Freak

by Jennifer Hillier

  “It was a combination of things,” Abby was saying. “I’d only ever been with Ethan. I wasn’t used to other men being so close to me. I knew they were going to arrest Ethan, I knew that the life we had was over. There didn’t seem to be a way out of the mess Ethan had created, and I felt smothered. Jerry kept saying I couldn’t leave. I remember panicking. I don’t remember anything after that.”

  “You cut his throat,” Bernadette Barkley said solemnly. “Even if you felt smothered, as you put it, that’s not typically what most people would think to do as a defensive maneuver.”

  The words hung in the air for a moment. Abby dropped her gaze. When she finally spoke, her voice was clear and she looked at Barkley steadily. “I have no explanation. All I could think about was getting as far away from him, from the police station, from everything, as I possibly could.”

  “So you’re in the break room kitchen, you had the knife in your hand . . .”

  “I don’t remember that.”

  “Was your intention to kill him?”

  “I don’t remember, but I’m certain it wasn’t.”

  Barkley’s face was the picture of skepticism. “It’s a tough scenario to believe.”

  “Well, that’s why I’m in here, isn’t it?” Abby said, meeting the blond woman’s gaze directly. “I’ve never once said I didn’t do it. I’m saying that in my mind, it was self-defense. But none of that matters now. They gave me nine years, and I’m serving out my sentence.”

  “I caught up with Jerry Isaac as he was arriving at his office the other night,” Barkley said. “I asked him to comment on your murder charge. Here’s what he had to say.” She nodded, and an image of Jerry in the parking lot of his office building in Fremont appeared on the screen.

  Bernadette Barkley was shown sticking a microphone in Jerry’s face, who already looked exhausted and pissed off. “Mr. Isaac,” the journalist said in a crisp voice, “in light of Abby Maddox’s recent charge for the murder of Diana St. Clair, our viewers are wondering how you feel. Do you think she’s capable of murder?”

  Morris finally stopped pacing and sat back down on the sofa.

  On the television, Jerry glared down at the petite blonde, his dark features forming an even darker expression. “How do I feel?” he repeated, and Sheila immediately thought, Uh-oh. “How do I feel?”

  Looking directly into the camera lens, Jerry yanked down the tight-knit collar of his black turtleneck, exposing the ugly scar, purple and puckered and angry. It glowed in the light of the camera. His tone was clipped and harsh, the words spoken slowly and enunciated clearly despite the rasp in his voice. “This is how I feel. Now get that camera out of my face, motherfucker.”

  Of course The Pulse censored the profanity. There was a bleep in place of the word motherfucker, but Jerry’s exaggerated lip movements left no room to dispute what he’d said.

  Despite his aggravation, Morris laughed. Hard. Sheila might have laughed, too, but there was nothing remotely funny about this interview. Nothing at all.

  The screen changed back to Bernadette Barkley. “When we come back, we’ll talk more about Abby Maddox’s life growing up as an orphan in Nebraska, her relationship with the Tell-Tale Heart Killer, Ethan Wolfe, and the pet rat she used to have.”

  Commercial break. Thank God.

  “Pet rat?” Morris muted the television, wrinkling his nose. “That’s disgusting.”

  “Turn it off,” Sheila said dully. Every muscle in her body ached. “I don’t want to see the rest of it.”

  “You don’t want to hear them discuss the new murders?”

  Sheila shook her head, more tired than she’d felt in a long time. “They can’t discuss that. Abby would be interfering with the investigation if she did, and it would kill her deal. And I have no desire to hear about her pet rat, or anything else she has to say.” She closed her eyes, leaning back against the sofa. “I’ve had enough. Turn it off. Please.”

  Her fiancé did as she asked. “Honey, trust me, it’s going to be okay.”

  Sheila opened her eyes and looked up at him. “I think that’s the first time you’ve ever lied to me, Morris.”

  chapter 21

  THE HOTEL ROOM at the Phoenix smelled like vomit. And there was nothing like the smell of vomit to make you want to vomit, too.

  The body was a few feet away, naked torso exposed, the carvings on her back as plain as day. Her long, dark hair streamed over the side of the mattress and the one eye that Jerry could see was swollen and glassy. Cause of death was the same—zip tie around the throat—and Jerry felt an eerie sense of déjà vu. But he knew this one was different, because this victim had been beaten. Badly. Face and head. The three women before her had not. The killer’s behavior was escalating.

  The victim’s fingerprints were on file from a petty theft when she was eighteen, for which she’d received a fine and probation. She’d been identified as Alice Bennett, age twenty-four, originally of Topeka, Kansas. She was found by the assistant manager of the hotel an hour after checkout time when calls to the room by the front desk had gone unanswered.

  The assistant manager of the Phoenix had entered the room around 1 p.m. and had gotten a very close, if unwelcome, look at the dead woman. She’d been covered with a sheet, he said, and he’d assumed she was sleeping. When she didn’t respond to his greeting, he’d shaken her. And then saw more than he wanted to.

  “I barfed,” Dave Puckett said, ashamed. The guy was barely out of hotel management school. He’d nearly vomited on the body itself, but managed to move away at the last second to empty the contents of his stomach on the carpet at the foot of the bed instead. The pile had since been cleaned, but the stench remained. “I know I should’ve done it farther away because I might have destroyed trace evidence and everything, but it was all I could do not to hurl on the body, you know? I’m really sorry. Hope I didn’t screw things up for you guys.”

  Everybody was a fan of CSI. Sometimes it was helpful. Sometimes it was a pain in the ass.

  What had caused Puckett to vomit was not the blood. The assistant manager insisted he was okay with seeing her bloody face; apparently he was also an amateur mixed martial arts fighter, and bloody faces were part of the job. No, what had grossed Puckett out was that when he had shaken the woman in an attempt to rouse her, the sheets covering her torso had fallen away, revealing the deep carvings on her back.

  That, and she was being eaten by a rat. An extremely large, disgusting, pink-tailed rat.

  “A rat?” Torrance had said dubiously when he heard this. “You have rats in your hotel?”

  “Of course not,” Dave Puckett had said indignantly. “We charge three hundred a night for a standard room. This was not our rat.”

  Crime scene had since caged the rat, found hiding in the bathroom. Jerry’s own stomach rolled at the thought of those rodent teeth tearing chunks of flesh from the woman’s skin. Whoever had put it there had wanted the woman to be eaten.

  The carvings on her back still said FREE ABBY MADDOX, and below that, 4/10. But this time, surrounded by rat bites, the message seemed much more urgent.

  There had also been a newspaper lying beside the body. Abby Maddox had made the front page of the Seattle Times this morning, and above her face—a screen grab from her feature on The Pulse the night before—screamed the headline ABBY MADDOX LOVES RATS.

  The killer had a sick sense of humor.

  Crime scene had just finished up. Everything had been photographed and bagged and was in the van, ready to be taken to the lab for analysis. Jerry watched as two guys in crime scene bodysuits carefully rolled the body onto a gurney, then rolled it out into the hallway.

  “You can get out of here,” Torrance said. “I don’t need you for a while. I’m still running down Estelle Kane’s whereabouts and I haven’t heard back yet from the techies about where the FreeAbbyMaddox site is originating from. Whoever owns the site has taken great pains to hide his location. I’ll touch base with you later.”

  Jerr
y didn’t argue. The dead woman’s partially eaten face was still seared in his brain, and he needed to take his mind off it.

  In his Jeep a few minutes later, he checked his phone and saw that Morris had called again. Damn, the big man was persistent.

  Sighing, he highlighted the number and pressed SEND.

  * * *

  There were only two reasons Morris would want to see him, Jerry thought. He either wanted to discuss Jerry’s failing marriage (which Jerry had no desire to do, despite Sheila and her fiancé’s concern) or he wanted to pound Jerry to a pulp. Neither thought was appealing, but if Jerry had to choose, he had a better chance of surviving the former. Jerry and Morris were the same height, but the former NFL offensive lineman turned investment banker outweighed him by at least seventy pounds. Jerry had been on the receiving end of a Morris punch once before, and it hadn’t felt good.

  The Golden Monkey, Jerry’s favorite dim sum restaurant (well, okay, his favorite restaurant, period), was busy and loud as always. He took a lot of heat for telling people how much he liked this place. The decor was dated and tacky, all peeling wallpaper and stained carpet and bathrooms that had seen one too many customers. The cuisine, however, was delicious. A person could easily stuff himself for ten bucks, fifteen if he was really hungry.

  Servers in bright pink vests maneuvered dim sum carts around the tightly spaced tables, while harried waiters darted around refilling water glasses and teapots. Morris hadn’t said much to Jerry yet other than the usual pleasantries, and that was fine by Jerry. He watched now as his friend stabbed another siu mai with his chopstick, Morris’s ham-sized hands looking ridiculous as he tried to navigate it out of its bamboo container. The siu mai—a steamed pork and shrimp dumpling wrapped in egg noodle—was delightful, though Jerry knew the big guy would never give him the satisfaction of admitting it.

  “Try this.” Jerry pushed something toward Morris he knew his friend hadn’t tried before. “You’ll like it.”

  Morris eyeballed it suspiciously, then seemed to decide it looked safe enough. A generous ball of shrimp rested on a slice of green pepper, doused in black bean sauce. He watched as Morris carefully maneuvered one out of the serving plate and directly into his mouth.

  “It’s good.” Morris chewed slowly. “Tasty.”

  “Have another.”

  Morris swallowed. “You’re trying to keep my mouth full so I can’t cuss you out for what you did.”

  Jerry put down his chopsticks and braced himself. “All right. Let me have it.”

  “You took my fiancée to see Abby Maddox.” Morris’s frustration was clear, even over the clanking and chattering of the busy restaurant. A few heads turned in their direction briefly at the sound of his booming voice. The server pushing the dim sum cart nearest them shot them a disapproving look. “Are you on drugs? I’m telling you, Jerry, if we weren’t such good friends, I’d—”

  “I’m sorry.” The apology was lame and Jerry knew it. “I tried to talk Sheila out of coming, man, I really did. I only stopped by her office to tell her about the murders myself so she didn’t have to read about them in the papers. I thought I was protecting her—I never thought she’d want to come along. And in my defense, once she’d made up her mind to talk to Maddox, there was nothing I could say to change it.”

  “Yeah, she is stubborn, that one,” Morris said grudgingly. Then he frowned. “I just don’t understand why you’re helping them. You’re not even with PD anymore. Why get involved?”

  “What was I supposed to say?” Jerry was getting so tired of everybody’s shock over this, when to him it was a no-brainer. “There’s a serial killer at work, and Maddox might be able to lead us right to him. What was I supposed to tell them? ‘I’m still mad the bitch cut me last year and so I don’t care if ten women get murdered, I’m not helping you?’ Come on, man. This is the right thing to do.”

  “The deal concerns me, okay?” Morris lowered his voice and Jerry had to strain to hear him. “Abby Maddox is a menace to society. She was Ethan Wolfe’s partner in crime. The thought of her getting out . . .” He stopped, shuddered, looked away.

  “You didn’t see the dead bodies yesterday, Morris,” Jerry said quietly. “These women, they’ve barely lived their lives, and some animal is snuffing them out one by one and carving Maddox’s name into them, just to get her attention. Much as I want to see that psycho bitch locked up for the rest of her life for what she did to me—and what I know she did to those homeless women last year—she’s the lesser of two evils right now. I don’t have the luxury of saying no.”

  Morris said nothing, which to Jerry meant he understood. They sat in silence for a few moments, neither man feeling the specific need to talk. The dim sum carts kept rolling by, and both of them continued to pick out dishes.

  “So how’s Sheila doing?” Jerry finally asked. “I, uh, saw the interview on The Pulse last night.”

  “You mean Maddox telling the whole world that my fiancée’s a sex addict?” Morris grimaced and took a long sip of his water. “She’s not doing well, amigo. She’s got a meeting with the board of directors at the university later this afternoon.”

  “Damn.” Jerry put his chopsticks down. “Is she going to get fired?”

  “I don’t know. I’m hoping that at worst, they put her on probation.” Morris rubbed his face, the worry showing in every wrinkle around his eyes and mouth. “She decided she’s going to come clean about her addiction, and she got letters this morning from her therapist and her meeting leader at SAA to show the board how hard she’s been working on her recovery.”

  “But the affair . . .”

  “Wolfe was twenty-three when Sheila got involved with him, and while it’s frowned upon, there’s nothing specific in her employment contract that says she can’t be romantically involved with a student of legal age. Because she’s tenured, they can only fire her on the grounds of moral turpitude, but they’d have to prove that her actions adversely affected her ability to teach. Which they haven’t. She’s received nothing but positive ratings from her students this past year.” Morris sighed. “And the reason I know all this is because we met with a lawyer first thing this morning.”

  “Shit, man.” Jerry shook his head. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Me, too.” Morris stabbed at another siu mai and chewed without enthusiasm. “Her career’s everything to her. If she loses her job, I don’t know what she’ll do.”

  “She’ll land on her feet. She’s strong.”

  “Tell her that. I’ve never seen her so down.” Morris leaned back in his chair. “You know, what I don’t get is why Maddox would blab it to the world. Sheila said she didn’t even think Maddox knew about her sex addiction.”

  “Because she’s a game-player, Morris.” Jerry met his friend’s distraught gaze with a steady one of his own. “She likes to play games. You remember the postcards she sent Sheila.”

  Morris nodded. The year before, when Maddox was on the run, Sheila had received four postcards in a two-week span, all of them from Maddox, all of them taunting her and threatening her safety.

  “She likes to mess with Sheila, but I don’t think she’ll ever hurt her,” Jerry said. “Maddox is a lot of things, but the one thing she isn’t is stupid. She knows if anything ever happens to Sheila, she’d be the prime suspect. Besides, she has eight years more on her sentence.”

  “She could be out in three with good behavior.”

  “Yeah, but still, three years can change a person.” Jerry didn’t really believe this last part, but he knew it was what his friend needed to hear. In his experience, once a psycho, always a psycho. But telling Morris what he really thought—especially since there was nothing he could do to change it—would not be helpful at all.

  The big guy finally nodded. Jerry nodded back. Both men reached for the last char siu bao, a white, doughy dumpling filled with steamed pork.

  “You take it.” Jerry pushed the bamboo container toward his friend.

  “Damned right, I w
ill,” Morris said, but he split it in half, making a point to place the slightly smaller bit on Jerry’s plate. The dough had cooled a little, but the sweet-and-sour barbecued meat inside was still warm and gooey.

  A moment later, Morris cleared his throat. “So have you talked to Marianne lately?” His deep voice was carefully nonchalant.

  “You know I haven’t.”

  “You should call her.”

  “Annie’s the one who left.” Jerry stiffened. “She’s made her decision.”

  “Yeah, but you’re still married,” Morris said.

  “A technicality I’m sure she’ll remedy soon.” Jerry knew he sounded bitter and hated himself for it. “I’m expecting the divorce papers any day now.”

  “That’s what you want?”

  “No,” Jerry said tightly. “Of course not. If I thought I could fix it somehow, if I thought I could apologize enough, I would. But we’ve been separated for six months. And now she’s moved on.”

  Morris stopped eating. “What do you mean?”

  “Annie’s seeing someone. It looks serious.”

  “Who?”

  “George Jackson,” Jerry said.

  Morris’s face was blank.

  “You know the basketball coach of the PSSU Steelheads?”

  “That guy?” Morris almost choked. His eyes were as round as dinner plates. “You’re kidding me. That guy’s the losingest coach in the Pacific Northwest! He’s an embarrassment! That’s . . . oh wow, man. That’s awful.”

  Despite his misery, Jerry chuckled. He should have known that Morris, of all people, would understand. It was bad enough his ex-wife was dating someone. But that guy? It was nice that someone else got just how humiliating it really was. “Unfortunately I don’t think the Steelheads’ win-loss record matters to Annie.”

  “I’m sure it’s not serious. He’s way too young for her.”