One Scream Away (28 page)

Making love with him would be the same, she thought. And she wanted to know for sure.

She leaned toward him, and a fraction was all it took. Neil pulled her in, and years of terror evaporated into thin air. His lips became her universe, and she kissed him with everything she had, taking and giving at the same time, knowing, at last, she was ready. With Neil, who felt so different from anything she remembered and so much better than anything she’d dared to dream, she knew she could do it.

She was ready.

N
eil drank her in, his hands closing around her upper arms. He strained to pull away even as he continued to kiss her, as if some invisible force were trying to pull them apart while some other force made it impossible for him to release her lips. Finally, he pushed her to arm’s length. “No,” he said, and Beth staggered back.

“Wh-what?” she asked. She looked flabbergasted.

He clenched both hands, the emptiness there an almost physical pain. But he couldn’t do this. Not when there was still such secrecy between them.

He closed his eyes, then stepped back. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

“You said to let you know what I decided.” Her voice quavered. “I’m ready now.”

“Ready.” Neil gazed at her, not knowing whether anger or pain was driving him. “Ready to see if you can stand it?”

“What? No.”

“You go to your house to see if you’re strong enough to survive seeing your world destroyed. You go to bed with me to see if you can stand it after years of being alone. I don’t want to be your litmus test for endurance, Beth.”

“I decided, Neil.”

“You decided to have sex with me.” He looked her straight in the eyes. “That’s not all I was asking you to think about.”

His meaning took shape visibly, one small thought at a time. Her jaw unhinged. “You wanted me to decide whether I wanted to go to bed with you.”

He held her eyes. “I wanted you to decide a lot more than that.”

She turned, hugging her arms over her chest, then spun back to him. She was angry. “You’re telling me that in all these years, you’ve always asked for a woman’s heart before you took her to bed? Only slept with women who might be the new Mrs. Neil Sheridan or something?”

“I’m telling you that in all these years, I’ve only slept with women who never even made me
think
about a new Mrs. Sheridan, whose hearts I never gave a damn about.” He paused. “
That’s
the difference.”

He turned to the door.

“Wait—”

Whatever she might have been planning to say died on her lips as Neil turned back, looking at her with such intensity he thought he might
will
the words out. Christ, he wanted this woman. He wanted to erase the horror of Chevy Bankes from her life forever and hold her so close she’d never be afraid again.

But she hadn’t asked him to do that. She wasn’t willing yet to trust him with her wounds. She’d just barely come around to trusting him with her body.

He looked at her a moment longer, hands fisting with the hope that she wouldn’t touch him again. This nobility shit was for the birds; if she offered herself again, he wasn’t sure his honor would hold.

She stepped close, her voice a broken filament of sound. “I don’t know what you want from me.”

Neil couldn’t help but stroke her jaw. “Then think about it some more. And for both our sakes, Beth, I hope you figure it out.”

Chevy Bankes sat in the parking lot of a strip mall, in a new Lexus that smelled like a beehive. He’d thrown out Mabel’s dashboard air freshener as soon as he got in the car, but the interior still smelled like fucking Honeycomb Harvest. He’d probably attract bears when he got out.

The morning had started with a small fire in Mabel’s bathtub—he’d decided the next doll needed a little help—then he dropped by a thrift store for a few clothes. He spent the next three hours tooling the metro area to find a place that would do. Finally, he hit upon a shopping center in Alexandria that had just the right components: a Wal-Mart, a Hair Cuttery, a frame-and-photo shop, a private hardware store, a florist, and at the end, a Blockbuster.

The Wal-Mart and the florist were all Chevy needed.

And, of course, the kid. A skateboarder about twelve or thirteen years old, wearing a knit hat, a double layer of shirts, and corduroy pants so tight Chevy wondered how he bent his legs. He’d converted the back of a Tex-Mex place into his own personal skate park and had been practicing a single move for twenty minutes: up the four steps to the restaurant’s back door, drop the board and push off hard, then land at the bottom, still moving. Over and over again.

Chevy looked at his watch, wondering if using the kid to do his dirty work was just being paranoid. Artist renderings of his Margaret Chadburne persona were showing up everywhere, but chances were good that no one in the general public had yet seen any pictures of the woman Chevy had been at Beth’s house, assuming there were any. Still, just in case, he’d retired both of them.

He rolled the Lexus up near the skate area, parked, got out. An older gentleman this time, though the air freshener that clung to his suit made it hard to stay in character. Still, he looked pretty good. Respectable clothes, respectable car, a slight hesitation to his steps—not quite a limp but a certain stiffness that spoke of bad joints. Enough that it was believable a jaunt into the Wal-Mart would be an ordeal for him.

He walked toward the skateboarder, digging in his wallet as he moved, as if he had a purpose. The kid noticed him about twenty feet out, picked up his board, and shot a furtive glance at the
NO SKATEBOARDING
sign in the corner of the lot. He held his board in front of him like a shield, deciding to stand his ground. This was an old dude: Fuck him.

“Excuse me,” Chevy said, and in the last second, he decided on an English accent. An evening at the improv. “I’m sorry, chap.”

The boy grunted.

“Say.” Chevy stopped a couple of strides short of a normal conversation distance. No need to spook him. “I was wondering if you could help me out a bit.”

“Huh?”

“I’ll pay you for it.” He pulled out some bills, seeming to have to search for the fifty he’d put on top. “I’m headed to my granddaughter’s birthday party and I’m afraid I’m a bit late. I need a spry pair of legs to run into the stores for me, you know? Would you do that?”

“Huh?”

“She wants one of those Barbie dolls, but the male one, what is it, uh—”

“Ken?”

“Ah, yes, Ken, but dressed up like a soldier…” A little perplexed. “They have those here in the States, don’t they?”

“Like G.I. Joes?”

Chevy pointed a finger at him. “
That’s
what her mum called it.” He looked at the boy, then across the parking lot to the Wal-Mart, which, to a older man with arthritis, was an awfully long hike. “Would you get me one of those? And a box of red roses from that florist, with nice long stems. It will take you five minutes, and me with my legs, ’twould take half an hour.”

“Uh…” The
’twould
had thrown him.

“And just have them print a card for the flowers. It should say, ‘See you in Covington, Love, Neil,’ all right? That’s N-E-I-L, not the other way, with an A.”

“Uh…”

“How’s fifty dollars as your fee? Will that be enough for you, then?”

The kid’s eyes lit up. “Uh…”

“All right, then. Sixty it is.” He put the bills in the boy’s hand, then added money for the gifts. “ ‘See you in Covington, Love, Neil.’ Got that?”

Figure it out.

Beth took the Hannah doll from the guard who brought it to the door, grimacing at the idea that she called it that:
the Hannah doll
. Still, that’s what it was—a representation of Hannah. The dolls were all representations of Bankes’s murders. The one delivered with Lexi Carter had been easy: It was the same doll Kerry Waterford had tried to sell Mrs. Chadburne in Dallas. A reproduction rather than a real Benoit. A fake, like Carter herself.

But this one, Beth thought, unwrapping the doll, didn’t make sense yet. Except for the obvious—oil stains from having been in a car engine—there seemed to be nothing unusual about it.

Figure it out.
Neil’s words, but not referring to the dolls.

She tried to put him out of her mind and went back to all the dolls, one by one, taking them out and laying each on the table. It made a freakish kind of sense—the eyelids, the cracks on the legs, the mismatched blouse. Like an instruction manual for murder. Beth wanted to cry as she touched them now. Their beauty, rarity, and quality all tainted by what they were being used to represent. She’d never look at another fashion doll without a lurch in her belly.

Figure it out.

She picked up the latest. No hairline fractures, no chips, no obvious repairs. As far as Beth could confirm, the clothing was all original. She was perfect, in fact, even better than the first doll, because of the mechanics. Only the Benoits owned by Stefan Larousse were reputed to be both this early and in such good condition.

She sat down at her laptop and typed in “LAROUSSE.” Spent a few minutes reading their history, even though she knew the Larousse dolls hadn’t been out of their home during Mr. Chadburne’s lifetime, and certainly not for sale. The Larousse family had held the collection privately for a hundred years, showing only select dolls at their pleasure to only a select audience. Still…

One description matched the doll Beth was looking at. Dated 1867, with a bisque head and breastplate, real hair, and the slight, openmouthed smile doll collectors coveted. But what set it apart was the joints: The elbows and wrists were made so they actually bent to hold a pose. Beth picked up the doll again, recalling that one wrist joint was a little loose—

The thought took her by surprise. Not even fully formed, it whipped through her brain and left a knot in her throat.
Loosen the cotter, take out the pin from the ball joint…

She bit her lip. She stripped the doll’s clothes and began dismembering the limbs, digging into each fragile joint like a surgeon whose misstep could cost a life. As a general rule, each chip or crack or mar on a doll dropped the price at auction by about a thousand dollars. Evan would be mortified by what she was doing, but—

There, in the left wrist. A ball joint, and Beth suddenly felt as if the temperature had dropped twenty degrees. The steel pin was missing. In its place, a tiny scroll of paper had been inserted.

It couldn’t be. Yet she knew. She
knew
.

Heart racing, she held on to the joint and groped for a pair of tweezers, then clamped them down on the end of the scroll. She tugged, lost the end, and squeezed it again, pulling until the scroll came free and the wrist joint dissolved in her hands.

Shaking, she unrolled the shred of paper. Her eyes blurred on tiny, hand-printed letters:
Go ahead, Beth. Scream.

T
hat’s her.”

Neil narrowed his eyes on the video screen. Copeland had pressed Pause when a specific person came into view. It was television footage shot at Beth’s house after Lexi Carter was found, one of dozens of tapes. This one was shot by Channel 5, from far enough away that the video-tech nerds at the Bureau had spent all morning trying to clarify the face. The footage had caught a tall woman in jeans and a sweater, with dark blonde, shoulder-length hair, wearing gloves and a mask. Like what about a dozen other crime scene specialists had worn when Carter’s body was found.

But no one recognized this woman. She wore no ID badge.

“Every technician, police officer, and FBI agent caught on television tape at Denison’s house has been identified,” Copeland said, “except her.”

“Him,” corrected Harrison.

“You’re sure we have all the tape that was shot?” Neil asked. The place had been swarming with cameras.

O’Ryan nodded. “We offered inside information on the case—newsbreakers—to the film crew who came up with something we could use.”

“Better than a subpoena,” Rick said, and everyone knew he was right. Forcing legalities on newspeople rarely influenced them. Promising them a big story was like offering pure gold.

“Run it again,” Neil said and watched it two more times.

He didn’t recognize her. A bigger-than-average woman, walked a little like a jock. No one in the Crime Scene Unit recognized her. No one on the police force recognized her. No one in the Bureau recognized her.

Him. Women didn’t pee into Coke bottles.

Bankes?

The tape cut to another shot from a different TV crew, but this one was distant, just a survey of Beth’s front yard. Copeland poked his finger at the screen to point out the person in question. “Right there,” he said, “loading the duffel into the front seat of that van.”

“Son of a bitch,” Neil said.

“What?”

“I did see her. In the house.” He closed his eyes, trying to place her in his mind’s eye. “I kicked that bag out of my way, and she picked it up.”

“The crime scene guys came up one bag short at Denison’s house,” Harrison said. “The techie who lost it said it was empty.”

“It wasn’t empty when I kicked it. Something hard inside. I heard it crack. No more pictures of his face?”

“That’s the only footage we have that caught her. Him. Whatever.”

“The photo lab came up with this.” Brohaugh pushed a couple of buttons, and the picture changed. “This is what Chevy Bankes would look like in that woman’s disguise. Not a very pretty broad.”

Neil stared. Blonde hair, female style, on Banke’s face. It wasn’t much better than one of those late-night TV show gags where they merge photos for laughs. But no doubt, it was the person who’d looked at him angrily and then grabbed the bag at Beth’s house. “Got this picture on the news?” he asked.

O’Ryan nodded. “And the boy driving the Escort ID’d her.” She winced. “Him.”

Harrison: “He can’t stay underground too long. The only reason he got a few days from us is that he was hiding in locked cabinets before we even got going. Now he’ll need a place to live, a car to drive, something. Someone has to see him.”