“No.”
“No storm cellar door outside? No record of him paying for a storage locker somewhere?”
“No, and trust me, we’ve looked. The task force has gone through his financial records and every aspect of his life for the past thirty years…long before the killings started.”
Holly shook her head. “This isn’t right. I’m telling you, he wouldn’t live in a place where he couldn’t have access to all his trophies. There’s got to be a cellar or something.”
Frustrated, Whit’s voice rose in anger, too. “So you tell me where to look next.”
Holly turned on him, as angry as he’d been with her. “Down. You need to look down. He was more like the animals he hunted that he was like a man. You know what animals do when they’re scared? They go into a hole, under a log, inside a cave. When they’re in danger, they do not stay above ground.”
Whit’s skin crawled. He’d never thought of a man that way before, but it made sense.
Holly spun toward the boxes and began pushing them around.
“There’s nothing under here, right?”
“We moved all of them,” Whit said. “It’s just an old house and an old beat-up hardwood floor.” He pushed a half-dozen of them aside to prove his point. “See? Nothing.”
Holly shook her head. It didn’t make sense. She began walking across the room from one wall to the other and back again, then ran into the next room and measured the distance to see if there could have been a dead space between the walls, but the figures matched up.
Whit watched her pacing, and then she suddenly stopped and turned to look at him.
“How old do bones and body parts have to be for a cadaver dog to smell them?”
Whit blinked. Shit.
“I’m not sure.”
“Get a cadaver dog inside this house. He’ll find what you’re looking for. Because it’s got to be here.”
“That’s pretty far-fetched,” Whit said.
“You wanted my best guess. That’s it. I’m telling you that the man I remember wouldn’t have destroyed those trophies. He wouldn’t have packed them away in some storage locker, or tossed them in the Mississippi for fear that he’d get caught. They’re in here. I can feel it.”
“I’ll make some calls,” Whit said. “In the meantime, I’ll get you back to the hotel.”
“I want to be here,” Holly said. “When you bring the dog, I need to be here. My mother might be, too.”
Whit nodded. “I’ll let you know.”
A short while later he dropped her off and drove away. But the closer he got to the precinct, the more certain he was that she might have given them the answer after all.
Fifteen
T
hey moved Harold to a holding cell to await his arraignment. He was a pretty sight when they booked him into jail sporting two black eyes and his broken nose bandaged.
He also had a bandage around his head and a couple of stitches in his scalp, with a continuing headache that the doctors had promised would fade with time. The fact that his skull was still in one piece after being hit with a pipe wrench was a miracle in itself, and there was nothing wrong with him that a doctor within the penal system couldn’t handle. His days as a free man had just officially come to an end.
He accepted that he was there because of poor judgment. He should have made a run for it. He had no one to blame but himself, but there was one thing that kept bugging him. He was missing his hair. His ponytail was gone.
At first he’d thought they’d cut it off while tending to his head wound, but they’d told him it had already been gone when he’d been brought in. He still didn’t know what had happened to it, and no one he asked had an answer.
Inside the cell, he stretched out on his bunk, then grunted when his feet slid off the end to dangle in midair.
He was too fucking tall for the bed.
He had a court-appointed lawyer coming for a visit, but Harold considered that a waste of time. They had him dead to rights. He had tried to kill his daughter and, for all he knew,
had
killed her man. No one had mentioned the cowboy’s condition.
It wasn’t as if he could plead insanity. Stupidity was more like it. Disgusted with the situation he was in, he rolled over onto his side and pulled his knees up toward his chin. When he did, half his backside was hanging off the cot.
A miserable fix.
Holly leaned against the wall as she waited for the hotel elevator. It was unusually slow, but there was an obvious reason. From what she could tell, a convention of Mary Kay representatives had checked in. She’d never seen so many women in pink in her life.
While she’d been at the hospital with Bud, she’d learned that the hotel manager had packed up their stuff and moved them to a suite. It was luxurious compared to the room they’d been in—a room that had suited her just fine until Harold Mackey had invaded it.
By the time she got out on her floor, she felt drained. She felt filthy after being in Mackey’s house, and not because of the layer of dust. That was a house where evil abided, and the sooner he was locked up, the better for all concerned.
She locked herself in her new suite and flipped the safety catch, as well. No one was getting into this room without a battering ram. She tossed her purse on the sofa, draped her jacket over the back of a chair and kicked off her shoes, but her steps were dragging as she crawled up on her bed.
She stretched out, exhausted and frustrated and worried about Bud. She fingered her engagement ring, wondering how everything could have gone wrong so fast. Her eyes closed as she rolled over onto her side. She needed to call Bud’s uncle Delbert and give him an update on Bud’s condition, and she told herself that she would do that in a few minutes.
Delbert Walker had brought her to tears when she’d called him earlier to tell him what had happened, admitting that she felt guilty beyond words that it had happened because of her.
But the old man had been adamant, claiming Bud would be just fine and for her not to fuss. He told her that Bud had done exactly what he’d gone there to do, which was take care of her, and if she was all right, then Bud would agree that the rest of what happened had been worth it. He said that was what men did: take care of the women they loved.
Holly exhaled on a sigh. Bud’s face flashed before her eyes, and he was laughing. It was the last thing she remembered as sleep pulled her under.
A phone was ringing. Holly woke with a gasp and then reached for her cell phone, only to realize it was the room phone. She rolled over and reached for the receiver.
“Hello?”
“Miss Slade, Whit Carver. Did I wake you?”
“Yes, but it’s all right. What’s happening?”
“I found us a cadaver dog. We’re going back to Mackey’s house this morning. Still want to go?”
“Yes, yes, I’ll be ready.”
“I’ll be there in about twenty minutes.”
“I’ll be outside waiting,” Holly said, and flew out of bed.
With no time for a shower, she stripped out of the clothes she’d slept in, then washed her face and brushed her teeth. Style was the last thing on her mind when she dressed. She brushed her hair, swiped some lipstick across her lips and reached for her shoes. Seconds later she was out the door and on her way to the elevator. With only minutes to spare, she bought two coffees and a sack of doughnuts in the lobby coffee shop and headed for the door, eating her first doughnut as she went.
Five minutes later Whit Carver pulled up. She brushed the sugar off her fingers, then got in.
“Morning, Miss Slade.”
“Holly.”
He smiled. “Holly.”
“That’s better,” she said, and handed him a coffee and the doughnuts. “Help yourself. I’ve had all I want.”
Whit’s smile widened. “Thanks.” He set the coffee in the cup holder, dug out a doughnut and took a big bite before driving away.
“So how are you feeling about this?” Holly asked.
“What? You mean bringing in the dog?” He shrugged. “I’m all for anything that will give me answers. How do you feel about it?”
Holly leaned back against the seat, absently rubbing her engagement ring.
“To be truthful, I can’t put into words what I’ve been feeling. Ever since my dad died—and I mean Andrew, the man who raised me—I’ve felt like I lost myself. I found out who I really am, and I wish I hadn’t. Harold Mackey is an animal. I want him gone. I’ll do anything I can to make that happen. But I need to talk to him before I leave St. Louis. If there is a God, He will help me find out what Mackey did with my mother’s body.”
Whit nodded. “I’ll make that happen. And I hope you’re right about today. Once we’ve got enough evidence to convict Mackey as the Hunter, the entire city of St. Louis will be grateful to you for coming back and telling your story. And the families of all his victims will be able to see justice done.”
They were silent the rest of the way to Mackey’s house, but when they pulled into the driveway, Holly’s anticipation rose.
The handler and his dog were waiting on the porch. They turned as Whit and Holly came up the steps.
“Detective Carver, I presume. I’m Ray Birch, and this is T-Bone.”
The German shepherd heard his name and looked up. With his mouth open and his tongue hanging out, he looked as if he were smiling.
Whit nodded. “This is Holly Slade. It was her idea to bring in your dog, and we’re hoping it pays off. Miss Slade believes that her father wouldn’t get rid of his trophies, which in this case happen to be scalps from his victims. They’re twenty years old. I can’t vouch for what condition they’ll be in even if they’re in there. Can your dog work with that?”
The handler patted his dog. “If there’s anything here, T-Bone will find it.”
“Then let’s get started,” Whit said, and unlocked the door.
Holly stayed back, watching the handler and his dog sweep through the house.
Ray gave the command that set the dog to working, then he followed, urging the animal on every now and then with a pat or a command. They went through the living room, then the kitchen and utility room. The only thing the dog spotted was a dead mouse in a trap, but he didn’t alert on it. Holly thought it was amazing that a dog could be trained to find dead bodies, and differentiate between people and animals.
After the front part of the house, Ray and T-Bone headed down the hall. They went into Mackey’s bedroom, going through the closet and exploring every corner before they crossed the hall and went into the second bedroom, which contained nothing but boxes.
Within seconds of entering the room, T-Bone whined. Holly tensed. It was the first sound she’d heard him make. Was that a good sign?
The dog headed for the boxes, and began circling them and climbing up on them, then behind them, over and over.
“We’re getting a hit,” Ray said.
Whit frowned. “We’ve already been all through those boxes.”
Holly knew her instincts about her father were right. “Move the boxes,” she said. “We need to move all of them.”
The three of them began shoving and scooting the boxes to the other side of the room, and the more floor space that was revealed, the more T-Bone began to react. He scratched on the floor, as if he were trying to dig.
Ray pointed. “There’s something under the floor,” he said, then called the dog off the hunt, praising him for his work and giving him a treat as he fastened the dog’s leash to a doorknob to keep him out of the way.
Holly was down on her hands and knees, pounding the floor with her fist to see if it sounded hollow, looking for anything that would tell her she’d been right. But the ambient light inside the room was dim, and there was no bulb in the overhead fixture.
She ran to the window and tore down the old shade with her hands. It raised a cloud of dust as she flung it aside, but it also let a bright stream of light come pouring into the room. She turned to look down the length of the room to where the boxes had been stacked, and as the sunlight bathed the floor, she caught a glimpse of something shiny. She moved closer for a better look, then suddenly stopped and pointed.
“Come look! Look at this!”
Whit moved closer. At first it just looked like a nail that hadn’t been driven far enough into the hardwood flooring, and then it hit him. Hardwood flooring wasn’t nailed down. It was tongue and groove. There shouldn’t be nails in the floor.
Holly got a nail file out of her purse and ran it down the same groove, then frowned at what came up with the dust.
“This looks like putty,” she muttered, rubbing it between her fingers. She did it again. “There’s more. Here and here and here.”
Whit frowned.
“We stop now! I’m calling in the crime scene investigators.”
As he stepped out of the room to make the call, Holly got up off her knees and walked outside to the front porch, then sat down on the step. The sun was hot on the top of her head as she waited, but it felt good to be out of that place. At least out here she could breathe easy.
There was a huge knot in the pit of her stomach. Her heart kept fluttering, as if it had forgotten how to keep rhythm. She gazed across the street, eyeing the small frame houses, all of them about as dilapidated as this one, and wondered what went on behind their walls.
The door opened behind her. Whit came out and sat down.
“They’re on the way.”
She pinched the bridge of her nose to keep from crying.
Whit felt her pain. He couldn’t imagine what kind of hell she carried in her head, not to mention the courage it had taken to reveal it.
They sat without speaking as time passed, watching Ray Birch playing catch with his dog in the front yard.
Suddenly Whit pointed.
“Here they come.”
Holly stood up as he went to meet the crime scene team, then led the way through the house. They began to take pictures. She followed, watching when one of them began tapping on the spare room floor with a big crowbar.
“It sounds hollow here,” he said.
It was the same place T-Bone had hit on, and the place where she had spotted the new nail.
Someone began prying up a board. Then another and another, until it became obvious there was a large space beneath the floor.