Beautiful Triad (23 page)

Did the two of them decide to go for a middle of the night boat ride? That didn’t make much sense to him because while under different circumstances he supposed it could be construed as romantic, the mood of the evening was somber at best. He couldn’t see them wanting to cruise the dark lake, especially since they were all planning to leave in the morning.

Awareness prickled along his skin like a physical touch.

Something was wrong. Decisively, he tossed aside the sheet and grabbed his shorts, yanking them on. He never distrusted his instincts.

Halfway down the stairs, he felt the breeze from the wide open door to the deck, the screen not even closed. Lights on, milk jug on the counter…

“Jesus Christ!” The words exploded and the sensation in his stomach resembled being sucker-punched as he realized Rob was sprawled in a pool of blood, half-hidden by one of the leather chairs.

He didn’t remember going down the rest of the stairs, but he must have because a second later he was kneeling by his best friend. Every training class he’d ever had kicked in because he found a thready pulse to his relief and sprinted into the kitchen to yank several clean towels from the drawer to help staunch the bleeding. Rob was semi-conscious, he found when he got back, his lashes fluttering.

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Beautiful Triad

169

“Heaton.” He croaked the name on a gurgle of blood, and then chillingly added another, barely audible. “Lauren.”

Not too far away, a boat engine started.

Heaton had abducted Lauren and shot Rob. Drew didn’t need to be FBI to figure that one out, but he was furious that if they suspected the damned guy, why the fucking hell hadn’t they arrested the crazy son of a bitch…

Luckily, from habit, he’d picked up his cell phone and shoved it in his pocket. He took it out and punched 911—something he’d hoped to never have to do in his life—and told emergency services in a staccato voice what was going on. For the life of him, he couldn’t remember the address of the house and Rob was in no shape to recall it, either, so he gave then Rob’s uncle’s name, plus pointed out Heaton lived next door.

Two seconds later, he called back. “Fuck the ambulance,” he said tersely, so torn over what to do next he felt like being physically sick.

Lauren was out there with someone who might kill her—but Rob was dying right in front of him. The chilling practicality was he didn’t know if he could help her, but he did know he could try and help Rob.

“These roads are hard to navigate back here, especially the dark. They aren’t going to get here fast enough. Tell me the nearest location where the ambulance can meet me and I’ll bring him there. I’m not a doctor but I think he has a collapsed lung. He can’t wait.”

“Sir, if you move him—”

“He can’t wait!”

In the end, after another life-threatening minute of arguing, she suggested, of all places, the rest stop where Karen’s car had been found, only about twenty miles away. Drew agreed and hung up, grabbed his car keys from the counter, and then somehow managed to hoist someone about his own weight over his shoulder. Staggering outside, he navigated the steps with the help of the railing and wrestled with the seat on the passenger side, lowering it so he could deposit Rob’s now completely limp body on the seat.

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170

Kate Watterson

His face was wet Drew realized, wiping at his cheeks with bloodstained hands that shook as he started the car and fishtailed dangerously on the gravel when he backed up. He hadn’t even realized he was crying.

Whoa, Fletcher, calm down. An accident now
…

Don’t
think about Lauren, God damn it. You can’t afford to think
about it
.

Panic was the enemy. Drew inhaled deeply, let out the breath, and took the driveway to county highway at a speed that wasn’t precisely safe but was about half of how fast he wanted to go.

Needed to go.

“Hold on, buddy,” he said, not sure if he was talking to Rob or himself. The headlights caught the line of trees and he barely missed taking out the mailbox as he gained the highway in a squeal of tires.

* * * *

He’d made two grave errors.

The first was underestimating Dr. Benjamin Heaton’s obsession.

It wasn’t like he didn’t realize the correlation between the interviews and subsequent disappearances of the subjects; it was what clued him into Heaton in the first place—but what Ken Marzetti had learned about psychology he’d discovered the hard way, by working cases involving nutbags.

In this case, a very rich, very intellectual, nutbag who apparently had decided to run as the net closed in.

That wasn’t really the problem. The FBI had anticipated he might try to run. His passport was currently flagged at every international airport in the country. His financial holdings also were monitored, his credit cards watched for every charge…in short, Heaton was screwed if he wanted to take the low road and escape before an indictment could be brought against him.

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171

What Ken hadn’t figured on was Lauren Hanes’ kidnapping. What kind of a maniac did something like that two hours after an FBI agent after his ass told him he was being investigated? Since they’d never been able to pin anything on him before, Ken had figured Heaton would be just as cocky about this investigation.

“He’s out of control,” the profiler on the other end of the line told him in a regretful voice. “Before, he’d carefully killed two women…or maybe even more—we might never know if there are other victims—a year apart, hidden the bodies, and moved on. But now, we have two killings in just a few weeks and another abduction.

Most of these perpetrators in some way want the fight, the challenge of how they might get caught. You told him something that made him believe he
was
caught. I’m going to guess you’ll be able to tie his graduate student into all of this.”

It was hard not to be defensive because Ken felt guilty. “I wanted him to stay
away
from Lauren Hanes until I could pin something on him.”

“I understand, but the trouble is, you and he don’t think alike.

Andrew Fletcher is probably lucky Heaton didn’t take the time to go up and shoot him in his sleep.”

Unfortunately, Ken would bet Drew Fletcher wasn’t feeling all that lucky right now. Last he’d heard, Rob Hanson was in surgery and unfortunately, Lauren Hanes was with Heaton unless he’d killed her already.

Best friend with a less than fifty-fifty chance of making it and girlfriend with a serial murderer. Nope, not much luck there except of the bad kind.

“We’d asked for a warrant and were just waiting to hear back. But still, unless I can get my hands on something more, we don’t have any real evidence except he knew all the victims. For that matter, other than being next door during her brief visit, he never met Karen McKenzie.”

“Agent Marzetti, you don’t have to explain to me.”

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Kate Watterson

Why
was
he explaining? Oh yeah, because he felt like shit the way all this had gone down. At least the sun would be up in an hour or two. “What will he do next?” he asked reluctantly, sitting in his rental car in the dark, the lake silent and calm. “Give it your best shot.”

“Kill Lauren Hanes. He has to complete the pattern. Then he might try to disappear, but keep in mind he chose to forfeit his status, job, possessions, all of it, when he shot her friend and kidnapped her.

This part of it is important to him. So important he couldn’t imagine not following through with it. When the threat of being arrested loomed, he had to act right away. You need to find her and fast. Good luck, Agent Marzetti.”

Not the answer he wanted. “Thank you.”

He flipped the phone shut and stared grimly at the windshield. It was still, pitch dark, and the lake was a good several hundred acres with all the surrounding area wooded. In the middle of the night, the best he could do was state police and sheriff’s deputies, and Heaton was a criminal, but he was not stupid.

What did the sadistic bastard have in mind?

* * * *

Her hands were taped uncomfortably together behind her back, but she was so numb from head to toe she didn’t even care.

At some point, shouldn’t self-preservation kick in? A part of her knew abstractly she was afraid, but the image of Rob bleeding all over the floor of the cabin kept everything else at bay. Lauren was still stuck in that moment when he collapsed on the floor.

It was dark in the cove where Heaton guided the boat, his face a pale gleam as he killed the motor and pressed a button to release the anchor. The splash sounded loud. “I suppose,” he said in an unemotional voice, “in retrospect killing Regina was a mistake, but I still really don’t regret it. The human psyche is interesting, isn’t it?

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173

That single act is going to ruin me, end my life, and I’m not sorry. I wonder why.”

Trees, black shadows, the creak of the frogs, the ripple of the water around the hull…

The murderer sitting across from her. Lauren just stared at him in disbelief, because never in her life did she anticipate anyone could so matter-of-factly admit to murder.

Please, God, let me wake up now from this terrifying dream
.

“I find sociopathic tendencies fascinating, but that would be entirely another book.” He turned his head and looked over the lake briefly, and then his attention was once again riveted on her face.

“What do you think, Lauren?”

Stay calm. Maybe Rob will be okay, maybe this maniac will let me
go
.

No. Who was she kidding? Heaton just confessed to murder. He wasn’t going to let her go.

The icy feeling of separation seemed to snap, as if she suddenly woke from a deep sleep. This was now, here, immediate, and if she didn’t do something, he would kill her as casually as he’d shot Rob.

Get a grip
.

“I think,” she said in a voice that only cracked a little, “that anyone who deliberately takes a life crosses a line that separates him from the rest of us forever. The term human no longer applies.

Animal is more accurate.”

He chuckled in the early morning darkness. “This is a favorite debate I’ve had with my students. What about provocation?”

Was this really happening? Did he really want an intellectual discussion about ethics
now
?

“Self-defense is different,” she said. And she meant it. If she could get her hands free and a weapon…

But she couldn’t. The minute she’d climbed in the boat he’d forced her face down over the seat with the gun to her head and used Ebook piracy is stealing. It is a federal offense.

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Kate Watterson

electrical tape to secure her wrists. Her fingers had lost all sensation some time ago.

“It’s still taking a life,” he argued, leaning casually back in the seat, his arms crossed over his chest. It was so shrouded in the sheltered area she could really barely see, but it looked like he was wearing his usual expensive slacks and tailored shirt, the manner of dress incongruous to the situation except the clothing was dark. “Isn’t killing someone killing someone, no matter the circumstances? A life extinguished by your hand. Explain to me the difference.”

“I’m not one of your students.” She did her best to look stoic when her pulse was racing along at five hundred miles an hour.

Maybe, if she could keep him talking, help would arrive, but she was leagues beyond some pointless debate with a lunatic. Surely, since the FBI had an obvious interest in Heaton, when Drew woke in the morning and found Rob…

Rob. Despair tightened her throat.

“What would you do, if your hands were free and you had this gun?” He causally lifted the weapon so it gleamed in the faint illumination. “Shoot me?”

Yes, she would. “Free me, give me the gun, and find out.”

A low laugh rang out. “Sorry. The question was purely hypothetical, Miss Hanes.”

“Is that what you did to your wife? To Karen?”

“Regina, I strangled.” His tone was the same as if he’d been placing an order at the drive-through in a fast food restaurant. “It was my pleasure. Her body is here, right in this very part of the lake. The blonde—Karen McKenzie they tell is her name—I knocked her unconscious first and then took her out to this scenic spot I know, and well…the stream did the rest.”

Lauren could barely speak. She felt sick, feverish, shivering in what an analytical part of her brain informed her was probably shock.

“Why are you doing this?”

“Because now your story belongs to me.”

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Beautiful Triad

175

Her confusion wasn’t an act.

“When you die, you can’t tell it to anyone else,” he explained patiently, as if she was a child. “Now then…I’ve wandered off course.

Tell me, what happened? Or more aptly, how did it happen that someone like you, normally conservative as far as I can tell, decided to take two lovers. Fletcher and Hanson don’t seem like the sharing types, either, but the dynamic of the relationship seems—”

“No,” she interrupted, shaking, an infuriating tear running down her face. She whispered, “I’m not going to tell you anything.”

“You can’t swim for long, Lauren, with your hands incapacitated.

And I always put them in the water.”