“So, you’ve talked to Katie?”
“Yes, about an hour ago. She called from home, just before she and Cathleen headed out. She said she left a message on your phone.”
“I’m not allowed to have my cell phone inside the prison.”
“Rainey, is everything all right?”
“Everything is fine, Melanie. I just need to talk to Katie. Have her call me back at—hang on.” She looked at the CO behind the desk. “Does this direct line show up on caller I.D.?” The CO nodded. “Melanie, tell her to call the number on the caller I.D. They will know how to find me.”
“I’ll tell her.”
Rainey hesitated before she said, “Keep the kids close today, okay?”
“I will.” Melanie’s apprehensive sigh reminded Rainey that Katie’s mother had also lived through the threats to their lives. She must have realized her uneasiness had been audible and quickly added, “Stay safe.”
“Always.”
Rainey handed the phone receiver to the CO at the desk, before turning to Danny. “Weather has Katie’s phone again. Would you try reaching Cathleen?”
“I did. It went straight to voice mail. Her phone must still be in the bag of rice. I took a shot anyway. You have OnStar. Did you try calling the van?”
“I’d have to go get my phone out of the car. I have the number stored in it.” Rainey turned toward the first exit door she saw. “Come on, we have to go.”
Danny grabbed her arm. “Rainey, stop. Our only hope of finding out who Chance is working with is to stay here and question him.”
“So you think he’s playing puppet master,” Rainey replied.
“Yes. Somebody on the outside has to be helping him.”
“But Katie doesn’t know she could be in trouble or the kids. She doesn’t know—”
“Katie knows, Rainey. She knows she’s always in trouble. You have taught her well. She isn’t alone. It is Cathleen’s nature to be observant and cautious. She’s smart and not without skills. She’s a trained soldier, a former Captain in the Army. Those two can handle themselves for a few hours, while we get to the bottom of this, and he can’t contact anyone if we don’t leave him alone.” He paused to make Rainey give him eye contact, before concluding with, “Put your fear aside for the moment. Don’t let him see your weakness.”
Rainey asked, “And what is my weakness, SSA McNally?”
“You love your family.”
“Don’t you think he might want me here to leave my family vulnerable?”
Danny seemed to think it through. His eyes never leaving Rainey’s, she watched him assess the situation. They were a good team. Their differing approaches and dispositions meant they covered more ground. She let him pause without disturbing his process.
When he finally spoke, his words were calm and measured. “You know this case. You know this man. Is he a serial murderer? I’ve read your notes. You always added the caveat, ‘or he knows something.’ You have suspected other family, or Hale Trucking employees were involved in these cases. If that’s true, which is more productive; questioning a known participant as opposed to hunting an unknown subject?”
Rainey looked out the window at the end of the hallway. Thunder rumbled as the predicted storm rolled in. Raindrops spotted the panes of glass. Cement mullions served as barriers to escape. Trapped, that about summed up Rainey’s situation. Stay inside with Chance Hale or go running around looking for a threat without a clue where it could come from—those were her options.
The gentle rain became a loud roaring squall, as the clouds opened up outside. The clap of thunder and flash of quickening lightning in the raging spring storm joined the beeps and blips of hospital noises. The lights flickered, sending staff scrambling to silence startled alarms. Another roll of thunder shook the building.
Rainey began walking back to the room where they left Chance Hale in shackles. “Come on, Danny. Mother Nature is playing my dramatic entrance music.”
As he hurried to land in step with her, Rainey couldn’t help the smile when she heard him say, “Cloud up and rain on his ass, Rainey Bell.” He chuckled. “I forgot how much I missed saying that.”
14
A few minutes later…
Butner Federal Correctional Complex
Butner, NC
“Why would you involve me in your life again, Chance?” Rainey asked. “You have been off my radar for years.”
“You really don’t know, do you?”
“Enlighten me,” Rainey challenged.
She had started her question before her hand left the door handle. She went about moving the furniture as Chance answered. Danny didn’t need instruction. He saw immediately what she was doing and joined in. Chance, now in ankle and waist chains, looked on curiously.
He answered Rainey’s question, “There is a new prosecutor in Florida. He came to see me. Said he was considering charging me with murdering Cindy Joan Amen. He based his theory on the evidence located in my truck in 2009 and assumptions found in written notes you left with the detective on the case. I’ve read them. You jumped to a lot of conclusions.”
“Those notes associated you with at least eleven bodies, Chance.”
“The prospects of my defense accusing you of planting all that evidence swayed the D.A. not to charge me back them.” Chance could not hide his smile, though he covered it with a compliment. “You did a fine linkage-investigation of a killer, former Agent Bell, but it wasn’t me. I’m hoping you can help me figure out who it is.”
At this point, Danny and Rainey had moved the desk out of the way and pulled the three chairs close together. “Breath stealing distance,” her dad would have called it. Rainey called it removing barriers to complete control of her suspect. The only way to make a man who is used to confinement feel more uncomfortable is to make his space even smaller. When she and Danny sat down, they were nearly touching Chance’s knees with their own.
“Well, then. We can help each other,” Rainey said. “You’re going to help me find out who took that picture and emailed it to you.”
“It’s the same person that murdered all those girls,” Chance reiterated.
“Good, then we have a common cause. You apparently have been thinking about this for years. Who do you believe it is?”
Chance broke into a broad smile. “So, you’re going to help me?”
Rainey noted that this was not duping delight. It was a genuine display of glee at the prospects of her re-involvement in his case. Either Chance’s plan was to get close to her for whatever reason, or he was innocent and believed she could help. A psychopath could mimic an honest man when cornered, Rainey reminded herself.
“I’ll ask again. What’s your theory?”
Chance scooted to the edge of his seat, bumping knees with Rainey in the process. His cuffed wrists attached to a ring on a belt-chain around his waist limited his movement. He pointed toward the boxes in the corner.
“Blackman sent this stuff over when he stopped being my lawyer. You’re going to need the information in the white box on top. The bottom box is my vehicular manslaughter case, which won’t interest you.”
“Blackman stopped cleaning up your messes. Why is that?” Rainey asked.
“I used up my shares of Hale Trucking, borrowing money against it. Blackman was retired. He had already worked a deal for me to be out in eight to ten on a fifteen-year sentence. I waved appeals to get that chunk lopped off. I didn’t need a lawyer until now. Know any good ones?”
Chance chuckled. Rainey and Danny did not.
Chance continued, “Blackman sent all my files to the trucking office. After I had sobered up in prison, I asked to have them brought here so I could study them.”
“What’s in the files?” Rainey asked while Danny moved the top box to the desk they had pushed up against the wall.
Rainey followed Danny and helped unpack obsessively neat, clearly labeled file folders from one of the boxes, as Chance answered her question.
“Wit
h what Blackman sent and what is available as public record, I compiled these files on the murders you connected with me.”
Rainey corrected him. “You connected yourself. All I had to do was follow your trail.”
Chance ignored her comment. “There were a few surprises in your report.”
“Like what?”
“You were looking at me for those early murders, the ones that happened before I met you.” Chance paused, for his smile to be seen, before saying, “And the fact that you stalked me up and down the east coast. I was on your mind a lot for many years. That’s an odd thing to know about a person—that they’ve been thinking of you.”
Danny interrupted Chance’s rumination. “You have copies of actual evidence in here. How did you come to possess this material?”
The question shifted Chance’s focus from Rainey.
“Blackman asked his D.A. friend for a copy of all the evidence found in my toolbox. He said he wanted to prepare for the inevitable charges the feds were determined to have filed against me.” He pointed at Rainey. “I think he meant her.”
Rainey ignored the jab and instead noted for Danny, “There is a folder for each I-95 corridor victim, the ones that showed up at Quantico addressed to me.”
“That’s a real conundrum, isn’t it? If I were the killer, why would I deliver to the police and eventually the FBI the bones of women who trace back to me? Yet, if I’m the guy you think I am, I would definitely taunt you with my ability to hide in plain sight.”
Rainey quipped, “Or you’re just a psychopath who felt ignored.” She grabbed a handful of files. “Are these files color-coded?”
Chance attempted to stand and then thought better of it when his movement drew Danny’s attention.
He asked politely, “May I step over to the desk?”
Danny helped Chance stand and stayed close to him as he shuffled up next to Rainey.
“There are thirteen folders, one for each murder or assault victim law enforcement tried to tie to me,” Chance explained. “The blue folders are I-95 corridor victims. The plain manila folders are for victims along the route traveled by Hale Trucking vehicles from Hillsborough, North Carolina to Pembina, North Dakota.”
Danny held up two red folders. “What about these?”
“That’s Gaskill and Travis, two sexual assaults I was questioned about.”
Rainey picked up the lone green folder. She opened it to see articles about Alyson Grayson. Chance had kept a close eye on the case. The file contained articles written on the five, ten, and fifteen-year anniversaries of her disappearance.
Chance looked over Rainey’s shoulder and commented, “She was a really nice person. I liked her, but I was awkward and drunk or high most of the time.”
“She should have gone home that night and left your ass to freeze,” Rainey said while staring at a picture of Alyson from a Pembina Weekly News article.
“But then you and I may have never met,” Chance said.
Rainey wanted to react with the anger she felt at his cavalier attitude toward Alyson. Instead, she closed the folder without comment. She needed Chance to be cooperative. He needed to make a mistake. He had eight years to strategize for this moment. Rainey had to let him run his script until the opportunity arose to disrupt his plan.
“You share your father’s penchant for organized documentation,” Danny said.
“You do know Joshua Hale isn’t my father. He is actually a half-brother. OB, my grandfather-slash-biological father, was a warped old man surrounded by even more disturbed women, made so by his tyrannical abuse.”
Rainey noted, “I understand most people who knew him thought OB stood for Old Bastard.”
“That’s what he was,” Chance said. “He was mean as that lion he kept. Her name was Geordie. She hated everybody but ol’ Obadiah. It wasn’t affection that tamed her toward him, though. She was scared of him, just like the rest of us. OB had her pelt on his bedroom floor and her lower jaw on the mantel. That was OB reminding us that he was in control of how things lived and died.”
Danny was incredulous. “He kept a lion?”
“Yes, in the grotto at the back of the property. OB built her enclosure like the one at the zoo he helped build in Oklahoma City during the depression. He ran away from home, ended up on an orphan train, ran away again, then lied about his age to work with the CCC. OB never lived a normal life, not even as a kid.
“Did you know OB worked the circus too, when he was young and after the war? He liked to tell how he bought his first truck with money he made before he was twelve. More than likely he stole the truck just like that bullhook he always carried. OB told people he took it off the man that tried to beat him with it when he was fourteen-years-old, an old bull man he said. That’s the guy that works the elephants in the circus.”
Danny chuckled and said, “This shit keeps getting weirder and weirder. What happened to the lion?”
Chance let out a short but deliberate sigh, before his tale began.
“One of the few memories I have of my mother involves that lion. She tried to befriend Geordie. She would haul me out to the grotto after supper when I was just a toddler. We would give Geordie scraps saved from clearing the dishes. I was four years old when OB cornered her on the cage side of the grotto. She pushed him away. He backhanded her so hard that I clearly remember the blood trickling from her nose onto the shoulder of my white tee shirt.”
Rainey commented, “That’s a lot of violence to witness as a child.”
“That’s not the worst of it. The old man slipped on the wet concrete and fell against the cage bars. Geordie saw her chance for revenge. She charged and took a swipe at OB, ripped through his shirt, and raked his back with her claws before he could roll away from her. He stood up, nailed Geordie right between the eyes with that bullhook, and then beat her to death in front of us. The message was clear for me fairly early. If you crossed OB, he would kill you.”
“Wow, what a fucked up place to grow up,” Rainey remarked.
Chance pointed the thumbs of his handcuffed hands at his chest. “And that makes me a perfect candidate for serial murderer. I wet the bed until I was six too. I set fires. I liked to blow things up. I wasn’t into torturing animals, but you can pretty much tick off the rest of the boxes you behavioral analysts look for—physical abuse, psychological abuse, a family history of sexual problems and psychiatric issues. I’ve read the books too.”
While he spoke, Chance surveyed the folders on the desk. Rainey had organized them in chronological order, making two purposeful errors in the process. She watched him see the mistakes immediately.
“You’ve placed Tammy Lynn Gaskill in the wrong place. That happened about a month before the main house blew up in October of 98.”
Rainey noted Chance expressed neither penitence nor bereavement when discussing the explosion that killed OB Hale, his wife, Letha, his daughter, Sarah, and his son-in-law, Roger Hughes. Chance should have been in the house. The fact that he was elsewhere on the property was suspicious. Having a police officer show up to his exact location and then swear Chance was passed-out drunk when the house exploded was almost too convenient.
Instead of showing concern for dead family members, he pointed to a manila folder, reaching out as far as his waist chains would let him, but not far enough. “Sharon Long should come after the Abrahamsen file.”
Rainey disregarded his need for her to correctly display the files. His OCD necessity for order left him vulnerable.
She feigned a lack of knowledge. “What happened with that explosion? Killed a bunch of family members, didn’t it?”
“Gee said—”
“Wait, are you talking about Jean Berry?” Rainey asked, remembering the redhead she met in Pembina.
“No, she’s Jean. Eugene is her son. We just called him Gee.”
Rainey asked, “Does Jean Berry come visit you?”
“Yes, she writes to me sometimes, or she used to. But she never comes to the prison.
Gee came a couple of times.”
Danny redirected the conversation. “What did Gee say happened the night the house exploded?”
“He said OB got mad about something and drove off in a huff earlier in the day, but not before he backed the pickup into the propane tank behind the house. Gee and Roger looked at the damage but didn’t see the pipefitting knocked loose in the basement. It leaked gas for hours. It was a cold night. The heater kicked on, and that was all she wrote. I am lucky I wasn’t blamed for that too.”
“You are luckier that you weren’t home in bed like the others, wouldn’t you say?”
Rainey asked the question while placing the Sharon Long folder in the correct spot in the order. Chance showed some relief, but he could not let go of the Gaskill file’s improper placement. He stared at the folder, not acknowledging the question. Rainey placed her fingertip on the folder and appeared prepared to move it, but stopped to ask Danny a question.
“SSA McNally, do you think we could get a copy of the report on that explosion? I’d like to see the investigators’ findings.”
Danny knew what she was doing. If he didn’t, one look at Chance would have given it away. He was breaking a sweat. His breathing became shallower. He was stressing out over one folder out of place.
Danny extended the torture. “Lieutenant Holmes said he’d bring a phone in here so I can hook up with Quantico. Brooks can find anything we don’t have here.”
Chance still stared at the Gaskill folder. He was almost there. Rainey tried to push him over the edge. Her finger played with the folder, moving it only slightly.
She dragged out the pain for Chance, telling Danny, “Hey, see if we can get some water. Coffee might be pushing it, but if they offer, I’ll take mine black.”
Danny asked, “When did you stop using cream and sugar? It was always two and two for you.”
“How sweet that you remember how I liked my coffee, but Katie made me drop sugar and dairy.”
“But you just ate a cheeseburger on the way up here.”
Rainey with a Chance of Hale (A Rainey Bell Thriller Book 6) Page 12