I checked vacation schedules for the schools you mentioned. There’s no match between the killings and any of the colleges and universities you mentioned. But Walt Walker’s elementary school? Bingo. I think he may be your man. Good work, Faye.
Faye worked to free Kali’s hands, but her hair ribbon was tied tight around them and the man’s tie binding her feet was tighter.
Kali’s voice was so faint that it hardly even qualified as a whisper. “He’s out there, Faye. Mr. Walker. He lied to Uncle Laneer. Brought me here. Picked me up and carried me. Tied me up.” She was trembling so hard that Faye had to support her with both hands. “Faye. He’s coming back.”
So she and Phyllis Windom had found the right algorithm. It was Walt Walker who had spent his school vacations preying on women. It was Walt who had packed a shovel into the trunk of his car and used it to beat Frida to death. It was Walt who had buried her alive. It was Walt who had driven to Alabama and Arkansas and Mississippi to do the same thing to other doomed women.
And it was Walt who had done this to Kali. But Faye had known this already, because she recognized the pale green tie she held in her hands.
Faye wouldn’t have thought that a silk tie would have been so hard to unknot, but Walt had bound Kali’s feet so tightly that the tie was cutting hard into her skin. She didn’t have the luxury of slicing through the silk, not when her pocketknife and everything else useful that she owned were safe in her hotel room.
As her eyes adapted to the darkness, she began to see things that she wished had remained invisible. A pile of long bones filled the crypt’s far corner. Nearer by—close enough to reach, actually—she saw a pile of skulls, maybe seven of them.
All of the bones were stacked so neatly. Was it someone’s job to do housekeeping in mausoleums, cleaning out old bones and making way for new ones? She didn’t want to know.
The ceiling was low and Faye couldn’t stand the thought of brushing it with her hair. She didn’t much like the idea of kneeling on a floor littered with human bones, either, so she stooped over Kali until she was able to free her. Taking the girl’s ankles in her hands, one at a time, she rubbed the circulation back into them.
“Do you think you can run? If you can’t, I’ll carry you, but we can go faster if you run.”
“I can run. I can run right now, so let’s go. He said he was coming back.”
Faye had one hand flat on the heavy door, ready to run, when she heard the raspy creak of another set of old hinges. She hadn’t closed the gate to the pathway leading to the church. If someone was entering the fenced graveyard, the sound of an opening gate could only come from the other one, where she had seen the prints of a pair of men’s dress shoes leading away from the graveyard.
“He’s coming back, Faye. Just like he said he would.”
Faye had no doubt that Walt was armed. In her mind, he was carrying a shovel like the one that killed Frida.
She and Kali had no weapons. They were cornered. They didn’t have his years of experience in killing. They only had one factor in their favor.
He didn’t know that there were two of them.
Joe left McDaniel with people who could help him, then was immediately back in the woods, tracking his own steps. He could get himself back to the point where the detective had been injured. From there, he could track McDaniel’s attacker. Maybe the man’s trail would get Joe to Faye.
Faye picked up Kali and put her behind the door where she would be hidden when Walt opened it. She took the spot opposite Kali, by the door’s latch, with her back to the wall.
She needed to disable Walt in the split-second that his sun-dazzled eyes spent searching the mausoleum’s floor for the little girl he’d left hogtied. She wished she believed that she could take him out with a purse full of pebbles, but she didn’t.
It would take him only seconds to walk from the gate to where they waited. As those seconds ticked down, Faye had only one idea for improving her makeshift weapon and she needed to do it fast.
She reached down and grasped something smooth, cool, and heavier than it looked. Trying not to think about what she was doing, she flipped the skull over and poured the pebbles into the cavity where someone’s brain had been, then she slid it into her purse and knotted the drawstring.
As she drew the drawstring through her fingers slowly, she assessed its length and judged where to hold it for the best possible swing. Then she waited without even trying to hide, ready to strike fast. There would be no second chance.
Kneeling face-to-face with Kali, she whispered, “Promise me one thing?”
The little girl was too scared to speak.
“When you see a chance, run. Don’t wait for me. Just go. Do you hear me?”
Kali never said a thing. She didn’t have time.
Chapter Forty-six
He saw no one. No one was coming to stop him. If his luck held for five more minutes, the time to stop him would have passed.
Bloodlust was crowding out logic, and he knew it. Linton and the detective had both seen him, and he doubted that he’d managed to kill them with a single blow each. Logic said that he should run to his car and drive away, but the bloodlust was saying, “Wait just a moment longer. The girl is waiting. When she’s dead, then you can run.”
He knew that McDaniel would have called for dogs by now. If
