by Nick Pirog
Caitlin reached the epicenter and asked, “Who is she?”
“Kim Welding.”
I didn’t have to tell her Kim was one of my students. In another life, Caitlin had frequently popped in on my class sessions. Gregory made a final adjustment to the spotlight and joined the party. He had a butterfly strip over the bridge of his nose, which as much as it pains me to say, looked about as perfectly symmetrical as before. Shucks.
I ran through the story for them, letting Caleb take over when I reached the point of his consequential discovery, and took back the reigns at my Eight in October revelation. I could almost see Gleason mentally slap himself on the forehead. He stamped his foot, “How could we be so stupid. The hot dates are when the women were killed, not when they’re found. What were we thinking? Good catch, Thomas.”
I was going to tell him that I never would have thought differently had Tristen not communicated via walkie-talkie, but I liked them thinking I stumbled on the marvel while sitting on the pot. Todd Gregory did not show his adulation as outwardly as Gleason, and if another one of my students hadn’t just been killed, I think he may have shot me.
Chapter 43
I rolled off the couch and strapped on my running shoes. I’d walked through the door last night at close to three. Caleb and I had been the first two removed from the scene and I had the pleasure of wearing the harness fitted for Gregory’s size 26 inch waist. My balls still felt like they were vacationing in my stomach. It hadn’t hit me until I’d been halfway home that I hadn’t given the slightest conviction to Kim’s eyes. I assumed they were somewhere in the melee of body parts. But what was their significance? They needed to see the site where the next woman was to be murdered.
I clipped the walkie-talkie to the top of my running pants and started out the front door. I started up the beach feeling rigid. Body, mind, and soul. It was like Kim’s murder hadn’t happened. I needed to limber up mentally and physically so the world could come crashing down. How many women were dead? Let’s count, shall we? Jennifer Peppers, Ashley Andrews, Kellon Atkins, and now, Kim Welding. Four in all.
What I couldn’t understand was how Tristen had moved down the ranks from Kellon to Kim Welding. Was Kim simply a filler in his massacre? Did he kill her out of simple convenience? The only thing I knew for certain is that Tristen wouldn’t stop until eight were dead.
I also knew somewhere on Tristen’s list, whether it was fifth, sixth, seventh, or eighth, was Lacy’s name. Probably written in blood on a wall somewhere. No, Lacy would not be taken from me. In fact, no other woman would be taken. I would die before I let that happen.
I ran hard for more than an hour before the tears came. I consoled myself with the confidence Tristen Grayer and I were now on a level playing field. He’d gone out of his way to make the odds fair and I would make him regret his charity. There were two hot dates left and the only possible victims I could think of were Caitlin, Alex, Lacy, and possibly myself. I also knew the exact date and time Tristen would strike. He would not stray from the rules, he would never cheat at his own game. The one thing I needed was the site of the next murder. I needed Kim Welding’s eyes.
After my run, I walked through the door and immediately dialed Gleason. He picked up on the third ring and I said, “Kim’s eyes. We need to find them.”
“One step ahead of you. I talked with Caitlin about twenty minutes ago. She just got all the parts sorted out at the morgue.”
“And?”
“No eyes.”
Shit. “Could they have fallen through the openings in the cage?”
“Theoretically, yes. But my gut tells me Tristen placed the eyes somewhere in the general vicinity of the Rogue Bluffs. Caitlin has twenty of her men helping us canvass the area later this afternoon. She even got three volunteers from the canine unit.”
“If we don’t find those eyes and Tristen thinks we have, we’re up a shit tree without a paddle.”
“It’s up shit creek without a paddle.”
“Whatever. We’re fucked.”
He said the team was meeting at the Roque Bluffs at nine and I told him I’d see him there. Part of me thought Tristen had taken Kim’s eyes and that they’d show up in my life somewhere unexpected in the next twenty-four hours.
Another part of me thought he’d placed her eyes strategically at the scene and they’d either gone out with the tide or were sitting in the belly of an osprey.
I ate three bowls of Lucky Charms for good luck and jumped in the Range Rover. As I pulled up to Caleb’s apartment, he and my sister were getting into his Passat. I honked and yelled, “Change of plans. Get in.”
The two of them hopped in the back and I said, “Lace, I assume you need a ride to the gallery.”
“Don’t you know it? I have five thousand things to do before Friday. Did I say Friday? What day is today?”
“Wednesday.”
She looked the opposite of calm. “There’s no way I can get all the stuff done I need to in two days. No way, no how.”
I dropped Lacy off at the gallery and had a quick chat with the security guard that I didn’t want her out of his sight. He nodded and I slipped him a fifty.
We passed a Dunkin Donuts on the way out of town and Caleb darted in. He came out with a bag of donuts, two tall coffees, a newspaper, and a subdued expression. Opening the passenger door, he said, “You’re not going to believe this.” He tossed the paper on my lap and he was right, I didn’t.
The front page headline of the newspaper, today entitled the Waterville Daily, read:
No Bluff! Student Found in Lobster Cage
How in the hell did Alex get wind of the story? For once I don’t personally escort her to the crime scene and she’s still able to stab me in the back. It wasn’t like there had been a small army at the scene. It’d been me, Caleb, Caitlin, Gregory, Gleason, and two of Caitlin’s men at the Bangor PD. Conner hadn’t even been there.
I opened the driver side door, walked around the SUV, and said, “Slide over, you’re driving.”
Caleb reversed the car and I sank into the article:
Don’t ask for this “Catch of the Day” unless you like ‘em young, pretty, and blonde. At approximately 10:00 P.M. last night, a young woman’s body was found dismembered and stuffed inside a lobster cage at the base of the Roque Bluffs. (Yes, the same bluffs where the last three victims of the Eight in October string were found.) The victim, Kim Welding, was a student at nearby Eaton College of Criminology, who subsequently lost another alum, Ashley Andrews, in a related incident almost a week ago. Both young women were students under Thomas Prescott. This must be a hard pill to swallow for the convalescing FBI consultant. We’re all starting to wonder, is any woman in Prescott’s inner circle safe? It appears not.
That was all there was. The article should have been in the editorial section for crying out loud. I reread the paragraph, then read it aloud to Caleb. At the last sentence he stared at me with such disbelief I had to yank the wheel to keep us on the highway. He shook his head, “Who does that bitch think she is?”
Funny, I was thinking the same thing.
Chapter 44
We pulled up to the bluffs at nine on the dot. It was the first time I’d seen them in the daylight. They looked so innocent and serene, nothing like the bluffs that dominated my nightmares for the past year.
There was a small congregation of about ten police vehicles, three with Canine Unit stamped on the side. This made me think that I should have brought Baxter.
I pulled up the utility compartment to toss in my cell phone and I’ll be—I had brought Baxter. I gave the pet rock a shake and he looked up with his big brown eyes and yelped three times.
Yeah buddy, I hope we find her eyes too.
Caleb and I joined a group of twenty men at the bluff’s edge. Caleb looked down into the cove and said, “I can’t believe you made me jump off this last night.”
I had to admit it was intimidating, close to a fifty foot plunge by daylight. Take twenty
feet off for the tide and it was a burley thirty foot vault. Conner, Gregory, and Gleason sidled up beside us. Gleason looked down and shook his head, “If I’d known it was this far down, I sure as shit wouldn’t have jumped.”
Everyone knew Gleason would have jumped if it’d been a hundred feet. I looked at Gregory and envisioned him on the diving board with orange floaties on his arms. The only way Gregory would have jumped is if George Clooney was mooning him from below. I turned my gaze to Conner. Conner would jump right now if someone dared him. I grabbed his neatly pressed blue shirt, ruffling it, and said, “And where exactly were you last night. Aren’t you supposed to be attached to Gregory’s dick?”
Conner flipped me off, “I was on a date. Remember, your sister dumped me.” He gave Caleb a sideways glance—who at the present moment—was staring out on the water contemplating a quick death as opposed to Conner’s wrath.
I edged between the two of them and said, “All right, we have some eyes to find.”
Caitlin assembled her army and said, “Here’s the deal. We have reason to believe last night’s victim’s eyes are in the general area and carry monumental weight in our case. Half of us will be searching the top of the bluffs and the rest of you will be searching below. There are plenty of nooks and crannies for a serial killer to hide a pair, or even a singular eye.” Ready. Break.
I made quick eye contact with Caitlin and she threw an uncomfortable smile my way. It reminded me that she might be smiling because I was fathering her child. My stomach filled with another two ounces of bile as I went to put on my harness. Come to think of it, I was excited about my balls being crushed into my Adam’s apple. It would take my mind off the four women in my life who had been murdered and my—roll of the dice—impending fatherhood.
Four hours passed and no flares were shot. No flares meant no eyes. No eyes meant no clue. No clue meant—well, I didn’t want to think what it meant.
At one-thirty a box was lowered to the ten of us at the lower camp, and I was pleased to see Caitlin had arranged for Angelini to cater the event. Caleb, Gleason, and I plopped down in the shade of the steep cliff, unraveling our sandwiches. (I’d made the recommendation to Conner that he, Caitlin, and Gregory, stay up top to minimize conflict.)
I’d taken down half my sandwich when Baxter appeared, which was peculiar because I’d locked him in the car with all the windows up. I rustled his small head and gave him a meatball to munch on. Gleason cracked a Coke, took a swig, and said, “I’ve been racking my brain as to how Tristen knows all our moves. He has to have a source at the force or with the Bureau.”
I contemplated this and said, “You’re right. He knows too much. You should have heard him when he was impersonating an agent from the Bureau, it was scary.”
I asked, “Whatever happened with your missing agent?”
“To the FBI he’s dead. They’re having his procession tomorrow. Todd and I are flying back for it in the morning. We’ll be back up here Saturday.”
That reminded me, Kellon’s funeral was on Friday. I lost my appetite and gave the rest of my sandwich to Baxter.
No one stumbled on the eyes and the search group punched out when the sun did. The more I thought about Kim’s eyes the less concerned I became. I hadn’t had to go on any treasure hunts for the past victim’s eyes. The eyes had been blatant, handed to me. I was confident the eyes would surface and if they didn’t, Tristen would throw me another bone. And he would know about the eyes. He knew my next bowel movement, my next sneeze, and probably knew if I were the next father to be.
Chapter 45
I slept like a rock. It seemed like the theme, seeing as I’d been walking on them, scavenging between them, and spelunking down them, all afternoon.
I spent the day at the gallery with Lacy and Caleb going over the small details of the following night’s gala. Lacy’s lighthouse landscape had been professionally framed and hung beautifully on the wall with about twenty-five other paintings.
I looked around and saw two Bangor Police officers milling about. I’d taken Caitlin up on her offer and there were now three full-time BPD officers posted. Lacy put me to work setting up tables, draping table cloths, and arranging centerpieces. There were tables for a hundred and thirty people, and at a hundred and fifty dollars a head, Lacy had made close to twenty thousand dollars for the Multiple Sclerosis Society before the night’s festivities kicked off.
Lacy and I left the gallery around nine-thirty and were home for the second round of SportsCenter. I ate three waffles with butter and powdered sugar before snagging a beer from the fridge. On the way to the couch, I passed my answering machine and saw I had five messages. I went through the caller ID, four calls were from Alex and the other was Charles Mangrove. I wasn’t in the mood to hear Alex’s ranting apologies, nor Mangrove’s lame excuse for flaking on my sister’s fund-raiser, and erased them all.
Kellon’s funeral was at noon at the St. Michael’s Episcopal Church in Newcastle, a small town about forty miles south of Bangor. I pulled into the parking lot and grabbed the kite I’d bought for Kellon off the passenger seat. St. Michael’s was a modern, gray brick, church set in an immense grass courtyard.
I made my way up the ten steep concrete steps and through the open cast iron doors. The inside of the church was narrow, a red carpet splitting the bleacher style pews. Eighty feet below the octagon vaulted ceiling, sparsely indexed, were fifteen adults and close to thirty kids. My esophagus attempted to trade positions with my large intestines as I took a seat in the far back right corner. The memorial service took close to an hour and I only choked up eleven times.
I needed to say my good-byes and made my way to a small group huddled near the casket. Kellon’s father was in the front row, his eyes puffy, his suit disheveled. We made eye contact and held it. I tried halfheartedly, but couldn’t muster an ounce of animosity towards the man. I’d lost a friend, he’d lost a daughter. All the death I’d felt in the past two weeks was nothing compared with what this man felt.
After two or three minutes I was on deck. The coffin was empty, they’d cremated Kellon’s crippled body, and each person was placing something special inside. I put the kite and a letter I’d written amid the roses and carnations, then left the church biting my lip.
As formidable as Kellon’s funeral had been—and it had been—I was dreading the second leg of my catastrophe biathlon more than the first. The doors opened at the Germaine Galleria at five-thirty, and I was penciled in to pick Caitlin up at five.
Before I hopped in the shower I did something I hadn’t done in more than ten days, I shaved. The scruff had to go. The guy with the scruff let women close to him die, not the close shaven man before me. On the surface, I did look a whole lot better clean shaven, but it went deeper, it was a metamorphosis, a new beginning, a fucking renaissance.
I put on the second suit I’d bought from Armani, a pricey charcoal pinstriped number that fit immaculately and contrasted nicely with my slate gray undershirt. I snagged my favorite tie, diagonally striped charcoal on enamel white, and laced up my shiny black Armani boots. I looked in the mirror and cringed. How was I supposed to expect Caitlin to get over me when I looked this good?
I pulled up to Caitlin’s house at five on the dot and had my hand on the horn, when I decided better of it and hopped out of the car. Caitlin opened the door, and my tongue landed on my left boot. She had on a teal dress, cut short. Her hair was straight and hung down onto her bare shoulders. Her glossy lips formed into a smile and her piercing blue eyes danced in the moonlight.
Yowza.
I fell into step behind her on the way to the car and I had a flashback to the first time I’d met her; there was an ulterior motive for my hesitation, which paid off when I fell into stride behind Dr. Caitlin Dodds. To say the view was spectacular would be an understatement, her professional skirt unable to shroud the well-maintained, grade-A caboose, housed beneath the fabric. Thomas Dodds, I could deal with that.
Maybe I could marry th
is woman. Maybe Caitlin should be the mother of my children. I didn’t like the direction my thought process was headed, nor did I like the direction Paddington was headed. I adjusted my belt, did a little shimmy, and caught up with Caitlin at the passenger side door. She had yet to say a word, and when I was uncomfortably in the driver’s seat I said, “You’re quiet.”
She smiled, “There’s not much to say.”
I agreed. There wasn’t.
There were two Bangor police officers stationed at the entrance to the Germaine Galleria. Caitlin knew both by name, and they both told her in their own words how spectacular she looked. She smiled a wee bit too long at the better looking of the two, and if I didn’t know better I would have thought I felt a twinge of jealousy.
I wonder if I can kill him with my cuff link.
We walked through the doors and Caitlin slipped her arm through mine. There were maybe a hundred people, the majority permeating at the edge of the many hallways flanked with paintings. Caitlin said she needed to use the ladies room and veered off unhooking her arm, at which point, I saw my friend Jack in the corner; some asshole holding him by the neck. I practically ran over to the two of them and yelled, “Double Jack and Coke.”
The bartender poured me a stiff drink and I ordered two flutes of champagne for the road. He asked for three drink tickets and handed me two flutes of Korbel.