Stone Maidens (40 page)

Prusik instantly identified the dark stone figurine—it was the same sliver that had been poking between Holmquist’s teeth in the car. Her heart started to pound. “Where’d it come from?”

The doctor leaned on the edge of her bed and lifted the sheet. “If you don’t mind, I need to see how you’re healing.” He pulled back a piece of sterile gauze, inspected, and mumbled some instructions to the nurse on redressing the wound. He checked the monitor recording her vitals.

“I’m waiting, Doctor.”

“I removed that stone object from a subcutaneous layer in your abdomen. You sustained a penetrating trauma, I’m not sure how exactly. Fortunately for you, it had not perforated your abdominal wall. Your infection would have been much worse if it had.”

A wave of panic passed over her: Holmquist leaning across her side of the passenger seat, her shirt pulled up, exposing her abdomen, and his finger rubbing back and forth across her scar. He had slit open her scar then and inserted the stone while she lay unconscious after being tased.

The monitor overhead beeped rapidly. The doctor ordered the administration of a sedative. Massaging the top of her hand, he said, “I understand you were attacked? My assumption is—”

“Please, Doctor, hand me my cell phone. I need to call someone. It’s very important. Please.”

She punched Dr. Katz’s speed-dial number and asked the doctor and nurse to leave her room until she completed the call.

“He didn’t kill me. Didn’t shove it down my throat. Why not, Doctor?” She started right in as if the conversation in her head had been going on all this time with Dr. Katz.

“Perhaps it’s something you said?” Katz replied. “You provoked him maybe? Caught him off guard the way you like to do, Christine?”

She went back over her chaotic car ride with Holmquist. “I remember the charm stone jutting between his lips. He told me he’d been at the museum when I...when I tried to give a speech. I told him I did research in New Guinea.” She was fuzzy about everything that had happened that day. It all seemed a jumble to her now.

“You see!” Katz said. “You connected with his interest in these things.”

“If I could
see
I wouldn’t have called you.”

“Christine, you told me yourself how over the millennia the indigenous Papuan people had inserted these carved stone figurines into the dead out of respect for their ancestors. You said
Holmquist had stolen these stones from the museum. He knew of that practice. He did this out of respect for you.”

She brushed her hand over the surgical dressing. Somehow Holmquist had found her old scar. Prusik did know that charm stones were often placed in the abdominal cavities of the dead by their clansmen. In the warped mind of a psychopath who crushed girls’ necks and inserted stones forcefully in their busted-out airways, where was there any room for respect for the living? It didn’t add up.

“Respect? That’s awfully far-fetched, Doctor. It’s not Holmquist’s profile.”

“Aren’t you forgetting another significant factor that makes your circumstances especially unique?”

She closed her eyes and let out a long sigh, comforted by Katz’s voice in spite of their unsettling conversation. “Of course, I realize David Claremont is part of this equation.”

How exactly, she couldn’t fully comprehend, although Eisen had reported back yesterday, before she fell ill, how the museum security tapes from the spring and summer data banks captured a remarkable sequence. On three separate occasions—each time within twelve hours of a visit by Holmquist to the Oceania collection—David Claremont had passed the same camera points leading to the same exhibit of charm stones. From the videotapes at least, there was no proof of an actual reunion between Claremont and Holmquist. Had David “seen” the museum display? Or had his own fascination with collecting and carving stones brought him there on its own right? If the result of a vision, it would explain David’s sudden unexplained departures to Chicago. He was acting on a compulsion to find the missing part of himself, this other who also liked stones, but who did such abhorrent, unimaginable things with them.

The museum tapes had also shown that on the evening of the gala, among the handful of casually dressed nonpaying guests, in attendance no doubt thanks to the museum’s free Tuesday night
policy, one stood out: a young man wearing navy-blue work pants and a stained Carhartt jacket. His face was never fully visible under the shadow of his baseball cap, but his stance and his gestures and his gait were unmistakable.

“We have no idea how Claremont, the good twin, may have influenced your killer’s thinking in the hours before their deaths.” Dr. Katz’s familiar voice brought her back to the present. “This is not a straightforward profile, Christine. It’s as much about a man’s soul—two men’s souls—and the search to fill a void inside as it is about a twisted psyche.”

“Maybe you’re right.” Christine sighed.

Katz made a spitting sound—Prusik figured he’d chewed off a piece of the ragged end of another ballpoint. “Maybe I’m right, maybe I’m wrong,” he said between spits. “I explain nothing. I can only put to you possibilities for what might be at work here. This is a strange case, sure. Genes alone can only explain so far. Claremont’s adoptive parents prove that a good environment does make a difference. Of course, we know very little about your killer’s childhood experiences. You must rest, Christine. Congratulations for proving to them all what a fine forensic scientist you truly are.”

“Thank you for saying that, Doctor.” She said good-bye to Katz, but her mind continued to whir. The thought of Holmquist pushing a charm stone inside her body made her queasy. Was her scar what he had meant by her “little surprise”? Did he think they shared something in common? The idea was revolting.

And Claremont. His anguish as he had followed his brother into the night had been so palpable that remembering it, Christine could almost feel it in her own body. Had he felt his own life draining away as well? Losing a synaptic link that had existed since before birth, since the womb, since a cleft in a single egg had split them into two? It all represented a planet of grief Christine could not fathom. And then Claremont’s ending up in the thorns, just like his brother? Christine shuddered. Had poor Claremont found the thorns, or had the thorns found him? She had read how
confounded and despondent one identical twin could become upon learning of the sudden death of the other. The loss of someone who truly understands, knows what you are going through without having to be told anything at all would be a devastating blow. Even if the someone was a monster. Poor David Claremont. He’d tried his best, but he’d never stood a chance. She ached in her gut at the thought.

A nurse entered and adjusted her IV drip, and soon, mercifully soon, Christine closed her eyes as the sedative took hold.

Sometime later, McFaron whispered, “Hey, partner,” his fingers tapping the top of her hand. “What are you doing?” The sheriff placed his trooper hat at the foot of her bed. “Sleeping the whole day through?”

“There’s enough room for the both of us in this bed,” she said, inching over as best she could. Suddenly there was nothing she wanted more than the feeling of his solid frame next to hers.

He leaned over and they kissed. “You’re not just saying that because of these drugs?” He jiggled the metal IV stand.

“Probably, but since when does that ever stop a big sheriff from taking advantage?” He leaned back down and cradled her as best he could with his one good arm. She wrapped her free arm around his chest, holding him close.

“I was so afraid of losing you, Christine,” he said softly. “I don’t ever want to lose you.”

“Oh, Joe, I don’t want to lose you, either. I know I’m not always a very nice person. And I’m sorry for not being straightforward with you, and for doing something that could compromise you, and...”

“Shhh,” he said. “That’s enough of that kind of talk.” He pulled back and kissed her fingers gently.

“Joe.” She gazed at him and couldn’t imagine a kinder, truer man. Tears were beginning to spill down her cheeks. “I’ve been wrong about so many things. What I said about our galaxies colliding? I think...I think maybe they can. If you still want them to.”

“I still want them to, Christine,” he whispered, and his smile suffused her entire being with a sense of contentment.

She sighed and nestled into him, drowsy again. Today was a reprieve, a welcome one. She was thankful to be alive. She had survived, and so had Joe, and so had whatever future was in store for them together. And for the moment, that was good enough.

A shriveled leaf twisted on a stalk in the unobstructed breeze over a vacant field of corn stubble. Rain fell in dribs and drabs. The air surrounding the Blackie Nursing Home was acid to the taste though the Lincoln strip mines were a good five miles away.

The tip-off had come from the day nurse, who’d overheard Earl Avery, one of the Blackie home’s patients, chuckling and talking about his two boys being famous while watching a TV news story on Claremont and Holmquist. The nurse later confirmed it by poking around Avery’s bureau drawer and finding four old letters addressed to him from a Bruna Holmquist pleading for him to send her money to support his two sons—Donald and David.

A cable TV van jerked to a halt across the road from the visitors’ parking lot. A WTTX TV news team scuttled across the back lawn toward a side door the alert day nurse held open. The video cameraman handed her a hundred-dollar bill for her troubles. A tall newswoman wearing a sharp-looking tan pantsuit with a bright-turquoise silk scarf followed in next. Last through the door was the backup grunt carrying an extra tape player in case something went haywire with the direct-link satellite feed.

Silently, the nurse led them down the hallway, and they slipped unnoticed into room 29. The cameraman flicked on the bright halogen lamp, aiming it squarely at the eyes of the sixty-one-year-old bedridden coal miner. Avery’s eyes fluttered open.

The newswoman began her routine—“Testing, one, two, three, testing”—and the cameraman gave her a nod.

“Lights are good. Sound’s ready,” he said. “You’re on in three, two, one...”

“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. This is Marguerite Devereux reporting to you live from the Blackie Nursing Home in Blackie, Indiana. We are in the room of Earl Avery, a bedridden coal miner recently confirmed to be the biological father of both David Claremont and Donald Holmquist. Holmquist is the serial killer of three girls that we know of, and is also responsible for the death of a psychiatrist who had treated Holmquist’s identical twin brother, David Claremont. Police shot Holmquist in a cornfield a week ago, later finding his corpse caught by thorns, in what appeared to be an attempt to escape. In a macabre twist, Claremont, the twin, was found dead a day later, his body similarly entangled in a thornbush.”

The newswoman turned her attention to the miner. “Mr. Avery?” She shook the old man’s arm. “Can you hear me?”

Avery’s head was propped on several large pillows. His eyes opened and he gazed straight ahead. The newswoman leaned over his bed.

“Marguerite Devereux from WTTX TV Indianapolis. I’d like you to answer a few questions for our audience.”

With his pronounced cheekbones and bushy eyebrows, the old man had the same pronounced cheekbones and bushy eyebrows of Claremont and Holmquist. Take away the white color of his hair and a few extra lines and it was the same lump of clay.

“I understand, Mr. Avery, that you are the father of David Claremont and Donald Holmquist. Is that true?”

A faint smile revealed the worn edge of deeply yellowed ivories.

“Jenny Sprade, age eleven, disappeared almost ten years ago from the coal-mining camp where you once worked. Penny Simons, age thirteen, disappeared two years before that.”
Devereux’s intuition was on overdrive. She had no proof against Avery other than guilt by genetic association—if his son Donald Holmquist was a vicious killer, so could he be. “Could you please tell the girls’ still-grieving families and the rest of our viewers whether you know anything about their murders? Mr. Avery?”

Avery began a cough he couldn’t stop. He stared at a glass on his bedside table.

The newswoman noticed. “You’d like a drink?”

She steadied the man’s hand as he slurped down water. “What about it, Mr. Avery? Do you know the police just found their remains in an abandoned shaft on the Lincoln Mines properties?”

The newswoman had his attention. Avery’s eyes were locked on the svelte figure under her suit jacket. Another coughing spasm erupted, black lung disease in its final stages. She gave him more water.

“Mr. Avery, what about Jenny Sprade and Penny Simons, the dead girls? For the sake of their families—they have a right to know what happened to their loved ones.” She leaned in closer to him.

Avery’s mouth sagged wide. He was barely able to take in air through lungs scarred from years of inhaling coal dust. His eyes brightened as the cameraman shifted position for a closer shot.

Frustrated, the newswoman let the mike dangle. In a whisper, she said to her technician, “You said he’d talk. What’s the deal?”