Cassie McGraw Box Set: Books 1-3

by David Archer

  She smiled. “I understand exactly what that means,” she said. “I don’t know if that has anything to do with being in love or not, but if you know you want to be with him, then that’s half the battle most couples end up dealing with. I’ve seen far too many of them who rushed together, then spend the next few years wondering why.”

  “Well, I know why I’m with him,” I said. “It’s because I smile and laugh more since I’ve known him than I have since the fire. I don’t know if I ever told you, but until I met Dex, I thought I was a genuine man hater. I couldn’t stand the thought of dating, I wouldn’t even let myself have male friends, because as far as I was concerned they were all vicious, abusive bastards. Since I started letting Dex into my life, however, I’ve come to the conclusion that it wasn’t that I hated men; it was just that I was afraid of them. Once I realized that, everything shifted into a whole different perspective. Fear isn’t something I am going to put up with, so it was necessary to let some of my guard down.” I shrugged. “Dex got past it. What else is there to say?”

  She giggled. “And is there any possibility that this thing might evolve into something more?”

  I rolled my eye. “Okay, again, this between you and me. I strongly suspect that, if I would even hint that I was willing, Dex would be dragging me down to the jewelry store to buy an engagement ring. Do I think about it? Sure, every once in a while I do. Am I ready for it? Not even close. When I do let myself think about what it would be like to be Mrs. Cassie Tate, it starts off with a smile and a warm feeling, but then this nervousness sets in. I’m not really sure what about it makes me nervous, but something does. Until I can get past that, I’m not willing to stick my neck out any further. That make any sense?”

  “Yeah, it does. On the other hand, I think I’ve gotten to know you fairly well. Are you sure the nervousness doesn’t come from feelings of inadequacy?”

  “Inadequacy? Where did that question come from?” I asked.

  “Cassie, you’re always making comments about your scars, about the way you look. Most people take it as you having a good sense of humor, but you and I both know that it’s a form of self-deprecation. You consider your scars a handicap. Are you sure you’re not just thinking that it would be wrong to saddle a man with a wife who looked like Freda Krueger?”

  I think that was the first time I’ve ever heard anyone else use Freda’s name, and it came as something of a shock. I mean, for me to talk about her is one thing, but nobody else had the right to say something like…

  She got you, Abby said. She hit the nail right on the head, didn’t she?

  I pushed her back, and caught myself biting my bottom lip. That’s something I do when I don’t like what I’m about to say.

  “There might be some of that in there,” I said. “I mean, think about it. Dex is a pretty good looking guy, in a Marlboro Man kind of way. Why should he be stuck with something that looks like me? I mean, do I really have the right to do that to anybody?”

  “You’re asking the wrong question,” Nicole said. “What you should be asking is what gives you the right to decide what Dex wants, or what he deserves? Isn’t that his call?”

  I made a face that said she was right, but I wasn’t ready to give up. “Maybe it is,” I said, “but how long would it be before he gets tired of looking at me? I’m not blind, Nicole. There are millions of women out there who don’t look like Frankenstein. Looking at this face every day, maybe for years and years? I can’t help thinking that would eventually take a toll on a man.”

  “Do you honestly think so? Do you think that anybody who cares about you gets tired of looking at your face? Cassie, Dex didn’t know you before you were burned, so to him, the way you look is just the way you look. Now, I can be blunt enough to say that it probably wasn’t your appearance that attracted him in the first place, but something did. Why do you think that’s going to change?”

  I didn’t answer, because we were pulling up at the shop about then. I glanced at her as I got out of the car, and she pulled the zipper across her lips once more.

  The tools got unloaded into the shop, and we all headed for home. It was close to eleven by the time Dex and I got back to the house, and we were both tired enough to not even bother with the TV. Critter had been fed and was content that we had returned, so we went to the bedroom and dropped clothes on the floor like we usually did.

  TWENTY-ONE

  I don’t know about Dex, but I slept like a rock. I remember opening my eye once, noticing the sun shining through the window, then realizing it was a Saturday. I rolled over and went back to sleep, cuddled up against Dex.

  It wasn’t going to last long, though. My phone rang just a few minutes later, and I felt that now familiar crawling on the back of my neck when I reached to pick it up.

  It was a number I didn’t know, of course. I hit the answer button and put it to my ear.

  “Cassie McGraw.”

  “Good morning, bitch,” Danny Kendall said. “You think you’re pretty hot shit, right now, don’t you? You think you really accomplished something, clearing out all the shelters?”

  “Kept you from raising your body count,” I said. “That strikes me as a win.” Dex rolled over and looked at me, but I held up a hand for him to be quiet.

  “Yeah, you think you’re cool. What you don’t realize is, you’re making your own job harder. You’re supposed to be finding me, stopping me. How are you going to do that if you’re not letting me do anything?”

  Suddenly he laughed. “Oh, but wait a minute,” he said. “You’re still working on the assumption that you’re smarter than I am. Okay, yeah, that explains a lot.”

  “What the hell are you going on about?” I asked. “Do you know that you sound absolutely crazy right now?”

  “Oh, is that an official diagnosis? Should I be making an appointment with a psychiatrist? Of course I’m crazy, you stupid bitch, because you took away the only thing in this world that really mattered to me. Did Mike ever tell you how close we were?”

  “Mike? If you want to know the truth, he hardly ever mentioned you. Hell, I didn’t even know you were in the Navy until now. Maybe you weren’t as close as you seem to think you were.”

  “Shut up! Just shut your mouth, bitch, you don’t know what you’re talking about! Mike and me, we were more than just brothers, a lot more. John, he was the oldest, so he was always off doing his own thing, but Mike was always right there with me.” He was breathing hard, like he was on the verge of losing control. “And you, you’re the one who took him away.”

  “Danny, I didn’t take him away,” I said. “His partner in rape and murder is the one who killed him, not me.”

  “But it was your fault! You knew what a fantastic guy Mike was, you should have just kept your mouth shut about what you found out. I read everything about that case, those things happened long before he ever met you. You had no right to tell anyone about that stuff.”

  He was shouting loudly enough that Dex could hear every word, and the look in his eyes told me that he knew the same thing I did: Danny Kendall was out of his mind.

  “Danny,” I said, “I wasn’t trying to get Mike killed. I wanted him to get help, because that need he had to hurt and kill people, that’s a sign of a badly warped personality. If he hadn’t called that other guy, Stuart, he might even still be alive. I was talking to him the whole time, trying to get him to see that he needed help, but Stuart insisted that they had to kill me. When Mike said he didn’t want to do it, that’s when Stuart killed him.”

  “Liar,” Danny said. “That’s all you ever did, you lied. You know why Mike came after you? Because he knew the truth, that you never really loved him at all, that you were just there to try to find the proof about the things he did. That’s your whole thing, isn’t it? You like to pretend you’re some kind of super detective, and make yourself out to be some big hero.”

  “Danny, what is it you really want? Do you want to kill me? Is that it?”

  “Kill yo
u? Oh, hell, no! I don’t want you dead, because then you won’t be suffering anymore. What I want from you is for you to know that all these people are dying, and it’s all your fault. You took away the only person in the world I cared about. Well, guess what, bitch, I’m taking away everybody you care about. Everybody!”

  “But you said you want me to stop you. If that’s what you want, then let’s figure out where we can meet. Just tell me, I’ll come right now.”

  There was silence on the line for couple of seconds, and then he laughed again. His personality was flip-flopping back and forth, one second in a rage, and calm and collected in the next.

  “Yeah, you’d like that,” he said calmly. “I’m not quite ready, yet. Got a few more people to take out, a few more pins to push into that voodoo doll I use you for. I’m going to hurt you, Cassie, the same way you hurt me, only a hundred times worse.”

  “Danny, there’s no point to this,” I said desperately. “You’ve already killed several people I care about, you already hurt me. The trouble is, you’re not thinking about everybody else you’re hurting. What about your mother? I talked to her the other night, and she’s so torn up over…”

  “Don’t talk to my mother! She never understood anything about us, nothing. All she ever cared about was John, what a great athlete John was, what a great student John was, how John was going to accomplish so much in the world. You know what John did? John got his high school girlfriend pregnant, and he works in a factory. That’s what Johnny accomplished. Me and Mike, though? We actually went out into the world and made something of ourselves.” There was a banging noise, like he was slamming the phone against something. “And you had to screw it all up.”

  “Danny…”

  “Shut up, I’m not done,” he said. “I told you the last time we talked. If you want to stop me, you’ve got to pay attention. Watch the things I do, and you will figure out where to find me. Just remember this: if you don’t come alone when you figure it out, an awful lot of people are going to die.”

  The phone went dead. I dropped it on the bed and looked up at Dex.

  “He’s completely lost it,” I said. “He’s not making any sense at all.”

  Dex shook his head. “You better call Pennington,” he said. “I’ll go put on coffee.”

  I called Pennington as Dex was climbing out of bed, and gave him a quick rundown of the call. I told him we were putting on coffee, and he said he’d be right over.

  I got up and pulled on the same clothes I had worn the day before, then made my way out to the kitchen. The coffee pot was just beginning to burp and gurgle, so I sat down at the table with Dex.

  “He keeps saying he wants me to figure out how to find him,” I said. “I wish I could figure out what he means by that.”

  “I heard him,” Dex said. “He said pay attention and you’ll figure it out. Pay attention to what?”

  “To what he’s doing, I guess,” I said. “I just don’t see how that makes any sense. I mean, he blew up the outreach and took Marsha and Angie, but he killed Brenda and Leanne right there. That was the first thing. The second thing he did was beat Marsha and leave her in my dumpster. After that, he tried to blow up my car, which doesn’t make any sense at all when he claims he doesn’t want to kill me. Then he beat up Angie and threw her out on the street in front of my office. Next, he put a bomb in New Beginnings and blew it up, and tried to plant another bomb on my new car while we were there dealing with the injuries he caused there. He planted his phone inside our house, but didn’t bother to put a bomb with it. Then he put a bomb out at Broken Arrow, but we managed to avoid anybody getting hurt on that one.” I shook my head and threw my hands in the air. “I don’t see it adding up, do you?”

  He shook his head. “Not to me,” he said. “Maybe we should try looking at it from another direction. Let’s look at the places where he’s attacked. You’ve got the outreach, then the parking garage at the hospital. After that was New Beginnings, and then Broken Arrow. Is there any kind of pattern there that you can see?”

  I thought about it, but I couldn’t see anything that connected those places, other than the obvious. I shook my head.

  “Okay,” he said, “then let’s look at the people. He killed Brenda and that lady, Leanne, right? Then he thought he killed Marsha, or at least that’s what we believe. Angie? I’m pretty sure he knew she wasn’t dead when he tossed her out of his car…”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “We’ve forgotten about the fact that he has an accomplice. When he dumped Angie, the witnesses said she was pushed out the back door of a sedan. That means there was somebody else in that back seat with her while he drove, or somebody else was driving while he pushed her out.”

  “Yeah, but I don’t see where that has any bearing on what we’re trying to figure out.”

  “It might not,” I said. “On the other hand, if we could figure out who the accomplice was, they might be easier to find than Danny is.”

  We continued kicking ideas around, but nothing seemed to make any sense. Whatever it was Danny wanted me to figure out, I wasn’t reading the clues properly.

  My doorbell rang, and Dex went to let the detective in. He joined us at the table and Dex poured each of us a cup of coffee.

  I went over the phone call again, giving it to him with all the detail I could remember. He used an app on his phone to record it all, but he was writing notes at the same time.

  “He’s taunting you,” Pennington said. “He’s trying to make you worry about who he’s going to hurt next.”

  “Yeah, well, guess what?” I asked. “It’s working.”

  “I know that,” he said gently. “I just wish I knew how to stop this bastard so that you could get back to doing what you do.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “You and me both.”

  “We’ve been going over the things he’s done so far,” Dex said. “He told her twice now that he wants her to pay attention in order to figure out how to stop him. Can you see any kind of pattern in his actions up to now?”

  Pennington shook his head. “Other than the fact that he’s obviously targeting people that will upset Cassie, no. I don’t see anything that could point to a specific place or time or anything like that.”

  “Neither could we,” I said. “What about the accomplice? Have we got anything on who that could be?”

  “Nothing. Other than the witness statement that Angie was pushed out the back of a car, we don’t have anything that indicates there was a second person involved anywhere else. It could have been another patsy, like Richard Long. I still think he was only killed to try to throw us off for a little while.”

  “But you said he had gunshot residue on his hands,” I said. “Doesn’t that mean he fired a gun recently?”

  He grimaced. “Not necessarily. Gunshot residue sticks to skin, no matter where it comes from. It could mean he fired a gun, or it could mean he shook hands with somebody who had fired a gun. There was a study done a few years ago where they tested the hands of school kids under ten years old, and more than half of them tested positive for GSR. You can literally just pick it up in the environment.”

  I shook my head. I was just about to ask another question when Pennington’s phone rang. He pulled it out and answered it quickly.

  “Detective Pennington.” He listened for a moment, and then his eyes suddenly went wide. “Secure the scene, I’ll be right there.”

  He looked at me as he put the phone in his pocket. “Do you know an Antoinette Denham?”

  “Oh, God, no,” I said. “She was one of my clients at the Outreach. What happened?”

  “She just walked into the hospital with a bomb wrapped around her. She told the security guards that only you can save her life, and if they try to take her out or evacuate the building, the bomb would blow up.”

  All three of us were up instantly and out the door. Pennington yelled something about meeting us there, jumped in his car, and roared out onto the street. Dex and I got into my Mustang, and
I fired it up and followed.

  With Pennington running his siren and lights, we made it to the hospital in less than ten minutes. I slid to a stop right behind him and the three of us rushed up to the emergency entrance. There were other police cars around the area, and the bomb squad truck was sitting at the end of the ER driveway.

  I spotted her from the entrance. Toni Denham was sitting on a small chair off to the side of the ER lobby, in an area that looked like it was set up for kids. There were little tables with toys built into them scattered around, and the wall behind her had a mural of kids playing in a grassy field, with big, fluffy clouds overhead.

  “There’s nobody around her,” I said. “That’s good…”

  “Security guards got everybody out of the area and back into the hallway behind the ER. She said that if the bomber sees people running out, he’ll detonate the bomb, so they’re keeping everyone inside but as far away from her as possible.”

  “Makes sense,” I said. I took a deep breath. “Okay, let me go find out why I’m the lucky girl he chose for this.”

  Dex grabbed my arm. “Cassie, wait…”

  I pushed his hand gently away. “I can’t, Dex,” I said. “We don’t how much time we’ve got, and she’s scared.”

  Toni looked up at me with tears streaming down her face as I walked toward her, and started blubbering. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, Cassie,” she said. “He said he can blow this up from anywhere, if I don’t do exactly what he tells me.”

  I looked her over quickly, and saw that she had some kind of headset hooked onto her right ear.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “Is he talking to you right now?”

  She nodded. “Yeah,” she said. “He grabbed me as I was leaving my house, and put me in a van. He had a gun, Cassie. He pointed it at me and made me put this on, then he buckled the straps and said if I tried to take it off, it would explode. He put this thing on my ear and dropped me in the street outside, and then he told me to come in here and say that only you could save me.”