Ruben almost felt sorry for the man as his eyes squinted in pain. Finally with one last crack, the light in Bute’s eyes went out and he pitched forward, face first. He hit the cement floor with a wet splat.
Paggie stood over the body, the pipe still held high over her head, panting. You could practically see the adrenaline coursing through her veins.
“Paggie, it’s okay. It’s okay,” Ruben murmured.
A strange smile spread over her face. “Okay? It’s way better than okay.”
That was an odd statement from his fiancée.
“Paggie, cut my ties,” Ruben urged.
“Cut them?” Paggie laughed harshly. “You still don’t get it, do you?”
Ruben feared that he was beginning to get it, but didn’t want to.
“No…”
Paggie’s smile turned savage. “Oh yes, lover…”
Ruben closed his eyes. It couldn’t be true. His fiancée was the sweetest person he’d ever known. So patient and loving. Ruben guessed that Kent was right after all. Female sociopaths were the best liars.
“Why?” he asked.
“Well, besides the fact I’m a sociopath?” Paggie answered with a laugh. “Maybe it was Nicole. Nicole, freaking Nicole.”
Ruben gulped. His fiancée was truly a killer and his captor. Probably best not to antagonize her.
“I am so sorry,” Ruben said, trying to sound sincere, because he truly was sorry he was in this situation.
“Don’t bother,” Paggie said, getting something down from a cabinet. It was a syringe set and a dime bag of heroin. “Did you really think anyone but a sociopath would put up with your worship of your ex? Seriously?”
“No, Paggie, please.”
She shook her head. “Do you have any idea how much fun we could have had if you’d just figured it out? I gave you every chance, Ruben. I even brought one of the bodies to your attention. If you’d just joined me.”
“Joined you?” Ruben couldn’t keep the horror out of his voice.
“Do you know how intense Bute and my relationship was?”
Ruben threw up a little into his mouth. All of Bute’s sexual bragging was about Paggie. About his fiancée. She was the one that introduced the side door to the brute.
This was not happening, Ruben thought as Paggie started to cook the heroin.
* * *
Nicole took the steps one at a time. Her phone was vibrating on her hip, but she ignored it. She didn’t want to answer it, then get eaten by whatever monster was lurking down in the shadows of the basement.
Each step leeched away the light until she was immersed in a pool of murk.
She clicked on her flashlight but it only sent a thin beam into the darkness. There were still plenty of shadows to go around.
Finally she reached the basement floor. Nicole swung right to left, trying to get a sense of how large the room was. From what she could tell, it went on forever. Her flashlight beam did little to dispel the sense of dread Nicole felt as she walked forward.
Nicole had to stifle the urge to call out again, because seriously, even if someone did answer, did she want to know about their presence down in the dingy basement?
Instead she walked forward another few steps. Finally, her light hit a back wall. At the least this wasn’t the never-ending basement. Small favors.
With each step, Nicole regretted her decision to come down here without backup. She really needed to stop letting Kent dare her into things.
Swinging her flashlight to the left, a flare brightened the room.
As she got closer, the only thing she found was a high heel with a stainless steel heel that had caused the light flare. Nicole took a few more steps to find the woman whom the shoe belonged to.
It must have been Sonya, but there was no way she could confirm that, given how badly beaten the woman’s face was.
Sonya wasn’t the killer. She was yet another victim. This had to be Bute’s handy work.
Nicole pulled her phone out and dialed Kent. “Sonya isn’t the killer.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Kent responded. “Information ten minutes old. You’re never going to guess who the killer is.”
“Since I’ll never guess, how about you just tell me?” Nicole prompted.
“You are no fun,” Kent replied.
“Kent…”
“Fine,” her husband replied. “It is Paggie.”
Nicole did a double take. She actually looked to the phone as if it might help her understand Kent’s words. “Paggie? Like Ruben’s fiancée?”
“Exactly like.”
“But why, how, what?”
“Just get over to their house,” Kent said, and cut the connection.
For a moment, Nicole just stood there next to Sonya’s body. It couldn’t be sweet little Paggie. And Paggie with Bute. That was just wrong.
But Kent was seldom wrong. And with that much confidence in his voice, he was never wrong.
She turned on her heel and charged up the stairs, glad to leave yet another basement filled with horror.
* * *
Ruben tried to pull his arm away, but damn, Paggie had gotten strong, plus he was still zip-tied to the chair.
“Don’t worry,” Paggie said. “This will make all your pain go away.”
“You don’t have to do this,” Ruben pleaded.
“Oh, but I do,” Paggie replied. “It is to pay you back for taking twenty months of my life that I will never get back.”
“You love me, I know you do,” Ruben said.
Paggie chuckled as she tied the tourniquet around his arm. “Love you? Do you realize how incredibly annoying you are? Besides the whole Nicole, Nicole, Kent, Nicole thing?”
Ruben felt his cheeks flush against his will. Maybe he did harp on those two a little too much. “We have a connection, Paggie.” Maybe if he could make her see him as a human, she wouldn’t shoot him up with pure heroin.
“You are so self-absorbed, you never saw it, did you? Me forcing myself to care about all your little worries. To put up with your boring ass love-making. Were you trying to go for some kind of Guinness World’s Record for the missionary position?”
Ruben tried not to get defensive, but come on. “You said you liked us to look each other in the eye when we made love.”
A harsh laugh escaped Paggie’s lips as she slapped his arm to raise a vein. “I had to say something to explain your lack of imagination.”
“Why didn’t you tell me you wanted something different?”
“Because I needed you to trust me completely. To feel completely safe,” Paggie stated. “So that you wouldn’t ever suspect I would dose you with antihistamines, so I could access your laptop and get the files I needed.”
“You drugged me?” Ruben asked.
She patted his shoulder. “Oh honey, you have no idea.”
No wonder he felt like he’d gotten a good, deep sleep and his sinuses were so clear. He should have suspected, he guessed.
“Why though? Why kill?” Ruben asked, trying to delay his inevitable death.
Paggie smiled, almost the same smile that he had fallen in love with. “Because of how it makes me feel. There is nothing more powerful.”
“Paggie, you can’t really mean that. Love is stronger than hatred.”
“You know what the best thing about killing you is going to be?” Paggie asked but didn’t wait for him to answer, which he was slightly grateful for. “So I don’t have to listen to your poster slogans. Seriously, Ruben, life isn’t black and white. It isn’t fair. It isn’t even close. Sometimes it isn’t worth it to just hang on for another day.”
Ruben frowned. “You don’t have to do this.”
“Oh, but I do,” Paggie said, drawing up the heroin into the syringe.
Was it useless to hope that it was a fresh needle? He would prefer if he did somehow escape this attempt on his life to not just end up getting AIDS. He supposed that was the kind of thinking that Paggie hated, so he didn’t bother to ask
the question. More than likely, he was about to die in the next few minutes, so he supposed that he didn’t have to worry about the quality of the rest of his life.
“Okay, this is going to pinch a bit,” Paggie said, poking the needle into his arm.
“Don’t,” Ruben said, not ashamed to beg.
“Before you die, why don’t you just admit that you love Nicole? You did all through our relationship and you do right now.”
As Paggie pushed the syringe and flooded his veins with ultra-pure heroin, Ruben tilted his head back and was honest. “I do.”
“Now isn’t that better?” Paggie said, although it sounded all slow and warped. She patted his cheek, as his world swirled in front of him. “And there’s no Kent to save you anymore.”
CHAPTER 18
“I wouldn’t be so sure of that,” Kent said, as he walked down Ruben’s basement stairs. Paggie had just given Ruben a shot Kent could only assume was of heroin.
“You? How?” Paggie hissed, backing away from Ruben.
Luckily under pressure, it appeared that the little vixen had made another critical mistake. Since Ruben was still breathing. His eyes were rolled back in his head and he was drooling, but he wasn’t dead, at least not yet. Paggie must have given him the same dose as she had the prostitutes who weighed half as much as Ruben. The tall detective had a chance if Kent was quick enough.
“You faked your death,” Paggie said, circling around the back of Ruben’s chair. Ah, body language told you everything you needed to know. Paggie was afraid of him. Very afraid. Rightfully so.
“So that you would tumble down this path of errors,” Kent explained. “I figured you’d act like a kid in a candy store once I was gone, but really you have outdone yourself.”
Paggie picked up a bloody pipe next to a very bludgeoned Bute.
“I’m not him,” Kent warned. Bute had the bulk, but the brains, even before his head was bashed in, not so much.
Paggie gripped the pipe with both hands and came after him.
Sometimes a gun would be nice, but then there would be no challenge.
At the last moment, Kent stepped out from the attack and nailed Paggie in the back of the neck with an elbow jab. She cried out, loosening one hand from the pipe to grab her neck.
Amateur mistake. Kent charged her, shoving her hard. Again, she allowed instinct to take over and dropped the pipe in order to put her other hand in front to block her fall.
Kent danced back as Paggie scrambled up, feeling around for her pipe. Kent kicked it away from her.
“Now what are you going to do?”
Paggie grit her teeth and came at him.
Oh, didn’t she know by now he loved hand-to-hand combat?
He allowed her to tackle him. She was trying to, in vain, knee him in the crotch, but she was simply too short. Her fingernails dug into his shirt, but did little damage.
Unlike Paggie, he’d been in just a few fights before. In a very ungentlemanly manner, Kent grabbed her long dark hair and pulled it from one side to the other. She screamed, her hands flying to her head, trying to make him stop.
Seriously, was she ever not going to take the bait?
“Paggie, I expected so much more from you. Great windup, but lousy pitch,” Kent taunted, pulling more of his tricks out of his bag. He’d fought enough deranged serial killers to have quite a few tools.
Paggie lashed a hand out and grabbed an old emergency flare from a work bench. She broke the seal and waved the sparkling red flame in front of her.
“That’s better,” he said, backing away.
Paggie seemed emboldened by his words and grabbed a small garden tool. Kent believed it was called a soil aerator, but no matter, it had three bent tines. Used right, the device could deliver some injury.
“You should have stayed dead,” Paggie growled as she came at him. Silly woman. Did she really think a flare and garden tool were going to bring him down?
The beauty of having no weapons was that it made you calculate all of your moves out to the most severe degree. Any error, even a few percentage points would lead to your demise. And since Kent would rather not die again, he made sure his timing was impeccable.
He let her come.
Why shouldn’t he?
Kent didn’t even move when he felt the heat of the flare on his skin. He needed her close. He needed her arm up for his ploy to work. He allowed his shirt to catch on fire, but still he waited.
Aiming perfectly, Kent threw a punch to Paggie’s brachial plexus. The nerve bundle deep in the armpit where all the nerves that controlled the arm rested.
The garden tool clanged to the ground as Paggie screamed.
Kent knew this was going to be fun, but he had no idea how much as he patted the fire from his shirt.
* * *
Joshua stood up. He was way too excited to sit down at his computer. His cells were vibrating at a level he feared might push him out of phase with this reality and he really, really wanted to stay in this dimension.
Paggie.
Who would have thunk? But he guessed that was her objective. To blend in. To date a cop and insert herself in the investigation? That took some serious balls.
But Kent was on the case now.
You are going down, bitch.
Jimmi and he were running every bit of information they had through the filter to prove that Paggie was their killer. They weren’t coming up with much. She was that good.
As Kent had said, she had made several critical errors. Bringing Bute into the equation had been a mistake that revealed too much about her intentions. Then to snatch Ruben?
Probably if she hadn’t done that, Kent still wouldn’t have figured it out, but she’d overreached just like most serial killers did.
Paggie had evolved too quickly for her own good.
And now Kent was on his way over there.
Could the profiler get there before Ruben died?
Or more importantly, would Kent want to save Ruben?
Those two had an odd relationship to say the least.
* * *
Nicole was pushing the Mustang as hard as she ever had, and it was holding up well. Despite how many times she’d been at Ruben’s, she had made several wrong turns.
Lactation brain. And her boobs were really pissed. In no uncertain terms, her breasts were letting her know that it was time to feed Logan. She would love to stop and feed her child and relieve this insane pressure, but both her husband and her partner were in danger.
Logan was just going to have to wait a few minutes.
Paggie was the killer.
Those words still weren’t setting easily in her brain together. Kind of like Detective and Harbinger. They weren’t natural fits.
But she was Detective Harbinger now. Just as apparently Paggie was their killer.
Why had she taken Ruben? The answer to that one seemed pretty obvious. But why kill her fiancé? Why now?
None of those questions were going to be answered until she got to Ruben’s. Joshua and Jimmi had texted her a hundred times. None of the information helped her resolve how Paggie had been a serial killer right under their noses.
She’d had a mani-pedi with the woman for the love of God. How could she sit there picking the best fall color for her toenails with a killer?
This was a lesson hard won.
Now she got why Kent had to fake his death. How else could he have flushed out Paggie? Nicole could only imagine how many other prostitutes would have died if Paggie had kept on the down low.
Damn her husband and his best intentions.
She still wanted to hate him for what he’d put her through, but she just couldn’t. Everything they had learned had been because Kent had the wherewithal to do what needed to be done.
Damn him.
Nicole made a sharp left turn, leaving rubber on the asphalt. She turned in front of three cop cars running with their lights and sirens on.
Could they make it in time, before Paggie claimed more
victims?
* * *
Kent circled Ruben as Paggie brandished a new wrench she’d picked up. Her little flare trick had flamed out a few seconds ago.
He rode the high. His pulse ringing in his ear. The heightening of his senses. He was in no hurry to finish this.
Well, there was some time pressure. His wife and half the department were probably on their way over here, but he intended to savor each and every moment until then. It wasn’t every day that you caught a serial killer.
“I called it, you know that?” Kent asked Paggie.
The killer’s eyelids narrowed. “What?”
“That you were a serial killer. Because you were a meter maid. Everyone thought I was joking, including myself, but clearly my subconscious was onto something.”
“Too bad it didn’t save all those people.”
Kent chuckled as he passed by Ruben again. He was pretty much out of it, just mumbling incoherently and drooling. Kent refocused his attention on Paggie.
“You think you’re so good? You are a baby serial killer. No one is going to write a book about you. No one is going to remember you in ten years. No, make that five years.”
Paggie smiled. “Trying to use your patented mind games on me?”
“You. Are. Insignificant.”
Oh, that got under her skin. She gripped the wrench with both hands, her knuckles blanching.
“I will, however, get some great groupies in prison,” Paggie commented.
Kent snorted. “In jail? Have you read my record? My files. Those self-defense claims might have been slightly exaggerated.”
Funny, Paggie’s smile fell right off her face.
“Did you really think you’d wreak this kind of havoc and go on living?”
Apparently, she had.
Oh, so amateur.
He almost felt sorry taking her life. Almost. But like she said, a female serial killer would attract a large following in prison and more people would die. That was why, once he had a serialist in his sights, he didn’t let them survive.
Ruben moaned something, distracting Paggie just long enough for Kent to lunge.
He hit her from the side, slamming her against the wall, knocking the wind out of her. Kent would have gone for the mortal blow, but she stumbled on Ruben’s feet, falling into the high detective.
2nd Cycle of the Harbinger Series: The continuation of the #1 Hard-boiled/Police Procedural smash Plain Jane Page 17
