by Jen Blood
Jamie glanced at him in surprise.
“You asked what I like about Erin,” he explained. He’d been struggling with the question all night; it was a relief to finally find an answer that felt true. “Why I’m out here. Turning myself inside out.”
“Unexpected?” she asked. “Explain, please.”
He shrugged. An owl swooped down farther along the path. Neither of the dogs seemed concerned. “Unexpected. The things she says; the things she does. Tough one minute, crying over sick puppies the next.” It wasn’t coming out right, but he got the sense that Jamie understood, regardless. He continued. “Last month I had the flu. She called my assistant to find out my favorite place to eat. For three days, she had them deliver dinners, and paid extra so they’d include cold medicine and jelly beans. She has a good laugh. Is a terrible driver. And I’m ninety-nine percent certain she’d let me drown if she had to choose between me and her dog.”
Jamie laughed. “And that’s a good thing?”
“It shows loyalty. I like that.”
“All right,” she said. She’d been dragging for the past half hour—Suddenly, she seemed revitalized. “Well, now I approve. Let’s find this girl, huh?”
It was midnight when Casper caught the scent and sounded off. The searchers were cold and the dogs were tired and Juarez knew that everyone should have been retired for the night hours ago. But Jamie had said they could keep on… Just a little longer, she’d told him. The dog’s excitement this time around sent a jolt of adrenaline through his system.
When both Casper and Phantom picked up the scent, neither of them slowing down, Juarez felt a familiar comingling of anticipation and dread take root.
“Erin!” he shouted. He hurried on ahead, shining his light into the darkness. Jamie was just a step or two behind him, cautioning him to go slowly.
He paid no attention.
“Erin! Are you out here?”
He thought he heard something, but there was too much noise to tell for sure. Jamie halted the dogs. Everyone listened.
Diggs was the one who answered, his voice so faint it was hard to hear through the trees. “We’re here. We need a paramedic.”
The dogs led Juarez and Jamie straight to them from there, through a short stretch of woods where Diggs was sitting vigil beside Erin, who lay motionless on the ground. Her eyes were closed. Juarez’s heart sank. He forced himself forward.
“She’s still alive,” Diggs said. He shook his head, fighting tears. “She passed out about twenty minutes ago—dehydration, maybe. Or shock. I tried to carry her…”
Jamie came over and tried to lead Diggs away, but he wouldn’t leave Erin’s side until the paramedics came. When they arrived and started attending to her, Erin came to with a start, fighting the moment she was conscious. Her face was a mass of cuts and bruises, her right wrist misshapen and dangerously swollen. Juarez knelt beside her.
“It’s okay,” he said quietly. She was shaking. “We’ve got you. You’re all right.”
She tried to get up, but the paramedics managed to convince her to stay where she was. She held tightly to Juarez’s hand, her eyes wide with shock. He waited for tears.
There were none.
“I’m glad you came,” she whispered to him.
He kissed the top of her head, holding her as close as he dared. Even then, it felt like she was very far away.
Chapter Thirty-Two
When I woke up, it was to white walls and white ceiling and a lovely floaty feeling I wasn’t anxious to leave. The second I moved, my mother appeared. My lovely floaty feeling faded.
“You’re awake,” she said.
I tried to nod, but my neurons weren’t firing in quite the right direction. I tried speaking instead. “Where’s Diggs?” I croaked.
She gave me a look I couldn’t read. I started to panic, until I realized it wasn’t an Oh God how do I tell her her best friend is dead look so much as a Not this again one.
“He’s in the next room—he’s fine. Heavily concussed and badly dehydrated, on antibiotics for all those war wounds he got out in the field. He’ll be all right.” She nodded to my wrist, now in a cast. “They had to do surgery; you’ve got some pins in there now. You’ll need at least two more before it’s one hundred percent again. If it ever is.”
I blinked at the ceiling. “Okay,” I said.
“Is there anything I can get for you?” she asked. “Maya’s on her way.”
“My dog. I really miss my dog.”
She actually laughed. When I looked at her, she was crying. Katherine Everett, with actual tears in her eyes. Or the morphine was working overtime. “He’s been staying with me. He’ll be glad to get back to you, though—I don’t give him all that fruity deluxe food you do.”
“It’s not fruity,” I said. “It’s raw.” I closed my eyes. Before I could drift away again, she took my hand. She squeezed it—the good one, thankfully—until I looked at her again.
“I want you to listen carefully to me,” she said. “Because we won’t go over this again.” Her eyes were shining with a feverish intensity. “Your father died out in the woods, that day when his sister was murdered. He never got over it. After that, he did everything in his power to turn his life around… But he never forgot that, and he made some bad decisions because of it. Got involved with the wrong people.”
I thought of the man in the woods—the angel of death, his gun pointed at Diggs’ temple. I didn’t say anything.
“Those people are powerful, and they’re deadly. If you keep looking…”
“Why did they save me this time, then?” I asked. “If they’re so intent on keeping me from finding out the truth—”
“Because your father and I can turn their worlds upside down.”
“Jack told me about Dad’s family’s tie to the mob—I know all about it now.”
She looked downright disdainful. “You think this is about mobsters? These people make the mob look like a bunch of choirboys in bad suits. This isn’t about them.”
“But you can’t tell me what it is about,” I said.
“No. I can’t. Your father has seen what happens when they’re threatened… And I’ve seen it through him. As long as you stay alive, I won’t tell their secrets. Not to you, not to anyone. But they only have so much patience.”
“I know that,” I said. My voice didn’t sound like my own. “I’m done.”
She couldn’t have been more surprised if I’d just announced I was ditching all my worldly goods and moving to Mars.
“I’m serious,” I said. “You’re right—I saw what they can do. What they will do. I’m done. I’m going back to your place, and I’ll write up this story and sell it to the highest bidder… Leaving out anything remotely connected to whoever the fuck this is. But that’s it. I’m done. It’s over.”
She still didn’t look convinced, but she nodded. “All right. That’s good.”
I studied her. The morphine was making me sentimental. “You were worried about me, huh?”
“I was annoyed by you,” she corrected me. “As I usually am. Why can’t you knit? Or take up some kind of light recreational drug, like the rest of the world does when they’re bored.”
I closed my eyes, smiling. “No. You were worried.” My voice faded. I felt her kiss my forehead the way Mrs. Brady always used to when she was tucking in her brood. Morphine really was lovely.
◊◊◊◊◊
The morphine had worn off and life was considerably less lovely by the next night, when I still hadn’t seen Einstein or Diggs, and nurses were coming around every half-hour to stick something in me or take something out. Juarez peered in behind a bouquet of roses. He looked a little nervous—probably because he’d already been subject to a tantrum from me earlier that day about being forced to wear paper pajamas with no backs to them.
“Up for a visitor?” he asked.
I nodded. “Please.”
He set the flowers on the table and dropped a pair of my favorite pj
’s in my lap. “Those are for you.”
“Flowers and pj’s? You’re officially my favorite person on the planet right now.”
“If I’d known that was all it took, I would have sent them months ago.”
He sat down. Since the rescue, in between the morphine and the bouts of unconsciousness, there’d been a tense uncertainty between us… Probably because I’d gone against his direct order to stay in Montreal for the night, thereby nearly getting myself killed. I suspected an equally large part of that was the fact that I’d been running in the woods for two days with a man Juarez had been insisting for some time now, was in love with me.
I tried to sit up. Juarez made a move to help me, but I stopped him with a glare. “So… What’s the what, please? Who killed whom? And how did Max Richards fit into all of it? And why was everyone convinced my father was the bad guy?”
“Max was a friend of your father’s from his hometown.”
“In Lynn,” I interrupted. “I got that part.”
“Max got thrown out of Lynn after he set the mayor’s cat on fire.” I winced. “Exactly,” Juarez agreed. “He came to Maine to stay with your father.”
“Who was having his own little rebellion by sleeping with everything with a pulse from here to the Mason Dixon line,” I added.
“Do you really need me for this?”
I closed my mouth and gave him my most winning smile. “I’ll be good. Please continue.”
He got serious after that. “Will Rainier took a different approach to your father’s challenge than Jeff had originally intended. And when your father told him that he was absolutely, positively prohibited from touching his sister, he and Hank engineered the plot to take what Will had decided was rightfully his. Regardless of what Erin had to say about it.”
I pushed away the thought of that night and everything Erin Lincoln must have gone through. It took some time before I could find my voice. Juarez took my hand.
“You want me to go on?”
I nodded. “Yeah. Please,” I said quietly.
He frowned, but he did as I asked. “Max must have followed them down to Eagle Lake that night when he heard about their plan. Hank ran, but he managed to keep Bonnie and Will with him.
“We found the place where he’d been keeping all these girls over the past thirty years—his sanctuary, you said he called it? There were two separate quarters in there: a cozy little apartment with those rules you told me about. Then, on the other side, a much darker room. Cages and chains. Video equipment. He kept exhaustive notes of his ‘research.’” He used air quotes on that last word, then fell silent.
“What about the other room?” I asked.
He shook his head, not sure what I was asking.
“Video equipment… Surveillance,” I said. “Was there any footage of that room?”
“We didn’t find anything. That’s where you said you and Diggs were kept…”
I thought of Diggs’ arms around me. I’ll never let go. The look in his eye when Rainier took me away. The angel of death, his gun pressed to Diggs’ temple.
I nodded. “Yeah,” I said. I couldn’t look at him, though. “That’s where we were kept.” He brushed the hair from my forehead. I changed the subject. “What about Max’s records? What did you find there?”
“Everything,” he said briefly. “He kept notes from the beginning, dating all the way back to that first night with Will and Bonnie and Erin Lincoln: who killed whom, how it was done. With one exception, Max never actually killed anyone. He just pulled the strings, convincing everyone else to do it for him.”
“Who was the exception?” I asked.
“Mark Saucier.” I looked at him blankly. “Bonnie’s husband. When they got married, Bonnie stopped working for Max. Stopped doing all his dirty deeds. Apparently, Max didn’t take very kindly to that. He goes into great detail about Mark’s final days.”
He’d gotten quiet again.
“You still say this only makes your top ten worst cases?” I asked.
“Definitely top five now.”
Someone else would have stopped then. Let it drop for a while; we’d been tortured enough, hadn’t we? All of us. Stopping didn’t seem to be in my DNA, though.
“So, why the J. on their chests? It doesn’t make sense to me, all those deaths somehow being used against my father?”
“I’m still not completely clear on that,” Juarez admitted. “We know Max took Jeff Lincoln’s identity when he was admitted to that psychiatric unit in Michigan, with the intention of blaming Lincoln if any fingerprints or DNA were left behind.”
“But that makes no sense,” I insisted. “If they actually caught my father after any of it, all they’d need to do was check his fingerprints and they’d see it clearly wasn’t him.”
“It was just part of the mind game,” Juarez said. “A way of continually reminding Adam that he was in some way responsible for these girls’ deaths. That he would always be part of it.”
“What about Ashley Gendreau?” I persisted. My chest was tightening in a not-terribly-healthy way. I ignored it. “Why did Hank think he saw my father there?”
Juarez shook his head. “I’m not sure about that one—there’s no mention in Max’s notes of Adam being there. The whole thing was Max’s idea, though: he had Bonnie give Hank the acid that day, then planned on framing him with the express purpose of representing him… Getting close enough to pull the strings on a whole new level. Will was hunting her that day, but Bonnie killed her, apparently. Max considered it a triumph: the first time she’d responded to a human being suffering.”
“A mercy killing,” I said. I closed my eyes.
He stroked my forehead with his thumb, his hand resting in my hair. He kissed my cheek. “You should sleep, Erin.”
“I know. I will. Just… Why did Bonnie kill herself? If she was part of it all that time, what was the trigger?”
“Based on his notes, I think Bonnie blocked out a lot of what she did… You mentioned she had dreams where she saw this J., right? I think she may have done a lot of this in a sort of hypnotic state. But she started to remember…”
I opened my eyes again. Sat up. That tightness in my chest wasn’t easing any. “Because I came to see her,” I said. “I triggered her memories of Erin Lincoln?”
He looked at me intently. “This wasn’t your fault, Erin. None of this was your fault.”
I knew he was waiting for me to break; he’d been waiting for it since they found me. Waiting for me to burst into tears so he’d have some idea how to fix things. Hold me close, let me cry it out of my system.
“I know that,” I said. My eyes had never been drier.
“Whoever killed Max and Rainier…” he began.
“I don’t know who it was,” I lied. “It doesn’t matter anyway, does it? They’re dead. Whoever killed them is long gone, and—let’s face it—he did the world a favor, anyway.”
“So it wasn’t your father, then?”
I looked at him. “No, it wasn’t my father. Why would you think that? My father’s long gone. On the run, who knows where.”
He didn’t say anything to that. It looked like he wanted to, though.
“Jack—”
Before I could pursue the subject, there was a knock on the door. A pretty blonde woman walked in with a duffle bag over one shoulder, leading a giant white pit bull. Juarez got up with unmistakable relief, greeting the woman with a smile. And a hug.
Huh.
“Erin, this is Jamie Flint. She was the one who headed up the team looking for you that night.”
“Just the dogs,” she corrected him. “I just head up the dogs. I’m useless with people. Am I interrupting…?”
“No,” Juarez said quickly. “Come in. I was just telling Erin how things were going. What we’d found.”
Jamie looked at me. She wrinkled her nose. “Well, then I’m glad I came. Nobody needs to hear all that shit after what you’ve already been through. I brought Casper here by to meet
you—I heard you like dogs.”
Casper trotted my way. I sat up and greeted her happily, roughing her ears while her thin tail whipped hither and yon.
“She’s a rescue dog? As in sniff-and-rescue?” She put her front paws up on the bed and licked my face, her whole body wriggling now. “I didn’t know bullies were made for that kind of work.”
“Depends on the bully,” Jamie said. “All my dogs are rescues—I travel around, looking for the right ones to work with. Shelters call when they have somebody they think fits the bill. I met Casper; she just seemed to have the nose for it. And she definitely has the spirit.”
I nodded. Something in me that hadn’t been right for days gradually slid back into place. While I was bonding with the dog, Jamie produced one very grimy backpack and a writing bag from her duffle.
“I also wanted to give you this,” she said. “We found them in the search. A lot of the stuff in there has had it, but there was an old journal that I thought you’d probably want back.”
I kept my attention focused on the dog, thinking again of Erin Lincoln. It took a minute before I trusted my voice. “Thank you,” I said.
Jamie took her dog and left shortly thereafter. I closed my eyes, exhausted all over again. Juarez leaned in and kissed my cheek. “Why don’t you get some sleep? I’m just going over to talk to Diggs for a few minutes.” He hesitated. “Have you seen him yet?”
I kept my eyes closed. Shook my head. For the first time since I’d been rescued, I felt tears well somewhere down deep. I stuffed them back down.
“I’ll visit soon,” I said.
“Whenever you’re ready,” Juarez said. “I’m sure he’s anxious to talk to you.”
◊◊◊◊◊
I finally worked up the nerve to see Diggs that night. The hospital was quiet. I wore my favorite pajamas, but decided against bringing his backpack to him. Not yet. My stomach was tight, and the sfeeling of being exposed after I’d been safely shut in my hospital room for two days was unnervingly visceral.