Stephen (ed.) - The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 18

He bent and picked her up. “I’ll bathe you, feed you, and nurse you.”

Three strides brought him to the dark mouth of the well. “After that, you’ll obey me in everything. Or you had better. And in time, perhaps, you’ll come to like it.”

He let her fall, smiled, and turned away.

There remained only the problem of the gun. Bullets could be matched to barrels, and there was an ejected shell somewhere. The gun would have to be destroyed; it was blued steel; running water should do the job, and do it swiftly.

Still smiling, he set off for the creek.

It was after four o’clock the following afternoon when Captain Barlowe of the Sheriff’s Department explained the crime. Captain Barlowe was a middle-aged and heavy-limbed. He had a thick mustache. “What happened in this house last night is becoming pretty clear.” His tone was weighty. “Why it happened . . .” He shook his head.

The horror writer said, “I know my house was broken into. One of your men showed me that. I know poor little Robbie’s dead, and I know Kiara’s missing. But that’s all I know.”

“Exactly.” Captain Barlowe clasped his big hands and unclasped them. “It’s pretty much all I know, too, sir. Other than that, all I can do is supply details. The gun that killed the boy was a twenty-two semi-automatic. It could have been a pistol or a rifle. It could even have been a sawn-off rifle. There’s no more common caliber in the world.”

The horror writer nodded.

“He was killed with one shot, a contact shot to the head, and he was probably killed for being in a room in which he had no business being. He’d left his own bed and crawled into his big sister’s. Not for sex, sir. I could see what you were thinking. He was too young for that. He was just a little kid alone in a strange house. He got lonely and was murdered for it.”

Captain Barlowe paused to clear his throat. “You told my men that there had been no cars in your driveway since the rain except your own and the boy’s parents’. Is that right?”

The horror writer nodded. “I’ve racked my brain trying to think of somebody else, and come up empty. Dan and I are old friends. You ought to know that.”

Captain Barlowe nodded. “I do, sir. He told me.”

“We get together when we can, usually that’s once or twice a year. This year he and Charity decided to vacation in this area. He’s a golfer and a fisherman.”

Captain Barlowe nodded again. “He should love our part of the state.”

“That’s what I thought, Captain. I don’t play golf, but I checked out some of the courses here. I fish a bit, and I told him about that. He said he was coming, and I told him I had plenty of room. They were only going to stay for two nights.”

“You kept your cellar door locked?”

“Usually? No. I locked it when I heard they were coming. The cellar’s dirty and the steps are dangerous. You know how small boys are.”

“Yes, sir. I used to be one. The killer jimmied it open.”

The horror writer nodded. “I saw that.”

“You sleep on the ground floor. You didn’t hear anything?”

“No. I’m a sound sleeper.”

“I understand. Here’s my problem, sir, and I hope you can help me with it. Crime requires three things. They’re motive, means, and opportunity. Know those, and you know a lot. I’ve got a murder case here. It’s the murder of a kid. I hate the bastards who kill kids, and I’ve never had a case I wanted to solve more.”

“I understand,” the horror writer said.

“Means is no problem. He had a gun, a car, and tools. Maybe gloves, because we haven’t found any fresh prints we can’t identify. His motive may have been robbery, but it was probably of a sexual nature. Here’s a young girl, a blonde. Very good-looking to judge by the only picture we’ve seen so far.”

“She is.” The horror writer nodded his agreement.

“He must have seen her somewhere. And not just that. He must have known that she was going to be in this house last night. Where did he see her? How did he know where she was going to be? If I can find the answers to those questions we’ll get him.”

“I wish I could help you.” The horror writer’s smile was inward only.

“You’ve had no visitors since your guests arrived?”

He shook his head. “None.”

“Delivery men? A guy to fix the furnace? Something like that?”

“No, nobody. They got here late yesterday afternoon, Captain.”

“I understand. Now think about this, please. I want to know everybody – and I mean everybody, no matter who it was – you told that they were coming.”

“I’ve thought about it. I’ve thought about it a great deal, Captain. And I didn’t tell anyone. When I went around to the golf courses, I told people I was expecting guests and they’d want to play golf. But I never said who those guests were. There was no reason to.”

“That settles it.” Captain Barlowe rose, looking grim. “It’s somebody they told. The father’s given us the names of three people and he’s trying to come up with more. There may be more. He admits that. His wife . . .”

“Hadn’t she told anyone?”

“That just it, sir. She did. She seems to have told quite a few people and says can’t remember them all. She’s lying because she doesn’t want her friends bothered. Well, by God they’re going to be bothered. My problem – one of my problems – is that all these people are out of state. I can’t go after them myself, and I’d like to. I want have a good look at them. I want to see their faces change when they’re asked certain questions.”

He breathed deep, expanding a chest notably capacious, and let it out. “On the plus side, we’re after a stranger. Some of the local people may have seen him and noticed him. He may – I said may – be driving a car with out-of-state plates.”

“Couldn’t he have rented a car at the airport?” the horror writer asked.

“Yes, sir. He could, and I hope to God he did. If he did, we’ll get him sure. But his car had worn tires, and that’s not characteristic of rentals.”

“I see.”

“If he did rent his car, it’ll have bloodstains in it, and the rental people will notice. She was bleeding when she was carried out of her bedroom.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Not much, but some. We found blood in the hall and more on the back stairs. The bad thing is that if he flew in and plans to fly back out, he can’t take her with him. He’ll kill her. He may have killed her already.”

Captain Barlowe left, Dan and Charity moved into a motel, and the day ended in quiet triumph. The experts who had visited the crime scene earlier reappeared and took more photographs and blood samples. The horror writer asked them no questions, and they volunteered nothing.

He drove to town the next morning and shopped at several stores. So far as he could judge, he was not followed. That afternoon he got out the binoculars he had acquired years before for bird-watching and scanned the surrounding woods and fields, seeing no one.

At sunrise the next morning he rescanned them, paying particular attention to areas he thought he might have slighted before. Selecting an apple from the previous day’s purchases, he made his way through grass still wet with dew to the well and tossed it in.

He had hoped that she would thank him and plead for release; if she did either her voice was too faint for him to catch her words, this though it seemed to him there was a sound of some sort from the well, a faint, high humming. As he tramped back to the house, he decided that it had probably been an echo of the wind.

The rest of that day he spent preparing her cellar room.

He slept well that night and woke refreshed twenty minutes before his clock radio would have roused him. The three-eighths-inch rope he had brought two days earlier awaited him in the kitchen; he knotted it as soon as he had finished breakfast, spacing the knots about a foot apart.