Fifth Grave Past the Light (24 page)

He released her slowly; then he spoke in a voice loud enough for the table of women to hear. “If life were fair, Cookie Kowalski, you would be mine.”

Her jaw dropped open, and the knowing grin he offered her accompanied by a conspiratorial wink had her shoulders shaking with mirth.

Uncle Bob couldn’t take any more. He stepped in between them. “But life isn’t fair,” he said. “You of all people should know that.” He took Cookie’s arm and led her away. Hopefully to a chair because I wasn’t sure how much longer she could stand.

Reyes watched them leave, then raised his brows at me. “I think I ruffled your uncle’s feathers.”

“That was pretty amazing,” I said to him when he reached past me for his towel. “Thank you.”

He paused just long enough to put his mouth to my ear and say, “Thank me tonight.” Then, before the women at the table next to us realized he was coming on to me, he walked back into the kitchen.

Gemma turned on me like a wildcat protecting her young. “Charley, what is this about?”

Uh-oh. Fess-up time. “It’s about the fact that I thought Officer Pierce was a serial killer.”

He stared at me aghast. Gemma stared at me aghast. Officer Rodriguez stared at me aghast. The only one who wasn’t staring at me aghast was Uncle Bob. He was too busy trying to recover the ground he’d lost with Cookie. He’d have a hard time, considering the Adonis with whom she’d just sucked face, but I had faith in him.

“Ubie,” I said, interrupting, “I could really use some backup here.”

“You honestly think I killed someone?” Officer Pierce asked, astounded. “Why would you even —? I mean, I can’t even comprehend —”

“I get that a lot. But look.” I pointed to my face and then to his. “See?”

“My scars? You think that means I killed someone?”

“That’s what I thought initially, yes.” I could’ve sworn on a stack of Bibles the pixie under my bed was pointing me to him. His scars were exactly like my scratches. And then with Nicolette predicting the blond hair and the number eight tattoo…

“Charley,” Gemma said, her tone edged with warning, “he had an incident when he was nine.”

“Yeah, it’s called – Wait, nine?” I ogled him. “You got those scars when you were nine?”

“Yes, he saw a young girl fall to her death, but by the time the police got to them, she was gone.”

Could it have been the same girl? “Did she scratch you?”

He frowned at me. “How did you know that?”

“How old was she? This girl?”

“I don’t know. It was dark and she was dirty. She had on a nightgown.”

“If you had to guess.”

“Six. Maybe seven. I’m just not sure.”

“You tried to save her,” I said as realization dawned.

His gaze dropped to the floor. “Yeah, well, I failed.”

I saw an empty table and herded our group toward it. Quickly because someone else was making a run at it as well. I beat them and pulled out a chair. “Sit,” I said to Officer Pierce. “And explain.”

“I was in the Boy Scouts,” Wyatt explained, “staying the summer with my grandparents in Elida, and my troop had gone on a camping trip to Billy the Kid Springs.”

“I’ve never heard of it,” I said, pulling out my phone to look it up.

“Don’t bother. I’ve looked on every map out there, trying to find it. I’m not sure it was an official name or anything. That’s just what everyone from the area called it. It was this little cove out in the middle of nowhere with a pond inside. I remember the water glowed a lime green color.”

“Lime green? Is it near Roswell? They have a lot of alien stuff down there.”

“Yes, it is, but I don’t think aliens had anything to do with the water there. Anyway, we were out there camping and I woke up in the middle of the night. I had to take a leak, so I put on my shoes and walked over to the top of the cliff above the cove. The water was glowing. It was amazing. I sat there and watched it, looked at the stars, the full moon, all that nature crap. Then I thought I heard something. Like scraping and whimpering. I called out but no one answered. So I lay on my stomach and looked into the cove from up top. There was a girl.”

“She was in the cove?” I asked.

“No, she was trying to climb up the side of the cliff, kind of around the cove part.” He bowed his head in thought. “Looking back, I think she may have seen our campfires, been trying to get to them. Anyway, I reached down to give her a hand. I kept telling her to take it, but she didn’t even know I was there until my hand touched her. She jumped, looked up at me, her eyes huge. She was terrified.”

I felt a wave of anguish surge through him. Even after all these years, it affected him deeply.

“I kept trying to get her to take my hand, but she wouldn’t at first. I thought she was going to climb back down, but then she must’ve realized I wasn’t a threat to her. She put her hand in mine and I pulled. But she slipped and swung to the side.” He took a sip of water before continuing.

Gemma put a hand on his arm. “This is what you couldn’t talk about with me,” she said. “This part.”

He nodded. “She was hanging over the cove and pulling me with her. She tried to get her footing again, but then she cried out. She was falling or being pulled. I couldn’t be sure. I lunged for her and she put out her other arm to me, but she missed.” He bit down. “I missed. Her fingernails scraped across my face and she fell.”

“I’m sorry, Wyatt,” Gemma said.

But he had succumbed to his memories. He stared into the water as they resurfaced and took hold. “There was no sound,” he said. “The cliff wasn’t that high. Maybe twenty or so feet. I should have heard her fall.” He withdrew inside himself and I realized this wasn’t just a painful memory but a traumatic one. “I realized someone else was there. In the dark. I heard breaths echoing in the cove and I was scared to death it was a mountain lion or something.”

“What did you do?” I asked, knowing full well it wasn’t a mountain lion or something. But he knew it, too. Even then, he could tell the difference.

“I ran for help,” he said, an agonizing pain evident in his expression. The wounds he had inside were much deeper than any scar he carried as a reminder of that night. “I left her there.”

Gemma squeezed his arm as Uncle Bob got up to answer a call.

“Officer Pierce —,” I started, but he interrupted.

“Please, just Wyatt.”

“Wyatt, this may sound really weird and I can’t explain how I know this, but I am absolutely certain that there is a connection to this girl and the mass graves that have been found down south.”

He blinked at me in disbelief. “How can that be?”

“You say you were nine?”

“Yes.”

“And you’re thirty-one now?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

God, I hated math. “Okay, that means that dump site is at least twenty-two years old. I’m wondering if the girl you saw wasn’t the first of the killer’s victims.”

“Why would you even make that connection? The springs are over two hundred miles east from here. And hundreds from the mass grave site south.”

Uh-oh. The sticky part. I looked at Gemma, then at Uncle Bob, who didn’t care because he was still on the phone, but it was Cookie who set him straight. “Look,” she said, throwing down some attitude, “you just have to trust her. She solves a lot of cases based on her hunches because they are never wrong.”

That was a bit of an overstatement, as Wyatt pointed out. “She was wrong about me,” he said.

“Almost never,” she corrected.

Gemma nodded. “Cookie’s right, Wyatt. Charley just kind of knows things. It’s weird. Like supernatural or something.” She snorted. “Not that she’s supernatural. That’s absurd. It’s not like she sees ghosts or talks to dead people or anything.”

She never quite got the concept of stopping while she was ahead.

“And she has issues. Like she’s always in trouble.”

I gasped. “I am not. And besides, you’re dating a guy who could have been a serial killer. What were you thinking?”

She gaped at me, then sputtered, then threw her hands up, utterly frustrated.

“Use your words.”

“He’s not a serial killer.”

“Yeah, but you didn’t know that,” I said, totally winning.

“Oh… my god.” She was annoyed. “Why do I turn into a fourteen-year-old every time I’m near you?”

“I do that to a lot of people.”

“The lab just called,” Uncle Bob said, totally interrupting. “The oil at the grave site is used oil of all types, motor oil, cooking oil, industrial lubricants… They think it was slated for a recycling plant and the truck driver dumped it on that land instead.”

“Okay, then why that land in particular?”

“I don’t know, pumpkin. We’re still working on it.”

He went back to talking on the phone.

“Why are you in therapy?” I asked Wyatt.

“Charley,” Gemma said, scolding me once again.

“It’s okay, Gem.” He refocused on me. “According to my supervisor, I have anger issues.”

“And why would he think that?”

Gemma’s mouth thinned, chastising me. “You don’t have to talk about this, Wyatt, if you aren’t comfortable.”

“No, it doesn’t matter anyway. Anyone with a laptop can find out. According to the department, I have a problem with men who use violence against women. I used excessive force to bring a man to the ground who was hitting his wife with a nine iron.”

After a startled gasp, I said, “Well, good for you.”

“Yeah, well, he has money and connections. I almost lost my job. But if I hadn’t been ordered to do six months of therapy, I would never have met Gemma.”

I liked him.

“You know, I have everything back at my place. All of my notes. I’ve been investigating the girl kind of obsessively since I became a cop. I have to get back on duty, but —”

“This takes precedence,” Uncle Bob said. “I’ll call your sergeant and let him know you’re helping with an ongoing investigation.”

“Perfect,” I said, clasping my hands together. “Then that’s where we’ll start. After we eat, of course.”

Reyes brought out green chili stew and a couple of quesadillas for us to share. I batted my lashes and promised to tip him later. It was no wonder he kept brushing across me as he helped the server set down our plates. The guy was such a rake.

“So what did you do next?” I asked Wyatt after taking a bite of hot stew.

“I woke up the counselors,” he said, dipping his quesadilla. “They called the sheriff’s office. A deputy came out. One.” He wiped his mouth on a napkin. “That was it. I kept trying to tell them there was a little girl lost in the area, but no one believed me. The deputy actually implied that I’d been scratched by a raccoon or a coyote or something.”

“In their defense,” I said, “those scratches had to be pretty deep for fingernails, considering your scars.”

“Not really. After everything that had happened, the scratches got infected. My parents had to come get me from my grandparents’ house early that summer to take me to a doctor in Albuquerque, and I had to go through a round of rabies shots, because the deputy on the night shift couldn’t tell the difference between a coyote’s track and a human’s.”

“Oh,” I said. “That sucks.”

“Still, he did find tire impressions that didn’t belong to our bus.”

“What did they belong to?”

“A few of the other kids thought we saw a pickup the next morning, but the deputy said it was probably just a ranch hand.”

“A ranch hand?” I asked, taking a sip of iced tea. “You guys were on a ranch?”

“Yeah. But I’ve been investigating. I can’t find any links to a missing girl and a ranch hand.”

“Who owned it? The land you were on?”

“A family by the name of Knight.”

I tensed in alarm. Mostly to keep myself from falling over.

Uncle Bob was just as shocked as I was. “The mass grave site is on a ranch owned by a Knight family.”

“No shit? Wait, I remember something about that.” He closed his eyes and thought back. “Yes, that ranch was owned by a Carl Knight, and I remember discovering that he had a brother who owned a ranch in southern New Mexico.”

“Brothers?” I asked, thrilled that we were getting places. Maybe not anywhere near a solid conviction, but places. “I’d say we have a pretty strong connection now.”

Uncle Bob nodded and started looking up a contact on his phone. He stood to call in our findings. No idea to whom. Cookie wiggled in her seat and clapped, exhilarated to be in on the conquest, especially one so heartbreaking. We were still miles away from a suspect, but every inch brought us closer to the truth, and the women in my apartment deserved at least that.

“So,” I said to Wyatt, “you said you’ve been obsessed? Have you found anything out about the girl?”

“Um, a little, yes.”

My hopes soared like a kite in the wind. “Do you have a name?”

“No.”

And crash landing.

“But I have tons of research materials at my place. You’re welcome to go through it.”

“I have to admit, Officer Pierce, I’m a little in love with you right now.”

Gemma smiled, knowing my seal of approval when she saw it.

I offered him my best Sunday smile. “So, now? Would now be a good time to hang at your crib?”

He chuckled. “Sure, if it’s okay with you, sir.”

Uncle Bob hung up and nodded wholeheartedly. “It’s more than okay. I’ll meet you there.”

He left to make yet another call. That man loved his phone.

We went en masse to the house of Officer Wyatt Pierce. He was renting a small two-bedroom in Nob Hill. It was a nice neighborhood, old and well established. Uncle Bob walked in still on the phone. He hung up as we went inside.

“Okay, I have Taft following up on our leads right now, and I’ve contacted Special Agent Carson to fill her in as well.”

“Awesome,” I said. “She’ll like me even more.”

“I just want to prepare you,” Wyatt said to Gemma as we stepped toward the back bedroom.

“For what?” Gemma asked.

“Remember when you asked me if I’d been able to put that night behind me and I said yes?”

“I do,” she said, wary.

“Well, I may have exaggerated.”

He unlocked and opened the door. Hundreds of papers littered every available surface. The window was covered in old news clippings and pictures. There were dozens of drawings of huge eyes hidden behind a mass of blond hair. He was quite the artist, and he had been searching for years. That girl never left him. He clearly felt responsible for her disappearance, which couldn’t be further from the truth.

“You realize that none of that was your fault,” I said.

“I know.” He added a completely unconvinced shrug for my benefit. He had no intention of shirking the responsibility he felt. I admired him for his conviction, but I could see worry flash in Gemma’s eyes.

We walked in and perused his research material. He had collected evidence on every missing girl in that time period from all over the United States.

“I don’t know if this will help, but I suspect the girl was Deaf.”

“How can you possibly know that?”

“It’s a hunch. I suspected it anyway, but when you said you’d tried to call to her and she didn’t look up at first, it made me realize she probably was.”

“Wait.” He held up a finger in thought, then tore through some files he had on an old trunk. “There was a girl missing from the Oklahoma School for the Deaf.” He found the file he was looking for and took out a picture. “This is her.”

He handed it over and a jolt of recognition spiked within me. Same pixie face. Same bow-shaped mouth and huge eyes, only she was smiling in the picture and her bangs were crooked. I ran my fingertips over her image. “It’s her eyes,” I said, and then I showed the picture to Cookie and Uncle Bob. “This is the girl.” I turned the picture over. Her name was Faith Ingalls.

“It was so dark out there,” Wyatt said, “and she was covered in dirt and blood, almost like she’d been buried and dug back up. I just didn’t recognize her from this picture.”

“Did they ever solve this case?” Uncle Bob asked.

He read through the file. “Not when I was looking into it, but that was a few years ago. She’d been missing for over a decade. They suspected a maintenance man by the name of Saul Ussery but could never prove it.”

I read over his shoulder. “Did you get anything else on him?”

“No, but we can run the name,” he said. “Something might come up now.”

Uncle Bob put down the file he was reading. “I can do that.” He called in to the station while I had other plans.

The girl was probably the serial killer’s first victim. His trial run. He wanted her but couldn’t have her, so he tried to take her by force perhaps. He may even have killed her accidentally, though I doubted it. He seemed to enjoy the act even then. The power. And it only fueled his thirst for blood. His obsession for blond women.

I tried Agent Carson first, but couldn’t get through. If she was at the mass grave site, she could have been out of bars. So I called Kenny Knight instead.