by Karen Rose
‘We have his face,’ Hyatt said coldly. ‘He’s killed a cop in Virginia and put one here in critical condition. Every cop in the state is looking for him. He won’t go far.’
‘He may have a boat,’ JD said, swallowing the lump in his throat. ‘Maybe two. Lucy’s father’s sailboat and maybe Malcolm Edwards’s cruiser. We need to find the place where he keeps them.’ He stopped short. ‘I put that compact in her pocket. Why aren’t we tracking her?’
‘We were,’ Drew said bitterly. ‘Closed in on the tracker’s location in minutes. The transmitter had been thrown in the back of a pickup truck and was driving around town. He must have found it on her and tossed it. We can’t track her.’
He’s going to kill her. JD shoved his fear aside, looking to the edge of the crime-scene tape. Thorne stood alone, his face drawn. ‘What’s Thorne doing here?’
‘He arrived right after it happened,’ Hyatt said.
‘If Skinner lives,’ Drew said, ‘it will be because of Thorne. He called 911, made sure we knew an officer was down, did first aid.’
‘I want everyone in my office in thirty,’ Hyatt said. ‘We need to plan. Dismissed.’
‘Wait,’ JD said. ‘Lucy would have needed to recognize whoever it was who called her. To trust them. She trusts Thorne and Gwyn. If it was Gwyn, someone was forcing her.’
‘Maybe one of their club friends,’ Hyatt sneered. ‘Maybe Thorne will cooperate now.’
But JD thought he knew. He could see a sliver of a scene, caught only by the corner of his eye at the time. It had been Monday morning and Stevie had just arrived at the scene at the chess table. Lucy had been walking toward the body when two people stopped her.
One had been Gwyn. The other had been as tall as a tree.
He crossed the parking lot to Thorne, the photo of Evan Reardon in his hand. But he didn’t have a chance to say a word before the man turned on him, white-faced with rage.
‘You.’ Thorne grabbed his lapels. ‘You were supposed to protect her. Where were you?’
JD had to force the true words to the side for the moment. Lucy was the focus, not his own guilt. ‘Look at this picture. Do you know him?’
Thorne’s hands dropped to his sides, face immediately changing from terrified and furious to blank with the shock of recognition. ‘This is Royce. Gwyn’s boyfriend. This is him? This is who has Lucy? Who killed Kevin?’
And at least nine others. ‘Yeah,’ JD said roughly. And he has Lucy.
Shock became terror once again. ‘Gwyn’s with him,’ Thorne said. ‘Royce picked her up at my place last night, late. Oh God. He’s got them both. They’re all I have.’
Thorne’s family, JD realized. But Lucy is mine. He’ll kill her.
Stay calm. Focus. Be a robot. He called on the calm he’d long ago learned to muster, felt it settle on his shoulders like a mantle. ‘We have Reardon’s face all over town. Every TV and newspaper will be asking for help. We’ll find them.’ We have to.
Thorne’s eyes were desperate. ‘What can I do? We have to get them back.’
‘Where and when did Royce and Gwyn meet?’ JD asked briskly. Tonelessly.
‘A few months ago. He came into the club, said a mutual friend had told him to look Gwyn up. Gwyn remembered the name. She’d known Royce’s friend from the circus.’
‘Who knew Gwyn was in the circus?’
‘Everyone. It’s part of her résumé.’
‘Lucy said Gwyn would sleep at his place. Where was that?’
‘I don’t know exactly.’ Thorne closed his eyes. ‘She brings me doughnuts from a place called DoughBoyz, with a z. She said it was near his building. That’s all I know.’
‘That could help.’ But it probably wouldn’t. JD knew the place. There were a dozen apartment buildings less than a block away. ‘Okay. Stay in touch if you hear or see anything.’
Wednesday, May 5, 9.15 A.M.
Goddammit. Evan leaned against the side of his car when the world began to spin. He’d lost a lot of blood. Damn cop. I should have aimed a little more to the right, dropped him right there. Then the cop wouldn’t have been able to get off a shot. Evan’s second bullet had hit the detective’s neck. I hope I killed the sonofabitch.
Gingerly he checked the makeshift bandage on his arm. The bleeding had stopped, but the cop’s bullet had done some damage. It’ll hurt like a bitch, but I can fix it. The medical bag he’d taken from Kathy Trask should have what he needed to do the job.
He’d managed to get the car back to the plant with both women in the trunk. Luckily he’d known to check Lucy for a tracking device. Gwyn had imparted that little nugget of information as she’d fallen asleep the night before. They tagged her like a polar bear. He’d only had to sleep with Gwyn Weaver a few times to learn that the minutes before she fell completely asleep were the best time to get information.
It was why he’d courted her, why he’d granted her every whim, why he’d made her think he was ‘the one’. She knew everything about Lucy Trask, or so she thought. She didn’t know that Lucy had abetted a rapist and a killer all those years ago. Gwyn wouldn’t have believed it had he told her, which he never would have done anyway. She was too valuable an asset to risk.
The sex hadn’t been bad, either. The circus girl knew some moves that he’d surely miss. So had the PI. For a while it had been dicey, doing both Gwyn and Nicki. He’d kept tabs on both women to make sure he would never be seen with the other, planting the tracking devices he’d stolen from Nicki in Gwyn’s purse and under Nicki’s car. The latter had paid off.
He’d been in Newport News dealing with Ken Pullman and Mary Stubbs when Nicki made her little trip to Anderson Ferry. How she’d known to go there he didn’t know. And it didn’t matter. She’d gone, which meant she knew his background, about Ileanna.
She’d checked on him. Behind my back. She wouldn’t have told. She couldn’t have. She broken the law, procuring false identification for him, setting him up with a new life. And he hadn’t been the first one she’d done it for. If she turned him in, she’d go to prison too. He hadn’t killed her to keep her quiet. I killed her because she pissed me off.
Afterward he’d regretted it. Not the doing of it, because she’d had it coming. She’d tried to plead with him, promised she understood, that she wouldn’t tell anyone about his sister. She’d told him she loved him. Which was a lie. If she loved him, she would have trusted him. She wouldn’t have gone behind his back. So she definitely had it coming.
Still, he shouldn’t have gone after her that way, in a rage. I should have brought her here. Killed her here. Instead he’d had to leave her body behind. Eventually that partner of hers would find her and come looking for him. Luckily he’d left no trail.
He certainly wouldn’t make the same mistake again. Pushing himself away from the car, he tested his balance, annoyed when his step was still unsteady. He made his way to the trunk and popped it open. Gwyn was still out cold, but she should be coming out of it soon. He hadn’t given her as much of the barbiturate cocktail as he’d given the others. She was so tiny, he didn’t want to kill her. He might need her alive to give Lucy incentive to do his bidding.
From what he’d seen on the dock, watching her old man get carved up might not cause Lucy any discomfort. Whether she still had feelings for her mother remained to be seen, but watching little Gwyn getting carved up in front of her would definitely cause her considerable pain.
Lucy had come to. He enjoyed the moment when she realized who had taken her, that little jolt of shock in those cold blue eyes of hers. Her eyes frantically scanned side to side, but he’d placed the two women so that they weren’t touching and couldn’t see each other.
‘Too bad you told Gwyn about finding my tracker in your purse. She went looking in her purse too. She’d found it and was dialing you when I came back from delivering Agar’s body.’
It was this that had prompted his risky snatching of Lucy this morning. He’d found Gwyn running from his apartment in her silk pa
jamas, her cell phone in her hand. She’d figured out who’d planted the tracker and was about to tell. He’d overpowered her easily, but then had to make some choices. If Lucy knew Gwyn had been taken, he’d never be able to use Gwyn as a lure. Lucy’s suspicions would soar and he’d never be able to get her alone.
So he’d chosen to act fast. Surgically strike. As it was, he’d had to wait until most of the cops had left the scene to place his call.
‘You shouldn’t have made her look, Lucy. Now she’ll have to die too.’
Chapter Twenty-Four
Wednesday, May 5, 9.20 A.M.
Stevie hung up her phone. She’d run a background on Evan Reardon as they waited for Hyatt who was late, having been called into another press conference.
‘Evan Reardon’s last known was in Oxford,’ she said. ‘Not far from Anderson Ferry. He’s a nurse. I just called the hospital where he worked. They said he quit three months ago.’
‘When Maynard said Reardon’s mother died,’ JD said. ‘Unwilling to wait idly, he’d been searching the box of photos Higgins had given them.
‘We went through that box a dozen times looking for Evan’s mother,’ Stevie said.
‘I’m making it thirteen. Reardon is here. He’s got a dock and he’s got a damn freezer and he’s got an apartment near a damn doughnut shop. He is here, under our noses.’ He picked up the team photo. ‘There were eight seniors. Buck, Malcolm and Ryan are dead. Sonny is missing. You said one died, two moved away and one lives in Baltimore. Where?’
‘I don’t know,’ Stevie said. ‘Debbie was going to check. Let me ask.’ She phoned Hyatt’s clerk, and when she hung up, her expression was triumphant. ‘James Cannon lives in an apartment in Fell’s Point. Same neighborhood as the Doughboyz doughnut shop.’
Yes. ‘Let’s go.’ He was halfway to the door when she stopped him.
‘Wait, JD.’ Stevie was dialing another number. ‘We need a warrant.’
‘We need to find Reardon,’ JD growled.
‘I want him too, but I want it to stick when we find him.’
JD returned to Stevie’s desk, trying not to bite her head off as she put Daphne on speaker phone and quickly filled her in. ‘Can we search Cannon’s apartment?’ she asked.
‘Not on a doughnut shop, honey. What else you got?’
‘Nothing yet,’ Stevie said.
‘I’m going over there,’ JD said. ‘If nobody’s home, I’ll canvass the neighbors, see if anybody’s seen Cannon lately and show Reardon’s picture. If Reardon’s been there, it means James is probably dead too.’
‘You call me when you know,’ Daphne said. ‘I’ll have a warrant drafted.’
Stevie hung up and grabbed her jacket. They’d reached the elevator when JD’s cell phone rang. It was the morgue.
‘It’s Craig Mulhauser.’
The doctor had been distraught on hearing Lucy was gone. ‘We don’t have any news.’
‘I know, that’s not why I’m calling. I just got a call from Mr Bennett, father of the deceased. He was asking when he could come in and ID the body.’
‘What? How are you going to do an ID?’
‘I’m not,’ Mulhauser said forcefully. ‘I told him that we’d made an identification based on X-rays. He became insistent that they’d been called to the city to do an ID.’
JD frowned. ‘Did he say who called them?’
‘He said it was you.’
‘Shit. Not again. He used me to lure Agar, too.’
‘I know. I told him to not leave his hotel until he spoke with you.’
‘Thanks, Doc. This could be a break.’ He hung up, told Stevie what had happened. ‘Where do we go first? James Cannon’s apartment or to Bennett and maybe get the truth?’
‘Bennett,’ Stevie said. ‘Let’s send uniforms to knock on Cannon’s door. If Reardon’s got Lucy, I doubt he took her there.’
‘He took her where he took the others,’ JD said, pushing the image of the others from his mind. ‘Somewhere remote.’
‘Right. If nobody answers the knock, the officers will canvass the apartment building. If Bennett tells us that Cannon was involved, that might be enough for a search warrant.’
Wednesday, May 5, 9.30 A.M.
Lucy’s head hurt worse than any headache she’d ever experienced. Royce. It was Royce all the time. Except it wasn’t Royce. It was Evan. Evan Bryan. He has me. And Gwyn.
She was tied, feet and hands, her hands behind her back. The tape he’d slapped over her mouth as he’d shot Detective Skinner was still there. She thought of Skinner, of how proudly he’d shown her the pictures of his new baby. Please don’t be dead.
Gwyn was lying behind her in the trunk. Now that the car had stopped, Lucy could hear her friend’s shallow breaths. They were alive. For now. He had her parents. Had he killed them?
He has my mother. He cuts out their hearts. He’ll do that to her. To Gwyn. To me. Panic started to rise in her throat, to choke her. Ruthlessly she shoved it back down.
JD, where are you? He’d put the tracker in her pocket. He’ll be here soon. But what if he didn’t get here in time? She needed a plan. Like? Like, Evan was wounded. Just before he’d slammed the trunk, Lucy had seen the bandage around his arm. She remembered the shot she’d heard. Skinner had shot Evan.
Good, she thought fiercely. From the paleness of Evan’s face, he’d lost some blood. Good, she thought again. She’d watch and wait. And if she had to, if she got the opportunity . . .
You might have to kill him. Can you do that? She thought of Kevin Drummond. Of Nicki Fields. Oh yes. I can.
Wednesday, May 5, 10.00 A.M.
The Bennetts were shaken when JD and Stevie arrived at their hotel room. JD hoped that would make them more forthcoming, but was prepared to deal with them harshly if they lied.
‘Now, this is what’s going to happen,’ JD said acidly. ‘You’re going to tell us what the hell happened to Ileanna Bryan twenty-one years ago. He has Lucy Trask.’
Bennett sighed. His wife closed her eyes.
‘And her parents and your sheriff,’ Stevie added and the two grew paler. ‘So start talking. What happened and who was involved?’
‘We don’t know exactly,’ Bennett said. ‘We knew the Bryan girl was assaulted. And we knew our sons. They all acted . . . squirrelly.’
‘Guilty, you mean,’ JD said. ‘Did they rape her? All of them?’
‘Russ claimed he didn’t,’ Bennett said. ‘The police closed the case after her old boyfriend killed himself. They said the boyfriend was guilty. Then Buck died and everything changed.’
Mrs Bennett fidgeted with her pearls. ‘We parents avoided one another, because I think we knew our boys had done something. Something terrible. We just didn’t know what.’
‘Who was doing the avoiding?’ JD asked impatiently.
‘Everyone except Myrna Westcott,’ Bennett said. ‘She was clueless, or chose to be. If you want a list, it was probably Sonny, Buck, Malcolm Edwards, Ryan Agar and James Cannon.’
JD noted they had not included their own son. ‘Will you sign an affidavit stating that?’
Bennett nodded. ‘Yes.’
Stevie was already dialing Daphne. ‘Got the statement. Get the warrant.’
JD turned to leave, then turned back. ‘Why did you request the articles on Lucy’s trial from Bart Higgins?’
‘Russ needed them,’ Bennett said. ‘He said a reporter wanted to do a story on Lucy and he wanted them to know the truth.’
JD frowned, confused. ‘But you liked Lucy. You had lunch when you came to the city.’
Mrs Bennett spoke up. ‘Because her mother asked us to. It was the best way for her to find out how Lucy was doing. I agreed. I don’t like to upset the Trasks.’
‘Ron can hold a grudge for a long time,’ Bennett added.
‘And Kathy knows too many secrets,’ Mrs Bennett said bitterly.
‘What does she know?’ Stevie asked. ‘Tell us. Now.’
‘A little about everybody, I im
agine,’ Mrs Bennett said. ‘But she knew that I had an affair back when the children were younger. I got . . . an infection. I had to tell my husband and he’s since forgiven me. But Kathy knew.’
‘She threatened to tell?’ Stevie asked, unable to hide her surprise.
‘Yes,’ Mrs Bennett said. ‘When Lucy got arrested. Ron refused to help Lucy, so Kathy turned to us. She wanted us to hire a lawyer for Lucy. She would pay for it, but it needed to appear that the money came from us. We refused. We didn’t want to make Ron angry. Then she threatened to tell about my . . . condition.’
JD’s eyes were wide. ‘Her mother paid for her lawyer?’
‘Yes,’ Bennett said. ‘She was too much of a coward to let Ron know, so we had to do it, and Ron has made us pay for years, in all kinds of little ways. It’s only that we knew Buck had been involved in that business twenty years ago that kept him from running us out of town too.’
‘Too?’ Stevie asked and Bennett flushed.
‘It’s just my guess. The Bryans had been accusing Ron and Kathy of stealing their daughter’s necklace. Suddenly the Bryans moved away. We all knew Ron was capable of using his power to further his own agenda. Nobody wanted to make him angry after that.’
What a fucked-up town. ‘Why did you get the trial articles for your son?’ JD asked again.
Bennett looked away. ‘Russ threatened our visitation privileges with our grandchildren.’
Kathy Trask wasn’t the only coward. ‘Where was Russ going to meet the reporter?’
‘I don’t know.’ Mr Bennett paled further. ‘It wasn’t a reporter, was it?’
‘No,’ JD said quietly. ‘It was probably Evan Reardon.’
The Bennetts flinched. ‘Oh my God,’ Mrs Bennett whispered.
‘I didn’t know,’ Mr Bennett murmured. ‘I didn’t know. I helped him . . . Oh God.’
Stevie touched JD’s sleeve. ‘Detective Fitzpatrick, let’s go.’