by Susan Cox
“Exactly. Smart girl.”
I squinted at the wall next to me. “Is that blood?”
“This is where I killed the priest and cut off his fingers. Pretty gross, right?” He actually wrinkled his nose, as if it was distasteful. “Lucky he wanted to see Katrina’s wine collection.”
I closed my eyes and felt my head pounding. “What time is it?”
“It’s about two in the morning. Nat was pissed you weren’t answering your phone earlier. I explained you’d come in for your usual afternoon tea and then left.” He bent over and fished around near his feet. He picked up my dripping phone, then held it out to me. “Oops.” He made a mock regretful face. “He’ll start to worry tomorrow probably, but by then you’ll have met with an unfortunate accident, or possibly a mugging gone wrong. I’ll think of something.”
I shifted to ease some of the pressure on my arm and looked up at him. He really was a sweet, good-looking guy if you ignored the fact that he was a stone-cold killer. “You’ve done pretty well so far.”
He looked delighted. “I know, right? It’s all been improvisation and so far, so good.” He held up his hand with crossed fingers and grinned at me, his eyes glittering. I shivered, even though I was sweating in my plastic cocoon. How could I not have noticed that he was completely insane?
“You fooled everyone,” I croaked.
“Not you though, right?” He hitched his own chair closer and he looked … excited. “So what was it? What gave you your first clue?”
If he wanted to talk, I was willing to indulge him. At least while we were talking, he wasn’t killing me.
“I think it was when I found Matthew so badly injured and he said, ‘coffee, black.’ That’s what he said to you that morning you brought him his coffee, remember?”
His face was screwed up in concentration. He started to shake his head, then stopped, his eyes wide. “Oh, I remember. But how did that help you?” He looked annoyed. “Don’t lie to me.”
“It was just the first tiny thing,” I said hastily. “To everyone else, he always said ‘black, no sugar.’ It probably doesn’t sound like much, but—”
“No, no, it’s your story, and that was really smart.” He beamed at me. “What else?”
Oh god, he looked like a kid waiting for the next chapter in a bedtime story. “Well, there were the nuns’ habits.” I decided to keep Father Martin out of it; God knew if he’d be in danger, too. “I don’t know much about nuns, but I heard somewhere that they were Olivetans. I was curious, so I looked them up online, and it said they wore white habits, not black.”
He tipped his head to one side and inspected me through narrowed eyes. “That’s not true. You saw the photos plenty of times, and they were wearing black. Who told you?”
He grabbed hold of my chair and shook it fiercely back and forth, leaning into me, his face inches from mine, his breath hot and his expression enraged. My head flopped from side to side. I was afraid my neck would break. Then he suddenly stopped, stepped back, and resumed his friendly, conversational tone. He sat down again and looked reflectively up at the ceiling. “Never mind; we’ll come back to that. What else?”
I cleared my throat. “I’m thirsty; can I have a drink of water?”
He unscrewed the cap of a bottle of water from the shelf next to my head. “You should have said something sooner. Here.” He tipped it slowly into my mouth, and I took several large gulps. “There. Better?” he said kindly. I nodded. “Now, what else?”
My stomach lurched. I wasn’t sure I could keep the water down and talk to that weirdly pleasant face at the same time. “Can you tell me your part of the story? I’m really interested.”
He preened slightly, which was terrifying to watch. “I’ll tell you my part, and then you can tell me more, okay?” I nodded. “Where shall I start?”
“Tell me about Katrina.”
“Good. Good. That’s the start, I guess. She asked me to set up the kids’ home for her. I made sure I was the go-between with the diocese over there. It was pretty simple to tell them she was still considering the project, and telling Katrina it was all moving ahead. It took organization, but I’m careful, and you can get just about anything done in Kiev if you know the right people and you have a little money to spend. She was always telling me I was wasting my education, so I decided to show her.” He giggled. “She paid quarterly into an account I set up, and the money came out gradually over the course of the year, apparently for things to maintain the house, feed and clothe the poor little orphans. Photos were simple—just some local kids and women who dressed up and posed for photos for the equivalent of twenty bucks. It was easy. Katrina left all the details to me, and I gave her copies of the same reports I was supposedly sending to the diocese—with spreadsheets and everything.” He giggled again, which was just—unsettling.
“What went wrong?”
“That stupid new assistant sent a report about St. Olga’s to the archdiocese for real; used her initiative, Katrina said. Some priest read it and left a message for Katrina that there was no St. Olga’s. I always kept track of everything going in and out of Katrina’s e-mail accounts, so I had his name and I was able to find him and kill him. Hit-and-run that time. After that, I figured it was best to make them all different, you know? So it would take anyone who was looking longer to put everything together.” His gentle face looked almost dreamy.
“When I got back from Kiev, Katrina was suspicious because the priest hadn’t followed up, and then she found out he’d died. She made some phone calls and whatever she found out, she realized things weren’t right. She was a smart cookie, you know? She should have trusted me.” He shook a gentle, admonishing finger in my face. “I got in the car so she could scream at me, but it didn’t last long. She hated leaving that car on the street—God, she was so pissed when her contractor broke through into some buried creek or something, and the wine cellar flooded.” He giggled again. It was chilling.
“What happened with the priest who came here?”
He shifted forward in his seat and said, as if to reassure me, “He wasn’t suspicious of me. He was just looking for answers, and my name was in Katrina’s obituary, as her survivor. We met at some pizza place in North Beach and I invited him to come up to Katrina’s place for a drink. He told me how his priest friend in Kiev had told him the odd story of the nonexistent orphanage. Then when he was run over and killed, I guess this priest got suspicious. I played it puzzled and then outraged, and said we needed to get to the bottom of it. And then I asked if he wanted to see Katrina’s wine collection.” He gave another of those little giggles.
“For an old guy he was pretty tough, but with the roofie and him not being in the best shape, I snatched his key ring, and it had this handy little point, so I jammed it in his neck. Then I chopped off his fingers, too.” He actually shuddered. “He said he was from South America, and I read once about these South American gangs who did that, and I thought it might point the cops away from the reason he was here.”
I was having real difficulty keeping my eyes open. I drifted off then jerked awake, terrified he’d killed me. I tried to think of something to keep him talking. “Why didn’t you leave him down here? Why did you take him over to the vacant building?”
He explained, patiently, as if I should have thought of it myself. “He’d started to smell, and with it being Katrina’s building, I mean, nobody knew this place was here except me, and I had all her keys, and with the blood and everything it would point the finger right at me. Point the finger!” He giggled again. “That’s funny. Anyway, I left him down here for a couple of days, while I figured something out. Then I remembered the empty buildings. There was an old shopping cart across the street, and I grabbed it. That guy, Matthew, saw me returning it, and he got upset, kept mumbling and muttering, ‘thief, thief, thief.’ You know how he was. I got him settled down. I told him I’d found it down the block and I was bringing it back to him. You know the funny part?”
He loo
ked at me brightly, waiting for a response, so I forced out, “No, what was funny?”
“That guy, the guy everyone calls Matthew? His name is Pavel Matthew. He was her son, can you believe it?” He burst into loud, genuine laughter. “I know, right? You look so shocked! He was in line to inherit everything. She had the trust set up and everything, so her estate didn’t have to go through probate. She made me swear not to tell anyone. Her will said if he died first everything went to St. Olga’s, so that was a no-brainer. Easy to find his dump of a place and push one of those piles of crap onto him. All I have to do now is wait for him to die because he’s kind of sickly anyway, or help him along if he gets out of the hospital. I’ll produce a DNA sample to prove the relationship, get everything transferred over to St. Olga’s. Easy-peasy, lemon squeezy. Okay, your turn.”
My mind was no clearer; the nausea was getting worse. Matthew, Pavel—living in the gutter where his mother parked her $100,000 automobile. Gavin’s eyes narrowed. “Why are you crying? Stop crying! Stop it! Stop it!”
My head rolled forward, and I tried to think of something, anything, that would turn me back into an appreciative audience. He snatched at my hair and pulled back my head. I blurted out, “Did you break into Katrina’s office?”
He drew in a breath and said admiringly, “That was you? Oh, wow, you really had me going. I had to see if there was anything to point the finger at me. Get it? So come on, your turn now. What else gave me away?”
“You said you didn’t know anything about computers, and for a while I thought it would stop you from doing all the sophisticated financial setup for the orphanage. But then I found out you went to a Swiss university which is the equivalent of MIT, where you earned a degree in computer science.”
He sat back. “That’s amazing. And that was all?”
“Basically, yes,” I said. Added to the nuns’ outfits and Matthew’s—Pavel’s—coffee habits, I guess it wasn’t much, and I’d had little more than suspicion when I’d gone to talk to him. He’d confirmed everything else.
“Well, I’m impressed.” He sat back in his chair and inspected me shrewdly. “The way I see it, you only figured it out while we were talking today. I mean, that’s why I roofie’d you, so I don’t guess you shared this with anyone. I’m sorry, but I have to leave you again. I’ll be back later, and then we’ll see. Do you want another drink of water before I go?”
My mouth and throat felt parched. “Yes, please.”
He picked up the bottle again and held it to my mouth while I took two gulps. “There’s a little sleeping magic in that one,” he said. “You rest. I have to go now. I have some arrangements to make,” he said apologetically, as if I were going to miss his company. “I may be a while, but I’ll see you later,” he added, before he climbed up the stairs, opened a trapdoor on some sort of hydraulic lift, and disappeared.
I tried to wriggle out of my bubble wrap and duct tape shroud, but it was hideously effective, and I was in real danger of knocking the chair over. With me completely immobilized, the six inches of water on the ground was probably enough to drown in. I shook my head every few minutes for a while to stave off sleep, but I could feel my eyes getting heavy and I finally closed them, thankful for the oblivion that awaited.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Hours or days later, something was banging, loudly, overhead. The noise reverberated through the wine cellar, and I thought my head would split open. I’d heard of sound waves killing dolphins; is that what was happening?
“Hey!” I yelled, or at least tried to. It came out as a barely audible whisper. I coughed and tried again. “Hey, down here!” After one final bang, the noise stopped. A large square of light appeared above my head.
“She’s down here!” I squinted against the light and heard an excited babble of voices.
“Jesus Christ!” That sounded like Ben.
“Ben?” I croaked. I couldn’t see anything except the light.
“It’s okay, I’ve got you.”
I leaned into him. He smelled like Ben. “Be careful. He’ll be back,” I whispered. “He’s insane.”
“Theophania, my dear. Hold still.”
“Grandfather?”
I could feel something being done to the bubble wrap locking me to the chair at the back, and then I felt it loosen and I fell forward into Ben’s arms. He pulled me free of the chair and, when my legs wouldn’t support me, bent down to pick me up instead. He carried me up into the garage, where he laid me down on the floor next to a sledgehammer and the battered remains of the trapdoor. It felt blissful to stretch out after hours of being cramped rigid on that bloody chair. The garage door was open, the air smelled fresh, and since the sky was faintly gray in the east, the night had passed and a new day was upon us.
“We’ve got medics coming,” Ben said to me.
I nodded. “Okay,” I whispered and struggled to sit up. “I’m really glad to see you. Will you help me to stand up?” I put my arms around his neck and let him pull me to my feet.
“Okay?” he said before he relaxed his hold, and I nodded. My mind felt weird and everything hurt, but I felt better standing, even on trembling legs. I couldn’t talk above a whisper.
And then, with no warning, came an outraged scream, “No! No! No! No!”, and Gavin reappeared, crashing into one of the people who’d created a protective phalanx around me. It wasn’t until he screamed again and flew through the air to land on his back, more or less at my feet, that I recognized Valentina and a classic jujitsu, over-the-shoulder throw. She knelt on his chest, but he wasn’t struggling. In fact, he was completely still, and I looked with some alarm at the growing blood pool on the ground around his head.
“Head wounds bleed,” Valentina said to me, coolly efficient, as she tied his hands together with—were those zip ties? Who carried zip ties around? And then I remembered why I shouldn’t be so surprised. She half-turned and zip-tied his ankles together, too. “He’ll probably be fine when he wakes up.”
“That was—very impressive,” I croaked. She shrugged.
From the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of another familiar face, and I turned to look. Jacob made me an odd little salute and a rubber-faced smile Grandfather was standing there, too, speaking on his phone, looking pale and resolute.
“How did you all find me?”
“Apparently, you’ve had a sort of honor guard keeping an eye on you, thanks to your grandfather’s friends,” Ben said.
I tottered over to Gavin, who was starting to come around, and kicked him, hard, in the ribs. It probably would have hurt him more if I hadn’t been barefoot. As it was I dislocated my baby toe, and an EMT had to put it back in place, but I didn’t care.
Valentina shrugged out of her jacket. I thought she meant to use it under Gavin’s head, and she was holding it out to me before I realized I was in my bra. Not a sports bra, either, but a frothy little confection of purple satin and lace. I refused to be embarrassed. I was part of a grand tradition of fierce women in underwear: Me, Wonder Woman, and Brandi Chastain.
“What’s goin’ on?” I heard Nat’s voice before he pushed his way through. “Have you found her? What are you doin’ out here in your scanties?” he added, catching sight of me and sounding slightly scandalized. He frowned. “Is it Mardi Gras?” Before I could answer, he looked down at Gavin, still flat-out and bleeding. I knew what was coming next. Nat’s eyes fluttered, and he went down like a house of cards, falling against Grandfather, who put out an arm to hold him up until he and Jacob eased him to the floor and propped him gently against the wall.
“He’s been frantic,” Ben said quietly to me, looking over at Grandfather and Nat. “Both of them,” he added.
I started to pull on the jacket, but the sleeve scraped painfully against the burns on my arm. I pulled it around my shoulders instead.
Ben had a supportive arm at my back. He nuzzled my ear. “Nice bra,” he whispered.
Gavin was taken to St. Francis by the EMTs, who arrived more or
less at the same time as Inspector Lichlyter. I was afraid she wouldn’t take me seriously when I explained why he would need a heavy police guard—less for his own protection than for everyone else’s. I wasn’t sure exactly what was required to get someone called a serial killer, but I felt three murders (nearly four, if we counted the attempt on Janine’s life) and a kidnapping qualified him for special handling. Somewhat to my surprise, she agreed. She even said, as the EMTs were treating my burned arm, that I was probably in shock, and she could wait a day to interview me. She and Grandfather exchanged nods as she was leaving.
The guest room door burst open as Ben and I reached the top of my apartment stairs, and Davo thundered down the hallway and snatched me off my feet in a painful bear hug. “Jeez, Theo, where the hell were you? We had half the fuc—flaming neighborhood hunting for you. Your granddad told me to go to bed a couple of hours ago; I got exams today or I’d have kept looking. Damn, I’m glad you’re okay. You know you smell really weird, right? You should get a shower.”
He wasn’t wrong. Ben wrapped my bandaged arm in a plastic bag so I could stand under blissfully hot water and sluice off the last eighteen hours. We found a note from Nat written a few hours earlier, saying he’d walked and fed Lucy and I had better CALL ASAP!!!
Lucy woke up, stayed in the bathroom with me, and licked the water off my lower legs when I got out of the shower.
I was two steps into the bedroom, wrapped in a bathrobe and looking forward to falling face down on my bed, when Ben followed me in and said, “Okay, there’s good news and bad news.”
“Oh God, really?”
“Well, no. It’s the same news. I guess it depends how you look at it. Nat called. Everyone’s at The Coffee, and they all want to know how you’re doing, and Nat says if you go there now and let them see you, it will probably save you a hundred separate conversations later. Your call.”
I dropped my head against his chest. “I have to go, don’t I?”
“Afraid so.”
“You coming?”