by LS Sygnet
It cannot be personal, Sprout. When someone wrongs you, you cannot react to it. They'll eventually get what they've got coming to them without a nudge from you.
The advice had come after I punched Timmy Horton in the nose as hard as I could because he wouldn't stop calling me a scarecrow. I was nine years old. And while my act of aggression had done little more than humiliate Timmy, my father was determined to nip that urge in the bud before it grew too violent.
As with all of his advice, the older I got, the more sense it made. In light of his crimes, the tidbits of wisdom became a treasure trove of how-to tips to avoid Dad's pitfalls.
I broke the rule. I snapped. I let anger override my common sense. I couldn't deal with the pain that Rick's double life caused. It wasn't because I loved him. I'm not even sure I know what love feels like. But Rick's stupidity turned my comfortable life inside out. It dredged up questions about my character, and frankly, I didn't want people remembering the gene pool from whence I came.
He had to die.
It should've never happened the way it had. In retrospect, I couldn't ignore the sense I got that night that Rick goaded me into pulling the trigger.
"Do you think your hands are clean in this, Helen? They're not. I might've let you walk away from the marriage without a fuss, but it won't save you when this case goes to court and the world learns everything."
"What do you mean, when they learn everything? I had no idea what you were doing, and there isn't a shred of legitimate evidence to the contrary."
"Except our wedding."
I hated him. It boiled in my veins every time I thought of how it all turned out in the end. All those years of playing dutiful wife, believing that my husband loved me and wanted to be with me, his objection to my career as a criminal profiler for the FBI on the grounds of my personal safety. It had all been a ruse.
Unbelievable. I had been taken in my own trap, beaten at my own game. Rick used me. He never loved me. I was an assignment, an insurance policy in case the inevitable ever happened. What sort of jury could overlook the fact that this criminal was married to an FBI agent? Either I was dirty too, or the FBI looked horrible for not vetting its agents better. And if that can of worms opened, Rick made sure I understood that the rest would be exposed too.
Not just Wendell, my beloved father rotting away in prison after my mother tried to kill him. No, there was another branch on the family tree now, one by marriage, but more damaging than I had ever conceived.
"You met him at our wedding, Helen. Remember? I said – this is my cousin Dan. You said – pleased to meet you Dan. Where are you from?"
Darkwater Bay. Uncle Sully was Datello's tie to organized crime. Cousin Danny was Rick's. And I looked like the world's biggest idiot.
While he taunted me for ignorant complicity, the grip on the gun I held behind his ear increased until suddenly, my arm jerked. Rick slumped face forward in the dirt. Yes, I had taken him down that dirt trail with every intention of killing him. I just figured I'd be present for the moment when it happened.
I stood over the lifeless corpse, his blood soaking the ground like oil staining a thirsty sponge. My eyes memorized the trees, the way the leaves fluttered in the gentle night breeze. Up higher, they recorded the constellations in the sky, the shape of the clouds that drifted over the moon and obscured it. Ears echoed with the protests of birds when a crack in the night disturbed their sanctuary. And those same dancing leaves whispered a cacophony of support.
He had it coming, Helen. Go home and be grateful that this is over, once and for all.
The irony was that even though there would be no Perry Mason moment in a court of law that would dredge up my past, expose my ignorance or cast doubt on my character, the damage would never be undone. As a matter of course, I became a suspect anyway. My life was still over, a life that comforted me for many reasons, the most of which was the proximity to my father and the knowledge that one day, I could conceivably speak to him again if only in an official capacity.
Rick Hamilton ruined my life, so I had taken his.
Was I an incarnation of Jerry Lowe, with my agenda to silence Danny Datello the same way I had closed the door on my ex-husband? I didn't know the answer anymore. For the first time in my life, I felt unsure of what I was doing.
The only thing I knew without doubt was that I did not want to end up like Dad. And even more, I didn't want to evolve into a monster like Jerry Lowe. Part of me feared it was already too late.
Chapter 39
A gentle shake pulled me away from my distant reflection. A little bit. I was aware that I was moving. Standing now. Someone was saying my name.
"Helen? Helen, talk to me. What's wrong?"
Yes, I really was in Darkwater Bay. I had already put a plan into motion. Sincerity slammed into me in the form of Orion's concerned expression. Johnny. For some reason, I seem to be naturally drawn to the wrong people. Rick Hamilton. Jerry Lowe. And all around me are genuinely good guys who are all but invisible. David Levine. Charlie Haverston. Even Chris Darnell turned out to be one of the trustworthy, and I despised him.
One good guy made his way through my perception filter and stirred something deep inside me. He stood in front of me wearing every emotion he felt like a badge of honor. My fingers moved of their own volition, stroked the side of his face tenderly. "Johnny." So much he didn't know, couldn't possibly know. If he did, the emotion in his guileless eyes would most certainly die. I didn't want that. Inexplicably, it mattered to me what these people, Johnny specifically, thought of me.
Could I reinvent myself at this late stage in life? Could I be a better person, find the honor that Wendell hadn't really instilled in me? Was that what I wanted?
"Helen." His chest heaved with a gulping breath. "Let's get through this case first."
"I don't know if I can." How could I separate who I had become from the evil deeds of Jerry Lowe? How could I sit in judgment on him and try to trick him into confessing his crimes when I was as guilty as he was?
Johnny pulled me into his chest and hugged me tightly. I felt his lips whispering over my hair. "Oh honey. I was afraid this would hit you hard at some point. You're safe. He can't hurt you. I'm so sorry that he got as close as he did, but I promise you, it'll never happen again."
I wanted to laugh. Of course he would attribute emotions to me that I didn't feel. Johnny wanted to believe I was shaken over the recent attempts on my life. It's always easier to let people believe the lie. I didn't see that I had any choice at this point. To correct him would involve a confession.
The other option felt much better. Stand here in his embrace and soak up the comfort offered. Sweet lethargy seeped into my bones. For an insane moment, I wanted to stay wrapped up in the safety he offered for the rest of my life.
"I'm calling people I can trust in to do this. You need to go home and rest," Orion said.
"No!"
"Helen, it's all right."
"It isn't all right. I have to see this through. I have to confront him for what he's done to these women. Johnny, I'm fine." I stepped away from him. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have done that."
"Are you sure?"
No, but I have to pretend to be certain. "I'm positive. Let's end this. The sooner we find Lowe's death-mobile, the sooner we can go arrest him. He's not going to be content filling in the blanks for Darnell indefinitely."
Johnny procured bolt cutters from the trunk of his car. The miracle was that I didn't find it odd to carry them around in case of emergency. He snapped the industrial sized padlock on the garage door and hefted it high above our heads.
I shined a flashlight inside.
The term used to describe this type of camper was a silver bullet. First constructed in 1936, the model had become an enduring symbol of luxury camping and life on the road. I took a tentative step into the neatly organized space in the garage and shined the light on the riveted aluminum body. The company emblem Airstream looked as pristine as the day it had been appli
ed on an assembly line. No dings. No tarnish. No discernible wear. Still, I estimated its age at minimum of forty years.
"What do you bet that when we open this bad boy we won't find bunks or booth style seating?" Orion asked.
He was right. Lowe probably gutted and customized the interior to suit his purposes long ago. "Ready to use your bolt cutter on the door?" A beam of light from my left hand flashed over the locked door. "Funny. He's got three key-only deadbolts on it, but he chooses to secure with a padlock while the thing is in storage. That's arrogance for you."
The padlock on the twenty-four foot camper was no match for Orion. The door opened noiselessly, well oiled and without a single creak to betray its age.
"Shine on, Doc."
I stepped closer. The light bounced off the opposite wall. "No dining booth." I gingerly stepped up the tiny stairs that descended when the door opened. Lowe had indeed gutted the interior. A straight-back wooden chair was bolted to the floor. Iron rings had been fastened to the walls near the ceiling and floor. Next to them hung chains in a variety of strengths. I shined the flashlight over them. Some of the links appeared to be intentionally weakened.
"He wanted them to fight and gave them every scrap of hope he could," Orion said. "What a sick fuck."
At the other end of the camper was a bed, also bolted to the floor. It was covered with a rubber sheet. "And that makes cleanup a snap," I murmured.
Orion was rummaging through the single cabinet in the camper's interior. "Bowie knives, handcuffs, empty blood vials, needles and syringes and hello … what have we here?"
I shined the light at his black-gloved hand. Johnny held a small vial of clear liquid between thumb and index fingers for my inspection. I stepped close and read the label. Succinylcholine. "How much is in the cabinet?"
"Just this one vial," Johnny said. "Unless you can give me some light to get a better look."
I directed the beam into the confined space, but he was right. Only a single vial remained. "How did Lowe get his hands on this? Succinylcholine is highly controlled."
"You can get anything off the 'net, Doc. Sometimes you need to show a prescription or have a DEA number, but those are a hell of a lot easier to come by than you'd imagine. When was the last time you were in a doctor's office?"
I couldn't recall.
"These doctors leave their prescription pads laying around. A shrewd thief doesn't take the whole pad. He peels off a quarter or a third of it, and the doctors are so busy, they don't even notice anything is missing."
"And the thief does what, forges the doctor's signature?"
"All he has to do is be generally illegible. Those online pharmacies aren't all shining examples of ethics. They fulfill the technical requirement under the law, end of responsibility."
"What else is in that cabinet?" I asked.
Orion fished around and pulled out a small video camera, one of the old ones so popular in the '90s. "You don't suppose ..."
"Are there tapes?"
He nodded and procured a handful of the small video cassettes with his other hand. "We should get this stuff back to OSI before we view it, Helen. You don't have to see this here."
But I already yanked the camera from his grasp. My eyes darted around the torture chamber Lowe used for God only knew how many crimes. My thumb flicked over the power button on the camera at the same time that I noticed a long screw protruding through the bottom of a shelf at the far end of the camper. "There," I said. "He mounted the camera there."
Johnny grunted his disgust. "That's incredibly stupid, to record the crimes he committed."
"Not when he needs to relive his crime over and over again, Johnny." I flipped the view screen out from the camera and pressed play. The scene was somewhat familiar, the carpeting, the coffee table, but with subtle differences in the environement from the first time I saw it. Magazines were fanned out over the surface of the table instead of stacked neatly in three piles of three. One lay open, the front pages tucked beneath the back as if the reader had simply been interrupted perhaps to answer the doorbell and left her magazine open.
"Helen, I don't think we should watch this here."
I waved him to silence, watched Gwen Foster back into the frame of the video. She was shaking her head. Tears streamed from her eyes. Her softly rasped, "no" seemed unnaturally loud. The man, Lowe, was head to toe in black, his mask in place over his face.
"Where is the child, Gwen? Did you think you could really keep her from me after all these years? I want to know where she is. Does she look like you? Like Brighton? Like your dearly departed Auntie Gwen?"
A trembling hand clamped over Foster's lips.
"Helen, please," Johnny murmured as he crowded my back. "We shouldn't see this here, not like this." His hand reached for the camera.
I slapped it away with one snarled warning. "If you don't have the stomach for it, wait outside. I need to know what happened to her."
Lowe reached for her, the buttons that peppered the living room floor went flying in vivid motion on the video. My eyes fluttered shut. I didn't want to see this part, didn't want to see a woman abused in the worst possible way a second time. But Lowe's voice still reached my ears and imprinted Gwen Foster's horror in my brain forever.
"Fight me, Gwen. You know I need it. Fight me, and end this once and for all. I'll find our daughter ... one way or another, I'll find her, and she'll never see it coming. Will she fight me?"
"Christ," Johnny rasped. "He had no idea that Vinnie was his son."
"He couldn't accept the truth, Johnny," I said so quietly it was barely audible over Gwen's sobbing. "His fantasy is everything to him."
I felt the rage radiate from his tense body. "I can't watch this."
"I need to see who actually killed her." Another thought occurred to me as the vantage point of the camera changed. "And someone is taping this for Lowe, Johnny."
Gwen lay stiffly on the floor even after Lowe finished with her. He sneered a warning not to move, though I wondered who it was intended for. He disappeared from the frame. The camera jarred again, came to rest on a steady surface, and my other suspect came into view.
"I could've been his daughter you know," Candy Blevins chuckled. "I'm like him. Fearless. You could never be my mother, though, all weak and sobbing. Bitches like you make me sick. He might need the fight to kill you, but I don't. Get up."
"God, Helen, please shut it off," Johnny rasped.
I stared at the two by three inch screen, watching Foster rise so docilely, Blevins produce the garrote and slip it around Foster's neck. On some level, it didn't surprise me that Gwen didn't fight. As the life drained out of her already glassy eyes, I realized something. Lowe had already killed the person that walked around in Gwen Bennett Foster's body. He slaughtered her years ago. Last Tuesday was only a formality.
I shuddered.
"Are you okay?" Johnny asked when I shut the tape off before Lowe returned from wherever he'd gone.
He couldn't know the conflict that roiled in my gut, the suddenly alert conscience that whispered the truth I couldn't deny anymore. You're no different than they are, Helen. Cold, calculating, homicidal. I threw out a red herring rather than own my guilt. "I'm glad he didn't shoot me up with succinylcholine the other day. I could've died very quickly without medical attention."
"He'll never hurt you or anyone else again, Helen." Orion ripped his cell phone out of his pocket and dialed. "It's me. We've got the crime scene on wheels. Send the state forensics guys over here, Chris. Helen and I will wait for them to arrive, and then I'll deliver her to OSI so she can suck the truth out of Lowe whether he wants it or not."
"Darnell?" I asked.
"Yeah. Lowe and the others are getting antsy."
"No doubt." I paused a moment to debate whether I should ask something that I noticed throughout the evening.
"What?" Orion's mouth slanted downward and pulled his eyebrows into a V along with it.
"I've noticed that when you talk to Darn
ell, you're not really asking for direction. He's not the head of OSI, is he?"
"Technically, that would be Governor Collangelo."
"Practically speaking, Darnell takes orders from you."
"And you miss nothing when you're paying attention," he muttered.
"That upsets you?"
"My situation, the success of OSI depends on my ability to maintain this façade that we created. Chris is in charge. I'm nothing but a pain in the ass ex-cop turned security specialist."
"So the business isn't legitimate."
"Oh, it is," Johnny said. "And very lucrative, and 100 percent mine. I just have very little to do with the day to day operations. Nobody at Security Specialists has a clue what I'm really doing, and I really need to keep it that way."
"What do they think?"
He shot a lascivious grin.
"You're kidding. They think you're out being a wealthy playboy?"
"And taking on select private investigations for special clients. Typically young, wealthy, single women."
In light of what we'd just seen, his levity seemed perverse. "You really are a pig."
"Hey, none of my clients would ever claim I was inappropriate, because I haven't been. Is it my fault that the world simply assumes that these women understand discretion better than most and that I'm too much of a gentleman to kiss and tell?"
"You're not really a womanizer?"
His grin widened. "I wouldn't go that far either."
Really perverse. I stepped out of the camper and moved to the garage door to wait for the state crime lab to arrive. "Won't it look odd if this scene is processed by OSI?"
"Did I piss you off back there with all that stuff about –"
"Don't be ridiculous. I gather that your precarious situation with staying off the radar is why you won't be part of Lowe's interrogation either."
"This case is an old wound on Darkwater Bay. It's been festering for longer than anybody realizes. However, it's the tip of the iceberg where crime is concerned. Don't get me wrong. It's a step in the right direction, and I'm thrilled that you figured everything out in short order. In fact, if I ever wrap my head around how fast you uncovered what it took me years to find, I'll probably have a serious bout of insecurity over it."
