One Scream Away (14 page)

Oh, damn. The legs were damaged. Tiny hairline fractures crawled through the bisque like a spider’s web, as if something had landed on the doll once upon a time, or it had been dropped. She sighed; damage like this was difficult to repair, and even the best repairs would be visible under a black light. But as costly as the damage was, it wasn’t unexpected. Some of these dolls, though originally for use as models in storefronts, had actually become playthings for children.

She sat down at her computer, wanting to lose herself and pass the time. It worked, until the phone rang.

Her heart gave a thump.
Neil?

“Hi, baby.”

Terror crashed in. Beth tempered it with fury.

“I’ve been missing you,” Bankes said. “And I know you can’t wait to see me.”

“I can’t wait to see you dead.”

He laughed. “Such a spitfire. I would have enjoyed you about an hour ago, when the woman I was with proved to be… boring.”

A chill slipped down her spine. “What do you mean?”

“I mean there wasn’t even a fight. No pain, no suffering, no pleading. She just fell into her own van and I shot her.”

Oh God, oh God.

“I didn’t even have the luxury of hearing her scream. But that’s all right. I have others to keep me going until it’s your turn.”

Beth swallowed back bile, nearly choking.
Last Wednesday in Seattle, yesterday in Indiana…
And just now, another?

“What are you doing? It’s me you hate,” she said. “Why would you hurt anyone else?”

“Oh, no,” he whined. “You mean, I’m not hurting you? But I would swear that’s
pain
I hear in your voice.”

Beth sank to her knees. She might not have even realized it except that she heard the sound,
thnk
, when she landed. “ S-stop. Don’t hurt anyone else.”

“Very nice, Beth. I love to hear you plead. It’s sweet to know you’re finally suffering.”

Hold on, don’t pass out. It’s too late for deals, too late for anything Adele Lochner could help with. Too late to protect Abby. Just make him end it.

“Then come,” she said low. “Come get
me
. I’m the one you want. You want me to plead? I’ll plead, you bastard. I’ll scream and cry all you want. I’ll beg—”

His laugh cut her off, low and evil. “Be careful what you wish for, doll.”

Click.

“Nooo!” The phone slid from Beth’s hands. She folded down and held herself tight, then leaned back on her heels, rocking like a madwoman.

He was murdering women. Not seven years ago, now. Last week. Last night. An hour ago. All she’d ever thought about was protecting her secrets and keeping Abby safe. And all along, Bankes had been killing women on his way to her.

She went to the desk unit of the phone. Hand shaking, she punched the CID button. The number came up: area code 571.

Arlington. Oh, God.

She rooted through her purse until she found Sheridan’s number, dialed.
The customer is not in the service area…
She tried again.
The customer is not in the service area…

But Bankes was near. Area code 571. She had to get Abby away from here.

Stay there until you hear from me. Trust me.

Beth palmed her cheeks dry. She went upstairs, checked on Abby, who was in a movie-induced trance, and retrieved the 9 mm from its secret compartment in the cornice of her highboy. She checked the cartridge and jacked it closed, then made sure there was an extra bullet in the chamber.

Focused now, her brain guiding her rather than her emotions, Beth pulled a suitcase from the closet in the guest bedroom. It was already packed. The only things to add were Abby’s toothbrush, a few toys she would have missed, and Heinz’s leash and food. Beth collected the toiletries, a couple of animals and a pillow for Abby, then picked up a hedgehog that was Heinz’s favorite toy. Stuffed it in the suitcase.

In three more minutes, the Suburban was loaded with Beth’s purse, the dog, the toys, and the suitcase. She went upstairs.

“Hey!” Abby complained when Beth turned off the TV.

“How many times have you seen this movie?” Beth asked, forcing a smile.

Abby giggled. “About thirty-hundred-thousand.”

“That’s what I thought. So listen. How would you like to go see Aunt Cheryl and Uncle Jeff tonight instead of waiting ’til morning?”

“Tonight? Right now?”

“Right now. Let’s hurry. Run to the bathroom first; it’s a long drive.”

“Okay!” Abby ran ahead, and in two more minutes, they were on the road. As soon as she got out of the city, Beth dialed Cheryl.

The first lies had been so hard. They were coming much more easily now.

N
eil banged through Rick’s office door. Cops milled around the desk like fruit flies. They all winced when they saw Neil’s battered face but were too focused on what was happening to comment.

“What happened?” he said, bulldozing his way through.

“Easy, man.” Rick’s brow creased. “You get sewn up?”

“I’m fine,” Neil said, touching the back of his neck where ten stitches tugged at his scalp. Courtesy of Beth’s private dick, Joshua Herring. “What happened?”

“A call just came in to Denison. We haven’t heard it yet. Your phone is out, so the guy called me. I told him to send the dub over here.” He shoved a finger at Neil’s chest. “But
you
get to explain the trace to the chief.”

The chief was the last thing on Neil’s mind. Another call? And this time, not anonymous. Beth had identified the caller as a man named Chevy Bankes. Info had been pouring in about him while Neil was at the hospital, but so far, they hadn’t made heads or tails out of Bankes’s connection to Beth.

But he
was
connected; he’d just called her again. And this time, her line was tapped.

The phone on Rick’s desk rang. “Sacowicz.” He listened, face intent. “Stay on her. For Christ’s sake, don’t lose her. I’ll send more cars.”

He hung up and looked at Neil. “Denison’s moving. She loaded up her car with a suitcase and the dog and the kid, headed north on I-95.”

“What?” It took five seconds for the words to register. When they did, Neil wanted to hit something. “Goddamn it. She promised she’d stay home.”

He felt the eyes of the other cops boring into him. No sooner had it dawned on him what they were thinking than someone said it aloud: “So Denison
is
in with Bankes. The bastard called her, and she’s going to meet him.”

“We don’t know that,” Rick said. “Let’s wait and hear the call. Billings will stay on her.”

“Just Billings?” Neil asked.

“No.” Rick snapped his fingers at an officer named Fernandez. “Get her in a net. In front of her, behind her, all around. Don’t take any chance of losing her or the man she meets”—he looked at Neil—“if she meets anyone at all. Remember, there’s a little girl in the SUV. Don’t let this turn into a clusterfuck.”

“Got it,” Fernandez said. He and three others were out the door in a heartbeat.

“She wouldn’t do that, Rick,” Neil said. “She wouldn’t take off without telling me. We had a… We came to an understanding.” But he wasn’t sure he believed it himself. Maybe it had all been an act. The gut-wrenching emotion, the sharing of Bankes’s name. Her tearful surrender to trust him. Their kisses.

“Was the call long enough to get a location?” Neil asked.

Rick went to a wall map. “Ten blocks. That’s the best they could do in the amount of time he was on the line. That would mean the call came from right in here, near St. Mary’s church in Silver Springs,” he said, tapping an area not twenty minutes from Beth’s house. “I’ve got uniforms around the perimeter in five-block increments, stopping anything that looks suspicious.”

“Lieutenant.” Another phone had rung, and a female officer held the receiver toward Rick. He took it. Silence again, and his face lost color. “Get all that to Fernandez; have them fax us everything.” He hung up. “Shit.”

“What is it?” Neil asked.

“We got a dead woman in a Dodge Caravan”—he paused to mark it on the map, just inside the circled area—“St. Mary’s parking lot. Shot in the head.”

Neil stared; Rick looked like he’d just been sucker-punched. “Get on it, Jackson,” Rick said to the woman. “Take someone with you from downstairs and start canvassing the area around the church. And notify Special Agent Copeland at the FBI—don’t let anybody touch anything in the van until the Feds get in there.” He looked at Neil. “I’m gonna go look. Maybe something in the van will give us a lead.”

“You mean another lead,” Neil said, a bitter taste in his mouth. “You’ve already got a net around the best lead. She’s driving north on I-95.”

“Maybe.” Rick waited, chewing his lip. Then, “You wanna stay and wait for the call when the audio comes in?”

Yeah, Neil wanted to. He wanted to hear the audio of a phone call that had sent Beth running away just hours after she’d kissed Neil and allowed him to comfort Abby and agreed to trust him. He wanted to hear what it was the bastard said that made Beth jump and run when it was all Neil could do to get her to even talk to him.

More than that, though, Neil wanted to be there when they got her. See her face. Look in her beautiful, secretive eyes. Make her look into his.

Screw staying to hear the recording. Neil said, “I’ll go follow Billings. Call me when you hear the audio if Bankes said anything besides, ‘I’m finally here, baby. Come meet me.’ ”

There was something more on the audio, and Neil’s heart jammed in his throat when he heard it just five minutes later.

“Listen to this,” Rick said, sounding breathless on the other end of the phone. They were both in their cars, interference crackling over the line and breaking up their voices. “It’s the audio of the call to Denison, ten minutes ago. Hold on to your steering wheel, man.”

Neil dumped the car against the curb. The phones clicked a couple of times, then the caller’s voice came through.

Threats. Intimidation. Confessions of murder. Beth, sounding shocked and frightened. Then baiting him, trying to bargain with him. Terrified.

“Jesus,” Neil said. He was breathing hard, heart thundering, though all he was doing was sitting still in his car. “Play that again.”

Neil listened, then said the second prayer he could remember saying in over nine years. The first had been a little more than a month ago, for his brother. Damn if it wasn’t close to becoming a habit.

Rick beeped back onto the line. “So she’s not with him. That’s good news, right?”

Sure. Good news. Beth was terrified and frantic, and a murderer had come all the way across the country to find her. She had Abby, was carrying at least a .22 if not the 9 mm she’d shot at Keet’s, and enacting some rash plan she hadn’t bothered sharing with Neil.

“Ready for some more?” Rick asked. “Denison headed west. She’s not going anywhere near Bankes, and unless he tapped her phone, too, he can’t have any idea where she’s going.”

“Do we?” Neil asked.

“Do we what?”

“Have any idea where she’s going.”

“Nope. That’s why I called you. Want the guys to pull her over?”

“Jesus. She’s got Abby with her.”

“We could do it easy. One car, two officers. Try not to scare the shit out of Abby.”

“You gonna let one car pull over a distraught mother who’s running scared and armed with two guns?”

“So we let her go a while, let the drive cool her off.”

“Yeah,” Neil said. “But I wanna be there when she stops.”

“Where are you? I’ll come pick you up.”

They drove for three hours, then Rick thinned the net and stayed on Beth. She wasn’t a threat except to herself, and they’d crossed through five different precincts. Now they were in the mountains of southwest Virginia, and Neil wondered if she was headed to Guam.

They’d learned next to nothing about the murder of the woman in the van. The victim was a thirty-four-year-old soccer mom and Catholic preschool teacher who’d been attending a staff function. She’d been shot in the head in her own van. No ballerina-like pose, no missing eyelids, no weird carvings on her legs. Not even an eyebrow-pencil mark on her temple, and it looked like a smaller-caliber bullet than a .38. There was nothing but the phone call to Beth to connect this woman to the man who was no longer their “unidentified subject.” He was identified now. His name was Chevy Bankes.

“Think she’s really going?” Rick asked. “Just gonna drive until she feels far enough away to stop?”

Neil toyed with it. “No. You heard her tell him to come. I think she’s gonna lure the bastard back to her house and try to kill him.” He closed his eyes. “I could have helped her.”

“Beth?” Rick asked, his voice low. “Or Heather?”

The old pain took a stab at Neil. “Jesus, Rick, either of them. I mean, if either one had just told me what was going on, I might’ ve—”

“Whoa,” Rick said, squinting into the darkness.

Neil skimmed the road for what Rick had seen. A pair of shiny green disks, frozen in the distance. Groundhog, maybe. Beth’s car swerved around it, brake lights flashing.

“She’s gonna kill herself,” Rick said. “Out here on these two-lane highways, probably falling asleep at the wheel. The woman’s gonna crash if she doesn’t stop soon.”

Neil looked at the green numbers glowing in the dashboard: 11:45. They were almost four hours outside the District, and he had no idea how far Beth was planning to go. He did know she’d been without substantial sleep for God only knows how long. She was a tragedy waiting to happen.

“Okay,” he said. “Let’s pull her over. Before she runs her car into a tree.”

Rick nodded. He radioed Billings but stopped in the middle of the transmission. “Wait, she’s getting off.”

Beth took a little road whose only name was proclaimed by a tired sign reading
CO. RD. 208
. Neil dug out a map, using the glove-box light to see. “Covington.” He thumped the map with his finger. “There’s a little town six miles north on 208 called Covington, an exchange from another state highway two miles this side of it.”

“What the hell’s in Covington?”

“I don’t know,” Neil said, “but unless she’s either lost or turns off at the interchange, that’s where she’s going. It’s not an easy town to find by accident.”