“It’s Sam,” he said, looking at it. “She needs me.” His voice almost vibrated with pleasure.
“Gramma probably needs her adult diaper changed,” Connie told him.
“But my fingers may gently brush against Sam’s as we change the diaper together,” Howie pointed out.
“Fine. Go. Just remember to come back for me.”
Once Howie left, Connie allowed herself a five-minute break before taking up the shovel and attacking the ground again. She was determined to dig until she found something. A gopher hole. A rabbit warren. A treasure chest full of Spanish doubloons. A pocket of oil that would make her richer than Midas and solve the energy crisis. Something. Even if it took all day and all night.
But it didn’t take that long. It took only another ten minutes.
Bodies, Connie knew, were buried six feet deep, for reasons she couldn’t recall. Something superstitious and ancient and partly forgotten, like so many modern rituals. Something about being certain that the dead person couldn’t get out of the grave…
She didn’t have to dig six feet, thank God, only three.
Only? Ha! Her arms and shoulders ached as her shovel hit something with a CHANNNNG sound. She thought—briefly—of her dream, of finding Jazz buried here, then plunged ahead, spooning out loose dirt and digging around the edges of the thing to find its dimensions. With a few more minutes’ hard digging, she’d managed to clear away its top.
It was a lockbox of some sort, measuring maybe twelve inches by five inches. Connie pried around the edges of it, then lay flat on her belly to reach down and pull it up. It was only a couple of inches deep, and lighter than it appeared; she had no problem hauling it out.
Once it was on the ground next to her, she stared at it for long moments. Gray and dull, with a hinged top and a stout combination lock hanging from a steel loop. She picked it up and tilted it gently from one side to the other. Something inside shifted. Something light, but relatively solid. It didn’t feel fragile. She put the box back down on the ground and stared at it.
Jazz had told her once how to foil a combination lock. She didn’t remember all of the details—something about sensitive fingertips and listening to the tumblers—so she just raised the pickax with the last of her strength, aimed carefully at the lock, and brought it crashing down.
And missed, gouging another new trough into what was left of Billy Dent’s backyard.
Oops. Crunching up the ground with a pickax was one thing, but hitting the small target of a lock was another al-together. Especially since she couldn’t afford to hit the box itself—she didn’t want to damage whatever was inside it.
She took a few deep breaths, yoga breaths, clearing her mind. Then, hearkening back to her acting training to center and relax herself, she swung again with the pickax and thought, Hey, wait, what if Billy left something explosive in that box? But it was too late—she couldn’t halt the momentum of her swing and the sharp, hard blade of the pickax smashed into the combination lock.
Which didn’t break.
Oh, come on! Her shoulders and arms felt like slabs of meat ready for the grill. The lock was dented and twisted, but a few tugs told her that it wasn’t going anywhere.
Could be something explosive in there. Could be anthrax. If Billy Dent left this, it could be just about anything. You should go get Sheriff Tanner and have him tackle this.
Made sense.
But, she countered her own internal logic, if you get the cops, then they’ll be all like, “Why didn’t you call us as soon as you got that first text message?” And you’ll have to put up with all that nonsense. And you might never get to see what’s inside.
Curiosity fueled her muscles as she swung the pickax again, trying not to imagine a choking cloud of something noxious and lethal erupting from the open box.
This time, the lock broke.
Connie opened the box, thoughts of explosives and gases and anthrax already fled from her mind. She needed to know what was inside. Some part of her thought that Howie would be disappointed not to have been here for the opening, but she was beyond caring now, driven. She had to know. She had to see it.
The box did not contain anthrax or a bomb or anything else exotic. A few inches shallow, it contained exactly three things: two clear plastic bags with envelopes zipped into them, and…
A toy.
She plucked it from the box gingerly, as if it were dangerous. But it was just a small plastic bird. Black. A raven, or maybe a crow. Something like that. Weren’t they part of the same family? Or genus? Connie couldn’t remember—her bio class interested her about as much as Whiz’s video games.
A crow… the Crow King…
This was a cheap plastic bird, the kind of thing you bought at a gift shop somewhere. It was hollow—when squeezed, it made a halfhearted wheezing sound. Connie shrugged and put it on the ground next to the box.
She unzipped one of the plastic bags and withdrew a manila envelope that measured something like six inches by five inches. Even as she did it, she thought, Maybe I should actually measure it and take notes for the cops, before realizing that she had already touched and moved the evidence. Oh, well. So much for preserving the crime scene.
What crime? So far, all you’ve found is some junk buried in the backyard.
The envelope was only partly full, still crisp and nearly flat, fastened with a metal clasp, then sealed. She opened it as gingerly as she could, thinking of old cop shows where “the guys in the lab” managed to pull DNA samples from envelope flaps and identify the killer that way. Her hands shook.
What are you doing, Connie? Call the cops! Call them now!
But she was powerless to stop herself as she peeled back the flap, then shook the contents out into her hand.
Anthrax! screamed some primitive part of her, but all that fell into her palm was a set of photographs.
There were half a dozen of them, all of them with three people. The man Connie recognized immediately—it was Billy Dent. He was younger, but there was no mistaking that infamous grin, those piercing eyes.
The woman, she knew, was Jazz’s mother. It was a shock seeing her—Connie had seen only the one photo of her, the picture Jazz kept in his wallet and now had scanned into his phone. The only picture that had survived Billy’s purge of all things “Mom” from the Dent house nine years ago. But here were more pictures of her.
Holding a baby, in the top picture.
Connie didn’t need to flip the photo over, didn’t need to read JASPER, 7 MONTHS to know that she was seeing something Jazz had never seen—his own mother holding him as a baby. Jazz had one fat little baby fist jammed in his own mouth, and from his free hand dangled the very same crow toy Connie had just examined. Baby’s first toy…
The other pictures progressed from Jazz at seven months to fifteen months. Connie couldn’t tell if these were special occasions or what. Each photo was roughly the same—Jazz’s parents and baby Jazz in some combination. In one photo, Jazz was standing, arms akimbo in that drunken baby waddle toddlers use, as his parents crouched near him, ready to catch him if he fell. It looked so normal that Connie realized in a flash how Billy had managed to go without being identified as a sociopath for so many years. He really did seem normal. He just seemed completely normal.
Jazz’s mom looked… unhappy. In most of the pictures, she seemed off-kilter, as if dissatisfied or distracted. Connie wondered if she was on drugs—some kind of prescription or maybe something you didn’t pick up at the pharmacy along with tampons and Halloween candy. Or maybe she just knew what her husband was, what he did, and she couldn’t hide that knowledge.
How many had Billy killed at this point? Did she think it would get better, that he would stop? Was she in denial?
And who, she wondered suddenly, took these pictures?