The Burying Place

she would fire. The wound in his shoulder still burned where her bullet had grazed him.

'You're a bad girl,' he said aloud. And bad girls need to be punished.

He scouted the ground level and then took the steps to the second floor. The first room in the hallway was an office with a computer desk and filing cabinets. A pale light glowed inside from a video loop repeated endlessly on the computer monitor. It was a screen saver of the Zapruder film showing the Kennedy assassination. As he watched, Kennedy took a fatal bullet in the head over and over.

Well, isn't that sick. Then he smiled at his own joke. Takes one to know one.

He rifled through the cabinets and desk drawers, pulling out months-old bank and credit card statements and cell phone bills. People never threw anything away. He flipped through a copy of the Duluth newspaper from the previous January and a February issue of Sports Illustrated. The swimsuit edition. He dug deeper, extracting file folders with tax information, which he paged through one by one. Toward the bottom of the desk drawer, he found a photograph of Kasey in a bathrobe holding her newborn son, his naked skin red and wrinkled. You look tired, darling.

But her eyes were the same. Blue. Fierce. He slipped the photograph in his pocket.

The next room was the bathroom. Kasey used bar soap that smelled like lavender. He spied threads of her red hair in the bathtub, which he picked up and twirled around his gloved finger. He imagined her stepping out of the porcelain tub, toweling her body dry, and studying her reflection. The tiny room would be humid and fragrant with her scent. When he opened her medicine cabinet, he found vitamin bottles containing fish oil and St John's Wort and prescriptions in her name for Xanax and Ambien.

Don't you sleep, Kasey? Poor baby.

He closed the cabinet and stared at his own face in Kasey's mirror. He kept his hair in a severe black crew cut. A gold earring hugged the lobe of his left ear. His right cheek was scarred and cratered from the acne he had suffered as a teenager. Looking at himself, he watched his dark, dead eyes come to life, like a doll turned on by a switch. He grinned and picked up an open tube of lipstick and scrawled a message for her on the glass. Two words to tell her who she was.

I want you to know I was here. I want you to know it's not over.

He found her bedroom at the end of the hall. The linens on the queen-sized bed were rumpled and unmade. Her closet door was ajar. He opened it and explored the contents, touching her blouses, running his fingers along the satin sleeves. On a hanger, he found a lace nightgown, which he removed and held at arm's length. It would fall barely past her thighs. The cups of the bra were sheer. He took the nightgown and draped it over the bed, as if she were lying there.

Looking down, he felt the familiar rage bubbling up like lava. For him, desire was rage. But it was different this time, because Kasey was different. She wasn't like all the others. He thought about waiting for her in the darkness and taking her now, but he willed himself to be patient. He wanted her to know. To feel him coming. To realize there was nothing she could do to keep him away.

As he turned for the doorway, he heard three muffled electronic beeps. He reached into his shirt pocket and extracted the small electronic receiver. The red light on the front of the black box was flashing.

He cursed silently.

Someone was at the school. Someone had tripped the sensors he had installed on the perimeter of the ruins. He couldn't have anyone discovering the burying place. Not now. Not yet.

Not before he was done with Kasey.

He ran into the hallway. By his mental calculations, he needed two minutes to sprint across the dark field to his van and another ten minutes to speed through the empty highways to Buckthorn.

He wondered: who's there? Who's going inside?

Was it the police?

He didn't have time to think. He hurried to the top of the stairs, and then he froze.

Headlights swept across the downstairs rooms. A key scraped in the front door lock. Someone was coming inside the house. He was trapped.

Chapter Thirteen

Kasey let herself inside and closed the door behind her. The house was dark and unusually cold. Through the front window, she watched the tail lights of Maggie's truck disappear toward the highway. She kicked off her boots and padded in her black athletic socks through the landmine of toys in the family room. She poured herself a cup of cold coffee in the kitchen, but when she tasted it, she poured it out in the sink.

'Bruce?' she called.

There was no answer. She was alone. She dug in her back pocket for her cell phone and dialed his number. The call went straight into voicemail.

'It's me,' she said in her nervous, child-like voice. 'I figured you'd be back by now. Is everything OK? Call me as soon as you can.'

Kasey hung up. She untucked and unbuttoned the shirt of her uniform, letting it hang open. A draft snickered from under the basement door, making her shiver. It was the kind of house where all the windows and doors leaked cold air. She couldn't really complain, because the rent was dirt cheap. A farm widow had died here five years earlier, and the woman's family rented out the property now to cover their expenses. They didn't put much money into the place, but they didn't ask for a lot of money in return. She and Bruce had lived here since they moved to Duluth.

Her eyes kept blinking shut. She wanted to wait for Bruce to get back, but she couldn't think about anything but sleep. She had slept badly all year, and even a couple hours felt like bliss when she could get it. She frowned, seeing the dirty dishes in the sink, but decided they could wait until morning.

Kasey dragged herself upstairs. Her foot landed on a wet spot in the carpet, and she cursed as the water soaked through the fabric of her sock. She reached down and peeled it off, leaving one foot bare. She squeezed the damp sock like a stress ball as she wandered down the hallway into her bedroom. She tossed the sock into their dirty clothes basket and stripped off her shirt and undershirt, leaving herself in a sports bra and her uniform slacks. She began to unbuckle her gun belt, then stopped in surprise when she noticed her sexy nightgown stretched across their bed.

'Bruce?' she called again.

She waited and listened. There was no sound, but even in the silence, something felt wrong. She fingered the lace fringe of the nightgown and frowned. With a quick glance, she noticed that her closet door was wide open, which wasn't how she'd left it. Little hairs stood up on the back of her neck.

She poked her face into the hallway and studied the succession of doors. The office. The bathroom. The nursery. Something shiny attracted her eyes. In the crack of the bathroom doorway, she spotted a silver cylinder on the linoleum by the toilet. It was her Walgreens lipstick.

That was wrong, too. She'd left it on the sink.

Her skin rippled with a wave of fear. She nestled the butt of her gun in her palm and yanked it out of the holster. She crept toward the bathroom and nudged open the door with her t—. The tiny room was empty, but when she reached around and turned on the light, her eyes fixed on the blood-red message scrawled on the mirror.

BAD GIRL.

Kasey stumbled backward, and her bare foot landed in another damp spot on the carpet. She understood now. He had been up here, him and his wet shoes, leaving tracks.

'Where are you?' she screamed, like an animal that puffs its fur to appear larger than it is. 'I know you're here! This time I won't miss. This time I'll blow your goddamned head off!'

She pushed her toe in an arc across the carpet and found another wet footprint. And another. The trail led her toward the nursery.

Kasey pointed her gun at the door. Inside, she heard a noise now, like a deck of cards being shuffled. It was the sound of the wind slapping the vertical blinds together through an open window. She squatted down to peer