She bit her tongue.
More rapping. “I know you’re awake.”
No…no, he didn’t. And she didn’t tell him, didn’t utter a word.
“Oh, fuck it.”
&nb
sp; The coffin was moving again and she heard the muted rattle of wheels, like those on a hospital gurney. Rolling, rolling along bumpy terrain…no doubt taking her to the pit where the coffin would be dropped and buried. She had to do something!
All motion ceased.
No doubt he’d reached the grave. Her grave.
“Who would have done this?” Morrisette demanded.
Reed, worried sick about Nikki, remembered staring into the bloodied carcass of LeRoy Chevalier. They’d pulled out the coffin and opened it up, revealing a naked and slashed body. Chevalier’s head had nearly been severed and there were dozens of wounds upon his body made by a sharp, deadly weapon. Finally Reed understood that the Grave Robber had no doubt also hacked up Carol Legittel and her children. Two dead. One brutally wounded. “This was done by someone who hated him. Someone with a dark rage. This isn’t like the other killings where the deaths occurred without a lot of violence…No, Chevalier was chopped to death and then his body mutilated.” Reed knew enough about serial killers to realize that Chevalier’s murderer was someone close to him, someone he’d mistreated, someone whose hatred and need for vengeance was white-hot. “This one is someone who’s enraged that he got out of prison and he’s blaming everyone involved. The jurors, the judge and the woman who almost got the case thrown out years ago, Nikki Gillette.”
“Who the fuck is that?” Morrisette asked.
Reed was thinking hard as the storm swirled around the soaked officers working the scene. Time was running out. Nikki was trapped with the monster somewhere. “It’s someone like Ken Stern, Carol Legittel’s brother. He hated Chevalier, promised to kill him—and as an ex-Marine, he would know how—or Stephen Legittel, her ex-husband and father of the children Chevalier abused, or Joey Legittel, her son, the only one who survived the killings.”
“Chevalier beat him and forced him to have sex with his mother, right?” Morrisette said, eyeing the carnage. She visibly cringed at the crusted, dark purple slash surrounding Chevalier’s throat.
Reed nodded, felt the icy rain run down his collar. “According to Joey. Along with his siblings. It was kind of a sadistic sexual free-for-all with Chevalier holding the whip.”
“Deserved what he got,” Morrisette muttered, turning away from the open casket as Diane Moses’s team worked the area as they had at the previous crime scenes.
Cliff Siebert hung up his phone. “I got through to the hospital. Charlene Gillette can’t tell us anything. She’s traumatized. An officer tried to speak with her but she won’t or can’t say a word. Nearly catatonic. Whatever she saw pushed her over the edge.”
“Shit.” Morrisette glared up at the sky. Blinked against the rain.
Reed felt as if Nikki’s life were in his hands and she was slowly, irrevocably, slipping away.
“Wonder why the asshole was buried alone?” Morrisette asked, jabbing her chin at the coffin.
“Again, not like the others,” Reed thought, panic surging through him as the seconds ticked by. Where the hell did he have Nikki? “Send a unit to every graveyard in the city,” he said, but his mind was turning wildly, remembering the trial twelve years ago. The bleak courtroom. Judge Ronald Gillette sitting imperiously above the proceedings. The jurors watching raptly as the prosecution laid out its case. There was a clue here…there had to be. The killer had tricked him, steered him off course, but he had to…Lightning forked the sky. Suddenly he knew. As surely as if Lucifer had whispered the answer in his ear.
It was what this entire case was all about.
“Where was Carol Legittel buried?”
“Don’t know.” Morrisette shook her head.
Siebert said, “I do. I saw it in the file. She and her children are in Adams Cemetery, a small plot east of town.”
That was all Reed needed to hear. “Let’s go.” He was already running through the spitting rain to his El Dorado. “We don’t have much time.”
Nikki was sweating, her heart pounding wildly. She had to find a way out. Pushing on the lid didn’t do anything. She needed a weapon. Something she could use to pry the thing open from the inside out, but what? She had nothing. She was naked.
But her father was still wearing his clothes.
Her heart nearly stopped. Unless the killer had discovered it, Big Ron kept a loaded pistol strapped to his ankle.
Nikki’s hopes jumped at the feeble possibility. Getting to the gun, and fast, seemed impossible.
But it was her only chance.