He thought of Merrick roughing him up. Childish! Nothing could have made him feel better. He’d met Merrick before, in one form or another. Bullies. Schoolyard bullies, like Harvey Heusman in seventh grade. He knew how to handle them. He’d done it before. Harvey had been one of his first victims. He wondered idly whether they had ever found him. It had been many years since he had visited Harvey’s grave, and realizing this, he felt a moment’s remorse — not for killing Harvey, of course, but for failing to keep his appointed rounds.
Like a favorite story that had been read and re-read again and again, recalling the killing of his childhood enemy had long ago lost its power to excite him, but that did not make him less fond of the memory. Visiting the older burial sites could make him quite nostalgic, and he was not one to ignore them. He was good about paying homage to — well, to himself, really! The thought amused him.
Ah, that little humorous moment was enough to ease the tension a bit.
He returned to his very detailed recollections of this afternoon, about to reach his favorite moment. Yes, here she was, pale and looking a little tired — she didn’t sleep well. He would have liked to believe that he caused her late-night restlessness, but on the first evening he had heard the sounds of one of her nightmares, and knew some other terror visited her. That was all right. He’d focus her fear where it belonged, all in due time. For now, it was enough to see the dark circles beneath her blue eyes, her hair falling forward across her face as she looked down for a moment as she walked.
She was coming closer now, closer, and — oh yes! She had the scent. He had breathed in deeply as she walked by him, smelling her scent and the dead woman’s scent together, mingled and lovely, lovely, lovely. Thinking of it made him tremble.
Oh, it was so right, so exquisite! Anticipation hummed through him like an electric current. Everything was working so perfectly, and with everything working so perfectly, it was all that he could do to be still, to lie on his back in this tent, simply feeling his own blood moving through his veins, every nerve thrumming with the strength of his desire.
15
THURSDAY, EARLY MORNING, MAY 18
Southern Sierra Nevada Mountains
The rain held off until just before dawn the next morning. The rainfall was not hard or steady — just a series of intermittent gentle showers for the most part — but the first of these awakened me as its chilly droplets struck my face. In my fitful sleep I had moved off my open sleeping bag, and so I came awake lying faceup, halfway outside the tent. The part of me that was still on the thin insulation mattress was fine, but the other thirty percent or so wasn’t so comfy. Especially the part that was getting pelted by cold water.
I moved back inside only long enough to change and pack up my gear. When I emerged, I saw the others were already breaking camp. No one wanted to linger here. Although weather might delay the plane’s arrival, last night it had been decided that we would hike back to the landing strip to wait for it.
Occasional but unpredictable gusts of wind made taking down my small tent a tricky business, and those who were managing the larger tent that had housed Parrish nearly lost control of it more than once.
I wondered if the trail would be muddy. Our progress had been slow before, and even though some of the weight of the food was gone from our packs, the body would be an awkward burden to steer through the terrain we had covered on the way in.
The rain briefly lessened the body’s lingering odor, to which I had almost become accustomed, and brought the scent of dampened earth and woods to replace it. But when the first storm passed, and the air became still again, the scent returned. Perhaps it was the moisture in the air that seemed to increase the scent’s power, or that short respite now resulted in a renewed awareness of it, but whatever the cause, its presence was soon unmistakable.
We set out just after a quick breakfast, which I made myself eat because I knew I’d need the energy for the hike, although my appetite was nearly zilch. I tried to cheer myself with the prospect of going home, of seeing Frank again, of being finished with this sad business. But I would not be finished with it, of course; the Sayres awaited me, and my editor expected a story.
As we began hiking, I saw that while the ground and grass were damp, there wasn’t much mud yet. The wind had steadied, and was not much more than a strong breeze. J.C. was in the lead, assuring us that he could now take us on a much more direct route back to the plane. Bob Thompson and the guards followed with Parrish, who seemed lost in his own thoughts — I hoped they were distressing visions of spending the rest of his life in prison. Bingle walked with me, while David and Ben took the first turn with the stretcher.
We reached the ridge between the two meadows — not far from where the coyote tree stood — and stopped to rest so that Andy and J.C. could take over the task of bearing the stretcher. We only planned to stop for a few minutes. But here, just after David and Ben had gently laid down their burden, two things happened that changed the course of our journey.
The first was that Nicholas Parrish said to Thompson, “I thought you would have shown more initiative, Detective Thompson. To find only one body, when my lovely tree surely tells you there are more here.”
After a moment’s silence, Thompson said, “Are you volunteering information, Parrish?”
“Do I need to say more than I have? Not all of my works are as enchanting as dear Julia — I do wish you’d let me have a peek at her. Her fragrance is so enticing!”
“Out of the question,” Thompson said, then reconsidering, added, “if you show me the other graves, I might be able to work something out.”
Parrish laughed. “You’ve made your forensic anthropologists frown at you, Detective.”
“He’s just stalling,” Duke complained.
Thompson nodded. “We’ll discuss your other victims when you’re back in your cell, Parrish.”
“Oh no,” he said. “It’s now or never.”
Thompson began pacing.
“You can count, can’t you?” Parrish said. “Count the coyotes.”
“A dozen. I know, I know,” Thompson said, still not decided. “If you knew there were more, why did you get rid of your lawyer? You know we can use everything you say to us against you.”
“He was boring. As you are becoming boring. I will show you another grave, Detective Thompson,” Parrish said, “but if we continue to hike, we hike away from it. We both know that I won’t be allowed to accompany you on another expedition, so as I said — now or never!”
“It’s a trick of some kind,” Manton said. “If there were more bodies, he would have negotiated for whatever he could get while his lawyer was still here.”
“Ms. Kelly,” Parrish said. “Can you understand why I don’t want my dear ones to be left behind?”
I thought I knew the answer, and why he asked it of the only member of the media he could appeal to at that moment. But I didn’t especially want to be involved in this decision; I was there as an observer. And the things I had observed — after looking into Julia Sayre’s grave — made me certain that I didn’t want to aid Parrish in any way, shape, or form. The others were looking at me, waiting.
It was Ben Sheridan who answered, almost exactly as I would have. “Mr. Parrish takes pride in his work. He doesn’t want it to remain hidden. That’s why we’re up here in the first place.”
“Yes!” Parrish said warmly. “You surprise me! You understand perfectly!”
Thompson was besieged by arguments for and against, mostly against.
It was then that the second thing happened, the one that decided the issue.
The wind shifted.
Later, I would look back at that day and wonder what would have become of our group had the wind blown in some other direction. But it shifted — shifted toward us — a stiff breeze coming off the other meadow, up one sloping end of it, to the ridge where we stood, and beyond.