They sped off through a series of access roads, through two gates, onto Cobb Parkway. A few minutes later they were on 75 heading north running at least thirty miles per hour over the posted limit. Walter hadn’t noticed any markings on the Suburban, nor were there lights on top, but nobody pulled them over as the driver expertly weaved through the traffic for nearly an hour before leaving the interstate for a quiet exit near some town Walter had never heard of called Cuman. They passed an abandoned gas station, several overgrown farms, and a rusted-out pickup truck with a maple tree growing through the center, surrounded by tall grass. The driver took several more turns before they left the pavement for a gravel road that became a dirt road about two miles in.

  A sickening feeling began to swell in Walter’s gut. They hadn’t seen another vehicle in nearly twenty minutes. Sealey could very well be driving him to his final resting place—a bullet to the back of the head out here and he’d never be found. Aside from Harwood, there was no record of him leaving Quantico. Certainly no record of travel to Georgia. He instinctively tightened the muscles around his shoulder and felt his 9mm in the holster under his arm. If Sealey was armed, Walter hadn’t spotted a weapon.

  The Suburban bounced as the wheels dipped down into a rut. The driver slowed, rounded several holes, then began to pick up speed again. Branches from the encroaching trees scraped against their ceiling and thumped along the sides.

  “Where exactly…”

  Before Walter could get the sentence out, they topped a hill and came down the other side, where a large field carved out an open space in the heavy woods. At least a dozen vehicles came into view with forty or fifty people bustling about. Most were wearing FBI windbreakers, while some were in sweat-drenched T-shirts wielding shovels. A mobile trailer, several large tents, and white canopies had been set up, and the first thought that entered Walter’s head was that this was some type of archaeological dig.

  The black body bags strewn about told a different story.

  “Oh, my God.”

  Sealey cleared his throat. “We’ve been calling it the Garden.”

  Chapter

  57

  They parked next to the trailer and got out of the Suburban in silence, rounding the front to get a better look.

  Walter opened his mouth to speak, but nothing came out except a soft gasp.

  Some of the black bags clearly contained bodies; others looked empty but were near recently dug holes or next to one of the dozens and dozens of small yellow flags that sprouted from the earth. More than Walter could count. Multiple generators buzzed nearby.

  Sealey said, “The first body was discovered completely by accident. It had rained for three straight days, and this place had turned into a giant mud pit. Some kids had come out here to screw around on their four-wheelers. One of them spotted a shoe—a black, red, and white leather limited-edition Air Jordan from Nike. I don’t know shit about shoes, but apparently kids pay upward of a couple hundred for these, and this particular kid knew exactly what they cost, so he got off his ride to get a better look, then probably wished he hadn’t. Somebody’s foot was still in the shoe, but the rest of that person’s leg had failed to join the party. The local sheriff found the body about twenty feet away, partially dug up by some animal. He got a crew out here to excavate, and a member of his team walked off about a hundred yards to take a piss back by the tree line over there and saw what looked like a mound of displaced dirt, possibly another fresh grave. The sheriff broke his team in half and got digging over there, too. That’s where they found body number two.”

  Sealey wiped his nose and gestured back in the direction they’d come from. “Those farms we passed on the way in, years back a couple of the farmers got together and bought a GPR. Do you know what that is?”

  Walter shook his head.

  “Ground-penetrating radar. They hoped to use it to map out some of the terrain, get a better handle on where the water was coming from and maybe get it under control. That plan went to shit when the money ran out, but the sheriff remembered they had it and sent a deputy out to borrow the machine. So they got the GPR out here, and anytime they found a disturbance, anything that looked like a possible grave, they planted one of those yellow flags. When the sheriff was on his third box of flags, he called in the staties, and when they opened up the fifth box of flags, the state police called the feds. By the time we got out here, this entire field was covered in those little yellow flags like the devil’s daisies. I don’t know who called it the Garden first, but the name stuck. Follow me…”

  Sealey led Walter around the side of the trailer to the large white tent and held the flap open.

  A rush of cool air floated over him as Walter stepped inside. One or more of the generators must have been running air-conditioning units, but the circulation they provided wasn’t enough to mask the familiar scent of death. The space was thick with it.

  Five bodies on stainless steel gurneys surrounded by bright halogen lighting rigs stood on the left. Four doctors in masks and scrubs appeared to be in various stages of autopsy. Several people looked up as they entered. The others went on with their work. They all looked exhausted. On the right, stacked in neat rows, were dozens of body bags like the ones outside.

  “How many?”

  “We’ve been moving them to a local hospital post autopsy, but between those, the ones in here, and the ones still out in that field, we’ve got sixty-three at last count. Like you saw, though, we’re still digging. There’s more. Best guess is close to eighty by the time we get the last one out of the ground.”

  “Eighty?”

  Sealey nodded. “Most are nothing but skeletons, but some, like the one wearing the Nikes, are fresh. The few we’ve found with tissue to work with were diseased. Various cancers, mostly, but we got a couple fatal blood clots, even three heart attacks, and I use that term loosely because the last heart one of the docs showed me looked like it exploded in the chest cavity.”

  Walter was staring at the body bags. “Have you IDed any of them?”

  “That’s the million-dollar question that led me to you,” Sealey said. “We’re taking dental casts to compare to missing persons, but that’s all gonna take some time. They’re all missing their first metacarpals, between the first and second knuckle. Sound familiar?”

  “Like the guy from the Edison, Glenn Beede, and Aneta Kostenko from Corktown.”

  “Don’t forget the two in Alvin Schalk’s freezer,” Sealey reminded him. “We haven’t found any females out here yet, all males. That tells us something.”

  Sealey gave a moment for all this to sink in, then turned and started back toward the door. “I can’t take the smell of this place, reminds me of failure. There’s something else I want to show you.”

  Walter followed him back out and over to the trailer, up a ramp and inside.

  Chapter

  58

  The trailer was a mobile command center. On the way in, Walter caught a glimpse of the trailer’s license plate and noted that it hadn’t been issued by a state, but simply said Federal across the top.

  Inside, Sealey tossed his black satchel onto the folding chair behind a cluttered desk. He scooped up several McDonald’s bags and sandwich wrappers from a table in the middle of the room, balled them up, and threw them into an overflowing trash can near the door. “I’m gone for a day, and the kids leave the house in complete disarray. Do you want some coffee?”

  “I’m good.”

  He shrugged and went over to a coffee machine in the corner, filled the tank with several bottles of water, dumped some grounds in the top from an open can, and hit the Brew button.

  Walter caught this from the corner of his eye as he stepped up to a topography map on the wall surrounded by dozens of sketches and photographs—images he’d memorized over the years. The map looked like a blowup from something much smaller. The lines and details were blurry, not meant to be this size, barely readable.

  “Not a lot of maps available for Jerkwater, Georgia. That’s the best we could get on short notice. It’s from some local farmer’s almanac,” Sealey explained, stepping up beside him. He traced the outer edges with the tip of his finger. “We came in right here; this is the path we followed. We’ve done a preliminary search of the surrounding woods but didn’t find anything out there. All the bodies seem to be in this open field. The yellow thumbtacks match all the remaining flags. Red means we already dug and found a body.” He shook a box of blue tacks on a table next to the map. “These are for the false positives. Haven’t opened it yet, because so far we have found a body in every hole identified by GPR.”

  Walter flicked a small piece of paper under one of the red tacks. It read: M-1906 7'. “What does this mean?”

  “Male, found seven feet down. Approximate year of origin based on depth.”

  “Nineteen oh six? Is that possible?” Walter was still going through the notes under the thumbtacks. “This one says 1841.”

  Sealey nodded. “I wanted you to see this before I told you, didn’t make sense to go into all of it on the plane. The oldest one we’ve got here appears to be from the 1720s. This group, whoever they are, has been actively dumping bodies out here for more than two hundred years.”

  He’d gotten tired of waiting for the coffeepot to fill up, and was now holding a mug under the thin stream. “This is the perfect dumping ground. This entire field floods every year, turns into a swamp for about three months. It’s low land, so the water eats away at the surrounding dirt, encroaches on the tree line. Throw a body out there when it’s wet, weigh it down, and Mother Nature does the heavy lifting, buries it for you. Every year when things dry out, there’s a little more dirt on top. Between that and the local wildlife treating the place like a buffet, it’s a wonder any of these bodies turned up. Without that hard rain, without those kids, we wouldn’t be standing here right now.”

  As he said this last part, he gestured at the images on the wall surrounding the map. Blowups of the drawings and sketches from Golston’s notebook. There were also images captured from the surveillance system at the Four Seasons of the girl who looked a lot like Amy Archer, but wasn’t quite her, coming and going. Although they were still blurry, these had been enhanced since Walter had last seen them. Sealey clearly had better tech than Detroit PD. There were also surveillance shots taken outside the brownstone on Franklin, most likely from Buncy and Wilson. Each photograph or sketch was tagged with a date. There were several police sketches, too. Walter had never seen those before.

  “The dates on the surveillance images are exact. With Golston’s drawings, I had to use the surrounding notes and make an educated guess. There’s a clear family resemblance between all of them. You see that, right?”

  Walter did, and he nodded, but none of them looked like Amy Archer, either. Not exactly. Even the ones at the brownstone only seemed to have a passing resemblance.

  “Here’s what I don’t get,” Sealey said. “Golston was a good artist, damn good. I couldn’t draw a person like this to save my life. So, if he were drawing the same person, I’ve got no doubt they’d look the same. These subtle differences aren’t the result of an unskilled hand unable to capture his subject; it’s the opposite—he’s skilled to the point where he can isolate those subtle differences. Understand?”

  “Backs up your theory that he followed multiple women over the years, all with a look similar enough to be family.”

  Sealey nodded. “What I don’t get is the age thing.”

  “The age thing?”

  “Every girl here looks like she’s maybe early to mid-twenties. Golston followed them for well over forty years. Why no drawings of the mothers or daughters? What about boys? One of them must have had a son at some point. Yet Golston’s focus was always on the girls, and only for this narrow age range. It’s like they hold one of them at a time as the public face of the group, then when she reaches a certain age she goes reclusive and someone else takes over? Mothers passing on the bug to their daughters, like I told you on the plane.”

  Walter was standing in front of the last photograph. A grainy black-and-white of Amy Archer leaving the brownstone. He recognized the dress and knew the picture had been taken moments before she hailed a taxi, moments before he went chasing after her, he was certain of that, but it didn’t look like her. The shadows didn’t help—the whole image was marred in them. “I never saw her again after this night. Not after she disappeared from that restaurant.”

  “You’d recognize her, though, right?”

  “Yeah. Of course.”

  “That’s important. More so than you might realize, because as far as I know, you’re the only person still alive who has had contact with her and can make that claim.” As he said this, Sealey’s eyes drifted back to the map, all those colorful tacks.

  She wouldn’t hurt me.

  The thought popped into his head, and Walter didn’t want it to be there. He didn’t want to think of Amy that way. He felt Sealey’s hand on his shoulder.

  “Come with me. There’s one other reason I brought you here.”

  Chapter

  59

  Sealey led Walter down a worn path through the dirt, around a tent filled with crates and supplies, and past a group of people huddled together studying what looked like an old alarm clock covered in rust and dirt.

  As they rounded the corner, another tent came into view and two men in army fatigues holding AR-15s straightened up. One was a Black kid, no more than nineteen. The other man was about ten years older, with short reddish blond hair that had begun an aggressive retreat on his freckled, pale scalp.

  “Sir,” they both said in unison, pulling their guns in tight against their chests and moving to either side of the tent’s closed flap.

  “Gentlemen.” Sealey tugged the flap open and motioned for Walter to step inside first.

  Two more soldiers were stationed at the interior, and Walter noticed the barrels of their rifles tick in his direction until they spotted Sealey coming in behind him. Then they stepped aside like the others.

  The tent seemed larger on the inside than Walter had expected, at least thirty feet square. Near the center, three more soldiers were busy assembling what looked like a large cage, complete with barred floor and ceiling, a metal box about seven or eight feet on each side. In the center of that nearly complete cage, a small person sat on a metal folding chair, hands and ankles cuffed to the metal frame and a black bag over their head, drooping loosely over their shoulders.

  An oily substance dripped from the cuffs.

  “What is that?” Walter asked.

  “Oxenberry. I mentioned it on the plane. We’ve been…testing it.”

  “Testing how?”

  “Never mind that.” Sealey stepped inside and reached for the black bag. “You’re the only one to ever get a good look at her. That’s why you’re here.” He pulled the bag off the handcuffed prisoner’s head and held it at his side.

  The girl’s head jerked from side to side. Gray eyes—dark and frightened—darted up and quickly scanned the room, taking in everything, taking all of them in, before glimpsing Sealey and settling on Walter, dropping into place as if that’s where they belonged—her eyes on him, his eyes on her.

  There was a piece of tape over her mouth and, judging by the puffiness of her cheeks, something beneath. Most likely a piece of cloth. She was wearing white canvas tennis shoes, no socks, a pair of jean shorts, and a white tank top—all filthy, as if she’d been dragged through the dirt. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail. Several loose strands fell across her forehead and the sides of her face.

  Sealey tapped his foot, a single impatient thump. “Well, is this her?”

  Walter felt a hard thump in his chest. “No.”

  The word dropped from Walter’s mouth before he gave it a second thought. As if placed there, trapped, and wanting to get out.

  And it isn’t her, is it?

  This girl was too young.

  But, damn, she does look like Amy. Could easily be her little sister.

  Amy Archer had been in her early twenties the first time they met, and that was eleven years ago. That put her in her late twenties when he last saw her sitting across from him at Giovanni’s. This girl was maybe nineteen, and that was being generous. There was a strong resemblance—the eyes in particular—no denying that, but it wasn’t her.

  Sealey’s face filled with frustration. “Are you sure?”

  Walter forced his mind to go back, pictured her sitting there across the table, smiling at him, her ankle rubbing against his.

  My name is Velma, Henry. Velma Barfield. And we’re on our first date.

  That wasn’t true, though. Velma Barfield was a killer—tried, convicted, and sentenced to death. And he wasn’t Henry. And the Velma Barfield who sat across from him at Giovanni’s, that girl from Iowa, didn’t quite resemble Amy Archer, and neither of them was the girl tied to this chair.

  She tried to lean away from Sealey, those gray eyes pleading with Walter to set her free. To help her. This girl, whoever she was, was terrified.

  “Can’t be her.”

  “That’s not the same thing. Is this her?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure?” Sealey repeated.

  Walter felt his head nod, and let it.

  “There’s a resemblance, though, right? Like we discussed? Family?”

  Behind the tape, her mouth twitched and she grunted, jerking her hands, ankles, and torso in a violent shudder. The chair wobbled, threatening to topple, but remained upright. The metal cuffs clattered but didn’t give. She tried again anyway, then a third time. Her eyes never left Walter’s, as if to say, I’m here because of you, and only you can get me out.