“She’s very good,” Irene said. Her neck still ached as she spoke. This time she’d gotten off easy. God help her if he didn’t like what she’d proposed.
“Damn straight.” He grabbed her thigh and caressed it as he watched Marie race out of the building and into the waiting car.
Irene lay against his chest and let her body rise and fall in tandem with his breathing. It relaxed her to sit and just watch one of them succeed. They hardly ever made it and to see Marie get in the car calmed her nerves.
As the car pulled away, he pointed to the far left screen which aired a running feed from various news stations. This time he had MSNBC up which featured a faded picture of Dennis DiMarco from his baseball days. There was never any sound, just the emotionless captions underneath the polished anchor’s face.
...accused of shooting 28 year old Christopher Kimball. Mr. DiMarco is considered armed and dangerous.
They went from the photo to a video feed of his wife walking from her car to the front door of her home. She hid the baby’s head from the cameras and kept her own down and out of sight of prying eyes. Even as the reporters barraged her with questions, she kept her cool and stepped inside her home without saying a word.
“Perfect,” he said.
This wasn’t necessary. She always hated when he did this. He’d take these people’s good name and drag it through the mud without a care for who it hurt along the way. Dennis didn’t deserve this. He had no idea that he was being set up. The ones who had their face out there in such a public way never get made it through their second job.. He’d last all of ten seconds before someone recognized him and called the cops. If the boss hears sirens, the button get pressed.
Dennis would never have a chance.
***
“We told him.”
Marie sat in the backseat exhausted, but exhilarated. “What?”
“Your brother. He’s been informed.”
“That was fast,” she said. “I thought it would take weeks.”
Eduardo shrugged. “The boss liked your idea.”
The whole job had taken less than five minutes and she’d gotten away with it without so much as a concerned glance from the other scientists. She’d spent most of her thirty-seven years being good and doing the right thing and now she was being bad. It ignited something in her heart.
She knew she should be sick to her stomach and be disgusted with what she had done. Those vials contained a solution for people who so desperately needed hope. Twenty years of her life had been dedicated to helping the very people she had hurt but, nestled in the back of the SUV, she was satisfied.
Marie had never felt so alive.
BOOK 5
She hadn’t slept all night. As her alarm blared at seven in the morning, Hannah still sat at her desk with the glow of the laptop coating her face. She had muted the TV but let it play as she worked. The six o’clock news had opened their broadcast with a warning to the local area to be aware of Dennis DiMarco, the armed murderer.
The Dennis Dimarco story had broken the night before and Kyle had been devastated for hours after he heard the news. Immediately after the incident was reported his phone burst with texts from his brothers. They couldn’t believe it, no one could. After he sat and stared at his phone for almost an hour, she finally got up the nerve to tell him about Lila.
They spoke for two long hours. At first he was angry that she had kept the secret from him but in light of the dismantling of his childhood hero, it was only able to penetrate so far. It was so much information coming at him at all once that she wasn’t quite sure how much he’d absorbed.
The police had taken Lila’s note but she had read it enough times to memorize it. When she got to the part about how she was forced to bring the bomb to the shop and how there were others, he balked.
“Bullshit” was the first word out of his mouth. He didn’t believe her and she couldn’t blame him. She had spent the last year bad-mouthing Lila in his eyes. She’d spent many arguments calling her friend a drug addict, a flake and a loser just to make Kyle get off her case. Now she wept over the loss of a person she had repeatedly said she wanted nothing to do with ever again.
They sat in the living room in tense silence for almost an hour before Kyle’s confusion and anger wore down. All he could do was stare straight ahead at the TV and watch the chirpy news anchor explain Dennis Dimarco’s life story and how it could have led to such a terrible end.
The story that CNN dwelled on was the ever-developing tale of Dennis’ rambunctious rebellious years in the minor leagues. They had already grabbed a few guys in their mid-thirties who had played college and minor league ball with him. Ruddy faced fame mongers came out under the spotlight and talked about their shock over Dennis’ behavior. They balked at the idea of good ol’ Dennis doing something like this but they weren’t surprised. Immediately they planted the seed of drug use and unprofessional behavior and the news speculated based on nothing. She stopped checking the Internet after an ex-girlfriend posted a picture of Dennis at a party with a beer bottle in both hands and wearing nothing but a pair of pink boxers. She knew that he hadn’t done it on his own volition. Her gut told her that Lila and Dennis were connected and she spent the night connecting each dot.
While Dennis froze her out, Hannah called up Lila’s roommate. She said that Lila hadn’t been home for the last week or so but she didn’t think much of it. Lila was always going out and ending up in Seattle or Austin without notice. She had been taken and so had Dennis.
The more they looked into Dennis’ story, the more bizarre it became. After an injury and subsequent surgeries, he quit playing baseball for good. With time on his hand and a pregnant wife at home, he decided to prep for the baby so she could go back to work. He was a doting stay-at-home dad and helped his wife do everything from cooking dinner to putting up the crib. When his wife went into labor, he sat at her side. He brought water and held her hand for the nine hours she lay in the hospital bed. Then he called up her mother in New Jersey to tell that everyone was doing well. He stepped out of the hospital room and no one saw him after that.
Not a soul saw him leave the building.
The news didn’t report on his almost two week disappearance before the shooting. Every reporter had a new angle on the story as they desperately looked for a way to figure out how a baseball hero turned into a cold-blooded murderer seemingly overnight.
After Kyle had calmed down enough to talk, she was able to tell him her theory on Dennis and Lila. It wasn’t a well thought out hypothesis but it gave him peace. As much as he hated Lila, he revered Dennis DiMarco. Kyle refused to believe someone he respected could be capable of murder unless he was being forced to do it against his will.
After he went to sleep, Lila let her fingers do the walking. It wasn’t hard to find other missing person cases, but harder to find the outliers amongst runaway teenagers and the unfortunate abducted young child. She sought out the older person who seemed to fall off the face of the Earth and she found them buried deep in the recesses of Google. It was always an odd store clerk or a successful businessman that got nothing more than a brief mention in a local paper. In each small blurb, a family member would state that the person had gone to work or went for a run and never came home. Every once in awhile, she’d look up one of the missing people and there would be the mention of a warrant being out for their arrest for a crime that seemed out of character.
One story was about a young woman, a receptionist, who left work early for a dentist appointment and never came back. Three weeks after she was reported missing, she was caught on surveillance stabbing a man in a back alley.
Her family was shell-shocked. This was a woman who went to church and volunteered at the children’s hospital. She never swore and never gossiped. All in all, she seemed like a model citizen. No one, not even police, seemed to be able to piece to together why she had done it. Even with her name and face all over the news, she never was never found. The case seemed
to fade away into obscurity.
Kyle rustled under the sheets. The dark night sky had vanished only to reveal the silence of a new day. She was in the middle of reading about another possible victim when he sat up in the bed.
“Babe, did you go to sleep?”
She briefly gazed up before looking back at the article she had cued up. He glanced over with a bleary gaze and forced the top of the covers off his body. “Hannah?”
It was an article about another man who had disappeared, only to reappear as the perpetrator of botched home invasion. He was arrested on the spot and died of an apparent heart attack while held in his cell. At just twenty-six and a marathon runner, police couldn’t rule out foul play in his death but no follow-ups were online.
“I think I’ve found more,” she said.
Kyle patted the bed next to him. “Come back to bed.”
“One second,” she said as she scrolled down. As she finished the article, Hannah added the marathon runner, Martin Yardson, to the list which had grown to ten names. Ten good people who had gone missing only to show up later as criminals. They had nothing in common except they were all from the San Francisco area. Other than that, they were all different ages, races and jobs. No one had ever put the puzzle pieces together.
“Hannah, please.”
She grabbed the paper and crawled over to bed. Her body was sore and stiff from sitting up for the last six hours. The moment she hit the mattress, she felt exhausted but she was still so excited about what she had uncovered.
“Let me show you.” Hannah snuggled up next to Kyle and handed him the sheet.
“What is this?”
“People like Dennis. Everyone on this list was a good person who went missing. And then they did something terrible. I think Lila might have been telling the truth.”
“People...like Dennis? Hannah what are you talking about?”
She sighed. “They think that he’s this monster but you know that he’s a good guy. He would never snap and do this. There was someone that forced him to shoot that guy. Like Lila. Lila was an addict but she wasn’t violent. She refused to set off that thing they gave her and they killed her. I saw the guy and he took her away to who knows where. And then all these other people...there’s doctors and secretaries and dentists on this list. Nice people who go away for a few weeks and show up doing something terrible. This is it.”
He took a quick look at her list. “If you right...”
“If I’m right, then we have to stop this. There are a lot of lives relying on us stopping this.”
Kyle wiped the sleep away from his eyes. “Then what do you want to do? Should we go to the police?”
“No,” Hannah said. “We have to talk to Dennis’ wife. We need answers.”
Benjamin had stayed away from Dennis ever since the terrible blonde woman left the room. The man hardly clung to consciousness before she pressed her dreadful button and now he was as white as a sheet and hardly moved.
All he wanted was out. If their goal was to prolong this torture, they had succeeded. But if they had wanted to change his mind then they were dead wrong. If anything, this had strengthened his resolve to continue with the plan they’d thwarted. There was nothing to go back home to and there was nothing in this basement to live for. Everyone who had ever known him hated him and the one person who had loved him was dead. There was nothing left.
The door opened without any of them acknowledging its presence. Each of them had grown numb to its creaking hinges and banging locks. He prayed that it was the blonde coming to take him away from this hell.
Instead it her brunette doppelganger, dressed in black heels and a tight dress. He didn’t recognize Marie as she walked in. The weary distressed woman who had been dragged out came in with her shoulders back and a bit of a grin on her face. It was a different person.
She sauntered right to Dennis and sat next to him. “What happened?”
They had propped him up against the wall in a seated position. His body wasn’t strong enough to hold him upright so he’d flopped to his side. Marie patted his hair like she was soothing a crying baby.
Milo looked exhausted. It had been a long night of tending to the invalids in the corner. Simon had fits and nightmares consistently which needed a tender hand to bring him out of while Dennis would go between coughing attacks, shivers and shakes that looked dreadful. The two of them were constantly on their feet as they checked pulses and grabbed bodies to make sure the two of them didn’t hurt themselves or others. Milo took the brunt of Simon’s blows and he had a black eye to show for it. The hours of arguing seemed useless at this point.
Benjamin’s own body was sore from lugging Dennis from the ground back up to a seated position. The two of them were afraid he’d choke if he was on his back but the man was too weak to stay up. He’d sat by Dennis’ side for so long that his arm muscles were worn and frazzled. He needed to move away. The distance wasn’t any more comforting.
“They zapped him,” Milo said.
“What?” Marie asked.
“They did his heart thing. It was...” Milo couldn’t even finish his thought. It was horrific. It wasn’t the blissful sleep that he had plotted out for the group. It looked painful and torturous.
“Is he okay?”
Milo shrugged. “He hasn’t really woken up but he wasn’t all that awake when they brought him in either.”
Marie lifted up his eyelids and felt his pulse. She moved down his body with the deftness of a trained physician. He was relieved to have the burden of Dennis’ well-being lifted off his shoulders.
“His pulse is alright and he’s cold but not alarmingly so. His stitches have held which is a miracle. I think he just needs some food. Is there any left?”
Milo grabbed the heel of the bread they’d left that morning and handed it to Marie.
“Dennis?” she said as she gently shook him.
He groaned and turned his head so slightly towards her.
“You have to eat something.”
He shook his head.
Marie put the bread up to his mouth. “You’re going to die if you don’t eat something. You’ve lost a lot of blood and you need this to get your energy back.”
Dennis opened his lips just enough to let her stick a small piece of bread into his mouth.
“Good,” she whispered. “Keep eating.”
It was like mom came home after the kids lost all control. She settled the room down. Benjamin wasn’t scared and neither was Milo. She could settle any medical complaints.
“Marie? Are you okay?” Milo asked.
She smiled. “Actually, I’m good. I’m really good.”
Milo looked at her confused.
“They listened to me. They actually listened to me. I had something I wanted to tell that woman and she did it. I feel...I can’t even describe it. I feel like this huge weight has been lifted off my chest and I can breathe again.”
“What did they do?”
She looked over at Simon who was still asleep.
“They told my brother about my niece. She said that they were going to keep it a missing person’s case and drag it out and that broke my heart. I worked with a family of a kidnapped child and it is absolute torture to have that small thread of hope that your child will return. As time goes on, the chances get so small but there is no closure. There’s no child to bury, just the hope of seeing them grow old. I couldn’t do that to him. So they told him what happened to Brianna.”
Simon’s head peaked up and Benjamin got ready to intervene. Simon had been on edge all morning. Marie’s news was not going to be good and there was no telling what Simon would do to her.
“What do you mean?” Simon asked.
Marie looked up, surprised at hearing from Simon but not deterred. “They told my brother that she was murdered.”
“Why? Why did you do that?”
She kept a finger on Dennis’ neck as she spoke. “He needed to know. You of all
people should understand.”
“But they’ll find out...” his word drifted off.
“Yes, they might. Or it might be too late. That wasn’t the point. This wasn’t to get you in trouble, Simon. This was for my brother.”
Benjamin was ready to pounce. Simon’s bottom lip quivered and his fists clenched beside his knee. His eyes darted back and forth between Marie and Benjamin. “Simon, don’t,” Benjamin whispered.
“Don’t what?” Marie asked.
“Nothing,” Benjamin said. “Let’s just stop this, alright? I think he understands what you’re saying.”
Simon’s eyes had watered. “They’ll find out...”
“They might not,” Marie said. “They moved her and there’s probably nothing to tie you. I wouldn’t worry about.”
“How? How can I not worry about it? I was in a nightclub. Dozens of people saw me. There were probably cameras everywhere.”
Milo rolled his eyes. “Why are you even worrying about this? What’s the point?”
“They’ll tell my family. They’ll be so upset.”
“Better than thinking you’re dead.”
Simon rolled his eyes. “Not much better. They’d rather get rid of me.”
“Don’t say that,” Marie said. “I’m sure they miss you.”
“Shut up. God, just shut up,” Simon said as his body clenched with anger. Benjamin wasn’t sure he had the strength to hold him back again.
The footsteps returned above their heads. “Of course,” lamented Milo. “They must be bored.”
“It’s my turn. They’re taking me.” Benjamin hoped that sounded scared but he was secretly thrilled. He wanted out of the room and given the power to finish what he’d started. As the footsteps grew closer, he took in the room as he wasn’t planning on coming back. This was going to be a one-way trip.
“Doubtful,” Milo said. “They’re never taking you. I bet it’s Simon. I bet they’re real ready to throw him to the wolves.”
“Shut up!” he screamed. Simon lunged at Milo but he strength was just as taxed as his boxing partners. He went for Milo’s head but the punch was easily deflected. With a simple swipe of his hand, Simon was on the ground.
The Six: Complete Series Page 20