Bound by Moonlight

by Nancy Gideon

  “As long as he had an innocent young girl to torture and rape. Didn’t that bother you just a little bit, putting those girls in the same position you’d been in?” Cee Cee couldn’t keep the disgust from her tone.

  “So, Dr. Farraday,” Babineau cut in to keep things civil and moving forward, “you returned each month, bringing in the new, carrying out the old.”

  “Yes. Ritual. Routine.”

  “Here in New Orleans, and before that in Las Vegas, in St. Louis, in Boston.”

  “You did your homework. Yes.”

  “But they were still alive when you picked them up.”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you killed them. Why?”

  “Donald would have been very upset to think they’d died. I told him I took them home.”

  Babineau and Cee Cee exchanged an astonished blink. Cee Cee had to say it.

  “He would torture, starve, and rape them for weeks, but just didn’t have the heart to put them out of their misery?”

  “That was punishment, Detectives, learned at one of those pricey institutions I placed him in. You can see the physical scars on him, if not the mental. But as far as killing, Donald couldn’t bring himself to step on a bug, let along protect himself.”

  “So you cleaned up after him.”

  “He was my son. My problem. It was the least I could do for him. I’d tell the girls I’d come to take them home, and they were all too willing to cooperate. I’d take them someplace isolated and inject them first, so they’d feel no pain, no fear.”

  “And kill them.”

  “What else could I do? He was my son.” That was said like it was only a biological fact, with no trace of emotion behind it. She regarded them then with interest. “What gave me away? I was so careful.”

  “Your fish tank.”

  “Fish tank?”

  “The aquarium chemicals were on Marjorie Cole.”

  The doctor laughed. “I’d just changed the water before I went to pick her up. Such a small, insignificant thing. I never gave it a thought.”

  “And your perfume. We thought it was men’s cologne. That threw me for a while because you don’t wear it at the clinic.”

  “It is cologne. It was my husband’s. I only wear it when I go out. It comforts me to think he’s with me.”

  “And you think he’d want to be with you, with the things you were doing?”

  No reply.

  Cee Cee rolled out of her chair and paced to the far wall, unable to maintain a stoic front. She squeezed her eyes shut and concentrated on slow, even breaths as her partner continued.

  “Dr. Farraday, you can do one final thing for your son and to help yourself. The last girl, Kelly Schoenbaum or Kikki Valentine, is still alive. Where does he take them?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t have to protect him anymore. Save this one life, Doctor. Let her live to make better choices.”

  “I’m sorry, Detective. I really don’t know. I dropped them off and picked them up at the cabin in the park. He wouldn’t tell me where he took them. He said that was private.”

  STAN SCHOENBAUM WAS holding a cup of cold coffee in unsteady hands with Joey Boucher babysitting him, while MacCreedy handled the paperwork. His gaze lifted, and when he saw their faces, his features fell. They didn’t have to tell him the news.

  “What am I going to tell Marilyn? That because of me our daughter is going to die?”

  The other three exchanged uncomfortable looks, not knowing what to say. Boucher took a deep breath and got out of his chair, crossing over to Cee Cee. He kept his voice very low, for her and Babineau alone.

  “You know there’s hardly any chance of them finding her. Maybe there’s another way. He brought back Babineau’s little boy. Maybe there’s something he could do—considering what he is and all.”

  MAX SAT ON the porch, rocking slowly in the glider, dressed in slouchy jeans, a black tee shirt, and his red high-tops. He couldn’t rest until he knew she was safe.

  Giles came up the steps, back from dropping Oscar off at school and Tina at her home to take care of some household matters. He took a look at the figure slumped on the glider, then settled against the porch rail to light a cigarette.

  “Playing hooky today, boss man?”

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  “Taking the day off.”

  “Yes. That’s what I’m doing.” He closed his eyes, rocking.

  “Want company?”

  “No.”

  “Want my opinion?”

  He slit on eye open. “No.”

  He waited, but Giles just smoked in silence. Max brooded, unhappy, dissatisfied, not knowing what to do.

  “What do you see when you look at me?”

  “Whaddaya mean?”

  Max waved his hand to encompass himself from head to toe. “What am I?”

  “The fella who pays me damned good not to answer questions like that.” At Max’s scowl, he sighed. “At one time, that would have been an easy one. A seriously scary bogeyman creeping around at Jimmy’s back, threatening to eat my eyes for breakfast.”

  Max didn’t smile at the reminder. “And now?”

  “Someone I trust enough to march up to the doors of hell and knock if you sent me.”

  “Why? I don’t understand. Why would you do that for me?” He shut out the sound of his mother’s voice. You’re special. Blessed.

  No hesitation. “Because you care, Max.”

  He blinked. “About what?”

  “Everything.” Giles made an expansive gesture. “Every damned thing, like it’s your responsibility, your problem. Jimmy, now Jimmy was a good man to work for, fair and generous. But there was no soul to Jimmy Legere. He didn’t trust nobody. He wouldn’t have gone out of his way for the needs of another living being unless there was something in it for him.” He waited for Max to nod in reluctant agreement before going on, his tone a bit tougher.

  “You could learn something from that, Max. You need to take a step back and ask what’s in it for you before you go giving everything away, a chunk of you at a time, to all them that’s got their hands out. You have to save something for yourself or you’ll be no good to any of them. You need to prioritize, to learn to say no.”

  “I have responsibilities. I want to do what’s right. How do I choose? How do I pick one and let the others fall away?”

  “What’s closest to your heart?” A chuckle. “Don’t answer. I can see her in your eyes. And that’s the problem, isn’t it: Why isn’t she here? Why aren’t you asking her these questions instead of listening to some dumb wiseguy?”

  “I’m not what she needs right now.”

  Giles laughed then, a big insulting laugh that had Max thinking about eating eyes on toast again.

  “You wouldn’t say that if you’d seen her come plowing in here after that business with your daddy, ready to cut me off at the knees if I tried to keep her away. She may not know what she needs, but it’s you she wants.”

  Max’s posture straightened. His head came up, his eyes grew bright. The very air about him seemed to vibrate.

  Giles flicked the remains of his cigarette onto the lawn and came away from the rail with a grin. “Why don’t you ask her?” he drawled, then went inside.

  Max waited for the orange and black vehicle to skid to a stop at the bottom of the steps. His initial anticipation took a plunge when he saw she wasn’t alone. Another unmarked cop car pulled in behind hers.

  Business first.

  Babineau and Boucher he could understand, but the sight of the third man getting out of the second car with the young officer had him bristling with outrage. He snarled, “What are you doing on my property?”

  Cee Cee motioned the others to stay put while she climbed up onto the porch.

  At first Joey’s suggestion had shocked her, but then she thought perhaps it was exactly the bridge needed to bring these two sides of her world closer. She knew from experience that working together to
right a wrong was the quickest way to erase differences. Teamwork. Loyalty. Trust. Things all of them understood and respected. So she’d brought her side to Max’s door.

  She’d known it was a risky idea bringing Schoenbaum, but he refused to be left behind. The others thought the sight of a father’s grief would overcome Max’s objections, but as his eyes narrowed into glittering slits, Cee Cee feared they were wrong.

  “Max, I need to talk to you.”

  When she touched his arm he took a denying step back, bumping the glider, sending it banging against the house. His breathing was fast, his tension palpable.

  “Max, I don’t know what’s between you and Schoenbaum, and right now I can’t afford to care. I need you to do something for me. For me, Max. Not for him.”

  “What might that be?” So wary.

  “Donald Lamb, the killer we’ve been after, is dead. His latest victim is still hidden away. We don’t know where she is.”

  “She’s in the swamps, Mr. Savoie.” Joey Boucher spoke up. “I—we thought maybe you could help find her.”

  “You thought wrong.” He started to turn away, but Cee Cee gripped his elbow and put herself in his path.

  “Max, she doesn’t have much time.”

  “She’s seventeen years old.” Schoenbaum’s voice quavered. “He’s had her for twenty-five days. I can’t even begin to imagine . . .”

  “I can.” Max flung off Cee Cee’s hand. “Would you like me to tell you? Would you like me to tell you about the cold that burns into the bones, and the hunger that cuts like knife blades until you’d eat anything you thought you could keep down? About fear so huge it’s a suffocating hand around your throat, so tight you can’t even pray to die? Imagine that, you son of a bitch. Imagine that while she’s out there and you can’t do a damned thing about it.”

  “Max!” Cee Cee’s tone reflected her dismay. “Stop it.”

  But all the impotent horror and fear of that child who’d once crawled underneath the glider was too excruciating to bear.

  “Imagine what it’s like to be young and helpless in the hands of monsters. To suffer for their hatred, their drunken viciousness, to beg and cry and plead while they cut you, kick you, and hurt you until your mind goes blank from the shock.”

  “Max, please.” Charlotte pressed her palms against his chest. His heart pounded with an explosive force. “Stop.”

  “That’s what I said to them. To him”—Max glared down at Schoenbaum—“and his two partners.” He caught her wrists and yanked her hands down as he looked past her into a man’s eyes that had been cold and merciless then.

  “Then put yourself in the place of the man who has to look at what’s been done to a child he loves, to a child who never did anything to deserve such cruel abuse. To have that child look up through no-longer-innocent eyes and ask why, and you have no answer. Then you’ll know what Jimmy Legere was thinking while he watched the pieces of your friend, Detective Peyton, bleed out onto the ground. Get the fuck off my property.”

  Shocked speechless, Cee Cee put up a staying hand to her colleagues and followed Max into the house as he stalked into Jimmy’s study.

  “Max!”

  He stopped at Jimmy’s desk, his hands gripping the edge of it. “Go away, Charlotte. Don’t ask me to help that man.”

  “You can’t blame a child for the deeds of the father.”

  “Can’t I? He didn’t have a problem doing it. He didn’t have any problem stomping on my hands, breaking my bones because he couldn’t get to Jimmy. He and Peyton and another of their pals didn’t have any problem smashing my nose and mouth with a Jim Beam bottle, then forcing me to swallow the whiskey along with chips of glass and teeth.

  “They used a Taser. It scrambled me somehow so I couldn’t shift, couldn’t protect myself. I couldn’t stop them. When they were done, I had to crawl home. I was eight years old.”

  His breathing was raw. “Now he knows how Jimmy felt when he couldn’t find me in town. He’ll know how Jimmy felt when he finally came home to find me curled up and whining like an animal under the porch glider, so beaten and broken all I could do was lay my face on his shoes.”

  Oh, Max. Poor little boy. Her eyes were damp and she placed her palm between his tense shoulder blades, rubbing gently, wishing there was a way to erase the pain she was forcing him to recall.

  “Baby, I’m so sorry. But this isn’t about Stan Schoenbaum and those others who hurt you. This is about a teenage girl who’ll die alone if we don’t find her. It’s got to be about that girl, Max.”

  “Why? Why does it have to be? Why can’t it be about me? About a little boy in the brutal hands of those who should have protected him. Policemen, Charlotte. Your colleagues. Your friends. None of you gave a damn about me. None of you would have cared if I had died in that ditch, bleeding and alone.”

  “I would have. I would have cared.”

  He turned to face her, his eyes flat and unblinking. “Then don’t ask me to do this, Charlotte. It’s too much. Not for him.”

  “For me.”

  “It’s not about you! Don’t make it about you.” Yet even as he shouted that, a part of him realized that it was. It had everything to do with two teenage girls in a warehouse, suffering at the hands of monsters. The anguish of that tore through the last of his composure.

  “I saved you, Charlotte. I rescued you. Don’t make me into someone who can save them all. It’s not what I am. It’s not what I do. I’m a destroyer, not a savior. I don’t care about that girl. I don’t care what happens to her. I just hope it’s something so awful, he won’t be able to close his eyes for the rest of his life without seeing the horror of it and remembering what he did to me.”

  She had to stop those awful words from pouring out of him. Cruel, hate-filled words so searingly vicious, they were a knife to her heart. Words that said a bridge between their two worlds could never stand.

  Her palm dealt out a silencing blow, with just enough force to stun him, and bring his hand up defensively to cover his mouth before he turned his back on her.

  “Detective,” Giles said softly. She hadn’t known he was in the room. He put his hand on her arm. “Time to go.”

  When she balked, he tugged insistently. She shook him off at the hallway and continued on with her shoulders squared to the front door.

  Sighing, Giles turned back to face an equally combatant posture and waited. A second. Two.

  With a roar, Max grabbed the edge of the heavy wooden desk and flung it, computer and all, through the French doors, across the porch, and out into the yard. As shredded lace curtains settled over the broken glass, Max sank down slowly to his knees, rocking forward, lacing his hands over the back of his neck to begin a soft wailing howl.

  The low, mournful sound made the hairs stand up on Giles’s arms as he placed his hand on Max’s shoulder.

  “That’s not quite what I meant, boss man. Not what I had in mind at all.”

  __________

  “HE WON’T DO it,” she said tightly as she came down the front porch steps.

  “Damn him, that selfish son of a—”

  Her hard shove drove Schoenbaum down to the ground. “You fucker,” she growled as she stepped over him. “Stay the hell away from me. Boucher, with us.”

  Babineau and Boucher exchanged glances as she got behind the wheel of the car. They climbed in wordlessly and were thrown back into the seats as she stomped on the gas, kicking up loose stones to shower the downed detective.

  “SAVOIE. LEAVE A message.”

  “Heya, Max. I’m just sitting here in this crappy station missing you, thinking about you, wishing I was home sharing a meal, sharing a conversation, sharing a bed with you. Just wanted to let you know that, and to tell you that I’m sorry I pushed so hard.

  “I should have been thinking about you. I shouldn’t have asked. I do care, and I do understand, and it’s okay.” A pause while she drew in a shaky breath. “Talk to you soon.”

  As the last hours of the wor
kday wore down to a miserable end, Cee Cee knew she couldn’t let things go until she made contact with him. She had a mountain of paperwork chaining her to her desk, following their booking of Judith Farraday, but she took another minute and dialed the house.

  “Helen, is Max there?”

  “No, Detective.”

  “Do you know when he’ll be back? I need to talk to him. I need to . . . I need to talk to him.”

  There was a long pause, then Helen’s crisp response. “He said he had some business to take care of out on the bayou. But then, you’d know about that— and what it’s going to cost him, don’t you?”

  Twenty-two

  MAX HATED THE smell of stagnant water and decay. He didn’t mind the damp, the cold, or the filth. But the stink that called up his half-remembered fears unsettled him. Donald Lamb’s scent kept him going, following the faint hints Lamb left when he’d pull a branch out of the way so his shallow pirogue could slip through.

  Max kept to the paths and boggy surfaces where he could skim across, trying to avoid the chilly plunges up to his knees, sometimes to his waist. He kept his focus on the scent of Kelly Schoenbaum from her leather watchband, and the traces left by Lamb’s careless touch. He knew the area well enough to have a general sense of where he was going. After that it would be luck rather than skill.

  He kept a nervous eye on the edge of darkness pushing daylight closer to the tree line, where soon it would be out of sight. The very last thing he wanted was to spend the night in the bayou, and precious little could push him to it.

  Just one thing, actually.

  He felt his phone vibrate but was busy leaping from branch to branch, tree to stump. Once he had solid ground beneath him, he checked his calls and saw Charlotte’s name. What could she have to say that he would possibly want to hear at this moment? This woman he loved. This woman he would do absolutely anything to please.

  Still angry and feeling more than a little bit guilty over his behavior, he put the phone away to continue on at a hard, punishing run. He’d go another hour. Maybe by then he could put his ego aside to listen.