Black Widow

by Victor Methos

  “I’m sorry.”

  Heidi reached back and slapped Heather so hard her cheek burned instantly. Heather’s hand covered the cheek and her mouth dropped open.

  “No,” Heidi said, “you’re not really sorry. Not yet.” She pulled out a syringe with golden fluid from her purse. “But you will be.”

  55

  Stanton took his boys to the only place he could think of that was safe: the precinct. He walked in, and several detectives stopped their conversation and watched him. Kai was in his office. Stanton closed the office door behind him, one boy on either side of him.

  “She kidnapped my boys, Kai. You’re the only one I know that I can trust.”

  They stared at each other in silence. Kai finally said, “Leave them here.”

  “You’re not going to ask—”

  “No, I’m trusting you. For now. Let’s just find her.”

  “I need to pick up her sister. I left her at a friend’s house.”

  “We can talk about the whys later. Go get my suspect and when she’s locked up again, we can talk.”

  “Kai… my boys…”

  “I know. I’ll watch them myself. I don’t want you taking them with you. Leave them here, and I’ll order pizza.”

  Stanton bent down and kissed Johnny and gave Mathew a hug. As he went to pull away, both boys threw their arms around their father.

  “Don’t go, Dad,” Johnny said.

  “I won’t be gone long, champ. I just need to pick someone up and bring them right back. I promise you I will not be gone long.”

  Stanton looked to Kai and nodded. The captain nodded back and said, “Boys, we got us a big screen in the lounge with a pool table. Come on, I’ll show you how to play.”

  Stanton watched them go. He waited until he couldn’t see them and turned and marched out of the precinct.

  As he stepped outside, the pain was so deep he thought he might have to sit down on the curb and close his eyes. He had let his boys get caught up in the insanity of his life. They had been chained in a dark closet. And he couldn’t even take them to the emergency room to make sure they didn’t have any injuries. She was still out there, and that would be the first place she would look for them. He had caught her by surprise and she wouldn’t be happy.

  Stanton drove to Rick’s house. He picked up the phone several times to call Melissa and tell her what had happened to the boys. It wasn’t until he was a few minutes away from the house that he managed to build up the courage to call.

  “Jon?” she answered.

  “Mel, where are you?”

  “I’m at the gym, why?”

  Stanton lightly bit the inside of his cheek and then felt the indentation left behind. “I need to tell you something. The first thing you need to know is that the boys are all right. They’re not hurt and—”

  “What happened?” she shouted. “What the fuck did you do?”

  “Mel, I didn’t do anything. They were kidnapped by—”

  “Kidnapped! What are you saying? Where are my boys?”

  “They’re fine, Mel,” he said as calmly as he could. “The boys are just fine. They are at the precinct right now with Kai. They were kidnapped by a suspect we have on a case…” Stanton didn’t think she needed to know the details. “They’re fine. They’re just fine now.”

  “You son of bitch,” she said. Her voice was crackling with emotion. Stanton could tell she was crying but was so angry that she couldn’t sob.

  “Mel, there was no way—”

  “Fuck you! I’m coming out there right now to get my boys. You fucking hear me, Jon. It was one thing to put me in danger. That fucking asshole in our bedroom. In our bedroom, Jon! And even after that you didn’t quit. He tied me up and was going to kill me.”

  The emotion had broken through and she was fully weeping now. Stanton had hit a nerve. Her children. She blamed herself for allowing the boys out with him, knowing something could happen to them. And the anger was directed at him.

  “Mel… I don’t know what to say. Everything you said is true.”

  “You’re done. They’re coming home with me.”

  Stanton was about to object but didn’t. She was right in all this. Everyone around him was in danger. He attracted it like some black hole, sucking in everything around it. The boys, his wife, his fiancée, his career… it all turned bad as soon as he got a hold of it.

  “Take them,” he said. “You’re right. They’ll be in danger with me.”

  A long silence before Melissa hung up. Stanton put the phone on the passenger seat. First he felt pity for himself and fear at what could have happened to his children. Then the fear turned to rage. Rage at the woman who took his children. Who made him believe he had found someone special. Someone who wouldn’t judge him. Someone who understood him and the energy of his life. He felt betrayed.

  Stanton stopped in front of Rick’s house and went inside. He didn’t hear anything, so he walked through the living room. In the kitchen, Heather was standing over the stove cooking.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “We need to leave. Is Rick not back yet?”

  “Nope. Where we going?”

  He stepped closer to her, looking into the pot. The concoction was some sort of frying meat with onions. “Back to the precinct. I got my kids back.”

  She looked up, surprise splashing across her face. “How’d you find them?”

  “The rent checks from her property were sent to Baby Dolls. My boys were there. She wasn’t, though. It’s possible she’s already left, or is in the process of leaving the island. I gotta get back and help them set up a net.”

  “A net?”

  “Monitor every way off the island. We can stop any boat or plane from leaving. One of the benefits of being on an island.”

  “Hm. Try this.” She lifted a wooden spoon with some of the meat. He took a bite. It was tender and tasted like lean Kobe beef. “It’s good.”

  She nodded. “Let’s eat before we go.”

  “I think we should leave now.”

  Sprinkling an herb over the food, she didn’t respond. She took the meat and spooned it onto two plates that were already sitting out. “I know you won’t have wine, so how about some orange juice?”

  “Sure.”

  Stanton stared out the sliding glass doors. The truth was he hadn’t eaten in almost twenty hours and was starving. The meat left a slight aftertaste but was smooth going down. He slid open the glass door. As he was about to step outside, he froze. His heart sank and a sick, gray feeling shot through his gut. Like he’d swallowed jagged metal.

  Rick was a vegetarian. There wouldn’t be any meat in the house.

  Slowly, Stanton turned around. The woman was searching the cupboards for something before she turned to the fridge. She took out some oranges and sliced them on the counter. Stanton reached down to his firearm.

  “I gotta make a call really quick,” he said.

  “Okay, but lunch is ready.”

  He stepped outside and shut the glass door. Taking out his cell phone, his eyes never left the kitchen. He didn’t have dispatch’s number as a contact so he called Kai. There was no answer so he left a message.

  “She’s here. Rick Mortinson’s house. Twenty-Four Keko Road. I’m alone with her.” He then dialed 911. “Detective Jonathan Stanton, badge number oh one four zero seven. I need units at Twenty-Four Keko Road immediately, with a possible code four.”

  “Roger that, the nearest units are on their way.

  He hung up. The woman looked out at him and smiled, and he smiled back. She walked to the sliding door and opened it.

  “You want to eat out here?” she said. “I saw a bench just up around the house.”

  “Yeah, that should be fine.”

  They both stood frozen. Neither one moving from the other’s gaze. The woman smiled. She took off the apron she was wearing and threw it into the house. When she turned around she was holding the 22-caliber Ruger that had been tucked away in one of the
pockets.

  “How did he taste?” she said.

  “Who?” Stanton already knew but couldn’t bring himself to think it, much less say it.

  “Your friend, Rick. You ate a portion of his quadriceps. Was it good?”

  “Heidi, you need help. I can help you.”

  She shook her head and laughed. “I need help? That’s what those people at the institutions said, Jon. We’re here to help. Only thing is, they weren’t.” She brushed her hair aside with a finger and tucked it behind her ear. “I kinda like myself as a brunette. What do you think?”

  “Where’s Heather?”

  “I let her run off after giving her something to slow her down. She’s somewhere in the jungle. Knowing her, she’ll probably get bitten by a snake or something.”

  “I don’t understand this. The men, I can see. But why your own sister?”

  She leaned back against the house, one foot coming up to its toes. It appeared like she could have been at a mall hanging out she was so relaxed. Damage or malfunction of the amygdala could cause a person to not feel fear or nervousness when they should. To not panic under pressure or even threat of death.

  “Do you want to know the worst part about being committed? Everything you do is seen as insane. I tried isolating myself from the other patients because I was in there with rapists and murderers. They wrote in my file that I had antisocial personality disorder and refused to cooperate or socialize with others. So I began socializing. And they wrote in my file that I had a tendency to form relationships with deviants. I told a nurse once about a show I had seen that said dolphins had been used to find German submarines in World War Two. It was my attempt to try and connect with one of the staff. To share something. They wrote in my file that I thought dolphins could talk.”

  “I’m sorry you had to go through that. I wish I could take your pain away but I can’t. And killing me or Heather, or anyone else, it won’t take any of it back. We’re all stuck with our pasts.”

  “So what is this? Some sort of reality therapy? Accept the past? I don’t accept it. None of it. Heather had the life I was supposed to have. I was the one that should have had the career and the marriage.” Emotion was breaking through now and her eyes glistened. “That was my life. Mine! Until she took it away from me. Her and those heartless fucks I called parents.”

  “They didn’t know what else to do. You started hurting people, and—”

  “Shut up!” The gun came up now, pointed at his face. “You’re not any different than me. You see people as less than people, too.”

  A long silence in the conversation was followed by her lowering the gun.

  “Did you care anything about me?” he said.

  She hesitated. “You asked me about evil. Whether evil could be beautiful. Do you still think that, Jon? Do you think evil can be beautiful now?”

  Stanton looked away. He watched the jungle and listened to the high-pitched chirp of the birds. “Yes, I think it can be beautiful,” he said truthfully.

  “Do you think I’m beautiful?”

  She said it in such a vulnerable, pleading way that he felt sympathy for her. He turned and stared into her eyes. They were wet. “Yes, I still do. But you have to stop.”

  “We had a real connection, didn’t we? I’ve never actually felt that.” She chuckled as tears rolled down her cheeks. “What do you think that says about you, Jon?”

  “Put the gun down, Heidi. There’s no reason for this.”

  “Really? Avoiding the death penalty isn’t a reason?”

  “There’s no death penalty here.”

  She wiped her tears with the back of her hand. “But there is in California, and Utah and Wyoming and Arizona… You think I’ve only done this here?”

  Stanton leaned back against the patio railing. The drop was about six feet to the ground. “Why the johns?”

  “Oh, that was just fun. Torturing them to death as they cried for God. But God never came to help them.” After taking a deep breath she stepped away from the wall. “Enough reminiscing, though. Turn around.”

  “Why? Can’t shoot me when I’m looking at you?”

  She lifted the gun higher. “I said, turn around.”

  Stanton turned. The sunlight was on his face and warmed him. Off in the distance, around the house, he could see the tail end of Rick’s truck.

  “I’m… I’m sorry, Jon.”

  “Me too.”

  Stanton leapt off the patio as the shot rang in the air. He didn’t know if he’d been hit or not. He didn’t wait to find out. As soon as he landed on the ground, he was on his feet and sprinting around the house. He withdrew his firearm and rolled on the ground and took aim at the patio. She wasn’t there.

  56

  Stanton dashed to the front of the house. He ran around the yard and through the front door. The house was quiet. With the Desert Eagle held in front of him, he stepped through the living room. He glanced over to the stairs leading to the second floor when he heard an engine turn.

  He sprinted out to the patio as Rick’s truck peeled out on the dirt road. Taking aim in the Weaver stance, he fired three rounds. All three hit the back of the truck.

  Emptying his clip, he knew he hadn’t hit her. He lowered the weapon and walked down to the road. Watching as the truck kicked up clouds of dust and was gone. In the distance, he could hear sirens.

  Stanton stayed at Rick’s house while the forensics team went through it. They had found Rick in the bedroom upstairs. He was tied to the bed and had been skinned alive. One of his legs was missing a large portion of the musculature.

  Stanton sent uniforms to search the surrounding jungles and called out the S & R unit, but they didn’t find anything. No trace of Heather. If she had made it back to the city, she was probably gone by now. Or, Heidi had lied and killed her. Buried her out here under the shrubbery where no one would find her.

  “Detective?” a forensic tech said, walking out of the house.

  “Yeah?”

  “We found this in the bedroom with the stiff. It’s addressed to you.”

  Stanton reached into the man’s pocket and pulled out two latex gloves. He snapped them on and then opened the envelope. Inside was a handwritten letter. The penmanship was in copperplate and it appeared like something that could have been written six hundred years ago.

  Jon,

  What we had was real.

  Sincerely,

  HR

  “Mean anything to you?” the tech said.

  Stanton folded up the letter and put it in the envelope. He handed it back to the tech and said, “No. Just the babblings of a crazy person.”

  He left the house. Rick fought the Department of the Interior, who wanted to demolish this house as unsafe due to a nearby volcano. Without him around, the house would be torn down and buried.

  Stanton hoped the memories of her would be buried here as well.

  EPILOGUE

  Stanton walked into the Lanai Airport. One of the smaller airports on the island of Oahu, it was tucked away in the central business district of Lanai City. Few people ever used it, but Stanton had been to it once before. When Melissa came to pick up his boys, she had used Lanai instead of Honolulu. He had said goodbye to his two sons not thirty feet from where he was now.

  Mathew, now eighteen, had called him the other day and said that he was moving out to the island. Johnny would be staying with his mother. Stanton tried to talk him out of it, that his brother and mother needed a man around, but Mathew had retorted that his mother had plenty of men around and didn’t need him. He would be flying back out to the island that summer.

  Stanton spotted who he was looking for. A woman in a red sundress with black speckles. He came next to her on the row of seats and sat down. The woman, who was wearing sunglasses, didn’t look at him.

  “I knew you’d eventually have to leave,” he said. “Island fever sets in after a few years.”

  She was silent a moment. “How did you find me?”

 
“You thought I’d drop the net, I’m guessing. That we could only keep that up for so long.”

  “I knew you wouldn’t drop it.”

  He looked to her legs. Once tanned and firm, they appeared pale now. Thin. “It was the name you bought the tickets under. Virginia Woolf. I’m guessing your favorite author?”

  She made a clicking sound against her teeth. “I thought I should have just picked a random name.”

  “Sometimes, in cases like these, the perpetrator’s unconscious can’t handle what they’re doing. The unconscious works to get them captured.”

  She scoffed. “Are you saying I wanted to get caught?”

  “Did you?”

  She didn’t respond.

  “We found Heather’s body. She died of dehydration. The jungle she was in was only fifty miles square. We think she walked in circles. The potassium you injected her with sped up the process. She might have made it otherwise.”

  The woman shook her head. “She was always incompetent. If she would have picked any direction and started walking she would have gotten out.” She glanced over to him. “You still with Homicide?”

  “Yeah.”

  She nodded. “I can’t go back with you. They will declare me incompetent and put me in an asylum. I won’t go there again. Ever.”

  “You’ve killed a lot of people, Heidi. This has to stop.”

  Moving her purse aside, she crossed her legs. She took off her sunglasses and put them in her purse. “You know, I really did feel something for you.”

  “I know.”

  “Did you for me?”

  He hesitated. “Yes.”

  “Odd how that works, isn’t it? You don’t get to choose who you fall in…” She didn’t finish the sentence and the two of them sat in silence a moment longer.