by S W Vaughn
Then I looked again, and I realized that something was very wrong.
The driver’s side door of Clarke’s car stood open, the interior lights on.
The garage next to the house was open too. Lights on. No car inside.
And there was a dark object lying on the driveway next to the car, slightly too small to make out from here. But it might’ve been a cell phone.
I eased the Jeep closer to the curb next to the driveway, parked and got out. My hand went to the police-issued sidearm as I walked. The object was definitely a cell phone, and it looked like Clarke’s.
There were spatters of something dark on the concrete, a few feet beyond the phone.
Blood.
The son of a bitch had Clarke.
I ran into the open garage, located the interior door leading to the house, yanked it open and rushed inside. A kitchen greeted me — clean, modern, absent any speck of personality. Not a single thing out of place.
Except for the rumpled, dog-eared book lying in the middle of the kitchen table.
Stab and Shoot. The autographed copy.
There was a piece of folded paper wedged in the middle of the book, sticking out from the top a few inches. My name was written on it.
My jaw clenched as I grabbed the paper and unfolded the note it contained.
You have one chance to leave this town, right now, and never come back. Never breathe a word about me, or any of this, to anyone. If you refuse to do this, I’ll make sure you lose a lot more than your “partner.”
Love,
Your number one fan
I couldn’t see anything but red.
He was going to kill Preston.
If he actually thought I’d let him do it, that I’d allow her to die, tuck my tail between my legs and run to save my own sorry ass, then he didn’t know a damned thing about who I was.
I was not the real Donovan North. He was the one who ran when the heat came down.
I’d be the one to stand, and finish the deadly game he started twenty years ago with Diamond Schilz.
And there was no way I’d let Preston Clarke become a casualty in the war on evil.
August wasn’t here. I knew it with a bone-deep certainty. He was bold, arrogant — but not stupid. He’d taken her somewhere else, somewhere private. And he wasn’t going to kill her quickly, because blonde-haired, blue-eyed Preston suited his sick tastes.
Or at least, the tastes he’d mimicked. Donovan North was the one with a thing for blondes.
And everything August learned was probably in that damned book.
I opened the tattered copy to somewhere in the middle, and nearly threw it back down on the table in horror. It was the section on the Kid Glove Killer, and August had made notes. Scribbles in the margins, between the lines. Brilliant technique. Try this on #2. Constrictor knot. How long until they can’t scream?
He’d highlighted several sections. Everything that described the torture in North’s stilted, flowery, gag-worthy prose.
This wasn’t a Bible. It was an instruction manual.
Suddenly, I knew where August had taken the detective. The one perfect, isolated, symbolic place — just as meaningful for Preston as it was for him — where he could take his time, and no one would ever come looking.
The Schilz house.
Chapter Forty
Preston
She woke up with a throbbing head, in a blur of light and shadows and indistinct shapes. All she could tell was that she wasn’t in August’s driveway anymore.
And then she recognized the smell. Musty, sour, decades of dust and filth and darkness.
Eleanor Schilz’s house.
The knowledge of where she was acted like a splash of cold water, and she jolted into full consciousness. She was lying down. Her first instinct was to sit up, reach for her gun. But when she tried to move her arms, the only response she got was a bright pain that surged through her wrists and shot into her hands, transforming them into burning gloves.
Gloves.
She stilled, focused on her breathing. She was on a bed. Filthy sheets, stained pillow, arms stretched up and wrists tied to the headboard railing. Peeling, water-stained, mildew-spotted ceiling above, buckled plaster wall to her left. And to her right, August.
The killer.
“I left your clothes on,” August said. He almost sounded apologetic, pleading, like this was all some kind of big misunderstanding and they’d laugh about it when he untied her and went down to the station to look in Henderson’s locker. “I’ll have to … at the end. But they can stay on for now.”
This was not a misunderstanding. They were not going to laugh about it later.
He was going to kill her.
She would not be a victim.
“This was his room, you know. Donovan’s.” August sighed softly and appeared to be sinking. She realized he was sitting down in a wooden chair that faced the bed, hands propped on his thighs and clasped between his legs. Fingers wrapped around the handle of a very large knife. “The three of us used to hang out up here, when she wasn’t on a bender. Donovan, Diamond, and me. We liked to … play.”
A shudder gripped her body. She hadn’t even thought about it, the fact that August had lived across the street from this place. With his mother and that awful stepfather. The pharmacist — that was why he’d seemed familiar. She hadn’t been friends with August in school, with him three grades ahead of her, so she’d never officially met his parents.
She’d only really known him as Officer Farnsworth.
“Diamond,” she croaked, and was shocked to discover how weak her voice was. How weak she was. Whatever he’d hit her with, the blow to the head had left her dull and senseless. “Did you …”
“Yes, I killed her.” Casual, as if he was admitting to shoplifting a candy bar. “It was Donovan’s idea, but he was banging her so he wouldn’t have gone through with it. Didn’t think I would either. He was impressed when I did.”
“No.” She shook her head, as if she could dislodge the words. As if she hadn’t thought herself, less than an hour ago, that Donovan was the killer. She was wrong, and August was lying. “He’s not like that. He’s—”
“That man is not Donovan!” August screamed, spittle spraying from his lips as he lunged from the chair. He started pacing back and forth, waving the knife around like a manic conductor with a demented baton. “He’s a nobody copycat. A doppelganger. A phony, sneering liar. He is not. Donovan. North.” He punctuated each word with a swipe of the knife through the air. “Donovan is left-handed. The fake is right-handed.”
Preston went very still.
August wasn’t just a killer. He was utterly insane.
“Donovan is a great man,” August muttered as his pacing finally slowed, and he plunked back into the chair. “He was going to come here himself, you know. Give me some pointers. Take out Mama Ellie. But I had to do that for him because … something happened.” He squeezed his eyes shut, pressed the heel of a hand to the right one. “And that copycat showed up here instead.”
Preston could barely follow his ramblings. If she didn’t do something soon, he was going to start using that knife he kept waving so carelessly around. She tried to tug at the ropes that bound her to the bed, loosen the knots, but it was no use. Every movement seemed to tighten the ropes further.
Her hands were throbbing now, the circulation slowly shutting down.
“August,” she said as gently as she could. Maybe if she fed into his delusions, she could get him to stop this madness. “You’re right. That isn’t the real Donovan.”
“Don’t patronize me,” he snarled, his lips curling like a dog’s. “You don’t know anything.”
“I know that Donovan did all these things. Not you,” she said. “I’d figured it out. In fact, I was about to call you when you called me.”
He rolled his eyes. “Liar.”
“No, I’m serious.” She struggled to keep a desperate note from creeping into her voice. “Donovan North is the Kid Glove K
iller. You saw that profile he wrote up on the board, didn’t you? It was all him. You didn’t do anything wrong. And I was going to ask you to help me catch him.” She tried to smile. “Then you could be the detective. Not him.”
She could see him considering it. The possibility of framing North, getting away with everything.
But then his face shut down. “You wouldn’t lie for me,” he said. “You never lie.”
“I wouldn’t be lying!” There it was — desperation. She tried to throttle it back. “I told you, I know it was North. He killed all those women in New York, and Chelsea, and Lynn. I even figured out how. He drove up here a month ago and killed Lynn, and then called the chief and said he could help with the case. It was … brilliant.”
The last word tasted like dog shit in her mouth. But she’d say anything to keep the psycho with the knife from torturing her. Raping her. Cutting her until she bled to death.
August stared at her, coldly speculating. “You’ll really tell everyone that it was all Donovan?”
“Absolutely,” she said. Anything. “Call the chief. I’ll tell her right now.”
He was out of the chair and over her so fast, she barely had time to blink. The knife was at her throat. “Promise?” he said, his breath hot in her face.
“I promise,” she stammered.
Just then, there was a tremendous, splintering crash from somewhere in the house. August jerked at the sound, and Preston hissed in pain as the edge of the knife pressed against her, stinging, cutting.
He pulled it back just in time to keep from slitting her throat.
“Farnsworth!” a deep, furious voice roared, muffled by distance. “I know you’re in here, you sick, pathetic, wannabe serial killer groupie. You hurt her, and I’ll carve a fucking shank out of your dick and gut you with it!”
Donovan.
Preston closed her eyes, only to open them a few seconds later when August climbed off her, and she felt cold metal press against her temple. He had a gun — of course he did. But it wasn’t her service piece, or his.
It was probably the one he’d used to kill Eleanor Schilz.
“He found us,” August said softly, and a terrible smile spread on his face. “Good. Now I can kill him, and save you. I think that’s a much better plan than telling the chief. Don’t you, Preston?”
She could only nod, while she silently prayed that Detective North had some kind of plan beyond insulting a deranged killer who was holding her at gunpoint.
Because if North was dead, then August would have no real use for her.
Chapter Forty-One
Marco
I didn’t have a plan, other than to find August Farnsworth and kill him.
He would be upstairs, in one of the bedrooms. Probably the one that belonged to Donovan. Of course, I had no idea which one that was, but I felt pretty confident that I’d be able to find it.
Whichever one had Preston Clarke in it, tied to a bed.
I headed straight for the stairs and started up, palming my sidearm as I walked. “Come on, Farnsworth. You’re the one who called me out,” I said loudly, making no effort to disguise my approach. “You gave me a choice, remember? Well, I choose option B. Stay here and kick your sorry ass.”
By then I’d reached top of the stairs. Ahead was a hallway with four doors. Three closed, one halfway open. They had to be in there.
The smell would kill them both if he kept the door shut.
I kept the gun loose in my hand and started down the hall. “Got a bullet with your name on it, Farnsworth,” I called out. “And I never miss. You must know that much about me.”
Right outside the open door now. I stopped to listen, heard breathing inside the room. Two people — one fast and shallow, the other slow and even.
I swung around the corner, through the door frame, already bringing my weapon up as I sighted my target and pictured the point of impact. Center of the forehead. One-shot kill. Not out of professional courtesy, but because I had to make this fast.
“My bullet is closer,” August said. “And I don’t even need to aim.”
I stopped, finger on the trigger. He had the Glock he’d stolen from my glove box in his hand.
And the muzzle was jammed against Preston’s temple.
August smiled at me, like we were kids in a candy store and he’d just found the golden ticket. “Put it down, or I’ll redecorate the place with her brains,” he said.
I looked in his eyes — killer’s eyes — and saw that he would.
I put the gun down. Held my hands up. “What do you want?”
“I told you what I want,” he said. “But you wouldn’t give it to me. You just had to play detective. The only thing we can’t figure out is why.”
Who the hell was ‘we’?
“Look,” I said. “You want me, you got me. Okay?”
August sneered. “Do what you want to me, but leave the girl alone,” he said in a high, mocking voice. “What do you think you are, a hero? Pathetic.”
I’d already started edging closer. He was sitting on a chair next to the bed where he’d tied Preston’s wrists to the headboard, just like all the others. There was a knife on the floor at his feet. If I could get him up, get him to point the gun somewhere else, I’d have a shot.
“You think you’ve got me figured out,” I said, playing a hunch — once more, something I’d read in that awful book. Killers who worked in pairs had an alpha and a beta, and I was betting that August Farnsworth was one hundred percent beta material. Which made Donovan the alpha. “I let you think I wasn’t really Donovan North, but I damned well am. This was a test. And you failed it, dipshit.”
August let out a strangled bark, and his gun hand wavered. “You’re lying,” he said, despite the fear that flashed briefly in his eyes. “You’re right-handed. Donovan is left-handed.”
For fuck’s sake. Of all the stupid things that could’ve blown my cover, he’d made me when I was signing that damned book.
And I was trying to be nice when I did that.
“Haven’t you ever heard of ambidextrous?” I bluffed. “That was part of the test.”
August surged out of the chair and swung the gun around, pointing it at me. “Pull your shirt down. Show me your right shoulder.”
I stared at him, dumbfounded.
The X.
Somehow, Donovan had that mark on him. That was why he carved it into the girls.
“Not happening,” I said stiffly. “I don’t have to prove—”
“Do it!”
I made no move to comply.
Sneering, August reached up with his free hand and pulled his own shirt down, revealing a scarred X on his shoulder. “She did that to him. Mama Ellie,” he said. “Claimed she was marking her territory. Donovan was pissed about the scar, so me and Diamond let him do it to us, too. So he wouldn’t be alone. If you’re really him, show me the scar.”
I lowered a hand slowly, as if I was about to show him. “I promise, you’re going to regret this,” I said.
Brief panic flared in his eyes again. I took the opportunity and lunged at him.
He got off one shot.
He missed.
I knocked him to the floor, one hand grabbing the wrist that held the gun while the other balled into a fist. I snapped his wrist and his nose at the same time. Blood gushed down the lower half of his face.
He didn’t cry out. Barely flinched.
Crazy didn’t feel pain.
When the gun clattered to the floor, his free hand flashed out and swatted it away, under the bed.
Then he shot his arm back, grabbing for the knife.
I punched him again. He bucked me off, drove a fist into my throat as he scrambled sideways, out of reach. The bastard was a lot stronger than he looked. But he hadn’t managed to grab the knife.
So I reached for it. As my fingers closed around the handle, August lurched to his feet and started across the room at a stumbling run, away from me. Toward the door.
&nbs
p; No … toward my gun on the floor.
“August, stop!” Preston cried out, bucking on the bed.
She was either in shock or denial, because he wasn’t going to stop. And I’d never get to him, or the gun under the bed, in time to make him stop.
But I never did get a chance to buy those sneakers.
I reached into my boot and pulled out my emergency blade. Perfectly balanced, honed to perfection, heavy enough to sink into anything, provided there was enough heft behind it. Once, I’d even thrown it into a guy’s skull from across the room.
I whipped it at August. The blade plunged into his back, right between his shoulders, and he collapsed abruptly on the floor.
Preston first. Then the gun.
August’s knife in hand, I pushed up next to the bed and leaned over the detective. “Hey, Clarke,” I said as I cut away the first of the ropes. “I think I know who the killer is.”
Her laughter was more like a sob. “Me, too,” she said.
I was sawing through the second rope when she screamed, “Look out!”
The blast of a gun broke across her cry.
This time, August didn’t miss.
I went down hard, my right arm a burning mass of pain. Couldn’t tell exactly where the bullet had gone. But the second I hit the floor, something flew over my prone body.
Preston, lunging off the bed. Going for August.
I gritted my teeth and thrust my good arm into the blackness under the bed, feeling for the Glock. Praying I found it before he shot her. My fingers brushed cool metal.
Thunder filled the room behind me.
Enraged, I grabbed the Glock and hauled it out, flipped myself over — and saw the shattered hole in the plaster ceiling where the bullet went through.
Preston had wrestled the gun from August and was pointing it at him.
But she wasn’t pulling the trigger.
Before I could yell shoot him!, he’d grabbed her wrist and twisted. Wrenched the gun back. “Remember what they taught us at the academy, Preston?” he said as he raised the muzzle to her face. “Don’t hesitate.”