“We need to check on Merrill,” said Diana. “Maybe Merrill had a father or a brother or something who died right before Elijah started visiting him. But … why Merrill and Rose and nobody else? Why are they worth breaking the rules for?”
“I … don’t know,” I said. “Something’s still not fitting.” I closed my eyes, trying to remember as much of our surveillance info as I could. “We’ve never seen him hurt anyone. We’ve never seen him attack anyone, we’ve never found a body or a crime scene we can connect him to, we’ve never found anything ‘bad.’”
“He gets his memories from dead bodies,” said Diana. “If we’re right.”
“If,” I said. I thought for a moment, listening as Potash gave the police Rose’s address. We’re still missing something important. I looked at Diana. “So what does Elijah do that he doesn’t have to do?”
“You mean the grief counseling?”
“I mean everything. Like how his powers work. If we’re right, he gets his memories from the corpses in the mortuary, but why?”
“Because he has to,” said Diana. “Getting your memories from dead people means you’d be constantly filling up on the memories of actual death. He’d remember dying of old age, dying of cancer, dying in car accidents. If they’ve been around for ten thousand years he might remember dying a hundred thousand times—why put yourself through that if you don’t have to?”
I hadn’t thought of that, and it disturbed me that I hadn’t. “That makes sense,” I said slowly, “but that’s still something he has to do. The question is what does he not have to do? Needing corpses isn’t the same as needing the mortuary, because let’s be honest: corpses are pretty easy to make. But he goes out of his way to use bodies that are already dead. He doesn’t kill.”
“Neither did Cody French,” said Diana. “He was still a monster.”
“Cody French drove girls insane,” I said. “Elijah Sexton doesn’t hurt anyone at all.”
“He’s not a good guy,” said Diana. “He’s a Withered—we kill the Withered, John, that’s our whole job. It’s our whole life.”
“What if he’s different?”
“He’s not,” she said harshly. “You heard Ostler: don’t get soft. You’re talking about a creature who’s preyed on humanity for ten thousand years—”
“You don’t know that.”
“We don’t know anything!” she said. “We’re blind, even more so than when we hit Mary Gardner, and she killed Kelly because of it. If you go after Elijah Sexton with anything less than straight-up hatred you’ll be dead, okay? He’ll kill you and probably the rest of us with you, just like every other Withered has killed every other person they’ve ever messed with.”
“Not everyone is evil,” I said, almost irrationally desperate to convince her—or myself. “Just because you think someone’s bad doesn’t mean they are. And even if he was bad he could change.”
“You’re wrong, John,” said Potash, hanging up his phone. His voice was cold and hard. “I just talked to the police, and when they put her name in her system they instantly hit a flag: her sister filed a missing-person report this morning. Rose Chapman’s disappeared.”
*
We were already most of the way to Rose Chapman’s house, and thus arrived before anyone else. A car was in the driveway, though it and the sidewalk were covered with about an inch of snow; that was probably just from the previous night’s storm, and it was far from the only snow-covered car on the block. More telling were the footprints leading from the curb to the porch—someone had pulled up, walked to the front door, then walked back out and driven away. I wasn’t a good enough tracker to tell if the prints leading from the house were any different than the prints leading to it—like if the person was carrying a body, for example—but I was fairly certain there was only one set. Had Elijah come here, and kidnapped the woman he thought was his wife? I wanted to believe it wasn’t him—that it was the three mystery Withered—but then why only one set of prints? I made a careful footprint of my own in the snow next to them, studying the comparison as Potash and Diana walked past me toward the door. The footprints were small—maybe it wasn’t a Withered at all, but the sister who’d reported Rose as missing?
I want you to be good, Elijah. Please be good.
“Whoever walked up here went inside,” said Potash, squatting by the front door. “They stomped the snow off their shoes onto the welcome mat, and then stepped in the pile on the way back out.”
“How can you tell?”
He shrugged. “You get a feel for these things.”
Diana rang the doorbell, and I trudged up the porch steps to join them. We waited a moment, rang again, then banged loudly on the door. Nothing.