“This is probably from the killer, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, Jim,” I say, “it probably is.” I don’t have the energy to make my voice sound biting. It comes out sounding tired. Jenny has no such problem. She stabs a finger into his chest with enough force to make him wince.
“You fucked up! Which pisses me off, because I know you’re a good cop. You know how I know you’re a good cop? Because I specifically requested you for this duty and knew you’d be more than just a warm body.” She’s fuming, far beyond being pissed off. For his part, Jim takes it all without a trace of resentment or justification.
“You’re right, Detective Chang. I don’t have a defense. The nurse at the station in reception brought it by. I saw Agent Barrett’s name, but I didn’t make the connection. I went back to reading my paper.” He looks so hangdog at this point that I almost feel sorry for him. Almost. “Damn! I let myself get lulled into a routine! A rookie mistake! Damn, damn, damn!”
Jenny seems to feel for the cop a little too, now that he’s so busy beating himself up. Her next words are more conciliatory. “You’re a good cop, Jim. I know you. You’ll remember this screwup till the day you die—which you should—but you probably won’t ever let it happen again.” She sighs. “Besides, you have done your primary duty here. You kept the kid safe.”
“Thanks, Lieutenant, but that doesn’t make me feel any better.”
“How long ago did this get delivered to you?”
He thinks about it for a second. “I’d say…about an hour and a half. Yeah. The nurse at the station brought it to me and said that some guy delivered it. She figured I could get it to you.”
“Go get all the details. How it was delivered, who, everything.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
I look at the envelope as Jim runs off. “Let’s take a peek inside.”
I open it. Inside is a sheaf of papers clipped together. I see at the top, Greetings, Agent Barrett! Which is enough for now. I look up at Jenny. “It’s from him. Them.”
“Damn it!”
My palms are a little sweaty. I know I need to read what’s inside, but I dread this killer’s next revelations. I sigh, fishing the ever-present pair of latex gloves I keep with me during investigations out of my jacket pocket. I slip them on, open it up, and pull out the clipped sheaf of papers. The letter is on top.
Greetings, Agent Barrett!
By now I imagine you are into the thick of it, you and your team. Did you enjoy the video I left for you? I thought the music I selected was particularly apropos.
How is little Bonnie? Does she scream and weep, or is she simply silent? I wonder about this from time to time. Please, tell her I said hello.
Most of my thoughts are, of course, devoted to you. How is the healing going, Agent Barrett? Still sleeping in the nude these days? With that pack of cigarettes on the nightstand to the left of your bed? I have been there, and I must say, you talk quite loudly in your sleep.
“Holy shit,” Jenny whispers.
I hand her the papers. “Hold on to these for a second.”
She takes them. I run to the nearest trash can, where I proceed to vomit up everything inside my stomach. They’d been inside my house! Had watched me sleep! A thrill of terror spikes through me, followed by a nauseating sense of violation. Then anger. Beneath it all, terror remains as the backdrop. One thought shouts inside my head: It could happen again! My entire body is trembling, and I slam a fist against the rim of the trash can. I wipe my mouth with the back of my hand and walk back over to Jenny.
“You okay?”
“No. But let’s finish it.” She hands me back the papers. They shake in my hands as we continue.
Matthew and Alexa, such a shame. You, alone in that ghost ship of a home, staring at your disfigurement in the mirror. So sad.
I think you are more beautiful scarred, though I know you believe that to be untrue. I’ll say something helpful to you, Agent Barrett, just this once.
Scars are not marks of shame. They are the brands of the survivor.
You might wonder why I’d offer a helping hand. It springs from a sense of fairness. A need to make the game exciting. There are many in this world who could hunt me well, but you…I think you can hunt me best.
I’ve gone to great effort to ensure that you are back in the game, and just one more thing is left, one last wound to stitch up.
A hunter needs a weapon, Agent Barrett, and you cannot touch yours. We need to correct this, to bring balance to the game. Please find attached some information that I believe to be at the heart of this difficulty you are having. It may leave a scar of its own when you read it, but don’t forget: A scar is always better than an unhealed, open wound.
From Hell,
Jack Jr.
I flip over the page. It takes only a few moments for me to understand what it says. Everything around me goes silent and slow. I can see that Jenny is speaking to me, but I cannot hear her words.
I am cold, and getting colder. My teeth chatter, I start shivering, and the world begins tilting away from me. My heart pounds, faster, faster, and then sound returns in a chaotic flash, like a thunderclap. But I am still so cold.
“Smoky! Jesus—Doctor!”
I hear her, but I cannot speak. I can’t stop my teeth from chattering. I see a doctor come over to me. He feels my head, looks into my eyes. “She’s going into full-blown shock here,” he says. “Lay her down flat. Put her feet up. Nurse!”
Jenny leans over me. “Smoky! Say something.”
I wish I could, Jenny. But I am frozen, and the world is frozen, and the sun is frozen too. Everything and everyone is death, dead, or dying.
Because he was right. I read the paper and, just like that, I remembered.
It’s a ballistics report. The part he’d circled for me said this: Ballistics tests prove conclusively that the bullet removed from Alexa Barrett came from Agent Barrett’s weapon….
I was the one who shot my daughter.
I hear the sound and marvel at it, before I realize that it is coming from me. It is a shriek, beginning low in the throat and then climbing, octave after octave, until it seems high enough to break glass. There it hangs, like an opera singer’s vibrato. It seems to go on forever.
Everything is going black now. Thank God.
19
I WAKE UP in a hospital bed to Callie hovering above me. There is no one else here. When I look at Callie’s face, I know why.
“You knew, didn’t you?”
“Yes, love,” she says. “I knew.”
I turn my face away from her. I have not felt so listless, so drained of life, since I woke in the hospital after that night with Sands. “Why didn’t you tell me?” I don’t know if there’s any anger in my voice. Don’t care.
“Dr. Hillstead asked me not to. He didn’t think you were ready. And I agreed. Still do.”
“Really? You think you know so goddamn much about me?” My voice sounds raw to me. The anger is there now, hot and poisonous.
Callie doesn’t even flinch. “I know this: You’re still alive. You didn’t put a gun in your mouth and pull the trigger. I have no regrets, honey-love.” She says the next in a whisper. “That doesn’t mean it didn’t hurt, Smoky. I loved Alexa, you know I did.”
I snap around at this, look at her, and the anger drains away. Just like that. “I don’t blame you. Or him. And maybe he was right, after all.”
“Why do you say that, love?”
I shrug. I’m tired, so tired. “Because I remember everything now. But I still don’t want to die.” I hunch into myself for a moment as pain shoots through me. “Which feels like such a betrayal, Callie. I feel like, if I want to live, then I didn’t love them enough.”
I look over at her, and I see that she is stricken by my words. My Callie, my happy-go-lucky Queen-Hell-on-Wheels, looks like I just punched her in the face. Or maybe the heart.
“Well,” she says after a long moment, “that’s not true. Going on after they�
��re dead, Smoky—that doesn’t mean you didn’t love them. All it means is that they died and you didn’t.”
I file this profundity away for future thought; I can feel its merit. “Funny, isn’t it? I’ve always been able to hit what I want with a gun. It’s always come naturally to me. I remember aiming at his head, and then he was so damn fast. I’ve never seen anyone move that fast. He yanked Alexa off the bed and made her take the bullet for him. She was looking right into my eyes when it happened.” My face twists. “You know, he almost looked surprised. With everything he’d done, he still had this look on his face, like for just a moment he thought he’d gone too far. And then I shot him.”
“Do you remember that part, Smoky?”
I frown. “What do you mean?”
Callie smiles. It’s a sad smile. “You didn’t just shoot him, honey-love. You filled him up with bullets. You emptied four clips into him, and you were about to reload when I stopped you.”
And just like that, I am there and I do remember.
He’d raped me, cut on me. Matt was dead. I was coasting on waves of pain, surfing in and out of consciousness. Everything was slightly surreal. Like being a little bit drugged. Or the hungover feeling you can get when you take an afternoon nap that’s just a half hour too long.
There was a sense of urgency, I could feel it. But it was far away. I was feeling it through soft gauze. I’d have to wade through syrup to get to it.
Sands leaned forward, putting his face close to mine. I could feel his breath on my cheek. It was unnaturally hot. A flash of something sticky—I realized it was his spit, drying on my chest. I shivered once, a full-body shiver. A long, rolling shake.
“I’m going to undo your hands and feet now, sweet Smoky,” he whispered in my ear. “I want you to touch my face before you die.”
My eyes roll toward him, and then roll up into my head. I lose time. I coast back into awareness and feel him at my hands, loosening them. Coast back out, into the black. Surf in again, he’s at my feet. Cowabunga. Light to shadow, shadow to light.
I come to again, and he’s next to me, spooned into my side. He’s naked, and I can feel that he’s hard. His left hand is fisted into my hair, bending my head back. The right is draped over my stomach, and I can feel the knife in it. That breath again, sour and hot.
“Time to go, sweet Smoky,” Sands whispers. “I know you’re tired. You just have one more thing to do before you sleep.” His breathing quickens. His erection stirs at my side, poking into my hip. “Touch my face.”
And he’s right. I am tired. So damn tired. I just want to coast into the black, have it all be done and gone and over. I feel my hand coming up, to do this last thing he wants—and then it happens.
“MOMMY!” I hear Alexa scream. It is a scream of full-throated terror.
It’s a backhanded, bone-rattling slap across my face.
“He told us Alexa was dead, Callie,” I whisper in the hospital room. “Said he killed her first. I heard her scream, and I realized that he’d lied to me, and I knew—I KNEW—he was going to see her next!” I clench my fist as I remember, and feel my body trembling in anger and terror, all over again.
It was as though someone had detonated a bomb inside me. I did not just come awake, I exploded. The dragon crawled up from inside my belly, and she roared, and roared, and roared.
I smashed Sands’s face, felt his nose crunch under the heel of my hand. He grunted, and I was off the bed and heading for the nightstand where I kept my gun, but he was like an animal. Feral and oh-so-fast. No hesitation. He rolled onto the floor and was sprinting out the bedroom door. I heard his feet pounding on the hardwood floors of the hallway, heading toward Alexa.
And I began to scream. I felt like I was on fire. Everything was turning white hot, adrenaline was burning me up, and the intensity of it was excruciating. Time had changed. It hadn’t slowed down, just the opposite. It sped up. Faster than thought.
I had my gun and was not so much running down the hallway as teleporting down it, moving toward Alexa’s room in flashes rather than steps. And I was fast, damn fast, because he was only just turning into her doorway, and then I was there too, and I saw her. On the bed, the gag he had placed around her mouth now loosened. Good girl, I remember thinking.
“MOMMY!” she screamed again, eyes wide, cheeks flushed, rivers of tears. And now I was the animal, no hesitation, raising my gun, aiming for his head…
Then horror. Horror, horror, horror, going on forever, never ending, hell on earth.
Then me, screaming. Screaming, screaming, screaming, going on forever, never ending, hell on earth. Me, shooting Sands, over and over and over, determined to shoot him till I was out of ammo, and then—“Oh Jesus, Callie.” Tears fill my eyes. “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, I’m so sorry.”
She takes my hand, shakes her head once. “Don’t worry about it, Smoky.” She squeezes my hand, a fierce squeeze. It almost hurts. “I mean it. You weren’t in your right mind.”
Because I remember hearing Callie bust in through my front door, seeing her appear, weapon drawn. I remember her moving toward me with exaggerated caution, telling me to put down my gun. Me screaming at her. Her moving toward me. I knew she wanted to take it away from me, and I knew I just couldn’t let her do that. I still needed to put it to my head, to shoot myself, to die. I deserved to die for killing my child. So I did the only thing that seemed to make sense to me. I pointed the gun at Callie, and I fired.
It’s pure luck that the chamber was empty. Thinking of it now, I remember that she didn’t even slow down, just kept moving toward me until she got close enough to take away the gun, which she tossed to one side. After that I don’t remember very much at all.
“I could’ve killed you,” I whisper.
“Naw.” She smiles again. It’s still a little bit sad, but some of the mischievous Callie shines through. “You were aiming at my leg.”
“Callie.” I say it as a reprimand, albeit a gentle one. “I remember.” I hadn’t been aiming at her leg. I’d been aiming at her heart.
She leans forward and looks me right in the eyes. “Smoky, I trust you more than I trust anybody in this world. And that hasn’t changed. I don’t know what else to tell you. Except that I’ll never talk about it with you again.”
I close my eyes. “Who else knows?”
Silence. “Me. The team. AD Jones. Dr. Hillstead. That’s it. Jones clamped down on it pretty hard.”
Except that’s not it, I think. They know.
I can tell she has something else to say.
“What?”
“Well…you should know: Dr. Hillstead is the only person who knows about your reaction to finding out today. Aside from Jenny and the rest of the team.”
“You didn’t tell AD Jones?”
She shakes her head. “No.”
“Why not?”
Callie lets go of my hand. She looks uneasy, a rare thing for her. She stands up and paces a little. “I’m afraid—we’re afraid—if we do, then that’s it. He’ll decide you can never go back to work. Ever. We know you may decide that, anyway. But we wanted to leave the options open.”
“Everyone agreed to this?”
She’s hesitant. “Everyone but James. He says he wants to speak to you first.”
I close my eyes. Right now, James is the last person I want to talk to. The very last.
I sigh. “Fine. Send him in. I don’t know what I’m going to decide just yet, Callie. I do know this—I want to go home. I want to get Bonnie and go home, and try to figure this out. I need to get my head straight, once and for all, or I’m done. You guys can follow up on AFIS and the rest of it. I need to go home.”
She looks down at the floor, then back up at me. “I understand. I’ll get it all into motion.”
She walks toward the door. Stops and turns back to me as she gets to it. “One thing you should think about, honey-love. You know guns better than anyone I’ve ever met. Maybe when you pointed your gun at me, you pulled the trigger
because you knew it was empty.” She winks, opens the door, and walks out.
“Maybe,” I whisper to myself.
But I don’t think so.
I think I pulled the trigger because, at that moment, I wanted the whole world to die.
20
JAMES WALKS IN and closes the door behind him. He takes a seat in the chair next to my bed. He’s silent, and I can’t read him. Not that I ever could.
“Callie said you needed to talk to me before deciding whether or not you were going to rat me out to AD Jones.”
He doesn’t reply right away. He sits there, looking at me. It’s exasperating.
“Well?”
He purses his lips. “Contrary to what you probably think, I don’t have a problem with you coming back to full and active duty, Smoky. I don’t. You’re good at what we do, and competence is all I ask for.”
“So?”
“What I do have a problem with is you being only halfway.” He gestures at me lying on the hospital bed. “Like this. It makes you dangerous, because you’re unreliable.”
“Oh, please eat shit and die.”
He ignores me. “It’s true. Think about it. When you and I were in Annie King’s apartment, I saw the old you. The competent one. So did everyone else. Callie and Alan started to defer to you again, to rely on you. Together we found evidence that would have been missed. But then all it took was a letter and you collapsed.”
“Little more complicated than that, James.”
He shrugs. “Not in the way that matters it’s not. Either you are back all the way, or not at all. Because if you come back like this, you’re a liability to us. And that leads to what I am willing to agree to.”
“What?”
“That you either come back fixed, or you stay the fuck away. If you try to come back still screwed up, I’m going straight to AD Jones, and I’ll just keep climbing until someone listens to me and puts you out to pasture.”
The fury in me is white hot. “You are some arrogant prick.”
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