He was alone now. It should have been Joe who stayed. She was the police officer and the shooter of a wanted man. It was her duty as a cop to stay on the scene and help secure it.
But he knew Joe wasn’t thinking like a cop right now. So he had let her go.
He looked at his watch. She should be halfway to Howell by now with Amy. He remembered seeing a road sign for a hospital there, and he had rattled off directions to Joe before she pulled away.
He hoped she remembered them. And he hoped she kept herself sane enough on the drive to handle the rolling country roads. He’d never transported a dying person before, but he could imagine that every mile must feel like a hundred. What he could not imagine was hearing the person next to you gasp her last breath and being able 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.
You can’t go in there.
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.