Still she lay motionless, not breathing…
“I’m so sorry,” the man sobbed in a high-pitched voice. “I’m so sorry, Mary. So sorry.”
She heard the match striking, heard the quiet whoosh of the fire igniting in a circle around her. She felt her energy seeping out in the puddle of blood beneath her, felt her life slipping away. She began to pray, even as darkness overtook her.
Martha’s funeral, though sad, was a celebration of a saint going home. The church choir, of which Martha had been a part, sang “It Is Well with My Soul,” and Nick Foster told stories of Martha’s devotion to Christ, her sacrificial acts of mercy around the town since arriving in Newpointe, her selfless acts of service to her church in the short time she’d been a member. He told of the miracle of the baby she and George had prayed for, and reminded the congregation that, reckoned in eternal time, she would only be separated from that baby and her husband for “a few minutes” before they would be reunited in heaven. He promised that some good would come of this death, whether the killer intended it or Satan wanted it, because God promised that all things would “work together for good to those who loved the Lord and were called according to his purpose.”
After the service, they assembled at the grave site in the small cemetery adjacent to the church. There, George held Tommy in his arms and wept as they lowered the casket into the ground. He and his parents and Martha’s parents stood accepting condolences from those who chose to give them. As friends and neighbors and church brothers and sisters hugged George or shook his hand or cried with him, they offered words intended to comfort and support—but those words often fell far short.
“Consider it joy,” Sue Ellen Hanover, one of the clerks at the local post office, told him, and George swallowed and nodded mutely. Standing nearby and watching, Allie knew that regarding his wife’s murder with joy was one of those God-sized tasks George hadn’t yet grasped.
“Think how many were led to the Lord through this funeral today,” Joyce Drake, who owned the cleaners, told George.
He bounced little Tommy and said, “Martha led lots of folks to Christ when she was alive.”
“But maybe more will come through this,” the woman insisted.
It was a nice thought, and most likely true, but Allie doubted that George’s heart was ready for that kind of speculation.
When she and Mark worked their way close enough to George, Allie reached up to hug him tight, choosing not to say anything. “She’s in heaven, man,” Mark said with tears in his eyes. “And as hard as it is for you to be separated from her, it’s not that long before you will see her again.”
George glanced self-consciously at those in line behind them, then lowering his voice, said, “Wonder if she’s really there, or just asleep ’til…”
Mark stepped closer and touched George’s shoulder. “He said, ‘Today you will be with me in paradise.’ Not hundreds of years from now, but today.”
Allie shot him a look, surprised that he still had any spiritual impulses.
George let his words soak in. “He did say it, didn’t he?”
“She’s there, buddy.”
George tightened his lips and looked down at the baby, who was just nodding off in his arms. “We gon’ be okay, you know. Tommy’s a miracle baby, and God ain’t gon’ forsake us now.”
Allie struggled to hold back her tears, but she failed. Wiping her eyes, she asked, “Is there anything we can do for you, George? Anything at all?”
George’s face changed, and his eyebrows lifted. “Yeah, matter of fact. There is.”
“What?” Mark asked. “Anything, man.”
“Put yo’ marriage back together. Some of us don’t got a choice. Don’t just th’ow it away.”
Allie looked down at the floor, avoiding Mark’s eyes. “We’re doing the best we can, George,” Mark said.
“You ain’t doin’ enough,” the grieving man said. He patted Mark’s shoulder, then forced a smile. “I can say these things ’cause I know you won’t deck me today.”
Mark breathed out a strained laugh, then his smile quickly faded as he looked at Allie. Squeezing his friend’s arm, he took Allie’s hand and led her back to the church.
They were silent for a long moment, then finally, Mark said, “Leave it to George to nail us like that today of all days.”
“He just doesn’t know all the facts,” she said in a flat voice.
“No, he doesn’t.”
So they did agree on something, Allie mused miserably.
She looked up at the parking lot, and saw a whole new string of traffic pulling in for Jamie’s funeral. While most of the town had come for both funerals, some had known Jamie better than Martha and had only come for the second one. “How long before the next funeral?” she asked.
Mark checked his watch. “About half an hour.”
“I’m gonna go try to repair my makeup,” she told him. “I’ll meet you inside the church.”
Chapter Nineteen
Susan struggled in and out of consciousness as the flames grew hotter around her and the smoke grew more smothering. As her consciousness returned, she forced herself to move. She was still bleeding, and her hand slipped through the wet puddle beneath her. Summoning all her strength, she turned her head—and saw the flames creeping across the carpet toward her. She had to move. She had to get out of the house while she still could.
She pushed with her feet, triggering unimaginable pain, until she managed to rise up on her knees. Blackness overtook her again, and she fell. But her consciousness hung on, and she pulled herself into a weak little ball and forced herself to roll with all the momentum she could gather-right through the flames that surrounded her.
She felt them singeing her hair and scorching her back, but she managed to keep rolling until she was out of the circle of fire the killer had made for her.
The flames were catching hold of the curtains and climbing the couch. Susan pushed with her feet and clawed with her hands until she reached the table next to the couch. She groped for the telephone cord, found it, and jerked the phone down. The phone fell off the table with a crash and a ring, and she dragged the cord until she had her hands on the base.
Darkness was coming again, sucking her under, but she managed to punch out 911. She couldn’t reach the receiver, didn’t know where it was. Smoke was filling the room, choking her, burning her lungs, and she felt the heat of flames licking close to her again.
“911, may I help you?”
She knew that the dispatcher could help her, but she couldn’t get the words out.
“Hello? May I help you?”
“Help…” The word was too faint, and she knew the dispatcher didn’t hear. She groped for the coiled cord to the handset and pulled the receiver closer. “Help…”
The darkness was too thick and the smoke too smothering, and she couldn’t get a breath. Finally, the darkness closed in on her, leaving her no escape.
Chapter Twenty
Ray Ford grew concerned when the crowd had thinned out and Susan was still nowhere in sight. He wondered if she had fallen asleep at home and missed the funeral. She hadn’t been sleeping well since the murders, and he wouldn’t be surprised if she’d lain down for a few minutes and failed to open her eyes again in time.
He went to the church office to call home, but someone was using the phone. No problem. He had time to run home and get her up before Jamie’s funeral began.
He trotted out to his car, pulled out of the packed parking lot, and headed down the street between the rows of cars parked on the sides of the streets. When he reached his house, he saw that Susan’s car was still there.
A dull buzzing noise sang from inside the house, and as he realized it might be the smoke alarm, he broke into a run. He reached the back door and flung it open. Smoke billowed out.
He yelled for his wife as he stumbled into the kitchen. His heart jolted when he saw the flames dancing in the living room. He grabbed the tablecloth from the kitchen
table and the fire extinguisher they kept under the sink, ran into the living room, and began smothering the flames, yelling, “Susan! Susan!”
Then he saw her, lying facedown in a pool of blood in the only part of the room that wasn’t yet engulfed.
“No!” His scream shook the house. He dropped the extinguisher, gathered her up, and crashed out the front door. As he collapsed with her on the grass, he saw that her face was blood-splattered and her chest was soaked with blood. He heard a siren as he searched her neck for a pulse. “Susan, hang on, darlin’. Don’t Don’t leave me, baby.”
Finding a pulse, he bent his head and began praying as the sirens grew closer. A fire truck stopped in front of his house, then an ambulance, and the paramedics rushed to take her from him. “She’s not dead,” he told them. “She’s not dead.” His voice cracked as he tried to speak. “You’ve got to save her. Please.”
But as they tried to stabilize her for rapid transport, he wondered if it was too late.
Chapter Twenty-One
Because no one knew for sure whether Jamie Larkins was a believer—and from her behavior, most assumed she was not-hers was a funeral of despair. Though Nick tried to offer hope, it was a floundering attempt at best. Nick had confided to Mark before the service that, as hard as he’d tried to come up with kind, hopeful words to say about her, most of what he’d heard from her friends and family had been wild stories about how “carefree” she was, how she loved life, how she would rather spend a night on the town with good friends than just about anything.
Empty sentiments for a life that would leave little legacy, Mark thought as he watched the pastor struggle with the eulogy. The difference between Cale’s face now and George’s at the previous funeral was profound. Though both were in agony, and neither could boast of much peace, George seemed to hold together better than Cale did.
Mark wished now that he had felt more concern about the Larkins’s relationship to God, but all those nights he’d gone to Joe’s Place and shared drinks with them, it had never crossed his mind that their need to find God might be urgent. He wasn’t sure where his mind had been, but he knew it hadn’t been on spiritual life-his own or anyone else’s. Not for a long time. He felt as guilty as if he’d had something to do with Jamie’s death himself. He’d moved a long way since his last Promise Keepers rally, he thought. An awful long way. In the wrong direction.
Allie was crying. Instinctively, he put his arm around her. She didn’t recoil, as he’d half expected, and he wished he could take her home and hold her through the night, comfort her and let her comfort him…
But these moments—sitting here so close to her, holding her, touching her—were no longer reality. And when reality set back in, he and Allie would once again go their separate ways, despite George’s admonitions.
After the service, they headed to their car for the procession to the grave site on the other side of Newpointe, which was not in the churchyard since the Larkins weren’t members there. Mark opened the door and helped Allie into his car, then got in and pulled into the procession forming in the parking lot. At the front of the line, just behind the hearse, was Johnny Ducote, another fireman, driving the big limousine—his “moonlighting” job when he wasn’t on duty. He had offered his services free for both families today, but Mark doubted that it gave them much comfort.
Before the hearse began to move, Mark saw Slater Finch pull out of the procession and make a quick U-turn. Several cars back, another car pulled out.
“Must be something going on somewhere to pull them away from this,” Mark said, reaching to turn on the scanner he kept under his dash. He kept it on most of the time, as many of the firemen and police officers did, to the chagrin of their wives and families, but he had turned it off before he’d picked up Allie.
“You’d think they could let the on-duty guys handle it,” Allie said. “It’s not like this is a football game. It’s the funeral of their colleague’s wife, for heaven’s sake.”
“Shhh. Listen.” He turned it up and tried to tune to an active frequency.
He found a police frequency first, heard an excited cop practically yelling into the radio. “The fire department is working on the fire, and we’ve got the ambulance taking Susan to meet the Medicoptor so they can get her to the hospital in Slidell. But I don’t know, the gunshot wound was pretty bad. If Ray hadn’t come home when he did and found her…”
“Susan and Ray?” Allie shouted, turning the radio up. “Not the Fords. Not Susan!”
“Oh, no.” Mark closed his eyes and covered his face. “Not again. They caught the guy! He’s still in jail.”
Someone behind him in the procession tapped his horn. Mark jumped and opened his eyes. The cars ahead were moving, and he was holding the line up. Jerking his steering wheel hard to the right, he pulled out of the line.
“Where should we go?” Allie’s voice was high-pitched, panicked.
“I don’t know. House or hospital?”
“The hospital,” she cried. “Oh, Mark. Hurry!”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Television vans were rapidly filling the parking lot at Slidell Memorial Hospital. Technicians scurried around setting up for live broadcasts as camera crews and reporters hurried toward the emergency room, providing a morbid sense of melodrama as Mark and Allie tried to find a parking space. The case was no longer just another murder, so common in south Louisiana. Now it was a serial killing, and the whole nation would follow the story.
Mark finally parked on the street, took Allie’s hand, and headed into the emergency room. It wasn’t easy—photographers and reporters were already crowded in elbow to elbow, some taping already, others calling in stories on the two pay phones or their own hand-held cell phones. The handful of people who’d come for treatment—a man with a cut arm, an asthmatic baby wheezing in his mother’s arms, and a woman who appeared to be close to passing out—seemed incidental to the news the reporters sought.
Mark and Allie pushed through the crowd to the information desk where a frazzled nurse sat. He started to ask her if Susan had made it to the hospital, then overheard a reporter taping for the six o’clock news: “…here in Slidell Memorial Hospital, where this bizarre serial killing, targeting only wives of firemen in the Northshore town of Newpointe, is taking a new twist. We’re told that Susan Ford, the newest victim, has a serious chest wound. She came very close to being burned as well, and if her husband had not found her when he did, she may have lost her life. She remains unconscious…”
The haggard nurse pulled a pencil from her beehive hair. “Sir, if you’re a reporter, I’m going to have to ask you to move over there.”
Mark swung his attention from the news anchor. “No, I’m a friend of Susan and Ray Ford. Do you know where Ray is?”
“Yes, sir, he’s here,” the woman said in a nasal twang. “But everyone here wants to see him. We’re not allowing anybody back.”
“Oh, please,” Allie said, bracing her hands on the reception desk. “He shouldn’t be alone through this. We’re close friends, and he needs someone with him.”
The nurse sneered at them. “You reporters are reprehensible. I don’t know how you sleep at night.”
“We’re not reporters!” Mark insisted. “I’m a fireman in Newpointe and I work with Ray.”
Her face changed, and she crossed her big arms and chewed on her pencil for a moment. “A fireman, huh?”
He pulled out his wallet and showed her his I.D. “Yes. Mark Branning. And this is my wife, Allie.”
It was as though he had changed channels on the woman’s personality. Instantly, she softened. “Oh, you poor thing. You must be scared to death that you’ll be next.”
Mark looked at Allie, and she looked back. He put his arm around her shoulders. Three firemen’s wives shot. He’d worried before that there was a killer on the loose in Newpointe. For the first time, he realized the killer was actually targeting—
“Excuse me!” The loud voice turned them around, and a
reporter stuck a microphone in Mark’s face. Blinding lights were suddenly on them. “I’m Clive Southerlyn from WDSU-TV in New Orleans,” the man said in his familiar broadcast voice. “Did I hear you say you’re on the fire department with Ray Ford?”
“That’s right,” Mark said.
“Sir, why do you think this killer is targeting your wives?”
He started to answer, but other reporters began to gravitate toward him, sticking more mikes in his face. “Uh…well, I didn’t realize until Susan was shot that he was…that is…”
“Do you know who could be doing this?” someone shouted.
“No…uh…”
A reporter jabbed a mike in front of Allie’s face, almost hitting her in the mouth. “What’s your name, ma’am?”
“Allie Branning,” she said, trying to back away.
“How do you feel about being a target for this killer, Mrs. Branning?”
“I’m not sure that’s what I am.”
“Are you going to stay at home tonight?”
“Were you friends with the other three women?”
“Do you know if Susan Ford was involved in drugs, as well?”
As Allie burst into tears, Mark struggled with the anger moving red-hot through his veins. He pushed away the cluster of mikes. “Please! We just want to know how our friend is doing.”
He pulled Allie along with him toward the double swinging doors leading to the examining rooms. No one stopped them as they burst through, but when the reporters tried to follow, two security guards appeared and held them back.
They stopped in the corridor. Allie was shaking, and she wiped her eyes with a trembling hand. “Are you all right?” he asked.
“I’m scared, Mark,” she whispered.
Private Justice Page 10
