by Robert Ellis
Matt kept his eyes on the man as he approached him. He was wearing expensive clothing, a tasteful pair of slacks and a casual dress shirt. The watch on his left wrist looked like a Rolex.
“Are you the owner of this shop?” Matt said.
The man shrugged, seemed amused, and took a moment to size him up. “Maybe,” he said. “And maybe not.”
“What’s your name?”
“Carlo Genovese,” he said. “What’s yours?”
“Matt Jones.”
Matt took in the body shop, then turned back to Genovese. He noted his dark hair and brown eyes, his grooming meticulous. But it was his person, his overall confidence, that Matt was counting on.
“I need a favor, Mr. Genovese.”
“Why me? The paper says you’re FBI now.”
Everyone in the shop had stopped working and moved in behind their boss. Matt tried not to be intimidated and made a point of taking a step closer and meeting Genovese’s gaze.
“There’s something wrong with my car, Mr. Genovese. I need someone to bring it in, put it on the lifts, and take a long look.”
“How long a look are we talking about?”
Matt thought it over. “Two, maybe three hours.”
Genovese nodded like he could read Matt’s mind and still seemed amused, but didn’t say anything.
“While my car is being inspected by one of your technicians, I’ll need to rent another. A car with no history and plates that someone forgot to write down. A rental paid in cash. What you need to know is that certain people are looking for me. They may pay you a visit. They may even demonstrate some degree of enthusiasm.”
“Enthusiasm,” Genovese said, narrowing his brow. “Are you saying that the killer might show up in my shop?”
“No,” Matt said. “The Feds.”
Genovese hesitated for a moment, then began laughing. As it settled in, everyone in the garage joined in.
“You said your name’s Jones, right? Detective Matt Jones?”
Matt nodded.
“This is South Philadelphia, Detective Jones. The FBI doesn’t run things here. We do.”
Matt nodded again. “You think it would be possible to get my car checked out? Maybe I could give you my card, and if anyone did stop by looking for me, maybe you could give me a call on my cell and let me know.”
Genovese took a moment to think it over. “If you’re in a jam with the FBI, Detective, then this one’s on the house,” he said finally. “I can’t wait till they get here. I’ll have Rose make a fresh pot of coffee.”
Matt handed over his business card and caught Genovese’s wicked smile. He’d picked the right place—the shop with no sign, the business with no name, and an owner who called himself maybe.
CHAPTER 54
Andrew checked his watch and realized that the nervous feeling he’d been dealing with for the past forty minutes, that feeling that reminded him of drinking too much coffee, was completely gone now. In its place was something entirely different. Something from the other side of the universe.
It had been an hour and a half since he dropped that tab of ecstasy.
For the first time in his life, his entire being was overflowing with a supreme brand of confidence. The entire world seemed to be glowing with peace and love and a certain level of contentment that went beyond anything he had ever imagined or even dreamed of. He looked over at Avery on the bed. She had pulled off her tank top and was getting out of her jeans. Her pink panties didn’t match her black bra but it looked good to him. Everything he was seeing in the room and out the window looked good to him.
“It’s hot in here,” she was saying. “I know it’s the ecstasy, but I need something to drink, Andrew. Orange juice or something.”
He could see the sweat collecting on her forehead and above her full lips. He didn’t want to move. He didn’t want to leave her alone in the room. He was in love with her, he realized. He was in love with her being, her body, the idea of her, the fact of her, the sound of her voice. But it was more than that. Way more. He loved everything about her. The things she was touching. The things she was looking at.
“I don’t think there’s any orange juice,” he said. “But there’s a six-pack of water in the fridge.”
“Bring it up,” she said. “I’m really thirsty.”
She tossed her jeans on the chair. Her long legs were mesmerizing; his dick, rock hard.
It took all of his strength to get out of his desk chair and leave her. And all he could think about was returning as quickly as he could. He raced down the steps and into the kitchen. Popping open the fridge, he grabbed the bottled water, then spotted two mango-extremo-flavored Gatorades and stopped. He couldn’t decide which would taste better right now. After several moments, he picked the Gatorade and rushed back upstairs.
Everything was good until he reached the landing. That’s when he hesitated. That’s when he froze.
The foul odor of his mother’s corpse had hit like a bomb and suddenly taken over the second floor. As he started down the hall, he noticed that his mother’s bedroom door was standing open. He peeked inside and found Avery standing over the corpse in the candlelight.
He couldn’t comprehend why he didn’t feel nervous. He didn’t understand why he wasn’t afraid. His eyes rose from his mother’s death grimace to Avery’s gentle face.
“Are you okay?” he whispered.
She turned and gazed at him without saying anything. There was something different about her now. Maybe it was her wide-open eyes, or the shock he saw on her face. She seemed so beautiful in a cheap sort of way. So familiar to him. So fresh and young.
She moved closer, pushing her body into him and kissing him.
“What happened to your mom?” she whispered.
“I shot her.”
“Why?”
He ran his hands beneath her arms and into the small of her back, her skin so soft and smooth. “She did things to me,” he said finally.
He wasn’t sure if she was even real anymore. He kissed the sweat on her forehead. He felt her body melting into his body. He felt her pulling him onto his mother’s bed.
CHAPTER 55
Matt spotted the elementary school on Sugartown Road and made a right, idling by the Holloways’ mansion in Devon. When he realized no one was there, he pulled up the drive and parked behind the guesthouse. He got out of his car, eyeing the property carefully, then legging his way around the mansion to the front door.
The lockbox was attached to the door handle. Brown had called the combination universal. Matt held his breath as he entered the numbers one-eight-seven, the penal code for homicide in California, then exhaled when the box swung open and he found the key. Once he was inside and felt the warm air, he became grateful no one had thought about turning the heat down.
Dr. Baylor had once said that he had eyes on him. As Matt had driven out from the city, he’d checked the rearview mirror and, just like his drive from the funeral home to the Strattons’, had no sense of being followed.
He decided to give it time and headed upstairs, ignoring the odor of dried blood and all those idiotic animal heads mounted on the wall. It took a few minutes to find Mimi Holloway’s dressing room, and after he did, he made a quick search of her lingerie. While he couldn’t tell if anything was missing, the drawers appeared full. When he checked the hamper, the killer’s future trophies were still here as well.
Matt’s cell phone started vibrating. He didn’t recognize the caller ID, but switched on his phone.
“This is Jones.”
“And this is me,” a man said. “Or should I say, maybe.”
Matt recognized Carlo Genovese’s voice instantly and followed his lead by not using his name.
“What’s up?” he said.
He heard Genovese cover the mouthpiece on his phone and say something to someone in the background. A door closed, then Genovese came back on.
“They were just here,” he said. “Your friends left a few minutes ago
.”
Matt walked out of Mimi Holloway’s dressing room heading downstairs. “Friends,” he said.
“I don’t think so,” Genovese said. “And they seemed disappointed that they missed you. There was a woman with them. On the hot side, but bitchy.”
Bitchy didn’t begin to describe Kate Brown. Matt let the thought go.
“Did they take the car?” he said.
“Yeah, they’ve got it. You can keep the one I gave you for as long as you need it.”
“Where did you say I was?”
“John’s Roast Pork, grabbing a sandwich. It’s ten blocks down the street, and I said I saw you getting on a bus. By the way, we found a GPS device hidden underneath the dash. There’s a built-in microphone and camera in the rearview mirror. You’re better off now. Be safe, friend. You ever need another favor, don’t hesitate to ask. See you when you return the car.”
Genovese hung up. Matt saw a shadow move on the kitchen floor and, when he entered, found Dr. Baylor sitting at the breakfast table with a glass of water.
“I followed you from the city,” the doctor said.
Matt nodded. “You’re pretty good because I was looking for you and I didn’t see you. How did you get in?”
“One of the goals of scouting a location is to walk away with keys.”
Matt shook his head at the new, ever-changing reality that he was beginning to think might be heavy enough to kill him. He gave Dr. Baylor—his uncle, his dead mother’s older brother, and a serial killer who’d murdered four coeds—he gave the doctor a long, careful, even unbelievable look. When he spoke, his voice was surprisingly steady.
“You should have turned yourself in when you had a chance in LA, Doctor. It’s not safe here. Not with these people. You were right. You’re the One because you’re the bigger headline.” Matt leaned against the counter. “It’s your eyes, by the way.”
“My eyes?”
“You and my mother,” he said. “She had the same blue eyes.”
It hung there, in the kitchen with the high ceilings, in the death house with all those animal heads on the wall. Matt’s words settled into the room hot and crackling like a wildfire.
Baylor turned to him with a quiet, almost innocent expression showing on his face. But soon the intensity changed and his eyes turned inward. Matt guessed that the doctor had become lost in another time, sifting through his earliest memories. His past.
“Then you know,” Baylor said.
Matt felt his heart pounding in his chest. “I know something else about you, Doctor. You murdered your mother and father. That’s how this got started. You did it for exactly the same reason you murdered the three coeds in Los Angeles, and another in New Orleans. Your father was a big name on Wall Street, but he was running a Ponzi scheme with his business partner. When it fell apart and was made public, you became embarrassed. All of a sudden, you, my mother, and your entire family were living in shame. His business partner took the fall because he’s the man you described to the police when they asked you what you saw. But he was only a phantom. You knew that he was as guilty as your father in the Ponzi scheme, and you wanted to see him go down, too. He took the fall for murdering your parents and died in prison. But it had to be you. You’re the one who killed your parents. That’s the only way any of this makes sense. How old were you?”
Baylor still seemed lost, his voice quieter now as he reflected. “I was twelve,” he said. “I was called Joseph then. Your mother and your aunt and I had a sister, Eleanor, who was thirteen and died a year later in a farm accident when we moved away.”
“When you moved?”
“Before our parents died, we lived on Curtis Place in Maplewood, New Jersey. We lived in a very nice house in a very nice neighborhood, and we were all very happy. It was a beautiful three-level Georgian colonial built in 1907. Lots of trees, close to the train, and an easy commute for Father, who, like your father, was the King of Wall Street in his day. Over the years I’ve kept an eye on our former home. No one can seem to get comfortable there anymore. It’s been on and off the market ever since the murders. People in the neighborhood say it’s haunted.”
Matt realized that while his family history was sordid and decidedly corrupt, even murderous, hearing his uncle, a man who would always be known to him as Dr. Baylor, talk about it felt like a blessing from the heavens. A chance to get another glimpse at his family. A way to inch closer to his mother, who’d died when he was just a boy.
“Tell me what happened?” Matt said. “I want to hear you tell me.”
The doctor shrugged. “You already know what happened, Matthew. We were living a storybook life, and then one day the stock market crashed and we found out that Father was responsible for all these people losing everything they had in this world. The worst part of it was that most of his investors were regular people who couldn’t absorb the loss and move on. Their lives were destroyed. Their hopes and dreams, their entire world was ruined. They used to stand in the street outside our house, shouting and screaming and throwing rocks at the windows. Death threats became an everyday event. My sisters and I were picked on at school. One of my teachers had lost her pension in the crash. She thought we deserved to pay for her misery, so she overlooked the bullying that was going on. I defended my sisters with my fists as best I could. But then one day, a man grabbed your mother. We were just kids on our way home from school. We were walking down the sidewalk, and he picked her up and started shaking her as if the crash, as if what Father had done, had been all her fault. I grabbed a rock and smashed him in the face. When he ran off, I found your mother crying on the sidewalk. That’s when everything began, Matthew. My war on the self-centered and my hatred for greed. That’s the day I decided it had to end.”
“You shot your parents after they fell asleep.”
“I told my sisters that I thought I’d heard someone break into the house. I woke them up and told them to hide in the attic. Then I walked into my parents’ bedroom, took the gun out of my father’s top drawer, and shot them four times, just to make sure. I ran upstairs. It was dark, and no one saw the pistol. I hid it in the attic underneath some insulation. As far as I know, it’s still there.”
“Tell me about my mother.”
Baylor’s eyes were on him, the melancholy showing on his face clear and true. “We were taken away from the house in Maplewood. We moved in with relatives, a distant cousin, who owned a farm in South Jersey and grew corn, tomatoes, and peaches. Our names were changed to protect us, and no one knew our secret. Not even after Eleanor was killed.”
A moment passed. Long and dark and sharp as cut glass.
Their secret.
Matt suddenly realized that this was all about their secret.
“What is it, Matthew? What just happened? What’s wrong?”
Matt didn’t say anything right away, his mind filling in his past like concrete being poured into an intricate mold of ascending stairs. His family’s plight really was about his mother’s secret. He could feel it in his gut now.
He met his uncle’s gaze, a serial killer’s gaze. “It’s the reason my father walked out on me and my mother. It has to be.”
“What reason could your father possibly have had to justify walking out on his wife and son, and trying to erase both of you from his past?”
Matt ignored the anger he heard in his uncle’s voice. “It’s the secret you kept, Doctor. My mother must have told my father about her past. She gave up her secret, and he panicked and walked out. It’s the only way all the dots connect.”
“But that makes him worse,” the doctor said.
Matt nodded. “It means that he was a coward from the very beginning. That he left the woman he loved—I’m assuming that he loved her—he abandoned his wife and son on the off chance a secret that had been kept for decades might someday be exposed.”
It seemed so clear. His father was just getting started and wanted to make a career on Wall Street. Unknowingly, he’d married the daughter of Howard
Stewart, a former investment banker and scoundrel who got caught cheating and stealing people’s money in what was then the biggest Ponzi scheme in the history of the New York Stock Exchange. The biggest con ever, that was, until Bernie Madoff came along and did exactly the same thing all over again.
And that’s why it really was all about the secret Matt’s mother had been keeping. If anyone found out about her past, M. Trevor Jones would have been blackballed. His career would have been destroyed before it even got off the ground.
If anyone found out.
Matt couldn’t help thinking that his father was as much a scoundrel as any of these horrible people. He couldn’t help thinking that maybe killing his father was what came next instead of chasing a madman with blond cornrows. He looked over at his uncle and caught the doctor staring at him as he sipped his glass of water.
Matt had noticed that his eyes had gone dead a few minutes ago, and his uncle had that look going. The one he shared from time to time with Adam Lanza and Dylann Roof, the mass killers in Connecticut and South Carolina. Matt was beginning to feel more anxious. He checked his watch. They’d spent more than thirty minutes here, and it felt long.
“We need to get out of here,” Matt said. “Out of here, and out of the city.”
Baylor nodded and got up from the table. “Give me a quick update.”
Matt sensed something was wrong and thought he heard an errant noise. “We need to get out of here.”
“Two sentences.”
Matt got into his jacket and grabbed his scarf. “He’s using the society page in the paper to pick his victims. Both Stratton and Holloway were featured stories on the first page. We know what he looks like, but there’s still no way of identifying him. Nothing’s changed. No one’s looking for him.”
The doctor nodded. “It’s time to go.”
Matt opened the kitchen door and watched his uncle leg his way past the pool and into the backyard, heading for the rear gate. But after just a few minutes—before the doctor even made it halfway—Matt saw the men in black uniforms carrying rifles enter the lawn from the trees. They seemed all jacked up as they shouted at him and surrounded him. He could hear the sounds of others storming the mansion and racing down the hallway toward the kitchen.
