“Yeah. Maybe.” Dan turned toward the motel room, blinking in the spill of light from its open door. “What do you say we take one more walk-through, then call in the big boys.”
“Fair enough.”
They lifted the crime scene ribbon and stepped inside. The place was just as Dan had seen it when he arrived, fresh from his fruitless dialogue with Bonnie Parker on the side of the highway. The unmade bed, the nightstand out of place and scarred with a knife blade’s thrust, the discarded phone and lamp. The carpet was damp, and water was pooled on the bathroom tiles near the half-full tub lined with a shower curtain. One wire floated in the cold water, while the other lay tangled on the floor.
“He cut the wires off the lamp and the TV,” Phil said as they stood in the bathroom doorway, “and trimmed the insulation off the ends.”
“Sounds like he wasn’t planning to put on this little show. He had to improvise.”
“Wonder what he used for juice.”
“He couldn’t have plugged the wires into the wall socket?”
“Not without tripping the breaker. No, had to be an independent power source. Something he had with him. A hair dryer, say.”
“Would a hair dryer pack enough punch to torture somebody?”
“That, I don’t know. They say you can fry somebody if you toss a hair dryer into a tub.” His hands fluttered, and he made a sound like a bug zapper. “But it could be a, what do you call it, urban legend.”
“How about that stuff floating in the water?” Dan pointed to two ragged chunks of foam.
“I’m thinking it was used as a gag. To silence the victim, and maybe to prevent him from biting his tongue off.”
“Looks like there’s some blood on it.”
“Maybe he bit his tongue anyway.”
“You keep saying he. What if it was a woman?”
Phil shrugged. “Could have been. Some sexual thing. Maybe consensual at first. Bondage play that got out of hand. Somebody didn’t respect the safe word.”
“Or maybe not like that. Maybe a revenge thing.”
“You’d have to piss somebody off really good to drive them to this kind of revenge.”
“Yeah,” Dan said. “Yeah, you would.”
Who was better at pissing off people than Bonnie Parker? Nobody, that’s who.
He remembered how she’d shivered when the subject of torture came up. Her hand holding the cigarette had been a little shaky. And he sure as hell didn’t believe she’d been meditating on the damn beach in the rain.
He turned away from the bathroom, and his eye picked out a hint of powder blue protruding from beneath the bed.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“I dunno.”
“You’re telling me nobody looked under the bed?”
“I instructed our guys to do only a cursory search. Drawers and closets, that’s it. Figured I’d leave the CSI stuff for the bag-and-tag brigade. Otherwise we’ll just catch hell for doing it wrong.”
“You have a rubber glove?”
Phil dug in his jacket pocket and produced one. Dan slipped it on, then got down on his knees and took hold of the item, drawing it into view.
A woman’s hat.
“Now that’s interesting,” he muttered. “That’s very interesting.”
He turned it over, examining the label. The hat had been purchased at Evie’s Consignment Shop in downtown Brighton Cove.
Parker shopped there. He had seen her.
“Think it’s something, Chief?” Phil asked, crouching beside him.
“Could be. See the label? I need to know who bought this hat.”
“We can talk to Evie in the morning.”
“We can talk to her now.”
“It’s the middle of the night.”
“Then we’ll wake her up. Put some excitement in her life.”
“I take it you have a suspicion who the hat belongs to.”
“Not just a suspicion, Phil. I know. I know.”
An unhealthy obsession, his wife had said. But she didn’t know about the itch. How it kept him up nights.
And how good it would feel to scratch that itch at last.
CHAPTER 23
The rain was falling harder as Bonnie retrieved her Jeep, and the wind was picking up, clutching with invisible fingers at the canvas roof. It looked like they were in for a genuine drenching.
Settled behind the wheel with her beret back on her head, she steered down the gravel track of the driveway and pulled around to idle alongside the back door. She was pretty sure she’d squashed some of Cynthia’s flowers, but the main thing was to keep the family out of sight of the road in case Pascal came back.
It took the Kirby clan six minutes, not five, to appear at the door toting two small suitcases and a sleepy towheaded boy in a rain slicker and pj’s. The kid was plugged into a pair of earbuds and gazed mesmerized at a smartphone’s screen.
Bonnie leaned out the window and whistled. “Let’s get a move on. Everybody into the car, chop-chop.”
Alan slid into the front passenger seat while Cynthia and A.J. took up the rear, sharing the space with the suitcases. Bonnie pulled off before her passengers had finished fastening their seat belts.
She reversed onto Old Road and turned east. Wet asphalt blurred beneath her hood. Trees framed the road on both sides. In time with the beat of the wiper blades, her gaze kept flicking from the windshield to the rearview mirror and back. Pascal had left the farmhouse, but he might not have gone far.
“How much can Junior hear?” she asked.
“Nothing,” Cynthia said from the backseat. “He’s in his own world.”
“Okay, here’s the thing.” She lit a cigarette. “Time for us to have a powwow. I need the truth, folks. And I need it now.”
Cynthia coughed. “Must you smoke?”
“Just doing my part to keep Phillip Morris profitable. I’m a shareholder.”
“Secondhand smoke isn’t good for children.”
“Neither are bullets. That oughtta be your priority right now.”
“I don’t think I like your attitude.”
“Yeah, I need to work on that.” She expelled a stream of smoke, hoping the bitch choked on it. “So before you two were Alan and Cynthia, you were Jeffrey and Caroline. I’m guessing there’s a story that goes with that.”
Alan looked at his hands. “It’s complicated.”
“Let’s stop the dance. Was there anything you told me on the boardwalk that was actually, you know, true?”
“Parts of it.”
“Which parts?”
“I did work for a nonprofit organization in New York—”
“Yeah, but it was a human rights deal, not a feed-the-hungry deal.”
“Um ... yes.”
“You’d been involved with that stuff for years, right? Going back to Chicago?”
“There I was mostly handling immigration and refugee cases.”
“And then you moved to New York and joined, uh, what was it called? Bleeding Heart?”
“Conscience Watch,” Alan said peevishly.
“Potato, potahto.”
“The abuse of political dissidents is no laughing matter,” Cynthia said.
Bonnie glanced in the rearview mirror. “Who are you, Sally Struthers? Jeez.” Then she caught sight of a distant flash of headlights behind Cynthia’s head. “Uh-oh.”
“What’s the matter?” Alan asked.
“Someone’s behind us.”
“You mean ...?”
“Let’s find out.” She floored the gas pedal and watched the speedometer bend to sixty, sixty-five, seventy. The headlights shrank momentarily, then expanded as the vehicle accelerated to match her speed. “Aw, shit.”
Cynthia was staring out the back window. “That’s him? That’s really him?”
“Sure looks that way. Hang on.”
His strategy was bound to be pretty basic: pull alongside the Jeep and take out the driver—namely, her. She
didn’t intend to cooperate.
She watched the sides of the road. Trees, trees, more trees, a blurred wall of trees hemming her in. No good. She needed open space.
And the headlights behind her continued to brighten as the SUV closed the distance with the Jeep.
Still more trees, too goddamn many trees. Hadn’t they ever heard of development around here?
The son of a bitch was close now. She couldn’t outrun the Lexus on a straight stretch of road. In another few seconds Pascal would be right on her ass, and then he would swerve into the other lane and overtake her.
She reached for the fanny pack, preparing to pull out her Glock, and then the right side of the road opened up, the trees disappearing to reveal a flat stretch of open field.
Finally.
She flung the wheel hard to the right and swerved off the road, bumping up onto the grass. For a bad second her tires were caught in a drift of mud—she felt them spin helplessly—and then they tore loose and she barreled forward, cutting a path at a ninety-degree angle to the road. The Jeep rocked on the rutted ground, throwing up pinwheels of mud. On her left, rows of crops flickered past—corn stalks or some goddamn thing.
“Did we lose him?” Alan asked.
“Of course not.” Even without looking, she knew the headlights were still dogging them. Cynthia’s low moan confirmed it.
She ground the gas pedal into the floor. The Jeep pulled away from the Lexus, maybe because it had better traction off-road, or maybe because Pascal wasn’t accustomed to blowing through muddy meadows at night.
A lone oak tree came up fast out of nowhere. She skirted it, but just barely. One of the low branches whickered against the Jeep’s side panel.
That’ll leave a mark, she thought ruefully.
She kept going. A bevy of nesting birds exploded out of the grass directly in front of her, launched like buckshot into the night sky.
She had crossed at least a hundred yards of open field, and she was just about to run out of room. Dead ahead lay another street, one that ran parallel to Old Road.
“Hold on tight,” she said, as much to herself as to her passengers.
She touched the brakes to prevent the Jeep from tipping over. She took a hard left, and took it fast.
Too fast. The muddy tires slipped on the rainswept pavement, and for a moment she was sure the Jeep would skid across the road into the utility poles along the far shoulder.
She spun the wheel, the Jeep straightened out, and she gunned the engine.
For the next few seconds they would be screened from their pursuer by the farmhouse and a high wall of crops. She raced east for half a block, then veered into a narrow clearing on the right-hand side of the road, nestling the Jeep amid a stand of tall evergreens. She killed the motor and lights.
“No one move or make a sound,” she said quietly. She took a look in the backseat and observed that A.J. was asleep. Amazing. Little bastard could doze through anything.
Cynthia hunched low in her seat. “It won’t work. He’ll see us. He’ll see us.” The words repeated like a mantra.
“Shut up.”
She did. Which was good, because otherwise Bonnie might have had to shoot her.
Alan whispered, “What if he does see us?”
“Then we’re fucked, Chuck.”
She eased the Glock out of her fanny pack. The carbine was stowed in the back of the vehicle, difficult to access. She hoped she wouldn’t need it.
There were a lot of ways for this to go south. If she’d left tire tracks on the asphalt, they would point directly to her hiding place. If Pascal had glimpsed her maneuver from a distance ... or if he spotted the concealed Jeep as he was driving by ...
He was always one step ahead. Always outthinking her. Why would it be any different this time?
She waited. Pascal hadn’t been that far behind. He had to be close, very close. He might have pulled to a stop already, headlights dark. He might be training his gun on her right now.
With a whoosh the SUV careened past, not even slowing. It hurtled around a blind curve, disappearing into the dark.
Gone.
“Score one for our side,” Bonnie said, hoping her voice didn’t sound as shaky as she felt.
CHAPTER 24
Pascal had begun to respect Bonnie Parker.
She had shocked him in the tub, drawn blood in the farmhouse, and even, by some black magic, eluded him on the road. By all rights and all logic she should have been dead three times over, yet she persisted in staying alive. She was proving a worthy enemy.
This surprised him. His first impressions rarely led him astray. He had sized up Parker as a mere annoyance—a raw blister of a girl, uncouth and rash, a weed in a dunghill. And so she might be, but like a weed, she was tenacious, thorny, and frustratingly hard to pluck.
Still, he would get her eventually. He had to. For her to defeat him would go against all reason. It would violate the natural order of things.
He steered the Lexus onto Highway 35, using the wipers to flick away the ribbons of mud that festooned the vehicle. No purpose would be served by aimlessly cruising the streets in hope of spotting her. The ambush on Old Road had been his best chance of taking her. He had waited in a turnout, his left shoulder bleeding slowly under his jacket, the pain distant and unimportant. He had assumed she would escort the family to a new location now that their home was no longer safe. The Jeep, which he remembered from the motel parking lot, was a rusted, battered thing, and he had no doubt the new Lexus could outpace it on the road and outmaneuver it in the rain.
All odds had favored him. It should have been easy to intercept her from behind, kill her with a shot through the side window of the Jeep, then nudge the driverless vehicle off the road and finish things.
Yes. Easy. Except she had led him on a chase through a farmer’s field, then vanished like a ghost. She must have cut down a side road or concealed herself behind a barn or in the woods. He had no hope of finding her. And his wound demanded attention.
First he needed to find a place to park his car. Leaving it on the street was not a good option. It was a possible that someone at the motel had seen the vehicle and given a description to the police. A parking garage would have been ideal, but there seemed to be no parking garages in the area.
He took an eastbound road off the highway and returned to Brighton Cove’s beachfront. On Ocean Drive he found a massive three-story edifice that surely dated to the Victorian Era. A hotel, he assumed, as he could imagine no other purpose for the structure. At the rear was an ungated parking lot, crowded but not full. He parked the Lexus there. Camouflaged by other cars, it was less likely to draw notice.
He switched on the ceiling light and removed the first aid kit from his satchel. He shrugged off his jacket, wincing, and removed his shirt, then inspected the damage. It was not severe. The bullet was of small caliber—a .22, he believed—and it had passed cleanly through his shoulder, leaving a neat round hole in his deltoid muscle, but missing the thoracoacromial artery and cephalic vein. There was intense pain when he moved his left arm, but pain was of no consequence. He had long ago trained himself to tolerate pain.
With iodine and sewing thread, he set to work repairing the shoulder. He had been wounded many times. Of necessity he had learned of the rudiments of combat surgery. Every killer must be his own corpsman. On countless occasions he had tweezed bullets from his sinews, cauterized wounds, darned his own skin with needle and thread.
Now, at forty-six, he was seamed with scars, a patchwork thing. With every death he had dealt, he had surrendered a small part of himself.
It could not have been otherwise. He had the dharma of a warrior. To fight, to kill, was bred into his bones. Down a hundred lifetimes he had followed this path, and only now could he see its end. Respite from battle for the remainder of this life, and for every life to come. After endless soldiering, he was on the threshold of a new destiny.
There was only this girl still stand
ing in his way, this one fascinating, damnable girl.
When the wound was closed, he applied a self-adhesive bandage, then tested his freedom of motion. Despite discomfort, he could work the arm freely. He was unimpaired. He was fortunate indeed that the shot had not caught him in the neck, severing his carotid or jugular, or cutting his spinal cord. The girl had surprised him with automatic-weapons fire. But she would not surprise him again.
The phone rang. Her phone, the stolen cell.
He dug it out of his pocket. He had expected her to call her own number, seeking some sort of parley, but not this soon.
He answered. “Yes?”
The voice that reached him was not the one he wanted to hear. “Did you do it? Is it done?”
Miss Parker’s telephone harasser. The drunken lout who had called him earlier. Pascal almost ended the call, then thought better of it. “It is not,” he said.
“She’s still not out of the way?”
“She is still very much in the way.”
“I thought you said she was as good as dead. Big man. Big fucking man.”
“Like a stubborn stain, she is more difficult to eradicate than one might think.”
“Then leave her to me. I’ll get her. I’ll put that bitch in the ground if it’s the last thing I do.”
That was good. That was what he wanted to hear. “Perhaps, my friend,” Pascal said slowly, “there is another way.”
“What way?”
“Perhaps the two of us can get it done ... together.”
CHAPTER 25
“This is where you’re taking us?” Cynthia asked as Bonnie braked the Jeep. “A donut shop?”
“Chill, girlfriend.” She shifted into park and killed the engine. “It’s only a way station, okay? I need to hear the rest of what you’ve got to say, and I can’t concentrate as long as I’m watching the road for another surprise appearance by Tall, Pale, and Ugly.”
“But why here?”
“You know any other place that’s open twenty-four hours around here? This ain’t exactly Sin City.”
She’d parked the Jeep at the side of the building, behind a trash bin, where it couldn’t be seen from the road. If Pascal was circling the streets like a shark, he wouldn’t expect them to be hanging out in a donut dive anyway. Probably. Although with this guy, you never knew.