Facing Evil

by Kylie Brant

  His reaction was immediate and visceral. And even he realized, more than a little illogical. He didn’t want her anywhere near that place, near anyplace that was affiliated with Vickie Baxter. At least not alone.

  Realizing the response stemmed more from the personal than the rational had him pausing before framing a reply. He was living with the woman. Sure, he’d told himself her safety had been the reason for their close proximity. After Vance had snatched her out of her shower and Sonny had later broken in to assassinate her, Cam had wanted to keep her as close as possible.

  But those threats were over. Repairs on her condo had been finished for days. She hadn’t mentioned moving back home, and he sure as hell wasn’t about to suggest it. He still wanted her near. And he couldn’t pretend his reasons were only safety-related.

  It might have been this case that had brought her back into his life, but it was far more that had her back in his bed. And if he couldn’t believe her professions of love—was afraid she couldn’t possibly be healed enough to utter them—he sure as hell wasn’t ready to blow this thing.

  His fingers poised on the texting keys, waiting until he could frame a rational reply. He knew better now how Sophie worked. What it took for her to compile a profile, and construct a pattern of behavior. To crawl inside sick psychotic minds and link their past and present in a way that might predict the future. She considered it a bonus when she could walk in the criminal’s footsteps. Go where they went. See what they saw. It helped, she said, to put herself in their heads. God help her.

  Your limbs won’t be intact if you turn an ankle at the farm he finally wrote. He was being stupid. It was broad daylight, and hotter than hell. He didn’t know whether the place had been repaired or razed. Either way, it was doubtful she’d have reason to linger. There couldn’t be a whole helluva lot to see there.

  Satisfied, he set the cell down and returned his attention to the wall map. DMPD was managing the tip line Cam had set up to handle calls reporting possible sightings and information about Vickie Baxter for the last three weeks. The volume of calls was staggering, and peaked again with every new mention of the woman in the media. A few days earlier the family of one of Vance’s victims, Cassie Wright Urban, had offered a fifty thousand dollar reward for a tip leading to Baxter’s arrest. That had taken the volume of calls from unmanageable to absolutely impossible.

  Picking through the information gleaned from the calls was like looking for a fish in the ocean. First came the crackpots, then those sniffing for a reward. Throw in dozens of ‘tips’ from vengeful exes wanting to make life difficult for a former spouse or significant other, add several disgruntled neighbors and then sift through all of them for the few stemming from genuinely concerned citizens. It was a recipe for failure, but the tips couldn’t be ignored. Somewhere in that mass of calls, he had to believe was a genuine sighting of the woman. Maybe a lead that would blow this thing wide open.

  His method was simple. Three different colors of pushpins—one correlated to each week—delineated the area of each sighting reported. They were coupled with a second purple pin if it was a ‘stationary’ sighting—a neighbor, an ex, a clerk in a store who bore a resemblance to Vickie Baxter. Impaled on each pin was a number correlating to the tip it represented.

  Cam propped a hip on his desk, arms folded, and sent a narrowed look at the map. The most promising tips had been checked out. Then they’d considered the locations where there were clusters of sightings. Canvasses required significant manpower, and that particular technique hadn’t panned out. He was getting less and less manpower allocated by the Des Moines Police Department for the task, and he really couldn’t blame them. Resources were tight everywhere. He needed a new strategy.

  A knock sounded at his door and Tommy Franks stuck his head in. “Busy?”

  “As you can see I’m practicing for the ballet. Show’s in a few hours.”

  Ignoring the sarcasm, the agent came the rest of the way in and folded himself into a chair. “Yeah, I can see you in tights and one of those…what do you call them…tutu things.”

  “It’s my legs.” He worked his shoulders tiredly. “You’re not the first to notice them.”

  “Don’t let the compliment go to your head. I’m half blind from looking over the feeds from the cemetery.”

  “Nothing?” Given the other man’s demeanor, it wasn’t a question.

  “Unless she’s some kind of master of disguises, she wasn’t there.”

  It wasn’t surprising, but the dead end added to the leads they’d been following that hadn’t panned out. A week ago—hell, up to a few days ago—Cam had suspected it meant that Baxter had left the area. The recent sighting of her at the airport, however, said otherwise. His gaze drifted back to the map. And the answer to her whereabouts might be right in front of him.

  Franks strolled over to peer at the scattering of pins. “Looks random.”

  “Tell me about it.” Cam stared at it broodingly. “But she’s here. We know that. She’s moving freely around the area. Someone’s seen her. Maybe even reported it. There’s got to be a different way to narrow down the leads.” The tips had been fed into a database and could be coordinated according to different parameters—addresses where the suspect had been seen, stores, streets, etc. “I’ve been focusing on similar locations, but when you factor out the tips that didn’t hold up to further scrutiny, that’s been a wash.”

  “So where’s she staying?” Unconsciously Tommy mimicked Cam’s stance, crossing his arms across his chest. “What’s safest? Not with a friend, even if she has one she hasn’t murdered yet. Risk is too great that someone would turn her in for the reward.”

  “Sonny had a house rented in his name. We know she isn’t there. She hasn’t returned to Vance’s home in Alleman or to the Stewart farmhouse she was staying at near Perry. Maybe there’s a safe house somewhere. A place they kept just in case they needed to lay low.”

  “She’d stand out in one of the smaller surrounding towns.” Franks settled into the familiar rhythm. They’d often bounced ideas off each other, one playing devil’s advocate for the other. “Des Moines metro area offers more anonymity.”

  “But a stationary spot still brings scrutiny. There are neighbors, unless she’s at another farm or acreage.”

  “There’s no property owned in any of their names.” Vance had been staying in his grandfather’s house while the old man resided in a nursing home. Sonny’s house had been rented, and Baxter had murdered the old woman who owned the farmhouse she’d been living in when they’d first caught up with her. “Can’t see them going for something that permanent.”

  “That leaves renting, leasing or…”

  “…a motel,” the two men said simultaneously.

  “Any of those three possibilities still doesn’t account for the randomness of the tip reports,” Franks pressed the heels of both palms against his eyes. Rubbed. “We’ve got nothing to link the sightings for us. Most of the tips place her at different locations simultaneously. So we’re back to where we started.” He lowered his eyes, caught Cam’s gaze fixed on him. “What?”

  “Stationary. Staying in one spot is stupid. Vickie Baxter is a lot of things. Dumb isn’t one of them. Sure, it makes sense if she’s hiding out in a rural, secluded area. And if she is, we’re going to have been damn lucky to find her. But if she’s not…” He rounded the desk, sat down at the computer. “She’s active again. Damn active if she’s responsible for both Webster’s and Traer’s deaths. She’s on the move. Scouting their whereabouts. Learning their routines. That takes time. Both were living in Des Moines. That puts her here for the time it took to plan and pull off their kidnappings.”

  He started typing commands into the database as he typed. “Motels are perfect. Anonymous. People coming and going all the time, with the added benefit of many of the occupants not being local.”

  “We sent Baxter’s picture out to every bed and breakfast and motel in a hundred mile area,” Franks pointed out, but
he was intrigued enough to round Cam’s desk and stand behind him as he typed.

  “Which hopefully gave the employees a heads up, but what about the guests? To them Vickie Baxter is just another face in an anonymous setting. And for hotel workers who see hundreds of guests a day, she might not stand out, either.”

  “Maybe.” Tommy leaned in closer to look at the screen. “Especially if she’s transient. Doesn’t stay in one place for too long, and if someone does call a tip in, it’s too late. She’s already gone. But every time she checks into a new motel she runs the greatest risk of being recognized.”

  As the results of the new search command scrolled down the screen Cam felt his initial surge of interest begin to dissipate. “Out of nearly a thousand tips we’ve got seventeen reports coming from all different motels. Is she going to a new one every night?”

  “Some of the sightings were called in on the same day. A motel guest made all but one. Maybe that’s what Baxter was counting on. The time it takes to check out the reports, the people are gone. Out of town, most likely. Makes the follow-up tedious.” Nothing about Franks’ tone sounded optimistic. “Where are we on your request to Gonzalez to get the team fully staffed again?”

  “She’s working on it. Patrick and Samuels might be available by tomorrow.” Cam turned to look at the other agent for a moment. Then he reached for his phone again.

  “You’ve got a better idea?”

  “I’m about to trade my firstborn to DMPD for some uniforms to help with this.”

  “You don’t have a firstborn,” Franks pointed out. He straightened and wandered back to the wall map.

  “I’ve been thinking of getting a dog. Maybe they’ll settle for pick of the litter. Rodriguez.” He switched verbal gears seamlessly as the lieutenant answered. “We might have something but need some manpower…wait. Will you wait? I think I can make it worth your while…”

  * * * *

  Sophia hadn’t expected to find much at the site of the Coates’ farm. Old rubble from the home, perhaps. Or a new ranch-style home sitting where the farmhouse had once stood. But she was surprised to discover a blackened shell of a decaying house. Tall weeds choked its foundation. Windows were boarded over. Porch steps were cracked or missing completely and what once had been a porch railing now looked like a gap-toothed grin.

  Getting out of the car, she tipped her head up and shaded her eyes above her sunglasses. The chimney that had once graced the south side of the home seemed to be tilting. The entire structure had a definite lean to it. She couldn’t help but wonder why the Coates’ surviving son and daughter hadn’t had the remains torn down. She wondered if it had anything to do with their unwillingness to talk to her. Maybe they hadn’t dealt with their parents’ death, even after all these years.

  She scanned her surroundings. Thigh-high corn crowded the fencerows on three sides. Outbuildings dotted the area, all in varying state of disrepair, but untouched by the fire that had ravaged the home. A rush of excitement filled her. It was rare for her to work a case in real time. Most often she was called to consult from afar, relying on case notes and law enforcement logs to write her profiles. When she did travel to locations, there wasn’t usually time to spare revisiting a suspect’s past. She depended on histories and demographics to develop the profiling framework. This opportunity was oddly satisfying.

  Picking her way carefully, she circled the dilapidated house. For whatever time Vickie Baxter had spent here all those years ago, the place had been part of the woman’s life. It had marked her in some way. She wondered if Vickie had marked it in return. If she had been responsible for the fire that had killed Mary and Allen Coates and their youngest daughter. If the hollowed out shell of a house stood in silent testimony of the evil that had been wrought here.

  The skin on her arms prickled. She doubted it would ever be known whether Vickie Baxter was responsible for the fire. But Sophia thought it was entirely possible that she had. The abuse the woman had suffered from childhood at her father’s hands would have significantly impacted a normal person’s capacity to trust. To form attachments. According to Denholt, Baxter hadn’t cooperated with the therapy that represented her best chance to heal.

  Perhaps, even at that young age it had been too late for her. And much too late for her future victims.

  All too aware that her heeled sandals weren’t the best footwear on the uneven ground, Sophia moved cautiously through the tangled weeds. The damage the house had sustained would be mostly inside. Denholt had told her that Mary and Allen’s bedroom had been the closest to the stairway upstairs. Even if they had awakened once the flames had rushed up the steps, they would have had to leap from the upper windows to safety.

  In her line of work she regularly immersed herself in the unbelievably cruel acts people inflicted on each other. Had Vickie Baxter been capable of arson and murder at the age of twenty? Her son had been taken away only a few years later, after years of savage abuse. Somehow she’d managed to escape punishment for it, leveling the blame at the men in her life. But the story Sonny Baxter had told his social worker was far different.

  Giving one last long look at the house before turning for her car, Sophia thought it entirely possible that the woman’s evolution to serial predator had started sooner even than the fire that had destroyed this home.

  It had begun with the torture enacted on her own young son.

  * * * *

  She listened for the sound of tires crunching over gravel to fade. To disappear completely. Only then did Vickie Baxter raise one of the cracked and warped exterior doors that led to the cellar’s exterior entrance and run in a crouch to the corner of the house to look at the departing vehicle. A black Prius. It turned left at the drive onto the dusty gravel road and was soon lost in a cloud of dust.

  Seeing the vehicle cemented her certainty about the identity of her unwanted guest. Even through the crack in the storm cellar door, the glimpse she’d gotten of the bitch had been enough. Dr. Sophia Channing.

  She could have ended it right there. It would have been so easy. Once the bitch walked by she could have thrown open the door and blown her fucking head off. But she had something better in store for Channing. The shrink would get everything she had coming to her. But first she’d play an unwitting part in Vickie’s plans.

  Stay or go? Torn, she shielded her eyes as she gazed down the ribbon of gravel, half expecting a plume of dust heralding the cops’ arrival. What else would have brought Channing here if she hadn’t been looking for Vickie?

  The answer came in a snippet from the past.

  A shrink’s office. One in an endless string that her aunt had dragged her to. A male this time. He’d been annoyingly difficult to manipulate, so she’d stopped talking to him altogether. But that hadn’t stopped him from talking.

  You have to open up about your past, Vickie. I can’t help you if you don’t. Take me there. Help me understand.

  Channing didn’t know shit about her, and that’s why she’d come. The realization had her lowering the weapon she clutched. Sliding the safety back in place. If there was one thing Vickie knew it was how shrinks worked. She hadn’t suspected Vickie was here. Couldn’t have seen her car parked behind one of the old wooden sheds.

  The cunt shrink had been trying to get a clearer picture of her past. Amused, she released a chuckle and turned to the crumbling stone steps leading to the dark cellar. She bent and picked up her Maglite.

  Good fucking luck with that. The only thing a charred deteriorating crappy farmhouse could tell her about Vickie Baxter was that she’d had a lot to learn at twenty.

  She’d meant to burn the fucking place to the ground.

  With the aid of the flashlight she made her way back into the cellar. There was a gaping hole in part of the floorboards overhead from where the fire had eaten away at the living room floor. She liked to think of her dear old auntie screaming as the flames melted the flesh from her bones. It’d be disappointing to think that they’d gotten off easy by dyin
g of smoke inhalation.