The Homecoming (51 page)

“The Marriott,” said Mavis, her smile coming back a bit. “You think Edgar picked up on something weird about the guy?”

“And told Coker about him? Maybe. It makes sense. If Coker was worried about people coming into town to take the money away, who better to put on a retainer than the ex-cop who worked at the best hotel near the airport? Can we get a record of everybody who checked in at the Marriott in, say, the last three days?”

“Sure. But why only three?”

“The receipts tell us Edgar began his surveillance Thursday afternoon.
My bet is he gave Charlie a heads-up and Charlie put Edgar on the surveillance right away. You know what, Mavis, forget three days. Can you find out who checked in on Thursday?”

“I can. You hungry?”

“I am, come to think of it.”

“Go get us burgers and coffee. I’ll get on the horn to Mark Hopewell. I’ll ask him for a list.”

“Cheese or plain?”

“I’m on a diet.”

“Plain then. And no fries?”

“I said I’m on a diet, not a death march.”

Nick was gone for ten minutes. While he was standing in the line, he called Kate. She said she was okay, just a little woozy. She was still in bed.

He told her he loved her.

“I don’t blame you,” she said. “I’m irrezissible. G’night.”

He clicked off.

His cell rang immediately.

REED WALKER
.

“Hey, Reed. Where are you?”

“I’m on my way down from Gracie. Where are you?”

Nick stepped out of the line and found a quiet corner in the hall outside the bathrooms.

“You sound like hell, Reed. You okay?”

“No. I jumped out of a building.”

“What?”

“Yeah. Candleford House. The fourth floor. I bounced through a bunch of tree branches and hit the dirt. Out cold. Lay there for a couple hours, until two State guys found me. They took me to the clinic there. I just got out a while ago.”

“You
jumped
?”

“Fucking well told you I did. You would have too.”

“You lived?”

“Here’s your sign.”

“I mean, are you hurt?”

“I think maybe my left thumb is okay. Everything else hurts like crazy. We have to meet. I’ll be in town in maybe an hour. Where are you?”

“I’m on a case.”

“Whatever it is, I need to see you right now. I found out a lot of crazy shit up in Sallytown. And I saw
seriously
crazy shit in Gracie. You ever
need a thrill, Nick, you go for a walk inside Candleford House on a moonlit night. I gotta talk to you.”

“What about?”

Reed gave him the A version, short, sharp, and memorable, ending with Clara Mercer’s warning about what was happening to Rainey and what needed to be done about it.

“Kill him,” Nick said, and watched heads turn. “A ghost told you to kill him?”

“I know. Nuts. But we gotta figure this out. Weird shit is going on. Where are you?”

“I’m at the Wendy’s on North Gwinnett. Mavis and I are on a double homicide.”

“Where’ll you be in forty-five minutes?”

“I don’t know.”

“Call me when you do. You call me as soon as you know where you’re gonna be later. Okay?”

“I will.”

Reed clicked off.

When he got back to the big Lincoln with the burgers, Mavis was still on the phone. He climbed in and set the bag down on the console. Mavis looked at him, held up a finger—wait one. Fine with him. He had a lot on his mind.
Kill Rainey?
And that was where it was going to stay, for now.

“Okay. Okay … thanks, Mark. Thanks a lot. You did great. Yeah, I know. Poor Edgar. Well, we’re on it. I’ll call you.”

She closed the call.

“Guy named Harvill Endicott checked into the Marriott on Thursday afternoon. Asked for a smoking room. Edgar was on duty. Mark thought the guy was an undertaker or a minister. This Endicott guy said he was a “facilitator and a collector.” He ordered up two cars, one a black Caddy and the other a beige Corolla. Two cars for one guy—”

“Corolla for surveillance and the Caddy for his ride.”

“Would you like to hear his description?”

“Absolutely.”

“Tall. Skinny. Pale skin. Seemed pretty fit. Well dressed. Gray suit, two bags. Mark said he thought Edgar was taking a real interest in him too.”

“Sounds like he could be Mr. Third Party in the motel video. Is he still there?”

“No. He checked out last night. Left the Caddy and the Corolla in
the lot out front. Took a cab to Mauldar Field. I asked Mark to go out and poke around the cars. Guess what he found under the Caddy’s rear bumper?”

“Edgar’s motion sensor thingie.”

“That’s it. You want to go over there? Mark’s pulling the video from behind his desk when this guy was checking out. Full front, face and all. He says he’ll have it waiting.”

Nick thought about that.

“No. Endicott’s in the wind. Send a cruiser to get the video from Mark and run it down to Cap City. Siren and lights all the way. We’ll get Boonie to run a full background on him, put out a still shot and a description. Get State and County on it too.”

“What do you want to do right now?”

“You know what we have to do.”

Mavis nodded.

“Go see Charlie.”

Mid-morning on the Saturday: Lemon and the prof from UV were in the morgue at Lady Grace, standing around a stainless-steel gurney. In the middle of the gurney was one of the bone baskets that the Coast Guard divers had pulled out of the willow roots under the banks along Patton’s Hard. The bone basket was lit up by a harsh overhead halogen. It looked alien and strange and yet still somehow human. This one was colored a steel gray.

Like all the others, it had what looked like human ribs tapering up from a central spine, the rib tips touching each other lightly. Inside the bone cage, sitting on a row of narrow cylindrical objects that looked like a spinal cord, was a large gray shape, roughly spherical, with creases on its surface that looked like the canals that Mars was once thought to have.

Lemon Featherlight was standing on one side of the gurney, and across from him was a stunning Nordic woman almost as tall as he was, a full-figured Valkyrie with long blond hair so pale it glowed. Her eyes were cornflower blue and large and far apart, her nose long and narrow
and hawkish. Her name was Helga Sigrid and she was originally from Reykjavik but now she worked as a forensic anthropologist for the University of Virginia at Charlottesville.

She was telling him, in layman’s terms now, since her previous explanation had been so technical that his brain felt like burning steel wool, what they were looking at here.

“Fossils,” she said, in a clear bell-like voice with a distinct Icelandic accent, or so Lemon assumed, since he’d never heard an Icelandic accent before. “Fossils happen when organic material is slowly replaced by mineral material. Each molecule of the mineral material replaces and duplicates the molecule of organic material that it has consumed. In a sense, the mineral uses the
shape
of the organic object as a mold, which is why at the end of the process, we have what looks like the body of something that was once alive but has somehow been magically turned to stone. Because, in a way, it has. That is what we have here.”

“So this thing was once alive?”

She shook her head.

“No. To be precise, what was once living material that looked
exactly
like this was once alive. But this object here is not organic and never has been. It is stone. At least, a kind of stone.”

“What kind?”

She frowned.

“Well … this is why I wanted to talk to you. Are you the owner of this … fossil?”

Lemon had to think that through.

“Well, not the owner—”

“Are you in a position to grant the university the privilege of taking these objects back to Charlottesville for further study?”

If not him, then who?

“Yes. I probably am.”

She smiled upon him.

“That is wonderful. We have never seen objects such as these. No one has. They are absolutely and profoundly unique. This is an unprecedented find, Mr. Featherlight. It is historical. Scientists will study these objects for years. Papers will be written. It is … simply thrilling!”

“But what were they? Originally?”

She frowned again.

“That is the puzzle, yes? I have examined the interior of one of these ribs and there can be no doubt that the molecular structure the minerals
replaced was that of a human bone. In this case, lying before us, we have a fossil record of a male Caucasian in excellent health who died at the approximate age of forty. Perhaps forty-five. This spherical object inside the rib cage shows the outward characteristics of a human skull, but it has been misshapen by geological forces I do not understand. It will be necessary to do MRIs and CAT scans to get an idea of what is inside. Further, the process of fossilization takes thousands of years, and yet this seems to be the fossilized remains of a very modern human. That is, a human exactly like the kind of human who emerged from the Olduvai Gorge three hundred thousand years ago and spread out across the planet. A modern man. Homo sapiens. A man exactly like you. It is a puzzle. Some force we do not yet understand has worked upon it. As I said, this is all so very exciting.”

“It looks as if it’s been … consumed.”

“Yes,” she said, looking down at it. “It does create that impression. As if it has passed through a process that transformed it into this shape. We do not generally see bodies this intact. As if the bones had been fused together by some kind of heat or energy. Animals scatter bones. Winds and tides have their way. Erosion. Sand. Yet here we have so many fossilized human remains, and all are intact. You say there are more? Many more?”

“Yes. The divers saw them all along that riverbank. Hundreds in plain view. More buried deeper in the root mass.”

She looked as if she might faint from ecstasy. Lemon was perfectly willing to help her with that if she asked him.

“So many? How magnificent! They will have to be excavated. A formal dig must be initiated. Mr. Featherlight, this find will put your town in the forefront of anthropological research. I can see these remains being named after you.”

“But they are
human
remains, right?”

“Oh yes. There can be no doubt. If you mean fossilized human remains, of course. There is no organic material here. Otherwise we would have the complication of finding out what sort of culture this person may have come from, and then determining their specific burial practices, and then, once our studies were complete, we would have to return this relic to the earth in a manner that suited those spiritual beliefs and rituals. In this case, we do not have that complication. These are replicas of something that was once human, rather like those poor sad figures that have been found in the ruins of Pompeii. From what I have
observed, I suspect that these
objects
may have been accumulating along the banks of your lovely river here for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years. By what process they have been consumed—one could almost be dramatic and say
devoured
—will be a fascinating line of inquiry.”

She finished her breathless recitation and looked as if she was thinking about hugging him.

“Yes, Mr. Featherlight, it is an extremely exciting find. The most important and exciting find of my career. Are you not thrilled?”

Lemon was thrilled, for a while, and then he worked out what this Valkyrie was telling him.

Something was
eating
people and spitting out their remains into the Tulip River. And whatever it was, it had been doing it for a very long time. Hundreds if not thousands of years, according to the Valkyrie. The Cherokee had a name for what it was.
Tal’ulu
, the Eater of Souls.

And she lived in Crater Sink.

He was sitting in his truck thinking about the implications of all this when his cell beeped.

Doris Godwin. He got the name in a moment. Doris Godwin was the streetcar driver who had helped him get Rainey down off Tallulah’s Wall. He pressed
ANSWER
.

“Doris—”

“Mr. Featherlight—Lemon—I’m a bit shook up here. Maybe you can help me? By the way, how’s the little boy?”

Lemon’s answer was careful.

“It was a kind of a seizure. He’s going to be tested for some neurological issues—”

“Yeah? Me too. I’m having a very bad day here. Can I send you some jpegs?”

“Sure. Yes. Of course. Right now?”

“Yeah. I’ve got them all loaded up.”

“I’m ready.”

“Okay. They’re on the way. What I want is for you to take a good look at them and then call me back tonight. I’m not going to stay on the line because I’m working right now. I’m at that turnabout at the top of Upper
Chase Run, but I got to get on the tracks again and I can’t take personal calls. I’m off at five.”

As she was talking, the jpegs came in. Lemon remembered that while he was tending to Rainey up at Crater Sink, she had gotten to her feet and taken a series of shots of the woods all around them. At the time he had his hands full with Rainey. Now he was looking at her shots.

“Jesus,” he said.

“Yeah. That’s what I said too. You call me!”

“I will.”

Nick called Reed as Mavis was pushing the Navigator up Arrow Creek. They were about fifteen minutes away from Charlie Danziger’s ranch. Reed answered the call on the second ring.

“Nick. Thanks for the call back.”

Nick put the cell on speakerphone.

“You still want to meet?”

“Yeah. Say where.”

“You know Charlie Danziger’s place. Up in the grasslands on the south slope?”

“I do. What’s at Charlie’s place?”

Nick glanced at Mavis, who nodded.

“You still have your badge and your sidearm?”

Reed was silent for a while.

“This is police business?”

“Serious as it gets. We think Charlie might have had something to do with the Gracie thing.”

Silence.

“No
fucking
way. Not possible.”