“It’s dark. Too dark in here.”
“Tell me so I can turn the lights back up.”
“Buried. Decent burial, but she kept coming back! It’s dark in the ground. Maybe she doesn’t like it there. Put her outside, put her in the park. Make her remember! Make her sorry.”
“Where did you bury her?”
“Little farm. Granny’s farm. She liked the farm. Maybe she’ll live there one day.”
“Where’s the farm?”
“Upstate. Not a farm anymore. Just an old house. Ugly old house, locks on the doors. She’ll lock you in there, too. Maybe leave you there for the rats to eat you don’t do what she says, when she damn well says it. Granny locked her in plenty, and that’ll teach you to mind your p’s and q’s.”
He was jerking on the chains as he spoke, rocking back and forth in the chair, teeth bared, skin shining with sweat.
“But she won’t sell it. Greedy bitch won’t sell it and give me my share. She won’t give me anything. Not giving her hard-earned to some freak. Time to take it, take it all. Bitch.”
“Lights on full.”
He blinked against them, like a man coming out of a trance. “I don’t have to say anything to you.”
“No, you’ve said enough.”
Chapter 22
She ordered droids and dogs, a search unit, and the equipment necessary for multiple-remains location, identification, and removal.
And knew it would be a very long, very difficult procedure.
She requested Morris personally, and asked that he select a team. She expected and was unsurprised when Whitney and Tibble arranged to make the trip upstate.
For the moment, for a small window of time, they would keep the media at bay. But it would leak soon enough, she knew, and the ugly carnival would begin.
Because she wanted time to prepare, to think, without the distraction of cop chatter or questions, she traveled upstate in one of Roarke’s jet-copters, with him in the pilot seat.
They flew through a steady, dreary rain. Nature’s way of weighing in, she thought, to make a hideous job more so. She saw a little burst of lightning bloom on the horizon, far to the north, and hoped it stayed there.
Roarke didn’t ask questions, and his silence throughout the flight helped steady her for what was to come. This sort of procedure would never be routine. Never could be routine.
“Nearly there.” Roarke glanced at the comp map highlighting their destination, then nodded toward the windscreen. “At two o’clock.”
It wasn’t much of a house. She could see that from the air as they started the descent. Small, ill-kept, poorly maintained, if she was any judge. It looked to her as if the roof sagged—probably leaked, and the lawn fronting the steep, narrow road was weedy and littered with trash.
But the back was blocked in with trees, and in front of them ranged a high fence. The lawn, such as it was, spread up, dipped down, following the rise and fall of land.
There were other houses, and the curious would come out of them before long. None of those houses were close, not to the bumpy land back of the house. A man with a mission, she thought, a man with a job to do, could carry it out in relative privacy in such a place.
Uniforms would knock on doors and ask about the Blues, and a dark van, and any odd activities.
They set down. Roarke killed the engines.
“You feel some sympathy for him. John Blue.”
Through the rain, she stared at the house, the dark, dirty windows, the scabs of paint puckering its skin. “I feel some sympathy for a defenseless child tortured by a parent, by a woman who most certainly was vicious and cruel. We know what that’s like.”
She turned her head, looked at him. “We know how it can twist and scar. What it can drive you to. And I feel a twinge, maybe more than a twinge, at the way I played the child in Interview. You saw how I went after him.”
“I saw you doing what needed to be done, even when it hurt you. Hurt you, Eve, as much as him. Maybe more.”