The Burying Place

by Brian Freeman

  Warm liquid ran on her skin. She grimaced as pain radiated outward from its hot core at her middle. There was blood in her mouth where she had bitten her tongue. She smelled burnt powder hanging like a cloud in the room.

  She heard someone coming closer. Standing over her. As she writhed, the cold metal of the barrel sank into the skin of her forehead. The dead weight sat there, pressed against her skull, as the person holding the gun hesitated.

  Regan found herself laughing. Blood bubbled out between her lips. All she could think about was that damn song by Duffy, as if she could hear its beat thumping along with her heart, spilling blood on the floor. It occurred to her to beg for mercy, but that was pointless. It was too late for that. She didn't expect it, and she didn't get it.

  A flash of flame erupted again.

  At the speed of light, the brightness reached her eyes a millisecond before the shell detonated inside her brain. No mercy.

  * * *

  PART THREE

  SILENT SCREAM

  * * *

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Valerie opened her front door on Wednesday morning and found her sister Denise standing on the porch. She cringed, watching the stony expression on Denise's face that covered up wounds of betrayal and humiliation. Valerie would have felt better if Denise had screamed at her, but instead, her sister marched past her into the house without a word.

  'Where's Marcus?' she asked after Valerie closed the door.

  'In Duluth. He had surgery this morning.'

  Denise worked her jaw uncomfortably as if she had something caught in a tooth.

  'Do you want some coffee?' Valerie asked.

  'Yeah. Fine.'

  They walked silently down the white hallway. Valerie retrieved a heavy mug and filled it with coffee and pushed it across the kitchen island to Denise. She sat on a bar stool and waited, but her sister didn't sit down immediately. Valerie could see Denise's eyes comparing the granite countertops and stainless appliances to her own shoebox kitchen. It was the same routine every time Denise set foot inside their house. Valerie knew the bitter envy Denise felt over the money she had. She felt guilty with every withering look.

  'Look, Denise,' she began, but her sister held up a hand to stop her.

  'Don't say you're sorry. I don't want to hear that.'

  'Then what can I say?' Valerie asked.

  'Right now, don't say anything.'

  Denise stared down the vast, sloping backyard toward the lake. She pushed her hair back behind her ears and drank her coffee in silence. She wore no make-up. Valerie knew that Denise deliberately avoided looking feminine, and for years she'd assumed it was because of her job. Cops weren't girls. They had to be tough. Now she wondered if the real reason was to avoid comparisons with herself. To pretend that there was no competition between them.

  'You've been selfish your entire life,' Denise announced in a harsh, angry voice. 'Everything came easy to you. You've never cared what I had to go through. I worked my ass off to get a tenth of what you've got, and you never worked for a damn thing, did you?'

  Valerie said nothing to deny it or to protest. Denise believed it, and she deserved a chance to lay blame.

  'I always wondered if you gave a thought to me and my life,' Denise continued, turning back from the window. 'I guess now I know, don't I? If there's something you want, you take it, and to hell with everyone else. Do you even have a clue what it's like to raise four kids and be on call every hour of the night and day and wonder if you're going to scrape up enough money to make this month's mortgage payment?'

  'No. I don't know. You're right.'

  'Well, maybe once in a while you could try to put yourself in someone else's shoes. That would be nice. Do you think I don't know that Tom and I have drifted apart? I've watched it happening for years. But guess what, sometimes life just grinds the love out of you. It sucks, but that's the way it is. I may have a crappy marriage, but it's my marriage. Not yours. Or at least it was until Tom decided that he preferred a fantasy with you to real life with me.'

  'Don't blame Tom, please,' Valerie told her. 'This was my fault.'

  'Do you think I need you to defend my husband? I know Tom. He wants to be the strong shoulder. And here you come all beautiful and weepy and lonely, and gosh, one thing led to another. Right? Is that what you were going to explain to me? Well, don't bother. Tom had a choice, and he made the wrong one. It doesn’t matter whether either one of you intended it to happen.'

  'You won't let me tell you I'm sorry. You won't let me explain. I'm not sure what you want me to say.'

  'Oh, am I making this hard on you, Valerie?' Denise snapped. 'Isn't that thoughtless of me. I should be more concerned with how you feel.'

  Valerie didn't want to cry, because she didn't want her sister to believe it was another play for sympathy. But she cried anyway and wiped her eyes. 'I know you won't believe this, Denise, but I've always been jealous of you.'

  'Oh, right.'

  'It's true,' Valerie insisted. 'You've got these great kids. You're married to your high school sweetheart. You have this amazing job.'

  'Don't patronize me.'

  'I'm not. I just admire how strong you are. I'm not like that. I've been fragile my whole life, and here my sister is this cop, wife, and mother who can handle anything. Just once in my life, I'd like to have the courage to do the right thing and stand up for myself. To be strong like you.'

  Denise shook her head. Her eyes were tired and hard. 'How could you, Valerie? How could you sleep with my husband?'

  'It wasn't about sex,' Valerie told her. 'I don't care about sex. I never have. I just - I just needed to be close to someone. There's no explanation. There's no excuse. It may not matter to you that we never intended it to become physical, but we didn't.'

  'I don't care.'

  Valerie nodded and spoke softly. 'It didn't last long. A couple times, that's all. We both knew it was wrong. But you have to understand that Tom rescued me. I'm not sure I'd be alive right now without him. I was thinking of suicide again back then.'

  Denise slammed her mug down, making a loud crack of stone against stone. Coffee spilled on the granite countertop. 'You are such a narcissistic little bitch. What do you want me to say? I'm so happy my husband saved my sister's life by fucking her brains out? You want to know what I really think, Val? I wish you'd gotten the balls and done it right. Tom's not your husband. If you needed to be rescued, you should have found somebody else to do it, or you should have taken a bottle of pills and gotten it over with.'

  Valerie paled, and she looked away, not wanting her sister to see the body blow she had landed. She separated a few paper towels from the roll on the counter and wiped up the spilled coffee. As she did, Denise reached out and put her hands over Valerie's.

  'I'm sorry,' she said.

  'You don't have anything to apologize for,' Valerie replied. 'You're right. I was suffering, and I wound up hurting my own sister. I'm selfish, and I'm a coward.'

  'Don't start with the self-pity.'

  'What else do I have? The only thing I did right in my life was have Callie, and I couldn't even protect her.'

  Denise pulled away in frustration. 'This always happens. In the end, it's always about you. And I buy into it. It's been that way all our lives.'

  Valerie didn't know what to say. She rubbed the counter until it was dry, making sure the coffee didn't leave a stain.

  'I have to ask you something,' Denise told her. 'As a cop and as a wife. I have to know.'

  'What?'

  'Is Tom the father?'

  Valerie's eyes widened in shock.

  'Don't play games, Val,' Denise continued. 'I need to know. Is Callie Tom's baby?'

  'No.'

  'Are you sure?'

  'Of course I am.'

  'Tom's not sure,' Denise said. 'He told me so last night.'

  'He's not Callie's father.'

  'How do you know?'

  'I just know. I can see Marcus in her.'

 
'Did you have her tested?'

  'Of course not. I couldn't do that.'

  'So you're just guessing,' Denise said. 'I asked Tom. He said the two of you had sex not long before you got pregnant.'

  Valerie shook her head. 'Marcus and I had sex, too. He was the last one.'

  'That doesn’t make any difference.'

  'My husband is the father of my daughter,' Valerie insisted.

  'Do you believe that, or are you just trying to convince yourself?'

  'It's true.'

  'You tried for three years, and you didn't get pregnant. Then you started sleeping with Tom. Wake up, Valerie. Believe me, I know exactly how fertile Tom's swimmers are.'

  'Callie is Marcus's baby. I know it.'

  'What about Marcus? Does he know it?'

  Valerie's eyes narrowed. 'What do you mean?'

  'I mean, did Marcus know you were having an affair?'

  Valerie heard Marcus shouting at her from the landing. You're not exactly innocent, are you?

  'He didn't know,' she murmured.

  'Are you sure? Grand Rapids is a small town. It's hard to keep secrets. Obviously someone saw the two of you together. Blair Rowe found out, so why couldn't Marcus?'

  'There's no way he could have known,' Valerie repeated.

  Denise shook her head. 'You know what it means if Marcus knew about your affair, don't you? He may have suspected that Callie wasn't his child. Didn't you ever wonder why he was so cold with her? What would he have done if he realized the little girl who was screwing up his perfect life wasn't really his?'

  'I don't want to hear this.' Valerie put her hands over her ears, but Denise reached across the island and yanked her arms away.

  'You can't run away from this. It gives him a motive. Did he know?'

  In her head, Valerie heard Regan Conrad taunting her outside the church after midnight. I don't have to tell you why, do I? She thought about the hospital envelope, hidden unopened in her dresser upstairs. The envelope that Regan had given her.

  I can't believe you didn't know.

  'No,' Valerie told her sister. 'Marcus didn't know about the affair. He never had any reason to think Callie wasn't his. And she is. She's his daughter. He loves her.'

  * * *

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Maggie watched the contents of the photo disk that Stride had found in Nick Garaldo's apartment sprinkle in thumbnails across her computer monitor. She leaned closer and chewed on her lower lip. The photos were dark and difficult to distinguish. She clicked on one of the thumbnails and enlarged the image on her screen. The photo showed an industrial locale, with a concrete floor and dusty pipes suspended from a bare ceiling. When she clicked on the next image, she saw a pair of giant boilers caked over with rust in front of a windowless wall. As she scrolled through the photographs, she found more images from the same underground site.

  One thumbnail - but only one - showed a picture of a person. Maggie saw a short, wiry man wearing jeans, rubber boots, a navy neoprene jacket, and a black wool cap. When she compared the picture to the driver's license photo in her file, she recognized Nick Garaldo.

  'Where the hell are you, Nick?' she murmured.

  Guppo poked his head around the corner of the office. He stood under a hot air vent, which fluttered his comb-over like a runaway hose. 'We're getting some network interference out here,' he told her.

  Maggie twisted around in her chair. 'Oh?'

  'Yeah, we think it's your hair.'

  He chuckled, and Maggie growled at him. 'Don't poke the bear, Max. I'm not in the mood. Come check this out.'

  'Whatcha got?'

  He joined her behind the desk and squinted at the monitor. He breathed heavily, and his forehead was dewy with sweat.

  'Stride found this photo card in Nick Garaldo's apartment,' Maggie told him. 'It looks like this guy was inside some kind of factory.'

  'It doesn’t look operational. The place is a mess.' He worked her mouse with a beefy hand. 'That looks like some kind of coal burner. He must be in a sub-basement somewhere.'

  'But why?'

  Guppo straightened up with a groan. 'Maybe this guy is one of those nutjobs who break into old buildings.'

  Maggie probed her memory. 'Didn't we have an intruder report at the old Armory a couple of months ago?'

  Guppo nodded. 'Yeah, somebody triggered the interior alarms. We sent a car over there, but we didn't find anyone.'

  'Pull the report for me, will you?'

  'Sure.'

  Guppo waddled out of the office. Maggie set the images into a slide show and leaned dangerously far back in her chair with her boots propped on Stride's desk. After the first few pictures, she drifted off, staring through the window at the mottled gray sky. She became aware of a hollow, guilty pit in her stomach as she thought about her and Stride together. It was one thing to wish for something for ten years of your life and something else altogether to have it happen when you least expected it.

  She didn't think he'd meant what he said. In the end, he'd want to go back to the way things were. When he woke up - in a day, a week, or a month - he would curse himself for letting his relationship with Serena slip through his fingers. The only question was whether he would be alone in bed when it happened, or whether Maggie would be with him. If that was how it was going to end, she didn't want to be there.

  She also knew that her friendship with Serena was doomed. Stride would tell Serena the truth. She didn't know if Serena would forgive Stride, but she would never forgive her. That was fair. Their relationship had always been a high-wire act. Behind every barb, Serena had sent Maggie a message loud and clear. Hands off - he's with me, not you. And every time Maggie talked about the past, she sent a reply. I knew him first.

  Sooner or later, one of them was bound to fall.

  'You OK?'

  She looked up. Guppo was back.

  'Yeah, I'm fine,' she replied. 'Did you get the report on the Armory?'

  'I did.'

  'Let me have it.'

  He placed it in her hands, and she flipped through the handful of pages. He lingered, waiting for her to say something, but she waved her hand toward the door without another word. He left and closed the door behind him. She knew he was annoyed. She wasn't normally gruff with Guppo, and he didn't deserve it, but she didn't care. Let him tell the others that she was on the rag.

  The officers who responded to the call at the Duluth Armory had taken interior photos near the downstairs access doors, and it was obvious to Maggie that the photos matched the images on Nick Garaldo's disk. If that wasn't sufficient confirmation, she also spotted a notation in the police report that they had found red pistachio shells scattered throughout the Armory rooms. She remembered the mason jar of pistachios in Garaldo's apartment. He had been inside the old building.

  She had no idea why Garaldo would invade the abandoned Armory - which contained nothing worth stealing, only detritus from years of disuse - but she knew that urban explorers were like Scuba divers or mountain climbers. They did it because it was there. She also thought it was a safe guess that Garaldo had been engaged in another break-in when he disappeared on Saturday. But where? Urban ruins were unstable and dangerous, and if something had happened to Garaldo, it might be years before they found him. If ever.

  Maggie studied the photos that looped across her monitor and spotted a single image of a different structure, outside, under the sunshine. She broke out of the slide show and scrolled down to the corresponding thumbnail, which was the last picture on the card. When she enlarged it, she saw an old-fashioned school building set in the middle of an overgrown grassy field. The windows sported gaping, jagged holes that resembled bats. The walls were eroded and crumbling. A sinkhole sat where part of the school had collapsed and been hauled away, leaving only the foundation.

  Seeing it, Maggie recognized the locale. It was the old Buckthorn School. The ruins had been a headache for the police and the township for years. Teenagers were always getting inside and getting
hurt, and just a few weeks ago, the city had scraped together the budget money to have the place boarded up and secured. Since then, she didn't think there had been any calls to the site.

  Looking at the photo, she realized that the school ruins would be an irresistible lure for someone like Nick Garaldo.

  Maggie pulled out her city directory and found the number for the administrator for the township of Buckthorn. She dialed, and Matt Clayton answered on the first ring. He had a big, exuberant voice.

  'Matt, it's Maggie Bei in the Duluth Police,' she said. 'Remember me?'

  'Hey, sure, Sergeant. Good to talk to you. What's up?'

  'It's that damned school again,' Maggie told him.

  Clayton groaned. 'Oh, shit, what now? We had that place locked up like Fort Knox.'

  'I don't know what's going on. Maybe nothing. We haven't had any reports at our office, but I was wondering if you'd heard anything from neighbors on the farms up there. Complaints, nuisances, stuff that might not get to us.'

  'Nothing,' Clayton replied. 'I thought we were finally done with that place. We had a contractor seal off the building, and we hired a local security guy to come by every couple of days and keep an eye on it. You know, walk around, tug on the locks, that kind of thing. He hasn't reported anything unusual.'

  'What's his name?'

  'Uh, hang on, let me check. Here we go. It's Nieman. Jim Nieman. You want his number?'

  Maggie grabbed a pen. 'Yeah, and could you get hold of him and give him my number, too? I'd like him to go over and do a look-see on the place inside and out. Tell him to give me a call and let me know what he finds.'

  'No problem. What's going on?'

  'There's a guy missing,' Maggie told him. 'A twenty-something kid named Nick Garaldo. Nobody's seen him since Saturday. I think he may be one of these urban explorers who like to break into abandoned properties just so they can say they've been there.'