by Casey Doran
“I’ll ask you keep your voice down.”
“And I’ll ask Doomsday to pee on you. Now answer the fucking question.”
“Yes. Okay? That, and more. He was very descriptive.”
“I’m sure. And I guess they also knew that you were the one who made sure that the police always let Booker walk. Which had to mean that Booker was working for you. That it was all your idea.”
Preston grimaced. It was like I was pulling his teeth out with vice grips.
“Yes.”
“What did they threaten you with?”
“Exposure. Bodily harm. It was typical, you will pay or we will come after you nonsense.”
“If you really believed that it was nonsense, you wouldn’t be packing a gun.”
I held out the picture Eli had taken of him outside the courthouse. It was the one with “Who is he talking to?’’ written at the bottom.
“Care to answer that question?” I asked.
“I was talking to Booker. He was becoming increasingly agitated. He was certain that somebody was following him. I would have normally thought he was paranoid, but it coincided with the emails and the threats.” Preston tried to stand, but I waved him back down with the gun. He looked around for help. Once again, he found none.
“You never had any idea who this person was?” I asked.
“For a while, I suspected that it might be you.”
He looked up at me with venom and hatred. Still trying to be smug. Still believing that he could use his powers of debate to gain the upper hand.
“I know now that it was your brother. Now that he is dead, I guess the problem is solved.”
I shook my head.
“No. It wasn’t Eli. None of it was ever Eli.”
I shook my head, feeling the full weight of the mistake I had made. The hunt for a killer had been one misstep after the next. One diversion after another. I’d fallen for all of it, allowed myself to believe that my kid brother was a monster. When the real monster was right in front of me.
Preston swiveled his head, looking impatient and wanting to get back to his house and his privilege.
“Then who? Who is he?”
Her otter, I thought, seeing the bloody footprints on the floor of my garage, the crime-scene gear bag in Alyssa’s car, and the rubber boots on her feet when I last saw her.
“She,” I told him. “Who is she.”
One of the first things I noticed about Alyssa was her eyes. They triggered something inside me, like I knew them. And maybe I did.
After returning home and rewarding Doomsday with a steak, I called Tanner and asked him how thoroughly he had checked out Alyssa Jagger.
“Just her service and personnel records,” he said. “I shouldn’t have been able to look at those, but a friend did me a favor.”
“Could your friend do you another favor and go back even further? Like maybe into records that would be sealed?”
Gus was quiet for a few moments. When he spoke again it was in his cop voice.
“That will be delicate. Those records are protected. It would help if I knew what you were looking for.”
“I’d rather not say. But if I’m right, I won’t have to explain. You’ll know.”
Tanner told me to give him some time, and hung up. It took him a half hour. His voice was more shaken than I had ever heard.
“Holy shit,” he said.
“So I was right?”
“You were right. Alyssa Jagger was adopted when she was twelve. Her birth father is listed as unknown. But I found the name of her birth mother.”
“Sheila Kerrigan,” I said. Her daughter. That’s what Eli had been trying to tell me. Her daughter. I thought back to the message the homeless person had passed on from my brother: “Hell has come to town to find you.” I had completely misinterpreted it.
“You have to tell Torrez,” Gus said. “Right now.”
“Ya think?”
I hung up and called Torrez’s cell phone. I waited while it rang, my mind racing. Jagger said she was at the Hell Kat show when Booker was murdered. The Dungeon was three blocks away. It would have been easy for her to slip out, kill Booker, and come back. Who bothers to check alibis for cops, right?
It had been right there and I had not seen it. Eli, somehow, had figured it out. He had come to warn me. But I refused to listen, refused to see what my own brother was trying to tell me. “You are not even hearing what I am saying,” he had told me. And I still didn’t hear it, even when he was clinging to me, clinging to life, trying one last time to tell me.
My call went to voicemail. I tried three more times, all with the same result.
I left Doomsday to his dinner, drove to the police station, and parked out back by the loading area next to a sign that let me know I was in a tow zone. With the tazer in my left hand, I used the Bluetooth in the radio to call Jagger. It rang four times before she picked up.
“What is it, Sands?”
I was back to “Sands” now.
“Alyssa, I just wanted to say that I’m sorry. I’m not trying to shut you out. I need some time to process everything that’s happened. But I don’t want to lose any more people I care about.”
Her voice softened.
“I’m sorry too. I shouldn’t have been such a bitch. This has to be hell for you.”
“Thanks. Anyway, I know you’re really busy, but can you come out for a minute? I’m parked out back.”
I could hear the smile in her voice as she said “Sure.”
I waited, fingering the grip of the tazer and tapping my hand against the steering wheel. Cops stood around the loading dock, taking in deliveries, smoking, sending text messages. A few of them were looking at me, no doubt wondering why I was sitting in a no-parking zone and contemplating telling me to piss off.
Jagger came out and walked toward the truck. One of the officers called something to her, and she raised her hand and said, “It’s cool. He’s with me.” She climbed inside and wrapped her arms around me. I kissed her. Then the cab ignited with the cackle of electricity and a flash of blue light.
Chapter Twenty-Three
When I left the hospital as a sixteen-year-old kid who learned that the world would never again be the same, I did what any sixteen-year-old does. I returned home. It had been three weeks from the day I killed Peter. Three weeks spent lying in a hospital bed, fighting infection, defying doctor’s predictions by staying alive. Three weeks of talking to local police and feds and refusing to talk to reporters.
When I was finally strong enough, I snuck out of the hospital, stole a car and drove back to the place I had spent my entire life. I found it still covered with bullet holes and crime-scene tape. The news vans had left, but blood remained splattered on the buildings. At the time, I wanted to drive through the property with a bulldozer and set fire to the ashes. Many of my parents’ victims were never discovered, and it was believed that at least some of them were buried on the grounds. News reports said that investigators had searched the grounds with dogs and infrared scanners. But whatever dead were hidden refused to reveal themselves. I figured a fire would burn away the evil, if only symbolically. It seemed wrong to allow a place that held such horrors to remain standing.
But my parents didn’t believe in legal details like wills or trusts. With no clear owner, the state seized control. It was sold to a wealthy cattle rancher who was more concerned with the land’s grazing potential than its history. But after several years of struggling, the rancher pulled up stakes and left. The last I heard it was deserted, a ghost town for local teenagers to drive past and dare each other to enter.
Which was how I found it now. The house had been painted. The bullet holes repaired. The fence replaced. But the land still told its story. It was the site of deception and murder and always would be, no matter how much time had passed or how much work went into covering it up.
I wondered if the basement was still there. Most people, the first thing they would do when taking over the ra
nch would be to annihilate the church and fill the basement with concrete. But it was there. Where the church once stood was now a barn. The stained glass windows and rows of pews were gone. The altar was now a work table. Peter’s office was a storage room. But the door remained. It bore a KEEP OUT sign. But there was no lock.
Down below, I found the offering table looking just as I remembered it, a slab of concrete that rose from the floor like a tombstone. Bloodstains told the story of all the lives shed at the hands of killers who claimed to be doing God’s work. My parents. I wanted to kick the table, to punch it, to rip it from the ground with my bare hands and hurl it as far as I could. But it was as immovable as Peter’s legacy. A mounted edifice for others to be broken against.
Under my arm was the box sent by Jagger holding the pictures of her victims. I placed the pictures around the offering table, doing my best to recreate the way it looked in my nightmares. After so many years, after so many deaths, my father’s playground was back and open for business. When I finished, I waited, looking at Jagger, who I had tied to a chair in the center of the room.
She woke mumbling and shaking her head. Her eyes were blurry. They roamed lazily around the room until they landed on the wall.
“Hi, honey,” I said.
Lucidity came fast for her. Along with the realization of where she was. But there was no fear. Instead, she threw her head back and laughed.
“You finally figured it out. Fuck! I was beginning to think you were never going to!”
“It took me a while. Eli finally filled it all in for me. Her daughter. That’s what he had been trying to tell me.”
Jagger nodded. “I figured as much. That’s why I was trying to get you to take me home. I knew you would sit and stew over it and eventually figure it out.”
“What were you going to do? Kill me after make-up sex?”
“Don’t be silly. I wasn’t going to kill you after sex. I was going to do it during it. It was going to be spectacular, the best orgasm I ever had. Too bad Eli had to screw it up. But I wonder how he figured it out.”
“No idea.”
“Why he didn’t just tell you who I was the moment he got to town?”
It was a good question. If he had, he would be alive. So would Grimes. And Rourke. So much blood spilled by Jagger’s hand, a hand that could have been restrained if only Eli had come to me sooner.
Except he did. He came to me early on, and I allowed myself to believe that he was a killer. Jagger led me down the path. But I had followed.
“It was very well played,” I told her.
“Thank you. It’s nice to know my work is appreciated. I really did put a lot of thought into it.”
She tilted her neck.
“My neck fucking is killing me, by the way. What the hell did you use? A cattle prod?”
“Tazer.”
“The one from my purse?”
“Yep.”
“So that’s what happened to it.” Jagger smiled. “Zapping me as you draw me in for a make-up kiss. That was rather well played yourself, baby.”
I turned my back, composing myself, not wanting Jagger to see how uneasy being down in Peter’s kill shack made me.
“Who else knows?” she asked.
“By now? Probably everybody.”
“Which means that sooner or later they’ll end up here.”
“One would have to think.”
“So, what’s the plan? Kill me? Murder me, just like you and your father murdered my mother?”
“I didn’t kill her, Alyssa.”
“You were the reason she died! My mother was your fucking birthday present!”
I turned back to Jagger to see her eyes burning with tears and hatred. The rage she worked so hard to repress around me finally rushed to the surface.
“I remember my mother. How she would take care of me. Make me breakfast before school. Read to me before bed. She promised that she just needed a little more time. She was taking nursing classes. Once she graduated and got a job we were going to move into a house. She promised. And she always kept her promises. But you and you father killed her before she had the chance.”
“I was sixteen.”
“And I was eleven! Eleven years old and sent away to a shitty orphanage before landing with a sick couple who liked to play with little girls! I did a fucking dance of joy when I found out they died in that car crash. Every time I see those damned public service announcements about the dangers of drunk drivers, I always think that there is at least one who deserves a medal. I dreamed about killing them myself for years, but I could never go through with it. I was a scared little girl and they controlled me through fear and abuse.”
“Why didn’t you tell anyone?”
“I did! But do you think anybody believed me? They were well-respected people. Had the nice house and the matching Mercedes and the country club membership. They even sat on the school board. Me? I was damaged goods. A castaway who had a drug-using stripper for a mom and a father listed as ‘unknown.’ Five and half years I suffered under them until I went away to college. By then I was too old to interest them.”
Tears ran down her face. Unable to wipe them away with her hand she threw her head back, relishing them, riding her pain like a climax. At last, the mask of control was stripped away. Jagger was allowed to show her true self, the self that only those she killed had ever witnessed.
“Do you really want to know what happened in that gas station in Kansas City? I killed them. All of them. Those punks drew down on me, and I shot them where they fuckin’ stood. It was the first time I had to shoot anybody. And you know what? I fucking loved it. For the first time in my life, I was the one in control! I wasn’t the goddamned victim anymore!”
“And the clerk?”
Jagger smiled. “He saw me shoot them, so he had to go too.”
“It didn’t look weird that he was killed with your gun?”
“You’re the writer, figure it out.”
I nodded. “Of course. You used one of theirs.”
“Obviously. He was so busy jabbering on about the blood all over his fucking floor that he didn’t even notice me pick it up. I covered the grip with my sleeve and shot him in the head. Lucky for me he was too cheap to have security cameras. That’s probably why the three knuckleheads picked it.”
“So, they were the first?”
“Yep. That’s when I realized who I really wanted to kill.”
Her eyes bore down on me like swords. I saw the years of repressed blame and hatred. And I understood it. She had been a child whose life was taken from her in bloodshed in the name of passing on the family legacy.
“Why the hell didn’t you just come after me? Why make so many other people suffer? People who had nothing to do with what happened?”
Jagger smiled.
“Because that wouldn’t have been nearly as much fun. And I wanted to see who you were. Who you became. See if the future you bought with my mother’s death was worth it. That’s when I decided what to do. Transfer to Peoria. Bide my time. And then start dropping bodies to get a reaction out of you.”
“It worked.”
“Yes, it did. You write about the release Christian Black experiences when he kills somebody, but you have no idea what it’s really like. Feeling that power. Living in that moment. It’s better than anything. Better than the best sex you ever had. Grimes begged me for his miserable little life. So did Rourke. He blathered on about how he knew I was a good person and that I didn’t really want to kill him. Showed him, didn’t I! And Torrez? That moron, acting like some swaggering, macho super-cop. I did everything right under his fucking nose. And most of the time, he thought the person behind my work was you.”
Jagger looked around the room. Her eyes landed on the offering table.
“You really thought that you were going to screw with my head by bringing me here? I’ve got news for you, slick, this isn’t the first time I’ve been back to this place. The first time was right before I tra
nsferred to Peoria. The place had been deserted for a while. I came in through the barn and broke the lock on the door. Walked down the steps and placed my hand on the table. I could feel her. Feel her energy soaked into the concrete. I swore to her right then and there that I would make you pay.” Jagger looked directly at me. “How about you? This is your first time being back in this room, isn’t it?”
“Yeah.”
“So whose head are you really screwing with?”
I thought about Jagger coming back here, paying homage to her slain mother. To Eli coming back, trying to find answers. That was when I realized how he knew.
“When you came back, you left flowers, didn’t you? On the table?”
“Yeah. Along with a picture of the two of us. I kept some over the years, hidden. You should know, I’m sure you found them when you set all of this up.”
I shook my head. “No. There was nothing here but cobwebs and bloodstains.”
I saw Jagger come to the same conclusion I just had. “Your brother. He found them.”
“And then he saw your picture in the paper after the first murder. Probably online.”
“Well, there you have it. Glad that little mystery is solved for you. But speaking of family, have you wondered what your parents would think of me?”
“What are you talking about?”
“If they were alive and you brought me home to meet the family, what would they think? I’m just like them. Killing people who need to be killed. Would they want to kill me, or recruit me? It’s an interesting question, if you really think about it.”
I wasn’t going to think about it.
“And if you kill me, Jericho, you’ll be just like them too.”
“Believe me, Alyssa. That is the only reason you’re still alive.”
“But you didn’t turn me in. You didn’t scream from the rooftops about who I was. No, Jericho, you brought me here. Because you wanted me to yourself. Because deep down, baby, you’re not sure what you want to do with me yet. Kill me? Fuck me? Let me go? You needed time to make your decision, so you dragged me way out here where we can have some privacy. It’s kind of romantic, if you really think about it.”
