“Maggie, are you here? Hello, anyone here? Maggie, Dr. Bondi?”
Piercing screams shattered the silence. Andrew stopped where he was, his heart pounding. Suddenly he was covered with sweat. “Maggie,” he cried out. “Maggie, It’s Andrew. I’m coming.”
The screams intensified, even more tortured and horrific. He couldn’t tell where they were coming from—they bounced off the walls and echoed in different directions. He started running, coming to a halt in a large room with an emergency exit to the driveway. He pivoted around and headed down another narrow corridor. In the pitch-black darkness, he pushed his way through a nightmare maze, medical equipment crashing on either side of him.
“Maggie, where are you? Maggie, answer me, please! I’ll find you! Please, Maggie, talk to me!”
Adrenaline pulsed through his body, fueled by a ferocious anger. Maggie! Oh, Maggie! She had found the murderer! Danny Joe Farrell was torturing Maggie somewhere in this damn, sprawling building. Andrew would find him and kill him with his own bare hands. He gave no thought to his own peril facing this madman. He had to get to Maggie before it was too late.
Field mice ran helter-skelter around his feet; he kicked at a huge rat as he ran, calling out Maggie’s name.
Then the screaming suddenly stopped and there was only silence. He didn’t know which way to turn in the cavernous space. Thwarted, he called again.
“Maggie, where are you? Speak to me!”
Then he thought he heard muffled sounds nearby. Was it only his imagination?
He turned a bend in the hallway and saw it: an interior light silhouetted a closed door.
Without a moment’s hesitation, Andrew increased his grip on the tire iron and slammed his body against the door, forcefully slamming it open.
A powerful light momentarily blinded him. The momentum carried him too far too fast; Andrew almost fell into the room. He steadied himself. His eyes adjusted. He froze in shock.
Maggie! Bloody, she lay shackled to a stone table—a surgical table! Naked. Spread-eagled. The pale body he loved, eerily lit by a high-intensity light.
Behind Maggie, at the far end of the table, loomed a man in surgical gear holding a scalpel. And he was bleeding. But could it be? His wounds looked self-inflicted. Throat and wrists slit?
His blood dripped on Maggie’s face.
Her beautiful blonde hair was matted with blood.
Was she breathing? Oh, please … was she breathing?
His arm raised, his tire iron clutched in his fist, Andrew focused on the madman. Daniel Farrell. The goddamn psychopath.
Andrew had begged Maggie, over and over again, to stay out of the murder investigation. But she wouldn’t listen to him.
And Andrew, who had never hurt a soul in his entire life, didn’t care that Farrell was already a bloody mess. He intended to finish the job. He was going to smash Farrell’s head in. He was going to destroy him, to avenge what that creep had done to his beloved Maggie.
I’ll kill the goddamn bastard!
Farrell, unsteady on his feet, held the scalpel, like a dagger, pointed threateningly at Andrew. Then the psychopath raised his other blood-soaked hand and began waving it crazily around, something limp flapping around in his hand, something blood-soaked and torn. A letter?
What the hell?” But it didn’t matter to Andrew what Farrell held. He intended to slam him with the tire iron, disarm him. Kill the bastard, if necessary.
As he inched his way around the table, Andrew kept his eye on the murderer. Farrell remained rooted in position but had stopped waving the letter. One arm dropped to his side. The scalpel hit the floor.
Slowly, almost rhythmically, he fell. His eyes closed. His body curled into a fetal position.
From some deep cellar of Danny Joe Farrell’s soul came childlike cries. “I want my mommy! Where did you go, Mommy? Why did you leave me? Who’s gonna take care of me now?”
“M-o-m-m-y!!!
40
A cacophony of annoying beeps brought Maggie swimming up from the depths of unconsciousness. Beep! Beep! Beep! She was alive! She struggled to unseal her heavy eyelids, prying one a quarter of an inch open. Light poured in. It was daytime. She attempted to move her arms. They were free! Now for the other eye. More light! When, finally, she could keep the heavy lids open, Maggie took in her surroundings. A pale green room. Artificial illumination. An antiseptic odor. A soft bed. I.V. tubes. Those damn beep, beep, beeps!
A hospital room! She was in a hospital! She was hooked up to … stuff.
Painfully she craned her head to check out her body. Everything that was supposed to be there seemed to be there. Monitors were attached to her arms and chest with suction cups. An IV line was inserted in her arm.
She shifted, trying to get into a more comfortable position, cried out from searing pain. Oh, God! Her rib cage! What had he done to her ribs?
Danny Joe! Oh, God! What had he done to her?
She wept quietly; she could feel the tears rolling down her cheeks. She’d been through hell and had every right to feel sorry for herself. “She’s coming to!” someone said, very far away. It was Andrew’s baritone voice!
She was alive … and safe … in a hospital! Andrew was here! She’d been so close to death. Somehow she’d been spared. Why? How?
Andrew, who’d been sitting behind her bedside curtain, rose, came close, leaned over the railing. “You’re awake!” he said, taking her hand in both of his.
What he didn’t say was, “You’re so pale!” What he would never tell her was, “Your eyes are bruised … blackened. Your hair … encrusted with the killer’s blood.”
She was a heartbreaking sight.
A nurse in blue scrubs appeared by his side. Peered at Maggie. Stuck a thermal strip in her mouth. “How do you feel?” she asked.
Ummmm, Maggie responded.
“You’ve been better, right?” the nurse commented, reading the thermometer, jotting down a note. “When they brought you here last night, you were unconscious. You’ve been getting strong pain meds for the broken ribs. That’s what the I.V.’s for. You’re going to be groggy and out of it for a while. Just let go and sleep.”
Andrew took her hand and kissed it, then in that gesture of his she found so touching, brought her hand to his heart. “I’ll stay here with you,” he said.
“You bet he will!” The nurse laughed. “We haven’t been able to pry him out of that chair!”
“What happened, Andrew?” Her voice sounded like a rusty hinge. “How did I get here?”
He stroked her hand, then cradled it in both of his. “You’re at St. John’s Pavilion. They’re taking very good care of you.”
“Damn right!” the nurse added, adjusting the bedclothes. “You poor thing!”
Maggie smiled a weak acknowledgement, then turned back to Andrew. “Where’s … you know?” She shuddered. “Where’s Danny Joe?”
“Don’t even think about that creep. You’ll never have to worry about Danny Joe Farrell again! I took care of him.”
Maggie gasped. “How? What? How’d you get there? Oh, I was afraid you’d come looking for me?”
“I did come, and your car wasn’t there so I started to leave.”
“I left my car there—right in front of the building! What happened to it?”
“He moved it around back. Put it in an old shed. It was your silly umbrella that made me think twice about leaving. Once I saw it, I knew you must still be there. So I came in. …”
“You came in? Oh, my God! Did you … did you kill him?” Her eyelids were drooping.
Andrew pressed his lips into a thin line. “No. I would have, if I’d had to, but it didn’t come to that. He just … I don’t know how to describe what happened. I went after him with a … a tire iron, and he just … fell apart. Started crying.”
“Started crying …” Ma
ggie drawled the words out, her eyes closed, and she fell asleep.
She slept for hours. When she woke up, it was dark out. Andrew was still sitting in the bedside chair, still holding her hand. He leaned forward and smiled.
“A tire iron?” Maggie queried, in her creaky voice.
He laughed, and stroked her now shampooed hair. “You funny thing,” he murmured, smiling. “Yes, a tire iron. He had a scalpel, and I started moving in on him.” He swallowed hard. “Before I could get close enough to strike him, he dropped some bloody thing that was clutched in his hand. Chief Betsy said it was an old letter.”
“His mother’s letter,” Maggie croaked.
“Yes. He dropped that, and then he collapsed in a heap on the floor. So weird—just like one of those toys we used to have. Remember? There was a guy on a string. When you pulled the strings he would stand up straight. When you let them loose, he’d fall in a heap. Only Danny Joe added sound effects; he started bawling like a little kid.
“Just then, police with drawn guns slammed into the room, and Danny Joe Farrell started screaming for his mommy.”
41
Chief Betsy pulled her chair closer to my hospital bed and took my hand. At the sight of my black eyes and facial bruises, her eyes had filled with sympathy.
“So, it’s … over,” she said, with a long sigh. “This elusive sicko who terrorized us for the better part of a year … this case can now finally be put to rest.”
“I owe you an apology for interfering with your investigation, Betsy. I wasn’t forthcoming with my findings. I was just so driven for reasons of my own, both personal and professional. He was shooting at our troops!”
I felt a tear dribble down my cheek. I was so weepy today—it must have been the pain meds.
“Look, Maggie, there’s nothing to apologize for. The truth is that we’d still be living under his shadow if you hadn’t taken the initiative and come up with an important witness … I’m talking about Leah Goldman. Finding her was clever, brilliant really … although you’ve had to pay a heavy price for your results.”
“Honestly, Chief, I couldn’t ever have imagined that the letter from Danny Joe’s mother would bring this madman to justice. I hadn’t turned it over to you for reasons of conscience. When Leah gave it to me, she made me promise to give it only to Danny Joe. She’d kept it for him faithfully for twenty years. Fortunately when I left for the veterinary hospital it happened to be in my briefcase. I hadn’t opened it, and I didn’t know what message it contained. But I intended to give it to you the next time I saw you. That’s why I was carrying it around. But I kept on putting it off, and it turned out to be a good thing, didn’t it? And really, it didn’t hold up the investigation or anything.” I was babbling.
“Well, I’ll disagree on that one, Maggie. Every clue, every piece of evidence, is important to an investigation.”
“But Betsy, if I hadn’t had that letter in my possession and blindly offered it to Danny Joe because I didn’t know what else to do, I would have been murdered. I would have been splayed on that table just like the dead cat he’d gutted.”
Chief Betsy patted my hand and gave me a weak smile. No one seemed comfortable with how close I had come to death. Not Andrew. Not Betsy. Not Claire. Not anyone. They all gave that same flaccid smile when I mentioned it.
And I mentioned it over and over again. I couldn’t get it out of my mind.
Betsy adopted her professional cop voice. “We’ve studied the documents and the letter—which he’d torn into two pieces after he read it, Maggie. When we opened that large white envelope Leah Goldman gave you containing a bunch of family documents, we found his mother’s real estate license under her maiden name, Tessa Svenson. Well, with information that his vanished mother had been a real-estate agent, and the help of the guys from Homicide, we were able to start putting two and two together.”
“You know, Betsy,” I cut in, that was something I’d considered from the beginning—that she might have been in real estate. I’d located a database covering all fifty states and researched the name, Farrell. None of those Farrells fit the bill. Of course, I hadn’t considered that the license might have been in her maiden name.”
“And it wouldn’t have done you any good if you had—since you had no way of knowing her maiden name.”
The lunch cart rolled into my room, and Betsy moved aside to let the aide deposit it on the bed table. She went to lift the lid on the main dish, and I shook my head. “I don’t even want to know what’s under there,” I said. “Andrew promised to bring me a salami sandwich with provolone and mustard.”
“On rye bread?” the Chief asked.
I nodded—of course. Now let me just finish telling you what I know, so I can get it off my mind. “It took some mental gymnastics for me to understand what these crimes were about. Danny Joe Farrell didn’t know his mother was dead. He was looking for her, and each time he found a real-estate agent who wasn’t her, he went berserk. He was on a quest for confrontation and revenge.”
My visitor’s expression was sober. “Maggie, I know that agents all over the country are raped and murdered every year. It’s a statistic the average person knows nothing about. Although this monster is behind bars, it won’t stop the others, until your industry changes some of its basic rules of operation.”
“I know. Thanks, Chief, for your support. They’re letting me out of the hospital tomorrow. My … various wounds have begun … to heal.” I reached for the glass and took a drink of water. Then I set it down exactly in its own condensation ring. I was going to need order and predictability for a long time, I expected. “And they can’t do much for broken ribs … same story. It’s a matter of time.”
I didn’t want to talk about having been raped, although, of course, she knew. I’ll need some therapy to overcome the trauma. I’d been heavily drugged, but I’d known what was happening. I’ll have to purge that experience from both body and soul.
42
Claire brought my clothes to the hospital the following day, a loose-fitting black Eileen Fisher sweatshirt and summer jeans. Andrew drove me home. We lunched together on my sunny terrace. Salade Nicoise and crepes from Petite Auberge. Pink clematis climbed the trellis, and the river peeked through the vines.
Despite the bucolic scene, Andrew seemed a bit jumpy. Finally he stood up. “Maggie, I’m going to run out to Starbucks and get myself some coffee. Do you want a Chai Latte?”
I thought about it. No. I needed to be energized. “Well, since I’m finally allowed to have coffee, would you please order me a grande, dirty soy chai latte in a venti cup with an extra shot.”
“Sure,” he said, with a wink. There was, I thought, something other than a wink going on in his brown eyes. Maybe a bit of a sparkle?
But I was still on meds, so I couldn’t be certain I wasn’t simply seeing things. After he left, I fell into a bit of a snooze, there, at home, next to the river, in the sun.
“Maggie?”
That was quick. Andrew was back already? Seemed like I’d just closed my eyes.
I opened them and smiled. There was my gorgeous man, standing next to me, grinning, one hand deep in his pocket.
“Where’s the coffee?” I mumbled, needing a jolt to wake me up again.
“Damn the coffee,” Andrew said, pulling his hand from his pocket. In it he held a small blue Tiffany box. Kneeling down on the slate terrace, still grinning, he held the box toward me. “It’s my damn fault that you haven’t been wearing this for the past couple of months.”
“Oh, Andrew,” I gasped, reaching out for the box. I opened it slowly, my eyes welling with tears. “Oh, Andrew, this is the most beautiful ring I have ever seen!” And it was. A stunning teardrop emerald set in gold.
“You remembered,” I said, as a tear of my own fell on the ring.
“Remembered what? That emeralds are your favorite stone? Of course I
remembered.
“Oh, Maggie, will you marry me? I love you so much. I want to spend the rest of my life with you.”
I reached out my hand, and Andrew slipped the exquisite ring on my finger. “Nothing would make me happier,” I said.
43
State Report – Chief Betsy Colwell
Daniel Joseph Farrell’s mother, a real-estate agent, abandoned him when he was eight years-old, a vulnerable age. She left him to the mercy of his drunken, abusive father, who violated the child in numerous ways.
As Farrell grew older, resentment festered. Eventually, he swore he would find his mother, confront and kill her for abandoning him. He began stalking real-estate agents.
Each attack on a female agent was almost as fulfilling as an attack would have been on his own mother. But none of these women was his mother, leading to disappointment after disappointment. With each frustration the attacks escalated. A deep sadness would turn to fury. Each time the woman wasn’t his mother, rage would intensify.
Daniel Joseph Farrell is believed to have been responsible for seventeen attacks on real-estate agents and one murder, that of Hudson Hills broker, Amy Honeywell.
Investigators have evidence that may well lead to more crimes for which this perpetrator will be found responsible. Until a trial date is set, Farrell will be held in the psychiatric division of a maximum security federal correctional institution.
Epilogue
She kicked off her shoes. Then she removed the crimson silk scarf she’d bought from a street vendor in front of Saks Fifth Avenue and hung it on the brass closet hook. Once she heard the news, her day’s activities had become a complete blur and she couldn’t wait to get home. Pouring herself a double vodka with a lemon twist and a couple of ice cubes, she carried the glass to the dining-room table and sat down. On second thought, she stood up again and went back for the whole bottle of Stoly.
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