South of Hell (Louis Kincaid Mysteries)

by P J Parrish

  His chest was on fire. He couldn’t pull in a good breath.

  Joe was standing over Brandt, her gun pointed at the ground but still held with a white-knuckled grip. Her eyes were pinned on the knife near Brandt’s fingers.

  “Are you cut?” she asked Louis without looking at him.

  “No.”

  She started to crumple.

  Louis’s eyes shot to the knife. It was covered in fresh blood.

  And he knew what Joe knew. The blood had to be Amy’s.

  Louis stepped to her and gently worked the .45 from her hand. The move seemed to sap her remaining strength, and her knees buckled. He caught her and pulled her close.

  “It’s all right,” he said.

  “I let him get her. I let him…”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  Louis wrapped an arm around her neck and held her. She fell against him with a sob. And he realized that until this moment, he’d never seen her cry.

  He pulled her tighter to his chest, his hand cradling the back of her head, holding her until her body stopped its terrible shaking.

  It was a long time before she was able to pull back and look at him.

  “We need to find her,” Joe said, her voice cracking.

  He knew she was right, but where should they start? Would it be quicker to drive into town and get the deputies back out here or to head off by themselves?

  Louis looked down at Brandt.

  His clothes were filthy, his jaw whiskered with a week’s growth. Louis guessed he’d been hiding in this bunker since he attacked Shockey. But where had Brandt been just before he appeared at the top of the hill?

  Louis eased away from Joe and knelt next to Brandt. His clothes were soaked from the waist down. And his shoes were caked with mud.

  “Joe, you take the Bronco and go get help,” he said, rising to his feet. “I’m going to look for Amy.”

  “No, I’m going with you,” Joe said.

  The Bronco bounced across the cornfields, getting mired in mud a few times but heading steadily north toward Lethe Creek. Finally, Louis was forced to bring the truck to a stop at the edge of the tree break. The copse of trees and brush was too thick to get through.

  Joe pushed out her door quickly and started away from the truck. “Which way?” she asked.

  “Straight through the trees and up the hill,” he said.

  She broke into a run and pushed through the brush. Louis quickened his step to keep up with her. He wanted to be next to her when they crested the hill in front of the cemetery. Because if he was right about how Brandt had gotten wet, Amy would be lying in or near the stream on the other side.

  Joe stopped at the top of the hill.

  “Oh, my God, Louis…”

  He drew up next to her. At first, nothing registered. Then he saw the splash of pink bobbing in the water.

  Amy was in the water on her back. Her pink parka was ballooned with air, keeping her shoulders afloat.

  Joe raced across the cemetery and down the slope. Louis followed, his stomach knotting as other details registered.

  Chalky white face, blue lips, hair streaming out behind her in the fast-moving brown water. He realized in that instant that if her body hadn’t somehow gotten wedged in the rocks, it would have been swept downstream.

  Joe was wading across the water. The stitches in Louis’s chest forced him to move slowly down the muddy slope behind her, but his eyes were riveted on Amy’s body.

  A final thought hit him like a hard punch. Amy wasn’t all cut up as Shockey had been. At least Joe would be spared that.

  With a splash, Joe dropped to her knees in the water and gathered Amy into her arms.

  “Oh, my God! She’s ice cold.”

  Louis reached her side and tried to pull Joe to her feet. “Joe, calm down. Let’s get her out of the water,” he said.

  Joe grabbed Amy under the arms. Louis took her feet. He could see now the rip in her parka and the stain of blood that surrounded it.

  They set her on the grass. He dropped down next to her, his fingers going first to her neck. Even under the collar of her jacket, her skin felt like frozen meat. He moved his fingers up and down, searching for the slightest pulse.

  “Amy!” Joe said. “Can you hear me?”

  “Joe, calm down.”

  Joe looked up at him as if he’d slapped her, then turned her attention back to Amy. Something changed in her, as if she’d suddenly found a way to shut down her emotions and unlock fourteen years of training. She roughly pushed Amy’s hair off her face and bent over her, putting her cheek against Amy’s mouth.

  “Louis, she’s breathing.”

  He finally found a feeble pulse. She was alive, but barely. And he knew they not only had to get her to a hospital, they had to get her warm—now.

  He started to rip off his jacket, then realized it was not heavy enough to do Amy any good.

  Joe saw him and frantically pulled at the zipper of her leather jacket. Louis eased the sodden parka off Amy. He was trying to remember his academy training, all the stuff about hypothermia, but nothing was coming.

  He reached down to pick Amy up. Joe caught his arm.

  “Your stitches. You can’t carry her,” she said.

  “I’ll do it. Just help me get her up.”

  He slipped his hands under her and, with a soft groan, pushed clumsily to his feet. Amy seemed to weigh twice as much as she did that day he first carried her from the house.

  Joe draped her leather jacket over Amy’s chest, then looked up at Louis.

  “You okay?” she asked.

  “I’m fine. Just help me stay steady crossing the water.”

  Joe wrapped an arm around his waist, and together they trudged back across the stream.

  Breathless, Louis stopped in the cemetery, trying to cool the burning in his lungs with deep pulls of air. Through the branches of the black trees beyond, he could see the bright red paint of Joe’s Bronco.

  He felt Joe’s arm around his waist. With a grimace, he hefted Amy up against his chest and started south.

  Chapter Forty-three

  He was alone now. It should have been Joe who stayed. She was the police officer and the shooter of a wanted man. It was her duty as a cop to stay on the scene and help secure it.

  But he knew Joe wasn’t thinking like a cop right now. So he had let her go.

  He looked at his watch. She should be halfway to Howell by now with Amy. He remembered seeing a road sign for a hospital there, and he had rattled off directions to Joe before she pulled away.

  He hoped she remembered them. And he hoped she kept herself sane enough on the drive to handle the rolling country roads. He’d never transported a dying person before, but he could imagine that every mile must feel like a hundred. What he could not imagine was hearing the person next to you gasp her last breath and being able to do nothing about it but keep driving.

  Louis pushed through the gate and walked toward the cornfields behind the house. His jacket was still damp, leaving his skin cold and clammy underneath. He wondered where that deputy was with the coffee Travis Horne had promised two hours ago. It would taste damn good about now.

  He stopped walking and looked down at Brandt’s body.

  They hadn’t touched him. Except to make sure he was dead. The broken knife still lay near his hand. The blood was dry now, coating the blade with a red film. Brandt’s denim jacket was peppered with bullet holes. Five of them in his right side. The sixth had ripped through his neck.

  Louis looked down at his own khaki jacket. There was a speckling of dark red drops—Brandt’s spatter probably—and a smudge of pink that belonged to Amy. He wondered if he had Brandt’s blood on his face and he didn’t really care, but he found himself wiping his cheeks anyway.

  It wasn’t something he liked to admit to himself because it seemed heartless and almost inhuman, but he was glad the bastard was dead. He was glad it had been Joe who had killed him.

  Louis shivered and looked arou
nd.

  The door to the storm shelter—or whatever it was—hung open on one rusty hinge. He stared at it for a moment, then looked up at the hill Brandt had leaped from.

  You can’t go in there.

  Why did Brandt care who went in there? He had abducted Amy and dragged her through the cornfields, all the way to the creek. Most likely running from the deputies who had been there that morning. The Gremlin was probably hidden out there somewhere, too. An easy escape for him and Amy, at least for a few miles until the deputies saw them.

  So why had he come back? What had he left that he was willing to die for?

  Louis withdrew the flashlight from his back pocket and clicked it on. He stepped inside the bunker. The stone steps crumbled some under his weight, almost sending him to the dirt. He dropped the flashlight as he tried to catch himself. It was a cheap one, and the cap popped off, spilling the batteries and killing the light.

  He inhaled slowly.

  There was a small square of sunlight near the door, but still, he felt buried in a darkness that seemed to have no end. He didn’t like being underground. It brought back all the terrifying moments of the time he had spent locked in the tunnels of an abandoned asylum while he listened to a madman murder a young woman.

  He picked up the flashlight and slid the batteries back in. The weak beam offered only a thin gray wash over the stone walls. The rafters were bowed under the press of the soil.

  He turned the light toward the back and started walking.

  Food wrappers, an empty bag of potato chips, a whiskey bottle. Nothing of value to Brandt or anyone else.

  He stopped at a large pile of dirt topped with a broken rafter. Louis turned the light up to the ceiling. The roots of the weeds above had penetrated the dirt, sending down spindly, pale tendrils above his head.

  The ceiling had caved in back here. But it didn’t look recent. The dirt and splintered wood looked dry, and the roots were withered.

  He started to turn away, but something glinted in the beam of the flashlight. He knelt next to the sloping dirt and moved the beam of the light slowly across edge of the dirt pile where it leveled into the ground.

  Again, a glint. He brushed gently at the soil.

  It was a small, narrow bone, the color of the ivory keys on the piano in the parlor.

  He gently dusted away more dirt. Another bone emerged. Seconds later, he’d unearthed a third and a fourth. Then, finally, as his fingers grew numb, he stopped.

  The small bones were embedded in the ground, still perfectly positioned to form a human hand. But it was the plain gold wedding band at the base of the fourth finger that held his eyes.

  Louis pushed slowly to his feet.

  This is what Owen Brandt had come back for.

  Jean.

  Chapter Forty-four

  Louis followed Detective Bloom back into the root cellar. Bloom was shining a powerful battery-operated lantern over the stone walls as they ventured toward the back. Louis felt something brush his neck and jumped, but it was just a withered corn cob hanging from the rafter.

  When the bright beam of the lantern came to rest on the bones, they stood out against the black dirt as stark as an X-ray.

  Louis’s gaze traveled over the sagging wood rafters and the heap of dirt in the corner where the ceiling of the cellar had collapsed. If these bones did belong to Jean, what had her final minutes on earth been like? She had been brutally stabbed inside the kitchen, yet she had managed to crawl all the way out here, a good fifty yards from the house, before she died of her wounds.

  And then to be buried and forgotten.

  No, not forgotten, never forgotten. Just lost.

  Did you have any other hiding places, Amy?

  Momma has a hiding place.

  “You think this is Jean Brandt?” Bloom asked.

  Louis stuffed his cold hands into his pockets. “Who else could it be?” he asked.

  “Hell, I don’t know,” Bloom said. “It could be another slave woman, for all I know. Or another old girlfriend of Brandt’s we don’t know he killed. This farm seems to get a hold on people in a way that makes them crazy. And dead or alive, they can’t seem to find their way off it.”

  Bloom started back toward the door. Louis stayed for a moment, staring at the wedding ring, then turned and followed Bloom back into the dull wash of white sunlight.

  The farm buzzed with cops, deputies from the county and troopers from the state. Blue cruisers and Livingston County patrol cars were wedged haphazardly on the grass. Two television vans were parked beyond the gate, reporters and cameramen craning to see over the cop who was blocking their access onto the property.

  “Someone cover this asshole up with a tarp,” Bloom hollered.

  He was talking about Brandt, who still lay a few feet from the root-cellar door. Dead leaves had gathered along the length of his body.

  Louis hurried to catch up with Bloom. He caught him near the barn as Bloom muttered something into his radio. Louis heard Amy’s name and a crackle of static, but then Bloom veered away to finish the conversation in private. It irritated Louis, but he remained where he was, not sure he’d get any information if he pissed Bloom off.

  Bloom came back to him. “The girl is okay,” he said. “The docs said they lost her once when her heart stopped, but they brought her back.”

  Louis blew out a breath in relief.

  “The wound itself wasn’t too deep,” Bloom said. “Her parka cushioned the thrust of the blade, and the cold water stifled the blood flow. But they also said if you and Frye had been ten minutes later, she would have died from exposure.”

  Louis looked out to the fields. He had almost given up looking for her.

  He turned to Bloom. “Look, if you don’t need me any more right now, I’d like to catch a ride into Howell,” he said. “I’ll bring Joe back to do her statement and answer questions.”

  “Yeah, you do that,” Bloom said. “But let me tell you something first.”

  Louis waited, figuring Bloom was about to chew on his ass for allowing Joe to leave the scene and for letting Amy run off and probably a dozen other things.

  “You remember a man named Mark Steele?” Bloom asked.

  “Yeah,” Louis said. “State police investigator. Stepped into a case I was working on up north in ’84.”

  Bloom nodded. “He’s still with the MSP, and he’s a major with the professional standards section. You know what that is?”

  “Internal affairs.”

  Bloom nodded again. “His job is to maintain the integrity of the entire agency in any way he can. I had a talk with him about you yesterday. You curious about what he said?”

  “I think I know what he said.”

  “Well, then know this, too,” Bloom said. “He keeps files on people like you. And yours has a big red flag on it.”

  “I haven’t broken any laws. Not now and not then.”

  “You’re still trouble,” Bloom said. “You’re like some poisonous gas that sneaks in, leaves a few people dead, and disappears again.”

  “What are you trying to tell me, Detective?”

  “I’m telling you this,” Bloom said. “If you’ve had even a passing thought of trying to come back here and get a PI license or wiggle your ass back into a uniform, think again. That ain’t going to happen for you in Michigan. Ever.”

  Bloom didn’t give him time to respond. He walked away, heading back toward the root cellar to direct the excavation of the bones.

  Louis turned up the collar of his jacket and wandered toward the road.

  If you’ve had even a passing thought…

  He hadn’t. There had been a few lonesome nights since Joe left last January, but they weren’t enough to compel him to pull up the roots he had worked so hard to put into the Florida sand. He had connections there now—to a blind ex-cop who needed his friendship and a boy perched precariously on the cusp of manhood who needed to be caught if he fell.

  Under the old oak tree, he stopped walking an
d looked out over the barren land.

  This wasn’t his place in the world, and he knew that. Despite the fact that he’d spent most of his childhood here and went to school here. Despite the fact he had once dreamed of wearing a badge here. Despite the fact that the woman he loved now lived here. Despite the fact that he now had kin here.

  “You’re Kincaid, right?”

  Louis turned. A state trooper was standing there. He had Amy’s backpack in his hand.

  “We found this out by an old tractor in the fields. My boss said you might want it back. We figured it belongs to the girl.”

  “Thanks.” Louis took the bag and looked toward the TV vans and the clot of reporters.

  The trooper started toward his cruiser.

  “Hey,” Louis called out. “Could you give me a lift?”

  “Sure.”

  Inside the cruiser, Louis sat staring out the windshield at the old farmhouse. The fog had burned off, and the sun was now high in the sky, outlining the house’s unforgiving angles in sharp relief.

  “Which way you heading?” the trooper asked.

  “Just get me out of here,” Louis said.

  Louis and Joe spent the next morning in Adrian filling out statements and giving taped testimony. Joe called Mike to tell him she had been involved in a fatal shooting that was probably going to get publicity. She promised him she would still be back in Echo Bay for the hit-and-run trial on Monday morning. She didn’t tell him she was bringing a sixteen-year-old girl home with her.

  Shockey had made through it another night. Louis had learned he was awake and talking, anxious to know what was going on with the case. They hadn’t had time yet to go by and update him. Their first stop after Adrian was Saint Joseph Hospital in Howell to pick up Amy.

  Louis stood at the door and watched as Joe helped her settle into the wheelchair. Amy was clutching the mud-stained backpack and the tattered stuffed rabbit. Louis thought she seemed a little subdued. Maybe it was just the painkillers, but he guessed it also had something to do with the fact that Joe had told her Owen Brandt was dead.

  They hadn’t told her about Jean yet.