Pale Immortal

by Anne Frasier

  Starvation, sleep deprivation, and isolation. Those were the three most important factors in breaking somebody, and this kid was on his way. Add plain old physical discomfort, such as being dirty and cold, then remove external stimulation like music, books, and television.. ..

  A kid could lose his mind.

  Persona breakdown it was called. For some people it could happen fairly quickly. Others took longer.

  And when you added fear to the equation ... Most people would agree that it was scary as hell being alone in the woods, any woods, especially without a light source. But to be alone in these woods...

  Phillip pulled the blanket out from under his arm and offered it to Graham.

  With trembling hands, Graham took it and draped it around his shoulders.

  Phillip had to be careful not to make the kid too miserable. So miserable that going to the police would have more appeal than staying where he was.

  "We need to talk." Phillip walked over to a pew and sat down.

  Graham followed. "Do you have anything else to eat?"

  "No." He dismissed the question; he didn't want to talk about food. "Listen, I know this is rough, and I'd like to help you." He made his voice sound as if his help might not be possible. "But you have to understand that I could get into a lot of trouble for letting you stay here. I'm really sticking my neck out. I could lose my job. I could even be arrested."

  "Are you saying I should leave? I can do that. I don't want to get you in trouble." He seemed to like the idea of getting out of there.

  "Where would you go?"

  Graham shook his head. "I don't know."

  Phillip let out a heavy sigh and pressed his lips together. "I'll tell you what," he finally said, after pretending to give the situation some thought. "You can stay here for a few more days, but if anybody comes around looking for you, you have to hide."

  Make him want to stay. Make him afraid of losing what little security he has. Make it seem like his choice.

  "You can't let anybody know you're here. Understand? I want to help you. I will help you. We'll figure something out. Okay? How does that sound?"

  "Thanks, Mr. Alba. That's cool of you."

  "Do you want to talk about anything? Because I'm a good listener." When Graham didn't answer, he continued: "Your mom? Would you like to talk about her?" He paused. "Or your dad. Would you like to talk about him?" Because Evan Stroud was the person Phillip really wanted to hear about.

  "I've done enough of that lately. I had to see the school counselor almost every day." Graham was calming down a little. He was looking more normal.

  "Yeah, but she does that for a living. She has to listen to you. Not that Mrs. Beale doesn't do a good job. I'm sure she does. But counselors often reach a saturation point where they have to shut themselves off or risk a meltdown. They have to keep a distance, so there's always a lack of real connection."

  "Yeah." Graham nodded while clutching the blanket under his chin. "That's how it was. Like her responses were something she memorized from a book."

  "Exactly."

  Graham was warming to him. But when it didn't seem he was going to share anything personal, Phillip got to his feet and headed for the door. Graham followed.

  Phillip swung around. "You can't come with me."

  Graham halted. "I can't stay here. Not in this building. Not in the woods."

  "You have to."

  "I can't."

  "You don't have any choice."

  "What about your place? Didn't you say you live around here? Couldn't I stay with you?"

  Phillip gave him a long look. "I'm already risking everything by letting you stay here."

  Graham backed off. "Okay."

  "Just another day or two," Phillip told him. "Until we figure something out."

  "I need food. I'm gonna start eating dirt pretty soon. And I need water. I'm so thirsty."

  "I'll see what I can do."

  "What about a light? Can you leave the light?"

  "How will I get back?"

  "I need a light. You don't know how it is here in the dark. I hear things."

  "It's just mice. Just raccoons. They won't hurt you."

  "No, I heard a voice earlier. A woman's voice. Like it was coming from far away. Like it was coming from underground."

  Phillip stepped closer and put a steadying hand on Graham's shoulder so he could give him an earnest look. The kid was losing it. "What were the voices saying?"

  Now that he'd confessed his fear, Graham's eyes teared up and he bit his lip to keep from sobbing. "Not voices—voice. One voice." He shook his head. "It's kind of a wailing. Like somebody who needs help."

  "Ever heard coyotes before? They sound like people crying. And now, in the spring, they're having pups, and those pups can make a lot of noise."

  "Coyotes? You think...?"

  Phillip lifted the lantern higher in order to get a better look at Graham's face. He was scared shitless. Phillip bit his lip to keep from smiling.

  "I don't know...." Graham's mouth turned down at the corners. He'd already lost it.

  Don't smile. Don't laugh.

  "It's probably because of everything that's happened, but the voice...." Graham said in a trembling breath. "It sounded like a woman. It sounded like my mother."

  Chapter 27

  The sun was coining up as Seymour Burton swung the squad car into the rest area on Highway 21. He'd gotten a call telling him an abandoned car registered to Lydia Yates had been discovered there. It wasn't Seymour's jurisdiction, but he certainly had an interest in the situation.

  State patrol was already at the scene, plus a couple of county deputies. Seymour took a swallow of coffee from his insulated refill mug, put it on the dash, got out of the car, and headed for the cluster of people.

  One of the state patrol officers separated himself from the pack and strolled over to Seymour. "Maintenance personnel called it in," the officer said. "Saw the car there yesterday, but didn't think anything of it. Travelers pull off the road to sleep. But early this morning the car was still in the same place."

  "Which means the car has been here"—Seymour did a quick mental calculation—"twenty-four to thirty-six hours."

  "No sign of a struggle. No sign of robbery."

  "Maybe the car broke down and they caught a ride with somebody."

  "That was one of my first thoughts, but there are too many personal belongings left behind."

  Seymour circled the car, peering in the windows, careful not to touch anything. He could see Graham's large pack in the backseat, his smaller one in front. Nearby was a CD player.

  A feeling of dread washed over him. Kids didn't go anywhere without their music.

  He thought about the photos that had just been discovered on the computer they'd confiscated from the pedophile. There had been about fifty digital images of Graham. And what they hadn't seen from the one full-frontal eight-by-ten print was the secret he'd been harboring. Scars. Scars old and new that crisscrossed his shoulders and back. If only they'd known. Maybe they could have kept him.

  Why hadn't he told them?

  He'd been ashamed. Seymour had seen it before. Victims often felt shame.

  A young male deputy walked over. "Alien abduction," he said with a laugh. "No other explanation."

  The state patrol officer made an annoyed face before practically agreeing. "The occupants do seem to have vanished into thin air."

  "Not really thin air," Seymour said. "What you have is simply a cold, contaminated scene."

  Wisconsin crime scene investigators were poking around in the grass, but it was probably pointless. "The car?" Seymour asked.

  "We're sending it off to the state crime lab," the patrol officer said. "Should be a truck here to load it anytime."

  "Anything touched? Any chance of getting prints, even though it's rained?"

  "It's possible. But I have to tell you that the local deputies rooted through the car already, hoping to find some ID."

  Seymour sighed.
"I figured that might be the case. Mind if I look around?"

  "Have at it."

  The restroom had been cordoned off, but that was more of a pretense, meant to look like the scene was being processed. Scores of people had been through there since the disappearance, and the building had been cleaned more than once.

  He looked in the women's restroom, then the men's. Outside, a dark-haired, middle-aged woman in a gray uniform leaned against the wall, smoking a cigarette.

  "Are you the one who called this in?" Seymour asked.

  "I should have noticed earlier," she told him. "But cars park out here all the time. I mean, that's what the place is for. So people can pull over and sleep."

  "That's perfectly understandable," Seymour reassured her.

  Witnesses often felt guilty when they couldn't come up with helpful information. Which was why they sometimes subconsciously recalled incidents that had never really happened. They wanted to help so badly.

  "Did you notice anything unusual? Anything out of the ordinary in the restroom itself when you cleaned it?"

  "I see a lot of weird stuff here. I mean, people are pigs. They do things they wouldn't do in their own homes. You have to have a strong stomach to clean these places. They shove things down the toilets. They go to the bathroom in the sink. They toss used tampons against the walls. It's not unusual to see blood. Especially in the women's room, although I've seen it in the men's too."

  "Did you see blood yesterday morning?"

  "Yes."

  "Where?"

  "On the floor. Near the sinks."

  "And you cleaned it up?"

  She suddenly looked as if she might cry.

  "It's okay. You didn't do anything wrong."

  "I mopped the floor. When I work someplace, I do a good job. Nothing half-ass. I scrubbed it down with the industrial-strength stuff we use. It'll kill anything. I did it twice, just to make sure I got it all."

  "What about the trash containers?" he asked. "How often do you empty them? Even the ones along the road?"

  "Twice a day."

  "Ever skip it if they aren't full?"

  "Never. That's just part of the shift. Doesn't matter how much is in it."

  "Thank you."

  Seymour walked away and found the officer in charge of the scene. "You might want to get some lu-minol and a black light in the women's room," he said, explaining what he'd been told about the possible bloodstains.

  "We'll look into it."

  Maybe they would, maybe they wouldn't, Seymour thought as he walked away. Some cops didn't like other cops putting in their two cents.

  He made a perusal of the grounds. He walked up and down the lanes and checked the trash containers. He could see that the officers on scene thought he was just some old geezer sticking his nose where it didn't belong. It didn't bother him.

  When he was finished looking around, he got in his car but didn't drive away.

  He had to let Rachel know about the new development. She'd be upset. Graham was probably dead. Lydia was probably dead. That was how these things usually went down. Sickos preyed on rest areas. Rachel wouldn't be happy to hear about this. She'd never said it, but she'd liked the kid. Everybody had liked the kid.

  Then there was the issue of Evan Stroud.

  Damn.

  Seymour and Rachel had always been close, and he'd never been one of those parents who kept a tight leash on his child. He didn't believe in that. Kids had to learn to think for themselves and even question authority.

  But he shouldn't have told her about Evan and the search warrant.

  He pulled out his cell phone, stared at it a moment, then forced himself to make the call. When she answered he closed his eyes and took a deep breath.

  Rachel slowly hung up the phone, dreading what she had to do next.

  From down the hall she heard the shower shut off. Five minutes later Evan appeared, dressed and clean-shaven. He'd put the same clothes back on— jeans and an untucked gray shirt over a black T-shirt, all badly wrinkled. "What's wrong?"

  "Something's happened." But he already knew that. How he knew, she wasn't sure. "It's Graham."

  From her years as a coroner, she'd learned it was best to say what had to be said clearly and concisely, packing as much information into that first sentence as possible, because once the ear heard the bad stuff, the brain shut down.

  "You'd better move."

  The shades and curtains were drawn, but sunlight crept in through cracks and around edges. With her hands on his shoulders, she walked him backward down the hall, where there were no windows. Behind him, several photographs had been grouped together on the wall. Of her mother, her father. There was even one of both their families, taken on a camping trip up north.

  "Graham is missing," she told him. "Lydia's car was found at a rest area northwest of here."

  His reaction was familiar. First came the shock. It was a physical thing—almost like the body taking a blow. Then came the shutdown. For Evan, that lasted only a few seconds before he came around and began thinking once more. She watched him pull himself together, watched his mind reach for information. "Signs of foul play?"

  "Nothing obvious, although my father said he talked with the janitor who called it in. She scrubbed what looked like blood off the floor of the women's restroom."

  "And the men's?"

  Where Graham would have gone. "Nothing. The abduction could have been random," she continued. "Random victims are often attacked at rest areas."

  What she didn't say—and maybe he didn't know—was that those kinds of attacks were the hardest to follow, because there was no acquaintance trail to trace back to the perpetrator.

  "But they can't be sure it was an abduction," he pointed out.

  "It's the most likely scenario."

  "What about an Amber Alert?"

  "They only do those if they have a lead. If they know the abductor's car. But they're getting the Missing Children's Network involved. They cropped—" She stopped, then continued. "They cropped the recent photo of Graham and are printing flyers."

  "The first twenty-four hours are the most important," Evan said. "That's what you always hear. It's been over twenty-four hours."

  "Yes." It was true. She'd rarely seen a good outcome after the forty-eight-hour mark.

  Evan turned toward the wall. He was trying to maintain control. "It seems strange that they're both missing, don't you think?" He stared at a photo of Rachel and her father that had been taken at Lake Tuonela. She was tiny, holding a fishing pole while her dad baited the hook. "If someone wanted to abduct a teenager," Evan said, "they would just take him. They wouldn't also take Lydia."

  "I've seen abduction cases where witnesses were also abducted." Rachel left out the part about witnesses almost always being killed.

  "What about Chelsea Gerber?" Evan straightened from the frame and turned around. "How long was she missing before her body was found?"

  He was a researcher. Not the same as an investigator, but their minds worked in similar ways. They asked pertinent questions. They looked for connecting threads.

  "Gerber was killed almost immediately," Rachel said. Not what a father would want to hear. Not what anybody would want to hear.

  "Who's on the case?"

  "Division of Criminal Investigation."

  "Same people involved in the Gerber case." They both knew how little progress DCI was making. "I can't turn myself in now. I have to find Graham."

  "Find Graham? How?"

  "You'd be amazed by what I can get done at night," he said. "When everybody is asleep."

  Chapter 28

  Graham came awake with a jerk, his heart slamming.

  Don't sleep. Can't fall asleep.

  Last thing he knew, he'd been sitting on the mattress, his back against the wall, eyes open wide as he tried to make out any movement or sound. Now he was lying down.

  He shoved himself up.

  Still dark. Still night.

  The night lasted forever.
You never thought about that when you slept through it. You went to sleep and you woke up and that was that. But it went on and on and on.

  He'd already lost track of how long he'd been there. Two nights? Three? He thought it was three. A little food. No water. No sleep. Freezing his ass off.

  What was he doing here? He couldn't even remember why it had seemed important.

  To get away from his mother. Yeah, he knew that. But he'd rather have her beat his ass every day than have to stay here any longer.

  Alba had assured him he'd fix things, that he'd figure something out. Like maybe find a decent place for Graham to hide. Maybe a place for him to start over with a new identity. He was almost an adult. He could do that. He could take care of himself.

  But Alba hadn't been around.

  And this was fucked.

  That's all Graham knew.

  Something small scurried nearby, and Graham imagined little mouse nails on the floor.

  He'd been hallucinating. Yesterday he stepped outside in the woods and thought he saw some people walking around in the graveyard next to the church. Graham had quickly ducked behind the trunk of a tree, and when he looked again, nobody was there.

  And hadn't they been dressed kinda weird? In old clothes?

  One man had worn a black coat with tails; a woman was in a long, dark dress.

  And hadn't somebody been crying?

  Yes.

  Wasn't somebody crying right now?

  He listened intently.

  There it was. That high, keening wail. That sobbing.

  A woman. The woman he'd told Alba about.

  The coyote.

  He tried to picture the word in his mind. How did you spell that? He couldn't remember. He couldn't think. He hadn't been able to think clearly for a long time.

  "Help me!"

  The voice didn't come from Graham's head, but from somewhere outside.

  A tremble shot through him, and his scalp tingled. Had he really heard that? Or was he dreaming while he was awake? People did that. He'd read about it. If you went without sleep for too long, you started dreaming when you were awake.

  "Help me!"

  He let out a terrified sob, then slapped a hand over his mouth.