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Small Town Monsters

7

and rushing back into an unkempt bush.

“I can see why they were afraid of him,” Clay said, looking over Kurt’s shoulder at the photograph. “He’s a monster.”

Kurt glanced over his reading specs up at Clay. “If he killed all of these people he certainly was.”

Kurt flipped through a sheaf of victim photographs; all were of twisted bodies. One victim, a young woman, lay in a dry creek-bed, one of her arms torn from its socket. Her shirt had been torn open to reveal a mangled torso. Another photograph showed an old man lying over a cedar post fence, his rear in the air, his arms dangling, outstretched in an almost ritualistic fashion. The sinews of his back and lower scalp had been chewed away, leaving large patches of exposed bone. His stomach had been opened and his intestines had fallen free to pool in a serpentine coil on the ground beneath him.

“Any of this looking familiar?” Clay asked after a hard swallow.

“What are you suggesting?” Kurt asked.

“I’m suggesting that those bite marks look a lot like the ones we saw up on Buren’s ranch.”

“Save it for the campfire, Clay; we’re not in the business of indulging ghost stories.”

Clay nodded, but his stomach didn’t settle.

Kurt continued to flip through the photos, mostly forensic pictures of Artemus’s property. A crew of detectives and cops had torn the whole place up. Every detail had been photographed and cataloged. Each hole revealed its own grizzly secret. There were buried body part; heads, arms, bones—a chilling graveyard of death and torture.

“Does evil like this really exist?” Clay asked, almost to himself.

“Yes, it does,” Kurt said, his voice flat. “And I thought I left it behind when I moved to DePalma Beach.”

“Maybe we should at least consider the possibility that—”

Kurt cut Clay off. “This is a 50-year old case. There is no connection between what happened then and what’s happening now.”