114
“NO, NO, no!” Mary says. “Wake up! Wake up!”
Mary releases the grip on my hair and leans forward, her breath hot on my face, shouting at me. “You don’t get to die yet! You don’t get off that—”
With everything I have left, I jerk my head upright, my forehead connecting solidly with the splint covering Mary’s broken nose.
Mary howls in pain from the head-butt, a wounded, tortured monster, her hands immediately pitching a tent over her nose. She falls backward and off me. I take a delicious, full breath of air and lift myself up, blood pouring into my eyes and out of my rib cage, the room moving sideways.
The scalpel, wet with my blood, resting on the floor. I reach for it, missing at first, seeing double, but finally getting hold of it while Mary writhes in pain on the floor, having broken her nose for the second time in a week, this time not of her own doing.
I try to get to my feet but fail, my right ankle shattered, my body so weak I can’t support myself. The lights are flashing in and out again like a strobe light, Mary closer to me each time they click on, the splint on her nose now gone, her face a bloody purple mash with a gruesome snarl and a hideous squeal—
I’m coming, Marta.
The strobe lights flickering, a gong echoing between my ears, Marta and I on prom night with our dates, hers the football captain, mine a sophomore buddy from math club three inches shorter than me, the day I identified Marta at the morgue, the time we stole one of mom’s cigarettes when we were ten, the night Books got down on one knee and showed me his grandmother’s diamond ring—
The stabbing pain in my ribs, Mary’s contorted grimace, snarling at me—
And then for a moment, everything is still, and Mary and I lock eyes, and she lets out a deep cry and rushes toward me. But I lunge toward her, too, pushing off with my good foot. The crown of my forehead crashes into Mary’s face. She cries out as she falls backward, as I fall on top of her, as I slap my left hand down on her chest and hold her down with my body weight.
Mary flails with her arms, reaching for my face, going for the scalpel in my hand.
My balance begins to wobble, my strength fading. This is it. My last chance.
My right hand strikes downward, the scalpel sinking into flesh and bone, then again, then again, thump, thump, thump, blood spattering my face, until Mary’s screams go silent.
And then everything is dark and warm.
115
WHEN I first see Marta, she looks radiant. She looks younger, more refreshed, happier. She looks like the best version of Marta.
At first, neither of us speaks. We move fluidly, weightless, into each other’s arms, and we cry. And then we laugh, because now we have each other again. And this time, as I promised her, it is different.
I tell her everything. I tell her how stupid and insecure I was, how much I admired her all those years, how I wished I could make myself be more like her, and to my surprise, to my infinite shock, she tells me the same thing. Oh, we laugh, how funny life can be. We each admired and envied the other without realizing it.
We laugh about those holidays with our flatulent Uncle Phil, the time when Marta first got her period and she cried, but I cried, too, out of jealousy that she beat me to it. We remember the time when she was eight and stepped on a nail in the woods behind our house, and Andy Irvin and Doug Mason fought over who would carry her back home, until I finally picked her up myself and carried her over my shoulder.
It feels as if our conversation never stops, has no beginning or end, the concept of time irrelevant. Because now it’s forever.
That thing about everything happening for a reason? We decide that the cliché, in this case, is true. We decide that if Marta hadn’t died, this killer would never have been detected, would never have stopped. Her death saved the lives of many others. And it brought us back together.
It’s not perfect, but it will have to do.
And now, at least, we have each other, free of our earthly constraints, our insecurities and petty differences. Now I have my sister back.
Forever.
116
THE LABORED breathing of retired special agent Harrison Bookman fills the otherwise quiet room. The door opens with a whoosh, and Sophie’s perfume wafts in.
“I know this isn’t a good time, Books,” Sophie says. “But we got confirmation from the old football coach in Allentown. ‘Marty’ Laney was the starting tailback for the school. A real standout. Then he—I mean she—left school after sophomore year, without warning, and finished high school in Ridgway.”
“Probably when Marty, or Mary, hit puberty,” says Books. “All the steroids in the world couldn’t change nature.”
“Right. She didn’t play sports when she got to Ridgway. In fact, the reports we have are that Marty was a recluse at her new school. Just went to class and then went home. No school activities. No friends. So it was easier to hide her true gender. Then Marty went to Pitt for college while living at home. Majored in forensic science. After he—I mean she—graduated, she went into the family business. Daddy kept her under his thumb his entire life.”
Books lets out a pained sigh. “That father’s a real gem. I mean, my mother once told me she’d wanted a girl when I was born. But she didn’t make me spend my whole life pretending I was one. Did we confirm everything about this asshole?”
“Yes, confirmed. Doctor Donald Laney was a high-school football star who blew out his knee his freshman year at Pitt and never played again. He became a forensic pathologist in Allentown. Mary’s mother died in childbirth—the one thing she told us that was true. When the Laneys moved to Ridgway, Doctor Laney opened a funeral home. Mary worked there with her father. And guess what ended up happening at that funeral home?”
“I don’t want to know,” says Books.
“It was shut down after state regulators received a series of complaints that corpses were being disfigured, mutilated.”
“Ah. That would be our Mary,” says Books, “practicing on dead people what she’d later do to the living, once Daddy passed away.”
“Yeah, yeah. Well, now she can join her father in hell.”
Silence. Then Sophie says, in a softer voice, “Anyway, Books—you hanging in there?”
“Sure, sure. I’m fine, Soph. I’ll talk to you soon. Great work on this case, if I didn’t say so already.”
“You did, actually. But we both know who deserves the most credit for this case.”
The room is silent, save for Sophie’s retreating footsteps, the whoosh of air as the door opens and closes.
“Yes, we certainly do,” Books whispers, choking out the words.
Silence again.
“Oh, Emmy,” he says. “Oh, Emmy. Oh, Emmy, please…”
I’m not ready, Marta. Not yet. I love you, girl, and I miss you like crazy, but I’m not done here yet.
“Emmy?” Books’s breath on my face. His hand taking mine. “Oh, my God—Emmy?” he says again, his voice quivering. “You’re awake.”
I force my eyes open, a flutter at first, and then I see him through fog.
“Emily Jean, I love you so much. I love you with all my heart. You know that, don’t you?”
“I…do,” I whisper. I don’t have the strength to even squeeze his hand back.
He runs his fingers gently over my face. “The way we left things…I was afraid I’d never get to say those things to you.” He presses his lips against my forehead. “You know I didn’t mean any of those terrible things I said to you, don’t you?”
“I…do.” I try to smile, but I’m not sure if it forms.
“You lost a lot of blood, but you made it. You did it, Emmy. You caught her. Do you remember what happened?”
“I…do.” My eyelids flutter and close. I’m not in a hurry to remember that night. I’m not in a hurry to look in a mirror, either. But the scars will heal. They always do.
“I can stay with you while you recuperate,” he says. “Just as friends, I mean
. No pressure. I can just help however you want. Your mom’s here, too. She’s downstairs right now getting lunch. She’s been here ever since we found you at the cabin.”
I adjust myself and feel the stinging pain on my left side, gingerly touch the bandage across my forehead, Mary Laney’s parting gifts to me.
Books pats my hand. “You need to rest,” he says. “And I need to call the doctor.”
“I…do.”
“You’re groggy, Em. Just sleep. I’ll be here when you wake up.”
He moves away from me. I barely open my eyes. “Books,” I manage.
“Yeah? Yes?”
“Come…closer.”
“Okay.” He leans in toward me.
My mouth is pasty, my lips dry and cracked. I barely have the strength to speak.
“Closer,” I manage.
Books looks at me funny at first. “Okay, sweetie.” He leans in nice and close, his ear nearly touching my lips. “I’m here, Em.”
Blessed sleep just moments away, my strength rapidly fading, I lean forward so that my words, barely a whisper, will register.
“I do,” I say to him.
Acknowledgments
A special thanks to everyone who helped with this novel. Pat Layng drew on his experience as a former federal prosecutor in Chicago to give advice and insight into the prosecution of arson cases. Dan Collins, a former federal prosecutor and current partner at Drinker Biddle & Reath LLP in Chicago, provided advice on matters large and small, including the details of securing search warrants and profiling serial killers. And the incomparable Sally McDaniel-Smith, for her tireless attention to the details of forensic pathology and arson—in other words, for explaining how to kill someone and make it look like an accident.
Detective Michael Bennett finally returns to New York City—and to the most unsettling, horrific case of his career.
For an excerpt, turn the page.
Los Angeles, California
THE WORK VAN was a new Mercedes, white and high roofed, with the bloodred words TURNKEY LOCKSMITH hand-painted on its side.
At a little before 7 a.m., it was winding through the Hollywood Hills northwest of LA, the steady drone of its diesel engine briefly rising in pitch as it turned onto the long climb of Kirkwood Drive in Laurel Canyon. Two hundred feet below the intersection of Kirkwood and Oak, the van coasted to a crackling stop on the gravel shoulder of the secluded road and shut off its engine. A minute passed, then two. No one got out.
As the bald Hispanic driver flipped down the visor to get the sun out of his eyes, he spotted a mule deer nosing out through the steep hillside’s thick underbrush across the street.
Go for a lung shot, he thought as he imagined getting a bead on it with the new compound hunting bow his girlfriend had gotten him for his birthday. Track the blood trail down between the infinity pools and twenty-person funkadelic hot tubs before lashing it to the van’s front grille. See how that would go down with Frank Zappa and George Clooney and K. D. Lang and the rest of the Laurel Canyon faithful.
He was feigning a bow draw when the elegant red deer suddenly noticed him and bolted. The driver sighed, leaned slightly to his right, and depressed the intercom button under the drink holder.
“How’s this? Line of sight OK?” he said.
“Yes. Maintain here until the handoff, then head for position two,” intercommed back the sharp-featured, amber-haired woman sitting directly behind the driver in the sealed-off back of the high-tech surveillance van.
There was a dull mechanical hum as the woman flicked the joystick for the high-definition video camera concealed in the van’s roof. On the console’s flat screen in front of her, an off-white stucco bungalow a hundred fifty feet up the canyon slowly came into view.
She panned the camera over the bungalow’s short, steep driveway of bishop’s hat paver stones, the broken terra-cotta roof tiles above its front door, the live oaks and lemon trees in its side yard. She’d been here several times before and knew the target house as well as her own at this point.
She was halfway through the tea-filled Tervis tumbler from her kit bag when a truck slowed in front of the target house. It was a new Ford Expedition SUV, glossy black with heavily tinted windows. After it reversed up the driveway almost butt-up against the garage, the passenger-side door opened and out stepped a lanky middle-aged white man in a gray business suit. He adjusted his Oakley sport sunglasses for a moment before he reached into the open door and retrieved what appeared to be a military-issue M-16.
Then, up on the porch above him, the bungalow’s front door opened and Detective Michael Bennett came out of the house.
The woman almost spilled the tea in her lap as she quickly panned the camera left and zoomed in on Bennett and the crowd of people coming out behind him. His kids were in cartoon-character PJs, their tan and striking blond nanny, Mary Catherine, in a bathrobe, drying her hands with a dish towel. One of the Bennett boys—was Trent his name? Yes, Trent—immediately started climbing out over the stair’s cast-iron rail, until Mary Catherine pulled him back by his collar.
The cacophony of the family’s calls and laughter rang in her earphone as she turned up the volume on the van’s shotgun mike.
“Arrivederci,” Bennett said playfully to his rambunctious family as he went down the stairs. “Sayonara, auf Wiedersehen. And, oh, yeah. Later, guys.”
The woman in the van watched silently as Bennett smiled and crossed his eyes and stuck his tongue out at his family. He was pushing forty, but still tall and trim and handsome in his dark-blue suit. Biting at her lower lip, she didn’t stop focusing until his dimples and pale blue-gray eyes slid out of the bottom of the frame into the SUV.
As the Ford rocketed out into the street, the amber-haired woman had already put down the joystick and was wheeling the captain’s chair around toward the three men in bulky tactical gear sitting and sweating on the steel bench behind her.
If it hadn’t been for the glistening snub-barreled Heckler and Koch machine guns in their laps, the large men could have been professional football players. Wide receivers in the huddle waiting for the quarterback to call the next play.
“To repeat one last time,” she said calmly as the work van’s engine suddenly roared to life and they lurched into the street. “Front door, side door, back door. When the doors pop, you will stay low until you are in position.”
The poised woman quickly lifted her own submachine gun from the foam-lined hard case at her feet. Easily and expertly, she worked the H&K MP7’s action, slamming the first HK 4.6x30mm cartridge into the gun’s chamber with a loud snap.
“This isn’t a drill, gentlemen,” she said, looking up at the Bennett safe house growing rapidly now on the flat screen.
“Welcome to life and death.”
THE WITNESS WAITING room adjacent to the second-floor federal courtroom where I was going to give my statement was a happy surprise after the fireworks show and my unexpected sidewalk rugby match. It had leather furniture and piped-in slow-dance Muzak and a rack of magazines next to the coffee machine.
For twenty minutes, I sat in it alone humming to Michael Bolton as Bob and his guys stood vigilantly in the hallway outside the locked door. The little stunt downstairs had fired them up beyond belief. Even with the tight courthouse security, they weren’t taking any chances.
I’d just finished pouring myself a second cup of French vanilla coffee (which I probably didn’t need, considering my already frazzled nerves) when the door unlocked and a middle-aged blond female court officer poked her friendly face inside and said it was time.
All eyes were on me as I followed the officer’s blond ponytail into the bleached-wood-paneled courtroom. The line of orange-jumpsuited convicts sitting at the two defendants’ tables peered at me curiously with “haven’t I seen you someplace before” expressions as I made my way to a podium set up beside the witness box.
Alejandro Soto, the highest-ranking of the Tepito cartel members in attendance, seemed especially curio
us from where he sat closest to the witness box. I recognized his gaunt, ugly features from the video of the Bronx motel where he had brought my friend Tara to rape and kill her.
I stared directly at Soto as the court clerk asked me to state my name for the record.
“My name is Bennett,” I said, smiling at Soto. “Detective Michael Bennett.”
“Bennett!” Soto yelled as he stood and started banging his shackled wrists on the table. “What is this? What is this?”
No wonder he was shocked. His organization was out to get me and suddenly, presto, here I was. Be careful what you wish for, I thought as two court officers shoved the skinny middle-aged scumbag back down into his seat.
The violent crack of Judge Kenneth Barnett’s gavel at the commotion was a little painful in the low-ceilinged courtroom. Our side could set off some firecrackers, too, apparently. Tall and wide, Barnett had the build of a football player, bright-blue eyes, and a shock of gray hair slicked straight back.
“Detective Bennett,” he said as I was about to take my prepared statement from my jacket pocket. “Before you begin, I would just like to gently remind you that the victim impact statement is not an occasion for you to address the defendants directly. It is a way for me, the sentencing judge, to understand what impact the crimes in this case have had on you and society and thereby determine what appropriate punishment to mete out to these convicted men. Do you understand?”
“Perfectly, Your Honor,” I said.
Especially the punishment part, I thought, glancing at Soto again.
I took my written statement out of my pocket and flattened it against the podium as I brought the microphone closer to my mouth.
I FLAGGED DOWN a gypsy cab and headed home.
The whole way back up the 101 to Laurel Canyon, I listened to the Mexican driver behind the wheel play a type of music called narcocorrido. Having become familiar with it in my recent investigations into the cartels, I knew the traditional-sounding Mexican country music had gangster-rap-style lyrics about moving dope and taking out your enemies with AK-47s.