Kisscut

by Karin Slaughter

  She mouthed, “What?”

  He shook his head, as if to tell her to give him a minute to think. Lena stood beside him, her shoulder to the wall by the door, sweating as she waited for him to make a decision. She hoped he would not wait too long, because stopping to think was taking away some of her resolve.

  Finally, he motioned her back behind him, then even farther back. He kept waving her down the hall, then into the stairway. When she was standing on the stair second from the top, her neck craned so she could look around the corner, he seemed satisfied. Lena braced herself for action as he raised his foot and kicked in the door. A flash of light came a split-second later, and somehow the door blew back, pushing Jeffrey down the hallway. A roar came a couple of beats later, and Lena ducked into the stairs as a ball of fire flashed up the hallway.

  “Jesus,” she whispered, covering herself with her arms as she knelt on the stairs. Lena waited for the heat to envelop her, or flames to eat her alive, but nothing happened. She stood from her crouch and peered around the corner into the hallway. Jeffrey was underneath the door, but he was moving. The top of the door was charred to a crisp. There were black soot marks along the walls, but there was no fire. The heat must have been so intense that it burned itself out.

  She heard a crackling to her left and turned quickly. The black curtains were on fire. Lena took off her jacket and beat them until they fell from the rod. She stamped the last embers out on the floor just as Jeffrey pushed the door off of him.

  “What the hell happened?” he demanded, touching his face and body, probably to see if he had been burned. He seemed okay from what Lena could tell. Somehow, the door had protected him from the blast.

  “I have no idea,” she said, dropping her coat and walking over to help him stand.

  “I thought I smelled something outside the door,” he told her, leaning heavily on her shoulder. “What the hell was that?”

  She asked, “What did you smell?”

  “Gasoline, I guess. I wasn’t sure. It was hard to tell with the paint.” He brushed his slacks off, but there was really no point. They both looked at his shoes. The soles had melted from the heat.

  “Dammit,” he muttered. “I just bought these last week.”

  Lena stared at him, wondering if he had hit his head.

  “Are you all right?” he asked, brushing something off her shoulder.

  “I’m fine,” she told him, and she was, but only because Jeffrey had made her stand in the stairwell.

  “Is that out?” he asked, pointing to the window. The heat from the blast had knocked out the panes and busted the sash. There were dark gashes in the wall where the curtains had ignited.

  “I think so,” Lena said, brushing back her hair. Dust fell out, and she guessed the ends might have been burned.

  Jeffrey walked down the hall, stopping just outside the doorway of the room. He was being careful, looking for a second device. Finally, he stepped into the room and turned around. “There was a trigger over the door,” he said, his hand over his chest. Lena wondered just for a second how he could be thinking so clearly. He could have easily been killed by the blast.

  Jeffrey pointed over the jamb, saying, “There’s a wire here that goes…” He followed something with his eyes, turning slowly around the room. “Here.”

  Lena peeked in to see what he was talking about. Three cans of gasoline were stacked in the corner. On top of them was a scorched bath towel and something that looked like it had been a clock radio at one time. The plastic was blown apart, and wires spewed out. The walls and ceiling were scorched and the plastic slats of the blinds in the window looked melted together, but remarkably nothing had ignited.

  Lena looked at the device, wondering who could have built something so rudimentary. The metal cans were sealed tight, and the clock had not even been connected to them, as far as she could tell. She touched the towel, then sniffed it. Whoever had arranged the bomb had not even doused the towel in gasoline to help it ignite.

  She said, “This was stupid.”

  “Yeah,” Jeffrey agreed. “What exploded, though?”

  “I have no idea,” she said, looking around the room. For the first time, she noticed that this was the only room in the house that was still furnished. Carpet was on the floor, and posters of boy bands were stuck on the wall. There was a little-girl feel to the room, with its once pink walls, white wicker furniture, and shelves full of stuffed animals. A full-sized bed with a pink blanket over it was against the wall opposite the door. The material was stiff-looking, as if it had been saturated at one point, then air-dried in the heat. Lena touched the blanket, then sniffed her fingers.

  She said, “Gasoline.”

  Jeffrey was looking around the room, too. “Everything looks like it was soaked in gas,” he said. “The windows are locked tight. Maybe the fumes built up, and when the door triggered the clock, the fumes caught fire?” Jeffrey looked down the hallway. “Fire needs oxygen to burn. Maybe the open window at the end of the hall sucked it out?”

  “It sure looked that way from where I was standing,” Lena told him. “The bomb guys can figure that out.”

  “Right,” he said, and pulled his cell phone out of his breast pocket. He made two calls, one to Frank at the station to get the bomb squad moving, the other to Nick Shelton at the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. He requested that a crime scene team come out to the house and search it with a fine-tooth comb.

  “We’ve got some time before they show up,” Jeffrey said, closing the phone.

  “Great,” Lena mumbled, thinking between the heat and the odor in the house, they might asphyxiate before reinforcements came.

  “Why didn’t she strip this room, too?” Jeffrey asked.

  Lena shrugged. “Maybe it was too hard for her to come in here after Jenny died.”

  “I guess,” he mumbled, wiping something out of his eyes. “But why go to the trouble to strip the house if they thought the bomb would burn it down?”

  “Arson inspectors can find just about anything,” Lena told him. “You can watch the Discovery channel and know that.”

  “It’s like she hated her,” Jeffrey said, not letting it go. “I can understand not stripping the room, but this…”—he indicated the gas tanks—“this doesn’t make sense.”

  Lena thought about Mark, and how he might have purposefully rigged the bomb not to explode.

  “Who would do this?” he asked. “Grace? Dottie? Was it Mark? None of this makes any sense.”

  To give herself something to do, she looked around the room. A set of cat figurines was on the dresser alongside some makeup that could only belong to a little girl.

  “Maybe she didn’t want to be reminded of Jenny?” Lena suggested, and even as she said the words, she got a bad taste in her mouth. “The bomb would have taken out everything.”

  “Maybe Dottie was abducted,” Jeffrey guessed.

  “By whom?” Lena asked. “That doesn’t jibe. And if she was, how did Lacey’s coat get in here? Are you saying that whoever snatched Lacey came after Dottie, too? Then took the time to strip and clean the house?”

  Jeffrey asked, “You think Dottie planted the bomb?”

  Lena shrugged, even though she was sure in her heart that Mark had planted the bomb. The paint on his clothes, the chemical smell on his body, all pointed to him at the very least being in this house during the last few days. There was no telling what he had been doing.

  Jeffrey was obviously thinking the same things as Lena. He said, “Mark had paint on his clothes. We can have the lab check it against the paint on the walls.”

  “It looked fresh,” Lena reluctantly provided.

  “Why would Dottie Weaver strip the house this way? Why would she leave without at least burying her daughter?”

  Lena wondered again if he’d hit his head. He was repeating the same questions over and over again, as if she might suddenly come up with the answer. She was about to ask him if he wanted to sit down when he turned around a
nd looked at the bed in the middle of the room as if it might start talking to him. After a couple of moments of this, he took his foot and kicked the mattress over.

  “What’s that?” Lena asked, but she could see well enough for herself. About twenty cheap-looking magazines had been stowed between the mattress and the boxspring. All of them had children on the covers doing the kinds of things that children should never be made to do. They all had the same title, too, Child-Lovers in a fancy script with a familiar heart drawing inserted where the “o” in lover should be.

  Lena put her hand on the wall, trying to steady herself.

  “You okay?” Jeffrey asked, cupping her elbow as if she might faint.

  “The design.”

  “It’s the same one Mark has on his hand,” he said, pushing through the stack of magazines. He mumbled, “I used to hide shit under my bed, too.”

  “Why would Mark do that?” Lena asked, not able to move past this point. “Why would he put that on his hand?”

  Jeffrey turned back to the bed. “Maybe it’s his way of saying he likes younger girls. Maybe that’s how those guys operate so they know each other,” he suggested, picking up one of the magazines. He leafed through it, then picked up another. His jaw worked as he stopped on a particular page.

  “What?” Lena asked, looking over his shoulder. A picture of Mark, probably taken a few years ago, served as the centerfold.

  Lena picked up a magazine and skimmed through it until she found another picture of Mark. Jenny was in this one, and they were doing something Lena could not describe. Worse, in the back pages there were photos of Mark with older men and some women. The adults’ faces were not shown, but Mark was revealed from head to toe. His expression was pained, and it brought tears to Lena’s eyes to see him compromised like this. Seeing what Mark had done and what he had obviously been made to do hurt Lena more than she wanted to admit. She finally understood why he had wanted to know what it felt like for her to be raped. He wanted to compare notes.

  Jeffrey examined the magazines, his jaw clenched so tight she had trouble understanding him when he spoke. “These aren’t exactly sophisticated. I guess a small press could handle it.”

  “Probably,” she agreed.

  “Christ,” Jeffrey hissed, scowling at the magazine he was holding. “This guy has on his wedding ring.” The disgust in his voice would have peeled paint off the walls. “That’s Jenny,” he said.

  Lena looked at the photograph. Jenny Weaver was pictured, a man’s hand firm on the back of her neck as he guided her down. The gold of the man’s wedding ring caught the light, and Lena wondered if that was part of the thrill for the perverts who looked at these pictures, thinking that the guy was married and having sex with little girls.

  She said, “That’s disgusting.”

  “Here’s the same ring in another one,” Jeffrey said, but he didn’t show her the photo. He continued to flip the pages. “And another one.”

  Lena asked, “Are you sure it’s the same—?”

  “Fucking pervert,” Jeffrey yelled, then twisted the magazine in his hands and threw it against the wall. “What the fuck is happening here?” he screamed. She could see a vein in his neck throbbing. “How many kids were involved in this thing?”

  Lena tucked her hands into her pockets, letting him get it out.

  Jeffrey turned, looking out the window at the backyard. His voice was softer, but she could still hear the anger when he asked, “Do you recognize any of the other kids?”

  Lena picked up a magazine, but he stopped her. “I don’t want you looking at this shit,” he said. “We’ll get Nick’s people on it.” He put his hand to his forehead, like a bad headache was about to strike. “How many kids are involved in this thing?” he repeated. “How many Grant kids were wrapped up in this?”

  She didn’t have the answer, but he knew that.

  He flipped open his phone again. “I’m going to get Nick here to look at this,” he said. “I want you to go to the hospital and try to get something out of Grace Patterson.”

  She shook her head, not understanding.

  “She’s connected to Mark and Jenny. She has to know something,” he told her. “I’d do it myself, but I’d probably rip her fucking throat out.” She saw his grip tighten around the phone. “Voice mail.” He waited a couple of beats, then said, “Nick, Jeff Tolliver. I need you to call me as soon as possible. We’ve got something new on the Lacey Patterson case.” He ended the call, saying to Lena, “There’s no way this isn’t a priority now.”

  Lena nodded, thinking she had never seen him this angry, not even at her.

  He dialed another number into the phone. While he was waiting for someone to answer, he instructed Lena, “I want you to confront Grace on what you know. I want you to tell her exactly what Mark told you, and I want you to find out what the fuck has been going on.”

  “Do you think she’ll tell me anything?”

  “Her daughter is missing,” he reminded her. “We found her coat here.”

  Lena looked down at her hands. “Considering what she was doing to Mark, do you think she cares?”

  He flipped the phone closed again, looking her in the eye. “Tell you the truth, Lena, I don’t know what the hell to think about anybody involved in this case.”

  He was about to open his phone again when it rang. Before he answered it, he gave Lena his keys and nodded toward the door, telling her, “Go.”

  Thursday

  15

  JEFFREY FELT like he had been blown across a hallway with a wooden door plastered to his body. His arms ached, and his knees felt like they would never bend right again. Working at the Weaver house had taken the rest of the day, but when he had called Sara at one in the morning, she had not hesitated to ask him over. Part of him was nervous about the way they had picked up so easily again. He kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, for Sara to say that she could not go through with this. Another part of him was just so damn happy to be back in her life that he wanted to enjoy every minute of it as much as he could. Even sitting in the tub with her, talking about what was probably one of the most horrible cases he had ever worked, he felt at home.

  He watched Sara across the tub as she sipped her wine, obviously letting what he had just told her sink in. Jeffrey had forgotten how great the claw-footed tub in her master bathroom was. Six feet long with a center-mounted faucet, it was perfect for two people. They had spent half their marriage in this tub.

  Sara rested her glass on her knee. “Where is Lena now?”

  “The hospital,” Jeffrey told her. “Patterson’s still holding on.”

  “She saying anything?”

  “Grace?” Jeffrey asked. Sara nodded, and he said, “She’s pretty lucid, but she’s got one of those morphine pumps for the pain.”

  “Breast cancer is an incredibly painful way to die.”

  “Good,” he said, leaning over the tub to pick up his glass of wine. With his parents’ shining example, Jeffrey had never taken to alcohol, but after today he needed something to take the edge off. Before he started talking to Sara, he had felt like his mind was spinning, not able to concentrate on one thing at a time like he needed to do. There were so many pieces to the case floating around, and so many questions that had yet to be answered. Somehow, the alcohol was giving him focus.

  Sara asked, “Do you really think Grace Patterson will give a deathbed confession?”

  “Not really, but you never know….” He paused, measuring hiswords. “Lena’s got this thing about Mark.”

  “What kind of thing?”

  “She kept insisting that he was raped.”

  “He was,” Sara pointed out. “Are you saying he willingly posed for those magazines, that he seduced his mother?”

  “Of course not,” he said, and he was glad she had made that point. “What I’m really worried about right now is Lena.”

  “She’s doing the best she can,” Sara told him. “Give her some time.”

  “I j
ust can’t take that kind of chance with her, Sara.” He rubbed his eyes, still smelling gasoline on his hands even though he had scrubbed himself thoroughly with soap.

  He said, “She’s too close to the edge. I don’t want to be the one standing there watching when she finally goes over. I don’t think I could live with myself.”

  “It’s going to take time for her to get past what happened,” Sara said in a measured tone. “If she ever does at all.”

  “She won’t even talk to anybody about it.”

  “You can’t force her to do it,” Sara countered. “She’ll talk about it when she’s ready to.”

  He stared into his glass, not responding.

  “So,” Sara said, obviously realizing he wanted to move on. “Let’s change the subject.”

  “Okay.”

  She summarized what they knew, ticking the points off on her fingers. “Mark and Jenny were posing for the magazines at Dottie’s house. Grace Patterson was involved with her son.”

  “Right.”

  “What about Teddy Patterson?”

  “He could be the link here,” Jeffrey said. “He’s a truck driver. Maybe he picks up the magazines and takes them across the country.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “Either at the hospital or at his trailer. Frank’s been tailing him.” Jeffrey took a healthy drink from his glass. “He doesn’t seem too concerned that one of his kids might be brain dead and the other has been kidnapped.”

  “What’s he doing?”

  “Staying by his wife, mostly.”

  “Maybe he’s focusing on one thing at a time?” Sara suggested. “His wife’s dying, he’s with her. That’s something immediate he can do instead of just sitting around feeling helpless.”

  “Trust me, he’s not the kind of guy to feel helpless.”

  “You think he’ll do something?”

  “I think he’ll leave town as soon as his wife is dead,” he told her. “I talked to Nick Shelton. We’re thinking Teddy’s going to be the contact for his collar over in Augusta.”

  “The guy Nick arrested who had the child pornography?”