Heart of Venom

Chapter Thirty-one

Three days later, the news broke about the grisly discovery of dozens of bodies at what looked like a small encamp— ment in the mountains above Ashland. A couple of retired folks who were hiking part of the Appalachian Trail apparently noticed legions of flies in the clearing at Grimes’s camp and went to investigate. They probably wished that they had just kept on walking.

But the hikers made a frantic call to the forest service, which in turn called in the po-po. Bria and Xavier were lucky—or unlucky—enough to be assigned to the case.

The po-po set up a staging area at the picnic tables in the park at the bottom of Bone Mountain, which was where I was right now. Bria had been practically living on the mountain for two days straight, and I’d brought her some food from the Pork Pit, along with enough for her to share with Xavier and her fellow boys in blue. I figured

that it was only fair, since I’d created a good portion of the mess that they were dealing with now.

Bria, Xavier, and I were sitting at one of the blue fiberglass picnic tables, several feet away from everyone else.

The two of them were scarfing down cheeseburgers with all the fixings, along with crispy steak-cut fries, coleslaw, potato salad, and some double-chocolate-chip cookies that I’d baked fresh that morning.

“We’ve got more than three dozen bodies in the pit alone,” Bria said, washing down a bite of burger with some raspberry lemonade that I’d also made. “All in various states of decay. Not to mention all of the men that you killed.”

Xavier nudged Bria with his elbow. “Tell her about the coroner.”

She snorted. “Oh, he’s having an absolute field day with all of this. You’d think that he was a kid, and it was christmas morning, given how giddy he is. It’s like he actually enjoys working on dead people.”

Speaking of the coroner, he was taking a break too and standing in the food line with some of the other cops and crime-scene techs. He held out his plate, and Sophia dished him up some baked beans and fries, and a thick, hearty, barbecued-beef sandwich. He noticed me watching him. He smiled and gave me a cheery wave before scurrying over to take a seat at one of the tables.

“Maybe he just enjoys all the overtime that the city has to pay him and his assistants for schlepping all the way out here,” I murmured in response.

Xavier looked at me over the tops of his aviator sunglasses. The noon sun beating down on his shaved head made his ebony skin gleam. “With all the bodies that you’ve dropped in and around Ashland in the past year, you’ve probably paid for a summer home for that man.”

“Well, it’s good to know that I have such a positive impact on our local economy,” I drawled. “If not so much on its citizens.”

Both Xavier and Bria grinned at my dark humor.

We sat there and chatted about other things while they finished their food. Xavier excused himself, got up, and went to go get seconds from Sophia, but Bria stayed at the table with me.

I glanced around to make sure that no one was within earshot, then asked her the question that had been on my mind ever since Finn had shown me the note on the guns in the back of Grimes’s trunk.

“Have you found out anything else about M. M.

Monroe?”

Bria shook her head. “Nothing. I’ve scoured the main house and the building where Grimes actually stored his guns, but I haven’t come up with anything. No pieces of paper with that name on them, no cell-phone numbers, no other indication that the guns were for M. M. Monroe. In fact, I haven’t found so much as a date book or even an old-fashioned ledger of who bought guns from him. Say what you will about him, Grimes protected his clients’ identities.”

“Finn hasn’t been able to find out anything on M.M.

either,” I said. “He’s still horrified that Grimes did everything face-to-face and that he didn’t even own a com— puter, much less use e-mail.”

Bria chuckled and shook her head. Then she reached down under the table and rifled through the backpack that she’d been carrying with her back and forth from the camp. She came up with a couple of towels and handed them over to me.

“I found a few things I thought you might like to have back.”

I unrolled one of the towels to find a silverstone knife nestled inside, one of the extra weapons that I’d used to fight the men on the ridge. “Thanks. I am glad to see them again. You can never have too many knives.”

Bria smiled a little, but then her face turned serious.

“There’s something else.”

This time, she pulled a brown envelope out of her

backpack and slid it over to me.

“I also took the liberty of going through Grimes’s house and removing all those creepy pictures of Sophia that he had,” she said in a soft voice. “I figured that nobody needed to know about Sophia except for us.”

I nodded and pulled the envelope over to my side of the table. “I appreciate that, and I’m sure that she and Jo-Jo will too.”

“How is Sophia? I’ve been so busy up here that I haven’t had a chance to drop by the salon and see her or Jo-Jo.”

“It’s hard to tell with her. She keeps everything to herself.”

Bria gave me a wry grin. “That sounds like someone else I know.”

I stuck my tongue out at her, but I couldn’t refute her words, because they were all too true. And I had my own nightmares about Grimes and his camp.

More than once in the past few days, I’d dreamed of being down in the pit, clutching Sophia’s shovel, and seeing nothing but tombstones looming over me. All the stones had been covered with my spider rune, drawn in my own blood.

Every time, I’d woken up in a cold sweat, thrashing against the sheets, gasping for breath, my skin stinging as though I’d been cut a hundred times with my own knives. I could only imagine how much worse Sophia’s nightmares were.

“I think that Sophia will be okay,” I said, finally answering Bria’s question. “It’ll just take some time, like everything does. The good news is that Jo-Jo finally has her strength back. She looked at her hair in the mirror yesterday morning and about had a heart attack. The next thing I knew, she was yelling at me to go get the car and take her to the salon so she could get the right kind of highlights to put on her hair.”

Bria’s grin widened. “Ah, the joys of having houseg— uests.”

Sophia, Jo-Jo, and Rosco were staying with me at

Fletcher’s until we could fix the damage that had been done to their home. It was a little strange having them with me when it had just been me in the house for the past several months, but I didn’t mind the company. In fact, it was rather nice, even if Sophia did stay up until all hours of the night watching old movies on TV, Jo-Jo muttered under her breath about the fact that I only had one kind of shampoo and conditioner, and Rosco kept scratching at the door to Fletcher’s office, wanting to see what was in there and if he could eat any of it.

A bell rang, signaling that the lunch break was over and it was time for the latest shift to hike back up to the camp. Xavier had Sophia wrap up his cheeseburger to go, while Bria reluctantly got up and threw her paper plates away before coming back over to me. I got to my feet too.

“Duty calls,” she said.

“What will happen to the camp now?”

She shrugged. “There’s been some talk by the forest service of renovating the camp and turning it into some sort of nature center. Maybe even establishing it as a get— away for folks hiking through the mountains.”

“Do the forest guys really think that people will want to stay in a place where so many bodies have been found?”

Bria shrugged again. “Technically, it is their land, after all. I guess they can try, at the very least.”

The thought of Grimes’s camp made me think of another empty residence in Ashland: Mab’s mansion. Now that M. M. Monroe was back in Ashland, or had at least turned his or her attention in this direction, the logical thing would be to take up residence there, since it belonged to him or her. But so far, the mansion remained empty, at least according to Finn’s spies.

Like Bria, Finn hadn’t been able to find out anything else about M. M. Monroe and what this person might be up to. But like we’d figured, it couldn’t be anything good, not with M.M. buying so much ordnance. At least we’d thwarted that part of the scheme. I’d kept all the weapons and ammo that had been in Grimes’s trunk and the other vehicles, moving them into the underground tunnel below Fletcher’s house for safekeeping, and the po-po had seized all of the weapons that they’d found at the camp itself. So M.M. would have to get his or her guns somewhere else. A small inconvenience, more than anything else, but I was hoping that it would at least give Finn enough time to track this person down and figure out what he or she was really up to in Ashland.

That bell chimed again, telling folks to get their butts in gear, or else.

Bria hugged me and told me that she would call later if there were any updates or if she found anything else interesting at Grimes’s camp. She went over to speak to Xavier, and then the two of them shouldered their gear and fell into step with the others. Bria waved at me a final time, then headed into the woods.

But she wasn’t the only one. The coroner also gave me another jaunty wave before he followed her up the trail.

I grinned and waved back. What could I say? I was starting to like that guy.

The esteemed members of the po-po trudged back up to Grimes’s camp, leaving Sophia and me behind to pack up the leftovers. We put the remaining food in the ice-filled coolers that we’d brought along, then moved through the picnic area, picking up the used paper plates, cups, and utensils and throwing everything into the trash bins.

We were about to grab the coolers and walk down the steps to our cars when I touched Sophia’s arm and handed her the envelope that Bria had given to me.

“Bria found these at Grimes’s camp,” I said. “She said that they were all over his house and that she took them down before anyone else saw them. I thought that you might want them.”

Sophia’s fingers curled around the envelope, and she hefted it in her hand, as though it weighed more than it actually did. Or maybe that was because of all the bad memories associated with what was inside.

Sophia sat down at one of the picnic tables, opened the envelope, and flipped through the photos, but I didn’t join her. This was her pain, not mine, and I figured that she might want a few moments to herself. So I busied myself by going through the area one more time and making sure that we hadn’t forgotten anything. Every once in a while, I would glance over to see how she was doing. Her expression was flat as she looked at first one picture, then the next, but I could see the pain shimmering in her eyes.

Finally, after she’d gone through them all, Sophia grabbed the photos and the envelope, got to her feet, and went over to one of the trash cans. She drew a long, thin lighter out of her jeans pocket, the one she’d used to light the sterno cans that warmed the baked beans and other food. She flicked the lighter on and held it up to the edge of one of the photos. She watched as the flames licked at the paper, then tossed it down into the trash can with the other garbage. I stood by, still and silent, and watched her.One by one, Sophia burned all of the photos, until flames flickered out of the top of the trash can. The smell of burning paper filled the air, along with bits of ash.

Finally, Sophia got down to the last photo in the envelope, the one of her wearing that white dress that had been on Grimes’s desk. She started to toss it in on top of the rest of the burning mess, but she hesitated. Instead, she stared at the photo for a long while, before finally sliding it back into the envelope.

Sophia noticed me watching her. “To remember,” she rasped.

I nodded. I understood that sentiment all too well. It was why I had so many rune drawings on the mantel at Fletcher’s house.

We stood there and watched the rest of the photos curl and burn, until there was nothing left of them but ash— and the memories, which weren’t nearly as easy to get rid of.