by T. R. Ragan
Thanks to satellite maps, they already knew exactly where to park when they arrived at Holmes’s house. Holmes didn’t get off work until eight o’clock at night. It was the middle of the afternoon. They had plenty of time. No wife, kids, or girlfriends to worry about. Kitally was the lookout. If anyone parked in Holmes’s driveway or at the curb in front of the house, if anyone walked anywhere near his place, Kitally would send Hayley a warning text.
“This shouldn’t take long,” Hayley said before climbing out of the car. “Fifteen minutes tops, unless I have trouble getting into his computer.” The guy was pretty active on social media for a sociopath. Tommy had befriended Holmes under the guise of having similar interests in video war games. It didn’t take Tommy long to figure out what sort of equipment Holmes was using.
Hayley climbed out of the car and headed across the street for Holmes’s front door, leaving the cleaning supplies behind.
Kitally watched Hayley go. It was true. She’d been having second thoughts about this whole vigilante thing, mostly because she had seen the look in Hayley’s eyes when they were dealing with Owen Dunham. If she hadn’t been there, Hayley might have taken things too far. And that made Kitally nervous.
Nothing had been the same since Jared’s funeral.
Sometimes life didn’t just go on, after all. Sometimes the world really did stop turning on its axis because that’s how it felt. Lizzy was angry at the world, and Hayley seemed to walk a fine line between compassion and coldheartedness.
She watched Hayley disappear inside Holmes’s house. Hayley was good. She made breaking and entering seem like child’s play.
Kitally focused her attention on the street in front of her. The houses on both sides were small and nondescript. At the end of the block, there was an empty lot littered with trash. A white sedan drove by. It was a woman driver. The lady kept her gaze straight ahead, didn’t appear to notice Kitally sitting behind the wheel of the car, waiting as the minutes slowly ticked by.
Her cell phone vibrated. She picked it up and looked at the caller ID. Mom. She’d have to call her back later.
Two kids on bikes were headed her way. She didn’t know whether to hunker down in her seat or sit up a little straighter. She opted for leaning over and looking through the glove box. If they slowed down even a little bit, she would text Hayley.
The kids cruised past without a glance her way.
She looked at the time. Only seven minutes had passed.
She sucked in a breath and then slowly released it. Every time a breeze blew by, the branches of the trees creaked and swayed. She looked at her phone. No texts from Hayley. No need to worry.
Her phone vibrated.
It was Mom. Again. Jesus. She hit Talk. “Mom, I really can’t talk right now, but since you’ve called twice in five minutes, I figured it must be urgent.”
“I just wanted to make sure you would be able to come by the house next week and water the inside plants.”
Now she remembered. Her parents were going on another trip. The Greek islands. “I’ll water the plants. I promise.”
“Is everything all right?”
“I’m fine. You and Dad have fun, and I’ll come visit when you get back.”
Unfortunately, it was never that easy to get off the phone with her mom. Every call required a comprehensive update on the family, which included second and third cousins Kitally had never met. By the time Kitally finally pulled herself free, another fifteen minutes had passed. Hayley had been inside Holmes’s house for twenty-two minutes.
Kitally looked around. Nobody in the neighborhood was out and about. Nobody checking their mail or mowing their lawn. She took a good look at Holmes’s house with its faded pink paint job. The walkway was uneven and cracked. The lawn was decorated with a few sporadic weeds. Blankets hanging over the windows made it impossible to see inside. Curling her fingers around the door handle, she was about to get out when she saw a car approaching. She decided to sit still, wait until the car passed before she made her exit.
But the car didn’t pass by at all. The Honda Civic pulled into the driveway.
It was him. Donald Holmes. He was home early.
Shit.
She grabbed her cell phone and quickly texted Hayley. Holmes is home. Get out of the house!
Holmes walked to the door. He was short and stocky. His clothes were wrinkled and baggy. Hopefully Hayley would hear him using his keys to get in the front door.
He stepped inside and shut the door behind him.
Seconds turned into minutes.
She kept waiting to see Hayley running around the side of the house, but nothing happened. Her nerves were shot. She couldn’t take it any longer. She climbed out of the car, went to the front, and opened the hood. Then she headed for the house and knocked on the door.
The door opened. Up close, she could see that his gut hung over his pants and a light sheen of sweat covered his brow. He held the doorknob with one hand and a can of beer with the other. His brown wiry hair curled around two monstrous ears.
Kitally shivered.
“What are you selling, little girl?”
“Nothing.” She tried to peek over his shoulder. “I’m having car troubles.” Without looking behind her, she gestured across the street toward her car. “Would it be possible to use your phone?”
He glanced at the car, then gave her a once-over before taking another look across the street. “That’s a nice car. Where’s your cell phone?”
“I forgot to charge it last night,” she lied. She couldn’t understand why Hayley wasn’t making a run for it, but maybe by calling him to the door she’d given her a chance to climb out a window or run out the back door. “Maybe I’ll just try the engine one more time. Sorry to have bothered you.”
Before she could leave, he grabbed hold of her shoulder, his hand clamped so tight she could feel the rough edges of his fingernails through her shirt. “You can use my phone,” he said.
She stepped inside. The door shut behind her. A lock clicked into place. She headed left toward the kitchen, but he stopped her again and pointed to the right. “The phone is this way.”
She followed him down a narrow hallway. The place smelled like body odor. The guy obviously didn’t own a bar of soap.
There were two bedrooms. Both doors were open. Holmes walked ahead while she stopped to look inside the first bedroom. There was a futon covered with dirty clothes. A desk with a computer sat in front of the bedroom window. Where is Hayley hiding? “Don’t you have a phone in your—”
A hand clamped over her mouth.
She hadn’t seen or heard him step up from behind her. He dragged her backward into the next room. Not only was he overweight, he was strong, and he had her flat on the ground with her hands wrenched back behind her, nearly three hundred pounds keeping her down. She wriggled, tried to get air to her lungs. It was no use.
Moving an inch or two at a time, Hayley wriggled her way out from under the bed. What was Kitally thinking, coming into the house? She had single-handedly compromised their plans.
On her feet, Hayley looked around the room. All that came to hand was an old stapler on the desk. It was a real warhorse, at least. The thing felt as if it were made of wrought iron.
It shouldn’t have surprised her to see Kitally beneath the big man in the next bedroom, but it did. She swung the stapler with all her might at his head, but merely clipped him when he turned at the last instant. The effort she put into the swing caused her to lose her footing and stagger backward into a dresser.
He was fast for a big man. He jumped to his feet and reached out for Hayley before she could catch her balance. Yanking her arm behind her, he twisted until she had no choice but to give in. He had her in a headlock.
Kitally was on all fours, her chest heaving as she caught her breath. Hayley watched her use the wood frame of the bed to slow
ly pull herself upward. Her legs wobbled like a newborn deer’s.
They were fucked.
But apparently it was all show. When Kitally whirled around, Hayley wrenched her head to one side, giving Kitally room to jam the heel of her hand into Holmes’s nose.
Bone crunched.
Hayley yanked herself free, but Holmes reeled around, blood gushing from his nose as he blindly planted his knuckles into Hayley’s left cheekbone.
Growling, Kitally struck him in the throat, then used her body weight to throw a sharp elbow dead center into his torso, finishing with a right knee to the groin.
Holmes grunted and fell to the ground.
Hayley and Kitally took off at the same time, down the hall and out the door. Hayley slammed the hood of the car down just as Kitally jumped in behind the wheel. Hayley leaped into the passenger seat right before Kitally hit the gas.
When Hayley looked back, she saw Holmes charge out the door holding his face, stopping in the middle of the street. He was still standing there when Kitally took a sharp left and disappeared out of sight.
Hayley opened the mirror on the visor. There was already some discoloration, and her eye was swollen and half-shut. “What the hell were you thinking?”
“Excuse me?”
“You heard me. Why did you come after me? That was never part of the plan.”
“All you had to do was text me,” Kitally said, “and let me know you were having problems getting shit done in there. I thought you had fallen into a black hole. When Holmes drove up and I didn’t see you drop out of a window or come running around the side of the house, I knew I had to do something.”
“Stupid move,” Hayley said. “I had it under control. And the reason I didn’t text you back was because I had crawled under the bed and I couldn’t reach my phone. I could hear Holmes in the kitchen, rifling through the refrigerator. Once he settled down, I was going to sneak out the back door.”
“You were on the wrong side of the house. The back door, if there was one, was on the other side.”
“Then I would have crawled through the fucking window.”
“You said you would be fifteen minutes.”
“No, I told you to give me thirty.”
Kitally shook her head as she kept her eyes on the road in front of her. “That’s not what you said.”
Hayley opened the glove box and pulled out the throwaway phone. Then she called 911 and reported a rape taking place inside the house on 1273 Florence Drive in Sacramento. She told them to hurry, and then she hung up the phone before they could ask for a name.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Lizzy had worked late last night and didn’t get home until well past midnight, when the only noise outside was the chirping of crickets. By the time she awoke, the sun was up and the day had started without her.
She staggered into the bathroom. A dizzy head prompted her to hang on to the counter for support. She felt hungover; with dark circles under her eyes, she looked hungover, too, and yet she hadn’t had a drink since Hayley found her in the office drowning her sorrows in a bottle of scotch three months ago.
It took her fifteen minutes to get through her morning routine. Downstairs, she found Kitally at the kitchen table, eating scrambled eggs.
“Morning,” Lizzy mumbled. “How did everything go with the prison guard? Any problems getting in and out?”
A girl stepped out of the main part of the kitchen and into view. Her black hair was pulled back into a bun. She was olive-skinned, ridiculously young, and pregnant.
Lizzy cocked her head and said, “Who are you?”
“I’m Salma. Who are you?”
Lizzy looked at Kitally. “What’s going on?”
“Hayley and I were driving around looking for the Ghost when we happened upon Salma sleeping in the park.”
“So you brought her here?”
“There’s plenty of room,” Hayley said from the main living area.
Lizzy lifted both palms in question. “Are we opening up some sort of home for misfits?”
Kitally’s eyes widened in surprise. “I don’t know. Is that what we are—misfits?”
“I can cook,” Salma said, “and I—”
Ignoring the girl, Lizzy turned around and walked into the other room, where Hayley was sitting on the couch, tapping away on the keyboard, absorbed in whatever she was working on. “We can’t talk openly if she’s going to be staying here,” Lizzy said.
Hayley looked up.
“What happened to your face?” Lizzy asked. “Who did that to you?”
“It’s not as bad as it looks.”
“Did Holmes see you?”
“Yep. He saw us both.”
Lizzy stood stock-still. Heat rose from her toes to her neck.
“It was my fault,” Kitally said as she entered the room behind Lizzy. “I should have let Hayley handle things, but I got worried and screwed everything up.”
“Yeah, well, it doesn’t really matter why or how,” Lizzy said. “We’re shutting this so-called operation down.”
“Not yet,” Kitally said. “There’s still a good chance they caught Holmes with the porn that we planted inside his house and he’ll be locked up. In fact, he could be behind bars right now as far as we know.”
“Don’t either of you get it?”
Kitally and Hayley waited for Lizzy to tell them.
“You weren’t ready,” Lizzy said to Kitally, angrily stabbing the air for emphasis. “I knew you weren’t ready, but I let you talk me into moving forward. And look what happened. He saw both of your faces. It’s over.”
“You’re overreacting,” Hayley said. “Holmes can’t prove we were ever in his house. He has no idea who we are, and I bet you he doesn’t have a clue as to why we were there to begin with.”
“Tell that to Detective Chase. He’s got his eyes on you,” she said to Hayley. “He’s got a file this thick.” She used her fingers to show her exactly how big the file was. “He’s got pictures and witnesses who say they saw you in the area where a dead man was found in his apartment—a man who supposedly put a bag over his head and committed suicide.”
Hayley sighed and went back to whatever she was doing before.
Kitally shot Lizzy a confused look. “What does that have to do with Hayley?”
“That girl,” Lizzy said, ignoring Kitally and pointing in the direction she’d last seen Salma. “She’s gotta go.”
“What happened to helping others whenever possible?” Kitally wanted to know.
“Do you see those words carved on my fucking forehead?”
“Wow,” Kitally said. “I get that you’ve got some major issues to deal with, but you don’t have to be such a bitch.”
Lizzy took a breath, tried to calm herself. “I’m going to my room to grab a few things and then I’ll be out for most of the day.”
“What about Shady Oaks Nursing Home?” Kitally asked.
“What about it?”
“You told me over the phone yesterday that you needed to talk to me about checking the place out.”
“Yeah, well, figure it out. The file is on the desk in the office,” she said as she walked off.
“I’ve never seen her so pissed off,” Kitally said after Lizzy walked away.
Hayley shrugged. “She’ll get over it.”
“Should I leave?” Salma asked.
“No,” Kitally and Hayley both said at once.
Tammy Walters and her four-year-old son lived in a one-bedroom apartment off Forty-Second Street. Long, unkempt dry grass and broken-down fencing surrounded the outside of the building, but the inside of the apartment was clean and neat, if sparsely furnished.
Tammy sat on a sofa, and Lizzy sat in an overstuffed chair facing her. “What can you tell me about your sister Miriam?”
“Do you me
an what kind of person is she? Her hobbies, her goals?”
“Sure,” Lizzy said. “Anything that might tell me what she’s like.”
Tammy thought about it for a moment. “Miriam is my best friend. Although we have the same birth parents, you wouldn’t know it once you looked at the two of us together. Miriam is tall and slender but with curves—you know what I mean?”
Lizzy nodded.
“But me—well, take a look at me—I’ve got a lot of meat on these bones and being five feet, three inches, nobody ever accused me of being tall.”
She laughed, but Lizzy could see that her heart wasn’t in it. Although she talked as if her sister was still alive, the probability of that being the case was growing slimmer every day.
“Not only is Miriam beautiful,” Tammy said, “she was always the brightest student in school.” She sighed. “I’d be lying if I said I was never jealous of Miriam, because I was. And if her own sister is sometimes jealous, think how many girls in high school were. I used to joke and call my sister ‘poor beautiful Miriam.’ ”
Tammy’s son brought over a toy, and, without missing a beat, she connected a plastic robot arm and leg and then handed it back to him. “There you go,” she said. “Momma loves you.” The kid ran back to his pile of toys in the middle of the apartment.
“Do you know how Miriam met Wayne Bennett?” Lizzy asked.
“Yeah. I do.” She pointed to her chest. “It was me.” She fiddled with her tight black curls. “After I heard that a girl I knew was handpicked by Wayne Bennett to be in his program, I called his office. I was outraged that my sister wasn’t chosen, and that’s when I found out that Miriam had never even applied.” She shook her head. “Why didn’t I just leave well enough alone?”
“We would all make different decisions and choices if we could see into the future.”
“Yeah, well, how many people make choices that put a loved one’s life in danger?”
Lizzy lifted a shoulder and left it at that.
“Anyhow, I talked Miriam into applying, and, of course, she got into the program. If she wasn’t so damned beautiful, Wayne Bennett probably never would have paid her any mind. But as it was, he took an immediate interest in my sister and that was that.”