“Neither do I.” He pulls out his gun. “Tell my daughter I’m sorry.” He puts it to his temple before she can react.
“No!” She instinctively runs forward, but there’s no point. He’s dead before he hits the ground.
66
Angie ducks her head as Officer Vickers guides her into the back of the squad car. When she hears a loud thud followed by something hitting the ground behind her, she turns to see Brad Skelton smiling. Relief washes over her.
Officer Vickers lies motionless on the ground, blood seeping from a cut on her forehead. Brad must have slammed her head against the side of the car, because he doesn’t have a weapon in his hands. She leans down to check the woman is still breathing and is relieved to find a pulse. She doesn’t want a cop’s death pinned on her.
“She didn’t see me coming and you were in front of her, so she can’t implicate either of us when she comes to,” he says.
“Get the keys to these.” She holds her hands up.
Brad finds the keys on Vickers and unlocks the cuffs.
Angie rubs her wrists. It’s become obvious that this situation is out of their control and Douglas means to take them all down, whether or not he finds anything. Anger washes over her. She won’t spend time in prison like her bitch of a sister. She hears the faint rumbling of the car crusher starting up in the distance and smirks. At least Wyatt got there before the cops noticed.
“What do you need me to do?” asks Brad.
“Just keep them distracted while I find Wyatt.”
Without her husband, she can’t afford to get away. All their bank accounts and assets are in his name. If she had access to any serious money, she’d take a car and drive away without him, but she can’t.
She watches Brad silently jog over to the house, where he pulls out his gun and waits outside the front door. The cops haven’t split up yet, so the scrapyard is clear. She’ll be able to grab a gun from the repair shop and then get the spare keys to one of the pickup trucks. She’ll let Brad take the fall for injuring Officer Vickers and she doesn’t care if he starts shooting the place up.
As long as he waits until she and Wyatt get away.
67
Nate’s getting to know Owen, and feels a little guilty that he’s spending more time with the boy than Madison is. It’s stuffy in the interview room now and he’d give anything for a glass of water, but he can’t go anywhere as it could be dangerous to leave the boy alone.
He’s telling Owen about Brody and how he’s a trained cadaver dog who helped them find a missing girl in California a few weeks ago.
“That’s so cool,” says Owen, leaning forward. “So let’s say I cut my hand open and I’m upstairs in a house. If he’s downstairs, would he hunt down the smell of blood even if no one told him to?”
Nate laughs. “Er, I’m not sure. We might need to experiment when you get home.”
Owen frowns. “Where’s home?”
“Stephanie left her house to your mom in her will, so we’ve been staying there.”
He looks surprised. “I loved that place. There was a railroad track going all the way around my room. I used to count the trains before I went to sleep. I still remember how many there were.”
Nate smiles. “It’s still there. I know, because I’ve been sleeping in your room.”
Owen’s face lights up at the thought of seeing the trains again. Then he becomes serious. “Are you and my mom dating?”
Nate shakes his head. “No. We’re friends. Plus, technically, she works for me as an investigator.”
He hears a shuffling noise outside the door and stands up, suddenly wishing he was armed. Owen looks afraid as Nate approaches the door. The noise has stopped. He takes a step backwards just as it swings open, obscuring his view, but he sees the look of terror on Owen’s face as he discovers who’s standing there. The boy ducks just as a shot is fired. The bullet hits the wall behind him.
Nate pushes the door closed on the gunman’s arm, making him drop his weapon. He hears a loud yell and a crunch followed by “Son of a bitch.” Then he opens it wide to see who’s shooting at them.
“He works for my dad!” shouts Owen.
The shooter is a uniformed officer, and he’s crouched on the floor, picking his gun up. Nate kicks him hard in the chest, but this guy is big. He takes it with barely a flinch. Nate kicks the gun away from him and it lands at Owen’s feet. He sees the look of temptation in the kid’s eyes.
“Don’t touch it!” he yells.
As the officer stands up, Nate punches him across the jaw and his fist screams with pain. That’s the first time he’s ever punched someone, and he wonders if he’s broken his hand.
The officer punches him back, and through the stars dancing in front of his eyes, Nate sees Owen pick up the gun. “Owen, no!”
His fear of seeing Madison’s son land himself on death row invigorates him. He goes for the officer’s nose this time, upwards with the palm of his hand, making the man fall backwards as his bones crunch.
Owen aims the gun and Nate’s convinced he’s going to fire, so he reaches out to take it off him, but he’s too late.
The gunshot is so loud in this small room that his ears ring and he can’t tell who’s been hit.
68
Madison lets Brody out of the car because he’s destroying the interior in his bid for freedom. He runs to Mike’s lifeless body and sniffs it all over. A machine has rumbled into life behind her, so she looks toward the scrapyard. She can see Wyatt standing on the walkway over the car crusher. He’s facing the controls. Why would he be working during the police search? She thought Douglas intended to arrest them both.
“Shit.” She realizes he must be destroying evidence.
She runs toward the chain-link fence and looks for a way in. It’s so old that it’s broken in several places, so she squeezes painfully through and, staying low, approaches the crusher, trying not to be seen. Metal and glass screech with the impact of the compression.
Wyatt doesn’t hear her as she slowly creeps up the metal steps. She can’t see any cops in the scrapyard, so she needs to be careful. She pulls her gun out just as Wyatt turns.
His face breaks into a smirk. He has an arrogant look in his eyes that she doesn’t like. It’s the same look he wore when he was driving her to the woods eighteen years ago. She glances at his hands. They’re empty. At least he’s unarmed.
“What’s in the car?” she asks over the rumble of the machine as it vibrates beneath her.
“Doesn’t matter now. There’ll be nothing left of it by the time the cops realize it’s evidence.”
He must have got out before Douglas and his team entered the house. She’s fuming at the thought. He always gets away with his crimes. She glances at the control panel next to him. She needs to turn the machine off before it destroys whatever’s being crushed underneath them.
“Heard a gunshot,” he says. “You been shooting people again, Madison?”
That smile on his arrogant face infuriates her. “Mike’s dead. He killed himself because of you.”
Wyatt has the audacity to laugh. He doesn’t give a shit about Mike. “Well, I guess he can’t testify against me and Angie now. And you’ll never get your conviction overturned.”
She’s furious. Mike was a good cop once. At least she wants to believe that. This piece of scum preyed on his addiction and drove him to desperation. “He told me Angie was responsible for Ryan’s murder. And you orchestrated the whole thing, you son of a bitch.”
Wyatt takes a step closer. “You’ve been nothing but trouble since the day I met your sister. I told her we should just kill you instead of the cop, but she wanted you to suffer. She wanted you to rot in prison for the rest of your life.”
Even though Madison has no relationship with Angie, it still stings that her sister hates her so much. Her loathing has clearly been gnawing away at her over the years. She raises the gun and points it at his chest.
“You wouldn’t dare shoot me.�
� He doesn’t look so sure of himself.
“Why wouldn’t I, after everything you’ve done to me?” She thinks back to herself as the young woman he took advantage of. Many times, alone in the dark, she’s imagined how different she would be now had that never happened to her. She might not have become a cop. Joining law enforcement was her way of stopping other people from getting away with violent crimes. And she made an impact, she knows she did. Until she took the promotion to detective. That was one step too far for her sister and Wyatt. They knew then that she had more power than them for the first time. They panicked. She swallows back her emotions. “Are you ever going to admit you raped me?”
He scoffs. “It’s not rape when you’re clearly begging for it. You wanted me from the day you met me. I saw it in your eyes.”
She shakes her head in disgust. “Is that why you had to hold a gun to my head while you did it?”
Doubt crosses his face, giving her hope that some tiny part of him feels guilty. But it’s gone before he can accept it.
“You have a choice,” she says. “If you don’t want to die here, you can agree to tell the cops about Angie being responsible for killing Officer Levy, Stephanie Garcia and Nikki Jackson. You’d only be charged with being an accomplice. You could make a plea deal before Angie and get a lesser sentence.”
He appears to consider it. “We had nothing to do with that girl’s death.” He smiles meanly. “Guess you’re not as good a detective as you think.”
“You expect me to believe that?”
“She must’ve been murdered by our boy.” He stares at her. “You should be proud of him, Madison. He turned out just like us.”
She ignores the dig and steals a glance over Wyatt’s shoulder to where two expensive-looking pickup trucks, one black, one white, are parked side by side. Her stomach flips with dread. The forensics guy at the station told Douglas they had CCTV footage of a white pickup truck leaving the amusement park at the time of Nikki Jackson’s murder. It was heading out of town to Gold Rock.
She looks at Wyatt. “If you didn’t kill the girl, then you won’t mind telling me who that white truck belongs to.”
He must realize why she’s asking, because he smiles. “Shit. Angie killed her?” He laughs. “She has bigger balls than I gave her credit for. She didn’t even tell me.”
Madison shakes her head and tightens her grip on the gun. She can’t believe he would find that funny. “She was only sixteen, Wyatt. She’d done nothing to Angie.”
His eyes burn. “She would have had her reasons. You know, you always assumed I was a bad influence on your sister. Made her do stuff a woman shouldn’t be capable of. You never once stopped to think that it could be the other way around. I’ve done things for Angie that would give you nightmares.”
She’s starting to believe that could be true. “Actually, I think you’re a fatal combination. Capable of things together that you wouldn’t do alone.”
“Like Bonnie and Clyde.” He laughs again.
She doesn’t like how close he’s getting, and glances down nervously. From up here she can see how lethal the crusher is. It’s ravaging the car and whatever he slipped inside. As a cloud disperses overhead, the sun reflects off the metal, temporarily dazzling her.
Wyatt lunges forward, spinning her around and knocking the gun from her hand. She hits the walkway and he looms over her as the crusher grinds below. A hard kick to her stomach sends pain shooting up her torso.
“Best make sure you don’t have any more illegitimate kids,” he shouts in her ear.
In her lungs, she can feel every cigarette she’s ever smoked and she’s struggling to control her breathing. She gulps back the pain and curls into a ball, protecting her head, as Wyatt prepares to kick her again. Before he can make contact, Brody bounds up the steps toward them and dives at him, His weight pushing him toward the edge of the walkway.
Madison holds her breath as Wyatt loses his balance. Brody hovers dangerously close to the edge too, until he manages to take a few steps back. Then he starts barking non-stop.
Madison knows she’ll never forget the look on Wyatt’s face as he falls backwards into the crusher. He sees his death coming and he knows it will be excruciating. Her instinct makes her reach out to him, but it’s no good.
The sound of his screams as he’s pulled under the compacter is harrowing. It stops abruptly just before a horrendous popping sound. The blood sprays upwards like a firework. Some lands on her and Brody.
She looks away, but it’s too late: she saw it. She expects to see it again many times in her nightmares. She has to stop the machine. She forces herself up and hits the blood-spattered off switch.
There’s barely enough time to catch her breath before she hears Angie’s voice behind her.
69
“No!” Angie’s advancing on her and she has a gun in her hand. She’s just watched her husband die. “You bitch!”
“It was you who killed Owen’s girlfriend, wasn’t it?” says Madison as she carefully descends the steps. There’s no way she’s getting trapped up there.
Angie looks feral. “You killed my husband!”
Madison spots Douglas running toward them from the direction of the house. He’s about to pull his weapon out, but he suddenly hits the ground hard, screaming loudly and clutching his shoulder, then he’s out cold. Someone’s shot him from behind. She notices Brad Skelton, long-time employee of Wyatt’s.
“Get the others too!” Angie yells to him. “I’ll take care of her.” She nods to Madison.
Brad turns back to the house and disappears; Brody shoots past Madison, following him. Why didn’t the dog go for Angie instead? She’s the immediate danger here. Madison has to buy herself some time.
“Wyatt explained it all to me.”
Angie looks surprised. “Did he now?”
“Yes. He said you wanted Officer Levy killed so I’d be put away for a long time. You were angry about what Wyatt had confessed: that I’d had his baby instead of you. It made you want revenge. I can force myself to understand your reasoning but I can’t forgive what you did.”
“Good job I’m not looking for your forgiveness.”
Madison ignores her. “But Stephanie wasn’t supposed to die, was she? You were meant to just be using Harris to squeeze her for information. At what point did you flip and order him to kill her?”
Angie smiles. “When I knew she wouldn’t tell us anything about you. She was loyal to the end. I couldn’t have her helping you; giving you a place to stay while you tried to figure out who framed you. She needed to go.”
Madison shakes her head. “You were there, weren’t you?”
“I was. Not in the house—I’m not stupid enough to risk leaving DNA behind. I was outside in a rental car parked down the street. Harris called me to say she wouldn’t tell him anything, so I told him to do whatever he wanted with her as long as she didn’t live to see another day.” She pauses. “I hope it gives you some relief to know she fought for her life. I heard her squealing like a pig all the way from where I was parked.” She’s grinning now.
Madison has to swallow her hatred and grief. She needs answers for Owen first. “And Nikki Jackson? Did she see Harris go into the house?”
Shock crosses Angie’s face before she replies. “I saw a girl with bright red hair wearing a Fantasy World T-shirt cycle past the car like a bat out of hell. I didn’t see where she came from, but it wasn’t hard to figure it out. I don’t know how much she saw but she was a potential witness.”
“Did you know then that she was Owen’s girlfriend?”
For the first time, Angie looks away. It tells Madison she had no idea.
“I tracked her down on Facebook through the Fantasy World page. She was listed as staff and tagged in some photographs. I friended her pretending to be a teenage girl and tried to arrange a meet-up, but she was wary. Instead she wanted me to be her goddam best friend online. All she ever talked about was how her parents didn’t love her and how she
thought her boyfriend might leave her for one of the girls who bullied her for being poor—Taylor her name was. She told me all kinds of things but she never named her boyfriend, so how was I supposed to know? She was so goddam insecure, it was pathetic. Still, it worked in my favor. When I finally caught her by herself at the park, I was able to use what she’d revealed online to silence her. She didn’t even put up a fight, she was that unhappy. If you ask me, I did her a favor by putting her out of her misery.”
Madison can’t believe how her sister can relay all this with no remorse whatsoever.
“There. Now you know. And now I can’t let you go.”
Her heart is beating out of her chest. Her sister is going to get away with everything. Douglas is lying completely still and she’s starting to worry he’s dead. She looks around and is about to run when Angie raises her gun.
“I should have done this years ago.”
The sound of Brody’s frantic barking comes to them, followed by a gunshot. The barking stops and Madison goes cold all over.
Angie smiles. “There goes your dog.”
Madison’s trembling. She sees someone approaching behind her sister and is careful not to let her eyes flicker over Angie’s shoulder. Instead, she turns to run. As she does so, she hears a gunshot ring out behind her and braces for impact. Seconds pass and nothing happens. She slowly turns around.
Angie is sprawled on the ground, face down. There’s blood coming from her thigh, but she’s alive and swearing in pain. Officer Vickers has blood dribbling from her forehead and is aiming her gun at Angie’s back as she approaches her.
“You hurt?” she asks Madison.
Madison shakes her head and sits on the ground, badly shaken.
Brody runs out from around the side of the house. He’s unharmed. She’s so relieved, she cries as she fusses him. His thick fur is covered in a fine dusting of Wyatt’s blood. “Oh my God, Brody. I thought you were dead. Nate would never have forgiven me.”
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