Nothing Stays Buried

by P. J. Tracy

  But by God, all of those eyewitnesses had been right, and he lowered himself farther down into the ditch, praying to God he and Gino would miss this particular train.

  FIFTY-TWO

  Grace had never heard anything like it—the angry scream of wind was deafening, even in Walt’s subterranean stone cellar, and loud crashes that sounded like exploding bombs seemed endless. The power had gone out ten minutes ago, and now they were all huddled together in a tiny, windowless room lit by a single flashlight. Annie gasped and covered her mouth when a loud, unearthly groan sent a shower of mortar crumbling down the wall.

  Buried alive, Grace suddenly thought, then tried to push the evil from her mind. She’d faced a myriad of terrors in her lifetime, but this was of an entirely different magnitude. Walt had been right—her gun was useless here and now. All any of them could do was cower in this tiny space and pray the house above them didn’t vaporize in a vortex of wind.

  Her grip tightened on Charlie, who was quaking against her leg. She wanted to soothe him, tell him it was going to be all right, but she just didn’t know at this point, and she never lied, not even to her dog. Besides, any words she spoke now would be swallowed up by nature’s roar.

  She felt the baby kick and placed a defending arm across her belly, horrified as she imagined the precious life growing inside being drowned in her stress hormones. Since she was helpless to do anything else, she started humming a lullaby. The baby would hear her.

  At some point—minutes later, an hour later?—Grace became distantly aware that the world had grown quiet again and everybody around her was beginning to stir.

  “Is it over, Walt?” she heard Harley ask.

  “Things like this don’t last too long, though it seems like a lifetime when you live through them. I’d say so, but let’s wait a few minutes before we go back upstairs.”

  Grace felt the press of her friends circling around her, then Annie’s plump arm around her shoulder. “Everything okay, sugar?”

  “Everything is fine. We’re all still here, aren’t we?”

  Eventually, they all followed Walt up the worn wooden cellar stairs to the main level of the house. Annie couldn’t stop shaking, because she had lived through tornadoes before down in Mississippi, and when you were cellared up and heard god-awful crashes like the ones they’d heard, you never knew what you were going to find when you finally opened up the cellar door.

  She breathed a great sigh of relief when Walt finally pushed open the door, revealing an entirely intact house. They crept through the dark living room like a human train, hands on the shoulders of the person in front of them, as Walt led them through the unfamiliar territory of his house.

  He trained his flashlight on the front porch that no longer existed. In its place was an enormous tree trunk. Rainwater dripped off the leaves and onto the living room floor, and mosquitoes were buzzing all around, eager to feast on bare flesh.

  “That’s what all the ruckus was about,” he said quietly, swatting his arm. “Knew I should have felled that oak last summer, when it was starting to hollow out.” He folded his arms across his chest. “I need to go out to the barn and check on the animals. Why don’t you all go check on your rig, make sure it weathered the storm. We’ll go out the back door, hopefully there isn’t a goddamned oak tree there we’ll have to climb over.”

  He showed Harley, Roadrunner, and Annie the way, but held Grace back as she and Charlie were about to follow. “Want you to know, my wife, Mary, and I lived through something as bad as this a few decades ago. Sheltered in the very same storm cellar and rode it out, just like we all did today. She was about six months pregnant with Marla. Mary told me she knew the baby was scared, so she hummed to her the entire time, trying to comfort her. That baby girl turned out to be a gem, and I’ve often wondered if that storm didn’t have something to do with that.”

  Grace looked at him curiously. “You heard me humming?”

  “I hear all kinds of things.” He looked down and busied his hands adjusting the straps on his overalls. “You’ve got yourself some good people.”

  “I do.”

  “I’m glad, you deserve it.” He looked up at the quickly lightening sky and pointed. “Sun comes out fast after something like this. It’s going to steam up like a sauna with all the moisture in the air.”

  “I can already feel it.”

  “Keep your eyes on the sky, there’s a rainbow coming, mark my words. Ironic, isn’t it? Go on, now, catch up with your friends and get to your business and I’ll go check on the barn and the herd.”

  He watched Grace MacBride and her fine dog walk away, then took his own path out toward the barn, assessing the storm damage along the way. The yard was littered with downed trees and limbs, and part of his new paddock fence had been swept away. The old barn was still straight and true, just missing a few pieces of siding here and there. He’d lived through storms like this before, and he considered himself lucky, only losing some trees and a front porch this time. Some other folks may have lost everything, including their lives.

  You could plant new trees and rebuild a porch or a house. Life was what mattered, and it was a damn shame that the Monkeewrench folks, for all they’d given him and all they’d been through down here, couldn’t bring Marla back.

  He paused at the tractor door of the barn in time to see the rainbow he’d predicted, arching over his cornfield. He’d seen hundreds of them during his lifetime—they were all a sight to behold, but they weren’t anything special, just light and water particles—but he let it put a little hope in his heart, foolish as it was.

  FIFTY-THREE

  Deputy Vince Cavuto had been pissed as hell when his partner, Karl, had suddenly and inexplicably dragged him from the shelter of Walt’s cabin just as the storm finally hit with a vengeance.

  “What the fuck, Karl!?”

  “No time, get down!”

  By then, Karl had pulled him through the woods to a low spot and shoved him facedown into a muddy hollow. Vince’s fists had been ready for a fight and his mouth was rifling off all kinds of expletives, but then the tornado sucked the life out of the world just above, and Vince willingly breathed in mud while he prayed for his life as hell on earth grazed over him, just barely.

  Looking at the cabin now, he understood—the damn thing was nothing but a flattened pile of rubble. If Karl hadn’t had the good sense to get out, they would both probably be dead.

  “Son of a bitch, Karl,” he breathed. “You saved our asses.”

  “We got lucky.” He looked around at the fallen trees and pieces of buildings scattered around the campground. A big swath of the woods had been completely stripped of trees. “God, this is as bad as I’ve ever seen it. It looks like the tornado cleared a path straight toward Walt’s farm.”

  “Go do a welfare check. I’ll stay here and preserve the scene. Or what’s left of it. Besides, who knows? This scumbag might come back for his guns.”

  “Eyes wide open, Vince.”

  “You, too. He could be anywhere.”

  Karl started jogging through the woods toward Walt’s, but his progress was hampered by the ugly, destructive mess the tornado had left in its wake. The path they’d taken down here before the storm was now littered with debris of all kinds, from toppled trees to sharp, nasty-looking pieces of corrugated sheet metal that had probably been ripped off somebody’s outbuilding roof. He even stumbled across a car tire and a muddy stuffed animal, which wrenched at his heart. That stuffed animal had an owner somewhere, and what had happened to them?

  He cleared another fallen tree, this time a mature maple, then stopped dead when he landed in a small river of watery mud sliding down from a high point on Walt’s property. The muck was like quicksand, creating a suction that almost pulled his boots off.

  “Son of a bitch!” he shouted to himself, then backed out of the quicksand and circled around the ma
ple, heading for higher ground.

  When he’d made it halfway up a small hill, he heard a strange sound, a low, loud sound, then watched in horror as a liquefied sheet of mud poured down the hill toward him. If he’d been a second too late jumping backward, he would have been buried alive in a mudslide.

  His shoulder unit crackled and he heard Vince’s voice. “You okay, Karl? I heard you shouting. Over.”

  “I’m fine, but there’s a mudslide out here, a big washout, and it’s . . .” Karl felt the earth go soft around his feet, then give way, and he fell and started sliding downhill with the mud and water and sodden clumps of dirt mixed with loosened rocks. He clawed at the moving ground, trying to find purchase, and finally latched onto something semisquishy, but solid beneath. Maybe a rotted tree root.

  As liquid soil sluiced around him in its relentless pursuit downhill, he finally saw what he was hanging on to. It was a human leg, and it sure as hell didn’t belong to somebody who’d just been killed in the tornado. He recoiled and scrambled backward as he watched a badly decomposed man slide down the hill.

  “Karl? Karl!” Vince was barking into his shoulder unit, but he didn’t answer, because the horror show didn’t end with the dead man. His sense of time and place halted abruptly the moment he’d seen the second body slide down the hill, and then the third. Their limbs flopped and tangled on their descent to the bottom of the incline, giving the lurid appearance of reanimated corpses struggling against the current of mud.

  When he felt a hand on his shoulder, sheer panic vaulted him upward and out of the muck, because he was certain some bloody swamp zombie had come to claim him. But when he turned around, it was only Vince.

  “Karl, come on, get out of this shit. . . . Oh, Jesus. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.” Vince’s hand went limp on his shoulder, then dropped away when he saw what Karl had been seeing for a long time. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” he repeated as they both watched tiny human bones tumble down to mingle with the adult dead who still had some flesh.

  “It’s a goddamned graveyard, Vince. A goddamned graveyard. The storm flushed them out.”

  FIFTY-FOUR

  Magozzi and Gino were finally standing upright in the ditch that had saved their lives, drenched, covered in mud, and dumbfounded as they looked at the decimated forest on the other side of the road. It looked like Godzilla had blazed a trail through the old oaks and pines, tossing them aside like toothpicks to make room for the rest of the debris he’d collected along the way. Magozzi saw lots of metal, a couple of cars, pieces of houses.

  “Jesus.” Gino let out a shaky breath. “Jesus.” He looked up at the sky—the sun was starting to peek out, as if nothing had happened. “There’s a fucking rainbow, Leo.”

  But Magozzi wasn’t listening, he was frantically punching the speed dial to Grace’s phone. He held his breath as her phone rang once, twice, three times, four—and then nearly collapsed back into the muddy ditch when she answered. “Grace, are you okay?”

  “Magozzi, where are you?”

  “I’m standing in a ditch with Gino and I think we’re close to Walt’s farm. Are you okay?”

  “We’re all okay. Listen, before the storm hit, Walt told us one of the sheriff’s deputies down here found a broken-down, abandoned vehicle that matches your description. They think he might still be down here.”

  Magozzi looked up the hill they’d never crested, still seeing the red-and-blue lights pulsing. The rainbow was bizarrely arching over the flattened forest like it was frowning down on the devastation below. “Thanks for the warning. We have to go, but . . .”

  “Be safe, Magozzi. Be safe, both of you.”

  Magozzi hung up. “Gino, they found his truck down here.”

  Gino narrowed his eyes. “Huh. I want to be excited about that, but the truth is, he could have dumped it and gotten a ride or stolen another vehicle. . . .”

  “It was broken down.”

  “Or he could be on foot.”

  “Exactly. Let’s go.”

  The squad was parked behind an uprooted tree, which looked like it had just missed the car by inches. As they jogged up, they saw a deputy getting out. “Minneapolis PD,” Gino announced as they approached. “Are you all right, Officer?”

  The man’s head jerked back in surprise. “Detectives Magozzi and Rolseth?”

  Magozzi was finally close enough to see the star on his chest. “Sheriff Emmet.”

  He shook their hands and looked at their muddy, wet suits sympathetically. “Sorry you got down here just in time to ride out the storm in a ditch. Glad you’re okay.”

  “We appreciate it, and we know you’ve got a lot on your plate with this storm, but Monkeewrench told us about the abandoned truck. Tell us what we can do to help.”

  Sheriff Emmet puffed out a frustrated breath. “I’d just assigned a search grid for a manhunt before the storm hit, but half of those men are already dealing with emergency response. I just called in support from other counties, but they’re digging out themselves. We don’t even know the half of what we’re dealing with yet, but initial reports are bad. Resources are going to be scarce for a while.”

  “Whatever manpower you can spare, we’ll join them, just tell us what to cover,” Gino said.

  “You sure about that?”

  “Sure as anything. Tromping through woods in horseshit weather, chasing down homicidal maniacs—it’s nothing new to us.”

  The skin around the sheriff’s eyes crinkled. “Yeah?”

  “Hell, yeah. Except the last time we did this, we were on an Indian reservation in northern Minnesota in the middle of a blizzard, and all the bad guys had AK-47s.”

  “Now that’s a story I’d like to hear someday. Come on, jump in my car and I’ll show you a map of the search grid and where we’ve got some holes. I’ve got a spare shoulder unit I can give you, but I don’t have any spare body armor.”

  “No problem,” Gino said. “We’ve got that covered.”

  “I’m glad to hear that.” The sheriff excused himself while he took a phone call. “Deputy Cavuto. Are your radios on the fritz again?”

  While he listened for a few minutes, his posture tensed and Magozzi literally saw the color drain out of his face. “I’ve got to ask, Vince, is one of them Marla?” He closed his eyes while he listened to the answer, but Magozzi couldn’t tell if the sheriff was listening to good news or bad. “I’ll be there as soon as I can. Call BCA.”

  “What’s happening?” Magozzi asked after he’d hung up.

  The sheriff took a moment before he answered. He looked hollow and lost, like a man looking into a void. “The rains unearthed at least four dead bodies near Walt’s and washed them down a hill.”

  Little pieces started clicking together in Magozzi’s mind. Serial killers often buried multiple bodies in one location. And their serial in Minneapolis had a connection to Buttonwillow. Buttonwillow also had a missing woman. “Marla. She’s the missing woman Monkeewrench is trying to find.”

  “Yes. Marla Gustafson. Walt’s daughter.”

  “Is she there?”

  “My deputy wasn’t sure. He thought they looked like men, but there’s some decomposition. There are also some small skeletal remains. A child. He doesn’t know if there are more, but I sure as hell hope not.”

  Gino dragged his hands across his mouth and looked at Magozzi. “Sticking with the theory that our guy is a serial killer with a day job, then that could be his dumping ground for his cartel hits. It might even be where he started.”

  “You think this is connected to your serial?” the sheriff asked.

  “It’s looking like a good possibility. Sheriff, go do what you need to and we’ll get out in the field.”

  “I’ll get you a map and let my men know you’ll be out there in plain clothes. Right now they have orders to stop and question anybody who isn’t in uniform.”

&n
bsp; “We appreciate it. Just tell them not to shoot the guys in the muddy, wet suits.”

  FIFTY-FIVE

  Harley and Roadrunner were all over the Chariot, walking around it, climbing up to the roof, running their hands along the metal skin, smearing mud and water and leaves into a mucky collage. Grace didn’t have to do a tactile inspection—the dents the hailstones had left were obvious.

  “Is it bad, Harley?”

  “It isn’t good, but it’s mostly superficial damage, nothing major. How did the rest of Walt’s place fare?”

  “I don’t know yet. He’s down at the barn now. If everything is all right here, I think I’ll take a walk out there and see if he needs any help.”

  Harley brushed off his hands. “Roadrunner and I will take a walk with you.” He looked down at Charlie, who was sitting at Grace’s feet, his tongue lolling out against the burgeoning heat. “You need a leash, young man. Can’t have you bolting off into the woods when there’s a manhunt in progress.”

  Annie popped her head out the door. “I’ve got the generator back online, and just in time—dear Lord, it’s getting hot again.”

  “We’re all taking a walk down to the barn if you want to join us,” Harley needled her.

  “Well, you know how much I love tromping through mud in high heels and fraternizing with barnyard animals, but if you don’t mind, I’ll just stay here and get the computers back online.”

  —

  Walt was resetting his paddock fence posts and nailing boards when he saw Jacob slogging up the field road, looking like death warmed over. He stopped his work and watched him approach, a knot of dread forming in his gut. He’d known Jacob since he was a child, and he knew all his looks and all his tricks to hide his troubles. Something was very wrong.