by Anne Frasier
Jude suspected the first killings hadn’t been Iris’s idea. But when they needed higher numbers, she’d sacrificed her family, something she later regretted, like most people with a conscience would, even when dealing with relatives who’d hurt her deeply.
From off in the distance a train sounded its horn. They both heard it. “I knew she was guilty,” Jude said. “I just didn’t know how guilty.”
“She squealed, didn’t she? She told you about me.”
“She never said a word.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“It’s true. You killed her for no reason.”
“Doesn’t matter. The performance is over. By now thirteen people have been killed on live TV, and my boyfriend is on his way out of town. We’ll meet in a couple of weeks and spend the rest of our lives together.”
Boyfriend. “If you’re talking about Leo Pisa, he’s locked up downtown, soon to tell us everything he knows about you.”
“You’re lying!” It took Clementine a little while, but she finally started wailing. It almost drowned out the sound of the train.
CHAPTER 52
The drive from the bluff to the traffic bridge would have taken ten minutes at a normal pace. Uriah made it in five, easing through red lights, keeping his eyes open for pedestrians and bikers. As he drove, he put in a call to Molly, their information expert and all-around miracle worker. He told her where they were. “We need all train traffic stopped.”
“I’m on it.” Keys clicked.
“Contact Dispatch. We’re going to need backup.”
“Got that too.”
“What about Blaine Michaels?” Jude asked when Clementine finally stopped screaming to stand hunched over, hands on knees, sobbing. “He died on these tracks. I heard he was your boyfriend. I suspect it was murder. If so, we’ll prove it, along with everything else.”
“It doesn’t matter!” Clementine glanced over her shoulder at the water below. Was she thinking of jumping?
“Where’s Elliot Kaplan?” Jude asked. “What does he have to do with this?”
She became aware of the sound of the approaching train. Clementine heard it too. Without answering Jude’s question, she turned and ran.
Uriah pulled to a sharp stop at the foot of the bridge, dust flying. He jumped from the car and ran up the incline, slipping on loose gravel. Once the rails were no longer over solid ground, walking grew treacherous and the glimmer of water below his feet was dizzying. Out in the open, the wind kicked up, maybe as strong as twenty miles per hour. His jacket flapped and his hair snapped against his forehead.
The train was getting closer. The engine labored across the bridge, pulling an expanse of coal cars behind it. Keeping an eye on his feet and on his target—the running girl with a waving flag of blond hair—he moved forward.
Jude slipped her gun into the holster and ran after Clementine. The cry of a police siren drifted across the water. Train cars flew past, metal wheels clacking rhythmically, the iron rails bouncing, the close rush of movement disorienting.
Someone shouted from a boxcar. “Come on!” Hands were extended to both her and Clementine.
Uriah appeared on the other side of the bridge, running straight for the girl. She was trapped. Shouts from inside the car increased.
“Halt!” Uriah commanded.
Jude saw a glint of gunmetal. “Don’t shoot!”
Maybe the shout startled her. Maybe Clementine stepped into a hole, or tripped over something in the dark. What followed that shout happened so fast Jude wasn’t exactly sure of the cause.
Clementine was almost to the open door. People on the train were cheering her on, ready to grab her hand. Some held up phone lights meant to help, but maybe the lights themselves blinded her. She stumbled. She tried to correct, and then she vanished.
The shouting inside the car turned to screams.
The train’s brakes engaged and metal shrieked against metal until the giant beast came to a complete stop. Jude pulled out her phone and ran, shining the flashlight beam until she spotted what she was looking for. She crawled under the train, the heat of the wheels and rails hot against her face.
Clementine was still alive, but her injuries . . .
“I must be okay,” she mumbled. “It doesn’t hurt.”
Jude grasped her hand. “Look at me. Don’t look anywhere but at me.”
The girl’s head shifted slightly and her eyes locked with Jude’s. She was an evil person, a heartless person, but right now Jude only saw her as a frightened, dying child.
And she smelled like cookies.
It was over quickly. In a matter of seconds she quit breathing and her eyes went blank. Jude waited a moment, then crawled from under the train to join Uriah on the embankment.
Sirens and patrol lights were upon them. Kids jumped from boxcars and scrambled up the bluff, scattering like mice, loose rocks skittering to the ground behind them.
“Not how I wanted this to end,” Jude said.
Uriah put a reassuring arm around her. She didn’t recoil. “There was nothing else you could have done.”
There was always a better way. “I don’t like killing people. I don’t want to kill people.”
“You didn’t kill her.”
Two breathless cops appeared. “Holy hell,” one of them said, spotting the body on the ground. His face blanched.
More cops were swarming now, setting up a perimeter. A few train kids who hadn’t run off were giving statements, one girl wrapped in a blanket even though the temperature wasn’t much below sixty. Shock did that. Sucked all the heat from your body. The conductor was gesturing, and a few of his words drifted Jude’s way. “Not my fault.”
No, not his fault, but he would live with this the rest of his life. And then Jude had another thought. Had he been driving the night Michaels had been killed?
Clementine’s backpack was nearby, the contents scattered near the tracks. Clothing, along with a camera. Jude aimed her light at it. An expensive Canon model, with white peace signs on the wide black strap. “That’s Elliot’s.” She walked over and picked it up even though it was part of a crime scene. It was smashed and broken, the SD card mangled. Elliot had mentioned using cloud storage, but that would take a subpoena to access, and the most recent photos might not have been uploaded yet, so it was possible some had been lost for good.
Also on the ground was a phone with a pink case. Iris’s. It still worked. While Uriah watched over her shoulder, Jude scrolled through the images. The most recent were of Iris, dead on the floor in Jude’s apartment.
“Trophy shots, taken with the victim’s own phone,” Jude said.
The biggest question: Where was Elliot? Was he part of Pisa’s crew and was he now on the run?
“We need to talk to Leo Pisa,” Uriah said.
CHAPTER 53
It hadn’t ended the way Leo had planned, but he was still pleased with the results. As he sat cuffed, ankles chained to a chair that was bolted to the concrete floor, a camera recording the interrogation by Detectives Fontaine and Ashby, Leo felt good. The thirteen kills on camera hadn’t happened, but the performance had been fed into living rooms around the Twin Cities. And now it was probably on YouTube with millions of views. That counted for something. He hoped he’d be able to watch the footage for himself one day. He planned to disclose a lot, but not everything. And he would include embellishments and lies to keep things interesting.
“What can you tell us about Elliot Kaplan?” Fontaine pushed a photo of Kaplan across the table.
Leo leaned back as much as he could. It was hard to look casual when your ankles were strapped to a chair. “I can tell you he’s dead.”
Fontaine was good at hiding reactions, but he caught a flinch. Next to her, Ashby was sitting with bloodshot eyes and a bandage on his temple. He looked like hell, so at least that was something.
“He took photos of someone in my group at the Roth funeral,” Leo said. “Maybe he planned to give them to you. Not coo
l.”
“Would that someone be Clementine?” Jude asked.
No sense in keeping her name out of it. They obviously knew she was connected somehow. “Yeah.” And she had more blood on her hands than anybody else. A lot more. “She followed him and killed him. Nothing to do with me. I mean, that didn’t fit anything I was doing. A kill of one was way out of sequence.” Even now, thinking about numbers being out of sequence bothered him so much he started jiggling his leg like an addict in need of a fix.
Both detectives noticed. He stopped briefly before starting again.
“So, where’s Kaplan’s body?” Ashby asked. “The more you cooperate, the better off things will be for you.”
“I don’t know. She never told me. Clementine came back with his camera and said she’d killed him. You need to ask her.”
“That could be a problem,” Ashby said. “She’s dead too.”
After a stunned moment, Leo threw back his head and laughed so hard tears streamed down his face. Not what they were expecting, or what he was expecting either. “I’m not surprised,” he finally said. “That crazy bitch was out of control. Biting people, gutting them. Eating pieces of them raw. Isn’t that some sick stuff? She turned it into horror when it was supposed to be art. When it was supposed to be a thing of beauty.” He attempted to wipe the wetness from a cheek with one shoulder. “But she really loved to kill people. And she really loved her affirmations.”
“The coroner will be able to match the bite marks to Clementine if what you say is true,” Fontaine said. “So if you’re lying . . .”
“Oh, they’ll match.”
Fontaine leaned forward. “What about the numbers?”
“You want to talk about numbers?” He would talk numbers to anybody who’d listen. “It was so beautiful when everything was working perfectly. But we messed up. It was supposed to be random people. That was the plan, but then Iris told us about her family, and how mistreated she’d been. They obviously didn’t deserve to be alive, but that’s where things went wrong. Never kill an acquaintance. It brings the investigation too close to home. I’m sure you know that. We could have kept going for a long time if we hadn’t involved Iris’s family. And then, when the numbers weren’t right and Iris didn’t die? I knew she’d talk.”
“She didn’t,” Fontaine said.
“She would have. She was slumming. She wasn’t really one of us.”
“And the telethon?” Ashby asked.
“I decided to wrap things up with a live finale. With all the phone-bank volunteers, I knew the room would have more than my required thirteen. I didn’t want a repeat of the Roth house.”
“Not sure I’m following this,” Fontaine said. “You basically had the spotlight, but you were trying to get away. That doesn’t sound like a finale to me.”
He didn’t respond.
“He chickened out,” Ashby said with a laugh.
“Ah.” Fontaine nodded. “You didn’t have your crew with you. You couldn’t pull it off by yourself. Especially without Clementine.” She tapped the table and leaned closer. “You know what? I think Clementine was your muse. She was the person who pushed you to up your game. She was the person who dared you to escalate. Without her, you were a coward, afraid to go through with anything. Am I right?” Fontaine had always looked so removed and shut off. Not now. Now she was plugged in, her eyes intense. “Here’s an affirmation for you,” she said. “Behind every great man is a great woman.”
That wasn’t even an affirmation.
“It’s close enough,” Fontaine said.
She’d read his fucking mind. “What’s going on? I heard you were always nice, even to criminals.”
“Incorrect.”
“I wonder if you killed anybody at all other than the guard,” Ashby said. “And he was an accident, really. Not part of the show. Your solo performance was a disaster.”
Pisa pulled against his restraints. They were baiting him. But were they right about Clementine? God, maybe. All of this started when they met. Had she planted everything in his head? The telethon shoot-out had definitely been her idea. It hadn’t even involved knives.
“You asked me to kill you,” Fontaine said. “You couldn’t even do that yourself.”
“I’m not a coward! I’ve killed people.”
“Who?” Ashby asked. “Who have you killed?”
“My mother,” he whispered in horror. Then louder: “I killed my mother!”
CHAPTER 54
Four days after the arrest of Leo Pisa, Jude and Uriah stood in the middle of the street with a mob of onlookers, waiting for her house to be razed. In all that had happened, she’d forgotten about her order for demolition. When the company called, telling her everything was ready, she’d decided to go forward.
Would she regret destroying it?
Yes.
But the regret and loss wouldn’t mean she’d made a mistake. You could make the right choice while still feeling regret.
Some of the crowd were press, but many were people who just wanted to see something torn down. Phones were already held high. The destruction would be captured on video, music would be added, and everybody would count their “likes” after the footage went live.
The case was probably as wrapped up as it was going to get. Pisa had given them the names of his remaining accomplices, all homeless kids, one with long gouges on his face from Iris’s nails. DNA from the semen taken from the Lake of the Isles body was a match too. They were all in jail now, Leo and his team of terrors, awaiting trial. Clementine’s autopsy had revealed she was left-handed. That was backed up by the girl’s mother, whom Jude managed to track down with a photo of Clementine that had gone viral. The woman cried while admitting that her daughter—real name Mary—had done some terrible things to animals and later to children, beginning when she was very young. The bite marks were also a match, as Pisa had said they’d be.
Jude had been right about him. He’d quit college to take care of his ailing mother, in the process losing a full-ride math scholarship. The woman had died under circumstances that hadn’t seemed suspicious due to her poor health. Pisa had killed her, and the overwhelming guilt of matricide, combined with a decrease in the popularity of his street performances, had been a trigger. And then he’d met Clementine . . .
Jude was relieved to find that Professor Masucci hadn’t been involved. She liked him. And she’d already picked up some special tea to deliver to his apartment while he awkwardly basked in the media attention his role in solving the crime had brought him. The one thing that still haunted her: they hadn’t found Elliot’s body. She thought maybe Leo had been lying, but Elliot’s credit cards hadn’t been used, and they couldn’t get a signal off his phone, and no one had spotted his car. Jude was feeding Elliot’s cat, trying to talk Uriah into taking him. The apartment would have to be vacated soon, and she’d offered to pack up the few things that were left. She hadn’t given up on him. Maybe that was delusional of her, but she wanted a body.
She was sorry Elliot couldn’t be here to document the demolition and add it to his photo collection. She’d almost postponed the event in hopes they’d find him, but things didn’t look good. His return would more than likely be in the form of his body being found in the woods or in a lake. It didn’t seem he had any siblings or a father, but they’d been able to locate his mother. Uriah had spoken to her a couple of times. She was in poor health and currently bedridden, and a trip from Texas to Minneapolis was more than she could handle right now. A sad situation all the way around.
Today, before leaving the pet-friendly hotel where she and Roof Cat were staying while her apartment was cleaned and painted after being the scene of a murder, Jude had put on a black knit cap to cover her white hair, hoping her presence would go unnoticed. It didn’t seem to help. People still did double takes, then quickly glanced away. The foreman spotted her, approached, and handed her a clipboard with a checklist attached. Every little box, from the permit to the environmental-hazard ins
pection, had been marked. The signature line was empty. “Gas and water have been disconnected and capped,” he said. “We made a final examination of every room, so we’re good to go. Just need you to date and sign off on it.”
She signed the form and passed the clipboard back.
“That’s all I need.” His voice was jolly. “It’s a small house, so it’ll take about an hour, maybe a little more.” He tucked the clipboard under his arm, strode away, and gave the man in the demolition excavator the signal to begin.
“It’ll make a nice garden spot for the neighborhood,” Uriah said, squinting and shading his eyes with his hand.
Jude had decided on the public garden, and she felt good about that. Something positive and beneficial. Studies had proven that green space reduced crime, and public gardens built community.
The operator in the cab of the excavator put the machine in gear and accelerated. Jude had expected a bulldozer, but the equipment was something used exclusively for demolition. Strange to think a company could sell enough of the things that demolished buildings to stay in business.
The engine revved, and the machine began to crawl forward on rubber tracks. With a whine and a shudder of metal, the bucket on the end of a hinged hydraulic arm moved into place, hovered spastically, then dropped to the roof. Looking like the jaws of a flesh-eating dinosaur, the metal teeth bit out a hole, exposing trusses and pink insulation. The arm shuddered and bobbed as it moved to take another bite.
Jude’s phone vibrated. With scant attention, she pulled it from her pocket and glanced at the screen. The message was from Molly, their information specialist.
Elliot Kaplan’s car is in the Minneapolis impound lot. His laptop was still inside when they processed the vehicle.
The machine continued to whine and the roof continued to collapse. Jude sent a reply.
Where was the car found?
Abandoned in an alley. The report is a bit unclear, but it seems power-line workers reported it when they disconnected the electricity to a house.