She screamed again, and that’s when the knife came out.
One second it wasn’t there, and the next it appeared like magic in Jasmine’s other hand, a thin curved blade shaped like a comma, razor sharp. The tip flew toward her and stopped, resting at the nape of her neck, grazing her flesh.
Then she truly understood what it felt like to be an animal, to know nothing but the need to survive. Up until that moment her fear had been existential in nature, a fear borne of speculation. She imagined all the things Jasmine would do to her and the possibilities terrified her. Once she saw the knife, though, there was no room left in her brain for imagination. The whole world narrowed down to its wicked silver point. She thought of nothing else. She only watched it, and waited.
“I’ll cut you if you make me.” A pause filled with a heavy breath. “Don’t make me.”
Jasmine pulled back until they were nose to nose. Laura stayed perfectly still. Jasmine moved closer. Closer still, never letting the knife waver.
And kissed her. A tongue, simultaneously rough and smooth, probed between her lips.
“Do you like it?” Jasmine said.
The knife point drilled into her throat, and the other hand slipped down the front of her body.
“Do you like me?” she asked, and licked the tip of Laura’s nose.
Laura took a deep breath, and spoke. “What should I call you? Patty Finch?”
It was the wrong thing to say. The person she had known as Jasmine DeVane threw back her head and shrieked with laughter.
“Try again,” she giggled.
“Patrick Finch, then,” she said, the words so quiet they almost dissolved.
Something in Jasmine’s face softened. “Poor Patrick. If you know about him, you must know about his mother.”
Laura couldn’t nod, not with a razor-sharp shard of steel at her neck. She forced herself to speak. “Yes.”
The tip of the knife made another pinprick in her throat. “And that’s how you put it together? That Patrick became Patty became Jasmine?”
“Yes.”
“That is so very disappointing to hear. You were supposed to be such a good little investigator.” Jasmine gestured to herself. “You think this is just an act? A costume? I’m not Patrick—I never was.”
“You’re him.”
Jasmine leaned back. Her hand moved in a blur and fished a small black box out of her pocket. She held it up to her face. “I’m not Patrick,” she said again, and the words came out in a low rumbly baritone.
“You have to be,” Laura heard herself say.
“You have to be,” Jasmine repeated, and Laura’s words echoed back to her in the killer’s voice. Jasmine shoved the box back into her pocket, then reached down and locked a viselike grip around Laura’s wrist. “I thought you knew me better than that.”
She tried to pull herself free, but Jasmine was stronger than she’d ever imagined.
“There’s still time,” Jasmine said. She forced Laura’s hand between her legs and pressed herself forward. The blade scraped delicately along Laura’s temple. Jasmine rolled her hips and closed her legs around Laura’s hand. Shaky breaths tingled in her ear. Pressure on the knife forced Laura to turn her head, and Jasmine pressed her lips to Laura’s mouth.
“You’re female,” Laura said.
Jasmine let go of her hand and smiled, and for a second she was her old self again, beautiful and self-aware and not at all violent. “Of course,” she said. “Shame on you, Laura, for thinking it had to be a man.”
And then her face changed. The smile fell away like a discarded mask. The skin drew tight, the lips wrenched back. Her teeth were fangs in the moonlight.
Laura knew this was not the time to push or to pry. This was the time for self-preservation. The survival instinct roared from the depths of her being, and no one was more surprised than she at what came out of her mouth next.
“Can I ask you a few questions?”
Jasmine paused. “A reporter until the end.”
“Is that what this is? The end?”
Jasmine smiled again, all sharp teeth.
Laura shivered. “So what’s the harm in a few questions?”
Her therapist seemed to weigh the words. Her hand moved. Laura caught the briefest flash of light on steel before the knife vanished. Jasmine reached up, open handed, and ran a finger through Laura’s hair.
“Ask,” she said.
Laura took a deep breath. “Who are you?”
“Mildred Finch’s daughter, of course. We moved here, my mother and I. It was a terrible time in my life. Horrible mothers—we have that in common.”
“Mildred didn’t have a daughter.”
“No, she had me. She picked me out like one would a pair of shoes to match a dress. She window-shopped girls at group homes until she found the perfect accessory to complement her life. To complete her lie. And she chose me because I was so very desperate for a mommy. I’ve always worn my heart on my sleeve.”
Laura tried to ignore the sensation of Jasmine’s leg snuggled up on top of hers. “She adopted you.”
“Nothing so legal. They used to line us up in the cold on Saturday mornings like meat hanging on a butcher’s hooks, and let prospective parents stare and prod at us. Sometimes another child got lucky. I never did. Then Mildred came two weeks in a row and spoke only to me. The third week she didn’t come, and it crushed me, but I recognized her car when it pulled into the back of the lot a few days later. I recognized her face when she waved me over.”
“She just took you?”
“A legal adoption was never in the cards for Mildred. But she needed a daughter. She needed someone to be Patty. Patrick outlived his usefulness even before she left Virginia. He’s still up there on that farm. She drank too much one time and started kicking me. She liked to hit, only this time she screamed something about how the old Patty was a no-good, evil child, and if I didn’t behave, I’d end up just as dead. Told me it was a mercy killing and that she buried him at his favorite hiding spot, some tree near the water.” Jasmine paused. “That’s how I found out I was a replacement.”
“What’s your name, then? Your real name?”
Jasmine smirked. “Does it matter? Now that I’m older, I look back and see my mother with new eyes. She was weak and afraid, but she was also a genius.”
“A genius,” Laura repeated, thinking of what she knew about that torturous, deranged woman.
“Yes, she was right, don’t you see? The human race is infected, Laura, and she taught that lesson well. Back in 1988, I hated her for it. I was an unappreciative child.”
“So you tried to run away.”
“Three times. And on the third time, he found me.”
“Hobbes.”
“Who else? He found me and he took me, and in the process he proved to me the truth of things. My mother was quite correct about the devils of our nature. I wasn’t the last little girl he stole, but I was the first.”
Laura knew Patty Finch had disappeared in July, so indeed, Jasmine had not been the last of them. An image leapt into her mind. The Christmas Angel, Maria Mendelsohn. It had also been a white Christmas when she was killed. The parallel of the two moments separated by twenty-nine years—snow on the ground, bitter air, the acrid taste of pennies in her mouth—resonated so strongly that for a moment Laura felt she would vomit.
“The one he let live,” she managed.
“He took us alive, you know. The first thing he made me do was strip, and then he started crying.”
Laura furrowed her brow. She’d poured so much time and energy into divining the mind of Eugene Hobbes, but not once had she imagined him shedding tears.
“I reminded him of his daughter, you see. The one that was taken from him. He chose me because I looked like her, and together we started a new family. I was ungrateful at first, but in time he came to enjoy me. He would call me his little secret. Made me dress like her, made me do things. Most of all he liked to make me watch when he worked
on the others.”
Her voice caught in her throat. “That’s horrible.”
“Yes! Now you’re getting it. Just so: a horror show. But it was real, Laura. Real. Do you understand?”
She said nothing.
“Monsters exist,” she whispered, “but no one seems to care.”
“You killed Olive Hanson.”
Jasmine slithered back across the truck’s cab. The Browning appeared in her hand. Her face vanished into gloom.
“They cared then, didn’t they?” she said.
Laura’s jaw worked, but no words came out.
Jasmine continued. “With the last girl, Hobbes made me help. Something broke in me then, something inside me I didn’t know existed right up until the moment it shattered. He looked into my eyes and saw it—saw that I was broken. I was of no use anymore. So he sent me off. Just crumpled me up and threw me away. No one even bothered to look.”
“Don Rodgers did.”
“Don’t lie to me. You can’t lie to me, not after so many sessions together. Not after you bared your soul.”
A small moan escaped between Laura’s lips.
“It took him more than two decades to realize I’d been taken. No one looked for me. Someone needed to take action.”
“So you killed a little girl,” Laura said flatly. “And then Frank Stuart, and then Hobbes.”
“I dragged him into the light. The rest of them were unfortunate, undeserving, the inevitable consequence of necessity.”
“Of your sickness.”
“Of my plan. The morning after they found her was beautiful. I walked through the streets and watched people act out grief like wind-up dolls. Human savagery plays nightly on the news and still they were shocked when it happened to them. The first domino had to be real, it had to be personal. A tipping point.”
“And Teresa Mitchem? Samantha Powell?”
Jasmine said nothing. She secured her gloves, pulled her hat down over her hair, and reached behind her for the door latch. When the door was just cracked, she gestured with the barrel of the Browning.
“Get out.”
“Jasmine, I—”
“During one of our sessions, you told me no price was too great to pay for the truth. You said you’d die to know what happened to the Mitchem girl. I wonder, do you feel that way still?”
“Please, you don’t have to do this.”
“Get out of the truck or I’ll shoot you.”
Laura pulled the door handle and stepped down into the snow. On the other side, Jasmine mirrored her movements, climbing out at the same moment and moving backward around the truck’s tailgate.
For a moment, just a moment, she disappeared from view.
Laura ran.
She took five great big strides across the field, careful to lift her feet up and over the snow. She pumped her arms, willing herself to move faster. The air must have been cold moving in and out of her lungs but she couldn’t feel it. Blood sluiced through her body’s pathways, wild and fierce. She wanted to live.
Five strides.
She made five strides, and then Jasmine tackled her from behind.
They slid through the snow together, Laura’s face pressed down into the ground. She could feel the hidden dirt and gravel scraping across her cheek. The blood ran free down her neck. Fevered breath hissed into her ear. Jasmine flipped Laura over like she was a rag doll, then rose over her. They lay in the wide triangle thrown by the truck’s headlamps. Jasmine hovered in front of the light. A dark silhouette looming over her. A shade with a gun in its hand.
The gun rose until it was pointing at her, light bouncing off its polished barrel.
“Get up,” Jasmine said. “Start walking.”
CHAPTER
37
SHE STUMBLED UP the diamond-plate steps in the center of the stands. Behind her came a high-pitched tinny scraping and the sharp ping of metal on metal. She stole a glance backward and saw Jasmine oh so casually dragging the gun’s barrel down a length of steel handrail like a prison guard running a baton across the cell bars.
At the top, Jasmine shoved her to the left. Ahead lay one of the speedway’s only remaining structures: the old concession stand. A new tin roof had been put on sometime in the last thirty years, as though someone had wanted to use it for storage, but it still had two long rusted serving windows facing downhill toward the track, and the side door stood open.
“Inside,” Jasmine said.
Laura froze on the doorstep. If she went inside, the chances that she would ever come back out seemed slim. The gun barrel poked painfully into her spine, but still she thought of trying to fight. If she was going to die, let it happen on her own terms. Maybe she could pretend to stumble, then spin around. If she was fast enough to avoid the first bullet, then she might have a chance.
From inside the door came the in-and-out hiss of distressed and rapid breathing.
“Inside,” Jasmine said again. “Someone’s been waiting for you.”
* * *
The light of the full moon had been bright, and it took her eyes a moment to adjust. She could make out several metal canisters stacked against the back wall, and next to them, the prone shape of a child.
Laura ran to her, bent down and put a hand on her chest. It moved up and down. She reached up and touched the chin, then gently turned the face toward the light of the door.
It was Samantha Powell. Her eyes were screwed shut like someone trying to ward off a night terror. A large bruise decorated her forehead, and one of her ears had been taped up with bandages. Her chest rose and fell, but the exhalations were far too swift for someone in a state of natural sleep.
She shook her by the shoulder. “Samantha.”
No response.
“She can’t hear you,” Jasmine said. “One of the benefits of my professional license is access to pharmaceuticals. Olive Hanson and Teresa Mitchem received the same treatment, if that makes you feel better.”
“You drugged them.”
“There was never anything to be derived from their pain.” She gestured with the gun. “Sit next to her and put out your hands.”
Laura did as she was told.
“Now I’m going to put this gun down here”—she rested it on the cracked concrete floor, on the far side of the girl—“and if you try anything, we’ll just see who gets to it first. Don’t make me hurt her again.”
Laura had seen just how fast Jasmine could move. She produced a dark-colored strip of plastic and looped it around Laura’s outstretched hands, mated the ends, and pulled. Laura recognized the distinctive ratcheting sound of a zip tie. Another went around her ankles, and then Jasmine stood. She pocketed the Browning, gathered up the girl, stood again, and carried her outside.
Alone in the crumbling wood room, splinters scraping at her back, Laura tried to think what to do. She had tried to be understanding, but now it was time to try and rattle her cage.
Jasmine came back inside and pulled the door shut behind her, then clicked a padlock onto the hasp. There was no sign of the girl.
“What did you do with her?”
“I wonder if her parents have finally learned to appreciate her,” Jasmine said. She was almost invisible in the dark, just a blotch against the light of the door.
“You’re just like him, you know. He molded you until it was like looking in a mirror. He was a killer; he begat a killer. You can stop. You have a choice.”
The figure shook, and then a sound exploded out from behind it. Thundering. Deafening. Echoing off the walls.
It was laughter.
Jasmine was laughing—no, she was practically convulsing, having a conniption, a bird’s warble moving rapidly between deep roar and animal shriek.
And as fast as it began, the laughter vanished.
“Please, Laura. He killed, I kill—so we must be the same? You’re such a smart woman; it’s not like you to be so reductive. Take a life for pleasure and you’re a beast. Take a life in self-defense and you’re an hones
t citizen. Take a life in war, you’re a hero. Intent is everything.”
“You don’t have to do this,” she said again, choking on the words.
“I didn’t have to do any of it. But someone had to.”
“For what?”
Jasmine stepped into the light. “Tell me: do parents around here still let their children roam alone at night?”
Laura balled her hands into fists.
“Of course they don’t,” Jasmine DeVane said. “They see the world for what it is. What it truly is. That’s my gift to them all. Perhaps someday there will be a cure for people like Hobbes. People like me.” Her voice shuddered. “And in the meantime, they’ve learned to keep their loved ones close.”
Some primal, fearful thing inside Laura wanted to squeeze her eyes shut, but she wouldn’t let them close. She wouldn’t give her that. She stared upward, defiant, and waited for whatever came next.
“Why else would I have drawn you to the cabin? Because the story needed to be told. It will be passed from generation to generation. A dark fable. A monster story to tell children around the fire. Why else would I have taken another girl and brought you here tonight? Because people need to know the monster still exists, lurking in the darkness, waiting.”
Jasmine slid down the wall next to Laura.
“They killed it, and it came back anyway. And us? We’re just two more of his victims.”
“Victims,” Laura said. She didn’t understand.
Jasmine pulled out the Browning, used her sleeve to wipe all the surfaces, and tossed it into the corner. The knife got the same treatment. She produced two more zip ties. One she pulled taut around her ankles, the other she tugged onto her wrists. She caught the end between her teeth and yanked it viciously until the thin plastic edge carved into her flesh.
“No matter how hard they look, they’ll never find the monster. I’ll already be gone.”
Laura’s head spun with the madness of it. “You didn’t have to tell me,” she murmured. “You didn’t have to kill me.”
“I didn’t want to,” Jasmine said, and a quaver in her voice made it sound like the truth. “But you should have taken my advice and quit. Once you took those pictures from the cabin and connected them to Patty Finch, I didn’t have a choice. I couldn’t have you putting it all together once I’m gone.”
Last Girl Gone Page 29