The Bride Collector (40 page)

But then he remembered that was wrong. He no longer hated unnecessary, brutal violence. It was who he was now. His only regret
was that some or all of these dead favorites now bleeding on the floor might live eternally in bliss. Wouldn’t that be a cruel
twist?

Quinton grunted, shoved the gun back under his belt, and left the salon. A strong wind was blowing. His visit to the salon
had been fruitful. He now knew that the dead Good Samaritan called Cassandra had called the police. They’d collected Paradise.
The fact that Paradise’s picture was on the tube meant that no one had connected Samantha to Paradise yet.

Following protocol, the officers had likely determined her to be mentally ill and taken her to the closest hospital with a
psychiatric ward. This was territory familiar to Quinton, who found all news regarding such matters interesting.

The closest psych ward would be West Pines at the Lutheran Medical Center on 38th Avenue in Wheat Ridge. She was likely there
now under the name Samantha. If not there, then in another hospital, perhaps Denver Health Medical Center, which had thirty-eight
beds in its psychiatric ward but was much farther off.

Quinton backed the truck out and rolled down the parking lot, happy to see no commotion behind him.

But he wasn’t happy. His face was still twitching and his mind was still buzzing and now he was sweating. His mind was full
of images, violent images of Paradise being made to look disturbingly ugly. Before he drilled her with holes and bled her
dry he would make sure she understood just how ugly she was. Just how unfair it was that God had let her be born. She was,
in fact, so ugly that God had sent him, the angel of death, to rid the earth of her. Put the garbage out, so to speak.

He would crush her spirit the way she’d crushed his when she’d rejected him seven years ago.

“CAREFUL! PLEASE, YOU’RE
going to kill us before we arrive.” Roudy wasn’t coping well with traffic. He lived comfortably in his delusions of grandeur,
but out here, the mundane rendered him nearly incompetent. He flung his arms out and lifted his slippered right foot toward
the windshield. “Watch it, watch it!”

“Roudy, please, I know this is a stretch for you, but I would like you to trust me.”

The poor fellow was white. “Okay, okay, if you could just slow down a little.”

“We’re only going half the speed limit.”

She’d done her best to distract him with the case, but Roudy’s belief that Quinton was already a step ahead of him didn’t
help. His opinion bothered Allison immensely. Roudy might not be too good with traffic, but he had navigated the case well
enough. She could only pray that he was wrong.

“Careful!” he warned again. “Get us there in one piece. Please!”

“You might be right,” she said.

“We’re going too fast?”

“No, it might be too late. James Temple from the FBI says they’ve already called all the hospitals. No one by the name of
Paradise has been admitted.”

“Assuming she was admitted under that name.”

“No one with a yellow T-shirt and jeans or anyone who fits that description.”

“Careful, please. Perhaps we should go back home and have them bring the files to me.”

“You told me yourself that ninety percent of good detective work is about sifting through leads. So, this is a lead. It’s
the nearest psych ward. Quinton worked here. If you’re wrong and he doesn’t have her, assuming he’s going after her—”

“But he is,” Roudy said, facing her. “Of course he is.”

“Because something happened between them,” Allison said.

“That’s not why. He’s going after her because she is the seventh and most beautiful whom he must deliver to God.”

“You’re sure it’s Paradise? Just because she’s missing—”

“I believe he loved her and tried to rape her,” Roudy said. “Now he’s back and he’s going to finish the job by killing her.
It all fits, it’s all in the details. Watch it, watch it!”

Allison was taken aback by his frankness.

“Dear God, help her. I hope you’re wrong, Roudy. I really hope you are wrong.”

THE BLUE SCRUBS
fit a little tight, but Quinton didn’t have time to delay his mission any longer. He could fit into any hospital for a few
hours without raising anyone’s eyebrows, but here he could pass as a doctor for a day and probably kill a dozen people before
being found out. He knew the place inside and out from his employment here a decade ago, and from what he’d seen so far, nothing
had changed except for their computer system. And he’d solved that challenge already.

He would only require ten minutes to find and take the little skank, and he doubted he’d need to kill more than the one doctor
who’d been so kind as to give him the scrubs.

Quinton pushed the man’s head into the large clothes hamper and looked in the mirror above the sink. From a distance he might
pass as Dr. Robert Hampton. Up close they would see the difference. It didn’t matter, he had no intention of speaking to anyone
up close.

He’d never had to use tremendous force to execute his role, but now that he was freed up to be himself, he found the skill
natural. And at a time like this, while the world scoured the streets for poor little Paradise, brute force was his friend.

The nice thing about technology was that it gave immediate information to anyone with access. He could have run from room
to room in search of a psychiatric patient named Samantha, but there was no telling where or if they even had her, and he
didn’t have time for a full-fledged adventure.

He could have forced the doctor to do the research on any one of many rolling, portable terminals in the halls, but there
were no terminals in the laundry closet, and he couldn’t risk the man making a scene.

Thanks to technology he needed neither a manual search nor Dr. Hampton to find out where they’d put Paradise, if they had
her. The good doctor’s magnetized ID card would do the trick.

Quinton turned his head with a long slow twist to the right and then the left, relieving the tension in his neck and upper
back. The chrome shelves next to the sink were stacked with supplies: folded smocks, white towels, Ace bandages, green plastic
bedpans, rolls of gauze, thermometers, blood pressure cuffs, and cloth sacks imprinted with the hospital logo. Three wheelchairs
were folded and stored next to the shelves.

He took one of the bags from the shelf and transferred his clothes and the gun into it. Then he unfolded one of the wheelchairs
and wheeled it from the closet, carrying the bag with his personal possessions in his right hand, walked down the hall, and
activated the first rolling computer terminal he came to. When the system asked for authorization, he simply slid the card
through the reader, magnetic strip down. The machine beeped and he was in. Dr. Robert Hampton.

Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned
.

He recited it out of habit, but he now knew why this had been his prayer. He
had
been sinning. He was perhaps the chief of all sinners, and his job was not done. There was more sinning left to do in this
one day than most folks would enjoy their entire lives.

Within thirty seconds he learned what he’d come to learn.
FIRST NAME: SAMANTHA, LAST NAME: UNKNOWN
had been admitted two hours ago and was now housed in room 303.

Walking with the purposefulness of a doctor, he headed directly to the elevator, took it to the third floor, and made his
way to the rooms, careful not to make eye contact with anyone. He set the wheelchair against the wall next to room 303 and
continued on, checking the other rooms across the hall.

Room 316 suited his purpose. Inside slept an older gentleman connected to a heart monitor. He flipped the monitor off, exited
the room, and pretended to be examining the patient’s chart outside room 303. It took the nurse on duty fifteen seconds to
abandon her station to investigate the disrupted heart monitor.

The moment she passed him, Quinton took the wheelchair from the hall and wheeled it into room 303.

There she slept. God’s favorite.

Oddly enough, she was strapped to the stripped bed, still dressed in her street clothes, though her feet were bare. The blue
cell phone he’d left for her lay on the bed table.

The site of her sleeping so peacefully on the hospital bed took him off guard. She was more beautiful in person than in the
photograph she’d sent him, and for a moment he wasn’t sure if he wanted to kill her or take her as his own.

But the moment passed and bitterness flooded his mouth. He could make no mistake; he did indeed hate this little wretch whom
he’d been sent to savage.

He walked up to Paradise and slugged her in the head. Her head jerked and lay still. The girl hadn’t even known what had hit
her.

Quinton set his plastic bag on the table next to the cell phone, unstrapped Paradise’s restraints, hooked his hands under
her armpits, and dragged her out of the hospital bed, dropping her limp form into the wheelchair. He arranged her feet in
the footrests, placed a blanket over her body, and sat her straight. Her head lolled to one side, but he kept her upright
by grasping the back of her shirt as he wheeled her forward. She would look like any sedated patient, rolling down the hall.

Quinton stuffed Dr. Robert Hampton’s ID along with the blue cell phone into his pocket and set his bag of personal items on
her lap. Then he wheeled her from room 303 and headed toward the elevator that would take them down to the emergency exit.

Less than a minute had passed since he’d turned off the monitor in room 316. And in less than another minute, Quinton was
beside his green Chevy truck, loading Paradise into the passenger seat, like a caring father taking his daughter home after
a visit to the emergency room.

He strapped her into the seat, closed the door, set the wheelchair into the truck bed, and slid behind the wheel. The Chevy
fired after a quick twist of the key.

Not until he was pulling out of the parking lot did the immensity of his accomplishment settle over him. She was his. Paradise
was finally his.

To hate and to kill as he saw fit.

“HE’S BRILLIANT, I’M
telling you.” Roudy floated around room 303 in his pajamas and slippers like a butterfly—to the bed, to the bathroom, to
the door, to the window—unsure of where he wanted to alight in this, the first actual crime scene he’d visited in his entire
life. He was himself again, having left the perils of traffic behind.

The nurse on duty and the administrator, a salt-and-pepper-haired thin doctor whose chin dipped below his Adam’s apple, stood
by, still in shock that their patient had been abducted.

It had taken only ten minutes after arriving to track down the admission of First Name: Samantha, Last Name: Unknown, who’d
been admitted two hours earlier after being picked up by police in a park not too far from CWI.

“Brilliant,” Roudy said. “Always a step ahead.”

“We can’t know for sure it was her,” Allison protested, without a shred of confidence. She snapped open her cell phone and
called the number Temple had given her.

“Of course it was,” Roudy cried. “All the details fit. A girl just over five feet. Clearly psychotic. Dark brown hair. Found
near the center. I can smell Paradise in the air.”

He answered after the first ring. “Agent Temple.”

“You heard?”

“I heard. And I just received confirmation. Seven bodies were just discovered dead in a beauty salon opposite the park. Best
guess is the killer tracked her location to the hospital. We don’t know how yet.”

Her legs felt weak and she sat on the edge of the bed. “A beauty salon?”

“Does it mean anything to you?”

“He’s… He’s trying to break her spirit.”

“Frankly, that’s the least of our concerns now. What matters most is that Quinton Gauld now has both Brad and Paradise, and
we don’t have a clue where.”

“He’s going to kill them.” She said it to herself as much as to him.

“We have every law enforcement agency in the state searching the most likely locations: barns, abandoned buildings, anything.
A Chrysler 300M is registered to his name; we’ve included the car to the profile. Rental records, banking—we’re digging up
everything we can tie to his identity, but this guy ran a pretty tight life. Not much coming up. False address.”

She forced herself to her feet, past her weakness. “You have to find him!”

“We’re trying, ma’am. Trust me, this affects us all.”

“How could he just escape? He just walked in here and took her without being seen?”

“Slow down. He may very well have been seen. I’ll have a team there in three minutes. In the meantime, security is asking
around. We still don’t know how he managed to get in much less get her out, but we will. These things take time, Miss Johnson.”

“We don’t have time!” she cried.

His end was silent.

“I’m coming down,” she said.

“I’m not sure what good that will… Hold on.” She could hear his muffled voice off the phone, swearing.

“What is it?” she demanded into the empty phone.

“… down there, Frank. Now!” He swore again and came back on. “Sorry. We have another body.”

“They found her?”

“No. Sorry, no. At the hospital.”

“Okay, I’m coming down to your offices. I’m not just going to sit around as long as he’s out there with Paradise, you hear
me?”

“This is an FBI investigation, ma’am. I know you’re upset, but there’s no way you can help us down here.”

“I may not be able to, but Roudy may.”

He paused. “Roudy. This is… one of your patients…”

“This is the man who identified Quinton Gauld. This is the man who helped Agent Raines put this case together while the rest
of your team stumbled around in the dark. And I’m bringing him down.”

He remained quiet for a moment.

“If you insist, ma’am, but I really don’t think—”

“I agree.” She looked up at Roudy, who was staring at her with wide eyes. “Yes, he’s invaluable.”

She hung up. Grabbed her purse.