One Scream Away (31 page)

“I’m great,” Abby replied. “But Mommy’s having a bad day.”

Neil caught Beth’s eyes.

“It’s just like Christmas when Santa brings toys that still have to be put together. Mommy hates that. She says the elves are lazy. Right now she can’t get the track together or make the cars work.”

“I can, too,” Beth said. Smother the pain. “I just haven’t finished yet.”

Neil sat on the arm of the sofa with Abby on his thigh. “Think I should help her?”

Abby lit up. “Do you know how?”

“Sure. Planes, trains, and automobiles. They’re guy things.”

Beth would have argued but for a startling truth: She’d be overjoyed to have Neil around to assemble the toys for Abby. And practice T-ball with her, and mow the lawn, and handle dozens of other things Beth had handled alone for seven years.

She left the racetrack in Neil’s hands, astounded by the direction of her thoughts, and went to pour some coffee. She’d worked so hard to not need anyone, to not
want
anyone, and she had prided herself on her ability to carry her own burdens. But suddenly, after the sharing of both love and grief they’d experienced last night, self-reliance seemed highly overrated.

Neil strode into the kitchen and slid his arms around her. “Abby went into the den to play a computer game,” he said, nuzzling her jaw.

Beth turned and laid a hand on his rugged cheek. “Rick—”

“Don’t,” he said, squeezing her hand. “Not now. He’d just want me to stay focused and catch the bastard.”

Beth nodded, knowing what she had to do. “You want to hear about the rape now, don’t you?”

He tipped his forehead against hers. “No,” he said tiredly, “it’s the last thing I want to hear. But it might help, if you think you can do it.”

The story leaked out. She told Neil everything she could remember, at first with detachment, then with tears as the details siphoned in. Neil gripped her hand as if he could keep her in the present, and Beth told him everything she had refused to let herself remember for seven years.

Anne dropped, and Chevy fell to his knees beside her. He looked inside the gym bag on the ground, and in that moment, sheer madness took over. No more taunting and teasing, as he had done with Anne. No more control. Just insane, unbridled rage
.

“Nooo! Bitch!” He stumbled to Beth. “Look what you’ve done.”

Grit your teeth. Don’t make a sound. That’s what he wants.

Smack. Beth stumbled to the ground, choking on the urge to cry out. The bag hung over his shoulder, and he pulled it up higher, cradling it with one hand. Then he flinched, as if he heard something
.

“Noo!” He covered his ear, trying to block something out, the other hand wielding the gun toward Beth. “Stop it, bitch,” he snarled, but he wasn’t talking to Beth. He looked like an animal with nowhere to go. “Who killed Cock?” he sang into the air, then growled from his throat. “You did, bitch!”

He shook his head like a dog spraying water, then snatched Beth’s arm and pulled her to her feet. He shoved the gun into her chest. “Don’t you hear that? Mother’s singing. She does that so she can’t hear Jenny cry. But she’ll stop if you scream.” He glanced wildly around. “This is just like home. Mother can hear you here. Scream so she’ll stop singing.”

Beth twisted from his grasp. She went two strides, but she was wearing heels and stumbled. He grabbed her, baring his teeth, and the gun wheeled into her cheek
.

She sprawled to the ground. Pain flared, tiny chunks of dirt and stone grinding into the open wound. Darkness swirled around her, and everything faded but the white-hot shards of pain in her face
.

Good. She needed her cheek to hurt. Then maybe she wouldn’t feel the ripping between her thighs. Quiet, now. Don’t make a sound. It’s what he wants
.

And then, finally, he was gone.

Beth blinked. Neil’s face was only inches away, his frown etched in stone. “He just left,” she said, puzzled. “He finished and climbed off. He picked up the bag and”—she squinted in confusion—“he was crying, I think. And just left me there.”

Neil brushed her bangs from her forehead. “You weren’t doing what he needed you to do. You weren’t screaming.”

Beth blinked, feeling oddly calm. “That’s all I can remember. Do we know anything more than we did before?”

“Just that it sounds like Bankes heard voices—his mother singing. He wanted your screams to stop her.”

“You know, whatever was in that bag was precious to him,” Beth said, sifting through the memories. “No matter what else was happening, he always kept it close.”

“He took something from your house in a duffel. I wonder if it’s the same thing.” Neil stood, pacing. “ ‘Who killed Cock?’ What was that about?”

“It’s what he heard in his mind, I think,” Beth said. “There’s a nursery rhyme that starts like that. ‘Who Killed Cock Robin?’ It’s in one of Abby’s books. I remember reading it and thinking it was sort of sick.” She pointed at Neil’s laptop, and he nodded and brought it to her. She typed in the title. At home, she knew just where the book was, but certainly she could find the rhyme on the Internet. “I think it was a folk song about the death of Robin Hood or some other famous English figure. Abby’s book gives annotations about the songs and rhymes.”

Neil bent over her shoulder when the site came up.

“I’ll be damned, there it is,” he said. “ ‘Who killed Cock Robin? I, said the Sparrow, with my bow and arrow, I killed Cock Robin. Who saw him die? I, said the Fly, with my little eye, I saw him die.’ Jesus. Nice little rhyme for a kid. And it goes on and on. Looks like there’s about a hundred verses.”

Beth rubbed at her forehead. “What did Bankes say when he sang this? He said, ‘Who killed Cock? You did, bitch.’ ” She shook her head. “I don’t understand.”

But Neil had picked up a thick three-ring binder and was thumbing through the pages.

“What is it?” Beth asked.

He stopped on a page, looked at it, and tapped it with his index finger. “Guess what Chevy’s grandfather’s name was: Robin Bankes.”

C
hevy looked at the G.I. Joe doll, half listening to the news. Mabel’s television was tuned to CNN Headlines, so the top stories got repeated every few minutes. He never had to wait long before they started talking about him again. Psychopath. Serial killer. Sexual deviant. The Hunter. No, that last one was losing favor. The Stalker, now, and even The Tormentor.

Finally, they were starting to get it.

And the talking heads were wild with speculation. People Chevy hadn’t thought of since he was a teenager were being interviewed, telling one story after another. He glanced in the direction of the dining room, hoping Jenny wasn’t listening. Most of the stories didn’t hold a grain of truth. He wouldn’t be surprised to hear someone suggest he’d killed his little sister, saved her in a freezer and eaten her, like that maniac Jeffrey Dahmer. Strange how being connected to a murderer suddenly made a person clamor to be in the spotlight, to say something no one else knew, to be the one who appeared on the morning news shows saying, “I knew him when…”

They didn’t know him when, Chevy thought. No one had ever known them. Mother made sure of it. No one could see past the flowers and songs.

Suddenly, the drone of the headlines changed. Chevy looked up to see the word
LIVE
pop up on the upper left corner of the screen. The cameras panned over a graveyard, then closed in on a bunch of people standing in the drizzle in dark jackets, the yellow letters FBI across their backs. A backhoe sat in the picture, a few people holding shovels. The camera homed in on an empty grave, then tightened further on a small white brick marker:
BANKES, 1990
.

Grandpa? They were digging up Grandpa?

Another grave came into view, another white brick:
BANKES, 1992
. Then the camera followed the officials loading two coffins into a hearse. Grandpa and Mother.

Chevy’s lungs froze for a moment. He couldn’t believe it.

There was only one thing they could want with his mother’s corpse: to review her cause of death. It wouldn’t be the first time they’d wondered about that, and Chevy didn’t care. But Grandpa, why Grandpa?

It hit him, and his chest tightened.
She can’t feel. She has bad blood
.

“It’s okay, Jenny,” he said aloud. “I’ll take care of you.” But inside, he was nauseous.

Damn them, damn them all. Damn Neil Sheridan.

Yes,
especially
Sheridan. Chevy punched off the television and looked at the G.I. Joe in his hands. Sheridan had haunted him—hunted him—from the very beginning, after Gloria Michaels, and if that weren’t enough, his careless actions with the duffel in Beth’s house had sealed his fate. If Chevy was a different type of person, like the simpleminded killers he’d known in prison, he’d just catch the asshole late one night and pop him with one of Mo’s pistols, be done with it. But Chevy was better than that. Beth cared about Sheridan—that was obvious from the rare glimpses a camera caught of the two of them together. A relationship had even been speculated upon by one reporter on Channel 42, trying to rake in the Jerry Springer audience. So Bankes was going to do more than just
kill
Neil Sheridan. He would use Sheridan’s demise to up the ante for Beth.

He sat back down on the couch, pushing the news about the graveyard out of his mind. He picked up the .22 he’d used on the woman at the church and screwed on the silencer. Two of Mabel’s thick phone books made the perfect bed. He laid the G.I. Joe on top, faceup, pressed the muzzle of the .22 against the doll’s left pectoral muscle, and squeezed.

A thrill ran through his limbs. He couldn’t wait to deliver
that
message.

The knowledge that Neil had done precisely what Copeland wanted him to—get the whole truth from Beth—sat on his shoulders like an anvil. He was now privy to new pieces of Chevy Bankes’s madness: Chevy’s mother sang so she wouldn’t hear Jenny’s crying. When Chevy got women to scream, his mother stopped singing. And at least as far as Chevy knew, his mother had killed her father, Robin.

Neil was privy to the information, but he couldn’t do anything with it. Feeding Beth’s rape to the task force—even to Standlin—wasn’t an option. And it wasn’t the only piece of new information weighing heavily on Neil’s conscience.

Beth sat down across the table. A collection of doll photos was spread out around Neil’s laptop. “What are these?”

“Your hunch was right.” Neil tapped the insurance photos. “The dolls you’re getting are part of the Larousse collection.”

Beth’s jaw unhinged. “You’re sure?” She frowned. “But how did Bankes get them, even posing as Margaret Chadburne?”

He handed a page to her. One of the Larousse heirs had finally come clean with an agent in Seattle. “Turns out the Larousses were the family who wanted to sell pieces to Chaney’s museum. The night you met Anne Chaney, some of the Larousse dolls were in the trunk of her car. She was planning to show them to you.”

“I can’t believe it.”

“Anne Chaney’s car was found two days after she died,” Neil said. “It was empty, and no one except Stefan Larousse and Anne Chaney knew the deal with the museum was under consideration. Larousse, believe it or not, was in financial trouble. The doll collection was a big part of his collateral for a major loan, and being the financial mogul that he was, he opted not to report the dolls missing. Apparently, with nine missing, the rest of the collection is devalued.”

“Nine? We’ve seen six,” Beth said, and Neil wished she weren’t so quick.

“We’ve seen six, but he’s probably done eight. There were two dolls that didn’t make it out of France during WWII. They were recovered in 1995.”

“I remember reading about that. But I never thought… Oh, God. The two missing women?”

Neil nodded. “Despite what Chadburne claimed, those dolls were never mailed to you.” He pulled out two of the insurance reports. “Bankes seems to be sending them in order from oldest to newest, so we think it’s these two. This doll has a replaced pate. That’s a wig, right?”

She nodded.

“The Denver woman we never found—the second woman—is a cancer patient. No hair.”

Beth looked as if she would retch. Quickly, he added, “The third one, for the Omaha woman, was a perfect doll. Valued at over fifty thousand dollars. Maybe he didn’t… hurt her.”

Neil watched as she did the math and thumbed through the pictures. He could do nothing as the worst of it hit her. “Then there’s still one more doll to go,” she whispered. “One more murder.”

“Two,” he said carefully. “Because the doll that represented Lexi Carter wasn’t a Larousse. It was a fake Bankes bought from Kerry. That leaves two Larousses that were in Chaney’s car that night.”

“And you know what they are? You’ve got the insurance reports?”

He waited. He could hardly bring himself to tell her.

“Well?” she demanded.

He handed her the pictures. “The last two dolls are a pair: a mother pushing a carriage, a baby doll inside.”

She went still.

“I won’t let him near you or Abby, Beth.”

“I know,” she said and cleared her throat. “I’m okay. I mean, it’s not like we didn’t know I was his ultimate target.” She paced, seeming to talk herself into it, then turned. “But it means it’s almost over. He’ll finish soon.”

“He won’t get to finish. I promise.”

She drew in a deep breath and let it out, and Neil saw her spine straighten with determination. She took the pictures of the last two dolls and went to her own laptop. “Well, I might as well study these dolls. Find out what he’s planning to do to us.”

The sadness took Chevy by surprise; he hadn’t expected that. In his dreams, the later stages of Beth’s torture filled him with anticipation and fulfillment and triumph. In reality, he didn’t want the end to come.

But he could feel things pushing him to move. Jenny, so fragile and hurt. The dog, still tied out there in a shed. Neil Sheridan sticking to Beth like glue, maybe even screwing her. And the icing on the cake now: The phone had just rung.