by Jonah Paine
Sam looked to his partner, confused. "You're going to have to step me through that one, Tyrone. Who are you talking about?"
"The girls. They're free."
Sam felt it like a punch to his stomach, a sudden burst that was halfway between elation and outrage. They had their confession, or close to it. But still, what was his motive? "Tyrone, are you referring to Jasmine Martin and Betsy Patterson?"
Pasco looked at him blankly. "I don't know who that is," he said at last.
Sam fished two photos of the girls out of the folder on the table in front of him and passed them over. "Jasmine Martin and Betsy Patterson," he said, indicating them with a finger. "Are these the girls you are referring to?"
Pasco nodded.
"And how, exactly, are they free? What are they free of?"
Pasco nodded decisively. "They are free of this world. This sinful world. They are free of want and pain and are in the bosom of the Lord."
Sam let out a breath and looked over to Bud. His partner merely shook his head.
He turned back to their suspect, who was now their confessed killer. "Is that what you did, Tyrone? You set them free?"
Pasco nodded.
"You set them free by abducting them and killing them." He could barely speak the sentence without shouting. For all his calm, an ocean of rage simmered just below the surface.
"I did what I needed to do," Pasco said in a stubborn voice, as if explaining himself to a school principal. "If I hurt them, it was so they would stop hurting. This world hurts girls like them. It hurts them, and it never stops."
Bud lunged across the table. "This world hurts them because it has monsters like you in it, you god damn son of a bitch!" He was breathing hard, and the veins in his temple bulged. This was no "bad cop" act. He was ready to rip their suspect's head off. Sam wasn't sure that he would stop him.
They had what they needed for a conviction now, but there was an important question to ask. "And Pamela Wilson?" he asked, sliding a picture of the third girl across the table. "Did you set her free, too?"
Pasco looked at the picture for a long moment. Sam thought he glimpsed fondness in the killer's eyes. "No," he said softly. "Not yet. But she'll be free soon."
"How?" Sam asked urgently. "Where is she? Where did you leave her?"
Pasco smiled at him. "Where she is doesn't matter. Where she will be is what matters. She'll be with God. She'll be free."
Sam almost struck him then. He knew the department brass were watching from the other side of the mirror, but for a moment he didn't care. For a moment he was ready to use his fists and his chair and anything else that fit into his hands to beat information out of this psychopath. The rage and the need for vengeance filled him for an instant, and then it drained out of him like water out of a broken pot.
In its place was a terrible urgency. Somewhere out there was a young girl who had been snatched from her family and her life and was now imprisoned without anyone to bring her food and water. If she was still alive, she had at most two days left.
Two days. They had two days to save a life. Unless Pasco became a lot more forthcoming, they weren't going to make it. For Pamela's sake, he prayed that he was wrong.
Forty-eight hours later they were no closer to their goal, and Sam sat in the back of the courtyard for Tyrone Pasco's arraignment and weighed the odds that Pamela Wilson was still alive. Everything he knew to be true said that she was probably already dead.
If the girl still had a chance, it was because he was missing something.
Sam's eyes were fixed on a row of seats near the front, where the parents of Jasmine and Betsy sat together. They had expressions that mixed grief and anger in equal measure, now that they had the opportunity to see for the first time the man who had ripped their families in two and inflicted a pain on them that would never go away. The judge was droning through the ritualized words and phrases that the occasion required of him, but the parents paid him no mind. Their eyes were focused on Pasco, where he sat in chains surrounded by armed guards.
There was a small commotion outside the courtroom's closed doors, not loud but audible enough that the judge paused and glanced up. Just at that moment the doors burst open and Pamela's mother burst in. Sam half rose from his seat, not yet knowing whether it was to comfort her or stop her from doing something terrible.
As soon as she caught sight of Pasco she stopped in her tracks. Her hands balled at her chest, and then dropped to her waist, balled in tight fists. "Where is my baby?!" She shouted in a searing voice that Sam was sure he'd carry with him to his grave.
The judge banged his gavel, and the bailiff took a few steps toward the distraught mother, but her husband had already hurried up behind her and took her, weeping, into his arms. He began leading her out of the courtroom, but even after they left Sam could hear the questions between her sobs: "Where is she? Where is she? Where is my baby girl?"
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
The bar was dark and musty-smelling. The neon beer signs and the televisions cast competing pools of red and blue light that washed over the hunched shoulders of the men staring into their glasses. Sam found everything far too familiar.
He had spent many hours here, when times were worse and he was still trying to feel better. Half of him wanted to flee, to turn on his heel and get the hell out of this place before his resolve cracked and he convinced himself that one glass of bourbon wouldn't be so bad. His other half wanted to find a seat at the bar and get started.
Someone whistled. He looked over and saw Bud waving to him, at a table that was crowded with cops. Some of them looked his way and lifted their glasses in a salute. Hail the conquering hero.
He walked over to the table and pulled a chair up. His partner gave him an appraising look. "You OK?
"I don't look it?"
"You look like hell."
"I've got a headache. But we're celebrating, so that makes me OK. He looked over his shoulder and caught the bartender's eye. "Ginger Ale!" he called, then turned back to the table. This wasn't the sort of place that had table service, but he didn't care if anyone ever brought him his drink. The main thing was to signal to everyone who might be tempted to buy him alcohol that he wasn't here to fall off the wagon.
Bud clapped him on the shoulder, hard. Things were still awkward between them. Sam figured that they might just stay that way, but here he was, sitting next to the man who had slept with his wife, and he was pretending like it was OK.
The strange thing was, Sam was starting to feel like maybe it was almost OK. He had certainly done some sleeping around of his own lately, and what he had with Patty was so far from a functioning marriage that it was barely recognizable. When he'd married Patty, he never imagined that he'd see her experience so much pain. He'd thought that, him being her husband, somehow he'd be able to shield her from that sort of thing. If that was his job he hadn't done it very well, and if that was his promise to her he had broken it many times over. So if she had found some moments of peace and happiness with another man, he wouldn't begrudge her.
Bud, though; he was another story. Sleeping with your partner's wife was just about the worst thing that a cop can do. Sam needed more time before he'd be ready to call Bud a friend again.
Bud was looking at him expectantly. "So!" he said. "We got him."
"We got him."
"A sicko rapist murderer is behind bars."
"He is."
"We tracked him down, and we caught him."
"Yep."
"So why do you look like your grandfather just died?"
For a brief moment Sam was at the point of opening up and telling him about Celeste. The words were right on the tip of his tongue, but then something dragged him back from the brink. That was a story he would be locking away, maybe forever. Instead, he kept it strictly business.
"There's something bugging me."
Bud rolled his eyes. "Isn't there always? Spill."
"Tyrone is guilty. No questions there. We got him,
he confessed, he's guilty. But everything we know about him says he's a mess. He was messed up as a kid, he was messed up in the military, he was even more messed up in prison. Now he can barely complete a sentence, and the only reason he had a job or a place to live was because his psychiatrist felt sorry for him."
"Yeah, so? What's your point?"
"My point is that we're supposed to believe that a guy like that is going to come up with a plan to steal client records from a psychiatrist's office so that he could research criminal methods and use them to hide his tracks? It doesn't figure. There's no way that Pasco could have come up with that idea, much less followed through on it."
Bud eyed him warily as he took a long sip from his beer. "So what are you saying?"
Sam leaned in towards him and lowered his voice. "I'm saying that I think he might not have been acting alone. I think maybe Pasco wasn't the one who was calling the shots."
Bud rolled his eyes again. "So we have a criminal mastermind on the loose, even though we have no actual evidence of that fact, and the one guy who we have caught has confessed to everything but hasn't gotten around to telling us yet that he was just following orders the whole time."
Sam leaned back again. Bud was right, of course. The fact that he didn't think Pasco was capable of acting alone was less than irrelevant in a court of law. He needed more, and he knew where to look for it.
"We need the scene. We need to know where he kept the girls."
Bud shrugged. "I'm with you, buddy, but he hasn't breathed a word of it yet. He tells us everything except that."
Sam leaned back and stared at the ceiling, his thoughts far away. He needed a crime scene. He needed to augment Pasco's testimony with physical evidence. Until they found the crime scene, he was blundering around in the dark.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Sleep wouldn't come. Beside him in the bed, Sam could hear Patty's slow breathing. She had headed up to the bedroom soon after he came home. Patty wasn't usually one to be early to bed, early to rise.
He suspected that going to sleep had seemed better to her than talking to him, or running the risk that he might try to talk to her.
Sam lay with his head on the pillow and stared at the pattern of shadows on the ceiling. The random pattern of spots and discolorations on the ceiling surface coalesced in his mind into faces and outlines; he could remember when he was a kid and he'd been able to scare himself by pretending that these faces were strange creatures peering at him through the walls and ceiling of his bedroom. Then, one day, those fears fade away and never came back. He learned, in time, that fear isn't something you need to create for yourself. Fear isn't a game you play. It will find you, all on its own.
He sighed and turned on his side, plumping the pillow beneath him. There was something that lurked in the back of his mind and wouldn't let him fall asleep. There were two details that should have fit together seamlessly now that he could finally see them clearly, and yet felt like shards from two different broken pots.
Pasco had been more than talkative since he'd been arrested. He almost seemed eager to share, as if he hoped the police would come to understand what he'd been doing. He had been relentlessly unwilling to tell them where they could find Betsy Patterson, but he could not have been more clear on the his motivation and why he had done the things he had done.
What he did to those girls, he did in order to free them from a sinful world. Every part of Sam rejected that idea. He hated everything that Pasco had done, and hated even more the fact that the man had found a way to believe that he was right to do so.
And yet.
And yet the fact that Sam could not accept Pasco's motivations did not mean that Pasco did not accept them, that he was not honestly acting in that misguided impulse. And if that were true, it meant that what Pasco did—everything that he did—was somehow filtered through the lens of saving the girls.
He believed he was saving the girls. Saving them by killing them. Saving them by mutilating their already-dead bodies.
Sam shook his head. That was the point where the thread broke and nothing made sense. He could, if he tried, get his head around the idea that someone twisted enough might come to believe that death, even murder, is a form of salvation. More than one religious cult had engaged in ritual suicide, which their members could not have done unless they believed something very similar to the delusions Pasco suffered from. But mutilation? How did that make any sense?
He knew what Bud would say. Bud would remind him that he was asking these questions of a crazy man, a psychopath. Bud would say that it's stupid to expect someone else's crazy thoughts and actions to make any sense to anyone else.
But still. The facts of the case didn't fit together, no matter how he twisted them around in his mind. They were like notes in a song that was being played out of tune. And no matter how he worked it, he could only find one way to make the music sound right.
There had to be a second killer.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Every time Sam looked at Lieutenant Garvey, he took it as a warning. Everything about the man sagged, from the skin on his face to the limp hair that dangled over his eyes and drooped down from his upper lip.
The man sat behind a faux-wood desk in a small office with walls a shade of yellow that might have been an original coat of white yellowed with age and neglect.
Sam knew that, if he did a good job and applied himself, some day he could be sitting in that chair. He was ready to do almost anything to avoid that fate.
Pleasantries exchanged, the two men eyed each other without affection. Sam thought that his lieutenant was a small-minded bureaucrat who was more invested in filing paperwork correctly than he was in seeing that justice being done. He knew that his supervisor thought he was an obsessive-compulsive pain in the ass who needlessly caused trouble and created work for others.
They both were right.
Sam didn't have high hopes for this conversation, but procrastinating would only make it worse. He opened his mouth and started reciting the speech he had rehearsed in his car on the way to work that morning.
"I've been thinking about the abduction case."
His supervisor squinted at him. Clearly he knew where this conversation was headed, and he didn't care for it. "Congratulations on the collar. You got the man."
"Yeah," Sam said without enthusiasm. "That's the thing. I don't think he was working alone."
The lieutenant leaned back in his chair. "You have evidence to support that?"
Sam sighed. "No physical evidence, not yet. But..."
"No evidence means no case. You have a suspect, you have a confession. You have three dead girls."
"Two dead girls," Sam interrupted.
"Two dead girls and one presumed dead," his supervisor allowed. "Terrible thing. Horrible crimes. The sort of thing that frightens people, keeps them up at night. The community wants us to close the book on this thing."
"We can't close the book if we haven't fully investigated the possibility that Tyrone Pasco was not acting alone."
"You said yourself that you have no evidence for that."
"No, but Pasco could not have done this alone. He lacked the capacity to..."
The lieutenant rolled his eyes. "So you're a psychiatrist now?"
"No, but..."
"The case is closed until such time as new physical evidence mandates that it be re-opened."
Sam glared in anger and frustration, but the other man had turned his attention to the stack of papers in front of him. Sam departed, unnoticed.
In his heart Sam knew what the report would say before he opened the manila envelope and read the papers inside. Now that they had Pasco in custody, they could check his blood for a match with the blood that had been found under Betsy's nails.
Sam knew that most cops wouldn't have bothered running the check if the case was already closed. It was like checking to make sure that you had turned off the lights when leaving your house in the middle of a power outag
e. Sam knew that there was a reason, sometimes, for not asking questions. No laboratory test was 100% accurate, and so if you already had a man you knew was guilty, why would you risk running a test that, by chance, carelessness, or incompetence might actually aid the defense's case?
Sam was not a man to leave stones unturned, however. He knew that his chances of sleeping at night were dependent on asking questions and collecting evidence until the itch in the back of his mind went away.
He opened the envelope and scanned the top-most page, then released a sigh. The blood found under Betsy's nails were not a match for the man they had in custody.
Not a match. Which meant that, either someone in the evidence chain had screwed up, or there was still a killer on the loose. In the former case, Sam's duty as a police officer was to burn this report and bury the ashes for fear that it might allow a monster to escape justice. In the latter case, his duty as an officer and a man was to get out there and look for the man they had missed the first time.
It was no contest. He stood from his chair, swung his jacket over his shoulders, and headed for the door. He had questions to ask and a good idea of who might be able to answer them.
CHAPTER FORTY
Sam walked up the sidewalk to Warren Sundquist's office and wondered what they should discuss. The first possible subject of conversation was the case against Tyrone Pasco, and Sam's belief that someone else must have been involved.
The second, and possibly more fruitful discussion, would be of Sam's obsessive tendencies and inability to leave well enough alone.
No one knew that he was here today. If his lieutenant discovered it, Sam had no doubt that he would end up on suspension. On the drive over he considered stopping and turning around any number of times, but he simply couldn't do it. The case was solved, they had their man, and they had a confession, but Sam could not bring himself to leave it at that, not so long as he had questions.