One Scream Away (21 page)

Neil nodded. “Fair enough.”

He sat down with her on the couch and filled her in on what they knew about Bankes. His family, his schooling, his employment. He hesitated when it came to Bankes’s sister, Jenny, but told her anyway.

“Oh, God,” she said, going pale. “Bankes killed her, didn’t he?”

“No one knows that.”

“But that’s what they believe, isn’t it?” Panic edged her voice. “He killed a helpless little gir—”

“Don’t go there, Beth. Not until we know.” He waited until it looked like she could hear him again, then picked up a napkin from the table and sketched out what they’d learned about his homestead: the lay of Bankes land bordering the Susquehanna River, the position of the house, the adjacent hunting range. “Chevy spent his teenage years in foster care, but he inherited his mother’s land when he turned twenty-one. He sold it the same day, for a song, to the man who owns this hunting range here. Mo Hammond. Philly agents are trying to track Hammond down now to talk to him. Of all the people in that town, Hammond might’ve known Bankes best. His family and the Bankes family went way back.” Neil gave Beth’s hand a squeeze. “We’ll find him, sweetheart. I promise.”

She nodded, and he thought she actually believed him. But there was also an unvoiced question in her eyes:
Before he kills again, or after?

He put down the pen and napkin. “Did you talk to Abby today?”

“Cheryl said they did a lemonade stand this morning—made six dollars and eighteen cents. Mostly donations, I think.” She stopped, sucked in her lips.

“And Standlin came by?”

Beth scowled. “You know she did. Haven’t you seen the latest additions to
my file
?”

“It’s a file on the case, Beth, not on you. And yes, I read it. It said you chewed Standlin out, clammed up, and walked away.”

“I’ll do the same to you. Don’t try.”

He smiled at the fire in her eyes even as he worried about all that stalwart independence. Maybe he shouldn’t push her or try to bully her into trusting him. Maybe he should just be patient and let her open up to him in her own time and manner. Or maybe he should just damn everything and peel off her clothes, show her how it would feel to—

“I know what you’re thinking,” she said smartly.

“Oh, I don’t think so.” He cleared his throat.

“Yes, I do. I know what you all think. You think I never dealt with what Bankes did. You think I avoided it by moving far away and having Abby and focusing on my career. Well, maybe you’re right. But putting me in a room with some bulldozer shrink won’t change it.”

“She’s just trying to profile Bankes.”

“She knows all about Bankes. By now the FBI must have a file on him three inches thick. The only thing they
don’t
know about him is where he currently is. It’s me Standlin is analyzing. It’s like she thinks I’m gonna snap, go off like a post office employee.”

“You’ve been hoarding guns, doing a lot of training, and keeping some pretty heavy secrets, Beth.” He stopped. He could have pressed the point but decided not to. He didn’t want to talk about Standlin. He didn’t want to talk about Bankes. He didn’t really even want to talk about Abby. He looked down at his hands, thinking about the one thing he really
did
want to talk about.

“Evan Foster thinks I want to take you to bed.” He paused. “I do.”

Her breath stopped and she stiffened.

“Easy, honey, I didn’t mean right this minute. I just thought I’d put the idea in your head, get you thinking about it.”

“I have been thinking about it.”

“Okay, then.” He forced himself to stand up, get some distance. “So, you think about it some more, then. Let me know what you decide.”

Neil swallowed. She’d spoken so quietly he wasn’t sure he’d heard right, but when her cheeks burned pink, he knew he had. His body responded with a swiftness that shocked him. A woman’s hand, a woman’s mouth, a woman’s body—they could all do that to him, had done it perhaps too many times and with too many women. But a woman’s words? He hadn’t known that was possible.

S
he was dreaming again; Neil could hear it, and the sounds tightened in his chest like a fist. Whimpers, screams that didn’t quite make it out of her throat.

Bankes was in there with her. Doing what? Tormenting Anne Chaney? Striking Beth with the butt of his gun? Something worse?

He groaned and laid a forearm over his eyes, sank deeper into his pillow. Leave it alone. It was part of the healing, he knew that. Hell, he’d dreamed about Mackenzie for years—still did sometimes. She’d be eleven now. Taking piano lessons, ballet. Playing soccer, maybe, starting to look at boys.

He got up, peeked in the door of Beth’s room. She was asleep but sobbing softly. Hurting. He went to the bed.

When he touched her she jerked so hard he jumped back. She cowered into a fetal position, her sleep-drugged body not able to get away, the dreams not letting her out. The truth climbed on top of him, and he wanted to kill someone. The next ten someones he ran into.

Bankes.

Neil left the room and called the agent stationed outside. “Stay with her,” he said. “There’s something I gotta do.”

“It’s two o’clock in the morning.”

“I’ll be back by three.”

On Beth’s street, he called Lexi Carter and woke her up.

“Jesus, Sheridan,” she said, a yawn in her voice. “Do you know what time it is? What are you doing?”

“Call off the dogs. I need to come by. I’m on Ashford Drive now.”

She did, then came back on the line, still sounding groggy. “What the hell do you want?”

“Let me in. I’m coming up the front porch.”

At first glance she reminded him of Beth, wearing a longish polo shirt with her dark hair disheveled. Which, of course, was the idea. “You shouldn’t be here,” she complained. “What if Bankes is watching?”

“Then he’ll see me leave again in two minutes.”

He climbed the stairs, not bothering with the lights until he got into Abby’s room. He went to her dresser and found a comb, a couple of hairbrushes, a whole lot of ribbons and bows and barrettes. He pulled out an elastic doodad that had two big plastic beads on it and held it up to the light. A tiny mass of ripped-out hairs was tangled around the elastic.

“Reggie says hi, by the way,” Carter said from the doorway. “He was surprised when I told him you were back at Quantico. Said he wants a rematch in the ring.”

Neil forced a smile. “Sure.”

“You okay?” she asked.

He pocketed the elastic band. “I’m fine. Sorry to wake you. This is all I needed.”

Twenty minutes later, Neil waited at the entrance of an FBI lab. A short, bulky man in a cardigan walked up. “Christ, you got old,” the man said, extending his hand.

“I need a favor, Max.”

He laughed. “I kinda figured that, what with the sneaking around in the middle of the night and all.”

Neil handed over the beaded rubber band. “DNA. And don’t report the findings to anyone but me, okay? Oh, and—”

“I know, I know: Rush it, right?”

“If you can.”

“Sure,” Max said, slipping the band into a plastic bag. “I mean, it’s only my career, ya know. Just a couple dozen years of work and my pension, my wife’s future and kids’ colle—”

“Max…”

He grinned, jowls jiggling like a bulldog’s. “Love to see you big macho types squirm.”

Neil was on his fifth cup of coffee the next morning when an agent called from the hallway. Neil opened the door.

“Dolls?” he asked, pointing at the boxes the agent carried.

The man handed them over. “Evan Foster wasn’t very happy about having them taken from the premises. Copeland had to wake up a judge and get a warrant. He told me to tell you it better be worth his while.”

“We’ll find out,” Neil said and closed the door just as Beth walked in. She’d dabbed makeup on the dark circles under her eyes, but she still looked beat. And beautiful.

“Are those Mrs. Chadburne’s dolls?” she asked, frowning. “What are you doing with them?”

Neil set both boxes on the table and opened the first. Gentle, now. All he needed was Margaret Chadburne or Evan Foster to sue him for destroying tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of dolls. “Something you said about the last one got me thinking,” Neil said, peeling off the packaging. He got through the bubble wrap and peanuts and found several sheets of tissue paper mummifying the doll. He let the tissue drop from his hands until the wide, dark eyes came into view. “This was the first one, right?”

“Right. You picked her up in my basement, remember?”

“You said she was worth more than six months of my salary. Why is that?”

A little crease dug into her forehead. “She’s early, she’s in good condition, and she blinks. Well, at least she’s supposed to. The mechanism is broken, but it’s rare to exist at all in such an early Benoit.”

Neil’s pulse began to race. Stay cool, stay cool.

He placed the doll on top of the padding inside her box and opened the second one. Blood moving fast now. “Was there anything unusual about this second one?”

“Unusual? No, not for something nearly a hundred and fifty years old. The bisque had some damage—hairline fractures on the legs.”

Neil swallowed. “Show me.”

Beth took the doll, her slender, practiced fingers removing the clothes. A pair of lace-edged bloomers was the last thing to go.

“Ah, Jesus.” Neil paced away from the table, rubbing the back of his neck. He could swear something had skittered across it. “Jesus,” he said again.

“What?”

“And the third one had a blouse that didn’t match, right?”

“Yes. Neil—”

“I need to make a phone call.” He cupped both her shoulders. “Do you trust me?”

She shook her head. Not a negative, just confusion, as if the motion would jostle things into place. “Yes. But wh—”

“Do me a favor and package the dolls back up. I want to take them to the lab.”

“You’re scaring me, Neil.”

“I know.” He was scaring himself. “Where is Mrs. Chadburne staying? I need to talk to her.”

“I don’t know. All I have is her Boise number, but it could be a cell. I didn’t know she was here until you told me. Neil, what’s going on?”

“I think Chevy Bankes knows Mrs. Chadburne. He may be using her dolls to get to you.”

She stared. “I don’t understand.”

“I don’t, either, yet.”

“Oh, God, Neil. If Bankes knows her—”

He put a finger over her lips. “You’re doing it again, Beth, jumping to conclusions. If they do know each other, it’s because Bankes needs her. He’s not going to hurt her.”

At least—Neil thought, but didn’t say it aloud—not yet.

Chevy shifted, unable to get comfortable. Damned oak. Even with a quilted packing pad folded beneath him and Beth’s sweater under his head, it might as well have been petrified redwood for as hard as it felt.

He closed his eyes, though they longed for light, and strained to listen for the impostor in Beth’s house. He could hear her easily when she was in the family room or kitchen, not so much when she went up to the bedrooms. Right now, he was sure she was all the way upstairs. The water had turned on a couple of minutes ago. Taking a shower, probably.

Chevy could use one of those. Maybe he’d join her. Wouldn’t that be a twist? From
someone’s been sleeping in my cupboards
to standing outside the shower stall, wielding a knife while the
Psycho
music swells…
reewk, reewk, reewk
.

He smiled at that, then drew in a long sigh. Not yet. He had to wait for Waterford’s doll and then catch the impostor asleep. She was a trained FBI agent, on her guard, here for the sole purpose of luring in Chevy. Hell, she probably showered with a 10 mm.

But it would be safe to give a little taunt. Just in case they thought he’d vanished. They knew his name now, knew his identity. He didn’t need to rely on strangers’ phones anymore. What would it matter to use his own?

He reached to the bottom corner of the cupboard, felt the Coke bottle he kept near, and reached a little farther. Got the phone.

Not much, just a little taunt. Something to let them know he was still alive and well. And just a scream away.

Neil left the dolls with a technician in the lab, getting digital photos of each. In five minutes, he had color eight-by-ten glossies in his briefcase. He went down two more floors to the command center, where Copeland, Standlin, and Brohaugh were looking at a laptop.

“What happened?” Neil asked. Copeland looked wired.

“Another phone call just came into Denison’s house.”

“No,” Neil said. “Christ.”

“It was too short to trace.”

“Let me hear it.”

Brohaugh pushed some keys. Bankes’s voice came through the speakers.

“Be-heth. Where are you?” Teasing, singsongy. He went right on, not waiting for her to pick up, and something prickled Neil’s spine. “You think I won’t get you. Don’t you know the police can’t protect you? Not the FBI, either. I’m too good. And I’m close. I can almost reach out and touch you anytime I want. I can
hear
your voice in my ears…”

Dial tone. Neil’s pulse was going like a racehorse.

“That call came from a cell phone purchased by Bankes in Seattle a month ago,” Brohaugh said before Neil could get his thoughts together enough to ask. “It’s the first call that’s ever been placed from it. And,” he said, glancing at Copeland first, “it bounced off the same towers that serve Denison’s neighborhood.”

Neil’s gut knotted.

“Arlington PD is canvassing all the neighborhoods in that cell tower range now,” Copeland said. “We could get lucky and find someone who saw him.”

So Bankes was right there, within blocks of Beth’s house, at least for the moment it took to place the call. He could’ve driven by, called, and rolled right out again.

“Sheridan,” Copeland said, “the net’s so tight around Denison’s house, there’s no way he could get in there.”

Neil noticed that Copeland was looking at him hard, trying to encourage him—like he expected Neil to blow. They all did.

Cool, now; stay sane. He couldn’t fly off the handle if Copeland was going to keep him in the loop. He had to stay focused: the dolls.