to do nothing about it but keep driving.
Louis pushed through the gate and walked toward the cornfields behind the house. His jacket was still damp, leaving his skin cold and clammy underneath. He wondered where that deputy was with the coffee Travis Horne had promised two hours ago. It would taste damn good about now.
He stopped walking and looked down at Brandt’s body.
They hadn’t touched him. Except to make sure he was dead. The broken knife still lay near his hand. The blood was dry now, coating the blade with a red film. Brandt’s denim jacket was peppered with bullet holes. Five of them in his right side. The sixth had ripped through his neck.
Louis looked down at his own khaki jacket. There was a speckling of dark red drops — Brandt’s spatter probably — and a smudge of pink that belonged to Amy. He wondered if he had Brandt’s blood on his face and he didn’t really care, but he found himself wiping his cheeks anyway.
It wasn’t something he liked to admit to himself because it seemed heartless and almost inhuman, but he was glad the bastard was dead. He was glad it had been Joe who had killed him.
Louis shivered and looked around.
The door to the storm shelter — or whatever it was — hung open on one rusty hinge. He stared at it for a moment, then looked up at the hill Brandt had leaped from.
Why did Brandt care who went in there? He had abducted Amy and dragged her through the cornfields, all the way to the creek. Most likely running from the deputies who had been there that morning. The Gremlin was probably hidden out there somewhere, too. An easy escape for him and Amy, at least for a few miles until the deputies saw them.
So why had he come back? What had he left that he was willing to die for?
Louis withdrew the flashlight from his back pocket and clicked it on. He stepped inside the bunker. The stone steps crumbled some under his weight, almost sending him to the dirt. He dropped the flashlight as he tried to catch himself. It was a cheap one, and the cap popped off, spilling the batteries and killing the light.
He inhaled slowly.
There was a small square of sunlight near the door, but still, he felt buried in a darkness that seemed to have no end. He didn’t like being underground. It brought back all the terrifying moments of the time he had spent locked in the tunnels of an abandoned asylum while he listened to a madman murder a young woman.
He picked up the flashlight and slid the batteries back in. The weak beam offered only a thin gray wash over the stone walls. The rafters were bowed under the press of the soil.
He turned the light toward the back and started walking.
Food wrappers, an empty bag of potato chips, a whiskey bottle. Nothing of value to Brandt or anyone else.
He stopped at a large pile of dirt topped with a broken rafter. Louis turned the light up to the ceiling. The roots of the weeds above had penetrated the dirt, sending down spindly, pale tendrils above his head.
The ceiling had caved in back here. But it didn’t look recent. The dirt and splintered wood looked dry, and the roots were withered.
He started to turn away, but something glinted in the beam of the flashlight. He knelt next to the sloping dirt and moved the beam of the light slowly across edge of the dirt pile where it leveled into the ground.
Again, a glint. He brushed gently at the soil.
It was a small, narrow bone, the color of the ivory keys on the piano in the parlor.
He gently dusted away more dirt. Another bone emerged. Seconds later, he’d unearthed a third and a fourth. Then, finally, as his fingers grew numb, he stopped.
The small bones were embedded in the ground, still perfectly positioned to form a human hand. But it was the plain gold wedding band at the base of the fourth finger that held his eyes.
Louis pushed slowly to his feet.
This is what Owen Brandt had come back for.
Jean.
Chapter Forty-four
Louis followed Detective Bloom back into the root cellar. Bloom was shining a powerful battery-operated lantern over the stone walls as they ventured toward the back. Louis felt something brush his neck and jumped, but it was just a withered corn cob hanging from the rafter.
When the bright beam of the lantern came to rest on the bones, they stood out against the black dirt as stark as an X-ray.
Louis’s gaze traveled over the sagging wood rafters and the heap of dirt in the corner where the ceiling of the cellar had collapsed. If these bones did belong to Jean, what had her final minutes on earth been like? She had been brutally stabbed inside the kitchen, yet she had managed to crawl all the way out here, a good fifty yards from the house, before she died of her wounds.
And then to be buried and forgotten.
No, not forgotten, never forgotten. Just lost.
“You think this is Jean Brandt?” Bloom asked.
Louis stuffed his cold hands into his pockets. “Who else could it be?” he asked.
“Hell, I don’t know,” Bloom said. “It could be another slave woman, for all I know. Or another old girlfriend of Brandt’s we don’t know he killed. This farm seems to get a hold on people in a way that makes them crazy. And dead or alive, they can’t seem to find their way off it.”
Bloom started back toward the door. Louis stayed for a moment, staring at the wedding ring, then turned and followed Bloom back into the dull wash of white sunlight.
The farm buzzed with cops, deputies from the county and troopers from the state. Blue cruisers and Livingston County patrol cars were wedged haphazardly on the grass. Two television vans were parked beyond the gate, reporters and cameramen craning to see over the cop who was blocking their access onto the property.
“Someone cover this asshole up with a tarp,” Bloom hollered.
He was talking about Brandt, who still lay a few feet from the root-cellar door. Dead leaves had gathered along the length of his body.
Louis hurried to catch up with Bloom. He caught him near the barn as Bloom muttered something into his radio. Louis heard Amy’s name and a crackle of static, but then Bloom veered away to finish the conversation in private. It irritated Louis, but he remained where he was, not sure he’d get any information if he pissed Bloom off.
Bloom came back to him. “The girl is okay,” he said. “The docs said they lost her once when her heart stopped, but they brought her back.”
Louis blew out a breath in relief.
“The wound itself wasn’t too deep,” Bloom said. “Her parka cushioned the thrust of the blade, and the cold water stifled the blood flow. But they also said if you and Frye had been ten minutes later, she would have died from exposure.”
Louis looked out to the fields. He had almost given up looking for her.
He turned to Bloom. “Look, if you don’t need me any more right now, I’d like to catch a ride into Howell,” he said. “I’ll bring Joe back to do her statement and answer questions.”
“Yeah, you do that,” Bloom said. “But let me tell you something first.”
Louis waited, figuring Bloom was about to chew on his ass for allowing Joe to leave the scene and for letting Amy run off and probably a dozen other things.
“You remember a man named Mark Steele?” Bloom asked.
“Yeah,” Louis said. “State police investigator. Stepped into a case I was working on up north in ’84.”
Bloom nodded. “He’s still with the MSP, and he’s a major with the professional standards section. You know
