Four Live Rounds by Blake Crouch Page B

paragraph had been typed in black ink.
     
    Greetings. There is a body buried on your
property, covered in your blood. The unfortunate young lady’s name
is Rita Jones. You’ve seen this missing schoolteacher’s face on the
news, I’m sure. In her jeans pocket you’ll find a slip of paper
with a phone number on it. You have one day to call that number. If
I have not heard from you by 8:00 p.m. tomorrow (5/17), the
Charlotte Police Department will receive an anonymous phone call.
I’ll tell them where Rita Jones is buried on Andrew Thomas’s
lakefront property, how he killed her, and where the murder weapon
can be found in his house. (I do believe a paring knife is missing
from your kitchen.) I hope for your sake I don’t have to make that
call. I’ve placed a property marker on the grave site. Just walk
along the shoreline toward the southern boundary of your property
and you’ll find it. I strongly advise against going to the police,
as I am always watching you.
     
    A smile edged across my lips. I even chuckled
to myself. Because my novels treat crime and violence, my fans
often have a demented sense of humor. I’ve received death threats,
graphic artwork, even notes from people claiming to have murdered
in the same fashion as the serial killers in my books. But I’ll
save this, I thought. I couldn’t remember one so original.
    I read it again, but a premonitory twinge
struck me the second time, particularly because the author had some
knowledge regarding the layout of my property. And a paring knife
was, in fact, missing from my cutlery block. Carefully refolding
the letter, I
    slipped it into the pocket of my khakis and
walked down the steps toward the lake.
     
    As the sun cascaded through the hazy sky,
beams of light drained like spilled paint across the western
horizon. Looking at the lacquered lake suffused with deep orange,
garnet, and magenta, I stood by the shore for several moments,
watching two sunsets collide.
    Against my better judgment, I followed the
shoreline south and was soon tramping through a noisy bed of
leaves. I’d gone an eighth of a mile when I stopped. At my feet,
amid a coppice of pink flowering mountain laurel, I saw a miniature
red flag attached to a strip of rusted metal thrust into the
ground. The flag fluttered in a breeze that curled off the water.
This has to be a joke, I thought, and if so, it’s a damn good
one.
    As I brushed away the dead leaves that
surrounded the marker, my heart began to pound. The dirt beneath
the flag was packed, not crumbly like undisturbed soil. I even saw
half a footprint when I’d swept all the leaves away.
    I ran back to the house and returned with a
shovel. Because the soil had previously been unearthed, I dug
easily through the first foot and a half, directly below where the
marker had been placed. At two feet, the head of the shovel stabbed
into something soft. My heart stopped. Throwing the shovel aside, I
dropped to my hands and knees and clawed through the dirt. A rotten
stench enveloped me, and as the hole deepened, the smell grew more
pungent.
    My fingers touched flesh. I drew my hand back
in horror and scrambled away from the hole. Rising to my feet, I
stared down at a coffee brown ankle, barely showing through the
dirt. The odor of rot overwhelmed me, so I breathed only through my
mouth as I took up the shovel again.
    When the corpse was completely exposed, and I
saw what a month of putrefaction could do to a human face, I
vomited into the leaves. I kept thinking that I should have the
stomach for this because I write about it. Researching the grisly
handiwork of serial killers, I’d studied countless mutilated
cadavers. But I had never smelled a human being decomposing in the
ground, or seen how insects teem in the moist cavities.
    I composed myself, held my hand over my mouth
and nose, and peered again into the hole. The face was
unrecognizable, but the body was undoubtedly that of a short black
female, thick in the legs, plump