The Last Child

Yoakum didn’t get it, but then he did.

The hell that Hunt was living through.

His life as he knew it.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The old station wagon coasted to a halt on a bent strip of narrow black. The road was empty, a dark, lonely stretch beyond the edge of town, bracketed by forest and quiet. Joh

The house itself was a bare hint: a yellow gleam and a collection of hard edges that didn’t seem to line up properly. A rotten-sweet poison seeped in from the dump a mile away. In daylight, the crows flocked and a distant gun barked as the junkman shot rats and cans. At night, the crickets called; but sometimes, for no reason, they fell silent. It was as if the world suddenly closed its mouth. Joh

Midnight. Dawn.

Six times.

A dozen.

Burton Jarvis was on the list because he was a recidivist. That was the biggest word Joh

Jar didn’t have what Joh

They were on his list.

One guy came more than the others. Sometimes he had a gun, and sometimes not. Tall and wiry and old, he had eager, shiny eyes and long fingers. He and Jar drank liquor from the same bottle and talked about stuff they’d done outside some village in Vietnam. They got all smoke-eyed when they talked about a girl they called Small Yellow. They’d spent three days with her in a strafed-out hut full of her dead family. Small Yellow, they’d say, bottle going up, one head shaking. Fucking shame.

Their laughter was not nice at all.

It took Joh

That’s where he went first.

The shed.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

By six o’clock the bodies were bagged. Hunt stood on the porch as the stretchers clattered through the door, the black vinyl looking awkward and slick. He eyed the street and the yard, both colorless under a dull, dark sky. The sun had yet to rise, but he felt it coming. Gray light gathered on treetops beyond the tracks and the eastern sky showed the barest hint of something new. Cop cars were all over the place, blocking off the street, angled at the curb. The medical examiner’s van sat at the edge of the yard, back end yawning wide. A dusting of reporters stood behind yellow tape, but it was the neighbors that Hunt studied the hardest. The street left a narrow footprint. Small lots pushed the houses together. Somebody knew something. They had to. His eyes cut back and forth, lingered on an old white man in a yellowed shirt, a black kid with shifty eyes, gang colors, and homemade tats. He studied a wide-faced woman with pendulous breasts and a child in each arm. She lived next door but claimed to know nothing.

Didn’t hear nothing.

Eyes full of hate.

Didn’t see nothing.

One of the department’s canine handlers appeared around the side of the house, his clothing smeared with filth, his face drawn. The dog, a black-coated mongrel, pressed against his thigh. Its tongue lolled out of its mouth as it gazed, unblinking, at the body bags. His handler shook his head. “Nothing in the crawl space or on the grounds. If there’s another body, it’s elsewhere.”

“You’re positive of that?” Hunt asked.

“Absolutely.” He thumped the dog’s head with an open palm.

Hunt felt something like relief, but was loath to put too much faith in the feeling. Just because Tiffany Shore was not here did not mean that she was still alive. He remained viscerally aware of the bodies behind him. “No chance that these threw the dog off?” He gestured at the bags.

“No chance at all.”

Hunt nodded. “Okay, Mike. Thanks for checking.”

The handler made a clicking sound with his mouth and the dog followed him out.

Nothing. They had nothing. Hunt thought about what Joh

Maybe.

More than maybe.

Hunt watched Trenton Moore secure the bodies in the back of his van. The medical examiner looked like Hunt felt: tired and gray, stretched as thin as the morning light. When he stepped back onto the porch, Hunt smelled coffee and formaldehyde, a morgue smell. “Sorry to give you two more so quickly,” Hunt told him.

Moore waved it off. “I was going to call you anyway,” he said. “I have a preliminary workup on David Wilson.”

“That was quick.”

“What can I say? I love my job.”

Hunt stepped to the far side of the porch, away from the door and the foot traffic. Moore followed him. “Talk to me.”

“He was alive when he came over the rail. The boy told us that, and my findings are consistent. Most of the obvious injuries, you saw. Broken leg and arm; multiple fractures, actually. Full details will be in the final report. Extensive abrasions from contact with the concrete and the ground. Fractured orbit on the left side. He had seven crushed ribs, also on the left side, massive trauma to his internal organs, internal bleeding, a punctured lung; but none of these things killed him.”

“Explain.”

“I found a single large contusion on his throat.” Moore indicated the front of his own throat, just above the collarbone. “The larynx was crushed, the esophagus. Massive weight was applied until the entire airway was damaged to the point of total obstruction.” A pause. “He suffocated, Detective.”

“But he was alive when Joh

“The contusion on his throat has a pattern. It’s extremely vague, only visible under magnification and not enough to take an impression or get any kind of match, but it’s definitely there.”

“A pattern?”

Moore’s expression was pained. “A tread pattern.”

Hunt felt sweat cool on his neck.

“Somebody stepped on his throat, Detective. Somebody stood on his throat until he was dead.”

Moore’s report changed the tone of the Hunt’s morning. It implied a viciousness that seemed colder, somehow, more cruel and personal.

Hunt walked into the house, unsettled and angry. The bodies were gone, but the black dawn felt darker still. At twenty-five minutes after six, Hunt’s phone rang. It was his son. Hunt recognized the number and flinched. With all that was going on, he’d not thought of the boy. Not even once. “Hello, Allen.”