The Buried (The Apostles) (25 page)

“Who is she?” Hayden asked again.

“An old girlfriend.”

“And I love cats,” Hayden deadpanned.

Hatch thwacked his teammate on the shoulder. “You know, I like this lighter side of you, Professor. I think you should have hooked up with Kate years ago.”

“Who is she?” Hayden insisted.

Hatch stretched his neck. “My ex-wife.”

Hayden, unshakable, solid Hayden, let loose a low whistle. “You were
married
?”

“I had a head injury at the time. The plates below my feet collided after a few nights of incredible sex.”

“Does Parker know?” Hayden asked, then immediately waved off the words. Parker knew everything.

When they reached Hayden’s rental car, Hatch handed him a sheet of paper. “Here are the questions I want you to ask the real estate agent.”

Hayden ducked inside and laughed.

“What?” Hatch asked.

Hayden shook his head. “Nothing.”

“Come on, Hayden, talk. Tell me what’s going on in that head of yours because you see things no one else sees.”

Hayden thumped Hatch on the shoulder and started the car. “I’m looking at you one year down the road, my friend, and I’m not seeing you on a boat.”

H
atch stood on the front porch of Grace’s house and waited for the green flash, that magical moment at sunset or sunrise when the sun slipped past the horizon line and an arc or ray of green slashed across the sky. According to an old Scottish sailing legend, the man who sees the green flash shall be blessed, for he shall be able to see closely into his own heart and within the hearts of other people.

In his ocean travels, Hatch had seen more than his fair share of green flashes, and he’d give anything to see one now and harness the power behind the legend, not because he wanted to see into his own heart, but because he desperately needed to get into a killer’s heart, a killer who wanted, ultimately, to kill Grace.

He pictured that stick figure in pearls with crossed out eyes. Who the hell wanted Grace dead? Who would orchestrate an evil game like this? And when would she strike next?

“She’s getting anxious,” Hayden had said before he went to track down the real estate agent who’d been representing a killer. “Our unsub’s been out in the open, out of her comfort zone too long, and she needs this game to end. I wouldn’t be surprised if she struck tonight.”

Tonight. The single word pounded Hatch like gale force winds. Tonight the Gravedigger could abduct the third and final victim. And what’s the worst thing that could happen?

The victim would die.

And then?

Grace would have three strikes.

And then?

Grace would die.

And then?

His own personal brand of nuclear annihilation.

He rested his knuckled hands on the porch railing with so much pressure, the gray, splintered wood creaked. He knew exactly what was in his own heart. He loved Grace and couldn’t imagine a life without her. How they were to manage a life together still needed to be worked out. Grace had accused him of being a free spirit, but that was far from the case. He was chained to Grace, and he had no desire to break those bonds.

The door opened and Grace stepped out with Blue shuffling behind her. “Land or sea?” she asked.

With the dark of night sliding in, the goal was to get as many bodies out in the swamp and marshes and beaches as possible. Jon had commandeered a high-powered fan boat and was already out on the Cypress Bend river.

“Land,” Hatch told Grace.

Blue hobbled behind them to the SUV. “Do you think we should make him stay home?”

“Do you think he’d let us?” Grace asked with a tilt of her eyebrow.

The old dog was like…like a dog with a bone. Hatch shook his head. Once he sunk his teeth into it, he wasn’t giving up, much like Grace. After that first phone conversation with Lia Grant, she’d thrown herself into the investigation, committed to see it through to the end. She climbed into the SUV, and he shut the door tightly behind her. His job was to keep her alive.

They drove away from the shack and into the deepening dusk. Their unsub could be anywhere, including Grace’s backyard. As they rounded the corner near the construction site, leaves on one of the camellia bushes rustled. Could be a deer, a black bear, or a killer.

He slowed, squinting into the graying night.

“What is it?” Grace asked.

“Not sure.”

He parked the SUV, and he and Grace walked across the recently cleared earth, circling the hole where Camellia and her child had been buried. A flash of silver glinted behind one of the camellia bushes. He grabbed Grace and lunged behind a wide sycamore.

The leaves shivered, and Hatch raised his Glock.

The bushes parted, and a woman stepped into the clearing.

“Lou?” Grace asked with a sharp intake of breath.

The old beekeeper jumped, something sharp and shiny falling from one hand and a fistful of red falling from the other. “Saints alive!” Lou clasped her gnarled hands to her chest. “You scared the living daylights out of me.”

Hatch lowered the gun but didn’t put it away. He closed the distance between them and picked up the length of silver that had fallen to the ground. A knife. “What are you doing here?”

Lou whisked the dirt from her hands, stepped aside, and motioned to the bush. “Gathering flowers.” She bent slowly, and he could almost hear the creaking of her old spine as she picked up a half-dozen lengths of camellia blooms scattered on the ground. “For CoraBeth.”

“CoraBeth?”

“The one they’re calling Camellia.” Lou tottered to the edge of the hole. “I saw her picture on the news and heard she was buried here.”

“You knew her?”

Lou tossed a single spray of camellias into the hole, the deep red blooms tumbling along the damp chunks of earth until they splashed into a shallow pool of water that had collected at the bottom. One by one, she tossed the flowers into the grave. Tears trailed down her lined cheeks and splashed into the water. “She was my daughter.”

A whoosh of wind slipped across the swamp, silencing bullfrogs and crickets. According to Berkley, the Gravedigger and Camellia looked similar.

“Your daughter?” Grace asked. “I never knew you had a daughter.”

“She was long gone by the time you came along, little Gracie.” The old woman snipped another cluster of blooms from the camellia bush.

“Tell us about your daughter, Lou,” Grace said.

The old beekeeper plucked a petal from a flower.

“Please, Miz Poole, little Gracie’s life may be at stake.”

Lou looked at Grace out of the corner of her eye and plucked faster. What did those old eyes see? Little Gracie picking out a jar of honey? A grown woman who was in danger? Hatch jammed his hands in his pockets so he didn’t grab the old woman’s shoulders and shake the words from her.

“CoraBeth was born more than fifty years ago,” Lou finally said. “Her daddy was a farmhand who worked the cotton fields north of Apalach one summer. He was a wild one, but he had him a smooth way with words. Charmed me
and
the bees.” Her cracked lips lifted in a faded smile. “Like her daddy, CoraBeth was a wild one. Didn’t like staying cooped up inside. Didn’t like goin’ to school. Spent her days wandering the swamp and dreaming of the day when she could fly away.”

“And?” Grace asked.

“And one day she got her wings. She came home all aflutter and said she’d found the man of her dreams, that he was going to pull her out of the swamp and build her a castle fit for a queen. I never heard from her again.”

Grace placed her fingers on Lou’s, and she stopped destroying the flower. “I’m sorry.”

“I did my grieving sixteen years ago when CoraBeth died.”

“Wait a minute,” Hatch said. “How did you know she died sixteen years ago?”

The old beekeeper threw the mutilated flower on the ground. “The bees told me.”

“The
bees
told you your daughter was dead?” Hatch asked with a rise in his voice.

“Yep, they told me she was buried in the ground, giving back to the earth because the earth gave her life. That’s the way of the land.”

“The woman you saw with Lia Grant, the one being buried near your place, she looked like your daughter, right?” Grace grabbed the old woman’s trembling hand and held it between hers. “That’s why you called her a ghost, because you thought she was CoraBeth, who had died a number of years ago.”

“Wrong, it looked wrong. After being dead so long, she should have been bones, just bones.”

“But she wasn’t,” Grace said with a calm she didn’t feel. “The person with Lia Grant was a real person, someone who looked exactly like your daughter.”

“Bones. She should have been bones,” Lou said as she extricated her hand and plucked at the gray hair sticking out from the bandana across her forehead.

“Someone like—”

“A daughter,” Hatch finished for her. “That’s why Berkley’s sketch and facial reconstruction look so much alike.” He turned to Lou. “The woman buried on this property is your daughter, CoraBeth Poole, which means the young woman you saw in the boat with Lia Grant and who worked on the cleaning crew in Port St. Joe could be your granddaughter.”

Lou tugged on the gray wisp of hair.

“Talk to me, Miz Poole. Did CoraBeth have a daughter?”

She pulled on the hair, as if trying to tug something from her brain. “I…I don’t know.” Her mouth trembled, the saggy skin of her neck quivering. “The bees never told me. Usually the bees tell me the important things. They should have told me. They
would
have told me.”

He took her hands in his, their fingers interlaced. “Think, Lou, think back. Did you ever receive a call, a note, a visit from a young girl who looked like CoraBeth?”

Lou stared at the bridge of their arms with longing. She wanted to cross over, to admit she had a granddaughter. The old woman’s thin arms grew as stiff and still as sun-brittled twigs before she threw off his hands. “She’s dead. The queen is dead!” Tucking the wisp of gray under her bandana, Lou Poole stomped off into the swamp.

“It’s her,” Grace said. “The killer is Lou Poole’s granddaughter. It’s all connected and it starts with this land, the highest point on Cypress Bend.”

Hatch turned his face to the night sky, which had slipped from plum to gray and was now bleeding to black. “The more important question isn’t who she is but where she is.”

Sometimes luck, not skill, separated the winners from the losers, and tonight she had both. She watched the two boys sneaking down the alley. The authorities were expecting the next pawn to be another young woman. Oh, this was good. Another game changer. One of these two noisy little boys would be just the right size. But two was one too many.

She pushed her glasses back up the bridge of her nose.
Think. Think. Think
.

Divide and conquer. That’s what she needed to do. She searched around the alley and found an aluminum can on the ground. Extra points for picking up litter. She tossed the can at a metal trashcan, the clank jarring the night. The boys jumped and took off. At the mouth of the alley, the boys split.

Silent and invisible, she took off after the one who turned right.

When she reached the boy, she grabbed him and swung the stun gun at his neck. The boy, small and scrappy, like a vicious little dog, slipped out of her hands. She lunged, flying through the air and slamming into him.

He kicked, his small-person tennis shoes connecting with her side. The stun gun slipped from her hand, but she caught it. She blamed all those video games she played as a kid. Good for hand/eye coordination. Jamming the stun gun against the small person’s neck, she watched as his body jerked and froze. At last she dug the needle from her front pocket—it was amazing what a person could buy off the Internet—slipped off the protective cap and jabbed it into his neck.

“
Aaargh
!” he cried.

“Final level,” she said when the boy’s eyes finally closed. She turned her face toward Cypress Point, where Grace and her pretty pearls lived and said, “And may the best sister win.”

Something cold and wet nuzzled her hand. “Go away.” A long, soggy piece of sandpaper licked her neck. “Not now, Blue. I’ll get you some bacon later.”

She reached for her pillow to throw at the dog, but her pillow wasn’t beneath her head. Her fingers slid along something warm and firm but soft, something that smelled of salt and sun. Hatch. Her head was on Hatch’s lap.

That’s when she heard the ringing.

Her phone. Someone was calling her phone. She scrambled upright. She was in the SUV. Where was her phone? She’d been holding it and must have fallen asleep. Hatch, asleep in the driver’s seat with his head against the window, didn’t move.

She dug between the seats and under Hatch. The ringing continued.

“Where are you?” She fell to her knees and fumbled along the floorboard, banging her head on the console. “Dammit!”

“Who you talking to?” Hatch said with a yawn.

“My phone.”

Hatch’s eyes flew open. His seat squeaked as he lunged for the light switch on the dash. Light flooded the vehicle.

At last she found her phone. The display read
RESTRICTED NUMBER
. “Hello!” Grace said, her hand shaking. Was this it? Level Three? “Hello!”

“Who the hell is this?” The voice was more than a little irritated.

“Grace. My name’s Grace Courtemanche. Are you okay?”

“Not really.” The bravado wrapped around the words faded away. “I kind of need some help.”

“What’s your name? Where are you?”

“My name’s Linc.” A quiver rocked the voice followed by a soft sob. “I was out messing around tonight with my buddy Gabe and got into a little trouble.”

Sweat broke out along her neck. “Oh, God.”

“What is it?” Hatch dropped to the floor next to her.

She handed him the phone. “Level Three. She has one of Alex’s friends. The one called Linc.”

Hatch took the phone. “Linc, my name is Agent Hatcher and I’m with the FBI. Where are you?”

“I’m in a hole in the ground in a stinkin’ plastic tote, like the one my ma has in her laundry room to hold dirty laundry.”

Good. This kid was a fighter, one clearly not immobilized by fear.

“I’m going to ask you a set of questions,” Hatch said. “I need you to stay calm, and we’re going to get you out of there. You ready, pal?”