Madison explained everything from the beginning. She told him about the phone call to Felicity from the anonymous caller and how the wording matched the note left on her door. She explained about Ryan documenting her activities at the request of someone who fit Ken’s description and claimed to be a cop. She explained about Felicity and Josie and how Felicity had said she was confronting him and he was a cop.
“I’m covered in blood, Tom. Did Ken used to be a cop?”
Tom’s voice was getting darker as it dawned on him what had occurred. “Yes, he used to be. In Sacramento. A long time ago. I never really checked into it. He was just a guy at the bar.”
“But you told him that you had stalked me?”
“What? No! I would never share that kind of information with a guy I know from a bar. I mentioned you, that you were a cool person or something, but it was just guys talking at a bar.”
This part could wait, but Madison wondered if Ken had been tailing Tom as well and if that’s how he knew Tom had stalked Madison.
“Did you guys talk about Samantha’s disappearance?”
“Probably; that was a pretty big story in the news. Other people asked me about the disappearance too. You asked me about it.”
Madison thought for a minute. Some of these details would have to get sorted out later, but they would bug her until they made sense. “Did you tell him I was investigating it? About the notes left on my door?”
“No, not at all. I’m telling you: he’s a guy in the bar. I don’t talk about my personal life.”
“You said you’d known him a long time. How long is a long time?”
“Did I? I’ve known him for a couple of years. I guess sometimes it’s just something you say; I’ve known him for a while.”
So Ken could have been stalking Madison since she first started tweeting about the case, to see how much she knew, and he could have seen Tom sitting outside her apartment. That must have been a bonus. San Diego was a pretty small town, when it came down to it. People knew each other. And bad guys could have good luck too.
“What do we do now?” Madison said.
“I’m going to cancel the BOLO on you, and then I’m going to find out who put it out on you in the first place. We don’t need a warrant from a judge for a BOLO, but we should have a good goddamn reason for it. Then I’m going to put an actual BOLO out on Ken. So wait … you thought this was me? That I had put the BOLO out on you?”
“Not my finest hour, Tom, but we can go over that later. Can we catch a murderer first?”
“Okay. Where will you be?”
Where would she be? That was an excellent question. She didn’t have to hide from the police anymore. She should probably get her car out of the garage at that house pretty quickly before she found herself charged with breaking and entering. But she had to get this blood off her. It was starting to make her skin crawl.
“I’m going to be at home. I’ll be careful.”
“Okay. Is this number you’re calling me from a good number to reach you?”
Madison missed her phone. She would have to get a new one. “Yes, this is fine. I can get texts on it. Can you text me when the BOLO is canceled?”
“Sure.” They were silent on the phone for a minute. So much to say. Not the time. They said goodbye and disconnected.
Madison couldn’t sit in this filth any longer. She figured that if there was an odd patrol officer who happened to drive by and check her apartment based on the BOLO—unlikely anyway—she could have them call Tom and she wouldn’t get arrested. She wanted to be back in her apartment.
She locked the BMW and left it on the street. She walked through the garden and up the stairs. The Santa Ana winds had picked up during the night, and it was dry and breezy. She had a painted wooden plaque hanging from the overhang: it had a moon face on one side and a sun face on the other. It was twisting in the wind and scraping against a piece of wood. She unlocked her front door and went inside, shutting and locking it behind her. She turned on the lamp sitting on her desk and threw her purse down. She didn’t want to sit on any of her furniture while covered in blood. She stripped off her clothes and walked into the shower.
Her life had changed so much in forty-eight hours. She felt a little bit like she was going into shock. She washed her hair and scrubbed her arms and fingernails. She wanted to hear from Tom that the BOLO had been canceled, but she figured it was just a matter of paperwork at this point. What she really wanted was for Tom to find Ken. Now that she knew what Ken was capable of, she had to take seriously the note he had left on her door. It wasn’t just a threat.
She got out of the shower and put on a clean pair of yoga pants and a white T-shirt—her uniform when she was at home. Her hair was wet, so she had it up in a towel. She could hear the wind outside, mixed with the waves. The scratching of the sun/moon plaque on her front porch was starting to creep her out. Maybe she shouldn’t have come home alone. Maybe she should have asked Tom to send a patrol car; but of course, when she was talking to Tom, she had still been wanted by the police, so that would’ve been a little bit like putting a fox in charge of the hen house. Normally she would call Dave to come over, but she didn’t even know his phone number by heart, and anyway he had a girlfriend now. She took her hair out of the towel and hung the towel up. She was starving. She walked out of the bedroom, and Ken was standing in her living room.
“You really need to get a better lock on that front door.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
If Madison screamed really loudly, it was possible Ryan would hear her. But there was so much wind tonight, and the waves were so loud, that she didn’t think her screams would make it over there. And then she would have lost her one chance to save her life. Ken would certainly kill her immediately to shut her up, just like he had tried to do with Felicity. She needed to figure out how to keep herself alive as long as possible.
She knew instinctively that she couldn’t act scared. She’d fallen apart when she saw Ryan’s journal of her activities; now was the time for steely calm and determination. Her life depended on it. Ken was a monster that thrived on fear. It was part of the high that he got. It was the power over another.
“Good locks are only necessary as long as there are people like you.”
He ignored her. “You are a busy little girl. I was looking for you everywhere, and then you turned up at the wrong place”—he shouted the last two words—“and messed up the fun I was about to have.” Ken was looking behind her desk along the wall. Madison was standing in the entryway to the bedroom area. She was afraid to move. “There they are!” He pulled out a bunch of drapery cords, cut into pieces. “I left these here the other day, just in case I’d be back and might need them.”
She could not allow him to tie her up.
“Are you afraid of a girl, Ken? You have to tie her up in order to have a conversation with her?”
He began laying the pieces of cord out on her desk, his gloved hands grasping each piece and releasing it almost tenderly and then patting it flat. “I wasn’t planning to have a conversation with you. And don’t try any of your tricks on me. I’m in control now.” It was like he was possessed. Madison was shocked—he was a completely different person than the one she’d met and spoken to before. This person was exuding evil; the guy she’d met before was charming. Apparently he had an ability to change personalities like a chameleon, or like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
“I didn’t say you weren’t in control. Clearly you’re in control.” That was important to guys like this. She stood without moving at the entrance to the bedroom. She hoped that if she didn’t seem like she was trying to get away, she could keep him from feeling like he had to tie her up. She couldn’t make it past him to the front door anyway; her apartment was so small that if she made any sudden movement, he could grab her and overpower her in seconds. Better to give him a sense of security.
“Hey, so how did you figure out where I lived?” Keep him talking. If he was talking, he wasn’t killing her.<
br />
“That part was easy. You gave me a scare: the private investigator tweeting about the bouncers at Hank’s. You were working a little too hard to find me and getting a little too close. I had to find out more about you. So I just took your name from your Twitter account and had a cop friend get me your address. Tom isn’t the only cop I know. Easy. And then I saw you.” He whistled through his teeth. “And you look like that. And smart too. And your downstairs neighbor, the brain surgeon, all it took was a hundred dollars a week for him to sell you out. Those notes, weren’t those great?” It had been a game to him. Taunting her with the notes. Seeing what she would do.
Having finished straightening each cord on the desk, he picked up the uppermost cord and started to make a knot in each end.
The Smith & Wesson was in her purse, sitting on her desk, right next to him. The one she’d gotten a license to carry. The one with the hollow-point pink-tipped bullets that would stop a bear. And it was out of her reach. She couldn’t do anything that would cause a physical altercation between them; she just wouldn’t win a fight against a guy. She had to be smart.
Keep him talking. “Did you know Tom before you found out about me?”
He finished with one cord and picked up another. He seemed eerily calm. It was like he’d come over to hang out with her. The longer she kept him talking, the longer she stayed alive.
“Yeah, how about that?” he said. “Not too much of a coincidence, not really. I know all the cops. But I did feel quite lucky the time I saw him outside your apartment, watching you. That was good info to have.”
“Why did you ask me to help you with the Rescue Mission thing? The woman, Sylvia, who needed help picking up her kids from school?”
He snickered. “I can’t believe you fell for that.” He chuckled again. “I made all of that up because people like you think if someone is willing to help, then they’re a good person.”
Madison did think that. But he wasn’t willing to help; it was all a facade. But it had worked. She had trusted him.
“How did you get Samantha into your car?”
He seemed proud of this accomplishment. “She was so drunk. I met up with her on the sidewalk, and she recognized me from the bar. I told her that I would give her a ride home. She got right into my car. Like taking candy from a baby. The ones I did in Sacramento were much harder. I was going to stop when I moved down here, but, well, I didn’t.”
So there were other deaths. Other women who’d been killed. He was a serial killer. Madison wished there was a way to leave this information for Tom in case she didn’t make it. Her head was muddled, trying to think of a way out, trying to think of a weapon she could use on him. But she was afraid to move from her spot. Any move she made had to be calculated toward her survival.
Madison realized he was tying special knots at the ends of the long cords; they were like the knots in the cords that had tied up Felicity. It must be part of a ritual.
“Where’s that surfer friend when you need him, right? I hated seeing those photos of him coming down your stairs after he’d been with you.”
Madison got the feeling there was something about her that was different from his other victims.
“Jealous much?” she said.
Her attempt to act confident and unafraid backfired. Ken’s face burst red, and spit flew out of his mouth as he spoke. “Shut the fuck up! You know, I wasn’t going to kill you. Not at first. I was going to talk to you. Maybe ask you out. But then I saw how you really are. You think you’re so much better than us regular guys, right? Even Tom. You walk around laughing at the rest of us mortals, right?”
This last was said with such violence that Madison flinched.
“Oh, you’re scared now, right? Well, just wait.” He finished tying the last cord.
Despite her fear, Madison couldn’t help but recognize the refrain coming out of his mouth: she was a girl, and so she owed him something. She was required to be sweet and loving and cater to a man’s needs and whims. And when she didn’t, she was a stuck-up bitch.
“Why didn’t you just kill me when I followed you to your yard in Spring Valley?”
“Oh, I would have, believe me. I was not happy that you found out where I lived. But too many witnesses.” He started walking toward Madison. “Now this can be easy, or it can be hard. It will hurt more if you fight back.”
Madison started to back up. If she kept going, she would hit her bed and fall on it, which would make things easier for him. There was no escape this way, just her bed and her tiny bathroom and a window she couldn’t fit through even if she didn’t mind the broken back when she hit the driveway. And yet something was happening. A plan. A way out.
When Madison’s father died, she’d thought she’d never hear his voice again—his deep, booming voice that anyone could recognize anywhere. The voice she’d heard down the hall at two years old, when she’d been left overnight in the hospital with a blood clot in her lung, left perhaps forever, as far as she knew, the voice that told her he was there and everything would be okay. She’d thought she’d never hear it again, but she’d been wrong: she heard it in her dreams. And she was hearing it right then.
Don’t you dare give up, Madison Kelly.
She stepped slowly, backward, backward, backward.
Her foot hit her bed, and she fell back onto it and everything went into slow motion. She saw her antique dressing table, made of oak with an oval mirror that was heavier than sin. She had it across from her bed so that she always fell asleep thinking about the women who had sat at it: putting on makeup or reading a book, their hopes and dreams and inherent losses of life all seeped into the oak, and the strength they’d garnered as a result reflected back in the mirror. Madison needed that strength now because she was truly afraid.
Madison saw now what bravery really was: not giving up. It wasn’t not being afraid. Everyone was afraid. Bravery was keeping on despite all odds. It was risking lying back on the bed, showing her belly, in the most primal of passive stances, in order to ultimately save herself. For in her love of old things was an impulse purchase she’d made and nearly forgotten about: a Czech .25 automatic pistol built in 1947 that was only the size of her palm. It was a relic, really: famously used by spies in the Cold War era, the kind of gun the guy had hidden in his sock after he’d been searched for weapons. She’d never thought of carrying it because it had no safety and she didn’t want to reach into her purse and shoot herself. It required just the slightest pressure to start the eight automatic bullets flying. It hadn’t fit in her safe, and on a whim she’d stuck it on a magnet underneath the bedside table.
She stared at Ken as he approached her. His eyes lit up at the sight of her on her bed, just like a girlfriend, the pieces of knotted cord in his hand perhaps unnecessary after all; he paused to consider his options. In one smooth motion Madison rolled to her right, reached under the table, grabbed the gun off the magnet and brought it up and aimed at his central mass. She emptied the clip into his chest. His arms flew up like they were choreographed: he was the dancing man outside a car dealership, arms flailing and wild, legs akimbo, silently discoing to a distant beat. The arms went up one last time before the air was let out of him … whoooosh. He fell quietly, almost gracefully, his body melting into a pool of malevolence onto the floor.
Madison’s ears were ringing from the gunshots. She’d never fired a gun outside of a range, and it was loud. She leaped up and looked down at him, ready to run for her purse in the other room if she needed more bullets from a bigger gun. But he didn’t move. His eyes looked at her, surprised. He hadn’t expected that. She waited. His eyes slowly closed. She stood watching as the blood poured out of the gaping hole in his chest. She’d always wondered how she would feel. She’d done it. She had actually taken a life.
“Damn,” she said. “That’s gonna leave a stain.”
She stepped over the body to go call Tom.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
It had been a long time since Madison
had been up for the sunrise; much longer since she’d been outside to watch it. She sat on her steps with one of those aluminum reflective blankets, although she thought blanket was too kind a word for it. She felt like she was sitting under a piece of tinfoil. Was there really any point to these things? Or did they just let passersby know something terrible had happened to that person and they might be in shock?
Tom had gotten there even before the first patrol car. She’d dropped the gun right next to the body and gone to sit on the steps. When you told the 911 operator that you’d just shot someone, it was always best to think through your next move carefully. The police could be slightly on edge when arriving to the scene of a shooting. So she was glad it was Tom—with everything they’d been through, he still knew she wouldn’t shoot him.
Tom came out of her apartment. “The coroner is almost done.” Madison scooted over so he could sit down next to her on the steps. They both misjudged the space, and his right hip smashed into her; he stood and chose the step above her instead. They sat for a minute without talking.
“I asked the detective that caught the case to let you sleep for a few hours before he took your statement. He wasn’t inclined to allow that. He has a lot of work to do.”
Madison coughed. She’d felt like something was caught in her throat since she’d shot him. Was it gunpowder? Leftover adrenaline? “I don’t need a lawyer, right?”
“I mean, you’re asking the wrong guy. I don’t think suspects should ever get lawyers.”
Tom was making a joke but Madison was too tired to find it funny. She tried to make a “ha” sound, but it came out as a cough.
“No, you don’t need a lawyer. Are you kidding? You’re a hero. We got a warrant for his yard in Spring Valley, and they’re searching it now. Whaddya think they’ll find? And with his comment about Sacramento, I’m sure there are some unsolved cases that are about to get solved. No, you don’t need a lawyer. I mean, maybe you shoulda had a hunting license for vermin, but …”
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