Dying Scream (5 page)

“Detective Hudson.” Thankfully, her voice sounded clear and direct. “What brings you out here?”

Gage’s mirrored sunglasses tossed back her reflection. The subtle stiffening in his shoulders hinted at his dislike of her formal address. She sensed gray, accessing eyes narrowed. So be it. It was better this way.

“
Ms.
Thornton. I hope you don’t mind, but my partner here—Detective Vega—and I wanted to observe the grave relocation.”

A hacksaw wouldn’t cut through that southwest Virginia drawl now. “The name is Barrington. Why?”

He moved toward her with intentional slowness. “I think you know why,
Ms
. Barrington.”

The two missing women he’d mentioned during their last visit. He believed those women were buried out here. And the fact that he’d not called ahead to announce his visit told her he didn’t trust her. The sting of that realization had her firing back before she thought. “Do you have a warrant?”

Gage shook his head slowly. “No, ma’am, I don’t. I’m just here for a casual visit. Do I need a warrant?”

Menace reverberated off the words like a flashing yellow light. If she had a bit more equilibrium where he was concerned, she’d have recognized that he was just doing his job. This was business. It wasn’t personal.

But it felt deeply personal, just like the questions he’d asked her in the hospital a couple of years ago. As she had then, she felt under attack.

Aware the gazes of Mazur, Dr. Heckman, and the construction crew rested upon her, Adrianna managed a smile that generally disarmed most. She’d eat dirt before she showed him any sign of weakness. “No. You’re free to observe. Just don’t get in the way of my crews.”

A hint of a smile tugged at the edge of his lips. “Oh, I’ll do my best to stay out of the way, Ms. Barrington.”

The honey coating didn’t mask the underlying message. Gage Hudson would do whatever he pleased, whenever he pleased. “Thanks.”

Adrianna turned toward Mr. Mazur and the six-man construction crew. Under Mazur’s paper-thin calm simmered a dark intensity. Built like a medieval knight, he had come up hard and made a fortune in real estate, she’d been told. Ruthless was how her own attorney had described Mazur. “Not the kind of guy you want to do business with,” her attorney had said. “Buys his land tracts from the dead and dying.”

But beggars couldn’t be choosers.

Adrianna moved toward Mr. Mazur, smiling as she extended her hand. “This is a pleasant surprise. I wasn’t expecting you.”

He took her hand, squeezed a bit too hard. “I told you I might come. Why aren’t your men digging?”

“I don’t know. They should be working.” Calmness in a storm was her specialty. Later, when she was alone, she’d lower her guard and allow tears and fear. “Mr. Mazur, you could have saved yourself the trouble of driving out here. I would have given you a full report.”

He didn’t seem taken by her smile either. “I like to see things for myself.”

“I see.” Like Gage, Mazur somehow expected her not to come through. “Well, you are welcome to stay as long as you wish. Now if you don’t mind, I’ll talk to my construction crew and see about that holdup.”

“I asked but the foreman wouldn’t say. Said he worked for you.”

Points for Mr. Miller. “I’m sure it’s nothing,” she said, hoping she was right.

“That Dr. Heckman has been lurking around all morning with that damn sign.”

“He’s harmless. I’ll handle him.”

“He says he’s going to call the press.”

“He’s tried several times. No one cares.” Adrianna moved over the uneven land, but made it just a dozen steps before Dr. Heckman cut across her path.

“Mrs. Thornton.”

She bristled. “The name is Barrington. What are you doing here, Professor?”

“Looking out for the dead.” He wore a tweed jacket with patched sleeves and what looked like tea stain on the lapel. Dark pants, rumpled white shirt, and tennis shoes completed the perfect stereotype of an eccentric academic. He smelled of mothballs and peppermint.

“They’re just fine without you.”

He tucked his poster under his arm and rubbed long, thin hands together. “You are desecrating the memory of this grand family.”

“I don’t look at it that way.” She’d paid more than she should for the gravesites in a lovely church cemetery down the road. Moving these graves was the only way she could save them. “Professor, if you’ll excuse me. I need to talk to my foreman.”

A frantic energy radiated from his blue eyes. “You can’t do this.”

“I can.”

“I will throw myself on the graves.”

“My foreman will throw you off this land if you so much as make a move.” If Mazur weren’t here, she’d have done it already.

Billy Miller, the grave removal company’s owner, was a tall man with a broad chest and a big belly that hung over his belt. Puffy cheeks and a ruddy complexion made him appear older than his thirtysomething years. He’d come highly recommended by several properties in Maryland and Northern Virginia and could handle the logistical tangles of moving old graves.

“What’s going on, Mr. Miller?” she said.

“We might have a problem.” Miller chewed gum constantly, which was an alternative to his former two-pack-a-day cigarette habit.

Adrianna felt Gage’s sharp hungry gaze. “What is it? Permits? Do the Feds have more questions about protecting groundwater contamination?”

Miller glanced toward the men behind her and frowned. “It’s a little more complicated.”

The growing tightness in Adrianna’s chest threatened to cut off her breath completely. “Explain.”

Miller drew Adrianna away from his crew, Dr. Heckman, and the cops before he spoke. He glanced back to make sure no one had followed. Satisfied, he planted his hands on his hips and kept his voice low. “I swept all the land inside the cemetery fence with ground-penetrating radar just like you asked.”

A cool breeze blew on her face. “Okay.”

“I found some irregularities in the soil in the corner nearest the river.”

“What does that mean?”

“Means I might have found something we weren’t expecting.” Gum snapped in his mouth.

“Like what?”

“Might be nothing.”

“Then why are we having this discussion?” Her words rang brittle and impatient.

Miller looked surprised. Up until now, she’d been calm and reserved during their few preliminary meetings. He glanced around again to make sure no one was in earshot. “I think I’ve found additional graves.”

A jolt of fear hit Adrianna. Temptation prodded her to see if Gage was watching. But she didn’t. Instead of looking at him or the cemetery, she glanced toward the band of trees that ringed the field. The woods were thick and the underbrush overgrown. “Where?”

“In the cemetery corner closest to the river.”

She turned slowly and studied the southeast section of the family graveyard shaded by the thick leaves of the oak tree. “I don’t see anything. It looks perfectly fine to me.”

Miller’s voice was patient. “That’s because you don’t move graves for a living. When a body decomposes, it shrinks and the soil on top of it collapses a little. The vegetation also grows back unevenly.”

“Is it a child’s grave?” She rubbed the back of her neck with her hand, wishing she could ignore her worries.

“No. Too large.”

Relief eased some of the fear she’d been holding. She’d often thought that this cemetery could be the place where her mother’s first daughter could have been buried. Frances Thornton would have been the one her mother would have called in a crisis. “Okay.”

Gum snapped as Miller shook his head and raised a slim T-shaped instrument that he’d been holding, which until now she’d not noticed. “This is a T-bar. I use it to take soil samples. By looking at the sample I can tell whether the soil has been disturbed or not.” The end looked like a cookie cutter, and showed her a cross section of dirt. “The radar and T-bar suggest something is buried in that spot.”

She thought about the reason for Gage’s visit. “I’ve read that families like the Thorntons buried servants close. A wooden marker would long have been eroded by the elements.”

Miller shook his head. “These sites aren’t that old. They’re less than a decade old.”

A decade. Was Gage right about Rhonda?

She pulled off her sunglasses. From the corner of her eyes she saw Gage by his car staring right at her. Damn. She’d heard once the guy had a freaky talent for finding the missing.

Miller leaned closer. “This is the country, Ms. Barrington. It’s the perfect place to stash a body. I saw it up in Maryland. We was doing a job and found the body of a missing child.”

Her heart tightened. “A child. You said this grave wasn’t a child’s.”

“Yeah, it’s not. I was just talking about an old case.”

Adrianna nodded. “Do you have any idea what or who is down here?”

“I’ll have to open it up to find out. And to do that I need your permission.”

God, this was not happening.

Miller glanced toward the wrought-iron fence. “There is something else to consider. You can go ahead and excavate the family plot and then dig up the unknown sites later. That way, if you actually find something—someone—then the other work will already be done.”

Adrianna saw his logic. It would be easy to take care of business first.

“What would be the harm?” Mr. Miller said. “Three or four days at most and you can do the right thing. No harm, no foul.”

So tempting, it would be easy to justify financially. But morally? She remembered the picture of Rhonda Minor—she’d had a bright, pretty smile. Dark hair. A dimple on her right cheek.

Miller took Adrianna’s silence for agreement. “So we go for the old graves first?”

Four days and the graves would be gone and she’d be free of this place.

Four days hardly mattered at all.

Four days was nothing in the big picture.

But now they seemed to mean everything. If that was Rhonda Minor in the ground, she’d not let her linger another day.

She relented to her conscience. “Dig the mounds up first.”

“You sure?”

“Yes.” Her stomach growing queasy, she slid her long fingers into the front pockets of her jeans. “But do me a favor. Be subtle. I’ve got two cops watching, a fanatic, and the new landowner. I don’t want to sound alarm bells unless I have a problem.”

“Will do.”

Miller nodded and turned and shouted to one of his men. When the guy approached, he said, “Smokey, get a shovel and start digging on that first site.”

Smokey, a willowy man, wore jeans, workboots, a black NASCAR hat and T-shirt with the number three on the front. He tossed the cigarette in his mouth to the ground and ground it out. “Okay.”

“This is above and beyond my bid,” Miller said.

“It’s my time and my money, Mr. Miller,” Adrianna said. “I can waste it however I wish.”

Since Craig’s accident, she’d made hundreds of decisions she’d not wanted to make. Some had turned out for the best, others had not. But good or bad, she’d learned to get the job done no matter how dirty.

Adrianna watched as Smokey grabbed a shovel from the bed of a red pickup truck. He sniffed and ambled as if he had all the time in the world. “Mr. Miller, do you think your man can move a little faster?”

Miller stiffened. The foreman didn’t like taking orders from a woman. “Smokey, get a move on.”

Smokey shuffled a little faster through the men and positioned his shovel. He put a mudded boot on the edge and shoved his weight forward. A wet summer and fall had left the ground soft and the shovel slid in like a hot knife into butter.

Adrianna nibbled her bottom lip. She wanted this to be nothing more than a simple delay.

Smokey dug out a few more shovelfuls of earth. The entire crew had stopped talking and all were watching as Smokey dug deeper. The shovel clinked against a hard surface. “I hit something.”

Her thoughts tripped and her stomach twisted into a knot. The workmen immediately circled around trying to get a better look. Miller got a flashlight from his truck and shone it down the hole. She heard a few gasps and muttered oaths.

Adrianna pushed through the ring of men who encircled Smokey and his find. They all smelled of sweat and tobacco.

Miller blocked her path. “Maybe you best let us take care of this.”

“What did you find?”

His haggard features struggled to remain stoic. “Let us worry about it.”

A couple of years ago, Adrianna wouldn’t have worried about it. She’d have let him take care of it all. That’s what she’d always done. Her father and then her husband had taken care of the important details.

And where had it gotten her? Knee deep in debt, with the cops, an eccentric, and an angry buyer breathing down her neck.

“Step aside.”

Miller pursed his lips and appeared to count to ten. “Suit yourself, Ms. Barrington. But I really don’t recommend you looking.”

She pulled in a steadying breath. “I’m a big girl, Mr. Miller.”

He shook his head.

Adrianna peered down the hole. What she saw nearly took her breath away.

Protruding from the ground was a human skull.

Chapter Four

Tuesday, September 26, 8:45 a.m.

The instant Adrianna turned and moved toward the cemetery’s corner, Gage suspected that there was a problem. Her stiff back and tilted chin reminded him of the day she’d left him. Something had upset her.

The crews had found something.

Gage couldn’t suppress the rush of exhilaration and despair. He’d bet his last dollar they’d found Rhonda Minor. “Something’s happening.”

Vega nodded. “You saw the T-bar as well?”

“Yeah. Let’s head over.”

“Sure.”

They’d not taken five steps when Gage’s cell rang. Not breaking stride, he pulled the phone from its holster and flipped it open. “Detective Hudson.”

“What’s your status?” Homicide detective Jacob Warwick rarely took time for pleasantries.

“I’m on the Thornton property. And I think they’ve found something.”

“What?”

“That’s what I’m going to find out. But I can tell you the foreman was carrying a T-bar and motioning toward the ground.”

“A body they weren’t expecting?”