Don't Even Breathe

  Dana hadn’t moved the torch away even a fraction of an inch from his head.

  “But I went to all this trouble of bringing him here,” Dana said, as though she’d done Maggie a favor and was now disappointed that her gratitude wasn’t forthcoming. “It seems such an awful waste not to—”

  “Dana!” Maggie’s hands flew up in supplication. “Listen to me. You’ve waited years for this. Don’t dilute the experience now. Your revenge is personal, like it was with Kristen. Remember how that felt? Remember the satisfaction that came from taking her life? That feeling of justice being served. It can be yours again, with me. But only if you let my dad go.”

  Still, Dana didn’t move. She stared at Maggie, as though Maggie’s proposal was the most ludicrous thing she’d ever heard. “What’s stopping me from killing you both?”

  “Nothing. But I know, deep down, you don’t believe my dad deserves being treated like this. He was good to you. Remember? You both talked all the time. You liked my dad, and he liked you. What you’re about to do, it’s just not right.”

  Dana seemed to mull over Maggie’s words. Then she relaxed her stance a little. “Okay,” she said, swinging the torch away from his head. “Just don’t make me regret conceding on this. Go ahead. Trade places.”

  Maggie didn’t know whether to feel relief or fright. “Thank you.”

  Keeping her hands raised and her movements slow and deliberate, Maggie rounded the water’s edge until she reached her father. Then she helped him stand. He stank of gasoline and fear.

  “Dad, it’ll be okay,” she said, holding his tied hands. “I promise.”

  “I peed myself,” he said, his voice low and wheezing.

  Despite everything, his comment brought a smile to her lips. “What happened? Didn’t Spartacus protect you?”

  “Can you believe I was on the toilet when the kid forced his way in? As far as I know, the dog is still tied up on the dock.” His hands trembled in hers. “Tell me, Magpie, you have this.”

  She squeezed his hands. “I do.” Then she pecked him on the cheek and let him go.

  He sloshed his way across the narrow strait, and once he was safely on the other side, albeit in Tyler’s custody, Maggie turned to face Dana.

  “On your knees,” Dana commanded. “Or Tyler hurts your dad.”

  Maggie hesitated, long enough for Dana to strike her in the stomach with the blunt end of the torch. Pain tore through her midriff, and Maggie keeled over, gasping for breath. She dropped to her knees, fighting for air.

  Dana reached into the reeds. “Be a sweetheart,” she said, holding out a gasoline can to Maggie.

  “Don’t I get a last request?” Maggie gasped. It wasn’t a unique response, but Maggie knew that every extra second of life she could buy delayed what could possibly be her last moments on earth. And she had no intention of making it easy for Dana.

  Dana pushed the can into Maggie’s hands. “No last requests. This isn’t Hollywood.” She flashed the flame across Maggie’s face. “Now come on. Chop-chop.”

  Maggie unscrewed the lid, flinching at the smell. Every sense analyzing her surroundings. Every creative brain cell conjuring up escape scenarios and calculating the odds of coming out of this alive. “But don’t you want to hear how sorry I am for what I did?” she said. She was, sincerely, and it came through in her voice, even though it wasn’t her motive for asking the question.

  But Dana didn’t seem interested in taking Maggie’s confession.

  “Just get on with it,” she said, her tone weary. “Don’t force Tyler’s hand. He’s an impatient young man.”

  On the beach, Tyler had an arm looped around her father’s shoulders, preventing him from moving, the Luger’s muzzle rammed against his temple. Next to Tyler, her father looked small, weak.

  Maggie’s heart felt like it was being crushed in a fist.

  She had to buy them time, she knew. Time to slow events down and to think. Time to give her father a fighting chance. Her own safety paled in comparison. This was all her fault; she couldn’t let anyone else pay the price for her past mistake.

  “If I do this,” Maggie said slowly, “I need your word you’ll let my dad go.”

  Dana waved the torch like a witch brandishing a magic scepter. “You’re in no position to make demands! Now do the deed.”

  “Please. Rita. Think how you’d feel if it was your dad.”

  Maggie used the name deliberately, hoping that saying it out loud would ignite a spark of humanity in Dana, drive her childhood friend to the fore.

  They’d once shared an emotional bond, seemingly unbreakable until Kristen had wormed her way between them. If any of Rita’s feelings for Maggie still existed deep inside her . . .

  But Dana’s response was bereft of emotion.

  “Rita’s dead,” she said. “You killed her, Maggie, the day you turned her into Helga.”

  The words smacked Maggie across the face, one at a time, sharp and stinging. She didn’t try to duck them. She let them hit her full force, knowing that any kind of defense was not only inappropriate, but selfish.

  After all, how could she argue with the truth?

  For several months she’d made Rita’s life a living hell, thinking nothing of the impact her name-calling had had on her. Sleeping well at night while Rita lay awake in her own bed, tears magnifying her eyes. Ostracizing Rita in school, indifferent to the air of awkwardness she cultivated. Her actions unforgivable, contemptible. Belittling her best friend, making fun of her, bullying her psychologically, chipping away at her confidence until the rebellious girl she knew and loved had been stripped bare and beaten, emotionally scarred.

  Now there was nothing left of her.

  Rita was gone.

  Maggie had helped create a monster.

  And any leftover feelings for Maggie had long since hardened into retribution.

  Maggie hesitated, burning up precious seconds, the gas can poised over her head, knowing that each second saved added up to minutes, and each minute added to . . .

  “Borrowed time,” Dana said, as though reading her thoughts. She nudged the gas can with the blunt end of the torch. “Not so mighty now, are you?”

  Maggie screwed up her eyes, clamping her mouth shut as gasoline drizzled over her, the liquid warm and hellish. It ran around her eyes, scalding the scuff on her chin. She wanted to gasp as fumes scratched at her nostrils. More than that, she wanted to run. Run for her life. But the thought of Tyler shooting her father kept her staked to the mud.

  “Did you know,” Dana said as the gasoline rained down, “that fire is the only way to purge a witch’s soul?”

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?

  Faced with her imminent death, Maggie expected to be scared in a way that she had never been scared before.

  Even as a small child she’d wondered what it might feel like to die, to let her last breath slip away, to go on to something better, or for her mind to cease eternally. Not necessarily the when or the how of the process, but rather the act itself. That fleeting moment separating life and death. The gap between heartbeats when the next heartbeat failed to come. That split-second transition from this world to the next, or to nothingness.

  Would she notice a blip in her consciousness?

  Or would everything just stop?

  Although Maggie had been raised in a Christian household, she’d never been force-fed religion. Her family had attended church when they had to, and her father had kept a large leather-bound Bible in a prominent position on his desk in his home office, occasionally reading passages from it to himself and to anyone within earshot. As a family, they had never discussed religion, but despite her mother’s adultery, the family had tried to observe Christian values. Where the subject of death was concerned, and the intricacies of what might happen next, Maggie had been left to make up her own mind, to wonder whether some ethereal part of her would still exist after the corporeal part ceased.

  The death question had staye
d with her all her life, more so since becoming a Deathtective, as definitively unanswerable as it always had been.

  Just the thought of it sent a shudder coursing through her.

  Would she feel unquenchable pain as the flames stripped her skin from her flesh and her flesh from her bones? Or would her torment be momentary—instantly replaced with perpetual bliss or with absolute nihility?

  Maybe the answer wasn’t so much about eternal essence or endless oblivion, but rather how she coped with the act itself.

  She held her breath, her eyes glued shut, waiting for the sudden unstoppable burst of intense heat that would signify her demise.

  But it didn’t come.

  She heard a commotion rising around her instead. The sounds of distant splashing, and the sudden shouts of gruff voices carrying over the water.

  “Police! Stay where you are! Do not move!”

  She cracked open her eyes, blinking as the gasoline vapors hazed her vision. Through stinging tears, she saw Loomis and Deputy Ramos, together with several other uniforms, wading toward the mud mound from different directions, their flashlights and handguns trained on Dana.

  Their sudden appearance must have taken Dana by surprise, because she had made no attempt to move, her face oddly emotionless. But then the reality of her predicament must have kicked in, because she dropped the torch and sprinted for the shore.

  Maggie was on her feet in a flash.

  She had no intention of letting Dana escape.

  Maggie lunged for her as she ran past. Dana hit out, trying to prevent Maggie from grabbing her. But Maggie was committed. She threw her whole weight into the tackle, knocking Dana off-balance. Dana managed to make it to the water’s edge before her legs gave out, and she went down with Maggie on top.

  Tepid water swamped over Maggie, flooding into her ears and mouth. Dana thrashed under her. Maggie struggled to breathe. She grappled to keep hold of Dana, but Dana was hitting out and trying to break free. Maggie had the advantage of being on top. But it was fleeting. Dana bucked, throwing Maggie off to the side and pinning her underwater.

  She saw Dana’s silhouette loom over her, distorted by the disturbed water, her fingers reaching down to scratch out Maggie’s eyes. Blunt fingernails scraping at Maggie’s face.

  Maggie’s lungs screamed at her to breathe.

  She reached up instead, her fingers finding Dana’s throat. She wrapped her hands around her neck and squeezed as hard as she could. Dana tried to throw herself off, but Maggie clung on, pressing her fingers into Dana’s flesh with every ounce of strength she had.

  Fire raged in Maggie’s chest.

  Then Dana’s struggles subsided, and she collapsed into the water next to Maggie.

  Maggie broke the surface, gasping for air.

  Loomis was standing over her, up to his knees in the lake.

  “You cut that close,” Maggie said.

  “You wouldn’t believe how bad the traffic is this time of night.” He grabbed Dana by her hood and hauled her to her knees. She coughed and spluttered as he slapped handcuffs on her wrists.

  Maggie staggered to her feet, her gaze swinging to the beach, her heart suddenly fearful for her father.

  But he was alone on the sand, a stick figure in the moonlight.

  “The coward fled,” he called weakly. “Took off through the woods the second he saw things going south.”

  “Go after him,” Loomis said to Ramos.

  But Maggie was already one step ahead, instructing the deputy to stay with her dad as she splashed across the narrows.

  Then she ran back through the woods as fast as she could in the dark, barefoot and wet through, clambering up the grassy incline and out onto the roadway as the wail from approaching EMS vehicles split the night.

  Kristen’s car was gone, and with it, Tyler as well.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  THE DAY AFTER

  With the notebook clutched to her chest, Maggie slid open the sliding glass doors. She stepped outside onto her patio, pulling the pashmina around her as she crossed to the firepit. It was late, stars speckling an inky sky. A pearlescent moon skimming the trees, and a chilly sixty-nine degrees to keep the crickets quiet. She placed the notebook on the patio table and then loaded kindling into the firepit. Satisfied there was enough tinder to get things started, she struck a match, her eyes narrowing at the sudden flash of incandescence.

  A full day had passed since the fatal showdown at Devil’s Landing. A madcap twenty-four hours in which Maggie had had hardly a moment to breathe, never mind gather her thoughts and evaluate her own emotional state.

  Some things took longer to percolate.

  The arrest and consequent processing of Dana Cullen had prompted a raft of paperwork and interviews, as well as airtime with a team of prosecutors from the State Attorney’s Office—their job, to assess how best to proceed with a case of this complexity. Two perpetrators committing three homicides meant marrying up various time lines as well as confirming clear lines of communication between both parties in premeditation.

  A confession only went so far.

  At this stage, pretrial, it was vitally important to cover every base, and Maggie had provided detailed statements to that effect, describing the course of events that culminated in the face-off at the lake and the subsequent execution of Thomas J. Cullen. She’d sat through two back-to-back interviews of her own: Smits accompanying her on a step-by-step walk-through of her every movement since Saturday, and the state attorney’s prosecutors combing through her statements to make certain there were no holes for Dana’s public defendant to exploit, allowing Dana to slip through to freedom. Tomorrow, or the next day, Maggie would sit in front of the Professional Standards Section to review her professional conduct within the remit of the office of sheriff, both before and after her being taken off the case. This was just the beginning.

  And Maggie was feeling worse for wear.

  In one respect, being busy had kept her mind at bay, preventing her from overanalyzing every little detail to the nth degree. In and around conversations with Smits and Corrigan, she’d had no time to think about herself and the emotional impact the last few days had had on her. Self-criticism was inevitable, she knew, with sleepless nights to follow, filled with her agonizing over all the ways she might have acted differently to change the outcome.

  The what-ifs that drove Steve mad.

  That was one of his earliest observations about her—that she tended to overly dissect situations after the fact, when nothing could be undone. He called it perceived control.

  Maggie wasn’t big on labels. And besides, there was nothing she could do about how she was made.

  So far, she hadn’t divulged to him the details of her close encounter with death, not sure if she was ready for his kind of professional assessment just yet. She knew she’d get it even without asking for it. In his own soft-voiced way, he’d tell her all the things she already knew. Package them up in neat little parcels with pink bows. Not just about the guilt she carried—that barb in her brain—but also the responsibility she felt over Dana’s murderous actions. He’d prescribe coping mechanisms to offset the trauma, and she’d most likely reject them. He’d tell her he had every right to express concern for her. And she’d tell him that she could live without her mistakes being highlighted and lectured on.

  They’d argue, but they wouldn’t fall out.

  Steve would have his say, and she would do what she did best—throwing herself into her work.

  Officially still removed from the case, Maggie had had to be satisfied with watching from the observation room while Loomis and one of their Homicide Squad colleagues, Detective Clayton Young, conducted the interview with Dana.

  It had been a tough watch.

  Maggie had thought Dana might clam up, say nothing, saving her verbal retribution for the courtroom, where she could express her twenty-year-old hurt to twelve strangers and the rest of the world. But to Maggie’s surprise, Dana had held nothing back, answe
ring Loomis’s questions concisely and without leaving anything out; all the while her icy gaze had never moved an inch from Maggie.

  Of course, Dana had had no way of knowing that Maggie was watching from the darkened observation room; she couldn’t see Maggie standing with Smits behind the one-way mirror. Nevertheless, it hadn’t stopped her from staring directly at her, and it hadn’t stopped Maggie’s skin from crawling.

  Over the course of two hours, Dana had told Loomis everything.

  Not once did she ask for a lawyer, even though one had been on standby. And neither did she stop talking the whole interview. It was as though the floodgates had opened and all the dark waters had come gushing out.

  Maggie had listened to it all, wishing she could go back in time and change the past so that none of this ever would have happened.

  But such thinking was folly, she knew.

  Dana’s plan to kill Kristen Falchuck, fake her own death, and then frame her husband for the murder had been a recent manifestation.

  Contrary to Maggie’s fears, Dana hadn’t dwelled on their bullying. Thanks to WITSEC, her relocation to Arizona had given her an opportunity to start anew, to shed her old skin and emerge as Dana Burnside. Twenty years ago, she’d put their stupid teenage bullying behind her and forged ahead.

  Infidelity, of all things, had triggered the recent reprisals.

  Cullen’s cheating had come to light during one of their heated arguments, and Dana had vowed to defend her nest to the death.

  Apparently, in the summertime, Cullen had undertaken a small landscaping job for Kristen’s landlord—at the mobile home adjacent to hers—and Cullen had met Kristen.

  A chance meeting with devastating penalties.

  Everything was innocent and aboveboard at first. But at some point, Cullen had shown Kristen photos of Dana on his phone, and that’s when Kristen had realized his wife’s true identity. Instead of backing off, Kristen had come on to Cullen—at least, according to him—increasingly over the days he was on site, until they’d ended up sleeping together during one of Dana’s weekend walkouts.