A
WELCOME
GRAVE
ALSO BY MICHAEL KORYTA
A WELCOME GRAVE. Copyright © 2007 by Michael Koryta. All rights reserved.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Peter Wolverton and David Hale Smith continue to display an astounding talent for remaining patient and positive during the ugliest of drafts, and, as always, I’m in their debt.
No one has waded through more drafts and mistakes with me than Bob Hammel, who probably has read ten times more Lincoln Perry pages than have ever been published. Thank you, Bob.
Lending a set of helpful, colorful, and decidedly unique opinions were Laura Lane and Gena Asher. One left wine stains on her copy of the manuscript, the other fell asleep on it, but they were key contributions nevertheless.
Deepest gratitude to those at St. Martin’s Press and Thomas Dunne Books for all their work and support— Thomas Dunne, Andy Martin, Katie Gilligan, Rachel Ekstrom, Matthew Shear, and the rest of the team.
It has been a true pleasure getting to meet the owners and employees of bookstores around the country, who are always gracious hosts and seem to truly love their jobs. Thanks for all the support.
I write because the work of others has entertained and inspired me over the years. Those writers continue to be a constant source of motivation—on and off the page. It is a true and valued privilege to receive advice and encouragement from the writers who led me into this business, and I’m most grateful.
And, of course, thanks to my family.
A
WELCOME
GRAVE
PART ONE
FAMILY
BUSINESS
1
Sometime after midnight, on a moonless October night turned harsh by a fine, windswept rain, one of the men I liked least in the world was murdered in a field near Bedford, just south of the city. Originally, they assumed the body had only been dumped there. That Alex Jefferson had been killed somewhere else, dead maybe before the mutilation began.
They were wrong.
It was past noon the next day when the body was discovered. A dozen vehicles were soon assembled in the field—police cars, evidence vans, an ambulance that could serve no purpose but was dispatched anyhow. I wasn’t there, but I could imagine the scene—I’d certainly been to enough like it.
But maybe not. Maybe not. The things they saw that day, things I heard about secondhand, from cops who recited the news in the distanced way that only hardened professionals can manage . . . they weren’t things I dealt with often.
Jefferson was brought from the city with his hands and feet bound with rope, duct tape over his mouth. A half mile down a dirt track leading into an empty field, he was removed from a vehicle—tire tracks suggested a van—and subjected to a systematic torture killing that was apparently quite slow in reaching the second stage. Autopsy results and scenarios created by the forensic team and the medical experts suggested Jefferson remained breathing, and probably conscious, for fifteen minutes.
Fifteen minutes varies by perspective. The blink of an eye, if you’re standing in an airport, saying goodbye to someone you love. An ice age, if you’re fighting through traffic, late for a job interview. And if your hands and feet are bound while someone works you over slowly, from head to toe, with a butane lighter and a straight razor? At that point an eternity isn’t what the fifteen minutes feel like—it’s what you’re begging for. To be sent to wherever it is you’re destined, and sent there for good.
The cops were preoccupied with the basics for most of the first day: processing the crime scene, getting the forensic experts from the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation involved, identifying the body, notifying next of kin, and trying to piece together Jefferson’s last hours. The locals were interviewed, the field and surrounding woods combed for evidence.
No leads came. Not from the basics, at least, not from those first hours of work. So the investigation extended. The detectives went looking for suspects—people whose histories with Jefferson were adversarial, hostile. At the top of that list, they found me.
They arrived at ten past nine on the day after Alex Jefferson’s body was discovered, and I hadn’t made it to the office yet, even though I live in a building just down the street. Below my apartment is an old gym I own and from which I occasionally make a profit. I’ve got a manager for the gym, but that day she had car trouble. She called me at seven thirty to say her husband was trying a jump start, and if that didn’t work, she might be late. I told her not to worry about it—no rush for me, so none for her. I’d open the gym and then leave whenever she made it in.
I’d gone downstairs with a cup of coffee in hand and unlocked the gym office. There’s a keycard system that allows members to come and go twenty-four hours a day, but Grace, my manager, works the nine-to-five in the
