At her words, he got calmer.
“You won’t wreck them?” he asked. “Do you promise that they’ll be okay?”
Yeah, not a killer.
To keep him calm, she shook her head.
“No, we’ll fix the ones that got damaged from my friend falling in them. I promise we’ll respect the graves, too.”
Oh, well, they were doing neither of those things. What she suspected was they were going to be playing in that cemetery a lot in the next couple of days.
Call it a hunch.
Her talking calmly seemed to help him stay calm, and make him agreeable.
“Okay. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you. They are all I have. I have to protect them. I promised I would keep all of them safe.”
She pointed at Gene, who had his gun pulled and in his hand as he was watching the man carefully.
It was time to see if he’d calmed down enough.
“If you come for one of us again, Jeffrey, my friend here will shoot you. Then, who will take care of your mom, the flowers, and the dead?”
Clearly, that resonated with him.
He had tears in his eyes.
When Raphael undid the cuffs, the man slowly got up. The whole time, he was wiping his eyes.
“I’m going to go.”
Oh, that was the best idea.
Really.
And just like that, he turned, and lumbered back across the cemetery toward the caretaker’s shack.
Oh, and they regrouped.
As soon as they were safely out of his range, Callen did triage on the situation, seeing how bad they all were.
They were more than a few scrapes.
Well, two of them were definitely in far worse shape.
“I’m calling Chris. He needs to meet us at the hotel. We’re checking in, and getting you four checked out. What the bloody hell? What set him off?” he asked.
She wasn’t sure.
She’d been calmly talking to him, but she suspected it was when she told him that it seemed like the graves had been fucked with by someone.
“He’s really protective of the graves. I don’t think he’s collecting eyeballs,” she said. “He wouldn’t defile the victims they belonged to, and I don’t think he’d abuse their skulls.”
Again, Ethan agreed.
“That’s my point. He’s definitely got some issues,” he admitted. “But he’s not skull fucking anything. I wouldn’t be shocked if he was impotent with mommy issues.”
She wasn’t sure where he fit into this, but she didn’t want to meet Jeffrey Von Gunter in a dark cemetery.
