Once in the car Devin read over her directions and realized she couldn’t read them all that clearly. She pulled up to Henry’s carport and killed the engine. He was still resting in his lawn chair, just where she had left him.
“Henry, on the way to the Gibson farm, do I take a left before or after the old Hampton Country Store?” Directions around Fenton were never given in blocks or street numbers, but by landmarks or property owners.
“You take the left after the store. The road will fork, and the left one goes straight up the hill to the ridge.” Henry leaned up in his chair. “Why on earth are you headed up there? That place has been deserted for twenty years.”
“I know. I just want to check out the view of the school so I can confirm something.” The engine rumbled back to life, and she had to shout over it. “Thanks for clarifying my directions!”
With a salute, Devin backed down the driveway. Henry tried to yell after her, but she either couldn’t hear or pretended not to.
Driving on gravel roads was not particularly Devin’s favorite thing. For one thing, it required a completely different style of driving, and it was easy to get loose and lose control if you didn’t know what you were doing. More importantly, it got the car very dirty. If she had not been on the brink of breaking this whole case wide open, she would have been in a very foul mood. Her phone rang.
“Talk fast I only have one bar.”
“Where are you?”
“On my way to the Gibson farm.” She started explaining the whats and whys of her field trip, but he interrupted.
“You’re breaking up. Listen to me…need…back here…found…Leary.”
Her heart skipped a beat. “Now you’re breaking up, but I think you said you found Michael Leary. I’ll be there in thirty minutes.”
“No. Now. The Family changed…name…not who you...”
Devin glanced at the screen of her phone she had no signal. She would take a quick peek from the top of the hill and then fly back down into service range. Curiosity was eating at her to find out more about Leary. Why had he changed his name and essentially gone into hiding?
The buzzing sensation of her intuition was so pronounced when Devin stepped out of the car that she felt as if someone would be cracked with the jolt of a taser if they tried to touch her. As she stepped around the dilapidated house to face the school, she barely needed her eyes to see. The current of electricity wove the images together in her mind as she pieced together the last of the puzzle. A water tower had been built at the base of the hill, completely blocking any view of the school or parking lot. It had not been there in 1964 of course, but he had known this morning when he gave her directions that her trip up here would be in vain.
Instinctively Devin pulled her gun, but what next? Playing cat and mouse on his turf was hardly optimal and there were only seconds to decide. Working her thumb frantically over the buttons of her phone, she sent up a small prayer that it would work if she could do it fast enough.
A cold, dead voice from her left cut her short. “You won’t get any service up here.”
Lifting her eyes to the grass in front of her, Devin’s jaw tightened, but she didn’t turn to look at him. “Hello, Adam.”
“Just in case, why don’t you go ahead and toss that phone out here?” He walked in a wide arc until he was standing ten feet in front of her, with his back to the water tower a .45 revolver aimed steadily at her head. Devin debated her options for a second and then tossed the phone at his feet.
“Your gun, too, Devin.”
Her right hand twitched, feeling the comfortable weight of her Glock, every fiber of her being was saying don’t give up the gun. The reckless part of her cop brain wanted to take the shot. The sensible side won out. Glancing down and sighing, Devin slowly raised her gun to the side and equally slowly slid the clip out, throwing it to her left about twenty feet away. Keeping her movements methodical, she slid the action back on the top of the gun, ejecting the bullet from the chamber, and threw the now empty gun five feet to her right.
“That’s an interesting gun choice, a little old school don’t you think?” she asked.
His tone remained blank, but his expression twisted into smug satisfaction. “Do you like it? I got it from Henry’s when I set his house on fire. I thought it would be a nice touch if I ended up having to shoot you. Then I could always shoot Henry, too, and set it up as a murder/suicide. That would cement it in everyone’s minds that he killed Laney, too—wrap up everything nicely.” Adam shrugged, thinking about what could have been. “It could have been that simple, but you had to keep pushing, and now everything has unraveled. All the secrets I’ve worked so hard to keep protected from a cruel world are going to be laid bare because of you.”
Devin lifted her face into the sunshine. “Because of me? I don’t think so. I’m not the reason for the secrets in the first place.” The breeze picked up, and she shifted her weight onto her right foot, shimmying an inch in that direction. “Of course you were raised on secrets, weren’t you? When did your father change his name? As soon as he left Fenton? Or did that come later?”
Adam didn’t answer, but his mouth was drawn into a tight white line.
If he was going to stonewall, she would keep talking until he gave some sort of response. “Leary to Lentz really isn’t all that creative. I mean, two L names that are five letters long? I’m curious—did he change it to hide from your mother?” Devin shifted another two inches to the right. “Really, I should say the woman who raised you, I can’t imagine Eloise Faulkner was really your birth mother.”
The bullet sailed past her ear and shattered the wall of the house behind her in an explosion of splinters.
Hello, Mommy complex.
“Shut your mouth, Devin! Mother took care of things.” Adam was red and shaking as he struggled between control and rage. “I’m not supposed to kill you yet, but it won’t bother me if have to.”
“I’m guessing it would bother Mommy, though, wouldn’t it? She really wants me for herself.”
It was surprising how well the sound of the pistol cocking carried on the breeze. “Mother would get over it. I got her a spare.”
Ice wrapped around Devin’s heart. Her confidence waivered for a moment. Everything about him suggested he was telling the truth. Her voice was rough with emotion when she finally spoke.
“Who?”
His grin sent the ice into her stomach. “Your favorite little milkshake maker, Casey Bittner. That sweet little thing was so trusting that she came right along with me.” His eyes were hard. “She’s also the insurance to make sure you do what I ask. Your cooperation makes it easier on Casey. Just remember that.”
Devin had to dig her toes into the ground to keep from launching herself across the dusty yard at him right then. “How did you get Casey and get here right behind me? I left just minutes after I called you for directions.” Maybe he was bluffing, it was possible they didn’t have Casey yet.
“Most people don’t spend enough time in cemeteries to discover all their secrets. For some reason, they trust the living more than the dead. I just sent you the long way around.”
The cemetery had been Eloise’s sanctuary from the tortures of high school. She would know all of its secrets.
“You know, the cemetery is actually how I put your dysfunctional little family tree together,” Devin said. “When we first met, you told me you originally came to Fenton doing a genealogy project in college, and Eloise used to do tracings of tombstones, that’s used in family history work.” She paused to take a breath and listened for any approaching cars, but heard no cavalry approaching. “Putting the last piece together was a little tougher. I suspected Eloise when I read the notes and found that she was actually the one who verified Michael’s alibi. There was no way she could see where he’d parked in the back of the school. Everything came together this morning when I saw the picture of the car in the Summit parking lot. Turns out I just needed the right set of pictures.”
&nb
sp; Adam’s sneer distorted his normally serene face. He spat on the ground in frustration. “You’re not brilliant, you know, just lucky and bull-headedly persistent.”
Devin shifted her weight to the right again. Was that a truck in the distance, or wishful thinking? “Why the big contradiction?” Devin asked. “You do all this work with abused kids, getting them to open up to you over frozen yogurt, when you’re murdering innocent girls that are no more then children. How did you get that messed up?”
His mirthless laugh sounded like a bark on the empty hillside. Adam jerked the pistol towards her right hand. “I guess we’re all looking for own kind of redemption, aren’t we, Devin?”
Anger writhed through her like a live thing. Every muscle in her body clenched to keep it contained, but her voice was a seething hiss. “Don’t compare us—it isn’t even close to the same thing.”
“Isn’t it? That little girl was destroyed, and you extracted a bloody vengeance that the legal system let you slide for. You’ve spent your whole career in law enforcement trying to make amends.”
Devin lunged forward, but was met abruptly with his .45. “I make amends for her! Because I couldn’t save her. I have no regrets for those degenerates.”
“Tsk, tsk such a temper. You stay right where you are.” His smile turned her stomach. “You see how I feel. My father was so distraught over Laney Bennett.” He spat out the acidic burn of her name on his tongue. “Knowing she was playing him for a fool, he went to the Summit that night and saw her cavorting with all those men like the tramp she was, and he ended her the way a piece of trash deserves. He wasn’t the kind of man that could live with blood on his hands, though. He was so remorseful about what he’d done that he sank into a depressed paranoia. Moving around and changing his name didn’t make a difference. He could never escape what he’d done, so he took his own life to be with his precious Laney.” Adam’s hand was trembling, and his icy eyes had glazed over with tears. Devin was sure he couldn’t hear the approaching truck. She needed to keep him emotional, but not volatile enough to get her shot in the next few minutes.
Devin spoke up. “So Eloise figures since he off’d himself, she’d get back at the world by killing random teenager girls? Makes tons of sense to me.”
Adam’s face turned purple, jabbing the pistol in the air as if he wished to stab her rather than shoot her with it. “Shut up! You don’t know anything! He was a brilliant man and would have had a great life if not for what that Bennett girl did to him. Mother had to protect him and his memory. We couldn’t let everyone know what he had done.” He paused to wipe the dripping sweat off his face on the sleeve of his shirt. It was a stark contrast to the crisply pressed Adam she’d known. “The plan was perfect. It had fail safes to cover every possible discovery. I was here to keep an eye on things. The evidence had been purged. Those girls were an unfortunate consequence, but I highly doubt they were innocent.” He shook his head in disgust. “You women rarely are.”
The truck was just a mile out, Devin guessed, but her heart sank. It wasn’t a diesel engine. It had a distinct classic sound. Henry’s cherry red Chevrolet came to mind. She pressed her right arm against her side and used her thumb to start working the spare clip out of her pocket. Just keep him amped up.
“We’re not innocent, huh? You mean like your sainted mother, the murderer?”
Adam’s entire body was shaking with rage. His eyes were bloodshot and dilated. Devin briefly wondered if he was high.
“Don’t talk about my mother!”
Somehow she forced out a laugh. “Why? She’s the whole reason I came to Fenton, to find the person who murdered Laney Bennett.” The denial was already on his lips, but she cut him off in a rush of words. “Eloise fabricated an alibi for Michael that he didn’t even need. He already had Dean and the 911 call, but she was the one who needed the alibi of being home all evening. The car I found in the pictures was not your father’s. It was a shiny black Cadillac from the funeral home. Stood out like a sore thumb among the hot rods and junkers the normal teenagers were driving.”
“You’re lying!” His voice was more a guttural snarl than human words.
“What would be the point of that, Adam?”
“You want me to turn against my mother and tell you lies about her! You’re poison!”
Any sign of the man Devin had known was gone. A switch had been flipped, and the bashful, child-protecting Adam was gone, replaced by this brainwashed monstrosity created by Eloise. His wild eyes shifted for a millisecond when they came back to her his face, smoothed into a calm mask. He lowered the gun to his side, but still kept it pointed. “We have company Devin. I think Henry is going to make this a little neater for me after all.”
Details were something that never escaped Devin in high-tension situations. When the adrenaline flowed, her senses became heightened. For many people it was just the opposite. They were reckless and unfocused. Luckily Adam fell into the latter category, because Devin could clearly tell that Henry was not slowing down to park next to her Mustang; he was gaining speed to make a charge. The clip was free of her back pocket. When Adam lifted his hand to give Henry a welcoming wave and false smile, she transferred the clip to her left hand and glanced down to locate the exact position of her gun on the ground.
Devin began the count. One. Adam’s eyes popped in realization of what was happening. Two. The ferocious sounds of wood cracking filled the air as the truck struck the first corner of the house. Three. Devin flung herself off the porch towards her gun as glass and debris filled the air. Adam reeled backwards, firing first two shots into Henry’s windshield and then sending one shot over her head. Scooping the Glock out of the dirt with her right hand, Devin tucked her head in a roll, slamming her right shoulder hard into the ground and flipping onto her back.
Years of training made the motions of shoving the clip in and pulling the action back beyond second nature. By the time she landed, Devin was bringing the pistol up in a two-handed grip. Adam was drawing down for his second shot on her, but she didn’t hesitate—three shots, center mass.
For a moment Adam stood frozen with the expression of a shocked fish that had been pulled from the water and couldn’t get a breath. Devin stayed where she was on the ground, keeping her gun aimed until he fell onto his back. Then, somersaulting onto her feet, she quickly approached him, kicking his pistol far out of reach. She never took her gun off him as she yelled across the demolished yard.
“Henry! Are you all right?” With the force of the crash, she wasn’t really expecting an answer.
A shaky voice called back. “Yeah, I’m okay, just a little beat up.”
Looking down into a face she no longer recognized, Devin watched the corners of Adam’s blood-spattered mouth turn up in a gruesome smile. His words came out in gasps of breath.
“You can’t tie me to any of those girls. You have no proof, and you’re the only one that heard my confession.” He shook with what might have been a sick form of laughter. “It dies with me.”
Glancing around until she found her phone just two feet away, Devin leaned down to pick it up and held the screen just inches from Adam’s face.
“The great thing about cell phones these days is all the features that don’t require any signal to work, like the ‘record memo’ option. If I have enough memory available, I can record up to twenty minutes of audio, and I don’t need any little bars to do it.” She waved the phone. “Want to say hi to Mom? I’m going play it for her later. Unless I shoot her on sight.”
Adam’s eyes went wide and frantic. He was starting to choke on the blood in his throat. He had seconds of life left.
“What do you want for her, Adam? Do you want me to end it quickly, or do you want her to sit on death row for ten years waiting on the needle? Tell me where she has Casey, and you can choose.”
His lips worked furiously; unconsciously, she leaned in, closer trying to make out what he was saying. His last words were a barely perceptible gurgle.
�
�Go to Hell.”
She stared at the lifeless body of the monster she’d had dinner with just last night and spoke to the air around her. “Apparently I vacation there.”
The beautiful song of salvation was playing close by—sirens were closing in on them.
Chapter 26
Devin was helping Henry hobble out of the cab and onto the tailgate of his truck when the battalion of squad cards and SUVs descended upon the yard. The dust cloud out of the narrow track of gravel road rolled out at least a quarter of a mile behind them. Bursting into the clearing, the lead SUV had to be pushing sixty miles per hour, but while the other vehicles came to a stop in a tactical formation the lead car slammed to a stop behind Henry’s truck, and Shane leapt out from the driver’s seat, running to Devin and Henry.
With the instinct of a cop he ran with his hand on his holster, but he had to get a hand on Devin to know she was still intact. He reached out grabbing her first by the shoulder, then touching her elbow, moving to her forehead and finally to her chin, each touch growing lighter than the last, the whole time his eyes scanning over her for a gunshot or knife wound, something bleeding or broken. Finding nothing but scrapes and bruises he finally looked into her eyes and with a look asked the question he couldn’t with words. Ever so slightly Devin shook her head no, but her eyes had already told him Adam was dead.
His hand was still resting on her on her chin; Shane slid it to the back of her neck and closed the distance between them wrapping his other arm around her waist to pull her tightly against him. When their lips met, all their fear, relief and denied attraction came crashing together. In the middle of a crime scene, with deputies running and shouting like a swarm of bees around them, Shane and Devin were alone in their own world. Devin still had her gun in hand, but clutched the fingers of her left hand in his hair. Even Henry’s low chuckle did not disturb them. When the kiss ended only their lips parted, they leaned their foreheads together as they caught their breath. Shane’s voice was raw with emotion.
Devils Among Us (Devin Dushane Series Book 1) Page 24