Jenn Vakey - Rilynne Evans 07 - Revenge with Murder (10 page)

“You never told me, did you get the results back on that blood test?” she asked.

“Yeah,” Ben nodded.  “There weren’t any obvious signs she had been exposed to a poison prior to her death.  I will have to run some more extensive test, but it doesn’t look like someone was already poisoning her when she was killed.”

“Until we have a chance to talk to everyone, we won’t know who did or didn’t have a reason to kill her,” Rilynne stated.  “What I want to know, though, is why she wasn’t just put into the refrigerator.  I know we’ve talked about it before, but it still doesn’t make any sense to me.  The fact that she was left in a popular diving location is also confusing.  I would think that any local would know to leave a body somewhere else.”

“So maybe the husband did come back and killed her,” Ben said.  “He wouldn’t be as familiar with the island, so he probably wouldn’t know the places to avoid when disposing of a body in the ocean.  Putting her on the outside of the fridge might have been an attempt at ensuring that the sea creatures would make a meal out of the remains.  If she had been in the water any longer, I’m sure that would have been the case.”

Rilynne processed through everything, pausing briefly to watch a pair of monkeys playing tag in a nearby tree, before sitting back up and turning toward Ben.  “So right now it looks like someone who isn’t familiar with the island with enough rage toward the victim to kill her and also to inflict the post-mortem wounds.  I told you what I felt when I saw those; the killer enjoyed them.  This wasn’t just someone who she rubbed wrong and they acted out in a fit of rage.  This was someone who had so much anger that they wanted to keep hurting her after she was dead, and they took pleasure in doing it.”

“Speaking of
hurting, how’s your wrist?” Ben asked, gently taking it into his hands and looking it over.  “Do you need me to get you any ice?”

Rilynne shook her head.  “It’s not that bad.  The only time it really bothers me is if I forget and try to use it.  I’m not very eager to find out how it’s going to feel in the morning, though.  I’m sure it will tighten up some more.”

“Well try soaking it in a hot bath before you get in bed,” he said.  “I tell you what, I’ll even keep you company while you’re in there.”  Without waiting for her to respond, Ben stood and started for the door.  When he reached it, he turned back around.  “Are you coming?”

H
er bare feet crunched the dead leaves coating the ground beneath her.  The trees surrounding her looked dead; their branches stood naked as they gently swayed from side to side.  They seemed to almost be reaching out for her.  Surprisingly, it wasn’t a startling sight.  Instead, she wished they were.  She wanted them to take her away.  The moment the thought crossed through her mind, she began berating herself.  As a wave of guilt settled over her, she watched the wind lift the leaves off the path ahead and move toward her.  When the breeze reached her, it bit at her nose.  It was cold, colder than she was dressed for.

Without needing to give it a second thought, she turned and started back the way she came.  After a few minutes of walking, she turned off the path and ventured deep into the woods.  Rocks and sticks covering the ground seemed to bite at her feet, but it didn’t slow her as she moved even deeper into the thick brush.  Just when she thought it couldn’t get any thicker, she pushed through and stepped out into a clearing.  It wasn’t particularly large; there was just enough room for the small, plain log cabin and a modest yard.

As soon as she was clear of the trees, she started running toward the house.  Instead of going in through the front door, though, she headed toward the back.  The back of the cabin was bare and windowless, with only a single door at the end.  The door, which had seemed so big when it first appeared, was almost too small for her when she finally reached it.  It scared her, and she wished to herself it was back to the large door it had been before.

She reached out with a shaking hand and pulled it open.  After closing it behind her, she found herself standing in a dark hallway.  Instead of venturing down, though, she pulled open a second small door to right of where she stood.  Though it was pitch black, she seemed to know exactly where she was going.  She climbed down the stairs and crossed through the basement before reaching out for something.  She couldn’t make out what it was, but something happened when she pushed it; a third door opened.

The dull light coming from behind the door was soft on her eyes.  The pit in her stomach as she pushed the door closed told her the same could not be said for what was waiting for her ahead.  The large room she stood in was old, but it was well maintained.  Like the doors, though, everything within it was too small.  She felt like she was in a funhouse.  The sofas at one end were outdated and worn, but there didn’t seem to be a speck of dirt on them.  As she looked around, she realized the same could be said for almost everything else in there.  It was so clean, in fact, that it looked like a whole team of maids went through it.  She knew that wasn’t true, though.  Her eyes scanned carefully through the room, looking for anything that wasn’t perfect.  She avoided one area, though.  Her gazed passed over the table against the back wall just long enough for her to see what it was, but she couldn’t make them stay longer.  It was a model of Addison Valley.  She hated that thing.

After straightening the one tiny pillow that sat slightly out of place on the sofa, she ventured through the swinging door that lead further into the house.  The long
hall she stepped into had the same dated look, but it left her with even more of a pained feeling.  That was only compounded by the fact that her head nearly reached the ceiling.  Even standing in it made her want to cry.  As the tears started rising, she reached up and slapped herself hard across the face.

The action shocked her, but it stopped the tears from reaching the surface.  “That was stupid,” she muttered to herself.

“What was stupid?” someone else spoke out.

She wasn’t alone.

“Who’s there?” she asked, looking around for its source.

Just then, a small girl appeared from under a cloth covered table against the wall at the end of the hall.  She was young; she couldn’t have been older than seven or eight.  Unlike herself, everything in the house seemed to be the perfect size for the young girl.  Aside from the outdated dress that was slightly big on her, she also appeared to be well kept.  Her hair was pulled back into a tight bun and her fingers donned soft pink fingernails.  Despite that, she looked sad.  It wasn’t the type of sad she usually saw on a child who just wasn’t getting their way.  This was different.  She wore a soft smile, but her eyes held a deep sorrow within them.

“What are you doing here?” Rilynne asked, looking around to make sure no one else was around.  “You shouldn’t be here.  It’s not safe.”

“I was hiding,” the young girl replied.  “We just wanted to play while he is away.”

Rilynne reached down and took the girl by the hands, kneeling down to her level.  “It’s not safe here.  You have to go before he finds you.  Where are the others?”

“They are in the rooms,” the girl said.  There was a positive note in her voice that made it sound like the thought would be reassuring.  Oddly, it was.  Before Rilynne could reply, the girl led her into the closest door.  Behind it was a small playroom with four doors coming off of it.  Each door had a different name on it.  They were bedrooms.  Like everything else, every object in the room was too small for her, down to the clock hanging on the wall.

“You go tell them all that the game is over.  This is no time to play,” Rilynne instructed.  “Are they all in here?”

The young girl shook her head and pointed back out into the hall.

Rilynne walked back out and entered the door closest to her.  Like the first, it led to a small room with four doors coming off of it, each dressed with a name.  The furniture filling it, though still too small for her, was slightly larger.  Unlike the first, this one wasn’t filled with toys.  Instead, there was a large bookcase against the wall and an assortment of chairs scattered about.  Sitting in one was another girl.  This one was older, though still in her early teens.  As soon as her eyes landed on her face, Rilynne felt her heart drop.  She had seen her before; she recognized her face.

“I told them not to play,” the girl said.  “They don’t listen to me the way they do you.”

“I don’t understand,” Rilynne muttered.  “What are you doing in here?”

The girl shrugged.  “I was going to get them all together soon.  Do you see the time?  He’ll be expecting dinner soon.”

“Go!” Rilynne ordered.  “Get out of here.  You can’t let him catch you.  Don’t you know what will happen?”

The girl just rolled her eyes and sat the book down on the table.  “Relax,” she groaned.  “I already have all of my chores done.  I even made sure all of the other girls were dressed and ready.  I just wanted to take a little break and get some reading in before you came for us.”

“You shouldn’t have done that!” Rilynne stated.  Panic filled her as she quickly looked around.  “What would have happened if I didn’t come?  You know what would have happened to you.”

The girl’s expression changed from defiance to something else.  The way she looked up at Rilynne unsettled her more than anything she had seen so far.  There was a flash of anger in her eyes and she seemed to almost be judging her. 

“I knew you were coming,” she stated coldly.  “You know what he would do to everyone if you didn’t come.  He wouldn’t hesitate before using the box.”  She stormed out of the room, Rilynne following closely behind.  When they reached the other door, she stopped and continued.  “What do you think he would do to all of us if you just decided not to come?”

Without waiting for an answer, she swung the door open and looked in.  Rilynne gasped as all of the small faces within looked up at her.

As her eyes quickly moved through the room, a heart wrenching realization settled within her.  The rooms weren’t too small.  She was too big.

“
R
ilynne,” Ben said, shaking her awake.  “Wake up, Rye.  You’re dreaming.  Wake up.”

Her heart was drumming in her chest as she sat up and her eyes shot open.  The room was dark around her, but she could just make out Ben’s face.

“Are you all right?” he asked, pulling her into his arms.

She shook her head as tears started rolling down her face.  She wanted to offer an explanation, but as hard as she tried, words would not come.  Her body shuddered in his arms for what felt like an hour as she tried to steady her breath.

“He has so many of them,” she said when she could finally talk.  “There are so many girls, and I don’t know how to find them.”  She raked her shaking hands roughly through her hair.  Her ring got tangled in it, pulling several strands out, but she didn’t care.  She was trembling so violently that the bed shook beneath them.  “I don’t know how to stop him.  I haven’t seen anything that will help me find him before he does that to another girl.  It’s almost time.  I could feel it.  She knows it’s coming.  She’s so scared.”

Ben didn’t seem to know how to respond.  He didn’t even try to think of the right thing to say.  Instead, he just pulled her in closer and held her until the tremors subsided.  With tears still streaming down her face, she let her body go limp in his arms.  She fought to keep her eyes open, not wanting to go back to that place, but it was no use.  As Ben gently rocked her, her eyes grew heavier and finally closed.

After the daughter of her best friend was kidnapped, Rilynne found herself in the middle of one of the most daunting cases of her career.  After the third body of a teenage girl was found over a five year span, they noticed they all shared several commonalities.  All had marks on their ankles from restraints and old injuries that showed no sign of proper medical care.  It was discovered that each girl had been taken at a young age and held for nearly a decade before being killed.  Rilynne had seen several things related to the case, but nothing yet that helped her get any closer to discovering the identity of the man responsible.  The only information she had been able to observe over the last few months was that he was keeping them in a secluded house in the woods, and he currently was holding at least three young girls.  That is until that night when she realized there were so many more.  The age of the eldest was what concerned her more than anything.  She appeared to be around the age the past victims had been when he’d taken their lives.  The beatings she’d seen him giving her seemed to be growing more frequent, and much more violent.  It had reached a point that every time Rilynne would see her, a girl she had identified as Lily Burns, she would brace herself for the possibility she might be watching the teen’s final moments.  What rattled her most was there didn’t seem to be anything she could do to prevent it.

She knew that he was holding more than just a single girl at a time, but until that night she didn’t know just how many of them there really were.  She had seen over half a dozen girls in her dream.  If any of the other doors off the hall led to similar living areas, though, there was no telling how many he actually had.  She had been searching through missing children’s reports for Bodker County, concentrating first on Addison Valley, as well as the surrounding counties.  Though she wasn’t sure, she believed he was operating out of Addison Valley, or at least living somewhere nearby.  There were so many children reported missing over the last decade that it was hard to narrow down which girls he might have taken.  Whenever she tried to concentrate on them, all she seemed to be able to see where the grieving parents.  Despite the fact that she tried to push it aside, the residual emotions from Kim’s abduction were overpowering.  It was leaving her almost blocked for any child abductions.

The last thought she had as she drifted back to sleep was actually a hopeful one, though.  She had seen their faces, or at least some of them.  Maybe now she will be able to start putting more names to the girls he was currently holding.  If she could figure out his hunting pattern, it might just lead her right to his door.

When Rilynne let her eyes open again, she was overjoyed to see the light reaching in from behind the curtains.  There was a relief like no other she’d ever felt in the moments after waking up on nights like this.  She always had a fear of slipping back into the nightmares she’d awaken and freed herself from the moment she allowed herself to go back to sleep.  When she sat up, she looked over to find Ben looking up at her.  He didn’t need to say anything to express the desire to make sure she was all right.  The sad, concerned look in his eyes said enough.

Rilynne leaned down and kissed his forehead before climbing out of bed.  She didn’t want to talk about it.  She knew that if she did, even for a moment, she would fall apart all over again.  Luckily, Ben didn’t ask further. 

They had nearly finished getting dressed before she finally broke the silence.  “You know what I really want right now?”

“What?” he asked.  There was softness in her voice that made her smile as he reached under the bed and pulled out his shoes.

“A cheeseburger,” she replied.  “One of those juicy ones that leave your hands covered but it’s so good that you don’t even care.”

Ben let out a shocked laugh and rolled his eyes.  “First, it’s nine in the morning,” he replied.  “Second, I don’t think you’re going to find one of those here.”

“I know,” she said disappointedly.  “Their burgers aren’t terrible, but they are far from mouth-wateringly fantastic.  Can we stop at that one place I love when we get back into town?  I’m sure we’ll be hungry after that long drive back from San Antonio, and I’ve been craving one for days.”

Ben didn’t answer her, but instead shook his head in the way he always did when she left him speechless.  No matter what mood she found herself in, that was one of his gestures that made her smile.

“You know, I’m actually looking forward to watching you talk to the victim’s family today,” Ben said as they walked hand in hand down the small driveway and onto the street.  “It’s not so much watching you actually talking to them, although you know how much I love that, but it’s really more of watching Perez try to keep from exploding with rage.  I think that’s actually been my favorite part of this whole vacation detour. 
Chaz and I actually put a bet on it yesterday.  He gives him three days before he has a complete meltdown.  I went for tomorrow.”

“That’s horrible,” she stated, though she wasn’t entirely surprised by it.  “But I want some of that action.  I think we will actually make it to the end before he cracks.  There’s just enough tension between him and the mayor that I think it will hold him back.  There’s obviously a story there, but he doesn’t seem to want to give any hint as to what it is.”

“Like they’re together?” Ben asked, unsure as to exactly what she meant.

Rilynne tried to picture it for a moment before shaking her head.  “I don’t think it
was anything like that.  I would go with either a political issue of some kind or family tension.  Who knows, on a country this small it is entirely possible that their grandparents has some huge feud that’s been passed down through the generations.  Her grandfather could have stole pigs from his grandmother’s family and things just started from there.  His grandmother probably retaliated by opening the latch on his fence and letting all of his livestock out.  Well then her father, who was likely in his early teens, would have wanted to join in and drilled a hole in his family’s boat.  After that sank, things really heated up.”

“You saw all of this, didn’t you?” Ben interrupted before she could continue.  The skeptical glare he was giving told her he was on to her little game.  “I’m guessing you saw the tension then had a flash and saw the whole family history behind it.”

“It was a dream, but yes,” she replied playfully.  She was so excited to share what she had seen that she almost bounced with every step she took.  “The really interesting thing is it was all a huge mistake.  Her grandfather had bought the pigs from some guy in town, not knowing they had been stolen.  He bought a few other things that weren’t entirely legal at the time, so he never told them what really happened.  If he had, the man he bought them from would have just turned around and shared the list of other things he had procured.  He was actually mayor himself, so he didn’t want to risk his position.  One family feud was better than losing his reputation and standing on the island.  I would have thought he’d have told his family, though.  If they had chosen not to fight back, I’m sure this thing would have ended with their livestock being let out.  I guess he didn’t really want to tell his son, though, and after that it just caught fire.”

Ben chuckled.  “That’s pretty funny,” he said.  “So basically the mayor and sergeant dislike each other for no real reason other than they think they’re supposed to.  There’s no way of convincing them otherwise, is there?”

“I could see how that conversation would go,” she laughed.  “‘So I’ve never been here before, but I happen to know that the family feud you two have was actually started over a misunderstanding when the former mayor was purchasing illegal products and decided to tell the guy to throw in a couple pigs.  Not wanting to be outed, he didn’t correct the pigs’ actual owner when they arrived and accused him of stealing the pigs that had disappeared from their property a few days before.  Oh, how do I know this?  I saw it in a dream.  Never come back to your island again?  That seems a little rash.’”

“I guess you couldn’t really say anything without outing yourself,” he agreed.  “Let’s not do that, though.  I wouldn’t be very happy if we were banned from here for life.  I guess it would be you who’d be banned.  I could always just come back without you.”

“I’m pretty sure people would start to talk if you started vacationing alone,” she stated.  “I don’t think you would be able to come out more than one more time before they kicked you out as well.  They’d surely think you were a little nuts.”

“We’re investigating a murder while on our honeymoon,” he laughed.  “I’m pretty sure that ship has sailed.  I think after this we will always be known on this island just for that fact.  We could prevent a major disaster or rescue a school bus full of kids from being devoured by a horde of raging monkeys and people would still remember us as those crazy people who spent their honeymoon searching for a killer instead of relaxing on the beach.”

Rilynne smiled and pushed her elbow into his ribs.  “I’m actually alright with that.  It’ll be nice to have a place we can go that people will know us.  A whole country!  We could actually tell people that there is a country where every single person knows who we are.  Then the story would get twisted the more people talked about it and it would end up finally being told as some gruesome group of serial killers on the island and the amazing couple that showed up and saved everyone.  They ended their trip as heroes and lived happily ever after.  I think I’d be okay with that.”

After grabbing breakfast, Rilynne and Ben headed straight for the station.

The sky had darkened slightly in the time since they’d walked into the diner.  It wasn’t dark enough for it to rain, and Rilynne hoped to herself that it wouldn’t get there.  Though she was sure her eyes were just showing her what she wanted to see, she was glad to see that it had lightened a bit by the time they reached the front steps of the station.

Sergeant Perez looked like he had been sitting on a hot coal when they walked in through the open door.  The sight of them only seemed to make it worse.  Rilynne’s eyes scanned the room until they stopped on a woman sitting against the back wall.  She was a little older than Rilynne, but not by much.  Her hair was neatly combed out of her face,
and her hands were folded and resting daintily on her lap.  Her makeup had been carefully applied, but it didn’t hide the sadness on her face.  Without needing an introduction, Rilynne knew exactly who she was.  She was Ashton Lunieski, Caitlin Burton’s daughter.

She looked over the rest of the room for Mrs. Burton’s husband, but he wasn’t there.  She stepped toward Perez to ask about him when he abruptly pushed up off of the edge of his desk.

“The mayor said I had to let you have the first run at him,” Perez said begrudgingly.  “She didn’t say how long I have to give you.  You have five minutes, then he’s mine.  Make the most of it, because I don’t intend to offer this courtesy again.”

The more distain he showed for their presence, the more curious Rilynne grew about the reasons behind it.  Although she and Ben had originally granted that he might just be carrying jurisdictional frustrations a little far, his behavior was leaving her with the feeling that there was another reason he didn’t want them around.  He didn’t even try to pretend that their assistance was even halfway wanted.  Instead, his tone seemed to be growing sharper with every encounter.  Rilynne wasn’t exactly sure what to make of it, but it was beginning to anger her.  Not wanting to risk him fighting the mayor’s request, though, she simply nodded and reached for the door.

Rilynne thought for a moment that she might have the wrong room when she walked in.  The man sitting behind the table was nothing even close to what she had imagined.  Given the victim’s age, she had assumed her husband would be roughly the same, but he was young.  With his shaggy hair, very similar to Ben’s aside from the color that was golden blonde, he look no older than herself.  She had to fight to keep the shock from her face, though she wasn’t sure she was successful.  If he had picked up on it, he had no reaction.  That didn’t really surprise Rilynne, though.   As she took her seat she imagined that he was surely used to people’s reactions when they discovered the almost thirty year difference between him and his wife.