The Burying Place

'We're all tired, Micki. It's been a long night. You've helped us a lot, and I appreciate it, OK? But I need to know if you have any idea who that little boy could be.'

'I already told you, I don't know. But it's not Callie, and that's good, right? I knew Dr Glenn wasn't involved. He couldn't do something like that to his daughter.'

'What if Callie wasn't his daughter?' Denise interjected.

Stride shot her a warning glare. He turned back to Micki. 'You told me that you lost your own son early in your pregnancy,' he said softly. 'I'm sorry, but I have to ask. Was that really true?'

'Yes! You know what happened to my baby!'

'OK. I know. And the light your mother saw in the woods, you're certain this was on the night that Callie disappeared?'

'Yes, she told me about it on Saturday, and that's when I went to search. That's when I found the toy.'

Stride nodded. 'OK, Micki. That's all for now. You can go home.'

The girl stamped past them up the slope. Serena watched her disappear between the trees as she headed for the lights of the mobile home. 'Where does that leave us?' she asked.

'Nowhere,' Stride said.

Denise reached for a cigarette and put it in her mouth without lighting it. 'Look, the toy horn was obviously intended to make us think there was a connection to Callie. Right?'

Stride thought about it but shook his head. 'No, that doesn’t make sense. As soon as we put a shovel in the ground, we were going to find out that it wasn't Callie buried there.'

Serena thought again about someone bringing a child's body to the woods in the darkness and how much the burial felt like a religious ceremony. Something private and painful. 'What if the toy is exactly what it looks like?' she suggested. 'A memorial.'

'What do you mean?' Stride asked.

'I mean that no one ever expected us to find that toy. It was put there the way you'd put flowers on a grave.'

'But whose grave?' Denise asked.

Serena retraced her conversations with Valerie. She realized that when Stride had told her about Micki's discovery of the toy horn, it had felt familiar to her. It had already been part of her consciousness about the case, because she had heard about it before. Valerie had told her about her night at the hospital on New Year's Eve, about the staff blowing toy horns when the clock turned to midnight.

She could almost picture the scene in her mind. See it. Hear it. Valerie drowsy with pain and drugs. The noise and excitement of the New Year in the maternity ward. The horns squealing. Lullabies playing on the hospital speakers with each new baby born.

'Another baby,' Serena said.

Denise looked at her. The unlit cigarette drooped in her mouth. 'What are you talking about?'

'There must have been other babies born in the hospital that night. New Year's night.'

'So what?' Denise asked.

'So I'd like to find out who they were. And whether Regan Conrad was the nurse for any of the mothers.'

'Yes, but if it was a stranger's child, why bury him here?' Denise asked. 'What does this have to do with Callie?'

'I don't know,' Serena admitted.

Even so, her instincts told her that the body in the ground was inextricably linked to Callie's disappearance. Somehow, she knew that this child, whoever he was, was the key to everything.

Stride was already on the phone. Serena watched him dial.

'Guppo, it's Stride,' she heard him say. 'I need some information. I'm looking for a list of babies born on January first, preferably those at St Mary's. See if you can find birth announcements on the News- Tribune website, OK? Boys only, don't worry about the girls. I'll hold.'

He waited. He stared at Serena, and she stared back at him. She realized that more than anything else right now, she wanted to kiss him.

'I'm here,' he said into the phone. 'That was fast. Give me the names and addresses of the parents, OK?' Then he said, 'Hang on, repeat that. Are you serious?'

Stride hung up the phone.

'We have to get back to Duluth right now.'

Troy Grange activated the security system on the downstairs level of his house before he went upstairs to bed. It was a useless gesture. He had purchased the system to protect Trisha and the kids, and the killer had gotten inside anyway and taken away his beautiful wife. He wanted to rip the panel off the wall and throw it in the fields.

Troy cried. He didn't let himself cry often, never in public, and never in front of his children. He needed to be strong for them. He couldn't bring back their mother, so the only thing he could do was go on with life. Keep them safe. Try to keep them happy. But when he was alone, in his private moments, he cried. He remembered Trisha's face as vividly as if she were still there beside him. Her touch. Her laugh. How her skin felt when they were in bed. He pounded the wall as he realized that those sensations would begin to dim now, and eventually they would slip out of his memory altogether.

Safety. Security. There was no such thing. You could live in a fortress and still not keep out the monsters. The sensors, the alarms, the locks, the bars were mostly an illusion. If someone wanted to come in, they could. People like Nick Garaldo would always figure out a way. Sometimes their motive was no more than mischief, to say they went where no one else wanted them to go.

Sometimes their motive was to kill.

Troy thought about Nick Garaldo. And Maggie. And the ruined school. He wondered if they would find Nick inside, trapped, suffocated, neck broken, or blood drained from his body. There were so many ways to die in ruins.

That was when the thought, the memory, poked into Troy's head.

He stared at the security panel on the wall and remembered the man who had installed it a few weeks earlier. A tall man with scarred skin and eyes like a dead fish. The kind of man who smiled in a way that made you think he wasn't smiling at all. Troy hadn't liked him.

He didn't know why his mind had dragged up a memory of the security man's face, and then he remembered that he had been thinking about Maggie's phone call. A security guard had called her about Nick and the pistachio shells. A security guard out at the old school.

Jim Nieman. That was the name. He was almost sure of it.

Nieman was the same man who had been inside his house.

Chapter Forty-nine

The rope snapped Kasey's chin back as she fell, and a shiver of pain coursed through her spine. She felt a crushing weight on her throat as her body dragged the thick cord into a vise around her neck. Her legs danced spastically. She clawed at the cord with her fingers, but the knots held, and all she felt was blood oozing from her abraded skin. She reached above her head to pull herself up and relieve the pressure, but she had no strength to lift her body.

Her mind grew cloudy. She knew she was dying.

Then the frayed section of rope where she had sawed with the metal plate split and gave way. The rope broke, and she fell in darkness and landed with an agonizing, bone-deep blow as her calves slammed the cement