The Butcher and the Wren(32)

They nod and grab the handle tight. They place their free hands on the sides of the casket to steady themselves. The officers pull forcefully while Wren and the paramedics push from the other end. With a great creaking sound, the casket frees itself from the surrounding earth.

“Stop!” Wren yells and puts her hand up.

They pause and gingerly release their grip on the end, leaving it propped up on the heap of displaced dirt beside it. Wren starts prying the lid and Leroux rushes to help. It comes free after a quick jerk from both of them, and they raise the lid to the waiting hands above.

Time stands still. The slow tick of the timer is the only thing that cuts through the silence.

“Oh god!” a paramedic exclaims, clapping his hand over his mouth in horror.

The woman inside the coffin looks to be in her late twenties. She has auburn hair, matted with mud, fanned out around her head. Her eyes are closed. Her face is peaceful though coated in grime. Dried vomit clings to her cheek and the lining of the coffin. Her feet are bare. They are scraped raw and crusted with dried blood and soil. Her white T-shirt shows ample signs of wear. A deeply set stain creeps down her left side and around her back. The officers know without Wren’s help that it’s blood. A lot of blood. The woman in the coffin is still, and she’s silent.

The timer goes off.





CHAPTER 21





JEREMY OPENS HIS EYES, FEELING rested even though he’s only had two hours of sleep. He sits up in bed, peeking behind the shades in his room, letting the warm light dribble in to greet him. His eyes sweep over the wide expanse of trees and green that stretch out in front of him like an ocean. It’s his own version of Aokigahara, the so-called Suicide Forest, in Japan, where lost souls go to die.

He left Emily in that forest last night, paralyzed from the waist down with nowhere to go. After he pulled the knife from her back, her eyes went wild. They bored into his own and almost pulsated with shock. He crouched there for a moment next to her, just watching as she gasped in pain. In her delirium, she even grasped for him like a lifeline.

When he at last left her in the cold blanket of darkness, she had called out to him. She had called for “Cal” to come back. She had begged him not to leave her there alone. Her wails had been his lullaby for a deep, if brief, sleep.

Now, he pulls on a clean shirt. It’s white and crisp. He stops to brush his teeth and carefully coifs his blond hair into place. As he makes his way out back, he listens to the sound the wooden planks make beneath his feet. His black boots pound heavily against them. He wonders then if she can hear him approaching. Did sleep find her exhausted, terrorized body at all?

“Emily!” he calls out into the distance.

He waits for a sound. Nothing but cicadas and birds answer him.

“You’re not dead, are you?” he yells again, only half joking. The only thing to answer him is his beloved bayou.

He picks up his pace, entering the dense trees and stepping off the wooden boardwalk toward the perimeter fence where he left her body. He’s anxious and excited.

“Emily, I hope you can forgive me,” he chirps, stifling a giggle.

He enters the open space near the fence and spots her. She’s leaning, almost completely horizontal, with her back against the fence. The wire fencing bends behind her, allowing a gaping hole to form. She’s motionless. For a moment, he wonders if she is dead.

No. No, that won’t do.

He picks up his pace, striding toward her with searching eyes. She can’t be dead yet. His entire plan would be ruined. She is supposed to be his message. She’s supposed to be his warning.

As he comes to her still form, he squints his eyes. Crouching down, he can see plainly it’s not Emily who lays before him. It’s Katie.

His heart quickens in his chest as he puts it together in his mind.

He missed.

He must have missed her spinal cord somehow. She was clearly still able to move when he left her last night. His mind races, as he places his arm through the hole. Emily bested him. She dragged Katie across the property and used her body to absorb the fence’s electric pulses. He touches the blood smeared onto the wire above Katie. Emily let Katie become a conduit and crawled over her to escape. The electric pulses would have barely affected her through Katie, if at all.

He stands, gazing out into the tall grass and expanse of trees outside the perimeter of his man-made arena. Emily is gone. As he closes his own eyes to the morning sun, he is at least thankful that he was overprepared. She won’t get far with her wounds and even if she does, still can’t see past her own blurred nose thanks to the tropicamide. He’ll be able to catch up to her soon enough. But this thought offers no relief. Everything has changed.





CHAPTER 22





WREN ALLOWS HERSELF ONLY A moment. Then she gets to work, reaching out her gloved hand for a pulse. She closes her own eyes and focuses on palpating for this woman’s carotid artery. She presses lightly into it and desperately tries to sense any kind of life. She feels it then, the slightest movement in the victim’s cardiac cycle beneath her fingertips.

Wren’s world brightens to vivid Technicolor. She looks up at the paramedics with wild eyes, yelling, “You’re up! She has a pulse!”

The two medics spring into action. They roll the victim slightly onto her side and discover the source of the dark blood staining her shirt behind her hip.