Crimson Lake Road (Desert Plains)
Page 31
They went inside and left Jax out front.
On the elevator up, Baldwin hit the emergency stop button. A loud beeping started. Garrett said, “What the hell you doing?”
“Is it true?”
“Is what true?”
Baldwin folded his arms and leaned back against the wall of the elevator. “Don’t bullshit me, Lucas. We’ve known each other too long. Did you stab that poor son of a bitch and try to pin it on her husband?”
Garrett’s face flushed red. “No, I didn’t. She and that prick made that up to make sure I didn’t get custody of my boy.”
“They stabbed some gangbanger and kept the knife and T-shirt just to frame you, huh?”
Garrett faced him squarely, his jaw muscles flexing. “I don’t know what the hell they did or why, but I know I didn’t stab anybody.”
“Why’d you break into her condo?”
“I was checking him out. Some guy moves in with your son, you wanna know about him. I had no idea who that bitch brought into that house. I did all the background, but you know that only gets so much. So I checked out what they had there.”
Baldwin stepped close to him so that their faces were only inches apart. “I swear to you, Lucas, if I find out you’re lying, I’m going to bring you in myself.”
“Back the hell off me. And don’t you think for a second you can threaten me, boy. I was wearing a badge while you were still popping zits in gym class.”
Baldwin held his gaze a little longer and then hit the emergency button, allowing the elevator to move again.
The elevator doors opened, and he stepped off. “Let’s get this over with.”
Garrett nodded to the officer stationed outside Chance’s room and then opened the door.
Jude Chance lay in a hospital bed holding a cigarette. He hadn’t lit it. Instead, he tapped it against his thigh, his wrists and ankles cuffed to the metal railing of the bed. He stared at a spot on the wall, and his eyes didn’t waver.
Baldwin followed Garrett into the room. Chance watched them, and a slow smile crept to his lips. He held up his cigarette and said, “Got a light?”
“Do you even smoke?” Garrett said.
“No, not really. Figure I’ll probably start since I’ll just be sitting in a cell most of my days now.”
Baldwin said, “So you know you’re going away?”
“Of course I know. You got everything you need for a conviction. At least for Leonard’s death, if nothing else. That was stupid. I rushed into it too quick. But hey, we had a gentleman’s agreement and he bit me in the ass. And I didn’t know how much he knew about me. Might’ve seen my car driving away. Couldn’t have that.”
“Why’d you have him call in?”
“You tell me,” he said with a grin.
“You wanted us thinking Harmony ran away, but why? If she’s dead, what does it matter?”
He put the cigarette in his mouth. “Shit, you really are clueless, aren’t you?”
“Is she still alive somewhere, Jude? If she is, tell me where and I swear to you we’ll make it worth your while. I’ll get the US Attorney’s Office and the DA on the phone right now to get a deal in writing. Let you avoid the death penalty. But only if we find her alive.”
He lay back and stared at the ceiling. “I’m not getting the death penalty, Agent Baldwin. Not when all the shit comes out about what Tucker’s gotten away with. They’ll give me life, maybe even life with parole, just to get all this out of the media.”
Baldwin and Garrett exchanged a glance before Baldwin said, “Why this case, Jude? You must’ve investigated other disappearances on your beat. What was it about Sue Ellen that got you to cross the line? It couldn’t be just your sister.”
He lost his smile. “I found out what he does to them. He’s a sexual sadist. He’s gotta have the pain with it, so he puts those girls through agony like you and I can’t even imagine. I just kept seeing my sister there . . . I knew I had to do something because you guys sure as hell weren’t.”
“Did you ever find out what happened to Sue Ellen?”
He nodded, staring off into space. “He kept her for a few months at his grandfather’s cabin on Crimson Lake. Tucker usually only kept them for a few weeks, so there was something about her he . . . liked, more than the others.”
Garrett said, “Did you find out how she died?”
“What the hell does it matter how? Dead is dead. Too bad I can’t say that about Angela, too, right?”
“What happened there?”
“Ya know, you just don’t think about some of the details when your heart is pounding and you’re in the moment. Those syringes were completely full. Enough to take a linebacker down. Who would’ve known Angela River could’ve survived? I guess we metabolize things differently. Would’ve been nice to see her dead, too, though.”
“Why? What did she ever do to you?”
“It wasn’t about her, it was about Michael Zachary. Making him hurt. Guess who Tucker’s neighbors on Crimson Lake were? Felix and Ana Zachary. Michael Zachary was seventeen, and he saw Sue Ellen there, knew she was being held in that house, and did shit about it. He’s lying through his teeth. He knows exactly who Tucker Pharr is. They were friends and he covered for him for years. The good doctor deserved what he was going to get. He was supposed to be the third painting, but hell, I figured getting him life in prison was good enough. And you guys would stop looking for me once you got that conviction.” He shook his head. “But shit happens, right?”
“How do you know Zachary knew she was there?”
“There was a girl who survived Tucker. She never came forward, but I found her. She said she made one escape attempt before she finally got away, and Zachary was out in the yard on the first one. She begged him for help and he took her inside his house and said he was going to call the cops, but instead he called Tucker.”
“Bullshit.”
“Believe it or don’t, man. I don’t care. I’m just telling you what she said, and she was credible. That dickhead knew exactly what was happening.” He looked up to the television, which wasn’t on. “He took part in it somehow. I could never verify that, but I’d bet my ass he did. That’s who Jessica is going to release back into society, Agent Baldwin. Him and Tucker out partying while all those girls are in the grave and I’m in a cell. You really think that’s justice?”
Garrett shook his head in disbelief. “You throwing a damn pity party right now? Do you feel bad at all for all this shit? Harmony was fourteen.”
“That girl died unconscious without a hint of pain. I guarantee you Tucker’s been abusing and torturing her since he got out of prison. It was a mercy, what I did. Do you know Child Services was called on Kathy Pharr eight times? She dated dope fiends and let them move into her house. Eight times, and you guys never tried to get Harmony out of that house. Shit, what I did lasted a minute. You guys let her go through torture for years.”
“She wasn’t having an affair, though, was she? Kathy Pharr,” Baldwin said.
Chance tapped the cigarette against his leg. “Nah. I made that photo. I did that hoping Tucker’d kill Zachary, but he was too much of a chickenshit. And how about faking calls from Zachary’s phone to Kathy’s? Company in Canada can do it for five hundred bucks. Easy enough. Especially when you and Jess are too stupid to actually verify if it’s real before using it as evidence.”
“It’s not stupidity, it’s trust. Jessica trusted you.”
“Yeah, well, that’ll teach her, I guess, right?”
Baldwin shook his head. He had one last question. “Why Sarpong?”
“Your mother told me during pillow talk she likes him, that’s why. And I’m done talking. Get me a lawyer.”
77
Tucker Pharr watched as the nurse checked the stitches in his shoulder. It stung, and he ran his finger over it and thought it felt like a zipper. The scalpel that psycho had stabbed him with had been so sharp that the doctor said he was lucky it didn’t go all the way through.
“I’ll be back to check on you later,” the nurse said.
When she’d left, he rested his head fully onto the pillow and picked up the remote to turn on the television.
Kathy and Harmony, he thought.
Shit.
Well, two less mouths to feed. Kathy was just a marriage that had to happen because she was pregnant and he had nowhere else to go. There hadn’t been a ceremony, and he was told they were only legally married because they’d lived together so long, and she’d filed something for disability benefits and listed them as husband and wife.
Harmony . . . he would miss Harmony. She hadn’t come to visit him in prison, and Tucker smiled when he thought of the look on her face when he’d gotten home.
“Forgot about me for twelve years, but you ain’t gonna forget about me now,” he had told her through the door when she locked herself in the bathroom that first night.
Shame about her. But she was getting too old anyway. There was that girl that Harmony hung out with sometimes . . . what was her name . . . Uma. Tucker had watched her playing with the hose in his backyard in a swimsuit with Harmony. She had freckles on her shoulders but nowhere else on her body.
The door opened, and another nurse came in. He could see the tattoos on her arms, and he stared at them as she said, “Looks like someone ordered some pain meds.”
“Sure did.”
“Arm,” she said, as she took out a syringe and a small bottle.
“They said it was gonna be a drip.”
“That takes a minute to set up. Guessed you’d want to get going now.”
He chuckled. “You guessed right.” He let out a long breath. “Helluva shit day, I’ll tell ya that.”
“Oh yeah? What happened?”
“You ain’t heard?”
She shook her head. “Shift just started.”
“Well, ya gonna hear about it. I was a hostage of some sick peckerwood.”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah. Got out of it by kicking his ass. He’s lucky I didn’t kill him. Ow!”
“Sorry. Your veins are hard to find.”
Tucker felt the warmth of the oily fluid in his arm, and it slowly rose up into his shoulder. He felt dizzy but didn’t feel the instant floating sensation he liked with pain meds.
“You sure you gave me enough?”
“What’s the matter, not feeling it?”
“Don’t feel the same.”
The nurse pulled up a stool and sat next to the bed. “It’s an interesting drug. You’re going to feel everything, be wide awake, but none of your muscles are going to respond to you.”
“What?”
She inhaled deeply and looked into his pupils. “Do I look familiar, Tucker? Do you remember me?”
“Should I?”
“What if I was fourteen and wearing a pink-and-white-striped shirt? Would you recognize me then?”
“Um, hey, I’m feelin’ kinda weird. Maybe we should get the doctor.”
She rose. “They’re going to be busy awhile.”
He opened his mouth and realized no words came.
“Oh yeah, you’re not going to be able to talk. Probably for the best. I should do all the talking, don’t you think?”
The nurse took out a phone and opened a picture. It was a painting. The same painting the man had set up in that basement.
Tucker tried to fight, to grab her, to jump out of bed, to scream . . . but his body did nothing.
“You kept me in that basement for months. Did you keep any other girls that long? I wondered every day if you did. I knew you’d kill me eventually, and I think that was maybe the worst part. You’d come back and I would think, Today’s the day. Today I’m going to die.” She exhaled and went to the sink and took out some instruments from the pockets of her scrubs: scalpels, strands of leather, and a needle the size of a pocketknife.
“I’m going to take out your organs, Tucker. One by one. You’ll live through the entire thing because I’m not taking out your heart until last. I’m going to sew your mouth shut, but I’m going to leave your eyes. I want you to see it. To watch me do it. Then, before I take your heart, I’m going to sew your eyes shut. But once I take out your heart, your brain will survive for six minutes. For six minutes, I’m going to put you through as much pain and terror as you put all those girls through. And you’ll be unable to scream or move while I do it. I can’t imagine a worse way to die, can you?”
He tried to scream again, but nothing happened. His eyes burned because he couldn’t blink, and the only movement was the rise and fall of his chest as he breathed and the motion of the blood in his veins. He had never noticed his body like this. Never noticed how loud his heart could be.
The nurse lifted a scalpel. “Ready? Okeydokey, let’s get started.”
78
Baldwin got the call around five in the morning from Young. He called Garrett, who told him what had happened.
“It’s bad, Cason,” he said on the phone. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
He threw on slacks and a sports coat. The hospital was an hour from his house.
Several uniformed deputies milled around the entrance to the emergency room. Garrett was out in the lobby. Without a word, he led Baldwin to the room.
The forensic technicians were already there, and he watched one of them come out with a camera. The tech looked pale and was sweating, like he might vomit any second. Baldwin stepped past him and into the room and froze.
Blood was everywhere. The floors, the walls, even the ceiling. Tucker Pharr’s body lay on the bed, a grotesque caricature of what had once been a human being. His organs had been placed neatly on the counter by the sink. Thick leather strands had sewn his eyes and mouth shut. Much of his skin had been removed, and the torso was open, the ribs spread wide.
The fourth painting.
“Looks like he finished his series,” Garrett said. “I’m goin’ down to sweat Chance and find out who he was working with.”
Baldwin couldn’t speak or take his eyes off the body. It didn’t look real, more like something in a Halloween haunted house. Plastic, rubber, and paint.
“You don’t need to. I think I know who did this.”
“Who?”
Baldwin thought back to his last conversation with Yardley and her refusal to tell him where she was going and why she had to be there in such a hurry. She’d been hoping to catch River before she left.
He shook his head. “Doesn’t matter now,” he said, his eyes still on the body. “She’s gone.”
Baldwin sat at the park near the federal building in his car and held Harmony’s photo. She was smiling, and several times he had wondered what she was thinking about. If the smile was real or if she had to fake it because she knew she had to go home to Tucker later and couldn’t bring herself to give a real one.
He saw ASAC Young running by on the sidewalk that looped around the park, and he set the photo down on his passenger seat and got out. Young didn’t notice him at first, then glanced at him and did a double take. He stopped jogging. The blue sweat suit he wore was soaked with dark rings around the neck and underarms, and he puffed heavily as he put his hands on his hips.
“Something happen?” Young said.
Baldwin put his hands in his pockets, looking out over a distant playground and a few children playing on the equipment. “I want to be in Child Crimes.”
“What?”
“I’ll let you transfer me out of Behavioral Science. But no more bullshit assignments. I want Child Crimes.”
Young watched him a moment. “What the hell you want that for? Nobody wants to be there; they have to be there. It’s like putting in your time at a shit job before getting a promotion.”
“Yeah, well, I got my reasons.”
Young spit onto the sidewalk. “You sure you can handle it? It’s not what you think. It takes a piece of you.”
Young took a couple of breaths and said, “If you’re sure, you got it.”
“No more white collar?”
He shook his head. “No, but remember you asked for this, Agent Baldwin. Like they say, careful what you wish for.”
It was afternoon when Baldwin got to the house. He knocked and waited, knowing she was home. Her car was in the driveway, and she had left it unlocked, something he had begged her not to do several times. Some lessons people needed to learn the hard way.
He got a text just then from Kristen Reece. All it said was, Case is over. Wanna grab a beer or . . . maybe dinner?
Baldwin grinned but heard the lock on the door slide open before he could answer.
The door opened, and Scarlett stood there. Neither of them said anything.
After a long while, Baldwin said, “Hi.”
She hesitated. “Hi.”
He reached out slowly and put his hand on her stomach. He ran his fingers across her belly and pictured the child inside . . . his child.
“I don’t know what kind of father I’m going to be, and I don’t know if we’re meant to do this together or not . . . but I wanna try. I wanna try to be there for my kid.”
Scarlett watched him a moment and then held the door open for him. He went inside, and she closed it behind them.
79
Tara wore a dress for the first time in her life. She’d never been to any fancy restaurants or upscale social functions and had never had a reason to put one on. The dress felt as alien to her as a Halloween costume and just as uncomfortable.
She stared at herself in her rearview mirror and was shocked how much older she could make herself look. Or did she just look that way permanently now? She wondered if stress could age a person as fast as time.
She wiped at a bit of lipstick on the corner of her mouth with a napkin, then got out of the car.
The prison was quiet today. Only one person waited in the visitors’ lobby, and the guard at the desk knew Tara by now. He let her sign in without checking ID and asked her how she was today. He was younger than most of the other guards, and handsome, with jet-black hair. Ethan, read his name tag. He told her about a new movie that he was excited about and suggested they see it together. She told him she’d think about it.