Faye was fumbling for her phone and its flashlight function, and she dropped it when she heard the familiar sound of something firm hitting the ground. The girl, bound hand and foot, was thrashing like a fish desperate for water.
Faye’s eyes were adjusting to the dim light admitted by the barely open door. Finally, she could see the child. Kali was covered with a century of dust and decay, but she was alive.
Dropping her purse, Faye threw herself onto her bandaged knees and began struggling with the man’s tie binding Kali’s ankles. The child made frustrated, wordless noises through the gag until Faye put a finger to her own lips. Then she unfastened the sparkly black belt wrapped around Kali’s mouth and thought of murder. The person who had done this to a child did not deserve to walk among human beings.
Kali knew this as well as she did. Her whisper was faint, but Faye could hear every word.
“Shut the door, Faye. Shut the door and hold it closed.”
“Shh. It’ll be okay. I’m here now. Be quiet while I get you untied, so that nobody hears us until we’re ready to run.”
The knots binding the little girl’s hands required so much of Faye’s attention that she never would have seen the text on her phone’s screen if it hadn’t been face-up where she had dropped it. Hoping it was McDaniel, announcing that he had failed to meet her because he’d been busy arresting the killer, she looked at the incoming text. It was not from McDaniel. It was from Phyllis Windom.
I checked vacation schedules for the schools you mentioned. There’s no match between the killings and any of the colleges and universities you mentioned. But Walt Walker’s elementary school? Bingo. I think he may be your man. Good work, Faye.
Faye worked to free Kali’s hands, but her hair ribbon was tied tight around them and the man’s tie binding her feet was tighter.
Kali’s voice was so faint that it hardly even qualified as a whisper. “He’s out there, Faye. Mr. Walker. He lied to Uncle Laneer. Brought me here. Picked me up and carried me. Tied me up.” She was trembling so hard that Faye had to support her with both hands. “Faye. He’s coming back.”
So she and Phyllis Windom had found the right algorithm. It was Walt Walker who had spent his school vacations preying on women. It was Walt who had packed a shovel into the trunk of his car and used it to beat Frida to death. It was Walt who had buried her alive. It was Walt who had driven to Alabama and Arkansas and Mississippi to do the same thing to other doomed women.
And it was Walt who had done this to Kali. But Faye had known this already, because she recognized the pale green tie she held in her hands.
Faye wouldn’t have thought that a silk tie would have been so hard to unknot, but Walt had bound Kali’s feet so tightly that the tie was cutting hard into her skin. She didn’t have the luxury of slicing through the silk, not when her pocketknife and everything else useful that she owned were safe in her hotel room.
As her eyes adapted to the darkness, she began to see things that she wished had remained invisible. A pile of long bones filled the crypt’s far corner. Nearer by—close enough to reach, actually—she saw a pile of skulls, maybe seven of them.
All of the bones were stacked so neatly. Was it someone’s job to do housekeeping in mausoleums, cleaning out old bones and making way for new ones? She didn’t want to know.
The ceiling was low and Faye couldn’t stand the thought of brushing it with her hair. She didn’t much like the idea of kneeling on a floor littered with human bones, either, so she stooped over Kali until she was able to free her. Taking the girl’s ankles in her hands, one at a time, she rubbed the circulation back into them.
“Do you think you can run? If you can’t, I’ll carry you, but we can go faster if you run.”
“I can run. I can run right now, so let’s go. He said he was coming back.”
Faye had one hand flat on the heavy door, ready to run, when she heard the raspy creak of another set of old hinges. She hadn’t closed the gate to the pathway leading to the church. If someone was entering the fenced graveyard, the sound of an opening gate could only come from the other one, where she had seen the prints of a pair of men’s dress shoes leading away from the graveyard.
“He’s coming back, Faye. Just like he said he would.”
Faye had no doubt that Walt was armed. In her mind, he was carrying a shovel like the one that killed Frida.
She and Kali had no weapons. They were cornered. They didn’t have his years of experience in killing. They only had one factor in their favor.
He didn’t know that there were two of them.
Joe left McDaniel with people who could help him, then was immediately back in the woods, tracking his own steps. He could get himself back to the point where the detective had been injured. From there, he could track McDaniel’s attacker. Maybe the man’s trail would get Joe to Faye.
Faye picked up Kali and put her behind the door where she would be hidden when Walt opened it. She took the spot opposite Kali, by the door’s latch, with her back to the wall.
She needed to disable Walt in the split-second that his sun-dazzled eyes spent searching the mausoleum’s floor for the little girl he’d left hogtied. She wished she believed that she could take him out with a purse full of pebbles, but she didn’t.
It would take him only seconds to walk from the gate to where they waited. As those seconds ticked down, Faye had only one idea for improving her makeshift weapon and she needed to do it fast.
She reached down and grasped something smooth, cool, and heavier than it looked. Trying not to think about what she was doing, she flipped the skull over and poured the pebbles into the cavity where someone’s brain had been, then she slid it into her purse and knotted the drawstring.
As she drew the drawstring through her fingers slowly, she assessed its length and judged where to hold it for the best possible swing. Then she waited without even trying to hide, ready to strike fast. There would be no second chance.
Kneeling face-to-face with Kali, she whispered, “Promise me one thing?”
The little girl was too scared to speak.
“When you see a chance, run. Don’t wait for me. Just go. Do you hear me?”
Kali never said a thing. She didn’t have time.
Chapter Forty-six
He saw no one. No one was coming to stop him. If his luck held for five more minutes, the time to stop him would have passed.
Bloodlust was crowding out logic, and he knew it. Linton and the detective had both seen him, and he doubted that he’d managed to kill them with a single blow each. Logic said that he should run to his car and drive away, but the bloodlust was saying, “Wait just a moment longer. The girl is waiting. When she’s dead, then you can run.”
He knew that McDaniel would have called for dogs by now. If Laneer had an article of Kali’s clothing for them to smell, his level of jeopardy was about to skyrocket.
But none of that mattered, because he was Death now, with the lug wrench swinging as easily as a shovel in his hand. He would remain Death until Kali was silent and still.
He pressed his palms to the crypt’s moldering door and pushed. The door pushed back with the weight of its years, but it yielded.
Chapter Forty-seven
Running. Linton was back on his feet and he was running. He was running to save the girl who had been his daughter since she was five years old.
She was still his daughter. Even if he and her mother had ever divorced, she would still have been his daughter, because you don’t divorce children. But they weren’t divorced. Frida was his wife until the day she died, and Kali would be his daughter until the day he died. That’s the way being a father worked. He wasn’t perfect but he wanted to be better, and he was her father.
He could see Walt Walker’s white shirt and dark pants moving among the old headstones, and he was gaining on him. Linton was younger, he was stronger,
and, this time he would make sure that the bastard never hurt another soul.
To do that, he needed to get to Walt before he got to Kali.
The door opened, grinding against its uneven doorsill. Its ponderous size, its age, the execrable condition of its hinges—all of these things slowed it down and this skewed the situation ever-so-slightly in Faye’s favor.
It was hard to wait, but she was only going to have one swing. After that, she was just a small woman trapped by a physically powerful man in a chamber with no exit.
His face cleared the plane of the door and, as she’d expected, it was turned slightly downward toward the spot where he had left Kali. Then he took one more step forward, and his head fully cleared the door.
During the instant that he stood confused by the empty floor, she stretched her arm out as much as she dared in the small space, giving herself the maximum possible lever arm to swing her pathetic weapon.
Holding her purse with both hands, she stepped into her swing for power, hinging her shoulders toward Walt Walker. The pebble-and-skull-weighted weapon struck him full in the face.
Running. He was running.
Joe found the spot where McDaniel’s heart had been stopped by a lug wrench. He stood there, looking for tracks and listening. Far ahead of him, he heard the sound of footfalls, so he lunged in that direction, stretched his long legs out, and ran hard.
Within minutes, he caught sight of the bald man, who was also running his heart out, but there was no sign of the man who had assaulted Detective McDaniel. Trusting that the bald man knew where he was going, Joe ran, giving over every ounce of his strength to the legs that carried him and to the pumping arms that carried his gait.
The blood spurting out of Walt Walker’s nose suggested that Faye and her pathetic weapon had broken it. His cheekbone was split open. Faye could see that she’d done damage, significant damage, but it wasn’t enough. He was still conscious. He was still vertical. His hands were still operational, ready to grab, crush, and break anything they could reach.
More to the point, one of those hands still held a lug wrench that would be just as deadly as any shovel he had ever swung.
He shook his head to clear it, flinging out droplets of blood. Then he turned his eyes to Faye.
She swung her weapon again, knowing that it wouldn’t be enough this time, either. The impact made him totter, but he stayed on his feet, as she had known he would.
She took a single step back. This wouldn’t save her, but it might give Kali an opening to dart out the door. Another step back put the mausoleum’s cold wall on Faye’s spine, and still he came for her.
One of his big feet moved toward her, then the other began to move, but stopped short. He tipped his head to look at her as if he, like Faye, could not understand why he hadn’t already struck her a killing blow. Then he dropped face-first to the floor, scattering the piles of bones.
Faye backed toward the door, wondering why Kali hadn’t run. Had she been hurt by Walt Walker’s falling body? Faye knew she hadn’t heard the child cry out.
Then there was a flash of green near the floor as Kali yanked Walt’s tie from beneath his shin.
“I knew he’d be harder to trip than you were.” She waved the tie. “This helped a lot.”
Faye had no confidence that Walker would be down for long. She thought seriously about beating him into submission, and perhaps to death, with his own lug wrench, but she wasn’t confident that she had the strength to do it before he grabbed it back and used it on her.
Only one option made sense. She snatched Kali off her feet and ran. She ran out the open crypt door, past rows of old headstones, out the open iron gate, and straight into Joe’s open arms. Behind him stood five officers, guns drawn, and a police dog. Beside him stood Linton.
“Drop your weapon,” said the officer who seemed to be in charge, and that was when Faye turned around and saw Walker loping up behind her. He was bleeding and he was limping, but the lug wrench was in his hand and he was advancing fast.
“I said drop your weapon.”
Walker’s eyes were like gray river stones embedded in cold clay. If he could hear and understand the officer, Faye saw no evidence of it. He was limping from Kali’s attack on his leg and he was bleeding from Faye’s attacks on his face, but he was still coming.
Faye didn’t want Kali to see a man shot. She clamped her hands over the little girl’s eyes and waited for a painfully loud sound and the smell of gunpowder.
Instead, she saw the police dog leap the distance between him and the advancing murderer. Just as he was trained, he took Walker to the ground, where the man lay groaning but alive for the police officers to take into custody.
Faye knew she should be glad that he was alive, but when she thought about the things he’d done, she wasn’t so sure. As the police converged, the vengeful part of her hoped that they tased him, at the very least.
A heavy hand fell on her shoulder, and Linton said, “Thank you. So much. Thank you for saving my girl.”
He gently but insistently took Kali from Faye, set her on the ground, and knelt to wrap both big arms around the child.
“I’m sorry—so, so sorry. I can’t stand to see you hurt or scared. I never meant to hurt your mama and I’m so sorry I did. We all paid a big price for what I did. Maybe could you let me be your daddy again?”
Kali didn’t answer Linton but she didn’t struggle in his embrace. She just laid her forehead on his broad shoulder and cried.
Chapter Forty-eight
It took a while for Joe to ditch Faye, but he managed it. She probably thought it was weird that he wanted to ditch her, now that they were reunited after spending most of the summer apart, but he was a man on a mission. Something needed to be said, and he planned to say it.
He’d thought about this conversation all summer, while he was at home on Joyeuse Island with the kids and she was here in Memphis working. He was thinking of it now, as he stood in the reception area of the police department, waiting to be shown back to Detective McDaniel’s office.
“I came to say thank you,” he said as he settled himself into McDaniel’s guest chair.
“For what? Phyllis Windom did more from her wheelchair in Schenectady than I did. She and your wife had identified Walt Walker as the killer before I was willing to even consider their serial killer scenario.”
“I already thanked Phyllis Windom. And Faye. I’m here to thank you.”
“But for what?” McDaniel asked again. “You’re the one who saved my life. I hope I thanked you properly at the time. I think I did, but stopping a man’s heart messes with his brain, too. I lost my car keys in my own house three times this morning.”
“You thanked me, but there was no need. I was glad to do it.”
“Nevertheless, I owe you. And I owe your wife. Without the two of you, Kali Stone might be dead and there might still be a serial killer on the loose.”
“That’s the other reason I came to say thank you. For him.”
“Huh,” McDaniel said, taking off his reading glasses and laying them on the desk. “For putting him away? Like I said, your wife had more to do with that than I did.”
“The way I see it, it took the both of you, but yeah. I want to thank you personally for that. But I also want to say thank you to the Memphis police who left him alive to pay the price for the things he did.”
“There’s no way he can pay that price. Even if he gets the death penalty, he’ll only die once.”
“Yeah, but the people who had him at gunpoint that day? They left him alive to face the death penalty, and they take their cues from you. Nobody would have blinked if those people had shot a serial killer who was charging them with a deadly weapon. Maybe, while he’s sitting in jail and waiting for justice, he’ll tell us about the all the other women he killed. Maybe their families will have some peace. Please tell those of
ficers thank you for me.”
“It will be my pleasure.”
“I know it eased Faye’s mind that they didn’t kill him.”
At this, McDaniel’s mouth actually dropped open. “After she saw what he did to Frida? After he kidnapped that adorable little girl she loves so much? After she fought him off in a freakin’ grave? There’s no part of her that wants him dead?”
“I’m pretty sure every part of her wants him dead. It’s just that watching those officers do everything they could do to keep him alive restored her faith in the law, at least somewhat. You watch the news, so you know that black men don’t always come out alive in situations like that.”
“I do, and it breaks my heart.”
“I can tell that about you, and that’s why I came here today. You do know that you scared her about to death that first day?”
“Huh?” McDaniel said again.
“She said you were short with her. Asked her a bunch of questions over and over. Faye really believed you suspected her of attacking the woman she’d just saved, just because she wasn’t white.”
McDaniel closed his eyes and blew out a long breath. “That breaks my heart, too, but I do watch the news. I understand why she felt that way, but I’m not like that. Most people in this city don’t look like me. If I can’t set that aside and do my job, then I need to go home.”
At that, Joe leaned forward and rested his elbows on his long thighs. “Don’t go home. The world needs people like you.”
McDaniel laughed.
“I wasn’t joking.”
“I know. I’m just laughing because your wife thought I was acting like a doofus because I don’t know how to talk to black people. Want to know the real reason I bungled the job of questioning her?”
Undercurrents Page 27