Stone Maidens

by Lloyd Devereux Richards

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  The sun rose to the noisy cries of red-winged blackbirds aggressively defending their territory. The feisty birds flicked their wings amid a cacophony of cackles. It had rained hard the night before and steamy mist was rising from the ground everywhere, making it look like a battlefield on the day after.

  The front tires of the rental car spun in the muck. McFaron put it into park. He’d get stuck if he drove any farther into the muddy field. His new four-wheel-drive truck was on order, and he wouldn’t have it for at least another week. The farmer who’d wakened him at four thirty that morning had insisted he come immediately. An early riser for years, the sheriff had elected not to stir Christine, who had spent the night at his home in Crosshaven. She’d looked exhausted after the press conferences yesterday and all the back-and-forth faxes and calls between his office and hers in Chicago.

  McFaron usually enjoyed the peaceful quiet of morning, a quiet that today was broken by the pesky birds raising a commotion near a hedgerow less than a mile from where the Bronco still lay totaled. Something was upsetting them. He removed his knee-high boots from the back of the car, a staple of the sheriff’s equipment kit. His left arm was in a sling, the tendons in his shoulders badly strained from the accident. He followed the farmer’s footprints, as the man had said to. It was difficult keeping his balance, pulling each boot free, wincing each time he had to jerk his bad arm to keep from falling. He huffed from the workout. Peepers trilled from a manmade pond. As he passed by it, the chorus abruptly ceased, silenced by the sucking noises of the sheriff’s rubber boots.

  Where the hell is it? The sheriff scanned the perimeter of the field. The blackbirds were relentless, dive-bombing the massive hedgerow. They made up in spitefulness what they lacked in size, the sheriff thought. It surprised him the birds didn’t budge as he neared. His eyes followed one bird as it swooped down upon another, then rose, joined another, and another, until dozens were rising and falling in a mad boil high in the sky above the dense, sprawling bush. He trudged closer. A man suddenly appeared, as if waving at him. But he wasn’t moving.

  For a brief moment, McFaron tensed. Then he continued forward more slowly, stopping short of the first thorny tentacle a good ten feet from where the man’s body was entangled. It wasn’t a pretty sight. The man’s hand was hung in an upright position, hooked through the index finger by a vicious-looking thorn. In his gaping mouth, the man’s tongue was bloody with peck marks. Still, no matter how loudly the birds protested and jabbered, the man was immovable, quite dead, his eyelids gouged out.

  McFaron recognized the brown Woolrich shirt David Claremont had been wearing when the sheriff had placed him under arrest at Echo Lake. The man was no longer wanted by police. In fact, he’d helped save Maddy Heath and Christine. In the eyes of the public and the law, he had transformed overnight from psychopath to hero.

  Now, though, the hero looked like a freakish scarecrow. A blackbird hopped angrily across the dead man’s chest. Other birds swooped low over the sheriff’s head, raising a fuss as if he were the next menace to barb.

  It hurt to see Claremont’s body in such a tormented state. McFaron felt badly that he’d told the state police to resume their wider search of the area when daylight broke. As it turned, not such a good idea. It crossed his mind too that the troubled man must have panicked gripped by some darker inward traverse that only an identical twin could know. Like losing a part of himself maybe, even if the other was a deranged killer. The scene was too gruesome for McFaron to ponder any further.

  McFaron flashed a shot with his camera, sending the birds skyward. The farmer who’d found Claremont was right. It would take a chain saw to carve through the murderous thorns to extricate the body. And it was downright weird his being caught up in thorns just like his brother Donald Holmquist had been less than a mile from this spot.

  The unfolding events at Echo Lake State Park and the farm field north of Crosshaven had miraculously altered things back in Chicago. Prusik still needed to complete and file her report, but Thorne had canceled her administrative disciplinary hearing as well as the special trip to Washington he’d planned for Bruce Howard’s promotion. Thorne had even apologized to Prusik, who surprised herself by not asking more from him over the phone. She hadn’t felt the need to.

  McFaron drove her to the Crosshaven airport. They waited in the car by the small concrete terminal building. Prusik focused on an incoming dot that was growing larger in the sky. It was her plane, the last flight to Chicago that evening.

  They sat silently watching the plane drift in; its landing gear descended, and it touched down in a flourish of reversing engines.

  She hadn’t felt right since last night. She chalked it up to exhaustion. Closing her eyes and leaning her head against the headrest, she murmured, “Ever notice, Joe, how one way or another life catches up with you?”

  “Beg pardon?” McFaron pressed his hand over hers on the car seat and gave her a puzzled look.

  She quickly withdrew her hand. “I haven’t told you…I need to tell you…”

  “What’s wrong, Christine? What do you mean about life catching up with you?”

  She fumbled her hand into her purse, wrestled out the pill canisters, and held them to his face. “This is what I mean. Benzodiazepines for panic attacks. Beta-blockers to help slow me down enough to sleep.”

  “It’s understandable. This has been a very stressful case.”

  Prusik leaned her head back and tossed two down dry. “You don’t know the half of it, Joe.” Her voice sounded strangely deep.

  The sheriff looked at her questioningly. Beads of perspiration formed on her forehead. Her cheeks were blotchy red. “Are you OK, Christine?”

  She forced herself upright, feeling blanched and tired. “I want to show you.” She softened her gaze and, without looking, lifted up her blouse, exposing the long purple scar along her left side.

  McFaron looked from the scar to her face and back to the scar again. Its lower edge bore a dark scab, a recent flesh wound. He wondered whether it may have been caused from her fighting with Holmquist, but he didn’t ask.

  “You know I did graduate research in Papua New Guinea, right, Joe?”

  He nodded.

  “I don’t know what drove me to it. I don’t know what I was thinking, what got into my head. Christine’s big plan. Go off to a foreign land on her own and study deviant behaviors in remote highland villages. Discover whether or not there are any remaining survivors of a feared clan called the Ga-Bong Ga-Bong. They were cannibals, Joe. I wanted to study cannibals. I wanted to see if there was any hereditary component to their behavior, or if it was all cultural. I wanted to see if they were proof positive that psychopaths exist among primitive peoples.”

  She squirmed uncomfortably in her seat. “I was out by myself one afternoon. Miss Bukari, my key informant, watched me leave the small village.” As she spoke, the high-pitched operatic scream of a palm cockatoo traced through her head as if she were, back there again, her sight clouded by the interminable haze and her skin a greasy saline paste.

  “I knew the Ga-Bong clan was treacherous. But I went down that forest path alone anyway, knowing full well the danger. I was out of my league, Joe. Out of my mind when I think of it now. I had no business leaving on my own without village or government support.”

  McFaron nodded. “You do tend to do things that way.”

  “The point is, at the time I really knew nothing about aberrant psychology. I’d only read some academic treatises—my knowledge was all conceptual. I was fresh bait wrapped in sweat-drenched khakis. I was a marked woman.”

  “Why do you say that, Christine?”

  “I hadn’t a clue. I brought it on myself. There I am deep in the TransFly region, a week’s riverboat ride out of Port Moresby, thinking, I’m smart. I can handle this. What an interesting, original dissertation this will be. And now I pay the price.” She closed her eyes. “The bits and pieces, the flashbacks. The panic attacks
. Triggered anytime anywhere. This case. The similarities.”

  “What similarities? What happened?”

  She looked directly at Joe’s face. “I didn’t hear him coming. His feather mask, the lanyard around his neck, the stone hanging from it. I was slopping around on riverbank mud…” She hesitated. “His knife, he cut me…” She gently traced her fingertips over her blouse along the abdominal scar, then wiped away the building sweat on her brow with the back of her hand.

  “You don’t have to—”

  She held up her hand. “His mask came off sideways in the struggle, revealing a white-haired man, old as my father for chrissakes.” The sour smell of his breath, the charm stone dangling in her face—the memory ignited in her as if it were yesterday. It caught her off guard, but she pressed on.

  “I kneed him. Tumbled into the river. Thank God for that. The one thing I did right. The only reason I’m talking to you today is that man’s advanced age. It was the Ga-Bong father, not one of the notorious sons, who had tried to shove a stone in me.” Her words came out with growing conviction. “But I outswam him and the rest of his hateful world that day.”

  McFaron shook his head in disbelief. “This case must seem like some kind of weird unfinished business for you,” he said softly. “I’m so sorry, Christine.”

  “Part of the time it really did.” She gazed out the windshield. “No question about it.” Her face eased. The medication was taking hold. “I swam downstream for what seemed like hours. I have no idea how I made it with that wound. I came to a dock full of people wearing trousers and shirts, peacefully standing. They were waiting for the ferry. Everything seemed so damn normal, so uneventful.” She drifted in a daze.

  He massaged the back of her neck.

  “That feels nice.” She sighed. “Your hand on my neck, I mean.” Prusik looked directly into McFaron’s eyes. “I’m finished with the FBI, Joe. You’re the first to hear it. Finished.”

  McFaron bridged the transmission hump and cradled her in his arms. “Don’t decide today. Think on it. You’ve done a fantastic job, Christine.” He kissed the top of her forehead. “You went out on a limb, and you stuck it out until the end. I’m damn proud of you for it. Not to mention a whole troop of Brownies who have you to be thankful for.”

  Christine slumped back in her seat, her eyes suddenly blurring. Her stomach felt queasy. For a moment her gaze out the windshield caught on two twinkling stars. In a tired voice, she said, “I don’t know, Joe.”

  She stared up at the encroaching night sky. “Like two galaxies—always looking as if they’re going to collide, but they never do. In fact, they’re not even close. But millions of light-years apart, just like us, Joe.” She blinked away tears. “We may look like we’re touching, but we’re just as far apart—my limitations, my parents’ limitations.”

  “Look,” McFaron said, taking her hand. “I’ve spent the larger part of my life holding in my feelings. It’s led to nothing but sorrows. Face it. Things never happen the way you want. And you can’t save everyone. Sometimes it’s all you can do to save yourself. Being here with you, I think to myself, wouldn’t it be a shame if we didn’t have our chance to collide?”

  At that she looked up at him. McFaron said, “All I know is how good you make me feel. I don’t want to lose that.”

  Without saying another word she kissed him, and they held each other close until the sound of the prop wash of the nineteen-seater as it roared down the runway had become unintelligible, distant droning. The last flight for Chicago had gone.

  Christine looked up at McFaron and smiled weakly. “Looks like my report to Thorne will have to be a little late. Again.”

  “Looks like it will,” Joe said, kissing her earlobe. “But I’ll be happy to help you out any way that I can, Special Agent. Maybe we should get on that right now.” He stopped his nuzzling abruptly and pressed his palm against her forehead. “Christine? You’re burning up.”

  The special agent didn’t respond. Her face was flushed, and she’d broken out in a sudden sweat that dampened her hair and temples.

  “Christine?”

  She attempted to move, winced, and doubled over with pain.

  McFaron accelerated down the airport exit road and radioed ahead to the regional hospital twenty minutes away.

  Christine stirred. The repeating beep of a monitor overhead measured her vital signs. An intravenous line was taped to her right arm. Out her hospital window was a vast field of stubble corn. She pressed the remote device by the bed rail that alerted the nurse’s station.

  “So, Ms. Prusik, how do you feel this afternoon?”

  Christine attempted to sit upright.

  “No, no.” The nurse gently patted her patient’s hand. “You must lie still, or you’ll pull out your stitches. Let me get the doctor for you.” The young nurse had a dark complexion and long dark hair braided in a bun. Christine read the nurse’s name on her ID pin. Miss Rodriguez.

  She strained to read the labels on the hanging bags of fluid that fed into her arm: one was a fairly strong antibiotic, the other a steroid compound she was unfamiliar with. A thin man of a young age entered the room, probably a greenhorn resident fresh out of med school, she thought. His head was shaven as clean as his face. He was dressed in a green gown and green booties, a stethoscope casually yoked around his neck. He smiled down at her. “How’s my first-ever FBI agent patient feeling today?”

  “Please tell me you’re not a doctor?”

  “Well, I was the surgeon on call last night when Sheriff McFaron brought you in,” he said while scanning her chart. “So I guess that counts for being a doctor.”

  “Surgeon? Did my appendix burst?”

  The young man stopped looking at her chart and studied her for a moment. “Your appendix did not burst. You had an infection. Caused by this.” The doctor withdrew a vial from his gown pocket and handed it to her.

  Prusik instantly identified the dark stone figurine—it was the same sliver that had been poking between Holmquist’s teeth in the car. Her heart started to pound. “Where’d it come from?”

  The doctor leaned on the edge of her bed and lifted the sheet. “If you don’t mind, I need to see how you’re healing.” He pulled back a piece of sterile gauze, inspected, and mumbled some instructions to the nurse on redressing the wound. He checked the monitor recording her vitals.

  “I’m waiting, Doctor.”

  “I removed that stone object from a subcutaneous layer in your abdomen. You sustained a penetrating trauma, I’m not sure how exactly. Fortunately for you, it had not perforated your abdominal wall. Your infection would have been much worse if it had.”

  A wave of panic passed over her: Holmquist leaning across her side of the passenger seat, her shirt pulled up, exposing her abdomen, and his finger rubbing back and forth across her scar. He had slit open her scar then and inserted the stone while she lay unconscious after being tased.

  The monitor overhead beeped rapidly. The doctor ordered the administration of a sedative. Massaging the top of her hand, he said, “I understand you were attacked? My assumption is—”

  “Please, Doctor, hand me my cell phone. I need to call someone. It’s very important. Please.”

  She punched Dr. Katz’s speed-dial number and asked the doctor and nurse to leave her room until she completed the call.

  “He didn’t kill me. Didn’t shove it down my throat. Why not, Doctor?” She started right in as if the conversation in her head had been going on all this time with Dr. Katz.

  “Perhaps it’s something you said?” Katz replied. “You provoked him maybe? Caught him off guard the way you like to do, Christine?”

  She went back over her chaotic car ride with Holmquist. “I remember the charm stone jutting between his lips. He told me he’d been at the museum when I…when I tried to give a speech. I told him I did research in New Guinea.” She was fuzzy about everything that had happened that day. It all seemed a jumble to her now.

  “You see!” Katz s
aid. “You connected with his interest in these things.”

  “If I could see I wouldn’t have called you.”

  “Christine, you told me yourself how over the millennia the indigenous Papuan people had inserted these carved stone figurines into the dead out of respect for their ancestors. You said Holmquist had stolen these stones from the museum. He knew of that practice. He did this out of respect for you.”

  She brushed her hand over the surgical dressing. Somehow Holmquist had found her old scar. Prusik did know that charm stones were often placed in the abdominal cavities of the dead by their clansmen. In the warped mind of a psychopath who crushed girls’ necks and inserted stones forcefully in their busted-out airways, where was there any room for respect for the living? It didn’t add up.

  “Respect? That’s awfully far-fetched, Doctor. It’s not Holmquist’s profile.”

  “Aren’t you forgetting another significant factor that makes your circumstances especially unique?”

  She closed her eyes and let out a long sigh, comforted by Katz’s voice in spite of their unsettling conversation. “Of course, I realize David Claremont is part of this equation.”

  How exactly, she couldn’t fully comprehend, although Eisen had reported back yesterday, before she fell ill, how the museum security tapes from the spring and summer data banks captured a remarkable sequence. On three separate occasions—each time within twelve hours of a visit by Holmquist to the Oceania collection—David Claremont had passed the same camera points leading to the same exhibit of charm stones. From the videotapes at least, there was no proof of an actual reunion between Claremont and Holmquist. Had David “seen” the museum display? Or had his own fascination with collecting and carving stones brought him there on its own right? If the result of a vision, it would explain David’s sudden unexplained departures to Chicago. He was acting on a compulsion to find the missing part of himself, this other who also liked stones, but who did such abhorrent, unimaginable things with them.