by Lis Wiehl
Eli bagged and tagged the bloody gloves, the messenger bag, the box, and the crumpled balls of newspaper. Then he delivered them to the Arizona State Police.
The Arizona State Police called the Portland Police Bureau, who in turn got in touch with eBay to find out the real name of the person who had sold Gina her messenger bag.
LiveFree, eBay staff informed the Portland police, was really one Jerome Harford, a frequent eBay seller. Jerome didn’t seem to specialize in any one type of item, and he had a 99.8 percent approval rating on eBay.
Jerome was brought in for questioning, and once he figured out that he wasn’t in trouble for his habit of Dumpster diving, he stopped stammering and wouldn’t stop talking. According to him, businesses and individuals threw out lots of perfectly good stuff—shoes, clothes, ballpoint pens, lamps with the plug-ins cut off. You never knew what you would find, which was why Jerome checked every Dumpster he passed. He kept whatever took his fancy and sold a lot of the rest on eBay.
Including the messenger bag.
Then Jerome led the police to the Dumpster where he had found the messenger bag on the evening of Cassidy’s death.
It was just two blocks from her condominium.
At about the same time as Detective Jensen was being notified about the messenger bag and the bloody gloves, Shannon Coffelt, an Arizona State Police crime scene technologist, was taking a sample of blood from the glove for a DNA test.
Next, Shannon worked to see if she could get prints from the inside of the gloves. Since the gloves had been discarded already inside out, she left them as they were. She began by inserting a narrow piece of PVC tubing into one of the thumbs, shoving it up until the tip was pushed completely inside out. Since there was no way to tell whether the glove had been worn on the left or right hand, she carefully rolled the entire thumb of the glove, over and over, along a length of black gelatin lifter. Slowly, the ridges and whorls of a thumbprint began to emerge. Shannon smiled and grabbed her Nikon.
“And you thought you were so smart wearing gloves, didn’t you?” she said out loud. It was moments like this that Shannon lived for.
In a few hours IAFIS had suggested a match to the two complete fingerprints Shannon was able to obtain. The latent fingerprint examiner confirmed it.
Neither belonged to Jerome Harford. Instead, the fingerprints belonged to a federal prisoner named Lucas Maul.
Six years earlier Lucas Maul had had a head of thick black hair. He was also a career bank robber who worked as a team with a guy named Axel Schmidt. Unlike most bank robbers who had no plans beyond writing a note, Maul and Schmidt carefully planned their robberies, staking out targets for weeks beforehand. They also picked times—like right after a department store deposited the weekend take—that would yield the greatest amount of cash.
Their luck ran out the day a plainclothes cop happened to be depositing his paycheck in the same bank that they were trying to rob. The resulting gun battle left the cop wounded and Axel dead.
Maul managed two more weeks of precious freedom.
Even though he had never fired his gun, FBI Special Agent Nicole Hedges dubbed Maul the Dueling Bandit.
He hated that name. It was catchy, and he supposed that was all that mattered to her. Not the truth.
Then Cassidy Shaw on Channel Four showed his picture again and again on the news. Crying crocodile tears about the wounded cop—who wouldn’t have been hurt if he hadn’t pulled his gun—she urged the station’s viewers to be on the lookout for Lucas Maul and to call 9-1-1 if they spotted him. Which a bartender eventually did.
Nicole Hedges also gathered the evidence that helped federal prosecutor Allison Pierce put Maul away. Cassidy continued to cover the story, especially when it came out that much of the money taken in the robberies could not be accounted for.
And Maul certainly wasn’t talking, not even when he was sentenced to twenty-four years in federal prison.
After his sentencing he ended up on the other side of the country in a federal prison in Virginia. Six years ticked by, years when he thought about the three women who had worked together to put him in prison and the judge who had sentenced him.
Then the left side of Maul’s face started to droop. The prison’s doctor suspected a stroke, but he lacked the sophisticated equipment needed to scan his brain. So Maul was taken under armed guard to a hospital.
That night, after a series of tests, the neurologist came to talk to Maul in his hospital room. Maul’s wrists and ankles were shackled to the bed, but the corrections officer still stood in the corner with his hands clasped in front of him, openly eavesdropping.
Maul was told he hadn’t suffered a stroke. Instead he had an incurable brain tumor. It was twined around his brain stem and couldn’t be treated. Not with surgery, not with radiation, not with chemotherapy. The doctor told him that he could expect to live about a year, maybe eighteen months. It was likely that he would feel perfectly fine until close to the end, when he would spend the last few weeks bedridden and blind. At that point, the neurologist said, doctors would take “comfort measures.”
Even the guard blinked at that.
Accepting the sheaf of brochures and printouts the doctor handed him, Maul took the news with a stoic expression. But his thoughts were in turmoil. He was going to die in prison. Blind and incontinent in a prison infirmary.
Maul was six years into a twenty-four-year sentence, but as a model inmate he could reasonably expect to be released after twenty. He had resigned himself to patiently serving out the remaining fourteen years, knowing that when he got out he’d have almost a million dollars waiting for him. It made the waiting almost bearable. He would be forty-eight, not impossibly old. He could still have a good life.
Now he would never get that life. Never get that freedom. Never get a chance to spend the money he had hidden. It was unacceptable. If he had only a year to live, he had to be free. Free to go where he wanted, eat what he chose, sleep with whatever woman caught his fancy. And first, and most important, free to extract his revenge.
After the neurologist left, an aide brought Maul’s dinner. The guard took off the wrist shackles so that he could eat, leaving his ankles still secured to the hospital bed. He said nothing before he resumed his post in the hallway, but his look said volumes. It said, It sucks to be you. It said, Being in this hospital room is as close to free as you are going to get, buddy.
As soon the door closed behind him, Maul went to work. Shackles and handcuffs were not particularly sophisticated. Most opened with a universal key. A key he didn’t have, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t open them.
The brochures the doctor had given him were held together with a small binder clip. Maul pinched the metal wire until one silver arm slipped free of the black clip. The arm was already bent at a ninety-degree angle. He slid it into the lock of the shackle and wiggled it. In less than a minute he had both legs free.
That still left the guard just outside the door. The guard and his gun. So that way was out. The window in his hospital room didn’t open. And Maul was dressed, if you could call it that, in only a hospital gown.
Fifteen minutes later, when the guard checked on Maul, he found the bed empty and the bathroom door locked. The guard wasn’t particularly worried, except by the possibility that Maul was in there trying to kill himself. A maintenance man was summoned to help circumvent the lock.
Meanwhile, Maul had already climbed up on the sink, pushed aside an acoustical tile, and crawled up into the ceiling. If any of the patients along the hall had happened to look up from their bed at just the right moment, they might have seen one of Maul’s brown eyes peeping at them. Six rooms down the hall from where he began, he saw what he wanted—a sleeping male patient who looked about his size. He dropped through the ceiling tiles into the man’s bathroom. Later the patient would wake up to find his shirt, jeans, baseball cap, and Nikes missing from the hospital room’s closet, as well as a vase of flowers from his bedside.
And by the
time the guard figured out what had happened, Lucas Maul was long gone and on his way back to Portland.
Portland, where his money was.
Portland, where the people who were to blame for his incarceration were.
Cassidy Shaw, the reporter who had harped on how he had to be found.
Nicole Hedges, the FBI agent who had given him his ill-fitting moniker and then arrested him.
Allison Pierce, the prosecutor who had persecuted him.
And Nate Grenfels, the judge who had sentenced him.
The last one, the judge, had already died. But not the rest.
Not yet.
But as Maul had made his way to Portland, he vowed to change that.
CHAPTER 36
It’s Lucas Maul,” Ophelia said. She had found Allison in the dining room, stroking Cinders. “Lucas Maul.”
Allison’s eyes opened wide. “He was a bank robber, right?”
“Right. I apologize for not realizing it earlier.” Ophelia felt her cheeks redden. “I didn’t think of checking for escaped offenders until just now. And Maul escaped from prison in Virginia a little less than two weeks ago.”
“Lucas Maul,” Allison repeated.
“I have his booking photo up on my computer screen if you want to see it.”
Allison followed her back into her office. Maul stared out at them with his chin lifted and his teeth clenched. His dark eyes offered them a silent challenge. Ophelia could see why Angel had called them intense.
Maul also had a thick head of black hair.
“He must have shaved it,” Allison said.
“Or he may have had it shaved for him,” Ophelia said. “I found a story about him online. He had been diagnosed with a brain tumor, and it sounds like he doesn’t have that long to live. When he started showing symptoms—which must account for that droop on the left side of his face—the prison didn’t have the equipment they needed to diagnose him, so they sent him to a large hospital. He escaped from there. I looked for other stories about it, but I didn’t find that many.” Ophelia figured authorities had been embarrassed.
“So Maul finds out he doesn’t have long to live and then he decides that his priority is to kill everyone who held him to account for the things he did? And that’s why he killed Cassidy and Lindsay?” Allison exhaled sharply through her nose. “What a waste. What a stupid thing to die for.”
While Allison was speaking, Ophelia heard the sound of cars turning into her driveway. She went to the window and twitched aside the blind. Nicole and Leif pulled up in separate cars.
Ophelia braced herself. She was proud of her computer programming skills. While she would be able to tell them she had solved the puzzle of the killer’s identity, it would be difficult to do so without also revealing that the reason it had taken so long was that she had overlooked one obvious parameter.
But as soon as she let them in the house, Nicole started chattering away about bloody gloves and eBay and fingerprints. And about Lucas Maul. Just before they had left the motel, Detective Jensen had called Nicole with the news that a lead from Arizona had been traced back to a Dumpster two blocks from Cassidy’s apartment—and to Maul’s fingerprints being identified on a pair of bloody gloves.
Now they knew who had killed Cassidy and Lindsay. But knowing who he was, the four of them realized as they talked, was not the same as finding him. Maul had no family and no known associates aside from the two men they had found dead in the motel. All authorities could do was keep casting the net, trying to figure out a way to track him down. They planned to release his photo to the media, although it turned out they didn’t have any that showed him bald.
“Nic is staying with me for the time being,” Leif told them, putting his arm around her shoulders. “It’s not safe for her to be at home, not when Maul might be looking for her. Not when he thinks she might be the last one of the Triple Threat standing. And we’ll have an agent watching my house in case he shows up there.”
Nicole ducked her head. Ophelia wasn’t certain what emotion Nicole was feeling. She couldn’t tell if the other woman was embarrassed or happy about this turn of events.
Ophelia was also distracted by Nicole’s clothes. She was wearing a pink and maroon outfit made of some shiny polyester material. It looked like a uniform.
“Is something wrong?” Nicole asked, and Ophelia realized she had been staring. Neurotypicals were not comfortable with open scrutiny. It was fine to stare—it just wasn’t fine to get caught.
“Your clothes are a different style from what you normally wear.” Ophelia liked people to be predictable, which meant Nicole should have been wearing a dark pantsuit.
“I borrowed a housekeeper’s uniform from the motel tonight to help me talk my way into the room.” Nicole grimaced. “That was before we knew the only people in there were dead. The day manager locked up my clothes for safekeeping, but he left while we were still processing the scene, and it turns out the night guy doesn’t have a key to that closet.” She tugged at the white round collar, and Ophelia caught a flash of a black layer she wore underneath. “I can’t wait to go home and change.”
“It’s been a long day,” Leif said.
Nicole yawned, making an almost musical vocalization, and Allison followed suit. Ophelia was normally immune to neurotypicals’ contagious emotions, but other people’s yawns were sometimes infectious. She yawned as well.
“I think we should call it a night,” Leif said, stifling his own yawn. “We can regroup tomorrow and decide what we should do next. There must be some way we can figure out how to find Maul.”
“Sure.” Allison blinked slowly, as if she were already half asleep.
A few minutes later Nicole and Leif left, after hugging Allison good-bye. To forestall either of them touching her, Ophelia crossed her arms.
“I’m exhausted,” Allison said as soon as the door closed. “I’m going to bed. It’s been a long day.”
She’d only been up for about ten hours, but Ophelia understood that time could be subjective.
Maizy and Cinders were unsettled, pacing back and forth, crying occasionally. Amber was hiding someplace, probably behind the refrigerator or under the couch. Like Ophelia, the cats were unused to having strangers in the house, bringing with them their smells and sounds and odd, unpredictable behaviors. She was stroking Maizy when she heard a faint tinkling sound. Glass breaking. It had come from down the hall.
“Allison?” She stood up and started down the dark hallway. She hoped the other woman hadn’t been looking through her bathroom cabinets. Maybe she had knocked over the glass jar that held the cotton balls.
Suddenly a big hand reached out of the darkness and grabbed Ophelia’s shoulder. She gasped.
“Don’t scream or I’ll kill you,” a man whispered. In his hand she saw the silhouette of a gun with a long barrel. His shaven head gleamed in the faint light. The left side of his mouth drooped, although it didn’t seem to affect his speech.
Had he heard her say Allison’s name? And what about Allison? Was she still awake? Did she know that Lucas Maul was right here, only a few feet away?
“I won’t scream,” Ophelia said. She modulated her voice so that it was louder than normal, hoping that Allison would hear. Hear and understand. Understand and react.
But what could Allison do? The guest room held no weapons, not even something that could be an improvised weapon. She hoped that Allison had Lindsay’s cell phone with her. That she was even now calling for help.
Ophelia’s eyes had adjusted to the dim light. Past Maul she could see into her own bedroom through the now open door. The window above her bed had been broken, the blinds twisted to one side, the glass pushed out of the frame so that it now lay on her bed in glinting knife-life shards. She didn’t like to think about the tiny slivers of glass that must have slipped among the downy feathers of her comforter, or of how he must have trampled it with his shoes.
“What do you want?” she asked.
For an answer,
Maul marched her back into the living room, holding her so close to himself that they bumped into each other at every step. He smelled sharply of sweat and beer. The scent took her back to a bad place.
When they stepped out into the light, she saw the silencer screwed onto the barrel of his gun. Maizy came toward them, meowing.
His foot shot out. It was so quick that Ophelia was still opening her mouth to shout a protest when he kicked the cat, almost casually, about three feet into the air. Maizy twisted in midair and managed to land on her feet, then darted under the couch, her ears flat against her head.
Ophelia was shocked. “Why did you do that?”
“Because I can,” Maul said, smiling lazily. “I can do anything I want.” There was no dissonance in his face or his body. He believed what he was telling her. “You’re very pretty, you know.” He reached his free hand toward her, and she flinched.
Maul laughed and stroked her cheek with his knuckles. She could feel the promise in them. He could caress her or kill her. His choice, and either was easy. Dark memories stirred in her gut.
“And because I can do what I want, you should do what I ask or I’ll do more bad things. And what I want is for you to get Nicole Hedges to come back here. By herself.”
“Why?” Ophelia asked. “What are you going to do to her?”
“I don’t think that’s any concern of yours, do you?” Maul offered her a smile that even she could tell was fake. He tightened his grip on her upper arm. In the morning there would be bruises shaped like fingerprints. She wondered if she would be alive to see them.
“How am I supposed to accomplish that?” Did she hear some soft movement from the back of the house, where Allison was? She reminded herself not to look in that direction, not to change expression.
“I can tell you’re a smart girl. Make something up. Just make sure she comes back without that Leif.”
“How do you know his name?”
“It’s my business to know things.” Maul’s eyes narrowed. “Not yours. So stop asking questions and do what you’re told.”