“He’s the one! He raped me!” Wendy’s accusation tore out of her in an anguished howl.
“Okay, good. That’s good. We’ll get him.” Ellery eased her chair back carefully, with no sudden movements. She caught Reed’s eyes. His hand went slowly to his own weapon. No, she thought, feeling the situation spiraling further out of control. No, no, no. “Wendy, please! Put down the gun. Let us handle it now.”
“He raped me!” Her dark eyes bore into her perpetrator.
“This bitch is crazy,” Butler spat out.
“Shut up,” Ellery ordered him sharply, her attention still with Wendy. “You did good,” she told the woman. “You got him.” She rose cautiously, trying to put herself between Butler and the gun. If she could remove him from Wendy’s sight, then Wendy might be able to hear reason again. “Now we can call Detective Manganelli and he’ll take him away. I promise.”
Wendy stepped sideways to keep the gun on Butler. She shook her head resolutely. “I’m gonna kill him.”
The crowd gasped collectively. Butler’s teacups rattled in their saucers. Ellery felt more than saw Reed draw out his gun, and she flung out her arm at him. “No!”
Too late. He was on his feet, his gun pointed at Wendy. “Put down your weapon,” he ordered her. “No one needs to get hurt.”
Wendy shook her head. Tears streamed down her face. “I got hurt,” she said mournfully. “I got hurt already so bad, like a knife in my gut, and every day, I bleed and I bleed. Now it’s his turn.”
“Wendy, please.” Ellery’s whisper floated over the tense, horrible silence. “Don’t do this. You can walk away right now and he can’t touch you, not ever again. You will feel better, I promise, but not if you shoot him.”
“You did.” Wendy looked at her, really looked at her, for the first time since it all started.
Ellery opened and closed her mouth. She had no reply. Wendy’s words came back to her—Can you sleep at night, now that he’s dead?—and she knew then that Wendy meant to kill Butler no matter what they did. She’d meant it all along. “No!” she cried out as she saw Wendy raise the gun again.
Ellery flung herself at the woman just as the first bullet split the air. Wendy kept firing even through the tackle, both of them falling through the air in a hail of gunfire. Bullets shattered the ceiling, raining down dust and shattered glass. People screamed and stampeded for the exit.
They hit the ground with a painful jolt, Ellery landing squarely on top of Wendy. She held her down simply by gravity, her ears buzzing and her heart pounding. She tasted blood in her mouth and wondered if she’d been hit. Wendy started sobbing. In the distance, Ellery heard the sirens begin to wail.
“Ellery,” Reed said gruffly, kneeling near them. “Ellery, are you okay?”
She saw he had Wendy’s gun. “I—I don’t know.” She rolled off of the other woman, taking care to keep her securely on the ground. Her legs felt like lead but she didn’t have any gaping bullet wounds anywhere. “I think so.”
“Come on,” Reed said, helping her to her feet. “She’s not going anywhere.”
On the floor, Wendy covered her face with her hands and curled into a fetal position, still shaking with the force of her anger and tears. Ellery suddenly remembered Butler and she whirled around with a jolt to find him seated in a chair, his hands cuffed behind his back. There wasn’t a damn scratch on him.
“You went for her, I went for him,” Reed explained.
Ellery hugged herself as a chill went through her. “She wanted to be me,” she whispered. “She did this because of me.”
“No.” Reed’s touch on her shoulder was gentle. “She did it because she thought it was the only choice she had.”
The shop, half darkened by the exploded lightbulbs, lit up again under the glare of the arriving black-and-whites. “But they’ll lock her up for this,” Ellery said, desperate and sad. Wendy had just shot up a trendy Boston hotspot with a bunch of rich white clientele. “She’ll go to prison.”
“I think,” Reed said mildly as they looked down at Wendy, “I think it doesn’t matter. I think she was already there.”
16
Christmas Eve day dawned bright and clear, but Ellery felt no warmth or cheer inside. She sat in Sunny Soon’s office because the good doctor had been rather forceful in suggesting Ellery make an emergency appointment. Some people, it turned out, still watched the news, and Dr. Sunny had gotten an eyeful on channel five. “You’ve mostly talked so far about Wendy Mendoza,” Dr. Sunny said from her wingback chair. “Why don’t we talk about you now?”
“She is me, or at least she wanted to be.” Ellery felt like Dr. Sunny hadn’t heard a word she’d said. “Maybe Wendy was right. Maybe we’re the same. I shot William Willett dead and I’m not sorry for it, either. If the brass made me come here so that I can see the error of my ways, so they can get some sort of mea culpa out of me, then screw them. I may as well leave now because that isn’t happening.”
“So you wanted Wendy to shoot that man—Butler.”
Ellery looked at her sharply. “No, of course not. She’s not a cop. She has no training. She could have killed half the people in that place and now they’ll probably lock her up for it. I’m just saying I understand why she did it. And if she’d managed to hit him in the process, I wouldn’t have cried a whole lot of tears.”
“Crying,” Dr. Sunny said mildly. “Is that something you do often?”
Ellery folded her arms and met Dr. Sunny’s gaze directly. “Not anymore.”
Dr. Sunny wore a red cashmere sweater with a white blouse underneath. At her breast sat a Christmas pin, a wreath of some kind, with little studded jewels that gleamed in the sunlight. To Ellery it looked like a snake eating its own tail. “Let me ask you this,” Dr. Sunny said after a beat of silence. “Do you want your job back? Do you want to rejoin the police force?”
“I keep coming here, don’t I? I’m doing what they asked.”
“You come here, yes,” Dr. Sunny agreed with an incline of her head. “You answer my questions with questions, or with one-word answers. You attend the group sessions and instead of participating as a real member, you embark on personal investigations into the backgrounds of the other patients.”
“Hey, Wendy asked me for help!” Ellery sat forward in her chair, belligerent.
Dr. Sunny’s impassive face didn’t react. “Did it not occur to you,” she said slowly, “that you could have said no?”
The question took the fire out of her, the protest dying on her lips. She slumped back in the chair and shook her head vaguely, looking past Dr. Sunny rather than right at her. “No one was helping her,” she murmured after a moment. She knew even as she said the words how ridiculous they sounded. Sure, Butler was behind bars now, possibly for good after the police had raided his apartment and found the driver’s licenses and panties and jewelry taken from his various victims. She recalled Reed’s face when he’d read the report. There were more women than we knew about. Those women, yes, maybe Ellery had helped them indirectly, and she had helped the faceless ones who would have been next, the victims who were not to be. But Wendy Mendoza? She was locked up in the state psychiatric ward, headed for trial as soon as she was deemed fit. Ellery could not honestly say she’d helped Wendy even one little bit.
She sank lower in the seat. Of course they weren’t going to give her the job back. She’d been a fool for thinking it was possible.
“Ellery,” Dr. Sunny said softly. “What do you want? What kind of life do you want for yourself?”
Ellery chuffed a humorless laugh. “Does it matter?”
“Of course it matters. Why would you think it doesn’t?”
Ellery straightened herself up and held out a hand to tick off the explanation for Dr. Sunny. “First, I wanted my father to stick around—you know, at least until I was done growing up. That didn’t happen. Then, I wanted my brother Daniel not to die. I mean, I prayed to God and everything, but Daniel just got smaller and smaller in the bed unt
il he was gone for good. I should’ve known better by that time, seeing as how I prayed for my own death in Coben’s closet but it never came. No, I was the lucky one who got to live. Then later, finally after everything, all I wanted was a nice job in a quiet town where no one knew what had happened to me. We all know how that worked out, don’t we?”
She trembled as she finished her speech, exhausted from the burst of emotion. Dr. Sunny’s dark eyes searched hers. “You prayed to be dead?” she asked softly.
Ellery cursed herself mentally for letting this detail escape. Stupid girl, she told herself, just as she had back in the closet, berating the mistakes that had landed her there. Her mother would be so angry. Stupid, stupid. For Dr. Sunny, she shrugged one shoulder. “Doesn’t matter now. I survived. I—I wouldn’t change that.”
Dr. Sunny looked thoughtful. “You’ve nearly been killed twice in the past few days. First in the alley and then when you jumped in front of Wendy’s gun.”
“Yeah, but I wasn’t killed, was I?” Her chin rose, defiant. She remained The One Who Got Away.
For the first time, Dr. Sunny favored her with something of a frown. “You were lucky. Again. But I can’t help but notice a pattern in your words and actions that seems hopelessly fatalistic.”
“Everything dies eventually,” Ellery replied darkly.
“Yes, but maybe you would like to try living first?” Dr. Sunny sat forward, as energized as Ellery had ever seen her. “I won’t sit here and pretend that you’ve had an easy road. You’ve been dealt some really harsh blows, the kind most people never experience, me included, so I can’t say that I or anyone else has simple answers for you. But you’re young, smart, and capable. You do have choices. So I ask you again: Ellery, what do you want?”
The dangerous question made Ellery’s heart pick up speed, and a sweat broke out across the back of her neck. But this time, she didn’t deflect or deny. She thought of everything she’d already lost and could never have again. She thought of the wide, blue expanse of Lake Michigan, the click-clack sway of the “L” train, and the juicy Chicago hot dogs. She thought of her tranquil little house near the woods, the one she’d bought with her own money, and how she’d had to abandon it last summer as another victim in Coben’s unending deathly legacy. She thought of Daniel. She thought of her mom. They spoke on the phone sporadically, but Ellery couldn’t remember the last time they’d really talked.
She thought of the nightmares and the daymares and the horrible claustrophobia that came from having a serial killer live inside your head. She could shake and scream and kick the walls but she never got him loose. She woke up sometimes gasping for air because she couldn’t breathe from the weight of him on top of her.
Ellery swallowed against the thickening of her throat. She thought of Reed with his kind eyes and his lean, rangy body and the way he treated her like she was normal, even though he knew very well what she was. When he touched her, she felt hungry and eager, heightened instead of diminished, and it scared the hell out of her. She understood now that there were big emotions left out there that she hadn’t grappled with, feelings she didn’t think were ever meant for her. Reed made them flash up, hot and fast, with a delicious sort of terror.
Now he was gone. Yet another thing she could never have, so it was pointless to ask.
Ellery felt tears burn in her eyes but she refused to let them fall. “I want—” she said, and halted at her tremulous, scratchy voice. She cleared her throat and tried again. “I want peace.”
* * *
Ellery smelled the smoke before she saw it. She stepped off the T to walk toward home and caught the faint charcoal scent of it mixing with the seaside air. At first she thought perhaps she’d imagined it, but then she turned the corner and saw the gray cloud in the distance, expanding over the city like a slow-moving storm. She jogged to her apartment building and didn’t bother to wait for the ancient elevator. She took the stairs two at a time and arrived huffing and puffing in her living room, turning on the TV and sinking onto the sofa to find the news. Bump wriggled up to her, wagging and seeking her attention, but she paid him no mind because of the scene now unfolding on her television set.
The local news had broken into whatever usual programming occupied the afternoon of Christmas Eve. There was a male reporter standing in front of a smoking apartment building in downtown Boston. It looked like a bomb had taken out the top two stories, charred and half-caved in as they were. It was a four-alarm blaze, according to the news crawl across the bottom of the screen. Two people had been taken to the hospital. Ellery turned up the volume. “Carnevale was released only yesterday to this halfway house,” the reporter said. “By all accounts, he’d been a model prisoner during his twenty-five years at Walpole.”
“No,” Ellery murmured, shaking her head. “No.”
She could scarcely believe it when the picture changed to show Luis Carnevale being led away by BPD officers. As with his arrest at the Gallagher fire, Carnevale had not fled but rather stood with the crowd to watch the burn. He looked directly into the camera, not smiling for it but not hiding, either. You knew what I was, his gaze seemed to say. You knew, and you let me go.
The segment cut to reporters assailing Bertie Jenkins as she tried to leave her office. Her face was a rictus of grief. “How do you feel about your uncle now?” Someone shouted at her. “How does it feel to know you freed a murderer?”
Bertie held up her hand, as if warding off the questions like they were physical blows. Ellery cradled the remote control to her chest, her heart aching for this woman she barely knew. She’d learned last summer how silently the devil could fall into step beside you. On the screen, Bertie tried desperately to find the safety of her car, but the crowd kept pushing in, in. “No comment,” she said, twirling dizzily under the cameras. The words came out as a plea. “Please—let me through. Let me through!”
Ellery snapped off the television and stared up at the ceiling, Bertie’s anguished words ringing in her ears. Let me through implied an out, another side, a respite and a freedom. She’ll have to learn soon enough, Ellery thought. There is no through.
* * *
Her mother called around nightfall, and Ellery lingered at the window while she spoke to her. “We have some lake flurries happening outside now,” her mother said. “Seems we may get a white Christmas after all.” Only ashes fell over the city of Boston tonight. Ellery was glad for the dark because it meant she could no longer see the smoke in the sky.
“Did you get the package I sent?” she asked.
“Yes, dear. The sweater is lovely, thank you. I love the peach color. Did you get the presents from me?”
“Yes, I’m saving them for tomorrow.” Ellery looked at the unopened cardboard box sitting on the floor near her couch. She knew without looking what it would contain, because each year her mother sent variations on the same three items: wool-lined house slippers, a leather-bound day planner for the upcoming year, and a box of candy. Sometimes she threw in a new toothbrush.
“Open it now,” her mother urged. “I’ll wait.”
“Mom, it’s late.”
“It’s not too late. Open it.”
With a sigh, Ellery retrieved a pair of scissors and slit open the box. House slippers, daybook, and candy, as presumed. But this time there was also a cylinder with plastic-capped ends. Ellery picked it up and uncorked one side to peer into the hole. There seemed to be some sort of paper within it, so she reached in to fish it out. It unfurled to reveal a faded Bruce Springsteen poster, with young Bruce and his guitar rocking out in front of an American flag backdrop. It had been vintage already at the time she’d found it in the secondhand store and tacked it over her dresser at home. She had spent hours looking at that poster and listening to his music, thinking he must have understood. Bruce sang while young Ellie had planned her getaway.
Her eyes watered, looking at it again now.
“Did you get it?” her mother asked eagerly.
“I got it. Thanks
.” She sniffed back the emotion and tried again, clear this time. “Thank you.”
“I liked to look at him hanging there in the bedroom, because I know you liked to look at him. I used to think maybe you’d take him with you when you came home again…” Her mother didn’t have to complete the thought because they both knew by now how the story ended. “Anyway, it’s better he’s with you. It’s—it’s where he belongs.”
“I’ll hang him up in a good spot,” Ellery promised. She carefully rolled up the poster and hugged it gently to her chest. “It’s funny, I didn’t realize you even saw him hanging there. I didn’t think you understood how much he meant to me.”
“Of course I understood,” her mother replied. “You were my daughter. I was your mother.” She paused. “We were the only two there.”
Ellery hung up with her mother, took the dog on a last chilly walk, and finally dozed off to some schmaltzy Christmas Hallmark movie playing on her television. She slept fitfully, her dreams full of fire, until she awoke in the black of night, alone in her dark living room. The TV had turned itself off by timer. The dog lay snoozing on the floor.
Ellery felt the dream receding away from her, like waves returning to the sea, and left behind was a new truth lying at her feet. Her mother’s words echoed in her head: we were the only two there.
Of course, Ellery thought. The only two. She had been blind not to have seen it before. Strangely calm, she got up as though propelled by an outside force and went outside into the silent, starry Christmas Eve. The frosty air nipped at her fingers and toes, and refrozen snow crunched under her footsteps. The roar of her car’s engine felt overloud on this, a sacred night, but Ellery did not even consider turning back. Bobby Gallagher had waited twenty-six years for someone to name his killer, and she wouldn’t delay him an extra second.
No Mercy--A Mystery Page 28
