Avengers of Blood (Cass Elliot Crime Series - Book 2)

by Woods, Gae-Lynn

  Cass poked her. “That’s not the Max I know.”

  “She grew up somewhere along the way.”

  “How did he know where you were staying?”

  “I’m not sure. The hotel receipt was in my jeans pocket, along with my room key. He might’ve picked my pocket out on the dance floor and realized I was in the Westin. Or maybe he followed me from the hotel to the club.”

  “Did you call the police?”

  She shook her head, refusing to look at Cass.

  “Why not?”

  Maxine stood and turned to face Cass, gaze focused on the ground. Her hands shook as she unbuttoned the top of her billowing blouse. She dipped the left side down and Cass caught her breath. A circling, loping scar started at Maxine’s protruding collar bone and disappeared beneath the lacy edge of her bra. A searing heat ran the length of Cass’s scar, which was eerily similar to Maxine’s, and her heart galloped against her ribs. It could be a coincidence that Maxine was raped by a man who left a physical reminder in the form of a scar. Or, and the thought nearly paralyzed Cass, maybe the same man had raped them both. She opened her mouth to speak but was struck dumb by a rising wave of panic.

  “It’s okay. It doesn’t hurt anymore.” Maxine pulled the shirt together and buttoned it, then stiffened as a biker rode past, his face obscured by a helmet and the indigo shadows. After he passed, she pulled a plastic baggie from her pocket. With trembling hands, Cass smoothed it flat to display a note. It was written in black ink on a piece of paper from a Westin notepad:

  Talk and I’ll cut them off. I’m watching.

  Cass fought a shudder. “Do you have any other evidence from him?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If you’d gone to the police or a hospital, they would’ve collected semen, combed for his pubic hairs, swabbed for DNA, that kind of thing.” Cass patted the bench, soothed by the routine questions. “Did you collect anything like that the next morning?”

  Maxine sat and shook her head.

  “Did he wear a condom?”

  “I’m pretty sure he didn’t.”

  “Have you been tested for HIV?”

  “I’m clean. For other diseases, too.”

  “What do you remember about him?”

  “Not much. He was white. I think his hair was dark. He looked like a million other frat boys.”

  Cass rested her chin in her hand, thoughts whirling as she tried to match Maxine’s details to her own. “What made you think he was part of a fraternity? His hair, build, did he wear a certain type of clothes, or have a fraternity symbol on his clothes or jewelry?”

  “So much of it is a blur.” Maxine clasped her hands in her lap and her fingers scrambled over one another. Her face was fierce. “I have a memory of short, neat hair and dark clothes. And one of those chiseled faces.”

  “That’s a start. Anything else?”

  She took her lower lip beneath her teeth and chewed lightly before speaking. “The rest is kind of garbled, I guess from the drugs.”

  “Give it a try. What do you remember?”

  The park’s trail lights snapped on, creating golden cones in the growing gloom. A lone man leaned against one of the light poles while a portly Dachshund explored the bushes nearby. Maxine stiffened. “I need to go.”

  “No, Max. Not yet. He’s just walking his dog. I ought to give him a ticket for letting the thing off its leash.”

  Maxine looked over her shoulder at the man, who had turned and was walking in their direction. “What if it’s him? He can’t see me with you, Cass, with the cops.”

  “We’re hidden, tucked under the tree. Protected. And I’ll duck my head,” Cass soothed. “Tell me what you remember, and once he’s out of sight, you can leave, okay? That way, if it is the guy who raped you, he won’t know where you went.”

  She nodded then, uncertain. Her voice was barely a whisper. “I have nightmares. And I know they’re mixed up, but I dream about the rape. I feel this heavy pressure on my chest and a burning along my scar. I’m scared to death and can’t move and he’s hovering over me.” Her breathing quickened and Cass reached out to hold Maxine’s hand, trying to control her own breathing. “I’m looking up at him and his face is all saggy, like it’s melting.”

  “Can you identify any of his features?”

  Maxine pressed her lips together and stood her bicycle upright. “It must be the drugs, but his face was messed up, like he was wearing a mask.”

  Cass’s pulse accelerated. “What kind of mask?”

  “You’ll think I’m stupid.”

  “No, Maxine, I promise I won’t. Sometimes your brain gathers useful information even when it’s under stress.” Cass looked at her friend. “What kind of mask did he wear?”

  Maxine closed her eyes and Cass fought not to vomit as her friend spoke. “It’s totally creepy. But I swear that in my nightmares I’m being raped by that president from the seventies who was impeached, Richard Nixon.”

  CHAPTER 65

  HITCH GLANCED DOWN AT the cell phone when it rang, surprised that the old man was calling so soon. He’d been away from Arcadia for six weeks now, and had expected the phone to stay silent for many weeks to come. He lifted it to his ear. “Evening, sir.”

  “How are you, son?”

  “Just fine. And you?”

  “How soon can you get home to Arcadia?”

  Home. Hitch rolled the word around in his mind while he looked across the bunkhouse. It buzzed with chatter from a Mexican radio station and reeked of stale pinto beans, cigarettes, and farts. Two men played checkers at a small table, and at another, four men were deep into a game of poker. Home was a word Hitch had never understood, but the little cabin secluded deep on the old man’s property was a lot closer to whatever home was than this dump. He checked his watch. “Tomorrow morning, sir, if I hitch. It’ll take about five hours if I drive away.”

  “Will there be any trouble with the vehicle?”

  Hitch glanced out the window at the selection of battered pickups. His gaze landed on a rusted Ford with no registration. He could swap the plates and doubted the ranch’s owners would even realize the heap was missing until Sunday, when they delivered supplies. “No, sir.”

  “Good. Go straight to the cabin. I’ll get some food out there and come by late tomorrow morning.”

  “Yes, sir.” Hitch closed the phone and silently stuffed his few belongings into his backpack. Without a backward glance, he took the Ford’s keys from a peg near the door and vanished into the night, his thoughts already on the future and the beautiful detective with fire in her hair.

  CHAPTER 66

  “AND THEY ALL LIVED happily ever after,” Cass said, smoothing the sheets around her niece and kissing the little girl’s forehead. The fresh scent of strawberry shampoo and baby powder brought a smile to Cass’s lips. Phoebe had suffered a bout of Daddy-homesick-itis this afternoon and Harry quickly scooped his youngest daughter up from daycare and brought her back to the Elliot home. Seeing that he was still up to his elbows designs, Cass volunteered to give Phoebe her bath and put her to bed. There was something pure and almost soothing about watching a child’s eyelids droop as they drifted into dreamland, and Cass’s mind was tranquil now after the shock of Maxine’s revelations. She stood and switched off the bedside lamp, turning as Phoebe called from the bed, voice thick with sleep.

  “Auntie Cass?”

  “Yes, Feebs?”

  “Did they really live happily ever after?”

  “Yes, they did.”

  “Did the princess keep her crown?”

  “Of course she did.”

  “Good,” Phoebe sighed, rolling over and tugging the covers with her.

  Cass left the door open a crack and flipped on the hall light. Across the hall, the door to Bobby and Mack’s old room was ajar, and Cass frowned at the sound of snoring. Farther along, her father’s bedroom door was open. Cass knocked and waited for his reply. As with the rest of the house, little had changed since he
r mother’s death over twenty years ago. Her father was sitting in the rocking chair that her mother had used to quiet all seven of their children. A paperback, illuminated by a puddle of white light from a bedside lamp, lay open in his lap. From its size and shape, Cass recognized it as The Big Book from Alcoholics Anonymous.

  “Hey,” she said.

  Abe Elliot smiled at his only daughter. “Hey yourself.”

  She hooked a thumb at the hallway. “Is that Goober?”

  “Harry said he turned up asking to spend the night again, and he didn’t have the heart to turn Goober away. But it worked fine, because Goober played Go Fish with Phoebe for hours. She won every game, and I think Goober really wanted to win.” He glanced at his open door. “Is Phoebe asleep?”

  “Finally,” Cass said. “I had to tell her the princess story three times before she’d had enough.”

  Abe cocked his head, a thoughtful expression on his face. “You never went through a princess phase.”

  “I wonder why?”

  “You probably didn’t have a chance. With six older brothers, you played cowboys and Indians, cops and robbers, and built forts out in the woods. But you had plenty of green Army men to play with.”

  Cass grinned. “They were everywhere, and always mutilated. Bobby used to bite their heads off.”

  “He did, didn’t he? I wonder if he ever passed them, or if they’re still stuck in his colon?”

  “Daddy,” she protested, sitting on the bed, “that’s disgusting.”

  Abe frowned. “Come to think of it, I don’t remember that you even had a Barbie doll.”

  “I didn’t, but Big Momma made a dress for G.I. Joe, do you remember?”

  Abe laughed out loud, then covered his mouth. “Out of an old red-checkered tablecloth. Was it Lloyd who got so upset about that?”

  “It was Mack. He was still young enough to love all those G.I. Joes and be offended that I’d tried to turn one of them into a girl.”

  Abe was giggling so hard tears were in his eyes. “Mack stripped that doll naked and chased you around the house with it, trying to explain the difference between boys and girls.”

  Cass grinned. “I think that was the first time I realized I wasn’t a boy.”

  Abe’s expression sobered and he fingered the book in his lap. “After your mother died, I worried that I couldn’t raise a girl. I’d had so much experience with six boys, I wasn’t sure I could teach you to do girl things.”

  “You did all right,” Cass said. “Between you and Big Momma, I ended up okay. At least I’m not a cross-dresser.”

  “No, you turned out pretty wonderful, if I do say so myself.”

  Cass’s heart swelled. Her father’s love was something she never questioned, but his praise was rare. “Thanks, Daddy.”

  “Was there something you wanted?”

  She glanced at the book in his lap. “I know you’re not supposed to talk about who goes to meetings, right?”

  He nodded slowly.

  “I need to clear someone. He isn’t really a suspect in one of the murders, but it would be good if I could confirm that he was at an AA meeting.” Her voice was soft when she continued. “Did you go Wednesday?”

  “I got back in time for the six o’clock meeting.”

  “There’s a guy named Joshua who says he was there. He has red hair, a bushy mustache, and his head is,” she motioned with her hands, “narrow.”

  Abe suppressed a smile. “He’s kind of unforgettable.”

  “Was he there?”

  “He told you he was?”

  She nodded.

  Abe ran a hand along his cheek, rough with the day’s growth of white beard. Cass loved that whispery sound. “Then I guess I’m not violating a confidence if I confirm that, am I?”

  “Thanks, Daddy.”

  Cass pecked him on the cheek and left him to his reading.

  _____________

  AFTER A QUICK SHOWER, she slipped into a t-shirt and shorts, surprised at how tender the scar on her chest felt, almost as if it were newly carved. Cass checked her email for new notifications, found none, and turned the laptop off. She slid under the covers and leaned against the headboard, finally allowing herself to delve into the emotions stirring since Maxine’s confession about the rape.

  The circumstances of Maxine’s pickup and doping were similar to Cass’s own, but that type of thing was far too common to mark Maxine’s attacker as the man who had raped Cass. The carving on the chest, however, was unique. As he had done with Cass, the rapist used a very sharp knife on Maxine, slicing barely deep enough to draw blood, but deep enough to leave a scar. Cass tried to remember the section of scar Maxine had shown her. It was still pinkish, which meant that it was relatively new, probably less than a year old. It followed the same meandering path as Cass’s did and was similar enough to be drawn by the same hand. And then there was the mask. If the cuts weren’t evidence enough that the same man committed these crimes, the Richard Nixon mask was.

  It had been six years since Cass’s rape. She doubted that he’d been inactive for that long and only started raping again when he spotted Maxine. But it was strange, perhaps more than coincidence that he picked two women from Arcadia. If he kept to the same pattern of spotting women at a club, doping them, then raping and cutting them, it was unusual that no reports of his crimes had appeared in the news. In Dallas, or elsewhere. His little notes must be working.

  The evidence she’d collected the morning after her rape was in her bathroom cabinet. At the time, she hadn’t really known what she was doing. But she used moistened toilet tissue to swab the glazed and cracking traces of semen from her thighs, combed her pubic hair for traces of his, and used clear tape to lift fingerprints from any possible surface in the hotel room. Every bit of it was stuffed in a tampon box she kept beneath her sink. Given that she was clueless about forensic procedures at the time, she hadn’t done a bad job. Any DNA on the pubic hairs would still be good. The semen would be hit or miss. And the fingerprints? Given the number of people in and out of a hotel room, it was hard to say what kind of hits might come back.

  Cass wondered why she hadn’t told Maxine that she’d been raped, almost certainly by the same man. Why hadn’t she confided in her best friend? Given herself the relief of solidarity? Perhaps she had been silent for too long. Maybe it was time to start talking. Not without caution, but talking to people she trusted. Cass thought about Maxine’s gaunt face, the huge eyes, that too-skinny body, and decided that she would start feeling Mitch and Kado out about how to process evidence that wasn’t collected from a crime scene. Tomorrow, she’d even take the tampon box and stick it in her locker, just in case she worked up the courage to talk to them. If he’d raped Cass and Maxine, there were certainly other women out there whose lives had been damaged, if not outright destroyed by this man.

  He was worth hunting.

  And just maybe, she thought as she reached out to switch off the lamp, he was worth killing.

  FRIDAY

  CHAPTER 67

  IT WAS EARLY, BARELY six o’clock, and conversations in The Golden Gate Café were muted when Goober and Cass pushed inside to hear Dolly Parton’s sweet voice coming from the jukebox. Cass yawned widely. She was weary from a night of bizarre dreams, where Richard Nixon sliced open Donna Moore’s paintings and sketches, interpreting their meaning.

  Wilbur and Wallace Pettigrew lifted a chin in greeting, as did the lawyers in the corner. She waved the folded paper, and then followed their glances to a booth in the corner. Her lip curled as she spotted Officer Hugo Petchard holding hands with Stan’s new waitress, Junie. Cass hurried to her customary booth, Goober trailing in her wake, and she sat with her back to the happy couple while Goober slid into the seat opposite.

  She’d found him in the dusty kitchen this morning, face confused as he contemplated the handle duct-taped to the refrigerator. His dark, thinning hair was neatly combed and he smelled of soap and toothpaste. She grinned at his lost expression. “Guess
you’d better come with me to The Golden Gate, Goob.”

  “What about my mower?”

  “I’ll call Bruce and get him to hook up the trailer and bring her to town when he comes. He’s got an early class today, so he’ll probably get her to The Gate before you finish your pancakes.”

  Satisfied, Goober had followed Cass from the house, stopping to slip his key into the little machine’s ignition. The roads into Arcadia were quiet this early in the morning, and she was pretty sure that Goober had drifted back to sleep against the passenger door, rousing when she parked at the courthouse and cut the engine.

  Cass’s hair was still damp from the shower she’d taken after her run, and she loosened the French twist at her neck and combed the wine-colored strands into place with her fingers before retwisting the knot. Glancing up to speak to Goober, she was startled to see Officer Mojo Franklin sitting in a booth by the front door, and even more surprised to see a laptop open on the table next to his breakfast. She had never known him to willingly work with a computer. He was in uniform, indicating that he planned to be at work on an official basis this morning. He met her eyes and flashed a wan smile.

  Stan Overheart arrived with two steaming mugs of coffee and a fresh pitcher of cream as the jukebox switched to Queen’s “I Want to Break Free”. “Hey, Cass. Hey, Goober. What can I get for you?”

  “Twenty breakfast burritos to go. You can fit five coffees in each of those carrier things, right?”

  He nodded.

  “Okay, ten coffees. Lots of cream and picante sauce on the side.”

  “Done. Goober, the works?”

  He nodded. “And double bacon?”

  “You’ve got it.”

  Cass stopped Stan before he turned away. “What’s up with Junie and Petchard?”