Brian Freeman - The Burying Place

She could almost picture the scene in her mind. See it. Hear it. Valerie drowsy with pain and drugs. The noise and excitement of the New Year in the maternity ward. The horns squealing. Lullabies playing on the hospital speakers with each new baby born.

'Another baby,' Serena said.

Denise looked at her. The unlit cigarette drooped in her mouth. 'What are you talking about?'

'There must have been other babies born in the hospital that night. New Year's night.'

'So what?' Denise asked.

'So I'd like to find out who they were. And whether Regan Conrad was the nurse for any of the mothers.'

'Yes, but if it was a stranger's child, why bury him here?' Denise asked. 'What does this have to do with Callie?'

'I don't know,' Serena admitted.

Even so, her instincts told her that the body in the ground was inextricably linked to Callie's disappearance. Somehow, she knew that this child, whoever he was, was the key to everything.

Stride was already on the phone. Serena watched him dial.

'Guppo, it's Stride,' she heard him say. 'I need some information. I'm looking for a list of babies born on January first, preferably those at St Mary's. See if you can find birth announcements on the News-Tribune website, OK? Boys only, don't worry about the girls. I'll hold.'

He waited. He stared at Serena, and she stared back at him. She realized that more than anything else right now, she wanted to kiss him.

'I'm here,' he said into the phone. 'That was fast. Give me the names and addresses of the parents, OK?' Then he said, 'Hang on, repeat that. Are you serious?'

Stride hung up the phone.

'We have to get back to Duluth right now.'

Troy Grange activated the security system on the downstairs level of his house before he went upstairs to bed. It was a useless gesture. He had purchased the system to protect Trisha and the kids, and the killer had gotten inside anyway and taken away his beautiful wife. He wanted to rip the panel off the wall and throw it in the fields.

Troy cried. He didn't let himself cry often, never in public, and never in front of his children. He needed to be strong for them. He couldn't bring back their mother, so the only thing he could do was go on with life. Keep them safe. Try to keep them happy. But when he was alone, in his private moments, he cried. He remembered Trisha's face as vividly as if she were still there beside him. Her touch. Her laugh. How her skin felt when they were in bed. He pounded the wall as he realized that those sensations would begin to dim now, and eventually they would slip out of his memory altogether.

Safety. Security. There was no such thing. You could live in a fortress and still not keep out the monsters. The sensors, the alarms, the locks, the bars were mostly an illusion. If someone wanted to come in, they could. People like Nick Garaldo would always figure out a way. Sometimes their motive was no more than mischief, to say they went where no one else wanted them to go.

Sometimes their motive was to kill.

Troy thought about Nick Garaldo. And Maggie. And the ruined school. He wondered if they would find Nick inside, trapped, suffocated, neck broken, or blood drained from his body. There were so many ways to die in ruins.

That was when the thought, the memory, poked into Troy's head.

He stared at the security panel on the wall and remembered the man who had installed it a few weeks earlier. A tall man with scarred skin and eyes like a dead fish. The kind of man who smiled in a way that made you think he wasn't smiling at all. Troy hadn't liked him.

He didn't know why his mind had dragged up a memory of the security man's face, and then he remembered that he had been thinking about Maggie's phone call. A security guard had called her about Nick and the pistachio shells. A security guard out at the old school.

Jim Nieman. That was the name. He was almost sure of it.

Nieman was the same man who had been inside his house.

The rope snapped Kasey's chin back as she fell, and a shiver of pain coursed through her spine. She felt a crushing weight on her throat as her body dragged the thick cord into a vise around her neck. Her legs danced spastically. She clawed at the cord with her fingers, but the knots held, and all she felt was blood oozing from her abraded skin. She reached above her head to pull herself up and relieve the pressure, but she had no strength to lift her body.

Her mind grew cloudy. She knew she was dying.

Then the frayed section of rope where she had sawed with the metal plate split and gave way. The rope broke, and she fell in darkness and landed with an agonizing, bone-deep blow as her calves slammed the cement floor below her. A loose nail drove into the meat of her leg, and she had to bite her tongue to keep from wailing in pain.

But she could breathe. Sweet air flooded her lungs. She collapsed on to her hands and knees and air swelled her chest.

Something scurried across her fingers, and she reared back. It was a rat, and it wasn't alone. The squeals of the animals were excited and close. She clawed the tape from her ankles and lurched to her feet. The blackness made her dizzy, and she waited for her head to clear. She listened for the noises of her captor, but for the time being, she was alone. Alone with no light. No weapon. No phone. She may as well have been lost in the fog again.

She started to walk with her hands and arms outstretched in front of her. Almost immediately, she tripped and fell. When she squatted and ran her fingers along the floor, she found a jagged block of concrete, three feet by four feet. She traced its edges and then stepped around it. As she inched forward, her numb feet crushed against pebbles of glass with each step and bled. Water dripped on her face. She kicked a piece of scrap metal that clanged on the cement and hissed in pain. She bent down and picked up an L-shaped joist, heavy and rusted. She nestled it in her fist and felt better that she had something she could use in self-defense.

Her hands touched a smooth wall ahead of her. She explored it with her fingers and felt lines of grout between square tiles. With her palms flat, she followed the wall, letting it lead her steps. She found the opening of a door frame where the wall ended, but the doorway itself was blocked with a sodden, rotting stack of wooden planks at least three feet high. She stopped, squinting, trying to see if there was an escape route on the other side of the doorway, but the interior was black.

Beyond the doorway, the wall continued, and she followed it until her fingers bumped into a new wall, made of plywood, not tile. She had walked herself into a corner. She turned, making her way along the perpendicular wall, moving more quickly than before. Her hands missed a wooden beam propped against the wall at waist level, and before she could stop it, the beam toppled noisily to the floor. She froze, expecting him to come for her, anticipating a cone of light stabbing through the darkness.

Nothing happened. Only the rats continued to stalk her.

Kasey grew bolder as she wondered if he had left her entirely on her own. She decided that time, not noise, was her biggest enemy now, and she stumbled quickly along the wall. Water dripped louder and faster, and her fingers banged into cold pipes hanging from the ceiling like spider webs. She collided with a concrete I-beam and weaved around it. The wall ended, and she took two steps into open space, in the middle of a dark nowhere.

She heard something close by. Soft, like a distant hiss. Wind.

The outside world wasn't far away. She steered for the sound and realized she was near a boarded-up window, and on the other side of it was freedom. Her fingers frantically examined the frame, looking for a spongy weakness where the water had softened the wood. Snow pecked against the window an inch away from her. She could feel the cold.