The Eighth Day Read Free

the trowel, lying on the floor at the dead man’s feet, didn’t prove a thing. Who’s to say there wasn’t a second trowel, a second tub, another bag of Sakrete?
    The ME didn’t answer him at first. Instead, he told the deputy that enough cinder block had been removed. When the deputy stepped aside, the ME inched into the little room, crouched, and snapped on a pair of surgical gloves. Then he began to search the dead man’s pockets. “People kill themselves for dozens of reasons,” he mused. “Sometimes, there’s a lot of self-hatred.” Extracting a wallet from the pocket of the dead man, he flipped it open and peered at the man’s driver’s license. “Terio.
T
as in
Tom
, -
e
-
r
-
i
-
o
. Who’s taking notes?”
    One of the deputies said that he was.
    “First name: Christian; middle name: Anthony. D-O-B: six-eleven-fifty-three.” The ME placed the wallet in a transparent plastic Baggie, sighed, and shone a penlight in the dead man’s eyes. “Had a case two years ago,” he said. “Guy decapitated himself—cut off his own head!”
    “Bullshit!” Poliakoff exclaimed, coming down the stairs. “How you gonna do that?”
    “Well,” the ME told them, “the way
he
did it, he tied a rope around a tree and looped the other end around his neck. Then he got in his car and floored it. Had a Camaro, so it came off pretty clean.”
    “But . . .
why
?” Delaney wondered.
    The ME shook his head and continued to examine the body. “Depression.”
    Poliakoff guffawed—“
I’ll
say!”—and Delaney, disgusted, walked outside, into the rain. It only took him a second to reach his cruiser and get in, but that was enough time to get soaked. Sitting there, with the rain clobbering the roof, he studied the water pearling on the windshield and tried not to think about the basement.
    But that was impossible. What he’d seen had rattled him. He had a touch of claustrophobia himself—maybe more than a touch—and the idea of sitting in the dark, waiting to die in that jackleg crypt, was the stuff of nightmares.
    And if the ME was right about it being a suicide, then—the idea skittered through Delaney’s head like an insect scurrying from a drain—that made it even worse.
    Because this guy, Terio, had obviously changed his mind. Delaney was sure of it. The first thing he’d seen in the flashlight’s beam was the dead man’s hands—or what was left of them. The fingers were stumps, the nails worn away, the torn flesh crusty with blood.
    So he’d been trying to get out, Delaney figured. Alone in the dark, he’d tried to claw his way through the stone.

TWO
    The car—Caleigh’s sensible Saturn—was well built, Danny thought. Here they were, five miles out of Nag’s Head, cruising back to Washington at sixty-two miles per hour, and you couldn’t even hear the road beneath the tires. In fact, you couldn’t hear
anything
. And that, of course, was precisely the point. Riding in the passenger’s seat with his eyes on the flat Carolina landscape, Danny was the target of an unmistakable Meaningful Silence.
    Which was completely unfair. They’d had a great time in the rental cottage. Just the two of them, a block from the beach. They’d ridden his Boogie board, splashed in the surf, basked in the sun. They’d danced till two A.M. two nights out of five. There had been candlelit dinners, thirty-six holes of miniature golf, and long walks on the beach at sunset. Now it was time to go home, and the silence coming off his girlfriend was like a cold front sweeping down from Canada.
    He hadn’t proposed.
    After all the sunsets and inspired sex, he
still
hadn’t proposed. And it was getting to her, he could tell. Because they’d been together for
three years
and, though they were still crazy about each other, he just couldn’t do it.
The problem,
Danny told himself,
is that I’m too marginal—and she’s too centered.
To put it another way, Caleigh was one year out of B-school and pulling down eighty grand a