Caged (36 page)

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Authors: Hilary Norman

BOOK: Caged
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More nervy now, Sam thought, than she had been outside the cage, and the soft green of her eyes looked opaque now.
‘Thank you.’ Grace covered her breasts with the towel, tucked it beneath her armpits like a bath towel, told herself not to think what it might have wiped up before, maybe blood or . . .
Stop.
‘Thank you,’ Sam said too.
‘What happened to your father?’ Grace asked Simone. ‘If you don’t mind talking about him.’
‘He died.’
Sam wanted to know how, wondered if the pair had maybe murdered the bastard, knew better than to ask, though clearly they had not done the obvious, had not made Regan’s parents their first ‘couple’.
‘Is that when your mother came down to Miami?’ Grace asked.
‘Oh yes,’ Simone said. ‘When she needed looking after.’
‘And you’ve done that for her,’ Grace said, keeping her tone neutral.
‘More than the bitch deserved,’ Dooley said.
‘What happened to her?’ Grace asked.
‘She has vascular dementia,’ Simone said.
Grace waited a moment.
‘I’d like,’ she said, carefully, ‘to hear about your dreams.’
Still holding on to the small truce, Sam realized, then saw Regan glance at Dooley, clearly deferring to him now.
‘Simone’s dreams,’ Dooley said, ‘were all about punishing her parents.’
‘And did you,’ Sam asked Simone, ‘punish them?’
Better for the question to come from him, safer for Grace, he hoped.
Simone said nothing, leaned back against the outer bars of the cage.
‘She never had the chance,’ Dooley answered for her. ‘The old man was dead and then Celine got sick, so Simone had to
adapt
.’
‘There were so many perfect couples,’ Simone said. ‘I hated them all.’
‘The trouble was,’ Dooley took over again, ‘she hated herself too for feeling that way, felt she had to be bad to want to harm them, which was why she’d been self-harming instead.’
Classic stuff, Sam thought, maybe just a little too textbook, and he risked a glance at Grace and felt that she
was
buying it, and if it was good enough for her . . .
Besides, it was all they had.
‘And you helped her move on?’ Grace asked Dooley.
‘Matt made me see that making my dreams happen for
real
was the only way I was ever going to break free,’ Simone said.
‘And was he right?’ Grace asked. ‘Has it helped you?’
‘Matt helped me see it was what I was meant to do.’ Simone denied her a direct answer. ‘He told me I wasn’t a bad person at all, because he hated those kinds of people too, hated their self-righteousness, their vanity.’
Sociopaths, in other words, Sam thought. A pair of goddamned sociopaths stumbling across one another, feeding off each other. Regan in part a victim, first of her parents, then of Dooley’s delight in finding someone he could control, someone so needy, and Sam had come upon those types before, had read volumes about them.
And the game that these two had been playing must have been challenging, and maybe Dooley thrived on that, too, maybe that was why they’d conducted their terror campaign in such a bizarre way – and game-playing had formed a basic part of the MO of so many serial killers.
‘I get the display choices now,’ Sam said.
‘Bully for you,’ Dooley said.
‘Very smart,’ Sam said. ‘The restaurant stuff laid down with the false art trail.’
‘We liked it,’ Simone said.
‘But
why
the display?’ Grace asked.
‘Because there’s no point making any kind of protest,’ Dooley said, ‘unless people are going to know about it. No point killing people and just digging a hole.’ He smiled at Grace. ‘No point unless someone
gets
it, right?’
‘And the glue?’ Sam asked, and he thought he knew the answer, but the longer they were prepared to go on talking, the better.
‘Together forever,’ Simone answered.
‘Like the song,’ Dooley said.
‘Those touchy-feely, happy, smug couples. We talked about it, and we figured it ought to be just the way they’d like to end their days.’
Grace felt sick again.
She wondered just how they would be joined together if no one came in time.
Skin, presumably. Brown to white.
And maybe Simone wasn’t altogether wrong in what she had just said, because she would rather be holding Sam’s hand forever than live without him.
Except what about Joshua?
She swallowed down the agony, mustered a smile for Sam, then realized it might be held against them.
Careful.
ONE HUNDRED AND SEVENTEEN
C
eline Regan was in no condition to be interviewed.
Norman Gardner, the manager of the home, had told Alvarez as much right away, but had, after some persuasion, allowed Beth Riley to see for herself.
She came downstairs after less than ten minutes.
‘Hopeless,’ she said.
Gardner had also handed over the two contact phone numbers that Simone Regan had entrusted to them. One the number of the Opera Café. The other her cell phone.
No reply on that, nor voicemail, and pinpointing current locations of cells was, in reality, nowhere near as miraculously rapid as it appeared to be in movies. All kinds of hoops to be jumped through first, court orders to allow cell trackers being even slower to obtain than search warrants.
Besides which, no one was betting on Simone using that phone right now.
Cathy, silent until now, asked the next question before Alvarez or Riley.
‘Where did Mrs Regan live before she came here?’
‘I don’t have that information to hand,’ Norman Gardner told her, then turned to Alvarez. ‘And even if I did, it would be a huge breach of confidentiality for me to give it to you.’
‘What about her doctor?’ Riley asked. ‘He might have it.’
‘Not necessarily,’ Gardner said, ‘since the lady’s been here a long time.’ He paused. ‘And he’ll very likely have the same issues.’
‘We’ll try him anyway,’ Alvarez said.
‘Quickly,’ Cathy said. ‘Please.’
‘I’ll get you the number,’ Gardner said.
ONE HUNDRED AND EIGHTEEN
C
oming to the end of question time, Sam suspected.
Simone was still leaning against the bars, but Dooley had started moving around just inside the cage. No perceptible impatience in him yet, but Sam knew there had to be a limit on how much
conversation
these two would permit.
He doubted if the Eastermans or the others had been granted these ‘privileges’ before dying, and he only hoped it had been quick for them, had a better understanding than before of the terror they must have endured.
‘What about the couples you chose?’ he asked.
‘Customers,’ Simone answered simply.
‘So what, just happy people who came in to the café?’ It was hard for Grace not to load that question with the loathing she felt, almost impossible to grasp such random cruelty.
‘That’s about it,’ Dooley said. ‘I let Simone do the choosing.’
Jess Kowalski came into Sam’s mind, what Martinez had said about her liking the fact that she had control over her rats.
This was another control thing, all the way down the chain. Dooley in charge of Simone, giving her his blessing, letting her choose their prey, then the pair of them exerting ultimate power over the victims.
Us now.
‘It had to be customers who came when Cathy wasn’t working,’ Sam said, knowing that had to be true since otherwise she’d have seen their photographs in the media and been one of the first to put it together.
Putting herself in even greater danger than she had already, unwittingly, been in.
‘Except in our case,’ Grace said.
Dooley nodded. ‘Different in your case.’
‘Not so different,’ Simone said. ‘We heard more from Cathy about Grace and Sam, the greatest couple in the world, than we ever heard about any of the others.’
‘And I was working the case,’ Sam said.
‘Sure,’ Dooley said. ‘Which made you the most likely person to track us down, given enough time.’ He shrugged. ‘Not that you were doing so great.’
‘But Matt said it made you the obvious final choice for Miami,’ Simone said.
‘Are you planning to move on?’ Sam asked.
‘Don’t suppose we’ll have much choice,’ Dooley said. ‘After you guys.’
ONE HUNDRED AND NINETEEN
C
eline Regan’s personal physician, Dr Richard Massey, was in bed with the flu, according to his housekeeper, Maria Rodriguez, who was refusing to wake him because she said he needed his rest.
Alvarez wasted no more time, called Tom Kennedy, who got right on the phone to Rodriguez.
‘Either you get Dr Massey on the line right now, ma’am,’ the Captain told her, ‘or we’ll hit the doc
and
you with a subpoena, and what that means, in case you don’t understand me, is if you don’t do as you’re told you could go to jail.’ He paused. ‘
Prisión
.
La cárcel.
’
‘For me?’ Maria Rodriguez was aghast.
‘Get the doctor
now
, ma’am.’
Less than three minutes later, the physician was on the phone, apologetic and plainly pissed with his housekeeper for making the police wait.
‘I know I have that address on file,’ Massey told Kennedy, ‘though Mrs Regan’s been at the Burridge for a while, so her house could have been sold or rented.’ He hesitated. ‘I remember she did go walkabout though a few months back, and I don’t know where she went to hole up.’
‘Would she still have remembered back then where she’d lived before?’ Kennedy asked.
‘She might have,’ Massey said.
‘Did she come back of her own accord?’
‘Her daughter brought her back. I’m afraid Mrs Regan was never the same again after that. I had to come in to see her several times during that period to calm her down, and she was extremely confused.’
‘In what sense?’ Kennedy asked.
‘She seemed obsessed about being locked in a cage,’ Massey said. ‘She said her daughter kept her locked up when she was bad, which we knew was the dementia talking, because Simone was highly thought of at the Burridge.’
‘We need that address,’ Tom Kennedy said.
‘It’s in my office,’ the doctor said. ‘I’d need to—’
‘We need that
now
, please,’ Kennedy told him. ‘The lives of two fine people are depending on you, Dr Massey.’
Not the Captain for nothing.
ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY
G
race was shivering again.
She hated herself for it, but it was a reaction she could do nothing about, and she needed to pee, too, but for now she thought she’d die before she’d do that in front of them.
And maybe she would.
At least Joshua would still have their wonderful family, and he was young enough to grow up scarcely aware of missing them.
But not Cathy.
Like Sam, Grace could not bear to think about what this would do to her.
There had been no peace in that young woman’s life, no real peace for any length of time since childhood, and thinking about her, Grace knew that she would, given the chance, claw these people’s eyes out with her bare hands if it helped.
‘My wife’s still cold,’ Sam said.
‘I’m sorry about that,’ Dooley said.
His right hand moved to his back pocket.
Drew out a medium-sized knife sheathed in leather.
Not a goddamned sword or athamé, Sam registered, though he couldn’t see the blade – didn’t
want
to see it – but the cop in him was remembering the time-wasting diversion that Beatty and Moore and their sick witches crap had lured him and Riley into.
Though it wasn’t their fault he hadn’t seen what had been under his nose all the time.
His
fault, as a detective and as a father and husband, for taking these bastards at face value, and if anyone ought to have known better . . .
He stared at the sheathed knife, thought of the other victims and their wounds. Looked at Grace and knew that he could not bear it, not for her.
‘For the love of God,’ he said to Dooley.
‘God doesn’t love us,’ Simone said.
‘Where do you plan to leave us?’ Grace’s voice was husky, her mouth and throat dry. ‘You must have worked it out.’
‘Of course,’ Dooley said.
‘I’m trying to think what’s left,’ Sam said. ‘I don’t think they make cooking pots our size, even as exhibits, though maybe you could have found a couple of old movie props.’
‘Much simpler,’ Dooley said. ‘Our solution.’
‘And not too far away,’ Simone added.
Running out of time.
‘I have a couple more questions,’ Sam said. ‘I mean, what difference to you if this is almost finished?’
‘Try us,’ Dooley said.
‘How did you work it with the second couple? I get that you delivered dinner to Duprez’s apartment, but then what?’
‘Good question.’ Dooley seemed satisfied. ‘I like that you haven’t worked it all out. Means we did a good job.’ He shrugged. ‘We’d expected Price to stay the night, of course, but we had a back-up plan in case she left before she fell asleep.’
‘I followed her home in the van.’ Simone was beginning to show signs of impatience, a wish to be done with them. ‘It wasn’t hard because she was out on her feet, so I took her in her garage, got her inside the house and waited.’
‘And you waited for Duprez to fall asleep . . .’ Sam looked at Dooley. ‘Or maybe you told him you’d come back to collect your dishes and he let you in.’
‘He sure did, and I told him to take it easy while I cleaned up, and he offered me a tip and told me I was a nice guy, even apologized for falling asleep.’
‘And when you’d done?’ Sam was feeding the other man’s vanity now – anything for more time, and besides, the cop in him still wanted the facts. ‘You got him down to the garage, into his car.’

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