“Kevin’s old room?” she asked.
“Until he abandoned us. I told him that if he left he’d end up in trouble. I tried to warn him.”
“Do you even want to know what kind of trouble he’s in?”
Balinda turned away. “What happens out of this house is not my concern. I told him he had no business running off with the serpent. Sss, sss, sss. It’s lies, lies, all lies out there. They say we came from monkeys. You’re all fools.”
“You’re right, the world is full of fools. But I can assure you, Kevin isn’t one of them.”
Balinda’s eyes flashed. “Oh, he’s not, is he? He was always too smart for us! Bob was the dumb one and Kevin was God himself, come to enlighten the rest of us poor idiots!” She took a breath through her nostrils.
She’d hit a button in the old hag. The adopted nephew wasn’t retarded like her own son and Balinda had taken exception to the fact.
Jennifer swallowed and walked to the window. It was fastened down with one screw. What kind of mother would raise a boy in an environment like this? The thought of Kevin crying as they passed by the house yesterday came with new understanding.
Dear Kevin, what did she do to you? Who was the small boy who lived in this room?
The screw was loose in its hole.
Balinda followed Jennifer’s stare.
“He used to crawl out of that window. He didn’t know that I knew, but I did. Nothing happens around here without my knowing.”
Jennifer turned back and brushed past Balinda. Nausea swept through her stomach. In a twisted way, Balinda had probably raised Kevin with noble intentions. She’d protected him from a terrible world full of evil and death. But at what price?
Slow down, Jennifer. You don’t know what happened here. You don’t even know that this wasn’t a wonderful environment for a child to be raised in.
She stepped into the living room and calmed herself.
“I knew he was sneaking out,” Balinda was saying. “But I just couldn’t stop him. Not without beating him raw. Never did believe in that kind of discipline. It may have been a mistake. Look at where it got him. Maybe I should have beaten him.”
Jennifer took a shallow breath. “What kind of discipline
did
you use?”
“You don’t need discipline when your house is in order. Life is discipline enough. Anything more is an admission of weakness.” She said it all with her chest puffed, proud. “Isolate them with the truth and they will shine like the stars.”
The revelation came like a cool balm. She looked around. So Kevin’s rearing had been weird and distorted, but maybe not terrible.
“A man has been threatening Kevin,” she said. “We believe it’s someone your son—”
“He’s my nephew.”
“Sorry. Nephew. Someone Kevin might have known when he was ten or eleven. A boy who threatened Kevin. He had a fight with this boy. Maybe you remember something that might help us identify him.”
“It must have been the time he came home all bloody. I do remember that. Yes, we found him in bed in the morning and his nose was a mess. He refused to talk about it, but I knew he’d been out. I knew everything.”
“What kind of friends did Kevin have at that age?”
Balinda hesitated. “His family was his friend. Bob was his friend.”
“But he must have had other friends in the neighborhood. How about Samantha?”
“That fool girl? They sneaked around. Don’t think I didn’t know. He let it slip a few times. She was the one who may have ruined him in the first place! No, we tried to discourage him from keeping friends outside the house. This is an evil world. You don’t just let your children play with anyone!”
“You didn’t know
any
of his friends?”
Balinda stared at her for a long time and then walked for the door. “You’re starting to repeat your questions. I don’t think we can help you more than we have.” She opened the door.
Jennifer took a last look around the house. She pitied the poor boy who grew up in this distorted world. He would enter the real world . . . naive.
Like Kevin.
But Balinda was probably right. There was nothing more to learn here.
Sunday
Afternoon
S
AMANTHA PACED THE FLOOR of the hotel room for the hundredth time. She’d anticipated almost every eventuality, but not Kevin’s disappearance.
Roland had paged her and she’d called him from the room phone. He wasn’t thrilled about her having turned off her cell but agreed that her plan had some merit. Meanwhile they had set up a meeting with the Pakistani, Salman, in Houston. This evening. Removing Kevin from the game by pulling him out of Slater’s reach might have been the best way to stall the killer until her return tomorrow. But she hadn’t considered the possibility that Kevin would disappear. Now she was due to catch a flight in a few hours, and Kevin was gone. Jennifer Peters would be burning up the phone lines by now, trying to find them, but Sam couldn’t bring herself to tip her hand—not yet. Something about the whole investigation bothered her, but she couldn’t put a finger on it. Something wasn’t right.
She reviewed the facts as she knew them.
One. Someone, probably a white male, had terrorized Sacramento over the last twelve months by selecting seemingly random victims, giving them a riddle to solve, and then killing them when they failed. He’d been dubbed the Riddle Killer by the media and the name had stuck with law enforcement. Jennifer’s brother, Roy, had been his last victim.
Two. She had opened an undercover CBI investigation under the premise that the killer had or was an inside man. Nothing indicated that the killer knew of her investigation.
Three. Someone with almost the same MO as the Riddle Killer was now stalking both Kevin and her in a game of riddles.
Four. A concrete connection had been established between this same killer and a boy who’d threatened both her and Kevin twenty years earlier.
On the surface, it all made perfect sense: A boy named Slater takes to torturing animals and terrorizing other children. He’s nearly killed by one of those children, Kevin, when Kevin locks him in a cellar to protect a young girl Slater intends to harm. But Slater escapes the cellar and grows up to become one of society’s worst nightmares—a man void of conscience with a lust for blood. Now, twenty years later, Slater learns that the two children who tormented him so long ago are alive. He stalks them and devises a game to deal with both in one fell swoop. Obvious, right?
No. Not in Sam’s mind. For starters, why had Slater waited so long to go after both her and Kevin? Did the small incident in the cellar just skip his mind for twenty years? And what was the likelihood that she, employed by the CBI, just happened to be assigned to a case involving the same person who tried to kill her twenty years ago?
And now, in the eleventh hour, this new lead from Sacramento— someone in Houston who claimed to know Slater. Or more accurately, the Riddle Killer. If she was right, they were all barking up the wrong tree.
Sam glanced at her watch. Two-thirty and still nothing. She had a plane to catch for Dallas at five. “Come on, Kevin. You’re forcing my hand here.”
She sighed and picked up her cell phone. She reluctantly switched it on and dialed Jennifer Peters’s number.
“Peters.”
“Hello, Agent Peters. Samantha Sheer—”
“Samantha! Where are you? Kevin’s gone. We’ve been trying to track him down all morning.”
“Slow down. I know Kevin’s gone. He’s with me. Or was with me, I should say.”
“With
you?
This isn’t your investigation. You have no right this side of hell to act without our approval! You trying to get him killed?”
Wrong, Jennifer, I don’t need your approval.
“Don’t insult me.”
“Do you have any idea how crazy things are down here? The media’s gotten wind, presumably through that deadhead Milton, that Kevin’s disappeared, and they’re already suggesting Slater kidnapped him. They’ve got cameras on rooftops, waiting for the next bomb, for heaven’s sake! A killer’s loose out there, and the only man who may be able to lead us to him has gone AWOL. Why didn’t you call? Where is he now?”
“Take a breath, Jennifer. I have called, against my better judgment. I’ve put in a request to share what we know with you, but only you, do you understand? What I share with you, no one else hears. Not Milton, not the FBI, no one.”
“Put in a request with whom?”
“With the attorney general. We’ve been working this case from a new angle, you might say. Now you know, but no one else does.”
Silence.
“Agreed?”
“I swear, the way these bureaucracies work, you’d think we still lived in caves. I’ve been busting my butt for a year on this case, and now I learn that some crackpot agency is doing an end run? Do you have any information that might be useful, or is that a secret too?”
“We have reason to suspect an inside link.”
“Inside. As in law enforcement?”
“Maybe. We would have shared files a long time ago if we didn’t suspect that someone inside may be tracking with Slater.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning we’re not sure who we can trust. For reasons I can’t go into today, I don’t think Slater is who you think he is.”
“You mean the boy?
I
don’t even know who I think he is!”
“That’s not what I mean. He probably is the boy. But who’s the boy?”
“You tell us. He threatened you, didn’t he?”
“That was a long time ago, and we have no ID. For all we know, he’s the director of the FBI now.”
“Please, don’t patronize me.”
“You’re right. He’s not the director of the FBI. All I’m saying is that we can’t eliminate the possibility that he’s someone on the inside. I’ll know more tomorrow.”
“This is ridiculous. Where are you now?”
Sam paused. She had no choice now. Withholding information from Jennifer would only hamper her investigation at this point. She needed the FBI to focus on their own investigation, not meddle in hers. And there was this little fact that Kevin was missing.
She explained her rationale for taking Kevin, and Jennifer listened patiently, interrupting occasionally with pointed questions. Sam’s reasoning finally won her a grunt of approval. The news of Kevin’s disappearance didn’t.
“So as far as we know, Slater does have him,” Jennifer said.
“I doubt it. But it does look like I’ve made a mistake. I didn’t expect this.”
Jennifer let the apology go, which from Sam was as good as an acceptance. The FBI agent sighed.
“Let’s hope he comes in. Soon. How well did you know him when he was a boy?”
“We were close. I didn’t have a better friend.”
“I visited his aunt’s house this morning.”
Sam sat on the bed. How much did Jennifer know? Kevin had never shared the details of his life in the house with Sam, but she knew much more than he suspected.
“I never did see the inside of the house,” Sam said. “His aunt wouldn’t allow it. It was hard enough sneaking around the way we did.”
“Was there abuse?”
“Physical, no. Not that I saw. But in my book Kevin suffered severe, systematic psychological abuse from the day he entered that twisted house. You talked to Balinda?”
“Yes. She’s created a sanctuary for herself in there. The only realities that make it past the cutting floor are the ones she decides are real. God only knows what the house was like twenty years ago. Manipulation of a child’s learning process isn’t unheard of—it’s even broadly accepted in some arenas. Military school comes to mind. But I’ve never heard of anything like Balinda’s little kingdom. Judging by Kevin’s reaction to the place, I would tend to agree. He suffered abuse in that house.”
Sam let the phone line remain silent for a while.
“Be careful, Jennifer. This is a case about a hurting man as much as it is a hunt for a killer.”
Jennifer hesitated. “Meaning?”
“There’s more. There are secrets behind the walls of that house.”
“Secrets he hasn’t shared with you, his childhood sweetheart?”
“Yes.”
By the sound of Jennifer’s breathing, Sam knew she felt uncomfortable with the tone of the conversation. She decided to expand the agent’s mind a little.
“I want you to consider something that’s nagged me for the last two days, Jennifer. No one hears, understand? This is between us. Agreed?”
“Go on.”
“I would like you to consider the possibility that Kevin and Slater are really the same person.” She dropped the bomb and let Jennifer respond.
“I . . . I don’t think that’s possible.” Jennifer chuckled nervously. “I mean that would be . . . the evidence doesn’t support that! How could he pull off such a crazy stunt?”
“He’s not pulling anything off. Please, understand me, I’m not suggesting it’s true, and God knows even considering the idea terrifies me, but there are elements to this case that just don’t sit right. I think the possibility is at least worth some thought.”
“He would have to be calling himself. You’re suggesting he was in Sacramento, blowing up victims three months ago?”
“If he is the Riddle Killer. I’m working on that.”
“And if he is Slater, who’s the boy? We found blood in the warehouse, consistent with this story. There was a boy.”
“Unless the boy was really Kevin. Or there was no boy.”
“You were there—”
“I never actually saw the boy, Jennifer.”
“Your father forced the family to leave! What do you mean you never
saw
the boy?”
“I mean I told my father the boy was there—there was plenty of evidence at my window and I believed Kevin for the rest. Call it a white lie. Regardless, I actually never saw the boy. We forced the family of a bully to move, but thinking back on it, the boy ran off before my dad could apprehend him. He accused a local bully based on my testimony, and I based my testimony on Kevin’s. But there was no definitive evidence that it was someone
other
than Kevin. I didn’t even know Kevin had locked the boy in the warehouse until yesterday.”
“The physical evidence for Kevin being Slater doesn’t add up. He blew up his own car?”
“I’m not saying that he
is
Slater. I’m only positing a possibility. Considering his childhood, Multiple Personality Disorder may not be out of the question—the Kevin we know wouldn’t necessarily even know that he’s Slater. Everything that we have so far could fit the scenario; that’s all I’m saying. There are no inconsistencies. Think about it.”