The fresh pot of decaf I set to brewing worked its magic. Before it finished chugging, the boys had floated into the kitchen on its steamy, wonderful smell.
“Mmm, coffee?” Mason asked, coming to slide his arms around my waist and pull me close. “You are a goddess.”
He might get mad at me, but he didn't hold onto it long. Thank goodness. “And you are a very lucky god.”
Jeremy was already filling his mug.
“You’re welcome.” I looked at Josh, the only one not waxing ecstatic over my brewing skills. He was looking around expectantly, and I said, “On the table, hon.”
He spotted the box and shouted, “I knew there’d be donuts!” on his way to get one.
I poured him a glass of milk.
We had our donuts and beverages of choice in the living room while the men folk wrapped up their game, and I watched. I wondered if I’d have got the gaming bug if I hadn’t been blind growing up. It used to eat at me, when I was a kid, hearing the other kids going on and on about the latest system or game. Maybe I should learn. Make up for lost time.
Josh was the first one to turn in. The rest of us were alone, still sipping coffee around the counter in the kitchen. Jeremy said, “I should get back to school next week. I haven’t been expelled. Yet.”
“Yeah, about that–”
Mason put a hand on my shoulder. I broke off, and he said, “Jere, do you think you’ll be able to stay sober if you go back?”
Jere lowered his head, started to say something, then closed his mouth again. “Because if you stay here, it’ll be easier. We’ll be here to help you.”
“To watch me, you mean. I don’t need a babysitter.”
“The hell you don’t.” They both looked at me. Jeremy all defensive and insulted, and Mason kind of long suffering and pleading. I put my hands up. “Fine, you two work it out. Just know that if it were up to me, you’d be on house arrest, with the sole exception of classes, for your entire freshman year."
He pushed his chair out, got up, and stalked from the room. “I'm an adult. You can’t tell me what to do."
"Oh, yeah? Watch me."
And he was up the stairs and out of my anger’s reach. I didn’t even realize I’d jumped up onto my feet. Mason gaped at me. I sat down and took a long sip from my mug.
“Tough love,” I said. “Look it up.”
“I don’t think that was helpful.”
“You’re right. It would’ve been more helpful if you’d backed me up. You can’t let him throw his life away, Mace.”
“The operative phrase there is his life. It’s his life. Not ours. And if we lock him in his room and do this for him, he’s never going to develop the strength to do it for himself.”
I set my jaw.
“That’s almost straight from one of your books,” he said.
My jaw went lax. “Damn you for being right."
He shrugged. “Let’s not fight. I love you too much.”
We were still okay. I didn’t even know how worried I’d been until he reassured me with those five words. I managed to hold my form, even though my insides had all turned warm and melty. I hid my mush-rush behind a layer of smug. “You should be thanking me. He only hung out down here after Josh went to bed, so he could ask about his father again.”
“Probably true.” I got the distinct feeling he did not want to discuss that particular issue. “What did your surveillance tell you?”
“Top news is that I got an anonymous text telling me Gary Conklin was released from the psych unit, and that he trashed his meds on the way out.”
“Whoa. How long ago did you get–never mind. I don't want to know. You’re gonna have to be careful, Rache.”
“Trust me, I plan to be. I also learned that we’re barbecuing on Saturday here with Sandra and the gang. Jim’s bringing the steaks. Amy's coming, too.”
“So the same thing we do almost every nice weekend from May to September?” he asked.
I blinked at him. “Is it getting to be too much?”
“It’s my favorite thing on planet earth. I miss it when it gets too cold and snowy. I wish Mom would come more often."
“Well, you know. Your mom has her garden club.” I stroked his calf with my toe. “Also in today’s news, Misty wants to go to college so she can shadow Jeremy’s every step. And he thinks booze is his biggest problem.”
He pushed out his lower lip and nodded. “Sounds about normal. Anything…about the case?”
“Maybe. Ivy attends a support group all the way in Endwell for childhood sex abuse survivors, all female including the group leader.”
“Ivy was abused as a child?” He looked stunned. Then his brows rose even higher. “Reggie?”
“I don’t know. Can we find out?”
“I’ve already tried to look into Ivy Newman’s background, ran into a log jam of sealed files. If I want to see them, I need a court order. And to get one, I need at least some evidence connecting her to the crimes.”
"And not to be on forced leave, probably," I said. I wanted to know what was in those sealed files.
“I still don’t think she killed all those men,” I said.
“So you keep telling me.”
“Those were the group members’ license plates I photographed. I want to put names with their faces.”
“I gave them to Rosie, since I'm persona non grata at the department right now. He's gonna run 'em for us. He got a few back so far. Here." He gave me a printout.
The three vehicles on the list were registered in the women’s own names. All were local within Broome and Chenango counties. Inspiration struck, and I started typing each name and city or town into the search bar on my various social sites. Facebook returned a couple of hits. I downloaded profile photos and hit the print button. My office was upstairs, its door closed, so the printer shouldn’t wake Josh. I seriously doubted Jeremy was sleeping.
Thinking about Jeremy set off a red alert in my brain. “We should’ve searched Jere’s room! He might have booze stashed up there.”
Mason rolled his eyes, and said, “Again, he’s an adult who has to make his own decisions. Besides, I did that earlier today when he was outside with Josh and the dogs. I put a mini fridge in there too, stocked it with Gatorade and candy.”
“Electrolytes and sugar. Good thinking.”
He nodded.
I didn’t want to ask, but I had to. “Did you find any alcohol?”
“No. I take that as a sign he’s trying.”
“He’s gotta stop trying and just do it.” I sighed, and got up to carry my empty mug to the sink. Mason was scrolling his phone, and came to join me there, holding it in front of me.
I was looking at a photo of an oval medallion with an image of a fiery woman engraved on its face. It was familiar.
“What is it?” I asked.
“A pendant of some sort. It was found between the seats of the professor’s car. His wife said it wasn’t his.”
It clicked in my head where I’d seen it before, and I wished to hell I didn’t have to say it out loud. “I recognize this.”
“From where?” he asked.
I started swiping through the photos I’d taken of the women outside the Church, and stopped on the one of Ivy. Mason was leaning over my shoulder.
“Is that…?”
“I don’t know.” Please don’t be the same. Don’t. Don’t. Don’t. I spread the image bigger and centered the oval pendant. Mason held his phone beside mine. “It’s the same,” I said, with the inflection doctors use for “It’s cancer.”
“This is it!” Mason said with the inflection new fathers use for “It’s a boy." “This is the physical evidence I need to get those files unsealed.”
“Is it…are you going to arrest her?” I asked.
His face went from eagerness, to disbelief with an edge of darkness. “Does it matter? If it clears Jeremy–”
“I know you think I’m protecting her, but I’m not.” The image of little Kate Ashton,
humiliated, sobbing, as her father violated her replayed in my head. So did Juan’s brimming, brown eyes. Okay, maybe I was protecting Ivy, just a little bit. But not at Jeremy’s expense. Never that. “If it's her, arrest her. But make sure, Mason. It has to stick or we make it worse for Jere. Okay?"
He said nothing.
“Let’s try to identify this image on the pendant. Who is it supposed to be? What does it represent?”
“You saw her commit one murder. Your stuff is usually accurate, right? And now we have physical evidence tying her to the second–”
“No, we don’t.” I snapped my fingers. “We actually don’t. She’s wearing her pendant. The one in the car can’t be hers.”
He shot me a look that said I was treading on his thinnest layer of patience. “It’s identical.”
“Have my feelings ever been wrong before, Mason? How can you not believe me when I tell you Ivy did not kill anyone except possibly Dwayne Clark?”
“How can you defend her when the police are looking at Jeremy for this?”
I shot to my feet. “I’m just trying to get to the truth.”
“Any truth that clears Ivy Newman, you mean.”
“Mason–”
“No. No, I can’t even talk to you about this right now.” He shook his head hard, got up and walked right out the door.
Mason was sipping his first cup of Joe, still in a pair of pajama bottoms and a T-shirt, barefoot, when his phone pinged. He’d already seen Jeremy off to class and Joshua off to school. He’d stayed up late, going over and over the murders, and everything he had on the other victims. Only one of them, besides Dwayne Clark and the professor, had kids. The others included a teacher and a coach. Access to kids for sure. Two more had priors. One for sharing kiddy porn online, and the other had been arrested for molesting his seven-year-old niece. The kid had later recanted, and the charges had been dropped.
So that was four with a definite predilection for sex with children. Two with obvious access to kids, and one he still had nothing on. He was pretty sure that all the victims had been killed because they were pedophiles.
Rachel had been asleep by the time he’d gone to bed. And he’d got up before her…and yeah, it was on purpose.
He felt like a real shit for that.
She came scuffing into the kitchen wearing a silky navy nightgown with a lace inset in its v neck under an open spa robe. Her bulldog was at her side, and her hair was a fluffy bat’s nest. Her eyes were puffy, too. If he said she looked like she’d been crying, she’d have clocked him in the jaw, but she looked like she’d been crying.
She stopped in the wide entryway and leaned against the side. Myrtle stopped and sat down. She never missed an opportunity to sit, and if Rachel stood there more than a minute, Myrtle would go perpendicular and probably start snoring.
He decided the best approach would be with coffee in hand, and made her a cup, heavy on the cream and sugar. She took the cup, sniffed it and muttered, “Checking for arsenic.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. Nobody uses arsenic anymore.”
“Hmph.” She scuffed to the nook where she could look out the windows. Myrtle never let much air between her and Rachel’s leg.
He went there too, but didn’t sit. He was casting around in his head for something to say, but as usual, she was ten steps ahead of him.
“So, do you really think there’s anything I wouldn’t do to protect Josh and Jeremy?”
“No. I don’t think that.”
“And you really think I’d lie to you to protect a serial killer?”
“I don’t think that, either.”
“Do you, in fact, Mason Brown, honestly believe I would put anything or anyone, even myself, above you and those kids?”
“I know better.”
She nodded hard, looked at her cup. He knew she wanted to be furious at him, maybe yell at him for a while, but he was deliberately making it hard for her to find a reason.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m out of my mind over Jeremy, not just the case, but the drinking, and the questions about Eric. Especially the questions.” He took a sip of his coffee, but it was more than half gone and already getting cold. Then he said, “To tell you the truth, it hurt my feelings that you didn’t feel like you could tell me what you saw. That you didn’t trust me with it.”
“I couldn’t trust you with it.”
“Rachel, you know you can–”
“Did you tell Chief V about Ivy’s pendant?”
“Yes.”
“See?” She sipped her still-hot coffee. And just like that, she was the one mad at him. How did she always manage to do that?
“Rachel, I don’t understand this. I thought I knew you inside and out, but I have never met this side of you.”
“This side of me? You know this side of me. This is the side of me who susses people out. The side that can listen to an interrogation and tell you if the guy is lying. The side that keeps telling me that Ivy Newman is good.”
“And yet you’re pretty sure she killed Dwayne Clark.”
“She’s a level of good I’ve never encountered before. And it’s not about what she did, it’s about what she is. It’s beyond good, what she is. It’s….” She exploded her head with her fingers.
He looked right into her eyes, listening with his whole being, because he wanted to get this. He didn’t like the rift he felt forming between them.
“This isn’t a different part of me, it’s the same part of me. I know things I shouldn’t know. That’s the part that knows she’s…good.”
“Whether she killed him or not.”
“She saved Juan from being raped by his father.”
“And the others–”
“I don’t think she killed them.”
“But is that your stuff or just what you want to believe?” he asked. “Because I think she did. I think she’s a vigilante, and I think she feels good to you because she believes she’s good. But she’s just a killer, Rache.”
“No. She’s not.”
He sat across the table from her, put his cup down, reached across and put his hands over hers. “I love you. This–” He touched her heart with his fingertips, then his own. “This right here, this is a zillion times bigger than everything else. That’s all static. It’s not about us. We’re gonna take care of Jeremy, whatever it takes, but that’s about Jeremy. We can’t let it affect what’s between us. Okay?”
She was quiet for a minute, processing what he’d said. Probably having one of those inner monologues she sometimes spoke aloud. She had entire conversations with her books while she wrote them. He’d heard her up there in her office, talking away. She was fascinating to him. Still. Always.
Then she got up, and came around the table, sat on his lap and kissed him like there was no tomorrow.
And then the phone rang, and he snaked his hand around her waist and picked it up.
“We need you, buddy. Rachel, too.”
“Rosie? What’s going on?”
“Rachel’s obsessed fan, Gary? He's losing it big time. Hurry it up, okay?”
I knew it was about Gary before Mason picked up the phone. I’d felt it buzz through me like a mild electric shock. I heard his plea inside my mind. “You’ve gotta help me.”
It took us mere minutes, maybe three of them, to throw on clothes, and hit the road in Mason’s Beast. He wasn’t far, one exit down 81. We off-ramped to Castle Creek. Mason used to have an old farmhouse there. He was all about fixing it up for the boys, before some psycho hosebeast firebug torched it, we thought with the boys inside.
Just driving by the site, an uncapped basement in the middle of a weed field, brought back the same feeling I’d had when we’d come home to find it engulfed. When we’d gone out, the kids and the dogs had been inside. When we’d returned, it had been in the process of burning to the ground.
Mason covered my hand with his. “It gets to me, too,” he said. “But they’re okay. We all are.”
I gave a sa
d smile, a fake firm nod.
The address Rosie had texted wasn’t hard to find. There were five police cars lined up. Three of them were Binghamton black & whites, and two were the blue and yellow of our New York State Troopers with their dorky wide-brimmed hats. I’m sorry, but they are. It’s New York and you’re wearing cowboy hats? What’s wrong with a freaking fedora?
There was a Bearcat with SWAT stenciled on its sides, but what chilled me most were the two ambulances.
All the vehicles’ lights were flashing. I always thought it would be better if they’d just turn them off. Seemed to me flashing bright lights at criminals might just agitate them.
We parked at the back of the line and ran forward. Mason grabbed hold of my hand on the way. As we approached, we could see all the action was in the back yard of a little white clapboard house with sky blue shutters. There was a picket fence, a mob of cops, and a pair of T-poles connected by clothes lines. No clothes, though. Just clothespins, every few inches, leaning this way and that way like drunken soldiers on parade.
We crossed someone’s lawn, kitty corner. Mason hopped over their back fence, then reached back, gave me a hand over. I’m not weak, I’m short. We made our way between the cops. I smelled the gas first. Then we finally breached the front line, and there was the whole story right there. Old man on a chair, duct tape wrapped around him every two inches from his shoulders to his ankles. All he could move was his head. His face was wrinkled and puffy and red. He had tufts of iron gray hair, pointing every which way. He was very wet. There was a gas can lying on its side near his feet. We stood outside the picket fence, looking in.
Near the back door of the little house, a very round woman in a kaftan and a long green sweater was shivering and crying and saying, “No, Gary. No Gary, you can’t. You can’t.”
Gary was standing a few feet away from the old man, holding a lighter that was already lit, like a true believer at an emo concert. It was one of those Bic lighters, a red one.
I looked past the lighter at Gary. I tried to tune in, but I could not close my eyes. I took a step closer to the white picket barrier between us. One of the cops said, “No closer, ma’am.”
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