One Scream Away (11 page)

“Maybe not, Mr. Michaels.”

The man’s face began to redden, a crimson stain climbing up from the vee of his collar. “I want you to leave my little girl alone. For the love of God, let my baby rest in peace.”

“Geesh, Dad,” Sarah said, “it’s not like it matters to Gloria anymore.”

He rounded on her. “How dare you.” The tendons on either side of his throat stood out, like a cobra. “How dare you say something like that about your sister.”

“Dad! What if Anthony didn’t kill her?”

“Anthony killed her. He killed her.”

Neil stood. “Mr. Micha—”

“Get out,” Tom said, his voice vibrating with tension. “Get out of my home and leave my family alone. We know who murdered our daughter, and you don’t need to stir it all up again.
Just get out.
”

Neil glanced at Gloria’s mother but found no help there. A second later, Sarah had his arm. “Come on, I’ll walk you out.”

Neil felt as if he’d just driven a knife into a man’s chest. He and Sarah walked to the driveway in silence, Neil on eggshells. They stopped beside his car and when she finally spoke, her words surprised him.

“You know,” she said, her voice pensive, “I wanted to go to Carnegie Mellon. Or Penn State.”

Neil waited. He didn’t know where this was going.

“Dad couldn’t stand it, the thought of me going away to college. So now I’m finishing at Bishop. It’s a junior college about four miles from here. He can almost tolerate my going to classes, so long as I don’t take any at night.”

Neil swallowed. He didn’t know what to say to that. If he could do it all over again and had the option of keeping Mackenzie under lock and key, he’d probably do it, too.

Sarah looked up, her expression filled with uncertainty. “I don’t want to send him back to that place he was after Gloria died. I don’t. But…”

“What?”

She shot a glance toward the house then stepped a little closer, her voice falling to a hush. “Anthony didn’t like peanut butter.”

Neil frowned, a sliver of apprehension sliding in. “Sarah?”

“I know, I know,” she said. Tears started. “I know Daddy told you that piece of candy had to be his. But it couldn’t have been. Gloria told me. It was one of the things she said she and Anthony had in common: They both hated peanut butter.”

Neil was dumbfounded. He turned, rubbing his hand over his face. “Sarah, why didn’t you tell anyone back then?”

“I did. I told Dad.”

“Your dad knew? Then why didn’t
he
tell us?”

Sarah blinked. “You just don’t get it, do you? He hated Anthony, and he does think with all his heart that Anthony killed her. He wasn’t going to let an eleven-year-old’s opinion about a piece of candy stand in the way of Anthony going to prison.”

“Would you put that in a sworn statement?”

“That my dad believed Anthony Russell killed Gloria?”

“No, that you’re certain Anthony Russell wouldn’t have had a Reese’s Cup.”

“Are you kidding? My dad would disown me.”

“Come on.”

“No, really. You don’t understand. Anthony’s death was Dad’s revenge.
You
gave him that. And if he didn’t have that much, I don’t think he could go on. He barely goes on as it is.”

Neil closed his eyes.

“Mr. Sheridan?” Sarah touched his sleeve, looking up at him. Suddenly she sounded like a little girl again. “Should I be scared? I mean, could the guy be coming back here or something?”

Neil frowned and patted her shoulder. “Nah,” he said. “There’s something else going on. I don’t know what, but I’m gonna find out. You’re okay.”

And that, Neil thought as he pulled out of the driveway, might be the biggest crock of shit he’d fed a pretty lady in a long time.

Chevy bent over Miss Legs, counting to ten. One, two, three… He was waiting for the blood. Four, five…

A tiny red bead squeezed out, another right behind it, and a string of liquid rubies welled up along the severed edges of flesh. At ten, he wiped away the strand, applied pressure with a cloth napkin from the motel, then sank back on his heels and started the count again.

One, two, three…

It was taking longer than he’d thought. He should have just killed her first and saved himself all this trouble and mess. Dead women don’t bleed. But they don’t scream, either, and Chevy had been hurting. He needed something to carry him over until Beth.

Nine, ten. Wipe.

Done.

He looked at the photo of the fourth doll in the set, looked at Legs, and decided on one more cut. A tiny blue vein crept from the crease behind her knee, barely visible in the silvery light. He cocked his head—a surgeon, considering—decided on it, then laid the edge of his X-Acto knife flush against her skin.

Legs gasped. “Oh, God, no! Not again. I’ll do anything y-you want.”

Stupid bitch. She
was
doing what he wanted.

Her body tensed as he pressed down on the blade, gently, gently. The tip punched though with a tiny “pop,” and her mouth opened around a glorious moan. Pleasure clutched at his vitals, the tape recorder whirring.

Easy now, not too deep. He dragged a long, darkening slit through the skin, like the line of a jagged country road on a map. A curve here, a jog there, a hundred-and-eighty-degree turn an inch below her knee. One last thin, spidery line, one last string of bloody beads to clean up. One last set of cries in his ears.

One, two, three… Wait, wipe. Count again. Wipe. Again.

Finished.

He called over his shoulder: “That’s it, Jenny, I’m done.”

“Wh-what?” Legs managed. “J-Jen…”

Chevy stared at her, surprised there was any sentience left at all. “Quiet,” he said. “I wasn’t talking to you. I was talking to Jenny.”

“J-Jenny?” She swiveled her head, as if she might actually be able to see through the blindfold. “Heelllp! Jenny, help—”

“Stop,” Chevy said. “Shut up!”

She writhed against her bindings. Damn it, if she reopened those cuts, he’d be cleaning her up until dawn. Everything would be ruined.

He yanked off the blindfold and measured out the spot for the bullet, then hiked to the edge of the stream where Jenny sat alone in the darkness. Belatedly, he wondered if she might have gotten cold. Her face was stark and pale, the wide caverns of her eyes lending her a dazed, haunted look.
She doesn’t feel
, Mother always said, but Chevy knew better.

“Come on, Jen,” he said, gathering her in one arm. “Someone wants to see you.”

Gun in hand, he carried Jenny to where Legs lay, still whimpering Jenny’s name in a string of incoherent whimpers. He knelt down close so she could see. “This is Jenny, bitch,” he said through clenched teeth. “She won’t help you.”

Legs blinked. Her throat worked, the sight of Jenny’s face stealing breath from her lungs and making the whites of her eyes glow. She gasped, a single, dumb-founded wheeze that filled her lungs with oxygen for one last time.

Chevy punched a bullet into her brain.

The crack of the shot sang through the air and he stood, cradling Jenny close, adrenaline leaking from his body like urine from the dead woman’s bladder. He waited as the staid, unearthly silence that always followed a kill wrapped cold arms around him. He hated this moment; this was the danger zone—that tense, gravid interval when the singing might come.

He waited, but there was only silence. Mother wasn’t here. She never came when he did it right.

He let out his breath and put Jenny down, spent another few minutes wiping off the woman’s legs. Finally, she was done.

Now, for the phone.

He rooted through her purse. Cosmetics, comb, wallet. He dug some more, fingers searching for the familiar shape. Nothing. He frowned and stuck a hand in the outside pocket. It wasn’t there, either.

His heartbeat stuttered. He dumped Legs’s purse on the ground. Stupid—now he’d have to gather everything up or risk leaving prints at the scene. But he had to find a phone. He had to talk to Beth.

He checked her clothing then straightened, shocked. No phone. Fury caught him by the throat. A moment after that, Mother began to sing.

N
eil left the Michaelses’ house and found a bar and a cheap motel at opposite ends of the same gravel lot. He started drinking early. He drank and tried not to think about the fact that not only had he killed the wrong man, but an eleven-year-old girl and her father had known it. He drank some more and tried not to think about the fact that he’d just ripped open the worst wound a parent can experience, and he didn’t even have any authority to find the answer. He drank some more and tried not to imagine Mackenzie crying out for him in the backseat of Heather’s car, of Heather hating him with every fiber of her being. Before he got around to thinking about Mitch, he was out cold.

A hangover had him in the morning, but so did a new determination. He nursed the hangover with a gallon of coffee and handful of aspirin from a gas station, then found the local sheriff and told him just enough about the present investigation to convince him to keep a deputy close to Sarah. He made a phone call to the one FBI agent who might listen to him, though he couldn’t say they had parted on good terms. Then he put the Charger on the road and turned it loose, ready to go back to Arlington and do whatever was necessary to nail the bastard who wasn’t Anthony Russell. For Gloria. For the Russells. For Sarah and her dad and mom.

For himself.

But he wasn’t prepared for what Rick had learned.

Rick handed him two pieces of paper. The top page was an e-mail saying, “See attachment.” And the bottom page—

Neil stared.

“They found her in the woods in Indiana about two hours ago.”

Neil’s brain simply stalled; he couldn’t make sense of the photo. A woman, shot in the head, a smudge or line on her temple. She was posed, as Lila Beckenridge had been, and naked from the waist down. Her eyes appeared unharmed. But her legs… Neil had never seen anything like it.

“It happened sometime last night,” Rick said.

While you were in a bar getting wasted.

“I don’t know what to say,” Neil said. “This is our guy? He didn’t do anything like this to the Seattle woman. Or to Gloria.”

“Not to the legs, but the gunshot wound is the same caliber, same placement of the bullet, and that line is gonna turn out to be eyebrow pencil, wait and see. Same MO—being taken in her own car, killed in a woods, car found not too far away and wiped clean. En route from the West Coast to… Jesus, maybe here. The only thing different is the legs.”

“Postmortem?” Neil asked. “There’s no blood.”

“He cleaned her up.”

Neil cringed. Then remembered: “Did Denison get a phone call?”

“No. But this vic didn’t carry a cell phone. I’ve got the phone company on the lookout for anything coming in to Denison’s number from anyplace between here and there—from pay phones, anything. Are your taps in place? Not that I know anything about that,” he added.

“Yeah. It won’t be in real time because a call’s gotta pass through my contact guy first, but if a call comes over Denison’s lines, he can route a recording here within a few minutes.”

“
If
a call comes. If it doesn’t, then she might be out of it: Maybe he really is some pervert who started out calling her at random.”

Scary dreams that make her cry…

Neil drew a deep breath. He needed oxygen. “I want to talk to her.”

“I’ve got a tail on her.”

“No, I mean, I want to
talk
to her. Tell her what’s going on, let her explain.”

“Why? Something happen with you two that you didn’t tell me? Something that made her stop hating your guts?”

“I’m done worrying about your lawsuits. We gotta put the murders in front of her.”

“Fine. But here, with her lawyer.”

“Damn it, just give me an hour. She’s got a kid, a career, a home. She’s not going anywhere.”

Rick glared at him. “If she gets a phone call from Indiana or ballistics shows this bullet is from the same gun as Beckenridge…”

“Then pull her in. I won’t stop you.”

“I’ll find out where she is.” He picked up the phone and Neil stepped outside to check his own messages. Nothing. No voice mail from Beth Denison saying,
I’m making a terrible mistake and I need you
. Nothing from Mitch, either, damn it.

Rick stepped into the hallway, holding out the phone. “Russ Billings.”

Neil took it. “Billings. This is Neil Sheridan.”

“Hey, Sheridan. I told this to Sacowicz, but he wants you to hear it for yourself. She’s at Chester Park right now, watching some sort of kids’ T-ball practice. But you wanna know where she went first?”

Neil’s hackles rose. “Where?”

With something in his voice that might have been awe, Billings said, “Keet’s.”

“Keet’s?”

“It’s a firing range,” Rick said, coming in on another extension. “Anything you wanna shoot, you can shoot there. Twenty-twos to assault rifles.”

Neil was speechless. Beth Denison did more than just carry a gun. She was brushing up her aim.

The house was nearly hidden, weeds molesting the flower beds and shrubs swallowing the porch. The steps offered up a buffet of rotted wood to termites, and the windows were clouded, as if shamed by what had happened inside.

In its day, when Mother was tending it, the house was an island of coiffed beauty. She kept it as perfect as a stage setting: calico curtains, freshly painted latticework on the front porch, trimmed bushes edging the walkways. And flowers. Mother liked flowers. Sang to them all day long.

Such a quaint, peaceful setting. The unthinkable couldn’t happen here.

But it did happen. Every day.

Be careful, Mommy. You’re hurting her.

I’m not hurting her; she can’t feel. It’s her blood. She has bad blood. La-dee-da. I, said the Fish—

“C’mon, Chev,” Jenny said suddenly. “Let’s get out of here. You promised you’d take me to the river, and this house gives me the creeps.”

Yeah. The creeps.

He shifted his gym bag and carried Jenny past the house and into the woods. Funny, but the river hadn’t seemed so far away when they were kids—probably because he always wished they could go farther. Chevy hated this property. Mother’s codicil willed Chevy the only thing that mattered, so he’d sold the property, house and all, to the first person who asked. Cheap.