by Lisa Jackson
“I think he had someone calling the shots.”
“That’s a helluva leap.”
“I’ve read Ronnie’s file, talked to his parole officer and yeah, he was our killer, but something’s just not right.”
“Hey!” an officer shouted from outside. “We found the truck. Got a scratch on it consistent with a round.”
“Shootout with Tiggs,” Montoya muttered. “This is our guy.”
Bentz swallowed hard as he searched the room, carefully examining the mantel, mirror, and desk. He found tattoo supplies and patterns and again, a notebook with pages of pages of palindromes, as if the guy lived for them.
It still seemed wrong. A bad feeling ate at him, roiling his stomach. He eyed the bed. Carefully made. Obviously the man spent all of his time either at the fire doing God knew what or here in the bed. “Hey, hand me a flashlight.”
“Looking for bedbugs?” Montoya asked, grabbing a flashlight from a uniform.
“Maybe.”
On his knees he shined the harsh beam over the sheets, pillows, and quilt. When he peered under the springs, he saw it. “Jesus H. Christ,” he whispered. Hidden deep inside the springs and mattress, he found tiny speakers, some kind of receiver and electronic gadgets he didn’t recognize.
“What is it?” Montoya asked.
“I don’t know.” He glanced around, searching for a radio or stereo that would transmit to the speakers and found none. “I don’t get it,” he said, but the bad feeling that had been gnawing at him just got worse.
“So who killed them?” Montoya said, motioning to the victims. “Obviously not Ronnie as he’s now a vic. So who’s left? The son? Eve’s twin? The guy we can’t find?” He shook his head. “Why would he off Ronnie Le Mars?”
“Good question.” Bentz popped a couple of antacids and walked outside, where the rain was a welcome relief from the stuffy, hideous cabin. “Somehow he knew Le Mars was here. No one else did.”
“Except the anonymous caller,” Montoya pointed out, scratching at his goatee. They walked toward the cruiser, wending their way through the other vehicles that had arrived, including a news van.
Bentz was not in the mood. Fortunately a spokesperson for the Feds was fielding the questions of two reporters.
As they reached their car, Bentz’s cell phone rang. Caller ID told him the call originated at Our Lady of Virtues.
“This is Detective Bentz.”
“Oh, hello, Detective. This is Sister Odine, with the convent.”
She got right to the point. “Remember, you asked me to let you know if anyone showed up here? Well, I thought you should know there’s a car parked at the cemetery. A red Volkswagen Jetta, I be lieve. I have the license plate.”
“What is it?” Bentz asked, but he could barely hear the nun’s words over the crashing of blood pounding through his brain. She rattled off the letters and numbers of the plate, confirming his suspicions. The Jetta belonged to his daughter.
“We’re on our way. I’ll meet you at the front gate of the convent. We’ll need the keys to the hospital.” He climbed into the passenger side of the cruiser. “How fast can you drive to Our Lady of Virtues?” he asked Montoya.
“Twenty minutes,” Montoya said, firing up the engine. “Give or take.”
“Make it ten.”
“Why?” Montoya was already cranking the wheel and hitting the gas. “What’s up?”
The cruiser shot forward.
“Kristi’s there.” Bentz hit the speed-dial button for his daughter and waited. No doubt she wouldn’t pick up. For the first time in a long while, he sent up a quick, short prayer. Please keep her safe!
The phone connected.
“Kristi!” he said. “Kristi!”
But she didn’t answer.
The phone indicated he’d just received a new text message.
I’m at OLOV asylum attic. Not alone. Send help. K.
Cole drove his Jeep as if he were fleeing Satan himself. As the wipers tossed off sheets of rain, he mentally kicked himself up one side and down the other. Why had he let Eve go to the bar alone? He’d known it wasn’t safe. He shouldn’t have allowed her to bully him, and now she might be lost to him forever! Now, after they’d just crossed so many hurdles, when they’d finally come together. He thought of their last night of lovemaking, in the hotel, and his jaw clenched so hard it ached.
He had nothing to go on but gut instinct.
He had no weapon, just the tools in the back of his rig.
He didn’t doubt that she was with the madman, though he had no idea where he’d taken her or what he’d done to her. In sharp, jagged pieces, he remembered Royal Kajak’s mutilated body, then Sister Vivian’s naked corpse, and the doll propped on the bloody bed.
His only hope was to piece together the messages that the killer had given them, the clues. Palindromes and numbers, backward and forward.
Through the slap of the wipers, in quick tempo, he thought 101; 212; 111; 444; 323; Eve; Renner; Kajak; Viv; Nun; Dad.
He was certain the numbers referred to rooms at Our Lady of Virtues, and he intended to walk those rooms and decipher their meaning. Somehow he would piece together the clues. He had no other options, and time, he felt with every breath he drew, was running out.
Eve opened an eye.
Where the hell was she, and why was the darkened room spinning?
Lying on her back, staring upward at a high ceiling, she heard the beat of rain, steady and hard. Her headache was back, pounding in her skull, and as she fought it, images came back. Fuzzy bits of memory. She’d been abducted. At the bar. And Anna…Oh, God, was she dead?
She blinked hard, remembering the cabin and Ronnie Le Mars and a woman weeping…. then…oh, God! Someone had come in and shot them both then hauled her away. She’d passed out again, only to wake up here.
In the hospital.
He’d brought her to the mental asylum.
She realized now that she was in Faith Chastain’s room, lying on the stained floor.
For the love of God, why?
And where was he?
She tried to sit up, but her arms and legs were still uncooperative and useless.
Try again, Eve.
It’s a situation of mind over matter!
Concentrating, she willed her right arm to move.
Nothing.
Come on, come on, don’t give up!
She tried again, focusing and straining, and her arm slid a bit, though in no controlled fashion.
Again! Hurry! Who knows how long he’ll be gone?
This time she was able to get her finger to twitch, but that was it. No great show of strength, no ability to push herself upright, no chance of running.
Then find a weapon.
She looked around frantically, but the room was empty.
Don’t give up. Be creative, damn it!
She looked frantically again, her gaze scraping every corner of the room. Nothing…Oh God…And then a little glitter near the hearth. Glass?
She started to try and move closer to the fireplace, but she heard something and froze.
Footsteps?
Overhead?
In the attic. What was he doing up there? Spying down on her? Using the peep holes in the attic, the ones she’d used as a child. How ironic that someone now might be spying on her. No, that didn’t make any sense. What the hell was he doing up there?
She was going to die. She knew it. There was so much she had planned for her life, so many things she still wanted to do. Cole’s image came to mind, and she nearly wept as she realized how much she loved him and that, recently, she hadn’t had the nerve to tell him how she felt. She remembered making love to him, feeling his body entwined intimately with hers and how he’d whispered words of love as he’d pushed her hair from her face. But never had she told him how she’d felt.
Fear of being hurt again had paralyzed her.
How foolish she’d been.
Now, she might never get the chance.
A lump filled her throat, but she ignored it. She had no time for “could have beens” or “should have beens.” She had no time for anything.
She looked again at the little bit of glitter near the fireplace. A piece of glass? Not much of a weapon.
But better than nothing.
He was coming for her.
Kristi’s only hope of escape was down the very stairs he would ascend into the attic.
His footsteps thudded as he ran down the length of the hallway. Hers were silent. While every instinct told her to run in the opposite direction, she quickly tiptoed to the chimney and melted against its far side, the rough bricks pressed hard against her back.
How could she have been so foolish? So stupid as to trust him?
She reached into her backpack and fumbled until she found the pepper spray. Then she waited.
And felt sick when she saw the beam of a flashlight. So much for hiding. So much for surprising him.
Not daring to breathe, she waited.
“I know you’re up here,” he said, standing in the doorway, sweeping his flashlight to the farthest reaches of the garret. In the illumination, she saw a rat scamper into a hole in the roof, and she bit back a gasp.
“You know, Kristi, you are such a tease. After everything I’ve done for you, now you’re going to hide?” There it was again, that sexy, cocksure tone that she found nauseating. “You know I’ve got Eve, don’t you? Your half sister.”
What? Half sister?
“Funny thing about that. She’s my sister too. Did you know that? My twin. She and I have the same mother, you two share the same father. How incestuous is that? We’re all just one, big, happy, sick family.”
Don’t listen to him. He’s talking crazy.
“Now wouldn’t that make one helluva story?” he asked nibbling on a pinky nail.
She was sweating, waiting for him to step deeper into the attic.
“I guess your dad never got around to calling and telling you the news. Maybe that’s because he’s not really your dad, now, is he? Old Rick is really, what? Your uncle? Isn’t that how it works? Your mother fucked around with a priest, right? Good old Father James. If only he could have kept his pants on.”
How does he know all this? Her heart was pounding, her muscles strung tight. Don’t let him bait you. That’s what he’s counting on. Do not listen.
“So the story is that your mother wasn’t the first woman that let the good priest into her panties. Oh, no. Father James was nothing if not persuasive and charming. Faith Chastain, a woman of…well, less than high moral standards, went for him too. Of course, it didn’t hurt that she was mentally disturbed. Did that stop the good priest? Hell, no! And bingo, she got pregnant. My mother, oh, make that my adoptive mother, she saw them, you know. Told me how Faith screwed the priest, really shook my mama’s faith.” He snorted as if the idea were absurd. “She considered herself a good, God-fearing Catholic, but it didn’t stop her from coming into my room at night now, did it?” he said, his voice rising with emotion.
Kristi felt her stomach lurch. She had to fight to keep from throwing up, to stay still and quiet. “So what’s really interesting,” he continued, his voice causing her to shrink against the rough bricks, “is that somehow Faith managed to hide her pregnancy from just about everyone.”
The guy was nuts! Insane! Kristi swallowed back her fear. Tried to keep a clear head.
“So you see…You and I, we’re blood, little sister. I can call Father James ‘Daddy’ too!”
No. This was unbelievable. No friggin’ way!
He swept the beam across the floor again and stepped into the room. “Come on, Kristi. Where are you? Believe me, you do not want to make me mad.”
You are mad. Crazy. Insane! But there was a grain of truth in his words, enough fact woven into his fiction to give her pause and make the skin on the back of her skull tighten in revulsion.
He turned the flashlight toward the ceiling, as if he thought she might be in the rafters. She clenched the pepper spray in a death grip.
He took one more step, and she sprang.
Just as he turned and shined the light right in her eyes. Blinding her.
“Stupid girl,” he muttered, and she blasted him with the spray, shooting a stream straight into his eyes.
He dropped the flashlight. It rolled onto the floor, shining in a wide arc.
For the first time, she saw the gun.
Pointed straight at her heart.
He was coughing. Tears streamed from his handsome face, but he didn’t seem to mind. He grabbed hold of her arm and forced her down the stairs, the gun pressed into her back.
She thought he was taking her to the third floor, but he pushed her farther and farther down the stairs, through the foyer on the first floor, past the dining room, and into a horrible place that was once the kitchen. Near the back door, he prodded her around the corner, where he yanked open a door to the basement.
Her heart sank, and she nearly stumbled on the stairs and half fell into a long hallway. Kerosene lamps had already been lit along the tiled corridor. They passed by darkened rooms that looked more like cells, and Kristi’s imagination ran wild as she thought of the patients who had been isolated here, below ground.
“Stop,” he said and nudged her into a room where a lantern burned and ancient tools and equipment hung from hooks screwed into the molding tile. She spied an electrical prod, a straitjacket, and a tray of time-dulled surgical instruments. Lights protruded from the ceiling, and she imagined the room had been one where surgical procedures had been performed. Her stomach churned.
A. J. plucked a grimy straitjacket from the wall. While pointing the gun at her head, he held the jacket out to her with his other hand and said, “Slip your arms through.”
“No.” She shook her head, her skin crawling at the thought. “I can’t.”
“Do it, Kristi, or I promise you, I’ll shoot you. Not in the heart to begin with. I’ll start with your femur, shatter the bone. Then I’ll shoot you in the hand.” He smiled through his tears and running nose. “Consider yourself lucky. That’s as sadistic as I get. If you would have run into my buddy, Ronnie Le Mars, he would have brought his knife. Done exactly what I told him to do. He thought I was God, did you know that? I had to look long and hard to find someone with ties to the hospital, someone who remembered Eve, someone who was psycho enough to play into my hands. And along came Ronnie. Released from prison. Someone I knew about from my mother who worked in the laundry at Our Lady of Virtues. I kept track of him, because he was perfect, and when he was released, everything I worked for could happen.” His eyes, still red and glistening with tears, actually gleamed, and he smirked with satisfaction. “But you won’t have to worry about Ronnie or his weapon of choice, because I put him out of his self-inflicted misery.” His face suddenly hardened again and he sniffed loudly. “I won’t hesitate to put you out of yours, so do as I say. Got it?”
Ronnie Le Mars was dead? Killed by A. J.? Stunned, she had to keep trying to make sense of this, find a way to best him. Desperate, she tried another tack. “I thought you were my friend.”
“Brother, Kristi, get it right,” he said, angrier than ever, his nose still running. “No, we were never friends. You were using me, that was all, and I saw through it from the beginning. But it worked for me, so I went with it.”
“And used me,” she said.
“Yeah, how’s that for irony?” He shook the straitjacket. “Put this damned thing on. Now!”
She didn’t move fast enough, so he took the gun and fired it point blank at the wall.
BLAM!
The shot cracked in her eardrums and split the tile.
“Watch out! The bullet could ricochet!” she yelled, jumping backward. He caught her with the hand holding the gun, wrapping one strong arm around her and forcing the sleeve of the straitjacket on her with his other hand.
She started to struggle until the gun barrel pointed at her, cool against her cheek. H
e was a cold-blooded killer. She believed that.
Once her arms were inside the sleeves, he set down the gun and tightened the straps, forcing her to hug herself, rendering her hands and legs useless. Dear God, what did he plan for her? She felt helpless and knew if she didn’t do something, she would die.
But your legs are still free…. Don’t give up. Remember. Never give up.
Crack!
A gun blasted.
Eve screamed. Sweet Jesus, what was happening? She shuddered to think.
She could only assume the monster had murdered someone. Possibly someone she knew.
Her stomach quivered and her head pounded. Trembling, she tried to somehow hold onto her thoughts. Think, Eve, think! Save yourself. Before he kills again!
One. Two. Three…
She had no idea why he hadn’t killed her yet, but she knew that it was only a matter of time, probably minutes rather than hours, until he’d end her life as well.
Unless she did something…took action.
Heart racing, she tried to swallow back her dread and think.
Four. Five…
She’d heard two sets of footsteps walk down the stairs. Whoever had been hiding in the attic had been caught. And killed. Holy Mother Mary, she couldn’t imagine who would have been in the garret or why. One of the nuns? Someone hiding, seeking shelter, a homeless person? Or someone she knew?
But now, she was certain, it was her turn.
Dear God, help me…. Please, please, help me!
Pull yourself together, Eve. You’re not dead yet!
Six. Seven. Eight…
Slowly her limbs began to tingle and ache. She could flex her fingers, straighten her toes…. She gritted her teeth, forced her arms and legs to drag her. Slowly. Inching. Her muscles rebelled, not listening to her brain. Come on, come on! You can do this! You have to!
With supreme effort, she started to move. Muscles straining, screaming in protest, she pushed herself ever so slowly across the grimy, dusty, blood-stained floor. Closer and closer. Toward the fireplace where she’d seen the glittering piece of glass.