Seconds turned into minutes.
He kept tapping, kept thinking.
And he listened to his gut, which was still telling him that those boys had not killed Ellis Langstrom.
Who, then?
And then he remembered something Dan Brewster had said only a couple of hours ago, when he’d gone out to Pinecrest to hear exactly what had transpired on the lake that evening when Mosler and McIvens rammed the Pinecrest boat. He hadn’t paid much attention to it at the time — he was far more interested in what Adam and Chris had been up to. But just before he’d left to pick up the two delinquents, Dan Brewster said his daughter had seen a scary looking man out on the lake in a rowboat that, at least according to his daughter, had something like a cross in the bow.
Ruston had known who it was right away, of course — old Riley Logan, who’d been living out in the woods for years, minding his own business except for his occasional forays into town to do some Dumpster diving.
And not causing anyone any trouble.
Yet now, as he reread the coroner’s report one more time, Rusty Ruston found himself thinking about Logan.
And not just about Logan.
There was also the Hanover girl’s murder.
Suddenly his gut was stirring.
Not churning, but stirring.
Trust your gut, he told himself.
Trust your gut.
Chapter 28
AT PRECISELY EIGHT o’clock the next morning, Ashley Sparks parked her car in the small lot behind Carol Langstrom’s antiques shop and found the key to the back door in the same spot where it had been “hidden” for at least the last five years. She was an hour early; that would give her time to go over the inventory book and familiarize herself with anything in the store she might not have seen before.
A square brown box — stained and battered — sat on the top step, and Ashley opened the door, turned off the alarm with the code Carol had given her, then picked up the box. Taking it inside, she put it on Carol’s desk and started to open it. But even before she’d pulled the first of the interlocking flaps loose, she hesitated.
Why hadn’t the box been taped shut? Surely it hadn’t been shipped like this. It took her less than five seconds to find the answer to that question: the box bore no label at all, which meant it hadn’t been shipped.
Then why was it there?
The answer to that question came just as quickly: it was something personal that someone had left for Carol, not knowing it wasn’t going to be Carol who opened the store. And if it was personal, she shouldn’t open it.
Turning away from the desk, Ashley moved through the office door into the shop itself, savoring the fragrance of the store; it smelled like tung oil and furniture polish. She’d always loved that smell, ever since she’d been a little girl and started poking around antiques shops with her mother. But this morning there was a dark undertone to the familiar fragrance.
She found the light switches, then turned on all the lamps in the showroom to show off their ornate shades to best advantage, and in less than fifteen minutes, everything was ready. She’d adjusted the positions of at least three dozen of the porcelain figurines that were Carol’s specialties, even moving one of them — a little boy sitting self-consciously on a toilet, his pants around his ankles and a surprised look on his face — into the restroom, certain that whoever was the first to use the tiny chamber that day would buy the item. Just as she was about to take a tour of the showroom, she heard the back door open.
“Hello?”
A second later Carol Langstrom appeared in the doorway. Though dressed perfectly, Ashley could clearly see the lines around her eyes and mouth, and the pallor that her makeup didn’t begin to cover.
“Carol? What on earth are you doing here?”
Carol smiled wanly, her sad eyes betraying the depth of her grief. “I can’t stay home alone — not by myself. At least not yet. All I do is think about Ellis and what I could have done to keep him from going out that night.” She bit her lower lip, and Ashley could see her struggling to control her tears. “I need to stay busy — I need to work. But not by myself.” The look in her eyes threatened to break Ashley’s heart. “You’ll stay with me today?”
Ashley reached out and gently touched her friend’s arm. “Of course.” As Carol retreated to the office in back, Ashley followed.
Carol glanced around the office as if searching for something, though Ashley was fairly certain she was doing nothing more than trying to distract her mind from thoughts of her son. Finally, her eyes came to rest on the unopened box on her desk. She gazed at it uncertainly, then turned to Carol. “What’s this?”
Ashley shrugged. “It was on the back step.”
Carol moved closer, then drew back. “Phew! It certainly smells strange.” Reaching out with her hand while still trying to keep her nose as far from the box as possible, Carol opened two of the flaps.
The stench that Ashley had been only barely aware of a few moments earlier now poured forth as a sickening odor, and Ashley struggled not to gag. “My God, what is it? It smells like a dead animal!”
Carol peered inside. For just a moment she thought it must be someone’s idea of some kind of strange art. There was what looked like some kind of wire construction and—
Oh, God!
Carol recoiled a step. “Call the sheriff,” she said, her voice catching.
“The sheriff?” Ashley echoed. Holding her breath against the noxious odor, she edged close enough to look over the edge of the box.
What looked like scraps of some kind of raw meat were hanging from whatever the wire had been formed into. She felt her breakfast rise in her gorge, and quickly closed the flaps of the box, putting a phone book on top to hold them down.
Only as the worst of the stench faded from her nostrils did Ashley finally pick up the phone and dial the number Carol Langstrom recited.
“
THAT WAS ON my doorstep,” Carol Langstrom said, pointing at the box that neither she nor Ashley Sparks had been able to bring themselves to touch during the few minutes it took for Rusty Ruston to get to the shop.
“Where did it come from?” Ruston asked.
Carol shrugged helplessly.
Ruston moved closer to the box. “No label at all? No note?”
“Nothing on the outside,” Carol said. “I don’t know about the inside.”
Ruston opened the flaps of the box, recoiling from the stench just as the two women had earlier. As Carol and Ashley automatically stepped back, he first looked into the box, then produced a pair of thin latex gloves from one of his pockets, put them on, and reached inside. Very gingerly he lifted the contents out of the box.
“Here,” Carol breathed, opening the morning newspaper and spreading it over a tabletop. “Don’t set it back on my desk. Set it here.”
Ruston placed the object on the table, then stepped back, and suddenly both women had a clear view of what it was that had been left on Carol’s back step during the night.
It was the bent and rusted frame of a lamp shade, whatever original covering it may have had long since stripped — or rotted — away.
Where perfectly sewn panels of silk or linen had once been stretched, there now hung ragged scraps of raw skin, held together by crudely tied pieces of string.
The skin had not been tanned; pieces of decaying flesh and rancid yellow globules of fat still clung to it, and the holes through which the string was unevenly laced looked as if they must have been made by an ice pick.
As Ashley struggled once again to control the nausea rising in her belly, a maggot dropped from the grotesque construction onto the newspaper. “My God,” she said. Choking on the words, she turned away.