“She was his date. Sam had been single for a few years, his wife passing and leaving him with our granddaughter. Meggie, too, after her grandmother.” Charlie cried harder. “She’s dead too, isn’t she? My little granddaughter, who never hurt nobody, is dead too.”
Steele looked at the list and nodded, telling him that she was missing as well. He waited until Charlie could talk again before he asked him where he had come from. By the time he had some information to go on, the rest of the men in the house were up as well and joining them. Kari was helping to get breakfast on the table with their cook Izzy and her husband Jake.
Ray was making arrangements to go by van. They would all load into it, but Steele and Kari would go by car. Not that they would normally be separated from the group, but Charlie knew where he had been but not the address. He would have to follow the man by car as he made his way back to where his body had been tossed, no doubt. It was going to be a long day if the list that was on the missing report was any kind of indication.
It took them nearly an hour to find the gravesite. And by the time they’d called in the local police, the news vans had started to show up. It took Steele having to call in a favor to keep their names out of the paper, and no one was happy when the Feds showed up. It was a missing person’s case up until the first body was discovered. Ray Hancock stood near him as the second, then the third body was found.
“You know how many are here?” Steele told him there might be as many as eleven. “Christ. Children too?”
“Yes.” Ray hated it when children were involved. Well, to be honest, they all did. But when Aster came to stand next to him, he told her to go to Kari. She was taking this very hard. The little girl, Meggie, had found his wife, and Kari had never had to help with a child before this. Steele continued speaking with Ray as his sister went to his wife. “They were at his home for Christmas. The woman who killed them was with the son. He seemed confused, his dad said.”
“You think she went there just to murder them?” Steele nodded. “Why? I mean, maybe she had a breakdown and just killed them on a whim.”
“She tortured them. Charlie looks like she cut him up over a long period of time. I’m betting that the autopsy will show that they were all done the same way. She brought them here, but I don’t think this is where they were killed. Charlie said he lived in this area, but this isn’t his land.”
“So we have to figure out where that is as well, unless it was his house. You think that’s where she killed them?” Steele just stared at him. “You know, don’t you? You know either who she is or where she is.”
“I know who she is, but you’re not going to like it.” Ray started cursing, and Steele just smiled. “Yeah, I know what you mean. We tried to tell them when they released her that this would happen again.”
Ellen Wooten had been in an institute for the criminally insane since she’d been eight. Ellie, as everyone had called her, had murdered not just her family, but the neighbors on both sides of them, as well as all the animals that had been in the houses. There were nineteen people killed and torn up by the child, and she’d been put away. Not her face, her name…nothing about her had hit the papers for over fifteen years, until about a year ago when her time served had been up and she’d been labeled as fit to return to society. A mistake by the system that was now coming back to haunt them in the worst kind of way.
“‘Model patient,’ they said. ‘Never even raises her voice,’ they said to me. I told them this would happen. I told them every day that fucking meeting was going on this would happen. Once those kind get a taste for it, there isn’t a damned thing going to stop them.” Steele let Ray go on. At least his voice was down so that the papers and news crews weren’t getting any of it. “What the fuck are they going to do now? I ask you this.”
“We find her, or help to find her, and have her put away again.” They looked at the dogs going over the property, and Steele watched as they pulled out another body, this one wrapped in what looked to him like wrapping paper. “I know that it won’t help these people, but we can hopefully save a few more.”
It took them nearly nine hours to find them all. All the people on the missing list had been accounted for, and even the dog and cat that had been in the family had been found with the bodies, as if she’d wanted to keep them together for some reason. Steele was thinking how she would have needed plenty of time to dig these graves for them, not to mention bringing them all to this site. He wondered if she’d had any help, and decided to go and ask the group of ghosts that were gathered around each other.