by Ladew, Lisa
He went back in the house and stripped off his flesh colored gloves, uncovering another pair beneath them. He stripped off his two outer layers of clothes, revealing cargo pants and a tight exercise shirt. His body practically thrummed in anticipation. Today was the day! He'd been working towards this day for months, but it finally had all come together in a way that would keep suspicion off of him.
Now all he needed was to wait for her to get home. He pulled out his phone and typed in the code to access her cameras. As long as she pulled in the driveway like she always did, he would see her coming and be able to take up his position behind her door, then disable her as soon as she turned to put her gun in the safe.
He had watched her do it fifty or sixty times from the upstairs window of the house for sale across the street. He was a whiz with hackers and crackers. He’d gotten the code to access her cameras from the emulator software he had installed in her computer. He’d gotten a copy of her key by bumping her lock one day when she was at work and copying the spare key she had hanging on her pegboard. He’d gotten access to the house across the street by bumping the lock too, although he could have done it a dozen other ways. People had no idea how easy it was to bypass any standard lock.
Seth allowed himself to relax a little bit. He fiddled with the settings on the cameras so they would beep if anything came within their range. That way he didn’t have to watch the screen constantly. He sat down at Kara’s dining room table and thought about all he had gone through to get here. Now that he was sitting still, he could think a bit better.
Well, not just here. He had a lot that was good going on in his life right now. He had finally managed to become a cop. He smiled slyly as he thought about what Kara thought of him. He knew she thought he was a little slow. Wait until she found herself bested by him. Wait until she found herself under him as he showed her how smart and capable he really was! Her last thought ever would be how she had been so wrong about Seth.
His mind divided slightly as he thought about killing her. He had never intended to kill anyone, but sometimes things got out of hand. He thought it would be easier to do it the second time around. That douche bag, Tim Hardy, had forced his hand. The guy had caught him taking pictures of him and the girl he was cheating with. Seth had taken pictures one night, sent them to Tiffany, and then gone back for more the next night. That was one of his rare mistakes. Tim saw him take a picture and Seth saw him seeing it. Seth quickly left the bar, his mind racing, trying to figure out what to do, but Tim had followed him. They’d gotten into a scuffle in the quiet parking lot next to Seth’s car, and Seth had to resort to stabbing him.
Seth remembered that moment like it was yesterday, even though it had been eight years before. The taller man had looked down at the blood coming from the left side of his chest in disbelief. Immediately, blood had flowed from his mouth also. Seth made the knife disappear and apologized, then said Get in, I’ll take you to the hospital. The taller man had seemed confused and leaned on Seth for support. Seth had thrown him in the back of the car and actually headed for the hospital, knowing that wasn’t a smart thing to do, but unable to think of anything else. He'd been half-forming plans to dump the guy in the parking lot, but when the man had given a last shuddering groan and collapsed completely on the seat, Seth had pulled over and checked his pulse. There hadn’t been one. So he’d taken Tim Hardy home and buried him in the backyard, working all night to be sure it was done before daybreak.
Then he'd waited, terrified, for the police to show up at his door. He'd wanted to move the body a dozen times. Why had he decided to bury it in his own yard? What a stupid thing to do! But when the police hadn't shown up in six months, he started to breathe easier. When they hadn’t come in a year, he went back to his old ways, convinced he was invincible.
Of course there had been a few hiccups along the way. The first time he’d ever tried to become a cop here in Westwood Harbor he had failed the mental evaluations. He went two towns over and tried again, and failed again. Then he got smart about it. He studied everything he could get his hands on about tricking and beating mental evaluations and lie detector tests and eventually was able to pass the test for prison guard. Admittedly, it wasn’t as strict as the one for becoming a police officer, but he had passed it.
Being a prison guard was better than being a security guard, but not near as good as being a police officer. Every day that he got home from work he thought about how to pass the police officer mental evaluations. He had to be a cop! And he wanted to be one here, in his hometown, where people would look at him and be impressed. People he cared about impressing.
Westwood Harbor had a policy of allowing applicants to try again after a year if they failed the psychological evaluation but Seth had studied their hiring patterns and broken into their digital records. He knew there was a bias, and if there was already a notation that a person had failed once, they always were failed again the second time. Once you had failed twice, you were told you could never apply again.
That was unacceptable to Seth so he started looking for ways around it. His first thought was to delete all the hiring records pertaining to him if he could find a way to do it, but then he realized the people who had tested him before would probably remember him. He thought about going over the police department heads to get the policy changed, but threw that out, figuring it would never work. He finally settled upon deleting all of his files and then waiting until the old guys who ran the psychological evaluations retired or moved out of that section. Over the years, he had thought many times of just killing them. It had been a rush, stabbing that guy in the parking lot and then burying his body. Even though the nights spent waiting in terror for the police to come and haul him away had been awful, he still looked upon them fondly too. Anything was better than his normal state of complete and utter listlessness. He really only felt alive when he was breaking the law. The thought made him chuckle since he had always wanted to be a police officer so badly. But who broke the law better than a cop? Besides, cops were untouchable, and that’s what he wanted to be.
Just to pass the time, he had started following the mayor, then stumbled across the fact that the mayor was complete dirt. He found a dozen things to blackmail him for. Cheating on his wife. Falsifying voting records. Destroying evidence. Embezzlement. With each discovery, he got a little bolder. If he ever was arrested, he would just need to call his good friend, the mayor, to bail him out.
He finally made his first contact with the mayor and convinced him that it would be in his best interest to help Seth. They’d gotten his old psychological evaluation erased and then Seth just had to wait for new faces to run the psychological evaluations. All told, he’d waited twelve years until he dared try again. After seven, one of the old guys had had a heart attack and retired but the other guy was still there. Seth had thought frequently about bumping off this last guy, but instead he kept himself busy with his girls.
He’d gotten into some trouble as a prison guard in his first prison, so he’d moved to Worshaw, but the same prison doctor worked in both places, so even though he’d managed to get away from his old supervisors, his counseling records had followed him. Eventually, he found out good old Dr. Doctor was actually bisexual and in love with a male prisoner. Seth had planted cameras in Doctor’s office and oh how he laughed when he saw the doctor lock his door and drop his pants.
There’d been a lot of other work involved in keeping himself looking squeaky clean for the last ten years, and he’d always worried about someone putting it together, but after he took care of Kara, he was going to actually become squeaky clean, he swore it to himself. At least for a while.
He thought idly about his plan and how ingenious it was. When Kara came home, he would have several hours to play with her, and then he would get rid of her. Once Zane was released from prison he would lure Zane over here and make it look like they’d had a lover’s quarrel, and then Zane had killed himself. Seth thought with pleasure about his ingenious plan
to plant Tim Hardy’s body in Zane’s shed. He knew they’d be able to tell that it had been moved, but he also knew they’d never be able to trace it back to him. That was all that was important.
His mouth curled into a moue of distaste. He hated the fact that Kara was fucking Zane dry, but he did have to admit that Zane would have his usefulness.
He glanced down at the computer monitors and saw everything was still clear. He allowed his mind to wander to what he would do to Kara when she got there. Everything he’d been dreaming about for months now.
He checked the time, then pulled one of the phones off of his belt. This was the one the desk sergeant would call when Zane was released on bail. The desk sergeant thought he was a lawyer named Robert James. If Zane wasn’t released by 8:00 the next morning, he would call his good friend the mayor and ask for a ‘favor.’
He would need to get things rolling by then so he could show up on time for work at 2:45 to wait for a field training officer who would never arrive. Seth smiled hauntingly and looked at the cameras again. Anytime now.
Chapter 28
Kara left the courthouse and headed straight back to the police station to find Joe and Ivy. They were on duty, but hopefully had managed to come up with what she needed. She called Joe on the road and he drove straight back to meet her. The patrol car pulled up in front of the receiving desk where Kara was shifting her weight nervously from foot to foot.
Joe handed her a manila folder out of the window. “This is everything that we put together. I think you can convince her with just this, but we’ve got the ringer back there,” he said, jerking his thumb over his shoulder.
Kara knelt down and peered into the back seat. A woman sat there looking nervous, her luggage next to her.
“We tracked down Ivy’s informant and found her at the bus station. She’s got a ticket to leave on the five forty-five and head back to New York. Two guesses who bought her that ticket and the first doesn’t count.”
“Howell,” Kara whispered.
Joe nodded grimly. “She doesn’t know his name, but we brought her back here to look at a picture. The description matches.”
Kara dropped her voice and whispered into Joe’s ear. “Has she admitted that it was a made up story yet?”
“Not yet, but we’re going to get her into the interview room and start working on her,” Joe said in the same low voice.
Kara gave Ivy a smile and said, “Message me as soon as you get something from her. I’m going to find Sgt. Gale.”
Joe nodded and tipped her a wink.
Kara thumbed through the manila folder and gritted her teeth. This had to be enough for Sgt. Gale to release Zane and arrest Seth. It didn’t explain everything, but it sure filled in a lot of holes.
Kara waited for Joe to pull the patrol car around to the prisoner's entrance, then walked back out to the parking lot to her car. A call up to the detective’s office had told her that Sgt. Gale was not there, so there was only one place left for her to be. Zane’s house. She drove into the subdivision and was gratified to see one of the detective vehicles out front.
Kara got out of her car and walked to the back of the house, spotting Sgt. Gale immediately. Sgt. Gale saw her too and walked over to her, a smile on her face. Kara had never seen her smile before and was slightly taken aback. She didn’t know what had caused the sudden difference in Sgt. Gale, but she was happy for it.
Sgt. Gale started talking before she even reached Kara. “You’ll be happy to know this body has only been in the shed for a few days. It was definitely moved from somewhere else. I’ll need to talk to my boss but I will probably be able to cut your boyfriend loose in six or seven hours.”
Kara’s heart fell at the word boyfriend but she ignored it. “How long will it take you to cut him loose if we can tell you who really did it?”
Sgt. Gale raised an eyebrow and Kara saw her hands twist together over an imaginary paper clip. Kara handed her the manila folder and watched silently as Sgt. Gale pawed through it. When the Sergeant looked up at her, Kara told her about the informant who was being interviewed at that very moment at the station.
Sgt. Gale’s face was hard again. She looked offended. Kara wasn’t surprised, that was the look all good cops got when one of their own went bad. “I’m going to put out an APB on Howell right now and send someone over to his house.” She thought for a second and then said, quietly, almost to herself, “I need to talk to the Chief too, right away.” She looked up at Kara, regret on her face. “I’ll still have to do an exit interview with Zane and I won’t be able to do any of that until I talk to the Chief and get moving on Howell. It’s still going to be a couple of hours.”
Kara nodded, she knew that. She wondered how Zane had done in the cell block last night. She knew he could take care of himself, but still it was a horrible place to spend the night.
Sgt. Gale was already walking away, muttering to herself quietly. Kara felt panic grip her. Zane was going to be released. Did he hate her? Was this the end of their relationship? Had she damaged his trust in her beyond repair? She thought that she knew the answer to all of those, and it was probably yes. Sadness pressed heavily upon her heart as she trudged across his yard, back to her car.
Kara looked around the street as darkness fell. Was this the last time she would ever see this house? Was she never to be invited back here? The thought caused tears to well up in her eyes. She liked him so much. And his ex-girlfriend was right, he was a good guy. But she'd lost him, she was almost certain of it.
She got in her car and drove around aimlessly for hours. She stopped at McDonald's and ate dinner, forcing herself to eat since she hadn’t all day. She chose McDonald’s, because she didn’t feel she deserved any better. She criticized herself endlessly inside her own mind for what she had done to Zane. For her moment of emotional weakness. For how easily Seth Howell had pulled her strings.
One part of her said to go back to the police station and wait for Zane to be released, but she knew that was foolish. If he was going to scream at her, give her the cold shoulder, or otherwise break her heart, she would rather he did it in private and not in front of people she had to see every day.
Kara turned her car around finally, and headed towards home.
Chapter 29
Kara pushed open the door to her house and turned to her right as the door swung shut behind her, placing her gun carefully in the gun safe. “Duke!” she called wearily, wanting to rub his puppy ears and smell his puppy breath. It always made her feel better.
She heard a noise behind her and before she could turn around to see what it was, blinding pain erupted on her neck. Her neck snapped to the right and she fell to the ground, but the pain followed her. She tried to fight but her very thoughts were being fried. She could smell burning hair and skin. Tazed. She was being tazed. She remembered this pain well from police recruit class. Blackness curled around the edges of her vision and finally the pain stopped. She heard a thick ripping sound and tried to open her eyes as something wrapped around her wrists.
She was being attacked in her own home! Seth? She couldn’t see well, but she started kicking out, as hard as she could at the person she sensed nearby. Adrenaline shot through her system, lending her strength but scrambling her thoughts even more.
A voice spoke roughly, “Quit kicking or you’ll get the taser again.”
Kara kicked anyway, harder, at the voice, trying to connect with anything, hopefully a skull. She had her heavy work boots on and if she could just daze him long enough to stand … She felt her boots connect with something but it wasn’t hard enough to be a skull. Something clattered to the ground and she kept kicking, trying to make contact again.
The taser came down again on her right cheek this time. Her skin danced hotly and she screamed, dropping her legs to the floor. She wasn’t giving up though. The taser was pulled away again and Kara blinked her eyes, trying to see.
“Sit up,” the voice commanded and shoved her shoulder roughly. “Sit up
and take those fucking boots off, now, or you get the taser in your eye socket.”
Kara recognized Seth’s voice and anger coursed through her. She wondered if Sgt. Gale would think to look for him here. She wondered how long it would take for someone to come and find her. She wondered if he knew that they had discovered his secret. She hoped not, it seemed like surprise was the only chance she had right now. He'd gotten to her so easily.
Kara sat up slowly and fumbled her hands to her left boot. Her eyes finally started to work again and she could see that her hands were duct taped together. Out of her peripheral vision, she saw Seth standing over her, taser in hand. She wondered how she could get out of this. Seth was bigger and stronger than her and had the same training as she did. She had a few more years of street experience under her belt, but he’d been a prison guard. He probably knew every dirty trick in the book. With the pain abating, she could finally think well enough to realize that she had precious few options. She dug at the knot on her boot and pondered screaming. But her closest neighbor, Bea, wasn’t home, or at least her car wasn’t in the driveway. She wondered if anyone else would hear her scream. Probably not. The house across the street was empty and no one else was close enough to hear anything.
She managed to get her left boot off and started working on her right. Her mind whirled with things to say. Was there anything that she could say to Seth to get him to stop this? They hadn’t ever become close while working together, but she had thought that would come in time. Now she realized Seth wasn't able to get close to anyone. Not in a real sense. He was a monster. A psychopath.
