He then spoke. When he did, it sounded like a drawbridge opening. “Who are you, Avery?” he asked, miming Howard Randall’s letter.
He opened his mouth and she watched as an enormous spider leg came inching out. Lawnbrook made a retching noise as the leg came out of his mouth. It was huge and hairy, easily the size of a large lobster’s claw. The body attached to it, along with the other legs, started to show in the back of his mouth, glistening and tight.
The dream shattered with that absurdity and Avery sat up quickly in bed—in her real bed this time. No metal slab, no smiling corpse beside her.
She gasped, unaware that she was brushing at her arms and shoulder to rid herself of the phantom spiders. She slid out of bed, feeling that they were in the covers. She caught her breath and walked to the bathroom for a glass of water.
That’s when she realized that the dream itself had not stirred her awake. It had been the buzzing of her phone. She had purposefully left it by her bedside in the chance that she got a call at night but the habits of the last three months had caused her to turn the ringer off when she had gotten ready for bed.
She ran to it and picked it up with hands that still felt as if there were spiders crawling on them. She saw Finley’s name on the screen, as well as the time in the top right corner: 3:07 in the morning.
“Hey, Finley,” she said.
“Welcome back to work,” he said. “Don’t you miss the late hours?”
“What’s up?” she asked.
“We found a body,” he said. “Pretty sure it’s not related to Lawnbrook but still sort of creepy all the same. You want in on it?”
She considered for only a moment before responding. “What’s the address?”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The searchlights bordering the small cove along the western edge of Jamaica Pond looked like something out of a sci-fi film from a distance—like several UFOs had come down to the body of water, waiting to kick off an invasion. There were a few police vehicles parked fifty or so feet away from the water and a few people scattered around the scene.
Avery parked behind a police cruiser and found Finley right away. He was standing over near the water, next to a small pier that extended out into the pond for a distance of about twenty feet. The pier looked very rickety, the sort of thing that had been well used several years ago and then neglected and abandoned.
Finley and three other officers were huddled around a body that had been laid down on a plastic tarp. It was a woman of about twenty or so—far too close to Rose’s age as far as Avery was concerned. Her hands were bound behind her back and there was something around her neck, a cloth of some kind.
“Any ID yet?” Avery asked.
“Not yet, but we’ll have it soon,” Finley said. “There was a debit card tucked into her back pocket. We’ve got the info being run right now. Should be any minute.”
Avery knelt down by the body for a closer look. The searchlights were some help, but Finley assisted in aiming a small flashlight at the body. Avery looked her over, doing everything she could to push images of Rose out of her mind.
The girl was quite pretty and surely weighed no more than one hundred and ten pounds. She had blonde hair that was a bit longer than shoulder-length and her blue eyes were wide open, staring up into the night sky. She was fully dressed, wearing a white long-sleeved top and a pair of tight-fitting jeans. Her hands had been bound with basic cord, a thick rope that had been expertly tied. The cloth around her neck was tied in the same type of knot, but it was loose-fitting. It had not been used to strangle her but looked dangerous nonetheless.
“This cloth on her neck,” Avery said. “I put my money on it being used as a blindfold. Her killer didn’t want her to know where they were going.”
“I don’t see any visible bruising,” Finley said. “No scratches or abrasions. No signs of a struggle from what I can see and—”
Another officer approached, walking quickly from the direction of the parked cruisers. “I got an ID from that debit card,” he said. “The victim is Abby Costello. Twenty-two years old, an employee at an accounting firm here in Boston.”
“Did you get an address?” Avery asked.
“Yes. We’ve got three officers headed over that way as we speak,” the cop said.
Finley looked down at Avery with a playfully suspicious look. “What are you thinking?” he asked.
“Her eyes,” Avery said. “They’re wide open. She was scared when she died, I think. Very scared.”
“Well, yeah. What’s so crazy about that?”
“Nothing at first glance. But if she was killed prior to being dumped, I don’t think there would be this expression of horror on her face. Besides…I see no indication of foul play before she was dumped into the water.”
“So you think the killer blindfolded her, brought her out to this random-ass pier, tied her hands behind her back, and tossed her in the water?”
“Yeah. I think the cause of death is going to be drowning. Her body wasn’t just dumped in an attempt to get rid of it.”
“Well, the ambulance is on its way,” Finley said. “The coroner should be able to verify that pretty quickly, I’d think.”
Avery stood up and walked out onto the pier. On its face, Abby Costello’s death bore no similarities to Alfred Lawnbrook’s. Still, the concept would not leave her alone. Maybe she still had spiders on the brain from that jarring nightmare…but she felt like there had to be some sort of connection.
Or maybe you’re trying to make one already messed up case much bigger than it is, she thought. Maybe you want that sort of trophy case in front of you after being gone for three months.
“Who discovered the body?” she asked.
“A guy out walking his dog,” Finley said. “Or so he said. When the first officers on the scene arrived, they said they smelled pot on his breath. The guy said he saw what looked like a lump of weird weeds floating out there. Hard to tell because it was so dark. As he got closer to the pier, he saw that it wasn’t weeds but blonde hair.”
“How long has the body been out of the water?” Avery asked.
“Forty minutes. She’d only been out for five or ten minutes before I called you.”
Avery looked around at the scene. She knew that there were sections of Jamaica Pond that often drew sizeable crowds, especially on the weekend. But this little cove was off the beaten path, the sort of place teens came to make out or smoke pot. The chance of finding a witness to what happened was slim to none.
“Was the debit card the only thing on her?” Avery asked.
“Yeah,” Finley said. “No cash, no phone…which I found strange. A girl this pretty at this stage of life…they’re supposed to be glued to their phones, right?”
“The killer probably took it,” Avery said. “That or it’s somewhere at the bottom of the pond.”
She looked at Abby Costello again, trying to determine how long her body had been in the water. Her clothes were soaked and her hair was matted. Avery hunkered down next to the body again and saw that Abby’s fingers were covered in wrinkles that often came from sitting in a tub of water for too long—only Abby’s were very wrinkled. Her palms had also gone a hard shade of white.
“I’d estimate that she was in the water for at least two hours,” Avery said. “Maybe the coroner can tell us more. Given that span of time, I doubt it would do good to make a perimeter of the area. We’ll hope we can get some fingerprints from her body or the blindfold.”
In the distance, she could see the ambulance lights. She once again looked back out to the water, wondering what secrets it might be hiding.
***