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He shook his head. “Not good. She looked like hell this morning.”
“I’m sorry, Mason. Your family’s a mess, and here I am horning in on you with—”
“It’s good you’re here. I’ve been racking my brain trying to figure out what to do for Marie and the boys, how to help, if it’s normal grieving or if it’s gone beyond that. I was just thinking I’d like to talk to you about it.”
I nodded, lowered my head and took a bite of my sandwich, which was already cooling and would soon reach that inevitable stage of inedible.
“But that’s not why you’re here, is it?”
I lifted my brows at him, slugged a little coffee down to clear my mouth. “What do you mean?”
“I can see you’ve got something on your mind.”
How could I have forgotten, even for a minute, that he was every bit as good at reading people as I was? Especially me.
I lowered my voice. “I had a dream.”
His eyes widened. “About the case I was telling you about? The missing soccer mom?”
“I don’t know. But if it was, she’s dead.” I looked toward the living room, then back at him. “I was inside her head, Mason. I was there with her while she was murdered.”
He looked horrified, then glanced toward the living room just like I had done. “How?”
“She was paralyzed. Drugged, I think. It was impossible for her to move. And the killer cut into her and ripped something out.”
He stared at me. “And you felt it? You experienced it like before?”
I averted my eyes, nodded. I put my hands over my rib cage, poking the soft area where she—I—had been stabbed. “The knife went in here and ripped left, then right. God, the pain was just...” I’d started breathing hard and had to stop myself, rein it in.
“Dammit, Rachel.” He put his hands on my shoulders. “Are you all right?”
“Yeah. I’m okay.”
“I thought you said you weren’t having the dreams anymore, that your brain was startling you awake every time one started?”
I nodded. “I took a sleeping pill. Figured I had to know what it was my brain didn’t want to let me see. Now I know.”
He shook his head slowly and started to say something, but his cell phone rang. He picked it up, spoke briefly, but mostly listened. When he put it down again he looked at me. “They found a body.”
I closed my eyes. “Was it...?”
“No details, but Rosie said it wasn’t pretty. I have to go.”
“I’ll stay with the boys.” I blurted it without even thinking first, then realized I was effectively shooting our agreement not to see each other right in the foot. He noticed it, too; I could tell by the way he was looking at me, his eyes all questiony. “I’ve missed those two more than I thought, and Myrtle’s in seventh heaven with Josh. We’ll hang out. Go take care of this. I’ll see you later.”
“Thanks, Rachel.” He put a hand on my cheek, then took it away, suddenly awkward, like he didn’t know why he’d put it there to begin with. “Thanks.”
He walked away, into the living room to tell the boys what was up, then up the stairs to grab his things. Then he came back down, shoving his wallet into his back pocket, his shoulder holster over his button-down shirt, gun in easy reach. And I was still sitting there with my half-eaten sandwich and my coffee, wondering how I’d gone from “We should stay apart” to “I’ll spend the day in your house with your nephews, awaiting your return.”
He came through the kitchen, looked me in the eye, and I knew he was thinking the same thing I was. I ought to say something. Clarify things. Right?
“I’ll get back as soon as I can.”
“Do what you need to. I’m not going anywhere.”
He nodded, like that was enough. For now. It would have to be, because I didn’t know what else to say. If I was having visions and people were dying and the two were connected, then we didn’t have much choice but to be together until we got to the bottom of things.
I could have thought the freaking universe wouldn’t take no for an answer. You know, if I believed in that sort of shit.
3
Saturday, December 16
The body had been found in a wooded area off I-81, a few miles north of the Binghamton area. Traffic was being detoured for a mile-long stretch, so the highway was eerily quiet.
Mason skirted the detour sign and drove right up to the cop whose car was enforcing it, bubble gum light flashing. He lowered his window, slowed down and flashed his badge, and the officer waved him by.
The scene was already swarming. The state police forensics team was already there, and Rosie was waiting for him on the shoulder, hunching into his police-issue overcoat and wearing a completely non-regulation furry hat with earflaps pulled down. Yeah, it wasn’t a warm day. The sun was shining, and the official temp was allegedly thirty-five, but it felt like single digits the way the wind was blowing. It was a cold wind, too. Icy.
Mason parked his new-to-him Jeep and got out, then walked onto the shoulder to stand beside his partner, the oversized and ready-to-retire, shaven-headed Roosevelt Jones. He followed Rosie’s gaze down the steep slope to the bottom, where a New York state trooper supervised while two forensics guys worked. One was taking pictures, the other, measurements. The body was still there, bent and twisted unnaturally. “Looks like they just tossed her and let her roll down and stay the way she landed,” he said.
Rosie nodded. “Looks like. Snow’s covered up any evidence on the bank here.”
“Tire tracks?”
“First responders ruined ’em.” Rosie shrugged as he looked toward the ambulance and police cruiser parked a few feet ahead on the shoulder. Their tire tracks were fresh in the soft ground, right where whoever dumped the body would probably have parked.
Mason shielded his eyes as he watched the men below. “Who called it in?”
“College student. Had a flat, pulled over a few yards back to change it and saw her lying down there. I got his statement and contact info, then let him go.”
“All right.” Mason turned up his collar. His coat was lined denim, but he hadn’t grabbed a hat and his ears were already freezing. “Ready to head down there, then?”
“I’ll wait up here,” Rosie said, eyeing the steep climb warily. “Man my size gonna trip and roll right down on top of her. I don’t wanna contaminate the scene.”
Mason shook his head. “Creative way to get out of climbing back up, but I’ll let you off the hook.”
“You better.”
Mason headed down, taking a route a few yards from the one the body had probably taken. The state cop on the scene was Bill Piedmont, a man Mason knew and liked. He didn’t know the two forensics guys, but then, they tended to move around a lot.
“Hey, Bill. What’s your take?”
“Mason.” Piedmont gave him a nod from beneath his wide-brimmed gray Stetson. Trooper standard issue. “Looks like she’s been here a while. Body’s frozen to the ground. Probably was hidden by the snow until the wind came up and blew it clear enough so she could be spotted from the road. Ground underneath her is bare.”
Mason was looking at the woman. She wore a blue dress, torn nylons, one shoe. The other was probably around somewhere. Most likely flew off her as she tumbled down the hill. She’d landed on her left side, left leg bent unnaturally beneath her, the right one folded up. Right arm extended, left one in front of her body. She had a wedding ring on her finger. Her hair was frozen to her skull. Red, he thought.
“So she was dumped before that first snowfall. What was that, a week ago?”
“Six days,” Piedmont said.
“Look like she was dead before she was dumped?”
Piedmont nodded and walked around the body, giving it a wide berth so as not to disturb evidence. Not that there would be any. Mason was already certain the killer had stayed up on the road and never set foot down here. Still...
“Oh, shit.” He could see the front of her now. The dress was torn from the hem up to her neck, flapping up and down in the frigid wind. She was cut all to hell and gone—gutted, it looked like. Then he looked again. Someone had cut two sides of a triangle into her skin, with its topmost point dead center just below her breasts, then peeled it back so the flap was lying folded over on her belly. He could see the edges of her rib cage and a gaping, frozen, deep red void he would rather not have seen.
It fit perfectly with what Rachel had described.
“Not another mark on her,” Piedmont said. “A fucking odd way to commit a murder.”
“She have any ID on her?”
“No, but we knew you had a missing woman matching her description, right down to the blue dress. So...”
Mason knelt and looked at the woman’s hands. There wasn’t so much as a broken nail. No bruising on her, none that was visible, anyway. “No signs of a struggle, no defensive injuries?”
“Not that I could see. You?”
Mason shook his head, then looked at the area around her. “There are a lot of weeds and brush down here. Enough to conceal her a little until someone got close enough to notice.”
The guy snapping pictures stopped snapping. “I think I’ve got all we need. The ME’s here. You can let him take her.”
“Bag her hands, just in case,” Mason said. She was pretty—or had been once. She’d died with her eyes open, but there was nothing in them now. No expression, not of horror, not of peace. Nothing. They were lifeless and shrunken, no longer even resembling human eyes, more like a pair of cloudy grapes long past their prime.
A team came down the hillside with a gurney and a body bag. Mason lowered his head. “I’m sorry this happened to you, Marissa. If you are Marissa, and I think you are. We’re gonna get whoever did this. I promise you that.”
Then he straightened and picked his way back up the steep embankment, moving at an angle to get better footing in the fresh snow. As he walked, he was tapping keys on his cell phone, keying in “location of the human pancreas” in the search bar. Then he clicked on Images, and saw that the pancreas was between the left and right sides of the rib cage and partially behind, tucked up against the liver.
That was where she’d been cut, where there was a gaping hole. Right where Rachel had dreamed of being cut, of having something torn from her body while she was still alive.
He hadn’t told Rachel which of his brother’s organs his missing soccer mom had received. He’d deliberately left that part out because he didn’t want to influence her visions. It would be like contaminating a crime scene, leaving traces around that might later be mistaken for actual clues.
Marissa Siorse, his missing person, had been a pancreas recipient. The ME would tell him for sure, but he was pretty certain that body down there was missing its pancreas. And if she was Marissa, that organ had originally belonged to his dead brother.
He didn’t want to think that Eric had come back from the dead to reclaim his parts from beyond the grave. But he hadn’t wanted to think that his brother had found a way to continue his serial killings from beyond the grave, either, and he’d been wrong. Eric’s crimes had been repeated by two of his organ recipients, men who, as far as Mason could tell, had been perfectly normal, law-abiding citizens prior to their transplants.
It’s not the same. This organ recipient is the victim, not the killer.
He told himself that, but the icy dread in the pit of his stomach was colder than the December wind freezing his ears.
* * *
Joshua teased me to come out sledding with him until I finally gave in. It looked as if Jeremy and Misty were hitting it off just fine, but being teenagers, they were unwilling to bundle up and take him out themselves. I told them I thought they were both assholes—I said it lovingly, don’t judge me—then dressed as warmly as possible, borrowing some gloves from Mason’s closet, and took Josh out there myself. Well, me and Myrtle, that is. She was almost as eager as Josh was. Besides, I needed something to wipe the nightmare, which I knew in my gut was more than just a bad dream, out of my mind.
The air was cold, sunshine bright, snow pristine. I could see my breath in big clouds every time I exhaled. It was good. Clean. Just the prescription I needed. I hadn’t seen much snow since my vision had been restored. It had only snowed once or twice so far this winter, and of course I’d been blind for the previous twenty. So I was taking it all in and loving it, like I did every new visual experience. And yeah, that made it tough to maintain my inner cynic, but I figured a few months of childlike wonder was to be expected and would pass soon enough, you know, like a bad bout of food poisoning.
Sighted people don’t appreciate their eyesight nearly enough, in my opinion. Those who’ve always had it, I mean.
We trooped up the hill, dragging a pair of red plastic toboggans behind us, Josh talking a mile a minute about the karate lessons he wanted to sign up for and all the things on his Christmas wish list, while Myrtle trudged right beside him, paying such close attention it was as if she understood his every word. She adored the kid.
We reached the top. Josh situated his sled, then turned to Myrtle and said, “You want to ride, Myrt?”
“Josh, she won’t sit still. She’ll wipe you out for sure.”
“I’ll hold her,” he said. He didn’t precede it with “Duh,” but he might as well have. “Come on, Myrt. Get on here with me.”
“She won’t like it, Josh,” I said, as Myrtle responded to his voice and plodded right over to him. She sniffed the sled thoroughly, then lifted her paws and stepped on board in front of him. “She’s blind. She’ll be scared.” If someone had said that about me, I would have punched them in the eye. I was being overprotective, and I knew it.
“I’ll hold on to her. Come on, Rachel, she shouldn’t miss the fun just ’cause she can’t see.” He leaned forward and wrapped his arms around my dog. Myrt was facing straight ahead with her teeth showing and her tongue hanging out. She knew something exciting was about to happen. I recognized that look. She was eager. Up for anything as long as her eleven-year-old buddy was involved.
“How are you going to steer?”
Josh tightened his arms around Myrtle, then reached one-handed for the rope handle threaded through the nose of the sled, which children everywhere use to fool themselves into thinking they have a modicum of control as they rocket down steep, snowy hills. Myrt whined uncertainly, and he let go of the rope and scooted forward. “You’re gonna have to ride with us and steer,” he told me with a smile.
“No way am I going to fit on that th—”
“There’s room. C’mon, Rache, please? Try it. Just once.”
I heaved a gigantic sigh and plopped my ass onto the sled. I stretched my legs, one on either side of Josh and Myrtle, planting my heels against the front of the sled, and reached around them to grab on to the steering rope that wasn’t going to work, anyway. What had I gotten myself into?
Josh grinned at me over his shoulder, and I believe my heart grew three sizes that day. We all leaned forward and gave the sled a scootch or two, and the next thing I knew we were flying down the hill toward the back of Mason’s house. I heard high-pitched squeals and realized they were coming from me just before we all went over sideways and tumbled into the snow.
When he sat up laughing, Josh still had my bulldog safely in his arms. Myrtle wriggled free and bounced in the snow, chest down, butt up, and wiggling in delight. She barked happily, and I knew exactly what she was saying: “Again, again, again!”
Okay, so I was wrong. Doesn’t happen often, but it does happen.
I brushed the snow off myself and got to my feet. “I’m too old for this.”
Josh stood, too. “Nobody’s too old for this. C’mon, let’s do it again.”
“Yarf!” said Myrtle. Which meant, damn straight, we’re gonna do it again—and again and again until one of us is too tired to do it anymore. Three guesses who that’ll be, old lady.
What? She’s a very verbal dog.
* * *
Jeremy was messed up. Misty could tell. He couldn’t look her in the eye for very long. Aunt Rache said when someone couldn’t look you in the eye they were either hiding something, incredibly self-conscious or too distracted thinking about something else. Misty thought it was the third thing. He had a lot on his mind. She had to do most of the talking, but she was good at that.
“So where do you go to school?” she asked him.
“Holy Family. It’s private.”
“I go to public.”
“Oh.”
“Right here in the Point. Is that where you guys live?”
