Jack_ Secret Vengeance - F. Paul Wilson [80]
Blood on Toliver’s hands … Saree had been right about that, but wrong about the piney part. Marcie wasn’t a piney. She’d lived in Shamong.
Unless there was another victim …
“Well, I’d seen Toliver with the sock you pulled out of that bare area. Did it belong to Marcie?”
Tim nodded. “Yeah, we found a ring and a sneaker too, all on the list of things she’d been wearing when she disappeared.”
“What’d he do … keep them as souvenirs?”
“That’s the odd part. The crime scene people say they were buried with her—on her—and had only recently been removed. Lots of ‘products of decomposition’ or something like that on them.”
Jack swallowed. “You mean he dug her up and…”
“No. They say the body hadn’t been disturbed since it was buried a year ago.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“Tell me about it. The only thing we’re missing from the list of what she was wearing is a pink hair band. We’re getting a search warrant for his locker and his home.”
Jack’s mouth went dry. The pink hair band around the neck of the possum—only he hadn’t put it there and hadn’t seen it in the locker.
As a matter of fact, he hadn’t seen the sneaker in the locker either. And the ring … it had fallen out with the marbles, but there’d been no ring in the box when he’d set it up.
An ice-footed spider scurried up his spine to his neck and settled there. Something was going on, something that couldn’t be.
“Okay,” Jack said, choosing his words carefully, “if the sock you dug out of the sand was the same one I saw fall out of Toliver’s locker—”
“It was—or at least we’re ninety percent sure it was. Here’s what we think happened: He left school, went home, stole a bottle of vodka from the house, a coil of rope from the garage, came out here, got drunk, buried Marcie’s belongings over there, right over her grave, then walked over to the tree and hung himself.”
“Somewhere along the line he wrote a note, didn’t he?”
“Right. Forgot to mention that.”
“Can you tell me now if it said who he hoped was ‘happy’?”
“From what we can tell, Marcie Kurek.”
“Huh?”
“The note said: ‘You win, Marcie. I ruined your life so I guess it’s only fair you ruined mine. I hope you’re happy.’”
Jack felt his knees soften with relief. He could have kissed Tim, although that might have got him arrested.
You win, Marcie … That meant guilt over killing her had made him believe Marcie was haunting him, ruining his life because he’d ended hers. That, not losing the game, had driven him to tie a rope around his neck.
Maybe Toliver had brought her out here thinking she’d be easy, and she wasn’t. Maybe he got rough with her like he had with Weezy, thinking she was playing hard to get, or maybe he simply wanted what he wanted when he wanted it, had always gotten what he wanted, didn’t know the meaning of the word “no,” and didn’t care to learn. Maybe things got too far out of control and he had to silence her.
He remembered Toliver’s words right out here Sunday night …
It was an accident! I didn’t mean it!
Whatever happened, Marcie wound up dead and he’d had to hide her body. Why he chose that particular spot, Jack couldn’t say, but with nothing growing there, he wouldn’t run into any roots, making the digging easy. Like digging at the beach.
Maybe killing Marcie awoke some sickness in him that liked what he’d done. Maybe it had driven him to kill a piney girl. And to bring Weezy here last week.
“You okay?” Tim said.
Jack yanked himself back to the here and now. He’d been fighting a wave of nausea at the thought of what might have happened to Weezy if she hadn’t escaped from Toliver’s car.
“I-I’m fine. I’d just like to know how that sock got from Marcie’s grave to Toliver’s locker without her body being disturbed.”
“So would we all. But we’ve learned that someone was harassing him lately, someone who was able to break into his locker and leave surprises. We’d like to talk to that