by S. T. Abby
We’ll figure him out, and we’ll stop him. It’s what we do.
Eventually, good conquers evil, because evil works alone.
Chapter 7
The devil can cite Scripture for his own purpose.
—William Shakespeare
LANA
In one week, I’ve marked off two names from my list. We’re getting closer. Jake is sweating bullets.
I’ve sped up the timeline and started hiding the bodies. I’ve changed my MO. I’ve also started adding the nails, something I hadn’t planned to do until later in the game.
My wax apple also has a lot more nails to mark the new debts I’ve collected, but we’ve moved my murder room to Jake’s house.
The media are no longer interested in me since Craig delivered the profile of the Scarlet Slayer. Yes, the media named me. Somehow, Jake got me the name he wanted.
It’s ironic the media lost interest in the hero side of me in favor of the dark side of me. Just goes to show how twisted and ugly this world can be.
“I hate how fast you’re cruising through the names,” Jake grumbles as I mark off the latest victim’s name.
“Two in a week isn’t too fast. I wanted to drag it out, but I’m sick of this. I’m ready for it to be over.”
“Because of Logan?” he asks, studying me from his seat.
“Yes and no. I’m tired of being tied to the past and unable to let it go. Aren’t you?”
He leans up, perching his elbows on the rails of the chair. “Tell me something, Lana, what do you think happens when this is all over—if we even survive it. Do you think he doesn’t find out? Do you ride off into the sunset—the agent and the killer? I want to know what you think for real. I’m good with ending this where we are, and moving on the best we can. I think that’s the only way you’re going to be able to keep him, if that’s your true endgame.”
My lip trembles, and I clear my throat. “Stopping now would be wrong. Marcus and Dad…they’re still dead and haunted by the way they died.”
He leans back, his eyes on me. “Sometimes I think I feel Marcus. I think he’s right here beside us, keeping us from being discovered. Other times I realize it’s ridiculous, and that our luck will eventually run out.”
“Do you want to stop?” I ask quietly, sitting down on the edge of his desk.
“Honestly? No. I want to kill them all for what they did. I want them to suffer. But it’s not fair for me to expect that from you when you seem to finally be healing. And it’s because of Logan you’re healing. He gave you back something you lost.”
“What?” I ask as he moves to the other side of the room, grabbing a drink from the mini-fridge.
“Your heart,” he tells me, looking at me with sadness in his eyes.
“You could move on,” I tell him, shrugging. “Marcus would want that.”
“I’ll stick to my torrid affairs with no emotional connection for now,” he answers with a brittle grin.
“Every time I think I can walk away…that’s the only time I close my eyes and see it happening all over again,” I say to him, sighing long and hard. “Sometimes I think I really did die, and that I’m truly the avenging angel my brother said we’d be together.”
I feel as though I only have one purpose in life.
“Maybe you are,” he agrees. “But maybe you’re allowed to give up vengeance for hope.”
“Then why do I see the nightmares when I consider stopping?”
His lips tense.
“Exactly,” I tell him, motioning around the room. “If my life was spared to right the wrongs of that time, then I won’t be at peace until they’re all dead. Others in that town are suffering. You know it. People just like Lindy who speak out against the ‘justice’ they dole. Women like Diana who has spent the last ten years worried one day her son would turn up dead or missing. People like my father who was killed for crimes he didn’t commit.”
He nods dully, knowing I’m right.
“It’s your choice, Lana. I’m just saying I’m with you regardless of what you choose.”
Tears. I hate tears. But they keep reappearing in my eyes at random.
I go to plop down in his lap, and he wraps his arms around me, pulling to me to him as I hug him. “You know you’re my second favorite brother, right?” I ask him, a joke I’ve said since we were kids.
He laughs against the side of my face. “Yeah. I know. Just like you’re my favorite sister, but only because you’re the only one I have.”
As we both laugh at the small bit of the past we’ve held onto, my mind turns over the past events of the last few days. The newest additions to my string of kills.
“Scream for me,” I tell Anthony, smiling while he bleeds, his cries of agony like sweet music to my ears. But the melody is off key, not hitting the same notes as it usually does.
This normally feels so much better.
“You fucking cunt! I knew you were evil. Just like your father.”
“No. I was sweet,” I tell him, meaning it, as I slowly slide the blade across his chest, leaving a shallow cut there. He gives me nothing more than a wince. “I was naïve. I wasn’t a virgin, but I wasn’t the whore you labeled me. My body was my temple and all that, until you all held me down, took your turns, and left me for dead. You killed Marcus. And he gave his life so that I could come back and pick you off one at a time.”
He screams when the knife slides down, and I taunt him again with the words he once used against me.
“Scream for me, Anthony. Scream loud. No one can hear you. No one cares.”
He does scream. He screams into the vast nothingness of the basement that is completely underground. Really, they make it too easy sometimes.
But I won’t leave him here. No one will ever know I was here at all.
“You’ll burn in hell. What we did was try to destroy the evil in the world. Evil is hard to kill,” he spits out.
“You seriously want to justify what you did as an act of justice? You claim righteousness even after your acts of violence and sin?”
He grins, his mouth a bloody mess. “You can’t sin against the devil. You’re straight from his loins, just like your father. They’ll stop you. Good always triumphs over evil. I’ll be avenged.”
My lips twitch, amused at how delusional he truly is. “This is good triumphing over evil,” I say quietly, watching as his eyes narrow to slits. He hates me considering myself the avenging angel, and I use it to my advantage. “This is your punishment. The act of good prevailing.”
“You and your faggot brother were already going to hell. We just sped things along.”
“If you’re the one in the right, why isn’t there some divine intervention saving you?” I ask him, standing slowly. “I was resurrected from the ashes, surviving against all odds. Yet you’re down here, suffering for the crimes of your past. Not me.”
He opens his mouth, but closes it. “See?” I muse, smirking. “Even the devil can quote Scripture for his own purpose. William Shakespeare, in case you’re wondering. But I’m not the devil, Anthony. I’m the angel who has come to take you all to hell.”
He finally screams louder than he has before when I take away that last bit of power he had, slicing it off at the base, kicking it away like the trash it is.
“You’ll never hurt anyone else,” I whisper darkly, drinking in the sounds of his pain, and ignoring the hollowness I feel for the first time ever.
I won’t stop.
I can’t.
Now to go back to Kentucky.
“I’ll tell the next one you said hello,” I go on, talking over the sounds of his sobs. “Your bestie is next.”
I’m jarred out of the memory by the sound of someone pounding on Jake’s door.
“Shit,” he hisses, glancing at the monitor beside us.
I scramble off his lap, my heart thumping painfully in my chest as I see Logan knock on the door again. This cannot be happening.
“Mr. Denver,” Logan says, looking up
at the camera Jake never bothered to hide on his front porch. “If you’re in there, we’d like to speak to you.”
Donny is beside him, looking all MIB with his glasses on. Logan opens his thingy and flashes his credentials to the camera.
“We knew this would happen,” Jake says as I shake with panic.
One man has the power to undo me, and he’s about to link me to everything if he finds me here.
“I’m SSA Logan Bennett,” Logan goes on, his voice for once not having a calming effect on me. Not even a little bit. I’m full blown crazy panicking now.
“Calm down,” Jake says, amused. Freaking amused. This is not amusing at all. “Just stay in here and lock the door. They won’t have a warrant. And it’s all about to be pointless to question me. We’re prepared for this. Remember that.”
I nod, then swallow hard, trying to lasso my logic back to me and swallow a massive chill pill. We’re always careful for me not to be seen when I come over. I park in town, using a rental car, and he picks me up somewhere with no cameras. I ride back in his van—that I call a kidnapper’s van—and he parks inside his garage. No one ever sees me.
They won’t know I’m here.
So why am I panicking?
Calm and collected, Jake puts several of the kill-list things under the false panel of the floor, then moves the lamp back over it, hiding it from sight. He flips a button, and five of the monitors on the walls sink into the walls as the false panel comes down, concealing them from sight as well.
“Stay here,” he repeats, moving out of the room quickly.
Immediately I go and lock the door, and then I listen through the walls like a total creeper. All I need is a glass stuck to my ear.
Nope. I don’t look guilty at all.
Chapter 8
The attempt and not the deed confounds us.
—William Shakespeare
LOGAN
“Think he’s just not home?” Donny asks as I pound on the door again.
My eyes rake over the empty driveway, but there’s a sealed garage. His vehicle could be in there.
“The neighbor said he rarely goes anywhere and never has visitors. She said he left this morning, but came back and has been inside ever since.”
Before I can knock again, the door swings open, and I look down, seeing something I really wasn’t expecting.
Jacob Denver is in a wheelchair.
“Sorry,” he tells us, looking at us with confused eyes. “It sometimes takes me a minute to transfer to my chair. How can I help you guys?”
The blinds are all drawn, but surely someone should have mentioned him in a wheelchair. I hate surprises, and I rarely have to deal with them.
Donny’s eyebrows are at his hairline, just as surprised by this turn of events as I am.
“Um…care if we ask you some questions?” I finally manage to get out.
It’s a whole new line of questioning now.
“Sure. Want to come in? The place is a mess, but it’s not as easy to clean as it used to be.”
Shit.
Shit.
Shit.
“Thanks,” I say, moving by him as he backs his chair out of the way.
My profiling mind gets to work as Donny types something into his phone. I glance toward the kitchen that is off to the right. All the countertops are lower than standard, making it more handicap accessible. I didn’t notice the ramp by the porch as suspicious, but now I realize I should have. His floors are all level and seamless, not even threshold plates over the connections to rooms.
The cabinets on top in the kitchen have no doors, but all that’s there are decorative things. Nothing someone would need to work in a kitchen.
My eyes scan the living room, finding the chair off the side that is at an angle, a remote dangling, as though he had to get help lifting out of it to slide into his wheelchair.
“It’s cheating,” he says, drawing my attention to him as he gestures to the recliner I was just eyeing. “But it makes life easier.”
He’s tone and somewhat fit, but I can’t see his legs too well in the sweatpants. Hate it is as I do, I discreetly kneel, pretending to adjust my shoe, and my eyes scan the bottoms of his shoes to see perfectly clean soles. They never touch the ground.
Well, fuck. He’s really handicapped.
I rise up, and he wheels into the living room.
“What the fuck?” I hiss to Donny.
“Hell if I know. I just texted Alan to find out.”
We break apart when Jake turns to look at us, eyeing us like we’re idiots. We are idiots, apparently. Someone better tell me why we didn’t know this before coming.
“Mind if I asked what happened?” I ask, wondering if this is in any way related to the mystery that is Delaney Grove.
He shrugs. “Motorcycle accident a few years ago. Paralyzed me from the waist down. It’s taken some adjusting, but I’ve managed to move on with my life.”
Definitely not our unsub. And his father has had court cases going on during several of the kill times, alibiing out that way. They were our only hopes, and it seemed so easy. Apparently too easy.
There’s no way a man in a wheelchair managed to overpower these guys, and do all the things that have been done.
“So why is the FBI knocking on my door and asking questions about my old wreck?” he asks, seeming genuinely confused.
“Any chance you watch the news?” Donny asks him, pocketing his phone.
“Not really,” Jacob tells us, shrugging. “It’s pretty fucking depressing, and I’ve had more of that than I care to reflect on.”
He crosses his hands in his lap. Not once has either of his legs twitched.
It’s a habit, when one is faking something like paralysis, to get twitchy, giving one’s self away. He hasn’t scratched his legs or anything.
I know Donny is watching for the same signs I am.
He’s too calm, too disinterested in us.
“So, you came by to ask me if I watch the news?” Jacob asks, looking between us.
He seems to enjoy the off-balance stance we have.
“No,” Donny mumbles.
“Actually, I was wondering if you could shed some light on the Evans family.”
A coldness crosses his gaze, and he looks away.
“You’re welcome to leave at any time.”
I look at Donny, and he looks at me. We stare, both of us confused.
“Mr. Denver, you were friends with them, and we think a serial killer is out trying to avenge their deaths. Even though the reports indicate they died because of a car accident.”
He looks back at us. “Does a car accident usually castrate a man?” he asks incredulously. “Does it leave a girl and boy so broken they drive for towns and towns to seek medical attention?”
“So you do know something?” I ask, leaning closer.
“I know that if someone is out avenging their deaths, I’d like to shake their hand. Marcus was my boyfriend, though I never had the balls to admit it back then. And Victoria was like my little sister. I was seventeen, like Marcus, when they died.”
My lips tense. He’s holding something back.
“Can you give us anything to help us follow up on how they were really killed?” Donny asks.
“Now you want to know? Because back then, when I went to the FBI dude who had wrongly profiled Robert Evans as a serial killer and told him my friends—the two sweetest fucking humans ever—had been killed by the town, he told me it wasn’t his case. To let the cops do their jobs, and if it was more than a car accident, they’d handle it.”
The bitterness in his tone is real, and he definitely doesn’t seem to be hiding his anger over it. Which makes him less suspect. Still…my gut is telling me he’s somehow involved.
“Who was that?” Donny asks.
“His last name was Bag, and his first name was Douche. Sometimes he went by SSA Johnson.”
Donny chokes back a laugh, but I’m not laughing. Johnson was a terrible profiler,
tarnished the reputation of the unit so badly that he was promoted. Gotta love fucking politics. As shitty as he was, he was invaluable because of the knowledge he had, so they “promoted” him to a bullshit position and gave him bullshit tasks to keep him under their thumbs.
He’s also the Godfather of the department, because he pretty much took profiling in the direction it has grown to be today, made it an actual thing with actual results, no matter how flawed those preliminary results turned out to be.
“You’re saying he ignored two dead kids?” Donny asks, no longer laughing as the words catch up to him.
“I’m saying he didn’t give a shit. And now I’m putting one foot in front of the other—metaphorically speaking, obviously—to stay out of the past. Now, unless you have something pressing to speak to me about, please leave. I have things to do.”
My phone rings as Donny tries to pry more out of him, just something to figure out what really happened.
I see it’s Alan calling, and I stand up, walking down the hall a little to answer.
“What the hell?” I hiss.
“Sorry. Sorry. Sooooo sorry. I don’t know how I missed it, but I got Donny’s text, and yes, Jacob Denver is definitely paralyzed from the waist down. Happened four years ago, to be exact. A drunk driver side-swiped him—hit and run. He was on a motorcycle. He’s been in a wheelchair ever since.”
Why does this still feel off?
“Thanks. Don’t miss anything this big again. We thought we had our unsub.”
“I know. I’m sorry. It’s just a small mention in his records. It’s not like I can open hospital files, and I wouldn’t have seen it at all if I hadn’t been looking for it.”
“Right. Okay. See if you can dig up any other friends from the past he might have shared with the Evans family. Something is definitely off with him. He never asked who was killed.”
Something topples to the ground from the room I’m standing in front of, and I try to open the locked door, curious as to why it’s locked.
“Can I help you?” Jacob asks, wheeling over to where I’m jiggling the doorknob.