A Dark Mind

by T. R. Ragan

  “We’re not there yet.”

  “I’m not going any farther until you tell me the plan.”

  “Fine,” Hayley said. “Once we get to the house, you’re going to park about a half a block away from Robinson’s house, facing east. I’m going to knock on the door. If anyone answers, I’m going to use my phone to take a picture.”

  “That’s illegal. You can’t simply take pictures of anyone you want.”

  “I’ll be discreet. He’ll think I’m making a call.”

  “And what if nobody answers the door?”

  “I’ll take a quick look around and see what’s going on.”

  “Promise me you won’t break into the house.”

  “I won’t break into the house.”

  Jessica stared at Hayley, wondering if she was lying. “I thought you didn’t make promises.”

  “I don’t.”

  Jessica huffed. “And this impromptu reconnaissance of yours will take how long?”

  “Ten minutes at the most.”

  Jessica thought about it for a second as she watched the wind swoosh through the branches of the trees lining the street, making them dance. “OK. Ten minutes. Otherwise, I’m calling the police.”

  “Do not call the police.”

  “I was kidding.”

  “Don’t call them until the twenty-minute mark,” Hayley added.

  Jessica didn’t like the sudden gravity of Hayley’s voice, let alone the idea of having to call the police at all. She hadn’t been serious about calling the police, but obviously Hayley was.

  “And this is the most important part,” Hayley continued. “If a car pulls into the driveway or you see anyone at all approaching the house, you need to give me a call. My phone is set to vibrate, so nobody will hear a ringtone.”

  Jessica felt sick to her stomach.

  “Are we good?”

  “Yeah, we’re good,” Jessica said as she pulled back into the street. “Let’s get this over with. It looks like it’s going to rain soon. Which way?”

  “Make a left at the next stop sign.”

  CHAPTER 24

  I hate a bitchy chick.

  —Gerald Stano

  Lincoln

  Friday, June 8, 2012

  “Why don’t you tell me who’s calling?” Lizzy asked.

  “And ruin all my fun?”

  “Are you the same man who attacked me in the park?”

  “I need to go, Lizzy. I have important business to attend to, but I really wanted to hear your voice.”

  “Before you go,” she said, “I have something very important to tell you.”

  “I’m still here.”

  “Good, because I want you to listen carefully. I’m your worst nightmare, asshole. I’m the shadow lurking in every dark corner from here on out. Maybe you’ve read a few articles about me. Maybe you believe everything you read and you think I’m teetering on the edge of a dark abyss. Well, guess what? You’re right. I’m teetering, all right, but I’m teetering on the edge of enlightenment. I get it. I’m all fucked up and because of my past history I tend to attract lunatics like you. But your plan to push me a little too far has backfired, because I’m the bitch who is going to find you and haul your sorry ass to prison, and the only thing you’ll be wishing is—”

  She heard a dial tone and realized her worst nightmare had just hung up on her.

  The nerve.

  For the first time in months, Lizzy felt something much stronger than fear. It was anger, raw, dirty anger. And in the blink of an eye, it smothered all her apprehensions and terror within. What she felt was not the fleeting kind of annoyance most people encountered throughout their day; this was full-fledged rage. And it felt good.

  A smirk formed as she walked along the dirt path back to her car.

  Sacramento

  Friday, June 8, 2012

  Hayley counted to ten. Clearly, nobody was home. The entry door to John Robinson’s house was solid wood—no way to peek through. The large-paned window was covered with dark curtains—nothing to see there, either.

  On to Plan B.

  It was easy enough to find the side gate, but not nearly as easy to open it. She reached over the gate, stretching her arm as far as she could, catching splinters along the way. Finally, she felt the metal latch, but it wouldn’t budge. Her fingers brushed over a heavy-duty lock—the kind of lock that needed a key.

  The old, weathered fence was warped, making it easier for Hayley to see through the cracks. The backyard was an exact replica of the front yard: dead lawn, no greenery other than weeds. There was a dented aluminum garbage can overloaded with trash.

  She glanced over her shoulder and saw Jessica peering out the window, looking worried.

  Their eyes met.

  Jessica shook her head and used both hands to gesture for Hayley to return to the car.

  Hayley shook her head right back at her and pointed to the backyard, letting her know she was going to climb the fence. Then she jumped. Gritting her teeth, she used all her strength to pull her body up and over. She landed on her feet, but then lost her balance and fell on her ass. Pushing herself up, she wiped herself off. The stench caused her nose to wrinkle. The air smelled like raw sewage and skunk, making her feel right at home.

  Her phone vibrated. She ignored it, knowing that Jessica was just being a worrywart.

  Hayley could see the driveway through the wood slats. Nobody had driven by and there were no new cars parked in front.

  As soon as Hayley left the car, Jessica began her countdown. It was past five. She turned off the music. She needed to concentrate. She didn’t like this street. The neighborhood looked abandoned: houses with broken windows, and an old mattress on the curb farther down the street. Nearly every mailbox lining both sides of the street had been destroyed, flattened with a hammer or a baseball bat. She couldn’t help but wonder how many of these homes, if any, were actually occupied.

  She’d read about streets like this. Houses were foreclosed and then deserted, leaving the empty homes for drug users and criminals. The entire street smelled foul.

  From where she sat, she could see Hayley at the front door to John Robinson’s house.

  Come on, Hayley. Nobody’s home. Let’s get out of here.

  Highly annoyed, she watched Hayley walk to the side of the house, stand on her tiptoes, and reach an arm over the top of the gate. The gate was obviously locked; otherwise she would have opened it and gone inside. When Hayley looked her way, she was relieved to finally make eye contact. Jessica gestured for her to return to the car, letting Hayley know her time was up. Instead, she watched Hayley jump and pull herself up and over to the other side.

  Shit. She should have known that Hayley wouldn’t give up so easily.

  Whatever.

  If Hayley wanted to risk her life, that was her prerogative…but for what? That girl was foolish. She had just climbed over the fence of a potentially dangerous man. Only Hayley would be so careless.

  Jessica refused to sit here and worry. She was going to get an ulcer if she kept it up. Hoping to distract herself, she looked at her phone. No missed calls. No new texts. Still no word from Magnus. It was killing her not to give him a call. She reached into her purse and pulled out the piece of paper with his number scribbled on it—the paper he had given her at the coffee shop.

  If she could hear his voice, she would feel so much better. She dialed his number, her heart racing a little faster with each ring.

  He didn’t answer.

  Out of the corner of her eye, she saw movement. She shut her phone and put it away. Outside, she saw a dog—a small scruffy dog with no collar. The dog looked like a mutt—a cross between a Maltese and an unidentified ancestor. Its ribs were showing.

  Aw, the poor thing looked hungry.

  She looked up and down the road—nobody outside looking for a lost dog. She scrounged around inside her purse until she found the snack bar she kept stashed away for emergencies. She grabbed her bottled water, too,
and climbed out of the car. “Hey, pooch,” she called.

  The dog turned and looked at her.

  “Are you hungry?”

  The dog’s tail wagged a little, but he wasn’t ready to come toward her.

  Jessica opened the bar, broke off a tiny piece, and held it out for him. “Here you go, pooch. Come on, you can do it.”

  He took a step forward, but then a truck came into view and ruined everything. The dog ran off and the car pulled into the driveway next door to John Robinson’s house.

  Jessica hurried back to her Volvo and slid behind the wheel. She pulled out her phone and dialed Hayley’s number. One ring, and then two…three…four.

  “Answer your phone, Hayley.”

  What’s the point of having a lookout if you aren’t going to answer the phone?

  Jessica scooted lower in her seat and watched the man exit his vehicle. He was a large man. Instead of heading for the front door, he headed for John Robinson’s house. He didn’t bother going to the front door. He went straight for the same side gate Hayley had jumped over and shoved a booted foot right through the wood, sending pieces of broken planks flying.

  Jessica gasped. What was the man doing? What was going on?

  He didn’t even look up to see if anyone was watching. He appeared to be completely at ease, as if kicking down doors and gates was something he did every day, before he ducked low and disappeared through the opening. The entire neighborhood appeared to be alive with crazy people. Jessica grabbed her phone.

  Hayley reached into her backpack and pulled out a tension wrench. It took less than thirty seconds to get the side door into the garage open. Once inside, she took a good look at the blue Toyota Camry, all shiny and clean. Even the rims sparkled like new. The entire garage was neat and organized. One entire wall was devoted to tools: saws, an axe, shovels, and an assortment of gardening tools.

  The fact that there was a car parked in the garage at all bothered her, since there had been nothing in John Robinson’s records about his being married. If he wasn’t married, the probability of his having more than one car was slim to none. And if he had only one car, then he was probably home. So why didn’t he answer the door when I knocked?

  She planned to find out. But first, she lifted her jeans to make sure her knife was safely tucked within the sheath strapped to her calf. She reached for the knife, grabbed the handle, and whipped it out, the blade pointing outward in front of her. Glad she hadn’t lost her touch, she put the knife away. Using the same twisted tension wrench, she then made her way into the house. She stood in the kitchen for a long moment and listened. All was quiet. No television on in the background. No radio. No washer or dryer or any sounds of any kind.

  The kitchen counters were yellow Formica. The table where John Robinson ate his meals was a midcentury vintage chrome-and-avocado piece surrounded by four aluminum chairs. The shag carpet was multiple colors. Like the garage, everything was orderly and clean. Even the walls looked newly painted.

  Her phone vibrated again, prompting Hayley to walk to the living room window and peek through the heavy curtain.

  Jessica was looking her way and making stabbing motions with her finger at the neighbor’s house. Hayley couldn’t see a thing and she didn’t care about the neighbor, so she gave her a thumbs-up and shut the curtain.

  It took about five minutes to do a quick run-through of the house. There were only two bedrooms. Nobody sleeping in the beds. In fact, the entire house hardly looked lived in. No pictures on the wall, nothing to tell her who lived here.

  She was in the bathroom, searching inside the medicine cabinet, when she heard loud noises coming from the house next door. She exited the bathroom, ran to the bedroom on the far side of the house, and looked out the window. The house next door was a clone of the house she was in right now. She could see the side yard and the door leading to the garage.

  Thump. Thump.

  What was going on over there?

  The neighbor was probably working inside the garage. No big deal. Focus. She needed to finish looking around and get out before Jessica called the police. Upon returning to the bedroom, Hayley noticed that the rectangular table at the end of the bed was actually a wooden chest. She lifted the lid. The chest was filled with women’s clothes, everything neatly folded. There was a pair of black pumps and a pair of size 8 leather boots. She reached for a cloth bag, tied with a silk rope. Inside were two blonde wigs. She pulled one out. It was shoulder length, with a wispy modern side-sweep of bang. It felt like real human hair.

  At the sound of a scraping noise in the other room, Hayley shoved everything into the chest, closed the lid, and hurried back to the main room. She stood there for a moment, listening, waiting to see if she would hear the noise again. That’s when she saw movement beneath a table between two chairs. A large section of the shag carpet was coming loose.

  A trapdoor?

  Shit!

  She made a run for it. Before she could escape, a hand shot out and large fingers grasped her ankle. She fell and hit her head on the corner of a chair. Rolling to her side, she used her free leg to kick him in the face.

  He grunted, but held tight. “Who the hell are you?”

  “Who the hell are you?” she shouted.

  “I’m just making my weekly rounds,” he gritted out, “looking for my sister.”

  Hayley’s eyes narrowed. “Eli Simpson?”

  “Now how in the world would you know that?”

  “I work for Lizzy Gardner.”

  He released a frustrated breath and let go of her ankle. “Is that an ankle monitor?”

  “What’s it to you?”

  “Nothing, I guess.” He climbed out of the hole and replaced the lid to the trapdoor. “This creep has more traps and rickety stairs than the Mousetrap game.”

  Hayley came to her feet and brushed herself off. “Anything down there?”

  “Nothing but an empty, windowless room with a workbench and some tools. I’ve been wondering how the guy has been getting in and out without being seen. He had some work done on his backyard a while ago. Sure enough, I found a tunnel leading from the greenbelt behind his house to the room below.”

  “Did you find anything in the tunnel?”

  He shook his head. “Did Lizzy send you here?”

  “No.” Hayley pointed toward the front door. “I’ve gotta go or the crazy girl who drove me here is going to call the cops.”

  He pointed at her face. “You’re bleeding.”

  She touched her face, felt the blood with her finger, surprised at how fast her heart was beating as she headed for the door.

  “What about you?” he asked before she left. “Did you find anything?”

  “A chest full of women’s clothes and some wigs.”

  “Yeah, he likes to play dress-up,” he said, waving her out. “I’ll take it from here.”

  She looked over her shoulder at Eli, even felt sorry for him as she shut the door behind her. She jogged across the street. Jessica had the passenger door open and ready.

  Hayley climbed in and Jessica took off the minute she shut the car door.

  Hayley’s heart thumped hard against her chest. She kept waiting for Jessica to ask her what had happened or at least yell at her and tell her she was a crazy bitch, but she was driving at the perfect speed limit and stopping at the end of every street, checking both ways before hitting the gas. If it weren’t for the big droplets of tears running down the side of her pale face, Hayley never would have guessed that Jessica was feeling any emotion at all.

  CHAPTER 25

  One side of me says, I’d like to talk to her, date her. The other side of me says, I wonder what her head would look like on a stick?

  —Edmund Kemper

  Sacramento

  Friday, June 8, 2012

  The metal garage door made a loud whirring noise as it closed. Once it shut, he pulled off his wig, tossed it on the passenger seat, laid his head on the headrest, and took a breath.

&n
bsp; He was still feeling the lingering effects of his talk with Lizzy Gardner. She was a sassy bitch. Just the way he liked them. She was cocky and overly confident and she wanted him to think she had him right where she wanted him. The notion made him smile.

  She had no idea what was coming, no idea what he had planned for her. If only he had a way to videotape her reaction when her life came tumbling down around her.

  A loud thumping noise caught his attention. No doubt about it, he thought as he climbed out of the car and shut the door, Kassie Scott was a stubborn one. And she would regret causing him so much grief.

  He used the key to unlock the trunk, and when he lifted it open, he saw a flash of movement and felt a sharp ache in his side. He staggered backward and looked down at the knife protruding from his body.

  Clever girl.

  Dazed, he watched her climb from the trunk.

  As the scene unfolded before him, he realized watching Kassie’s escape would be funny if it weren’t so ludicrous. Feisty little lady obviously thought one little steak knife would be the end of him. She had no idea who she was dealing with. All he could see in his mind were all the ways in which he wanted to and, more importantly, would cause her pain. A lot of pain.

  Taking unhurried steps, he followed after her, determined to show her who was boss.

  As she tried to slide open the bolt that would allow her to escape, he pulled the knife from his side and plunged it into her thigh. Her high-pitched scream forced him to slam her head into the wall and knock her out. He grabbed some rope and tape from his work area, tied her hands and feet, and then placed duct tape over her mouth.

  Standing straight and tall, he looked down at her for a moment before bending down so that his face was level with hers. After a while, her eyes fluttered open as she slowly became aware.

  “This is only the beginning,” he warned her. “In the end, when you come to terms with death and believe dying will bring you peace, you’ll be wrong. I will be sleeping with your corpse. These hands,” he said, showing her both hands, palms flat, fingers pointed upward, “will be playing with every part of you. These fingers, each and every one, will be intimately devoted to your body for hours on end.”