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“It’s a dead body,” Carlos says, stating the obvious.
“Not just any body,” I say, pointing to the hand.
There are two fingers missing.
“That’s Harvey Curry,” I say.
Carlos reaches down, takes the slickened wrist in his gloved hands, and pulls. Once he manages to get more of the arm out, I join him. It takes a lot of pulling and navigating—and our clothes don’t survive without getting sewage splattered on them—but we finally heave Harvey’s body out and into the grass.
Every surface of his body is coated in slime, the clothes soggy, the hair matted and muddy. But there’s no doubt, behind the black glop oozing down the skin and the muddy mask partly covering his face, this man is—was—Harvey Curry.
I stick the hoe back into the sewage and push it farther into the filth. Deep underground, as far as I can reach, the hoe snags something. I strain to drag the thing—whatever it is—closer.
Carlos joins me, submerging the rake into the muck. It’s difficult work, the two of us struggling shoulder-to-shoulder, but we finally get the object lifted toward the surface.
While most of it’s still submerged, the topmost part comes out of the muck. It looks like a volleyball at first—its white surface visible through dripping sewage—but the object shifts and empty eye sockets become discernible, along with a triangular hole where the nose once was and a gaping toothy mouth.
“It’s another body,” Carlos says.
“And this one’s been down there a lot longer,” I grunt.
“Yeah,” he says. “So who the hell is it?”
CHAPTER 44
WITH CARLOS’S RAKE snagged in the ribcage and my hoe tangled in a belt around the corpse’s waist, we manage to pull the fetid body up and out of the hole. It slumps down next to Harvey. Some skin remains, clinging to the bones like parchment paper, but most of what’s left is a skeleton in muddy clothes.
I wedge my gloved fingers into the rear pocket of the dead person’s threadbare jeans and find a wallet. It’s a careless mistake to leave the wallet with the victim, but maybe Parker was overconfident that the body would never be found.
I flip it open, spilling credit cards onto the grass. I stare at the driver’s license in disbelief.
Jackson Clarke.
Carlos and I stagger farther into the yard to try to escape the stench. I fling off my gloves, put my hands on my knees, and take a deep breath. The air is clearer here but only a little—the stink has followed me. It’s on my clothes and in my hair.
“Parker killed Jackson Clarke,” I manage to say between deep breaths. “He’s a murderer.”
Carlos thinks for a moment and then says, “It makes sense now.”
Yes, it does. When Jackson Clarke was released, he didn’t make a run for it like everyone assumed. He was innocent. We know that now. But Parker was convinced he was the Cereal Killer.
So Parker killed him.
He probably snuck over to the grain elevator from his house—taking the same route I did, only in reverse—and killed Clarke. Then Parker hid the body in his septic tank and resigned from the Rangers, claiming he was upset that Clarke had gotten away. But that was just an act. The whole time he knew that Jackson Clarke wasn’t on the run. He was rotting in a sewage-filled grave under the grass where Parker’s children played and where he and his wife hosted family cookouts.
“I’m going to call this in,” I say, straightening my back and taking a deep breath through my nose.
“Wait,” Carlos says.
His skin looks pasty in the moonlight, clammy with sweat.
“What do you mean?” I say. “We’ve got two dead bodies here. We have to call this in.”
“We don’t know who we can trust,” he says.
He explains that if someone from the Rangers did, in fact, tip off Parker the other day, they could do the same again. If we have any chance of catching him, we need to keep this to ourselves.
At least for now.
