Split Second

by Alex Kava

  “Absolutely. I know what I’m doing, girlfriend. I’m investing in you, Tess. Don’t need you going out on your own and becoming my competition. Now go home and celebrate with that handsome man of yours.”

  On the way home Tess wondered if it was possible, the part about celebrating with her “handsome man.” Daniel had been so angry with her last week when she’d refused to move in with him. She wasn’t sure she blamed him. Why was it that every time a man wanted to get close, she pushed him away? No matter what she did, the past seemed to follow her around, sucking her back into its comfortable, but destructive, cocoon.

  Tess found herself pulling her leased Miata into the parking lot of Louie’s Bar and Grill. She decided to pick up a bottle of wine. Then she’d call Daniel, apologize for last week and invite him over for dinner to help her celebrate. Surely he would be excited for her.

  She tried to remember why she felt she needed to apologize again. Oh, well. It didn’t matter, as long as they put it behind them. She was getting good at putting things in the past. Yet, if that were true, what was she doing back here at Louie’s? Shep’s Liquor Mart was only three blocks down the street. What did she need to prove?

  She reached for the ignition and was just about to leave when the back door swung open, startling her. A stocky, middle-aged man came out, his hands filled with trash bags, his apron grimy and his balding head glistening with sweat. A cigarette hung from his lips. He heaved the bags into the Dumpster and wiped the sweat from his forehead with his sleeve. As he turned to go back in he saw her, and then it was too late.

  He tossed the cigarette to the ground and strolled up to the car, carrying his bulk with a swagger. He thought he looked cool. When, in fact, he simply looked like a pathetic, overweight, balding, middle-aged man. Despite all that, she found him endearing, the closest thing she had to an old friend.

  “Tessy,” he said. “What the hell you doin’ here?”

  “Hi, Louie.” She got out of the car.

  “Nice ride ya got here,” he said, checking out the shiny Miata.

  She let him examine and admire it, neglecting to tell him it was a company car and not her own. One of Delores’s mottoes was that to be successful you must first look successful.

  Finally, Louie turned his sights on Tess. She felt his eyes slide down her designer suit and his whistle made her blush.

  “So whatcha doin’ here? Slummin’?”

  “Of course not,” she snapped.

  “Hey, I’m just jokin’ with ya.”

  “I know.” She smiled, hoping she sounded convincing and not defensive. “I need to pick up a bottle of wine. Just thought I’d give you the business rather than Shep’s.”

  “Oh, really?” He stared at her, his eyebrow raised. “Well, I appreciate it. And you know you’re always welcome.”

  “Thanks, Louie.”

  Suddenly she felt like that restless, going-nowhere bartender she had left here five years ago. Would she ever be rid of her past?

  “Come on,” Louie said as he swung a muscular arm up around her shoulder. The smell of body odor and French fries made her stomach turn, only she was surprised to find it was homesickness she was feeling instead of nausea. Then she thought of Daniel. Later, he would smell the smoke and the burgers. She realized that would be enough to ruin the celebration.

  “You know what, Louie. I just remembered something I forgot back at the office.” She turned and slipped out from under his arm.

  “What? It can’t wait a few minutes?”

  “No, sorry. My boss will have my ass in a sling if I don’t take care of it right now.” She climbed inside her car before Louie had a chance to object. “I’ll stop in later,” she said through the half-opened window, knowing full well she would not. “I promise.”

  She turned the car onto the street, and when she knew she was safely out of sight, she gunned the engine. But it took several miles before she could hear the radio instead of the pounding of her heart. Then she remembered that she had passed Shep’s Liquor Mart. She didn’t care. She no longer felt as if she deserved a celebration, yet she tried to concentrate on her recent successes and not the past. In fact, she remained so focused, she hardly noticed the dark sedan following her.

  7

  BEFORE the pizza or Gwen arrived, Maggie poured a Scotch. She had forgotten about the bottle until she discovered it staring up at her, safely stored in a box—a necessary antidote to the contents. The box was labeled #34666, the number that had been assigned to Albert Stucky. Perhaps it was no accident that his file number would end in 666.

  Assistant Director Cunningham would be furious if he knew she had copied Stucky’s official file. She would have felt guilty if each document had been recorded by someone other than herself. For almost two years Maggie had tracked Stucky. She had viewed every one of his scenes of torture and dissection, scanning for fibers, hairs, missing organs, anything that would tell her how to catch him. She had a right to his file.

  The doorbell chimed. As usual, Gwen was ten minutes late. Maggie tugged at her shirttail, making certain it hid the Smith & Wesson tucked into her waistband. Lately, the gun had become as common an accessory as her wristwatch.

  “Traffic was a bitch,” Gwen said before the door was fully open. “Everyone’s trying to get out of D.C. for the weekend.”

  “Good to see you, too.”

  She smiled and pulled Maggie in for a one-armed hug. Despite Gwen’s petite and feminine stature, Maggie thought of her as her own personal Rock of Gibraltar. She had leaned on Gwen and depended on her strength and words of wisdom many times.

  When Gwen pulled away, she cupped Maggie’s cheek in the palm of her hand, attempting to get a good look at her. “You look like hell,” was her gentle assessment.

  “Gee, thanks!”

  She smiled again and handed Maggie the carton of Bud Light she carried in her other hand. Maggie took it and used the action as an excuse to keep her eyes away from Gwen’s. It had been almost a month since the two women had seen each other, though they talked regularly. On the phone, Maggie could keep Gwen from seeing the panic that seemed to lie so close to the surface during these past weeks.

  “Pizza should be here any minute,” Maggie told her as she reset the security system.

  Gwen didn’t wait for an invitation to come in. She took off to roam through the rooms.

  “My God, Maggie, this house is wonderful. May I check out the second floor?” Gwen asked, already making her way up the stairs.

  “Can I stop you?” Maggie laughed.

  She and Gwen had met when Maggie had first arrived at Quantico for her forensic fellowship. Maggie had been a naive newbie who hadn’t seen blood except in a test tube, and had never fired a gun except on the firing range.

  Gwen had been one of the psychologists brought in by Cunningham to help profile several important cases. It was her remarkable insight into the criminal mind that had attracted Cunningham when he first asked her to be an independent consultant for the FBI’s Investigative Support Unit. Maggie learned quickly that the assistant director had been attracted to Dr. Gwen Patterson in other ways as well. A person would have to be blind not to see the chemistry between the two, though Maggie knew that neither had acted upon it, nor ever intended to.

  From the first time Maggie met Gwen, she had admired the woman’s vibrancy, intellect and dry sense of humor. Maggie had seen her win over diplomats as well as criminals with her sophisticated but charming manner. Gwen was fifteen years older than her, but had instantly become a best friend as well as a mentor.

  The doorbell chimed, and Maggie’s hand grabbed her revolver before she could stop herself. She glanced up the stairs to see if Gwen had witnessed her reaction. She stopped and looked out the peephole, examining the fish-eye view of the street, then she opened the door.

  “Large pizza for O’Dell.” The young girl handed Maggie the warm box. Already she could smell the Romano cheese and Italian sausage.

  “It smells wonderful.”<
br />
  The girl grinned as though she had prepared it herself.

  “It comes to $18.59, please.”

  Maggie handed her a twenty and a five. “Keep the change.”

  “Gee, thanks.”

  The girl bounced down the drive, her blond ponytail waving out the back of her blue baseball cap.

  Maggie set the pizza down in the middle of the living room. She reset the security system just as Gwen came rushing down the steps.

  “Maggie, what the hell happened?” she asked, holding up the dripping T-shirt, splattered with blood.

  “What is this? Did you hurt yourself?” Gwen demanded.

  “It’s nothing, Gwen. My neighbor’s dog was injured. I helped take it to the vet. This is the dog’s blood. Not mine.”

  “You’re kidding.” It took a minute for relief to wash over Gwen’s face. “Jesus, Maggie, you just can’t keep your nose out of anything that involves blood, can you?”

  Maggie smiled. “I’ll tell you about it later. We need to eat, because I am starving.”

  They went into the kitchen, and Maggie pulled out paper plates and napkins from a carton on the counter. Each grabbed a cold bottle of beer and returned to the living-room floor. Maggie scooped up pizza as she noticed Gwen examining the open carton next to the rolltop desk.

  “This is Stucky’s, isn’t it?”

  “Are you going to rat me out to Cunningham?”

  “Of course not. You know me better than that. But I am concerned about you obsessing over him.”

  “I’m not obsessing.”

  “Really? Then what would you call it?”

  Maggie took a bite of pizza. She didn’t want to think about Stucky, or her appetite would be ruined again.

  “I simply want him caught,” Maggie finally said. She could feel Gwen’s eyes examining her, looking for signs. Maggie hated it when her friend tried psychoanalyzing her, but she knew it was simple instinct.

  “And only you can catch him? Is that it?”

  “I know him best.”

  Gwen stared at her a few more moments, then picked up her bottle by its neck. She took a sip and put the drink aside. “I did some checking.”

  She reached for a slice of pizza, and Maggie tried not to show her eagerness. She had asked Gwen to use her connections to find out where the Stucky case was stalled. When Cunningham exiled Maggie to the teaching circuit, he had made it impossible for her to find out anything about the investigation.

  Gwen took her time chewing. Another sip while Maggie waited.

  “And?” She couldn’t stand it any longer.

  “Cunningham has brought in a new profiler, but the task force has been dismantled.”

  “Why the hell would he do that?”

  “Because he has nothing, Maggie. It’s been over five months. There’s no sign of Albert Stucky. It’s like he’s fallen off the face of the earth.”

  “I know. I’ve been checking VICAP almost weekly.” Initiated by the FBI, the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program recorded violent crimes across the country. Nothing close to Stucky’s M.O. had shown up. “Maybe he’s changed his M.O.”

  “Maybe he’s stopped, Maggie. Sometimes serial killers do that. No one can explain it, but you know it happens.”

  “Not Stucky.”

  “Don’t you think he’d be in touch with you? Try to start his sick game all over again? After all, you’re the one who got him thrown in jail.”

  Maggie had been the one who had finally identified the madman the FBI had nicknamed The Collector. Her profile, and a discovery of an almost indistinguishable set of fingerprints—arrogantly left behind at a crime scene—were what led to the unveiling of The Collector as a man named Albert Stucky, a self-made millionaire from Massachusetts.

  Like most serial killers, Stucky seemed pleased by the exposure, wanting to take the credit. When his obsession turned to Maggie, no one was really surprised. But the game that followed was anything but ordinary. A game that included clues to catch him, only the clues came as personal notes with a token finger, a dissected birthmark and, once, a severed nipple slipped into an envelope.

  That was about eight months ago. Maggie still struggled to remember what her life had been like before the game. She couldn’t remember sleep without nightmares. She couldn’t remember not feeling the constant need to look over her shoulder. She had nearly lost her life capturing Albert Stucky, and he had escaped before she could remember what feeling safe felt like.

  Gwen reached over and pulled a stack of photos from the box. She was one of the few people Maggie knew who wasn’t a member of the FBI and who was able to eat and look at crime scene photos at the same time. Without looking up, she said, “You need to let this go, Maggie. He’s chopping away pieces of you, and he isn’t even around.”

  The images from the scattered photos stared out at Maggie, just as horrific in black and white as they had been in color. There were close-ups of slashed throats, chewed-off nipples, mutilated vaginas and an assortment of extracted organs. Earlier, with only a glance, she had discovered how many of the reports she still knew by heart.

  “Just because there hasn’t been a murder doesn’t mean he hasn’t started his collection again.”

  “And if he has, Kyle will be watching.” Gwen rarely slipped, using Assistant Director Cunningham’s first name, except times like now, when she seemed genuinely concerned and worried. “Let it go before it destroys you.”

  “It’s not going to destroy me. I’m pretty damn tough, remember?”

  “Ah, tough,” Gwen said. “So that’s why you’re walking around your own home with a gun stashed in the back of your pants.”

  Maggie winced. Gwen caught it and smiled.

  “Now, see, instead of tough,” she told Maggie, “I think I would have called it stubborn.”

  8

  HE COULDN’T remember pizza delivery girls being so cute back in his younger days when he had worked at the local pizza place. Hell, he couldn’t remember there being delivery girls back then.

  He watched her hurry up the sidewalk, long blond hair trailing behind her. She had her hair in a cute ponytail—sticking out the back of her blue baseball cap, a Chicago Cubs cap. He wondered if she was a fan. Or maybe her boyfriend was. Surely she had a boyfriend somewhere.

  It was too dark now to depend on the streetlights. His eyes were already stinging and a bit blurred. He slipped on the night goggles and adjusted the magnification. Yes, this was good.

  He saw her check her watch as she waited on the porch. This time another man answered the door. Of course, the guy would give her that dumb-ass look of astonishment. The man fished bills out of the pockets of his sagging jeans. He was a slob, grimy with sweat stains under his armpits. And, yep, there it was, another wiseass remark about how cute she was or what he wouldn’t mind tipping her with. But again, she smiled politely, despite the color rising in her cheeks.

  Just once he’d like to see her kick one of these idiots in the groin. Maybe that was a lesson he could teach her. If things worked out as he planned, he’d have plenty of time with her.

  She hurried away along the sidewalk, and the cheap bastard who had tipped her only a dollar watched her ass the whole trip back to her shiny little Dodge Dart. That sight alone was worth much more than a dollar. The cheap son of a bitch. How the hell was she supposed to put herself through college on dollar tips?

  He decided that women were better tippers when it came to delivery services. Maybe they felt some odd sense of guilt for not having prepared the meal themselves. Who knew? Women were complicated, fascinating creatures, and he wouldn’t change that if he could.

  He replaced the goggles with dark sunglasses, simply out of habit now, and because the oncoming headlights burned his eyes. He waited for the Dodge Dart to reach the intersection before he turned around and followed. She was finished with this batch. He recognized the route back to the pizza place, Mama Mia’s on Fifty-ninth and Archer Drive. The cozy joint took up the corner of a neighbo
rhood strip mall.

  Newburgh Heights was such a friendly little suburb it gagged him. Not much of a challenge. Nor much challenge in the cute pizza delivery girl either. But this wasn’t about challenge, it was simply for show.

  The girl parked behind the building and gathered up the stack of red insulators. She’d be back in a few minutes with another load to deliver.

  The neon sign for Mama Mia’s included a delivery number. He flipped open the cellular phone and dialed the number while he unfolded a real-estate flyer. The description promised a four-bedroom colonial with a whirlpool bath and skylight in the master bedroom. How romantic, he mused, just as a woman barked in his ear.

  “Mama Mia’s.”

  “I’d like two large pepperoni pizzas delivered.”

  “Phone number.”

  “555-4545,” he read off the flyer.

  “Name and address.”

  “Heston,” he continued reading, “at 5349 Archer Drive.”

  “It’ll be about twenty minutes, Mr. Heston.”

  “Fine.” He snapped the phone shut. Twenty minutes would be plenty of time. He pulled on his leather driving gloves, and wiped the phone with his shirt. As he drove by the Dumpster he tossed the phone.

  He headed south on Archer Drive, thinking about pizza, a moonlit bath and that cute delivery girl with the polite smile and the tight ass.

  9

  IT WAS almost midnight by the time Gwen left. Maggie knew she’d never be able to sleep. She had double-checked the security system several times after Gwen’s departure. Now she paced, dreading the night hours, hating the dark and vowing to put up drapes and blinds tomorrow.

  Finally she sat down cross-legged in the middle of the pile created from Stucky’s personal box of horror. She pulled out the folder with clippings and articles she had downloaded. Ever since Stucky’s escape five months ago, she had watched newspaper headlines across the country on the Internet.

  She still couldn’t believe how easily Stucky had escaped. On his way to a maximum-security facility Stucky killed two transport guards. Then he disappeared into the Florida Everglades, never to be seen again.