The Lillian Byrd Crime Series

by Elizabeth Sims

  The rest of the dates fit. I was looking at the shorthand chronicle of a deprogramming retreat founded around the time that the first of the Midnight Five had disappeared. Iris Macklin’s entry meant there’d been fourteen subjects. The Midnight Five were here. The blank lines beneath Subject N and the blankness of the rest of the pages in the notebook sickened me more than anything I’d seen so far.

  I closed the notebook.

  Back to the pie case. For once something wasn’t locked. I unlatched the door panel, and a blast of chemical smell came out. Carefully I reached in and took out a little pedestal with its tooth.

  I couldn’t easily make out the marking on it; it looked like a dark beetle. I noticed a magnifying glass on a shelf inside the case. I held the glass and the tooth up to the light. The tooth was an incisor. Painted in gorgeous—I have to tell you—detail was a copy of one of Raphael’s Madonnas. I couldn’t tell you the name of it; I skipped too much of art history class to know. This tooth had everything—the expression, the hair, the background, the proportion.

  I rubbed my finger over it and realized it was actually an engraving, a shallow engraving. Like scrimshaw. I shook my head. Can you believe it? Human-tooth scrimshaw.

  I pictured Mrs. Creighter, a corpulent elf, sitting patiently at her workbench, smiling slightly perhaps, as her pudgy nimble hands created these delicate masterpieces.

  I took a quick look at the rest of them, then checked my watch: three-forty. I’d been there a very long time for a break-in.

  The other teeth sported a variety of religious art. Thirteen of them were arranged in a row in a special holder. With a start I realized I was looking at DaVinci’s The Last Supper, one face per tooth. Jesus, with extra halo, was in the center. All the teeth were front-type ones. I remembered Iris’s molars were left in her head.

  I found another little tray, or dish, filled with small bones, in the bottom of the case. A round bone caught my attention. It was convex like a shield, and it rang a bell in my mind. Bonnie’s amulet, yes. Her amulet wasn’t some faux Native-American charm—it was somebody’s kneecap. Nicely smoothed, to be sure, stained mahogany and set with little chips of human teeth.

  I left everything as I found it and looked around for a phone. I’d call Ciesla, then exit and keep watch until he showed. Clutching my burglar’s tools, I started back up the steps. I allowed myself a deep breath and pictured Ciesla’s face when he got a load of all this.

  I swung around the corner from the top step, moving fast now into the hallway. But something was wrong—the lights were on in the bar. And Mrs. Creighter was planted there, feet apart, aiming her gun at me. And as I skidded to a stop on my heels, as I’d thought only characters in cartoons could do, she shot me.

  34

  Knowing what I know now about how easy it is to score a solid hit with a handgun at close range, I’m a little surprised at what happened. At the last microsecond my body began to react, and I must have twisted some way. Mrs. Creighter probably thought I was diving for the floor, so she jerked the barrel of the gun down as she pulled the trigger. Cak! The report was sharp and very short. She missed, then fired again. The bullet struck my right thigh in an explosion of hot force. My leg flew out from under me and I hit the deck.

  I screamed, not so much from pain as panic. Mrs. Creighter rushed over to me. As I writhed on the floor she looked down and yelled something, but I couldn’t hear her: My ears were ringing from the shots, which had been amplified in the narrow bare hallway. I felt a deep burning in my thigh. I cursed a torrent, getting a little hysterical as blood welled up between my fingers. “You bitch from hell, you piece of shit, you shit!”

  “Shut up,” Mrs. Creighter said. Towering over me she looked like a Macy’s balloon. Bonnie appeared next to her, holding a drink and a cigarette. Evidently the two had come in quietly while I was down the basement, fixed themselves a couple of drinks, and discussed strategy while waiting for me to come up. Bonnie kicked away my pry bar and hammer.

  “Come on, let’s go,” Mrs. Creighter said. “Get up, come on.”

  “Ma, don’t touch her!” Bonnie cried. “Why did you shoot her? Now I have to—we have to—”

  Mrs. Creighter stood over me grinning violently, appearing not to hear.

  Bonnie let out a desperate sound, almost a sob. “Wait a minute then.” She set her drink down on the floor. Grunting heavily, they dragged me by the arms down the hall to the stairwell.

  I tried to resist, clutching the doorframe. As we tottered on the brink, Mrs. Creighter let go of my arm, and I pitched forward. To avoid flying down behind me, Bonnie let go too. I felt space open below me and thought, what the hell. I relaxed and just sort of bounced all the way to the bottom, turning one somersault, I think. My back slammed against the door at the bottom. Mrs. Creighter clattered down after me.

  “You ripped up our locks,” she said, pushing open the door and stepping over me. Bonnie, having retrieved her drink, clumped down to join us.

  “Come on, get up,” said Mrs. Creighter, nudging me with her foot. “We’re not going to hurt you anymore.”

  Hah. I pushed myself into a sitting position, my legs stuck out in front of me. The pain in my thigh was hot and fierce. I’d thought you got a kind of grace period after getting shot, you know, when you don’t feel pain. Well, I didn’t get one.

  Mrs. Creighter went over to one of the metal cabinets and took out a white towel from a stack in there. She spread it on the couch and said, “Come on, sit over here. Come on.”

  Bonnie said, “Oh, Lord.” She eyed me the same way she had before, with that dreamy, almost submissive look. Yes, that was it. My stomach turned.

  Mrs. Creighter pointed the gun at me again. “Get up.”

  Putting weight on my right leg made me see stars. I hopped over to the couch and flopped down on it. Bonnie brought another towel and tried to dab my jeans with it. “Are you all right?”

  As she bent over me her amulet swayed forward and touched my nose. I jerked back and snatched the towel from her. “Get away from me.”

  There was only a tiny dark hole in my blue jeans. I pressed the towel against it. The wound was bleeding, I could feel it, but it wasn’t gushing. Just flowing steadily. The gun was the same .22 auto, so I counted myself lucky that the slug was little and probably just lodged in the muscle somewhere. It sure felt big, though.

  “Take that jacket off,” Mrs. Creighter ordered. I did and threw it on the floor. She picked it up and felt the limp pocket, then seated herself on the other end of the couch at my feet. Bonnie hopped up onto the gurney nearby, biting her lips. The three of us sat there for a few moments without speaking, catching our breaths. The initial pain in my leg began to subside, replaced by a deep, dull throbbing. My situation wasn’t a good one.

  I watched Bonnie. There was something about her, a duality, some ambivalence that gave me hope. All along Mrs. Creighter had been the more murderously hysterical of the two. They were a perversion of the mother-daughter unit, all right. How deep did murder run in each of them? They were both sweating, their foreheads identically sheened with perspiration.

  Bonnie seemed somehow stronger than her mother, yet emotionally vulnerable. She appeared confused. I had to find a way to take advantage of her.

  As we sat there, Mrs. Creighter appeared to go into sort of a trance. I remembered a passage in one of Minerva LeBlanc’s books that said the few people who’ve survived serial-killer situations report that the murderers’ faces appear totally expressionless, devoid of any feeling or awareness. Mrs. Creighter’s face was like that now.

  But Bonnie’s face was boiling. Emotions seemed to be surging through her: excitement, repugnance, guilt, love, loathing. She startled her mother and me by breaking the silence.

  “Ma, I—” She stopped.

  Mrs. Creighter slowly looked over at her, through her. At the same moment, she put her hand on my foot. I flinched.

  “Ma, I don’t want this one dead. This one’s different.” Bonnie was
fighting something—it was all over her face. “This is screwed up, this is all screwed up now.”

  Mrs. Creighter said, in a voice as expressionless as her face, “Nothing’s screwed up. Everything’s well in hand.” Her face was embryo-like, with a pushed-up nose and a small, curving chin. She was the most grotesque human being I had seen to date.

  I took a deep breath of the dank, close air. I didn’t have time to waste. Everybody knows you’re not supposed to try to push crazy people around, lest they go off on you, but these two had already gone off on me. I was scared, angry, and bleeding, and I had the feeling that Bonnie, though ostensibly in control of the situation, could be manipulated.

  “Bonnie,” I said, in a tone that was firm but warm, “let’s cut the crap.” She looked at me in surprise. “I know you have feelings for me,” I suggested. “That’s the reason you haven’t grabbed that gun and finished me off. Am I right?”

  Her lips parted, then closed in a faint smile.

  “You’re a very misunderstood person,” I went on. “That’s frustrating, isn’t it?”

  “It is, it is!” Tears of self-pity sprang to her eyes.

  I saw my opening and forced myself to take it. “I bet you can’t guess my secret.”

  “Lillian?”

  “I have feelings for you too, Bonnie.”

  “You feel something special for me?”

  “Something very special.” That was true, all right.

  I thought Mrs. Creighter wasn’t listening from the depths of her trance, or murderous reverie, or whatever the hell it was. But she was.

  “My little girl isn’t right,” she said. “She’s made mistakes in her life. But here is where we find redemption. We all find it here.”

  “Ma, be quiet.”

  “Don’t make another mistake.”

  “Ma, be quiet. She knew what was going on. She could see it. I have to think.”

  “She’s a fraud.” Mrs. Creighter lifted her eyes and addressed God—her God, anyway. “It’s all right. We’re going to go on just like before. In praise. In glory. We need nothing else.” She fondled the gun in her lap like a darning egg.

  Without warning, Bonnie hopped off the gurney and grabbed a roll of adhesive tape from an open shelf. Quiet fragments of words poured from her lips; after a few seconds they coalesced into “No one’s going to leave me, no one’s going to leave me.”

  I thought she was about to bind me up, but no. Before her mother could react, she stripped off an arm’s length of tape and wound it around her mother’s wrists, flipping the gun away as she did so. It clattered on the floor. Mrs. Creighter gasped. Then she bent and extended a second length down around her mother’s legs, which stuck out like hams from the hem of her flowered dress.

  It took her all of five seconds to neutralize the old girl.

  Her mother yelled, “Don’t go speaking in tongues on me!” Bonnie slapped one last wad of tape over her mouth.

  Then she grabbed up the gun, which I knew I couldn’t have gotten to first anyway.

  Mrs. Creighter looked down wonderingly at her bonds.

  “I don’t want you shooting her again,” said Bonnie.

  I relaxed fractionally. “Thank you so much.”

  Mrs. Creighter grunted and pulled at the tape.

  Then inspiration struck. Mustering an extremely sincere smile, I said, very slowly and with a lot of feeling, “Look, Bonnie, this might be premature, but we could run away together. You know? And be rid of all of this. What do you say?” I extended my open hand. She’d either buy this or not, right now. “You’ve had a lot on your shoulders. I want to take care of you. I’ll handle everything so you can relax.”

  Ding. Before my eyes Bonnie turned from an impenetrable psycho into a pathetic little girl. Her body language completely changed: I saw the tight carriage of a grown-up melt into the uneven, trusting movements of a child.

  She hopped back up onto the gurney, then hopped down again and sat on the floor next to the coffee table, looking up at me. She held the gun with both hands, as if it were too heavy for just one.

  I said reassuringly, “There really aren’t any secrets, are there?”

  She shook her head, smiling in relief.

  From there we covered quite a bit of ground. With the malevolent force of her mother temporarily neutralized, Bonnie began to talk as if she were a dam somebody had just blown a hole through. She spoke rapidly, without pause, using odd repetitions and fragments. I had to listen closely to follow her.

  “In the beginning I was little, and I knew I was different. I was different, but I didn’t know how, and then it was that we had no choice about the proper way to worship, but then...”

  The deal was, Bonnie told me, that her father had been a charismatic preacher in some fiery sect I’d never heard of, and he’d held complete and dysfunctional sway over the whole family. After a stint as a teenage missionary, Bonnie escaped and took up a swingin’ lifestyle, insofar as a stunted weirdo like her could swing. She had a few gay experiences, then decided that was it for her; the key to life.

  She deluded herself into thinking she could normalize relations with her family, and made the mistake of coming out to them while they were all together in an automobile en route to a family reunion at some relative’s house out West.

  Mr. Creighter had a heart attack at the wheel, sending the car into a ravine. Bonnie’s sister Veronica was killed instantly, but Bonnie and Mrs. Creighter were thrown clear. While unconscious, they experienced a sequence of religious visions involving winged lizards, talking cacti, smoldering crankcase oil, and each other.

  Bonnie landed in a private mental institution for a time, then got it together enough to set up housekeeping with her mother back at the old homestead.

  Because God told her to, she bought the bar with all the money they had. God instructed her to do a great many other things from then on, and she did them all, with the avid help of her mother. Over time, it seemed, Mrs. Creighter took on more of a leadership role.

  From time to time during this monologue, Mrs. Creighter grunted and yanked on her bonds. Her skin poured sweat; the bosom of her dress got soggy. As for me, my thigh was hurting worse, and I saw more blood oozing from beneath the towel, darkening my jeans. My head felt light. I tried to make ESP contact with Billie, telling her to call Ciesla. Wake up and call the police now, I telegraphed.

  35

  Bonnie talked for perhaps an hour solid. I learned that for her, there was nothing contradictory in building up a business that catered to gay women and killing off a small percentage of them in the name of God. Owning the bar obviously fed Bonnie’s need to be near women, her need to feed herself sexually.

  The Midnight Five, as I’d guessed, fell into the category of curious, nervous women who had responded to her blind ads and had come to the bar once, perhaps after hours. I pictured others creeping in during business hours, tentative and scared, looking not very approachable. I’d seen such women occasionally at the Snap. They’d sit in a corner with a drink, not calling attention to themselves, rarely talking to anyone, but watching the room with hungry, shame-filled eyes.

  I could see Bonnie lying in wait for such women and discreetly pouncing, with no one the wiser. Someone who came to the bar publicly just once, especially a bar as busy as the Snapdragon, well, who’d remember her?

  Bonnie seemed to think such women could be turned away from the terrible path of sin they were about to take. I’d heard of the Bible being used as a weapon before, but it remained unclear to me exactly how Bonnie put it to use. I got the sense that the murders were supposed to be some kind of sacrifice or atonement.

  I learned that Iris had been special to Bonnie because she seemed to actually like Bonnie. So Bonnie broke her rule of only preying on women unknown to others at the bar. It’d been simple carelessness in disposing of the body that set the ball rolling for me to start asking questions.

  I gathered that the mother had always been badly cracked, but being married
had held her together. The family tragedy had set her loose and put a cherry firmly on top of her psycho sundae. She seemed to get a deep satisfaction out of helping her daughter. As she saw it, Bonnie was earnestly cleansing herself of evil, here in this basement, and she wanted the show to go on and on.

  Bonnie, I thought, was about to begin telling me about her mother’s ghastly hobby, when her speech slowed. Her words began to jell into complete sentences; her frantic cadence dropped.

  She looked me in the eye and said, “Certain things were not my fault.” Then she fell silent.

  Something had happened to the Creighters after the psychological jolts they’d received. Mother and daughter shared a certain number of genes and a certain outlook. I guess it was natural for events to affect them similarly and for them to act in tandem. They’d convinced themselves that their actions were moral and just, if not by the standards of earthly justice, then divine.

  I saw a glint of reason gradually take hold in Bonnie’s eyes; I knew it to be fundamentally false, but at least it was something. Her psychotic break couldn’t last forever.

  As if reading my mind, she said, “Someone should stop us.”

  I started to say, “That’s just what—” but we were both startled by Mrs. Creighter leaping to her feet, free of her tape.

  While Bonnie had been talking, she’d remained quiet except for the occasional grunt, but she’d been silently working free. I saw that her perspiration had acted as a lubricant, helping her slip out of the tape. Now she ripped off her gag—a small piece of her lip came off with it, leaving a bloody spot—and shrieked, “The word of God doesn’t sit still! Listen to God!”

  It was go time. “Shut up!” I screamed at her. I edged forward on the couch. “Bonnie, look, you’re not crazy. You’ve convinced yourself that you’re doing God’s work, when all along you’ve only been serving your own appetites. You indulged yourself, then tried to make up for it by destroying people just like yourself.”