The Burying Place

by Brian Freeman

  'You like Duffy?' she called over the music.

  Serena nodded, but she winced at the volume. Regan pushed a button that muted the sound. The silence was startling.

  'Better?'

  'Thanks,' Serena said. She eyed the books on the shelves and saw a collection of homeopathic medical reference guides and cookbooks devoted to vegetarian and organic foods. The furnishings in the library, like the rest of the house, were upscale.

  'I left most of the rooms the way my dickstick lawyer decorated them,' Regan explained. 'I like the idea that he and his fat wife spent years getting the house just the way she wanted it, and then he had to hand me the keys.'

  'That's a pretty nice consolation prize for a busted affair,' Serena said.

  'Well, if you're going to play fast and loose with your client's money, be careful who you tell. He liked to whisper secrets in my ear when he was fucking me.' She added, if you're a museum piece like Valerie Glenn, men want to make love to you. Me they like to fuck.'

  'I heard you and Marcus Glenn were having an affair,' Serena said.

  'That's not a secret.'

  'I also heard he dumped you.'

  'So what if he did?'

  'Were you angry?' Serena asked.

  'What do you think? I was furious. But I'm not exactly the girl you show off at the country club on Saturday nights.'

  'People at the hospital call you unstable,' Serena said.

  'Unstable? That's rich. His wife is the one who's unstable. Clinical depression. Meds.'

  'Where did you hear that?'

  'I told you, men like to tell me secrets. Marcus included.'

  'You didn't look surprised to find the police on your doorstep,' Serena said.

  'I'm not stupid. Exactly what is it you want to know, Ms Dial?'

  'I want to know if Dr Glenn gave you a key to his house.'

  Regan shrugged. 'Oh, I understand. No forced entry. No broken windows. Very suspicious. It must have been the crazy, jealous nurse.'

  'The key,' Serena repeated.

  'Why does it matter? I was nowhere near the Glenn mansion on Thursday night. I was working. Lots of people saw me.'

  'So I hear.'

  'Then why are you bothering me?' Regan asked.

  'You blame Marcus for your break-up. You work with babies. A baby is missing.'

  'I spend my life with moms and babies,' Regan retorted, jabbing a finger at Serena. 'I'm a nurse. A midwife. A counselor. I help women, Ms Dial.'

  'Do you have children yourself?'

  'I have hundreds. Every baby I've delivered or cared for is in some way mine.'

  Serena leaned forward. 'That's an interesting thing to say.'

  'Every nurse feels that way.'

  'Were you in the ward when Valerie Glenn gave birth?' Serena asked.

  'I was in the hospital that night, but I didn't assist.'

  'But you were there?'

  'I was there. So what?'

  'Was that before or after Marcus dumped you?'

  Regan's mouth made an angry slash. 'Before.'

  'So was it hard for you to watch him and Valerie with their new child?' Serena asked. 'Did you know right then that he was going to give you up?'

  'You don't know anything, Ms Dial. The baby didn't make any difference to Marcus.'

  'Then why did he dump you?'

  'Because a divorce would be too ugly. And expensive.'

  'You hate Valerie Glenn, don't you?'

  'She's exactly the kind of blonde rich bitch I despise. So what?'

  'She convinced Marcus to drop you by the side of the highway like a bag of trash. That must have stung.'

  Regan pointed a finger at the doorway. 'We're done talking.'

  'You didn't tell me if you had a key to the Glenn house,' Serena said.

  Regan stood up. 'OK. I did. But not anymore.'

  'Where is it?'

  'In a landfill. I didn't need it after Marcus and I split up. Now I'd like you to leave.'

  Regan turned her back and stalked out of the library, and Serena followed. In the foyer, she yanked open the front door, and as Serena went past her, Regan grabbed her shoulder. 'Instead of interrogating me, you ought to be looking at the people who were inside the house that night, Ms Dial.'

  'Meaning what?'

  'Meaning you never asked me how I met Marcus. Aren't you curious?'

  Serena nodded. 'How?'

  'He came to me last year about that girl. The teenager in the trailer near Sago. Migdalia Vega.'

  'What about her?'

  'Marcus wanted me to help her. Off the books. He didn't want anyone to know.'

  'Know what?' Serena asked.

  'She was pregnant,' Regan told her. Then she pushed Serena out and slammed the door.

  Serena sat in her Mustang in Regan Conrad's driveway. She pressed her cell phone to her ear to hear Jonny's voice through the static. The signal came and went unevenly this far north of the city. He sounded distant.

  'Pregnant?' Stride said.

  'That's what Regan says.'

  'So what happened to Micki's baby?' he asked.

  'I don't know. I think we should find out.'

  'I'll talk to her,' Stride said. He added, 'Are you coming back here tonight?'

  Serena hesitated. 'I thought I'd stay at our place.' 'Oh.' it's a two-hour drive at night,' she told him. 'And the deer are running.'

  'I know. You're right, that's a good idea.' if you really want me to come back there, I will.'

  'No, stay at home,' he said. 'I'll see you tomorrow.'

  The silence told her that he had hung up.

  She thought about calling him back, but she wasn't going to do that. It was easier to be alone. She turned on the Mustang. The radio station played a ballad by Trisha Yearwood. It was something sad, something about loss, with Trisha's voice so smooth that you didn't realize you wanted to cry. She turned it off, because she couldn't deal with the song, and she didn't want it going over and over in her head all night.

  As Serena turned around and headed out of the long driveway, she noticed Regan Conrad staring at her from the bay window, with her hands planted fiercely on her hips. She also noticed that one of the two cars that had been parked in front of Regan's garage was gone. The Hummer was still there, but the old Escort had vanished.

  Someone had been in the house. While Duffy begged for mercy, someone had used the music as cover to get away.

  * * *

  Chapter Fifteen

  Nick Garaldo studied the silhouette of the ruined school across the open stretch of dirt and grass. He reached into the side pocket of his backpack and fitted a hands-free voice recorder over his ear. He tapped the switch and spoke softly.

  'I'm outside the Buckthorn School. I'm preparing to make my assault.'

  Nick emerged from the protection of the tall weeds lining the creek basin and picked his way through a minefield of dirty glass. He dug into his pocket for a handful of red pistachios. One by one, he pried apart the shells and popped the nuts into his mouth. As he chewed them, he sprinkled the shells on the ground. Pistachios were his weakness - he ate three bags a week - and his calling card, too. On every assault in the urban caves, he left a trail of salty red shells behind him. The Duluth Armory. The steam tunnels underneath the University of Minnesota. The abandoned mental hospital in Cambridge. The silos of a shuttered flour mill in the western prairies. He had invaded them all and signed his name with pistachios. It was his little joke for the police and the security firms that tried to catch him.

  When he had scouted the old Buckthorn School over the summer, Nick wasn't concerned about access. The ruins were wide open for anyone who was brave or foolish enough to explore inside. But not now. He assumed that someone had been killed or raped at the site, and the liability had finally forced the township to shut up the building against marauders and post No Trespassing signs. The popular teen sport of tossing bricks through the glass of the old school was over.

  The windows were now boarded up, nail
ed shut with sturdy plywood. Chains and locks looped through the door handles. It wasn't going to be easy to get inside, but for Nick, that was part of the challenge.

  He switched on his flashlight. The beam of light speared the bright eyes of a raccoon, which lumbered away into the field. He crunched through brick and rubble into the open lower level that had served as the plant for the school's utilities. Most of the foam ceiling tiles had fallen and decayed, and those that remained were water-stained and furry with mold. Electrical conduits dangled from the ceiling.

  'They can lock it up, but they can't keep the kids out entirely,' he recited into his voice recorder. 'You've got cans of Budweiser, Big Mac boxes, and used condoms. God, who would be crazy enough to have sex in this cesspool?' Nick wrinkled his nose. 'There's a nasty smell, too. I think it's coming from upstairs.'

  He did a reconnaissance of the stairwell leading up to the main level of the school but, like the windows, the concrete stairwell had now been sealed. He made a complete circle, navigating around fallen stonework and pipes. He never noticed the black box cemented to the stairwell or the red light that flashed once as he crossed through an electronic beam.

  Nick retreated to the field behind the school and made his way up the grassy slope at the northwest corner so that he was on the same level as the main floor of the school. He ate more red pistachios and tossed the shells. He followed the wall of the school, stepping over a rusted radiator that lay on its side like a lazy pig. A row of sixteen windows cut through the brick wall. He could reach up and touch them with his hand but, like all the others, the windows were sealed. He turned the next corner, stirring a nest of blackbirds that startled him as they screeched and flew away in a huff of wings and feathers.

  From where he was, he was now visible to traffic on Township Road but, so far, he hadn't seen a single car. He pointed a flashlight beam toward the high end of the wall, where five sets of windows stretched in a row to the front of the school. The plywood on two of the windows was loose, thanks to rain dripping from the roof and rotting the wood. The windows were frosted and square, large enough to allow him to squeeze through, but they were set at least twenty feet above the ground.

  Nick continued to the front of the school, where a large sinkhole marked a section of the building that had burned down. He hauled himself up on the jagged edge of a low concrete wall. Minding his balance, he grabbed the edge of the roof and pulled himself up far enough to swing his leg on to the tar surface. He completed the climb and found himself on the roof of one of the lower wings of the building, abutting the brick wall where the plywood hung loose from the window.

  He ripped off the plywood so easily that he almost fell. Half of the frosted panels on the window had long since been broken in. He leaned through the open space and examined the interior with his flashlight. The beam illuminated steel braces and the backdrop of what had once been a basketball frame. He was breaking into the school auditorium.

  'Here we go,' Nick said.

  He removed a coil of rope from his backpack and secured it to a steel pipe on the exterior wall of the auditorium, then threw the rest of the rope through the window where it dropped to the floor below. Hanging on to the rope with gloved hands, he pushed himself through the gap, bracing his legs against the inside wall. Inch by inch, he worked his way down the wall until his feet splashed into a puddle of cold water at the floor. He let go.

  'I'm inside the ruins,' he said.

  With the windows covered over, the interior of the school was darker than the night outside. He listened to the dripping of water and felt it spatter on his face. Somewhere in the great space, he heard a familiar squeal. Rats. He couldn't see them, but he knew they were there, scrabbling through the stagnant water.

  Then there was the smell.

  Now that he was inside, it was ferocious, like rotting meat in the hot sun, so strong and nauseating that he had to pinch his nose shut with his fingers. He wanted to gag, and even when he breathed open- mouthed, the stench rose up anyway through his nasal passages.

  'Something's dead in here,' Nick said.

  He waved the beam of his flashlight ahead of him. The floor was a mess of ventilation pipes, wire netting, and steel I-frames. The interior walls had gaping, jagged holes where bricks had caved in like missing teeth. He took fragile steps toward a doorway on the far side of the auditorium. Dark shapes scurried in and out of the puddles and hid inside the pipes as he came closer. He saw red eyes in the tunnel of light.

  The doorway led to a narrow hall, where the line of dark, boarded- up windows stretched along the wall. Glass littered the floor. He shivered from the cold and dampness. The smell, as he moved down the hallway, got even worse. So did the gathering of rats.

  Nick stopped.

  It was impossible to move silently through the debris, and for a moment he was certain he had heard the clatter of someone else's footsteps on the far side of the school. He waited to see if the noise would recur, but a minute passed, and it didn't. He told himself he was letting the place get the best of his imagination. He was alone. No one else would dare to be inside.

  When two more minutes of silence passed, he kept going.

  He reached a doorway leading to a smaller room, where a broken wall of cinder blocks rose to the ceiling like a honeycomb. His flashlight shone on a row of concrete beams. Green algae bloomed on the floor. In this room, the smell soared, feeding rancid decay into the air. He covered the whole lower half of his face with his gloved hand, but he couldn't extinguish the stink. The rats were bolder here, running back and forth in front of him. Urgent. Excited. Hungry.

  Four feet away, where the light made an arc on the floor, he saw them.

  Six bare feet.

  Nick lifted the flashlight and then dropped it and shouted. The flashlight fell and broke, bathing the room in darkness, but it couldn't erase the awful image from his brain. Three women, naked, were tied to old-fashioned school chairs. Their skin was bloodless and white, where they still had skin. Most of it had been eaten away, exposing muscle, organs, and bone. Rats scampered on the desks and in their laps and across their shoulders and breasts. 'FUCK FUCK FUCK!'

  Nick backed up and staggered like a blind man, hands outstretched, colliding with the concrete pillars as he hunted for an escape. His feet tripped on debris, and he fell, cutting his hands and arms on sharp metal. His skin grew slippery with his own blood. He pushed himself up and felt along the wall until it ended, and he spilled into another hallway, tunneling through a house of horrors.

  'Help!'

  He reached out with his spread fingers, and his hand found the bat-shaped remnants of broken glass in one of the windows. He hammered his bloody palm on the plywood nailed to the outer wall, but the stiff wood refused to yield to his panicked blows. He wailed for someone to hear him in the lonely land outside.

  'Help! Oh my God, help me!'

  Behind him, out of the darkness, a human hand clapped on his shoulder. Nick screamed and spun. A flashlight dazzled his eyes. He saw the shadow of someone tall and large looming over him like a bear, and he thought for an instant he'd been rescued.

  'Oh, thank God,' Nick cried.

  His relief was short-lived. A fist as hard and strong as a brick hit his face and snapped his head against the peaks of glass. The light in his eyes went black. Nick tasted pistachios again and realized his mouth was filled with bile. His knees buckled, but as he fell, a powerful forearm locked around his neck, choking him and jerking him off the ground.

  His chest roared, bellowing for air.

  His legs kicked and flailed.

  As he struggled, the cold and the stench slowly disappeared and left him in a vacuum of perfect silence. He floated away from the pain and, eventually, he floated so far that he felt nothing at all. He was somewhere else entirely, listening to water drip like the ticking of seconds on a clock. He was in a cave that he had all to himself. He was exploring.

  * * *

  PART TWO

  FRAGILE SOULS />
  * * *

  Chapter Sixteen

  On Sunday morning, the third day after Callie Glenn disappeared, frustration began to seep into the police war room in downtown Grand Rapids. Stride had seen it before. The first forty-eight hours were an adrenaline rush of urgency and determination. The phones rang incessantly. Emails flew back and forth among agencies throughout the state. Leads overwhelmed the system the way a sudden downpour overflows the sewer drains. No one complained because every contact in those precious early hours was an opportunity to break the case open.

  Find a baby girl. Bring her home.

  By Sunday, however, the lack of progress began to suck oxygen out of the investigation. Everyone knew that time was an enemy, and the enemy was winning. Two hours after a kidnapping, you can draw a small circle on a map and estimate the maximum area in which a missing person is likely to be found. You can set up road blocks. Canvass the region. Ten hours later, the diameter of the circle grows by hundreds of miles, bulging past the resources of the police to enclose and investigate it. Two days later, the universe of hiding places is essentially limitless.

  Stride hoped that Callie Glenn was still alive somewhere within northern Minnesota, but the reality was that she could be anywhere by now.

  He pored over hundreds of contact reports, hunting for a needle in a haystack. The tiny office on the third floor of the county headquarters was knee-deep in paper and littered with empty coffee cups and food wrappers. He knew that the dimensions of the search forced them to rely on a simple philosophy: do the right things, and hope they got lucky. If they were going to find Callie, someone had to remember the girl's face. Someone had to see her and make the call, and the police - wherever they were - had to make the right follow- through. He could manage the process, but Stride and the small team inside the Sheriff's Department couldn't have eyes and ears everywhere.

  After an hour, he pushed the papers aside and got up and wiped the whiteboard hung on the opposite wall. His instinct was to go back to what really happened on Thursday night. Figure out why and how Callie disappeared. With a black marker, he drew a line down the center of the board and then wrote OUTSIDE on one half of the board and INSIDE on the other half.