I don’t scream for my mother. Knowing that woman, she’d let me get burned alive if it interfered with her soaps.
The flickering flame stains Bianca’s loose waves of blonde hair violet and throws deep shadows beneath the goggles on her face.
I thought I could be apathetic this time, but I’d been wrong. My groping hand searches for Hannah’s, and her fingers squeeze mine like I’m her only lifeline. And I am. I may be a monster, but I’m the lesser evil in this room.
Words are wet and raspy, cramped and tangled as I utter them, but I have to, because she’s got a thousand pounds of hairspray clinging to her crispy curls, and the thought that Hairspray Equals Flammable chomps into my brain like a Venus flytrap. “Hood. Your hood. Hannah stand up, and put your hood—”
The flame dies, and a gasp curdles in the back of my throat when something smashes into my knuckles. They flatten on impact. A constellation of white stars flit in my peripherals.
A brick. A stone. Something heavy.
The pain lessens into rhythmic pulses. I’m curling my wrist into my chest when something smacks the top of my head. It doesn’t hurt—it’s more confusing. I twist back into the wall, Bianca’s medicated cherry breath filling my nostrils.
I inhale the cloud of lozenge-scented air until she steps back and sparks up her blowtorch. She holds up a finger and waves it sharply through dancing blue light. Like when you smack a puppy’s nose with a rolled-up newspaper and wag a stern finger. Stay. Good girl.
“Soon it will all be over,” she says in the deadest voice I’ve ever heard.
And I have no doubt she means all of it, the end of every blink and every breath, until both Hannah and I are tattered, charred husks of our former selves.
I try to stand, but she kicks me into the wall.
One appalling minute bleeds into another of resignation, and I do nothing but stare at the leaping blue-white flame, rocked with the endless, echoing thought of what next?
NINETY-FIVE
It’s the perfect storm. Two psychopathic personalities colliding, bringing out the very worst threads of the other’s character. Instead of fireworks, there’s death and devastation.
What happened? Had he seen those scars on Bianca’s wrists? Did they remind him of his mother? Was this a basic Oedipus complex? He’d seen his mother raped and beaten, watched her slash her wrists with a razor blade, attributed gargantuan amounts of pain to love? Or was he just turned on by violence? He’d seen it too early, when he was old enough to comprehend the acts, but too young to stop them.
Jacob’s father had barely hit the preoperational stage of cognitive development; governed by egocentrism and only capable of seeing situations his own way—all he likely knew was what had happened was scary, but Leoš was far beyond that stage of maturity—well into the concrete development stage.
“Hello?” Lisette waved her hand in front of his face. “Are you in there?”
John swatted her hand.
“You looked like you were in a trance. I was calling.”
“I was ignoring you.”
Lisette poked the space between her eyebrows. “I’m going to cut Jacob loose. I don’t want to draw up the fucking paperwork.” And she stomped off to do so with muttered expletives.
He pulled out his phone and relayed warrant requests that would surely be denied to Stacy, over a background of clacking keys as she transcribed his words.
“Got it,” she said after a few minutes. “I sent them and CC’d Bob. Is there anything else you need while you’ve got me?”
“Ask Interpol for their files on Leoš Ivashkov. I know he wouldn’t have much of a record in the States, but it’s worth a shot.”
“I already put out feelers.”
He sunk onto the leather couch tucked beneath the window of Lisette’s office, and rested his head on the arm. “Has anything popped with vacant buildings?”
“A few, but I don’t think they’re prime hostage dungeons. I looked at the blueprints and ruled them out, but I can send the addresses. The financials on that security company pan out. I’m looking into employees next, but it’ll take longer.”
Lisette barged through the door, walls rattling as it slammed behind her.
Stacy’s typing sparked up again. “I’ll keep looking and—wait, there goes my other line. I’m going to put you on hold, it might be a call back from one of my contacts.”
“No, just get back to me if you have something.”
He rolled his head back as he disconnected. Lisette’s upside-down face blinked back at him, the set of her lips softening. “You look exhausted. Uniforms are getting rid of Jacob. Have you put in for warrants?”
“Yes.” Though he wouldn’t hold his breath. He swung himself into a sitting position and cracked his neck.
Lisette slumped onto the couch’s arm. “I keep thinking of what Heckles said. How she’s keeping them where her heart lives. We didn’t have a lot of time to mull it over earlier, but I can’t shake those words.”
He still didn’t quite know what to make of that statement. “Stacy’s running searches of unoccupied buildings, but she hasn’t gotten any hits. If anything, I’d think her heart would live in her family home in Laguna.”
She stared into space, a crease of mystification carving between blonde eyebrows. “Her heart died in Aunt Melinda’s cellar. I keep circling back to that.”
John didn’t bother commenting on the obvious. Aunt Melinda’s house was cobwebbed and boarded up—decomposing, just like Melinda.
Lisette toyed with the stretched-out hem of her wife beater. He couldn’t decide whether to interrupt the reverie or leave her to it, but she spoke before he had to make a choice.
“Bianca’s family is all dead.” The wrinkle between her brows smoothed. “Mom, Dad, sister.” The yellow ceiling lights caught her eyes as she stared into it, pupils retracting to pinpricks. “They’re dead. So they ‘live’ in the cemetery.”
He nodded. Typically that was where the dead lived.
“They’re her heart, aren’t they? At least Reagan. I doubt anyone would think of Leoš Ivashkov as close to their heart, and we can’t prove he’s involved, anyway. Bianca isn’t anywhere else that might have significance. But her heart lives there, buried under six feet of dirt in her sister’s coffin. Stan says she has flower deliveries, so we know she visits.”
“Well, she’s not inside Reagan’s grave.”
“No, I know that.” She rattled the chain around her neck, sergeant’s badge swaying like a hypnotist’s clock. “But she comes from money. And people with money to waste have all sorts of shit they don’t really need. Yachts, country club memberships, Scottish castles. You should see some of the mausoleums in the ritzier cemeteries. They’re huge.” She dropped the chain. “We need to find out where her family’s buried.”
NINETY-SIX
Bianca takes long, ratcheting breaths that sound like the rusted door hinges of my ancient Ford Taurus. Hannah’s voice crossed over into death; she’s so silent she may have died from fear. Standing and trying to run hadn’t helped; she’d smacked straight into a wall.
My eyes follow the quivering flame as it dances, reflecting against the plastic goggles she’s wearing, and then drop to floor.
The flame disappears as she stoops to retrieve the brick I’ve been eyeing.
It takes a moment for the answer to click. This is the only window of opportunity I’ve had. I’ll die, whether I fight or not. She’d kept her hair bound in a ski mask when I was here with Abby, when I’d been convinced she wasn’t a she at all. She’s not recording this time—no twin red circles from the corners of the room—so she hasn’t bothered with disguises.
Hair pulling may be wimpy, but it’s very effective. And the yelp she lets out is surprisingly satisfying. The clatter of the blowtorch hitting the floor, even more so.
My fingers claw up her hair, into the tight-stretched flesh of her scalp. Pulses of pain throb in the knuckles of my smashed hand, but I grind my teeth agains
t it. She drags me to my feet as she backs up, flailing arms splitting the air between us. Her shrieks can’t begin to resemble words—just guttural, animal-instinct growls.
The room’s not large. A wall has to be within stumbling distance, so I yank until there’s a thwap when she collides with one and collapses.
I brace myself with one palm against the granite, the other coiled in a fistful of hair. Her legs buck and thrash, a knee sinking into my stomach when I drop to the ground and grope for those night-vision goggles.
What she doesn’t know is I’m used to the dark, having been kept in it so long. Sounds are magnified, smells more intense. She’s turned me into an overgrown bat with echolocation. I don’t need to see her. I can feel the heat of her skin and hear how far away her ragged breaths are.
I pull back a knot of hair and slam her head into the wall. A grunt snarls in her throat, and it sounds like she’s choking on it, gagging around a floppy, swollen tongue.
I draw my knee up and stomp.
“Hannah,” I scream. “Get to the door.”
NINETY-SEVEN
John burst through the interrogation room Stanley Heckles had been sequestered inside. The door swung into the wall with enough force to shake the one-way glass.
“Does the Cartwright family own a mausoleum?”
“I don’t know,” he said, bewildered eyes snapping up from his hands. “Is that one of those big houses in cemeteries? The kind with statues in front?”
John slid halfway on the seat. “Something like that, yes. But you did visit, and she’d brought flowers? Where did she put them?”
Heckles bobbed his head. “White roses. She said she always bought white, since it’s the color of surrender. I didn’t really know what she meant. Sometimes she confuses me, so I stopped asking. She took me inside the maus—big house thing.”
“Which cemetery?”
“Evergreen Memorial.”
Lisette she stuck her head into the room, John’s iPhone glued to her ear. “That place’s pretty much neglected. New owners bought it for pennies, and don’t keep up with maintenance. It’s a twenty-minute drive. I’ll make it in ten.”
NINETY-EIGHT
Hannah doesn’t answer.
“Hannah!” An artic chill runs through my already-cold interior climate. She better not be dead. Can you die of fear?
It’s not a good idea to walk away when I can’t be positive Bianca won’t catapult to her feet. This is a horror movie. Villains never die—at least not right away.
I do anyway, dragging one hand along the floor until my fingers hit gold and close around the brick.
“Hannah, you need to get up.” A trill pulls up the tail end of each word. “You need to get to the door.” I’d go to the door myself, but I have to make sure, absolutely positive, that Bianca’s dead, gone, never coming back.
Making it to the other side of the room is like trudging through air that’s suddenly become clam chowder, but I do after what feels like forever.
Cold fingers scrabble at my shins, blazing hot new trails in the territory of my frozen fear. I pull back my foot and kick, hard, and though it doesn’t incite noise, it must have hurt.
Blind mutant intuition whispers in my ear, demanding now, right now, before she uncoils like the snake she is.
So I don’t think, just smash the brick into the limbs I sense are closest. The struggle she puts up is sheer, blind, utter panic; a We’re All Going to Die, But Please, You First tumble of flailing legs and fingernails and hissed cursing and insanity, but eventually I land a blow that presses PAUSE on her fight.
My hand gets wetter and wetter each time I pull the brick back, until the gravelly crunches turn into soft squishes.
I’m not tired, despite the cold sweat coursing between my bra cups and sliding down to my navel with each blow I land.
“Brooke?”
I start at Hannah’s timid voice and bolt to my feet. My hand is still clenched around the brick as I stumble toward her. I can’t afford to let my guard down and abandon my only weapon.
It’s obvious she’s holding back tears in the way her words stretch and crack. “What’s going on?”
My fingers find her hairspray-starched curls, and I sink onto one knee. “You’re fine. We’re going to get out of here. We’ll get out and call your mother.” In an afterthought I add, “And 9-1-1.”
“But she locked us in.”
“She’s got to have the keys on her.” Though I’m not psyched to rifle through her pockets. “Go to the door. I’ll find them.”
She tugs on the hem of my shirt when I try to stand. “You can’t leave me.”
“I’d never leave you,” I promise. “Get up. Find that blowtorch and go to the door.”
Hannah clamps her hand around my arm when something convulses in the corner.
NINETY-NINE
John felt the full weight of a pale, bloated moon suspended in a cloud-curdled sky, above the silent lawns of Evergreen Memorial. As if it had grown physically closer to the earth during the drive over.
Warm wind whistled through overgrown grass and the woven wrought-iron bars of the back gates as they approached.
Lisette pulled out her Glock, and shot off the rattling padlock. The gates creaked, almost with an edge of distant, mocking laughter, as though disrepair had turned them wicked, and they would love nothing more than to watch terrible things happen to the two of them.
She kept her weapon drawn, blending into the surroundings like an oiled shadow. John didn’t entertain the idea of waiting for backup or reinforcements, and it seemed Lisette hadn’t, either.
Moonlight bleached her hair and skin silver as she looked from side to side. John kept a few paces behind her left flank. “If Brooke estimated a five minute walk, it’s got to be close.”
Overgrown weeping willow branches brushed swaying blades of grass, dead leaves caught in a tornado of dirt clods as wind swept by. It was when they slipped past the fringe of old trees with gnarled bark, that they saw it.
The mausoleum had the same ancient quality of the surrounding trees, like it had grown from a root beneath the ground, as well.
Lisette broke into a run, and took the ivory steps three at a time. Cartwright had been carved into granite above the entrance, and the stairs were flanked by statues of white angels with small smiles and blank stone eyes that seemed to follow John’s progress.
“Motherfuck.” She slammed her palm into the steel door. “She must have it blocked from the inside.” She snapped up her walkie-talkie. “I need that goddamned SWAT team now.” Moonbeams tiger-striped her eyes through the branches of a far-off tree when she turned to John. “Do you think she’ll be alive?”
He would have answered, but Stacy’s cheerfully lunatic ringtone rang out, so foreign amidst the hushed landscape of moldering headstones, that for a moment the pair of them did nothing but stare stupidly, until John’s higher brain suggested he really ought to answer, if for nothing more than putting a stop to the racket.
“I know you told me not to call,” Stacy began, a second after he’d fumbled with his iPhone and stuck it to his ear, “but I heard back from Interpol, and Ivashkov’s plane is due to touch down any minute. That email I hacked—the one the ‘contact me’ comments from the blog are routed to—got a new message. It’s only one line and pretty cryptic, but I found an IP, so that’s good news.”
Lisette aimed her third kick at the mausoleum’s door, which did nothing at all but rattle as though it were giggling at her failed attempts of forced entry. “Call the airport, and ask security to detain him. Give them instructions to wait for me.”
“They won’t hold him long without a warrant. You’d better hurry.”
“What does Interpol have?”
“Well, it turns out organized prostitution is illegal in Czech Republic, but enforcement is lax, and since they’re considered private clubs where members pay dues, police couldn’t make arrests if they wanted. He hasn’t been charged with anything past 1989—
drug smuggling—but he’s been accused of paying political contacts to further his own agenda. No worse than the dicks in Washington, huh? He was naturalized in 1990; dual citizenship here, and in Czech Republic. It’s not much. Interpol’s good for records and AFIS and ballistics, not so much in the way of gossip, or word on the street.”
Beams of multiple flashlights shone through blackness the low-slung, guttering moon couldn’t reach, voices and grumbling static drawing nearer.
“Hurry the fuck up, goddamnit,” Lisette shouted across the lawns, having forfeited round four with the mausoleum door.
“Doesn’t she speak eloquently,” Stacy said. “It’s funny, you’d never know she had a mouth like that from looking at her.”
The swell of backup loomed closer, and John turned to Lisette as he and Stacy disconnected. “I’m going to leave you to it. Ivashkov’s jet’s landing soon.”
“You’re never going to get anything out of him. It’ll be a wasted trip. I can order a tail later if the lieutenant can make room in the budget.” She descended the stone steps to dodge the avalanche of men in black fatigues and Kevlar. Dew-smeared grass smushed beneath her Timberlands as she found to her way to his side, hands on hips, not appearing as imposing as he knew she tried to be, even with a holstered Glock and a scowl that could peel paint.
“A tail won’t do any good, either. I’ve asked Customs to detain him. I need to at least try to speak to him.” He held out his hand, which she looked askance at, as if he were suggesting a moonlit waltz amongst the headstones. “I need your keys.”
She dug them from her pocket and slapped them into his palm. “What about Brooke?”
“You’re here. She won’t be alone.”
“But,” she spluttered over the horrible screech of metal on metal as SWAT burst through the mausoleum’s door, “this is your case. Your victim. Don’t you want to make sure she’s okay?”
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