Pale Immortal Read Free

die—it was all the same to him; that was obvious. "Are you Evan Stroud?" he finally asked.
    "Yes."
    "I have a message for you."
    If it was anything like the one he'd just tried to give him, Evan didn't want it.
    "I'm Graham."
    "Graham?"
    "Are you going to pretend you've never heard of me?"
    Choose your words with care.
    Evan had no idea who he was, but he didn't want to set him off again. The kid was staring at him with a directness Evan couldn't recall seeing in many adults. He also noticed that the night was fading.
    The kid spoke again. "Your son," he spit out, as if the words left a rotten taste in his mouth. "I'm your son."
    Evan fell back on his heels.
    Punctuating that announcement, sirens began to wail from somewhere in the distance. As Evan listened they drew closer, then trailed off, heading toward downtown Tuonela, from the direction Evan had recently come.

Chapter 3
     
    The siren shut off with one final squawk.
    Damp wind blew down the collar of coroner Rachel Burton's jacket as she stood on the edge of the Tuonela town square. Hands in her pockets, she regarded the nude body of a female victim lying in a shallow ditch parallel to the road, a few feet from the base of a maple tree. If memory served Rachel correctly, it was one of those varieties of maples that turned a glorious shade of electric red in the fall. Right now it was leafing out, even though it was only early April. But enough of that. Enough of trying to distract herself from the horror in front of her.
    The victim had been tossed like so much garbage. The scene reminded Rachel that no matter how the people of Tuonela tried, they couldn't ignore their history any more than London could ignore Jack the Ripper.
    The headlights of two squad cars were aimed at the body, along with the beams of three flashlights. No one spoke. The only sound was the steady clang, clang, clang of a metal toggle against a flagpole in the center of the square. Nobody seemed to know what to do. Rachel sensed they were all waiting for her. She'd seen a lot of death, so it was only natural that they'd look to her for guidance.
    "Who found the body?" she asked.
    "We were on patrol," said a young male officer. "We circled the square twice before I saw it."
    "Let me borrow your flashlight."
    He passed it to her. She took a few steps closer, aware of the cold dew seeping through her sneakers. The victim's throat had been sliced. She directed the flashlight beam to the ground around the body.
    No sign of blood.
    Dying was often the only way people left Tuonela. Rachel had noticed that about the same time she'd started grade school. But Rachel had made it a point to get out. When she was little and people asked what she wanted to be when she grew up, she always said a doctor or teacher or nurse. "But not here. I want to be somewhere else. Somewhere far away." The adult asking the question would look baffled and chalk it up to weird things kids said. But Rachel had been serious. You had to fight the desire to stay. That had always been her goal: Get the hell out of Tuonela.
    She'd made it as far as Los Angeles. Which was almost as far as a person could go without a boat.
    Just keep going until the land stops.
    She thought she'd gotten away; she really did. But then her mother became ill, and Rachel took a leave of absence from her job as coroner to come home and help her father. When her mother died, she was offered the combined position of county coroner and medical examiner. It was unusual but not unheard-of for one person to have both jobs. Especially in a place with few deaths and no murders. Even though she was only thirty-two, even though she'd been one of the best coroners in L.A. County, she'd decided to stay in her hometown.
    Truth be told, she'd been getting tired of the relentless crime in L.A. But L.A. wanted her back. And in L.A., she could distance herself. This .. . this atrocity in front of her was almost like discovering you had a serial killer in the family.
    Every