands, a repulsive task that Jane was grateful she did not have to perform.

  Especially when she saw what they finally dredged up.

  The woman’s body now lay exposed on a plastic tarp, her moss-flecked hair dripping black water. So stained was her skin with tannins, it was impossible to distinguish her race or an obvious cause of death. What they did know was that her death was not accidental; her torso had been weighed down with a bag full of heavy stones. Jane stared at the tormented expression preserved in the woman’s blackened face and thought: I hope you were dead when he tied that bag of stones around your waist. When he rolled you over the bank and watched you sink into dark water.

  “This is clearly not your missing woman,” said Dr. Daljeet Singh.

  She looked up at the Maine medical examiner who stood beside her on the bank. Dr. Singh’s white Sikh headdress stood out in the fading light, making him easy to spot among the more conventionally garbed investigators gathered at the scene. When he’d arrived, she’d been startled to see the exotic figure step out of the truck, not at all what she expected to encounter in the North Woods. But judging by his well-worn L.L. Bean boots and the hiking gear he packed in the back of his truck, Dr. Singh was well acquainted with Maine’s rough terrain. Certainly he’d come better prepared than she had, in her city pantsuit.

  “The young woman you’re looking for was abducted four days ago?” asked Dr. Singh.

  “This isn’t her,” said Jane.

  “No, this woman has been submerged for some time. So have those other specimens.” Dr. Singh pointed to the animal remains that had also been pulled up from the bog. There were two well-preserved cats and a dog, plus the skeletal remnants of unidentifiable creatures. The stone-filled sacks tied around all the bodies left no doubt that these unfortunate victims had not simply wandered into the mire and drowned.

  “This killer has been experimenting with animals,” said Dr. Singh. He turned to the woman’s corpse. “And it appears he’s perfected his preservation technique.”

  Jane shuddered and looked across the bog at the fading sunset. Frost had told her that bogs were magical places, home to a wondrous variety of orchids and mosses and dragonflies. She didn’t see the magic that evening as she stared across the undulating surface of waterlogged peat. What she saw was a cold stew of corpses.

  “I’ll do the autopsy tomorrow,” said Dr. Singh. “If you’d like to observe, you’re certainly welcome.”

  What she really wanted to do was drive home to Boston. Take a hot shower, kiss her daughter good night, and climb into bed with Gabriel. But her work here was not yet finished.

  “The autopsy will be in Augusta?” she asked.

  “Yes, around eight o’clock. Can I expect you?”

  “I’ll be there.” She took a deep breath and straightened. “I guess I’d better find a place to stay for the night.”

  “The Hawthorn Motel’s a few miles down the road. It serves a good breakfast. Not that awful continental stuff, but lovely omelets and pancakes.”

  “Thanks for the tip,” she said. Only a pathologist could stand over a dripping corpse and talk so enthusiastically about pancakes.

  She walked back up the trail by flashlight, the path now well marked by little flags of police tape. Emerging from the trees, she found that the parking lot was starting to empty out; only a few official vehicles remained. The state police had already searched the building, but all they’d found was trash and the putrefying remains of that raccoon she had spotted earlier. They had not found Josephine or Bradley Rose.

  But he’s been here, she thought, gazing toward the woods. He parked near these trees. He walked the trail to the bog. There he tugged on a rope and hauled one of his keepsakes from the water, the way a fisherman hauls in his catch.

  She climbed into her car and drove back along that crumbling road, her poor Subaru jouncing across potholes that seemed even more treacherous in the dark. Moments after she turned onto the main road, her cell phone rang.

  “I’ve been trying to reach you for at least two hours,” said Frost.

  “There was no reception at the bog. They finished searching and found only the one body. I’m wondering if he has another stash—”

  “Where are you now?” Frost cut in.

  “I’m staying here for the night. I want to watch the autopsy tomorrow.”

  “I mean right now, where are you?”

  “I’m going to check into a motel. Why?”

  “What’s the name of the motel?”

  “I think it’s called the Hawthorn. It’s around here somewhere.”

  “Okay, I’ll see you there in a few hours.”

  “You’re coming up to Maine?”

  “I’m already on my way. And someone’s joining us.”

  “Who?”

  “We’ll talk about it
when we get there.”

  Jane stopped first at a local drugstore for new underwear and socks and then to pick up a take-out pepperoni pizza. While her hand-washed pants hung drying in the bathroom, she sat in her room at the Hawthorn Motel, eating pizza as she read Jimmy Otto’s file. There were three volumes, one for each year he had been a student at the Hilzbrich Institute. No, not a student—an inmate, she thought, remembering the ugly concrete building, the remote location. A place to securely segregate from society the sort of boys you didn’t want anywhere near your daughters.

  Jimmy Otto, most of all.

  She paused at the transcript of what Jimmy had said during a private therapy session. He’d been only sixteen years old.

  When I was thirteen, I saw this picture in a history book. It was in a concentration camp where all these women were killed in the gas chambers. Their bodies were naked, lying in a row. I think about that picture a lot, about all those women. Dozens and dozens of them, just lying there like they’re waiting for me to do whatever I want with them. Fuck them in any hole. Poke sticks in their eyes. Slice off their nipples. I want there to be a bunch of women at one time, a whole row of them. Or it’s not a party, is it?

  But how do you collect more than one at a time? Is there some way to keep a corpse from rotting, a way to keep it fresh? I’d like to find out, because it’s no fun if a woman just rots away and leaves me…

  A knock on her motel room door made Jane snap straight. She dropped the half-eaten slice of pizza in the box and called out, in a none-too-steady voice: “Yes? Who is it?”

  “It’s me,” Barry Frost answered.

  “Just a second.” She went into the bathroom and pulled on her still-damp slacks. By the time she got to the door, her nerves were steady again, her heart no longer racing. She opened the door and found a surprise awaiting her.