His caution had kept him from silencing her on sight, but now he was left with the fear that she’d seen him. Even if she hadn’t seen his face, perhaps she had seen something else, a piece of evidence that would eventually surface from her subconscious and lead the police to him.
He memorized her face, because he would need to find her again. She had deep brown eyes with the intelligence and intensity of a deer sniffing human scent. He memorized her tears trembling on her lower lids because she was too busy digging to wipe them away. He memorized brown hands that were both strong and delicate as they worked to free Frida from a grave where he’d intended for her to stay. The set of her jaw had said that she would not be deterred from this task or any other. He needed to know her name, where she lived, what she did every day.
This woman moved him as much as Frida had, and this was a good thing. He was going to need to silence her. He might as well enjoy it.
Chapter Eight
Nobody was looking at Faye. Quietly, she backed away from the paramedics, working hard to save a woman who needed them badly. She needed to know that Kali was not watching this.
Stepping between the bushes and tree trunks that hid the little girl’s hiding place, Faye entered the small clearing where Kali whiled away her days. She expelled a relieved sigh when she saw that no one was there.
The magazines were right where Faye had seen them, still wrapped in plastic that was now beaded with dew. Kali’s bag of trash hadn’t moved, either. Only one thing was different. Trash was scattered across the small patch of grass where the little girl sat. Faye knew this was where she sat, because there was no room for her to sit anywhere else.
The trash bothered Faye for two reasons. First, throwing garbage around seemed uncharacteristic for a child who cared enough about her space to keep a trash bag handy. And second, it made no sense for there to be trash in the only open spot large enough for sitting unless Kali had dropped it as she left, probably in a hurry. Otherwise, she would have been sitting on an ice cream wrapper.
Looking more closely at the ice cream wrapper, Faye’s heart sank. It held a half-eaten ice cream sandwich, and the chocolate mass cradled between flat chocolate cookies was only partially melted. She knew Kali’s mother kept ice cream around the house. All evidence pointed to Kali sitting right here, and so recently that she must have seen terrible things. She’d almost certainly seen Faye find the buried woman. Worse, it was entirely possible that she’d seen her be buried. She might even have seen her stabbed or shot.
A lightly worn path led from Kali’s hiding place and Faye followed it. The path paralleled the creek, and the water sounds got louder with every step as it descended to another shallow crossing like the one near Faye’s parked car. Once across, it took a hard right away from the creek and put Faye within sight of the back doorstep of a modest home.
The house’s white vinyl siding was cracked and mildewed. Dark windows watched Faye like fathomless eyes. A metal swingset that looked as old as Faye stood rusting in the yard with no swings at the end of its chains. It wasn’t a beautiful home, but the roof was solid and the yard was neatly kept. Maybe Jeremiah had been right when he’d said that there were a lot of children who were worse off than Kali.
Faye heard more voices behind her saying, “You say there’s a witness? Where is she?” so she turned away from Kali’s house. The police had come and she needed to go help them find a monster.
The detective was not impressed with Faye’s ice cream clue, or he said he wasn’t. She showed him the wrapper, hidden in a circle of trees, and he was only marginally interested until she told him that the ice cream in it was still frozen.
Upon hearing that news, he yelled at her for disturbing evidence. She wanted to say, “Which exactly is bothering you? Are you annoyed that I showed you a worthless piece of trash, or are you annoyed that I disturbed something worthwhile? That’s ironic, since you would have ignored it if I hadn’t been here. Besides, how was I to know that the ice cream wasn’t melted unless I checked? If I had waited for you, we would never have known that it was still frozen when I got here.”
But she said nothing, because the detective did not seem like someone who really wanted to hear what people thought.
Instead, she asked the question that never left her mind. “How is she?”
The man had introduced himself as Detective McDaniel. He didn’t answer her question about the victim’s condition, but Faye could see the paramedics starting an IV and dead people didn’t get IVs. The woman was still limp and unresponsive, but maybe there was hope.
“Can you tell me who she is?” he asked.
“No, I don’t know who she is,” she said. “I wish I did.” She wasn’t sure he believed her. Why else would he ask, again, “Are you sure?”
She answered him with “I’ve never seen her before in my life,” despite feeling insulted that he had asked her to tell him, yet again, that the injured woman was a stranger.
His “Hmm,” was loaded down with doubt. “Ma’am, I need you to explain to me how you came to find this poor woman.”
“I heard some noises up above me—”
He interrupted her to ask, “What kind of noises?”
“Footsteps. A voice—”
He interrupted her again. “The killer’s voice?”
“No. I didn’t hear any words that I could understand. Once I got up there, I realized that I didn’t hear any words because there weren’t any words
