One Scream Away (22 page)

“I’m supposed to tell you what I learn from Beth, right?” Neil asked. He pulled three pairs of photos from his briefcase. Three pairs of eyes followed. “This is Lila Beckenridge, who was murdered in Seattle,” he said, using a magnet to stick the first photo on the whiteboard. “Her eyelids were cut off.” He stuck a picture of the first doll just beneath the picture of Beckenridge. “This is the first in a set of antique dolls Beth has been appraising. She received it from Boise, where the owner lives, via overnight-air last Friday. This doll was in perfect condition, except her eyes are supposed to close when she’s lying down. They don’t.”

Copeland frowned and crossed his arms.

Neil put up the next photo. “Marsha Lane, Indianapolis.” Her legs had tiny, bloodless lacerations snaking through grayish flesh, like spider’s webs. Everyone on the task force had seen the photos; still, Neil could feel them wince when he put up the picture. “And this,” Neil said, pulling out the photo of the doll with cracked legs, “is the second doll Beth received.” He paused, letting everyone look.

“Holy Mother of God,” Copeland whispered.

“Now,” Neil said, producing one more pair of pictures, “our local soccer mom, murdered in her van and wearing a blouse her husband didn’t recognize.” He put up the picture of the third doll just beneath. “The blouse on this doll isn’t part of the original clothing. Compared to the rest of the outfit, it’s new.”

Silence gripped the room, and finally Brohaugh said, “Shit.”

“Does Beth know?” Standlin asked.

“A little, not all of it.”

“What about the two missing women?” Copeland asked.

“The widow who owns the dolls, Margaret Chadburne, has been claiming all along that two of the dolls she sent have been lost in the mail. Beth’s been waiting for them to arrive for the past week. And,” he added, “Mrs. Chadburne is here. She flew in yesterday.”

A sound whispered past Standlin’s lips. “He’s going to kill her,” she said. “The minute he realizes we know he’s using her, he’s going to kill her.”

“Or she’s in on it with him,” Brohaugh said. “Maybe he’s paying her to deliver the dolls.”

Copeland stared at the photos. “We’re gonna find her body in a Dumpster, aren’t we?”

“Is Denison expecting any more dolls?” Standlin asked.

“Yes, but she doesn’t know how many.”

“We need to figure out what dolls Chadburne has,” Standlin said. “If we know what dolls Bankes has access to, then maybe we can predict what he plans to do next. Figure out his pattern.”

“We’ll have to find Chadburne first,” Neil said. “We have a number, but it’s a Boise-based cell. She isn’t answering.”

“I’ll check hotels,” Brohaugh said, “car rentals.”

“And the post office. Find those missing packages,” Copeland said. “Maybe the dolls inside will lead us to the missing women.”

A phone rang. Everyone looked at their belts, and it was Copeland’s.

A minute later, he hung up and rubbed a hand over his scalp. “That was the field office in Philly. A county sheriff just reported a missing gun owner in Samson, Pennsylvania. It’s Amos Hammond—the man who bought Chevy Bankes’s property.”

Neil stared. They all did, as if their collective brain systems had crashed and needed a moment to reboot. No one was saying anything when Rick slipped in.

“What’s going on?” he asked, taken aback.

Neil grabbed Rick’s arm and headed for the door. “Road trip.”

S
amson, Pennsylvania, wasn’t much more than a wide spot in the road. The main drag had two traffic lights three blocks apart, a five-and-dime, a greasy spoon, and a rundown building with the word
Anti ues
painted on the roof. The only gas station in town, Grover’s, had closed, but about a mile north, a second gas station—also named Grover’s—sat at the intersection of two state routes. Grover had apparently moved out to where he might catch some traffic.

Mo Hammond’s Shooting and Hunting Range was situated four more miles north. A sheriff’s deputy was posted at the entrance when Neil rolled up, plotting how to talk his way through on Rick’s badge. He was surprised when the deputy said, “Sheridan?”

“Yeah,” Neil said, showing his driver’s license.

“Special Agent Copeland called, said to clear you through.”

Score one for Copeland.

They drove a hundred yards into the woods before Hammond’s store came into view. It was a one-story cedar building that had started as a rectangle and, due to ill-planned additions, wound up looking like something a four-year-old might construct out of blocks. A gray sedan with federal plates and two sheriff’s department vehicles were parked in front, beside a rusty Honda Civic bearing a bumper sticker that read
Support the NRA: Shoot the Motherfucker.
A slimy pond sat to the west of the building, and to the east, several acres had been cleared for pistol lanes and a rifle range. A posse of buzzards soared a hundred feet above the rifle targets, as if hopeful something juicier than bull’s-eyes would get hit now and then.

Neil took a deep breath, tension balling his right hand into a fist. Bankes had been here, he could feel it. No way did Mo Hammond disappear by coincidence.

He and Rick stepped into the store.

“No, no, noooo!” a woman wailed somewhere in the back. “You can’t do this. Let me go!”

Neil started back, but a man said, “It’s okay; the sheriff’s back there.” He came out from behind a gun case, a black man wearing glasses with lenses the size of gum sticks. “Christian Waite,” he said, offering a hand, “from the Philly field office.”

They made introductions while the yowls from the back room intensified. “What’s going on?” Neil asked.

“Mo Hammond’s wife. Sheriff Grimes is talking to her.”

The back room smelled of body odor and gun oil, and a bulky man who must’ve been Grimes stood off to the side. Two deputies held a three-hundred-pound woman by the arms. She wore a sleeveless cotton dress, her armpits a couple of weeks out from their last shave, and her hair styled by about twelve hours of sleep. Her eyes homed in on Neil.

“Did you find him? Where is he? Can I see him now?” And, as an afterthought, “Who are you?”

“Mrs. Hammond,” Rick began, and Neil stepped back. Let Rick handle her.

Neil introduced himself to the sheriff and whispered, “We need to get her outta here. This could be a crime scene.”

“That’s why the boys are holdin’ on to her,” Grimes said. “When she came in, she was runnin’ around crazy.”

“What does she think happened? Is she afraid Bankes might’ve got him?”

“Mo’d be lucky if that’s what happened.”

“What?”

“That woman came in here with a Remington thirty-aught-six, looking to blow Mo’s brains out.”

R
ick got the story from Hammond’s wife: Mo was last seen the day before yesterday, wearing aftershave and a clean shirt, which, she said, only proved he was on his way to see “some bimbo whose thighs don’ close.” Neil listened for five minutes then sought out Sheriff Grimes.

“Some SAC from Quantico called,” Grimes said, snorting. “Said don’t touch anything ’cause he was sending in a team to dust the place. Like we wouldn’t’ve known that, maybe.”

Neil made an apologetic gesture; he understood the game. “Got a lot of crime scenes for this case. Some were messed up pretty good before the SAC could get anyone in. He’s a little nervous.”

“Yeah,” Grimes said, and his gaze dropped to Neil’s scar. Pondering which team Neil played on, no doubt: the bureaucrats or the real crime fighters.

“Drug dealer about nine years ago,” Neil said, running a finger along the snarled flesh. “His aim was just bad enough to skim off my cheek instead of take off my head.”

“Lucky,” he said, and just like that, the dog sniffing ended. “Come on. I’ll take you around. Out here, Mo has his regular inventory…”

The store was well kept, the showcases all Windexed and the cabinets neat. There was a bathroom, a spartan office, and a storage room that housed extra guns and ammo, old boxes of office records, a retired Dell desktop computer, and an office chair with two broken casters. “What used to sit there?” Neil asked, noting a corner where dust marked off a rectangle of clean floor.

“Don’t know. Could ask Andy, the guy who works here with Mo. I sent a deputy to bring him in; he might know which bimbo Mo was screwin’.”

They went outside and walked the perimeter of the building, looking for footprints or tire tracks. “Lotta rain the last couple days,” Grimes said.

“Looks like a few tracks from yesterday or today,” Neil said, pointing to a muddy edge of the drive where several vehicles had overshot the gravel. “Can you get some casts made?”

Grimes’s head bobbed up and down, one of the team now. “Sure thing.”

“So,” Neil said, his hands riding his hips as he scanned the rest of the land, “with Mo gone, no one’s shot here lately?”

“Well, yeah. I think Andy had things open yesterday. He usually works Fridays.”

Neil eyed the buzzards. “What happens to the prey?”

“Huh?”

“People come here to shoot animals, right? What happens to them?”

“Oh, Mo has a strict policy about that: You kill it, you take it. No carcasses left behind.”

Neil was listening, but his mind hiked ahead. He started diagonally across the rifle-shooting lanes.

“What’s up?” the sheriff asked.

“Buzzards.”

“Buzzards?” Grimes looked up. “Oh, well, they’re always around. There’s always an asshole or two leaves a gut dump.”

“By the targets?”

A little hesitation. “Well, no. I imagine Mo puts up new targets every couple weeks or so; that’d be a bad place for a gut dump.”

That’s what Neil was thinking.

Grimes stopped. “You don’t think—” He didn’t finish but picked up his pace to match Neil’s.

They walked across the firing lanes toward red-and-white targets strung on the fronts of hay bales. Some were virtually untouched; others annihilated. The bales of hay themselves were pretty ragged, and thousands of small holes dotted the dirt wall that rose up behind.

Neil looked into the sky. The buzzards were right overhead, higher now, but not scattering. About ten yards closer, the stench hit him. He opened his mouth, careful not to breathe through his nose.

“Son of a bitch,” Grimes said and pulled his jacket up over his nose. “Son of a bitch.”

Neil came to the edge of the targets and put up a hand for Grimes to stay put; Mo was a friend of his. Neil stepped around the haystacks, cursed, and closed his eyes.

He went back to Grimes. “Found him,” he said.

Forensics took over. Mo Hammond had been shot three times at close range with what looked like a .22, and numerous additional times—postmortem—by rifles. Any information beyond that would be hours coming to light as they took apart the crime scene an inch at a time. Neil hung around for the first hour, flexing his hand and bouncing on the balls of his feet, then phoned Copeland.

“Can you clear me to get into Bankes’s house?”

Copeland sounded tired. “Sure, but we’ve already been through it. It looked like no one had been in there for years.”

“Did your guys tear it apart?”

“No. We were careful to leave things alone, in case he came back. There’s an on-site guy still there keeping an eye out.”

“I’d like to take Rick and have a look.”

“Go.”

For some reason, Neil expected a dilapidated, ghost-like Victorian structure on a Hill or the equivalent of the Bates Hotel. Not at all. Bankes had grown up in a quaint, two-story home nestled in the woods, probably built just after the Depression. It had a deep front porch, ginger-breading under the eaves, and remnants of flower beds along the walkways. The property was overgrown, but in its day, Neil thought with surprise, it might have been lovely.

Inside, the same: neglected now, but once a home. Mo had sold off most furniture and any belongings that might have fetched a few dollars, but shadows of a family’s life remained. There was a broken-legged metal table in the eat-in kitchen, and curtains still hung in the living room windows. Closets and drawers were empty but for one catchall kitchen drawer that contained a few remnants of life’s detritus: a couple of ancient receipts, a spare button, a few pennies, three rusted paper clips. Neil unfolded the receipts. One was for gasoline at Grover’s; he could barely make out the price in the faded ink—59.9 cents a gallon, in 1976. Ah, the good old days. The other was for a package of cloth diapers from the five-and-dime store.

He put the receipts back in the drawer and moved on. The only bathroom sat on the main floor, and three bedrooms—two dormers upstairs and one downstairs—were empty except for a couple of pieces of furniture that had been too dilapidated to sell. Half the basement seemed to have been finished off as another bedroom; the floor had carpet with indentations where a double bed once sat, and a broken nightstand crouched against the wall. Grandpa’s room, Neil thought, but wasn’t sure why.

Rick wandered in as Neil tugged open the nightstand drawer. An old Bible sat inside.

“Anything?” Rick asked.

“Not really,” he said, picking up the Bible.

Rick let out a long breath. “If Bankes was gonna come here, he’d’ve done it already. When he killed Mo, maybe. He wouldn’t come back now.”

“Unless he’s planning to bring Beth here.”

Rick shook his head. “He’s gotta know we’re watching it.”

Neil thumbed through the pages of the Bible. The first page was missing—torn out. He frowned, trying to think what was on the first page of a Bible… an inscription or dedication, maybe? Owner’s name?

His phone rang. “Sheridan,” he said, setting down the Bible.

“Hey, this is Waite.” The Philly agent with the skinny glasses. “Where are you?”

“Still in Samson, over at the house Bankes lived in. Hammond’s property, I guess.”

“Good. Sheriff Grimes just put me on a lead—a guy who knew Chevy way back when. Wanna come?”

“Say where.”

“Where” was a nursing home ten miles from Samson, on the way south toward Arlington.

“It’s Ray Goodwin, the guy who was sheriff when Bankes’s little sister disappeared,” Waite said, leading them down a wide, sterile hallway. In the last room on the right, Ray Goodwin sat in a wheelchair, his gnarled fingers tapping on the arms. A big man once upon a time, he’d lost his bulk to the inactivity of the chair. His jowls hung empty, his skin blue-veined.