“No, there isn’t time,” Kristilynn ordered, choking back her fear. “Get out of here, now, before he comes back! Get help for us, for me!”
“But I could –”
They heard the door to the garage squeak.
“Now!” Kristilynn mouthed. “Move it!”
Terrified, Sandy scanned the room, unsure which way to run. A rush to the front door would have taken her too close to the garage, so she hurried toward the door facing the river, unlocked the bolt and disappeared into the darkness.
Coming in from the garage, Beau heard a door open in the living room. He ran, his long legs taking big steps, toward it. A quick glance across the room, and he saw Kristilynn on the floor in front of Sandy’s empty chair. The door facing the river stood ajar.
“Damn it to hell!” he shouted. The shotgun in his hand, he rushed through the open door.
The river lay straight ahead, twenty-feet from the front door. Beau saw no sign of Sandy, as he looked for her silhouette in the moonlight. He decided she must have run straight into the woods surrounding the house on both sides, a thick pine forest with deep underbrush.
Casting an eye over the shadows of the trees, looking for any sign of Sandy McCuskey, Beau’s anger built. The women had disobeyed him and taken advantage of his absence. Now he’d lost her. He didn’t know how much time he had before the police figured it all out and came for him. Now that they knew he was behind it, he felt certain they’d pressure Edith Mae.
“She’ll squeal like a pig,” Beau murmured. He knew his mother. She could say what she wanted about covering for him. She said she’d never turn him in. But staring down a prison sentence, she’d talk.
“That old woman wouldn’t ever give herself up for me or for no one else.”
Then he thought of Sandy. If his mother didn’t turn him in, Sandy would. She’d find a house to run to, get to someone who’d call the police and give him away.
He wanted to stay to find her, but in the dark the only light came from the moon reflecting on the river. He saw nothing move in the woods. No sign of where the old woman hid. Beau listened to the soft pulse of the current churning against the riverbank, smelled the moss and pine. It all seemed peaceful. But somewhere hidden in the woods, a frightened old woman watched him.
“Shit,” Beau hissed. Then he reconsidered. He’d never wanted Sandy McCuskey. She’d been an accident. What he wanted waited inside the river house, helpless on the living room floor. Or was she helpless?
Beau turned and ran back toward the house.
“I’m coming for you, bitch! Be ready, because I’m coming for you!”
As soon as Beau ran out the door, Kristilynn used the empty chair to pull herself into a seated position. She looked around for something, anything she could use. She grabbed a basket of yarn off a low table and found knitting needles. She snatched one of the needles, but worried the thin round metal would break too easily to make a good weapon.
“There has to be something else,” she murmured as she pulled herself around the floor. “Something stronger.”
She saw another basket, one in the corner near the computer desk, and thought it might be for sewing. Maybe it held a scissors. But it was too far away. She couldn’t get there quickly enough. Beau could return at any moment. Instead, she spied a phone on an end table, and she went for it. Hurry! Hurry!
As Kristilynn strained to reach the phone, Beau burst into the room, his face flush with rage.
Kristilynn rolled over onto her stomach, the hand with the knitting needle beneath her.
“It’s time! We’re getting the hell out of here.” He bent to grab her. As he did, her right arm jerked out from under her. The knitting needle plunged into his side inches above his left hip.
“Owwwwwwwwweeeeee!” he shouted, lurching upright. “Damn it to hell!”
He yanked the bloody knitting needle out and threw it into the kitchen. Then he leaned over, put the full weight of his body behind his fist and clubbed Kristilynn.
A pool of blood started seeping around her head onto the floor.
Forty-three
We called for backup as we drove toward the river. Del had three deputies en route, and the captain called two rangers and a few troopers in from the Conroe office. We converged in a gas station parking lot not far from the house and discussed the plan. We’d decided to park along the road a quarter mile from the house and then spread out and walk in from the woods, surrounding the house on all three land sides.
“Don’t underestimate Beau Whittle. This guy is capable of anything,” Del said. “If he makes any move that endangers the hostages, any way you can get a bead on him, shoot.”
As Del and I discussed our strategy, the others asked questions.
“Are you going to try to talk him out, Lieutenant?” one trooper asked.
“First we’re going to try to figure out where he is in the house, take him by surprise, bring him down fast,” I said. “The sheriff has an arrest warrant in place on the arson cases, so we’re covered.”
“What if he makes us?” a deputy asked.
“Then we’ll try to negotiate, while we look for an opening,” Del explained. “Our first priority is the safety of the hostages.”
Another of the troopers wanted to know, “How do you figure this guy, Lieutenant? Have you got a profile of him?”
“We do, but the wild card here is that we’re not sure of his endgame,” I admitted. “My belief is that Whittle may have already decided he won’t survive this, and he’s working toward that finale. This, of course, makes him even more dangerous. He has nothing to lose.”
“A suicide by cop scenario?”
I’d thought about that and hadn’t ruled it out. “Absolutely possible, but he’s going to want to kill the hostages first. And my guess is that he’s thought long and hard about how to do it. Everything this guy has done involves fire. He’s obsessed with it, drawn to it. For this to be satisfying for him, it’ll involve a blaze,” I explained. “I’m not saying he absolutely won’t do it at the house. He could torch the place. But the sheriff and I believe that he’ll look for a more theatrical setting.”
“He’s going to want to go out in a show?” a deputy asked.
“Absolutely,” Del said. “Everything Beau Whittle has done has been dramatic. Burning the churches, even lighting the last one with folks inside.”
“He’s not going to want to go out with a whimper,” I agreed. “That could be to our advantage, because he’ll want to delay until he’s ready.”
Del spread out the map and showed the others how to circle around from both sides to the house on the small country road and where to park. We’d start walking toward the driveway, splintering off and heading into the woods, angling in toward the house. “If we get up to the house unnoticed, the sheriff and I will approach and see if we can get eyes on him,” I said. “If he’s not with the two women, we’ll move in.”
“What if he is with them?” another deputy asked.
“We’ll try to talk him out,” I explained.
“Everyone got it?” Del asked. The others answered that they understood. “Then let’s go. Everyone stay safe.”
Del drove in from one side with half our back up, while I split off and took the opposite route with the rest of the group. I saw the headlights on his car until we switched them off a distance from the house. A little closer and we got out and started marching. As we walked, I signaled at the men, sending them one at a time into the woods. Del and I were going in at the most central point, on either side of the driveway.
I concentrated on the job and tried not to think about what we might find, what could happen. I had to focus and be ready for anything. Del and I reached our entry points simultaneously, as planned. He waved at me, and we walked into the trees.
In the woods, narrow shafts of moonlight filtered in around us. The dry foliage crunched under my feet, and the parched brush looked nearly skeletal. My leg skimmed a bush, and a handful of dead, broken branches fell to the
ground. I scanned to the sides and saw the trooper to my right coming my way. Del was invisible on my left in the dark woods.
As we grew closer, I saw Del again, and he nodded at me. We stopped behind the last trees before we were fully exposed. I glanced over the clearing around the house and saw no one.
There were lights on in the house, a small one-story with a high-pitched roof. I signaled Del, and we moved forward cautiously, low to the ground to not be easily seen. He went to one side of the house while I took the other, and we worked our way toward the front. The garage door was down.
I stretched up and looked in a window into the kitchen. I saw no one, but the house appeared torn apart, chairs on their sides, food strewn over the counters, and the floor covered with scattered garbage. The folks who owned the place weren’t going to be happy with their uninvited house guest’s manners.
I shuffled through the fallen leaves toward the front door. Del and I met there. He nodded, and I signaled to him. I stood back and raised my rifle as he grabbed the doorknob. He gave it a twist, pushed, and it swung open.
I followed him in.
We entered a small hall, then a living area. I noticed a door across the room open, on the river side. By then our men were stationed in the woods, in position in case Beau bolted out the front. As I veered to the right, I saw an overturned chair. On the floor near it, I noticed a pool of blood as wide as a softball.
I kept walking, rifle up, watching for Beau. He could come at us from any direction.
Out of the living room, I entered the kitchen. I swung behind the cabinets, opened the pantry door and looked for him hiding inside. No luck. From the kitchen, I opened another door, this into the garage. I saw an SUV’s outline in the darkness. I ran my hand over the wall in the most likely places and found the switch that turned on the overhead light.
The SUV was the RAV4 reported missing at the last fire, at St. Pete’s Methodist. I bent down and looked under the SUV, but saw no one hiding. The other side of the two-car garage was empty. I walked through and checked inside a large closet, empty except for racks of tools. I headed back into the house.
Del and I crossed paths in the living room.
“Anything?”
He shook his head. “They’re gone. Did you see the blood?”
I lowered my weapon. “Not good.”
We walked outside to rejoin the others. They’d found no signs of Beau or the women either.
Disappointed, I called the captain and brought him up to speed. I requested a forensics team to process the house. “So he took the women? Where to?” the captain asked. “You and the sheriff have a theory?”
“We haven’t gotten that far,” I admitted. “We were counting on finding them here.”
“Damn, this isn’t good!” the captain said.
Just then, I heard a woman’s voice, wobbly and tight, calling at us from the woods. “I’m Sandy McCuskey. Over here! I want to come out! Please, don’t shoot me!”
Forty-four
“Did he take Kristilynn?” Sandy shouted as she walked toward us.
A round but fragile-looking woman, she slumped slightly. Her clothes were bloodstained. She had ligature marks on her wrists and ankles and an angry looking egg that stuck out an inch or more from her forehead.
“Call an ambulance,” I ordered one of the troopers, and he went off to radio in the request.
“Mrs. McCuskey, I –”
“Call me Sandy,” she said, a weak attempt at a smile. She limped. Debris, dried leaves and twigs dusted her clothes. “Kristilynn untied me and told me to run. I twisted my knee when I got down on the ground under the trees with the bugs. I thought I felt a snake.” With that, she gave an involuntary shudder. “Are you that woman ranger?”
“Yes, I’m Lieutenant Armstrong, this is Sheriff Delga –”
“Kristilynn told Beau about you, Lieutenant. He said he saw you watching her house.” The old woman’s voice rose, and I couldn’t tell if it reflected anger or curiosity. “Why didn’t you see him take her?”
“I don’t have time to explain things now,” I said. “We need to know what you saw. We have to find Kristilynn.”
While Del and I listened, Sandy recounted the horror of her five hours with Beau, what he said and did. When she finished, I asked, “How’s Kristilynn? Physically?”
“Not good,” she said, shaking her head. “That piece of… I’m old and I shouldn’t swear, but he’s a –”
“What did he do to her?” I felt my heart sink when Sandy described how Beau butted both of them with the shotgun, breaking Kristilynn’s nose. I asked about the blood on the living room floor. “It’s a good-size puddle.”
“I don’t know what he did to her while I was outside,” she said. “But I think he must have hit her again, hard. Probably enough to knock her out.”
“Why do you say that?” I asked.
“When he carried her out, I watched from the woods. Kristilynn wasn’t moving. She looked like a rag doll in his arms.”
“So, she was unconscious?” Del asked.
Sandy looked at both of us and shrugged. “That or dead.”
Mrs. McCuskey had no insights into where Beau might take Kristilynn. Although he hinted at a plan, he never spelled it out. She described the car he was driving, a black Camry.
We didn’t have a lot of time to come up with ideas, but all I kept thinking about was where Beau would take Kristilynn. I knew he wanted that big show at the end, the drama of a fire. He might be planning it as his own funeral pyre, or it could be that he intended to flee after watching Kristilynn burn.
Maybe she was already dead.
“Okay,” Del said. “We need a plan.”
I thought back to Jimi Jo, what she’d told us about Beau’s list. “This is all I can come up with,” I admitted. “And it’s just my gut instinct, no certainty that –”
“That’s okay,” Del said, impatient that I hedged. “Just spit it out. We need something to go on, quick.”
“Jimi Jo said Beau had a particular hatred for Christ’s Garden and Chapel of the Pines. He wanted those two churches in ashes.”
“Yeah,” Del said. “I think those two pastors advised his mom to cut Beau off, get him out of her life. But there’s a half-dozen people guarding each of those churches. He wouldn’t –”
“Pull them off,” I said. Del appeared to not understand. “Pull them back so the churches look deserted, and have them watch from far enough away that he doesn’t see the guards.”
“You’re inviting Beau to burn them down?”
“We need to bait a trap and draw him in somewhere we can corner him.”
Del shook his head. “I hate to do that.”
“Del, it’s either risk the churches or Kristilynn’s life. And we’ll do our best to stop him before he does damage to either.”
The sheriff looked more than a little nervous, and I understood. In the next election, the county’s voters would come down hard on a sheriff who kept them from protecting a church torched by an arsonist. It might be hard to get the reasoning across in election-year sound bites. For a minute, he chewed on the idea.
“Del, I –”
“Let’s do it,” he said, about as pleased as if I’d suggested we lure Beau to Del’s own house. “I’ll set it up.”
While I called the captain to fill him in, I overheard Del on the phone going over the plan with a deputy he had stationed at Christ’s Garden. Del described the car, the black Camry, and said we were on our way. “We don’t know if he’s headed your way or not. He may still have one of the women, Kristilynn Cavanaugh. Or he may have dumped her. We’re not sure that she’s still alive.”
The preacher took the deputy’s phone, and I heard him shouting so loudly that Del held his away from his ear. “I will not tell my men to stand down!” the guy screamed. “You want me to sacrifice our church?”
Del sighed. “You know, we’ve gotta do the Christian thing here, pastor. We’ve gotta do our best to save that
woman’s life.”
Forty-five
Driving through the darkness, Beau considered his next move. He had Kristilynn in the trunk again. Her head bled where he hit her. He’d come down hard on her, and he figured his knuckle must have torn her scalp. Unconscious, she was breathing funny, and Beau wasn’t sure how bad he’d hurt her.
He thought about his mother, wondering what she did when the cops woke her up in the middle of the night to tell her about the two women he kidnapped. That’s the first place the ranger and the sheriff would go, he figured. They’d bothered Edith Mae before, and they’d probably go back and grill her again, to try to find out where he’d go.
“Ma’s told about the river house by now,” he whispered. He had few illusions about the old woman, understood who she was and that in a tight spot she’d save herself first. “Snitched me out. No doubt. And that old woman, Sandy, probably told them all about this car.”
He looked at the dashboard clock. Four a.m. In a few hours the sun would rise. Then people would wake up, turn on the news, and they’d all be on the lookout for him and the Camry.
The question was where to go. He thought of his list of churches, wondered if they were still being watched. Maybe they pulled the guards off to go to the river house? Maybe they hadn’t. The only way to know, he decided, was to drive out to one and look. But if the cops did know about the car, they’d be watching for the Camry.
Beau pulled off the highway and into the first small town he saw, circled through looking for a car that looked accessible, one far enough away from a house so that the owners wouldn’t hear him rig it to start. The last thing he needed was to wake up some guy who’d grab a gun and come after him.
“I’m not dying until I’m ready to die,” he whispered. “I’m gonna finish this first.”
He found nothing suitable, so he continued on into another small town. This time he locked on a six-unit senior citizen’s apartment with a rear parking area.
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