"I'm real sorry for all the families."
"Well, at least there's one happy family. The folks of that boy that was under the stall should sure be having a good day today."
He gave a nod and veered off into a smaller hall lined with offices. Everyone in Doraville was affected by these crimes, though I guess the severity of the affection was lessened with your emotional distance from ground zero—the killing field above the town.
I felt a little foolish, now that I thought about it. It was nuts, warning Manfred. He was older. But he was small, and attractive, and right now he was vulnerable. He was a stranger, too, and wouldn't be missed as quickly as one of the local boys. It was nuts because if you looked at it logically, there was no way the remaining killer—a killer only I seemed to be worried about—would take another boy. Everyone was watching, everyone was wary, everyone was suspicious. At least, they had been. Now it was another story. The boogeyman was in jail, his tormented son was dead, the last victim was safe in the hospital and going to live. A happy ending for just about everyone. The people I heard talking about it were even not too unhappy about poor Chuck, because he would have been so messed up anyway by his father's death, and all the people assumed he'd had to help his father with the boys and the guilt of it had driven him to sacrifice himself. He'd redeemed himself, maybe.
I thought only part of that was the truth.
But if Chuck were alive, I wouldn't have given a nickel for his life. Because his dad's partner would suspect that Chuck knew his identity, even if the boy hadn't. So someone really was happy Chuck had died, and had good reason for being so.
I thought of all the good things I'd seen in Doraville, and all the nice people I'd met. There was a snake in the grass in this pleasant mountain village, and it was a pretty huge snake. Doraville didn't deserve to be singled out for such horror.
When Tolliver pulled up by me, I got into the car and without saying a word, he drove me up to Davey's old farm, the site of so many cold graves.
Klavin and Stuart were up there, and for once I wasn't displeased to see them. They were measuring the area and making some more pictures of the orientation of the buildings to the road, the surrounding terrain, and whatever else took their fancy. We got out and watched in silence for a few minutes.
They were busy, and disinclined to talk to us. Each couple tried to pretend the other one wasn't there. The wind was blowing up here, and it was chilly, though the beautiful sun took the edge off. I had discarded my heavy coat and put on a blue hoodie, and I pulled the hood up around my face and tucked my hands in my pockets. Tolliver put his arm around me and kissed my cheek.
As if that had been a signal, the two SBI men approached us.
"Have you given your statement at the police station about yesterday?" Klavin said.
"No. We'll do that before we leave town. We just wanted to ask a question, see if you'd answer it," I said. "I suppose it'll be a long time before all the tests are finished on those poor boys."
Stuart nodded. "What were you wanting to know?" he asked. "I figure you're entitled to an answer or two, since you found them."
That was a refreshing point of view, and one with which Klavin didn't necessarily agree.
"I want to know if they were fed and cared for after they were taken," I said. "Or maybe they were sedated. I want to know if their lives were extended."
Both the agents froze. Klavin had been messing with a tiny digital camera, and Stuart had been loading some small machine into the back of their rented SUV. "Why?" Stuart asked, after they'd resumed moving. "Why do you want to know that, Ms. Connelly?"
"I wonder if there was more than one person involved in torturing these boys," I said. "Because I really suspect that Tom Almand wasn't working alone, that he had a killing buddy who helped subdue the poor boys. Some of them were big boys, you know. Tom Almand was a little man. So, did he have some story that made them trust him enough to put themselves into a situation they couldn't get out of? Or did he have a strong right arm that would be sure they got that way?"
The two men looked at each other, and that was enough.
"You gotta tell people," I said. "They all think they're safe, and they're not."
"Look, Ms. Connelly," Stuart said, "we got half the team in jail. We got their killing floor. We got their dump site. We got their survivor, safe and guarded. We even got their backup place for stashing victims, for whatever reason they had it: maybe they prepared it in case they heard this place was being sold, maybe they realized the road up here might become difficult in the winter. Then they'd use the place in the Almand barn. We figure this because there aren't as many bloodstains at the barn. There isn't all the paraphernalia we found in there." He nodded toward the old shed to the left of the Davey house.
"We want to catch this other bastard real bad, Harper," said Klavin. "You don't know how bad. But we don't figure he's going to be grabbing anyone anytime soon. You see what we're saying?"
No, I was too dumb to understand. "Yes," I said, "I see. And to a certain extent, I agree. It would be crazy for him to grab anyone else. But you see what I'm saying? He is crazy."
"But so far, he's managed to maintain a perfect façade," Stuart said. "He's clever enough, got enough sense of self-preservation, to keep on doing that."
"Are you sure about that? Sure enough to risk some boy's life?"
"Listen, the fact is, you don't have anything else to do with this investigation," Klavin said. He'd reached the end of his patience.
"I know I'm not a cop," I said. "I know I usually just come in to a town, do a job, and leave. And I like it that way. If I have to stick around, worse stuff happens. And then we have to stay longer. We want to drive out of Doraville. But we don't want anyone else to die. And until you catch this other killer, there's that possibility."
"But what can you do to stop it?" Klavin asked reasonably. "So far as we're concerned, after you give your statement about yesterday, you and your brother can leave. We have your cell phone number, and we know your home address."
"He's not my brother," I said. If Tolliver could tell people, I could, too.
"Whatever," Klavin said. "Hey, Lang, did you know your dad was in jail in Arizona?"
"No," Tolliver said. "I had heard he got out of jail in Texas, though." If they'd been trying to upset Tolliver, they had gone about it the wrong way.
"You two really got shanked in the parent department," Klavin said.
"No doubt about it," I said. He couldn't make me angry like that, either.
He looked a little surprised, maybe a little abashed.
"I can't figure you out," I said. "You can be decent when you want to be. But this shit about our parents, you think we haven't heard all this before? You think we don't remember what it was like?"
He hadn't expected me to clear the decks. Klavin clearly had issues.
"You two go on," he said, while Stuart watched him, a certain guarded look on his face. "Go back to town. Get your statements entered. Then leave. This case has too much cluttering it up. The psychic. You. Now that you've seen Tom Almand swing a shovel, I guess you know who attacked you. You gonna file charges?"
Oddly enough, I hadn't even thought about it. So much had happened since I'd been attacked that it had been low on my list of mysteries to solve. I took a moment to think about it. Theoretically, I was all in favor of Tom paying for the attack on me. But thinking realistically, how could we prove it was Tom? The only evidence against him was that he'd been known to hit someone else with a shovel, and he'd had reason to want to hit me—if you count the fact that I'd found his victims a reason, and I reckoned it was. I'd stopped his fun. At least, I'd thought so, until the trapdoor had swung open. I saw those boys' faces every time I thought about the trapdoor: the one face covered with blood and lifeless, and the other just as bloody and full of fear and a terrible knowledge.