Bone Harvest - Mary Logue [80]
Then the man went back outside.
The boy sneaked out from behind the door. And he saw Mr. Schuler talking to the man. The man was holding a gun. He and Mr. Schuler weren’t yelling. They looked like they were talking about the weather. Then Mr. Schuler turned and walked away. He got about halfway across the barnyard when the man lifted up his rifle and pulled the trigger. Mr. Schuler stumbled forward; then he fell. The man shot him again.
The boy went and hid behind the door again. There was no safe way to get out of the house. The man was standing with the gun right out front. He felt like his legs were shaking so hard he would fall down. Then he heard the man come in the house, look around, and walk past him. The boy kept his eyes closed, praying the man wouldn’t see him.
The man went up the stairs and the boy ran into the kitchen. The baby was under the table. The mom was next to the chair.
He ran out the door and that was when he saw the fingers. The cut-off fingers. He grabbed them and ran. He ran past Mr. Schuler, lying facedown in the dirt. He ran past Denny out in the barn. He ran up over the hill and through the fields. He ran until he came to the hill above his house.
His mom was down there and she would take care of him.
But first he needed to put the fingers in a safe place.
He had a hiding place behind the barn where he kept his favorite things. He went there and took out a metal pipe tobacco container. It was red. His father had given it to him. He put the fingers in the container and closed it.
Then he ran to tell his mother what had happened.
CHAPTER 25
Claire found Tyrone sleeping in the conference room. The poor man was sitting in a chair, his head pitched forward on the table, cradled by his arms. It was five in the morning and the sun was coming in through the blinds, dappling his dark face. A cup of half-drunk coffee was next to his head. She needed to wake him and tell him what she had figured out.
Finding a last cup of coffee stewing in the coffeemaker, she poured it into his emptied cup. Then she walked back to the conference room and shook him.
He jumped and made a deep noise in his throat.
“Sorry,” she said.
“Oh, God, I’m still here,” he said, looking around.
She handed him the coffee. “Are you getting up or going back to your room to sleep?”
“The air conditioner in my room still isn’t fixed. I figured I’d sleep better here than there. I’m getting up. I think I managed to get a few hours.” He sniffed the coffee and mumbled, “This stuff smells singed.” Then he drank it.
“What’s going on with the finger?” Claire asked him.
“It’s on ice.”
“What?”
“Literally. Some specialist is coming to look at it. We’ve checked the hospitals, put out an APB, women’s shelters, et cetera. No one has turned up with a finger cut off.”
“God, that makes me sick. I wonder who the person is.”
“I wonder how they are.”
Claire sat down next to him. “Tyrone, I figured something out. I think there was another person at the Schulers’ when they were murdered—someone who survived the massacre.”
He closed his eyes and rolled his eyes around and then opened them wide. “Another person? Tell me.”
So she told him what she had discovered.
He squeezed his mouth tight; then broke it open in a smile. “Takes a woman to count the plates.”
“Well, in all fairness the plates were easier to see in the photograph that Folger had in his scrapbook than in the photos in the file.”
“We’ve got to find this person.”
Claire nodded.
“It could be our guy, the pesticide guy.” Tyrone looked over at her. “Any ideas?”
“The person who comes to mind is Lowman, Earl Lowman. He always claimed that he went over to return something he had borrowed; but what if that was just a story; what if he was actually there when it happened? What if he was responsible?”
“We’ll just have to ask him.”
“I’ve been trying to get ahold of him.”
“Well, he’s in town.”
“Lowman?”
“Yeah, he called late last night or early this morning from the hospital. He