Page 44 of Confessions of the Dead

Not the pipes.

Without raising his weapon, Matt turned toward the sound and found himself facing the wall of lockers.

34

Riley

RILEY’S HEAD SWIVELED UPand she glared at the window. There was a smudge in the top right corner of the glass, dark red, looked like blood, and a small crack a few inches long. She hadn’t seen whatever struck, but it didn’t sound like something hard. Instead, it sounded muffled, heavy, like a bag filled with something wet.

Riley’s legs didn’t want to work, but she forced them to. She slowly climbed to her feet and peered out the corner of the glass, careful not to expose any more of herself than she had to.

Three small figures were standing on the sidewalk in front of her house, deep in the shadows of the Millers’ red maple. Kids, no taller than her. She couldn’t see their faces, but she could make out that much. One was holding a baseball bat, resting on it like a cane. Looked like a boy, but Riley couldn’t be sure. The middle one wore a blue-and-white sundress, one she recognized. Riley couldn’t see the girl’s face, but she was certain that was Evelyn Harper. She was a year older than Riley, should have been a sixth grader, but got held back in kindergarten for missing too manydays. She picked on Riley and half the other girls at Hollows Bend Elementary; she wore that same dress at least once each week, sometimes twice. The third was short, probably Evelyn’s eight-year-old little brother, Robby. He got in trouble last year for bringing a dead cat to school in his backpack. He told everyone it got hit by a car, but Evelyn let it slip he beat it with a hammer in the vacant yard behind their house. Nobody believed her; Robby wasn’t like that. Either way, he got suspended for a week. He had the same backpack with him, resting against his leg, his hand twisted around the strap.

Evelyn stepped forward, peeled from the shadows of the large maple, and glared back at Riley, her head at an odd angle.

35

Matt

SEVERAL OF THE LOCKERSwere labeled, names written on masking tape in Gerald’s neat script. The moan had come from the locker on the bottom left—untagged—supposed to be empty.

This time, Mattdidraise his gun. He eased his finger over the trigger guard as he stepped to the locker and knelt.

When he pressed his ear to the cold stainless steel he heard it again.

Faint this time, but definitely coming from inside.

With his free hand, Matt reached for the heavy latch and tugged. The lock disengaged, and the door swung open with a belch of frigid air. The drawer slid out as effortlessly as the one on which he’d placed Norman, only this one wasn’t empty—

Fully dressed, his impossibly pale skin covered in a layer of white frost, his teeth chattering, was Gerald Furber.

The tips of his fingers were bloody, and three of his nails were gone. Red streaks lined the sides of the stainless-steel drawer. There were droplets on his shirt, too, and Matt knew if he wereto look inside, the ceiling of that drawer would be red. He had no idea for how long, but Gerald had tried to claw his way out and failed.

Several seconds slipped by, and Matt only stared because what he was looking at didn’t seem real, couldn’t possibly be real. Then his grip tightened on his gun and he looked back toward the hallway, at the stairs leading up to the residence beyond that. “Ger, is somebody else here? Who put you in there?”

The coroner looked up at Matt with unblinking eyes, unnaturally wide. A sound escaped his lips, barely a whisper, and Matt had to lean down to hear him.

“ … hiding. Got locked … in …”

“Hiding from who?”

Gerald’s tongue slithered out between his clicking teeth and licked his chapped lips, this dead-looking gray thing that had no business in the body of the living, as if it had already crossed over and had been waiting for the rest of Gerald’s body to join it.

“They don’t like … what I do to them after … they pass. They’re angry … with me. They’re …”

He turned his head to the side and coughed. Mucus bubbled at his nose. When he turned back to face Matt, his eyes rolled up toward the locker directly above him, labeledMILLER. “I only wanted to be close to her. Didn’t … didn’t want to say good-bye … yet, but that made the others mad. Always … quiet. Quiet … until today …”

Miller was Aubrey Miller. Thirty-one. She’d died from a brain aneurysm two days ago. Her husband had found her dead on the kitchen floor. Ellie had taken that call and waited with Aubrey’s husband until Gerald arrived with the hearse and brought her back here.

Matt slipped his gun back in the holster and tried to understand. “What others? What did you do?”

Gerald Furber licked his lips again. “She was so …”

Pretty.

The word popped into Matt’s head only because Ellie had mentioned it. She said Gerald had taken a look at the dead woman’s eyes with a penlight and immediately knew the COD, he’d seen it before—burst vessels in the left, no longer facing the same direction as her right eye, but instead pointed off to the side. He’d still perform an autopsy to confirm his theory, but he seemed absolutely certain.She was so pretty, Gerald had told Ellie.It was a shame to cut her up.It wasn’t the words that bothered Ellie as much as the way he stroked Aubrey Miller’s hair as he said them, the way he spoke, as if Ellie weren’t in the room. As if she were a voyeur looking in on some private moment.

The revulsion flooded through every inch of Matt’s body. He leaned closer to the shivering man. “Did you do something with … to … Aubrey’s body?”

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