A Twist of the Knife

by Becky Masterman

  My eyes grew slowly accustomed to the darkness, so I was able to spot a turnoff narrower than the road, and a glint of a red rear reflector. I nudged Todd and pointed to it.

  “Laura,” I whispered.

  We continued on for ten minutes, walking as quickly and as quietly as we could, our shoes sucking into the sandy mud in places where the water had pooled and we didn’t see. Then a small clearing and a smaller house.

  I knew Laura from her build and the limp, so I turned my flashlight on her coming out of a house that was more like a shed. She didn’t close the door behind her, but stood looking at me as if she could see who I was even with the light in her eyes. Her stillness said she belonged there. I was the one whose presence was odd. Having been caught in the rain she was soaked, which she didn’t seem to notice any more than the mosquitos that flocked to her.

  My skin crawled, watching them on her and her lack of reaction to them. I wanted to slap at them. I wanted to slap her. I had a feeling from the way she left the shack that there was nothing urgent to deal with here. “How about I talk to her while you check the perimeter,” I said. He nodded and moved off around the left of the house.

  “Why are you here?” I called, getting closer but not too.

  “I’m not sure,” she said, engagement with me somehow bringing her out of a daze. “Why are you here?”

  “Looking for you,” I said. “What’s in there?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “I think I saw a few rats.”

  I went past her into the shack, weapon drawn. Laura didn’t turn around to watch or warn me. Todd had circled around the other side of the house, giving me an all-clear, and standing, watching Laura who didn’t look at him.

  Inside, with the night and the rain hiding the moon, it was all darkness. I switched on my flashlight and pointed it randomly around, hoping that Laura had told me the truth, that there was no one here. I saw a sty of a dwelling. A raw half-eaten fish, dried animal feces, and plates of what looked like the stuff they put out on a bar next to your beer littered the floor. In place of a bed, Erroll had been using an old couch that someone sometime had dragged in. Besides a light blanket there was a pillow, waxy with grime.

  I caught something in the corner of my eye and flashed my light on a skittering along the edge of the wall. Like Laura, I assumed a rat, but it was too big to be a rat, too thin, too slinky. I found it again. A ferret. So Murry keeps ferrets, I thought. That explained the shit and plate of kibbles on the floor, and also the animal scavenging of the bodies, and maybe the fur that had been found in the tarp used to bury the Creighton children. Murry had kept the bodies here, possibly even murdered the children here, before he wrapped them tightly in the tarp and took them by boat to the island. Only not before the ferrets got to them.

  But where’s Murry? I checked the bathroom, a toilet and a shower stall big enough to be on a small boat. Filthy like the front room. I left.

  “Where did they go?” I asked her.

  Laura didn’t pretend to not understand that by “they” I meant Alison and Erroll Murry. She shrugged.

  “I should call for backup now,” Todd’s words said.

  What my brother meant was You got Laura. That’s the best I can do.

  I nodded my agreement. Then he said, his tone casual, “How about you give me that, Laura.” He had gestured to her side, and then I saw the gun she held in her right hand, angled away from me and tucked against her thigh.

  “What?” she said to Todd, and then to me, “What?”

  I saw her anger flare the second time she said it, and heard the accusation in it. I didn’t try to coddle her. I treated her like she had all her wits with her. “Coleman, we know where to go. We need to get a move on, and my brother won’t go without that gun.”

  She looked at me like I had betrayed her, but let Todd take the gun out of her hand.

  “Are you sure Alison has been here?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Pretty sure.”

  “There’s a truck parked behind the shack,” Todd said. “It’s registered to Murry. And a jeep.”

  “That would be Alison’s,” I said.

  Todd said, “Murry’s boat is at the dock.”

  Knowing what I knew now, it didn’t take genius to figure out the next move. “Todd, how about dropping us off at Coleman’s car, then you can go somewhere to get a signal and alert Delgado we’ll be at Shayna Murry’s place. We won’t do anything but keep an eye on them until you get there, so hurry.” I gave him the address.

  “Why there?”

  “I bet Alison has been all over this area with Larry a million times looking for the children’s bodies, so she knows. Murry went on foot because he knows they’ll be keeping an eye out for his truck and the boat. Alison is tracking him with Larry. Where he went is secluded and private, boarded up, and not too far from here. Shayna Murry’s house. It’s a guess, but it’s the only one I’ve got, and we don’t have a tracking dog to confirm it.”

  “Why you instead of me?” Todd asked. Again, I could hear what he wasn’t saying: Why Laura?

  “Because I know Alison better than either of you. She’s got some respect for me. I’m the most likely to keep everyone alive. And Coleman is FBI. If the shit goes down before backup, she has more jurisdiction in this county than either of us.” She’s unarmed and I’m not going to let her out of my sight until this is finished.

  I may have gone from insistence on Laura’s total innocence to preventing worse things from happening, but that’s how it goes.

  Forty-six

  Laura was too silent on the short drive over to Shayna Murry’s place. She may have been cold from the drenching, and I kept the AC off in her car as I drove (she was still eerily passive and didn’t object to my driving), but I didn’t like the way she sat bent over pressing her hands between her knees. For what we were about to do she appeared a little too lethargic.

  I pulled in to a grassy lot a little ways down from Shayna Murry’s place.

  “Are you going to let me go in there unarmed?” Laura asked. As with Todd, I heard what she was saying underneath her words. Don’t you trust me?

  “Alison won’t kill Murry until she gets him to confess. So what I’m going to do is make sure they’re in there, and if I can, talk Alison down. You catch the backup when it arrives and let them know. Okay?”

  Whatever Laura heard underneath my words that made her eyes narrow, she got out of the car but stayed put, leaning against it. I came up behind the house and saw the smallish window, not boarded up like the ones in front. Standing on tiptoe I could just barely look in from the bottom right corner of the window, the dark hiding me from whoever was inside.

  I thought I smelled something burning and hoped it wasn’t Erroll.

  From this vantage point I could see the rod for a shower curtain. I was looking over the bathtub shower stall. I nearly slipped when I looked down and saw Larry looking back at me. His lips pulled back in a snarl.

  But then I saw he was not actually looking back at me. He was laser focused on someone in the tub. Alison stood at the door of the bathroom, her back turned to me. With Larry keeping guard, she didn’t have to be cautious about whoever was in the tub. I needed to confirm it was Erroll Murry, and for her sake, I hoped he was still alive.

  I thought I could talk to her, and no time to waste, with Todd and Delgado probably on the way. I quickly made my way around to the front door.

  Crime scene tape had been stripped away from the front porch, and the door was unlocked. Alison must not have thought she needed too much time to get the whole truth from Erroll.

  Unlike the shack we’d just left, this place had electricity, of course, and a gooseneck desk light had been turned on in the front studio. The boards over the windows kept the light from showing outside. The powder the crime scene techs used to dust for latents after Shayna’s murder still coated much of the surfaces, and the place still carried the disgustingly sweet odor of decomposition. It always would.

 
So far neither Alison nor Larry was alerted to my presence. Maybe the smell prevented it. I had been here before and knew that the hallway led to the bedroom led to the bathroom.

  I hadn’t seen a firearm, at least not in the bathroom. And I didn’t want to approach Alison with mine pointed at her. It sends the wrong kind of message when you’re trying to negotiate. I put mine in my back waistband. In the bedroom I noticed a heavy comforter on the bed, and I grabbed it, doubling and doubling it again as quietly as I could. I’d seen this sort of thing with K-9 trainers and thought it should work. I wasn’t sure when Larry would hear or smell me and shift his focus from Erroll in the bathtub.

  Not a moment too soon.

  Larry appeared at the bedroom door, his lips now curled up over teeth that were meant for me. He didn’t look much like a therapy dog right now. Then Alison was behind him, her thoughts so hard in her eyes I couldn’t tell if she saw me or not.

  Maybe the comforter wasn’t enough.

  We stood-off like that until I was aware of Laura standing beside me. I felt her reach behind me and pull out my pistol. “Don’t,” I tried to say without moving my lips too much and setting Larry off. But Laura did anyway.

  So I hissed out of the corner of my mouth, “Shoot the dog,” and backed up a bit out of the bedroom into the hallway.

  “I can’t shoot the dog,” Laura hissed back.

  That was enough for Larry. Without waiting for a signal from his mistress, he attacked.

  Braced for the impact, I met him with my body and kept the padding of the comforter between us. His jaws snapped for my face, close enough to feel his breath. Wrapping the comforter around him felt like putting a straitjacket on a hundred-pound meth tweaker. He nailed me on the forearm, but I was so bent on not getting killed I hardly felt it at the time. Luckily he wasn’t real good at balancing that long on his hind legs, and tripped. I fell on top of him, pinning him on the floor with the whole weight of my body, his teeth brushing my cheek, vaguely hearing Laura shouting, “I’ll shoot the dog! I’ll shoot the dog!”

  I couldn’t have shot the dog either. He wasn’t your basic junkyard dog, he was a colleague. But Alison didn’t know that, and enough of her came back to care for the only family she knew. She couldn’t save the others, but she could save this one.

  “Larry, down,” she said.

  Larry went limp under me, and whimpered like a good therapy dog. I had enough adrenaline pumping, though, that if he had tried to lick my face I would have punched him. I rolled over next to him, and rose cautiously, saying, “Good dog, good boy, Larry,” knowing that coming from me it probably had no effect.

  With Larry less of a threat, Laura turned her attention back on Alison, giving her the same order Alison had given the dog. “FBI,” she said. “Get down.” I wasn’t sure about the legality of her law enforcement claim, but she was the only one in the room with a gun.

  Alison ignored Laura’s gun, turned, and moved back into the bedroom, out of sight.

  Laura looked at Larry, who sat quietly but at attention. “I couldn’t shoot the dog,” she said.

  “Don’t waste time,” I said, and, “Give me the gun.”

  Which she did not. She followed Alison to the bathroom. I closed the door that would keep Larry in the hall, and followed Laura.

  We stood at the entrance to the small bathroom and observed her sitting on the edge of the tub. Holding up his head by the hair with one hand, in the other she held a knife to the throat of Erroll Murry. There were puncture marks in his arm and a tear in his face where he had been mauled by Larry. Otherwise he was aware. He was too aware for his own good, his eyes bugged out with terror. A stun gun was on the floor next to the tub, but it hadn’t been fired. I wondered if he’d told her what she wanted to hear. When he saw us he started to wiggle, but the knife at his throat made him stop.

  “Alison, what are you doing?” I said, knowing the answer, but stalling for time, and wondering if Laura would get in a head shot before the knife sliced through.

  “He killed my family,” she said. “He let my father die in his place.”

  “I know,” I said. Not caring about Erroll except in an abstract sense, but caring about Alison, who had been so good and endured so much, I wanted to stop her. I wanted to save her. And I wanted to save Laura from killing her.

  I said, “Alison, don’t do this.”

  “He says he’s scared, but not as scared as he was all those years after he found out there was a kid he missed killing. He deserves to die.”

  “I know, I know. All the scumbags in the world deserve to die. But this, this doesn’t look to me like righteousness anymore. It doesn’t have that noble a name. This guy’s not worth it. You don’t want to do it, not with us watching like this.”

  Having an audience didn’t seem to bother Alison. Her head wagged back and forth an inch, like she was hearing her own thoughts instead of my words. She pressed the blade into Erroll’s neck where the water from the shower flowed down. I could tell the knife was pretty sharp from the thin line of blood that crept to the surface and washed down the front of his T-shirt. She didn’t look at Erroll as she did this. She watched Laura, or more precisely, the finger that Laura held against the trigger of her gun.

  Alison said, “If you shoot me, the last thing I’ll do is slash his throat. That’s really all I want. So you do what you have to do.”

  The air crackled with uncertainty. I took a chance, reached into my pocket and drew out the letter Marcus Creighton had written but failed to send. Alison’s focus was so fixed on Laura, though, I was unable to distract her with it.

  “Alison, your dad wrote you a letter the night before he died. He addressed it to Kirsten. He knew it was you. Read the letter, Kirsten.”

  Alison wouldn’t fall for it, wouldn’t take her eyes off Laura’s trigger finger. “Alison,” I said. “Come away now. Read the letter.”

  “He took my family. He took my life,” she said. “Isn’t that right, Erroll. Tell the woman what you told me.”

  While we talked, Erroll’s mind had been concentrated on nothing but gauging the pressure of the knife. If he wanted to nod he was too terrified to do so, with the blade pressed just gently enough against his throat. He reached his hand up to ease the pressure, and Alison nicked the hand. Erroll moaned and tears flowed.

  “Never mind,” Alison said. “I’ll tell them what you told me. You just nod, okay?” When he didn’t speak she pressed harder. “Okay?”

  Erroll gave a nod that pressed the knife just a little deeper.

  “Alison, please let Erroll go now,” I said.

  “You never ever talked to my father, did you, Erroll? You didn’t know him.”

  Alison eased up the pressure of the knife to encourage him.

  Erroll shook his head.

  “Erroll felt bad for his sister, that she was poor and the Creighton family had everything she deserved. Nod if that’s true, Erroll.”

  Erroll nodded.

  “Alison, the police are on their way. They’ll deal with Erroll,” I said.

  “Erroll says he didn’t know there were three of us until Shayna told him. And Shayna loved her brother more than my father, so she protected him. But what he won’t tell me is how it happened. I have to know. Erroll, tell us.”

  Erroll struggled but the way his head twisted I had the sense if he could have freed his hands he would have covered his face.

  “No.”

  “Alison, put down the knife,” I said. “Can you just put down the knife.”

  “Erroll,” Alison chided, as a mother would her naughty son.

  I gasped as he turned his head toward the shower wall and the blade entered, a thin sheet of blood emerging down his neck.

  “Erroll,” murmured Alison, quietly. “What did you do to the children?”

  His eyes closed and that long ago memory finally seemed to explode from his mouth. “I’d never kill kids. Never. But he came in and tried to pull me away and then she came in too and they both
started screaming. I only wanted to shut them up. I’d never kill a kid, I’d never kill a kid.”

  “But you did,” Alison said.

  Then she slit his throat. The blood gushed and mixed with the water, turning pink before it got to the drain.

  Laura and I leapt forward simultaneously in that futile gesture to stanch the blood that can’t be stopped. But Alison was already standing, now between us and Erroll with the knife still in her hand. She waved it back and forth and took a step forward. “It’s okay, it’s okay,” she said in the tone of reassurance that she meant us no harm as long as we cooperated. “I just needed to make sure he died this time. Before.”

  I knew what she was thinking, that she herself had been one of the people responsible for her father’s death, and now it was her turn. “Alison, don’t do it,” I said. “We can get you help. It doesn’t matter what you’ve done, the law will be sympathetic.”

  “I don’t want sympathy,” she said. “I want my life to have been different.”

  Laura kept her gun trained on Alison as they did a little dance in a mirror image of each other.

  “I don’t want to kill you, Alison,” Laura said, taking careful aim at a spot I couldn’t guess.

  Oh yes she did, I thought. She sort of wanted to kill Alison. And Alison wanted to be killed. These two women both wanted the same thing. And if Laura succeeded, I knew I would have lost them both.

  “Don’t worry,” Alison said to Laura. “I’ll kill you instead.”

  “Not necessarily,” Laura said, and, as Alison lunged with the knife upraised, fired.

  The knife flew away and bounced off the bathroom wall, but Alison wasn’t stopped. After her surprise and pain she lunged again, this time with nothing but her will to die. Laura stepped back and away from her, further into the bedroom.

  “Don’t,” I half-whispered, afraid to tip the scale in the wrong direction, but unable to resist. “Don’t be so sure of yourself.”

  “I won’t,” Laura said. I couldn’t tell if she was talking to me or trying to convince herself.