by T. R. Ragan
Jared put his arm around her and nudged her toward the front entrance. “We’ll wait outside for the police to arrive.”
The homeowner held the phone to her ear and a protective arm in front of her daughter as Jared ushered Lizzy out the door.
The door slammed shut behind them. The lock clicked into place before they heard the woman lecture her daughter about opening doors to strangers.
Tuesday, February 16, 2010 1:23 PM
After all these years, she finally decided to look for him. She’d finally come home.
He let the curtain fall back into place, then hurried down the hallway to the master bedroom. There it was, on his nightstand: his Nikon. He’d bought the camera in anticipation of what was to come. Over the years he’d regretted not having any keepsakes. He stayed up late last night in order to read all about the tech specs and accessories. His Nikon had a built-in image sensor that would free images of dust particles using a special filter. It also had a 920,000-dot color LCD monitor and fast and accurate auto focus.
With camera in hand, he raced back to the large-paned window at the front of the house and cracked open the curtain, just enough to make room for the lens. He fiddled with the buttons, setting the camera to take continuous pictures - four to five pictures per second. He looked through the viewfinder. The camera was sleek and easy to handle. Magic. He zoomed in. He could literally see the sweat of her brow.
Tingles swam up his spine, shooting through his body like tiny sparklers on the Fourth of July. The picture was so clear it was as if he could reach out and touch her. His breathing quickened. His loins tightened. Yes.
Every picture was razor sharp. Lizzy Gardner still looked the same. Still so young. So vibrant. So alive. Her face was flush. Her eyes bright. But not for long.
He never thought she would have the guts to come looking for him. He had called her because he wanted to hear her voice. And, of course, to let her know he was back. It saddened him to think he had actually cared for her...trusted her...believed in her. She was a good girl. At least he’d thought she was. Now he knew otherwise. Back then she told him she would never leave him. She also said she never lied. Click. Click. Click.
After her escape, he thought she was going to lead the feds to his front door. Thinking the gig was up, he’d been forced to get rid of the other girls’ bodies quickly and without any artistic thought to their disposal. A shame considering all the trouble he’d gone to, to dress the girls up proper for when they were found. Instead, he cleaned out the attic and the bedrooms and buried his beloved insects right along with the bodies in the backyard. A few days later, he’d asked a colleague to cover for him under the ruse that his mother was on her deathbed. Then he hopped on a plane and flew to Arkansas. Fate stepped in when he’d walked into his mother’s house and met her neighbor, Cynthia Rose.
He and Cynthia fell in love almost instantly. At the time, he considered closing his business and staying in Arkansas, but the voice in his head wouldn’t allow it. Besides, nobody had contacted him or come to arrest him, which told him Lizzy hadn’t gone to the authorities because she did, in fact, love him and she didn’t want to see him go to prison.
But everything changed in an instant six months ago when copycat Frank Lyle kidnapped a girl named Jennifer Campbell and tossed her body in Folsom Lake as an afterthought. Authorities caught the idiot within two days of finding the body.
Frank Lyle ticked him off good, though, when he tried to take credit for all of his hard work. Lyle told the feds he killed all four of the girls they found fourteen years ago. Not surprisingly, the media began to hound Lizzy Gardner. Journalists came out of the woodwork with tidbits of information. Evidently the media had stayed away from Lizzy all of these years because her therapist said she was too “fragile” to talk with anyone. Apparently Lizzy was getting better though, because the media no longer considered her off limits. In fact, he saw news clips of Lizzy teaching young girls to defend themselves. She had hardly changed.
Lizzy might look the same, but things were different now. For starters, he knew the truth now. Lizzy was a liar. According to an interview her father did with Barbara Walters, the night Lizzy disappeared was the same night she had lied to her parents and snuck out with her boyfriend.
What had innocent little Lizzy been up to before he bashed her over the head and took her home?
Not only was Lizzy a liar, she was a whore. And yet he had bought into her bullshit.
He gritted his teeth. Thanks to Frank Lyle and Lizzy Gardner’s endless string of lies, the voices in his head returned in high definition surround sound. The whore had lied to her parents, and then left her girlfriends, so she could go and fuck her boyfriend. And then she made the biggest mistake of her life...she lied to him.
For days, for weeks, for months. All lies.
The beat of his heart drummed against his ribs at the thought. His palms grew moist. Lizzy Gardner must now suffer the consequences of her actions. His chest rose and fell with each excited breath. Lizzy would know exactly what he was going to do to her once he caught her. She’d seen it all before. She knew what he was capable of.
But first he intended to have a little fun.
Click. Click. Click.
Chapter 11
Tuesday, February 16, 2010 9:25 PM
Jimmy Martin stepped out of his car and listened to the message from Dr. Lehman. He snapped his cell shut. He would have to wait until tomorrow to get the lab results. He already knew it was bad. Doctors had their assistants call the patient if they had good news to share. Otherwise, the doctor made the call personally. Not too long ago, Jimmy had watched his mother die a slow cancerous death. He knew what to expect. He had a few more years before mandatory retirement. But it was beginning to look like he no longer had to worry about that.
Jimmy didn’t like having regrets, but it seemed he had enough of them to go around. He’d been promoted to Assistant Special Agent in Charge of the Sacramento field office fifteen years ago, before anybody ever heard of Spiderman. For the first time in his long career with the Bureau, he felt an indescribable sense of accomplishment six months ago when they put Frank Lyle, aka the notorious Spiderman, behind bars.
Now everything was turning to shit.
Frank Lyle was turning out to be nothing more than a wannabe serial killer. The real Spiderman was back and he meant business.
When it came to life, Jimmy thought, he had failed at everything. He and his wife were talking divorce. He still loved her, but she was tired of attending functions alone. She was ready for a real relationship with someone she could count on, someone who would be by her side when she turned off the lights at night. His daughters hardly talked to him anymore. Although his girls were often on his mind, he’d always put work before family. And now he was paying the price.
His phone vibrated and he opened his cell. It was his wife, Marianne. “Is everything all right?”
“Where have you been? The girls just left.”
Shit. Unfrickinbelievable. He’d forgotten about their dinner plans. “I’m sorry.”
“What’s wrong with you, Jimmy? How could you forget something so important? You promised we would tell the girls together.”
“Did you tell them?” he asked, hoping she didn’t, since he didn’t want the divorce any more than he wanted cancer.
“I couldn’t. Donna had important news she wanted to share with both of us. She waited hours for you to show up before she finally told me that she was going to marry Jeff.”
“Oh, is that right?” He swallowed a bitter taste in his mouth. “That’s nice. Have they set a date?”
“That’s nice? You hate Jeff. What’s wrong with you?”
“Nothing. I’m fine. I just want my girls to be happy. Including you, Marianne. I want you to be happy, you know.”
“You don’t sound like yourself. What’s going on?”
“It’s been a long day. I’m sorry I wasn’t there tonight. I’ll be home soon.”
She
snorted.
He clicked his phone shut. Jimmy scanned the area in front of Lizzy Gardner’s apartment. Earlier today when he arrived at the Walker house with a search warrant, he’d seen something in Lizzy Gardner’s eyes that he hadn’t seen before. Fear.
Because of Spiderman, Jimmy had been tied to Lizzy Gardner by an unbreakable thread for the past decade plus. And yet he’d never known what to make of Lizzy Gardner. Now he was beginning to see she was more than likely a product of unspeakable madness and cruelty. She was a woman trying to make sense out of confusion and disorder, which had to be something like trying to do an autopsy on a rubber doll. It couldn’t be done.
Jimmy was used to dealing with corpses, not survivors. For the first time since taking the oath, he found himself trying to put himself inside the victim’s head instead of the killer’s. He felt an overwhelming sense of empathy. He felt responsible, and most of all, he felt powerless.
Staring up at the stars, Jimmy took a moment to collect his thoughts before he looked about again, wondering if Spiderman was watching him now. Up the road, less than a block away, he spotted an unmarked sedan. John Perry was on watch tonight. He was a young rookie agent, eager to learn. He was also a newlywed. Jimmy liked the kid. A part of him wanted to warn the rookie, tell him to get out of the business before he journeyed too far into the darkness—get out while he could still look into his wife’s eyes and believe there was more good in the world than evil.
Tuesday, February 16, 2010 9:32 PM
Jared got the call from his sister at 9:14 p.m. Her words still rang in his ears: “Come quick! Mom and Dad are at it again, only this time I think Mom’s really leaving him. You have to hurry. Dad tossed Mom’s car keys in the pond and I swear I think he went back into the house for his gun.”
Jared kept his eyes on the road as he recalled his first homicide. Tracey Baker, wife and mother of three, pointing a gun at her husband, daring him to try and leave her. Her kids, ages fifteen, twelve, and eight, all watching with wide eyes, praying their father would set his suitcase down, walk back into the house and make everything better. Instead, Brandon T. Baker took the dare along with a bullet in the back of his head. It wasn’t the blank look on Brandon’s face as he fell to the ground or the horrified gasps of the onlookers that remained in Jared’s mind. It was the kids’ reactions that had stayed with him all this time. The way all three of those kids pleaded with the officers not to take their mother from them. They had lost their only living grandparent a month before and they had no relatives to speak of. Regardless, Tracey Baker was hauled off. And the kids were taken in by Child Protective Services. Last time he checked, all three kids had been separated and put into foster homes.
After signing in at the front gate, Jared drove past a sprawling man-made lake that shimmered beneath the moonlight, making for an elegant setting that only the rich could afford.
An immediate right turn took him around a circular driveway framed by neatly trimmed hedges and well-manicured trees. He pulled into one of six designated parking spaces next to his sister’s Jaguar.
He took the stairs two at a time. It was eerily quiet. He stepped inside, his footfalls quiet as he walked across a large expanse of marble tile. The house, with its wide entrance and spiraling staircase with custom-designed iron rails, looked like a high-priced resort instead of a home.
The front entry was bright and smelled like springtime with all of the fresh flowers adorning a marble-topped console carefully placed beneath a massive gilded mirror.
Mom was the first person he noticed as he entered the main living area. She was facing her left. Her hands were held up in the air like a cop trying to stop traffic. She stood tall. Her thick silvery hair was cut even with her jaw line. The silver strands glimmered beneath the crystal chandelier. She wore a black cashmere jacket with a zip-up front and matching pants hemmed just above high-heeled shoes adorned with silver buckles. Strangely, he felt compelled to take in every detail. He saw his sister then. The movement of her eyes told him their father hadn’t seen him yet.
“Jared,” his mom said, before he could head the other way and sneak up behind Dad.
Jared moved forward and stepped down onto plush white carpet. He looked at his father. “Dad, what are you doing?”
“Go home, son, and take your sister with you. This isn’t any of your business.”
Jared stepped closer, prompting his father to turn the gun on him instead. “That’s great, Dad. You would shoot your own son? For what? What the hell are you doing?”
“Why don’t you ask your mother?” Dad waved the gun between them. “Ask her why it’s all come to this.”
Jared raked a hand through his hair, relieved now that he’d had a chance to look into Dad’s eyes. Dad was frustrated, but he would never shoot either one of them. So Jared went along for now. “Mom,” Jared said. “What did you do to set him off?”
She lifted her chin defiantly. “I told him I was leaving him. Your father is a judge. Apparently nobody tells him they’re leaving him.”
His dad was handsome in a clean cut, patrician sort of way with dark hair turning silver at the temples. His demeanor and looks usually radiated a bristling sense of confidence and leadership. But not tonight. Tonight his father looked ruddy-faced and haggard. Defeated.
“Tell your only son why you’re leaving me.”
“I’m in love with someone else,” Mom said, her voice sad, yet resigned.
“Tell him who!” He waved the gun again.
His mother’s hands were shaking.
“Stop it, Dad,” his sister shouted. “Just stop it. He’s been drinking,” she told Jared. “He’s not thinking rationally.”
“Your mother has been fucking the goddamn dentist!” That statement was followed by a round of bitter laughter. His father’s head dipped, his chin hitting his chest. By the time Jared reached his side and took the gun out of his hands, his father’s laughter had turned into a torrent of tears.
Chapter 12
Wednesday, February 17, 2010 7:25 AM
Lizzy turned off the ignition but remained seated in her car. She listened to the whistling of the wind as it curled and coiled its way through the engine and seeped through unseen crevices. Outside, the gangly naked branches of the maple trees, lining both sides of the street, swayed back and forth as if dancing a Viennese waltz.
It was Wednesday. A lot had happened in the past few days. She had planned to sleep in this morning, but who was she kidding? She hadn’t slept well, much less slept in, for years.
Yesterday, as she and Jared sat on the sidewalk in front of the Walker’s house, aka the house of horrors and waited for the police to arrive, Jared called Jimmy Martin to fill him in on what was going down. It hadn’t taken the feds long to get a warrant to search the house. While she and Jared waited, something told Lizzy they were being watched. When she’d mentioned as much to Jared, he gestured toward the house across the street where an elderly woman watched them from her kitchen window.
Lizzy had left it at that, but still, her instincts were on high alert. He was close by, and he’d definitely been watching her. Instincts never lied. She’d learned that lesson the hard way.
Mrs. Walker and her daughter had not been pleased to learn that their house might have once been used as a place of brutal torture. Lizzy’s main concern when they finally left the premise was that there had been no sign of Sophie. The Walkers had bought the house six years ago from a man, now deceased, who went by the name of Carl Dane. Jimmy Martin was looking into the matter and had promised to keep her updated.
Lizzy stepped out of her old beat-up Toyota. When she closed the door, the hinges creaked in protest. Since being inside the house of horrors, more and more images had been popping in and out of her head like Mexican jumping beans. Spiderman was a doctor. She was sure of it...and yet something didn’t gel. What wasn’t she seeing?
The street outside her office seemed oddly deserted for a weekday morning. More than likely the chilly weat
her had kept most people in their warm beds this morning. The morning air was brisk and cold, and yet she couldn’t solely blame the weather for the chill she felt in her bones. Reaching over her shoulder, she touched her holster to make sure her gun was where it should be. Old habits never died.
Maybe she should have waited for Jared, after all. He’d called at eleven last night, said he’d been at his parent’s house and offered to stay at her apartment. He was worried about her. But she turned down his offer. She had a bad habit of pushing people away. She always regretted it in the end. But that didn’t stop her from making the same mistake over and over. To make herself feel better, Lizzy had invited him to her place for dinner tonight, as long as he did the cooking. Jared agreed. He’d sounded distant, as if he was a million miles away.
Feeling like a gunslinger in the Old West—empty street, gun in the holster, evil in the air—Lizzy took steady steps toward her office. The rubber bottoms of her winter boots thumped against the pavement as she walked. The boots were five-years old and counting, but still warm and comfortable with good traction. One of the perks of working for herself—she could wear what she wanted. Being a private investigator didn’t require heels, nylons, or ironing. A pair of jeans, waterproof boots, a cotton v-neck T-shirt, and her favorite insulated fitted jacket was all she needed to get through the winter months.
Every time she exhaled, her breath came out as a puff of white fog. She glanced at her watch. The flower shop down the street wouldn’t open for another hour; same for the salon across the street from her office. The only sounds were the whistling wind and the distant hum of traffic on the main boulevard a few blocks away. According to this morning’s weather report, storm warnings were being issued. By Friday, wind gusts were expected to top 80 mph.
As she drew closer to her office door, she slipped her key from her coat pocket. Shadowy movements reflected off the paned-glass window. She glanced over her shoulder. Nothing but dancing tree branches. Shit. Her imagination was getting the best of her.