Maggie O'Dell Collection, Volume 1: A Perfect Evil ; Split Second ; The Soul Catcher

by Alex Kava

  CHAPTER 54

  Gwen needed to slow down, but she gulped the remainder of her wine, anyway. She could feel Tully watching her from across the small round table with a polite look of concern while he fumbled with his spaghetti and meatballs.

  He had chosen a lovely Italian restaurant with crisp white tablecloths, candles in every window and an array of wait staff that treated them with a kind and friendly manner, then screamed at each other in Italian as soon as they got behind the swinging kitchen door.

  She had barely touched her fettuccine Alfredo with fresh cream sauce and portobello mushrooms. It smelled wonderful; however, right now the wine and its anesthetizing effect was all she wanted. She needed something to wipe away the feel of that pencil stabbing into her throat and the desire to kick herself for being so stupid. She was beginning to understand why Maggie resorted to Scotch so often. Maggie had a much longer and more grisly list of images to wipe out of her memory bank.

  “I’m sorry,” she finally said. “You probably should have left me in my hotel room. I’m afraid I’m not very good company tonight.”

  “Actually, I’m used to women not talking to me at the dinner table.”

  It wasn’t at all what she expected him to say, and she found herself laughing. He smiled, and it only then occurred to her how awful this afternoon must have been for him, too.

  “Thanks,” she said. “I really needed to laugh.”

  “Glad I could help.”

  “I certainly messed up this trip. We didn’t get anything.”

  “I wouldn’t say that. Pratt thought that Father Joseph sent you. He said it. That’s more than we knew before, and it may be all we need to connect him and the others to Reverend Joseph Everett. It will be a wasted trip, though, if you don’t eat something.”

  He smiled at her again, and she wondered if he wanted to forget about this afternoon as much as she did. He was still looking at her as if expecting an answer.

  “If you’d like, we could go somewhere else, if this isn’t quite what you had in mind,” he offered.

  “Oh, no, this is fine. It smells wonderful. I’m just waiting for my appetite.”

  She hadn’t told him she helped herself to a glass of champagne while she changed for dinner. The hotel had mistakenly sent up a newlywed basket to her room. When she called down to the front desk, the clerk was so embarrassed, he insisted she keep and enjoy it, that they would send another to the intended couple. Well, she wouldn’t be able to enjoy all of it. The basket included massage oils and an assortment of condoms. She’d have to settle for the champagne and chocolates.

  She watched Tully wrestle with his spaghetti, mutilating it into small pieces instead of wrapping it around his fork. It was painful to watch.

  “Mind if I show you how to do that?” she asked.

  He looked up, saw what she meant and immediately turned red. Before he could answer, she slid her chair over, so that she was sitting next to his right arm. Without making a big deal or fuss, she gently put her hand over his, barely getting her fingers around his large hand in order to show him how to hold his fork.

  “The secret,” she said, while reaching across his lap and taking his other hand, “is in the spoon.” She nodded for him to pick up his spoon in his left hand. “You pull just a little spaghetti with your fork to release it from the pile, and then you wrap it, slowly in a smooth gentle motion, against the bowl of the spoon.”

  She could feel his breath in her hair and could smell the subtle scent of his aftershave. His hands complied with her every command, and it surprised her how good they felt against her own palms. When the task was complete, she let go, sat back into her chair and scooted to her side of the table, all the while avoiding his eyes.

  “Mission accomplished.” She pointed to the perfectly wound spaghetti still on his fork. “You’re a quick learner.”

  He hesitated, then brought it to his mouth. He tried the process again while he chewed, lifting his fork to show her when he managed it on his own. This time their eyes met and neither of them looked away until one of the wait staff interrupted, offering to refill their wineglasses, which Gwen accepted. She was sure it was probably a good idea to also anesthetize the unfamiliar arousal she was suddenly feeling.

  With this glass of wine, she did manage to eat some of her fettuccine and even clean up her half of a cannoli dessert. Through coffee and during a long cab ride back to the hotel, she found herself telling Tully about her practice and the old brownstone she was restoring, while he told her about Emma and the trials and tribulations of raising a fifteen-year-old girl. She hadn’t realized he had custody of his daughter. Somehow his being a devoted single father only completed the annoying image she already had of him as the perfect Boy Scout.

  At her hotel door, she invited him in for a glass of her complimentary champagne, sure the Boy Scout wouldn’t accept and that she was safe. The Boy Scout accepted. Before she poured the champagne, she turned to him, needing to say what she had avoided saying all evening.

  “I need to thank you,” she said, meeting his eyes and holding him there, so he couldn’t joke his way out of this. “You saved my life today, Tully.”

  “I couldn’t have done it without your help. You have really good instincts, Doc.” He smiled at her, obviously still uncomfortable with taking any of the credit. Okay, so he was going to make this difficult.

  “Could you just let me thank you?”

  “Okay.”

  She came to him, stood on tiptoe and still had to tug on his tie to bring him down to her height so she could kiss his cheek. As she did this, she noticed that his eyes were now serious. Before she pulled back, his mouth caught hers in a gentle but passionate kiss that was no longer about gratitude.

  She rocked back on her feet, feeling a bit out of breath and staring up at him.

  “That was unexpected,” she said, surprised that she was feeling light-headed. It had to be all the wine.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, restoring her image of the Boy Scout. “I shouldn’t have—”

  “No, you don’t need to apologize. Actually, it was…it was quite nice.”

  “Nice?” He looked wounded, and she smiled though his eyes were still serious. “I think I can do better than nice.”

  In two steps he was kissing her again, only this time it wasn’t long before his mouth refused to be confined to her lips. Gwen leaned against the back of the sofa and her fingers slid across its texture, looking for something to grab hold of while Tully continued to convince her that he could, indeed, do better than nice.

  CHAPTER 55

  Ben Garrison didn’t get back to the Ritz-Carlton until late. He found the employee door at the back alley and took the freight elevator up to the fourteenth floor. This morning he had argued with the desk clerk about getting moved to a different floor. No matter how anyone looked at it, the fourteenth floor was still the thirteenth floor. Surely there had to be another corner suite available. But now, it looked like it wouldn’t matter. His luck was back. Nothing could go wrong. After these photos hit the newsstands, he would be king of the fucking world again.

  As soon as he got back to his room he threw his duffel bag on the bed and stripped out of his clothes, bagged them in one of the plastic hotel laundry bags and tossed the bag next to the other trash he’d dump in the morning. He set his boots in the whirlpool tub to clean later and slipped on the plush terry-cloth robe that the wonderful housekeeping staff had left fresh and clean on the back of the bathroom door.

  He had packed his developing tank and enough chemicals to develop the film. He could make a contact sheet of the exposures he wanted to sell. That way he wouldn’t have to take them to a local twenty-four-hour photo shop and have some pimply faced kid freaking out by what he saw.

  While he pulled out everything he’d need, he called down to room service. He ordered their roast duck with raspberry chocolate cheesecake and the most expensive bottle of Sangiovese on their wine list. Then he dialed his own number to re
trieve his messages. After the National Enquirer had hit the stands, he expected some calls from news editors he hadn’t heard from in years, suddenly pretending to be his best buddies again.

  He was right. There were fifteen messages. His damn machine could take only eighteen. He grabbed the notepad with the hotel’s embossed logo and began going through the list. He could hardly contain the smile and finally laughed out loud at the two messages from Curtis, the first wanting to know why he hadn’t brought the exclusive to him and the second telling him he’d beat anyone’s price for whatever else Ben had. Oh, yes, life was good again. It was very good.

  One of the messages was from his old pal, Detective Julia Racine—he had been hoping to hear from her. Unlike the other messages, Racine didn’t waste her breath sweet-talking or befriending him. Instead, she threatened to arrest him and charge him with obstruction of a police investigation. Jesus! She could turn him on just with her voice, especially when she talked dirty. Hearing her call him a “fucker” gave him an incredible hard-on. He played the message again, just to enjoy the sensation. Then he decided to save it for future use, rather than erase it.

  He flipped through his little black book, and it occurred to him that he might be able to make it up to Detective Racine. As much as he enjoyed her calling him a fucker, he wouldn’t mind cashing in on one of the quid pro quos she was so famous for. From the tone of her voice, the poor woman probably hadn’t been laid for some time, be it male or female. And he had to admit, tonight had sorta put him in the mood. He was quite certain he could come up with a proposition that might be as interesting to Racine as it was to him.

  Finally, he found the phone number he was looking for and started dialing Britt Harwood’s number at the Boston Globe. It was late, but he’d go ahead and leave a message. Hell, might as well give the hometown boy a first shot at this exclusive. He smiled, thinking of Harwood’s face when he showed him the contact sheet of a dozen good little Christian boys mauling and ripping the clothes off women in the middle of Boston Common.

  CHAPTER 56

  Tully still couldn’t believe it. If it hadn’t been for cellular technology, he’d be back at the hotel with Gwen, perhaps even making their way through that gift basket of champagne and condoms. How close had they come to making a huge mistake? Yet, he’d give anything to be back there with her instead of standing under a moonlit sky, up to his ankles in mud, listening to a chain-smoking detective mangle the English language as they waited for the medical examiner.

  At first, he’d wanted to strangle Morrelli for the interruption, even if there really had just been a murder similar to the one at the FDR Memorial. He caught himself wondering if Morrelli had done it on purpose, which he knew was crazy. After all, how could Morrelli have known what he was interrupting? Hell, Tully hadn’t known what was going to happen. Fact was, he still couldn’t believe he had even kissed her, let alone…What was he thinking? Maybe it was for the better that they had been interrupted. Otherwise…otherwise, it could have been…hell, otherwise, it would have been pretty incredible.

  “Here’s maybe the marks you talkin’ about?” Detective Kubat shone the flashlight on an area six feet from the body.

  Tully bent down and examined the circular indentations. One was clearly stamped in the mud. A possible second one looked rubbed out. They did look like the marks at the FDR Memorial. What the hell did they mean?

  “Did someone get a photo of these?”

  “Hey, Marshall,” Kubat yelled. “Get your ass over here and shoot a couple of Polaroids of this here.”

  “What about her clothes?”

  “Folded all nice like and piled up over there.” He swung the flashlight to highlight the spot, though the clothes had already been bagged and taken by the mobile crime unit. “Weird thing, though, they’d been all ripped up and ripped pretty good.”

  Tully stood and looked around. They appeared to be in a fairly secluded area of the park. On one side were trees, on another a brick wall, and yet the girl’s body was sitting against a tree and staring out at a clearing with a wooden bench and lamppost. In fact, it looked like she was staring right at the bench, posing for some admirer sitting there.

  “What about ropes or cords? Anything?”

  “Nope, nothin’. But get a load of this.”

  He led Tully closer to the body. A police spotlight lit up the area around her, its stark light transforming her into a white-faced puppet. She was bruised much worse than the Brier girl, a black eye and bruising from what looked like a left hook to the jaw. Her head tilted to one side, revealing three or four tracks of ligature marks. Without saying anything more, Kubat bent down and snapped off the spotlight. At first, Tully couldn’t figure out what he was doing and then he saw. The girl’s neck lit up, the track marks glowing in the dark.

  “What the hell?”

  “Pretty fuckin’ weird, huh?” Kubat said, and snapped the spotlight back on. “Anything like that with your victim?’

  “There was some sort of glittery stuff found on her neck. I guess I didn’t realize it glowed in the dark.”

  “Oh, hey. Here’s Doc Samuel,” Detective Kubat said, waving to the tall, distinguished-looking woman in a trench coat and black rubber ankle boots. She looked like the only one who’d come prepared. “Doc, this here’s that FBI guy, J.R. Scully.”

  “Actually, it’s R.J. Tully.”

  “Really? You sure?” Kubat looked at him as if it were possible Tully could have gotten his own name wrong. “I was thinking it was like that X-Files lady. Ain’t her name Scully?”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “Yeah, I’m sure it’s gotta be Scully.”

  “Agent Tully,” Dr. Samuel said, ignoring Detective Kubat and holding out her hand. “I’ve been told you might know a thing or two about this killer.”

  “Maybe. It looks like the same guy.”

  “So the victim’s ID might be in her throat?”

  “Yeah, sorry, Doc,” Kubat said. “If that’s the case, it sure would speed up things on our end.”

  “As long as we can do this without compromising any evidence,” the medical examiner told him with a stern tone that sounded more like a schoolteacher’s. “You mind putting out your cigarette, Detective?”

  “Oh, yeah, sure thing, Doc.” He stabbed it against a tree, pinched the end off with his fingers and tucked the unused portion behind his ear.

  Dr. Samuel found a dry rock big enough to set her case on. She began pulling out latex gloves, forceps and plastic bags. She handed Tully a pair of gloves.

  “You mind? I may need another pair of hands.”

  He took the gloves and tried to ignore the knot forming at the pit of his stomach. He hated this part and missed the days when he could stay in his office and do his own style of analysis from photos and digital scans.

  Suddenly, he found himself wondering why the hell he hadn’t shut off his cellular phone. He had honestly considered it after that spaghetti-twirling lesson, but then was embarrassed that he had even considered it. He probably would have turned off the damn phone if he hadn’t been worried about Emma and her trip to Cleveland. But she had called to say she’d arrived safe and sound at her mother’s early that afternoon, so why was he still worried about her?

  Dr. Samuel was ready. He followed her instructions, being careful where to kneel and keeping out of the spotlight. He tried to not think about the girl’s eyes staring at him or the smell of decomposing flesh. Flies were already buzzing, despite the night being chilly. Tully couldn’t help thinking they were the insect world’s version of vultures. The damn things could sense blood and set up shop in a matter of hours, sometimes minutes.

  Kubat stood to the side. He handed Tully his flashlight. “Might need that to see inside her mouth.”

  The medical examiner used the forceps to tug gently at the duct tape, peeling it off easily and bagging it. She had to use her gloved fingers to pry open the mouth, then she nodded for Tully to shine the flashlight while she picked
up the forceps again. Tully pointed the light.

  Something moved inside.

  “Wait a minute,” he said. “Did something just move?”

  The medical examiner leaned in for a closer look, tilting her head while he positioned the light. Then suddenly she jerked back.

  “Oh, dear, God!” she said, scrambling to her feet. “Get a couple of bags, Detective.”

  Tully stayed where he was, stunned and motionless, still holding the flashlight in position and listening to Kubat and Dr. Samuel. They scurried around, trying to find something, anything to capture the huge cockroaches that started pouring out of the dead woman’s mouth.

  CHAPTER 57

  Maggie knew she should get up and go to sleep in her bed for a change, but to do so would disturb Harvey’s huge snoring head, which was nestled in her lap. So she stayed put. The old La-Z-Boy recliner had become a sort of sanctuary. It sat in her sunroom, facing the floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out over her backyard, though there wasn’t much to see in the dark. The moonlight created dancing shadows and skeletal arms waving at her, but thankfully no wisps of fog ghosts tonight.

  She wished she could erase from her mind the visit to her mother’s, like rinsing out a bad taste from her mouth, but the Scotch wasn’t cooperating. It wouldn’t stop the memories. It couldn’t fill that goddamn hollow feeling. And for some reason, she kept hearing that voice, over and over again in her head.

  Your father was no saint.

  Why in the world had her mother made up such a lie? Why did she want to hurt her?

  Memories kept replaying in her head, some in slow motion, some in short, quick flashes, others in painful stings. Her mother had been with so many men, so many losers, bastards. Why then would she insist on putting Maggie’s father in that same category? What kind of cruel joke was she trying to play? Was this something Everett had planted? Something he had convinced her mother to do? Whatever the reason, it managed to bring the walls—those carefully constructed barriers—crashing down, and now the flood of memories wouldn’t stop.