Edge of Midnight

by Leslie Tentler

  “I know,” she whispered.

  “I’m going to get a shower, all right?”

  She remained in place as he went into the bathroom. In the doorway he turned briefly to look at her, and Mia could see the well-defined lines of his body silhouetted against the hall light. His broad shoulders and hard chest, narrow waist and hips. Emotion mingled with the desire she felt. I don’t know what’s going to happen with us. It was an uncertainty they shared.

  When he entered the bedroom a short time later, she was already nude and under the sheets. She noticed he had brought both his cell phone and service weapon with him. Although the security system was on, she was aware of the danger that existed outside their safe haven.

  She raised herself onto one elbow as he removed his boxers and got into bed, turning to face her. He caressed the gentle curves of her body, cupping one small breast, the brush of his fingers instantly hardening her nipple. For a time they simply stared into one another’s eyes. Then Mia kissed his throat, his collarbone, her fingers threading through the sparse hair on his chest. The nightlight she’d found inside her suitcase, wrapped in one of her T-shirts, cast the bedroom in a soft, bluish glow. Even now, that one simple gesture from him tightened her throat with gratitude.

  He readied himself for her, rolling on a condom, and she sighed at the welcome weight of his body over hers. His mouth captured her small gasp as he entered her, his hands tangling in her hair. She blinked hazily up at him as he began to move inside her. Their bodies were still so new to one another. Mia reveled in the way he filled her, in the way his languid strokes brought her to a fever pitch, until she was breathless and whispering pleas against his ear.

  She loved his own ragged gasp as he came inside her.

  A short time later, she skimmed her fingers through his hair as he slept. She’d become his refuge, she realized, from the lethal shadows he chased.

  Mia said a fervent prayer to keep him safe.

  It was early morning, the sky still gray outside.

  She was already showered and dressed, awaiting the arrival of her deputy escort. Wandering the small living area, a cup of coffee clasped between her palms, Mia could hear the water running behind the closed door of the bathroom.

  Eric’s briefcase sat open on the table. She slowed next to it, unable to not look. A series of black-and-white photographs peeked out at her from beneath his paperwork. Despite the sense of foreboding that fell over her, she placed her cup on the table and picked them up, feeling her stomach clench at nearly the same time.

  She barely recognized Karen Diambro.

  In the crime scene images, her nearly nude corpse lay on black asphalt, swaddled in plastic sheeting. Enough of it had been pulled away to reveal the full extent of desecration, however. Mia swallowed past the lump in her throat. Her mind flashed to the same type of sheets that had been strung up inside the cinder-block room where she herself had been held captive only a few weeks ago.

  The body was battered. Bruised. Odd burn marks marred the torso, as did the numeral carved into the skin. One hand was splayed over her breasts, its fingers bearing five gruesome holes. Even with Walt’s warning, the sight shook her. She’d heard the police terminology for it before: overkill. The brutality inflicted caused tears of anger and empathy to burn behind her eyes, the images far more personal to her than any she had seen before on the job. She flipped slowly through the rest of the photos. Karen Diambro had been petite, with dark hair and brown eyes like hers.

  I was the lucky one. I escaped.

  Anna Lynn Gomez and Karen Diambro were substitutes for me.

  The images brought the harsh reality home.

  She couldn’t let this psychopath continue—she had to do whatever she could to help, didn’t she? The water stopped in the bathroom. Mia buried the photos back underneath the papers.

  “Everything all right?” Eric asked a short time later. He’d emerged from the bedroom, wearing suit pants and a blue dress shirt. He struggled with his tie. Mia walked over to help him. As she pulled the silk through and tightened the knot for him, she took care that he didn’t notice the faint tremor in her hands.

  “Everything’s fine,” she said.

  “You look upset.”

  “I look like I haven’t finished my morning coffee.” Forcing a smile, she allowed her fingers to glide over the smooth silk that lay against his chest, her job completed. “There. All done.”

  “Will’s coming to have lunch with you today?”

  “He’s bringing it in. We’re eating in the employee break room, like you suggested. And by suggested, I mean ordered.”

  Eric sighed. “I know it’s not the private meeting you had in mind, but it’s safer. And I’m already tying up enough resources watching you. We’ve got every available man across the local Bureau and JSO hunting this bastard down.”

  She nodded her understanding. Bending his head, he brushed his lips over hers. Mia felt a wave of guilt, knowing how strongly he’d be against it. But her emotions had pushed her to a decision.

  No matter the consequences, it was something she had to do.

  35

  He couldn’t believe what he saw.

  Allan jammed the van’s gear into Park and cut the engine. The door to the cinder-block building hung open like a broken jaw. Forgetting the Venti-size latte he’d picked up on his way home, he launched himself from the driver’s side and hurried across the gravel in the early-morning light.

  Someone had trespassed while he’d been out during the evening.

  Entering, his heart pounding, he saw the overhead light had been left on. He’d been violated, but by whom? Lupita? Those low-life, teenage thugs who lived nearby? They had been caught breaking into property before. He looked around hastily, checking for some sign of disturbance. Missing tools. Overturned furniture. But nothing appeared out of place. His throat tightened with anxiety as his gaze moved to the previously padlocked cabinet. Open. Breathing hard, Allan swung its doors wide. The vials containing his treasures remained inside. All still lined up perfectly, an exact half inch between each of them. None was missing, but someone had seen them.

  Someone had been here.

  A red haze clouded his vision. The monster he’d barely been managing to keep tamped down emerged. Bellowing his outrage, he picked up a metal stool, beating it against the table before finally flinging it against the wall. It smacked the plastic sheeting and crashed to the floor.

  Panting with exertion, he worked to rein in the anger that had been bubbling within him ever since Macfarlane had ridiculed him on television, painted him as a pathetic loser in front of the whole city. And now this. It was too much. Too much. His eyes swung around the unoccupied room. He yearned for someone to take his fury out on, but there was no one now. Not anymore.

  Calm down. Allan drew in several deep breaths and tried to think rationally about the problem at hand.

  If the intruder had seen something of concern, wouldn’t they have called the police? Wouldn’t flashing blue lights have met him as he turned onto the gravel road? He looked objectively around the room again, trying to see it through another person’s eyes. He was neat and thorough with his cleanups. The jugs of bleach lined up on the shelf were a common household item. And the hooks in the walls and ceiling could be purely functional, couldn’t they? Perhaps whoever had been snooping in the cabinet had been looking for something else, the vials’ labels and contents falling beneath his or her notice.

  He’d gotten lucky before.

  Probably kids, he told himself. Looking for weed or alcohol.

  Allan remained long enough to take a complete inventory and make sure nothing was gone. His copies of the digital recordings were still there, too, burned on CDs and hidden in a drawer of the workbench. Then turning off the light and locking the door, he took the path through the woods to the house, irritated by the birds chirping overhead in morning song.

  He couldn’t leave this place even for a few hours without everything going to hell.<
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  The stench of cigarettes was noticeable as soon as he reached the screened door that led into the kitchen. Gladys sat at the table in her frayed housecoat, an ashtray in front of her littered with butts. She didn’t even try to hide it. Her oxygen canister was parked at her side, as was her damned Chihuahua, who growled and bared his teeth at Allan’s entrance.

  He wanted to punt-kick the mangy mutt into next week. Instead, he snatched the lit cigarette she held and extinguished it in the ashtray, then dumped the lot of it into the sink and ran water over it. “We’ve talked about this. Repeatedly. No smoking.”

  She merely stared at him with her faded blue eyes and drooping mouth, her lopsided expression somehow more defiant than usual. Her skin appeared chalky-white and dry as parchment. Behind her, the television on the counter was on and turned for once to a morning news program.

  “Have you seen anyone lurking around here, Mother? Lupita or those horrible Larkin boys?”

  Her eyes narrowed. “I woke up at five and you weren’t here. Where’ve you been?”

  Where he’d been was Jacksonville Beach, watching the bungalow the idiotic deputies had practically led him to from the covert of an unrented property across the street. He had spent hours there—had seen Macfarlane himself go inside the house where she’d been hidden. He had been trying to plot out some kind of fail-proof plan to take her. As daylight had begun to seep into the sky, he’d come home to get some sleep and attend to Gladys’s needs. He would set up camp again tonight and wait for his opportunity to prove just how far from a loser he was.

  “I had a morning pickup. A television set—”

  “You’re a liar,” Gladys spat, surprising him. “Just like your miserable father.”

  He saw it then. The extra set of keys to the building he kept in a drawer in his bedroom. They lay on the table next to her teacup. The keys to the cabinet’s padlock were on the same ring. Allan went cold.

  “Your wickedness comes from his side, not mine.” She shook a gnarled finger, her thin voice rising. “You’ve been on the television! I tried to tell myself that drawing wasn’t you. But now I know what you’ve been doing out in those woods. All these years…I’ve prayed for that sickness to be out of you!”

  Blood pounded in his ears. Gladys? How had she gotten all the way down to his workshop? She couldn’t have walked, could she? He remembered her car, an old Plymouth she let Lupita use to run errands. With the housekeeper’s departure, it had been returned and now sat in the carport. It infuriated him that after all this time, she chose now to watch something besides televangelists.

  “You promised me after that little girl.” A betrayed sob escaped her. She shook her head and pressed her fingers over her wrinkled mouth. “What you did to her… I kept your filthy secret because you were my son! We prayed and you swore you’d never do it again! Shame!”

  Allan wished Gladys had a mute button like the television set. She was starting to screech.

  “You’ve got the devil inside you, just like your father! Lucifer!”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he attempted, face hot. “Your medication has you confused—”

  “Those vials.” She took a phlegmy, anguished breath, wheezing. “I saw them. They’ve got women’s names on them! Their fingernails, their teeth—it makes me sick! I won’t hide your sin this time!”

  Closing his eyes, Allan rubbed a hand over his face. He could feel Puddles under the table, cautiously sniffing his pants leg. This couldn’t be happening. He tried to shut out her accusing shrieks.

  “Be quiet, Mother,” he warned under his breath. He needed silence to think. Gladys was a shut-in, an invalid. He could cancel the phone service and sell her car. She wouldn’t be able to tell anyone…

  “You’re a perversion! Bound for hell!”

  She began praying aloud, beseeching God to cast the devil out of him. To make him a real man instead of a weak, pitiful child of the dark. Her entreaty went on and on until it evolved into a self-pitying monologue. The burden He had placed on her by giving her such a wretched, miserable son. Allan’s face grew hot and he began to shake.

  I won’t lose control. I won’t lose control.

  “I should’ve never had you! Should’ve turned you in for what you did to that orphan girl! But you were my child! My yoke to bear!” She pumped her fist against her bony chest. “I was glad when you were gone! No one asked you back here!”

  As she continued her caterwauling, Allan drove his fingernails into his palms until his skin began to bleed. A tsunami of rage washed over him. How dare she. If she didn’t shut up he wouldn’t be able to contain it. He could feel it moving inside him.

  The monster clawed to get out.

  It was midafternoon by the time Eric returned to the FBI building in Baymeadows. He’d been out with another agent, following up on the leads still trickling in through the hotline—including a suspicious, dark-haired male who’d been reported loitering around a girls’ softball team practice at the University of North Florida. The man had been peculiar and Eric figured he might end up being someone else’s problem eventually, but he wasn’t their unsub. They did run him off the campus, however.

  “We heard back from the Maryland and Virginia DMVs,” Cameron told him, sitting at his desk as Eric entered the third-floor office. They’d split up earlier, with Cam leading a recanvassing of the area where Karen Diambro’s body had been found the day before. “None of the temp agency’s workers are showing licenses in those states.”

  It was a disappointment. The absence didn’t completely rule out the names on the list—the unsub could’ve been unregistered there or had a license under an alias—but it greatly lessened the probability. Eric draped his suit coat over the back of a chair, taking some relief from the heat in the building’s air-conditioning. “Let’s still run the full background checks.”

  “I’ve already got someone on it, but it might take a few days to get through all thirty-six names.” Cameron added cynically, “Oh, yeah, some guy turned himself in to the JSO a little while ago, claiming to be The Collector. He vaguely matches the physical profile, but Boyet and Scofield are dubious since he doesn’t seem to know any confidential details of the case. They’re contacting hospitals to see if he’s been under psychological care.”

  While it wasn’t unusual for someone unstable to admit to high-profile murders as a way of getting attention, it did add to the static that made it harder to isolate the real contenders. Eric felt a growing frustration. It seemed as though they’d been through a maze of dead ends. And despite the press conference he had hoped would incite the unsub, there hadn’t been so much as a blip on the radar. Sitting down at the desk adjacent to Cameron’s to check his email on the computer, his cell phone rang. The name that appeared on its screen worried him. He answered.

  “Agent Macfarlane, it’s Will Dvorak.”

  Will was supposed to see Mia at the newspaper before flying back to Chicago. Eric asked, “Is everything all right?”

  “I don’t want to alarm you,” he said carefully. “But Mia isn’t here at the Courier. She left of her own volition, apparently. She’s gone.”

  “Gone?”

  “She took my car.”

  Eric rubbed his forehead. “You need to explain yourself.”

  “We’d just finished lunch and I stepped out to return a call to my agent. When I got back, she’d disappeared along with my car keys. She left a note apologizing and telling me there was somewhere important she had to go—”

  “Did she say where?”

  “No. She promised she isn’t in any kind of trouble and that there’s no need to send a posse out after her. I went to the parking garage to try to stop her but she’d already taken off. She isn’t answering her cell, either.”

  Already, Eric was moving toward the door, irritated and worried at the same time. Cameron gave him a look, his interest piqued.

  “How long ago?”

  “I’m guessing about forty minutes.” />
  He didn’t try to control the censure in his voice. “You waited that long to call me?”

  Will sounded nervous. “The call with my agent went long, and then after I realized she was gone I spent a while trying to reach her by phone. She’s my friend, Agent Macfarlane. She asked that I not alert you at all, but I couldn’t do that. I thought it best to call.”

  “You should’ve called me right away,” he said flatly, walking down the corridor. “If you hear from her, you let me know immediately.”

  Eric ended the call. Cameron caught up to him as he waited for the elevator.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Mia took off from the newspaper.”

  He raised his eyebrows, surprised. “Why?”

  “She said there was something she had to do.” He had a growing certainty about where she’d gone, and he didn’t like the idea of it. In fact, he’d specifically refused her request on more than one occasion. But Mia had been adamant about wanting to help in any way she could. Eric thought back to that morning. She’d seemed pensive, but he’d chalked it up to the early hour and the stress of being taken out of her routine. He hadn’t read more into it than that.

  “Find out about this guy the JSO is holding, all right?” he said as the elevator doors slid open and he stepped on. They’d be negligent not to look into it, but he knew in his gut The Collector wasn’t going to just turn himself in.

  Cameron nodded. “Do you know where she is?”

  “Yeah, I think so.”

  His concern grew as the elevator plummeted to the lobby. Surely Wilhelm wouldn’t conduct another therapy session with Mia, especially when he himself had warned against it for her own safety. Walking briskly across the heated parking lot to his car, he tried to reach Mia by cell phone. Like Will, he got her voice mail. He called Dr. Wilhelm’s office next as he pulled from the complex, but there was no answer there, either.