Nothing Stays Buried Read online

  ALSO BY P. J. TRACY

  The Sixth Idea

  Off the Grid

  Shoot to Thrill

  Snow Blind

  Dead Run

  Live Bait

  Monkeewrench

  G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

  Publishers Since 1838

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  Copyright © 2017 by Traci Lambrecht

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Tracy, P. J., author.

  Title: Nothing stays buried / P. J. Tracy.

  Description: New York : G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2017. | Series: A Monkeewrench novel ; 8

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016047462 (print) | LCCN 2016058324 (ebook) | ISBN 9780735212459 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780735212466 (Ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Police—Minnesota—Minneapolis—Fiction. | Serial murder investigation—Fiction. | Computer scientists—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Mystery & Detective / General. | FICTION / Thrillers. | FICTION / Crime. | GSAFD: Suspense fiction. | Mystery fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3620.R33 N68 2017 (print) | LCC PS3620.R33 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016047462

  p. cm.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  Contents

  Also by P. J. Tracy

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FORTY

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

  CHAPTER SIXTY

  EPILOGUE

  In loving memory of P.J.—mother, partner, best friend, soul mate. You made magic happen for me from the moment I was born, and being your daughter was a magnificent gift. I will miss you every second of every day.

  I love you more than all the stars in the universe.

  That’s how we always signed our cards to each other, and we really meant it.

  PROLOGUE

  Something horrible was going to happen to Marla. Somewhere down the road there had to be payback for her perfect childhood, her perfect career at the veterinary clinic, her perfect apartment in Minneapolis, her consistently perfect life. Friends who adored her envied her in equal measure, and secretly waited for the tragedy to come, because they believed in the law of averages and the irrefutable balance of good and bad in every life. And also because in the darkest moments of their own less than perfect lives, they just had to believe that someday Marla would get hers.

  “Good things come to good people,” her father was fond of telling her on those rare occasions when the shower of her good fortune made her feel just a little bit guilty. But if that were really true, why did the rest of the world believe the opposite? The notion that goodness was punished was so pervasive that even the language was permeated with warnings. Only the good die young. Nice guys finish last. No good deed goes unpunished. Phrases like that had often given Marla pause; made her think she should try harder to do something bad occasionally, like forget to return a library book, just to even out the scales.

  And then she’d run over the bunny.

  “Stop crying, Marla. And stop calling it a bunny. It was just a goddamn rabbit.” Her father had tried to comfort her with semantics. “Probably the same one that ate every lick of my spinach plants last week. Every last lick.”

  But he hadn’t known the worst of it, because she could never bring herself to say it aloud. The bunny hadn’t died right away. She’d seen it in her rearview mirror, trying to drag itself off the road with its front legs, because the hind legs wouldn’t work. She’d had to go back and run over it again.

  It had been the right thing to do; but oh my God, that image in her rearview mirror would be with her to the end of her life, and although her father had felt great sympathy for her distress, he hadn’t felt a bit for the rabbit. How could that be? How could you feel sorry for someone for being sad and not feel sorry for something being dead?

  She spent the next week imagining that the bunny had been a nursing mother, and that somewhere baby bunnies were cold and mewling in a hidey-hole, slowly dying of starvation. She never admitted that to anyone, because people tended to think you were a bit unbalanced when you empathized with animals to the point of torment. But empathy was the disease Marla had inherited from her mother, and there were no boundaries to it. She couldn’t help connecting to everyone and everything she encountered; she couldn’t stop speculating about their lives, their families, their pain—even that of silly rabbits that ate her father’s entire spinach crop and then ran out in front of a speeding car.

  Normally Marla didn’t mind the night drive out to the farm, especially on a Thursday, when the freeway was empty. Tomorrow night the frenetic weekend race to lake cabins would fill the two lanes heading out of Minneapolis with a jam of lights, white and red, crawling bumper-to-bumper for sixty miles before it starte
d to thin out. But tonight, and every other summer weeknight, the road shot straight and true into deeper and deeper blackness where the exits were few and far between. Her exit, just three miles up, was what worried her. That particular two-lane road was one bunny shy this week, thanks to her, and she greatly feared a repeat of last week’s carnage.

  She took the ramp more slowly than usual, stopped at the top and spent a long time looking both ways before easing right onto the two-lane road. There was no moon tonight, and the darkness seemed to swallow the beams of her headlights, as if she were shining them down the throat of a monster. She slowed even further as she approached the S curve through the woods where the bunny had once lived, and that was the only reason she didn’t run right over the large black shape in the middle of the road.

  As soon as her headlights hit the thing, she recognized it as one of those large plastic bags the volunteer crews used to pick up the occasional litter on road cleanup days. Still, it had startled her, and she could hear her heart pounding in her ears as she pulled over onto the shoulder and stopped. She sat there for a minute trying to catch her breath, her fingers still curled tight around the wheel, eyes wide and fixed on the bag.

  Relax, Marla. Blink, for God’s sake. It’s not an animal, not a person; it’s just a bag of trash. Normally these bags were carefully placed on the shoulder for the township truck to collect, but this one was smack-dab in the middle of the two-lane road, and a genuine hazard to any vehicle coming around the blind S curve at a normal rate of speed. It never occurred to her to simply drive around it and go on.

  Her mind was already busy imagining a speeding car zipping around the first bend in the curve, slamming on the brakes, veering off the road, and plowing head-on into a tree.

  It was only after she got out of the car that she also imagined that same speeding car running into her while she was trying to drag the bag off the road, which made her move a lot faster.

  It was surprisingly heavy, and it made a terrible scraping sound on the pebbly asphalt as she tugged and pulled it by inches toward the shoulder, and that was when she began to suspect what was really in the bag. She released it with a little squeal and a shiver, and backed away.

  Motorists killed more deer on this particular curve than all the hunters in the county managed to bring down during hunting season. You didn’t think much about what happened after the accidents unless you happened to see the roadkill crews making their rounds, loading grisly remains into the open-backed truck that hauled them away. Sometimes the job got messy, and then they had to use a shovel and a bag. Apparently this particular bag had fallen unnoticed off the back of the truck when it accelerated on the curve.

  Marla looked down at the bag with a mixture of sadness and distaste, understanding the heaviness now, seeing the telltale swells and lumps that clearly marked a large object and not a collection of discarded cans and paper. At least she hadn’t killed this one; hadn’t witnessed its violent end, which made the job ahead a little easier. She wondered absently why it didn’t smell, murmured a brief prayer that the bag didn’t rip when she tried moving it again, then bent to her work.

  This time she put her back to the side of the road and tried pulling the bag toward her. The large animal inside shifted and rolled with the first tug. Marla winced, but kept at it, right up until the moment the bag snagged on a sharp piece of broken asphalt, tore open, and a bloody human arm fell out.

  Marla snapped upright and stifled a choked gasp. For a minute her mind didn’t work at all, and then when it started up again it manufactured terrible pictures. Not that there was a dead person in that bag, because that was a reality she just couldn’t accept at the moment. What occurred to her instead was that in the movies, just when the heroine thought she was safe, the supposedly dead person’s hand jerked out and grabbed her ankle.

  “Oh God, oh God, oh God.” She began to back very, very carefully away, toward her car, keeping her eyes focused on the inky blackness of the road ahead, because she didn’t dare look down at the bag again.

  And then suddenly, twin white lights pierced the darkness and began rolling toward her, faster and faster. Too small for headlights. They’re reverse lights. Dear Jesus, there was a truck up there, so close, and she’d never even seen it. And now it was coming for her.

  Marla was totally paralyzed for a few moments, trying to regain her composure, rationalizing for the sake of her sanity, because none of this made sense in her perfect world.

  The truck is not coming for you, it’s coming to help you. This is the country—people stop to offer assistance when they see a car on the side of the road, because in Buttonwillow, Minnesota, everybody is your neighbor, even if you live twenty miles apart. It’s probably somebody you know, maybe even somebody you went to grade school with. And there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation for that body in the trash bag. . . .

  Marla snapped back to reality. No, no, no, there wasn’t. There was no perfectly reasonable explanation on God’s green earth for a dead body in a trash bag in the middle of a deserted country road. No perfectly reasonable explanation for this truck, suddenly appearing out of nowhere. And now, because she’d been thinking too much again, it was too late to duck into the safety of her car and screech away. Too late to call 911 or Jacob, because the truck had rolled to a stop a few feet in front of her car and now the driver’s door was slowly creaking open. At that point, she abandoned all thought, succumbed to panic and instinct, and bolted into the woods.

  Every inch of her felt like it was on fire as she leapt through the brush and bramble, dodging trees in the darkness, clambering over fallen logs, tripping over exposed roots and scrambling back to her feet. She knew these woods—Cutter Creek was to her right, and a few hundred yards up ahead there was a clearing and then Hank Schifsky’s cornfield. Another quarter of a mile up was his long dirt driveway and his old farmhouse. She could make it.

  And then she felt herself falling, felt her ankle give way as she tumbled down a steep, washed-out gully that hadn’t existed when she’d run wild in these woods as a kid.

  She choked back whimpers of fear and pain and dragged herself to the base of a large oak tree, trying to make herself as small as possible. And as stupid as it was, she hadn’t lost hope; she was still waiting to hear the call of a friendly voice behind her. “Ma’am? Ma’am! Don’t run, I’m here to help you!”

  But all she heard was relentless, crashing footsteps in the woods behind her. The raspy pant of her pursuer.

  Something switched off inside her. She divorced herself from her immediate reality, from her physical being, and retreated deep into the core of her soul. There it was peaceful, a place where she could think of her past and her future. She should have married Jacob. And if he’d still have her, she’d do just that. They’d have babies and live in Buttonwillow until the end of their days. They should have done it a long time ago, back when they were both eighteen and Jacob had given her the promise ring she still wore on her right ring finger, even though she was a grown woman.

  The footsteps were getting closer now, crunching through the dead branches and old, dried leaves that littered the forest floor. Things couldn’t end here. She had to leave something so Jacob and her father would know she’d been here, had made it this far, and could maybe piece together what had happened if she didn’t make it out of these woods alive.

  She pulled the ring off her finger and placed it by the base of the tree where she was hiding, and as she heard the labored breathing getting louder, she got up and started running on her swollen, ruined ankle, screaming at the top of her lungs.

  —

  The lights were what Walt would always remember. They didn’t belong in this dark night in the countryside. They lit up the thick woods on the north side of the narrow road, throwing spooky shadows through the tightly packed tree trunks and brush.

  They shed unwelcome light on the north side, where there was a turnaroun
d with space enough for one car to park, for the daring anglers who skidded down the treacherous slope to drop their lines in the creek below. You fished at night during the few weeks when the suckers were running, but for the rest of the summer, only kids parked there at night to kiss and hold hands, and sometimes more than that, before the clock ticked to curfew.

  The turnaround had been there as long as Walt had been alive. He’d parked there with Mary, his high school sweetheart, before sneaking back home, and he’d proposed to her there, too. Right there, where the path down to the creek carved a hole in a stand of cottonwoods far older than he was now.

  All these things belonged here, had always been here, but not the lights, and yet tonight they were everywhere, startling the early spring frogs into silence, as if the whole place had been swept clean of night creatures.

  Marla’s car, the white Ford Explorer he’d bought for her when she graduated from college, was sitting in the turnaround, visiting the very spot where she might have been conceived all those years ago. It was spotting from the gentle April rain that had just started to fall, and Walt’s eyes brushed over it as if it wasn’t there, because it shouldn’t be.

  He had been standing here so long while the Highway Patrol set up the lights and county deputies paced the grounds. He was glad the Highway Patrol was here. The more departments, the better. It gave the scene, the tragedy, a level of import that promised careful attention.

  The crime-scene techs, who looked like astronauts in their white suits and booties, hurried to cover that dreadful, bloody place in the middle of the road that was surrounded by blinking red lights and peppered with iridescent yellow crime-scene markers. One of the techs, who had known Walt since he’d worked for him baling hay as a high schooler, looked over his shoulder at the old man.

  “Probably isn’t human blood at all,” he said with a fake, forced shrug. “Raccoon, squirrel, deer more than likely.”

  Walt didn’t move. He kept looking at the plastic now covering the blood, protecting it from the rain. “Marla hit a rabbit last week on this very road,” he said.