Nick didn’t think so. Rodney liked his creature comforts. But he didn’t say so. He was too busy looking at the way the rug beneath the coffee table was cockeyed and wrinkled up at one corner. A loose woven rug, the kind that gets kicked up at the corners and becomes a trip hazard. Not something a blind man would have in his living room.
A tide of self-disgust welled up in Nick’s body.
He
was the one who was blind. Unwilling to see what was right in front of his eyes.
And there was no place else…
He walked over and kicked up the rug, stomped on the floor, then shoved the coffee table aside and tore the rug away. A door. He ripped it open.
God help him. There was a room down there.
A techie handed him a flashlight. Nick stuck it under his arm and cocked his gun. Quentin and two others aimed their lights into the hole and Nick started down, Quentin right behind. It was a narrow cement staircase, dirty, cracked. It went down nine steps then hair-pinned around a landing.
The smell hit him first, then the heat, then the sounds. The smell: burned pork and vanilla wax. The temperature: too hot for a basement in November. The sounds: high singing like a women’s choir or one of those English boys’ choirs…
Regina coeli…
That’s all Nick had time to notice before he heard the dull roar of a machine in the corner—and the wheezing of a woman.
“Cover me,” he said, and Quentin fell in behind him. Nick rounded the hairpin landing far enough for his
eyes to adjust to the darkness. He squinted and his gut wrenched. In the center of the room, a heavy workbench. On top, a woman.
“Ah, God,” he breathed. “Rebecca.” She was laid out on a table, face up, dead still. Her breathing sounded like a freight train. Her teeth chattered behind lips that somehow didn’t open, though it had to be over a hundred degrees down here. “Ambulance,” Nick called up the stairs, while Quent walked around Nick with his gun and flashlight.
“It’s clear,” Quent said. He hit the stairs, calling out orders, pulling a string on a bare light bulb on his way. Nick’s heart stopped when the light came on.
Rebecca was duct-taped in place. Yards and yards of it, around and around her and the table, ankles to throat. Her face was immobilized by a strange looping of the tape under her chin and across the top of her forehead, and the powdery residue of clay left her looking chalky. Her lips were cracked and sealed shut, as she struggled to take in air through her nose. She shuddered with chills.
Nick bent over her face. “Rebecca,” he said, touching his finger to her cheek. She was on fire. “It’s Sheriff Mann. You’re safe, now, sweetie. We’re gonna get you out of here.”
EMTs were the enemies of a crime scene. Nonetheless, everyone cleared out to give them access to Rebecca, focusing on the upstairs while they waited. Nick called for Gamble, who found evidence of tire tracks in the living room—a small motorcycle—in and out the door several times, leaving mud that Rodney had tried to wipe up with the towels. Clean enough to have fooled Nick or a casual visitor, but not a crime scene crew. In the kitchen, everything
was in its place, except for the orange juice Rodney had bought to match the receipt that served as his alibi for the time when Rebecca was taken. The juice sat out on the counter, unopened, with the receipt tucked underneath.
Nick’s hands fisted. The fucker was taunting him.
He walked the small cabin, remembering being in here before. With Calvin and Rodney and Quent, nothing out of place. He stepped over to the ceramic bowl of Mardi Gras beads, remembered thinking it was an awfully sparse collection of souvenirs for a life almost thirty years long. He fingered the beads, then picked up the black mask beside them.
“Rodney’s mother took him to Mardi Gras the night she killed herself,” Nick said when Quent came over.
“Think that’s hers?”
Nick turned it over. It wasn’t worn, but had the feeling of being old, untouched. Dust had settled in a dull sheen over the satin and jewels and feathers. A dark spot stained one yellow feather.
Nick handed it to Quentin. “Probably.”
“All clear.” An EMT emerged from the basement, carrying a plastic bag of fluids with a tube running behind him. They pulled Rebecca up the cellar stairs on a stretcher, the fluids going into her veins and oxygen into her nose. Nick offered a silent word to a God he wasn’t sure of, praying their efforts weren’t too little, too late, then he and Quent went back downstairs. The place was lit up with floodlights now, but it was still hot and the air was cloying. A church choir still floated from the CD player, the CD case sitting on top bearing a picture of a cathedral and a bunch of Latin titles.
Nick hit a button on the machine and the angel voices died. The dull roar that had hummed beneath the singing
continued on from a machine in the corner. Nick narrowed his gaze on the machine. He remembered it: an industrial-sized kiln he’d once helped move into Margaret’s workshop, back when she still did large sculptures like the boy and girl statues in the garden. He’d helped Jack vent it out the back of the barn, but when Margaret started focusing on smaller works like her masks, she’d gotten rid of it.
Apparently not. Rodney had it now. It was vented through the fireplace in his living room upstairs.
A dozen thoughts crossed Nick’s mind as he made his way around the table and over to the kiln. Rosa:
“It’s hot in here. Smells like pork.”
Calvin:
“Eighteen-hundred-and-fifty degrees. Too, too hot.”
Erin, reading:
“Witches have red eyes, and cannot see far. When a child fell into her power, she killed it, threw it in the oven and cooked it.”
And Nick’s own question, over and over again…
Where are the other bodies?
With a pit in his gut, he laid a hand on the kiln. Hot. He turned it off, heard the gas flames inside suck their last breath, and moved around to open one of the port holes. He looked inside.
His turn to be sick.
Nick forced himself to keep thinking, keep moving.
No, don’t think about the ash and bones in the kiln—almost certainly Jack—there’s nothing to do about that now. Think about Rodney. Where he’s going. What he’ll do next.
Sick bastard.
He stepped away, giving Quent a look in the kiln, and stopped when he noticed a shelf on the wall. He frowned. It was covered in dust but too nice to be mounted in a musty, unfinished cellar: stained cherry with carved corbels and gilt trim. It should have been in a dining
room or formal living room, or on display in the grand foyer at Hilltop. He aimed one of the flood lights at it. Dust rings marked the surface—five of them—where small items used to sit. The first had been absent so long its ring was barely visible, and the next had built up a good bit of dust, too. But the next two were covered with the finest sheen of powder, as if something had sat in those rings until only a few days ago. A fourth spot was oval and nearly clean, and a fifth marked the place where something with a square base had been removed just recently, and so hastily that a streak of dust had been wiped away.
Nick took a step closer and felt a crunch. He looked down. Shards of broken porcelain or china lay at his feet. And against the wall sat a bucket containing more. He squinted—made out a woman’s head from one piece, an arm from another. And a wing.
“Angels.”
“Figurines,” Quent said, joining him. “You think these are the ones Margaret took from her father?”
Maybe. Nick picked up one piece, an oval base. It had handwriting on the bottom—
February 4, 1990—Mom.
It fit perfectly over one of the dust rings.
“February fourth is Rodney’s birthday,” Nick remembered. “Gifts?”
Quentin dragged the bucket out. “Could be. There are more angels here than there are spots on the shelf. And there’s writing on all of them. Not just the dates.” They dug through for another minute, putting together the bigger pieces into piles that appeared to make the other angels, piecing together what was written on each.
“ ‘To watch over you another year,’ ”
Nick read, then used the inscriptions to arrange the angels by year.
“Nineteen-eighty-three to 1993. Rodney’s first ten
years. And Claire Devilas died during Mardi Gras right after he turned ten.”
“So you’re right. They were birthday angels. So what?”
“I don’t know. But it would explain why both Margaret and her father wanted the collection. They would have wanted for Rodney to keep them.”
“Except it looks like Rodney didn’t want them,” Quent said. “This is pretty meticulous destruction, not to mention keeping the pieces after they were broken.”
Yeah. And something else was bothering Nick. “They weren’t broken all at the same time. I mean, we don’t know about the first five, but these from the last five years—you can see from the dust rings when they came off the shelf. This one’s been gone for years. This one not quite so long, but a while. This was probably there just a few days ago and this one—” He stopped, a terrible notion rising to the surface. “Jesus. What if—”
“What if, what?” Quentin asked.
Nick pointed at the piles of porcelain on the floor that had once been the earliest angels, the ones that hadn’t been on the shelf but that Rodney had kept in a bucket. “Lauren McAllister,” he said, then went to the next. “Sara Daniels. Robin Weelkes. Eleanor Vann and her daughter. They were all killed before the Calloways moved here, before this shelf went up.”
Quentin picked up the idea, moving the base of each angel now sitting in a pile onto the shelf. “Shelly Quinn.” He looked at Nick, then back at the broken figurine. “She was the first murder after they moved here.”
Nick picked up the next. “Elisha Graham—the girl whose parents wouldn’t let her come home.”
They did the same with a figurine for Jack and one for Rebecca. Then, they ran out of angels.
“So, where’s the last one?” Quentin asked, as Nick’s phone rang.
It was Feldman, his voice wired with tension. “Special Agent Fisher—the one assigned to Dr. Sims—is dead.”
Nick stared at Quent.
Fisher? The last angel?
“What happened? Where’s Erin?”
“His body was just found at the intersection of 219 and Grauters. He was shot. It looks like his car was stolen from the scene and there’s a motorcycle there.”
Nick’s throat clogged. “Where’s Erin?” he said again.
“She left the Engels’ house an hour ago. Her purse is sitting on the road with Fisher’s body.”
Footsteps. Erin held her breath. He was coming.
A tidal wave of terror washed through her. Suddenly she was sixteen again, lying in bed with her eyes squeezed closed and her fingers curled around the gun under her pillow, straining to hear if Jeffrey was coming.
Only this wasn’t Jeffrey. And she didn’t have a gun. She didn’t even know for sure if, when the lid to this dank, musty trunk finally opened, she would have the strength to use her limbs. She’d lost all sense of time and direction. Spent every ounce of energy she could muster trying to make noise or move. She had no idea where they had stopped. She only knew Rodney had gotten out of the car and disappeared for a little while.
And now, he was coming back. Footsteps on the gravel. Closer.
The footsteps stopped, and Erin couldn’t help the horrible surge of panic that washed through her veins. It wasn’t just fear for her life. It wasn’t even just the fear that she’d come all this way to prove Justin innocent and he would die, anyway. It was the fear that she’d never see Nick again, or Hannah.
No, stop it. She couldn’t think like that. She had to keep her head. Rodney was a mental case and she was a shrink. Get into his head, figure him out. Stop him from taking this horrific string of murders any further.
Stop him
. Sure. That notion was so ludicrous she might have laughed if the stakes hadn’t been so high. For God’s sake, he was an animal—a brutal, keen-eyed manipulator who had taken pleasure in a twelve-year ruse. The extent of that deception was flabbergasting. The depth of his evil, mind-boggling.
Keys jangled. Erin held her breath and heard the key slide into the lock, heard the catch of the clasp and felt a sudden
whoosh
of air. She opened her eyes, blinking even though there was little but moonlight. Took a deep breath and smelled the scents of pine trees and clay. Felt the cold muzzle of a pistol touch her cheek.
Erin turned to stone.
“Ah, she’s still alive,” Rodney said, sounding gleeful. “That’s a relief. I would have been sorely put out to come all this way and then find you were dead before your time.” He bent down close, his breath whispering against her cheek. “This is a reminder to you that I’m the one with a gun. Get out of the car and walk in front of me, peaceably, mind you, or I won’t hesitate to use it. On an elbow or kneecap, or something fun like that.”
The threat hit its mark. Erin tried to move, but her muscles were tied into cramps and her equilibrium off. Rodney cursed and hauled her out of the trunk. She crumpled to her knees.
She gritted her teeth against the pain, gravel biting into her knees, and struggled to right herself. Dared to look around. Trees, darkness, gravel. And something else. Scraps of white hanging on a tree trunk.
Astonishment whipped through her breast. Nick’s cabin.
She tried to think, but Rodney didn’t give her a chance. He snagged her arm—her wrists still bound with duct tape in front of her—and yanked her upright, poking the gun into her back.
“Move. Into your lover’s house. We don’t have all night.” He chuckled. “Well, at least
you
don’t.”
Nick, Quent, and all the Feds hit the intersection of 219 and Grauters. Panic gnawed at Nick’s gut. An unbearable swelling of fear he hadn’t felt since Hannah lay in the hospital with a bullet wound in her head, and Allison lay on a slab.
He shoved that thought down and forced himself to focus. The Fed, Fisher, was shot at close range, from maybe ten feet away. It made sense. He wouldn’t have been worried about walking right up to a blind man. Rodney’s motorcycle, the one whose tread marked the cellar stairs, had been tucked in the ditch along the road, almost out of sight. The gray sedan—the cheap rental that wasn’t supposed to look like a Fed car—was gone.