Death Notice

Other businesses eventually followed. A gourmet bakery opened next to a bed-and-breakfast. An art gallery specializing in modern painting moved in, along with several upscale dress shops. Longtime residents such as Kat suddenly and surreally found themselves living in an arts community.

No one who lived there could have predicted that the town would experience such a rebirth. But whether one liked it or not—and Kat did—it looked like Perry Hollow was there to stay.

While she drove up Main Street, Kat scanned the thoroughfare. There was Big Joe’s, doing steady business both day and night. Beyond it sat Awesome Blossoms, where Jasper Fox probably still waited in vain for his missing delivery van, Gunzelman Antiques, and Wellington’s, the dress shop. The other side of the street boasted a bakery called Neverland Cakes and a store specializing in designer handbags.

Each storefront was decked out oh-so-tastefully for the upcoming Spring Fling, one of Perry Hollow’s numerous festivals designed to bring in day-trippers from Philadelphia and New Jersey. The festivals worked. Last year’s Spring Fling, with its flower sales and Ferris wheel, had drawn thousands of visitors. Attendance for that was surpassed only by July’s Independence Day street fair, which advertised food, fun, and fireworks, and October’s Halloween Festival, which lured tourists with the promise of fall foliage and hot apple cider.

How much of a draw the events would be now that Perry Hollow was the location of a brutal murder remained to be seen. As Kat drove, every pedestrian on Main Street glanced at the Crown Vic. When she looked into their eyes, Kat saw fear reflected back at her. Every man, woman, and child in town had by now heard about the murder. Kat was certain those staring bystanders on Main Street wondered where she was heading—all the while hoping it would be to catch a killer.

Only one person didn’t pause when Kat passed. Dressed in a shirt and tie, he sprinted off the sidewalk and into the street in front of her so fast she had to slam on her brakes to avoid hitting him. The man hurried to the car and gestured for Kat to roll down her window.

“Afternoon, Martin,” she said.

Like Kat herself, Martin Swan was one of those people who never got around to getting out of town. To his credit, Martin made it farther than Kat had, getting all the way to Temple University. Then his mother died, forcing him to come back home with only three years of journalism school under his belt. It was enough for the Gazette, which hired him as a reporter, and it seemed to be enough for Martin himself.

“You got a minute, Chief?” he asked. “I wanted to ask you a few questions about George Winnick.”

“The investigation is still ongoing,” Kat said. “So I don’t have much information to give. When I have something, I’ll tell you.”

Her statement—or lack of one—didn’t deter the reporter. Whipping a pen and small notebook out of his shirt pocket, he asked, “Was George murdered?”

The answer was yes. George didn’t sew his own mouth shut before he died. Nor did he deposit his corpse on the side of the road. Yet she wasn’t going to tell Martin that until there was an official cause of death.

“I don’t know yet,” she said. “We’ll have a better picture after the autopsy is conducted.”

“Is it true he was found in a homemade coffin?”

Unfortunately, Kat couldn’t lie about that. A truck driver saw it. So did several dozen cops.

“It was a wooden box, not a coffin,” she said, not even convincing herself.

She expected Martin to bring up the premature death notice that had been faxed to his own newsroom. When he didn’t, Kat realized Henry Goll was telling the truth. He hadn’t informed anyone at the Gazette about it.

Thinking about the obituary writer created a question of her own, which she immediately posed to Martin.

“How much do you know about Henry Goll?”

Martin gave her a sly smile. “You’re the second person to ask me that today.”

“Who was the first?”

“My sister,” he replied. “She said he had a cute phone voice and wanted to know if the rest of him matched it.”

“What did you tell her?”

“Yes, but only if his voice cracked.”

Kat frowned at his cruel reference to Henry’s scar. Martin noticed and quickly apologized.

“That was mean of me. The guy can’t help how he looks.”

“Do you know what happened to him?”

Martin shook his head. “No idea. Henry Goll is pretty much a closed book.”

“I thought that was the case,” Kat said. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to get moving.”

She shifted the Crown Vic into gear and started to slowly pull away. Martin followed next to the open window, keeping pace with the car.

“Come on, Chief,” he begged. “I have to file a story by seven and I have nothing to go on.”

“I have nothing to tell you. I wish I knew more.”

Martin had fallen behind. He was now beside the patrol car’s back window, but Kat could still hear him call out, “Are there any suspects?”

Kat called back: “We’re looking at all possibilities.”

Although the reporter tried, he couldn’t keep up anymore. He stopped in the middle of the street and, with labored breath, yelled, “Tell me as soon as you find something!”

Kat stuck her arm out the still-open window and gave him a thumbs-up sign before speeding up the street. In the rearview mirror, she watched his retreating figure return to the sidewalk, shoulders slumped in disappointment.

At the end of Main Street, Kat turned onto Old Mill Road, which ran as far as Lake Squall. Perry Mill still stood there, now only a shadow of its former glory. Despite the town’s revitalization, no one had thought to restore the one thing that had led to its formation in the first place. So the mill was left in ruins. Its crumbling outbuildings had collapsed into piles of rotted wood. Its roads became pockmarked with gullies and potholes. Its long dormant railroad tracks vanished into the weeds.

All that remained of the compound was the mill building itself, a formidable structure that measured seven stories from base to rooftop. It hovered over the trees in the distance, the muted sun slipping behind its angled roof. At one point, hundreds of people worked there. Now it was a ghost from the past, shrouded in the fog that rose off the lake.

Although Kat had never stepped foot inside the mill, it had haunted her imagination ever since she was a little girl. When she was growing up, her father would occasionally come home and announce that another accident had happened there. He never filled in the grisly details, which made Kat’s imagination spin madly. Late at night, hunkered down beneath her covers, she pictured a mill full of deformed men working the same saws that had snatched their limbs.

She had quickly grown out of that phase, thank God. But now the horrors of her youthful imagination had come to life in adulthood. Only George Winnick’s murder was more disturbing than anything she could have come up with as a girl.

Kat shuddered as she drove past the area where she had found George’s body, still marked by a banner of police tape. Although the coffin and its grisly contents had been hauled away, she could still see them there, lying in the snow. She hoped the image would fade with time and that eventually she could drive Old Mill Road in peace. Yet she suspected the image would be like Perry Mill—always present, unchanging, and waiting to be revisited.

SEVEN

That afternoon, Nick drove to the county morgue. Cassie Lieberfarb rode with him, fiddling with the radio. Flitting from station to station, she found nothing to satisfy either of them.

“We’ve got country, country, Muzak, and more country.”

“No classic rock?” Nick asked.

“No, but if you’d like, I could sing ‘Stairway to Heaven.’ I learned it in the girls chorus at Temple Beth El.”

“As tempting as that sounds, I’ll pass.”

“Then instead of singing,” Cassie said, “how about you tell me why you lied about going to Florida on vacation.”

She was using her analyst’s voice, which contained no judgment, no amusement. It was a flat, neutral tone that Nick had heard hundreds of times. Although normally when he heard it, the voice was directed at suspects, not him.

“I didn’t lie,” Nick said.

“Did you go to Florida?”

Eventually he shook his head.

“And was it really a vacation?”

Another more reluctant shake.

“See,” Cassie said, “that means it’s a lie.”

Caught in her inquisitive gaze, Nick felt like a specimen beneath a microscope, wriggling and defenseless. He straightened his spine in a show of strength. It didn’t work.

“I was interviewing killers,” he said.

“Who?”

“Edgar Sewell. Mitchell Ramsey. Frank Paul Steel.”

Cassie processed the names a moment, matching them to the unspeakable crimes they had committed.

“Those cases are thirty years old,” she said. “Why were you talking to them?”

But she knew the answer. And Nick knew that she knew. But Cassie wasn’t going to let him off the hook. She thought it helped to talk about his past, that it was therapeutic. Nick disagreed, so he said nothing.

After a full minute of silent détente, Cassie declared defeat.

“We won’t talk about it anymore,” she said. “But you know how I feel about this. I understand it’s hard for you to deal with, but digging into your past like that won’t—”

Nick stopped her with an upraised hand. “I thought we weren’t talking about it.”

“We’re not,” Cassie said with a shrug. “We’re traveling in silence.”

Fortunately for Nick, they didn’t have to travel much farther. They had reached their destination.

Once they were parked, it took them no time to find the medical examiner. He was a squat and gray-faced man, having a cigarette outside the equally squat and gray-faced county morgue.

“Lieutenant Donnelly?” he asked, eyeing Nick through a haze of smoke.

“In the flesh.”

The medical examiner extended the hand that didn’t contain a Pall Mall. “I’m Wallace Noble. Any trouble getting here?”

Instead of waiting for an answer, Wallace Noble let out a hacking cough that emerged from deep within his chest.

“Goddamn these cigarettes,” he muttered before taking a hearty drag. “Things are going to kill me soon.”

“Why don’t you quit?” Cassie asked.

Wallace exhaled twin streams of smoke through his nostrils, like an angry bull in a Bugs Bunny cartoon. “I’ve spent almost forty years looking at dead folks and determining their cause of death. Frankly, it gives me comfort already knowing the cause of mine.”

With a half cough, half chuckle, he dropped the cigarette and ground it into the sidewalk with the toe of a wingtip.

“Now let’s go take a look at poor George.”

Nick and Cassie followed him inside, where they passed a small waiting area before entering a long hallway painted the same color as pea soup. At the end of the hall, they made a right and stopped at the door to the autopsy suite. There they wrangled into autopsy gowns and slipped shoe covers over their feet. Then it was into the autopsy suite itself.

George Winnick’s corpse was already out and lying uncovered on a stainless steel table in the center of the room. The halogen lamp hanging over it cast a wide halo of light onto the skin, turning it a shade of white so bright Nick had to look away until his eyes adjusted.

“Is there an obvious cause of death?” he asked.

“Nothing jumped out at me so far,” Wallace said. “When I cleaned him up a bit, I found marks on his arms, legs, and forehead.”

“What kind of marks?”

Wallace shrugged. “Off the top of my head, I’d say they were rope burns.”

Nick shot a sidelong glance to Cassie, who was already taking notes. Since killers who bind their victims are usually smart and organized, the rope burns suggested a high level of planning. Right away, both of them knew this murder wasn’t a spontaneous act.

“As for what killed George,” Wallace continued, “I don’t think we’ll know that until we open him up.”

He handed Nick and Cassie latex gloves before snapping a pair onto his own hands. “What are you guys looking for anyway?”

“The stitches,” Nick said as he put on the gloves and approached the table. “We need to see if it resembles the handiwork of another killer who sews up his victims.”

“The Betsy Ross Killer, right?”

“He’s the one.”

“Why does he sew them up?” Wallace asked, both fascinated and repelled at the same time.

“I’ll get back to you after I catch him and ask him.”

Wallace and Cassie joined him at the examination table.

“I only found stitches on two places,” the medical examiner said. “One’s at the neck. The other spot was the lips.”

Nick saw both areas. The lips had been sewn shut in a wide cross-stitch pattern. On the neck, the stitches were close together, sealing up a small gash.

“What do you think?” he asked Cassie.

She gingerly placed a finger at the wound and ran it along the thread.

“At first glance, it certainly looks like the work of our guy,” she said. “But the lips—that’s unusual.”

The Betsy Ross Killer had never gone for them before. Until Mr. Winnick, he had stayed away from the face entirely.

Nick reached into his jacket and removed a small digital camera. When he bought it, the clerk at Radio Shack told him about all the “awesome” vacation photos he’d be able to take with it. That was a year ago, and so far, corpses were the only things the camera’s lens had seen.

Leaning over George’s body, he took a picture of the lips, the flash from the camera filling the room in a quick burst. Nick took five more shots from various angles, as the medical examiner watched. Each flash of the camera caused him to flinch.

“What happened to his eyes?” Cassie asked.

Nick stopped taking pictures long enough to look at George Winnick’s eyes, where a small line of red circled each socket.

“That’s where the pennies were,” Wallace said. “Placed right over the eyes.”

“But why the red marks?”

“The coins were frozen to the skin. I had to use hot water to pry them off.”

“Do you still have them?” Cassie asked.

The medical examiner nodded. “They’re in my office. Tagged and bagged and ready to be examined.”

Nick raised his camera again and moved on to the neck. He crouched down next to the table and snapped off another five shots.

“I need you to remove the thread,” he told Wallace. “And save it. We’ll need to examine that, too.”

Wallace obliged by picking up a pair of suture scissors and carefully slicing through the thread, one stitch at a time. The gash widened, although no blood dripped out of it. The blood had all settled by that point.

“Here you go,” Wallace said, tugging the thread from the skin and dropping it into an evidence bag that Cassie had waiting for him.

He then moved out of the way, letting Nick and his partner get an unobstructed view of the wound. It was a clean cut, smooth along the edges. There was no hesitation involved. The killer had done it in one careful slice.

“I’m thinking scalpel,” Cassie said. “That incision is too clean for a knife, no matter how sharp it is.”

“That’s a change,” Nick added. “The Betsy Ross victims had ragged wounds.”

Cassie nodded in agreement. “That’s because there was rage involved. He was angry when he did the cutting. But this wound is different. It’s clinical. Detached.”

Nick had a better word to describe the wound. Precise. Who ever had caused it chose that spot for a reason.

Free of the stitches, the incision widened like a toothless smile. Nick raised his camera and fired off a few shots. He zoomed in. On the camera’s display screen, the depths of the wound came into sudden, startling focus. Nick saw an artery—most likely the carotid—bulging just beyond the parted curtain of flesh and fat. Colored a pale purple, it was marred by tiny lines of black.

Nick lowered the camera.

“I think there’s more stitches.”

He backed away as Wallace Noble swooped in. Using a small hook, the medical examiner gently tugged the artery until it emerged from the open wound. In the harsh light of the examination room, it was clear that Nick was right. The artery had been sliced open as cleanly as George Winnick’s neck had been. And just like the neck, the wound had been sewn shut with tight loops of black thread.

“I’ll be damned,” Wallace said, shock setting off his smoker’s cough. “Now I know what killed poor old George.”

EIGHT

“George wasn’t a great man. But he was a good one. And he did right by me.”

Alma Winnick, a potato sack of a woman in a powder blue house dress, gave her stunted eulogy from an armchair covered in cat fur. Kat knew it was an act and that Alma mourned her husband. But the widow refused to show her grief while a stranger was in the house.

“I think he knew death was coming for him,” she said flatly.

“How so?”

“My brother died last month. Car accident. You probably read about it in the paper.”

“My condolences,” Kat said, feeling even more sorry for the woman sitting across from her. So much loss in such a short period. Kat’s own family had spread it out. Her father died suddenly when she was eighteen, killed by a heart attack. Her mother stuck around for two more decades, succumbing to cancer the previous summer. Losing them separately had been hard enough. Losing them both within a month of each other would have been too much to bear.

“At my brother’s funeral, George was the first person to sign the condolence book. As he wrote his name down, he said, ‘Alma, dying is a terrible thing.’ He never talked that way before. Never mentioned death. That’s what makes me think he knew his time had come.”

Kat, who didn’t put much faith in premonitions, doubted George Winnick knew he was about to die. If he did, his death surely ended up being far worse than he ever imagined.

“I told him not to worry,” Alma continued, eyes cast down. At her feet lay a calico with a milky eye and only three legs, and Kat couldn’t tell if the widow was addressing her or the calico. “He was strong. And tall. Do you know how tall he was?”

“No idea.”

“Six feet, two inches.” Alma said it with a mixture of admiration and awe that made Kat’s heart break just a little. “I come from a short family. So when I first laid eyes on George, he looked like the tallest man in the world.”

“Do you know of anyone who might have wanted to harm your husband? Any enemies? Grudges?”

Alma shook her head at each suggestion Kat threw out.

“I don’t understand why someone would want to hurt my George. He was a good man. People liked him. He worked this land a long time. His folks were here before the mill. That’s a good number of years, and people respected that. Even the boys he had out here in the summer respected that.”

Kat’s ears perked up. “Boys?”

“Every summer, George would hire a couple boys from the junior high to help out on the farm. It took some of the load off his back and it did the boys some good, too. Taught them the value of hard work.”

Kat asked Alma if she remembered the names of some of the summer employees.

“Troy Gunzelman,” she said. “Him, I remember.”

That was no surprise. Troy’s notoriety extended beyond Perry Hollow and into the next county. Even a woman as sheltered as Alma would know about his exploits on the field.

“Any others?”

Alma shrugged. It was obvious she was getting tired of being peppered with questions. Kat was tired of doing the peppering. But both of them had to continue.

“When was the last time you saw your husband?” Kat asked.

“Last night. I thought he would have come to bed after checking out the noise, so I went to sleep. When I woke up, his side of the bed was untouched.”

“Is his truck missing?”

“No,” Alma said. “It’s parked in the same place it was last night, so I assume he didn’t drive it.”

“You mentioned a noise. What did it sound like?”

“Animals.”

Alma turned to look out the window next to her chair. Kat followed her gaze across the snow-covered yard and past a John Deere tractor old enough to be in a museum. Beyond it was the barn, where several more cats and a handful of chickens loitered outside. Kat heard the whinny of horses from within, followed by the sharp bark of a dog.

“It was a racket,” the widow said. “They were making noise something fierce. George thought it might be a bear or a mountain lion. They’re rare, but they’re still out there, believe you me. Saw a bear out on Old Mill Road once. Scared the Lord out of me.”

Kat saw Alma’s dead husband on Old Mill Road, and it scared the Lord out of her.

“What time did the noise start?”

“About ten thirty.”

A cold bomb of fear exploded in Kat’s chest. If Alma was correct, then the fake obituary had indeed been sent before George Winnick died.

“You’re certain of that?”

“Fairly sure,” Alma said. “I remember looking at the clock when George left to go check on the barn.”

Kat jerked her head in the direction of the barnyard. “Do you mind if I poke around out there a bit?”

When Alma shrugged again, the hopeless lift of her shoulders said, Sure, go out there. Find your clues. But it won’t bring my husband back. He’s gone forever.

After thanking Mrs. Winnick for her time and patience, and after offering her condolences once again, Kat left.

Outside, she tramped across the yard toward the barn. The sun was still out, thanks to daylight saving time, which had gone into effect the previous morning. The newfound brightness allowed her to look for footprints in the snow. She saw dozens of them—from Alma, from George, even from the stray cats that seemed to roam everywhere. If the killer had crept through the yard the night before, it would be impossible to trace his steps.

Inside the barn, Kat found herself confronted by a surly Rottweiler chained in a far corner. It barked ferociously as soon as she entered. When it lunged in her direction, the chain hooked to its collar stretched so tight she thought the animal was going to choke itself to death.

The noise from the dog set off the horses housed in stalls along the barn’s right wall. There were three of them in total, their heads shaking in agitation at the presence of a stranger. The only animal not perturbed was a black cat sleeping in a square of fading sunlight that slanted in through a cracked window. Unlike the other animals, it didn’t move a muscle.

Kat surveyed the cluttered barn, the scent of hay and manure stinging her nostrils. In addition to the animals, the barn housed a tractor, a riding mower, and a plow. A pyramid of hay bales sat near the horse stalls.

This was where the farmer first encountered his killer. She was certain of it.

The killer had most likely entered the barn not long after faxing the death notice to Henry Goll. His presence there had irritated the animals, which in turn roused George.

Kat put herself in the place of George Winnick, standing in front of the open barn door in about the same spot where he would have entered. She saw what he would have seen—a barn full of shadows.

She took a few steps forward. Cautious ones. Like what George might have taken.

Because there were no signs of a struggle in the barn, her assumption was that the farmer didn’t notice his stalker until it was too late. Perhaps he didn’t see him at all. The killer could have snuck up on George, creeping up quietly behind him.

Looking around for hiding places, Kat saw the possibilities were endless. Behind the barn door, for one, or in the shadow of the tractor. Near the sleeping cat was a small alcove, no larger than a broom closet. The killer easily could have hidden there, eyes adjusting to the darkness as he waited for his victim.