Don't Be Afraid (24 page)

Her mother didn’t bother to say hello. “Emma’s awake! She’s talking!”

“We’ll be right there!”

Chris was already pulling on his clothes. They dressed in a breathless silence and Amy took the upstairs bathroom while Chris raced down to use the one on the first floor.

He was on his cell phone in the kitchen when she came down. She heard him before he saw her.

“Of course, baby. I promised, didn’t I? We’ll do that, too, but I can’t get away for at least another week.”

A wave of nausea washed over Amy and she stopped in the kitchen doorway, gripping the frame. Chris pivoted around the linoleum floor, stopping short when he saw her. The perfect O of surprise on his face might have been funny under different circumstances.

“I gotta go,” he said into the phone and snapped it shut. He gave Amy a big, fake smile. “Ready to go?”

She nodded. “Just need a glass of water.” She passed him to get a glass and filled it at the sink.

It could have been his secretary on the phone. He used “baby” a lot, it didn’t mean anything. It was gray outside the kitchen window, fog hovering above the dead grass. The clock chimed half-past six.

“Who did these come from?” He was fingering the roses on the table. He had a quirky half smile.

“Yes, I wonder who,” she said, playing along.

“No, really Amy, who sent them? Do you have an admirer?”

He wasn’t joking. “I guess I do,” she said slowly. “Actually, I thought you were my admirer.”

She said it lightly—keep it light, don’t let him see the hurt—but when he laughed she felt it like a blow in her stomach.

He must have seen it on her face, she’d never been good at hiding her reactions, because he stopped laughing. “I wish I had,” he said quickly, but the damage was done.

They took two cars to the hospital by unspoken agreement. She parked first, ran ahead of him into the hospital, but he caught up with her in the corridor. Took her hand. They entered the room that way and Dorothy Busby’s smile was bigger than Emma’s.

“I want to go home, Mommy.” Emma’s voice was listless and muffled by the oxygen mask, but it was her voice. Amy blinked back tears.

“I know, sweetie, I know.” She kissed Emma’s hand and then her face, being careful not to crush her, but needing to feel the life in her.

“Where were you, Mommy? I wanted you.”

“I’m so sorry, honey. Mommy wanted you, too.”

Then Emma noticed her father and her eyes lit up. “Daddy!”

Amy moved so Chris could sit next to their daughter. She watched as Emma lifted her thin arms to wind around her father’s neck. She had an IV in her left hand and the veins stood out against her pale skin.

Dorothy Busby was at her side. “Did you call him?” she whispered excitedly.

“No, you did.”

Amy’s mother didn’t look in the least abashed. “He has a right to know if his daughter’s ill,” she said. “Look how happy Emma is to see him!”

Emma
was
happy. Chris had lowered the railing and was perched on the bed facing her, holding her hands in his while they chatted in low voices. Whatever he said made Emma giggle, and the sound tore at Amy.

“I’m going to get some coffee,” she said. “Do you want anything?”

Chris and Emma ignored her, but her mother stood up. “You just got here,” she said. “Stay with Chris and Emma. I’ll get the coffee.”

“No, Mom, I’ll do it. You must be tired from sleeping here.”

The reality of everything she’d been through in the past few days was starting to take its toll. Her hands shook as she counted out the money for the coffee and she sank into a booth in the cafeteria, unable to handle the trip back up to the ICU.

“Here, take this.” Something soft was pressed in her hands. A man’s handkerchief.

She looked up through her tears and saw Ryan dressed in his paramedic’s uniform. She hadn’t seen him since they’d shared a brief lunch together in what seemed a lifetime ago. He slid into the seat across from her and clutched her hand. “I heard about Emma, how’s she doing?”

“Better,” she said, trying to swallow her tears, but the look of sympathy on his face only made them flow faster.

“I know it doesn’t seem like it right now, but Emma’s tough. She’s going to get better.”

She nodded, gulping. “I know she will. I know.” How could she tell him that she was crying because she’d been foolish enough to believe that her husband had changed?

“It’s just—it’s been a stressful time.”

“I heard about the police. I can’t believe they think you could have done those things.”

The scorn in his voice buoyed her spirits slightly.

“But they do,” she said. “And if I get arrested, I’ll lose my job and what will happen to Emma?”

“Don’t go there.”

“I don’t know if I can handle it—”

“You don’t have to handle that now, so don’t.” His voice was firm, but his eyes radiated compassion.

She wiped her eyes, sniffling and trying to contain it. “I should go. My mother’s with Emma.” And my husband.

She hesitantly offered him the handkerchief, but he smiled and shook his head.

“Keep it.” He stood up. “I’ve got to go, too, but I’m glad I got a chance to see you. My timing really sucks, but I wanted to know if you’d like to go out again. I really enjoyed our lunch.”

“I did too.”

“I’ve wanted to call you, but your life seemed, well, pretty complicated.”

She laughed weakly. “There’s an understatement.”

He took a napkin from the metal dispenser on the table and scribbled a number on it. “If you want to grab a bite, or you just want someone to talk to, call me.” He handed it to her. “That’s my cell—so you can always find me.” He squeezed her hand again. “Hang in there.”

She stopped in a bathroom to splash cold water on her face before going back up to the ICU, but her mother gave her a penetrating look as she accepted the coffee Amy handed to her.

Chris was preparing to depart. He had his coat on and had raised the bedrail. “I don’t want you to go, Daddy,” Emma said in her raspy voice, weakly clutching one of his hands.

“I know, baby, and Daddy doesn’t want to go. But I have to.”

He peppered her forehead and cheeks with kisses and ended by kissing both of her hands. Emma’s lower lip trembled.

“I’ve got to talk to Mommy for a minute before I leave,” he said. “I’ll be right outside and then I’m going to wave to you. So you get ready to wave back, okay?”

The hallway was empty except for a rolling cart piled high with hospital bed linens. The nurses’ station was just around the corner. Amy could hear the hum of activity and voices. Someone laughed, a high twinkling sound.

“I want you to come back to New York,” Chris said. “As soon as Emma’s given a clean bill of health.”

Amy tried to speak but couldn’t around the lump in her throat. She shook her head.

“No?” Chris looked puzzled. “Why? I’ve missed you, you’ve missed me—you said as much last night—and Emma needs us together. I told you I’m sorry. Let’s move on.”

“Who were you on the phone with?” she said.

“This morning?” He looked hunted. “Nobody important.”

“A female nobody?”

He sighed, a long, drawn-out whistle of exasperation. “C’mon, Amy, I’m only human. I don’t know what more you want from me!”

Amy answered him, knowing she was saying goodbye to her marriage. “Fidelity.”

Desk duty involved a whole lot of paperwork. Farley carried a cardboard box full of old case files into the squad room and dumped them on Mark’s desk with a terse “This should keep you busy,” and the expectation that he’d be spending his morning doing nothing but scutwork.

“That guy has you in his sights and he just keeps pulling the trigger,” Black said with a grin as he eyed the towering stack. He cocked a finger at Mark. “Bam, bam, bam!”

Detective Dickson passed by with a cup of coffee and laughed at Black’s remark. Mark picked up half the stack and held it out to them. “I’ll be happy to share the love.”

“No way, man.” Detective Dickson raised his free hand and fled, laughing.

Black smirked. “No can do. Gotta go interview a potential witness.”

“Who?”

“Neighbor of Amy Moran’s. Old lady. She’s got a clear view of their house from hers. Figured she might have seen something.”

“What? Amy Moran wielding a nail gun?” Mark laughed.

“You’re not going to be laughing when I get the arrest warrant.”

“No, I’m going to be looking at the sky,” Mark said, “’cause on that day pigs will fly.”

“Yeah, keep up that shit,” Black said, straining to get on his worn blue blazer. “But don’t come complaining to me when you don’t get the collar.”

“Ditto, partner.”

Black snorted. “What? You’re going to find the crucial information while you’re a desk jockey?”

“They have this new invention,” he said speaking slowly, “it’s called the in-ter-net.”

Black flipped him the bird and offered his parting advice, “Better not let the boss catch you surfing.”

It had occurred to Mark that being desk-bound gave him one advantage—time to access VICAP, the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, the FBI’s comprehensive on-line dragnet.

In this database were the records of hundreds of crimes and hundreds of offenders. If his killer was a serial offender, it was possible to track down similar crimes elsewhere.

He made a cursory attempt to get through the paperwork, doing enough to appear engaged whenever Farley happened to pass by, but he spent most of his time on-line.

He smiled as he successfully connected with the database. The faces on the screen didn’t smile back. They were hard, stone-cold killers and baby-face teenagers trying to look tough for the camera. In some eyes you could see fear and that fear was the only glimpse into their humanity. In some he saw joy, but these weren’t the photos that frightened him. The ones that scared him were the faces with nothing in their eyes.

He’d never agreed when people referred to violent felons as “animals.” Most of the animals he’d known had more compassion than these men. He’d been a cop for eight years, but he still wasn’t inured to the litany of crimes.

Bodies slashed and burned. People tortured. Children lured away with false promises. Reading crime databases was like taking all that was evil on the earth and reflecting on it all at once. No wonder there were so many cops who became alcoholics.

Thinking about that brought him perilously close to the events after the bar the other night and he really, really didn’t want to think about that.

He forced the thought of that awful encounter out of his mind and focused on his search. Serial killers was much too large a subset. Even serial killers in the Northeast garnered too many names and cases. He expanded the search to include realtors and serial killers, but didn’t find any matches.

He tried missing fingers and that brought all sorts of hits, but unfortunately once he’d delve a little deeper, none of them was a good match. Either no names or faces matched or the person could be eliminated due to location or other facts about the case.

After an hour the only thing Mark knew was that there were far too many unsolved homicides in the United States. He tried dozens of different searches, but the cases they yielded didn’t jump out at him. It occurred to him that maybe he wouldn’t recognize a case similar to this and that all of the cases seemed similar after a while.

He’d been at it for over four hours before he hit a possible connection. A series of unsolved murders in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Five killings, all of them female, spaced over a relatively short period of time—three months—with a few common denominators. They’d all been in houses either for sale or going on the market, they were all single women, and there was evidence that the killer had stalked them prior to the killings.

This perp had strangled his victims. That was a big difference, but it could be that Mark’s guy had just changed killing methods. And there was nothing about missing fingers or any other trophies. Maybe just an oversight or maybe it wasn’t the same guy at all.

Juarez looked away from the screen for a moment and rubbed his eyes. They were aching from staring at the screen so long and so was his neck. He stood up and stretched as hard as he could, hearing his back crack, before sitting back down. He’d take street work any day over this job.

“C’mon, give me something solid,” he muttered, scrolling through the information. Then he saw it. A single line at the bottom of a page: “One witness.”

 

 

Mary Deerborn was seventy-eight years old, a tiny frail-looking woman with a heart-shaped face and eyes still haunted by the loss of her husband. Stephen Deerborn had died the year before, she informed Detective Black when she saw him eyeing a picture of the two of them in the hallway of her two-story frame colonial.

“I was all of twenty-five when we moved here,” she said as she ushered Detective Black into a pleasantly furnished living room. She offered him one of the wing chairs that flanked the fireplace and took her own seat on a floral sofa. “An old married lady of three years and a new mother. Of course, I was hardly more than a baby myself!” She gave a sweet little laugh.

He saw that a tray with a teapot and two china cups with saucers rested on the coffee table between them and resigned himself to the social call that Mrs. Deerborn clearly expected as the cost for getting any information.

There were pictures from the couple’s long marriage on the end tables and the mantel. Smiling children grew up to have children of their own and brought them back to the house where they’d posed for countless Christmases and Easters. It made Black nostalgic for his grandmother and the look and feel of the tiny Cape Cod where she’d lived and died.

“We have seven grandchildren,” she said, handing over a cup of tea with a steady hand. “It’s just a shame that Stephen went so soon.”

“How old was Mr. Deerborn?” Black asked, accepting her offer of sugar. They were in little cubes in a silver bowl. He hadn’t seen sugar cubes in years.

“Only eighty-three,” she said, sighing with regret. “He was perfectly healthy, too. Well, except for the cancer at the end.”

Black hid a smile behind his cup. “Thank you for agreeing to see me, ma’am.” He put the teacup carefully down and pulled out his notebook. “As I told you on the phone, I just wanted to follow up with you about what you told Officer Feeney about your neighbor across the street.”

“Mrs. Moran is such a nice young woman and her daughter is a very sweet little girl.” Mrs. Deerborn sighed again. “It makes me miss my own grandchildren. I wish they lived as close. But that’s not the way things are nowadays. Children scatter to the ends of the earth.”

“That’s certainly true, ma’am,” Black said. He couldn’t agree more. Not that there weren’t some mornings when he wouldn’t like to see the back of Emmett Junior and his snot-nosed friends. The delicate chiming of Mrs. Deerborn’s mantel clock pulled him from thoughts of his own family and back to work.

“As Officer Feeney mentioned when he spoke with you on the phone, we’re trying to track Mrs. Moran’s whereabouts for the morning of September 6 and the evening of September 14.”

“Those are the days on which the murders occurred, detective?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Oh dear.” Mrs. Deerborn set down her own teacup and clasped her hands in the lap of her lavender wool skirt. “I never dreamed we’d have such crimes in Steerforth, did you?”

Black didn’t point out that he was a homicide detective so yes, he’d done more than dream it. His toes were tapping against the Oriental rug and he wished she’d get to something useful.

“Well, I know that Mrs. Moran had nothing to do with those crimes,” the elderly lady said stoutly.

“You have some proof of this?” Black tried to keep any testiness out of his voice.

“Well, not precisely, not what you’d call proof,” she said, drawing the words out. Then she thrust out her chin. “I’m a good judge of character, detective, and I always have been. Mrs. Moran is not the type of person who’d do such an awful thing.”

Black itched to tell her about the cherubic looking twenty-year-old who’d attended church every Sunday and burned down his house with his mother locked inside so he could collect on an insurance policy, but he restrained himself.

“But the morning of the sixth, Mrs. Deerborn. You saw something then?”

“No, dear, not on the sixth. It was the eighth I mentioned. That’s when I saw him.”

“Him?” he said. “Who’s him?”

“Why, the man I told Officer Feeney about.”

Black took his glasses off and pinched the bridge of his nose. He was going to personally hang Feeney out the second floor window by his toes.

“I thought you told Officer Feeney that you’d seen Mrs. Moran leave her house on the sixth?”

“Oh, yes, that’s true.”

“And what time was that?”

Mrs. Deerborn brushed that question away with a small hand. “Oh, the usual time. But that isn’t important, detective.”

“No?”

“What’s important is the man.”

Pudgy Feeney would be crying for help, but none would be forthcoming. He’d strip him to his undershorts first.

“Tell me about the man.”

Mrs. Deerborn smiled. “Okay. As I told Officer Feeney, I didn’t think anything of it at first—I’m not a suspicious person, you know.”

“Of course you’re not.” Black scribbled Feeney’s name on his notepad and drew a little skull and crossbones next to it.

“And I might not have noticed anything if it hadn’t been for Sammy.”

“Sammy?”

“My terrier. Didn’t I mention that I had a dog?”

“No, I don’t think you did.”

“Oh. Well, he’s out back now. On a lead, of course.”

“Of course.”

“I don’t believe in letting dogs run loose, tearing up other people’s gardens. That’s happened to me before and I’ve lost all my tulips—”

Black had a sudden taste for whiskey. Was there a polite way to ask for her to doctor his tea?

“But you were talking about Sammy,” he interrupted her.

“Oh, yes, where was I?” Mrs. Deerborn looked confused for a moment and then she smiled. “So I might not have seen anything if it weren’t for Sammy’s barking.”

“You saw a man?”

“He’s a good dog, you see, and he doesn’t bark at people he knows. So I knew it wasn’t the postman or any of our neighbors—”

Get to the fucking point!
Black screamed in his head. He thought he could probably crush the bone china cup in one hand. He imagined how it would feel to do that, or to crush it to a fine powder under his heel. Better yet, he could hurl the damn thing into the recesses of the fireplace and listen to it smash against the stone.

“—and I saw him walking up the side of the yard and then disappear around the back of the house. If he were a deliveryman, wouldn’t he just go up the walkway? So I thought it was very, very strange. I watched for a while, but then I didn’t see him anymore.”

“And Mrs. Moran never spoke of anything missing?”

“Oh, no. At least not to me.” Mrs. Moran put a hand to her mouth. “I do hope it wasn’t a burglar. Nothing was taken, was it?”

“Not that I know of.” Black pocketed his notebook and stood up. “Thank you so much, Mrs. Deerborn. That’s been very helpful.”

She stood hastily. “But don’t you want to know what he looked like, detective?”

Feeney was a dead man. “Sure,” Black said, digging back out his book. “Did you get a good look at him?”