Stones Unturned by Christopher Golden Read Free Book Online Page B

wondered how many of them would be so grateful for life after a few thousand years without the possibility of death.
    Don't be so morbid , he thought. You have a job to do.
    Clay glanced around the room again and studied the mourners one by one. Based on the crime scene, the way the body lay, the lack of a struggle, Boston homicide figured the dead man had known his killer, so it stood to reason that the murderer might well be in this very room.
    One way to find out.
    He stepped past a little girl in a dark green dress that might have been more appropriate for Christmas, nodded to the girl's mother, and started toward the front of the room, where the casket stood on a low platform. Clay inhaled deeply the aroma of the hundreds of flowers arranged in a display around the dead man. But laced within that smell was the odor of chemical air fresheners used by the funeral home. No matter how fresh the body was when it was embalmed, there was apt to be a stale smell to it. The flowers were usually enough to cover it, but funeral homes always pumped in that overwhelming floral stink, like an overzealous grandmother's perfume.
    As he moved past the family of the deceased — Corey Gillard had been twenty-seven and unmarried, so that meant parents, two brothers, a couple of small nieces — Clay didn't bother studying the faces of the grieving any further. The truth wasn't going to be revealed in their eyes. The killer might be struggling with guilt, but in the aftermath of a tragic death, people reacted in all sorts of ways. Emotions overflowed. Too many people in that room were troubled to make any presumptions based on their behavior.
    Clay waited while a gray-haired man knelt beside the coffin and said a prayer. When the man stood, sniffling and wiping at his nose, and moved away, Clay slid in to take his place. The kneeler was warm from all of the people who had paused to pay their respects in the half an hour since the wake had begun.
    The top third of the casket was open and within lay a waxy figure that had once been a man. That absence of life had always intrigued Clay, for he could not die. Perhaps he might be killed, but many had tried since the dawn of time and no one had succeeded. Death was loss, but to Clay it was not less of self. It was loss of love and warmth and comfort and fondness, and the acquisition of ache and regret. He thought of human death whenever he saw a squirrel crushed on the road, or seashells littered along a beach.
    That was all that remained of Corey Gillard now, a shell.
    The dead man's face was slack in some places, taut in others, where the thread used by the mortician had tugged at his flesh. His arms were crossed, hands laid over his heart. Somewhere further south, beneath the heavy maple of the lower two-thirds of the coffin lid, was the wound that had actually ended his life. But it would have been sewn up now and dwarfed by the incisions left by the medical examiner during the autopsy.
    What did it matter, though. He was a shell.
    The thing that had been within the shell, his soul or spirit or whatever one was inclined to call that spark of life, had vacated the premises. But life left traces behind. No one knew that better than Clay.
    And taking life . . . that left traces, too.
    Behind him, an old woman cleared her throat, impatiently awaiting her turn to pray over the corpse of Corey Gillard. Clay lowered his head as though in prayer, fingers steepled in front of him, eyes closed. He waited a few seconds for appearance's sake, and then reached out to touch the dead man's hand, just a moment of contact, his own good-bye.
    At least, that was how it would appear to the people in the room.
    When he stood and backed away, allowing the old woman to gingerly replace him at the kneeler, his vision had changed. There was a tint to the air in the room, at least in his eyes, as though a light mist had begun to gather. Clay took a deep breath and ran a hand through his close-cropped hair, then