Broken Dolls (A Jefferson Winter Thriller)

by James Carol

  ‘I need to get to the gym more often,’ he said.

  ‘You say that like you know what the inside of a gym looks like.’

  Hatcher gave me a short smile. ‘Screw you, Winter.’

  I tried the door. Locked. There wasn’t a spare key in any of the obvious places, so I blew some heat into my frozen fingers, took out my lock picks and went to work. The lock took a couple of minutes to crack. It was old and heavy, in need of oil, and my fingers weren’t working so well. I pulled the Colt from the back of my jeans and followed the gun inside, my wet boots leaving a trail of damp footprints.

  The kitchen was big, with a stone floor and fixtures that looked old but weren’t. The room was spotlessly clean. Tins of food were piled up on the work surfaces and, at first glance, they looked as if they’d been placed randomly. At a second glance, I saw the order. Soup in one group, baked beans in another, spaghetti hoops in another, and so on.

  Each group was neatly positioned and made me think of Andy Warhol. Aside from the tin cans, everything was squared away and shipshape. No dirty dishes in the sink. No clutter of any sort. There was a smell of orange groves and bleach in the air. Looking around, three letters sprang to mind: OCD.

  I stood completely still in the middle of the kitchen, melting snow running down my face and clothes, and listened hard. The sounds we heard were the sounds you’d expect to hear in a house this old. The pop and rattle caused by air bubbles in the water pipes, the occasional creak, the whirr of the refrigerator.

  No sounds of life.

  Only one door led from the kitchen. I walked over to it, placing each foot with care and distributing my weight as evenly as possible, my wet footprints following. Hatcher moved as silently as air and the only reason I knew he was there was because of his breathing. We reached the door and a noise from upstairs stopped us in our tracks.

  ‘Any ideas?’ Hatcher whispered.

  I shook my head, placed a finger against my lips, then turned the handle and pushed the door open slow and easy. I went out into the corridor, my gun hand moving left to right, up and down, covering all the angles like I was back on Hogan’s Alley at Quantico. Hatcher was a step behind. He had his gun out, too. I stopped and listened, all my attention focused on the upper floors.

  Another noise from above, but there was no mistaking what it was this time. The sound of a scream gets inside you like no other sound. This was a female scream, long and drawn-out and filled with agony.

  We broke into a run, reacting to the sound like it was the bang of a starter pistol. Someone was hurting and it was our job to stop that hurt. We sprinted into a large entrance hall then headed for the stairs, taking them two at a time. At the top we turned right and ran into a corridor.

  There was a light behind the door at the far end. The smell of hospitals got stronger the closer we got. The door was ajar and I hit it with my shoulder, slamming it all the way back and smashing it into the wall. I crashed into the room, my gun moving in all directions. The adrenalin was pumping and my finger felt heavy on the trigger. I scanned the room, taking everything in.

  Catherine Grosvenor’s shocked face, her mouth scrunched into a surprised O.

  The five wedding rings on the mannequin hand.

  Rachel Morris bound to the chair, alive and breathing and missing a finger.

  The TV screens.

  I could see Templeton on one of the screens. She was stripped to the waist and strapped to a wooden chair. Her sweatshirt had been cut off and lay in tatters on the floor. Adam stood next to her with a large bowie knife in his hand. Templeton was in a bad way. There were welt marks from where she’d been beaten. Streaks of blood spread out from the three-inch knife wound that ran from the bottom of her sternum to her belly button. She was conscious but only just.

  ‘Microphone on,’ said Catherine Grosvenor. ‘Adam, the police are here. You know what to do.’

  Adam walked up to one of the cameras and stared into it. His face was large on the screen. It was like he was staring directly at me. I stared back. He had a handsome face, a trustworthy face. His eyes twinkled with good humour. He didn’t look like a killer, but then my father hadn’t looked like a killer, either. Neither did Bundy, Dahmer or John Wayne Gacy. They never did.

  I looked over at Catherine Grosvenor. ‘Tell him to put the knife down.’

  ‘Put the knife down or what?’ Adam’s voice came from the wall speakers. The volume was pushed to the point where the sound distorted.

  ‘Put the knife down or I’ll shoot your mother.’

  Adam laughed. ‘Like that’s going to happen.’

  I pulled the trigger.

  70

  I reached the bed in two strides, clapped my hand over Catherine Grosvenor’s mouth and pulled the plastic cuff from her finger. The heart monitor let out a long plaintive note, the universally recognised sound of death. There was a hole in the pillow an inch from the old woman’s head, feathers floated gently back down to the bed. My ears rang from the gunshot. The smell of cordite filled the room and stung my nostrils.

  Catherine Grosvenor glared at me and tried to move her head from side to side, the only part of her body she could move. Plenty of people had wanted me dead over the years, but nobody had wanted it as badly as Catherine Grosvenor did at that moment. The old woman was as insubstantial as air and I held her easily. I put her in a stranglehold that stopped the flow of blood through her carotid artery, felt her go slack, then laid her head back on the pillow.

  All this happened in seconds. It happened so quickly that Adam hadn’t had time to process what his ears were telling him. He’d heard the gunshot, and a millisecond later he heard the heart monitor flatline. It should have been a simple equation but grief would have made him stupid.

  ‘What have you done?’ Adam whispered. His voice became a shout, loud and filled with fury. ‘What have you done!’

  I got up close to Hatcher, close enough for my lips to touch his ear, and gave him the three-second version of my plan, hoping that would be enough. Time was not on our side.

  ‘We’ve just done you the biggest favour of your life, Adam,’ said Hatcher. ‘You don’t have to do what she says any more.’

  ‘Why did you shoot Mother?’

  This wasn’t the response I expected. How the hell had Adam confused my voice with Hatcher’s? Hatcher sounded nothing like me. It was another example of how grief had made him stupid.

  ‘You don’t have to do what she says any more,’ Hatcher repeated.

  I ran over to the medical trolley and found a pair of scissors and a roll of bandage tape. I tossed the tape to Hatcher so he could gag Catherine Grosvenor. By my reckoning she’d be out for another twenty seconds and then the shouting would start. We needed Adam Grosvenor to believe she was dead. We needed him in a state of shock and denial. We needed him confused and not thinking straight. It was Templeton’s only chance. The orbitoclast was on the trolley in the basement, and I’d seen what Adam could do with it.

  I went over to Rachel Morris and pressed a finger against her lips. Shut up. I cut the cable ties, helped her to her feet and we headed for the corridor. Behind me, Hatcher was talking up a storm. The detective was doing a great job. He was keeping Adam in the present, keeping it personal by using his name wherever he could. He was promising the world without giving a single thing away. Textbook stuff.

  ‘Tell me everything you can about where Adam was holding you,’ I said once we were out of range of the bedroom microphone.

  Rachel started talking, and kept on talking until we reached the door that led down to the basement. I was impressed at how together she was, how focused. There were no questions, no recriminations, no self-pity, just precise answers to my questions. Donald Cole would have been proud.

  I went down the stairs alone and jogged along the corridor to the basement door. The light switch and the dog flap were exactly how Rachel had described them. I lay down on the floor with my head right up next to the dog flap. The plastic acted as a soundboard,
amplifying what was happening on the other side.

  Hatcher’s voice was distorted and he sounded like an angry robot. The way it had been manipulated explained why Adam hadn’t been able to tell the difference between Hatcher and me. Adam’s voice was quieter, more natural-sounding.

  I made myself wait, made myself listen, forced myself to be patient because I needed to build up a picture of what was going on in there. It wasn’t easy. I was over-adrenalised, buzzing with nervous energy. There was a mocking tone in Adam’s voice I didn’t like one bit, a pleading tone in Hatcher’s voice I liked even less. Things were about to turn critical.

  I pushed the door open and walked into the basement. The light was blinding. It reflected off the white tiles, glinted off the exposed steel on the dentist’s chair. Adam was standing alongside the chair, using Templeton as a shield. His left arm was curled around her body, gripping her tight, the bowie knife in his right hand was pushed up against her throat, and his head was hidden by Templeton’s. It didn’t matter where I aimed, there was no clear shot.

  Templeton was unconscious. The only reason she was upright was because Adam was holding her up. Blood seeped from the wound in her stomach, but it looked worse than it was, superficial rather than anything life-threatening. I stepped to the left and Adam matched my move, twisting around so Templeton’s body was between us.

  ‘Drop the knife, Adam.’

  ‘You drop the gun.’

  I held the gun steady, left hand supporting the right. Beyond the gun sight, all I could see was Templeton. Wherever I moved, there she was. I told myself I was back on the shooting range at Quantico, that this was a cardboard target rather than flesh and blood. Told myself to chill. Willed my heart rate back to a more manageable level.

  ‘Not going to happen.’

  ‘Drop the gun or I’ll kill her.’

  ‘If I drop the gun you’re going to kill her anyway, and then you’re going to try to kill me.’

  ‘Drop the gun.’

  ‘Why did you do it, Adam?’ I needed to buy some time to think. I’d already played through all the scenarios in my head, every single last one of them. It didn’t matter what move I made, Templeton always ended up dead.

  ‘Why did I do what?’

  ‘Why did you lobotomise those women? Killing them would have been so much easier.’

  ‘Mother told me not to kill them.’

  ‘But it was you who came up with the idea to lobotomise them, wasn’t it?’ My brain was working overtime. There had to be an answer, a way to unravel this mess that left Templeton alive. There was always a solution. Always.

  ‘That was my favourite part.’ There was a smile in Adam’s voice. ‘For a moment the lights were on, the next second, nothing. It was bizarre. They looked like people but they weren’t, they were empty. They were like ghosts.’

  ‘That wasn’t the real reason it was your favourite part, though, was it?’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘There was another reason, wasn’t there?’

  ‘And I suppose you’re going to tell me what that was.’

  ‘You didn’t have to hurt them any more,’ I said. ‘You didn’t really want to hurt them, did you, Adam? You only did it because your mother told you to. Because she made you angry and you needed someone to take that anger out on.’

  ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  I could hear from his voice that I’d got that one right. I could also hear that we were done talking. For a moment the world stopped turning and time ground to a halt. Everything went still. Adam’s fingers tightened on the knife handle. Any second now he was going to drag the blade across Templeton’s throat, opening her carotid artery and killing her within seconds. Once that was done he’d drop her body and wait for me to shoot him. I’d seen this before and that was how most of them chose to go.

  The solution came to me in a single bright flash of inspiration. I was thinking so far outside the box, the box had ceased to exist. I went through the moves in my head, over and over, making sure there were no errors. Just like shooting pool, I told myself.

  My finger tightened on the trigger and I thought about Sarah Flight staring blankly out of a window for the next fifty years. I thought about everything she could have been and everything she would never be, all that lost potential. I thought about her mother going to visit her every day. I thought about her mother getting older and I thought about the day when her mother wouldn’t visit any more. I thought about how close Templeton had come to the same fate.

  Just like shooting pool, I told myself.

  Cardboard rather than flesh and blood.

  Alive is always better than dead.

  My first bullet hit Templeton in the shoulder. By the time it reached her it was travelling somewhere in the region of 1‚000 feet per second. I’d aimed for bone and hit bone, which meant that Templeton absorbed most of the energy from the bullet, a vicious punch that made her jerk back violently and sent her tumbling to the floor. The rest of the energy had to go somewhere. That somewhere was Adam. The punch that hit him wasn’t as hard as the one that hit Templeton, but it was still enough to send him spinning and loosen his grip on the knife. Metal clattered on ceramic, the sound dulled by the boom of the Colt.

  I dropped to my knees and counted off one and a half seconds. During that one and a half seconds Adam rotated through a full 180 degrees, just like I’d calculated. More importantly, he spun away from Templeton. It was like two billiard balls colliding, Newtonian physics in action.

  My second bullet smashed upwards through the thin bone at the back of Adam’s skull. Because of the angle of entry, the bullet hit the prefrontal bone, the thickest part of the skull. Rather than exit the skull, the bullet bounced around inside Adam’s brain, tearing apart his prefrontal cortex, the same part of the brain that had been destroyed when he performed his lobotomies. Adam dropped like a rock and was dead before he hit the floor.

  71

  I shut my suitcase and carried it to the door. My plane wasn’t scheduled to leave Heathrow for another four hours, then there would be the inevitable delays due to the snow. The runways were clear but there was still a backlog of flights to work through, so there was plenty of time to get to the airport and get checked in and go through all the security protocols that had been implemented after 9/11.

  Two days had passed since I killed Adam. Two days of questions and speculation. The ducks were now neatly lined up, asses were suitably covered, and I had my escape to a sunnier place all planned. This storm would blow on for a while before it blew itself out. But that was Hatcher’s problem, not mine. The bad guy had been taken down. Dead or in prison, it didn’t make much difference to me. I’d still sleep as well as I ever did.

  I headed to the balcony for a last smoke, my mind already on the next case. That was the way I’d always done things. Once the bad guys had been stopped they ceased to be interesting. The interesting ones were the ones who were still out there, and there would never be a shortage of those.

  Someone knocked on the door. This wasn’t the firm knock used by room service the world over, it was more tentative, someone seeking an invitation to enter rather than someone demanding entry because it was their job. I opened the door and Templeton stood there smiling that great smile, her arm strapped across her chest to keep it still. The surgery had gone well, but she’d be setting off airport metal detectors for the rest of her life. She looked over my shoulder at the suitcase.

  ‘Going somewhere?’

  I stood aside to let her in. ‘Shouldn’t you be in hospital?’

  She walked over to the sofa and sat down heavily, her discomfort obvious from the stiff way she moved.

  ‘How bad is the pain?’ I asked.

  She made a so-so gesture with her good hand. ‘Right now the drugs are doing their thing so it’s just about manageable. Another hour and a half or so and I’ll be coming down the other side, and then it won’t be so manageable.’

  �
��You weren’t supposed to be discharged until tomorrow.’

  ‘I snuck out when the nurses’ backs were turned.’ She paused and her face turned serious. She glanced away and when she looked back the seriousness was gone, replaced by an expression that contained a touch of uncertainty. It was an expression that didn’t sit comfortably on Templeton. ‘I didn’t want your last memory of me to be in a hospital. That wouldn’t be right.’ She paused again and cracked a lopsided grin. ‘I wanted to say goodbye properly.’

  ‘And,’ I prompted.

  ‘And I thought that maybe we should talk about what happened. You know, clear the air.’

  I kept quiet. Always the best policy when a woman says she wants to talk.

  ‘In his final report, Hatcher said Adam Grosvenor committed suicide by cop.’

  Templeton was watching me carefully, her expression serious again. This time I kept quiet because we’d just stepped into a minefield. Hatcher had run his report by me before he submitted it. That report had become the final word on the subject. Everyone was happy. Hatcher’s superiors were happy because the bad guys had been stopped and that made them look good, and the media was happy because they had a great story, and the relatives of the victims were as happy as they could be because they’d got something they could rationalise as justice.

  The sole voice of dissent belonged to Catherine Grosvenor, who was telling anyone who listened that her son had been murdered, but nobody was listening too hard. In the end it was her word against Hatcher’s.

  And that was the problem, because things hadn’t quite gone down the way Hatcher described them in his report. Most of what he wrote was an accurate and true account of events, but there were a couple of things that weren’t. First off, he said we found the Colts in the house. And secondly, he said I warned Adam Grosvenor before I pulled the trigger. Blatant lies whose only purpose was to cover my ass.

  Not that I was going to lose any sleep. Whatever happened, however things had gone down, it was a good shooting. Adam Grosvenor deserved to die and Templeton deserved to live. It was that simple. From the way Templeton was staring she obviously had her suspicions, but because she’d been unconscious at the time, that’s all they were, suspicions. She nodded once to herself, an indication that she’d come to some sort of decision. Her eyes softened and the seriousness slid away and she was back to being someone I recognised.