The Soul Hunter (26 page)

“Elaine did?”

“She scratched up the trunk of the car trying to get to it. Dug a hole right into the pavement by the trunk, she was so agitated.” She checked her watch. “The dog handler comes in half an hour if you want to talk to him. Or meet Elaine.”

“What kind of dog is she?”

“Rottweiler, I think. She’s real sweet until the gate closes. Then she knows she’s at work and she does her job.”

“Which is?”

“Keep everyone out of the lot. No exceptions.”

“Even employees?”

“Even me.”

“So there’s a window of time between six and seven when no one’s on the lot and Elaine isn’t here yet.”

She nodded. “Depending on what time we make it out of here.”

“I think the police said Drew was last seen at six thirty p.m.,” I said.

“Gate’s locked at six. How’d he get the body in?”

“Over the fence?”

“Razor wire around the entire perimeter. Sometimes people throw a mattress over the wire and crawl over.”

“Seems like it’d be hard to do dragging a body.”

“And where’s the mattress? I don’t think they found anything.”

“Would blankets work?”

“If you had enough of them. There’s a lot of fibers on that wire. Cops took samples.”

“Can I take a look?”

She put her coat back on and handed me a man’s jacket that
had been hanging on a peg behind the desk. It smelled like smoke. I put it on and followed her out the back door of the trailer.

The back gate wasn’t ten feet from the trailer. It was chained and padlocked. A dumpster sat beside the gate.

“Here’s where people get in,” she said. “They climb onto the dumpster, throw something over the razor wire, and climb in.”

“Why haven’t you had the city move the dumpster?”

She looked at me sideways. “You haven’t lived in Dallas long, have you?”

“A few years.”

“Might as well ask the city to give me a pedicure and wax my legs for me while they’re at it. The cars are all locked and insured. Sometimes someone will bust a window and take a stereo or something.”

“Where do you keep the car keys?”

“In a safe inside the office. Building’s all locked up and alarmed. That glass in the customer window is bulletproof. We never keep cash on hand after hours. And then there’s Elaine. We really only have that one hour of vulnerability. We’ve been here fifteen years. Very few problems, knock on wood.”

She walked around the building and stopped in the back corner of the lot. I bent down to see where she was pointing.

“Elaine tore up the pavement here. Dug right into the asphalt. Car’s trunk was scratched to pieces. Her paws were bleeding.”

“How’d the body get in the trunk if the keys are locked in a safe?”

“It was a Honda,” she said.

“Come again?”

“You don’t need a key to get into the trunk of most foreign cars. Hondas have a latch. Pops it right open.”

I pointed at the back gate.

“Any chance that gate was left open that night?”

She shook her head. “Only time we ever unlock it is to take
the trash out. I didn’t close that night. My receptionist and our mechanic did. He took the trash out, then went back into the office for a few minutes. The gate was open maybe ten minutes at the most. Yolanda locked it before she left. She clocked out at 6:57. A little later than usual. She does that sometimes. Four kids. She needs the money.”

“But it’s possible. If someone saw her leave it open, they could rush in, stick the body in the trunk, and get out before she got back.”

We both stared at the layout for a minute, thinking. Finally, I held out my hand. “Thanks very much. You’ve been extremely helpful.”

“I hope they catch the guy.”

“They have someone locked up.”

“Who is it?”

“His name is Gordon Pryne.”

“Doesn’t ring a bell.” She threw her cigarette on the ground and screwed it delicately into the asphalt with the toe of her dress shoe. “Doesn’t matter who it is as long as they got him. I don’t like the idea of a killer wandering around in my alley.”

We said our goodnights and she let me out, locking the gate behind us both and driving off into the night. The wind was starting to whip. Could be another storm coming.

I walked around the lot and stepped into the alley.

A six-foot wooden fence ran most of the length of the alley, with open gateways every twenty yards or so. That takes care of your entry problem and your exit problem, as Randy the rodent man would say. Anyone would have free access to the alley. The one chain-link was the fence around Critter Cars, making it the only property fully visible from the alley.

I wondered why Pryne hadn’t just put the body in the dumpster. On such a cold evening, no one would be poking through trash bins in the middle of the night. It would have
made a decent hiding place and it was much more accessible.

Gordon Pryne was impulsive. Sloppy really. Not a plan-ahead type of guy. He’d left a wide, messy trail of damning evidence behind him in each of his other crimes. He was just the type to dump her body in a trashcan. Or even leave it out in the open. Either option was convenient and conveyed an impersonal, contemptuous attitude toward the victim.

Why the sudden finesse with Drew’s murder?

And Drew Sturdivant had been killed within the first couple of blows. For a violent act, it was as humane as possible. Pryne liked to make his victims suffer. That seemed to be the point, actually. Drew’s killer had used multiple blows, the paper had said, but most of them had been inflicted in a frenzy after she’d died. Which sounded to me like she knew her killer in some loaded, personal way.

Did Pryne have that sort of relationship with Drew? I doubted he had that sort of relationship with anyone.

And why did he leave the ax on my porch? I still had no answer to that nagging little question—the one that had gotten me into this whole mess in the first place.

I was creeping myself out standing at the scene of the crime in the dark. And I definitely didn’t want to stick around and meet Elaine. I got in my truck and drove to my house, surprised at the pleasant sense of anticipation I felt knowing that sweet, fluffy Melissa would be there to greet me.

T
he moon had gone by then, ducking behind the gathering night-clouds and leaving the street to swallow up the slim reflection of my headlights on the ice as I drove home. My house was dark when I got there, all shut-down and shuttered. I felt depressed and alone just looking at it.

I’d apparently forgotten to turn my porch light on when I left this morning. It’s a tough call, that porch light situation. Leave it on all day and announce to local ax murderers that you’re not home? Or leave it off and come home to a pitch black house? It’s one of life’s stubborn dilemmas.

I pushed the button on my garage door opener, expecting the familiar, reluctant groan and the gape of yellow light as the door yawned open. But the door stayed firmly clamped shut. I let out a string of cuss words, followed by an all-purpose prayer for forgiveness, and parked my truck in the driveway. I’d forgotten to give Kay Basieri her smelly coat back before I left the car lot, so I peeled it off now and left it on the front porch to air out overnight.

I unlocked the front door and threw my stuff down. The air was stony cold and smelled flat and dank, like the underside of a rock. I locked the door behind me, flipped the switch in the foyer, and found myself standing in dead darkness. No electricity meant no space heaters, no lights, no working refrigerator. Just a water heater (thank you, Jesus), a gas oven, and the dinky gas wall
heater in the bathroom. If it was something other than a breaker switch, it was going to be a long night. I felt my way to the bedroom and reached under the bed for a flashlight I keep there. It’s about the size and weight of a baseball bat, which renders it a multi-purpose instrument. Should the need arise.

I pushed the button on the flashlight and walked behind the beam to Melissa’s hutch. The cedar shavings were all piled up in one corner, the rest of the hutch floor almost bare. Her bowls had both been knocked over. The big plastic milk bottle I’d cut open at one end and turned on its side (for a handy hide-out, in case Peter Terry came calling) was empty.

“Melissa,” I cooed. “It’s your Aunt Dylan.”

It didn’t seem right to refer to myself as her mom. Drew was her mom, of course. I was just the crazy woman Melissa got stuck with after she was orphaned. Besides, I needed to get used to thinking of myself as an aunt—since I’d already been crowned World’s Greatest Aunt by my father and his idiot wife Kellee.

I expected the rust-colored mound of shavings to shift and for Melissa (who always seemed to emerge from hiding when I entered a room) to poke her nose out of the pile and hop on over to me, happy to see me after her first day by herself in her new home. But nothing happened.

“Melissa, sweetie, I’m home.”

I dug carefully into the shavings, pulling them away from the center until I got to the bottom of the pile. The hutch was empty.

I heard a piercing squeal come from the kitchen. Like the sharp screech of metal against metal. Did rabbits scream? I had no idea.

I rushed to the kitchen and flipped on the light, forgetting momentarily that I had no electricity. I pointed the beam in the general direction of the screech. Melissa was there, on the kitchen floor, running around in quick, tight circles, pawing at the cabinet door under the kitchen sink. She’d peed on the floor, leaving
a tiny pool of urine in the middle of the kitchen. I walked over and pointed my light at the mess. Dirty paw prints recorded a frenetic, circular dance on my linoleum.

“Melissa!”

She ignored me and kept scratching the door.

I heard the screech again and flinched, my whole body cringing, a rush of naked fear surging right up from the floor to my hair.

The screech came from her general direction, but I could tell now that it did not come from Melissa. It came from behind that cabinet door.

“Melissa,” I said again, more gently this time. “Hey, Melissa. Settle down, honey.”

I walked over to her, put the flashlight down on the countertop, and picked her up. She fought me and freed herself from my grip, thudding to the floor awkwardly and scrambling again to the cabinet door. The bottom edge of the wood was raw from her scratches. I pulled her away again and held her firmly against the floor with one hand.

I would rather have jumped into a pool of battery acid than open that door. Some poltergeist was back there. But of course, I stood up, clutching Melissa tight, picked up my flashlight, and opened the door slowly with my foot, swinging both sides open. There, in a reassuring assembly of order, were the soldiers in my war against germs, all lined up at attention, labels pointed forward. From Ajax All-Purpose Cleanser to Zep Orange Industrial Degreaser.

As I leaned down to shine my light into the cabinet, Melissa wriggled free again and hit the floor running. I expected her to head once again for the open cabinet, but she high-tailed it to the other end of the kitchen and turned to stare at me, her back to the wall, her eyes bright, reflecting the light back at me as I pointed it in her direction.

She twitched her nose calmly. She’d cornered the monster. Slaying it was apparently my job.

I knelt on the floor and pointed my light again into the cabinet. At first I didn’t notice anything out of place. And then I saw a bottle of Tilex lying on its side in the back. I began to remove bottles from the cabinet, one by one, setting them on the kitchen floor. When I reached for the Tilex, the screech returned and the Tilex bottle began to jerk wildly. I yanked my hand away and pointed my flashlight.

Glaring back at me were two tiny eyes, red in the light. I pulled back again and let out a little scream. I heard Melissa take off for the bedroom.

I stood up and rummaged through a drawer, producing a pair of kitchen tongs. I used them to reach once again for the Tilex, pulling it away gingerly, shining my light directly at the red eyes, which glared, unblinking, back at me.

It was a rat. Caught in one of Randy’s glue traps.

As I leaned in to get a closer look, the rat let out another screech. I flinched and pulled away, sitting back on my heels.

Now let me just say here that I’ve read the research on animals and emotion. Animals supposedly do not experience complex feelings like we do—only the simple, primal ones necessary for survival. Like fear. But anyone who has spent any time at all with animals will tell you with great conviction that their pets feel love, shame, joy—the whole rock and roll. Of course, the academics all choose to ignore them in favor of their own rat-maze-with-a-mild-electric-shock experiments. As though anyone subjected to electric shock would give you an honest answer.

This rat, I swear to you, was enraged. And what it flung at me with those eyes was hatred. I can’t find another word for it. Simple, pure, unflinching hatred.

The rat was dark brown with a long, black tail. It was maybe eight or nine inches long, nose to tip. Its belly was stuck to the
glue trap, stem to stern, and in its struggle, it had disemboweled itself. The rat was dying. A slow, hopeless, miserable death.