“Or he could have killed you all.”
“That would have been better.” Beneath his fingers, her skin grew cold and her pulse faint and rapid. “Kathy handed me her phone and pointed under the bed. She attacked him. He killed her first. He was angry. Because she made him kill her fast.”
“Why didn’t she get under the bed?”
“Dorm beds. Close to the floor. Small space. I fit.” Maddie quit talking.
He recognized the finality.
She did not want to remember. She did not want to talk about this. Yet she was caught in the web of memories. She couldn’t get out. Not without his help. He had to respond. “Got it.”
Not much of a response, but it pushed her to the next memory, the next moment. “I couldn’t … I was on my belly, arms out. Head sideways. I couldn’t see the phone. I had to maneuver. I dialed 911. But he made them be quiet. My friends. He told them to shut up. They were afraid. They did. He didn’t seem to realize … that I was missing. They didn’t … didn’t remind him. He gagged them. I called 911. I did. But I couldn’t … couldn’t talk. Was afraid to talk. Couldn’t tell them what was wrong. Left the line open. They … the police … didn’t realize … sometimes they got prank calls from dorms. You know? Until Georgia started screaming. She got the gag out and screamed and screamed. He said he would open us up a new way so he could get satisfaction while he killed us. And he did. I heard him. He raped my friends … while they were still warm.” Maddie leaped up. She ran for the bathroom.
Jacob heard her retching.
Okay. She had reason to be scared.
She had reason to be nuts, too … although some people would say he was the last person able to intelligently make that decision.
He got one of her kitchen towels, wet it, went in, and laid it across her neck.
“Thank you.” She propped her elbows up on the seat, held her head in her hands. Her complexion was tinted a pale green.
He leaned against the sink. “How old were you?”
“Eighteen.”
Now the inevitable question. “Did he find you?”
“When he was done with the others. He counted bodies. He dragged me out. I saw then that he had grown one of his nails long and filed it to a point. The campus cop started pounding on the door. He—Ragnor—used that nail to slice me from my breastbone to my belly.” Now her voice was steady, matter-of-fact. “Then he tried to stab me in the … in the uterus. I was kicking at him and screaming. The cop got the door open and shot him. His brains blew … they hit the wall. They splattered me. My face. Blood and brains and cruelty I could taste.”
“And rescue,” he reminded her. Then he realized—he sounded like his military trauma-recovery therapist. Like his goddamn stupid asshole of a therapist, saying goddamn stupid-ass shit that was supposed help.
Apparently it did. Or maybe Maddie had fought her way out of the web so many times she knew what to do, because she continued, “The school had to … close the dorm. No one ever stayed in our rooms again. A year later they tore down the building. Because no one would stay there.”
“Makes sense.”
She started to get up off the floor.
He put his hand under her arm to help.
She flinched away.
He could almost hear her inner shriek. Don’t touch me. Don’t touch me. Don’t touch me.
He let her go and walked out to the kitchen. He sat down in the same chair.
She came out, still pale, but steady. She walked over, picked up the scissors, and went to work on his hair again.
So he had the guy with the fingernail. But he wanted to know the whole of the predator who lurked on her drawings and in her subconscious. “Then your fiancé was murdered, too.”
She seemed almost cool about this death. “I saw the killer leave the house. He wore a coat and hat. It was Colorado in the winter, so that wasn’t unusual. But the viciousness of the crime … that was. So the detectives said. That’s why they decided it was me. Because I’d spent time in an asylum, so I must be a vicious murderer.”
Sarcasm. Good. She wasn’t merely a passive victim. “Which killer do you fear?”
“It’s not that easy. The thing that hunts me now is not one or the other. He is both. Or neither. He is evil. He thrives on terror. My terror. I fear he will come for me. I fear he will come for anyone who knows me.” She put down the scissors. “You shouldn’t be here. You should go.”
“I would welcome a monster I could kill.” Jacob put his hand on her hip and pushed her around to face him. “Have you sleepwalked before?”
“Not that I know of.”
“You were headed over the cliff. Are you sure you were asleep? A plunge into that ocean is a pretty solid way to commit suicide.”
“I wasn’t committing suicide! I don’t want to die.” Her voice got softer, almost pleading. “But I don’t want to live like this, either. When I moved here I thought I had left my demons behind. For six months, I thought the worst thing that could happen to me was being scolded by Mrs. Butenschoen for not deadheading my roses properly. Then things started happening. First my furniture moved by itself. I was working hard and I get absentminded, so I didn’t think too much about it. I thought I had done it and forgotten. But then my food disappeared out of the refrigerator. I was still hungry, but I told myself it was more absentmindedness. I lost weight. Then the lights flickered, on and off, on and off, and I knew. I knew someone was after me.”
“Someone? Not your monster?”
“At the time, I suspected that someone in town was playing tricks to make me go away.”
Now that was paranoid. “Why would someone do that?”
She plucked at the neckline of her Rockies sweatshirt. “I couldn’t stay in Colorado. After Easton was killed, I was accused of the crime.”
“I heard.”
“I was acquitted, but no one believed I was innocent. The people in my neighborhood requested that I move. My brother wanted me to get a house close to him. His neighbors petitioned to keep me out.” Tears rose in her eyes. “Like I was a child molester. I saw my best friends murdered. Witnessed it. Then the man I loved had his throat slashed in our home. I was grieving, and all anyone could think was that it was my fault. Somehow, my fault because I’d been in the loony bin. That’s what one of Andrew’s neighbors called it. The ‘loony bin.’” In a fierce voice, she said, “Crazy isn’t a disease. I didn’t catch it from the inmates who lived there because they were schizophrenic or delusional. I was there to recover. And I did!”
He studied her. She made sense. She looked normal. “Then what made you decide it wasn’t someone here trying to get rid of you?”
“I saw him. The man who killed Easton. In my backyard. He was going out the gate to the alley.”
“How did you know it was him?”
“He wore the same hat and coat.”
“Could be anybody.”
“They never found the man who killed my fiancé.”
“So you think the guy who killed your fiancé is after you? Doesn’t make sense. Why doesn’t he just kill you?”
“Because he feeds on terror. Some people do, you know.”
“Yes. I know.” The way he saw it, everything revolved around the fiancé’s murder.
Maybe the cops were right, and she had been so psychologically destroyed by witnessing her friends’ murders that she had killed her fiancé. Maybe her fiancé’s murder had nothing to do with her, but she had gone whacko and imagined someone was stalking her. Maybe someone actually was so obsessed with keeping her isolated from the human race that he—she was convinced it was a he—would kill the man she was going to marry. And chase her across the country to torment her here.
But why? Why would someone be obsessed with keeping her mentally off balance? What could be in it for them?
With a sudden leap of aggression, she leaned into his face and stared into his eyes. “I’m done talking. Now you. You tell me. What happened to you?”
He
picked up his coffee cup. As he’d said, the grounds had settled. But the coffee was cold and thick and black and made him want to gag. He put it down. “I was in the military in high school. ROTC. Went to college on an ROTC scholarship, went professional as soon as I graduated. In all, I’ve dealt with the military for twelve years, and this Korean operation was the dumbest idea the brass ever came up with. That’s saying something.”
She stopped cutting and stepped around to lean against the table and watch him. “What’d they do?”
“The U.S. Army, in its infinite wisdom, decided to place a bunch of their high-IQ recruits in a South Korean research facility with orders to think outside the box. The theory was that if these kids got a look at a place that was officially at peace but where a real shooting war could break out at any minute, they’d come up with clever ideas for weapons or defense that no one else had ever imagined.” In some remote corner of his mind, he noted that she had barely sipped her coffee. She’d made it, but she didn’t like it.
“Why were you there?”
Obviously, it never occurred to her he was a genius, too. And he wasn’t. But—“I’ve got a degree and a respectable IQ, so I was put in charge of them. It was like being a dorm mother with a bunch of brainiac Camp Fire kids. Six boys and two girls, all under the age of twenty-five, and bored out of their skulls.”
“They got in trouble.”
Yeah, Maddie, jump to conclusions. The right conclusions. “They invented and built a prototype of a small hovercraft that…” She was too easy to talk to. Not that he thought she was a North Korean spy. But still. “Theoretically, this hovercraft could fly low, carry soldiers and equipment while eluding the enemy. One night the kids were drinking. Doing shots. One of the girls—Mormon, she didn’t drink—woke me up at zero two hundred. Her intoxicated comrades had decided to see how well their invention worked. They went over the border, into the DMZ. They hadn’t returned. The North Koreans are never amused by anything or anyone attempting to invade their country by any means. So I went over the border looking for my kids. My responsibility plus I had combat experience. I found them. They’d managed to get past the DMZ before they crashed. I didn’t have a chance to get them back across the border before the North Koreans captured us. One of the kids had to spout off about who we were. Then … the enemy took us … they drove us to … this building.” Jacob had been talking like a normal person. But he was running out of steam, running out of words, running into trouble. Because pain was waiting out of sight, over his horizon, to take him and hold him hostage.
Those kids. His bright, careless, innocent, stupid brainiac kids.
“What happened?” Maddie whispered.
“By the time it was over, we knew the dead were the lucky ones.”
“I am so sorry.” She put her hand on his arm.
At her touch, the pain blasted him, blew him to pieces like a detonated grenade.
He flung off her hand, stood up, shouted, “No! No! I don’t care. I don’t want to hear. I don’t want to feel. I don’t want to … see.” He could see. It wasn’t fair. He could see a warm beach where palm trees waved and waves broke over warm sand … He would never forget the sight as long as he lived, and every time it lit up his mind, he wanted to kill someone.
He had killed someone.
But that wasn’t enough.
He needed to kill himself.
He put his hands to his head, to the rough patch of cut hair and the grizzled length of matted hair. “I have to go. I have to…” He looked up at her. “What have you done to me?” Turning, he ran out, stumbling, through her door, down the street, over the barrier. At the edge of the cliff, he stood until dawn lit the sky.
He never noticed the slight, still figure that watched over him until he returned to his house.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
At dawn, Jacob stumbled his way back down the street, shut himself in his room, and blocked the door. He huddled in the corner, eyes wide, staring into darkness, willing back the words he had spoken.
Like all the mistakes he had made, he couldn’t fix this one. Nothing he did—wishing, praying, ranting, swearing—could turn back time to a moment when he was strong, confident, and sure of himself. He knew. He had tried them all.
He sat like that, on the floor in the dark with his legs pulled up to his chest and his arms around his knees, for hours, days, an eternity of writhing in agony.
Yet life relentlessly marched on. For when the electricians fixed the power he discovered that the bedroom light switch had been flipped on. Without warning, the overhead blasted him with incandescence.
He went mad: screaming, shouting, rampaging around his room until he managed to turn it off. Then he went roaring out into the living room and screamed at the crew until the electricians fled, the framers retreated to the outside of the house, and only Moore and Web remained.
When Jacob had wound down and stood panting, Moore said, “Your refrigerator’s working again, and so’s your hot water heater. We’re knocking off for the day, going to the bar for a beer. See you tomorrow.”
In his slow, understated tone, Web said, “You should shave your head. Because right now, you look like a breaded veal cutlet.”
Jacob stood, breathing hard, watching Moore and Web leave in separate pickups, knowing they were headed to a pleasant, normal evening the like of which he could not even remember. While he … he was going to take his razor and shave his head—and cut his own throat.
Except he didn’t have the guts for that.
So instead he sat in the funky-smelling recliner and stared out into the night.
If he was lucky, Madeline Hewitson would try to walk off the cliff again.
This time he wouldn’t stop her.
* * *
First thing in the morning, Kateri called a meeting of her law enforcement officers in the briefing room, and asked Ed Legbrandt that the city cops be there, too.
She didn’t want to explain this kidnapping theory to these guys, not at all, and she definitely did not want to explain it twice. But it had to be done, so she sat on a high stool behind the podium and waited while the officers filed in, got coffee, grabbed folding chairs, and planted themselves.
Even when she added in the Virtue Falls cops, she only had thirty-one guys to cover the whole county: twenty-two guys here, nine off-shift, all males, all iffy about a girl boss. About half of them had been willing to listen to Garik Jacobsen and give her a chance, and even now with the election coming up, they were okay with her. The others … the others were like most guys in uniform, both in the Coast Guard and here. A woman was fine as long as she knew her place. Attitudes were changing. But not fast enough.
Bergen sat in the front row. Of course. The guy never said anything hostile. Never showed her less than respect. But he was always there, always watching.
Once the guys got shuffled around, Officer Bill Chippen called, “Sheriff, how’s the campaign going?”
“Pretty good with you guys out there stumping for me.”
Patronizing male chuckling. Some patting of Bergen’s shoulder.
“A lot of people don’t think you have enough experience to be sheriff.” Officer Ernie Fitzwater had been in town and on the force his whole life. He prided himself on saying what he thought. He also wasn’t offended when she answered him plainly, and that counted for a lot.
“I am sheriff,” she said.
“Appointed,” Officer Norm Knowles snapped back. Now he was easily offended.
So she answered to the whole group. “Guys, this is like being commander of the Virtue Falls Coast Guard unit. I was the only female there, too. All it required was that I prove myself twice as smart, skilled, and accomplished as the men.” She raked them with a glance. “Luckily, that was never difficult.”
Guffaws. Much elbow poking. Some frowns. At least one vote lost. But she supposed Knowles wasn’t going to vote for her, anyway.
Bergen crossed his arms over his chest. “Guys, way to set her up for
the punch line.”
When they were done with their ritual razzing, she got serious. “Gentlemen, I called you in because—”
“Because someone put dog poop on Mrs. Butenschoen’s front walk?” Rupert Moen asked.
Kateri tried to decide if she could ignore that.
She couldn’t. “Please tell me you’re joking.”
Heads shook. Men grinned.
“She called the cops because someone put…?” Kateri faltered.
“Twice.” Moen held up two fingers. “She has had to remove dog poop from her front yard twice.”
“I thought the dog couldn’t get in her yard anymore,” Kateri said.
“The dog next door would have to gain about one hundred pounds to produce that much poo,” Moen assured her.
Now Kateri fought a grin. “So someone is gathering up dog bombs and decorating her yard with them?”
“Strategically decorating her yard.” Moen managed a fair imitation of Mrs. Butenschoen’s fussy indignation.
The officers guffawed.
When they had calmed and she had fought back her amusement, she gravely said, “This is an outrage. I am outraged. But sadly, the sheriff’s office actually doesn’t have the resources to have a patrol car sit outside her fence twenty-four hours a day.”
“Mrs. Butenschoen told me to tell you she realizes that,” Moen said.
Kateri raised her eyebrows. “Civilized of her.”
Moen continued, “She has decided to get a security camera mounted on her front porch and point it at her yard to catch the culprit.”
“Good.” Kateri nodded. “Good.” Finally. One problem fixed without her having to do a damned thing. She looked down at her notes and once again saw the texts, and her humor failed her. When she looked up, the men had sobered, too. “Guys, I have reason to believe there’s a kidnapper and someone who is being kept against their will somewhere in Virtue Falls or the general vicinity.”
Bergen straightened in his chair. “Why do you think that?”
Trust him to think to ask. “Cordelia Markum has intercepted a series of texts over the past months that point to this conclusion.”
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