Farewell to Goodbye

by Penny Childs

  “What I heard about you on the news…is it true?” Wendy asked shyly.

  With a gentle smile, Mel said, “That all depends on what you heard, Wendy.”

  “That you were taken too, a few years ago, by a man that wanted to kill you.”

  “It is true.” She pulled the sleeve of her sweatshirt up and held her arm out so the girl could see the scars that crisscrossed her arm from the knife and the scars made from the cigarettes. “My reminders.” She lifted her chin and saw the girl’s eyes widen at the sight of the ugly scar that went from ear to collarbone. “He almost got me.”

  Wendy swallowed. She had scars of her own and seeing Mel’s made her feel less self-conscious. “What did he do to you?”

  Mel bit her lip. She did not want to talk about this, but knew she could not ask this child to if she was unwilling to do it herself.

  Wendy’s mother got out of her chair. “Your father and I are going to get some coffee, honey. Will you be okay?” She seemed to understand that maybe Mel and her daughter needed to be alone to talk about this.

  Wendy nodded. “We’ll be fine.” She looked Mel in the eyes. “She knows.”

  Taking the chair Wendy’s mother had vacated, Mel sat facing the girl. She knew she still had a question to answer. “I was twenty six years old, with the FBI and I had a gun,” she told the girl with a rueful smile. “I thought I was untouchable. I sure found out different in a hurry though. We were after the man that tried to kill me. I wanted to catch him so badly. He’d killed so many women before he took me. And the things that he did to them were terrible.” She closed her eyes a moment and sighed. “I went against my boss’s orders and tried to catch him myself. I tried to lure him to me so that I could arrest him. Instead of me catching the bad guy, he caught me.” She gave Wendy a look. “I think that he used the same woman to lure me in as the one that attacked you last night.”

  Wendy’s eyes widened again.

  “We never caught her. She pretended to need my help and when I went into her room Julius Becker was waiting for me.” She felt her heart thumping in her chest as it always did when she thought about it. About his hands on her. His knife. His voice. His deep throated laughter. She knew her hands were trembling and her voice was too as she said, “He raped me first, while she watched and egged him on. Then he used his knife on me. She put her cigarettes out on me.” Rubbing the scar at her throat with her fingertips, she said, “He always cut the throat last, so he could watch his victim bleed to death.” She frowned. “The woman left a few minutes before that. I guess she’d had her fun.”

  “How did you survive?” Wendy asked quietly.

  Mel smiled a true smile this time. “My partner found me. He shot Becker between the eyes.”

  “Good,” Wendy whispered through clenched teeth. Then she looked up through long lashes. “Sometimes I wish someone had shot Joshua Martin. Sometimes I wish I could have.”

  Mel knew what she meant and how she felt. “Killing someone isn’t as easy as it looks, Wendy, even if it’s justified.”

  “Have you ever killed anyone?”

  Mel shook her head. “I haven’t, but I know a lot of guys that have and it eats them up, even when they had to do it.” She wondered about Trevor. She wondered if killing Becker had left a permanent scar inside him.

  “Still… It doesn’t matter anyway, they gave him lethal injection.”

  “And you thought you were safe,” Mel guessed.

  Wendy nodded. “I did. Even when I heard about this killer on television, I thought, ‘he won’t come after me’. I mean, what are the odds, right?” She sighed. “My mom didn’t want me leaving the fricking house, even to check the mail, once she saw the story on the news. She practically tried to lock me in my room.”

  “But you didn’t want to live in fear anymore.” Mel knew what it was to live in fear. She’d been doing it for the last seven years of her life, whether she had known it at the time or not. Only now did she realize this. Only now did she realize that even if Trevor left her again, he had given her back something precious; freedom from the paralyzing fear she’d lived with for so long.

  Wendy nodded. The sheriff did understand. “I guess my mom was right.”

  “Do you want to talk about what happened?” She saw the hesitation and said, “I’ll understand if you don’t.”

  “I know you understand. That makes it easier. The damn shrink says she understands, but she doesn’t. The doctors say they understand, but they don’t. None of these people who say they understand really do. And it pisses me off when they say they do while they’re looking at me the way they look at me. I’m tired of pity too.”

  “I know.” She took the girl’s hand in hers. “Believe it or not, being able to tell you about what happened to me helped me today. I’ve never been able to talk to someone else who’s been through what I have. They have groups, but I refused to go. I even ditched my shrink after a month.” She paused, staring at the girl. “Don’t do that, keep going. Keep talking. I should have, you taught me that today.” She thought maybe she would even try again with the shrink after all of this was over.

  “I’m glad I could listen then.” She closed her eyes against the tears that came. “Eric was bringing me back from the movies. My curfew was at eleven. We were almost late. Don’t tell my mom or dad, but it was because we stopped at the rest area on the way home and kissed some,” she said, a blush rising to her cheeks.

  “I won’t tell,” Mel promised with a smile. She was willing to bet Wendy’s parents knew about the kissing.

  “We pulled around the corner of the street I live on and that van cut us off. Eric didn’t have the doors on his car locked. We live in a small town. They yanked open the doors and pulled us out. The woman threw me on the ground while the man beat up Eric.” Her small hands balled into fists and she chewed her lower lip.

  “Take your time, Wendy,” Mel told her, feeling her hand begin to shake in hers. Tears ran down the girl’s cheeks.

  “She told me if I tried to run or screamed they would kill Eric. So I stayed on the ground while she went to where the man was kicking Eric. They started to argue about bringing him along. The man wanted to and the woman didn’t. I guess the woman won, ‘cause they left Eric and took me.

  “They threw me in the back of the van. The man stayed back there with me and the woman drove. While she drove he…” Sniffling, she shook her head.

  Mel pulled a tissue from the box next to her bed and handed one to her.

  “He didn’t touch me that way, at least. He tied my hands though, and got out a torch.” Quaking, she said, “And I knew what that meant. I tried to fight him but he hit me and held me down.” She lifted her bandaged arms. “He burned me a few times, slow. The whole time he laughed and laughed. Then I heard the woman yelling. She said they were being followed and she thought it was a cop. She said they would dump me in the road to get rid of them and run for it.” On a long sigh, she said, “And that’s what they did. They slowed down and rolled me out the back of the van. I was scared of falling out of the van, but not as scared as staying in it.”

  They both sat in silence for a moment before Mel asked, “Wendy, you didn’t get a look at the woman at all, did you?”

  She shook her head. “She wore a ski mask the whole time. She had green eyes, that’s all I know.”

  “Did they talk about anything?”

  Wendy thought about this. “I did hear her say they needed to find a new place to stay while they waited for the right time to make their final move.”

  Mel frowned. “Did they say what their next move was?”

  Wendy shook her head. “No. Just that they were waiting for just the right time.”

  “Hmmm…” Something nagged at her now, but she could not figure out what it was.

  Seventeen

  Trevor woke a few hours later, stiff and groggy. He sat up and stretched, grimacing when his neck and back popped loudly. Getting up he decided that if it ever came to it again he
would take Mel’s advice and grab a cot. Her couch sucked.

  Walking out, he passed the conference room and found it to be empty. He located Brody at the front desk, pecking away at the keyboard of his computer. “Mel back yet?” he asked.

  “Nope,” Brody said, looking up.

  Trevor’s brows knit together in worry. She had been gone hours now.

  “If it makes you feel any better she just called in about a half hour ago and asked me to send a deputy to Wendy Chapman’s boyfriend’s house to go over his statement again.”

  Trevor took in a breath of relief.

  “She also said she would be a little longer with the girl. She told me they were getting on good and she wanted to talk to her some more.”

  “Okay,” Trevor said, definitely feeling better now. He thought for a moment, scratching at his itchy chin. His scruff was driving him nuts. He’d not shaved in over twenty four hours and it grew so quickly he could shave twice a day if he had anywhere to go at night. “I’m going to run back to her place and get a shower and shave before I go insane. If she gets back before I do, just tell her to sit tight, okay?”

  Brody shrugged. “Sure. No problem.” He went back to whatever he had been doing on the computer.

  “You have a car I can borrow?” he asked. “Renee has the rental and I’ve been riding with Mel.”

  Brody looked back up. “Yeah, there are a couple of the SUVs out back.” He dug through the drawer in front of him and came out with a set of keys. “Here ya go.”

  Trevor took the keys with a thank you and walked toward the back door of the building. His mind was on Mel, sitting up in that hospital room with a girl she didn’t even know, comforting her the way he had not been able to comfort Mel when she had needed him.

  He thought it wasn’t any wonder that she hadn’t wanted to have anything to do with him when he had come back into her life.

  He remembered it all too well. After shooting Becker he had rushed to her and found her bleeding out at the neck. The memory came back to him with such force he stopped in his tracks.

  Placing his hands over the wound on her neck, Trevor looked into those eyes that he had fallen in love with and pleaded with her to just stay with him.

  Mel tried to say something.

  Shaking his head, Trevor tried to quiet her. And that’s when it came, flooding into his head. Every single image and emotion that she held. They assaulted him so brutally he almost could not see or hear anything else. In danger of a psychic overload he looked around frantically and saw Bill standing on the other side of the bed. Pulling his hands from her wound, he backed away from her. “Bill, you have to do it, I can’t.”

  “Trevor!” Bill yelled.

  “I can’t do it Bill. I can’t. I can’t stand to touch her!” He was still backing away, until he hit the wall. And there he stood, her blood covering his hands, as she looked to him, confused, afraid and hurt. He stood there even when she asked for him. Even when the paramedics showed up and Bill went to him and told him that she needed him.

  He stayed the day with her in the hospital, sitting in the chair next to her bed, not once touching her. Even when she woke and reached a hand out to him. He just sat there and stared at her hand. He could not touch her.

  Finally, when her anger got the better of her she gave him what he wanted. She told him to get away from her and stay away.

  He had given her what she had demanded for the last seven years. “And I never once tried to explain it to her,” he whispered to himself. “Maybe she would have understood.” Moving again, he walked out of the building and climbed into the SUV matching the ID on the key ring Brody had given him. He drove to her house trying not to think. The past was the past. The future was uncertain, but it held a glimmer of hope. He had spied love in her heart when he had gone looking for the location of the killers.

  Clutching the steering wheel, he turned the SUV onto the dirt road she lived off. He could not believe what he had done to her. He knew one thing for sure. He would never desert her again. And he would kill these bastards before he let them hurt her.

  He pulled into her driveway and was three quarters of the way up it when he hit the brakes and stopped in the middle of the narrow drive. A tree lay across the drive, blocking his path. He sat staring at it, his gut screaming at him. The problem was he could not turn around. Trees lined the drive on each side too closely. The other problem was he did not believe the tree had fallen down of its own accord. He thought he could see a small pile of sawdust near the brush covered trunk. He was reaching for his weapon when the blast came. The passenger window shattered and he saw a large figure reaching in for the door lock.

  Training took over and he did not deter in his effort to draw his weapon.

  The man reaching in got the door open and was lunging across at him as Trevor’s weapon cleared the holster. He did not manage to point it at his assailant, much less get a shot off before they were grappling in the front seat for the gun.

  With the man’s hands around his wrists and the gun pointed at the seat, Trevor thought to pull the trigger to scare the guy. Instead, he drew his head back and delivered a head-butt to the other man’s forehead. He felt the guy’s grip loosen and took advantage, shoving him back, then taking aim and firing.

  The assailant jerked back, then fell, with a look of astonishment in his eyes. He dropped heavily to the ground by the passenger door.

  Relived, but not assured, Trevor was turning back toward the driver’s window when he saw a shadow pass over it, then heard the bark of a gun, the sound of breaking glass, and felt the pain high on his leg, in his thigh. The shock of it was enough to make him drop his gun to the floor, which he immediately threw himself across the bench seat to try and retrieve.

  She was around the vehicle and leaning in the open passenger door before he could find the gun on the floor. She put the muzzle of the handgun to his forehead and smiled. “I’d like nothing better than to put a bullet in your head, Agent Giles. I wouldn’t give me an excuse if I were you.”

  Laying across the seat, unbelievable pain exploding in his leg, he stared the woman in the eyes, his fingertips just inches from the gun on the floorboard of the SUV.

  “First you went and killed Julius. Now you had to go and kill Ted.” She shook her head. “I put a lot of planning into this. I was kind of hoping he’d get to see it through to the end.” Reaching into the pocket of the light jacket she wore, she pulled out a bottle of water. “Sit up,” she demanded.

  He did so, with a groan of pain.

  She slid into the passenger seat and closed the door, kicking his gun under the seat with her heel. She shoved the water bottle at him. “Drink it.”

  He took the bottle but did not remove the cap. “I don’t think so.”

  “If you don’t, I’ll put a bullet in your kneecap. If you still don’t, maybe I’ll shoot your other one. Then a foot. Whatever it takes.”

  He stared into intense green eyes. She meant it. Unscrewing the cap, he put the bottle to his lips and tilted it back, taking a tentative sip.

  “Drink it like you mean it, Agent Giles, this ain’t no tea party.” She laughed. “Don’t worry, it’s not poisoned. I want you alive. At least for a little while.”

  He was not comforted by the fact that she wanted him alive. “What are you going to do?” He was also not comforted by the fact that she wore no disguise. She did not mean for him to live to tell anyone what she looked like.

  “Don’t worry about it. Drink the damn water before I change my mind and shoot you again.”

  Mel walked back into the station at almost noon. She knew that Renee and Craig had returned as well. She had seen their vehicles out front. “Brody,” she said in greeting as she passed the front desk.

  He grunted at her and kept typing. He was doing a lot of the paperwork for all of the guys that were out searching. He didn’t like the fact he couldn’t be out there too, but he had hurt his back a few weeks ago and would never be able to stay on his f
eet long enough to be of any use.

  Going to the conference room, she found Renee and Craig in their usual spot at the back of the room, heads together, hunched over a computer.

  “Hey, boss,” Craig called out.

  Frowning, Mel said, “I thought I’d find Trevor in here.”

  Renee shook her head. “I haven’t seen him since before we left this morning.”

  Shaking her head, Mel left and headed for her office. He must have been more tired than he had thought. She smiled. He would pay for sleeping so long on her crappy little couch. This she knew from experience. And she was a good foot shorter than him.

  Her door stood open. She leaned in and did not see him. “Okay,” she muttered, walking back to the front. When she reached the front office she called out, “Brody!”

  “Yeah boss,” he said absently.

  “Have you seen Agent Giles lately?”

  He stopped his typing and looked up. “Oh, shit. I’m sorry boss. He wanted me to let you know he was going to run by your place and shave or something. It completely slipped my mind.”

  Mel sighed. “All right.” She wondered what time he would be back. “When did he take off?”

  Brody thought, then looked at the clock on the wall. “Oh, about three hours ago.”

  “Three hours?” Mel asked, thinking. “If he was running to my place only to shave he shouldn’t have been gone more than an hour and a half, and that’s if he dilly-dallied.”

  Brody shrugged, thinking that Trevor was a big boy. “He looked like shit, boss. Maybe he fell asleep or something.”

  She considered this, then shook her head. No. Not Trevor. With an oath, she pulled her phone from her back pocket and dialed. Trevor’s phone rang ten times, then dropped her into voice mail. She left him a brief message, disconnected and headed for the conference room.

  “Hey, we may have a problem here,” she said to Craig and Renee.

  They both looked up at her.