Death Notice (40 page)

“Very good,” Nick said. “But where could he have found that much sawdust lying around?”

Kat remembered examining the squirrel in Troy Gunzelman’s locker. She had pushed a finger through the hole in the
squirrel’s stomach, finding sawdust. But not just any sawdust. It had smelled of pine. The same wood used to build George Winnick’s coffin.

She mentally listed everything she knew about the crimes. The homemade coffins, built of plain pine planks. The vehicle Caleb Fisher heard on Squall Lane. The seclusion and space the killer needed to enact such heinous deeds. And now the sawdust.

It all connected, leading Kat to only one possible location.

She gasped. “Henry’s at the sawmill.”

Henry couldn’t summon more than the one word he had previously uttered. His brain produced a torrent of them inside his head, rising and falling in half-completed thoughts. But a disconnect remained between brain and mouth, causing him to repeat that one word over and over.

“No,” he moaned as his captor contemplated his weakened state. “No.”

Martin slipped the surgical mask over his face again and walked away. Henry rolled his head to follow him, but he was lost in the darkness.

The whole place was dark, a bubble of blackness surrounding him. Henry tried to get an idea of where he could be. He sensed walls and a ceiling, but they were far away. The scent of pine and damp wood tickled his nostrils. Somewhere, he heard a pipe drip.

Then footsteps. Martin. Coming toward him again.

This time he brought light with him. It was a kerosene lantern, which he placed on the table next to Henry.

The glow from the lantern allowed Henry to finally see his surroundings. He was in a barn of some sort. An old one, vast and abandoned. Exposed beams hovered high above. The distant walls were paneled with uneven wooden planks.

Martin planted a hand on Henry’s skull, holding his head in place. Henry felt a length of rope slide across his forehead, just below the hairline. It tightened, trapping his head in place, forcing his eyes to face upward.

“Keep still,” Martin said, leaning over him. “This is going to hurt.”

On the edge of his vision, Henry saw a needle. It was about two inches in length and looped with thick, black thread. When Martin moved the needle to his other hand, it passed before Henry’s eyes, catching the lantern glow and reflecting it briefly. Soon it was gone, and all he saw were Martin’s knuckles moving just beneath his nose.

The needle pierced Henry’s bottom lip. Then pain. Worse than he expected.

It started at the needle’s entry point, concentrated there. But when Martin pushed the entire needle through the flesh of Henry’s lip, the pain spread, pulsing outward in a circle of agony.

On its way out, the needle’s eye snagged on the exit wound, pulling Henry’s lip away from his teeth—a hook refusing to let go of a fish.

The pain forced him to speak again.

“No.”

Martin didn’t stop. He drove the needle directly into Henry’s upper lip, where it repeated the same steps of push, pain, pulse, pull.

Beads of blood sprouted on Henry’s lips. Some clung to the thread. Others rolled down his chin, tickling their way onto his neck. Still more moved back toward his lips, slipping between them and into his mouth. Henry tasted the blood, bitter on his tongue.

He spoke again. “Martin.”

At last, a new word. The pain ignited Henry’s mind. More words formed in his head and managed to escape his lips.

“Why?” he asked. “Tell me why.”

Needle in hand, Martin stretched his arm, tightening the thread inside both lips. It created a slithery feeling, like a maggot burrowing just beneath the surface of Henry’s skin.

“Why?” he persisted.

“Does it really matter, Henry?” Martin’s voice was distracted as he concentrated on the task at hand. “What’s important now is that you stop talking.”

Henry didn’t. Talking meant his lips were still moving. Which made them harder to pin down. Which meant they wouldn’t be sewn shut. Which meant Martin couldn’t continue with whatever else he had planned. If that’s what it took to stop him, then Henry was prepared to talk all day.

“Tell me.”

Martin didn’t wait for his lips to stop moving before shoving the needle into them. It was the bottom lip again. Push, pain, pulse, pull.

“It’s a long story,” he said.

He moved to the upper lip. When he yanked the thread taut, it hurt worse than the first time he’d done it. Instead of one slithering probe inside him, Henry felt two, tightening in unison.

“I want to know.”

“I suspect,” Martin said, “that you already do.”

He continued to sew Henry’s mouth, creating new points of pain in his lips, all of them connected by the sliding thread. He also continued to talk, practically chatting as Henry squirmed beneath his needle and thread.

“I know you’ve been in my sister’s bedroom. So I know you saw the picture of my father. That’s why Deana was drawn to you, you know. Not because you’re actually worthy of her. Because of Dad and how much you looked like him, scars and all. The resemblance was—”

He stabbed Henry’s bottom lip.

“Uncanny. That’s the word for it. I noticed it, of course. It was like seeing his ghost. And you know what they say about ghosts, right? They have to be put to rest.”

Martin stabbed his upper lip.

“But I couldn’t just do it outright. That would have been disastrous. I needed practice first.”

Bottom lip.

“That’s why George was the first. So tall, you two. Both about the same height. I noticed it when I was covering his brother-in-law’s funeral. That’s when it dawned on me that if I practiced on people who had the same qualities you did, I’d be an expert at preservation when your time came.”

Upper lip.

“Troy was the second. He was younger and, let’s face it, Henry, far better looking. But he was the only person in Perry Hollow who had your build. All those muscles. All that strength.”

Bottom lip.

“Then there was Amber Lefferts. Such pale skin. Exactly the same shade as yours. Only I never got the chance to see what it was like to preserve it. A pity, really. I hope you don’t turn out badly because of my lack of practice in that regard.”

Upper lip.

By that point, half of Henry’s mouth had been sewn shut. When he spoke, it was out of the unobstructed side of his mouth. The words came slowly, thick and slurred.

“You . . . don’t . . . need . . . to . . . kill . . . me.”

Martin shook his head, clucking in disapproval. “But I do. It’s not over until I do that. It’s not over until I preserve you, just like I preserved Daddy.”

He resumed his sewing, plunging the needle once more into Henry’s bottom lip.

“But you were a hard man to get to. Always alone. Always locked in your office. That’s why I had to send you those faxes. It was the only way to flush you out. It’s why I faxed you the Campbell boy’s name tonight. When Deana called to tell me you were leaving town, I had to act fast. I needed a decoy. And I knew that when you saw his name, you wouldn’t leave. You’d try to save him, just like the others. And you did.”

Martin finished his task with alarming speed.

Bottom lip.

Upper lip.

Push, pain, pulse, pull.

Finished, he tied off the thread and took the needle away.

Henry’s mouth was now entirely sewn shut. He screamed behind the unnatural seal, trying in vain to make his voice connect with the air outside of his mouth.

Martin ignored him as he walked away from the table. Henry felt his presence recede in the darkness. A moment later, he returned. Henry heard a small clunk on the table next to his head, followed by the light scraping sound of fabric being opened. It was a pouch of some sort, filled with something heavy.

“I’ve got my tools,” Martin said brightly. “It’s amazing what you can buy on the Internet. Formaldehyde. Chloroform. Aneurysm hooks. It’s all there for the taking.”

Henry was mute and terrified, his eyes widening as Martin leaned over him again. He held up something sharp and metallic, giving Henry a good look.

It was a scalpel, glinting in the lantern light.

“I have a feeling,” Martin said, “that you know what’s going to come next.”

It should have taken Kat fifteen minutes to get from the hospital to Perry Mill. She made it in six.

Swerving onto the gravel road that led to the mill, she cut the car’s headlights. When she was within a hundred yards of the mill’s sole remaining structure, she shut off the engine and jumped out of the car.

Rising against Lake Squall, the mill towered over her, blotting out the stars in the night sky. The way it stood next to the water made Kat think of a graveyard. The mill was the tombstone. The lake was the grave. With a nervous shudder, she realized it could already be marking the spot of Henry’s death. And in a few minutes, maybe her own.

She’d find out soon enough.

She sprinted toward the mill, a flashlight her guide. When she reached it, she saw Martin Swan’s pickup truck parked next to a wide-open rectangle on the southern side of the building.

Kat reached for her Glock. She held the gun and flashlight together in her outstretched arms, one on top of the other. Before being swallowed into the mill’s darkness, she paused.

In the car, she had tried to radio Carl, with no luck. She suspected he was with the others at Martin’s house, searching the empty premises. She knew she needed backup. It was downright irresponsible to go into that mill alone. But she also knew Henry was inside, and the prospect of finding him alive dimmed with each passing second. Waiting to reach her deputy would take time she didn’t have to spare.

She had to risk it.

As she crept into the building, Kat’s nose was immediately filled with the smell of dust, decay, and pine. Everywhere, pine. Rising off the floor. Drifting down from above. Closing in at her sides.

This,
Kat thought,
is what it smelled like inside one of those homemade coffins
.

The thought disturbed her. So did the darkness, which had joined the pine scent in surrounding her.

Sweeping the flashlight back and forth, Kat saw she was in a warehouse of sorts. Stacks of pine planks dotted the room, forgotten relics of the mill’s heyday. Moving through the piles of rotting wood, she spotted a small door on the other side of the room. Chipped paint across the front designated it as
ACCOUNTING.

Kat reached the door in five long strides and burst inside.

It was an office. At least it had been long ago. A desk still sat in a corner, overtaken by rust. A filing cabinet lay overturned on the floor. A calendar hung on the wall, its mold-streaked pages forever insisting it was March 1990.

Kat spotted several large jars sitting on the dilapidated desk, each filled with coins. She pointed the flashlight into one of the jars. A copper glow reflected back at her.

Pennies. Hundreds of them.

She moved on, pushing out of the office and into a short hallway littered with feathers, used condoms, and rodent shit. Kat stepped over all of it as she peeked into the three rooms that lined the hall.

The first one was mostly bare, its floor containing the same detritus found in the hallway. The only object inside was a wood-handled hatchet. Its blade was sunk deep into the floor, the handle rising from it like a petrified sapling.

Kat kicked at the handle and the hatchet toppled onto its side, the blade digging up a chunk of the floor with it.

She turned her attention to the second room, aiming both the gun and the flashlight into its dark recesses. The light latched onto a pair of eyes, which reflected it back in an ominous glow. Seeing them, Kat gasped.

The noise startled the eyes’ owner, which in this case was a deer. Standing in the center of the room, it raised its antlered head and looked at her. When Kat took a step backward, the deer charged toward the door, an angry snort puffing from its snout.

Kat jumped out of the way, flipping into the next room as the buck burst into the hallway. It turned, hindquarters skidding into the wall, and clomped down the hall. Kat watched it leave, white tail bounding into the office she had just vacated.