by Regan, Lisa
He stared at her.
His attorney said, “Alex? Is there something we need to discuss in private?”
Ignoring her, he continued to stare at Josie. “I told her not to come back. She only ever caused trouble.”
“I don’t think that’s true,” Josie said.
He leaned forward, eyes wide. “It is true. She was the one who hurt Mother.”
“Because she was angry with your mother, Alex. Your mother let Frances hurt you. Zandra knew that none of you—not you or her or your mother—could hurt Frances back, so she took things out on your mother.”
“No, I—that’s not—she did hurt Mother but Father, he didn’t—he never—”
“He did hurt you, Alex. You must know that. Where do you think Zandra came from? She arrived after Nicolette left, didn’t she? Nicolette was bigger than you, older than you. She tried to protect you from Frances, but it was a losing battle, wasn’t it?”
He gave her a pinched expression.
Josie went on. “Nicolette couldn’t handle what was happening in your house. She was just a kid herself. She had no resources. Her own mother failed to protect you from Frances. She had nowhere to turn, no way to keep you from getting hurt. So she left. One day she was there and the next, she was gone, and you were left with a monster. You were vulnerable, helpless, defenseless, and—”
Alex’s eyes dropped to the table, and something rippled over his face. The skin of his forehead loosened, and his lower lip jutted out in a pout. Josie dipped her head so she could see his eyes, which glistened with tears. “We’re not supposed to say her name ever,” he said in the childlike tone he’d used at the caretaker’s home when Josie first talked to him.
“Alex,” Josie snapped.
The attorney jumped. “Detective Quinn.”
He looked up at her again, his features sharper, his expression confident. “This is not part of the game,” he said.
“Zandra’s not part of the game?” Josie asked. “That hardly seems fair. She’s been playing all along.”
The attorney said, “Maybe we should stop. I’m afraid I don’t understand what’s going on. Alex—”
“Shut up,” he told her. To Josie he said, “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Don’t I? Who killed Nicci, Alex? Was it you?”
“Of course not.”
“Who killed Codie Lash and her husband?”
“I didn’t do that,” he said. “It was a mistake.”
“Your mistake or Zandra’s?” Josie asked.
A low growl vibrated in his throat. “That bitch. I spent my whole life keeping her out of trouble. She ruins everything.”
“No,” Josie said. She thought about the exchange between Alex and the Lash couple. Even before Mr. Lash had gone after him, Codie had been berating him. She had pushed him. Pushed and pushed until he was at a breaking point.
“She does!” Alex insisted.
“No, she doesn’t,” Josie argued. “Her job has always been to protect you because you’re a psychopath.”
“That’s enough, Detective Quinn,” the attorney huffed.
Alex put his hands over his ears. “I said shut up,” he hollered.
Josie pointed a finger at him just the way Codie Lash had and said, “It’s true. You’re a psychopath and a liar. Everyone knew it, didn’t they? Your mother knew it, Frances knew it. That’s why you weren’t allowed to go to school, because you’re mentally—”
The attorney stood. “Really, Detective Quinn. That’s enough. This interview is over. You’re out of line. I didn’t come here so you could berate my client and call him names.”
Alex lunged across the table and wrapped his hands around Josie’s throat. The attorney screamed. Josie fell backwards as Alex’s full weight descended on her. She used their momentum to roll him over so that she straddled him. His hands loosened, and she whipped them out of the way, turning him swiftly onto his stomach and pinning them behind his back. She used the cuffs on her belt to restrain him. Her breath came fast, but she was relieved to see that her team had followed her instructions and not come racing to her rescue immediately.
“We’re going to stand up now,” she told him.
Alex’s attorney helped Josie stand him up and sit him in the nearest chair. He shook his head as if he were flipping long hair out of his face. His eyes narrowed and he glared at Josie. His voice sounded different when he spoke. Petulant and higher-pitched. “He doesn’t remember any of that shit, you dumb bitch.”
Josie’s heart skipped two beats. She tried to keep the tremble out of her voice when she said, “Zandra?”
Alex rolled his eyes. “Who the hell else were you expecting? I mean, you were trying to get me, weren’t you?”
Josie looked at Alex’s attorney, but she didn’t object. She nodded for Josie to continue. This was what Drake worried about. A client with Dissociative Identity Disorder was his own defense.
To Zandra, Josie said, “You did the killing, didn’t you?”
“Of course I did. You think little baby Alex could have done it? You think sensitive artist Alex could have done the dirty work?”
“He had to know that you were doing it,” Josie said.
Another eye-roll. “He knows what he wants to know. He hears what he wants to hear. He listens to me when he feels like listening. I don’t care what he says about me or how much he resents me, he knows I took care of him. He knows I’ve always taken on the bad parts, the parts he couldn’t handle. So yeah, I went into that locked bedroom with Frances every time. I did that so little baby Alex wouldn’t have to. I killed the people he took, the people whose bones he wanted to use for his art and his games. He tried to make me go away so many times. He’s wanted to kill me for so long, did you know that?”
Josie said, “Yes. I did. Do you know why?”
“He thinks you’re so smart, but you seem pretty dumb to me,” Zandra said. “Didn’t you hear anything I just said? I take the bad stuff so he doesn’t have to. If he kills me, all those memories die with me.”
“Then why are you still here?” Josie asked.
“Because unlike that worthless bitch Nicolette, I will never leave him. No matter how bad things get. No matter what happens. I will never abandon him. I’m his real sister. I’m the one who was there for him.”
“You’re his mirror,” Josie said. “It’s not Alex choosing the victims, is it? It’s you.”
“Duh,” Zandra said. “I choose them and he takes them. I kill them and he makes art out of them.”
“You always choose two people who reflect each other in some way,” Josie went on. “That’s why their names are similar. Terri and Terry, Kenneth and Kendra, Tony and Toni. Male and female.”
“He likes it that way,” Zandra explained. “No one is ever alone, not even in death. That’s how he prefers it. I told you, he’s a baby. He doesn’t want anyone left alone the way that shitbag Nicolette left him. I told you, I’m a better sister than she ever was.”
“Why does he only display one of them, then?” Josie asked.
Zandra shook her head. “You’re really thick, aren’t you? Because he knows I’m supposed to be a secret.”
Josie remembered that Hanna had dedicated one of her shows to ‘my darling Alex and Zandra.’ “But your mother knew about you.”
“Why do you think she made us stay in that godawful house? She couldn’t let us out into the world. The first time she sent that little baby to school, I would have made him go away where he was safe and told the teachers what Frances was doing to him. Then they would have taken us out of there and put Frances in jail. No way were either of them going for that.”
“They both knew that Alex had alters?” Josie asked.
She had researched Dissociative Identity Disorder before this interview. She knew that there was still some discord in the field of psychology where the disorder was concerned. There were many camps that didn’t believe it existed at all. But the experts who studied it mos
t extensively were unified on several characteristics: it was usually the result of extreme trauma, often in childhood. The affected person’s psyche developed what were called alters, meaning entirely different personalities or people within their fractured psyche. Some alters, like Zandra, emerged for the very purpose of bearing the brunt of abuse. There didn’t seem to be any limit as to how many alters a person with DID could have but most experts agreed that there was always a main alter—one who showed him or herself more than the others and had a great deal of influence. There were some patients with DID whose alters spoke to one another and other people with DID who simply had amnesia for the time periods during which their alters took over. Alex appeared to have a little bit of both. He was well aware of Zandra, and based on the pages that Trinity had typed up, he had often engaged in dialogues with her, but he didn’t remember all of the things that happened when Zandra was firmly in control.
Zandra said, “They both knew—about me, anyway. There are a couple of others they never met. We didn’t have many friends.”
“Why did you kill Nicci?” Josie asked.
“Because he took the reporter,” Zandra replied. “He didn’t want her for her bones, you know. He wanted her to tell his story. Like it’s some big epic story. He really thinks he’s the smartest thing ever, you know, and this art obsession of his—he’s even worse than our mother. She thought she was hot shit, too. Anyway, he was keeping the reporter so she’d tell his life story, but how could his story be complete with that nasty woman still out there, living a perfectly normal life? She had to go. I had to prove to him that I’m a more important part of his story than she ever was. She’s dead and I’m still here. Just like I told him I always would be.”
“What happened to the reporter?” Josie asked. She felt lightheaded waiting for the answer.
Zandra smiled. “Oh, you think I’m just going to tell you? I’m not him, dumbass! You have to ask him what he did with her.”
“I did,” Josie said. “He wouldn’t tell me.”
“You think I will?” Zandra shook her head. “No, that’s not how this works. You have to play his game, Detective.”
Sixty-Two
Josie felt as though she had run a marathon. Back in the great room, she sat at her desk while her team and Drake stood staring at her.
“I feel sick,” Drake said. “You know his attorney is having a field day right now. It’s like winning the lottery for her, and we’re no closer to finding Trinity.”
Noah said, “Hey, that’s enough. Let’s keep our focus on Trinity, okay? So we didn’t get her location from… Zandra or whoever the hell was talking in there. We need to keep trying other avenues.”
Mettner said, “Was that even real? What if it’s all an act?”
“It wasn’t an act,” Josie said.
“Boss is right,” Gretchen agreed. “I dealt with some criminals with DID back in Philadelphia. It’s a real thing. Complex and complicated. But that’s not our problem. That’s for the attorneys to hash out before trial. Right now, we need to get into the head of one person and that’s Alex Thornberg. He’s the Bone Artist.”
“This is his game,” Josie agreed. “Just like Zandra said.”
“Okay,” Noah said, beginning to pace. “Then what is he after? Every game has a winner and a loser. He wants to win. How does he do that?”
“Press coverage?” Mettner suggested. “He’s always wanted that, so people would know how smart he is—although he’s already going to get all the press he could possibly want now that he’s been caught.”
“It’s not just about him wanting people to know how smart he is,” Josie said. “This is about him trying to prove something.”
“Prove something to who?” Drake scoffed.
Josie rocked in her chair. “To the only person he left alive.”
“His dad?”
“Yeah, did you read any of the pages that Trinity typed?”
Drake grimaced. “Of course I did.”
“He thought Alex was stupid. Alex wanted to be an artist, like Hanna, but Frances squashed that.”
“So what? What does this have to do with Trinity?” Mettner asked.
“She’s his historian,” Gretchen said. “Zandra just told us that. His biographer. She knew everything there was to know about his case before he took her.”
Josie added, “Including the fact that for every victim he put on display for the world to see, there was one we never found. One no one even knew about. We still have to find those victims. He would have used their bones. He must have because they’re not anywhere on the properties. Wherever he took Trinity, it’s the site of his final piece.”
Drake raised a brow. “Piece of what?”
“Art!” Josie said. “Remember—he thinks of himself as an artist. Somewhere in this state is his final work of art. If we find that, we find Trinity.”
“Are you listening to yourself? Where in the hell could this guy put on a goddamn art installation made of bones and a famous reporter and not have the whole damn world freaking out?”
Josie looked around at all of them, working through everything she knew in her mind. She kept coming back to Alex’s relationship with Frances. She turned her chair around until she was facing Chief Chitwood’s office. His door was open. He had gone to a meeting with the District Attorney. Josie stood up and walked into his office, looking out the window. She heard the footsteps of her team and Drake following her. Then Gretchen’s voice. “Boss?”
Josie looked across the street to the trees lining the sidewalk. Then her gaze drifted upward to the blue sky where a large bird glided past. A hawk or an osprey. She couldn’t be sure. Not a carrion bird.
“Raptors,” she blurted out.
“What’s that?” Noah said.
She turned and looked at them all crowded inside the Chief’s door. “Raptors kill for their food. They snatch living creatures out of their natural habitats. They roost up high, don’t they?”
Drake shook his head. “Have you lost your mind? Is this what a nervous breakdown looks like?”
“I’m serious,” Josie said. “Many raptors roost in treetops or the tops of buildings or telephone poles, don’t they?”
“How the hell would I know?” Drake snapped.
“Frances’s favorite birds were raptors,” Josie said. “In the pages that Trinity typed, that was mentioned. Also, Trinity wrote in her diary that the subject of raptors came up between her and Alex—well, Max—and he was uncomfortable. He knew all about them from his dad, but he didn’t like them. He does, however, like scavenger birds.”
“Does he like them or does he just like the fact that they accelerate skeletonization?” Noah asked.
“It doesn’t matter,” Josie replied. “Alex’s entire life has been about proving to Frances that he is smart, that he is worthy; that he is as talented an artist as his mother.”
“I’m pretty sure Frances knows that Alex got the last laugh in this situation,” Mettner argued.
“Sure,” Josie said. “But we’re not talking in the literal sense right now. We’re talking about Alex’s body of work as an artist. The symbolism. His last, great piece would be in a place that symbolically, Frances would see. Frances is a raptor.”
“And Alex is a scavenger,” Gretchen said.
“Raptors have great eyesight.” Drake said with a sigh. He walked over to the window and looked up, spotting the raptor Josie had seen moments earlier catching thermals above them. “Would you say they spend more time in the sky than perhaps a scavenger bird does? Since scavenger birds will spend a great deal of time on the ground feeding once they find a food source?”
Josie said, “I would. Drake, she’s on a roof. Trinity is on a roof somewhere. Some kind of raised structure—a bell tower or clock tower. Somewhere high up in the air.”
“But where?”
“We have to follow the pattern,” Josie said. “The mirror victims. I was supposed to be the mirror victim in this case.”
“The mirror victims were male and female,” Mettner reminded them. “They had the same names: Anthony and Antonia, Kenneth and Kendra, Terrence and Teresa, Robert and Roberta.”
“Like him and his sister—well, his alter,” Noah added. “Alexander and Alexandra.”
“To him, Zandra was his sister in a much more real sense than his actual sister ever was,” Josie said. “So yes, him and his sister. I can be the mirror because I’m Trinity’s sister. He always leaves his display in the place where he took his mirror victim from.”
Drake said, “But he didn’t take you.”
“No, but he tried. Near Callowhill, where Trinity grew up.”
“So what? You think she’s on the roof of your parents’ house or something?” Mettner asked.
“No,” Josie said. She thought about Callowhill. She’d been almost an hour from her parents’ house when he crashed into her. “The preserve.”
Sixty-Three
They got to the preserve in less than an hour, rolling up to the main building in a caravan of police vehicles. It was late afternoon but there was still plenty of daylight. Cheyenne Thomas and a few of her staff came running out of the building, panicked. When Josie explained to her what was going on, she said, “I’m sorry, but we’ve had no unusual activity. As you can see, we’ve only got this small group of buildings and none of them are particularly high. We’ve got some ladders if you’d like to get up there and have a look.”
Josie panned the area. Disappointment rounded her shoulders. Noah walked up beside her. “Maybe she’s not here.”
“No,” Josie said. “This is the place. I’m sure of it.”
Mettner jogged over. “I’ll call the K-9 unit in this county and see if I can get them down here. We’ve still got stuff from her suitcase we can use to scent her.”
“Thanks, Mett,” Josie said. She turned to Cheyenne. “Do you have any old maps of this place? There was a hunter who went missing and whose remains were found on the preserve back in 2000. Do you know if he had a deer stand nearby?”