Last Words

by Mariah Stewart

  “Chief Beck didn’t say anything about the victims being tortured.” A woman several rows to Mia’s left said loudly.

  “What would you call being held captive for an indefinite period of time, shackled, repeatedly raped, then when he’s finally done with you, when he’s taken everything you have, including your dignity and your will to live, he wraps you in cellophane starting at your feet, until your entire face is covered so that you fight for even your last dying breath?” Mia said more sharply than she’d intended. “If that isn’t torture, I don’t know what is.

  “Something else-he’s very sophisticated; the fantasy he’s living out is highly evolved. He’s a very confident man. Maybe owns his own business. And he’s bold. It takes a very bold man to do what this man does. There’s a high degree of risk here, taking the entire operation into consideration.”

  As Mia made her way back to the front of the room, she made it a point to meet and hold the gaze of every man there. She was looking for a challenge.

  “If he’s so smart and he’s so sophisticated, why did he leave that girl’s body on her front porch?” someone asked. “And it doesn’t seem so smart to me to leave a dead body in the police chief’s Jeep.”

  “After a while, I suspect he needed to brag a bit.” Mia smiled. “Genius needs to be recognized.”

  “So he’s showing off?” a young woman in the front row asked.

  “Exactly.” Mia nodded. “For all his intelligence, all his sophistication, he is, at heart, a show-off.”

  She’d reached the podium and returned the microphone to its stand.

  “There’s one other thing about him that we know for certain,” Mia told the silent crowd. “The man we’re looking for is a sadistic coward. He has to tie his victims down to control them. He gets the greatest sexual satisfaction from torturing his victims. That’s what he gets off on. He fantasizes about how he can dominate his victims, how he can degrade them through various sexual acts, and then he lives out his fantasies. He makes sure their death is a long, drawn-out affair. It’s slow and deliberate and he savors every second of it. By then, he’s humiliated them, he’s stripped them of everything, and he’s kept them restrained so that he has total control over them. But without those restraints-without the duct tape and the chains, and the hours he forces them to spend alone-without those weapons, he is nothing but a weak little man. He’s a coward. He can only be satisfied by tying a woman up and raping her.” She looked around the room and added coolly, “Can you think of anything more pathetic?”

  She stepped back from the microphone and nodded to Beck before walking down the center aisle and out the door.

  17

  Mia sat in the Adirondack chair, her legs stretched out straight in front of her, her head resting against the hard wooden back. She closed her eyes and listened to the waves lapping at the shore, and felt almost as if she were being rocked to sleep. Not that she wanted to fall asleep out here, on the wide lawn behind Sinclair’s Cove, but it was a restful moment.

  She’d made one stop on her way out of town before driving to the inn from the meeting in St. Dennis.

  “I’d like a room,” she’d told the pleasant young man behind the desk when she arrived.

  “I’m sorry. I’m afraid we’re booked to the rafters.”

  “Mr. Sinclair said there’d be a room for me.”

  She frowned. She hated the thought of having to drive back to Connor’s house now. She was tired and feeling worn out.

  “Oh.” The desk clerk reached under the counter and pulled out a small slip of paper. “Agent Shields?”

  “Yes.”

  “Mr. Sinclair called earlier and asked that we re fresh one of the cabins for you. He said to apologize that we could not accomodate you in the main house.” He handed her a key on a long leather circle. “Last cabin on the left as you go around the back of the building. May I take your bags?”

  “No apologies necessary. And I only have a few bags.” Just the ones under my eyes, one from Bling, and, oh yes, the one holding the bottle of Pinot Grigio on the passenger seat of my car.

  “Please let me know if you need anything,” he told her. “We have breakfast starting at seven, though we can make arrangements for coffee and muffins earlier, if you like.” He smiled. “A lot of people come for the fishing and they like to get an early start.”

  “No fishing for me,” she promised, “and hopefully no early start.”

  She turned toward the door and noticed the portrait hanging over the fireplace. Following her gaze, the clerk told her, “That’s the late Mrs. Sinclair. Pretty lady, wasn’t she?”

  “Mr. Sinclair’s wife?”

  “Yes.”

  “What happened to her?”

  “She drowned four years ago.”

  “What a tragedy,” Mia said.

  “It really was. She was really nice.” He lowered his voice. “A little on the bossy side, but we all liked her anyway.”

  “How did she drown?” Mia would have expected someone who lived on the water to be a strong swimmer.

  “Boat overturned. She took one of the small out-boards to do a little crabbing and stayed out too long. Who knows how that happened. Storm came up real fast and she couldn’t get back in. Mr. Sinclair took it real hard. He’s been raising the kids-Danny and Delia-on his own. Doing a good job, too. They’re nice kids.”

  The desk phone rang and he excused himself to answer it. Mia thanked him for the key and went through the lobby to the front porch. After parking her car in the lot, she walked around the back of the inn and followed a cobbled path to the last cabin.

  There were lights on, both inside and over the front door. For a moment, she wasn’t sure she was at the right place. But it was definitely the last cabin. She slipped the metal key into the door and pushed it open.

  Her cabin was almost identical to the one in which Holly Sheridan had stayed at the opposite end of the row of similar structures. The small front room contained a white wicker sofa, a matching chair, and an end table that held a tall ceramic lamp, the base of which was a seagull with its wings half opened. A basket of fruit, cheese, and crackers was on a tiled tray had been placed upon the coffee table. A fairly new television sat on a stand in the corner and a neat pile of current magazines was stacked on the end table.

  Next to the tray something lay folded inside white tissue paper. She slipped a finger through the tape and pushed aside the paper to find a navy blue T-shirt with a silk-screened image of the inn. A note on the tray from Daniel Sinclair welcomed her to the inn and apologized that the only shirt they had was an extra large. “We give them out to all our guests,” the note informed her, “but last week we had a sorority reunion and went through all the smalls and mediums.”

  Mia held up the shirt in front of her. It was indeed large, but it was a nice gesture. She refolded the shirt and took it into the bedroom and left it on the foot of the double bed, which had been turned down. She peeked into the bathroom and found fresh towels and two water glasses, along with the obligatory soaps, toothbrush, toothpaste, and mouthwash.

  She went back into the sitting room and sat on the edge of one of the sofa cushions and picked through the basket of fruit. She immediately bit into a green apple. She’d missed dinner and was starving. A few pieces of cheese and several crackers later, and Mia felt herself begin to revive. She stuck the key in her pocket, took one of the glasses from the bathroom, grabbed the bag holding the wine and her handbag, and went outside into the dark.

  When she arrived at her cabin, she’d noticed the chairs set to overlook the bay, and chose the one closest to the water. She took the corkscrew from her shoulder bag and opened the bottle, and poured herself a glass. Stretching herself out in the chair, she sipped her wine and watched small dark birds darting across the water.

  She was on her second glass of wine when she realized the small birds were bats.

  “Oh, swell,” she muttered, pulling herself into a ball and hunkering down in the chair. �
�Maybe they won’t see me.”

  The moonlight was bright on the bay; except for the presence of the bats, it was a near-perfect night. It was quiet, except for the beating of the occasional wing overhead and the croaking of the bullfrogs from the marsh on the far side of the inn. She tried closing her eyes and willed herself to ignore the bats.

  They’re eating insects, she reminded herself. That’s good, right? The more they eat, the fewer mosquitoes to bite me. They have no interest in me.

  That’s what her big brother always told her.

  The thought of her big brother brought a pain to her heart.

  “Go away, Brendan,” she whispered to the night. “Crawl back into that little corner of hell where you’re going to spend your unhappily ever-after, and don’t come back…”

  A sound behind her drew her attention and she looked over her shoulder. The shadow of a man stretched out across the lawn, growing larger as it drew closer.

  When the figure was about twenty feet away, it demanded, “Want to tell me what that was all about?”

  Beck. And he didn’t sound happy.

  “What was what all about?”

  “That little show you put on back there. What the hell were you thinking, taunting him like that? Were you trying to get him to come after you?”

  She pulled her gun from her bag. “Better me than someone else.”

  “Yeah, sure. If he comes at the place and time you want him to.”

  Beck stood five feet away, looking down at her. From the chair, he appeared to be about twelve feet tall and most foreboding.

  “The problem, as I see it, is that he’s going to be doing the choosing, Mia.”

  “Maybe so.” She put the gun back, then sat up and grabbed the bottle by its neck. “Would you like some wine? There’s another glass in my cabin. I could-”

  “I don’t drink.”

  “I didn’t used to.” She set the bottle back on the ground and took a sip from her glass.

  “What happened?”

  “Shit.” She told him matter-of-factly. “Shit happened.”

  He picked up the bottle and appeared to be looking at the label.

  “How’d you get here?” she asked.

  “Borrowed the car from Hal.” He tilted the bottle in her direction. “How long have you been doing this?”

  “Oh, roughly a half hour.”

  “I meant-”

  “I know what you meant.” She waved a hand dismissively. “That was my weak attempt at humor.”

  He replaced the bottle on the ground near the chair.

  “None of my business, I know, but I’m curious. You don’t have to answer.”

  “Since I got back from Indiana.” She leaned her head back and looked skyward to avoid his eyes.

  “What happened in Indiana?”

  “We had this case…twenty-two-year-old guy killed his whole family. Mother. Father. His sisters. Their husbands and children.” Her voice dropped with each word until Beck was almost leaning into the chair to hear her. “Eleven people in all. He killed every one.”

  “I guess there’s no point in asking why.”

  “Oh, there was a why. His father wouldn’t cosign a loan for him to get a new car, so he shot him and his mother. Went to the first sister’s, asked the brother-in-law, who also declined, since the guy with the gun was unemployed. Shot him, too. Then I guess he figured, aw, fuck it, and he went house to house and just blew them all away.”

  She cleared her throat.

  “And after that, there were these three little boys in Virginia…”

  They sat in silence until Beck broke it by saying, “You mentioned once that your brother-”

  “Yeah, yeah. Doesn’t take a genius to draw a line between the guy with the gun in Indiana and the guy with the gun in my family.” She waved her glass in his direction.

  “Want to tell me about it? What happened with him?”

  “I’m sure you read all about it. It was a really big story about two years ago. FBI agent behind a child-smuggling ring, runs into his cousin while preparing to take a shipment of kids out of some small Central American country, later attempts to assassinate the cousin, kills the cousin’s brother by mistake. The networks, the newsmagazines, the papers, they just couldn’t get enough of it.”

  “That was your brother? The killer?”

  “Good old Brendan.” She took a gulp from the glass and stared into space. “This case in Indiana, when they spoke with the neighbors and with friends, they all said how close the family was. An ideal, all-American family, they all said. Well, they used to say that about us, too.”

  “People on the outside, they never really know what’s going on.”

  “Well, in our case, apparently no one on the inside knew, either. He never showed a thing, never gave any one of us a hint that something was evil and twisted inside him. And the thing is, none of us ever saw it.” She leaned forward in the chair again and whispered, “Why didn’t we know?”

  “Because he obviously didn’t want to share that part of his life with you.”

  “But you’re family, you should know.” Her eyes welled but no tears fell. “And here’s the thing that’s killing me. Connor-who my brother had intended to murder-still treats me like the princess.”

  “The princess?”

  “I was the only girl in the entire family.” She nodded. “That’s why I was the princess.” She leaned forward and added, “That’s why I should have been the one to know.”

  “The one to know about Brendan?”

  She nodded.

  “I’m not following that.”

  “I was supposed to be the momma. I was supposed to take care of the boys the way Mom would have. And I did not do that.”

  “I thought your brothers were all older than you.”

  “They are.”

  “And the cousins, the other three guys? They were all older, too?”

  She nodded.

  “Then why were you supposed to be responsible for them?”

  “Uncle George said so,” she told him solemnly.

  “Uncle George?”

  “My mother’s uncle.”

  “When did he tell you that?”

  “When everyone came back to the house after my mother’s funeral.”

  “Uncle George told you that you were supposed to be the little mother because your mother was dead?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Mia, with all due respect, Uncle George has his head up his ass. That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard.”

  “I agree. It was stupid and cruel and it was sexist, and my mother must have turned right over in her grave, but I was seven years old and I had just watched my mother be put in the ground.” She sniffed and wiped her face with the back of her right hand. “I still wasn’t clear on whether or not she was going to come back. I mean, even if she could get out of that box, how was she going to dig through all the dirt?”

  Mia took a deep breath. “You know, no matter what you tell a child about death, they really don’t understand a damned thing you’re saying, because it’s all beyond their experience.

  “I clung to the adults around me for a long time because I had to. They all became much more important to me than they had been before she died. So when one of them told me something so profound, I believed it. I believed it for a long time.”

  “You still believe it.”

  “I try really hard not to. But it’s still in there.”

  “You need to find a way to get it out, once and for all.” He paused for a moment. “Have you thought about maybe seeing someone…?”

  “Yeah, I have.” She tried to smile. “But basically, I’m lazy. I’ll try to deal as best I can with something before I’ll break my routine and try another way of dealing. It’s the way I’m wired.”

  Beck picked up the bottle again. “This is not a good way to deal.”

  “Maybe not,” she conceded, “but at least I can sleep at night. For a while, I could not.”


  “You didn’t have problems sleeping before you left for Indiana?”

  “Not really. When I first moved, it did take me a few days to get accustomed to the sounds in the new house, but for the most part, I was okay.” She thought that over for a moment. “But I’d been traveling a lot for several months. That’s why Connor suggested I move into his house.”

  “Your cousin Connor?”

  “Yes. Super Special Agent Connor Shields,” she stage-whispered. “We tease him about being the real international man of mystery because no one knows where he goes or what he does when he gets there.”

  “You share a house with him?”

  “Not really. He’s never there. That’s why he offered me the house. I was traveling a lot and rarely at my apartment, which was expensive, and he had bought this house but he wasn’t there either, so he suggested I give up my apartment and move into his house. Then I could save money and buy a house of my own.” She laughed softly and said, “No one knows how Connor found this place-it’s butt ugly, by the way, a sort of mustard yellow, stone-set-in-stucco bungalow on a forgotten road in the middle of the woods. And no one can figure out why he wanted to buy it, since he’s never around. But he bought it and he moved into it, remodeled, then promptly left the country.”

  She paused, then looked at Beck and said, “You really think I’m going off the deep end, don’t you? I’m not, and I’m sorry if I’ve given you that impression. I just have trouble sleeping, that’s all.”

  “I think you have a lot on your plate,” he said softly. “And I also think you might want to talk to someone professional, because if you keep doing that”-he pointed to the glass in her hand-“you’re going to have a bigger problem than not being able to sleep.”

  “I know you’re right,” she said, but did not put the glass down. “And for the record, I tried sleeping pills, but they made me too groggy in the morning. I’ve tried meditation, hypnosis, acupuncture, and exercising until I can barely walk. Nothing seems to relax me except a few glasses of wine at night. I know it isn’t smart, but…” She shrugged.

  “Don’t you have a headache when you get up?”

  “Sometimes, but I don’t really drink that much. I mean, I don’t pass out or anything. I just drink until the voices stop and I can sleep.” She rolled her eyes. “Oh, now I’ve really done it, haven’t I? Now you think I hear voices.”