LUCY: The Complete Lucy Kendall Series with Bonus Content (The Lucy Kendall Series Book 5)

by Stacy Green

  I said nothing, walking briskly to the car. Lennox caught up with me, two quick beeps from the SUV indicating he’d unlocked it. I jerked open the passenger door and sat down, making sure to slam it shut.

  Lennox slid into the driver’s seat. “Look, I’m sorry. I should have told you that Chris visited his father last month. But to be fair, I only found out this morning. I thought if I told you it might mess with your head.”

  “You wanted to get my reaction,” I said. “To make sure I didn’t know.”

  “Not at all,” Lennox said. “You were so sure Chris hadn’t spoken with his father that I was afraid finding out might throw off your game. And yeah,” he sighed, starting the car. “I knew he talked about you–or a woman I assumed was you. Weston wasn’t lying. Chris didn’t name any names. I thought if he actually talked, things might go better if you didn’t know Chris had been here. And I was right.”

  “You threw me to the wolves,” I said. “Chris hid more things from me than I realized. You didn’t tell me because you want to be able to say ‘I told you so,’ if it turns out Mary breaks him.”

  “You’re wrong,” he said. “I want to find Chris and his mother. And his grandfather. I don’t care whose feelings get hurt in the process.” Lennox hit the gas. “And my plan worked. Weston connected to you, somehow.”

  I didn’t bother to explain why John Weston connected to me. The agent would eventually figure it out for himself. “Fine. Then I want some answers.”

  “Go ahead. I’ll do my best.”

  “Yesterday, when we showed you that kill line, the route we thought Mary’s father might have taken. We were all bouncing off the walls, and you took it in stride. And today, Weston’s confession didn’t shock you.”

  Lennox drove out of the gate, waving at the guard. His silence only proved he had something major to tell me. I tried to remind myself that he was the FBI agent, and I was just a private investigator here because he allowed it, but my ego and personal investment mucked up my ability to rationalize.

  Once we entered the highway, he spoke. “I’ve had my suspicions about a father-daughter team since the Mary Weston-Beckett case hit my desk last fall.”

  “Why?” How could he have possibly known about Alan?

  “First, we knew Mary was a killer. And when I started going over the Lancaster stuff, I saw something that freaked me the hell out.” Lennox gripped the wheel, obviously still affected by the memory. “My first year as an agent, I worked a lot of cold cases. Some of the very same ones Kelly looked at yesterday, although not Myra Weston’s. That never came up, and if it had, I would have made the connection sooner. But I saw the pattern, and I considered a long-haul trucking route. Those files you all saw, they were minimal. You didn’t see the crime scene photos.”

  “Bad?”

  “Horrific. Multiple sexual assaults, torture. The girls were bound and two of the autopsies showed it had been several days since they’d eaten. But it was the sepsis that rang a bell.”

  “Mary and her unwashed foreign objects,” I said.

  “Some of the torture marks were similar to those found in Lancaster,” Lennox said. “Lighter marks, flesh wounds from a pocket knife in specific places. Possible signatures. When I spoke to Assistant District Attorney Hale last fall and heard about how Mary and his stepbrother met, I started to wonder. Because like you, I believed Lancaster wasn’t her first go around.”

  “Alan was in Lancaster,” I said. “For all we know, John Weston did very little of the crimes. Alan might have been the main male perpetrator.”

  “Did Chris ever mention his grandfather being around?”

  “Not to me,” I said. Which meant exactly zilch at this point. “I’m sure ADA Hale would have told you if he had. But there’s quite a few things Chris hasn’t told me.”

  Lennox took the exit for the airport. “He definitely doesn’t have genetics working in his favor. And with the position they’ve got him in now, assuming he’s still alive, he’s vulnerable. How far can they push him? What will he do to survive?”

  “He won’t kill anyone.” I didn’t know if I believed that anymore. People could be pushed to do terrible things in the heat of stress.

  That’s what I had done, and where had it gotten me? Is that the person I wanted to be? Because my chosen path would certainly land me in the supermax before it was all over, and with how many deaths on my soul? Or even worse, on the run like Mary, using fake names and constantly looking over my shoulder, wondering if today was the day I’d finally be caught.

  Kelly’s words drifted back to me, and I thought again about the job opening with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Maybe I could make a difference there. I could carve out a new life, reinvent myself. Make peace with the bad decisions of the past and focus on the future.

  The idea sounded like a fantasy, but after being inside the prison and seeing the pale, worn countenance of John Weston, one I very much wanted to cling to. At least I still had the opportunity to try to fix my life.

  Thanks to his own foolish decision–something I was certainly guilty of–Chris had everything against him.

  On the plane, awaiting take off, Lennox made calls and barked orders. I sat down and tried to come to grips with everything I’d learned today, but the understanding wouldn’t come. I felt as if I’d stepped into the middle of a movie and had no way to orient myself. No clue what to do next.

  Lennox was about to make it worse. He stopped at my seat. I’d already buckled in and closed my eyes, hoping for sleep. “What is it?”

  “There’s been a second sighting in Virginia. With Chris.”

  25

  Lennox left me at the station with a cursory goodbye and a promise to update me on the sighting. In the conference room, more files and case jackets had arrived. Kelly’s and Ryan’s heads were bent at painful angles, each of them lost in their own work. Todd stood at the whiteboard, scrawling more notes.

  “There’s been another sighting. This time Chris was with them.” My voice sounded scratchy. “In Virginia, the gas station outside of Dale City. Lennox is on his way.” I sank into the chair next to Kelly and scooted as close as I dared. Somehow sitting next to her cleared some of the mottled air in my head. “John Weston talked. Mary’s father was with them in Lancaster, and he threatened to kill Chris if John didn’t take the blame.”

  All three of them stared. Kelly squeezed my hand, and without thinking, I leaned my head on her shoulder.

  “We’re searching for anything on Mary and Alan Kent,” Ryan said. “So far it’s pretty scarce, which isn’t surprising since they probably haven’t used the name since the late 50s. We also found a few other unsolved cases in both Maryland and Virginia that might be their work.” He paused, his shaggy bangs nearly in his eyes. “Or his. Alan’s I mean. We’re not sure, but it fits what we know about the other cases. Just a different interstate.”

  “We don’t know what he did before 1972,” I said. “Other than taking his daughter to ride with him on the road. Stands to reason he started killing in his truck then.”

  “She was just a kid,” Todd said, his trademark empathy seeping through. “If he killed them in front of her, it’s no wonder she turned out this way.”

  “I have no doubt he did.” I assumed I didn’t need to explain why. Surely they could see all of the signs: Mary’s inability to bond with her sons, her stone cold killing, her skill at making any situation work for her. She’d been groomed to be a killer.

  “Now they’ve got Chris.” Emotion snagged in my throat, and I stumbled away from the table. “Excuse me.”

  I couldn’t allow them to see me cry. Especially Todd, although I knew he understood. Whatever lies and games Chris might have played with me, my heart ached for the torment he must be enduring. Mary wouldn’t stop until one or both of them were dead. The thought left me cold and shaking. Leaning against the wall, clammy with sweat and outright exhaustion, I searched for the ladies’ room, but my legs gave out a few f
eet away. I slipped to the chilly floor and put my head on my knees.

  Dry sobs wracked my chest. I rocked back and forth, unsure if I cried for Chris or myself or something more. In that moment, if I could have ended it all, I would have.

  “Lucy.” Kelly sat down beside me, her delicate arm wrapping around my shoulders. “It’s going to be all right. Somehow.”

  “No, it’s really not.” It hurt to talk through the tears. “No matter what happens, none of us are going to be all right. Not like we once were.”

  “Well no,” Kelly said. “But I accepted that a long time ago.”

  Shame heated my face. “I’m sorry, I wasn’t thinking.”

  “It’s fine.” She gave me a squeeze. “I think it’s about the new normal, you know? Like you go through this period of agony and then denial, telling yourself you can just deal with whatever happened. And then you slam the bottom–for me it was running away from that last foster home and nearly dying of exposure, you remember that?”

  I shoved the hair out of my face and tried to stow the tears. “You scared me to death. That winter was so cold, and I thought for sure you’d lose a foot. Not to mention the pneumonia.”

  “You know being in that hospital was the safest I’d felt?” She asked. “Even when CPS originally rescued me from my stepfather, and I spent a few weeks at Children’s Hospital, I still believed he’d find a way to come for me. And if he didn’t, one of his buddies would.”

  “I would have never allowed that to happen.” Kelly had still been a teenager when she’d been rescued, and CPS’s hope was the light atmosphere of Philadelphia’s Children’s Hospital and its highly trained staff would make her feel safe. She’d spent the entire time curled in a ball, refusing to look at or speak to anyone.

  “I know that now,” she said. “But the second time, with the pneumonia, something changed. I realized I wanted to live, and that just maybe, I had some kind of shot at a different life–a decent life. Even if I had to learn to accept my baggage.”

  Even after all these years, I couldn’t fathom how Kelly had found the strength to do more than simply exist. Her struggles made my problems seem woefully small, and I finally found my composure. “Sitting there with John Weston, I knew he’d talk. You know why?”

  “Because you convinced him you understood Mary.”

  “That was only part of it, and more for Lennox’s benefit,” I said. “I knew he’d talk because like any good psychopath, he can read people. Smell his own kind. He picked up my scent as soon as I entered that room. I saw it in his eyes. Almost like we bonded.”

  “Still, why give you anything?”

  “Because he still cares about his son.” I told her about Chris’s conversation with his father. “Lennox kept it from me because he wanted to preserve the situation. I’m still pissed, but I get it.”

  “Chris didn’t tell you,” Kelly said. “I guess that’s par for the course.”

  I nodded. “But this was in the last month or so, when I started losing it. Chris is feeling abandoned again, so he goes to his father and ends up telling him all about me. I guess John Weston sees me and thinks, maybe this one is deranged enough to defeat Mary and her father once and for all. Either way, he’s got nothing to lose. He practically asked me right in front of Lennox if I had the stuff to best Mary. Meaning could I kill her and save Chris.”

  “I think you might be reading into things,” Kelly said. “Projecting.”

  “I love you,” I said, “but you weren’t there. Trust me, he sensed it. That’s the only reason he talked.”

  “All right then. So what are you going to do about it?”

  I looked at her through still-leaking eyes. “I have to find a way to stop Mary. Without becoming any more like her.”

  “You’re not.”

  “But I could be,” I said. “How many shades off am I, really?”

  She tapped her fingers against my wrist. “That’s the difference. You’re aware of it. You see your flaws. She used hers to the worst sort of advantage.”

  “I’ve done the same.”

  “But you won’t anymore,” Kelly said. “You can embrace those flaws and use them without making certain choices. And we can find her before Chris is too far gone.”

  “You really believe that?”

  “I have to. How else do you think I managed to make this trip?”

  26

  Kelly and I returned to the conference room to find Todd and Ryan buried in the files. Todd glanced up when we entered, questions in his eyes. I ignored them and sat down. He sighed, pulling off his reading glasses and tossing them onto the table, where they skidded to a stop. “My eyes are about to start bleeding from all this data. I don’t think we’re going to find anything more.”

  My mind remained on the sighting in Virginia. Chris had been alive as of roughly three A.M. this morning, able to walk on his own. That’s all Lennox would tell me without looking at the security tape himself. It could be hours before he decided to update us, and by then I might lose whatever vestiges of sanity I had left.

  The shy officer manning the station’s entry appeared in the doorway. “Detective Beckett?”

  “Yes?”

  “There’s a man on the phone who claims to be your father, a Josh Beckett. He was told to contact you here.”

  Todd’s face hardened into smooth stone. “Please patch him through.”

  Less than a minute later, the phone rang. Todd took his time approaching it, circling the black device as if it might blow up. Finally, he hit the speaker button. “This is Detective Beckett.”

  A scratchy throat cleared the room, the sound of phlegm and sickness echoing between the walls. “Son? This is Dad.”

  “Right. You’re on speaker at the Jarrettsville, Maryland police station. I assume someone tracked you down about Mary?” Todd might as well have been speaking to a stranger. No, that was wrong. He treated strangers with much more respect. Not that I blamed him.

  “Er, yeah. Can we talk?”

  “I need to know anything you can tell me about her,” Todd said. “What name did she give when you met her?”

  “Mary.”

  “Her last name.” Todd dropped his chin to his chest, hiding his face.

  “Weston.”

  “That didn’t ring any bells for you?”

  “Why should it? It’s not exactly an uncommon name, and damned near six years had passed.” The man’s tone flared, and I hoped Todd reigned in his emotions enough to keep his father on the line.

  “All right, then. What about her father? Was he around? Did she talk about him?”

  Josh coughed again, the sound coming from deep in his chest. Hopefully he had a place to stay in this bitter cold. “You don’t remember?”

  “No,” Todd said. “I wasn’t around that much, and I tried my hardest to forget.”

  “Look, I’m sorry,” Josh said. “I was all sorts of messed up after losing your mother and then my job. Mary was just there, and she was messed up too. We kind of gravitated towards each other.”

  “Right,” Todd said. “Again, her father? And messed up how?”

  “She’d been in that accident a few months before we met. Her father had been driving. Wrapped the car around a tree, and she got the worst of it. Messed up her brain for a while. That’s why they didn’t speak.”

  Todd looked at me as he spoke. “They weren’t speaking?”

  “Nope,” Josh said. “She hated him when I met her. Or said she did. I always figured it was more like anger and wanting him to ask for forgiveness. Anyway, she’d just come out of the hospital for depression when we met.”

  “She was hospitalized?” I couldn’t stop myself. “Do you know where?”

  Josh didn’t seem to mind the intrusion. “Somewhere south of Philly, that’s all I know. She spent about three months there, and when she came out, she was loaded on anti-depressants and anti-anxietys and whatever else they gave her.” He paused. “I shouldn’t have dipped into her stash. That’s wh
ere all my real troubles started.”

  Todd scowled, and I knew he wanted to say more. Remind his father that hooking up with Mary in the first place was the real trouble. “Did she ever ask you to kill for her?”

  “What? No. I’d have gone straight to the police. That’s why I still can’t believe this. I mean, sure, she got to be a real bitch after Justin was born. More and more of a meanness came out, and I think that’s ’cause she went off the meds and never went back on. I might have worried about her beating the shit out of him. But never anything like what the police are saying now.”

  “What about her father?” I asked. “Did she reconcile with him?”

  “Not that I know of,” Josh said. “But near the end of our marriage, I was pretty far gone. Even before Justin’s problem. I spent too many hours out drinking, just to get away.”

  “Justin’s problem,” Todd spat, “was that Mary beat and raped his friend with a spoon and then let him take the blame for it. He lost a decade of his life because of her, not to mention the emotional trauma. And you just walked away.”

  Kelly squeaked beside me. Ryan’s eyes went wide. The room heated with awkward tension, the already too-close walls threatening to close in.

  “That was her fault too,” Josh said. “Any time we’d argue or I’d ask too many questions, she’d throw stuff in my face. How I couldn’t keep a job, that I was a bad father–anything she knew she could zing me with. And then she’d offer me one of her antidepressants and a drink, talking about how we just needed to chill out and relax. I didn’t want to fight anymore, so I gave in. You give in enough times, it becomes a habit.”

  Mary controlled Josh Beckett with drugs. I’d done the same thing to more than one of my victims.

  Todd had regained his composure. “Do you know of any land they might have owned? Any other names she used? Any place she’d run to now?”

  “She was a penny-pinching miser, I can tell you that,” Josh said. “She worked in the school cafeteria, and then she did side jobs cleaning houses, even though her arm and shoulder bothered her for a long time. She never gave any of the housecleaning money to the family. It all went into her emergency savings.”