The best way to bind the chain was working it in a circle between her wrists. Each time she thought the bind was taking hold the chain would slip. The thick coat and sweatshirt underneath made the work difficult. Rainey pushed her chest forward, creating more room to work behind her, but still she couldn’t get the chain to lock up. Her fingers grazed the cold steel of the seat support. She scooted her body closer to it. Scoring the chain against the support would make the process of binding it easier. Rainey could feel the cuffs biting into her wrist. She had to be careful of cutting too deeply. Blood slicked chains would never bind.
Scrape, scrape, scrape, and twist, twist, twist. Still the chains slipped. Rainey would have already snapped them and left the vehicle if the cuffs were in front. She thought about running with her hands behind her back. The farm was in the middle of nowhere. Rainey had not seen a house within a couple of miles, when they drove in. It was growing dark. The rain fell steadily on the roof. The temperatures would drop back below freezing overnight. Katie was looking for her by now, Rainey was sure, but did she have any clue where to find her. Whoever had drugged and restrained Rainey, and more than likely Ellie too, was counting on no one looking for her at the farm.
Scrape, scrape, scrape, twist, twist, twist. No bind. Flashes from the day started to filter into Rainey’s thoughts. It was nine a.m. the last she knew of the time. The sun set around five-thirty p.m. these days. It had to be close to that time, maybe four-thirty. It was hard to tell because of the rain. It could be earlier, if the clouds were thick enough to block the sun. Rainey thought she had been out cold for most of the day.
Who drugged her? Was it Ellie? She drank the coffee too. She said it was hot in the room. Maybe someone was trying to drug Ellie and got them both. Another flash of the mudroom— someone was tying her boots. Rainey focused on the memory. What could she hear? It was a man’s voice. He was talking to her, but she couldn’t make out what he was saying. He was looking down at her boots. Rainey couldn’t see his face. Someone else was in the room, not moving, behind the man squatted in front of her. She could smell dryer sheets and cologne. Rainey focused again on the man’s head. He finished the bow on her boot and looked up.
“I’m sorry, Rainey,” Theodore Suzanne said, inches from her face.
Scrape, scrape, scrape; faster now. Knowing who had her only made it more difficult not to panic. To pull off all he had so far, this guy was very clever. He probably did not mean to snag Rainey in his plans, and now that he had, he was unpredictable. Careful planning and plotting was only genius as long as nothing went wrong. Something definitely had gone wrong in this plan. Theodore had no reason to kill Rainey, until now. She believed she was alive only because he was working out how to get away with her murder.
Scrape, scrape—Rainey stopped moving. Light entered the barn. A door had opened somewhere. She heard voices approaching, one male, one female. Ellie was still alive. Rainey heard the sound of breaking glass and scooted a few inches in order to see what was happening. She didn’t have to wait long. Theodore Suzanne’s face appeared in the sliding door window. He reached for the handle and pulled the door open. He stood there, holding an M1 Garand rifle in his small hands.
Theodore was a little man, five feet four inches tall, maybe one hundred and thirty pounds soaking wet. At twenty-eight, he was already balding, but could still use a haircut and a couple of shampoos. His clothes were ill fitting and rumpled; exactly the guy one would expect to find in an injustice collector with an erotomania obsession. Theodore Suzanne was the poster boy for the disheveled and disorganized. But not, Rainey thought, the mastermind of a long string of crimes that required cunning, patience, and organization. The rifle looked like a large toy in the hands of boy. Rainey didn’t feel the least bit afraid of him. In fact, he looked scared to death.
“What in the hell are you doing, Theodore?” Rainey demanded.
He glanced over his shoulder and then looked back at Rainey, saying, “Anything she tells me to.”
Ellie stepped from behind Theodore, holding Rainey’s Glock at his back. “Bet you wish you’d slept with me now. I would have rocked your world. I still might, just for fun.”
“Well, now,” Rainey said, feigning apathy. “This is interesting, a female serial killer. Don’t run into them every day.”
“I came to warn you,” Theodore said.
“A little late, weren’t you?” Rainey said, analyzing her recently revealed captor. She looked at the rifle. “I suppose that’s not loaded.”
Ellie laughed. “I’m not new at this, you know.”
“So, what now, Ellie?” Rainey asked. “How are you going to kill me and get away with it? I’m sure they’re already looking for me. The GPS tracker isn’t hooked to the mirror. They know where I am by now.”
“Oh, they are looking for you. The police came by to check on me, as this was your last location, before the GPS stopped pinging back. It seems your wife has called out the National Guard—well practically. You do know all you have to do is disable the antenna connected to the OnStar box, don’t you? I’m not dumb.”
“How did you explain my disappearance?” Rainey said, all the time thinking, “Good girl, Katie. Keep looking. You’re close.”
Ellie answered with mock excitement, “Haven’t you heard? Graham Dean Colde has regained his memory and is stalking me, and he may have abducted you after you left my house this morning. No one has seen you for hours. How could they know Colde was hiding with you in my barn? I sure had no idea until I stumbled on him.”
Theodore tried to explain to Rainey, “I wasn’t stalking her. I was remembering her. I told Mr. Wise that. I told him I didn’t shoot those people. I don’t know who did, but I know Ellie shot me.”
“Like anyone would believe you, you pathetic idiot.” Ellie chuckled maniacally.
“Mr. Wise did,” Theodore said, his small chest puffing with indignation.
“And Wellman learned it wasn’t wise to ask the wrong questions,” Ellie countered, and laughed louder. “See what I did there? I’m clever, right? You have to admit that.”
“They’ll be plenty of questions, if I disappear,” Rainey said, while her mind raced, looking for a way out of her predicament.
“You’re not going to disappear. You’re going to die at the hands of a disturbed young man, just like all the others.” The pretty blonde with the big blue eyes put on her best southern charm, thickened her accent, and hid the blackness of her soul. “No one would suspect little ol’ Ellie. She’s been through so much tragedy. Bless her heart.”
Ellie produced a long sliver of thin window glass and slashed at her forearm. At first a dark red line, the wound opened, sending a crimson rivulet down her arm. Theodore saw this and swooned into the van on top of Rainey, still clutching the rifle. Ellie gathered his legs and shoved them into the van.
She looked down at Rainey, who could barely see her through the tangled arms of the man on top of her. “Why, look. He’s got Ellie’s blood all over him. What a sick, sick boy. How unfortunate that profiler didn’t see him coming.”
#
5:35 p.m.
Overcast, 35.1oF, Windchill 29.3oF
“That was a mistake, cutting your arm,” Rainey said from the floor of the van, as it moved along what she imagined was a rutted out farm path.
Theodore lay motionless at her side, after she squirmed enough to move him off her. The sky was darkening, but Rainey could see trees through the windows. Ellie was driving her deep into the forest.
“I don’t make mistakes,” Ellie replied.
“That’s the narcissist talking,” Rainey countered. “Arrogant enough to believe you’re infallible.”
Ellie resumed the innocent southern flower accent from before. “I can’t believe he was in the barn the whole time y’all were looking for him, officer. I thought I saw someone and went to check it out. That’s when he grabbed me. He must have hidden his van in there while I was gone this morning.”
“He got me and
not you? Come on, that’s a stretch.”
Ellie continued, undaunted, “And isn’t it lucky that I remembered Graham fainted at the sight of blood. That’s why I broke that old blown-glass window in the barn. I put my arm through it and cut myself on purpose. When Graham saw the blood, he fainted, and then I ran out and hid in the woods. I thought they were going to find me out there frozen to death, before he stopped looking for me. I’m so sorry about Rainey. I came back to the house and called as soon as they left in her van. He must have hidden in it, when the tow truck brought it to my house, and surprised her when she was leav—”
Rainey interrupted, “Okay, okay, I get it, an answer for everything. I can’t say you haven’t thought this through.” While they talked, Rainey never stopped scraping and twisting the handcuff chain, the sound of her movements covered by the jostling of the van on the uneven path. “And you’re right, no one has suspected you of anything other than being a black cat one shouldn’t cross. But do you really think anyone is going to believe this scrawny-ass boy put me in cuffs.”
“Now, who’s being an arrogant narcissist?” Ellie chuckled. “I’m not much bigger than he is and I put you in cuffs. Keeping handy those little individual coffee servings, with crushed Halcion tablets I got from the sleep dentist, has proved a very effective method of subduing prey of any size. They, like you, became compliant and malleable. Heavy duty scar, by the way. Graham said I should worry. You kill all the people that fuck with you.”
Rainey shuddered to think what this woman had done while she was unconscious, but she stayed focused on the cuffs and keeping Ellie talking. “I know him as Theodore, and he is suffering from a vivid fantasy world he’s created loosely based on my life, and devoid of many facts pertaining to the reality of my experiences with serial killers such as yourself.”
“Oh, you’ve met someone like me before?”
The narcissist in Ellie believed her to be unique, superior, and capable of unlimited power and success. Rainey had compared her to other serial killers, and still Ellie had to think herself special among them. Killers like Ellie enjoyed one thing immensely, discussing themselves.
“Sure, I’ve met people like you before. Shall I tell you who you are, Ellie Paxton Read?”
“Please do. I can’t wait to hear what you have to say, while you try to buy time to save your ass. Go ahead, enlighten me, before I prove you right about what a cold blooded murderer I am.”
“Let’s see,” Rainey began, “you’ve committed matricide, patricide, fratricide, killed your husband and several friends, and let’s not forget Wellman Wise. You are by definition a serial murderer, killing more than two people with a cooling off period in between each crime.”
“You’ve got me so far,” Ellie said, laughing as if Rainey had called her out for dying her hair blond.
“Wait, did you kill Cassie Gillian? I can’t see how you gained from that. How was she standing in your way?”
“Does it matter?”
“Yes, it matters. The reason you killed her, if you did, tells me more about you.”
“Cassie fell in love with me. I was planning to move to Wilmington with Burgess. She was going to tell everyone about us, and the things we’d done with Skylar and Adam. I couldn’t let that happen.”
“And Ely, you left out the part about you and Cassie and Ely. The epitome of narcissism, did you fall in love with your reflection, Ellie?”
“Fuck you,” came from the front seat.
But it was true. Rainey could tell by the answer. This was a human being with no social boundaries, no empathy, and absolutely no remorse. Who else had Ellie killed that Rainey didn’t know about. “Burgess’s sister, what about her?”
“Her grandfather was going to send her to medical school. Do you know how much that costs? I couldn’t very well let her have that big a piece of my pie, now could I?”
Rainey summarized, “If it stands in your way, it has to go. Ellie wants, Ellie gets. Is that how it goes?”
“I didn’t get you,” Ellie answered.
“And now you’re going to kill me. It kind of makes my point,” Rainey said.
A chuckle preceded the, “I guess it does,” from the front seat.
“In that case, you have at least one personality disorder, probably more, I’m guessing several more. Narcissism is at the core of psychopathy, and you are definitely a psychopath. We should really give you some tests before I make that call, but seeing as how you are a stone-cold killer, I’ll go out on a limb.”
“You’re funny. I wish I had known you under different circumstances,” Ellie said.
Rainey replied, “I don’t. I try very hard to stay away from people like you. Whether you kill who you associate with or not, you do damage them. You manipulate and con everyone. You take what you want, and it is always you doing the taking. There is never any quid pro quo. If you do something for someone, it’s because you will benefit in some way. You are too caught up in your self-importance to develop empathy, let alone genuine affection.”
“That’s harsh. I liked Burgess.”
“Until what, until he didn’t suit your fantasy anymore? You certainly weren’t faithful to him. Is that why he threw you out?”
“I left him,” Ellie stated, unable to admit defeat.
“After he set boundaries you weren’t willing to comply with, right?”
“He wanted me to settle down, have babies, be boring.”
“Ah, boring, things can never be boring. That’s the histrionic personality. She must have attention, excitement or she’ll cause trouble,” Rainey said, ticking off another character disorder trait.
Ellie continued to find her own comments amusing, laughing while she explained how status quo murder in cold blood was for her. “Burgess decided we should ‘grow up,’ his words, not mine. I said, ‘Be an adult, just not a boring one.’ He was tired of swinging, tired of me swinging without him, so he had to go too. I couldn’t just leave him. Sadly, getting half of Burgess’s money wasn’t enough, but his estate, his insurance policy, and the timely death of his grandfather fixed me up quite nicely.”
“I forgot about him. You got to old man Read, didn’t you?”
“Old men with bad hearts should not fish alone,” was all that Ellie offered on that “natural” death, but Rainey was sure she caused it.
“The Reads paid dearly for knowing you. You couldn’t use Burgess or sleep your way onto the silver screen, so he was worth only money to you. How about your brother? I’ll bet he had a hefty life insurance policy provided by you, as well.”
“Ely was drinking at night, calling me whining, saying he couldn’t live with the guilt anymore. What a waste of air he was. He couldn’t even pull the trigger on our parents after we had made a deal. I got Graham to come over that morning, I did all the leg work and preplanning. All Ely had to do was pull the trigger and he couldn’t even do that.”
“Why Ellie? What did your parents do to you?”
“Dad was taking a job in the Middle East and he was going to make us do our senior year in a fucking desert. Our senior year? I was not missing out on homecoming queen and head cheerleader to wear a fucking rag on my head. And Ely would have lost his chance at the scoring record, which he won that next year. Dad would not listen to reason, so we had no choice.”
“You mean you had no choice. Ely was never really into it, was he? Did he never figure out that when you shot Graham the second time in the chest, you were actually trying to kill him?”
“You’re good, I’ll give you that. Oh, he wondered, at first, but I told him I tapped twice by accident. He fell for it, but then it was a constant chore to keep him together. He lost his athletic scholarship, flunked out, could never hold a real job. I thought I was in the clear with him when he disappeared down in Mexico for a couple of years, but he didn’t stay gone.”
“He was a liability, a loose end you had to tie up eventually, right?” Rainey encouraged Ellie to keep talking, pretending to find her reasoning va
lid.
Ellie loved the spotlight. She continued, “He flew through his part of the money from our parents’ insurance and what Graham’s parents’ insurance had to pay. He was constantly borrowing more from me. I thought, you know I have that big policy on him. Why not make some money and get rid of a problem, before he pulled an Eric Menendez and confessed? That weekend, I told Burgess I was going to hike in the Sierras for few days, which I was known to do. I borrowed, without her knowledge, a friend’s identification and flew under her name.”
Rainey interjected, “I bet you always have a few friends that could pass for you in a pinch, and vice versa. That wasn’t the first time or the last your alibi had you one place, while you were actually at, say the beach, killing an old friend in the insurance business?”
“Oh, Adam. He got too nosey about Burgess’s death, because I was stupid enough to buy another policy from him after cashing in on Ely’s. Adam had all these questions about both deaths. Okay, yeah, I made that one mistake, but I cleaned it up. No one else ever questioned Ely’s drunken mishap, not after Burgess told about his late night drunk dialing. It actually worked in my favor that Ely kept his drinking quiet. It explained his going out on the boat at night, drunk and alone.”
“And of course you were sufficiently shocked and devastated upon returning from the retreat to find you brother had been killed in a horrible accident. Really, you’re quite cunning. Why didn’t some acting agent scoop you up? Was fucking you not all that fantastic, or did they see your flaw?”
Ellie’s tone changed. She ignored the sex comment and went right for the narcissistic trigger Rainey pulled. A flaw? She didn’t know she had one. “What flaw would that be?”
The chain on the cuffs bound up, finally. Rainey squeezed her wrist together as far as she could, but it wasn’t enough. She needed to move and Theodore was in her way.
Colde & Rainey (A Rainey Bell Thriller) Page 16