Free A Killer in the Wind by Andrew Klavan

She says she used to live in a place with other children, then she went to live with the Fat Woman.”
    “The Fat Woman.” I felt a choking surge of rage as more of the night came back to me. “She remember anything about her?”
    Monahan blinked rapidly. With that schoolboy face of his, he looked like a baffled ten-year-old. “She said the Fat Woman told her to call her Aunt Jane.”
    “Aunt Jane!”
    “I asked the kid what Aunt Jane looked like. She said Aunt Jane had no face.”
    “Oh, for Christ . . . What the hell is this, Monahan?”
    Monahan turned one hand in his lap: a helpless gesture.
    “Emory’s going to talk to us,” I said. “Lawyered-up or not. He and I are going to have a private conversation.”
    “Not unless you’re planning a road trip to hell.”
    “What—he’s dead?”
    “It was an understandable reaction to the fact that you put five slugs in him.”
    My mouth opened. I meant to say something but only a slow breath came out. I tried to see the scene through the fog: Emory screaming . . . me with the gun . . . “Did I?” I murmured finally.
    “Three in his chest, two in his head,” Monahan said.
    “I don’t remember.”
    Monahan lifted his chin and did his best to give me a meaningful look. “The fool drew down on you, bro,” he told me. “Tried to put a .357 in you with an 850.”
    I held his eyes only a moment, then looked down at the gray and white tiles of the floor. I saw flashes in my mind of Emory—only flashes. He had been holding a red plastic container when I first came in. Then later, his hands were empty. I tried to remember him with a gun but I couldn’t. Certainly not a CIA 850. That was a classic throwaway. That’s what Monahan was telling me, see, with that meaningful look of his. He—or someone—had planted the gun on the dead man after I’d blown him away in cold blood.
    “I don’t remember,” I said again. I felt it, though. I felt sick inside. The drugs . . . “Too bad. He could’ve told us more.”
    “Yeah, he could’ve.”
    I stood up. I was wearing one of those thin hospital gowns they give you, my ass hanging out the back. I yanked the gown off, tossed it aside. There was a blond-wood bureau against one wall. I pulled open the drawers until I found my clothes. I started to get dressed.
    Monahan could see how I felt, I guess. “He deserved to die. He deserved worse.”
    “It’s true,” I said. “He did.”
    “No, you don’t even know yet. You were right about him.”
    I buckled my belt. “Was I? What do you mean?”
    “We found a graveyard in the woods behind the house.”
    I had my shirt halfway on. I stared at him.
    “Eight children so far,” Monahan said. “They laid off digging last night but they’ll be back at it this morning. They’re sure to find more.”
    I went to the window, buttoning my shirt. I felt strange. Heavy and strange and distant. Suddenly I remembered the photographs I saw Emory burning in the trash can. My God, my God, I thought, the things people do to one another .
    I looked out through the slats of the blinds. We were on the second story. There was a courtyard below. Grass and paths and benches and a couple of small plane trees, leafless in the winter cold. No one was out there. Nothing was moving but a gray-brown squirrel. I pulled the string of the blinds and lifted them. I knew somehow the dead boy would be waiting—and there he was, small and frail and shivering beneath the naked branches of a tree. Gazing up at me, expressionless, with his large dark eyes.
    “Were they girls and boys both?” I asked Monahan. “The bodies they found. Were they both girls and boys?”
    “Yeah, both.”
    “Any IDs.”
    “We’re working on it.”
    Alexander, I thought. One of the dead children would be named Alexander.
    “If you get any hits let me know,” I said over my shoulder—and when I looked out the window again, the courtyard below was empty. The emptiness had a feeling of finality to it.
    I did not