Harper Connelly Book 3 - An Ice Cold Grave by Charlaine Harris

Author:Charlaine Harris [Harris, Charlaine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2010-04-04T09:00:00+00:00

Page 77

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“We promise we’ll be respectful,” Klavin said, interpreting my look correctly. “We realize you’ve had trouble with law enforcement agents in the past.”

I thought about it. I thought about the check Twyla Cotton had tucked into my hand the night before, the check that was over and above the amount we’d agreed upon for finding her grandson. I thought about the families crowded into the church, the grief and fear. Balanced against ridicule from men I’d never see again, that ridicule seemed like nothing.

So I took a deep breath, closed my eyes to help me concentrate, and looked into one of the graves again. I picked the one closest to the road. I pointed at it on the drawing. “This is Tyler,” I said. “He’s been tortured. His skin was cut off in strips. He was raped. Clamps were put on his testicles. He was ready to die and welcomed death, because he knew no help was coming. The cause of death was strangulation. Some time in the recent past, he’d broken his leg.”

There was a quick intake of breath from one of the agents. I didn’t open my eyes to see which one. Tolliver took my hand, and I gripped his hard. In my mind, I walked to the next grave. “Hunter,” I said.

“Whipped, fucked, branded. He thought someone would come, right until the end. Lived for two days. Hypothermia.” Hunter had died in weather like this, cold and damp. The November abduction, I guessed. “No broken bones. He had…scoliosis.” I saw the curve of his spine, shining below me. It went on, the litany of torture and death. Sex and pain. Young men, used up and discarded. The two transient boys had had no particular bone problems, but the locals had…except for Jeff McGraw and Aaron Robertson. So that was fifty percent. The broken bones were a dead end. They’d died of a variety of reasons. Most of the reasons were oddly passive, like the strangling and hypothermia that had killed Tyler and Hunter.

“Passive?” Klavin sounded indignant. He pulled a white handkerchief out of his pocket and patted his nose. He’d caught a cold probing around the killing site. “Abducted, tortured, raped. That sounds pretty damn active to me.”

“That’s not what I’m trying to express,” I said. “They were let to die. They weren’t stabbed or shot or poisoned, something that would cause instant, sure death. Hunter was just left there, and he died. Maybe weather interfered with their visits, maybe he—the killer—was bored with him. The strangulation—well, you can change your mind at the last few seconds on that, too.”

“I see what you mean,” said Stuart. “Like the death was kind of an afterthought, or an experiment.”

“Like the pleasure didn’t come with the death, but with what lay before,” I said. “The pain was the attraction. And once they were all used up, and there wouldn’t be any more reaction from them, they were no good anymore.” But that wasn’t quite right.

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