The next thing Ellie knew, she was wearing oversized clothes that made her look and feel much frailer and weaker than she actually was. Her blonde hair was damp. She glanced at the drab grey walls of the room that seemed to leech her life away. The only color came from the tiny red light on the camera mounted in the upper corner. She looked at her hands resting on the aluminum table. Though Troy’s blood had been washed from her skin, little scarlet flakes lingered under and around her fingernails like crusty, dry paint. She recognized this place. It was the interrogation room where she showed Detective Peaches and Detective Skinner her first death portraits: Kimberly Jannis and Pamela Cornish, the two women she had failed to save.
Ellie balled her fist. The hooded man couldn’t keep getting away with this.
The door opened.
Detective Skinner entered and took a seat opposite of her. There were dark circles under his droopy eyes. He wore a wrinkled suit jacket and a heavy frown on his bulldog-like face. Glaring at Ellie, he set his jaw. Silence hung heavy between them.
Skinner tapped his finger on the tabletop. Ellie bounced her leg under the table.
The junkyard dog detective leaned in. “How is it that every time the killer attacks, he vanishes, there’s a dead body, you survive and my detective partner is conveniently passed out on the floor?”
Ellie didn’t have a response to that.
Skinner shook his head. “Fine. Stay quiet. We have all night. Too bad Troy doesn’t.”
Ellie burst from her seat, knocking it back. In the time it took Skinner to blink, Ellie had his cream-colored tie wrapped in her balled fist and was pulling him toward her blood-red face.
Skinner raised his hands in a nonthreatening manner and turned his eyes to the camera.
“Careful, Mrs. Batter,” he warned. “I’m not the only one watching.”
Ellie glanced at the camera and released the detective. He plopped back into his seat. She sat, also, and crossed her arms to make herself small.
Skinner fixed his tie. “I’ll let that one pass. Just because I’m such a nice guy.”
“Where is Troy?”
“St. Peters ER,” Skinner replied. “There’s a very little chance that he’ll survive the night. Hell, I’d say that the chance of him surviving the next hour will be a gift from the heavens.”
Ellie’s eyes watered. She wanted to wail, to punch something and scream at the top of her lungs. Instead, she was completely silent. Her building anger kept her from breathing properly. She visualized the hooded man’s horrid face. His one silver eye and his one green eye. The scars on his pale skin. Ellie gnashed her teeth, locking her jaw so tight it would take a crowbar to pry it open. She needed to stop him, not waste time with Detective Skinner.
“You know I’m innocent,” she told the detective. “You’ve seen my blackouts.”
“I know you’re a freak,” Skinner replied harshly. “Innocent, on the other hand…”
“No more BS, Skinner,” Ellie barked. “You saw what I painted at that bar.”
Skinner didn’t say anything. It was too disturbing for him to make some rude comeback about.
Ellie wished that she could forget what she did. She didn’t remember the act, of course, but the idea of what she had drawn would haunt her, even if Troy survived. She tried to push it to the back of her mind, but it lingered like the stench of death. “The people in that mural are my family. My brother Paul, my mother Martha, and my father Howard. The longer I sit around here, the greater chance that the mural comes true. You understand?”
Skinner eyed her with a heavy frown. He leaned back in his seat, not wanting to get grabbed again. “That’s serious, Mrs. Batter, but let me paint a picture for you. Police get a call from a screaming man via a rogue officer’s cellphone located in the basement of an abandoned bar. When they arrive, the rogue officer is down, the screaming man is slashed open, and his wife has used his blood to paint an image of herself and her family gunned down like victims in a mass shooting. Let’s just say you’re an officer on duty. What’s your first instinct?”
Ellie sighed. “That the wife is the killer.”
“Bingo,” Skinner said, slapping the tabletop. “Now, thankfully for your sake, you and I both know that the real killer is out there.” He hiked his thumb back to the bullpen. “But all those officers out there don’t know jack, nor do they know about your death paintings or whatever. That puts you and me in a difficult position.”
“Bring in Detective Peaches,” Ellie protested. “He saw the man, too.”
“No doubt,” Skinner replied. “But he got his already injured skull kicked in. I’m no medical doctor, but kicking someone with a concussion in the place that concussed them to begin with is not healthy. I’ll be surprised if Peaches doesn’t have brain damage.”
“Is he at least awake?” Ellie asked, grasping at straws.
Skinner replied. “Define awake. The doctors got him drugged out of his mind.”
Ellie inhaled and looked away from him. She thought about a plan before speaking. “Bring me a pencil and sketch pad.”
Skinner chuckled at that. “Yeah, so you can stab me with it?”
“No,” Ellie growled. “So I can draw your hooded man’s face. I’m an artist, in case you forgot.”
Skinner stood up. “I’ll never forget. Trust me on that, Mrs. Batter.”
He scooted out of his chair and headed for the door.
Ellie quickly wiped away a tear and rested her head on the tabletop. She wondered how much blood Troy lost, how much she drew out of him to paint her portrait, and how much the doctors would have to pump back into him. Skinner was right. If he survived, it would be through an act of God. Ellie wasn’t always the praying type, but this seemed like the right moment, even if the power to paint the prophetic death portraits was more a curse than a blessing.
Skinner returned with a pencil and sketch pad as Ellie requested. He sat down and slid it across the table to her.
“Draw,” he commanded with his gruff voice.
Ellie started on the hooded man’s scarred face. She didn’t need to close her eyes to imagine him. Her photographic memory was working overtime. She recreated the laceration scars across his nose, forehead, and under his silver eye. If Ellie had colored pencil, she’d recreate his pasty white skin and pale pink lips. It only took a few minutes for her to complete the sketch. Working faster was one of the benefits she’d gleaned from her power.
Detective Skinner grabbed the legal pad and pencil with his stubby sausage fingers and reviewed the sketch with an inquisitive eye. “Evil has an ugly face.”
Ellie eyed Detective Skinner. “Will that help?”
Skinner put it aside. “I’ll put out an APB. A guy like this won’t be hard to miss.”
“Contact Andrew Maneau,” Ellie said. Andrew, her mentor and art agent, was the only target that the hooded man had failed to kill thanks to Ellie’s intervention.
“I was planning on it,” Skinner replied. “The Michael Dillinger lead turned out to be a dead end.” He put an emphasis on the word dead.
It seemed like weeks ago since Ellie had spoken to Andrew when, in reality, they’d spoken on the phone not ten hours ago. He was vague on why he and his old friends were targeted by the hooded serial killer. Nevertheless, he told Ellie that he hurt someone really bad when he was young, but didn’t explain whom or how. He directed Ellie to his friend Michael, who would supposedly have the answers. However, Michael was already dead. Andrew was Ellie’s and the police’s last best chance at finding the killer, but he had left town a few days ago after the killer made an attempt on his life. Trusting in her death portrait, Ellie had thwarted that attack. Andrew lived, but the killer put Ellie in his crosshairs. Your actions killed your husband, a man’s soft, tormented voice said in her head. She didn’t bother trying to shut the voice up. It was speaking the truth.
She tapped her leg swiftly under the table as Detective Skinner got up. “So…”
Skinner looked down at h
er with the legal pad tucked under his armpit. “What?”
“I’m free to go?” Ellie asked.
Skinner smirked and headed to the door.
Ellie stood up, putting her palms on the tabletop. “I helped you.”
“You did, but it’s time for the police to do their job,” Skinner said as if speaking to a child. “You should be kissing my feet because I’m not putting you in jail.”
“Where do I go then?” Ellie asked, face red with fury.
Skinner looked her up and down. “The safest place for you is a mental hospital.”
Ellie set her jaw to keep herself from spewing a tsunami of obscenities.
Skinner explained further. “You’ll be there for one-hundred twenty hours, or five days, as is customary for mentally unstable suspects. After which, a committee will decide if you’re crazy or not. Be praying that we have Scar Face behind bars before that.”
“Or what?” Ellie asked.
“Or you better start getting used to the loony bin. Hell, it might be a good fit for you,” Without another word, Skinner left the interrogation room. The door fell shut behind him with a loud thump.
Ellie pinched the bridge of her nose to kill her growing headache. If someone had told her a month ago that Troy would be in the ER, a serial killer was hounding her family, and she would be in the mental hospital for the criminally insane, Ellie would laugh in that person’s face. Nonetheless, this was her situation, and never had Ellie felt more confused and alone.
A short time after Detective Skinner left, a few officers escorted her to a small bus. She was one of the few people, and she was pretty sure that the rest of the riders were homeless acting crazy to get a free meal for the night. When Ellie arrived at the mental hospital, the nurse led the way to Ellie’s room. It was much nicer than a jail cell, but just as cramped. The rest of the residents were locked up for the night, making the institution appear much more vacant than it was.
Ellie put on her new clothes: grey scrubs with matching pants and generic tennis shoes a size too big. Wearing everything but the shoes, she climbed onto the plastic-covered mattress that squeaked every time she moved slightly. She looked up at the white ceiling and imagined Troy looking back down at her. She looked away, letting her tears soak into her bandaged cheek. She could still see Troy in her peripherals. She bit into the covers and screamed.
The next morning, Ellie opened her eyes. She didn’t know if she slept at all. She forced herself to sit up. After a few moments, she gathered enough strength to tell her legs to stand. Dragging her feet, she shambled into the bathroom and washed her face. The bandage below her right eye peeled back at the corner. Ellie fixed it and returned to the room just in time for a hospital worker to escort her to the mess hell, with two burly men flanking her on either side. She saw other patients. One laughed hysterically, another mumbled and moved her hands about in uncanny motions, and most were quiet observers that looked “normal.”
Ellie sat by her lonesome and was handed a mediocre breakfast. She knew she needed energy but didn’t have an appetite. Nonetheless, she ate, getting a count of the room’s various exits. There was really only one way out. The front door. If she could find out where the fire escape was, that would be her best bet. She glanced up at the wall clock. She had at least sixteen hours, maybe more before her family died. If Troy’s death mural taught her anything, it was that the time that it took for these murders to occur varied from painting to painting. She wondered if the code was hidden somewhere in the mural but she was overlooking it. Nonetheless, twenty-four hours was the most she was willing to risk.
She spent the early part of the day watching TV with the other patients. Why the nurses chose to play the sci-fi channel at the mental institution was beyond her. Nonetheless, she found herself watching Jeff Goldblum in The Fly undergoing his horrendous transformation with a couple of droolers. The absurdity of the situation would be comical if Ellie wasn’t a participant in the madness.
About midday, she was sent to her room with no viable plan of escape. She’d even talked to a few other residents, keeping her intentions as vague as possible when she asked them about exits, daily routines, etc. The information they gave her was useless or flat-out wrong. She needed a source she could rely on, but the guards wouldn’t let her make a phone call, let alone speak to her themselves.
After lunch, Ellie had lost all hope. She couldn’t warn her parents or little brother, no one told her about Troy’s current condition, and she was trapped.
Ellie flopped on her bed.
“One hundred and twenty hours,” she mumbled to herself. She felt sick. She tried to nap, but found herself tossing and turning.
The doctors brought her out of her room to run some tests and ask her about her mental status. Ellie kept her answers vague. She didn’t want to say anything she might regret later. The doctors seemed as perplexed at her case as herself. She overheard them talking about sleep deprivation as the potential cause, but they spoke with uncertainty. A small part of Ellie wanted to tell them about the portraits and the blackouts. She knew talking about it would be stupid, but it would’ve been nice to get some of that stuff off her chest. Ellie returned to her room after dinner.
She looked outside her barred window. The glass was clouded, but she could still see the orange glow of a streetlight in the night. The night guard double-checked the locks on the door and walked on.
It wasn’t for another two hours that the doorknob jiggled.
Ellie sat up in her bed, watching the knob wiggle up and down as someone worked the key on the other side. She didn’t have a clock in the room, but knew that the twenty-four-hour mark for the death mural was coming to a close. Fear pinged in her heart like movement on a motion sensor. What if the hooded man had found her? What if he got inside of the mental hospital? What if he was the one at the door right now? Ellie glanced about the room. She had no weapons. No heavy objects. She removed her left shoe. It wouldn’t hurt the man at all, but at least she wouldn’t be completely defenseless.
The knob turned for a final time and the door opened slowly, as if the person on the other side didn’t want anyone to hear. Ellie stepped toward it. She needed to get ready to bolt out into the hall if the moment arose. The door opened enough for the opener to peek their head through.
It was a man wearing a black beanie, black fleece, blue jeans, and dirty tennis shoes. He had a five o'clock shadow, deep green eyes, and a calming smile.
“Peaches?” Ellie exclaimed in a loud whisper.
Detective Adrian Peaches held the finger of his gloved hand over his lips. He turned back to the hall behind him and then looked at Ellie with wide eyes. “We don’t have much time.”
“What’s happening?” Ellie asked.
If Peaches was annoyed by the question, he did well to hide it. “You’re leaving.”
It took Ellie a second to process his words in conjunction with his attire. This wasn’t a formal release. “You could lose your job.”
Peaches’s calm facade was unwavering. “Let me worry about that. The cameras will be back on shortly, so we need to go now.”
Ellie nodded in affirmation and hastily slipped her shoe back on. They moved swiftly through the faculty. Peaches led the way, gesturing her to slow down as they reached corners in the various hallways. As they slipped through the mess hall, Peaches went tense and pointed to a nearby table. Ellie was confused by the gesture but then noticed the shadow climbing up the nearby wall. They sought cover under the table and watched the night guard pass. He had his ear buds snuggled in his ears and his flashlight bouncing lazily across the floor. The moment he left the room, Peaches nodded and they moved to the entrance. Ellie moved in swift, precise steps as the front doors came into view. She could taste freedom and boy, was it sweet. She twisted back, noticing Peaches lagging behind. He was still speed walking but had clenching his eyes shut and was grimacing in pain. He opened them for a second, noticing Ellie’s interest. He gestured for her to keep moving.
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Ellie reached the visitor parking lot that was largely vacant. Peaches directed her attention to a pick-up truck parked by the curb. They rushed toward it. When they were a few yards from the truck, Peaches tossed Ellie the keys and said, “Drive.”
3
RECREATION
It was a little before 10 pm, and the city’s nightlife was in full swing. Long lines of millennials gathered outside of nightclubs, bars were packed, and the only quiet places were the late-night coffee shops that populated the liberal city of Northampton, Massachusetts. Ellie glanced in the rearview, watching the traffic behind her. She hadn’t seen any cop cars, and Peaches’s police radio only spilled out soft chatter. Maybe they actually got away with it.
Peaches leaned back on the passenger seat and shut his eyes. “You need to take that off.”
Ellie didn’t get what he was referring to until he pointed just beneath his right eye. Ellie took one hand off the steering wheel and touched the bandage on her cheek.
Peaches elaborated. “The scars will be noticeable, but not as much as the bandages.”
“Right,” Ellie replied. She dug her fingernail under the loose corner of the square patch and peeled it back. She grimaced, feeling air touch her stitched flesh. The puffiness around the red slash had deflated, but the deep wound had only started to heal. Ellie balled up the patch and put it in the cup holder. She unwrapped the bandage around her neck and did the same thing. Peaches pinched the bloody remnants between his fingers and tossed them out of the window.
“Littering is a crime,” Ellie said.
Peaches smiled his sweet, trustworthy smile. “It is, isn’t it?”
His partner Detective Skinner may have been rude, ugly cuss, but Ellie had come to realize that he was a much straighter cop than Detective Adrian Peaches. After all, it was Peaches who allowed Ellie to assist with the investigation without telling his superiors, and it had been Peaches who’d been more than willing to follow the clues of the portraits even when it put them in questionable places and circumstance. Normally, Peaches would wear a nice suit, speak softly, and have a friendly aura about him that said I’m willing and ready to help. Tonight, in his dingy pick-up and his sketchy attire, it seemed like he was showing his true colors.
Stolen Secrets: A Collection Of Riveting Mysteries Page 24
