Next Girl to Die

by Dea Poirier

  “What do you have to do? You have to kill?” I ask, trying to coax him into talking to me more.

  “These Christ-cunts are all alike,” he spits. “They go in there to sing their hymns and beg for forgiveness, and then they come out to lead their double lives.” He stalks closer.

  “What’s your problem with church?” I ask, curiosity vanquishing the fear from my voice. I knew the killer had an issue with the church, because he cut off the tattoos. But what caused it?

  “They’re all guilty of something. They try to use God to absolve themselves. But I know the darkness in their hearts. He can’t help them. Only I can,” he says.

  The boat rocks, water lapping at the hull. Though there’s not much of a breeze, the water is choppier than I would expect on a night as clear as this.

  “How can you help them?” I twist my wrist against the rope, hoping to find a weakness, but there’s none.

  “By killing them so they can’t hurt anyone else,” he explains, and he starts to slam something hard into the hull of the boat until water hisses and sputters onto the deck. “I can’t choke you—that’s a punishment for them. And you’re not guilty of their crimes. But the sea, the sea will take you,” he says, and all the adrenaline in my blood gives way to ice. He’s going to let me drown. I’m not sure if that’s a worse fate than being strangled. “You weren’t like the others. You didn’t act like her. I thought you were different,” he mumbles.

  “Who?” I ask. But he doesn’t answer me; he just keeps banging something hard into the hull of the boat. “Please, stop this now. We can talk this out,” I plead.

  “I didn’t want to kill you. I want you to know that. You’re making me do this.”

  “What about the others? Did they make you do it too?”

  He’s silent for a long time. Then he says, “I had to kill them. If I didn’t, my sister came back. She was the first I punished. After that, she cursed me.”

  “Wha—” I start to ask, but he cuts me off.

  “It’s too late,” he says as he steps in front of me.

  “Frank, please,” I plead, and my voice cracks.

  He grabs onto a line, pulling a tethered boat closer, and steps out onto the deck. A few seconds and a roar of an engine later, he disappears into the darkness. Cold water laps at my feet, and I struggle against the ropes and the chair he’s bound me to. No matter how much I struggle, it doesn’t budge. With every rapid beat of my heart, the water rises higher. My head swims as panic takes over.

  The sea rises higher, like cold fingers tightening around my legs. I struggle, and my chair topples to the side. Water rushes around my side, shoulder. My head lolls against the deck. The more adrenaline pours into my blood, the more I realize I can’t stop this. The more I move, the more my skin burns. Fibers from the ropes dig into my flesh, and I know if I get out of this, I’ll be rubbed raw. The water laps against my side, rising higher. Reflexively, I suck in a sharp breath as the icy water bites into my flesh.

  I lurch hard against the restraints on my ankles, and I’m able to pull out a bit of slack. My heart races, and hope rises in the back of my mind. I can do this. I can get out. My wrists ache as I tug at them, but with each movement, I’m getting more room to move. I kick hard again, the water splashing inside the boat.

  With the cold of the water and the way it’s rising, I’ve got only minutes before hypothermia kills me. A wave of adrenaline hits me, and I pull hard enough to free my right hand. With my hand free, I pull on the ropes holding my left. I get free just as the water lapping against the left side of my face floods my mouth. Realization hits me all at once. We’re at least one hundred yards from the shore. In normal conditions, I could swim that with no problem, but in freezing water it’s another story. With the boat halfway submerged, I force myself forward and out, throwing my body fully into the water. Goose bumps dot my arms, my legs. The more I try to propel myself through the icy water, the heavier my limbs become. I flop onto my back, floating and kicking myself toward the beach. I alternate between front and back as I try desperately to fight the cold and stay afloat. By the time I reach the shore, my body is as stiff as stone.

  I crawl up the beach near the park, and a wave of hope hits me, propelling me. If I can go a little further, I can reach Jason. He’s on patrol there tonight. When I make it through the tree line, the beam of his flashlight cuts through the dark night 150 yards in front of me.

  “Jason,” I call.

  The light moves toward me, and he jogs, the beam bouncing. He stops dead in his tracks when he sees me. A second later Noah jogs up beside him and helps me to my feet.

  “It’s Frank,” is all I can manage to say through the waves of shivers racking my body, though Jason already knows. With his help, I climb in the patrol car. When he slides in, he starts the car and turns the heat off. As desperate as I am to warm up, I know why he’s doing it. If a person with hypothermia is heated too quickly, they can go into shock and die.

  “I’m going to take you to the hospital, and then—”

  “The hell you are. We’re going to get Frank now,” I growl and explain the situation fully, even though I’m overcome by spasms. This perp isn’t getting away from me. The asshole killed my sister and then tried to kill me. I’m taking him down now.

  “We need to at least call for backup,” he says.

  I agree, and after we’re done calling Sergeant Michaels, I send Noah to get me dry clothes so I don’t end up with pneumonia—not to mention it wouldn’t be comfortable to start an interrogation soaking wet.

  When we pull up to Frank’s shop, Sergeant Michaels and Marshall drive in behind us. Though Jason has been slowly cranking up the heat for the last ten minutes, I don’t feel any warmer. My muscles are seized with shivers, and my damp clothes cling to me like a second skin. My heart pounds, and I reach for the car door. I take a deep breath to ready myself.

  As a group, we move to the front of Sergeant Michaels’s squad car. It takes a few seconds for us to coordinate. Though I want to pull my gun, kick in the door, and clock Frank across the face, that’s not going to happen. Sergeant Michaels is determined to go in first. We all draw our rigs.

  “Claire, you watch around back in case he goes out there,” Sergeant Michaels says.

  Frustration ripples through me. I want to be in the front, cuffing him. Not waiting around back. And though I try to fight him on it, he won’t listen.

  Sergeant Michaels’s knocks resonate through the house, and the scuffs inside warn me of movement. I strain my ears as I try to listen over the pounding. My pulse skyrockets as anticipation boils inside me. He should have answered the door by now. I have half a mind to barge in the back. Just as I take a step forward, the door flies open. I jump back, the door whizzing by so fast the air hisses against my cheek.

  Frank barrels into my side, knocking the wind from me. But I’m able to regain my footing, barely. I raise my gun.

  “Stop, Frank. I’ll shoot,” I warn. My finger presses against the cold trigger. With my heart pounding and the adrenaline burning in my veins, all I want to do is shoot him. I want to put this asshole down. But I can’t. Because as much as I want to bury a bullet in his brain, that’ll erase the answers I need, the answers the other families need, and this isn’t just about me.

  He turns and faces me. Even in the low light, his eyes are wild, feral. There’s a war being waged on his face. His feet are planted firmly, his fists clenched. Run or fight. From the way his lips twist, I think he’s going to choose fight. But he turns, taking off toward downtown.

  “Guys!” I shout as I run after him.

  Frank is faster than I imagined he’d be—or maybe he just seems fast, as my joints are so seized from the cold that I can hardly move. He jogs down an alley in front of me, and I grab the flashlight from my belt. I won’t let him get away. My heart pounds as I turn, chasing after him. We weave through the alley, dodging dumpsters and stacks of pallets. My chest tightens, as if I’ve strapped my vest too tight. The
alley spits us out on Main Street, beside the café. My feet pound against the pavement, and I gain on him, closing the twenty-foot gap between us. I push myself harder. I have to catch him. I have to take this asshole down. Once I’m close enough, I jump, tackling Frank.

  His body hits the ground with a hollow smack, the impact so hard it knocks the air from my own lungs. Though I expect the fall to knock him out, he thrashes, his elbows coming at me the moment he hits the ground. I dodge to the left just as he nearly hits me square in the jaw. Wind hisses past my face as I dodge to the right now. I punch him hard in the kidney, my knuckles throbbing just seconds after they make contact. Adrenaline burns in my veins, taking away the kiss of pain shortly after I register it.

  “Stay down, goddamn it,” I growl as I struggle to pin him to the ground.

  He rocks backward again, his whole body shifting, and he nearly bucks me off like an unbroken stallion. Though I try to avoid it again, his elbow connects with my jaw. Lights explode behind my eyes, and my mouth floods with copper.

  I hit him hard in the spine with my knee, so hard a bolt of pain shoots up my leg. I clench my teeth against it. The moment I slap the cuff on his left hand, all the fight goes out of him, like he’s deflated. The sound of the guys running up behind me assures me this is over. We got him.

  CHAPTER 36

  Sergeant Michaels and Allen drag him off the ground as I read him his Miranda rights. They take him back to the station, and when Jason and I pull in, I find Noah waiting in the parking lot, a bundle of clothes under his arm.

  “Did you get him?” he asks as he hands over the clothes to me.

  “We got him. Thank you,” I say, out of breath, as I give him a quick kiss. “I’ll catch you up later.”

  Once inside I head into the bathroom of the station, peel off my wet clothes, put on the dry ones Noah brought me, and grab a cup of coffee. I’m still so cold that I feel like my soul has frostbite. It’s going to be a couple of hours before I can start questioning Frank. We’ve got to get him processed first.

  Sergeant Michaels pulls me into his office while Allen and Marshall are processing Frank. “Are you going to be okay in there?” he asks, concern thick on his words.

  “I’ll be fine,” I say quickly and turn back to the door.

  “You can’t pretend this isn’t personal to you.”

  “This is personal for all of us. We’re all involved,” I say, because while it may not be blood, everyone on this island feels like extended family. We know these people. We all lost people we knew and loved.

  He nods. “I want Jason in there with you, just in case.”

  “Fine.” I grab Jason and pull him into my office so we can get on the same page.

  “What’d you find at his place?” I ask. While I got changed and Frank was processed, Jason spent a couple of hours at Frank’s place to start executing the search warrant with Vince. I can’t believe that Sergeant Michaels was able to get a judge to sign off on it so quickly. But apparently, he had some favors to call in.

  “Several pieces of dried flesh. Tattooed flesh,” he says as he wrinkles his nose. “And two purses of victims.”

  Checkmate.

  We head into the interrogation room. Frank is slumped at the table, his wide shoulders hunched. Jason and I take seats at the table across from him. I’ve got a legal pad in front of me so I can take notes and have him write a statement in his own words after he confesses. Because he will confess.

  “So, Frank. When did you kill for the first time?” I ask as I take a sip of my coffee.

  He glares at the table and glances up at me for just a moment. I can’t tell if he’s going to cooperate or if it’s just now sinking in that he got caught.

  When he doesn’t speak, I add. “We searched your house. We know.” As if the things he said on the boat—or him trying to kill me—weren’t enough.

  He twists his head from side to side, popping his neck. A low, cold laugh rolls out of him. “When I was sixteen.”

  Frank is in his sixties now. Over forty years of killing. The pieces all click into place for me. So I was right: Sheriff Dyer didn’t do any of the killing. He just covered for Frank. And Rachel was the first kill he couldn’t clean up. Someone found her first.

  “Who was it?” With the disappearance of his sister and the missing details about her, I knew something had to have happened to her; otherwise we would have been able to find details about where she’d gone.

  “My sister,” he says, and a sinister, joyless smile spreads across his face.

  “And why did you murder your sister, Frank?”

  “My mother left us when I was six and my sister was ten. Delilah thought it was my fault that she left. It changed her. Made her so angry. When my dad would leave us alone, she’d beat me. Eventually, I felt like I deserved it, like I really did make Mom leave. As I got older, though, it got harder to stomach. I watched her go to church, be nice to everyone else, and then come home and beat me. I couldn’t take her double life. And in my teens I finally fought back. When I was sixteen, I strangled her. When Dad got home, he saw what I’d done. We took her body into our boat and dropped it in the water.”

  I write down a few notes and do my best to remain stoic, though the details turn my stomach. “How many others have you killed?”

  He shrugs and laces his fingers together atop the table. “I don’t know.”

  “How many murders did your father cover up for you?” I ask, hoping if I’m more specific, he’ll answer me.

  “Six or seven.”

  “What were their names?” I ask, writing the possible number of victims down on the paper.

  “Figure it out yourself.” He spits the words at me and then smirks like he’s pleased with himself.

  “How often did you kill?” Jason asks.

  “There wasn’t any timeline—just whenever my sister’s voice started screaming in my head again.” As he says this, he motions toward his left ear.

  “Why did you start killing more often?” I ask. All serial killers escalate, but typically there is a reason, and it seems his kills were very spaced out for a long time.

  “Cancer. My time is running out.”

  I’m not sure whether to be happy or pissed. Even after he does get locked up, the punishment will only last so long if he’s sick.

  Anticipation boils beneath my skin. I know the answer already. I’m sitting across the table from the person who killed my sister. But I still have to ask. I need to hear him say it.

  “Did you kill Rachel?”

  He nods. “Things changed when I killed Rachel. Dad couldn’t hide what I’d done anymore.” His fingers steeple on the table in front of him. “He said he wouldn’t cover for me anymore. That’s when I started dumping them in the water. But it didn’t feel the same—I didn’t like it. They belong in the park. For years, though, I didn’t have many options. I had to make my sister’s voice stop. But after my diagnosis, I wasn’t as worried anymore; I could put them wherever I wanted. Either way I’m going to die.” His eyes meet mine, and the look in them is so foreign I don’t even recognize him.

  “Why, Frank? Why?”

  “They deserved it. They were just like my sister. That’s the last question I’m answering. I want a lawyer.”

  CHAPTER 37

  Noah and I have gone around and around in circles for weeks. Half of me wants to leave the island and pray that I never have to see it again. The other half of me doesn’t dare leave until Frank’s trial is over. Things have been slow, almost painfully slow, since we caught Frank three weeks ago.

  We’re back in Noah’s hotel room. He’s got his laptop open, typing away on a deadline. Every day I wonder how much longer he’s going to stick around—or how much longer I want him to stick around. At some point he’s got to get back to his real life. And I’ve got to figure out what I’m going to do. I’ll end up dead from boredom in a few months if I stick around here.

  “I think we should move in together,” Noah says out of
nowhere. It takes me so off guard that I nearly choke on my coffee.

  “I’m sorry, what?”

  “I think we should move in together, whether that’s here or South Carolina or wherever else you want to go.”

  It’s the first time he’s mentioned moving in together. The other conversations led me to believe we’d both still have our own space—which is what I’ve wanted.

  “I’m not ready for that. I don’t think we’re ready for that,” I say, worried the honesty will give too much bite to my words.

  “Why? We spend almost every night together anyway. It just makes sense, unless you don’t see this going anywhere.”

  I open my mouth to argue, to tell him all the reasons I’m not ready, that maybe I don’t see this going anywhere, that maybe it’s better for both of us if it doesn’t, but my phone interrupts me. Worried it might be about my case, I grab it. “Hold that thought,” I say as I accept the call. “Detective Claire Calderwood.”

  “This is Sergeant Pelletier from the Camden Police Department.”

  Camden is right across the bay, about fifteen minutes north of Rockland after the ferry. “How can I help you, Sergeant?”

  “You solved those murders down in Vinalhaven, right?” As he talks, I can hear seagulls cawing in the background.

  “Word already got out about that? Yes, I did.”

  He clears his throat. “Yeah. I was hoping I could get your help with something here. We found a body, a young girl. She was dumped in a motel.”

  My heart races the more he talks. A million questions pop into my head at once and fight their way to my tongue.

  “What was the state of decomp?”

  “There isn’t any. The body was barely cold when we found her.”

  I look across the table. Noah eyes me curiously. “Yeah, I can help you with this. I’ll be over there as soon as I can.” After Rachel, with Frank’s trial coming up—it’s time to move on. It’s time to see what else the world holds for me beyond this island. Noah smiles at me, the dimple on the left side of his mouth quirking.