She stepped around him and Reed followed her back out into the dimly lit gray corridor. His gaze swept up and down, probing for anyone lurking in the shadows, as Ellery marched toward the elevator without a backward glance. He hurried to catch up with her before the elevator doors closed. She leaned against the metal wall, studying her fingernails, while Reed just stared.
“That’s not the first one,” he said finally. “Is it?”
She said nothing as the elevator dinged its arrival on the ground floor; she merely pushed off the wall and brushed past him toward the outside. Reed realized he wasn’t going to be able to force her to talk, so he just fell into step beside her as they walked the cold, dark streets. The jingle of Bump’s collar sounded overly loud in the frosty night air. When he paused to sniff at a snowbank, Ellery turned to look at Reed. “There hasn’t been a note before,” she said. “Not like that. Reporters sometimes slip their cards under my door, asking me to please call them. Everyone wants to write the next true crime bestseller, it seems.” Her voice took on a touch of irony, and Reed was forced to glance away. His own book about Ellery had sold more than a million copies; of course, back then, she’d had a pseudonym and no one knew her address.
“This wasn’t some reporter who wrote that note,” Reed pointed out. “That was a threat.”
Ellery again said nothing. She stalked off down the street with Bump scrambling behind her to keep up. Reed loped after them, his breath fogging in the cold air. “On Halloween, someone thought it would be funny to leave a pair of rubber hands outside my door,” she said when he’d rejoined her. This was the Ellery he knew: the one who recited terrible facts without a trace of emotion. “Sometimes people try to take my picture when they think I’m not looking. After the summer, when I first moved here, I was in line at the grocery store, and the checkout girl stopped the conveyor belt and just started staring. I turned around to see what she was looking at and found out I’d been standing next to a tabloid magazine with my picture on it. Then a few weeks ago…” She stopped suddenly, and looked up at the sky.
“What?” Reed asked softly when she did not continue.
She shook her head and kicked at the icy slush on the edge of the sidewalk. “I was waiting for the T when this guy came over to me. He was dressed in a suit and carrying a briefcase, kind of like you. He asked if I could tell him the time. I didn’t realize until I had my arm out to check my watch that he wasn’t interested in the time—he wanted to see the scars. I guess I should be glad he wasn’t taking pictures, too.” An edge crept into her voice at these last words, and she made a pivot back toward the apartment building, leaving him momentarily alone on the street.
“I’m sorry,” Reed said as he caught up with her again. “I’m truly sorry for all of it. But Ellery, this note tonight wasn’t sick curiosity—this was a power play by someone hell-bent on rattling you, at the very least.”
“They’ll have to try harder, then.” She yanked open the door to her building and Reed followed her back inside. She glanced behind her when she realized that he was still there. “I thought you had a plane to catch.”
“I’m worried about you.” They rode the elevator up to her floor. He looked around the hallway for any sign of security cameras. “Is there any way to see who left the note?”
“No,” she said as she unlocked her door. “People here value their privacy.”
Reed was glad to see at least that she double-locked the door behind her, but his heart was heavy as he watched her set about making tea. Her shoulders were square, her mouth a determined line, but her eyes were downcast and hidden from him. He was beginning to understand that all the locked doors in the world weren’t going to fix the problem, that it wasn’t possible to shut out Francis Coben on the other side. Even from his prison cell, he trailed her like a ghost because the world looked at her and saw only him. “The ogling and paparazzi will die down as people get tired of the story,” he said with sympathy. “But the note tonight still concerns me.”
She looked up and met his gaze. “You’re thinking of the summer, of the birthday cards.”
“Truthfully, yes.” The last time someone started harassing Ellery about her macabre past, it had turned out to be the prelude to a series of brutal murders.
Ellery put two mugs on the counter, so at least she wasn’t kicking him out. “You really think I’m unlucky enough to attract the attention of a third serial killer?” she asked dubiously as she dropped in the tea bags.
Reed had to admit it would be a stretch. “It’s unlikely this note is from a serial offender,” he agreed, “but you have to keep in mind that these men are admirers of one another’s work.”
“I think I know that,” she replied evenly, and Reed’s face went hot. Of course she wasn’t some rube patrolman that he had to explain this to; she’d been there, unwittingly, the night one serial murderer had birthed another.
“He doesn’t have to be a serial killer,” he said quietly, “to be someone very dangerous.” He wondered if she had searched for herself on the internet, the way he had from time to time, and seen the explosion of results since the summer. She had a full Wiki page now, one that was of course linked back to Coben’s, but that was just a drop in the bucket compared to the more gruesome commentary. There were message boards and social media groups devoted to her—some admiring, some just hungry for more of her story. They speculated on precisely which farm tools Coben had used to rape her. They knew she had nailed her closet doors shut. They discussed openly whether she, out of all the victims, deserved to be the one to live. There were Photoshopped pictures and derogatory sexual slurs, and even a few disgusting anonymous monsters who claimed they’d like to take up where Coben had left off. “Maybe I should stay here tonight,” he said, “just to be sure whoever it is doesn’t come back.”
“Absolutely not.” She took up her mug of tea and walked past him toward the living room.
“Ellery…”
“I have a gun, and you know I can use it.”
He shut his mouth, recalling the last time he’d seen her with it. Ellery curled into one end of the sofa, nothing more dangerous than tea in her hands, and after a moment, Reed gingerly lowered himself to sit on the other end of the couch. There was a long, uncomfortable silence.
“You’re not responsible for what happens to me,” she told him. “Not anymore.”
“Yes, pardon me for giving a damn,” he shot back, irritated now. He was about to say more when his phone rang from inside his pants pocket. The caller ID read Kimmy, and Reed would have loved to ignore it, but he knew at this point she would only keep ringing him until he picked up. He’d been dodging her calls for more than a week, and his sister had surely had enough. “Kimmy,” he said, forcing some cheer into his voice. “How nice to hear from you.”
“Sure, so nice you haven’t replied to any of my messages,” she answered, but she sounded only mildly annoyed by this inconvenience. Reed’s loved ones were used to his erratic schedule.
“Sorry, I’ve been really busy.”
“Uh-huh. I’ve got two kids with the flu, a cat that needs four teeth removed, Jack’s out of town until Tuesday, and oh yeah, I’ve taken on three new divorces this week. Merry effing Christmas to all of us, every one.” Kimmy ran a family law practice in Roanoke, Virginia. She had volunteered to handle Reed’s side in his own divorce, but he had declined her kind offer to show Sarit that she can’t just walk off with Tula—she’s a Markham whether Sarit likes it or not. “You’re not so busy that you’re skipping Christmas, are you?” Kimmy asked him now.
Reed glanced at Ellery, who was sipping her tea and scrolling through messages on her phone. “No, no. I’ll be there.”
“Good. What do you think this big announcement from Daddy is all about?”
Reed had received the holiday summons along with his three sisters, but he’d honestly not given the matter much thought. His father, Virginia State Senator Angus Markham, would have been a preacher if he hadn’t gone in
to politics. A born orator, he could whip up a speech-cum-sermon in the blink of an eye, and he didn’t care whether his audience was on a street corner or in the state capitol building. “You know Dad—he loves a stage.”
“I keep waiting for him to have a lectern installed in the family room,” Kimmy replied.
“Mama would never stand for that.”
“Speaking of Mama, I talked to her the other day, and she said she thinks Daddy will love the genealogy tree, especially since it confirms what he’s been saying all these years, that he’s related to George Washington.” Reed sat forward and cradled his head in his free hand as if to ward off the conversation to come. He knew full well the reason Kimmy had been trying to reach him. “On her side, Mama’s ancestors go back to Mary, Queen of Scots. Can you believe that? Our mother is like royalty.”
“I’ve never doubted it,” Reed said, his eyes closed as he waited for The Question. Kimmy didn’t keep him in suspense.
“Have you gotten your results yet?”
Reed clenched his jaw and then willed himself to relax. “No, not yet,” he lied. The email from DNA Discoveries, Inc. had been sitting in his in-box for a couple of weeks now, but Reed had not been able to make himself retrieve the results.
“Reed,” his sister said reproachfully. “We’re running out of time to get this done before Christmas, and we need you.”
“You don’t,” he replied, more harshly than he’d intended. “You don’t need me for this.”
“Of course we do,” Kimmy said, sounding wounded. “You’re a part of this family, no matter what—Mama and Daddy would spit hellfire if we left you out. And think of the surprises you might find! Maybe we have a blood relative in common after all somewhere back through the ages. Wouldn’t that just be amazing?”
“Right, amazing.”
“So you’ll get the results and send them to me?” Kimmy prodded. “Soon?”
“Soon,” Reed answered, regretting again his initial agreement to participate in this project. When he hung up with Kimberly, he found Ellery had put her phone aside and was watching him with naked curiosity. “My sister,” he said by way of explanation. “The youngest one, Kimmy. She’s got a bee in her bonnet about our family history, so she had us all take a DNA test so she could make an ancestry history book for our father for Christmas. You know, where you spit in a tube and send it off and then you get a report back telling you that you’re one-quarter Dutch, one-eighth Native American, and so forth.”
“Oh,” Ellery said, and then she looked into her tea. “That’s nice, I guess, that she wants to document your family DNA. But, um, aren’t you—?”
“Adopted,” Reed finished for her with a sigh as he sank back into the couch. “Yes.”
“Wow,” Ellery said after a beat. “That’s some Christmas gift to you, then. Your sister has got a set on her the size of Saturn, huh?”
He couldn’t help his grin, because, yes, Ellery had nailed Kimmy in a nutshell. “She means well,” he said. “She’s not trying to make me feel excluded so much as she’s catering to our father’s love affair with his own history. Now that everyone can trace their heritage back practically to the Neanderthals, Kimmy’s taken on the ‘big picture’ view, which is that we’re all related, more or less. I’m just on a different branch of the family tree.”
“And what do you think about that?” Ellery’s tone suggested she wasn’t impressed.
Reed hesitated. His adoption had never been a secret, to him or anyone else, since Angus Markham lived his life in the public eye, but few people had ever asked Reed how he felt about it. The assumption seemed to be that he was lucky, having been plucked from the apartment of his murdered Latina mother into the warm and loving care of the well-to-do Markhams. Most days, Reed felt that way, too. Sitting across from Ellery, who had her own rocky family history, Reed could admit it wasn’t always so easy. “Kim thinks we might find we have a common ancestor,” he told Ellery. “That’s part of the process, you see—you can put your DNA into the system and it will tell you if there are others who have taken the test who might be related to you, and if these people can trace their ancestry back to the Pilgrims, why then, so can you.”
“So that would legitimize you,” Ellery guessed. “Is that it?”
“No, no, I don’t think that’s it. It’s just … I don’t think Kimmy understands. I’m not worried about stumbling across some long-dead relative. I’m concerned about the ones still walking the earth.” It was touching, in a way, that his family seemed to forget Reed had ever belonged to anyone else. Kimmy and his other sisters, Lynette and Suzanne, didn’t have to look beyond the walls of the Markham home to see their DNA in action. They had the same narrow nose, bright blue eyes, and dimpled chins. It wasn’t until Tula was born that Reed saw his features clearly echoed in another human being. He’d wondered from time to time if his other family was out there—siblings or cousins, aunts and uncles. Somewhere, he had a biological father.
“If you found them,” Ellery asked, “would you want to meet?”
“I don’t know. Maybe they would be able to tell me something that explains what happened to my mother.” The one relative Reed knew about, his mother, had been murdered at age nineteen in Nevada. The case remained open and unsolved. “Or maybe I could find out medical information that could be useful to Tula. As it is, I’m a blank slate.”
Ellery drew her leg up and rested her chin on her knee. Watching her bend and shift like a teenager reminded Reed how far apart in age they were. “I’ll tell you what I think,” she said, “if you want to hear it.”
He made a sweeping gesture with his hand. “By all means.”
“If you get your results, it has to be because you want to know. Not to help your birth mother. Not for Tula. You. You’re the one who has to live with the knowledge, whatever it is. Not anyone else.”
She got up off the couch and left him there to think about it. When he went to find her again, she was washing out the mugs in the sink. “So are you going to call McGreevy and ask about the investigation into the Gallagher Furniture fire?” she asked without turning around.
“I’ll call on one condition,” he said, and this statement did make her turn and face him.
“What?” She dried her hands methodically on the checkered towel.
“You let me spend the night here on your couch.”
They looked at each other for a long moment, but Ellery finally relented. “Okay,” she said. “One night.”
She brought him out a blanket and pillow to make up the sofa, and he began working on his makeshift bed. Ellery watched him with her arms folded across her middle. “You’re not one of those people who believes that nonsense about how, if you save someone’s life, they belong to you forever, are you?”
Reed paused with the end of a blanket in his hands. He’d rescued a few people from probable or certain death over the span of his career. But he felt drawn only to Ellery. Not because he’d saved her, but because of all the ways he couldn’t. “Well, if that’s true,” he said slowly as he turned around to face her, “it means we’re both stuck with one another.”
She frowned. “One night,” she repeated. “That’s all.”
* * *
In the morning, Reed awoke to a tongue bath over his face. “Gah! Back off, you stinking hound,” he cried, pushing blindly at Speed Bump’s sturdy, waggling body.
Across the room, he heard Ellery’s voice, full of amusement. “You’re the one who wanted the couch,” she said. “It comes with some perks.”
Reed arose creakily from the couch, his stiff back aching. “May I avail myself of your bathroom—and perhaps some disinfectant?”
“He’s had all his shots,” Ellery retorted. “Can we say the same for you?”
He scowled at her as he walked past her to the bathroom, where he washed his face and redressed in his clothes from the day before. He would have to stop by the hotel before leaving to collect the remainder of his things. Later, he scrounged toge
ther the makings for blueberry pancakes while Ellery visited the gym inside her apartment building. He deliberately waited until she was in the shower to make his call to McGreevy. It was Friday and a slow week, so his boss was in an expansive mood when Reed reached him at the office. “Markham,” he said heartily, “did you catch yourself a rapist?”
Reed frowned, because McGreevy knew as well as he did that there was essentially zero chance a perpetrator this skilled would be caught within twenty-four hours of Reed’s analysis. “The local PD are hard at work on the case,” he replied.
“Good, good. So you’re back here this afternoon, then.” It wasn’t a question.
“The plane leaves in a few hours,” Reed said, without committing one way or another to being on it. “But something else cropped up here and I wanted to ask you about it—the arson investigation from the 1980s, the one with the furniture store fire. You worked that case, didn’t you?”
“I played a part.” McGreevy’s tone had become guarded. “I was working out of the Boston office when the fires started happening—late 1987, it was. By the end, nearly every LEO in the state was involved in that case in one regard or another. What’s it to you?”
“Luis Carnevale is up for parole.”
There was a strange note of silence. “Yes,” McGreevy said at length. “I’d heard that.”
“His niece is a lawyer who is putting pressure on the parole board. She says Carnevale was railroaded, and if they don’t let him go, she’s going to petition the courts for a new trial. It’s all over the news up here.”
“And what would you like me to do about it?”
Reed chose his words carefully. “The victim, Myra Gallagher, is concerned that Carnevale might be released, that his niece might have an argument on her side.”
“Bullshit. Carnevale was guilty as sin. It took the jury just an hour to convict him, that’s how strong the case was.”
“His niece says it was engineered that way.”
No Mercy--A Mystery Page 8
