by Todd Ritter
Henry’s renewed mental capability soon spread to the rest of his body. His strength increased, allowing him to buck uselessly against the wooden flat he lay upon. The rust fell away from his jaws. His tongue stopped flopping. He could speak.
And the word he chose to say was “No.”
Some of the weight lifted from his eyelids. Using complete concentration, he was able to open them, the strain causing his lashes to flutter. He pushed on, willing his eyes to open completely.
When they did, he saw a figure wearing surgical scrubs and latex gloves. A mask sheathed his face, covering his nose and mouth. A paper cap covered his head. Wrapped around his waist and chest was a black rubber apron.
Seeing Henry’s open eyes, the figure yanked the mask down and gave him a bemused smile.
It was Martin Swan.
“Hello, Henry,” he said. “Glad I could catch you before you left town.”
THIRTY-SIX
Kat and Nick made half a dozen calls between them. To Gloria Ambrose. To Tony Vasquez. To the state police and the county sheriff and Carl.
“Go to Martin Swan’s house,” Kat told her deputy. “Go there now.”
It was the same thing she and Nick had told everyone they reached. Carl was the only one to ask questions.
“What about crowd control?” he said. “People are still going crazy down here.”
He was talking to her on his cell phone in the middle of Main Street. The confusion in his voice was clear even through the spotty reception and panicked background noise.
“This is more important,” Kat said. “Just go. Now.”
“You haven’t told me why.”
“Because Martin Swan is the Grim Reaper.”
Kat was certain of it. The proof was spread across Nick’s bed. Martin had written about George’s and Troy’s funerals, which meant he had attended both. Alma Winnick mentioned her brother’s funeral had also been in the Gazette. Martin covered that one, too.
But more damning than his byline was the nickname he had given the killer in print. Grim Reaper, which when scrambled spelled Meg Parrier. Only Kat had come across that name after George’s murder, before the Grim Reaper nickname was coined in the paper. That meant Martin Swan had it in mind long before he made his first kill.
“What about you?” Carl asked. “Where will you be?”
“I’m at the hospital. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
When Kat hung up, she caught Nick staring at her.
“You shouldn’t go to Martin’s house,” he said.
“But I have to. He has Henry.”
“Then Gloria and the rest will find him there.”
There was a distance in his voice, the result of more than just medication. He was still thinking. Kat saw it in his eyes.
“You don’t think he’s there, do you?”
Nick shook his head. “He needs more seclusion than that. Think of the space required. And the noise it would make. He used a different location.”
“Then where?” Desperation had seeped into her voice. The clock was ticking and time was running out for Henry Goll. “Help me figure out where it is.”
“I am,” Nick said. “Again, we need to think like him and look at the clues.”
“He barely left any clues,” Kat said, exasperated.
Her entire body twitched, yearning to escape the hospital room and join the others at Martin’s house. But Nick insisted on being methodical.
“He left animals at the scene,” he said. “What were they stuffed with?”
Kat thought back to Caleb Fisher’s basement. He used prefabricated molds on his animals. The ones Martin left behind had been stuffed the old-fashioned way.
“Sawdust.”
“Which begs the question why. Why not rags? Or hay? Or paper?”
“Because it was the only thing readily available.”
“Very good,” Nick said. “But where could he have found that much sawdust lying around?”
Kat remembered examining the squirrel in Troy Gunzelman’s locker. She had pushed a finger through the hole in the squirrel’s stomach, finding sawdust. But not just any sawdust. It had smelled of pine. The same wood used to build George Winnick’s coffin.
She mentally listed everything she knew about the crimes. The homemade coffins, built of plain pine planks. The vehicle Caleb Fisher heard on Squall Lane. The seclusion and space the killer needed to enact such heinous deeds. And now the sawdust.
It all connected, leading Kat to only one possible location.
She gasped. “Henry’s at the sawmill.”
Henry couldn’t summon more than the one word he had previously uttered. His brain produced a torrent of them inside his head, rising and falling in half-completed thoughts. But a disconnect remained between brain and mouth, causing him to repeat that one word over and over.
“No,” he moaned as his captor contemplated his weakened state. “No.”
Martin slipped the surgical mask over his face again and walked away. Henry rolled his head to follow him, but he was lost in the darkness.
The whole place was dark, a bubble of blackness surrounding him. Henry tried to get an idea of where he could be. He sensed walls and a ceiling, but they were far away. The scent of pine and damp wood tickled his nostrils. Somewhere, he heard a pipe drip.
Then footsteps. Martin. Coming toward him again.
This time he brought light with him. It was a kerosene lantern, which he placed on the table next to Henry.
The glow from the lantern allowed Henry to finally see his surroundings. He was in a barn of some sort. An old one, vast and abandoned. Exposed beams hovered high above. The distant walls were paneled with uneven wooden planks.
Martin planted a hand on Henry’s skull, holding his head in place. Henry felt a length of rope slide across his forehead, just below the hairline. It tightened, trapping his head in place, forcing his eyes to face upward.
“Keep still,” Martin said, leaning over him. “This is going to hurt.”
On the edge of his vision, Henry saw a needle. It was about two inches in length and looped with thick, black thread. When Martin moved the needle to his other hand, it passed before Henry’s eyes, catching the lantern glow and reflecting it briefly. Soon it was gone, and all he saw were Martin’s knuckles moving just beneath his nose.
The needle pierced Henry’s bottom lip. Then pain. Worse than he expected.
It started at the needle’s entry point, concentrated there. But when Martin pushed the entire needle through the flesh of Henry’s lip, the pain spread, pulsing outward in a circle of agony.
On its way out, the needle’s eye snagged on the exit wound, pulling Henry’s lip away from his teeth—a hook refusing to let go of a fish.
The pain forced him to speak again.
“No.”
Martin didn’t stop. He drove the needle directly into Henry’s upper lip, where it repeated the same steps of push, pain, pulse, pull.
Beads of blood sprouted on Henry’s lips. Some clung to the thread. Others rolled down his chin, tickling their way onto his neck. Still more moved back toward his lips, slipping between them and into his mouth. Henry tasted the blood, bitter on his tongue.
He spoke again. “Martin.”
At last, a new word. The pain ignited Henry’s mind. More words formed in his head and managed to escape his lips.
“Why?” he asked. “Tell me why.”
Needle in hand, Martin stretched his arm, tightening the thread inside both lips. It created a slithery feeling, like a maggot burrowing just beneath the surface of Henry’s skin.
“Why?” he persisted.
“Does it really matter, Henry?” Martin’s voice was distracted as he concentrated on the task at hand. “What’s important now is that you stop talking.”
Henry didn’t. Talking meant his lips were still moving. Which made them harder to pin down. Which meant they wouldn’t be sewn shut. Which meant Martin couldn’t continue with whatever else he had p
lanned. If that’s what it took to stop him, then Henry was prepared to talk all day.
“Tell me.”
Martin didn’t wait for his lips to stop moving before shoving the needle into them. It was the bottom lip again. Push, pain, pulse, pull.
“It’s a long story,” he said.
He moved to the upper lip. When he yanked the thread taut, it hurt worse than the first time he’d done it. Instead of one slithering probe inside him, Henry felt two, tightening in unison.
“I want to know.”
“I suspect,” Martin said, “that you already do.”
He continued to sew Henry’s mouth, creating new points of pain in his lips, all of them connected by the sliding thread. He also continued to talk, practically chatting as Henry squirmed beneath his needle and thread.
“I know you’ve been in my sister’s bedroom. So I know you saw the picture of my father. That’s why Deana was drawn to you, you know. Not because you’re actually worthy of her. Because of Dad and how much you looked like him, scars and all. The resemblance was—”
He stabbed Henry’s bottom lip.
“Uncanny. That’s the word for it. I noticed it, of course. It was like seeing his ghost. And you know what they say about ghosts, right? They have to be put to rest.”
Martin stabbed his upper lip.
“But I couldn’t just do it outright. That would have been disastrous. I needed practice first.”
Bottom lip.
“That’s why George was the first. So tall, you two. Both about the same height. I noticed it when I was covering his brother-in-law’s funeral. That’s when it dawned on me that if I practiced on people who had the same qualities you did, I’d be an expert at preservation when your time came.”
Upper lip.
“Troy was the second. He was younger and, let’s face it, Henry, far better looking. But he was the only person in Perry Hollow who had your build. All those muscles. All that strength.”
Bottom lip.
“Then there was Amber Lefferts. Such pale skin. Exactly the same shade as yours. Only I never got the chance to see what it was like to preserve it. A pity, really. I hope you don’t turn out badly because of my lack of practice in that regard.”
Upper lip.
By that point, half of Henry’s mouth had been sewn shut. When he spoke, it was out of the unobstructed side of his mouth. The words came slowly, thick and slurred.
“You . . . don’t . . . need . . . to . . . kill . . . me.”
Martin shook his head, clucking in disapproval. “But I do. It’s not over until I do that. It’s not over until I preserve you, just like I preserved Daddy.”
He resumed his sewing, plunging the needle once more into Henry’s bottom lip.
“But you were a hard man to get to. Always alone. Always locked in your office. That’s why I had to send you those faxes. It was the only way to flush you out. It’s why I faxed you the Campbell boy’s name tonight. When Deana called to tell me you were leaving town, I had to act fast. I needed a decoy. And I knew that when you saw his name, you wouldn’t leave. You’d try to save him, just like the others. And you did.”
Martin finished his task with alarming speed.
Bottom lip.
Upper lip.
Push, pain, pulse, pull.
Finished, he tied off the thread and took the needle away.
Henry’s mouth was now entirely sewn shut. He screamed behind the unnatural seal, trying in vain to make his voice connect with the air outside of his mouth.
Martin ignored him as he walked away from the table. Henry felt his presence recede in the darkness. A moment later, he returned. Henry heard a small clunk on the table next to his head, followed by the light scraping sound of fabric being opened. It was a pouch of some sort, filled with something heavy.
“I’ve got my tools,” Martin said brightly. “It’s amazing what you can buy on the Internet. Formaldehyde. Chloroform. Aneurysm hooks. It’s all there for the taking.”
Henry was mute and terrified, his eyes widening as Martin leaned over him again. He held up something sharp and metallic, giving Henry a good look.
It was a scalpel, glinting in the lantern light.
“I have a feeling,” Martin said, “that you know what’s going to come next.”
THIRTY-SEVEN
It should have taken Kat fifteen minutes to get from the hospital to Perry Mill. She made it in six.
Swerving onto the gravel road that led to the mill, she cut the car’s headlights. When she was within a hundred yards of the mill’s sole remaining structure, she shut off the engine and jumped out of the car.
Rising against Lake Squall, the mill towered over her, blotting out the stars in the night sky. The way it stood next to the water made Kat think of a graveyard. The mill was the tombstone. The lake was the grave. With a nervous shudder, she realized it could already be marking the spot of Henry’s death. And in a few minutes, maybe her own.
She’d find out soon enough.
She sprinted toward the mill, a flashlight her guide. When she reached it, she saw Martin Swan’s pickup truck parked next to a wide-open rectangle on the southern side of the building.
Kat reached for her Glock. She held the gun and flashlight together in her outstretched arms, one on top of the other. Before being swallowed into the mill’s darkness, she paused.
In the car, she had tried to radio Carl, with no luck. She suspected he was with the others at Martin’s house, searching the empty premises. She knew she needed backup. It was downright irresponsible to go into that mill alone. But she also knew Henry was inside, and the prospect of finding him alive dimmed with each passing second. Waiting to reach her deputy would take time she didn’t have to spare.
She had to risk it.
As she crept into the building, Kat’s nose was immediately filled with the smell of dust, decay, and pine. Everywhere, pine. Rising off the floor. Drifting down from above. Closing in at her sides.
This, Kat thought, is what it smelled like inside one of those homemade coffins.
The thought disturbed her. So did the darkness, which had joined the pine scent in surrounding her.
Sweeping the flashlight back and forth, Kat saw she was in a warehouse of sorts. Stacks of pine planks dotted the room, forgotten relics of the mill’s heyday. Moving through the piles of rotting wood, she spotted a small door on the other side of the room. Chipped paint across the front designated it as ACCOUNTING.
Kat reached the door in five long strides and burst inside.
It was an office. At least it had been long ago. A desk still sat in a corner, overtaken by rust. A filing cabinet lay overturned on the floor. A calendar hung on the wall, its mold-streaked pages forever insisting it was March 1990.
Kat spotted several large jars sitting on the dilapidated desk, each filled with coins. She pointed the flashlight into one of the jars. A copper glow reflected back at her.
Pennies. Hundreds of them.
She moved on, pushing out of the office and into a short hallway littered with feathers, used condoms, and rodent shit. Kat stepped over all of it as she peeked into the three rooms that lined the hall.
The first one was mostly bare, its floor containing the same detritus found in the hallway. The only object inside was a wood-handled hatchet. Its blade was sunk deep into the floor, the handle rising from it like a petrified sapling.
Kat kicked at the handle and the hatchet toppled onto its side, the blade digging up a chunk of the floor with it.
She turned her attention to the second room, aiming both the gun and the flashlight into its dark recesses. The light latched onto a pair of eyes, which reflected it back in an ominous glow. Seeing them, Kat gasped.
The noise startled the eyes’ owner, which in this case was a deer. Standing in the center of the room, it raised its antlered head and looked at her. When Kat took a step backward, the deer charged toward the door, an angry snort puffing from its snout.
Kat jumped ou
t of the way, flipping into the next room as the buck burst into the hallway. It turned, hindquarters skidding into the wall, and clomped down the hall. Kat watched it leave, white tail bounding into the office she had just vacated.
She stayed hidden in the third room, trying to calm the pounding of her heart. When her pulse slowed to an acceptable rate, she scanned the room. It contained more wood. But instead of planks of pine, it was filled with boxes made of it.
Coffins.
A dozen of them sat evenly spaced on the floor. A matching lid covered each one. Unlike the coffins Kat had found George and Troy in, the lids weren’t nailed shut.
These were empty and unused and waiting to be filled.
As she backed away, Kat knocked into one of the coffins. She tumbled over it, taking the lid with her. It flipped off and clattered on top of her legs. Kat kicked it away while swinging the light in front of her until the beam stopped at the now-open coffin.
Someone was inside it.
Kat held back a yelp. Crawling to her knees, she shuffled to the coffin’s edge and peered inside.
It was Lucas Hatcher. His arms were crossed at his chest. Two pennies covered his eyes. In the middle of his forehead was a bullet hole.
Kat looked for, but couldn’t find, stitches in his lips or a gash at his neck. That mutilation, she realized with horror, had been reserved for Henry.
Nick clamped a hand over his mouth to keep from yelling. The pain was bad when he slid out of bed but manageable. Now, when he was forced to actually walk, it was excruciating.
He edged across the room, supporting himself with the metal pole his broken leg had hung from. His entire body silently screamed for him to stop. And his mouth would have screamed out loud if it wasn’t for his hand, which remained over his lips.
He finally removed his hand when he reached the door. Counting to three, he threw the door open. Harry-Gary stood a few feet away, his back turned. Nick didn’t waste a moment. He hobbled up to the nurse until he was right behind him.
“Harry?” he asked.
The nurse spun around, surprised.
“It’s Gary.”