“You’re right. There are other victims out there,” Harry said. “And they probably don’t even know it.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
When the detectives dropped Sarah and Josh off at the “safe house,” she had been expecting at least one of them to stay. She was quite surprised when they all left.
“Torres will be back to drive Josh to work.”
“I need to call in to make sure I’m working. I don’t have a set schedule yet.”
“Okay, just let Trina know,” Harry said.
“Um, excuse me. Trina?”
“Yes?”
“Who’s staying with us?”
Detective Lassiter looked at Harry and Torres before she answered, and Sarah knew that no one had been assigned to them. They were being left on their own.
“Unfortunately, we all have other cases we’re working on as well as this one so we can’t stay here with you but I assure you that you’re safe. We need to be out there hitting the street looking for McCarthy anyway. The sooner we catch him the sooner you can go back to your home. We can’t catch him sitting around here. Besides, he’s not the Mafia. He has no way of finding out where you’re staying unless he follows one of you back here. As long as you’re cautious, you’ll be safe,” Lassiter said.
“Okay.”
“Don’t worry. We’ll catch him,” Harry said and then, just like that, they all filed out of the apartment, leaving Sarah alone with her husband and their combined fears and anxieties.
True to the detective’s word, the Extended Vacation Suites was a brand-new sprawling motel that looked more like an apartment complex. It rented out rooms by the week and the month and there were more families and couples living there than she ever would have expected. Most of them, Sarah guessed, had probably lost their homes to foreclosure. Looking at the single moms, the single dads, the married couples with two, three, four, and five kids all crammed into these little rooms, Sarah made up her mind that she would not abandon her home.
In addition to the families there were the obvious prostitutes, the drug dealers, the gamblers, and con men, the solitary men and women living transient, secretive lives better suited to motel life than permanent residence. They made Sarah nervous but curious in a voyeuristic way. She knew she’d be spending many days peeking through the curtains to spy on her neighbors. She never thought of herself as one of those types of people but then she hadn’t lived in an apartment since college.
There were twelve buildings separated by a parking lot and landscaped courtyards. There was a gated pool just a few buildings away and a clubhouse with a modest fitness center that was just two treadmills, an exercise bike, an elliptical machine, and some free weights.
The buildings were only two stories high, stucco, painted tan with orange accents. If it wasn’t for the marquee-size neon sign at the front of the complex it would have looked like just another apartment or condominium complex. Sarah sat on the bed staring at her suitcases. It was still hard to believe everything that had happened to her in the last few days. It seemed like only yesterday that she was waking up to the smell of burned pancakes and frying bacon, eager to finish breakfast so she could have sex with her husband. Now, sex was the furthest thing from her mind and she was hiding out in a motel from a sadistic psychopath with the power to resurrect the dead. It was hard to believe and even harder to accept. She looked over at Josh, who was sitting beside her, staring at the blank TV screen with vacant eyes. She wondered if Josh would ever recover from what he had seen on that tape. She wondered if either of them would.
She stood up from the bed and began to undress. Sarah needed a shower. Her muscles felt tired and achy. She could feel the tension bound up in her sinews like coiled springs. She felt dirty. She imagined that she could still feel Dale’s sweat and semen on her. She could feel blood in her hair, on her skin. She knew it was all in her head but that did not change the fact that she felt grimy.
Standing there naked in front of Josh, she wondered if they would ever regain their sex drives. Josh was not even looking at her. He continued to stare off into space. A week ago Sarah would have been offended and probably would have given him head just to prove to herself that he still found her desirable. Today she was relieved that he wasn’t interested.
Sarah walked into the bathroom and turned on the shower. The water was hot almost immediately and Sarah stepped in. She closed the shower curtain, but then memories of all the horror movies she’d watched as a kid came flooding back, along with the very real fact that she was now being stalked by her very own psycho, and she ripped the curtain open again. Water sprayed all over the bathroom tiles as Sarah scrubbed the memory of her assault from her skin. Taking a shower with the curtain closed was yet one more thing she knew she would not be able to do again for some time.
When she walked out of the bathroom wrapped in towels, Sarah found Josh sitting on the edge of the bed with his nine-millimeter in his hand. It was cocked and Sarah could only assume that it was loaded. The way he stared at the gun, Sarah knew she had come out of the shower just in time.
“Josh? What are you doing with that gun? What were you about to do, Josh? Were you going to leave me?”
“I can’t take this. I’m sorry.” Josh raised the gun to his head and tears began to stream from his eyes.
“Don’t you fucking dare! Don’t you fucking dare, Josh! Don’t! Don’t!”
Sarah held out her hands for the gun as she rushed forward, dropping her towel and pausing just short of snatching the gun away from his head. She was afraid he would pull the trigger if she tried to take the gun from him and one of them might get hit.
“You don’t know, Sarah. You don’t know what it’s like. That twisted fucker, what he did to me. I can’t get it out of my head. I keep thinking about…about…”
Sarah shook her head. Her eyes were wide, staring, unblinking at Josh, darting from the gun in his hand to his eyes and back to the gun. “No, Josh. No. Put the gun down.”
She inched closer and sat beside him. She placed a hand on his thigh and turned to look at his face.
“Let’s talk about it, Josh. Talk to me. But you can’t leave, okay? We have to stay together. I need you, Josh. I can’t go through this alone. You’re supposed to protect me.”
“But I can’t! I can’t protect you! That skinny little geek walked right into our house and raped you while I was lying right beside you. He raped me, Sarah! He raped me! I can’t even protect myself.”
Josh’s eyes were wild. He looked scared. But more than that, he was ashamed. Sarah could see the humiliation written all over him. Dale had shattered his pride, his self-esteem that he had worked so hard to rebuild after what had happened to him as a boy. Dale had huffed and puffed and blown it all away. He had broken him, just like he had set out to do.
“When I was a kid, I was a baseball player, a good one. Did I ever tell you that?”
Sarah nodded. He had.
“That priest, Father Steve. That’s what we called him, Father Steve. Steve Miller was his name. He was the head camp counselor and coach of our baseball team. I was the star. I was better at baseball than I ever was at hockey. Father Steve would always try to get me to stay after practice or after the game to work on my pitch or my swing or help put away the equipment. He would try to touch me but he was a little guy, about five-four. A little skinny guy like Dale. I was almost as big as he was when I was ten. I would just push him away and tell him to stop playing. I would even laugh about it. I laughed about it with the other guys at camp too. He had tried stuff with most of them too. We thought it was a joke. We used to talk about how we would kick his scrawny ass if he ever tried anything. Then one day, we were alone after a game, and he just attacked me. I tried to fight him off but he was too strong. He raped me. I couldn’t stop him. After that I left baseball. When I got back home at the end of the summer I left the church. I didn’t tell anyone what happened at first. I was too embarrassed. I started lifting weights when I was eleven. I used t
o dream about finding Father Steve and strangling him to death. But I never did. I never confronted him. Then one day I told my parents. My dad slapped me and yelled at me. They put me in reform school where I was raped by a bigger boy and one of the counselors. I started lifting weights until I was too big for anyone to fuck with. I started playing hockey in high school and power-lifting to make myself even bigger and stronger.
“When I was in college, there was a news story about a Father Steve Miller who’d been indicted for child molestation. He was accused of molesting over a hundred boys over the course of twenty years with the church. They were asking for other victims to come forward to testify. I recognized a couple of the witnesses from summer camp. They had been on the baseball team with me. I turned the TV off. I couldn’t watch it and I never came forward. I just tried to forget it all. I started drinking. I was a roaring drunk when you met me. That’s why I started skating so badly. It wasn’t because I didn’t have the killer instinct. It was because I was usually playing drunk. That’s why I got kicked off the team. I started going to AA while we were dating. I wanted to get better for you. I didn’t want to lose you.”
It was the most Josh had ever told her about what had happened. Sarah was sobbing hard when he was done. She hugged him as he lowered the gun from his temple and dropped it into his lap. She could feel him sobbing hard against her. They sat like that for several minutes, releasing all of their pain.
“If you didn’t want to lose me, then don’t lose me now. Stay with me. Let’s fight this thing together.”
Josh sat back and uncocked his pistol.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Not knowing where to find Sarah was driving Dale crazy. He had become obsessed with her. He kept sneaking back to her house to check for her, wary of the police who drove by periodically to check the house, sometimes parking in front for hours at a time, watching his house as well. Dale would simply wait until dark and sneak around back and jimmy one of the windows.
At night they would shine the big spotlight on their side mirror on his house as they drove by, looking for Dale. Sometimes they would get out and check the backyard with a flashlight. Luckily, the yard adjacent to theirs belonged to a house that had been foreclosed on. It was abandoned and Dale would sit in the window behind a sheet he had tacked up as a curtain, watching until the cops went away. Then he would break in. He’d gone into the house three times before he was convinced they had fled. Their luggage was gone and Dale wondered if they had taken some kind of emergency vacation. But something didn’t seem right about that. If the cops had managed to catch Dale they would need a witness. They would have ordered them to stay in town. They had to still be in Vegas somewhere. They were probably in witness protection. Somewhere where only the police knew where to find them.
Dale slipped back out of the Lincolns’ house and hopped back over into the adjoining yard just as the next patrol car pulled up. By the time the police officer wandered around the rear of the house with his flashlight, Dale was back in the abandoned house, watching him from the window. The car sat in front of Sarah’s house for nearly an hour. When it finally drove off, Dale watched its headlights turn the corner, then watched until its taillights disappeared down the street. He waited another ten minutes to be certain that no other patrol cars would be coming to take its place before he climbed into the new Hyundai Sonata he’d picked up at the auction and drove off toward the police station. If the police were the only people who knew where Sarah was, then that’s where he would start.
Dale drove up Washburn Street doing thirty-five miles an hour, and not a mile over. His eyes repeatedly checked the rearview mirror for police cruisers. Getting caught now would ruin everything. He would never see Sarah again if he went to prison.
Crossing Lossee Street was nerve-racking both because of the number of police cars that traveled this stretch of road, breaking the very speeding laws they were sworn to protect, and because of the traffic and the lack of a stoplight. Crossing the four lanes of traffic became a game of high-speed chicken. Dale got lucky and drove across all four lanes without stopping, narrowly missing a battered old truck full of construction workers.
Dale pulled up outside of the North Las Vegas police headquarters on Washburn, parked across the street from the police parking lot, and waited. He watched as police officers, a couple of ATF agents, and even one car that he could have sworn was marked FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION came and went. After an hour neither the black woman nor the old detective with the ponytail had appeared. Dale was growing impatient. The thought of walking into the station and asking for them crossed his mind several times and he might have been desperate enough to try if he had remembered either of their names. He sat there for a moment trying to recall the name the black woman had given him when she’d come to his house to arrest him. He could even picture the business card she’d left him sitting on the top of his desktop computer. He just could not make out the name.
Another hour went by. Dale watched policemen dragging in spitting, cursing, fighting, drunken prisoners. He watched them leave in their civilian clothes and head home to their wives, girlfriends, or a bar stool and a bottle. Dale was getting anxious. Patience had never been one of his virtues and this waiting was testing every ounce of will he possessed. He wished that he had a gun. He wanted to grab any cop at random and force them to tell him where Sarah was. The only thing holding him back was not knowing whether just any cop would know where they were or would even be able to locate them. He’d watched Law & Order enough to know that when the police took someone into protective custody, they kept the location of the witness secret from all but a very limited few.
A black Crown Victoria pulled into the parking lot and as soon as it passed Dale’s car he spotted the ponytailed silhouette. It was the old cop, the one whose throat he had cut in Sarah’s living room. Dale tried to restrain himself from running across the street and tackling him in the parking lot. He watched the old cop walk into the station and Dale sat back and waited a bit longer. The man would be coming out again soon and Dale would have to be ready when he did.
Dale hadn’t really thought of a plan. He didn’t know how he planned on kidnapping the cop or getting the Lincolns’ whereabouts out of him. He didn’t have a gun and he didn’t know if he could get close enough to use the knife. The old detective would shoot him on sight. He still had the hammer but that again meant getting close. Even if he did manage to ambush him again he would still have to drag him off the street and into his car without being seen or stopped. Dale hoped that he could simply follow him right to where Sarah was staying without having to confront the old detective at all. That would have been far easier. Dale was still sitting there trying to figure out how he would get close enough to make the detective tell him where Sarah was when the detective walked out of the station and climbed into an old gray F-150.
The truck left the police station and Dale followed in his Hyundai, wishing that he’d had the foresight to tint the windows or at least wear some sort of disguise. His mind was not working right. He still could not figure out how he was going to get what he wanted from the old detective. He looked at the savage-looking diver’s blade sitting on the seat beside him, rusting with dried blood, the hammer on the floor with bits of skull and brain matter matted onto it. He followed two car lengths behind the old Ford, even though the detective seemed completely oblivious to everyone around him.
The old detective pulled into the parking lot of a bar and grill, hopped out of the truck, slamming the door behind him, and strode toward the bar, eyes fixed like lasers, like a man on a mission. Dale followed. The old hippie cop was either going to pull his old lady out of the bar by her hair or he was a drunk about to go on a serious binge. Dale sincerely hoped it was the latter. It would make his job so much easier if the old detective was barely conscious when he left the bar. The only drawback was that it meant another long wait. Dale turned the radio to an oldies station and laughed when they began playing a tune by the
Spice Girls. Who would have ever thought that they would be considered oldies? Dale wondered. Two songs later Milli Vanilli came on the radio, blaming it on the rain. Dale wanted to take the knife and pierce his own eardrums with it. Dale had never been into goth music but when Depeche Mode came on and declared that they gave in to sin because they had to make this life livable, he couldn’t help but sing along. He knew exactly how they felt. Dale’s eyes closed and he sat back and listened to the music. Before the end of the song he was dreaming again.
His mother was standing above him. He could see the claw hammer pull back, raised high above her head. There was blood on the hammer. It was saturated in it. And there were bits of brain, his brain. The ham-mer began to fall again. Everything went black. Dale woke up.
There were tears on his face, and his clothes were drenched in sweat. Run DMC was playing on the car radio and the old detective was leaving the bar. Dale drove the Sonata over to the detective’s truck. His hand gripped the hammer as he inched closer. He was perspiring again, hoping the detective wouldn’t turn around and see him behind the wheel and start shooting. He pulled up beside the detective’s truck, watching as the old cop staggered as if sleepwalking to his car. Dale slipped out of his SUV with the hammer in his hand. The old cop had his back turned, fumbling with his keys, trying to find the key to the truck. Dale hit him once with the hammer at the base of the skull and the detective folded and went down.
The detective lay on the gravel-top parking lot, snoring loudly as if he had just fallen peacefully asleep. Dale dragged him into the SUV, fished in the detective’s pockets for handcuffs, and locked his wrists together behind his back; then he took the detective’s gun out of the shoulder holster and placed it under the driver’s seat along with the hammer and the knife. He reached across the detective and strapped his seat belt across his chest.
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