I’m beginning to sound like a Gidget movie, Gregor thought. Luis was turning the car off the road onto Elizabeth Toliver’s driveway, which seemed to be full of vehicles, as if she were having company. The front of the house was dark in the dusk, but as they came around to the big paved area in the back, Gregor could see lights on in the kitchen windows. Mark passed back and forth a few times. The car pulled closer to the garage and Gregor saw Jimmy Card appear suddenly in the window. He was holding a large glass full of something dark. Twenty years ago, it would have been a Manhattan. These days, it was probably a Diet Coke.
“Oh, boy,” Gregor said, thinking it wouldn’t be long before every celebrity photographer in America knew that Jimmy Card was here and in a house with no security protection whatsoever—and no possibility of providing any, either. The Toliver house was what the Bureau would have called an “undefensible area.” It had no fences or gates, and it was surrounded on all sides by open land. Gregor grabbed his attache’ case, expecting Luis to pull up to the back door and let him out before parking the car in the garage, but Luis didn’t stop. He went straight across the asphalt to the garage and waited while the door pulled up automatically in front of him. If Gregor had been thinking clearly, he would have asked Luis to let him out right then. Instead, he found himself being pulled into the dark garage while security lights flicked on above his head. The garage was half full of things nobody had used for years and nobody would ever use again: an old rotary lawn mower, its long metal handles so thoroughly rusted they looked like sand; a stack of molded plastic garden chairs in black and pink; a pile of boxes marked “Betsy’s Books.” There were a lot of boxes. Elizabeth Toliver must have been a terrific reader as a child.
Gregor got out of the car. The lights were still on, but the garage door had closed behind them, automatically, the way it had opened. He saw an ordinary door to one side, propped slightly open.
“I’m going this way,” he said.
Outside the high windows on the three garage doors, the sky was streaked with bright, hard pink the way it was right before real sunset. The leaves on all the trees nearby were drooping. Gregor let himself out. After the air-conditioned sterility of the car, the air out here was humid and sickly sweet. The house up ahead looked the way houses do in house magazine articles about how to make your house into a home. There was a path that curved around a long, low hedge that had been cropped as closely as it could be and still be left alive. He took that rather than striking out on the lawn, in case the Tolivers cared seriously about the way their grass looked.
He was at the edge of the hedge, right before the lawn itself started, when he realized that something was wrong, and had been wrong, for a while. The sickly sweet smell was getting stronger. All of a sudden, it seemed to envelope him, the way skunk-smell did when a skunk was hit in the road. This was not the smell a skunk made. He knew this smell very well. He had had it around him more times than he liked to remember. He told himself that, in this case, it was most likely to be another dog, or a cat, or a woodchuck, another animal ritually slaughtered at Elizabeth Toliver’s altar, another prank.
He looked down at his shoes and saw the snaking curve of something white against them. He was too aware of just how quiet it was. He couldn’t even hear Luis in the garage. No sound was coming from the house. He moved slowly to his right, around the end of the hedge, looking at the ground the whole time. He did not want to do any more damage than he had already done.
I need a flashlight, he thought idly. The dark was descending at record speed. The snaking white thing trailed around the end of the hedge and back toward the bushes that flanked that side of the garage. There were dozens of bushes, all evergreen, so densely placed that there was no room for anything between them. Follow the yellow brick road, Gregor thought, moving carefully so as not to step on the white thing, not to disturb anything, not to cause any more trouble than he absolutely had to. If he had been one hundred percent certain, he would have gone straight into the house and called Kyle Borden and anybody Kyle could think of to use for reinforcements.
A second later, Gregor was certain. The long white thing was an intestine, stretched out by some accident he couldn’t begin to determine, and on the end of it was a body, twisted and mauled as if it had been broken in half. Not Liz Toliver’s body, Gregor thought with relief. Then he wished desperately that cell phones worked in these mountains.
It wasn’t Liz Toliver’s body, but it was the body of a woman, and she had been as thoroughly eviscerated as yesterday’s dog.