by David Archer
“You’re right, it doesn’t make any sense. The only thing I can figure is that he’s been too busy with the women he’s got to take the time to go back and erase them. If it were me and I wanted to cover my ass, I’d make sure there was no trace of any recordings, I’d wipe out my IP address from logging into the system, everything.”
My eye popped open wide. “IP address,” I said quickly. “Can you get any kind of IP address on whoever erased those recordings?”
“Already tried, Princess. Nothing there to find.”
“Curiouser and curiouser,” I said. “Dammit, I would have loved to have heard those other conversations.”
“I can imagine. Anything else you want me to do?”
I thought for a moment. What kind of things did the TV detectives always want their computer geniuses to do? “Can you find out if there has ever been another situation like this? Where women who were talking to abuse shelters suddenly started to disappear?”
“Sure,” Alfie said. “Might take a little time, but I’ll have something for you by tomorrow morning. Give me a call then, okay?”
“Okay,” I said. “Thanks, Alfie.”
“Later, Princess.” That ended our conversation, and I put my phone in my pocket.
SEVEN
I got up to tell Angie it was time to close up, but she was already gone. I vaguely remembered her sticking her head in my office door while I was listening to the recordings, so she must’ve been telling me she was leaving then. I checked the front door and made sure it was locked, and was about to turn out the lights in my office when my desk phone rang.
A shiver went from my tailbone all the way up to my neck. I reached out and picked up the handset and put it to my ear. “Cassie McGraw,” I said.
The distorted voice had changed a bit, slightly higher in pitch, but I knew it was the same caller. “Have you learned your lesson?”
I sat down and leaned my elbow on my desk, clamping the receiver between my shoulder and my ear. “What lesson is that?” I asked. I had pulled out my cell phone and was dialing Alicia with my thumb.
“I warned you. I have given you the opportunity to change your ways, but you have rejected it. Now, someone must pay for your stubbornness. Which of the women should be the first to pay for your sins?”
I heard Alicia answer on the cell phone, as I reached over and put my caller on speaker. “Why should any of them pay for my sin?” I asked. “If it’s my sin, why don’t you come and take me? Let me pay my own price.”
“That is not for me to decide,” the voice said. “I am but the instrument of God’s Will, and He has instructed me to send you one last warning. Which of the women should be the vessel of His message to you?”
“I get it,” I said. “You’re too much of a coward to come after me, aren’t you? You don’t have the balls for that, do you? You will go after these poor, weak women who are already broken, but you don’t have what it takes to come after the one who is your actual enemy.”
“If you will not choose, then I must choose for you. I hope that I choose wisely, so that you will no longer ignore the warnings God is giving you. You should get on your knees tonight, and ask God to forgive you for all the lives you have destroyed.”
The line went dead, and I pulled the cell phone up to my ear. “Alicia? Another call. I’m still at the office, if you want to come and hear it now.”
“Damn,” she said. “Let me get hold of Niles, and we’ll be right there. Don’t go anywhere.”
I went out to the reception computer and found the recording so that it would be ready when they arrived, and then I listened to it again. It was all I could do to hold back tears as the voice talked about making one of the women pay for whatever it was he claimed I was doing.
It sounded as though he was going to kill at least one of them, and I wondered how I was going to cope with it if he did. Even worse, I was suddenly struck with the memory of Lizzie, her eyes looking at me with hope. How could I handle it if her mother were discovered dead, possibly with some message to me scrawled across her body?
Alicia showed up about five minutes later, but Niles took another ten. By the time he got there, Alicia and I had sat through the recording twice, and we were forced to go through it twice more with him. I managed to find a blank CD and record it for them, and then I finally got to lock up the office and leave.
There was no longer any doubt, Niles had informed me, that the perpetrator was definitely aiming his efforts my direction. For whatever reason, he had decided that I was the one he wanted to hurt the most, I guess, and I suspected he was about to get his way. The thought of any of those women paying the ultimate price because this son of a bitch hated me so much was almost more than I could bear.
I had my phone in my hand and had dialed Dex before I even realized what I was doing.
“Hey, there,” he said. “How’s it going?”
“It’s going straight to Grizzly’s,” I said. “Meet me there?”
“I’m already on the way,” he said. “Are you sure you don’t want to get something to eat first? We could hit McDonald’s, it’s right down the street.”
I thought about it for a second, then nodded. “Good idea,” I said. “We both know I have trouble holding my liquor on an empty stomach.”
“Sounds like you plan to tie one on,” Dex said. “I’ll see you at McDonald’s.”
He was actually quite right. I had learned, if I planned to do any serious drinking, that it was a good idea to eat a lot. Add this to the fact that, while most people don’t know it, a burn victim has to consume half again as many calories as a normal person, and almost a third of those need to be calories from fat. It helps us heal, but even after the healing process has gone as far as it can, it helps us to keep in the best health we can manage. It’s especially important in the wintertime, when the loss of fat from our bodies under the burn scars means we get cold easily. Burning extra calories is sort of like stoking up the fire; it keeps our inner core temperature up a bit higher when we need it.
A double quarter-pounder and a large order of fries later, I locked up the Kia behind McDonald’s and rode with Dex down to the bar. I like his old Mustang, and riding in it is one of the rare times when I actually get whistled at. Sitting on the passenger side, people watching the car go by only see what a little girl once called “my pretty side,” and every now and then some guy will let out a whistle. Call me vain if you want, but it kinda feels good.
Of course, if he got a really good look at me, the same guy would probably run screaming into the night. One of these days I’m going to have to try leaving Freda at home.
It’s actually possible. There’s a company that one of my doctors told me about that makes prosthetic masks, and I bought one. It was custom-made for me, and covers the entire left side of my face and neck, even down onto my shoulder and part of my chest on that side. It goes on with some glue that is supposedly not harmful, and then all I have to do is apply a little makeup to the edges to make it all blend together. It even has an ear and hair on that side, so I can look perfectly normal for a few hours at a time. According to the company, the adhesive can last up to forty-eight hours, and my mom told me that she couldn’t tell it wasn’t real, even when she looked closely and touched it.
Of course, that means having to put in the glass eye, and I hate that thing. It makes this popping sound as I push it in, and it gives me the creeps. I think I’ve only had it in twice since I got it, and I’m in no hurry to put it in again. Besides, I’ve gotten pretty good at bedazzling my eye patches.
The first thing I noticed as we entered Grizzly’s was that Nicole and Jimmy were there. They spotted us and waved, and Nicole pointed at the empty chairs at their table, so we decided to join them.
“Hey, Cassie,” Nicole said as she gave me a hug. “How’s it going? Any new developments on the missing...”
I shook my head. “I am not talking shop tonight,” I said. “I told Dex I just wanted to let my hair down and
dump the stress tonight, so that’s all we’re going to do.”
She laughed. “Sounds good to me,” she said. “You remember Jimmy, right?”
“I sure do,” I said. “Hi, Jimmy. Is she driving you crazy yet?”
“I hope so,” he shot back. “Then she has to stay with me and help me get my sanity back. That’s her specialty, you know.”
“Oh, I know,” I said. “And from what I’ve seen, she’s pretty good at it.”
Amanda spotted us and hurried over. It was the kind of night when I felt like I needed more than just a beer, so I ordered a margarita, instead. Dex looked at me for a moment, then asked for a Bud Light, as always. Anything stronger, he claimed, would set him to running off at the mouth and make him feel pretty stupid the next day.
The band struck up a tune, and Dex grabbed my hand. I didn’t even pretend to object this time, just went out and danced and gave it everything I had. Something bumped me on the butt, and I turned my head to see Nicole and Jimmy right beside us. She gave me another booty bump, and we both laughed, which made the men laugh with us. It felt good to laugh.
Of course, in the back of my mind was the knowledge that one of those poor women was going to be hurt or killed because of me. I wasn’t denying it, nor was I ignoring it; I was simply not ready or able to process it at that moment. If I actually tried to focus on that thought, my head would start spinning and I’d feel almost dizzy, and then my brain would distract itself with something else. I used to call it “the butterfly effect,” because it was like when I was a kid and was trying to do something, and then a butterfly would come past my field of vision and catch my attention. Whatever I was doing before was forgotten, at least for a while.
Some people don’t have butterflies, though. Dex watched me dance and laugh for a couple of songs, and then he led me back to our table while Nicole and Jimmy were still going strong on the dance floor. I picked up my margarita and took a healthy sip, but when I put it down he was staring into my eye.
“What’s happened?” he asked. “Something’s eating at you.”
I tried to brush it off for a second, but then the tears showed me to be a liar. I wiped them off my cheek and took a deep breath, then managed to look him in the eye. It was far too loud in the bar to talk normally and I didn’t want to shout, so I slid my chair over next to his and leaned close to his ear.
“Another call came in just as I was leaving work,” I said. “He says I haven’t learned my lesson, so he wanted me to choose one of the five missing women to pay the price for ‘my sins.’ I tried to get him to just come after me, but he says this is what God wants him to do, so he said he’d choose one of them and hung up.”
“You call the police?” he asked.
“Yeah, while I was still on the phone with him. Alicia and Niles came down and listened to the recording and got a copy. Niles says it’s definite now that I’m the real target, so all these women are suffering because of me.” I wiped my cheek again.
“Bull,” Dex said. “They’re suffering because of some crazy who gets off on hurting people who are already hurting. He may be trying to drag you into it, Cassie, but that isn’t your fault. Don’t let him guilt you into giving up, you’ve done way too much good.”
I laughed, but it was filled with irony. “Doesn’t feel like it right at this moment,” I said. “Right now, all I can really think of is that Wanda’s daughter was hoping her mom would be coming home, and for all I know she may already be dead because I kept going in to my office all week.”
“That’s what he wants you to think, but you can’t give him what he wants. If you’re thinking about that, then you can’t focus on whatever you’ve got to do to find this bastard. Are the police getting anywhere?”
“I don’t think so.” I hesitated for a moment, but then I told him about what Alfie and I had discovered. The pattern of stalking the women for a full week was a clue I couldn’t even tell the police about, just like the recordings of the earlier calls the women had made to Harvest of Hope. “The part I can’t figure out is why he would have erased all the calls but the last one for each of them. That doesn’t make any sense, it’s like leaving a trail of breadcrumbs for the police to follow.”
“Except the police aren’t following them,” Dex said. “Are they?”
I shrugged. Somehow, thinking this through and talking it over with Dex was helping me to sort it out. “I can’t imagine they’d miss something like that. They’ve got all the phone records, so they should be able to see the calls to Harvest as easily as we did, and all crisis lines have to be recorded, so they should automatically want to listen to the recordings. If they do, they’ll hear the same things I heard.”
Dex cocked his head to the side and looked at me, his eyebrows furrowed like he’d just had an odd thought. “What if they can’t?” he asked.
“You lost me,” I shot back. “Why couldn’t they?”
“Police can’t go to Alfie, they have to get a warrant for things like that. What if they haven’t made the connection yet?”
I stared at him. “They must have,” I said. “I mean, they’d naturally look at the phone records for the missing women, so they should see the calls to Harvest...” I trailed off, and Dex just waited. “Crap, Dex,” I said, “they might not even bother. They’re looking at it from the angle of an attack on me, and I work for Saint Mary’s, so they might not pay any attention to Harvest at all. Women in abuse situations make an average of sixteen calls to abuse hotlines before they decide to actually get help, and if we look at those phone records again, I bet we’d find other hotlines they called. The police might not ever bother to look at those particular calls.” I put my face in my hands and my elbows on the table.
“Okay,” Dex said. “Then we need to turn this on its side and look at it from another angle. How do we track this guy down?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know,” I said, almost moaning.
Nicole and Jimmy came back at that moment, and Dex winked at me to say we’d finish the talk later. I gave him a weak grin, because I really didn’t want to involve Nicole in any of what we were doing.
The next few hours went by in a blur, or maybe the blur is because everything after that was saturated in tequila. I didn’t get totally wasted, but I had a good time and ended up leaving my car at Mickey D’s and going to Dex’s place that night.
And then we were laying in his bed, and his hand was gently caressing my skin. I couldn’t bear the thought of anyone else ever touching my burned flesh, but Dex could run his fingertips over it and all I felt was gentleness. Part of it was knowing that his own burn scars told him how different the sensations were, now.
A lot of people think that burn scars have no feeling, but that isn’t always true. In my case, for instance, the sensory nerves were damaged but not destroyed, so after the skin began to heal, feeling started coming back. That meant an incredible amount of pain for a long time, and that was exacerbated by the edges of the burns, where they were only second and first degree. Those were excruciatingly painful until they healed, but they were nothing compared to the pain of nerves that are only just realizing they were almost burned away. I was in a coma for a couple of weeks, so some of it was happening before I actually felt it, but I didn’t miss out on as much of it as I would have liked.
Gradually, though, the pain faded away and a new kind of normal sensation began to develop. I can’t explain it completely, but it’s like—when someone touches me gently on the scars on my side, for example, it feels like a cotton ball being dragged over the skin. Press harder, and it starts to feel like sandpaper. Pretty weird, right? Because of the sensations, I slept mostly on my right side, so the left side was what he could reach.
Dex knew how to touch me, though, and I enjoyed it when he did. It was like he was barely letting his fingertips make contact, and it could send a shiver through me that reminded me of pleasures before the fire. When he did it, we always ended up wrapped around each other, making animal noise
s and exhilarating in just being alive. Even margaritas couldn’t stop that from feeling good.
And then we slept. I always slept like a rock when I was with Dex, even though I was normally a very light sleeper. At home, even the cat jumping up on the bed would wake me, but when Dex was in bed beside me, I guess I just felt safe enough to ignore everything else.
Morning woke me when it peeked in through the window curtains, and I rolled over. Dex was already up, which was normal for him, and I could smell coffee in the air. I got up and found that he’d left his robe on the bed for me, slipped it on, and padded down the hall to the bathroom.
Once the morning necessities were out of the way—toilet, a quick shower, and brushing my teeth with the toothbrush he had bought when it became obvious I’d be an occasional guest—I put the robe back on and went to the kitchen. I was almost there when I realized I’d forgotten to grab my eyepatch when I got up, but I shrugged and went in anyway. Dex was the only person who ever saw me without it, because it had a tendency to come off in bed. He didn’t even seem to notice, but if I started to leave the house without it, he’d remind me.
“Coffee,” I said as I entered. “Coffee is the essence of life.”
“And it’s ready,” he replied. He poured me a cup, and then the smell of bacon filled the kitchen as he dropped some into a frying pan. “I felt like cooking. You want eggs or waffles?”
“Mmm, waffles sounds delicious. I didn’t know you had a waffle maker.”
“That’s because I don’t,” he said as he opened the freezer. “I do, however, have a toaster.” He took out a box of frozen waffles and popped four of them into it.
“Cool. Want me to help?”
“Nah, I got it.”
I sat there and watched him work, and for the first time I considered what it might be like if we were actually a couple. Could I handle getting up every morning and spending time with him before we both went off to work? Would it change who we were? I liked things the way they were, with me able to go my own way as much as I wanted, and spend time with Dex when it suited me, but was that really fair to him? It was like I was only using him for sex.
