Someone was taking the nails from her closet.
8
He had quick, nimble hands from years of piano lessons but no experience whatsoever with the tools of manual labor, and the hammer felt clumsy in his sweaty fingers. Reed gouged at the wood trim on the closet door as he yanked the nails free, one by one. He was huffing from the effort and the knowledge that he was way out over the ledge here, breaking into Ellery’s home and searching her things. If he was on the job with a badge behind, him he never would have dared to do something this reckless, but he wasn’t on the case, not technically, and he had to know for sure: Did he rescue her all those years ago only to have her grow up to repeat Coben’s crimes? The answer had been in the closet back then, and so that’s where he went for answers now.
He had given a cursory search to the rest of the room, so half her dresser drawers sat open, their contents rifled, and he’d pulled a couple of boxes of old shoes and belts out from under her bed. Nothing there. The hot room smelled like dust now; he could practically feel the dirt beading up on the back of his neck. She lied. She lied. She sent those cards herself. The words were the driving chant inside his head, forcing him onward even as the splinters pricked his hand and the nails fell like rain around him. He’d broken about six laws already, each one easier than the next. The last time he’d done this, when he’d followed his gut and trespassed onto private property, he’d found a half-dead girl in the closet and ended the day a hero. No one back then gave two shits about Francis Coben’s constitutional rights. No one would care about Ellery’s either.
He gave another angry yank, and a nail came shooting out, pinging off his chest like a metal hornet. He was so involved in his effort, blood roaring in his ears, hammer clawing at the nails, that he almost didn’t hear the creak of the floorboard in the hall. When reality of the noise and what it meant reached his muzzy brain, Reed froze with the hammer in midair. His body went completely still even as his heart thundered on against his ribs. There was nowhere to run or hide. He closed his eyes briefly in anticipation of what was coming around the corner.
When he opened them again, he found Ellery herself standing in the doorway, the barrel of her gun pointed straight at his chest. “What the hell are you doing?” Her gaze flicked around the room at the disarray, but the weapon did not shift from him even a fraction. Reed didn’t have an immediate reply. He stood there, chest heaving, sweat streaking down the sides of his face, the nails scattered at his feet. He saw the scene suddenly as she did. He was a trespasser, a felon. A voice inside his head whispered to him: If she’s crazy, then what are you?
“Answer me!” She took a step forward and he saw her arm tremble. One fumble with the trigger and he’d be dead. “What the hell is this?”
His shoulders sank. What the hell, indeed. “The analysis came back on the birthday cards,” he told her, his voice soft but his gaze intent as he watched for her reaction. Their eyes were locked together now, and the gun was reduced to a blur somewhere between them. “The DNA on the envelopes,” he continued, “the samples collected from the place they were sealed—two of them were a match. To you.”
Confusion spread across her face. She was searching herself for answers, maybe because she did not think he would ever find out. Reed allowed himself to glance at the gun. His own weapon was on the bed, four feet away, where he had left it when he’d exchanged it for the hammer he still clutched in his right hand. He eyed the distance, measuring his chances, and Ellery caught him looking. “That’s not possible,” she said, moving to position herself between Reed and his gun.
“Danielle Wertz is the best in the business,” he told her. “She doesn’t make mistakes.”
“It doesn’t have to be a technical mistake. My DNA would have been all over those envelopes. They were delivered to me and I opened them.”
“I instructed Danielle to collect samples only from beneath the seals. That’s what she did. The results point to you as the person who sealed those envelopes.”
“Bullshit! I didn’t touch them until they showed up in my mailbox.”
“The DNA says otherwise.”
“Well, then it lies,” she said coldly.
In Reed’s experience, it was the opposite: people lied, science told the truth. But if Ellery was truly off the rails, it was possible she wouldn’t remember or be able to acknowledge, even to herself, that she had sent the cards. “Do you ever have blackouts?” he asked her. “Periods of time you can’t remember?”
Her brow crinkled. “What? No.”
“Maybe you find things in your home you don’t remember buying. Or friends who reference a conversation you had together that you don’t recollect ever happening.”
“Everyone forgets stuff sometimes,” she said. “I am not crazy.”
He tried to keep his voice calm and soothing, but she was still pointing a gun at him. “You’re hurt. You’re scared. Anyone would be after what happened to you. You brought me up here to help you, Ellery. That’s what I aim to do.”
“By breaking into my house and searching my stuff?”
His cheeks flamed at the question. “I had to check … I had to be sure…” Adam Kennedy’s killer had sat right in front of him, and Reed had just let the guy go—let him walk right out of the station to go back and suffocate a precious six-year-old boy.
“Go on, then.” Ellery’s voice was hard as she waved the gun at him. “Look.”
He felt the presence of the closet at his back like it was a living, breathing thing. “Why don’t we just talk for a few minutes?” he suggested, loosening his grip on the hammer as a gesture of conciliation.
“No!” she shouted at him, furious now. “You wanted to look so bad, so do it!”
Reed’s ears tingled and he felt light-headed as he turned slowly, hesitant to put his back to her. Crazy or not, she was in her rights to shoot him. He’d invaded her home. He bent low so he could tug the last of the nails free from the door. There was only the sound of his breathing and hers, and the bits of metal clattering to the floor. At last, the nails were all gone, and Reed stood up. He cast a look behind him to gauge her expression. Ellery looked grim but determined.
“Open it,” she said, enunciating each word.
The door was stuck in the frame, swollen by the summer humidity and frozen by years of nonuse. Reed gritted his teeth and pulled with all his strength, groaning along with the wood as it finally came free. The smell of dead air wafted out of the dark hole. Reed carefully set the door aside and peered into the closet. It was empty.
“Well, there you go,” Ellery said from behind him. “Now you have my big, terrible secret. Are you satisfied?”
Reed stuck his head in first and then finally stood fully inside the musty wooden closet. He touched the walls and the bar where clothes should have hung, but the only thing he found was years’ worth of built-up grime. He wiped his hands on his jeans as he exited the closet. “I, uh…” He was beginning to doubt his own theory.
“Maybe you want to check the others,” she said steadily. “Just in case I’m hiding dead people in them somewhere. Maybe Coben was contagious—is that what you’re thinking? He touched me and now I like to cut up people too?”
“The birthday cards,” he began, but she cut him off.
“I didn’t send them! I kept the first one because it was creepy, because I don’t celebrate my birthday at all, for obvious reasons, and no one around here even knows when it is. My mom calls—sometimes, when she thinks of it—but otherwise, July thirteenth is just like any other day in my life. Except for three years ago, when the first card arrived. Then another one came the year after. And another. I can’t explain why my DNA was under the seal, but it wasn’t because I had any part in creating them. I wish I had thrown them out. I wish I’d moved to outer Siberia or something! I wish the whole thing would just stop.”
Reed studied her for a long moment, taking in the anguish in her gray eyes and the dirt smudge on her cheek. If this was an act, it was a convincing one. “I�
�m sorry,” he said quietly.
Ellery gave a bitter laugh, but at least she lowered her gun. “For which part? The part where you broke in and ransacked my home? The part where you think I’m capable of murder? Or the part where Francis Coben kidnapped me, raped me, cut me up, and shoved me in a closet?”
He felt each word like a slap. She had been so quiet when he’d found her, this girl he didn’t know at all. The picture on her Missing poster had been two years out of date, showing a gangly giraffe-type preadolescent at twelve years old, all neck and long limbs that the rest of her had yet to grow into. I’m sorry, her mother had said at the time, it’s the most recent photo I have. Abigail Hathaway had smiled for the camera back then. He looked around now at the ruins of her bedroom, at the strewn clothes and the glint of nails on the floor.
“I can’t believe it,” she said, more to herself than to him. “You think I’m insane. That I’m like him.”
“I thought…” He paused, gathering himself. “If you were insane, it would be understandable.”
She blinked at him slowly. “It would?”
The simple question made embarrassment wash over him. “No,” he admitted after a beat. “Not really.” Psychologists and law enforcement had been studying serial murderers for years and still they had no idea where they came from, what was the switch that turned them from people into monsters. Ted Bundy had blamed his killings on the fact that he liked pornography and that his girlfriend in college broke up with him. Yet if viewing skin flicks and getting dumped in college could turn a person into a homicidal maniac, the country would be strung with bodies like paper dolls, lined up from end to end. No, when you got right down to it, they still didn’t understand a damn thing about these men. Coben’s parents had been distant but not outright abusive. No one had seen him coming.
Reed cleared his throat and moved to pick up one of her T-shirts that he had dropped on the floor in his frantic search for … what? Body parts? Birthday cards? Whatever clues or proof he had sought, he clearly wasn’t going to find them here.
“Don’t,” she said as he bent to touch her clothes. “Just … don’t.”
He withdrew his hand. She hadn’t put the gun away, but at least she wasn’t pointing it at him anymore. “You went behind my back and halted the analysis on the beer bottle,” he said, sounding a trifle defensive even to himself. “You have to admit that was suspicious.”
“And that gives you the right to break in here and search my house?”
“It tells me there are things you are hiding.”
“My whole life is hiding, or hadn’t you noticed?” She looked at the dark cave of the closet and was quiet for a long moment. “Go ahead and run the bottle if you think it’s so damn important,” she said at last. “See if I care.”
She turned her eyes to his and held his gaze steady, letting him know she meant it. Whomever or whatever she had been protecting, all bets were off now. Her cell phone buzzed from inside her pocket, and Ellery dug it out with one hand to check the message. She digested it without any change of expression, but when she turned the phone to show it to him, his blood went cold.
You’ll get what’s coming to you.
“Still think I’m making it all up?” she asked tightly.
“Who sent that to you?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. The number is untraceable.”
“The number—you mean you’ve checked it already?” Realization dawned. “This isn’t the first message you’ve received.”
“There was one last night too.” She called it up and showed it to him. I know it’s you. “I guess maybe it’s more than just you who suspects me, huh?” she said with dark humor.
He stared down at the phone in his hands. “Why didn’t you show me this last night?”
“Why didn’t you just ask me about the birthday cards rather than break into my house?”
He flushed at the rebuke, because of course she was right, and he was starting to realize that maybe she didn’t fully trust him either. The phone buzzed again and he juggled it in surprise, nearly dropping it, but Ellery snatched it from him in midair. It wasn’t a text this time but an actual caller on the line.
“What?” Her eyes went wide in horror as she listened to the person on the other end. “When? Okay, I’m on my way there now.”
“What is it?” Reed asked when she hung up.
“Units are responding to shooting on Larkspur Lane,” she replied as she holstered her gun and left the room with the cell phone still in her hands. He followed her.
“A shooting? What happened?”
“I don’t know, but I can guess,” she said.
They went into the humid, sticky night. A weak breeze ruffled the trees and thin gray clouds stretched across a full moon. Reed trailed Ellie down the long driveway to where her truck was parked near the end. Speed Bump started wagging and prancing from foot to foot at their approach. “Here,” she said, grabbing the leash and handing it to Reed. “You can stay with Bump. Lord knows you’ve made yourself at home by now.”
“Oh, no,” he said, even as he accepted the leash. “The dog can stay, but I’m coming with you.”
“The hell you are.”
“Ellery.” He took her arm, the one still holding her phone. “Someone is threatening you now, remember? I don’t know who’s sending you those texts, but the one person you can be sure isn’t sending them is me, because I was standing there practically at gunpoint when you got it. So please pardon me if I don’t feel delighted about you heading off into the night by yourself, not five minutes after someone threatens your life.”
She looked furious, maybe because she knew he was right. She jerked her arm free from his grasp and boosted herself into the truck. “Fine,” she called down to him. “You can get in—both of you.”
Reed frowned down at the dog, who gazed back adoringly and thumped his tail on the ground. “Can’t we leave him here at the house?”
“Nope,” Ellery said as she started the engine. “Got nails all over the floor.”
Reed had no good reply to that, so he did as he was told and rode shotgun with Bump’s paws digging into his legs the whole time. Ellery took the corners so hard, Reed and the dog ended up smashed together against the passenger-side windows. “Would you care to share where we’re headed?” Reed asked as he pushed in vain at the dead-weight sack of fur planted in his lap.
“I’m afraid it’s the Franklin place,” was all she said.
They arrived at Larkspur Lane in under ten minutes, but Reed saw they were still late to the party. The street was lit up like the Las Vegas Strip, every house ablaze with light despite the fact that it was near midnight on Sunday. Neighbors had stumbled out onto the lawns in their pajamas to gawk at all the action—which was easy to spot given the presence of all three squad cars plus a fire truck. Ellery stopped her truck at the first available spot along the side of the road and leapt out practically before the thing was in Park. Bump barked after her, clambering into the driver’s seat, and Reed seized this moment of freedom to get out. Ellery was already halfway across the lawn, and Reed had to jog to catch up with her.
“Sam?” she called when Chief Parker emerged from the house. “Sam, what happened?”
“Ellie?” He frowned at the sight of her, and the frown turned to a glower when he spotted Reed with her. “What are you doing here? Who called you in?”
“Joe called me. He said there’d been a shooting.”
Parker gave a short nod. “Rosalie Franklin,” he said with regret. “She took one shot to the leg and one to the chest. They’re taking her to Bay State now, but it doesn’t look good.”
“No,” Ellery said, shaking her head. “No. What about Anna?”
“The girl appears to be unhurt.”
“Can I see her?”
Parker tilted his head at her, as if he hadn’t expected this level of investment. “She’s already been removed from the premises. We’ve got a social worker with her and they’re havin
g her checked out at the hospital, just in case.”
Ellery’s face was a naked mix of pain and anger. “And Darryl?” she demanded. “Where’s he?”
Parker nodded with his chin toward one of the squad cars. “Don’t worry. He’s not going anywhere for a very, very long time.”
Ellery didn’t seem to hear him. She charged toward the car and the burly officer standing in front of it. “Are you happy now?” she screamed at the car. She kicked it hard, denting the side and making the big man in the back jump in surprise. “You feel like a real man, do you, shooting your wife like that?”
“Easy,” said the officer guarding the car. He grabbed her with both hands, but she struggled against him. “You got to chill out, Ellie. We got him.”
“Don’t touch me!” She wrested free and resumed her ire at the shooter. “What’s the matter? Did she cook the wrong dinner? Wear the wrong clothes?”
“That’s enough!” Chief Parker strode across the lawn to intervene. “Hathaway, this isn’t your scene and you’re not on duty. You should leave now.”
“How dare you?” Ellie whirled on Parker now, her anger like lightning in search of the most convenient target. “How dare you send me out here, time after time to answer the disturbance calls, telling me, Oh, there’s nothing we can hold him on, Ellie. We just have to wait it out, Ellie. Now you say it isn’t my scene?”
“Look, I understand you’re upset. We all are.”
“Fuck upset!” She tore at her hair with both hands. “He beat Rosalie like a stray dog, and you knew it. I knew it. Hell, everyone on this block knew it! No one did a damn thing to stop him. Now Anna may lose her mother, and Rosalie may lose her life.” She drew a shuddering breath, tears glimmering in her eyes. “If that happens … if she dies, it’s on you. It’s on all of us.”
She kicked the squad car one more time but dodged the officer before he could grab her. She fled across the lawn, past the cars, past her own truck with Bump looking on, and off into the dark. Reed hurried after her, relieved when she came in sight again. She was striding quickly along the side of the road, muttering words he could not make out and swiping periodically at her face. He matched her pace but hung back a few steps, unsure what to say. It had become clear to him that this shooting was unlikely to be related to the ongoing abductions; it appeared to be a routine domestic abuse case, which, he gathered, probably wasn’t so routine in Woodbury, Massachusetts.
The Vanishing Season Page 16
