“See you again soon,” Dale whispered, grinning at her still as her heart stuttered in her chest and died.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Josh was already up, getting ready for work when Sarah awoke. It was dark outside. Sarah could see the full face of the moon beaming through her windows.
“I was gonna wake you before I left.”
“Do you have to go?”
“I probably should. We need the money. Do you have Detective Lassiter’s number with you?”
Sarah nodded toward the purse on the dresser.
“It’s in my purse.”
Josh began digging through her bag. He removed Sarah’s cell phone and the detective’s card.
“I’m going to program it into your phone. She’s number eleven on your speed dial. If anything happens just hit eleven. What about your gun?”
Sarah reached beneath her pillow and felt for the pistol.
“Got it right here.”
“Okay. Just stay awake with that gun where you can get to it and I’ll be home soon.”
“I can’t believe I slept that long. I didn’t even get to go for a run. Do you think we should check the camera?”
“We weren’t asleep very long. I seriously doubt anyone broke in here in broad daylight. The sun had just set when I woke up an hour ago.”
“Okay.”
“We’ll check it in the morning when we both wake up.”
Josh kissed her on the cheek and walked out the door.
“Josh, wait!”
Josh walked back into the bedroom.
“Do you think you can install that security bar before you leave?”
Josh took a quick peek at his watch and Sarah knew that he was calculating how long it would take him to drill the four holes it would take to install the bar and screw it into the metal door frame versus the time it would take him to get to work.
“Sure. I’ll take care of it.”
Sarah rose up on her tiptoes and kissed Josh on the cheek. She followed him as he walked into the garage to get the screw gun, a level, and a hacksaw, and then back to the rear slider door. It didn’t take Josh long to get the bar cut down to the right size and installed. Sarah felt a pang of guilt as she watched him work. They hadn’t had sex in days. He hadn’t mentioned it but she knew it must have been bothering him. Just a week ago she would have been begging him for a quickie before work rather than pestering him to install a lock on their door so no one could break in and rape and murder her. She couldn’t wait until they finally caught that fucker. Sarah couldn’t wait to get her life back.
She walked over to the cupboard and took down a tin of Colombian coffee. She pulled down the coffee filters and prepared a fresh pot. It was going to be a long night with Josh gone. There was no way she was going to allow herself to fall asleep without him.
“Okay, it’s all done. I’ll see you in a few hours.”
Josh kissed her and headed swiftly for the door. Sarah knew that he was trying to leave before she asked him to do anything else or tried to get him to stay. As badly as she wanted to yell for him not to leave, she remained silent as he walked out the door. She peeked through the blinds and watched as Josh pulled the Saturn out of the garage. As he drove off down the block, Sarah turned her gaze toward the neighbor’s house. The blinds in the front room facing the street were swaying again. Someone had been there just moments ago, watching her, watching Josh leave, she was sure of it.
“That son of a bitch!”
Sarah ran upstairs and retrieved her gun from beneath the pillow. She checked the chamber and the clip as she ran back down the stairs. She ejected the clip into the palm of her hand and froze. It was empty. Sarah was positive that she had loaded it.
“Oh shit.”
She looked back down the stairs and then turned and looked back up the stairs at her open bedroom door. Sarah walked upstairs and back into the bedroom. She looked over at the VCR, then up at the smoke-alarm camera. Before she checked the tape she went into the closet and found the box of .40-caliber bullets and reloaded the clip. As she slid bullets into the gun, she checked the room for bullet holes. There were no holes except for the one in the door and the drywall from the week before.
Sarah’s hand trembled as she reached for the universal remote and turned on the TV. She pressed PLAY and then REWIND and watched in horror as Dale cleaned her bedroom in reverse. Sarah rewound the tape past the murder and then paused it at a scene that made her stomach lurch and heave: Dale raping Josh. She fastforwarded and rewound it several times to be sure what she was seeing.
“Oh God. Oh God.”
She rewound the tape all the way to the end and then watched the entire thing at regular speed. She saw Dale ambush them both and club her and then Josh with the hammer. She watched him pull out a roll of duct tape and bind Josh’s wrists and arms before he regained consciousness and then do the same to Sarah. Then she saw him rape her and then Josh. The next part turned her blood to ice water. She watched Dale murder them, both of them; then she watched him wrap them both loosely in plastic that he had brought with him as he went about tidying up, scrubbing the floor and the wall behind the bed, wiping blood spatter from the nightstand, and then changing the sheets and the pillowcases. Sarah hadn’t even noticed that earlier when she had reached under the pillow for the gun. He had changed the pillowcases. The Kevlar pillowcase was gone. She watched him empty all the bullets from the gun and place it under the pillow and then he arranged Sarah and Josh next to each other in bed.
Seeing her own lifeless body bleeding out onto the plastic was surreal. How was this possible? How could she possibly be watching her own murder on video? It didn’t make sense. She looked down at her chest and there was no evidence of a wound. Just one small freckle she’d had for as long as she could remember. Other than that, her skin was smooth and unblemished. She continued watching the rest of the video.
She watched him struggle to lift Josh back onto the bed without the plastic slipping and spilling more blood onto the freshly cleaned bed and floor. Then she saw him kneel over her. With the camera’s overhead angle she couldn’t see exactly what he was doing. It looked like he was kissing her. Then she saw him begin removing the plastic from around her, once again being careful not to get any blood on the new sheets. That’s when she noticed that the wound in her chest was gone and she was breathing.
“What the fuck?”
Sarah rewound the tape. Sure enough there it was. One minute she’s dead and bleeding and the next she’s breathing. She let the tape play and watched as he did the same thing to Josh before gathering up the plastic and the duct tape and his knife and the hammer and slipping out the door. A few more minutes passed and she watched as Josh got up and began getting ready for work.
“This is impossible. This is fucking impossible!”
She had her evidence, the evidence she’d been waiting for, but evidence of what? Even looking at it on tape she couldn’t believe it.
“Because it’s not fucking possible!”
Sarah rewound the tape and watched it again, once again feeling nauseated and having to fast-forward past the video of Josh’s rape.
“My poor husband.” She wondered how she could ever let him see this. It would scar him for life. Then she watched the murders again, the cleanup, and then the resurrection. Dale had somehow brought them both back to life.
Sarah collapsed onto the floor and just sat there staring at the TV, not knowing what to do or whom to call. She knew she had to call Josh but she didn’t want him to see what she had seen. She knew that it would have destroyed him. She had to call the cops. But what would they do with this? This didn’t make sense. Sarah picked up her cell phone and dialed eleven. Detective Lassiter picked up on the second ring.
“Hello?”
“Detective Lassiter?”
“Yes. Who’s this?”
“This is Sarah Lincoln.”
“Mrs. Lincoln?”
“Yeah.”
Sarah pau
sed not knowing what to say.
“Is everything okay?”
“No. I mean…I don’t know. I’ve got something you need to see. I got it on tape…on video.”
“The rape?”
“Yes.” Sarah paused again. “And more.”
“I’ll be right there.”
Sarah hung up the phone and took a deep breath; then she dialed Josh’s number. He didn’t answer. After five rings his voice mail picked up. He must have already been on the casino floor.
“Uh…Josh. You need to call me back. It happened again. And…and I got in on video, all of it. It’s terrible. That sick bastard. It’s so terrible. And there’s more. I know why we can’t remember anything. I know why I thought he murdered me. He did. He murdered both of us. This is so crazy. Call me back. No. Just come home. Come home. I can’t explain this over the phone. You have to see it. I have to show you.”
Sarah hung up and sat down with the gun in her lap. She stared out the window at the house across the street trying hard to suppress the urge to walk over there and knock on Dale’s door and blow his fucking head off. It was harder than she ever could have imagined.
When the black Crown Victoria pulled up outside, Sarah was still holding the gun. At some point she had cocked it. She was aiming it at the neighbor’s door when the insistent ringing of the doorbell finally registered through her fugue. As she uncocked the pistol, Sarah had a moment to wonder what she would have done had Dale opened his front door and stepped outside. She imagined herself pulling the trigger again and again and watching tiny explosions of red blossom in his chest, abdomen, neck, and forehead as the tiny full-metal jackets tore holes in his flesh. The doorbell rang twice more accompanied by a fist pounding on the door before Sarah ran downstairs to let the detectives in.
“You okay? I was just about to kick the door down!” Detective Lassiter said as she stepped into the house and reholstered her weapon. Detective Torres still had his own Glock nine-millimeter clutched in his hands, eyeing her suspiciously before finally opening his sports jacket and slipping the gun back into its holster.
“I’m sorry. I was…distracted.”
“So, you said you had some new evidence? A video?”
“Yes. It-it’s upstairs. Maybe you can make some sense of it. Because I don’t know what the fuck is going on.”
The two detectives followed her upstairs and into her bedroom.
“Sit down.”
Detective Lassiter took a seat on the bed across from the TV while Torres remained standing. Sarah turned on the television and then started the VCR.
“We installed a security camera this afternoon when we got home. It’s in the smoke detector.”
Sarah watched the detectives’ expressions as the tape played. She watched them wince and scowl and frown in discomfort as the rape and murder played out on-screen. Their jaws dropped and Detective Lassiter turned to look at her with a dozen questions on her face as, on the TV screen, Sarah’s and Josh’s corpses began to reanimate.
“What the hell?”
“What the fuck is this?” Detective Torres asked. “Is this some kind of CGI shit? This was all bullshit?”
“No! It’s real. I don’t understand it either.”
“Mrs. Lincoln, this isn’t going to work. If you faked some kind of murder scene to set up the neighbor we can’t go along with it,” Detective Torres said.
“I didn’t fake anything!” Sarah shouted.
“I just saw your husband get up and go to work after having his throat slit! And here you are standing and talking to us after I watched the nerd next door stab you to death. How do you expect us to take this to a jury?” Torres was livid.
Sarah shook her head.
“How the fuck should I know? You’re the cops. I have this piece of shit on tape raping and killing me and my husband and I expect you to do something about it!”
“But you’re not dead!” Detective Torres shouted.
“But I was raped! Here’s the fucking evidence. Now do your damn job!”
“Mrs. Lincoln—”
“Sarah. I told you, call me Sarah.”
“Okay, Sarah. We can’t do anything with this tape. A defense attorney would tear us apart. And what do you think would happen if a jury saw you pop up out of the bed after being stabbed in the chest? They’d think it was all special effects or CGI.”
“Then don’t show them the whole film. Just show them the rape and the murder until we figure out how he did whatever the hell he did to us.”
Detective Torres shook his head.
“I don’t know.”
Detective Lassiter began to speak and then paused. She looked up at the ceiling and then around the room, then back at Sarah.
“We could. We could try to use it to get a confession. We could use it to get a warrant for his arrest and a search warrant for his home.”
“Trina, we would be willfully tampering with evidence,” Torres said.
“Not really. I’m not saying we erase the rest. We just don’t show them the rest. We stop the tape right after the murders.”
There was a long silence while everyone in the room considered the possibilities. Detective Lassiter spoke up first.
“You swear that this tape isn’t a forgery? You didn’t fabricate this or alter it in any way? You swear this is real?”
“I wouldn’t even know how to fake something like this. I don’t know who would outside of Hollywood.”
Detective Lassiter held up her hand to silence her and Sarah stopped talking and tapped her foot impatiently. She felt like she were back in grade school being chastised by one of the Catholic school nuns.
“Fuck all of that. That’s not what I asked you. I want to hear you swear it to me. Swear that the whole thing went down just like you said it did.”
“I swear.”
Detective Lassiter took a deep breath and then ran her hand over her forehead. She looked at the floor and then up at the ceiling and then let out all the air in her lungs in one long, exhausted exhalation. Sarah was afraid the woman was going to call bullshit on the whole thing and just walk right out the door. Sarah had gotten visual proof of what she had been saying the whole time and still the story was no more believable. It still made no sense at all.
“Okay. Then we do it. I’ll go talk to the judge. Torres, you get some black-and-whites across the street and arrest that piece of shit.”
Detective Lassiter stood up from the bed and both Sarah and Torres gasped. Where the detective had been sitting, blood had soaked through the sheets leaving a perfect impression of both butt cheeks. The detective’s entire backside was wet with blood.
“What the fuck?”
“I guess we have what we need to get the CSU over here now.”
“Shit. These are my favorite pants.”
Detective Torres smiled. “And now they’re evidence.”
“Shit,” Detective Lassiter repeated.
Sarah was still staring at the bloodstain. Somehow, it was more real and terrifying than the video. Because that puddle of red made the images on the tape undeniable.
“Why don’t you try calling your husband again. Have him meet us down at the station. We’re going to need statements from both of you. I would suggest that you both try to remember as much as you can.”
Sarah’s hands trembled as she picked up the cell phone. She was still staring at that big red ass-print in the sheets. Her fingers were just about to punch in Josh’s number when the phone began to vibrate, startling her and causing her to drop the phone. It continued to vibrate as Sarah stood above it just staring at it. Finally, she reached down and picked it up on its final ring.
“Josh?”
“What’s going on? Are you all right?”
“The detectives are here. I’m fine. He was in the house again. While we were both sleeping. He broke in and he raped me again. It’s all on tape.”
There was a pause.
“Have the detectives seen the tape?”
&nb
sp; She knew that he was looking for some sort of corroboration. He wanted them to verify her story for him.
“Yes. They’ve seen it. Josh?”
“Yes?”
“He did things to you too.”
She hadn’t intended on saying anything. She didn’t want him thinking about it as he drove home. She didn’t want him to be distracted and drive too fast and get into an accident. She didn’t want him playing scenes over in his head, each one more terrible than the previous one, trying to imagine what “things” Dale had done to him. But she didn’t want him discovering what had happened for the first time surrounded by cops, watching him getting raped by that fucking emaciated geek.
Josh’s voice sounded weak and unnaturally soft and timid.
“What things? How could he have done anything to me without waking me up? How could he have done anything to either of us? Did he drug us like we thought.”
“No. We were both awake.”
“Awake? How is that possible.”
“You need to see the tape. He killed us. Both of us. And then he…I don’t know what he did. He brought us back somehow.”
“Brought us back?”
“Just meet us at the station. I’m headed there with the detectives right now. They’re going to need a statement from both of us.”
“Let me speak to the detectives.”
Sarah handed the phone to Detective Lassiter.
“Hello, Mr. Lincoln.”
“What the hell is going on?”
“I have no clue. All I know is that I have a tape showing a multiple rape and murder and I am going across the street to arrest your neighbor and I need you to come down to the station to give a report.”
“Did you say multiple rape?”
“Mr. Lincoln, just meet us down at the station. There’s really nothing I can tell you right now. You’re going to have to see it for yourself. None of this makes sense to me.”
Detective Torres was on the radio calling for backup while Detective Lassiter was talking to the assistant DA trying to get a warrant for Dale’s arrest.
“I’m going to arrest him on probable cause but it would be nice to have a warrant to back me up. We’ve got him on tape committing two rapes along with two counts of attempted murder.”
The Resurrectionist Page 16