by Elle Gray
“Ten seconds,” Brody says.
I quickly step inside, finding myself in a mudroom. Recalling the plans for the house Brody had sent me; I make my way around the corner to find the keypad on the wall of the laundry room.
“I’m here,” I tell him.
“Five seconds,” Brody says. “System will reboot, and then you have five seconds to enter the code. Remember, it’s—”
“Moira,” I reply. “From the Latin for, ‘one who cannot let go of the past.’”
Brody laughs, and I shake my head. I’m not the most self-deprecating person in the world, but I can be when it suits me. And in this moment of stress and tension, I need a little humor.
“System back online,” Brody says.
I punch in the code and hit the enter key, only to see it flash red. No good. I look and see that I didn’t press the “I” hard enough to record.
“Hurry, hurry, hurry,” Brody says.
Clenching my jaw, I punch in the code again, making sure I take the time to press every button carefully. M-O-I-R-A. I definitely pressed each letter this time. The alarm beeps again and then goes dark. There’s nothing for a moment. My stomach churns.
And then the keypad flashes green. A breath of relief explodes from me.
“Thank Christ,” I mutter.
“The house is yours,” Brody says.
“Perfect. I’ll be in touch.”
I disconnect the call and wander through the first floor of the house. It’s as clean and tidy inside as it is outside. Everything has a place, and everything is in its place. I walk to the living room and look around, frowning. The place looks sterile. As if he spends no time in the living room at all, and it’s here simply for show.
The thing that strikes me the most though, is that there are no personal effects at all. No pictures. No diplomas on the wall. Nothing indicating anybody actually lives here. There’s absolutely nothing that gives me any sense of the man David Tucker is.
I turn and wander down the long hallway and find myself at what I assume is his bedroom door, so I turn the knob and push it open. The hinges squeak, and the door bumps softly against the wall behind it.
I’m surprised by what I see. This is the one room in the house that is in total disarray. The bed is unmade, the covers hanging half on the bed, half on the floor. I see broken picture frames on the ground. Clothes are strewn about as if somebody was hastily throwing things out of the closet, and a strange smell permeates the air.
I step deeper into the room and pick up one of the broken picture frames. It’s a younger David Tucker and a beautiful young brunette with brown eyes. They’re standing together, dressed to the nines at some formal gala. I’m wondering if it’s a gala at his hospital.
“Moira,” I mutter.
I’m no expert, obviously, but even I can read the body language of the couple in the photograph. His smile is wide and genuine. He’s a man in love, and he has his arm around her waist, pulling her to him, almost protectively. She, on the other hand, is leaning away from him. Her smile is wooden. False. She’s not even looking at him. This is a woman who does not like Tucker in the least.
Lying the frame back down where I found it, I stand up and look around the room. It’s then I realize what the strange smell in the room is: disuse. This room hasn’t been used since Tucker walked in here, and no doubt found Moira screwing somebody else in their bed.
Once he’d kicked her out and she was gone, he’d sealed the room up and hadn’t used it again. And yet, he’d kept it just as it was. A perverse and twisted shrine to what he’d lost. As the sense of judgment rises up within me again, I have to beat it down. People in glass houses and all that.
Confident I’m not going to find what I’m looking for here, I back out of the room and search the other downstairs bedrooms. Nothing. I walk up to the second floor. The first room looks like it was in the early stages of becoming a nursery. I frown. Another room frozen in time. Another room dedicated to broken promises and shattered dreams. Like stepping into the past.
I open the door to the second room upstairs and find myself in his home office. This is Tucker’s lair. There’s a couch against one wall, and it’s obvious he sleeps on it. There’s a desk with a laptop standing open on top of it. There are a pair of tall oak bookcases filled not with books, but pictures of Tucker and Moira. They had done a lot of traveling apparently and liked to document everything.
There are pictures of the pair of them in Venice, Rome, Paris, Tokyo. Sao Paulo. Fiji. Berlin and London. There’s another of them with the Great Pyramid of Giza in the background. And in all of them, Tucker looks blissfully happy. And why shouldn’t he? He thinks he’s enjoying the world with the love of his life.
As I look closer at the photos, I see that Moira’s face is less effusive. Her smile is never genuine, and she is always leaning away from him as if recoiling from his physical touch. I can’t be certain, but in some of the photos, her expression is less contemptuous, but more… fearful. Indeed, in some of the pictures, she looks downright scared of him.
Personally, I can’t believe Tucker couldn’t read the situation. That he’d blinded himself so much that he couldn’t see what was staring him right in the face: his fiancée despised him.
It makes me wonder why she stayed with him in the first place. Was it truly because she wanted the security and comfort being the wife of a surgeon would provide her? Or was she afraid of what he might do if she tried to leave? Had she seen glimpses of the Mr. Hyde that lurked within him and was terrified of it? Too scared to leave, too scared to stay?
Had she set up the situation that finally ended their relationship? As my mind plays it out, focusing on the fear I see in her face in some of those photos, I can’t help but wonder if she knew the only way she was going to get away from him was to have somebody there who could intimidate him and give her the chance to flee?
This is all speculation, of course. These are all questions I’ll never have the answers to. But it almost doesn’t matter. The facts are that David Tucker experienced something millions of people around the world face every day: his lover cheated on him. But instead of moving on with his life, he lashed out in rage against the world, not because of his supposed heartbreak or loss, but because he felt taking the lives of young women was the only way to assert his masculinity.
Tucker’s a fairly good-looking guy who makes bank, and by all accounts is an intelligent and kind person. He could have rebuilt his life at any time. Could have found validation and lived a happy, successful life. But he chose to unleash a monster on this city. And now Stella and five other women are dead because this creep needed to feel like a big strong man.
But all that will have to wait. I can get into all of the psychological ramifications of this after we bring him down. I turn and continue to survey the room, and my eyes fall on a large painting that’s hanging crooked on the wall. Just half a centimeter off, but enough for me to notice. Like most of the house, Tucker’s lair is obsessively clean, so the crooked painting, to me, is incongruous. I step over to it and grab one of the corners, then pull it back— and see there’s a hollow behind it.
Curious, I take hold of the painting and pull it down off the wall, carrying it across the room and set it down gently. And when I turn back to the hollow, I feel my insides immediately lurch.
“Oh my God,” I whisper.
Shelves have been built into the hollow. On the top shelf sits six jars, and within those jars, six human hearts float in a preservative fluid. Each jar has been labeled with a name and a picture of the woman it was taken from. I look at the jar with Stella’s picture for a long moment, emotions thicker than mud churning inside of me.
“Arrington,” a voice— Tucker’s voice— calls to me. “I see you’ve found my special treasures.”
My hand immediately goes to the gun on my hip, and I spin toward the doorway, only to find it empty.
“Over here, moron,” Tucker taunts me.
I turn around and se
e that his laptop has come to life, and his face fills the screen. Of course. He was watching me through the camera built into the computer. Stupid. It was a rookie mistake. But then, if I’d covered it up or turned it off, he would have known as well. Damned if I do, damned if I don’t.
“You just don’t get it. Do you?” he sneers. “You small-minded fools don’t get what it is I’m doing here. I’m trying to make the world a better place. A more honest place.”
I scoff. “By murdering people? By murdering innocent young women?”
“Innocent?!” he nearly shouts. “They were liars. Deceivers. Manipulators. They were whores who needed—”
“To be taught a lesson, yeah I heard your sermon the first time.”
His face darkens and twists with rage. His breathing is ragged, and he closes his eyes for a moment, trying to calm himself down. Only when he’s back in control of himself does he open his eyes again.
“I don’t expect that intellectual inferiors like you would understand,” he says. “You just don’t think clearly enough. You’re so caught up in your own tedious, mundane lives that you just accept things for what they are, rather than think about what they could be.”
“At least I never beat a woman to try to make her see things my way,” I snap. “The way you beat Moira.”
He goes silent for a long moment. I can see his jaw clenching and unclenching as he stares into the camera. His contempt for me couldn’t be clearer.
“I did not beat her. I am not that crude or uncivilized,” he replies. “I tried to teach her to be a proper lady. To be true—”
“Uh huh. She was smaller than you. You bullied her. You beat her,” I cut him off. “No more civilized than your common gorilla. Dress it up however you want, but the bottom line is that you are a woman beater and a murderer.”
“Like I said, I wouldn’t expect an intellectual inferior like you to understand,” he says, his voice ice cold.
“I will say you have constructed quite a fantasy life for yourself. Do you know I almost pitied you? I saw the bedroom you left like a shrine,” I prod him. “It must have sucked to walk in on her banging some other guy, right? Was he a big guy? I bet he was. And I bet she brought him home purposely, just so you’d catch her in the act. I bet it was because she knew what a coward you are. Knew you didn’t have the stones to fight somebody bigger than you. It was the only way she was going to escape you.”
His face contorts into a mask of the purest rage and hatred I’ve ever seen. He’s a flurry of blurred motion on the other side of the screen, but I hear things crashing all around him, and the shattering of glass, as he throws his tantrum. I want to push him hard. Want him to make a mistake and reveal where he is. I’m hoping that he’ll challenge me to a duel or something, anything, that will put him within arm’s reach from me. This needs to end. He needs to be stopped.
It takes a few minutes for his tantrum to subside, and when it does, he’s red-faced, puffing, and sweating. It takes a couple more minutes for him to calm enough to be able to speak again. And when he’s calm, he looks at me through narrowed eyes, a baleful sneer on his lips.
“Listen, if you get right down to it, you and I have some things in common,” I start. “We’re not nearly as different as you’d think. Why—”
“Save it,” he snaps. “Don’t think for a moment that I’m going to buy into this whole ‘we can relate to one another’ business.”
“So what do you want then? Why are you bothering with this?” I ask. “To let me know you’re smarter than me? You’re not, by the way.”
“Oh, but I am. You’re just too dim to see it, Arrington,” he responds. “But in truth, I’m only bothering to contact you to let you know that I’ve won, and you’ve lost. I have beaten you.”
“Oh yeah? And how do you figure that?”
His laugh is malevolent, and his eyes are as dead as a corpse’s. He stares at me for a long moment, no doubt basking in whatever victory he thinks he’s achieved. And then it hits me. The question that I should have asked the moment I saw his face pop up on the screen.
“Oh, there it is. He sees it now,” Tucker chirps in a sing-song voice.
His laughter echoes through my head and my gut wrenches. I stare at him for a long moment, and he just stares back, his smile wooden, his eyes cold.
“I thought you were in surgery,” I finally croak.
He’s in the front seat of a car.
“Yes. So did Agent Wilder,” he replies triumphantly. “Oh yes, I figured out who she was, by the way. I know she’s at the hospital right now. Isn’t it just delicious?”
The anger and fear of what he’s going to say next well up within me like a dark tide. I want nothing more than to reach through the screen and throttle him. I want to tear his head off his shoulders and leave him in a puddle of gore.
“Where are you, Tucker?” I ask.
“On the road. Decided it was time to get out of town for a while,” he says with a contented smile. “And as far as Marcy goes, that’s what I called to tell you. She’s mine, Arrington. You’ll never have her.”
“What have you done with her?”
The camera pans over, and I see Marcy bound and gagged in the back seat of his car. She’s struggling against her bonds, her eyes wide with fear. Tucker pulls the camera back, so his face is all that’s on the screen, his smile victorious.
“She’s fine. For now,” he tells me. “But I assure you, school will be in session very soon. There are many lessons I plan on teaching Ms. Bryant. This is going to be fun.”
“Tucker—”
“And I just wanted you to know that this all could have been prevented. None of this would have been necessary, had you just stopped hunting me as I’d requested,” he goes on. “But no, you let your ego get in the way. So now poor Marcy is going to pay the price for your sins.”
“You piece of—”
“Her death will be on you, Arrington. Her blood is on your hands,” he growls, the amusement suddenly giving way to anger. “Goodbye!”
The screen goes dark, and though I’m tempted to smash the laptop to pieces, I manage to hold back. Brody might be able to find something of value on it. I know it’s probably unlikely. I have little doubt the hard drive has been wiped. Tucker is too smart to leave anything we can use.
But the rage inside of me builds. And I scream and kick the painting I’d pulled down off the wall. The wooden frame cracks and splinters apart as my foot tears through the canvas. I grab the chair from Tucker’s desk and slam it into the wall. The chair leaves a heavy dent in the drywall.
My breathing heavy and ragged, I take a moment to calm myself down. Once my breathing is back to normal, I pull out my phone and call Blake.
“Get to my place now,” I tell her when she answers. “Tucker has her.”
“On my way.”
Thirty-Six
Arrington Investigations; Downtown Seattle
“What in the hell happened?” I demand.
Blake sighs. “Tucker swapped out of his surgery. Didn’t put it in the schedule, so when the nurse checked, she had no record of it.”
“He knew we were coming,” I groan. “But how?”
“He must have been watching us,” Blake says. “Must have known Marcy was working with us.”
I pace the Fishbowl, my arms folded across my chest, my hands balled into fists. My mind is spinning as hard as my gut, worry for Marcy pulsing through every cell in my body. Tucker’s words echo in my mind. I feel responsible for Marcy. I fear he’s right, that I will forever feel like her blood is on my hands.
I arrived at my place shortly after Blake. The front doorman had been shot and killed. As had the two-man security team I’d hired. Nick took a bullet to the shoulder, but he’s going to be all right, thankfully. It’s the only spot of good news in this entire mess.
Blake and I got a quick lay of the land then bugged out, leaving Nick to explain what happened to the police. We couldn’t afford to hang around answering que
stions for hours. Not while Tucker is out there and he has Marcy. We need every minute we can get, and we’ve wasted too many already. I’ll deal with the police later.
“He didn’t give you any hint where he was headed?” Blake asks.
I shake my head. “None. And he was careful to keep the background out of frame, so I’d have no point of reference.”
“There’s nothing on his laptop,” Brody announces.
“And the hits just keep on coming,” I mutter.
“Brody, search all public records,” Blake says. “See if he owns property anywhere.”
“On it.”
I continue pacing the room, my blood pressure rising with every step I take. I know it’s not my fault. I know this isn’t my responsibility, and that I can’t control what Tucker does. Logically, I get it. But my emotions are telling me something else entirely. The bottom line is that I do feel responsible. Call it residual guilt about Veronica like Blake thinks it is, or whatever you want to call it. It doesn’t really matter at this point. All that matters to me is that Marcy put her faith and her trust in me, and I feel like I’ve let her down.
My friend— and yeah, I guess I consider Marcy a friend— is in danger, and there’s nothing I can do to save her.
The room is silent and charged with tension. The only sound is the clack of Brody’s fingers flying over the keys. But then he sighs and sits back in his seat.
“Nothing,” he says. “Unless he has it in somebody else’s name.”
Blake runs her hands through her hair and leans forward, putting her elbows on the table and her head in her hands. I can see that she’s beating herself up. That she feels responsible for Tucker getting the drop on all of us. But this isn’t her fault. At the same time, there’s nothing I can say that will take that burden of guilt off her shoulders, any more than she’d be able to take the burden from mine.
