Veteran serial killer Klaus Fischer is determined that his most recent murder will be his last, but like many retirements, this one isn’t sticking. No one has come close to suspecting he’s buried the victims on his quiet suburban California cul-de-sac property—but he’s feeling the urge to kill again, and this time he’s set his sights on a target dangerously close to home.
Widowed Peg Jurgensen has lived on the cul-de-sac for the past fifteen years, and she’s ready to shed her doldrums and re-enter the world around her. And where better to start than with mothering the curious young teen Eliza van Damal, whose family just moved to the cul-de-sac in order to expose their daughter to a better life.
Eliza, however, prefers to coerce the enigmatic hermit next door, Alex, into helping her pass math. Alex wishes the lot of them would disappear.
The closer these misfits become, the more danger even the most ordinary conversations invite. As the body count rises, can these residents trust anyone hiding behind their doors on this street?
While one would think that a little water on the ground would soften things up after the long bake of yet another hot and dry California summer, once it hit the earth, the moisture had no impact whatsoever. The rocky terrain had to be dug out mostly by pickaxe rather than shovel, my tired arms chiseling out boulders as big as my head one by one and then tossing them aside into a crude mound. The rain—a wholly unexpected downpour for this time of year—only made the rocks slippery and more difficult than ever to deal with, especially in the dark.
A shallow grave wasn’t an option. I’d learned that the hard way two years ago. Living on the outskirts of town has its advantages, but teeming wildlife is not one of them. Raccoons will eat anything, and coyotes can smell blood for miles. But the worst are the opossums. The monsters are strong, and their little hands can pick up rocks. Not the really big ones, but they can easily lift stones as big as a softball. They eat anything, but it’s the sheer tenacity that really causes problems. They can undo a full burial mound in the middle of the night, and after a body is exposed to the elements, well, you’ve got a serious problem, not just from the raccoons, coyotes, opossums, rats, and other ungeziefer—er, vermin—but from the flies, wasps, and other bugs swarming around the thing.
I wasn’t keen to relive the experience from the last time around, when on a Tuesday morning I found a carefully dug (though admittedly much too shallow) grave completely unearthed and the fresh corpse of the hausfrau within nearly ripped to shreds. There were bits of red dress scattered for thirty, forty meters, little fragments the raccoons must have finally decided weren’t worth even attempting to eat. I had to cancel my work trip to Texas later that day—a whole other problem—and then spend all afternoon and the night that followed cleaning things up and digging a much deeper grave just to be sure the wildlife couldn’t get to it. Fortunately, the cul-de-sac was dead quiet as usual, and no one asked any questions.
The experience was enough to turn me off of this business for more than a year. Until last night, anyway.
End of Excerpt
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