by Lisa Gardner
People in the neighborhood whispered about them now. That sad family in the sad little house on the corner. Did you hear what happened to their daughter? Well, let me tell you …
Sometimes Nora Ray thought she should walk around with a scarlet letter attached to her clothes, like the woman in that book she’d read her senior year of high school. Yes, we’re the family that lost a daughter. Yes, we’re the ones who actually fell victim to violent crime. Yes, it could happen to you, too, so you’re right, you should turn away when we walk too close and whisper behind our backs. Maybe murder is contagious, you know. It’s found our house. Soon, it’ll find yours.
She never said these things out loud, however. She couldn’t. She was the last functioning member of her family. She had to hold it together. She had to pretend that one daughter could be enough.
Her mother’s head was starting to bob now, in that way it did right before sleep. Her father had already called it a night. He had work in the morning and that made him somewhat more normal, in this strange little pattern they called their lives.
Abigail finally succumbed. Her head fell back. Her shoulders sank into the deep comfort of their overstuffed sofa, bought during happier times and meant for happier days.
And Nora Ray finally stepped into the room. She didn’t turn off the TV. She knew better by now; the sudden absence of TV voices awakened her mother faster than any shrieking alarm. Instead, she merely took the remote from the pocket of her mother’s faded bathrobe and slowly turned down the volume.
Her mother started to snore. Soft little wheezes of a woman who hadn’t moved in months, yet remained exhausted beyond her years.
Nora Ray clenched her hands by her sides. She wanted to stroke her mother’s face. She wanted to tell her everything would be all right. She wanted to plead for her real mother to come back to her because sometimes she didn’t want to be the strong one. Sometimes, she wanted to be the one who curled up and cried.
She set the remote on the coffee table. Then she tiptoed back to her room, where the air-conditioning was permanently cranked to a frosty fifty-eight and a full pitcher of water sat by her bed at all times.
Nora Ray buried herself under the thick comfort of her bedcovers, but she still didn’t fall immediately asleep.
She was thinking of Mary Lynn again. She was thinking of their last night, driving back from T.G.I. Friday’s, and Mary Lynn chatting away merrily in the driver’s seat.
“Uh oh,” her sister was saying. “I think we just got a flat. Oh, wait. Good news. Some guy’s pulled in behind us. Isn’t that neat, Nora Ray? The world is just filled with good people.”
The man was tired. Very, very tired. Shortly after two A.M. he completed his last chore and wearily called it a night. He returned the van to where it belonged, and though his muscles truly ached now, he took the time to wash the vehicle, inside and out, by the comforting glow of lantern light. He even crawled under the van and hosed down the undercarriage. Dirt could tell stories. Didn’t he know.
Next he pulled out the dog carrier. He sponged it down with ammonia, the sharp, pungent scent stinging his senses back into hyperalertness, while also destroying any evidence of fingerprints.
Finally, he took inventory. He should wash down the aquarium, too, though what could it prove? That he once had a pet snake? No crime in that. Still, you didn’t want to leave things to chance.
You didn’t want to be one of those dumb fucks his father talked about, who couldn’t find their assholes with a flashlight and their own two hands.
The world was spinning. He felt the gathering storm clouds in the back of his brain. When he got tired, the spells grew worse. The black holes grew to tremendous size, swallowing not just hours and minutes, but sometimes consuming entire days. He couldn’t afford that now. He had to be sharp. He had to be alert.
He thought of his mother again and the sad look she wore every time she watched the sun die in the sky. Did she know the planet was dying? Did she understand even back then that anything that was beautiful could not belong long on this earth?
Or was she simply afraid to go back inside, where his father would be waiting with his quick temper and hamlike fists?
The man did not like these thoughts. He didn’t want to play this game anymore. He jerked the aquarium from the inside of the van. He dumped its grass and twig matting into the woods. Then he dumped in half of a bottle of ammonia and went to work with his bare hands. He could feel the harsh chemical burn his skin.
Later the runoff from this little exercise would seep into a stream, and kill off algae, bacteria, and cute little fishes. Because he was no better, you know. No matter what he did, he was still a man who drove a car and bought a refrigerator and probably once kissed a girl who used a can of aerosol spray on her hair. Because that’s what men did. Men killed. Men destroyed. Men beat their wives, abused their kids, and took a planet and warped it into their own twisted image.
His eyes were running now. Snot poured from his nose and his chest heaved until his breath came out in savage gasps. The harsh scent of ammonia, he thought. But he knew better. He was once again thinking of his mother’s pale, lonely face.
He and his brother should have gone back inside with her. They could’ve walked through the door first, judged the mood, and if it came to it, taken their punishment like M-E-N. They didn’t, though. Their father was home, and they ran away into the woods, where they lived like gods on pokeweed salad, wild raspberries, and tender fiddleheads.
They turned to the land for shelter, and tried not to think about what was happening back in one tiny cabin in the woods. At least that’s what they’d done when they could.
The man turned off the hose. The van was washed, the aquarium cleansed, the whole project sanitized within an inch of its life. Forty-eight hours later, it was over.
He was tired again. Bone-deep weary in a way that people who had never killed could never appreciate. But it was over. Now, at long last, he was done.
He took his kill kit away with him. Later, he tucked it beneath his mattress before finally crawling into bed.
His head touched the pillow. He thought of what he had just done. High heels, blond hair, blue eyes, green dress, bound hands, dark hair, brown eyes, long legs, scratching nails, flashing white teeth.
The man closed his eyes. He slept the best he had in years.
CHAPTER 18
Quantico, Virginia
5:36 A.M.
Temperature: 84 degrees
Quincy jerked awake to the sound of the phone ringing. Instinct bred of so many other calls in the middle of so many other nights led him to reach automatically toward the nightstand. Then the ringing penetrated a second time, shrill and insistent, and he remembered that he was at the FBI Academy, staying in a dorm room, where the lone phone sat on the desk halfway across the room.
He moved quietly and quickly, but it was no longer necessary. Even as he cut off the third ring, Rainie was sitting up sleepily in the bed. Her long chestnut hair was tousled around her pale face, drawing attention to the striking angles of her cheeks and the long, bare column of her neck. God, she was lovely first thing in the morning. For that matter, she was lovely at the end of a long day. All these years later, day in, day out, she never failed to take his breath away.
He looked at her, and then, as happened too often these days, he felt a sharp pain in his chest. He turned away, cradling the phone between his shoulder and his ear.
“Pierce Quincy.”
And then a moment later, “Are you sure? That’s not what I meant—Kimberly … Well, if that’s what you want to do. Kimberly …” Big sigh again. The beginning of a headache already building in his temples. “You’re a grown adult, Kimberly. I respect that.”
It didn’t do him any good. His last surviving daughter had ended yesterday angry with him and had apparently started today even madder. She slammed down the phone. He returned his own receiver much more gently, trying not to notice how his hands shook. He had been tr
ying to mend the bridge with his mercurial daughter for six years now. He hadn’t made much progress yet.
In the beginning, Quincy had thought Kimberly simply needed time. After the intense episode of what happened to their family, of course she harbored a great deal of rage. He had been an FBI agent, a trained professional, and still he’d done nothing to save Bethie and Amanda. If Kimberly hated him, he couldn’t blame her. For a long time, he had hated himself, too.
Now, however, as year advanced into year, and the raw ache of loss and failure began to subside, he wondered if it wasn’t something more insidious than that. He and his daughter had gone through a harrowing experience. They had joined forces to outwit a psychopath as he’d hunted them down one by one. That kind of experience changed people. Changed relationships.
And it built associations. Perhaps Kimberly simply couldn’t view him as a father anymore. A parent should be a safe harbor, a source of shelter amid turbulent times. Quincy was none of those things in his daughter’s eyes. In fact, his presence was probably a constant reminder that violence often struck close to home. That real monsters didn’t live under the bed. They could be very attractive, fully functioning members of society, and once they targeted you, not even a smart, strong, professionally trained father could make any difference.
It still amazed Quincy how easy it was to fail the ones you loved.
“Was that Kimberly?” Rainie asked from behind him. “What did she want?”
“She’s leaving the Academy this morning. She talked one of the counselors into giving her a leave of absence for emotional distress.”
“Kimberly?” Rainie’s voice was incredulous. “Kimberly, who would walk barefoot through fire before asking for a pair of shoes, let alone a fire extinguisher? No way.”
Quincy merely waited. It didn’t take long. Rainie had always been exceptionally bright. She got it in the next instant.
“She’s going to work the case!” she exclaimed suddenly. In contrast to his reaction, however, she threw back her head and laughed. “Well, what do you know. I told you the Georgian was a hunk!”
“If Supervisor Watson finds out,” Quincy said seriously, “her career will be over.”
“If Watson finds out, he’ll simply be mad he didn’t get to save the second girl first.” Rainie bounded out of bed. “Well, what do you want to do?”
“Work,” Quincy said flatly. “I want the ID on the victim.”
“Yes, sir!”
“And maybe,” he mused carefully, “it wouldn’t hurt to pay a visit to the forensic linguist, Dr. Ennunzio.”
Rainie regarded him in surprise. “Why, Pierce Quincy, are you beginning to believe in the Eco-Killer?”
“I don’t know. But I definitely think that my daughter is much too involved. Let’s work, Rainie. And let’s work fast.”
Kimberly and Mac drove toward Richmond mostly in silence. She learned that his taste in radio stations ran toward country music. In turn, she taught him that she didn’t function well without a morning cup of coffee.
They had taken his car; the rented Toyota Camry was nicer than her ancient Mazda. Mac had thrown a backpack filled with supplies into the trunk. Kimberly had added hiking boots and a duffel bag filled with her sparse collection of clothes.
She’d retrieved her gun first thing this morning, turning in the plastic Crayola along with her handcuffs. She signed a few forms, relinquished her ID, and that was that. She was officially on leave from the FBI Academy. For the first time since she was about nine years old, she was not actively aspiring to be a federal agent.
She should feel anxious, guilt-stricken, and horrified, she thought. So many years of her life she was suddenly throwing away on a whim. As if she ever did anything on a whim. As if her life had ever held a hint of the whimsical.
And yet, she didn’t feel horrible. No shortness of breath that would indicate an oncoming anxiety attack. No bunched muscles or pounding headache. In all honesty, she actually felt the lightest she had in weeks. Maybe, beneath her sleep-deprived haze, she was even a little giddy.
What that meant, she didn’t want to know.
They made good time getting to Richmond. Mac handed her a printed-out e-mail, and she navigated to the offices of the U.S. Geological Survey team, which were located in an office park north of the city. First glance wasn’t what Kimberly had expected. The office park, for one thing, was plunked down in the middle of suburban sprawl. They passed a community college, a housing development, and a local school. There were lovely sidewalks shaded by graceful trees, wide expanses of deep green yards, and brightly flowering pink and white crepe myrtle trees.
The USGS office building, too, was different from what she had pictured. One story of brick and glass. Newer. Lots of windows. Nicely landscaped with more crepe myrtle trees and God knows what kind of bushes. Definitely a far cry from the usual government décor of monochromatic malaise.
So a nice building in a nice place. Kimberly wondered if Mac knew that the FBI Richmond field office was literally right down the street.
She and Mac got out of the car, pushed their way through the heavy glass door and were immediately greeted by the waiting receptionist.
“Ray Lee Chee,” Mac said. The receptionist smiled at them brightly, then led the way.
“He’s a botanist?” Kimberly asked as she followed Mac down the wide, sunny hall.
“Geographer, actually.”
“What’s a geographer?”
“I think he works on maps.”
“You’re bringing our leaf to a mapmaker?”
“Genny knows him. He went to school with her brother or something like that. Apparently he has a background in botany and he said he could help.” Mac shrugged. “I have no jurisdiction; it’s not like I can order up any expert I want in the state.”
The receptionist had arrived at an interior office. She gestured to the partially opened door, then turned back down the hall, leaving Kimberly alone with Mac, already wondering if this wasn’t some kind of fool’s errand.
“Mr. Chee?” Mac asked, poking his head through the doorway. A short, well-built Asian man promptly fired back his desk chair and popped up to greet them.
“Oh God, don’t call me that. Ray, by all means, or I’ll keep looking around for my father.”
Ray pumped Mac’s hand vigorously, then greeted Kimberly with the same enthusiasm. The geographer was younger than Kimberly would’ve thought, and definitely not a dried-out academic. He sported khaki shorts and a short-sleeved shirt made out of one of those micro-fibers favored by hikers for wicking the sweat from their bodies.
Now, he gestured them into his paper-jammed office, then bounced back into his chair with about four times the necessary energy. His biceps bulged even when sitting and his hands were moving a mile a minute around his desk, looking for God knows what.
“So Genny said you needed my help,” Ray stated brightly.
“We’re trying to identify a leaf. I understand you have some experience in that sort of thing.”
“Spent my undergrad days studying botany,” Ray said, “before I moved into geography. For that matter, I also studied zoology and for a brief stint in time, auto mechanics. Seemed kind of funky at the time. On the other hand, when our truck gets stuck out in the field, everyone’s happy to have me along.” He turned toward Kimberly. “Do you talk?”
“Not before coffee.”
“You need some java? I brewed the world’s strongest batch in the kitchenette just half an hour ago. Stuff will knock the ZZZs right out of you, while putting some hair on your chest.” He held up both of his hands, which were trembling with caffeine jitters. “Want some?”
“Mmmm, I think I’ll wait.”
“Well, suit yourself, but after the first sixteen ounces or so, I’m telling you, it’s not so bad.” His dark gaze rebounded to Mac. “So where’s the leaf?”
“Actually, we brought you a picture.” Mac dug into his folder and pulled out the piece of paper.
&n
bsp; “That’s all you got? A picture?”
“It’s a scanned image. Actual size. Front and back.” Ray kept staring at him and finally Mac shrugged ruefully. “Sorry, man. It’s all we got.”
“A real leaf would be better, you know. I mean, much better. What’s this for again?”
“It’s a piece of evidence in a case.”
“Like from a crime scene?” Ray’s face brightened. “If I ID this, can it be used to catch the bad guy or locate a corpse? Like they do on CSI?”
“Absolutely,” Mac assured him.
“Groovy.” Ray accepted the paper with more enthusiasm. “A picture is definitely tougher, but I like a challenge. Let’s see what you got.”
He took out a magnifying glass and studied the image for a second. “Well, let’s start with the basics. It’s an angiosperm—to you, a broadleaf tree. Given the oval shape with pointed tip and coarse-tooth margins, it’s most likely from the Betula family—some kind of birch.” He looked up. “Where did you find this again?”
“I’m afraid I can’t comment further on that subject.”
Ray resumed staring at the picture. He frowned. “This is really all you’ve got? No bark, no flowers, no twig?”
“That’s it.”
“Well, then you also like a challenge.” Ray’s desk chair shot back. He jerked to a stop in front of the bookshelf across the way and rapidly skimmed titles. His fingers settled on a big volume labeled Gray’s Manual of Botany. “In the good news/bad news department, birch is one of the larger tree families, with a number of species commonly found here in Virginia. If you’re into history, the old Appalachian mountaineers used to make birch beer from the sap of black birch trees, which tastes a bit like wintergreen. They came close to harvesting all of the black birches in the mountains to make the stuff, then synthetic wintergreen oil was developed, and the mountaineers moved on to making moonshine. All’s well that ends well, you know.”