I walked to the doorway of the room and looked inside. Sleeping on a single bed was Quilla. She was tied to the bed with two leather straps. She breathed evenly. I detected a slight snore. I guessed that Nolan had her drugged.
“What’s the deal, Nolan, is she next?” I asked.
“She’s not here to get away from her folks.” Nolan laughed. “Alright, let’s go. Downstairs. C’mon.”
“Why?” I stood my ground.
“Why what?”
“Why Quilla? Why Alyssa? Why all of them? Jesus. Your wife?”
“How’d you know she was my wife?”
“I saw her picture on the fireplace. Why, Nolan?”
“With regard to Patricia, it was a matter of not wanting her to leave me. No matter how much I begged her to stay, she wouldn’t, so one night I got this crazy idea and, well, there was never anymore talk from her again about leaving me.” He turned off the light in the room Quilla was in, then closed the door. “There’s no sense dragging this out, Del. Move.”
Nolan nudged me in the back with his gun, almost knocking me down the stairs. “Why is she in that room?”
“She’s too skinny. Needs some fattening up. The best preservation is done with bodies who have some meat on them. That’s why I’ve always had such a hard time making them damn anorexics look good. I never kill them right away. I want them to look just right when they die, especially their faces, since that’s the area of the body I’m primarily interested in. The girls I pick usually need to be a tad fleshier, considering all the experimentation and work I do on their faces, so I fatten them up a little.”
I was getting sick to my stomach as we walked through the den, into the dining room, then past the kitchen and out the back door, but I was compelled to keep asking questions.
“Wasn’t it taking a big risk to leave them alive? Didn’t they try to escape?”
“They’re not alive for long. A week tops. And I let them think I won’t be hurting them. A real trust thing happens quickly. By the time they’re ready to die I think it’s fair to say we’ve bonded. And when they die they feel no pain. I give them an injection. Puts them to sleep. That’s when I begin the embalming.”
“Tell me you wait until they’re dead.”
He shook his head. “Del, you know from basic embalming classes that the ideal body state for more perfect preservation is as soon after death as possible. Keep walking.”
“I can’t see,” I said. “It’s pitch black out here.”
“Your eyes will adjust in a few seconds. Move in a straight line. There’s nothing in my back yard to bump into.”
“Where are you taking me?”
“You’ve got to die, Del.” The words stung. I was feeling scared in a way I’d never experienced before. He had murdered five women and was ready to kill a sixth. I knew he would have no qualms about killing me.
“You could do this to me, Nolan, after all these years?”
“This really pains me, Del, because I like you a lot. This might sound corny, but you were like a son to me. I enjoyed teaching you the trade when you first started with us. But you know the truth now. What I am supposed to do, let you live if you promise you won’t tell?”
I said nothing. The only thing running through my head was how he was going to do it. “How?” I asked.
“Hold on a second,” he said as we stopped by a small shed about twenty yards from the rear of his house. I assumed it was where he kept his power mower. “Open the door.” I tugged at the door and it creaked open. “Now step back and get down on the ground spread-eagled.” I did. Quickly, Nolan reached into the shed and came back with a shovel. “Alright. Get up and keep walking.”
“What are you gonna do with the shovel, Nolan?”
“I’m not gonna do anything with it. But you’re gonna dig a hole, then you’re gonna lay in it, then I’m gonna cover you up.”
“You’re gonna bury me alive?”
“Hell no. That’d be cruel. You’ll be dead before the first pile of dirt gets dumped on you. Veer to the left.”
Chapter 24
I veered to the left. My eyes were now adjusted to the dark. Whether Nolan lived on a cul de sac or a dead end, what concerned me most was the gully about fifty yards behind his house that we were headed to. If his plan was to kill me and hide my body in a shallow grave in the gully he could rest assured I would never be found.
“Are there any other bodies buried back here, Nolan? People who stumbled onto your little secret?”
“Matter of fact, there are two.”
“My God,” I thought to myself.
“Two girls who didn’t work out. One from about eight or nine years ago, and another from, oh, about fifteen.”
The time frame piqued my interest.
“You killed Alyssa fifteen years ago,” I said. “Why did you need another girl?”
“Alyssa was my second choice. The first one was sick. I didn’t know it until I started working on her.”
“She was going to be dead because you were gonna kill her. So what if she was sick?”
“I wanted perfection. Keeping a body a long time means starting with a body in perfect condition. That’s why I never went for the older ones.”
“What about Brandy Parker? Why didn’t you bury her in the gully with the other two?”
“That was a miscalculation,” he said. “Once a year, on the anniversary of the death of my great grandfather, Angus Oberfuolner, I go to the cemetery to pay respects, just as my father and his father did. Nine years ago it was Brandy Parker’s misfortune to be there on the day I went. She had come to the cemetery to make tracings of old headstones. Somehow she had made her way to the Section where my family’s plot is located. She was there, making a tracing, when I arrived. At first, the idea of her being my next challenge hadn’t even entered my mind. I was at the cemetery to do my annual duty. It was something that I took seriously. I’d been mulling over the fact that finding another girl was something I had to start thinking about again…and that meant planning. When you kidnap someone it has to be thought out for weeks, sometimes months in advance. Why do you think I was able to get away with taking Virginia and Alyssa and the others? Planning, Del. Meticulous planning. With Brandy Parker I acted spontaneously, but only because everything seemed to be in my favor…everything fell into place.”
“How do you mean?”
“To kidnap someone there can’t be any trace of them. Their families have to be convinced that they ran away. It’s easy to dispose of purses and handbags and such, but what do you do with a car? Every woman I ever took was kidnapped when they were in a situation where they had left their home or place of work on foot.”
“What did it matter?”
“I didn’t have to worry about disposing of their vehicles. That, more than anything, was what made me act so quickly with Brandy Parker. In the few minutes we spent talking she let it slip that she’d been in an accident and that her car had been totaled. As yet, she hadn’t gotten a new one. She was hitchhiking everywhere. Guess what, Del? She hitchhiked to the cemetery that day. Hearing that, I began formulating a plan. I knew she was there alone. Not a soul was near us. I could knock her out, put her in the trunk of my car and have her home in fifteen minutes.
“What went wrong?”
“Knocking her out was easy. From all my years working on bodies I knew the exact location of the right nerves to hit…like when you see people in movies render someone unconscious with the touch of a hand. She was out like a light and didn’t even know what hit her. It was while I was about to pick her up and carry her to my car that I saw it.”
“What?”
“She had a hideous scar on her face.” As he pointed at the right side of his face the photograph I’d seen of
