CHAPTER FIFTEEN

“Burn the whole forest down,” Larry suggested. “Just pour gasoline over every square inch, light a match, and watch this place go inferno.”

“I might,” said Toby.

“Yeah! We’ll dance in the flames! It’ll be the party of the century! Burn, burn, burn!”

“You want to know the best part?” asked Nick. “Watching Owen run through the woods with his hair on fire. Total body burn. I’ll cheer for that. Hopefully I’ll even have a bucket of water in my hand that I can refuse to throw on him.”

“It wasn’t Owen’s fault.”

“Oh, of course not, his claws aren’t bloodstained at all. Somebody else grabbed his jaws and opened and closed them on Melissa’s arm. Owen’s just a big furry puppet.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I don’t know crap about what you mean, Toby. I just know that you should destroy that thing. Get a machine gun and pump six thousand bullets into its chest. Flay the skin right off its bones. Better yet, get the army involved, have them drop a whole atomic bomb right smack-dab on his cave. Turn Owen into a pile of glowing white ashes.”

“Not painful enough,” said Nick.

“I don’t even care about making him suffer. I just want to see something spectacular. Flames or an atomic blast. Wipe him off the map.”

“He’s my best friend.”

“Are you still clinging to that? Toby, I know you don’t think of me as a father figure, but I’m going to share a piece of wisdom with you: When somebody tears your girlfriend apart and scatters her guts all over the ground, he ceases to be your best friend. He ceases to even be a pleasant acquaintance. It’s pretty much mortal-enemies territory.”

“But he’s the only thing I’ve got.”

“Well, yeah, now. Because of him. You don’t have to open the valentine with the time bomb just because it’s the only one in your mailbox. If you’re that needy, move to California and live by your mommy and daddy again.”

“I don’t need your advice.”

“You know what’s sad? We’re dead, and Melissa’s dead, but you’re talking to us instead of her. That’s pretty fucked up. Where is she?”

“I don’t know. I can’t find her.”

“Priorities, man. She was ugly, but she was a lot better looking than this guy.” Larry pointed at Nick. “And she was a great lay. Even without a basis for comparison you know she was a great lay.”

Nick nodded. “That toy thing was sensational.”

“Both of you, just shut up and go away.”

“No, I want to see how you deal with this mess. It’s snowing, so that’s a point in your favor. Cover the tracks. Cover the blood. What are you going to do with the body?”

“I don’t know.”

“Won’t be easy to bury her in frozen ground. You’d need some heavy machinery. You may have to take her home with you.”

“I’m not doing that.”

“Yeah, I suppose keeping a mangled, rotting corpse at your place is a bit morbid. And the cops might find that kind of discovery fairly interesting if they search your house. So you can’t bury her and you can’t take her home. I think you’re pretty much left with dragging her off the main path and building a nice little makeshift aboveground grave.”

Toby whispered infinite apologies to Melissa as he carried her through the woods. She was so light. Half of her face remained, though her eyes were gone, and there was no expression. No scream, no grin, nothing to show what she’d once been.

He gently placed her on a pile of snow. She sunk down into it a bit, not enough to hide his crime, but enough to bring fresh tears at the sight of her moving away from him.

He pushed snow over her, burying her.

There should be some kind of marker. A cross or something to memorialize her.

“Don’t even think about it,” said Larry.

Of course, he was right. There was no place here for honoring his dead girlfriend. This was about covering up a horrible crime. Nothing else mattered.

He couldn’t leave her out here forever, but the forest was huge. Nobody would find her before the snow melted. Not even Owen.

He was freezing to death. Could be hypothermia. He needed to go back home, take a long, hot bath, and try to get his mind working again so that he didn’t miss any important pieces that might send him to jail.

I didn’t kill her.

But he had. He’d put her in this situation, promised her that everything would be fine.

Leave guilt out of it. From a purely practical standpoint, even if they blame her death on a wild animal, having her body discovered means that the police might link her death to the deaths of Larry and Nick. Those you did do. Don’t let yourself get caught. Don’t go to prison. You’re only twenty-nine, you still have plenty of living to do.

Or he could put a bullet in his skull and make things better for everyone.

“Don’t do it,” Larry said. “Even I don’t think that’s the way to go, and I hate your fucking guts.”

There’d be no suicide. Toby wasn’t going to be found dead in his living room with his brains decorating the wall like abstract art. He did dumb things all the time, but he wasn’t a complete moron, and he’d figure out a way to get through this.

Toby eased himself into the hot water. It felt wonderful on his frozen extremities, but it ignited the claw marks on his back.

The antiseptic hurt even worse.

“That bitch,” he said.

Mr. Zack glared at him. “Stop it. That’s completely inappropriate.”

“I know, I’m sorry, I just didn’t think she’d actually do it.”

“What exactly did she say?”

“She said she’d met this guy, she refused to tell me his name, and she said she was in love. I thought she was just pissed at me for some reason.”

“Did you have a fight?”

“Not a serious one. Things weren’t going as well as they used to, but I really thought she’d be here at the store when I came in this morning.”

“Thank you for speaking with us, Mr. Floren.”

“No problem.”

“The last person to talk to Ms. Tomlinson, besides you, of course, was her mother, two nights ago. I don’t mind telling you that she shared a somewhat different view of your relationship with her daughter.”

“What do you mean?”

The cop, Detective Dormin, smiled, though it was only with the corners of his mouth. He looked about forty and Toby had disliked him immediately.

“Apparently Melissa told her that things were going extremely well. She was in love with you. Thought you might even be The One.”

Toby chuckled without humor. “Just like a woman, huh? One day she’s madly in love, the next day she’s running off with some stranger.”

“Interesting that she didn’t tell her mom about this.”

“Do you think something else happened to her?”

“No, we’re not ready to call it foul play quite yet. A girl that age doesn’t have her head screwed on completely straight. I did find it interesting to go back through some files and see your name attached to another disappearance. Two disappearances, actually. You know who I’m talking about, right?”

“Of course I do.”

“Apparently they ran away, too. Were never heard from again. You didn’t get along with them very well, did you?”

“You’re right. Fifteen years ago I was questioned about two missing kids. Dear Lord, it’s a killing spree!”

“Hey, watch the lip. If you think this is a joking matter you’re going to be very disappointed when I slap some cuffs on you. It was more like fourteen years, and there’s no statute of limitations on murder.”

“If you’re accusing me of murder, I’d like a lawyer.”

“I’m not accusing you of anything yet. When I do, I’ll have all my ducks in a row. I hope you do as well. Tell me, Toby, if I may be so informal as to call you Toby, did you hear any gunshots last night?”

“Yeah. A bunch of them. I hear gunshots all the time. That’s what happens when you live in a rural area.”

“Again with the lip.”

“Am I free to go?”

“You are, but I’d recommend that you stick around and answer as many questions as I’ve got for you. And I’ve got a lot of them. You’re what we like to call a ‘person of interest,’ and I’ve got something of an obsessive personality. You don’t want to be my pet project.”

“Fine. What do you want to know?”

“Start from the beginning again. Be detailed.”

It’s a huge, vast forest. They’ll never find her.

Toby’s story held up to close scrutiny. It had to. Nobody would know he was out in the woods with Melissa. He couldn’t imagine that she would have told anybody about Owen beforehand. If she had, and somebody came forth, he’d worry about it then, but for now he was just going to assume that his secret was safe.

He wondered how Owen was doing.

How much blood had he lost? Was he okay? How did a wild animal tend to a bullet wound?

Was Owen as lonely as he was?

Was Owen even still alive?

He wanted to go out into the forest to see him, just a quick glimpse, just to satisfy his curiosity, but, of course, he couldn’t. He couldn’t go back into the woods until he knew for certain that the police were no longer watching.

Anyway, he hated Owen now, right?

“Hello, Mr. Floren, so sorry to drop in on you unexpectedly like this.” Detective Dormin handed Toby a piece of paper. “This is a handy little search warrant. Judge Baird’s number is on the top if you’d like to give him a call. I’ll wait.”

“That’s okay.”

“Great, I’m glad that you won’t be giving us any problems. You’ve got some puffy eyes, Toby. Doing a lot of crying, have you? Guilt or sorrow? Maybe a little of both?”

“I lost somebody very close to me. I don’t need you giving me crap about it.”

“You’re right. That was unkind of me. Nice place you’ve got here. I recommend that you find yourself a good book to read and a comfortable spot, because we’re planning to be here for a while.”

Toby threw up into the toilet. He couldn’t keep any food down anymore.

Melissa. He missed her so much.

“Had yourself a nice little barbecue, did you?” Detective Dormin asked. “Seems kind of cold for that sort of thing, but I’m not one to judge. Fresh ashes in there. The lab boys, they said they don’t really look like charcoal. They say, and you’re going to think this is the strangest thing, that it’s fabric. Isn’t that odd? Why would somebody be burning fabric on their barbecue grill? I’m a smart fellow, and I’m having trouble wrapping my mind around that.”

“Am I under arrest?”

“Do you think you deserve to be?”

“Don’t treat me like I’m a kid.”

Dormin leaned across the table. “Do you know what I hate most in the world, Toby? Liars. I hate liars more than I hate murderers and rapists. It’s a little quirk in my personality, I guess. So I’m not that fond of you. The fact that you cooked your clothes, that’s suspicious to me. Why does a man burn his clothes? It’s just peculiar. Now, I’ll be honest with you, my wife has threatened on several occasions to burn my favorite pair of socks, the ones I still wear even though they’ve got holes in them, but you’re not married, are you? You don’t even have a girlfriend anymore. Unfortunately for me, my hunch that you burned your clothes to hide evidence because you wore them when you were murdering Melissa Tomlinson isn’t enough to arrest you. But it’s enough for me to ensure that you have some long, uncomfortable days. So why did you kill her?”

“I didn’t.”

“Yep. Some long, uncomfortable days.”

“In local news, Hector Smith, age seventy-eight, was found deceased in his backyard by his grandchildren last night. Smith had reportedly gone out to investigate a disturbance, and awoke several neighbors, who called 911 to report screaming. Smith was apparently savaged as if by some sort of large animal. Chief of Police Martin Rundberg had this to say: ‘At this time we do not know exactly what kind of animal attacked Hector Smith. We urge local residents to use extreme caution when venturing outdoors, until this thing is captured. Though we had men on the scene minutes after the call was made, Hector Smith’s head was torn from his body, so obviously we’re very alarmed and concerned about the situation…‘”