Brian Freeman - The Burying Place

'Leave me alone,' she insisted.

'We're way beyond that. You know it. I know it. This is about you now, not me.'

'What do you want?' she repeated.

'I want you to meet me.'

'You're crazy.'

'You're talking like you have a choice, Kasey. But you don't. We both know you don't.'

She squeezed her eyes shut. Tears pushed their way under her eyelids. 'We're leaving. Tonight. We're driving away. You'll never find us.'

'I will find you. I'll find your husband, too. And your child.'

'Leave them alone!' Her voice was a strangled scream, choked and heavy.

'I'd like to. This is between you and me. But if you leave, then I have no choice. I'll have to make sure you pay, and then your family pays, until there's nothing left. You don't want that.'

'Oh, my God, why are you doing this?'

'You're the one who put yourself in the middle of my game.'

'It was an accident. I never meant for it to happen like this. I never wanted anything to do with you.' Her cheeks flushed red as she cried. 'Please.'

'You're going to meet me. Now. Fifteen minutes.'

'I won't do it.'

'Yes, you will. You'll do anything to save your family. I know you.'

Kasey said nothing. Her brain raced, and she looked for a way out, and she saw nothing but the walls.

'Fifteen minutes,' he repeated. 'Meet me where it started between us. Alone.'

'No.'

'If you're not there, I'll kill them, Kasey. In awful ways. You know I'll do it. If you're late, or I smell a cop, you can expect to come back home and find them both gone. You better hurry.'

He hung up.

Kasey put her hand flat on her chest as she hyperventilated. She saw a rusted hunter's knife on the shelf and thought about killing herself, cutting open her wrists and bleeding to death on the concrete floor. But it wouldn't save them. If she was gone, he'd still come after them. She knew it. She knew his game. Instead, she grabbed the knife and shoved it in her back pocket.

Fifteen minutes. She didn't have much time. She wiped her face and steeled her nerves. If he wanted a fight, she would give him a fight. Only one of them would end up alive, and it would be her, not him. He was right about one thing. She would do anything to save her family.

Kasey climbed the stairs out of the basement. Bruce was in the kitchen, watching her strangely.

'Did I hear you talking?' he asked.

'It was Guppo. He needs me at the crime scene out at the old dairy.'

'Why?'

She shrugged. 'He can't figure something out, and he needs my help. He knows we're leaving in the morning.'

'You don't have to go. This is their problem now, not yours.'

'As long as that guy is out there, it's my problem,' Kasey blurted out, her voice growing shrill with anger and frustration. 'It's our problem.'

Bruce stared at her. 'What's wrong?'

'Nothing. Nothing's wrong. I have to go. I won't be long.'

Her coat was draped over the back of the couch. She put it on and zipped it up to her neck. Bruce watched her, and she hoped he couldn't read her mind. He always told her he didn't trust anyone in the entire world except her, but there were days when that felt like a burden she couldn't handle. He was her opposite in so many ways. That was one reason they were good together. She would never have survived this past year without him.

'It'll be better when we're in the desert,' he told her. 'You'll see.'

Kasey nodded as she put on her gloves and tried not to cry. The desert felt like a dream. She wondered if she would ever see it. She opened the front door, where the wind gusted into the foyer, bringing a cloud of snow. Before she left, she turned back and put a gloved hand on Bruce's bushy beard.

'I'm sorry,' she said.

'For what?'

'For putting us in the middle of this.'

'It's not your fault,' he told her. 'You can't blame yourself.'

'I do anyway.'

She kissed him and closed the door before her emotions betrayed her. As she tramped across the dirt toward the garage, she cringed in the cold air. The fierce wind bit at her exposed skin, and the wet snowflakes clumped on her eyelids, making her blink. Her eyes moved constantly, studying every corner and shadow. She wondered where he was. When she yanked open the garage door, she made sure the space was empty before hurrying to their car and climbing inside. She locked the doors and didn't let the engine warm up before backing through the drifts and speeding toward the highway.

Kasey was alone on the road. Snow poured across the headlights and made it difficult to see. She remembered the same lonely drive a week earlier, lost in the fog, but she knew where she was going this time. She remembered how the gun on the seat beside her had comforted her that night, but she had already surrendered her gun. She put the knife there now instead and eyed its dull blade, but no sense of security came with it.

It took her less than ten minutes to criss-cross along Highway 43 and retrace her steps to the abandoned dairy on Strand Avenue. She came from the northeast, past the house of the woman who had died in the field, across the bridge over the rapids of the Lester River. Her body felt the icy grip of the water again, the way it had knocked her off her feet. She remembered the screams and the sounds of the shots coming from her gun. She remembered standing over the woman's body after the man had escaped.

She turned into the driveway near the white dairy building. No other cars were parked there. She saw no one waiting for her. She grabbed the knife and secreted it in her pocket as she got out of the car. The wind howled. She swayed on her feet as images of that deadly encounter a week earlier hammered her brain. She had spent the days since then trying to forget, and now she was back here, the last place on earth she wanted to be.

Kasey shoved her hands in her pockets. She squinted against the snow. When she wandered toward the dairy, she saw water stains on the cinder blocks and broken frosted windows. If she looked closely, she expected to see her own footsteps, coming up from the river, winding between the pines and stealthily hugging the rear of the building. As she came around the corner of the dairy into the open stretch of grass, now white with snow, she had a vision of the woman still lying there, her body in the field. Susan Krauss. Kasey could run and run and never escape her.

But it wasn't a vision. It was real.

Kasey peered through the snow that blew sideways across the grass, and right where the woman had been, right where she had died, was another body.

'Oh, no.'

She ran, slipping, toward this new victim, who lay face down and half buried by the driving snow. The body was a woman. She was naked, her skin oddly bloodless and blue, as if she had lain there for hours. Her head was turned to the side, but where her face should have been, there was mostly a pulpy mess of bone and brain.

Kasey lurched back in revulsion. It was Regan Conrad.

She spun around, but he was already behind her, near the wall of the dairy ten feet away, smiling.

'I knew you'd come.'

His voice was husky and unafraid. He wore no mask this time, and she could see his face. His right cheek was pockmarked with acne scars. His black hair was short and wiry. His dark eyes were reptilian as they focused on her, seeing her for what she was: prey. She had no illusions about why he hadn't bothered to hide his face. This was the end.

Kasey screamed for help, but it sounded like a whisper above the hiss of the storm.

'No one will hear you,' he said. 'It's the just the two of us out here.'

'You sick son of a bitch,' she blustered, covering her terror.

'This doesn’t have to end badly, Kasey. You belong with a man like me, not that beer-bellied husband of yours. Come with me.'