by Julia Shupe
“So you never believed he was rehabilitated,” Jacob said. “It’s just like you said when we walked in the door. You’ve been waiting for this moment for decades.”
“I’d like to say that I haven’t” she said, “but in truth, I have. I can’t deny that. When I met Carlton Tubbs, he was a fledgling killer. He was standing at the precipice of an abyss of pain and torment.”
I flinched at the reference. I’d always thought about violent crime in exactly those terms.
“He’d taken things too far,” she continued. “He’d gotten a taste for it. He’d felt the power that comes from dominating others. With Meghan, he’d experienced that passion. And,” she added, “I always suspected that he was disappointed in himself, that he viewed Meghan Newton as his life’s biggest failure. I was afraid he’d try to redeem himself—not with her, mind you, but perhaps with someone else.”
“Okay. So what did you encourage him to do? What kinds of jobs?” Jacob asked. “What routines? Did he profess an interest in anything specific?”
“He talked about driving a truck sometimes.”
Great, I thought. The serial killer’s dream job.
“He mentioned landscaping or delivering merchandise.” Her eyes fell to the gloves on her lap. “Carlton liked the idea of becoming a gardener. He liked the notion of helping something grow, of adding to life, instead of taking it away.”
“You mean killing it,” Gil clarified.
“I suppose.” She frowned. “Regardless, I tried to encourage those thoughts. I encouraged him to stay away from alcohol, beer, and pornography, or anything else that had previously triggered Smith.”
“You actually referred to Smith by name?”
“No. Not by name. Carlton never spoke about Smith. He refused to talk about him at all. Whenever I’d try to broach the subject, he’d completely shut down. He’d end our session. I didn’t want that.”
“So you really don’t know if Smith is real, or made up,” I said. “You can’t be certain either way.”
She cocked her head. “Like I said before, I can’t be absolutely certain. But mark my words; you can be certain of this. If you’re out there now, looking for Smith, then trust me: you’re wasting your time. There is no Smith. Smith isn’t a real person. He’s a young boy’s coping mechanism, a place he created in which to hide. Agent,” she added, turning to Jacob. “Don’t get me wrong. Smith isn’t a complete loss. You can use him in a different way. He’s something you can add to your profile. He’s a big part of who Carlton is. But don’t be led down a fool’s path. Smith isn’t real. He never existed. Let me be perfectly clear. In this case, you’re not looking for Lucas and Toole. This, Agent Forrest, is the story of Jekyll and Hyde.”
Chapter 23
“We got a hit,” Donald said. It was the first time he’d sounded excited in days. “An ID on CPD 18.”
Jacob swiveled in his chair. Their flight from Sacramento had arrived last night. Late last night, he thought, scowling at his bitter coffee. Or was it early morning? He couldn’t tell anymore. After so little sleep, the days were blending together. He was exhausted. They all were. They’d been pushing themselves hard. And the three-hour time change was killing them. It had etched lines into their haggard faces. Jacob looked like he’d aged ten years, and Gil, like a Mack truck had run him down in the middle of the street. Vanessa, on the other hand, still looked lovely. Her face was drawn, and her eyes a bit puffy, and she’d been wearing that perma-frown since walking through the door. But she was still as striking as he remembered her to be. And it wasn’t just her sleek hair, shapely figure, or olive complexion. It wasn’t her fierce determination, sharp wit, or work ethic. It wasn’t even her intellect. It was all of those things, and many others, too. Vanessa Stone was exceedingly special. Rare. She was one of a kind.
She was strong, but also, in a strange way, reserved. He’d spent the last forty-eight hours studying her. He’d seen her in action, and he liked her style. Rookie detectives tended to talk too much, which inadvertently caused the victim to shut down. People struggled to fill awkward silences, often with things they never wanted to say. Waiting them out was an important strategy. It took practice, patience, and seasoning on the job. Not that Vanessa was a rookie, of course. She’d been with the Sarasota force for many years. She’d seen her share of beasts and monsters. She’d earned her place on the team.
But there was something else about her, as well: a unique collection of mannerisms. At Meghan’s house, she’d been watchful and alert. She’d taken it all in, and said little. She’d been guarded and thoughtful. She’d taken care to consider what she said before she said it. Every sentence had been well crafted, like she’d been trying to convey the right sentiment. She hadn’t spoiled the facts by injecting personal opinion.
But hadn’t she always been guarded? he asked himself. Wasn’t that the reason their relationship had died?
Vanessa had always been a mystery to him. She cared for him. That much was obvious. An attraction like theirs would never fully fade. They’d dated other people in—and after—high school, but the force of their attraction had always pulled them back together. Hell, he thought, it was much more than that. He’d dated other women back then, but he’d cheated on every single one of them—many times with Vanessa herself! And he was fairly certain she had done the same thing.
And it wasn’t as if he hadn’t tried to make the relationship work. He had. He’d worked hard to make it stick. There was one time he remembered quite well, that weekend he’d visited her in Gainesville, in an apartment she shared with a girl she didn’t like. Though he hadn’t told her his plans at the time, the trip had been something of an experiment to him. His road, at that time, had been forked, and he’d wanted to explore each prong exhaustively. One path led to Virginia, where he’d planned to complete his coursework for the FBI, and the other, he’d been certain, involved Vanessa. He’d wanted to see what her life was like, and if she’d carve a place for him in it.
She hadn’t.
Sipping his coffee, he winced. A cloud of oily grinds had adhered themselves to the side of the cup. That trip had been nothing short of a disaster. At the time, she’d been drowning in grief. Her mother had been taken. The pain had gutted her. Rebecca Stone had been taken from her home thirteen months before Jacob made that trip, and the Vanessa he found in Gainesville had been shattered. She was depressed and sullen. She drank too much. She barely offered him courtesy or kindness.
He peered at her over the rim of his cup, wondering the same thing he’d wondered back then. Had he been too quick to judge her? Had he been fair? Maybe he could have tried harder to reach her. Many times since, he’d felt guilty about that. He’d all but left her drowning in darkness. He’d flown to Virginia and started a new life, and the specter of that decision still haunted him.
“Well?” Gil growled, pulling Jacob from his musings. He set his clotted drink at the edge of the desk. “Don’t keep us in suspense,” Gil was saying. “CPD 18. Who is she? Where’s she from?”
“Amanda Reed, age twenty-two, born in Siesta Key. Lived twenty or so miles from the slough.”
“Twenty or so? What’s that?” Gil huffed. “Twenty or so? What kind of clown-show are we running over here?”
Lowering his papers, Donald gave them all a bow. “18.6, to be exact. Parents are on their way as we speak. They’ll be here within the hour.”
“That’s great.” Jacob heaved a sigh. “That gives us less than an hour to prepare.”
“Prepare?” Vanessa’s voice sounded hoarse from little sleep.
Jacob stood and stretched his lower back. For the last two hours, they’d been scanning the names of missing persons in the area, of women who fit the profile—if there was such a thing. In this case, the victims were particularly—or deliberately—random. Jacob rubbed his eyes, his hands trembling from the consumption of too much caffeine.
“Yeah,” he said. “We have to prepare—and well. Vanessa, I think you and I should take
the parents. Somehow, despite their pain, we have to get them talking.”
“Then you better do that before you take them to view the body,” Gil said. “Take their statements before you take them to the morgue, because once you do that, you won’t get a bloody thing.”
Jacob nodded. Gil was right. The grief and the horror of seeing their child’s body would likely render them useless. Jacob had always hated that part: knowing the truth, yet deliberately withholding it. It was an underhanded, but necessary evil. “Gil,” he added, clearing his throat, “what we need from you is a time line, a moment by moment study of the time leading to the day she was taken. Why don’t you and… I’m sorry.” He struggled to remember the other guy’s name, the one who was leading the search for Tubbs. In his head, he’d been calling him “coke-bottom glasses”.
“Call him Skolnick,” Gil offered sarcastically. “Everyone does. Skolnick, as in Lewis Skolnick? As in Revenge of the Nerds? As in one of the best films of the 1980’s?” Jacob stared, his mind blank. Gil lifted his hands. “Come on, man. Revenge of the Nerds? Skolnick?”
Vanessa rolled her eyes. “Forget it, Gil. He doesn’t get it. Nobody does, and nobody cares, and for the record, Revenge of the Nerds was one of the worst films of the 1980’s.” She let out an exasperated sigh. “Let’s just get to work. Let’s get this over with so we can all go home, try to get a few hours of sleep, if we can. I can barely concentrate. And this coffee isn’t doing jack shit—and it sucks.”
“If you need a wake up call,” Gil suggested, “just focus on Harry’s shirt.”
The man beside Donald stepped forward. “Why? What’s wrong with my shirt?”
“Other than the color?” Gil whistled. “Hot pink?”
“I’ll have you know, my friend, that the color is salmon. Only alpha males get away with wearing salmon.”
“Oh. Right. Okay. I guess it’s good thing I’m a beta male, then.”
“Enough,” Jacob said weakly. “Harry—or Salmon—you and Gil find everything you can on Amanda Reed. I want to know every damn detail: where she bought her morning coffee, where she filled her gas tank. I know we can’t pinpoint an exact TOD, but we can start by piecing together an accurate time line. Look at cell phone records, receipts, debit card purchases, gym memberships. Anything. Everything. There has to be a connection. We just have to find it. There must be a methodology in the way he’s choosing them.” Lifting his hands, he massaged his temples. “Because if there isn’t, we may never find him.”
Chapter 24
It was night. It had to be, but how could she really be sure? Night and day blended together down here. Down here, time lost all meaning. It was hard to say how long she’d been here, or when she had last been home. She couldn’t remember. She wasn’t even sure “down here” was an apt description. It seemed like it was, like it was someplace underground, but it was so damn dark she couldn’t tell. She was inside a small enclosure of rock, earth, and crumbling mortar. The construction of it was simple and crude, suggestive of an unskilled craftsman. The mortar between the stones was flaking to the floor, and the floor was nothing but a slab of rotting wood, set on an unforgiving bed of solid concrete. The air was musty and thick, and the heat was a blanket that smothered her face and nose.
If she could somehow get clean air, she thought, just a breath of something cool, something clean. How many times had she wished for that? How many times had she choked on panic?
She had no pillow, no sheet, and no food. She’d been given no tissues, no towel, no blanket. He’d left her a single glass of water, swirling with dust, but the chain around her wrist offered little latitude, barely enough to reach out and touch the rim. She summoned the courage to reach for it again, but the pain in her head was intense and shocking. It rivaled the pain of her thirst. It throbbed with each beat of her heart.
This is it, she thought. He’s gone too far. This time, my injuries will kill me. They’re too severe, too grave, and I’m ready.
She’d sustained a concussion. She was certain of that, the blows so severe she’d gone deaf in her left ear. And when she wasn’t fighting the nausea, she was trying to keep the room from spinning. It would lurch and tilt, like the bucking deck of a boat in a thunderstorm. It would rush at her face and then pull away fast. It was the worst case of vertigo she’d ever experienced.
And last night, of course, had been the worst night of her life.
She could tolerate the heat and the smell, she told herself. And the pangs in her stomach, over time, had waned. Hunger, she figured, was like that. When he’d first brought her here, she was sure the hunger—not the beatings—would kill her. But as time dragged on, her body had acclimated to that. The body, she’d been horrified to learn, was an amazing piece of machinery. Human perseverance seemed to know no bounds. How many times had she cursed her dogged will? How often had she begged her body to just give up? Give in? Stop endeavoring to heal?
A few weeks ago, she’d tried to starve herself to death; refusing to eat what little food she was given. She’d also tried her best to ignore that glass of dirty water. Wasn’t dehydration a quick way to go? Humans could live only a few days without water. Perhaps she would die of dehydration or malnutrition. Perhaps that was her ticket out of hell. Or at least it was a way to take back her control, a way to ruin his plans.
She sneered at the water, tears gathering in her sandpaper eyes. Mind over matter was horseshit. When the body was hungry, or thirsty enough, the mind could do little to thwart it.
My God, she thought, why can’t I just die?
If she could just surrender to the exhaustion and the agony, curl on her side, and abandon the pain. She’d run into the waiting arms of death, if she could. If only it could be that easy. Those arms were kind and inviting, she knew. They wanted to embrace her. They whispered to her with gentle voices. And she listened.
She shifted on the wooden plank and the pain exploded in her head. The smallest movement would set it off. Even breathing, at this point, took concentrated effort. To form a coherent thought was as taxing as trying to reach that water.
She’d lost her voice several days ago, as much from the screaming as from the dehydration. The pain he inflicted was white-hot and searing. And he wanted her to scream. He enjoyed it. She’d tried not to, of course, but in the end, she had. Screaming was a contest she played with herself; her screams like prizes she refused to let him win.
A sudden fit of coughing sent fire across her aching ribs. She was sure that three, maybe four, had been broken. And over the last few days, her cough had worsened—as had the infection in her sinuses, and the pain. Blood was a coppery taste in the back of her throat.
Maybe this is hell, she thought suddenly. Maybe I’m dead, and this is my punishment.
How many times had she circled back to that? How often had she contemplated her sins? Which of them, she wondered, had brokered her this terrible fate? Was it one in particular, or a combination of many?
Let’s see, she thought, for the hundredth time, her sins like the pages of a Sears catalogue. There had been that one time, her senior year of high school, when she’d slept with Cody, her best friend’s boyfriend. And what about her second year of college? The biology exam? The one she’d stolen from her professor’s computer? The one she’d later sold on the internet for $100 a pop? She’d surely paid for that one, had she not? And there’d been many others that were far worse than that.
There were the drugs, the drinking, the multiple sexual partners. She’d bullied the weak, and made fun of the less fortunate. At times, she’d wished misfortune upon others. She’d put her wants and desires above decency. She’d cheated on the love of her life—several times, the worst of her sins, in her opinion. But she’d already paid a steep price for that one. He’d left her, of course, which had gutted her soul. And he hadn’t even left because of the cheating. He hadn’t, to her knowledge, even known about that. He’d left her because of who she was—and who she wasn’t. He’d left because he found
someone else, someone better, someone kinder, light-hearted, and fun. She’d always known she was none of those things. She complained too much, and she laughed too little, often at the expense of other people.
With a groan, she attempted to curl her battered hand beneath her chin. She deserved to be here. She’d reached that conclusion. This horror was recompense for a poorly lived life. This was the comeuppance she deserved for being a bad person, for being apathetic, for taking the beauty of the world for granted.
But what about second chances? Didn’t everyone deserve one? Despite how shameful a life she had lived, didn’t she deserve to try again? And if a second chance was ultimately granted her, what were the things she would change?
Her stomach cramped. She let loose a soundless sob.
She’d start by telling people how much she loved and cherished them. She’d find beauty in the simplicity of an afternoon thunderstorm, tranquility in something as uncomplicated as a flower. She’d be quieter, more cerebral, less boisterous, more attentive. She’d listen to others, and value their opinions, stop judging them for every little thing they said or did. Life was precious, down to the last blade of grass. Why had it taken rape and torture to finally figure that out?
She felt like weeping, but had no more tears to shed. And the torment, she knew, was far from over. He’d come back, again, again, and then again. And if it weren’t tonight, it would probably be tomorrow. Though her head was fuzzy and fogged, she wasn’t daft. She knew he couldn’t stay away for longer than two days. He wouldn’t. He simply wasn’t capable of it. He wouldn’t allow her the time to heal.
Like a woman gone mad, she let loose a weak cackle, wincing at the knife-stabbing pain in the back of her head. He’d come back to abuse her, and to ensure she hadn’t died. He was worried about that. She’d figured that out. He’d force her to eat stale bread and drink juice, and he’d check for infections in her multiple wounds. She was running a fever. He’d frowned at that. It had been over a week, and it hadn’t subsided. And she was certain he’d laced her glass of water with aspirin. He didn’t want her to die—not yet. It was much too soon. He hadn’t tired of her yet.