by Karen Woods
“Better than I had hoped. The stress is getting to her.”
“Of course, it would be. I’m not sure how well I would have held up to everything that she’s gone through lately,” Glenna replied.
“Do you have anything else to tell me?”
“Nope. That’s about it. The snake was certainly capable of producing a nasty bite. From the looks of it, it was probably alive when it went into the water,” Glenna said with a sigh.
“God.”
“Yeah,” Glenna said. “I don’t know what else to say. I wish that I could be of more help. But, I’m a vet, not a herpetologist, definitely not a forensic pathologist.”
“Thanks anyway, Glenna.”
“How badly was Geoff hurt?” Glenna asked. “The other night, I mean?”
“It could have been worse.”
Glenna turned away.
“You aren’t still carrying a torch for him, are you?”
“What? Me?” Glenna replied without conviction. She still didn’t face me. “That would be profoundly stupid. Now, wouldn’t it? I mean, he’s supposed to be marrying Alicia on the thirtieth, isn’t he? Even I am smart enough not to allow myself to stay hung up on a man who is committed elsewhere.”
“You want to go to a movie tonight? The new Stephen King film is in town. It might be an interesting diversion. I’ll even spring for pizza.”
Glenna smiled softly as she turned around. “Now, there’s an offer that would turn any girl’s head.” She chuckled. “Why couldn’t I have fallen for you?”
“Maybe because you are brighter than normal?” I offered with a smile.
Glenna laughed tightly. “Yeah, right. Just now, I don’t feel particularly bright.”
I crossed the room to stand just in front of the petite veterinarian. I touched her face, lightly, with the back of my hand. “Glenna,” I said.
She moved into my arms. I held her close, in the comforting embrace of an old and valued friend.
“Philip,” she whispered just before she left my embrace. She stepped back a couple of paces. “Pizza and a movie sound good. But, I’ve got dress rehearsals for the Theatre Guild tonight. I’ve really got to be there.”
“Of course you do. Can’t have the Guild’s production of The Mousetrap have dress rehearsal without its prized director.”
Glenna smiled softly. “Sorry.”
“Take a rain check?”
“Love to,” the petite vet said. “But for something other than a Stephen King film.” Then her eyes softened to hold an invitation, “Unless you were also offering to hold me all night to protect me from the nightmares which always come after I see a horror film?”
I smiled at her. “I never know when you are serious, Glenna.”
“That’s always been the problem. No one ever has,” she said almost under her breath.
Chapter 28
ALICIA
I awoke suddenly from my nap, at three-fifteen on the afternoon of May 14, still shaking from the nightmare. Do you call them nightmares when they occur during the day? Of late, the dreams were too surreal for me to mistake them for reality. Thankfully. Still, I woke shaking each time.
I saw, in my dream, Hernandez handcuffing Sarah to Joanie—the girls standing back to back—then chloroforming them both before taking them out into the night. Then the images had dissolved, becoming far more lewd.
The two dead Hernandez brothers, Luis and Juan, had specialized in furnishing girls for extremely kinky encounters as well as for blue and even snuff films. The images I had seen in my dreams were nothing more than the memory of what I had found out about the way that they had worked.
Even telling myself that, I felt sick, defiled, and shaky.
I forced myself to lie back on the bed and close my eyes. Then I took a series of deep, slow, breaths to calm myself.
The hour had just past four in the afternoon. I was looking through the refrigerator and freezer in the kitchen, hoping for inspiration. Dinner wouldn’t be anything outstanding. Yet, I was hoping for the ingredients for more than another humdrum meal.
I don’t know why I was inspecting the cabinet’s contents. I knew all too well what was contained there since I had replaced everything only this morning.
Finally, I decided that deliciously different food was not going to magically appear upstairs in the kitchen. So, I went to the cellar stairs. Flipping on the light, I made my way down into the dank, poorly lit, inadequate excuse for a basement.
I walked over to the freezer with the intent of retrieving a package of steaks from the large, older, chest freezer. I pulled the chain on the porcelain light fixture that hung just above the freezer. The light coming from the single 100 watt bare bulb was harsh, yet adequate for the use.
I lifted the heavy white metal lid and peered into the frosty box.
The last thing that I expected was to find another set of eyes staring back at me . . . A set of dead eyes . . . In a face contorted by pain . . . encased in a block of ice, no less . . . a little girl’s face, as familiar to me as my own.
Joanie.
I looked at the brownish/red tinged cube of ice for the longest moment, not daring to believe my eyes.
In the small part of my mind still working, I knew that I couldn’t touch it, shouldn’t touch it. I tried to tell myself that it wasn’t real, that it couldn’t be real.
I dropped the lid of the chest with a resounding thud as I heard someone screaming. It wasn’t until the bodyguards had thundered down the steps that I realized that I was the one screaming.
Chapter 29
PHIL
Al was sitting on the long living room sofa with her legs drawn up to her chest and with her arms hugging her denim covered legs tightly to herself. Geoff sat beside her, speaking far too lowly for me to hear his words, although I recognized the soothing tone.
“Can’t you stay out of trouble?” I only half teased, as I saw the strained and shocked expression on her face.
“Obviously not,” she answered. She rocked herself gently, slowly, back and forth.
“The city is running up quite a bill by having the State Police Crime Scene Services here of late,” I replied, again only half in jest. “You’ve got to stop this, Al. We can’t afford the tax hike to pay the bills.”
She smiled weakly at me. “Funny,” she replied in a tone which belied her words.
“That’s better, Al. Don’t let the bastard get to you,” I advised.
“It’s not his getting to me that I am worried about,” Al said in a strained tone. “I wish that he would show his face so that I could get this over with, one way or the other. I am so sick of this tension that I could scream.”
Geoff touched his fiancee’s arm. “‘Licia. Hang on. Fight back, baby.”
Tears streamed down her face. “He killed Joanie, Geoff. Joanie, whose only connection to me was the circumstances of her birth. I can’t believe that he killed Joanie. She was a Hernandez. The last link to his brothers. Why would he kill her? Just to get back at me? It doesn’t make any sense. It just doesn’t make any sense.”
“You said that he had sworn to take everything from you that you cared for.”
“But, Joanie, Geoff?” Alicia demanded. “She was just a child. I had never even seen her except for photographs since the morning that I gave her over to Clay and Maggie Houston.”
I took a seat and opened my notepad. When have you ever seen a cop without a notebook? People think of guns as police equipment, but cops use pen and paper far more than we ever use our guns. In fact, anymore, I tend to think that I am at a far greater danger from a nasty paper cut than I am from an armed assailant.
“I hate to have to do this, but I have to take a statement, Al. I’ll try to make this as straightforward as possible.”
“I’m sure ‘Licia appreciates that, Phil,” Geoff replied with strain in his voice.
“Tell me about today . . .”
I listened to her tale.
“Did you check the freezer wh
en you got rid of the open packages?”
“Yes. It wasn’t there last night.”
“Al . . .”
“I know,” she said, “you have to establish a time frame on this. I know that.”
I sat, staring at a blank wall in my office at the municipal services building. The further that this case evolved, the more that there was which didn’t fit.
The phone rang. I picked it up before the second ring.
“Mallory.”
“Phil? Bill Gregory here.”
I sat up a bit straighter in the seat. William Gregory, M.D., was the local physician who served as the county’s Medical Examiner.
“Yes, Bill? Do you have a cause of death?”
“I think that you had better get over here. You aren’t going to believe this.”
“Tell me.”
“You have to see it to believe it.”
“Right there, Bill.”
It was less than a ten-minute drive from the municipal services building to the local hospital. I parked in back and walked into the basement door. Down a hall, past classrooms which were inhabited by student nurses and EMT training, then turning right and down another hall, he finally came to the suite of rooms that were used, thankfully rarely, for autopsies.
I entered without knocking.
“Bill?”
Bill looked up from the report he was writing. “Come on in, Phil. Like I told you on the phone, you aren’t going to believe this without seeing it,” he said with a puzzled smile.
“Do you have a cause of death?”
“Nope. Thank God.”
“You had better explain that. I’m not following you.”
“Come on through.”
The inner room was very similar to the rooms in the surgical suite on the fourth floor. It was very well lighted, appointed in stainless steel, and chilly. My eyes went immediately to the head that still lay on the table. Only now, it was no longer encased in the block of ice in which Alicia had found it.
“Go, take a closer look,” the doctor suggested. “Look closely.”
I fought back the revulsion that I always felt in a morgue. You’d think that I would have gotten used to this by now, but I haven’t. I walked to the table.
“I’ll be damned! I’ll be god-damned and boiled in oil!” It was fake, a gruesome work of an obviously twisted mind.
The medical examiner snorted. “Probably. If it is any consolation, it had me going too, for about a half a second. But, I couldn’t prove what I was thinking until some of the ice came off.”
I reached out to touch the head, then pulled my hands away before doing that. “Who has handled this?”
“Only the officers who brought it and me,” Bill stated.
“I doubt that we’ll get any good prints off of it, but I have to try. Dump it into an evidence bag. I’ll see that it is dusted for prints.”
“You had probably better tell Alicia about this,” Bill said.
I nodded. “That isn’t something that I’m looking forward to.”
“How’s she holding up?” Bill asked in concern.
“Considering everything, not too badly. Not too badly, at all. She was pretty shaken up over this, though.”
“I’d like to get my hands on the person who did this to her,” the doctor said. “Just for five minutes. This was not funny. Just five minutes, Phil. Do you think that you can arrange it?”
“Not likely, Bill. There are too many people who would like to get a shot at this guy. Too many people.”
I didn’t have to tell him that I was one of the first two on the list. I could see that he understood that.
“Find him.”
“We’ll get him.”
Bill nodded in agreement. “Give Geoff and Alicia my best regards.”
“Will do.”
John, the bodyguard, answered the door.
“Is Doctor Jenkins at home?”
Al stood at the doorway between the living room and the entrance hall. “Weren’t you the one who said that I was running up quite a bill for the city to pay?” she drawled.
I smiled slightly.
“What’s happened now?”
“Good news.”
“I could use some. Come on into the living room.”
Al looked at me in disbelief from across the room. “Fake?” Her voice rose in volume and shrillness, “Fake?”
“Someone is trying to drive you nuts, Al.”
“Tell me about it,” she replied. Then she smiled a forced smile. “And he’s doing a very fine job of it. I hope that Hernandez is getting a thrill out of this.”
Geoff looked at me and then at his fiancee. “So, Phil? Where do we go from here?”
I ran a hand through my dark hair. “Hernandez obviously learned his trade well.”
“A bit too well,” Al responded.
“His trade?” Geoff asked.
“Before he took it upon himself to go after Al, he was in an apprentice special effects man in Hollywood. And he was starting to make a name for himself,” I explained. “He was the only one in the family with a straight career. Although, it was suspected that he was involved in the film end of the family business.”
“Lord.” Geoff growled.
Al shrugged and rose from her chair. “I am going to bed, if you will excuse me.”
“Are you feeling well?” Geoff asked.
“No. I’m feeling pretty badly, actually.”
Geoff levered himself up from the couch with a groan. His ribs were obviously giving him a good deal of pain. He walked over to her. He touched her forehead. “You don’t seem to have a fever. Do you need to go to the doctor?”
Al sighed. “Don’t worry about it, Geoff. I’m not physically ill, just emotionally distressed. You are the one who should be in bed. You still have to be hurting from those cracked ribs . . . I’m just mollycoddling myself.”
Geoff smiled at her. “Pregnant women deserve to mollycoddle themselves.”
“Well,” I said, “I’ll be going now. Sleep well, both of you.”
“Thanks for everything, Phil,” Geoff told me.
“I only wish that I could do more.”
Al nodded negatively. “You’ve done everything that anyone could expect from you. Thank you, Phil. You are a good friend.”
I smiled at her, somewhat hesitantly. “If you need anything.”
“When have you ever known me to be shy?” Al demanded.
I laughed. “Hang in there, kid. Sooner or later, he’s going to slip up. When he does, I’ll get him.”
“Well,” she said with more than a shade of malice, “one of us will.”
Chapter 30
THE DIARY, May 14
The fools don’t even realize that they can’t have a private conversation in that house, or in any of their offices. They haven’t found the transmitters I’ve hidden.
I’ve got the tapes of her saying how it is necessary to take out Raoul. Fool. Those tapes will be the nails in her coffin shortly.
This is almost too easy. She’s running scared. The snake and the prop head did it. Now, she’s beginning to know what I could do to her. And she’s scared. But, not nearly as frightened as she’s going to be before this is all over.
The kid is one of the last straws for her. And now she has another kid to think about, another bastard. It’s almost funny.
So sanctimonious, so holy, so apart from the world. My how the mighty have fallen. But, she never was what she pretended to be.
She’s got a couple of surprises coming yet. I almost wish that I could be there to watch her get what is coming to her. Justice is sweet. Revenge is sweeter.
Chapter 31
GEOFF
I paced the emergency room hall. I had brought her into the hospital with the help of one of the bodyguards who had carried her downstairs and had driven us here. I knew that I should have been waiting out in the waiting area. I wanted, needed, to be here if she needed me.
Doug Webb, the county sheri
ff, was pacing the same hall. One of his deputies had been shot during a ‘routine’ traffic stop in the county. The young man’s prognosis was apparently not good. But, I was too concerned about ‘Licia to spend much time thinking about Doug’s problems.
‘Licia was in the same treatment room where I had been only days before. The door was closed. Only two minutes ago, Ed Roby had gone inside.
Phil walked up behind me. “How is she?”
“I don’t know. She’s frightened.”
“The baby?”
I nodded negatively. “God, Phil, she woke up bleeding and cramping. I’m scared to death. I can’t lose her now. And if she loses that baby, I don’t know what she will do. I don’t know what this is going to do to her. I don’t know how much more she can take.”
Phil looked around to see if anyone was listening. No one was. “When she told me that she was pregnant, you could have knocked me over with a feather. You had a vasectomy before you asked Jan to marry you, twenty years ago.”
“I had it reversed.”
“I thought that after that long, it was almost impossible to do.”
It is. But, I wasn’t going to tell him that. Best friend or not, there are just some things that you don’t tell anyone. “The specialists are doing marvelous things these days.”
“She wanted this baby,” Phil said after a moment.
“Sometimes, I think that she wanted the baby more than she wanted me,” I admitted. Heaven knew that much was true. “God, Phil, I don’t know how she is going to cope with this.”
Phil just looked at me, totally at a loss for what to say.
Fortunately, Ed Roby chose that moment to come out of the treatment room. “We’re taking her up right now for an emergency D&C. She’s losing too much blood. Connie Yerke is on OB/GYN call tonight. She’ll do the surgery.”
“Then, she’s lost the baby?”
“I’m sorry, Geoff,” Ed said with compassion. “Spontaneous abortion at this stage of the game is usually nature’s way of handling mistakes. And it happens far more often than most people want to think about. She was—what—less than a month into term?”