by Osborne, Jon
Dana sighed, missing him more than she thought she could ever miss anyone. And even though the little boy wouldn’t be her natural child, the love she felt for him sure as hell felt natural enough to her. And who knew? Maybe she and Bradley could forge an even stronger since they’d actually chosen one another.
One thing was for sure: Dana couldn’t wait to find out.
She smiled at the thought of their upcoming play-date despite the uneasiness still boiling away in her stomach. Shelley Margolis would accompany them to the Cleveland Zoo for a fun-filled day of animal-watching, and Dana had very little doubt that the child psychologist would take notes the entire time regarding the way she and Bradley interacted with one another, so she’d really need to bring her “A” game that day.
Dana blew out a slow breath over her teeth and stretched her neck in a futile effort to relieve some of the tension knotting up her aching muscles. Flying economy was worse than wearing a straitjacket sometimes, but it had been all that she and Blankenship could get on such short notice – not to mention all the government would spring for. If she’d been able to, though, Dana would’ve paid for at least business class from her own pocket and would’ve considered it money well spent.
She let out another soft breath. Cramped flying quarters aside, she knew that if she never accomplished another thing in her entire life that she couldn’t afford to let down her new partner or his two little girls. Bradley, either. And to guard against that possibility, she’d need to dig down deep right into her very soul and gut it out even when the going got tough. Even when the going got impossible.
And even if it meant that she’d miss out on sleep for the next forty-eight hours.
Small price to pay, all things considered.
Dana shook her head. Hell, she’d stay up for a hundred hours if it meant that she and Blankenship could wrap up this horrific case and put away the heartless perpetrators behind it. Even for a seasoned investigator like her – someone who’d watched her own parents brutally butchered in front of her shocked and horrified eyes when she’d been just four years old – the vicious murders of the pregnant women had proven almost too much for to bear. Once again, death would have been too good for the monsters who’d carved out those unborn babies from their mother’s pregnant stomachs.
Then again, death wouldn’t have been a bad place to start.
Besides, Dana wasn’t really that tired right now, anyway. Far from it, actually. Frustrated? Yeah. Pissed off? Hell, yeah. Feeling like she might lose her mind and murder someone herself if another pregnant woman died another horrible death? You’d better fucking believe it. But not tired. Not even close. Her rage kept her awake; fueled her. After all, how could she feel tired after what had happened to those poor women?
She shuddered as the terrible reality of the situation chilled her all the way down to her bone marrow. Two pregnant black women and their unborn children had already died gruesome deaths, and no doubt there’d be more to come – and soon – if she and Blankenship didn’t start making some serious headway on this case. With any luck at all, though, they’d find the next bloody piece of the puzzle somewhere in the backseat of Betsy Campbell’s green Subaru hatchback, where the prize-winning musician had died on a deserted stretch of highway at the hands of some murdering white-supremacist asshole out there who’d thought it a perfectly reasonable proposition to cut an unborn baby from the distended stomach of an expecting woman.
Dana shook her head again and tried to reset her brain’s wiring. Try as she might, she just couldn’t shake the abrupt and extremely troubling suspicion that they’d missed something back in New York City.
But what the hell had they missed?
She ran through the day’s events in her mind again. She and Blankenship had done their due diligence on Jarvis’s apartment, questioning the man’s landlord before handing off the case to the very capable hands of another pair of federal agents from the NYC field office. And Jarvis had ruled himself out as a suspect in Betsy Campbell’s horrific death, doing everyone a huge favor by hurling himself off the Queensboro Bridge at ten a.m. that morning.
Dana tapped the side of her head in an effort to get her brain working more efficiently. It didn’t work at first, but then the bone-chilling realization suddenly dawned on her with all the subtlety of an aluminum baseball bat cracking hard across her forehead.
She sucked in a sharp breath through her nostrils that stabbed her lungs like a switchblade knife. Not only did it seem odd that someone capable of slicing unborn babies from pregnant women’s stomachs would feel such a high level of remorse so soon after committing his heartless crime, it was absolutely unthinkable.
She widened her pale blue eyes as the idea wormed its way even deeper into the center of her brain, her heartbeat skipping several beats in her chest.
She reached over and shook Blankenship awake.
Dana’s new partner emerged bleary-eyed from whatever dream he’d been having, obviously not pleased about having been roused from his slumber. “What is it?” Blankenship asked irritably, shaking his head in annoyance and blinking rapidly to clear the sleep from his tired brain.
Dana held his drowsy stare and gripped his right wrist forcefully enough to bring him back into the present. She needed him here for this. “Jarvis didn’t commit suicide,” she said, feeling her heartbeat notch up another fifty levels in her chest. “The son of a bitch was murdered.”
CHAPTER 30
When the last of the cops had finally cleared out an hour later, Angel found herself alone in the same house that she and Granny Bernice had shared since Angel had been a baby.
Her grandmother’s Baseball Weekly lay open across the kitchen table, the statistics that had caught Granny Bernice’s eye circled in red marker. In the upper-left margin of the open page, Granny Bernice had scrawled, Hafner’s gotta stop swinging at that first pitch! They’re always throwing him junk!
Going back out onto the porch, Angel held her kitten, Tinkerbelle, in her lap for the next hour, much too numb to cry. Much too numb to do anything, really, but sit there.
There were arrangements she’d have to make now, of course, and she wasn’t looking forward to any of them. The funeral Mass over at St Anthony’s… the burial at Edgewater Cemetery… dealing with her grandmother’s bank accounts and other financial concerns… dealing with the undertaker.
When the utter emptiness inside her chest finally threatened to swallow her alive twenty minutes later, she went back into the house and made her way across the kitchen before picking up the phone.
She paused and considered what she was about to do. Was she really ready to open this door again? she wondered.
She took a deep breath through her nostrils and let out the air again in a slow exhale over her bottom teeth. Before she could change her mind about what she was doing, she dialed a familiar number on the old-fashioned rotary phone hanging on the kitchen wall.
Was she really ready to open this door again?
Only one way to find out.
CHAPTER 31
Janice Wiley stood in front of her freshman Creative Writing class at New Mexico State University and went over the bullet-points of her lecture again.
“OK, everyone. So, we want to start out our stories with action, right? Grab the reader straight from the first page and they’re more likely to continue reading. Avoid passive voice whenever possible. Use strong verbs and always avoid adverbs like the plague.”
A blonde girl in the back of the class raised her hand.
“Yes, Jessica?”
“What’s the key to finding a literary agent, Dr. Wiley?”
Janice cleared her throat. “Wish I knew, honey. I’m just a frustrated novelist like the rest of you. Hell, my muse left me way before any of you kids were even born.”
“What’d she go and do a heartless thing like that for?” a boy in front asked.
Janice smiled. “Because she’s a heartless bitch, Justin. A mean, heartless bitch.”
&nb
sp; The entire class laughed.
Twenty minutes later, Janice dismissed the last class of the day on a Friday afternoon to go celebrate the weekend. Frat-house keggers awaited the less-inventive among her students while the more daring of their number would no doubt experiment with some clumsy same-sex romance in the back of the library stacks. And why not? Wasn’t that what college was all about? Trying out new things? In any event, Jackson Hall had been largely emptied out now as Janice crafted her lesson plan for the following week.
A moment later, a soft knock sounded at the door.
Janice looked up from her lesson plan to see a huge blonde man standing in her doorway. “May I help you, sir?” she asked.
The man smiled a set of perfectly straight white teeth at her. “I’ve got a creative writing question for you there, if you don’t mind, professor.”
Janice sighed. Though her office hours had been clearly posted on her door, it never failed that some random student would show up to pick her brain at five o’clock on a Friday afternoon. “What’s your question, sir?” she asked, trying her best to hide the impatience in her voice but no doubt falling far short. “I’ll see what I can do but it needs to be quick. I’ve got a doctor’s appointment that I need to keep in exactly forty-five minutes. I’ve been waiting two weeks for this appointment now and I really can’t afford to reschedule. These people make it very difficult to do so.”
The blonde man shifted uneasily from one foot to the other, still looming in the doorway and stretching his powerful-looking neck. “I’ll make it quick, I promise, professor. Anyway, what does it mean when they say you have to murder all your little darlings?”
Janice waved a hand in the air. “It’s nowhere near as dramatic as it sounds, I assure you. It’s a reference to purple prose, flowery writing. It means you have to cut out all the fat from your story, no matter how badly it hurts.”
The blonde man nodded and stepped inside the classroom, pulling shut the door behind him and producing a switchblade knife from the back pocket of his designer blue jeans before taking a menacing step in her direction. “Well, now, you’ve got a little darling in your stomach there right now, don’t you, nigger? Should I cut that out too? No matter how badly it hurts?”
A split-second later, Janice Wiley’s terrified screams echoed throughout the marble-tiled hallways of the largely deserted academic building. A hundred yards away – on the far side of the structure and shielded by a long table lined with Bunson burners – English major Joe Blanton and philosophy minor Kenneth Hammond broke their frantic embrace in the back of the chemistry lab and raised their eyebrows quizzically at one another.
Then the boys simply shrugged their shoulders and went back to what they’d been doing. After all, they’d waited a very long time for this day to finally arrive and whatever the screaming was about would just have to wait. This had to happen now or it was at risk of never happening at all.
And in the state each boy found himself currently, that simply wasn’t a realistic option at this point.
Wasn’t a realistic option, at all.
CHAPTER 32
Blankenship’s tired brown eyes as Dana’s words filtered through the fog in his brain and slammed hard into his cerebral cortex.
He sat up straighter in his seat and blew out a short, hard breath. “Well, I’ll be goddamned,” he said. “Didn’t even occur to me that whoever outfitted Jarvis with his fancy new suit would want to make good and goddamn sure that they didn’t leave any open ends behind. Make good and goddamn sure that the asshole didn’t sing out his poor little orphan heart if you and I got to him in time to demand a private concert. Fucking rookie mistake on my part.”
“On both our parts,” Dana corrected. “I was every bit as blinded as you. Didn’t occur to me either until just now.”
“Yeah, but you finally figured it out,” Blankenship said. He paused while his mind cleared further and his brain went to work more efficiently inside his skull. “Anyway, I’ll update Kendall and Mulvey when we touch down in Washington. But the question now is: what the fuck are we going to do about it?”
Dana shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ll touch base with Krugman when we land in Seattle and see what he thinks about the whole thing. Other than that, though, I have no idea.”
Blankenship shook his head. “I was dreaming about my little girls, you know,” he said, almost wistfully.
Dana smiled gently. “I don’t blame you. Those two little angels are certainly worth dreaming about. You’re a very lucky man, Bruce. Don’t ever forget that.”
Blankenship shook his head again. “Never do, sister.” He pulled back the sleeve on his navy-blue blazer and glanced down at his watch. “Anyway, we’ve still got another two hours before we touch down in Washington, so what do you say you and I put our time to good use instead of me sleeping it all away in La-La Land?”
Dana lifted her eyebrows. “What did you have in mind?”
Blankenship leaned forward in his seat and retrieved his briefcase from underneath the seat in front of him. Sliding out Lee Jarvis’s Macbook Pro, he flipped down his tray table and powered on the computer.
When the Macbook had cycled through all its start-up processes, he cracked his knuckles loudly and ran his fingertips deftly over the keypad. “Watch and learn, my dear Holmes,” he said. “I’m about to show you how I’m not entirely useless. I didn’t go to M.I.T. just for the chicks, you know.”
Dana gave him a look.
Blankenship pulled back his head in mock offence. “What? That was part of it, sure, but not the only thing.”
Dana rolled her eyes. “Whatever you say, Watson.” She nodded down at Jarvis’s computer. “Anyway, I don’t want to hear about how you broke the hearts of all the nerdy girls out in Massachusetts right now. Just hurry up and show me what you can do with that thing already.”
CHAPTER 33
“Oh my God, Angel. Just, oh my God.”
Malachai’s glistening brown eyes brimmed over with tears. He’d loved Angel’s grandmother, too – no matter how much good-natured ribbing the old woman had subjected him to.
Sitting close together on a bench at Edgewater Park with their knees touching, Angel and Malachai stared out at the massive merchant marine ships that were floating by on Lake Erie. A beautiful evening – still sunny and warm – bathed their skin like bathwater. Seagulls filled the blue sky above, calling out to each other noisily in their piercing voices as they rode the wind effortlessly on their outstretched wings.
“What are you going to do?” Malachai asked finally. “Are you going to stay in the house, or is that going to be too hard for you?”
He paused and looked down at the ground. “You can always stay with me, you know. I can always sleep on the couch.”
Angel brushed aside the subtle reference to his infidelity with a weak wave of her left hand. She knew that he wasn’t trying to add to her grief right now. He was trying to take away her pain, just like he’d always tried to do ever since they’d been seventeen years old. No matter what his other faults might be – and there were a hell of a lot of them, she knew – Malachai Grimes was still an extremely sensitive man. An extremely loving man. It was what had drawn her to the jerk in the first place.
Angel smiled gently at him. “Thank you, Malachai. We’ll see, but I think that I want to stay in the house for now, stay around her things. I don’t know if that makes any sense to you, but I really think it’s something I need to do at this point. For now, anyway.”
Malachai nodded. “It makes perfect sense, Angel. But if it ever gets to be too much for you, my offer stands. I know I haven’t always been the best boyfriend in the world but…”
She cut him off with a look before he could finish. She didn’t want to hear the rest right now. Couldn’t hear the rest right now, really. It was just too painful.
Looking deep into his soft brown eyes, Angel suddenly realized with her whole heart and mind and body and soul that Malachai would take away all her pain if
only he somehow could, and that would need to be enough for her.
For now, anyway.
That was when the tears finally came.
Malachai didn’t say anything else after that, just held Angel close on that park bench while she let all the sadness come spilling out through her eyes.
There was an awful lot of it.
CHAPTER 34
The sharp knife glanced off the copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses that Janice Wiley jerked up in front of her face just as the huge blonde man came lunging across the empty classroom at her.
Janice had never liked the book before – had always found it rather dry and almost impossible to understand in certain places – but now she absolutely loved the goddamn thing. From here on out, Joyce would always be her No. 1, go-to guy, no matter what. Come hell or high water, he’d be her favorite author for the rest of her life – however long or short that might turn out to be right now.
Her chair clattered down noisily to the floor as she scrambled to her feet and scurried around the desk, trying to keep some distance between herself and the huge blonde man as they went around in circles staring at each other like predator and prey. The blond man’s breathing sounded excited, like an animal that had smelled blood on its mortally wounded quarry and now sensed the presence of a long-overdue meal.
His piercing blue eyes glittered with undisguised hatred as Janice kicked off her high-heeled shoes in order to give her feet better traction on the slippery floor. Her heartbeat slammed violently against her ribcage, pumping blood furiously to all parts of her body and doing whatever the hell it could do to keep her alive. “What do you want from me?” Janice sobbed. “What did I do to you? Please leave me alone. I’m pregnant, for Christ’s sake!”
The blonde man sneered and whipped the sharp knife back and forth through the air. “I know that, bitch,” he hissed. “That’s exactly why I’m here. You and your race-traitor husband are fucking up my country with that mutant inside your stomach and now you’re going to die for it. You and that goddamn virus.”