“In your opinion, is Tucker Pennington any more dangerous than the people who’ve already been released?”
Everyone was silent. From the back of the courtroom, Alexis Dole’s eye bore through her. Toward the front, Carrie Santero leaned forward in her seat.
“No,” Linda said. “He’s no more dangerous than any of the others.”
The judge dismissed Linda and called out for Patricia Martin again. The staff said she wasn’t ready again.
“Well, Miss Martin either wants to make a statement or not. We haven’t got all day.” He looked at his list again. “How about Brenda Drake? Is Brenda Drake available?”
A hand shot up from the back of the courtroom and a young woman stood. “Miss Drake is deceased, Your Honor.”
Roth leaned forward and squinted. “And who are you?”
“Detective Carrie Santero.”
He checked his list. “I don’t see your name on here, Detective.”
Carrie hurried down the aisle, holding her case file in the air. “I’m here on Brenda Drake’s behalf.”
“Objection,” the attorney said. “The detective is not on the witness list. She can’t speak for someone else.”
Carrie stopped at the wooden gate. “I have information regarding Brenda Drake’s death that will help the court make its decision, Your Honor.”
“I’ll allow it for now,” the judge said. “But don’t get comfortable.”
Carrie set her case file on the witness stand ledge as she laid her hand on the Bible and raised her right hand to be sworn. After she said, “I do,” she sat and opened the file. “Your Honor, the reason Brenda Drake could not be here to testify is because shortly after she received notice to appear, she got a second letter.” Carrie held up the letter from The Master and said, “I believe this was sent by Mr. Pennington as a way to intimidate her. It worked, because she killed herself.”
“Excuse me, if I may, Your Honor,” the attorney said. “Was this letter signed by my client?”
“No,” Carrie said. “It was signed by The Master, a name he called himself when he assaulted his victims.”
“Was the envelope it came in postmarked near Sunshine Estates?”
“I didn’t see the envelope.”
“I’m sorry, but is there any proof at all this letter was sent by my client?”
Judge Roth looked at Carrie.
“Not physical proof, Your Honor.”
“So you have, what, mental proof?” Judge Roth asked. “Spiritual proof? Exactly what kind of proof did you bring us today, Detective?”
“That wasn’t the only letter, Your Honor. Retired Detective Bill Waylon received one also.”
“Objection.”
The judge looked at her. “Do you have anything else?”
“The second letter threatened a police officer’s family, sir.”
The attorney raised both arms in the air in exasperation. “Your Honor, I object to every single thing this witness has said to the court so far. Unless the detective can offer some kind of foundation linking these letters to my client, then I fail to see how this is doing anything but wasting the court’s time.”
Judge Roth turned toward her. “Can you?”
Carrie couldn’t find the words to tell him she could not.
“You’re dismissed, Detective,” the judge said. “Is Miss Patricia Martin ready yet?”
“No, Your Honor,” the staff person called out from the back.
The judge stroked the sides of his mouth with his thumb and forefinger as he mulled over his decision. Finally, it was made. He picked up his gavel and said, “Release Mr. Pennington from custody.”
Tucker raised his head from between his hands. He looked stupefied. His mother and father burst from their seats to clutch him from behind. Grace Pennington’s sobs of relief were loud and guttural, like screams.
* * *
Carrie asked the court staff where she could find Patricia Martin. They told her just go down the hall and you’ll hear her.
The corridor was nearly empty at that end of the courthouse. The rooms were meant to be set apart from the proceedings. They were a safe place where attorneys met with clients, or witnesses were kept with their families. Patricia Martin’s parents were sitting outside of the room. The husband was fatter and balder than he looked in his driver’s license photo, Carrie thought. He had his arm around his wife. She sat with her back straight. Both of their faces were blank. Drained. They didn’t look up as Carrie walked past.
Carrie could see shadows moving behind the frosted glass within and leaned her head to the door. There was a sharp cry inside the room at the sight of Carrie’s shadow. “Someone’s here! No. They’re trying to take me in there. I don’t want to see him! Don’t make me go in there, please. Please, I can’t, please.”
Someone whispered quietly to her and told her it was going to be all right.
Carrie knocked softly on the door. “No!” Carrie turned the door handle and opened it just enough to put her face in. Patricia Martin was curled in a ball on one of the chairs, shivering and frail. Linda Shelley was bent down beside her, trying to calm her.
Patricia clutched Linda in terror at Carrie’s appearance. Her feet slid across the chair’s polished wooden seat, scrambling to get away.
“It’s okay. Listen. Hang on,” Carrie said. “It’s over. You don’t have to go in. You don’t have to see him.”
Patricia stopped moving. Her eyes opened wide and blue. “I don’t?”
“No,” Carrie said. “Just take a deep breath, all right?”
Patricia clutched the sides of her face and wept with relief. “I don’t have to see him. Oh my God! Thank you!”
Linda hadn’t let go of her yet. She stayed kneeling next to her, with her head down, eyes cast to the floor.
“They’re putting him back in jail,” Patricia said. She was weeping and laughing at the same time. “I knew they would. I knew they couldn’t let him out. Will they keep him forever now? They have to, right?”
Linda didn’t look up.
Carrie cleared her throat. “Well, you see, Miss Martin. Here’s the thing.”
* * *
Both doors on the ambulance slammed shut. They were still able to hear Patricia Martin screaming as it drove away. It had taken four medics and both Carrie and Linda to strap her down to the gurney before loading her onto the ambulance. Patricia’s mother was in the back of the ambulance with her and her father was following behind them in a station wagon. He gave both Carrie and Linda a withering look as he drove past.
“So that didn’t go as well as it could have,” Carrie said.
“No shit,” Linda said.
“Oh, I’m sorry. If only there’d been a licensed psychologist around to break the news to her in a more productive way instead of sitting there with your thumb up your ass and letting me do it!”
Linda came within inches of Carrie’s face. “Do not yell at me.”
“Or what?”
Behind them, Tucker Pennington emerged from the courthouse. He turned his face upward toward the sun, basking in the warmth, like a reptile. His mother was wrapped around his arm, clutching him tightly. She’d finally gotten her son back and nothing in the world was going to let him get taken from her again. Tucker’s father guided them down the steps as a shining black Cadillac came around the bend and stopped. Their driver got out to open the rear doors and let the Pennington family inside.
Linda put her hands inside her coat pockets as they drove off. “I’m assuming you’re going to keep tabs on him.”
“You’re damn right,” Carrie said. “How soon before he does it again, do you think?”
“Who knows? With the right treatment maybe never. It’s impossible to say.”
They walked together toward the parking lot, the heels of both of their shoes clacking against the concrete in near unison.
“You want to get a drink or something?” Carrie asked. “I could use one.”
Linda stopped to g
et her car keys out of her purse. “You want to drink with me?”
Carrie shrugged, “I’ve drunk with way worse people. I don’t know. What the hell? Why not?”
“Are you one of those people who has a lot of friends?”
“No.”
“Me either.”
“If we went out for a drink and then we became friends, we could fight crime together,” Carrie said. “I’m the hard-ass detective and you’re the older psychologist.”
“Easy. I’m not that much older than you.”
“Let’s say, more seasoned, then.”
Linda laughed. “Listen, I can’t get a drink right now. I have somewhere I have to be. Some other time, maybe?”
“Sounds good,” Carrie said. She reached in her purse to get her keys as Linda walked away.
9
The bar was an hour away, but she didn’t have to be there until seven P.M.
There was time. Linda was excited and impatient, but it wouldn’t do her any good to arrive early. Her showing up was supposed to be a surprise and she didn’t want to ruin it.
She drove to the post office. She went through the front door and went right to her PO Box, hoping none of the clerks saw her. It had been weeks since she collected her mail and they were sure to be annoyed at her for letting it get so full. It wasn’t full at all. She opened the door and saw a yellow Postal Service index card with the words Overstuffed Box written in Magic Marker.
She lowered her head and went around the corner to the counter, holding the yellow card of shame. “Hi,” she said when she reached the front of the line.
There were three registers but only one was open. The duty clerk was an Asian woman with a thick accent. She eyed Linda and said, “Box One-sixty-one?”
“Yes.”
“You’re here for your mail finally?”
“Yes.”
“You haven’t been here in a long time.”
“I know. I’ve been busy.”
“We had to put it in the back.”
“I’m sorry.”
The clerk vanished into the rear of the building and came back holding a plastic bin piled with mail. She set it down on the counter and started going through it, looking for any parcels that needed to be scanned. It was crammed with junk mail, catalogs, bills, circular ads, and dozens of other envelopes.
The clerk pulled out a large yellow package. “You shop a lot online?”
“Sometimes,” Linda said. There were people standing in line behind her then, waiting for their turn. Other postal clerks walked behind the counter but never stopped to open any of the registers.
“People who shop a lot online need to come in more often.”
Linda looked over her shoulder again and smiled sheepishly at the person behind her. He looked annoyed. She looked back at the clerk. “Do you want me to go through that and find the parcels for you so you could help these people behind me? I don’t mind waiting.”
The clerk ignored her. She scanned several more packages and typed on her computer and put them back into the bin, one by one, until she’d finished. The line was all the way to the door by then. The clerk slid the bin across the counter and said, “Take the bin with you. Bring it back when you come in next time, and don’t wait so long.”
Linda picked the bin up with both hands and carried it toward the door. She apologized to everyone in the line and used her back to open the door. She walked across the parking lot with the bin of mail toward her car with the wind rustling across the top of the open box, threatening to snatch up loose pieces of mail and send them into the wind.
* * *
Linda made it home with time to toss the bin on her kitchen counter but not look at it. She raced up the bedroom steps. She needed to be naked and in the shower fast, so she undid her earrings and left on her necklace. She kicked off her shoes. She slid out of her blazer and undid the buttons on her purple shirt, then tossed the shirt onto her bed as she entered her bedroom. She undid her pants and pulled down her underwear and unsnapped her bra. She tossed it all at the hamper.
She pulled open her closet door. There was a long line of dress suits and business casual wear and shirts emblazoned with the Vieira County logo on the upper left breast, but there, nearest to her, was her dress for that evening.
She’d gone out and bought it the same day she received the phone call inviting her out to the bar that night.
She laid the dress on the bed flat so it didn’t crease. She put her shoes on the floor next to the bed. She went into the bathroom and turned on the shower and didn’t wait for it to get hot. She slid a shower cap over her hair and got in. The water was cold. She didn’t pay attention to it.
It occurred to her that she didn’t remember locking the door when she came in. She thought about it as she scrubbed the lengths of her arms and the sides of her neck and beneath her breasts. She’d come in the door, carrying the tote, and dropped it on the table, and come upstairs. The door was shut. That much she was sure of. Whether or not she’d locked it, she couldn’t remember.
She scrubbed her legs and hips and stomach and worked the washcloth into the recess of her belly button and made quick work of her legs and lower torso.
Of course I locked it, she thought. It was the same feeling she had when she cooked breakfast in the morning and then, as she was driving to work, couldn’t recall if she’d turned off the stove’s burners. When she came home, they were never on. On the rare occasions she’d turned around and gone home to double-check, they were never on either.
She tossed the washcloth into the corner of the tub and ripped back the shower curtain. The bathroom was filled with steam. The mirror was opaque and dripping. She grabbed a towel and wrapped it around herself and pulled off the shower cap and opened the door to her bedroom.
It was quiet. Her dress was still lying on the bed. Her shoes were still positioned near the bed on the floor. Time was still slipping away before she’d get stuck in rush-hour traffic on the way to the bar and wind up being late. Whether or not the door was locked would have to wait.
The dress was mid-length and hugged tight to her body. She stepped into it and wiggled it up over her shoulders, then twisted and turned and flapped her arms around, trying to get it zippered up the back. When it was done she closed her bedroom door to see herself in the full-length mirror mounted on the wall behind it. She saw the reflection of the bedroom wall and closet door behind her and she stopped.
Linda knew that the psychic phenomenon of knowing when you are being stared at is untrue. A psychologist named Edward B. Titchener had studied it in the late 1800s, debunking the idea that it was caused by any sixth sense. The latest research had shown that it was largely due to confirmation bias. The subject believes they are being stared at and suddenly looks around to see who is looking at them. Someone else detects their sudden movement and turns to see what caused it. Now, everyone was looking at one another, and the person who thought they were being started at initially feels they are proven correct.
It was all just an illusion that people believed in. Meaningless superstition. Linda stood in front of the mirror, searching the room around her in its reflection.
There was nothing there. She forced herself to turn and look and saw nothing but her laundry and bed and dresser and closet door and the steam escaping from her bathroom.
“This is what I get for spending my entire life surrounded by maniacs,” she said.
She went to her dresser for her makeup bag and carried it back over to the mirror. She bent close to put on her lipstick and eye liner, stopping only a few times to check the room behind her, before telling herself it was all in her imagination.
* * *
Linda drove toward the bar and didn’t hit any traffic. The GPS on her phone guided her toward the shopping center with ease and stayed connected the entire time. She drove listening to music and tapped the steering wheel as she sang along with it. She followed the GPS into the parking lot and pulled in.
The bar
was at the far end of the shopping center, with a large blue neon martini glass mounted over the entrance. She grabbed her purse and hurried across the lot toward the door. She went inside and made her way past the people crowded at the entrance, waiting to be seated in the restaurant section. She raised her head to look across the bar, and there he was.
Jacob Rein, holding a margarita in one hand and staring at his phone with the other. Rein, like she’d never seen him. Dressed in an expensive suit and undone tie, casual and fashionable at the same time. His hair, carefully unkempt and styled. Jacob Rein, no older than the day the she’d met him. Younger even. Undamaged.
He looked up from his phone and saw her standing there. “You must be Dr. Shelley.”
“That’s right,” she said. “You must be Jacob Junior.”
Jacob Thome put his drink down on the bar and wiped his hand on his suitcoat before holding it out to shake hers. “I tried to call you to keep you from coming all the way out here.”
Linda’s face fell. “He’s not coming, is he?”
“I’m afraid not. He sent me a message an hour ago saying something came up.”
“Did you tell him I was coming?”
Thome could see the hurt in her eyes. “I wanted it to be a surprise. I’m sure if he knew you’d be here, he would have come.” He moved aside to clear her path to the bar and said, “Here, let me buy you a drink.”
Linda set her purse on the bar. “I’ll take a glass of red wine. I might as well, right?”
Thome flagged the bartender down and ordered her wine and another margarita for himself.
Linda tried not to stare. “You look just like your father. It’s amazing.”
“I hope that’s a good thing.”
“It is. Why did you change your name?”
“He asked me to. After his legal troubles, he didn’t want me associated with him. I regret it.”
“So why did you pick that one?”
“When I was a kid we lived in Philly. Jim Thome was our favorite baseball player.”
The wine arrived and she took a sip. “I’m trying to imagine him taking you to Phillies games and I can’t. I guess I always pictured him sitting at home brooding, waiting for darkness to fall so he could go out and look for bad guys.”
Blood Angel Page 12