by Blake Pierce
He might even be somewhere beyond that gate right now.
She had to let Crivaro know.
She pulled out her cell phone and typed out a text message to Crivaro—the first text message she’d ever tried to send …
Come to gate on unpaved road to the right of the park.
… and she hit “Send,” hoping she’d done it correctly.
Then she pushed open the gate and left it standing open as she walked on into the desolate grounds, following along the car tracks.
The tracks took her past grim, skeletal structures of what must have once been amusement park rides. An eerie feeling came over her—a ghostly sense of what this place must have been like in its heyday, packed with happy people. She could almost hear music and shouting and clanging and other festive sounds. Just like the poem suggested, Riley felt surrounded by a “palpable public crush of revelers.”
Finally, the tracks led into a large roofed area held up by columns and fragments of walls. The day was still warm and sunny, which made this place seem particularly dark and dank. As she wandered in among the shadows, her eyes had to adjust to the dimness.
Riley guessed that this area must have once been some kind of arcade for games and amusements. A sort of metal trough passed through the space—possibly where the stream had once run for the game involving the ducks, fish, and swans.
Deeper inside the roofed area, the tracks led her to an old, beat-up vehicle. Was it the same car she had seen the killer drive away from the marina? Riley thought probably so. In any case, somebody was definitely here somewhere right now.
It was a terrifying thought.
Riley decided she’d better explore no further, but instead go back to the gate and wait for Crivaro and McCune to arrive.
But just as she turned around, a high-pitched sound caught her ear.
She stopped dead still to listen.
Soon she heard it again—and she was knew right away what it was.
It was a woman’s scream.
The scream was followed by softer sounds that she thought must be whimpering.
She followed the sound through to the far end of the building, where she found herself in the midst of dark hallways that must once have been some kind of vast network of hallways connecting several buildings.
The labyrinth!
Growing more frightened by the second, Riley turned again to go back.
But she heard the voice again—louder, more piercing and urgent.
She forced herself to continue on her way, following a concrete ditch where lay a couple of broken hulls of two-seated boats. She realized she was in what must have once been a “tunnel of love.”
For a while, the only light she could see was coming in through broken places in the ceiling. But finally, some distance off, she saw a partially open door that shed some light into the labyrinth.
Shivering all over now with fear, Riley approached the door and cautiously pushed it the rest of the way open. The door led into a large room that was lit by a single glaring white light hanging over a long table.
At the far end of the room was a wire mesh storage cage.
Inside the cage, Riley saw someone in a clown suit crouching on the floor.
Is it him? she wondered.
But then the clown let out a whimper of despair, and Riley realized …
No, it’s her. It’s his next victim.
The woman’s face remained hidden against her knees—she didn’t seem to be aware of Riley’s arrival.
Without stopping to think, Riley rushed toward the cage to let the woman out.
Suddenly, a wildly colored figure leaped right in front of her.
It was a man in a clown suit wearing the full makeup of a grotesque whiteface clown.
He danced wildly about, waving a short length of steel pipe.
“Oh, you’ve come, you’ve come!” he cackled wildly. “I knew you would! I knew last night at the marina wasn’t the end! I knew we’d meet again! You couldn’t stay away! You couldn’t resist!”
Riley was horribly disoriented now.
She felt as though she’d been dropped into the middle of a nightmare.
Seizing the element of surprise, the clown lunged at Riley. She ducked away and he narrowly missed her head with the pipe.
Barely able to keep her balance, Riley kept trying to duck and dodge away from the man and his weapon, all the while looking for some hard object she could use in her own defense.
Her eyes lighted upon another length of steel pipe lying on the floor.
But as she reached for it, she felt a sharp crack on the back of her head, and the world went black.
*
When Riley tried to open her eyes again, she was blinded by blazing, hot white light. She tried to move, but realized she was lying prone and bound fast by strong restraints.
She felt fingers touching her all over her face, smearing something cold and wet all over it.
Makeup, she thought.
He’s making me up as a clown.
She guessed that he’d already dressed her in a clown costume while she was unconscious.
She managed to open her eyes a little.
She could see his face now—all white with garish colors.
“There,” he said, lifting his fingers away from her face. “All done now. Have a look!”
He held up a mirror and Riley saw her own face, horribly painted.
He said, “I’m so glad you came. I kept the other girl alive in hopes you’d come. I want to see which of you is strong enough to stay with me. I have a feeling you’ll be the one!”
To Riley’s horror, she saw that he was now holding a syringe in front of her.
She remembered what the medical examiner had said about the other two victims—how a fatal dose of amphetamines had brought on horrible deaths from sheer terror.
“No!” Riley cried out. “No! No!”
“Hold still,” the clown said. “Who knows? You might even like this!”
She felt the sharp needle against the crook of her arm and braced for it to pierce her skin.
Suddenly, a loud crack resounded through the room.
A spurt of blood exploded from the clown’s forehead, and she heard him crash to the floor.
In another instant, she saw the faces Crivaro and McCune hovering over her.
They were busy severing her bonds.
In a flustered voice McCune said to Crivaro …
“I had to take the shot. He was going to inject her. There wasn’t time.”
“It’s OK,” Crivaro told him. “It was a clean kill.”
Crivaro paused for a moment to stroke Riley’s hair.
“I swear to God, Sweeney,” Crivaro said with a smile and a wink. “I’ve never known a human being who could screw up so many things in so little time as you.”
Soon Riley was freed from her bonds.
“Don’t get up,” Crivaro ordered. “I want you to sit right there until I get this mess sorted out.”
Riley obediently stayed where she was.
CHAPTER FORTY FOUR
Riley woke up and opened her eyes.
For a moment, she had a slight feeling of déjà vu.
She was in a hospital bed again.
But it was a different bed this time, and in a different room.
This bed was walled off from the rest of the room with moveable partitions and a closed curtains.
The weird spell of familiarity quickly passed as Riley remembered where she was and how she’d gotten here …
No, I didn’t have another miscarriage.
This bed was in the medical clinic of the J. Edgar Hoover Building. She’d been brought here after her desperate struggle against a psychotic killer dressed up as a clown.
She’d survived all that—and she was going to be just fine.
For the moment, though, it felt good to be lying down and not exerting herself. And she smiled as she remembered Agent Crivaro’s crazed efficiency when he’d gone int
o action after McCune had shot the killer.
Crivaro had quickly gotten Riley loose from her restraints. After making sure she wasn’t drugged, he’d called an FBI emergency line to get people going on a lot of other problems. He ordered an ambulance to pick up the woman who’d been caged, and he demanded an investigative team to hurry over and examine the site.
Soon the labyrinthine ruins had been swarming with people following Crivaro’s orders. Then Crivaro had put McCune in charge of the chaos and taken Riley to his FBI vehicle. He’d rushed here with the siren screaming, phoning ahead to make sure a medic would be ready to meet them in the garage with a wheelchair.
Riley’s smile widened as she remembered how Crivaro had almost driven the clinic staff crazy with his frantic demands that Riley be well tended to.
“Check every inch of this girl. She’s not been drugged, but she got hit bad on the back of the head and was maybe unconscious for a little while. Make damn sure there’s nothing seriously wrong with her, especially not a concussion. And get that awful goo off her face. I’ll be back soon.”
An anxious nurse had done just that. She’d checked Riley out thoroughly and determined that she wasn’t suffering from concussion. She took care of the bump on the back of Riley’s head, cleaned and freshly bandaged the older cut on her shoulder, and tended to a few other minor scrapes and bruises. Riley was especially relieved to have the clown makeup washed off her face.
Finally, the nurse had given Riley a sedative and told her to sleep.
And now here she was, awake and feeling remarkably refreshed.
Soon Crivaro came into the room and sat down beside her bed, anxiously asking her how she was doing.
“I’m fine,” she said. “Don’t worry.”
Crivaro growled and said, “Who said I was worried?”
Riley managed not to laugh.
Then she asked, “What about the woman in the cage? Is she going to be all right?”
“Yeah,” Crivaro said. “He hadn’t drugged her yet, but of course she was traumatized. We sent her to the ER and got in touch with her family. Social services will be working with them. She didn’t know exactly how long she’d been locked up there, but it seems to have been a long time, maybe two or three days. She’d barely had anything to eat or drink during that whole time, and she sure as hell didn’t get much sleep.”
Crivaro paused and squinted.
“It’s odd—how the killer kept her alive like that, going against his own MO. He acted so fast with the other two women—abducted them, took them to his lair, drugged them to death, and disposed of their bodies. I wonder why he treated this one differently. I wonder why he took his time.”
Crivaro scratched his chin and added, “Anyway, you probably saved her life—first by figuring out where the killer was, then by rushing in there like some damn fool idiot.”
Riley knew Crivaro was right—she had saved the woman’s life.
But Crivaro didn’t know exactly how true that was, or why.
Riley remembered something Joey had said when he had her bound and helpless …
“I kept the other girl alive in hopes you’d come.”
He’d been fascinated by Riley—the way she’d cracked his riddle and answered with a riddle of her own, the way she’d escaped his clutches at the marina, and finally the way she’d found her way into his labyrinth.
Riley shuddered a little at the thought …
His obsession with me saved the other woman’s life.
Riley figured she should tell Crivaro about all that …
Some other time. Not now.
Crivaro looked at her in silence for a moment, as if trying to evaluate just how well she was really doing.
Then he said, “We’ve been getting more information about the killer. You deserve to be brought up to speed about it. Do you feel like joining us for a conference?”
Riley was taken a bit aback.
Us? she wondered.
Who is us?
But she sensed that this was something she’d better not miss. She nodded to Crivaro. He waited in the hall outside while she got out of bed and back into her clothes. Then she followed Crivaro to a conference room on another floor of the building.
When they walked into the room, Riley saw three men sitting at the conference table. Crivaro’s old partner Elliot Flack was here, and so was Riley’s intern training supervisor Hoke Gilmer. And of course, Agent McCune was also present.
She was startled that they all stood when she came in, almost as if she were an important person. She was even more startled that they took turns shaking hands with her, congratulating her on solving the case.
She was flattered, of course. At the same time she couldn’t help thinking …
The FBI really could use more women.
When they all got seated, McCune began the briefing, directing his remarks to Riley.
“Of course, the process of our investigation is just getting underway, but we’re putting together some preliminary information about the killer, Gordon Shearer—AKA ‘Joey.’ I personally talked to the woman you met at the museum, Anita Lockwood. She was able to shed some light on things.”
McCune glanced over his notes for a moment, then continued.
“According to Ms. Lockwood, Gordon spent most of his life under the radar. Apparently his parents worked at Whopping Escapades for a brief time. They were carney types who never stayed in any one place very long. When they left Whopping Escapades, they abandoned their five-year-old son—just took off and left him there. Nobody ever saw the couple again. Our people are trying to track them down, but so far we’ve turned up no trace of them. We possibly never will.”
McCune drummed his pencil eraser on his notepad and continued.
“Ms. Lockwood gave us the names of some other people to talk to—people who’d worked at Whopping Escapades when it was open. Over the years, a lot of employees seem to have taken turns raising him. For a while, a group of clowns were responsible for him. Something bad seemed to have happened during that time. He became terrified of the clowns, wouldn’t go near them anymore. So other staffers took him over.”
Riley gasped a little and said …
“So at least one of the clowns must have abused him.”
McCune nodded and said, “That’s what it sounds like. Maybe even sexually. So it’s not surprising that he developed some sort of sick fixation about clowns. But from what people have told us, he was a rather disturbed kid to begin with, even when his parents were still around. His oddness may have had something to do with their abandoning him.”
“What kind of oddness?” Riley asked.
“Wild swings in mood and behavior,” McCune explained. “Sweet, affectionate, and polite one minute, hostile, angry, and even vicious the next. As he grew up he was in and out of school, and in and out of trouble. Folks breathed easier when he seemed to settle down and work at various jobs at the park. But eventually the park closed down—and apparently nobody realized he had slipped back in there and stayed.”
That word ran through Riley’s mind again …
Abandoned.
It was the story of the miserable boy’s life.
McCune continued, “After the park closed, nobody from his old life had been in contact with him except Anita Lockwood.”
Riley added, “And even she didn’t know about his real living circumstances.”
“That’s right,” McCune said, looking again at his notes. “That pretty well covers what we’ve been able to learn so far. Do you have any questions, Sweeney?”
Riley thought for a moment, then said …
“Maybe not so much a question, but I got the distinct feeling that he was very intelligent.”
McCune nodded, looking impressed by this insight.
“He was indeed,” he said. “We found a hoard of books stashed away in his lair—most of them stolen from public libraries. He seemed to have read incessantly, especially about the history of clowns dating all the way back to
the sixteenth century.”
Crivaro shook his head. “Smart, twisted, and isolated from the world—a deadly combination. It’s small wonder he eventually became a killer.”
“A real ticking bomb,” Elliot Flack added.
There was a murmur of agreement, and the meeting came to an end.
When they went out into the hallway, Crivaro touched Riley on the shoulder.
“I know I’ve been pretty hard on you,” he said.
“It’s OK,” Riley said. “I deserved it.”
Crivaro chuckled and said, “You sure as hell did.”
Then he paused and added, “But I didn’t misjudge you when I pushed you into the program. You’ve got instincts like I’ve never seen. And … I hope you don’t give up.”
Crivaro walked away, and Riley found herself standing alone in the hallway, realizing that she had a decision to make. But at the moment, she had no idea what to decide.
“What next?” she murmured aloud.
As if on cue, her phone rang. Her heart leapt when she saw that the call was from Ryan. When she answered, he sounded nearly hysterical.
“Riley! Are you OK? What the hell’s going on? I heard on the news that the Clown Killer’s dead—and your name is mixed up in it somehow. Talk to me. Are you safe? Are you hurt?”
Riley said, “I’m fine, Ryan. Don’t worry.”
“I want to see you. Where are you? Where can we meet?”
Riley was startled by how different he sounded from when he’d stormed out of their apartment just last night.
She said, “I’m at the J. Edgar Hoover Building.”
“How soon can you get to the National Mall?”
“I can walk over there right now.”
“Great. Let’s meet in front of the Lincoln Memorial.”
*
As Riley approached the Lincoln Memorial, she saw Ryan sitting on its majestic stairway. She called out to him, and he ran to her and took her into his arms. He seemed to be frantic with relief.
As they sat together on the steps looking out over the vast Reflecting Pool, Riley thought …
No more evasions.
She wasted no time telling Ryan everything that had happened since he’d left, sparing no ugly details. She even told him how the killer had been only seconds away from injecting her with a fatal dose of amphetamines before Crivaro and McCune rushed in to her rescue.