One Scream Away (40 page)

Oh, God.

Beth faltered at the sight of the small skull gleaming like a silvery moon in his hands. He handled it gingerly, as if it were a quail’s egg, and a tear ran down his cheek.

“Jenny, meet Beth. She’s finally going to pay.”

N
eil barged through the underbrush to where four agents were wired up. Harrison was hot on his heels. They’d gotten a call from Copeland as the ambulance drove away with Abby: The dogs had found something. Neil’s heart hadn’t beat a normal rhythm since.

Copeland put up a hand to stop him. “Hold on. We can’t go in any farther yet.”

“They got the cone?” Neil asked.

Copeland had a finger on the receiver in his ear, listening. He nodded. “The dogs picked up Denison’s scent. When they narrow the cone enough, we’ll pull them back.” He looked away, concentrating on whatever the voice was saying in his ear. “No kidding. Really?” He looked at Neil. “Okay.”

“What?”

“The lab’s been looking at the baby bones we found at the river. Says the infant found there was a male.”

Neil frowned. “Not Jenny?”

“Apparently not. They haven’t been able to date the diapers receipt yet, or find birth records from the Bible. But maybe there really was another baby before Chevy. A boy.”

“Maybe.” Neil thought about it for a minute, but he couldn’t really care anymore. He had Abby back, and the dogs had picked up Beth’s scent. That’s all that mattered. “Fuck it,” he said. “Let’s go with the dogs.”

“I’ve got twenty agents ready to go in.” Copeland gave Neil a long look. “You aren’t one of them.”

Neil cursed and ran a hand through his hair. A second later he felt Harrison’s hand on his shoulder.

“We’ll take care of her, man,” Harrison said, almost like a friend. Rick would have approved, Neil thought. “We’re close now.”

“That’s J-Jenny?” Beth could hardly force out the words.

Bankes caressed the small skull like a lover. “My mother spent years in her own father’s bed, and this is what came of it. A baby with bad blood. Mother wouldn’t take care of her. That whole fucking town believed she took care of her; they never believed me.
I
took care of Jenny. Mother left her in her own shit and sang fucking little songs and pruned her flowers while Jenny cried. She said Jenny couldn’t feel, but she could, I know it. She
can.
You know how I know that, Beth? Because I can hear when she cries. All her life, all the years she was missing. She cried until I finally found her again.”

Oh, God. Beth blinked and tried to follow what he was saying, tried to fit it into what he was doing to her, what he had done to all those other women over the years. What he had done to Abby. “You found her again?”

“When I was twenty-one. Mother told me where to find her. But it was too late, then. She’d already fooled everyone.”

Follow the story, try to keep up. “I d-don’t know why you’re angry with me.” But then she thought she did. “Because I made everyone believe my husband was Abby’s father? You said blood didn’t matter. You said you didn’t care about—”

“I don’t care about Abby, I care about Jenny!”
he roared, and Beth shrank back from his intensity, even as she marveled at the tenderness with which he held his sister’s skull. “You hurt her, you fucking, deceiving little cunt.
You hurt her!
”

Beth blinked. Something moved in the forest behind him. Her heart did a somersault.

Pay attention, don’t look. Follow his twisted mind. Think.
I hurt her. I hurt Jenny.

“I d-don’t know how I hurt Jenny.”

He squatted down, still just out of reach of her legs, and everything behind him went still again. It might have just been an animal—a deer or something. It was still too dark to tell. But even as she warned herself to caution, her heart began to thump. She tested the bindings of her hands. Damn it, they were tight, if her fingers were wiggling at all. She couldn’t be sure anymore.

“Look,” he said.

She looked at Bankes, looked at the skull. His trembling finger circled a tiny black hole. An inch above the temple. Just where all the women in his killing spree had been shot.

“You did this, bitch.”

She gaped at him.

“The night you killed Anne Chaney. After I’d found Jenny again and cared for her and together we were making Mother stop all that singing. You hurt Jenny all over again.”

There were two shell casings from a thirty-eight pistol, Beth. One bullet struck Anne Chaney in the back. What about the other?

Memories flew through her mind. A shot into Anne Chaney’s spine, and another shot… wild.

“I n-never meant to, Ch-Chevy,” she said, almost choking on his first name. “I never meant to hurt Jenny. It was an accident, I didn’t mean to hit your bag.”

“Mother sang so loud that night. She sang for the next six years while I was behind bars. I had no tapes there. I had to send them to Mo Hammond to keep for me with Jenny and the dolls. So I had nothing to make Mother stop.”

Beth sat stunned. He rotated the skull slightly in his hands. “And this.” He ran a finger along a jagged crack in the head. “Sheridan did this. At your house. He kicked Jenny. He deserved to die.”

Bankes was so intent on Jenny’s skull he wasn’t looking around. Movements. More than one now. She could feel them. Oh, God, someone
was
out there.

Bankes’s gaze lifted to Beth. It was black with rage. “You hurt Jenny, then pretended to be innocent and sweet. You planted fucking flowers. An Oscar-worthy performance, Beth, as good as Mother’s. Can’t you hear her singing now?”

He leaned closer to her and she flinched.

“When I pound a cunt, Mother hates that the most. It reminds her of Grandpa, and she stops singing.” He stared at Beth, the whites of his eyes showing. “And now,” he said, digging into his bag, “it’s your turn.”

He came up with five new tapes. They were all labeled
Beth
.

* * *

“They’re in,” Copeland said and waved Neil over. “You can listen, but I’m in charge, you understand?” Neil nodded. Right now, he’d agree to anything. “Reconnaissance has them. They’ve got a view.”

Neil got wired up and listened, barely breathing.

“They’re in a tree house,” came a hushed voice that belonged to a man Neil had never met named Wexler. “A hunter’s stand, I guess. Suspect has a thirty-eight. The woman’s on the floor.”

“The floor?” Neil asked. They weren’t close enough to see. Only a handful of recon agents had gone in past the dogs. The rest of them stayed in an outer perimeter, awaiting Copeland’s orders. When they descended, they’d do it all at once, a shock-and-awe strike.

“She’s bloody, clothes ripped,” Wexler reported. “I can’t tell how bad she’s hurt. Doesn’t look good.”

Neil closed his eyes, adrenaline surging. Focus. He touched his .45 out of habit, longing for the assault rifle he’d cradled against his chest for the past nine years.

“Aw, shit,” Wexler said. “He’s on her.”

“What?”

“He’s running the pistol down her throat, over her breasts. Man, I think he’s about to do her.”

“Can you get a shot?” Copeland asked.

“Not from this angle, too many trees. Christ. He’s touching her. She’s trying to weasel away—she’s tied up…”

Neil ripped out the earpiece and lunged. Copeland and Harrison both grabbed him. Together, they rammed him up against a tree.

“Sheridan!” Copeland whispered, gripping him hard.

“I’m going in,” Neil said. “It’ll freak him out to see me alive. Throw him off.”

“It’ll
piss
him off, that’s what it’ll do,” Harrison shot back right in Neil’s face. “Are you listening to Wexler, man? There’s a gun on your woman, for God’s sake.”

“I’m
dead
. I can go in there and fuck with his mind. I can push him over the edge.”

“What edge?” Copeland growled, holding Neil’s shirt in his fists. “The one that makes him screw whatever he’d planned for Denison and just put a bullet in her head? For God’s sake, let me get the team in there.” Copeland stared at him until Neil nodded, then stepped back. He touched his earpiece.

“Wexler,” he said, “we’re coming in.” He clicked to another frequency to address the full team. “This is Copeland. Suspect is holding the woman in a deer stand and has a gun to her throat. Sexual assault in progress. On three, we go in. No one shoot; I repeat,
Hold your fire!
” He looked at Neil, took a deep breath. “One… two…”

The gun slid cold and hard down her throat. Beth cringed and was sorry a second later. Even that small reaction made Bankes smile. Don’t react. Don’t cry. Just
think.

She would swear there was someone out there, but what if she was wrong? She couldn’t sit here and let Bankes make a tape recording of her torture while she awaited a cavalry she wasn’t certain of. Still, she knew they were out there. Police? The FBI? Neil?

No, she’d almost forgotten. Not Neil.

The gun dragged farther down her body. Her spine went rigid, the pain a fire that had dulled to a constant, red-embered throb, now withering beneath pain of another nature. The barrel of the gun found her crotch. It rubbed, taunted through what was left of her dress. The duct tape held. Bankes slipped a finger through one of the gaping runs in her panty hose and yanked. The nylons shredded to nothing.

Be weak, act scared, feed his obsession. Cry, whimper.

He looked up as if a sound had caught his attention, then dismissed it, the gun still teasing the cleft between Beth’s legs. He glanced at the tape player. The Play and Record buttons were both depressed, the faint hum of reels
whrring
in her ears. He smiled.

“It’s time, Beth. Cry for me. I’ve waited so long to add you to my collection.”

Beth looked at the tape, then stared him in the eyes and spoke loud and clear for the recording: “Go to hell, you bastard.”

“Three!”

The shout seemed far away to Beth, yet suddenly the forest moved. Everywhere, and all at once. Figures wearing goggles and armor skittered through the woods like black mercury, then stopped so sharply the night seemed to die.

Bankes yanked Beth up against him. His gun gouged into her throat, pushing her view to the sky. She buckled her knees. If he was going to hold her hostage, she could damn well make it hard for him. Somehow the pain didn’t matter anymore.

He tightened his grip, staggering around the deer stand in the weak light of the lantern, swaying, turning three-sixties. He kept moving, keeping Beth’s body close against him. He wasn’t going to give anyone a clean shot.

“She’s mine!” Bankes’s voice sounded panicked. “Stay back. I haven’t finished with her.
She’s fucking mine!”

Beth gasped for air past the barrel of the gun, nearly choking. Everything that had moved two seconds before had suddenly gone still again. Silent. Deathly.

Then a deep voice rumbled, “Wrong,” and Beth’s heart stopped. It wasn’t possible. But the voice came again, nearer this time, rolling through the silence like thunder. “Wrong, Bankes.
She’s mine.
”

A
chorus of assault rifles flinched in unison, but Neil stepped past them. To a man he could feel the tension, the tightening of every finger on every trigger, the narrowing of each eye through the sights, and the furious voice of Armand Copeland sounding in their earpieces. Neil, already unarmed, yanked the stupid thing from his ear, dropping it with the night-vision goggles as he strode to the center of the dimly lit woodland stage. Copeland was likely to kill him, but that didn’t matter now. He stopped thirty feet from the deer stand.

“Let’s clear that up once and for all, Bankes,” Neil said sharply. “Beth is mine, not yours.”

The look on Bankes’s face was priceless. The look on Beth’s made his heart stand perfectly still. She couldn’t see him down in the trees because her face was angled up by the gun. But he could see her. Blood streamed down the right side of her face and caked her dress. Her legs dangled as if she couldn’t hold herself upright, and her feet looked as if they’d been through a blender. Her chest rose and fell in great, heaving breaths, and her clothes were bloodstained and shredded, especially at one shoulder. It was fucking fifty-six degrees.

Neil wanted to tear Bankes’s dick off. Instead, he balled his right hand and tried to sound casual. “Didn’t expect to see me, did you, Bankes?”

“You’re d-dead,” Bankes whispered.

Neil smiled. “ Suck-er.” He said it in a juvenile, sing-songy taunt, and a surge of perverse pleasure washed through him. “We put on a little show for you at the park. Did you see it on TV? The season’s biggest hit.”

“Rebecca Alexander killed you!”

“Rebecca Alexander shot me with blanks. She fooled you, Chevy; we all did. How ’bout that? There doesn’t seem to be a woman in the world who hasn’t fucked you over.”

“Shut up!”

“Neil.” The word croaked from Beth’s lips.

“I’m here, honey; I’m fine. We did it. Everything’s going to be okay now.”

“Abby—”

“Is alive. She’s not hurt, sweetheart. Abby is
fine
.”

Beth closed her eyes, her face still pushed skyward by Bankes’s pistol. The barrel pressed so deeply into her flesh Neil thought it might rip through her skin.

He stepped forward. Bankes had stopped swaying and doing three-sixties, probably realizing that the part of the deer stand at his back didn’t make for a good sniper shot. He was right; no one would shoot him in the back, anyway. This team wasn’t armed with .22s. Any bullet fired into Bankes’s back from this team risked ripping through him and hitting Beth. He was safe as long as he kept Beth glued against him.

How long would he last? How long would Beth last?

Neil saw the pale sphere on the bench. The missing skull, the gift in the codicil from his mother. Jenny.

No, not Jenny. A boy.

The thought plucked at Neil’s brain and he toyed with it. With the lab reports unfinished, he couldn’t know for sure yet. But maybe he knew enough to mess with Chevy’s mind.

“So, I see you brought your big brother to watch you in action,” Neil said carefully.