by Jaime Maddox
“Too bad. Two hours and thirty-eight minutes. And if I see anyone else coming up the drive, your girlfriend’s going to die.”
“Hawk, calm down! It’s a hunting club. People come and go constantly. I can’t control that.”
“I’ve been in the Poconos for a few months now, Dr. Thrasher. I can tell the difference between the locals riding in their SUVs and the local sheriff. Who, by the way, is also my guest. Anyone else shows up, and I’ll kill them all. And I think you know I’m quite capable of it.”
The hairs on the back of her neck stood up. “I understand. I’ll be there.” The phone went dead.
Abby placed a hand on her back. “Hawk?” she asked.
“He has them at the cabin. He says he’ll kill them if I’m not there by eight thirty.”
Abby looked at the clock beside the bed.
“What do I do?”
“Let’s get Frieda. We’ll call Frank and ask him.”
Frieda wasn’t in her room. They found her at the kitchen table, looking fresh in spite of only five hours of sleep. Ward filled her in.
“You have to call the police, Ward.” The voice of reason was Abby’s.
“Hold on for a second,” Frieda said. “This guy is an egomaniac. Maybe he just wants to talk and find out what you know. You can’t prove anything. Maybe he realizes that. Maybe he’ll just tell you to back off, threaten you.”
“So you don’t think he wants to kill me?”
Frieda shook her head. “He’s been getting away with murder because he’s been sneaky about it. No one suspected a thing. Well, nothing they could prove, anyway. But if he puts a bullet in you, there’s not much room for speculation.”
“He could make it look like an accident. Or a murder-suicide,” Abby suggested.
“It still draws attention to him, doesn’t it?”
Abby shrugged. “Unless he just slips away and pretends he wasn’t there. Shit, Ward, I don’t know. He seems like a coward—killing helpless people. He’s used a syringe to do his work, never a gun. But maybe he has to do something drastic now, because he’s scared.”
“I guess we can’t be sure of anything he’ll do. But he’s in real trouble if the police show up. I think he’ll kill Jess and Zeke, and himself. And Wendy, too, if she isn’t already dead. No, guys. We can’t call the police.”
Abby seemed to read Ward’s mind, and she shook her head. “Ward, no. You can’t go there. It’s too dangerous. You don’t even own a gun.”
Something Hawk had said triggered an idea. “No, but I know a lot of people who do.”
She told Abby and Frieda her thought. “It could work.” Abby agreed, though reluctantly. “But I still think you should call the police.”
“He thinks I’m in Philly. We have a two-hour advantage, and a surprise could work in our favor.”
“If you’re wrong, people could die. One of them could be Jess. Or you.”
Ward reached out for Abby, pulled her close. “Ab, he’s a psychopath, and he’s killed dozens of people already. If he’s caught, he’s going to prison. He won’t allow that. If the police show up, Jess is dead. Her only hope is for us to surprise him. Now are you with me?”
Abby gazed at Ward, who was astonished by what she saw in her eyes. Love. Abby had never said it, but there it was, written in the clouds of concern. The realization was startling, but not quite as amazing as the understanding that she loved Abby, too.
The nod was almost imperceptible, but Abby’s voice was strong. “Let’s go get ’em, tiger.”
Chapter Twenty-nine
Gunshot Wounds
Tom Billings, whose cell-phone number had been stored in Ward’s phone under the first name Quad, held up the arm Ward had set six months earlier and twisted it enthusiastically. “Good as new,” he boasted.
In spite of the circumstances, a smile spread across Ward’s face. Tom was just as she’d remembered him, and that was exactly why she’d reached out to him for help in this mess. He hadn’t been put off by the early morning call or skeptical of the information she’d relayed. He believed her story, and if three citizens of his town were in trouble, he and his friends were more than willing to help get them out of it.
And so, twenty men and their all-terrain vehicles were parked along the old road that led to Towering Pines, and Ward, Abby, and Frieda watched as they unloaded their ATVs from pickup trucks and trailers. Their plan was simple. The men would ride over the mountain and down to the lake, making enough noise to capture Edward Hawk’s attention. Then Frieda would drive up to the cabin in her truck. If the three prisoners were in the cabin, Hawk wouldn’t be able to let Frieda inside. He also wouldn’t shoot her, with those twenty witnesses lingering so close by. Hopefully, he’d leave the shelter of the cabin and meet Frieda outside. That’s when Ward and Abby and a few of the sharpshooters in the bunch would take him down. They were all armed with rifles, loaded with tranquilizers. Ward and Abby would hitch rides over the mountain on the ATVs, then wait with the other shooters in the woods behind the cabin for Hawk to emerge.
It seemed so simple. Ward didn’t want to imagine what would happen if Hawk panicked and decided to shoot everyone and just flee down the mountain. She didn’t think he would, though. He clearly thought he was smarter than everyone else, and Ward hoped his ego would hold out awhile longer, that he’d continue to believe he could outsmart everyone and get away with this. He wanted her, because she knew what he’d done. Hopefully, he’d wait. She glanced at her watch. It wasn’t even seven thirty. He didn’t expect her for an hour. This posse was going to be a surprise.
When everyone was in formation, Ward hugged Frieda and wished her well. “Don’t approach the cabin until you see the guys heading down to the lake.”
“I got it,” she said, and saluted Ward. “Try not to shoot yourself, Doc.”
Frieda had thought she should have been the one with the gun in the woods, but they all agreed she was the least threatening of them all to approach the cabin. Hawk wasn’t likely to panic at the sight of an elderly woman with a fishing rod in search of indoor plumbing. He’d recognize both her and Abby, so they weren’t possibilities. The men, though, would be a threat, and who could predict what would happen if he suddenly felt threatened?
Frieda pulled away in her truck, and Ward and Abby climbed onto their assigned ATVs. Ward rode with Tom, and Abby with his son Tommy. The roar of engines soon filled the quiet, and then they were off, a single line of hunters out on a deadly mission.
The sun hadn’t reached this side of the mountain yet, so it was still cool at this early hour, and as they ventured deeper into the forest, Ward was glad she’d worn jeans and a hoodie for their mission. On the other side of the mountain the sun shone brightly. Would that help or hurt them? A blanket of fog would have been good for cover, but not so good for eyeing a target. Perhaps the bright sun was a good omen.
Years of neglect had caused the road to fill in with weeds, but the drivers seemed unfazed as they climbed the rugged path that zigzagged up the mountainside. In ten minutes they were at the top and began the descent without pause. Halfway down, four of the quads stopped and allowed the others to pass. The six marksmen—Ward, Abby, Tom, Tommy, and another father-son team named RJ and Rex—readied their guns and gathered around Tom for instructions.
Tom pulled a paper out of his pocket. He and Ward had drawn a rough sketch of the hunting club as they’d developed their plan, and now he used it to show them the positions he wanted them to take.
“Tommy, you’re here,” he said, pointing to a spot in the tree line several hundred yards to the right of the cabin’s front door. “You’re going to have to hoof it to get in position, so start moving. You’ll be shooting from behind Hawk, but we have to be prepared that he might come out a window or something like that. Please don’t hurt yourself, or your mother will never forgive me.” Tom winked at his son, who gave him a thumbs-up and began jogging through the woods.
“RJ, you’re going to be here.” His pos
ition was to the right, and he’d be shooting just over Frieda’s shoulder as she stood in the driveway at the cabin.
“The rest of us are here, behind and to the left.”
“Can he escape out the back?” Abby asked.
Tom shook his head. “The cabin is built into the mountainside, with no windows on the back side. He has to come out the front door or the door on the left. We can’t cover the front of the cabin, except from this bank of trees where Tommy’s going to be. There’s nothing but open space between the front porch and the lake, so we won’t have anywhere to hide. Hopefully, he comes out and walks left toward Frieda.”
Their approach down the mountain was hundreds of yards to the right of where the SUVs had gone, and they stayed well back in the woods to keep under cover. When the cabin was in sight, they stopped. Ward scanned the area for movement but saw none. Two vehicles were parked next to the cabin, and she recognized them both. The missing hearse from the funeral home and Zeke Benson’s truck.
At Tom’s signal, they fanned out. Ward was grateful for the thick, low-lying pine branches that hid them from view. They were nearly at the clearing behind the cabin before she could clearly see it, and if she was having trouble seeing the cabin, Hawk would surely have trouble spotting her posse sneaking through the woods. They took cover behind a line of pines and waited as Frieda’s truck slowly made its way up the long drive. In the distance, Ward could see the ATVs parked by the lake, the drivers gathered around them.
Show time.
*
Pushing aside the dusty curtain, Edward looked past the rocking chairs, across the massive front porch of the cabin and the expanse of flowered field beyond. The convoy of ATVs that had come up over the mountain was now parked, and it looked like the riders were preparing for a day of fishing. Fuck! Just what he needed. It was only a matter of time before one of them had to use the bathroom and headed up to the cabin. He had to get out of here.
Glancing at his watch, he weighed his options. It was 7:45. Ward Thrasher would be here in less than an hour. But did he have that long? He didn’t think so. He’d have to kill these three now and then intercept her on the road. There was only one road to the cabin, so she’d have to use it. He could meet her there, at the entrance to the hunting club, a mile away from the prying eyes of the guys on the ATVs. She’d have to slow down to make the turn from the main road onto the dirt and gravel driveway into the property. He’d shoot her then, head straight to JFK, be in Florida in six hours and out of the country by nightfall. What other choice did he have?
He sighed. How had this gone wrong so quickly? He’d been successful for twenty years because of intelligence and meticulous planning. Other than the first time, when he’d been driven by anger, his kills had been well orchestrated and unemotional. He’d deviated from that pattern by spontaneously abducting Jess, and now he was in trouble. He had three witnesses to get rid of, and his avenue of escape was closing quickly.
He’d planned on a shooting, a double murder-suicide, but he could hardly start shooting with the riders so close. They’d be raiding the cabin before he had a chance to get out of the driveway. If only he hadn’t brought Zeke, he’d have had one less headache to deal with. He might have been able to sneak the women out of the cabin, but not the six-foot-tall, two-hundred-pound sheriff. But Zeke was a talker, and he’d given Edward a lot of useful information on that day he’d brought him to the cabin to go shooting. Jess was in a lesbian phase. She’d been involved with Ward Thrasher. Jess adored the lake and had spent much of her free time here when she was young.
When Jess disappeared, Zeke had been bound to show up at the cabin looking for her, possibly with reinforcements, so he’d figured it was better to get him out of the way from the start. At least then, the sheriff wouldn’t surprise him at an inopportune moment. Who knew his plan would turn into such a disaster.
It had taken hours of intimidation before Jess finally told him what had aroused her suspicions. It was so ironic that, under other circumstances, Edward might have laughed. He’d killed a hundred mostly innocent patients, and the one that tripped him up in the end had been one who really deserved to die. Anyone stupid enough to ride an all-terrain vehicle in the dark forest while under the influence of alcohol should be killed before having a chance to reproduce and make more idiots.
Christian Cooney had been alive when he came in to the ER but had multiple broken ribs and a collapsed lung. His heart was bruised and beating irregularly. He was in shock, with pitifully inadequate veins. The paramedics had tried multiple times to insert an intravenous catheter but failed. Edward had inserted a large catheter into the subclavian, the large vein beneath the clavicle, just a few inches from the heart. When the nurse turned her back, he injected a large shot of air into the tubing. It only took a second for the air pocket to make its way to the heart, and the air lock it created instantly shut down the man’s circulation. Blood couldn’t get out of the heart to the lungs for oxygen. There was no blood for the lungs to send back to the heart, no blood to feed the brain and coronary arteries. Almost instantaneously, the heart rhythm went from normal and steady to a fatal, fibrillating dance of death.
Edward had worried as the nurse began CPR. Sometimes, the chest compressions squeezed the air bolus through the circulation or broke it up into tiny, more manageable bubbles of air, and the patient survived. Fortunately, that good luck had never befallen his patients. On one prior occasion when he’d killed with air, he’d had quite a scare when the patient experienced a transient return of his pulse, but the heart had quickly tired and given out. This time, he’d watched the monitor intently, ordered meds which he knew would be useless, even volunteered to do compressions himself, which he was careful to do incorrectly. However, the broken ribs had made CPR difficult, as the full force of energy wasn’t transmitted into the heart. The resuscitation efforts were futile, and Edward had another death certificate to add to his collection.
No one could prove he’d murdered Cooney. But Ward Thrasher, following him on his journey through the mountains, had seen some sort of pattern. That wasn’t truly a mistake on his part, was it? How many ways were there to murder a medical patient without leaving evidence? He only had so many options. Repeating his methods was necessary if he wanted to continue killing. And he wanted to continue killing. As soon as Ward arrived, he’d kill all of them and then get out of town. He’d move someplace far away and start over.
Then another thought occurred to him. What if Thrasher had somehow arrived in Garden early and come over the mountain on those ATVs? What if she hadn’t been in Philly but was still in the mountains and was out there now, waiting for him? He looked down the hill, trying to get a better look at the riders, then snagged a pair of binoculars hanging on a hook. He couldn’t see their faces clearly from this distance, but they all appeared to be burly men. Thrasher looked a little boyish in scrubs, but she wasn’t that tall, and she was thin. Still, he wondered. Could she have disguised herself? He looked around the cabin suspiciously.
“Who are they?” he demanded of Zeke as he reached over and brutally pulled the gag from Zeke’s mouth.
After swallowing a few times, Zeke finally found his voice. “I imagine it’s the guys who ride up here all the time. Mostly retired guys, some of their sons. They ride and fish.”
Edward used his knife to slice the tape that bound Zeke’s legs to the chair, then roughly pulled him to his feet. “Take a look. Tell me who they are.”
Zeke took the proffered binoculars and raised his hands, still cuffed, and gazed through them. “Can’t say. They’re too far away,” he said as he set the binoculars on the windowsill.
“There was no one fucking here that day we came to shoot!”
Zeke shrugged and backed up as Edward motioned him toward his chair. As Edward was about to retape the sheriff’s legs, a noise drew his attention back to the window. “What now?” he asked as he pulled the curtain aside and peered out. A red pickup truck had pulled up at the side of th
e cabin. “I don’t fucking believe this. Who the hell is that?”
He looked at Zeke. “Come here and tell me who this is!”
Zeke struggled to his feet.
“I don’t have all day, Sheriff!”
“My balance isn’t so good. Don’t forget, you put quite a lump on my head.”
“I’ll do more than that if you don’t move a little faster.”
Zeke swayed and reached out to grab the counter as he walked that way, resting a moment.
“Move it!”
A second later, he stood beside Hawk at the window and pushed the curtains aside. “Looks like Frieda Henderfield to me,” he said, and in a flash he raised his right elbow and jammed it into Hawk’s nose. He followed the initial blow with a whack to the head, using the binoculars, and several swift kicks in the groin.
With Hawk kneeling on the floor, bleeding profusely, Zeke opened the cabin door. “Frieda Henderfield, I’ve never been so happy to see someone in all my life. Could you do me a favor and call the state police?”
Chapter Thirty
Traumatic Arrest
Ward ran toward the cabin as soon as she heard Zeke’s booming voice, with Abby and the two men right behind her. The men below had been carefully watching from their place by the lake, and Ward saw them all racing to the ATVs for the trip up the hill. As she burst through the door of the cabin, she nearly cried with relief.
Zeke had his gun in his cuffed hands, trained on Edward Hawk, who was curled on the floor, blood pouring from his nose. Hawk’s moans of anguish weren’t the only cries in the cabin. Jess and Wendy, both gagged and bound, sat in chairs beside the cabin’s large table, rocking and murmuring as Frieda worked to free them. They seemed to be making a frantic effort to get her attention. Did they possibly think she wouldn’t notice them?
She closed the few feet to the table in a fraction of a second, pulling the tape first from Jess’s mouth and then from Wendy’s.
