“What the hell are they doing out there? See if there are any abandoned buildings, churches. Try churches first,” Jack directed.
Zachery hung up the phone and looked at Jack. “We will find them. Everything will be okay.”
“Stop saying that.” Jack pulled out his cigarette pack and lit one. After inhaling deeply, he said, “Amanda Knowles found out Keith wasn’t her real father—” He pressed harder on the gas.
God, how I hoped Nadia had tracked the call and at minimum that I had saved a man’s life.
I heard voices from outside the coffin but only caught mumbled words.
I needed out. The haziness had somewhat cleared, and it was easier to assess my options. I thought of punching through the lid of the coffin but realized the unlikelihood of that. The space was too tight to muster a punch or a kick that would contain enough strength. On top of which, wood coffins were built to withstand six feet of dirt and not cave in. Unfortunately, my only way out was if someone let me out.
If I yelled and screamed, it would take what little bit of oxygen I had left. I would risk killing myself. If I stayed quiet Amanda may leave me in here to die.
I had to think of how she operated. She had learned from Bingham. She would be organized. But Paige and I had thrown confusion into her plans making her deviate course and improvise. She had crossed over from being in control of her emotions to an illogical and disorganized state of mind. At this point, she would prove her point and that might mean killing us.
Paige had yelled out there was another burial site and that Amanda had a gun. If Amanda had lost all control she would have just shot Paige but she hadn’t.
The vibrations of footsteps were headed toward me. The lock on the casket hit the wood. As the lid opened, my eyes squinted from the brightness.
Amanda held a gun on me. “Get out now. And do as I say.”
“Where’s Paige?”
“She’s sleeping.”
“Did you kill her?” Rage heated my earlobes and raised the hairs on my neck.
“Get out and do as I say.” Her fiery red hair sprung as wild flames around her face.
I held up both arms, and got out of the coffin.
“In there.” Amanda cocked her head toward the corner alcove, but her eyes and the gun remained fixed on me.
I walked to the corner and looked at the circular grave. Images flashed through my mind of the sites from Salt Lick and the bodies of the victims.
“In that door.”
Inside Paige sat on the floor, her legs bound and her arms behind her back. Her eyes were covered. There was a gurney, and I recognized the man on it. There were two vertical slashes in his torso already.
“Daddy, we have two friends who will be joining us.” Amanda graced his forehead with the touch of her fingers.
Jack pounded on the door to Keith Knowles’ house. “FBI! Answer the door!”
Both he and Zachery held their guns ready to fire.
“We’re going in.” Jack stepped back and looked to Zachery who charged at the door. It opened, and Zachery had to catch his balance from the momentum.
“Where’s your father?” Jack asked the question as he entered the house with Zachery behind him.
“You can’t just come in—”
“Where is your father?” Jack repeated the question, his nose gracing the end of Reggie Knowles’.
“He’s not home.”
“Do you have any idea where he’d be?”
Reggie shook his head.
“Listen, Kid, we need you to keep calm. We have reason to believe your sister has him.”
“Has him?”
“Do you have any idea where she would take him?”
“Take him?”
Jack pushed Reggie into a hallway wall. With one hand splayed on Reggie’s chest and the other wielding the gun, he said, “Anywhere special to her?”
“I can’t think of any—”
Jack’s cell rang. He kept the eye contact with Reggie as he backed up, and answered. “Agent Harper.” He balanced the phone between his ear and shoulder and clipped his gun back in the holster.
“I found a church on Utopia Road up around where the signal triangulated. It’s been abandoned for five years now. Its name used to be The Redeemer Church of Christ.”
“Send the directions to my phone.”
There was no response.
“Nadia?”
“I just got the financials back on Lori Carter, Bingham’s sister. You’re not going to believe this, but in her Will she left a few hundred thousand to Amanda Knowles. Hang on a second. There was a stipulation. She was to buy the church on Utopia Road.”
“That’s where we’ll find them.”
Jack went back inside. “Reggie, you’re coming with us.”
“What? Why? What did I do?”
“We need to keep an eye on you.”
Zachery took Reggie’s arm and guided him to the squad car.
Behind the wheel, Jack asked Reggie, “Does your father have a cell phone?”
“Yeah.”
“We’ll need that number.”
He rhymed it off and Zachery dialed.
I got down on the floor beside Paige and brushed a hand on her arm, doing so carefully as to not alert Amanda.
Keith Knowles lay sedated, as his chest rose and fell. Beside the cot, a table held a scalpel, a bottle of rubbing alcohol, a jar of cotton swabs, and a towel stained with blood.
“What are you looking at?” Amanda waved the gun at me. “You try to understand, and you will fail. You could never understand why I do this.”
The fire in her eyes advised my instinct that it was best to remain silent.
She kept the gun on Paige and me as she brushed the back of her free hand along her father’s hairline. “He deserves to die, to gain repentance, to be forgiven.”
“You do God’s work.”
She turned to face me. She studied my face, the contortion of my mouth, my eyes. “That’s right.”
“All the people you killed deserved to die.”
Amanda smiled. “Yes, that is right.” Another brush of her hand caressed her father’s head.
As a narcissist, appeal to her intelligence, make her feel unique, elevate her. “Help me to understand.”
The smile disappeared. The hand came off her father’s head.
“Did he make you feel less than perfect?”
Amanda’s facial expression hardened, and then fell. “Keep quiet!”
I held out my hands. “Please let her go. It will show a sign of good faith to let her go.”
“No!”
“They will be here soon.”
“You told them where I am? You have sinned!” Spittle flew from her mouth.
“It’s the FBI. They have ways of finding people.” I used the term they in an effort to separate Paige and I and make us more relatable to Amanda.
“They won’t find us here.” She picked up the scalpel from the table, wielding it in the hand that had moments ago caressed her father’s brow. “You don’t seem to understand that I’m in control here, not you, not the FBI.” She moved closer to her father. “You made me do this to him.” She slid the knife into his torso, holding the skin taunt with the side of the other hand that held the gun. The man let out a moan that turned into a wail. “See what you made me do.”
Her attention was more on her father than on us. She laid the gun on an angle across the man’s torso, and although her hand was close to it, she wasn’t in control of the weapon. This was my opening except I knew the moment I’d move she’d turn on me with both the gun and the knife. There wasn’t much time to think about it. I had to act.
Amanda moved closer to her father. She looked down on him affectionately, yet there was something more in her eyes. She was losing control, quickly. If I didn’t move now, the man would die.
I brushed a hand on Paige’s thigh trying to communicate through touch and energy that I was making a move.
“Ssh,
don’t cry daddy.” Amanda caressed his forehead.
The man’s moans were low as if his sedation kept him groggy and not fully aware of the level of pain his body was experiencing.
Amanda watched over him, hovering there as a loved one does a sick relative in a hospital. I moved toward her slowly still uncertain how I was going to gain the control in the room.
“The phone continually rings straight to voicemail.” Zachery referred to Keith Knowles’ cell.
“She’s got him.” Jack pushed the gas on the patrol car harder. They had called in back-up, and their sirens wailed through the city streets and out to the country roads, serving as a reminder that law enforcement couldn’t stop all evil from happening but could hopefully hold the guilty accountable and prevent some of it.
“How did your sister know that Keith isn’t her father?” Jack glanced in the rearview mirror to their captive passenger.
“What do you mean not her father?” Reggie curled his lips backward and up toward his nose.
“You didn’t know,” Zachery said, shifting in his seat and looking through the bars separating the front from the back.
“No. But she was always different from the rest of us. I just thought she was the black sheep. They say every family has one.”
“She never said anything to you about finding herself, or who she was.” Zachery did his best to lead the man along.
“Mandy always talked about that sort of crap. How can you find yourself? Are you lost? Anyway, a while back she got on it more. Started withdrawing from us.”
Zachery turned back around to face the road.
Jack glanced over at him. “She did find out the man she thought was her father wasn’t.”
Reggie’s voice came from the back. “She got in arguments with dad more. I don’t know what about, but they’d yell for hours until one of them would storm from the house. Normally it was Mandy. She has a temper, especially when she doesn’t get her way or people can’t relate to her standpoint.”
Jack looked back in the rearview to the caravan following behind them—five more squad cars and two ambulances. He was ready to take this woman down, save a man’s life, and get his team back alive.
My heartbeat sounded in my ears, dulling my sense of hearing, yet awakening my perception in other areas. Amanda’s movements seemed to slow down. I broke down her passes in segments. Her attention was solidified on her father. It was almost as if Paige and I no longer existed.
“You could have told me. I would have forgiven you.” Her words came out in a whisper.
She moved the knife over his torso again. Before she lowered the blade, the time to act was now. I rose to my feet quickly and enforced a roundhouse kick to the small of her back. She let out a roaring scream and crumpled to the ground. Her gun fell just out of reach. The blade remained in her hand.
“You must pay!” She slinked across the floor toward me, the bloody knife jabbing at the air, hungry to strike more flesh.
I closed the distance between us careful not to get slashed by the swaying blade. The gun was near Paige’s feet, four feet away. Amanda must have noticed my calculating as she made a move toward it. I lunged across the floor at her and attempted to pin her to the ground. The blade flew wildly, swiping the air with deadly force. She squirmed and moved beneath me, trying to get control, trying to strike me. I lost grip on her. The blade swiped past my head. She kneed me in the groin. With it the pain took my clear vision but reinforced my desire to survive.
“You can’t stop God’s work.” Amanda made a move for the gun, and I roped my hands around her ankles.
Her legs kicked in an attempt to free herself and buy the other required few inches to reach the gun. I pulled back on her, but she extended and reached the gun. The blade dropped to the ground. The gun pointed on me.
“Get off me or I will shoot her!” Amanda glanced at Paige, but for too brief a time for me to make any movement toward her. If I did, I’d have a bullet between the eyes.
“I will do what I came here to do.” Amanda scooped the knife from the ground and rose to full height. Her attention was on me, the gun aimed at my forehead. “Try something like that again, and they’ll be collecting your brain matter from the floor.”
I sat there, filtering dirt through my fingers, feeling powerless. But as Amanda brushed the skirt of the cot, I noticed a black mass under the bed. She moved more to the right, and the light in the room revealed its identity. This would be how we’d get out of here alive.
Jack and Zachery noticed the rundown church from a ways down the road.
He turned on the radio to address the other cars. “Sirens off now!”
“Copy.” The officer from the other cars came back, even though it wasn’t necessary as everything went to silence.
Jack looked to Zachery. “We don’t need to scare Amanda into doing something. Her mind works differently. If she feels threatened, she won’t back off; she’ll go at it stronger which means no one will walk out—”
“You think she’s going to kill dad,” Reggie interrupted.
A smirk lifted the corner of my mouth as I viewed the find as a buoy among stormy seas.
Amanda’s attention had become fixed on her father again.
I moved across the floor slowly, inching my way toward the underside of the bed. My fingers grazed the grip of the gun. If I could get just a little closer…
A foot kicked me in the abdomen. I curled as a poked caterpillar, both of my hands cradling my gut.
“You must want to die.” She aimed the gun on me; a flicker in her eyes darkened them. She sat the gun on her father’s torso and came at me with the scalpel. “You want to feel their pain before you go? Be cleansed of your sins?” She came down toward me, the knife gripped tightly in her hands.
“Were they all sinners?” I had to buy time for the knot to untie from my core.
“Yes, I told you.”
“Even Sally Windermere?”
“She was a fornicator.” Amanda came down on top of me and straddled my torso.
“And she alone was guilty? Why not her fiancé too?”
Amanda smiled. “It was a lady’s turn to pay for sins. Now it is a man’s. But plans can be modified. You, her—,” she bobbed her head backward to gesture at Paige, “—and then him. The man who called himself father.”
The man who called himself father? My suspicions had been completely accurate, but I tested them further. “Why him?”
“He committed the greatest sin. Hypocrisy. He pretended to be my father when he wasn’t. Lance is.”
Hearing the verbal confirmation sent images and audio through my mind as a slideshow. Reggie had said Keith may have appeared righteous, but added the man wasn’t that pure, and the way Amanda came to Bingham’s defense at the college, terming him a good friend. But what cemented my assumption was her smirk and how it held a familiarity that had first transported me to Bingham. Something in her eyes brought a sense of déjà vu. “I see the resemblance.” I extended my arms to reach a gun. My fingertips fell shy of contact.
“You’re being snide.”
“I’m being truthful. You’re intelligent like he is.”
“Again flattery only works on the weak-minded.” She leaned down further over me. “Are you ready to die?”
The blade lowered. I reached for the gun. The weight didn’t feel right. I pulled the trigger, heard the click. Amanda laughed. “You didn’t think I’d be stupid enough to leave it loaded?”
I gripped on the wrist of her hand that held the knife.
“You can’t stop me!”
I squeezed it tighter. Amanda screamed. Her hand released the knife. She came at my throat with both hands. I held her back with one arm and tossed the knife toward the corner where Paige sat.
“To your left,” I called out.
“No!” Amanda rose from me and charged towards Paige. I took the gun from her father’s torso, aimed directly at her brain stem and pulled the trigger.
Amanda�
��s body flew forward.
“Brandon!”
I hurried over and pulled the dead woman off Paige. I lifted Paige’s blindfold. “The nightmare’s over.”
Paige took a deep breath.
I traced a finger down her nose and went to kiss her lips.
“Great job, Kid.”
I turned around to see Jack, Zachery, and a few uniforms standing behind them.
“I catch the serial killer and I’m still Kid?”
Paige smiled at me as I undid the ropes on her.
“You have to earn a name, Kid.”
Paramedics came in the room and tended to Mr. Knowles. I pulled up from my haunches, helped Paige up, and went over to Jack. “He’s not her real father.”
Jack’s smile slanted higher to the right, his eyes pinched. He put a hand on my shoulder. “Yeah, we know, Kid. Lance Bingham is. Turns out Anna Knowles had an affair on her husband. When she wouldn’t leave him to be with Bingham, he snapped and saw it as his job to punish her.”
“Anna was Bingham’s stressor.”
“And when Amanda found out about the lie, she sought out her real father. Obviously she found someone she could relate to.”
“Obviously,” I said.
All of us glanced over at the paramedics working on Keith Knowles.
“Of course somehow you pieced this all together.” Jack’s eyes held the question, how.
“Well, I had a bit of time to think. If Amanda was Bingham’s daughter, it would create a strong enough bond to make her capable of such horrible things. She would follow in his footsteps to feel like she belonged. With her mother dead and uncertain who her real father was, she’d feel like she lived her life with strangers. She was the perfect find for Bingham.”
“Hmm.”
A paramedic said to us, “Looks like he’s going to be alright. His blood pressure is a little low, but we’ll get him going on an IV for his blood sugars. A few days rest, and some stitches, and he’ll be fine.”
I couldn’t help but think as they loaded the man on a stretcher how he might be fine physically down the road, but psychologically, he’d have a long road ahead of him. I know I did.
Eleven (Brandon Fisher FBI Series #1) Page 33