The Prettiest One: A Thriller (44 page)

After the briefest of pauses, Bookerman said, “Can’t say I’m surprised.”

“And second,” Chops said, “she’s in the trunk of my car.”

His father was quiet a moment while he appeared to be processing that. “What are you gonna do with her?”

“I’m bringing her to you.”

“What the hell for? I don’t want her. Give me a little time to mourn for my son, for Christ’s sake. I don’t want to see whoever killed him. Just do whatever the hell you want to do with her. I’m too tired. It’s been a bad day today. Real bad. I feel like shit. And now this. My son’s dead. I’m tired, George. You can come over in the morning and tell me all the bad things you did to your brother’s killer if you want, how you made her suffer, but right now, I’m going to bed.”

“Wait up for me,” Chops insisted. “I’ll be there soon.”

“I’m not waiting, George.”

“Listen, Dad. Trust me on this. You’ve been waiting a long, long time for this. A few more minutes aren’t going to kill you.”

A long pause. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“Wait up and you’ll see. I’ll be there soon.”

He couldn’t wait to see his father’s face when he opened the door. It would be like Christmas morning.

Bix and Josh had crisscrossed the entire city of Smithfield, or so it seemed to Josh. And while they were forced to drive in random circles, hoping for a glimpse of the dark sedan, Darryl Bookerman’s son was driving straight to wherever he was planning to go. For all they knew, he was already there and had already started doing whatever he planned to do with Caitlin.

“Damn it,” Josh said, pounding his thigh with a fist. “Where is he?”

“What is it with these damn Bookermans?” Bix asked. “This is the third time one of them has tried to take Katie. Bunch of twisted freaks.”

“He’s the one who killed One-Eyed Jack,” Josh said. “He has to be.”

“No shit. We need to find him fast and get Caitlin the hell away from him. Where was she going, by the way?” he asked. “When she left your room?”

“Don’t worry about it,” Josh said. “Listen, I know you have a thing against the police, but it’s time to call them. Caitlin was going to turn herself in tomorrow anyway. And we need them
right now
.”

“Hey, I’m all for that now. We do need them. But what are you going to tell them? Be on the lookout for a dark sedan?”

“If I tell them that a woman has been abducted, and it happens to be the woman whose picture was in the news today, the woman wanted in connection with the warehouse murder, they’ll pay attention. They’ll tell the cops that are out on patrol to look for the car.”

“Even if he hasn’t holed up somewhere yet, we still have no description other than ‘dark sedan.’ You know how many cars fit that description? We don’t even know what direction he went.”

“I’m calling them,” Josh said as he pulled out his phone.

“Like I said, it’s fine with me. But I don’t know where you’re gonna tell them to start looking.”

Josh dialed a nine. “If only we had some clue about where he might take her.”

He dialed a one.

Bix said, “The only places we know that are connected to that family are the junkyard from twenty-two years ago—and you said that’s no longer even there—and Mike’s house, which is full of bodies. I don’t know if he would take her back there, with his brother’s corpse just lying there, but he knows that we know about that place. He’d want to take her somewhere we don’t know about.”

Josh dialed another one, the final digit . . . then disconnected. An idea had come to him.

Acutely aware—almost painfully so—of the seconds ticking by, Josh brought up the Internet browser on his smartphone.

“I thought you were calling the cops,” Bix said.

“In a minute. Shut up, will you?”

Josh revisited the public property records database for Hampshire County, Massachusetts. He typed as quickly as he could without making mistakes. He couldn’t afford mistakes. Caitlin didn’t have time for them.

That morning, Josh had learned that no one named Bookerman owned property in the area. That evening, he had searched for the address where they had found Mike Bookerman and learned that he was going by “Michael Maggert” now and owned the property in that name. But Josh had never looked for more properties owned by Mike Maggert. He did so now but found only the one. Searching by name again, though, rather than by address, Josh now saw that there were two other Maggerts who owned property in or around Smithfield. A Leonard Maggert and a George Maggert. Could one of them be Darryl Bookerman’s other son?

“What are we doing, Josh?” Bix asked. “We’re losing time.”

“Damn it, shut up.”

A quick search for “Leonard Maggert” combined with “Smithfield, Massachusetts” produced an article about a sixty-eight-year-old Smithfield resident who rolled a perfect game in a local seniors bowling league. That obviously wasn’t the man who took Katie. The same search with “George” substituted for “Leonard” produced no results at all, so Josh couldn’t rule out the possibility that George Maggert was really George Bookerman. Maybe a family of Maggerts had adopted both boys when Darryl went to prison. Josh went back to the property records and found it quickly.

“1320 Linden Road,” Josh said. “You know where that is?”

Bix nodded. “Is that where they are?”

“There’s no way I can know for sure, but other than Mike Bookerman’s house, which has two dead bodies in it, it’s all we have.”

“Linden is pretty close,” Bix said as he banged a sudden, hard left. “We caught a break. We’ve been driving in circles. You could have figured this out when we were on the other side of town and added fifteen minutes.”

Bix gunned the Explorer without regard for the speed limit, traffic lights, or safety—all of which was fine with Josh. Maybe they’d even attract a police escort and they could lead the cops right to the door of George Maggert . . . who hopefully was really George Bookerman.

Josh called 911 and explained that a woman had been abducted and that he was in pursuit. The operator asked his name. He gave it. And he gave Caitlin’s name. And knowing this would get the cops’ interest, he said that the woman in the trunk of the kidnapper’s car was the same woman whose picture had been on the news and in the papers all day. He begged the operator to get cars to 1320 Linden Road as soon as possible. And in case he and Bix were wrong and Bookerman
was
taking Caitlin back to Mike’s house, and knowing that it no longer mattered, Josh also gave the cops that address and said they’d find two dead bodies there. Then he hung up, willed the truck to move faster . . . and prayed.

The car eased to a stop. Caitlin huddled in the dark and waited for the trunk to open. She gripped the tire iron she’d found in the blackness—once she had stopped panicking—and prepared to come out swinging the second the lid began to rise. She thought of the tire iron she’d used to escape from Mike Bookerman seven months ago and hoped she would have the same luck with his brother. A car door closed. Footsteps crunched in gravel, getting closer to the trunk. The latch disengaged and the lid popped up a little and . . .

Caitlin rose to her knees, shouldering the lid the rest of the way open, and swung wildly in front of her with the tire iron and connected with . . . nothing. There was no one there. Suddenly, the trunk lid banged hard against the back of her head, sending her sprawling forward and knocking the tire iron from her hands. Too late she realized that Bookerman’s son had stood to the side of the trunk in case Caitlin tried to pull something like the stunt she had just attempted, and when she took her swing, he’d slammed the lid back down on her.

“Nice try,” the man said as he pulled her from the trunk by her hair. Caitlin screamed and tried to hold her scalp to keep it from tearing away from her skull. “People call me Chops,” the man said. “You don’t want to know why.” She landed on her face on the gravel, and he dragged her roughly across it for several feet. “Remind me what your name is again.”

The calm way he was able to speak to her while at the same time brutalizing her was chilling. He yanked her to her feet.

“Your name?” he said.

“Caitlin Sommers.”

“Caitlin, that’s right.” He pulled her away from the car, across uneven slate pavers, toward a big house that looked like an unmade bed. Peeling paint. Missing shutters. A gutter hanging loose at one end. The yard had been neglected for years; the grass was sparse, and where it still managed to grow, it was too long. There was no garage and no other car in the driveway. Caitlin hoped that meant that no one was home . . . and by no one, she meant no Darryl Bookerman.

They were at the front door now, and Chops opened it without knocking.

“Dad,” he called. “I have a surprise for you.”

“I’m back here, in the living room.”

The voice was that of an older man who needed to clear his throat in the worst way. And even though it had aged, it was also instantly recognizable to Caitlin, though she hadn’t heard it in person in more than two decades. Then again, why shouldn’t she remember it? She’d heard it in her nightmares nearly every night since then.

The man who called himself Chops gave her a small shove and she started walking. Then a strange thing happened. Her steps became extraordinarily slow. Her breaths seemed to come once a minute. Time had slowed to a glacial crawl and a fog began to envelop the room.

Hunnsaker had finally learned the identity of the man who had been killed at the warehouse two nights ago. Padilla called to inform her that he was Peter Brennan, a loser from Philadelphia who was a suspect in the hijacking of an eighteen-wheeler on a run from Nevada to Philly eleven days ago. Brennan and his partner had made their move at a truck stop, putting a serious dent in the driver’s head on his way back from taking a leak. The thing was, the idiots had hit the truck after it had delivered most of its goods. According to Brennan’s partner, who was in custody, all they got was a box of smartphones, which wouldn’t be too difficult to fence, and a box containing half a dozen prosthetic human hands, which would be a lot harder to move. A quick check by Padilla revealed that some company in Michigan that made bionic human hands had filed a report about the loss of six of their robotic prosthetics that had been custom-made for specific patients on the East Coast. Hunnsaker wondered why the hands hadn’t been shipped FedEx or UPS, but Padilla said something about the shipper knowing the trucker personally. Anyway, Peter Brennan apparently had some pretty big outstanding gambling debts with some people who wouldn’t take kindly to missed payments, so he screwed over his partner and skipped town with the phones and the fake hands. The cops tracked down his partner in crime, who was only too happy to finger Brennan.

So, that was one mystery solved. But they already had another. Someone had found the body of a young woman crammed into the knee well of a desk behind the reception counter of the Eagle Inn Motel. It could be a coincidence, Hunnsaker realized, but when Padilla informed her of the murder and told her that there hadn’t been a robbery or any signs of a sexual assault, Hunnsaker knew there was a connection. The strange thing was that the woman had been killed with a knife. If Caitlin Sommers was involved, that was odd. The victim at the warehouse had been killed with a gun. What little Padilla had been able to learn about Sommers in the past hour made it hard to believe that she was capable of stabbing someone to death. It didn’t seem to fit. Then again, maybe either the husband or boyfriend who was running with her had done it. Either way, Hunnsaker was certain it was connected.