Guilty as Sin

by Tami Hoag

  She could hear Slater coming behind her as she ran through the outer office. Chancing a glance over her shoulder, she slammed a thigh into the corner of Phoebe's desk. Black stars bursting in her head, she half sprawled across the desk, and her right hand hit the stapler. She closed her fingers around it and ran on.

  “You fucking bitch!” Slater sobbed behind her.

  He launched himself at her as she flung the door open, tackling her with his arms wrapped around her upper body. They landed on the floor, Ellen taking the brunt of it as she was sandwiched between the floor and her assailant. Her forehead hit hard. Her breath left her in a painful whoosh. But she pulled her feet beneath her and fought to buck Slater's weight off her.

  They wrestled across the floor, Slater grabbing at her shoulder, trying to turn her onto her back beneath him. Ellen bit at his fingers, the blood dripping from his face into her eyes, into her hair, running down her cheek. She twisted suddenly beneath him and swung the stapler against his temple and cheekbone, snapping his head to the side, dazing him and giving her just enough opportunity to roll free.

  She scrambled to her feet and started to run, realizing too late that she was pointed in the wrong direction—away from the sheriff's department. Now she would have to get to the first floor and double back.

  Slater caught her at the stairs, grabbing the collar of her coat and a handful of hair, yanking her almost off her feet. The stun gun came up and Ellen blocked the hit with her shoulder. The gun gave an angry, crackling buzz. No defense wounds, he'd promised. If he'd nailed her the first time, there would have been none. The voltage would have dazed her senseless, and he could have quickly and easily slit her wrists for her.

  Her left arm was wedged between their bodies. Ellen groped, latching on to Slater's testicles, squeezing as hard as she could. A howl pierced her eardrum and he shoved her away, doubling over, clutching himself. Ellen's shins hit the steps, then she fell up on her hands and knees. The stapler clattered free.

  Up.

  Shit. No options. Run now, figure it out later.

  “Time to die, birthday bitch.”

  Birthday. Thirty-six. The birthday Ellen had been dreading. Suddenly thirty-six seemed far too young.

  She flung herself up the stairs, stumbling as one heel caught an edge. She grabbed for the handrail, her fingers scraping the rough plaster of the wall, breaking a nail, skinning her knuckles.

  The stairwell was barely lit, drawing in the ragged edges of illumination that fell from the lights in the halls above and below. Security lights. They offered nothing in the way of security. In the back of her mind she heard a low, smoky voice, “Your boss needs to have a word with someone about security. This is a highly volatile case. Anything might happen.”

  She reached the third floor and turned down the hall, heading east. If she could make it down the east stairs—If she could make it to the walkway between the buildings— He wouldn't dare try to take her in the walkway with the sheriff's department mere feet away.

  “We've got you now, bitch!”

  There were telephones in the offices she ran past. The offices were locked. Her self-appointed assassin was jogging behind her, laughing. The sound went through her like a spear, like the sure knowledge that he would kill her. Pursuit may not have been his plan, but it had become a part of the game.

  The game. The insanity of it was as terrifying as the prospect of death. Beat the system. Wreck lives. End lives. Nothing personal. Just a game.

  She ran past Judge Grabko's courtroom and ducked around the corner that led back toward the southeast stairwell. Scaffolding filled the stairwell, cutting off her escape route. The scaffolding for the renovators. Christ, she was going to die because of the stupid plaster frieze.

  “Checkmate, clever bitch.”

  The northeast stairs looked a mile away. Midway stood the iron gates that blocked the skyway between the courthouse and the jail. She lunged for the fire alarm on the wall, grabbing the glass tube that would break and summon help.

  The tube snapped. Nothing. No sound. No alarm.

  “Oh, God, no!” She clawed at the useless panel. The goddamn renovations. New alarms going in. State of the art.

  “Come along, Ellen. Be a good bitch and let me kill you.”

  She grabbed the handle of the door to the fire hose and yanked.

  “You have to die, bitch. We have to win the game.”

  His hand closed on her arm.

  Her fingers closed on the handle of the ax.

  He threw his body against the door and slammed it, snapping a bone in her wrist. Ellen screamed, the pain dropping her to her knees.

  Sobbing, cradling her broken left wrist against her middle, she knelt at the feet of her killer. The workmen's tarps were spread all around, covered with plaster dust as thick and fine as flour, scattered with scabs of old plaster and empty Mountain Dew cans.

  “Come along, Ellen,” Slater said, squatting down. “Be a good bitch and let me kill you.”

  He never noticed her right hand until it opened two inches from his face, throwing plaster dust into his eyes and into the gaping wound in his cheek.

  Ellen stood and jerked the ax free. She whirled just as Slater lunged at her, grabbing her ankles, hitting her in the thigh. With the stun gun.

  The current seared through her skirt, stormed along her nerve pathways. It hit the brain instantly, leaving behind stunned bewilderment. In a fraction of a second all control of arms and legs was gone. She fell like a stone, the ax sailing five feet away.

  She lay on the tarp, eyes open as Slater bent down close.

  “Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall,” he murmured, his ravaged face inches from hers. “Some by virtue die.”

  The dispatcher, a round Nordic-looking girl with fly-away blond hair and an unflattering uniform, led Jay down the walkway between the sheriff's department and the courthouse, batting her lashes and offering her opinion that he should have starred in Justifiable Homicide instead of Tom Cruise.

  He flashed her the smile, an absent, halfhearted gesture. “Thank you, Mindy, but I'm more comfortable being a writer. I really didn't have anything to do with the movie.”

  In fact, the story had been virtually unrecognizable by the time Hollywood had finished with it. Jay had shrugged off that irksome little detail on the way to the bank. It didn't matter. It was just entertainment. He got paid either way.

  A twinge hit his atrophied conscience. The people he wrote about were real, not fictional. They had lives that went on after the crimes that were his focus. They were people like Hannah Garrison and Megan and Ellen.

  “Well, you should think about it,” Mindy bubbled on, unlocking the door to the courthouse. “You're way better looking. He doesn't really have much of a chin, you know. Not that he isn't cute. He is. But you should have ranked lots higher than him in that People list, too. I don't know who makes that thing up. He's a Scientologist, too. Did you know that? That just spooks me. It's like a cult or something.” Her small eyes rounded suddenly. “Ooh! You're not a Scientologist, are you?”

  “No, ma'am. I belong to a snake-handling religion,” he drawled, straight-faced, lifting his hands as if each contained a fistful of writhing copperheads. “Nothing more spiritual than takin' up snakes.”

  Poor Mindy. The girl backed away, fighting a horrified grimace with her inbred Minnesota manners. Jay thanked her politely as she scooted back toward the sheriff's department.

  As he headed through the deep gloom toward the stairs, he kept imagining the expression on Ellen's face as he shared the news that he was helping O'Malley hunt for leads on Wright's past. The image that came to mind was pride, which the cynic in him dismissed. He was a grown man, and he told himself he had long ago burned out his need for approval from “respectable” people like his family, like Ellen.

  He climbed the stairs to the second floor, shaking his head a little as he saw the door to the county attorney's offices standing open, light spilling out into the dark hall. H
e hadn't even bothered going by Ellen's house, despite the hour. She wouldn't go home to lick her wounds. She would go right back to the job and dig in harder than before.

  He expected to find her in the conference room, bent over a pile of statements, glasses slipping down her nose. But the room was empty. Jay's nerves tightened as he took in the papers strewn across the floor. Papers painted with bright, thick splotches of blood.

  Ellen lay flat on her stomach on the filthy tarp like a broken doll, her arms flung out to the sides at odd angles. She fought to make her brain work, tried in vain to will her arms to move. She had heard footfalls, knew someone else had come into the building. At the sound of Jay's voice calling her name, she tried to scream, but the sound was contained in her mind. Slater, straddling her on his knees, tightened his hand around her throat and squeezed until she couldn't breathe.

  He had spent the last few minutes cutting a length of rope free from the scaffolding and fashioning a noose. All the while she lay helpless, unable to move, but able to watch him. At the first sound of another person in the building, he crouched over her and expertly slipped his fingers into position around her larynx.

  She closed her twitching eyes and tried to direct her scattered mental powers to Brooks. Please come looking, Jay. Please come upstairs. Please hurry.

  Footsteps sounded again below them. Hurrying. Breaking into a jog. Again in her mind she screamed, but no sound broke past the hold Slater had on her throat. What if Jay didn't come? What if he left the building, went back to the sheriff's department? Slater would have time to kill her and get away. Even if he had lost his chance to make it look like a suicide and clean up all evidence of himself after, he would still be able to kill her and escape.

  She had to do something. Now.

  The feeling was coming back into her arms. First, in the form of throbbing pain in her broken left wrist, then in small muscle spasms. If she could reestablish the connection between thought and movement . . .

  Slowly her fingers curled into a fist, scraping chips and nuggets and chunks of old plaster into her palm. She would get only one chance. If she failed . . .

  With all the concentration she could muster, she ordered her arm to move, to swing, ordered her fingers to open. Some of the debris fell short. Some hit the balusters of the railing and bounced back. The rest sailed into space and fell to the first floor. A meager effort to pin her life on. If Jay wasn't looking . . . Even if he noticed it, he might be too preoccupied to think it significant.

  Slater, on the other hand, found it too significant. His hand tightened savagely on her throat. He bent down close and whispered hoarsely in her ear. “You fucking bitch. You are dead. Now.”

  His mouth closed on her ear, his teeth biting into the cartilage.

  Ellen's mouth stretched open as she tried to gasp breath, succeeding only in dragging her tongue through the plaster dust. Her vision blurred with spiderweb lines of blackness. Her lungs burned with the desperate need for oxygen.

  The instinct for survival shot adrenaline through her in a burst, jolting her body to action. Kicking, flailing, she swung an arm back, catching a finger in the torn flesh of his face and digging into the wound.

  Plaster bits raining down to the floor of the rotunda caught Jay's eye as he hurried toward the stairs. Then came the cry—strangled, masculine. Above him—where the plaster had come from.

  “Ellen!”

  He shouted her name as he bolted for the stairs. If she was up there and not able to make any sound to call him, there was no time to spare. He didn't have the luxury of calling in cops.

  He made the third-floor landing and ran toward the hall with no sense at all of what he might be rushing into—a knife, a bullet, a body. There were no thoughts at all for his own safety. His only thought was Ellen, that she was in danger, that she needed help.

  “Ellen!”

  Slater punched at her head, batted at her broken wrist, breaking her hold on his torn face. He pushed to his feet just as Jay came into view at the north end of the hall. Snatching up the fire ax, Slater rushed him.

  Ellen struggled to her knees, gasping for air. In horror, she watched Slater bring the ax back and swing it like a baseball bat.

  Jay dodged sideways, and the blade of the ax sang through the air. Too damned close. Before Slater could pull it back for another swing, before Jay could give any thought to his plan, he stepped in close and landed a left cross on Slater's jaw. Slater staggered sideways and dropped to one knee.

  He came up swinging the ax backhanded. Jay ducked low and caught him hard in the ribs, knocking the wind from his lungs. He let his weapon go. The ax clattered to the floor, the handle spinning out of reach. Moving in quickly, Jay aimed a boot at Slater's chin as he doubled over. But Slater caught the kick and jerked Jay off his feet.

  Jay landed hard on his back. Before his vision cleared, Slater was over him, the pale beam of the security light glinting off the blade of a hunting knife he had pulled from his coat.

  Ellen staggered to her feet as Jay went down, fear and fury and pain coursing through her. Slater was the key to the evil that had contaminated her haven. He had killed Denny Enberg and Dustin Holloman. He would have killed her if not for Jay. And now he would kill Jay.

  Vay managed to twist out of the way of the first knife strike, though the blade sliced the sleeve of his coat, releasing a mass of goose down that puffed up into the air between them. He wasn't as lucky the second time, or the third.

  Slater stabbed viciously, his mouth open, the gaping wound sucking in and blowing out with his breath, blood and spittle spraying in a pink foam. The blade of the hunting knife struck Jay's forearm as he tried to defend himself, tearing coat sleeve and muscle, hitting bone. He punched out with his other hand, barely connecting with Slater and leaving himself open to another assault.

  The blade sank deep into the hollow of his right shoulder, and a white-hot burst of pain spread through his brain like a dark cloud, dimming his vision. He could feel the blood well up like water from a spring as his arm went dead.

  Move, move, move!

  Twisting, kicking, he got Slater off him and his feet beneath him. He scooted backward in a frantic retreat, with Slater in aggressive pursuit.

  He hit the railing that overlooked the rotunda, saw Slater pulling the knife back, raising it high, the look in his eyes pure animal bloodlust, not human in any respect.

  A hundred hard, clear truths cut across Jay's mind at the speed of light. He would never know his son. He had wasted too much time on spite. The only people who would mourn his passing would be the ones who made money off him. And what had begun with Ellen, what she had awakened in him, would die in this moment, unfulfilled.

  Screaming, Slater pulled the blade another inch higher over his shoulder. Ellen hurled herself at him, hitting him in the side of the neck with the stun gun, shooting sixty thousand volts of electricity directly to his brain.

  Eyes wide, he dropped to the floor, his body jerking and convulsing, then going utterly still.

  Ellen stared at him, the horror of the last few moments hitting her. The strength that had carried her through vanished, and tremors shook her.

  “It's all right,” Jay murmured, sliding his left arm around her and gathering her close. He pressed his face against the cool silk of her hair and kissed her. “It's over, baby. It's over.”

  An insidious numbness was creeping through him, creeping in on the edges of his mind. He felt that the energy that comprised his being was gathering into a softly glowing ball and slowly drifting out of the wounded shell of his body. He fought the sensation, as seductive as it was. All he wanted was to hold Ellen, shelter her.

  “Oh, God, you're bleeding!” she whispered. She fumbled to press a hand against the gushing wound in his shoulder. His blood oozed out between her fingers and ran in rivulets down her hand.

  “Don't worry,” he told her. “I can't die a hero.” He gave her a pale shadow of his smile. “It'd be too damned ironic.”

>   CHAPTER 36

  In his dream Josh saw blood. Rivers of it. Geysers of it. Smooth, oily pools of it. He was in it up to his chin. The undercurrent pulled at his feet. The hands of the Taker closed around his ankles and tried to pull him down. The Taker had chosen him. The Taker wanted him. It frightened him to disobey. He had gone into the smallest box of his mind to hide, and still the Taker had hold of him, pulling on him.

  He had been told to obey. Bad things would happen. Terrible things. They had already started. Josh could see his whole world tearing apart, just the way the Taker had shown him. But still he clung to the sides of his box, holding on to what was left of his world.

  If he could just hide long enough . . . If he could make himself even smaller inside the shell of his body. If he could get back inside the box . . .

  His hands were slipping. He gulped a breath as the Taker pulled him under, through the blood.

  Then, just as quickly, he was free. He broke the surface, soared, as if he had been thrown clear of a slingshot. Into the light. Into the air. He could breathe again. He was flying. And below him the blood drew into a smaller and smaller puddle, and then it was gone.

  Josh's eyes snapped open. The room was dark, except for the night-light and the numbers on his clock. He felt as if he had been sleeping for a long, long time. Days instead of hours. His mom was asleep in the sleeping bag on the floor. She looked so tired and worried. Her brow was frowning.

  Because of me.

  Because of the Taker.

  There was so much she would never understand. So much he wished they could both forget and just start over, as if they hadn't even been alive until today.

  Maybe they could do that, if he wished it hard enough, if he was good enough . . . if he could only find the courage.

  CHAPTER 37

  The farmhouse sat on an isolated, wooded acreage just over the county line to the south in rural Tyler County. The nearest neighbors were Amish farmers who had no interest in the comings or goings of the “English.” Ellen had to imagine they were taking notice this morning. Cars from the Tyler and Park county sheriff's departments, the Deer Lake PD, and the BCA filled the yard while news vans and reporters' vehicles clogged the road. Uniformed officers kept the press at bay while the detectives and evidence techs went about their work.