He wore an expression of total surprise when she shot him—point-blank in the chest.
The impact drove Travis backward. She didn't want to look, though she forced herself. She had to be sure that the job was done. Otherwise, she might have to fire again in the seconds remaining to her.
Travis lay on his back on the floor. There was a ragged hole in the center of his chest. Blood was pumping through the hole.
Then there was another crash, and suddenly the room was filled with two other men.
“Hands up!” one of them shouted.
Jessica dropped her gun. Then she turned to face the two policemen. Through the glare of their flashlights, she noticed that one of them was wearing SWAT gear. The other one she vaguely recognized as the tall, balding cop she has seen a few hours ago on the sidewalk near the Loft. He was undoubtedly the one who had visited her mother’s house that day, investigating her whereabouts.
Jessica raised both of her hands high in the air. She could afford no mistakes, no misjudgments from here forward.
“I surrender,” she said.
Epilogue: 3 months later
“It’s over,” Alan said. “It’s over before it’s even begun.”
Alan shook his head and stared across the lawn of the ODCI’s office building, and at the interstate beyond.
He, Dave, and Maribel were huddled beside the sole window in their office area. They had just learned that Jessica Knox was dead.
The three of them had been busy preparing for the start of Jessica Knox’s trial, which was scheduled to begin in less than two weeks.
Or rather, had been scheduled. There would be no trial for Jessica Knox now.
Travis Hall had died three months ago from a gunshot wound that ruptured his heart.
After placing Jessica Knox under arrest, Alan had immediately called for the paramedics. But Travis was dead before the ambulance even arrived. The coroner later said that Jessica’s accomplice had probably died within minutes of hitting the floor. Although Jessica Knox claimed that she had fired hastily and in self-defense, her single shot had been guided by a deadly aim.
“It’s ironic, isn’t it?” Maribel said. “In the end, she died for love—only not her own love, and not because anyone was infatuated with her.”
To this observation, Alan could only nod silently. Dave let out a long sigh.
Jessica Knox had been stabbed only hours before by Alicia Griggs.
Although Alicia Griggs had gone free that night, she had been arrested two days later. Griggs was charged with aiding and abetting Travis Hall—who had likely intended to murder an Ohio state investigator in the alley of Covey Avenue. When Griggs was arrested in her apartment, she was found to be in possession of several different varieties of illegal narcotics. This only added to her legal problems.
Both Griggs and Knox had been sent to the Dayton Correctional Institution. This in itself was no great coincidence, as there are only three Ohio correctional facilities that house female offenders, and Dayton was the closest of the three to Cincinnati, where both women would be tried separately.
As far as anyone knew, Knox had not even been aware of Griggs’s presence at the Dayton facility, though Griggs was very much aware of Knox. One night shortly before lights out, Griggs cornered the other woman in a deserted corridor and stabbed her repeatedly with a shank.
Griggs—who was struggling with drug rehab, panic attacks, and severe depression—cried out, “You killed Travis, you bitch!” as she delivered the blows.
When the two male guards finally arrived, they had difficulty pulling Griggs off Knox. The killer, who was not an especially large woman, nevertheless fought so viciously that she had to be tased. By the time they subdued her, she was covered in her victim’s blood.
Jessica Knox was rushed to the infirmary; but as in the case of Travis Hall, it was already too late for medical care.
“There will still be a trial,” Alan said. “For Alicia Griggs. Only now Alicia Griggs will go up for Knox’s murder, plus her complicity in what Travis Hall had planned.”
“And Knox will never go to trial,” Maribel added bitterly.
“Yeah,” Alan said.
Since her first meeting with her court-appointed attorney, Jessica Knox had clung to a dubious story: She had indeed been half of the serial killer duo known as Lilith, but she had acted only under duress, and she had never had full knowledge of the extent of Travis Hall’s crimes.
Knox’s attorney had planned to tell the jury that Jessica had also been a victim of Travis Hall. According to this version of events, Knox’s participation in the crimes attributed to Lilith had been secured only through threats of death, physical abuse, and extreme intimidation.
“I still wonder sometimes if she truly knew everything,” Dave said now. Like Maribel and Alan, he was still in shock from the news. Though it was not necessarily a bad thing, from a law enforcement point of view, no one had expected it to end like this.
“Oh, come on, Dave,” Maribel said. “Don’t tell me you think she was innocent.”
“I’m not saying she was innocent,” Dave countered, more than a little defensively. Maribel had long insisted that Dave had developed a misplaced affection for Jessica Knox, all because she had effectively spared his life that night in the alley. “But there are degrees of guilt. Maybe Hall did use some kind of manipulation on her.”
“Right, just like the bank manager who made her clean out a deceased woman’s safety deposit box.”
Since Jessica Knox had been publicly revealed as the only living suspect in the Lilith murders, her probable crimes at the bank had also become a matter of public interest. Seth Greenwald, the bank manager who had been successfully blackmailed by Lilith, had been repeatedly grilled by police—as well as his employer.
No charges were ever filed against Greenwald. From a legal perspective, his behavior had fallen into a gray area. But the senior management of the bank required less exacting criteria. Seth Greenwald had been fired from the bank some weeks ago, Alan knew.
“She was almost certainly guilty of theft at the bank,” Dave acknowledged. “But as for shooting those men—we don’t know.”
“There’s no way Travis Hall could have gotten close enough to those men without Jessica Knox’s close cooperation,” Maribel said. “So she knew. She had to know.”
There was also the matter of the shooting of Travis Hall. Jessica Knox had repeatedly insisted that this was self-defense. Had she gone to trial, though, the prosecution would have argued that Jessica had killed her partner in cold blood, so that he would be unable to testify against her, thereby contradicting her claims of partial innocence.
“For all we know,” Alan said. “Jessica Knox might have fired the head shots that killed Lilith’s three victims. At the very least, she must have known what Travis Hall was doing. But let’s change the subject for a moment. Dave, I understand that you have an announcement to make—a change in your personal status.”
“What?” Dave said. His cheeks immediately flushed red.
“I believe that Dave has a girlfriend,” Alan said. “And she’s not a serial killer. In fact, she’s been vetted by the police.”
“Oh, yeah,” Dave said. “You’re referring to Lisa.”
“How long were you going to hold out on us?” Maribel asked, leadingly.
Alan knew for a fact that this was no news to Maribel, but she would miss no opportunity to needle Dave with such banter. There was no malice in it. Cops needed the occasional practical joke and personal teasing as comic relief. There was an adolescent aspect to such behavior, of course; but it lightened the gloom that so often came with their work.
Both Alan and Maribel were aware the Dave had been dating Lisa Cullen for more than two months. Once the divorced single mother had been cleared of any connection to Lilith’s crimes, there was nothing to stop Dave from asking her out.
This required Dave to come clean about his initial charade, and to reveal that his original presentatio
n of himself had been a concoction. Lisa, Alan knew, had accepted the revelation with good humor. After all, she had not been completely honest in her own dating profile. And she was apparently attracted to the idea of dating a cop—even a mostly desk-bound cop like Dave Hennessey.
Most of us are liars at one time or another, Alan thought, staring out the window again. We all make masks for the purpose of hiding our secrets in certain times and situations. And many of those lies are wholly forgivable, in the big scheme of things.
And then there are the people who lie for completely evil ends—people like Jessica Knox and Travis Hall.
“All right, then,” Alan said, sighing and giving the view of the highway one last look. “Let’s get back to work. Last night the story of ‘Lilith’ came to an end, more or less. Today has been a quiet day so far; but the day’s not yet half over.”
Lilith: a novel Page 26