by Tim Green
“Get that stupid bitch back here!” Amanda heard the police captain yell from halfway across the lot. But it was too late now. She was at the door and pressed herself tightly against the rough faded siding beside the room’s entrance before reaching over and gently knocking.
Nothing happened.
Amanda knocked again and heard movement inside the room. Her heart was sprinting. She crouched. The door rattled and swung open.
CHAPTER 6
Amanda sprang at the man with her gun in his face. He fell backward inside the room and she quickly pinned him down to the floor with her knees, screaming, “Don’t move! Don’t move a goddamn muscle!”
The man’s eyes were wide and darting back and forth. He held his hands up over his head and splayed the backs of his fingers against the musty carpet. The girl who looked to be no more than ten began to scream in a heavy southern accent.
“Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!”
In the confusion three strike team officers spilled into the room training their automatic weapons everywhere and kicking down the bathroom door. On the nightstand between two sagging double beds was a fitness magazine with a half-naked man and woman on the cover. On the TV, Bugs Bunny rolled a boulder into the path of Elmer Fudd and then crunched on a carrot. Amanda closed her eyes briefly and shook her head until the shouting of the officers who had followed her inside subsided. The girl continued to cry for her father.
“Ehhhhh, what’s up, Doc?”
Amanda slowly got up off the man’s chest and sighed as the other officers flipped him roughly onto his stomach, stepping on his hands and feet before they cuffed him. Amanda walked to the frail-looking young girl, who was sobbing loudly, and took her quietly in her arms.
“It’s all right,” she said, stroking the girl’s long blond hair. “Your daddy’s going to be all right. He didn’t do anything wrong, honey, and neither did you. These men won’t hurt him. They’re the police, honey. They won’t hurt him. We made a mistake.”
“We got him!” one of the officers shouted out into the parking lot. “All clear. We got him. All clear.”
Amanda pushed through the officers and past the trembling man with the girl in her arms. Marco rushed up to her.
“We got the wrong man,” she said in a dying voice to Marco.
“How do you know?” he asked. “How can you say that?”
“Because I know who I’m looking for,” she said over the top of the girl’s quivering head.
“You want to explain yourself, Annie Oakley?” the captain asked.
Marco pursed his lips in frustration and turned to the captain. “She’s been after this man for almost a year,” he said, “and seen what you saw this morning more times than you want to know.”
“Terrific,’’ the captain said.
Amanda made her way toward a female trooper, a big woman with close-cropped hair but a round, matronly face.
“Will you take care of this young lady?” she said. The woman’s taut features went soft. “That’s her daddy and this whole thing is a mistake. They thought she was the one that . . . the other girl . . .”
The woman officer gave Amanda a knowing look and began to fuss over the girl. From the TV inside the room came the sound of Bugs pounding Fudd over the head with a mallet. The girl shook in the cop’s arms.
Amanda turned away and got into the passenger side of Marco’s Crown Vic. She sat staring straight ahead without bothering to watch the Georgia police stuffing the young girl’s innocent father into the back of a cruiser. There really was no one to blame. Things like this happened. An innocent man in the wrong place at the wrong time.
After a few minutes Marco got in beside her.
“Well,” he said, exhaling with exasperation, “that was different.”
He looked at her and said it again. “That was different.”
“What do you want me to say?” Amanda said, staring back at him.
“Nothing,” Marco said. “I don’t want you to say anything.”
“I was right,” she said.
“I think you probably were.”
“I know I am. That’s not the man. That woman at the desk said he had a pornographic magazine. Do you know what magazine he had?”
“What?” he asked.
“A muscle magazine. He wasn’t a pervert. Just wanted to lose his gut.”
Marco shook his head. “This is the Deep South, you know. You can’t make a local police captain look like an ass.”
“Can you get them to keep looking?” she asked.
Amanda still knew she was right about their killer. She was certain that somewhere close by he was waiting to feast his eyes on the evening news, maybe to even go back to the crime scene and watch the excitement, to press his fingertips into the yellow crime scene tape.
The problem was that Amanda was thinking two or three steps ahead of everyone else. She knew the man they’d just taken into custody wasn’t the right one. But the GBI wasn’t going to be that easily convinced. Just because some crazy redheaded FBI agent said her instincts were telling her the man was innocent didn’t mean they weren’t going to follow through with the thoroughness that defined them as police.
“It’s going to be tough. I’m sure you ain’t on Barney Fife’s favorite people list,’’ Marco said. He didn’t say ain’t so it sounded funny coming out of his mouth.
“But I was right,” she said. “Can you imagine if one of the cops killed that father? Can you imagine the stink of that mess? Where would we be then? The whole thing would be out, and even if we did get this kind of chance—a fresh crime scene, I mean—he’d know that we were going to search every motel in the area and he’d change his pattern.”
“That may happen now anyway,” Marco said. “There was a TV truck there, you know.”
They rode for a while in silence. Amanda looked at her watch.
“Damn,” she said. She dialed information back in Virginia and got the phone number of Glenda’s Brownie leader.
“Hi, Allison? This is Amanda,” she said. She could hear the chatter of young girls in the background. They were giggling, talking, and even shrieking. It was a happy sound and it made Amanda strongly aware that she was hundreds of miles away.
“Who?”
“Amanda,” she said. “Amanda Lee.”
“Oh. Oh, yes, I’m sorry. Do you want to talk to your husband?”
“My . . . yes. Please.”
Amanda bit into her lower lip.
“Hi,” Parker said.
“Hi,” she said. “I just was checking. How’s the star?”
“She’s shining pretty bright,” he said. “How’s it there?”
“Fine.”
“You want to say hi?”
“I’d like that,” Amanda said. She stole a glance at Marco. His eyes were fixed on the country road. His mouth shut tight.
The sound over the phone was muffled as Parker covered the receiver. She could just make out his voice, asking Glenda to come and talk. Marco started to whistle quietly. Parker took his hand off the phone.
“Can we give you a call back?” he said. “She’s right in the middle of these felt stars that we’re cutting out to go on her vest. She’s . . . I . . .”
“That’s fine,” Amanda said. “I just wanted to let her know I’m thinking of her. I’m glad one of us could go. I love you.”
“Love you, too. Bye.”
“Bye.”
She hung up and bit into her lip again.
“Everything okay?” Marco asked.
“Yeah,” she said. She lifted her chin. “I’m fine.”
As they pulled into the small town of Jackson, the road turned into four lanes. Its center was bisected by two sets of railroad tracks. On either side was a handful of three- or four-story brick buildings—rows of freestanding storefronts standing shoulder to shoulder along a sun-bleached sidewalk. American flags hung limply from many of the buildings. With the car windows down, Amanda could smell the pungent aroma of creosote from the
train tracks baking in the noontime heat.
Amanda suddenly said, “I think we should pull everybody we’ve got out of the Atlanta office. Right now. I think we should get our own people down here in force and keep up the search ourselves.”
Marco winced at the suggestion.
“What?” she asked.
“Rand,” he said. “I’m not too high on his list.”
“Why? Because you left him in Atlanta?”
“We never got along,” Marco said. “It was a personal thing. One night we were all out in Buckhead. We had a few. He said some things and I popped him.”
“This is bigger than some pissing match between boys,’’ she said.
“I know. I know,” he said holding up his hand. “I’ll do it. I just want you to feel the pain in my ass, that’s all.”
“Okay,” she said. “I feel your— Stop!”
“What?”
“Stop the car!”
CHAPTER 7
Before Marco could brake, Amanda had the door open, and as he slowed she jumped out. A battered red pickup driven by a young farmer passing them on the right swerved and screeched to a halt. The truck just clipped Amanda, and she spun a full circle before she fell to the pavement. She was up in an instant, as if she’d done nothing more than trip on her own feet.
“Are you crazy?” the driver said out of his rolled-down window.
Amanda ignored him, drawing her gun and beginning to run now for the street corner. A bearded blond man had just come out of a coffee shop across the street and disappeared behind that corner.
“It’s him, Marco!” Amanda yelled back over her shoulder.
Marco swung the car around amid the blaring horns and started after her. When Amanda got to the coffee shop, she passed its broad front window and peeked furtively around the brick corner. She saw him. He was wearing a pair of jeans, cowboy boots, and a black leather vest without a shirt. His arms were crawling with tattoos; a cigarette hung from his lips. He looked both ways for traffic down the side street and jogged across. He slipped between two parked cars and proceeded briskly down the opposite sidewalk, but without any apparent awareness of being followed.
Amanda started after him at a fast walk, trying to keep her excitement in check. Just then Marco took the corner with a shrill little yip from his tires and pulled up alongside her. Amanda scowled his way then looked back down the street just as her man dipped into an alley between a hardware store and a pool hall. She had no idea if he’d noticed the car and that’s what made him bolt, or if that was simply his chosen route. Without a word to Marco, she dashed across the street and peeked around the second corner.
Halfway down the alley, the man quickly glanced her way. She thought she’d been seen, but he then mounted a rickety set of stairs and disappeared into the back of a building without hurrying. She presumed the building must have its front entrance on the main street. Marco had stopped the car and was out of it now and beside her.
“You see those wooden stairs just this side of that red Dumpster?” she asked him, pointing.
“Yes.”
“He went in there,” she said. “You go around to the front and I’ll go in from the back.”
“What the hell are you talking about? What did you see?”
“He fits the description,” she said.
“So do about a million people,” he said.
She looked at him and said, “Marco, you know me. Right?”
“Yeah, I know you . . .”
“Well, trust me, it’s him,” she said. “I can’t tell you why I know, maybe the way he was dressed, I don’t know, but let’s go get him and we can sort it out later.”
Marco shook his head but drew his gun anyway and checked the action. As he started back up the sidewalk toward the main street, she heard him say, “This can’t be any more of a disaster than what happened back at the motel . . .”
Amanda waited a few minutes to give Marco time to get to the front of the building, then stepped cautiously down the alley. It was cooler than the street but still close and quiet and strangely peaceful. She didn’t know for certain if the man had seen her, but she had to proceed as if he did. When she got to the stairs her nose wrinkled at the smell of kitchen garbage mingling with the hint of raw sewage that drifted up from a shadowy grate beneath her feet. She mounted the steps cautiously with her gun in one hand and the other on the railing.
She pulled open a flimsy wooden screen door whose springs squeaked in protest as she entered a dim hallway. To her right was the abandoned kitchen of a restaurant, and to the left a filthy laundry room. The linoleum floor was dirt-stained, with banks of built-up dust and grime next to the wall and in the corners. A bare bulb hung from a corroded pair of wires in the ceiling, revealing a dark set of stairs that climbed steeply in front of her and off to the right. She wondered if Marco was already inside.
Then she heard him yell, “FBI!”
Amanda launched herself up the stairs. Halfway up, she heard more shouting then the crash of a door slamming shut. By the time she got to the top of the steps, all was quiet except for the steady hammering of her heart in her ears.
The second floor was lined with doors, and down at the far end of the hall she could see the front stairwell in the light of a dusty window that looked out onto the main street. The long narrow building was a dreary flophouse, the kind of transient hotel that probably rented rooms by the week.
Amanda breathed deeply and tried to steady her hands, which still shook in the wake of the adrenaline wave.
Part of her wanted to cry out to Marco, but something told her to keep still. Slowly she proceeded down the hall, stopping to listen at each door and test their handles. Halfway down, she grasped the old brown ceramic knob of a door on the right side and twisted. Like the others, it wouldn’t budge. She ran her eyes up and down the faded oak door and wondered, if she did hear something behind one of these doors, whether or not she could kick it in.
Suddenly the door on the opposite side of the narrow hall sprang open.
Amanda leveled her gun and there was a shriek.
In the doorway was the shocked and haggard face of a heavy middle-aged woman with a cheap blond wig. Her sagging eyes were red and bleary, and she wore a ratty pink terry-cloth robe. At the sight of a gun she dropped her cigarette to the floor and swatted at the air with both hands as if bugs were attacking her, then slammed the door shut.
Amanda breathed deep again and shuddered. She had nearly fired a round into the woman’s face.
Three-quarters of the way to the front of the building she came to a door whose handle turned. She readied her gun and opened it slowly. She was struck immediately by the pungent aroma of cats. Her heart leapt into her throat. It was the same stench she’d smelled in the motel room outside Nashville where Oswald had tortured and killed his last victim. She swung the door wide and the scene flooded into her mind.
On almost every flat surface above the floor was a cat, dozens of them of all different breeds and colors bathed in the yellow light of a single floor lamp in the corner. When she stepped inside, they began to move, flowing away from her like ripples on a pond, hopping from a couch to a windowsill or from a chair to the floor. The stench of their excrement was overpowering. Beyond the couch, through a doorway that led into a small kitchen, Amanda could see a man busily working on the floor. It was the blond, bearded man from the street. He was intent on whatever it was he was doing.
Amanda moved across the room, spilling cats in her wake.
She was halfway to the kitchen before the man they knew as Oswald looked up into the barrel of her gun.
He jumped off Marco’s body and yanked her partner up in front of him as a shield. Marco was semiconscious and bleeding from the temple. He had already been hastily bound and gagged by Oswald with duct tape. Oswald had one arm around Marco’s chest, holding him up with amazing strength.
In his other hand an enormous bowie knife was pressed tight to Marco’s throat and already dra
wing blood.
“Freeze!” Amanda heard herself shout. It was nearly a scream.
Behind Marco and Oswald she saw the flash of another face, black eyes, short dark hair, and a goatee. A second man. So brief was the image that she wondered if it was the devil or if she’d seen it at all.
Her USP 40 was leveled at Oswald’s head. She was only fifteen feet away. Her accuracy within that range was deadly, her marksmanship unparalleled, but she wavered. It was a decisive moment, one she’d never be able to take back as hard as she might wish. A malevolent white-toothed grin bloomed in slow motion on Oswald’s face as he drew the gleaming blade across Marco’s throat, opening it with a thin scarlet gash. The wound split open with meat-red lips, then in a blink it yawned wide, roaring blood.
Amanda fired her gun, striking Oswald squarely in the face. Both men fell to the floor and she felt an instinctive scream erupt from her throat. She leapt toward Marco’s body and in a bath of blood tried desperately to keep him alive.
CHAPTER 8
Nearly two months after his dinner with Gavin Donohue, Jack gazed at the wallet-size school picture of his ruined little girl. The sight of her small round innocent face with its trusting smile left him floating in a dizzy haze. It felt like nitrous oxide in the dentist’s chair. Only a slim tether kept him connected to reality, maybe even consciousness itself. But soon the moment passed and he felt his feet on the floor of the rented Ford Taurus, his hands tightly gripping the vinyl wheel. His heavy breath had painted a patch of fog on the cold windshield and even steamed up the lower half of his round gold-rimmed glasses.
The fear was back, dressed in uncertainty and revulsion for what he was about to do. He beat it back with raw hatred and rock-hard logic. He needed a purpose. He needed to do something about what went on every day. It wasn’t only his daughter. There were others. An old newspaper clipping he’d taken from the library rattled between his fingers. The headline read: CHILD RAPIST GETS TWO YEARS. Every day Jack could read about the violation of some young girl in the newspaper, each act more horrible than the next.
