Chosen to Die (31 page)

“You’ve never seen this,” Chilcoate reminded him, as he motioned to his private area. “MacGregor said you were cool and I trust him.”

“I was never here.”

Chilcoate nodded curtly.

“There’s not a lot,” Chilcoate admitted, “but I think it’s important. A writer at the
Mountain Reporter
received some kind of communication from the killer; Manny Douglas has already written a story and scanned copies of the letters, then sent everything to himself via e-mail.”

“You hacked into the newspaper’s computer?”

Chilcoate shook his head. “No questions.”

“Fine.”

“And you asked about Brady Long and his sister. I found out she left Seattle on a plane bound for San Francisco.”

“No. She’s in an institution.”

“Not anymore.”

“But she’s mute. Hasn’t said a word in fifteen years. How would she—?”

Chilcoate held up both hands. “I’m just tellin’ ya. I’ve got her itinerary. She bought a ticket. Headed to the city.”

“How? What does that mean?”

“You tell me.” Chilcoate gazed at him steadily.

“You think she’s a part of this?” Santana asked incredulously. There was a surreal quality to the equipment in the windowless basement room, lights glowing, all backdropped by Jimi’s guitar licks.

“Don’t know.” Chilcoate wagged his head back and forth. “But it’s interesting. I’m going to check into her stay at Mountain View. So far, it doesn’t seem that she ever left before.”

“But she may have had visitors?”

“And phone calls.” He reached to his desk and pulled some papers from a printer. “Here’s what I got from the newspaper files.” He handed the sheaf to Santana. “These don’t leave the premises, so I hope you’re good at memorization.”

Santana grunted, already lost in the article. The story, with a byline crediting Manny Douglas, was all about how Star-Crossed had contacted Douglas by sending him letters that were supposedly duplicates of those found by the police. According to Douglas’s article, Star-Crossed, using the initials of the women he killed, was sending a message. The last one being:

BEWAR THE SCION’H

Santana looked at the last note and in his mind he inserted Regan Pescoli’s initials into the unfinished line. “Beware the scorpion’s wrath,” he whispered faintly, feeling the blood rush from his head as he repeated Ivor Hicks’s weird phrase. He stared at the letters and the entire plot clicked together in his mind. Then he crushed the damned pages in his fist.

“Hey! What are you doing?”

“I heard that phrase just today.” His voice was flat. Dead.

“From who?” Chilcoate demanded.

“The father of the killer.” In that instant, Santana would stake his life on one clear fact:

Billy Hicks was the Star-Crossed Killer.

Alvarez still wasn’t at her desk, but Grayson knew she had come in earlier.

A dozen unanswered questions pounding through his head, he tried the task room where the temperature, like the rest of the department, was hovering high in the stratosphere. Zoller had been replaced by Scott Earhardt, another junior detective, who was now manning the desk. A window had been cracked, yet Earhardt was sweating. The big table was still littered with gum wrappers and empty cups from the earlier meeting, but so far, the searches had turned up empty.

Standing near the far wall, Alvarez was studying the map. She caught a glimpse of Grayson and her face muscles tightened. “Oh, God,” she whispered, paling slightly. “They found someone? O’Leary? Pescoli?”

“No.” He shook his head. “But I did get a call from Chandler. Hubert Long died this morning and Padgett flew the coop,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

He told her about Padgett leaving Mountain View Hospital and buying an airline ticket to San Francisco.

“I just spoke with the doctor today. She caught me when I was at the Lazy L, interviewing Clementine and Ross,” Alvarez protested.

“She left sometime after she heard about Brady’s death.”

“Left…” Alvarez sniffed and shook her head. “I don’t get it. You think she was faking her mental illness?”

“Seems unlikely.”

“More like unbelievable.”

“I know.” He agreed. Had the same thoughts himself. “Fifteen years is a helluva long time.”

“You don’t think she’s—involved—in her brother’s homicide, do you?”

“How could she be?” Grayson asked, and they stared at each other.

“Well, then…why wait? If she knew a killer, why not hire him when she was first institutionalized?”

“Maybe she didn’t know anyone then. Maybe she met him there and he ended up here…Hell, I don’t know.” He mopped the sweat from his forehead. “Jesus H. Christ, it’s an oven in here.” He looked at the map. “Forget Padgett for now. What’ve you got?”

“Something’s been bothering me…well, not just one thing. Take a look at the map.” She pointed to each of the spots where vehicles or bodies had been located. “We’ve never found a correlation between the killing grounds and the spots where he took the women and left them. But every spot on the map is within a ten-mile radius of Cougar Basin and Mesa Rock, both of which are pretty much in the middle of all the dumping grounds.”

He was nodding. This wasn’t a news flash. “We’ve scoured that area.”

“Yeah, maybe.”

“What are you getting at?”

“If you start here at Horsebrier Ridge, where we located Pescoli’s Jeep,” she said, pointing to a dot marked on the map and the pushpin stuck into it, “and head due north, you cross Mesa Rock, where good old Ivor claimed the Reptilians found him. Go on through and you end up at Wildfire Canyon, where Wendy Ito’s body was discovered. And her Prius was located here.” She moved her finger over the map to the spot where another pin was located. “Over here we have Nina Salvadore.” Alvarez pointed to the area where Salvadore’s body had been discovered.

Sweating, feeling like she was going over old ground, Grayson said, “So it’s all near Mesa Rock where Ivor claimed the damned aliens took him. You trying to link them to Ivor Hick’s ‘abduction’?” He aimed for levity but heard the impatience in his own voice. “You don’t think Ivor’s involved. The man is generally drunk as a skunk. Incapable. Couldn’t pull off the planning.”

“I don’t think it’s Ivor,” Alvarez assured him. “He is always drunk. We’ve taken him in so often he refuses to let us call his son to pick him up. But he isn’t just an old man who hallucinates. Now he’s the only person to have been on the scene where two of the bodies, Wendy Ito’s and Brady Long’s, were discovered.”

“Nate Santana found Long.”

“But Ivor was there,” she said, pointing again to the map. “Mesa Rock abuts the Long property, right?”

Grayson gazed harder at the map and said slowly, “Yeah. There was a time when Hubert Sr., Brady’s grandfather, tried to buy more land in the area. Mesa Rock is on government land, but there’s an old mine of some sort there. Not copper, gold, I think, or silver, but the owner wouldn’t sell.”

“Who’s the owner?”

“I’m not sure any longer.” Grayson’s eyes narrowed. “I think it was handed down through the Kress family. That’s what it was called a hundred and fifty years ago or so. Silver. The Kress Silver Mine.” He met her gaze. “Ivor Hicks was married to Lila Kress.”

“And still lives up on the property,” she said.

“What are you thinking?”

“What about Ivor’s son?” she asked.

Billy Hicks?

“No…” Grayson slowly wagged his head from side to side.

“Doesn’t Billy own a place nearby, on the same tract of land? Didn’t he know Padgett and Brady Long? Doesn’t he work his own hours and volunteer at the Fire Hall? Maybe he used their computer to access ours. We’re all tied in together. If he was smart enough, he might have been able to follow our investigation from the beginning.”

“Billy Hicks isn’t some stranger,” Grayson argued. “He’s lived here all his life!” But it was making a horrifying kind of sense, and the light in Selena’s dark eyes, the tightness pulling at the corners of her lips, told him she already believed Billy Hicks was the killer.

“Just because a father isn’t the brightest bulb in the strand doesn’t mean that the son isn’t smart.”

“He’s smart all right. I saw it on his application when he wanted a job.” He rubbed a hand over his jaw.

“And you turned him down?”

“We weren’t hiring. There was a freeze. Besides, Hicks had gotten into a couple of fights…God almighty…”

“We’ve got to pick him up,” she said urgently.

“We’ll go to his cabin. Interview him. Get evidence,” Grayson warned. “’Cause if you’re wrong…”

“I’m not! He’s got Regan.”

“Shit,” Grayson muttered, and they headed toward the door as one. His cell phone rang before he’d taken three steps. Glancing down, he said, “It’s Kayan,” then clicked on. “Grayson.”

“Looks like we’ve got ourselves another one, Sheriff,” Kyan Rule said without much emotion.

“Another one?” He and Alvarez exchanged tense glances. “Where?”

“In North Star Gulch. Tied to a tree. According to dispatch, a couple of kids out sledding in this mess found her.”

“You make an ID?”

“No, sir, but it’s not Pescoli, if that’s what you’re asking.”

He was. He hadn’t known it, but a guilty sense of relief slid through him. “Give me the exact location,” Grayson commanded. “We’re on our way.”

“It’s not…” Alvarez started.

“No. Not Pescoli.”

Not yet.

Frantic, his heart pounding, Santana left Chilcoate and ran to his truck. He punched out the numbers of Alvarez’s cell phone and started the engine. “Come on, come on,” he muttered, throwing his truck into reverse, backing up, then jamming the gears into drive and hitting the gas.

His call was sent straight to voicemail.

“Shit!” He left a quick message: “This is Nate Santana. Call me! I think the killer is up at the Kress Silver Mine. I think that’s where he’s got Regan!” Driving like a madman down the long, twisting road to Chilcoate’s house, he turned north.

Ivor Hicks, that old nutcase, had spilled the beans. But he wasn’t the culprit, he wasn’t the one who had to fear the damned “scorpion’s wrath.” It was his son.

Hard to believe.

Billy Hicks was the killer?

It had to be! Had to!

“Damn, damn…damn,” Santana said as the snow and gravel crunched beneath his tires as he wound through the thickets of drooping fir and stark, skeletal birch trees.

In his mind, over the ever-increasing frantic feeling of panic for Regan, he tried to roll back the years to when they were all kids—he and Billy, Padgett and Brady.

He flipped on the wipers and damned the falling snow, though patches of blue hinted that the storm was nearly over.

It had been true that Billy Hicks had felt proprietary toward Padgett Long, back in the day, like a number of others, as well. Santana had witnessed that need to possess her himself. All the horny high school boys had been hanging around her back then. She was beautiful, smart, and different from the girls they went to school with. Rich, sophisticated, and slightly naughty, Padgett only came around in the summer or at Christmas break.

“Fresh meat,” one of the kids, Gerald Cartwright, had said, ribbing Billy once. “And, hell, in my book, she’s USDA prime!”

Billy had knocked Cartwright flat. He’d ended up in the emergency room with a broken nose.

At the time, Santana had thought Cartwright had gotten off lucky. As a kid, Billy’s temper had gotten the better of him, but as an adult, he’d seemed to keep it under control.

Santana pushed his truck onto the county road. Rising in the distance was Mesa Rock, a flat-topped mountain butting up to the abandoned Kress Silver Mine and Hubert Long’s Lazy L, where Santana worked.

“Right under your goddamned nose,” he said, cutting a glance at his reflection in the rearview mirror. His jaw was set, his eyes dark as obsidian, the corners of his mouth pinched in disgust. If he’d pieced this together earlier, if he’d looked in the right places, Regan might never have been abducted.

He silently cursed himself as the road began a series of sharp switchbacks. Traffic was light; he hardly saw another vehicle. Good.

Shifting down, he thought of Brady Long. What a prick. He and Billy had been acquaintances, nothing more. But that had been a lifetime ago. What had set Billy off now?

Who the hell knew?

He had to call the police. Alvarez was out, so, with one hand, he punched in 9-1-1.

Before the second ring, the phone was picked up by a female operator. “Nine-one-one dispatch. What is the nature of your emergency?”

“This is Nate Santana. I’m looking for Detective Alvarez or anyone on the task force! Now.”

“Sir, is there an emergency?”

“Hell, yes, there’s an emergency. I know who the damned Star-Crossed Killer is and where he’s located.”

“Is anyone injured?”

“Five people have been killed already!”

“Sir—”

“Just get a message to Detective Selena Alvarez or Sheriff Dan Grayson of the Pinewood County Sheriff’s Department! Tell them that I’m on my way to the Kress Silver Mine, out on the south side of Mesa Rock. I think that’s where he’s got them. His next victims are in the mine, and Billy Hicks, he’s the damned Star-Crossed Killer!”

“If you’ll stay on the line—”

Through the windshield he spied a minivan coming from the opposite direction and seeming out of control. The running lights were on dim, but they were heading right toward him. Damn!

He dropped the phone on the passenger seat.

The minivan’s tires were gripping, trying and failing to gain traction, as the vehicle slid across a patch of ice.

“Shit.”

Running lights bore down on him.

With both hands, Nate eased his truck toward the shoulder, keeping his speed steady.

“Don’t do it,” he warned. “Lady, don’t hit me!”

The driver was worried, a woman with a van filled with kids. The nose of the van crossed the center line, if it could have been seen, her wheels bumping out of the twin set of ruts left by previous vehicles.

Santana didn’t have time for an accident or anything slowing him down. He pushed his truck to the limit of the road, his right tire precariously close to where he knew there was a ditch. It was filled with snow now, the edge indistinguishable, but he had to get past her car!

He saw the minivan’s fender heading straight for him.

He punched the accelerator, his truck fishtailing as he shot past the van. With an effort, he straightened out the wheels and jumped forward.

With one eye on the rearview mirror, he watched as the van wove across both lanes once, twice, then found its grip and lane. “Get home,” he muttered under his breath and felt a fine sheen of nervous sweat between his shoulder blades. “It’s Christmas Eve!”

The minivan disappeared from view and he picked up the phone again, but he’d lost the call. His wipers scraped against the windshield, rubber screeching on dry glass. He snapped them off and pressed hard on the throttle.

There was still nearly ten miles of twisted, icy road before he reached the silver mine and Regan.

And what then? When you get to the mine, what will you do? How will you find her? There are miles upon miles of tunnels running beneath the acres that constitute the mine. How the hell will you locate Regan before it’s too late?

He knew the answer to that one.

He’d start with Billy’s house.

From there he might get a clue as to where the creep was holding his victims.

He might not tell you.

Wrong, he thought, his mind imagining just what he would do, if he had to.

Billy would spill his guts under the right kind of persuasion.

Usually, Santana was a nonviolent man, a person who could understand animals, commune with them with only touches. But when it came to humans, especially those who exacted their own torture and cruelty, Santana knew just what to do. Compliments of the U.S. Military.

The bitch isn’t giving up.

I run after her, steady, barely breathing hard.

I’ve got her and she knows it.

I watch as she stumbles, then falls down the embankment. Stupid woman. Didn’t she see that potential slide? She falls faster and faster down a ravine as I jog around the lip of the ridge, keeping her in my line of vision, staying on the deer trail that cuts along the edge of the hill.

She cries out and something flies from her hand. A stick…no, the bitch had a knife in her fist! One of mine! Now it’s gone. Lost in the snow.

This is getting worse and worse.

More and more out of control.

Rage thunders through me.

She thinks she can steal from me?

Then cut me with my own blade?

She deserves everything I give her and more! While she tumbles toward the bottom, I find the path that angles deep into this depression and never once let her out of my sight.

She finally slows, stops, and forces herself to her feet, but she’s unsteady. Dizzy. And I’m closing the distance as she staggers away.

For the first time I feel a bit of satisfaction.

She can’t last forever.

And the snow has stopped falling, patches of blue above. I vault over a frozen log, and a weasel, a blur of white with a black-tipped tail, scurries away deeper into the undergrowth. I take that as a good sign.

Yes, in many ways, it’s a perfect day for her to die.

Of course, I would prefer to break her spirit.

To make her depend upon me.

To have her think she’s in love with me.

To want me.

To offer herself up sexually.

I would love to see the hope in her eyes as she imagines me mounting her the way that bastard Santana does.

Oh, I would make her forget him!

Fuck her within an inch of her life.

Leave her sweating and panting and hurting with the feel of me.

Not that I would do it. It’s not part of my plan, and I’ve made no exceptions in that area. Yes, I left two in the forest in one day, Brandy earlier than Elyssa, which was a slight alteration, but I couldn’t leave Brandy alone too long. She had too much fight in her, even as she turned to me.

As for breaking Pescoli’s spirit, it would have taken too long, been too dangerous. This is better, in a way. This chase. I can be satisfied leaving her in the forest now. I have my camera in my jacket, along with a small hammer and the note. I keep a copy of them with me—in my killing jacket—always.

I shift the coil of rope on my shoulder and feel a little zing of anticipation in my blood, a rush of adrenaline that keeps me going, my legs striding easily, my lungs beginning to burn with the cold, dry air.

How will Grayson feel when they finally discover her?

Desperate?

Disheartened?

Furious?

All of the above?

Good!

Bring it on. I can’t wait until the cops find one of their own, naked and dead. Then they’ll get the message: Everyone’s vulnerable. Even you, Grayson, you sanctimonious prick. Now do you think I’m not good enough? Just the pathetic son of an old lunatic and a whore of a woman who left them?

“Beware the scorpion’s wrath,” I say softly and the warning seems to slither through the icy trees and across the frozen streams, making the forest shiver with anticipation.

How often did my bitch of a mother whisper those very words before she hit me across my bare buttocks with a slim belt that stung and bit into my flesh? How many times did she force me to stand waiting, trembling in the corner, without a stitch on? Oh, I quivered and cried, anticipating her attack. And as she struck, she told me about Orion and the sting of the scorpion which had killed the great hunter. Oh, yes, she repeated the story with great relish, savoring it, as much as the beating she inflicted.

Sick, horrid woman!

And I took it. All of her wickedness and wrath while dear old Dad turned a blind eye, then poured himself into a bottle so far and so deep that his sanity fled.

Oh, yes, Mother. You finally delivered your punishment until, at twelve, I turned the tables. I was as tall as you were, and as strong. I refused to strip. Grabbed that belt and swore I would kill her if she ever tried to hit me again!

But then, you had one more trick up your sleeve. One more humiliation in store for me.

You walked out of the house and died less than a week later. Got the last laugh by leaving me alone to live with a drunken old man who believed in aliens. And I got to suffer the pity and scorn of the community.

I’ve heard them talk behind my back all these years. Whisper to each other. Laugh about the old goat and his sorry boy.

My jaw aches now, thinking about you.

I surface as if from a dream. I’ve spent too much time thinking about the past while running after Regan. Caught in my reminiscence, I’ve run on instinct, following her, but not closing the distance.

No more!

Now, I focus.

Run faster.

Feel my heart beating and the coil of rope jostle with my strides. My grip on the hilt of my knife never lessens and I start closing the gap, running faster, dragging cold air between my teeth, my gaze as always, centered upon my prey:

Regan’s athletic backside.

She’s sexy in a very earthy, darkly feminine way.

But now she’s really slowing. Laboring. Those long, athletic legs straining.

This, I realize with a deep sense of self-satisfaction, is going to be easy.

Brandy Hooper was already dead, her skin blue, the gouges in her flesh attesting to her struggle against the rope that bound her to the tall, lone fir tree. A star had been carved into the bark of the tree above her head, and with it a note had been nailed into the trunk. Alvarez read it as a gust of frigid wind caused the page in her hand to flap and moved the stiff, frozen strands of the dead girl’s hair. As predicted, this message was identical to one Manny Douglas had received.

“God save us,” Alvarez said, feeling a quiet rage simmering deep within. Instinctively, for the first time in a long, long while, she made the sign of the cross over her chest, an automatic response from her childhood. As soon as she realized what she’d done, she felt embarrassed, flushing even in the harsh cold.

What the hell was that all about?