Nowhere to Hide (22 page)

“Another body. That’s all I can say. I don’t know any more than that, and if I did, I’m not able to talk about it yet. Take me back to my apartment.”

He must’ve understood she wasn’t fooling around because he did as she requested. She was grateful he didn’t go over their moments in the attic. She needed time to process them herself. Not that she was sorry. Far from it. But she was completely aware that Jake was dangerous to her, not because of the investigation, but because she had a weakness for him. Always had.

As if sensing she was thinking of him, her cell phone rang and when she checked the number she saw it was him. She clicked it off without answering and Gretchen asked, “What?”

“My father,” she lied. “Did I ever tell you that he cheated on my mother, like all the time?”

“No.” Sandler was eyeing her carefully, as if she were a new species of animal, which in a way, she kinda was.

“You know how you know something. You didn’t think you knew it, but you did. You just kinda let it go, and then one day it becomes so obvious you can’t believe you didn’t get it earlier.”

“What happened?” she asked.

“My mother intercepted a note meant for my father from his lover, at the time. There’s no date on it. I don’t have proof. But I know. . . .” She inhaled and exhaled, shaking her head. “My mother was so upset that she was driving too fast and didn’t look out and ran into a truck and that was it. I figured it out last night.”

“And you had a powwow with your father about this?”

“Nope. Don’t need to. Auggie’s right. Best thing to do is stay away from dear old Dad.”

Agent Donley had rejoined Bethwick and they were gathering their reports together and heading out. Auggie was long gone, and D’Annibal was back in his office, glaring at a computer screen as if it held terrible information, but he’d been in that position for long moments and it was clear he was pissed and thinking in his head. September sat back down at her desk. Her head was full of the events of the past few days and she sensed she needed some time to just collect her thoughts and put them in some kind of order. It wasn’t like her to just run on adrenaline, but that’s sure as hell what she’d been doing.

Just before six, George called, “Hey.”

September and Gretchen both looked up. Thompkins was just hanging up the phone and swiveling in his chair, his bulk making the seat protest as if in agony. “I gotta callback from one of the summer school teachers at Twin Oaks, a Ms. Chapel. Looks like she had a sort-of friendship with Glenda Tripp,” George said. “They got to talking one night and swapped stories. Tripp let it be known about her doctor uncle who’s up on charges for practicing without a license et cetera, et cetera, and it comes up that Tripp was a little wild during those formative teen years and had sex with some guy on her uncle’s examining table.”

“Okay,” Sandler said, interested. “But haven’t we all got a few skeletons in the closet?”

“Tripp called the experience ‘sex with a psychopath.’ Said afterward she was weirded out and steered clear of the guy and where her uncle was practicing,” George added with a lift of his eyebrows.

“Got a name?” September asked, knowing already that he didn’t or he would have said so.

“Nope.”

“Did she say where this examining table was?” September asked.

“Conversation didn’t go that far. Ms. Chapel showed a little too much shock and Tripp clammed up. But it didn’t appear to be Tripp’s husband. Sounds like they were married less than a New York minute, but this was before him, apparently.”

“The ex-husband lives on the East Coast,” Sandler said reflectively. “He wasn’t anywhere around when she was killed.”

“We called him. He’s remarried. Said he and the wife were home, but we talked on a cell phone,” September remembered, her heart clutching a little. “Maybe we didn’t follow up enough.”

“Maybe,” Sandler said, frowning. “But it’ll be easy enough to check if he was around during any of the killings.”

“Right,” September said.

“Our doer’s a local boy,” Sandler said with a slow shake of her head. “It’s not the husband, but I’ll check him out some more just to eliminate him.”

“Sounds good,” George said, turning back to his computer.

September asked him, “This incident on the examining table? It would have been thirteen, fourteen years ago?”

“Sounds about right,” George allowed.

“Wonder where Dr. Navarone was practicing then,” September asked. “He moved around a lot, as I recall.”

“Wonder if Tripp’s fuck-buddy was a patient,” Gretchen guessed. “She called him a psycho.”

“Maybe it doesn’t mean anything. That’s what Sheila Dempsey called everybody when she was a kid,” September said.

“But maybe it does,” Sandler said.

“I’ll ask Auggie,” September decided, getting up and sliding her chair into her desk. “He was at that shoot-out with Navarone and he’s still finalizing things on the Zuma case.” She headed toward the back hallway and the locker room.

“What the hell are you doing?”

The killer felt the hairs on the back of his neck rise. He was cleaning out the van, at work. He’d cleaned it and cleaned it and cleaned it, but somehow the smell of the whore couldn’t be removed.

He slowly straightened and turned to regard Mel, his drunken boss. Mel’s eyes were red and he was a little unsteady on his feet, but he was still functioning at some level. “Cleaning the van,” he told him.

“Fuck it, man. Get outta here.” Mel waved one loose arm. “Go home. Get some rest.”

He nodded and closed the back doors, glad Mel hadn’t seemed to notice all the extra tools he had in the back along with the bottles of solvents and bleach. He’d already taken off the magnetic signs that said
MEL
’
S
WINDOW
COVERINGS
from both sides of the white van. It was his own van. Mel reluctantly paid some of his gas, but there was no company vehicle, which was fine because he changed the plates for his excursions. He was good at stealing ones with tags that would be good for a while.

Mel wanted him to leave so he had some time alone with the bottle in his office drawer before he went home to the wife, a nagging bitch with a voice that could cut glass.

He drove home with a feeling of anxiety rising. The beat of the beast’s heart was starting to thunder again. How come? he asked himself, slightly alarmed. He’d been able to hold back the beast, contain it, but now it had escaped and was running rampant. The whore had been a good kill, but it wasn’t enough. He needed more. Much, much more.

But he had to wait. Had to. He’d waited so long and he needed to draw it out, make it last, stop the laughing.

But the beast wasn’t listening. The beast wanted.

The beast had wanted for a long, long, long time. He’d been afraid of it at first, afraid people could see. He’d shivered in his bed. Had not been able to control his bladder and mistakes had happened. He’d been beaten for those. And then at school he’d wet his pants when the girls had played that trick on him, tried to pants him. They’d covered their mouths with their hands and run away screaming and he’d looked at Nine for help. She’d been nice to him, but she turned away. He could still see the way her ponytail swung in front of him, taunting him. Dark hair with red. And she’d given that report on the ocean. She talked of tidal waves and sea creatures and the anemone with its dark hole and waving fingers.

His erection had been impossible to hide, but luckily he was in the back of the class and neither of the boys on either side of him had given him away to the laughing girls. Laughing and laughing.

His hands squeezed on the steering wheel, his knuckles showing white.

He wanted to cut them all!

Twenty minutes later he pulled into the driveway of his place and looked quickly to the main house. It was quiet. The bitch was maybe sleeping. Pulling to a stop in front of his apartment, a converted garage, he locked the van and hurried inside before he could be seen.

He needed her to die, but could not afford to kill her. Couldn’t have it traced back to him and it would be. It would be.

Quietly, he changed his clothes from the gray jumpsuit he preferred to work in, to a pair of brown pants and a sweatshirt. Then he moved back outside, listening for her, then he crept around the back of the main house and found his way into Avery Boonster’s field, turning his face skyward.

The field where he’d killed the whore was several miles away. Too close. He’d killed her too close. He needed to be in the Laurelton city limits and away from here. Take the heat away from himself instead of bringing it near. He hadn’t been thinking straight. He’d only been able to see through the beast’s eyes and the beast was consumed with need, didn’t think things through.

Dangerous.

He stalked across the fields toward the Boonster spread. The sheep looked at him as he approached and then moved away. They didn’t trust him. He’d taken some of them when he was younger and Avery had found the carcasses. Told on him and his father had taken the strap to him with that glint of triumph in his eyes.

He escaped to a place where September Rafferty was his. They were together, but in his dreams she turned on him, opened her black maw and laughed.

He was moved to a different school; a secretive ploy because his father and mother sensed something wrong and they were through with him. The old lady took him in, but her eyes were dark and flat, like his father’s, and she knew he was wrong. Winning her trust became an obsession to him, and he forcefully pushed the dangerous, black thoughts aside, would not listen to the beast’s growls. He pushed thoughts of September aside as well, but he saw the other girls in school who reminded him of her. They didn’t know the beast inside his breast, and they let him draw near to them.

His camouflage worked, at least in the beginning. He could be someone entirely different. He saw Sheila at school and she was so much like September that his thoughts turned to her. He saw her walking through the halls, smiling and joking, always with that moronic Schmidt. He stayed in the background and kept his eyes on them. Once he saw Schmidt slide his hand down to her rump and he had to hurry to the bathroom and beat off. Later, he went hunting for raccoon and squirrel, failing in his quest, and he fought back the screams that tore him inside like razor blades.

The old lady suspected, but she didn’t know. He did not approach Sheila. Like Nine, she was skittish. As he grew older he learned to put on the outer shell, and for a time he could walk among them, the laughers, and they didn’t notice him.

But then he saw September again. One elementary school event between his old school and his new, and there she was. And Sheila was there. September and Sheila. He couldn’t tell them apart. In a sexual haze he sensed there was meaning there, but it escaped him.

Then he saw the documentary on the ocean and he waited, heart pounding, for the sea anemones. He nearly passed out when they came on. He understood. September. . . she was the sea anemone. He wanted to stab her deep into her hot center. It was all he could think about.

And then it happened. The bad thing that no one knew about. He’d stolen the old lady’s car . . . pushed it out while she was sleeping . . . and drove aimlessly into Laurelton. It was meant to be, because all of a sudden there she was: September, with a girlfriend, someone he knew, one of his neighbors. He followed them and learned their routine and then one night he put on the outer shell and met them.

But he was gawking. He could sense it, but couldn’t stop it. And they saw him and understood and they laughed and laughed and laughed at him, tittering behind their hands.

Until he stopped them. The beast stopped them.

He’d killed September. He’d killed her, and maybe now he would be rid of the beast.

But she wasn’t dead.

He understood then that she could not be killed without the ritual. There were steps to take, rules to follow. And when she died, he would die. But not before, and there was much work to be done.

Now he walked back to his apartment, carefully skirting the yellow-eyed windows that looked into the night from the old lady’s house. He unlocked his door, locked it behind him, then pulled out the key to the upstairs.

That’s where the treasures were. The mementos from the girls who laughed. He carefully searched through the drawers for his favorites and pulled out the sample of hair. Her hair.

He put that back, and pulled out the next box, the treasure trove. Before he reached inside, he pulled a pair of disposable latex gloves from the box he kept by the cot, then carefully, he drew out the book:
All About Me
. September’s life carefully constructed by her loving parents. That’s where he’d found the lock of soft, baby hair. He flipped through the pages and smiled. After a few moments, he put the book down and reached into the box for something else.

A report. The sea anemone report. His hands clenched, and he put it back in the box. He couldn’t part with it. It was his. Forever. Instead, his hands roamed to the cardboard with the pictures she’d added about her family. He stared and stared at it. The brothers and sisters, mother and father. Perfection when he’d been given shit.

Turning it over, he saw her name printed in her unformed hand. With a smile, he took it downstairs, found a red felt-tip pen and scratched another message onto the back of the paper, next to her signature.

He almost kissed it, but froze, his lips a centimeter from the paper. Fucking DNA. Instead, he gently folded it and slipped it into a large envelope. He knew her address. He knew all about her. But should he show his hand, or mail it to the station?

The station.

His chest began to pound.

The beast was on him again. How long could he wait? He needed to take Nine soon. He needed her.

His heart began to thunder in his ears. A silvery shiver of fear slid through him. What if, when he finally had her, it wasn’t enough?
What then?

But no. It would be the end. They would be together for all eternity and the beast would be put to death.