Act of Betrayal

by Shirley Kennett

  He looked her over at the same time she was appraising the situation with a practiced eye. She was about his height and a little heavier than he was, which was fine. Reaching out, he tugged at her hair. The wig tilted sideways.

  “I never was too good with these things,” she said, straightening the wig.

  “That’s okay,” he said, opening the bag of food. “You’re not going to be wearing it for long.”

  “Where’s the cash?” Marlene said. “I have to check in by phone.”

  He showed her three hundred dollars and her eyes indicated approval. She pulled a cellular phone out of her purse and made a quick phone call.

  “Now, then,” she said, turning to him with a smile, “What do you want to eat first?”

  She never saw the blow coming, and Cut made sure to hit where he wouldn’t leave a visible bruise that might put her out of business for a few days. He could be considerate when he wanted to.

  When he had the unconscious woman lying on the bed, he stripped off her clothes and put them on over his own, rolling his jeans up to the knees so that they wouldn’t show beneath the long skirt. Marlene was going to be hopping mad when she woke up, and her only choice would be to wear the shirt and slacks he left draped across the foot of the bed. Only the shoes gave him a problem. He squeezed his feet in and ate his dinner, wondering at what time a meal ceased to be called dinner and became breakfast.

  Emptying the food out of the bag, he put his own shoes inside—he’d need them later—and slung the woman’s purse over his shoulder. He stood in front of the bathroom mirror and checked himself. He might pass for her, as long as the light was poor and the inspection was superficial. It was near the end of the shift for the officer out in the lot, and Cut was gambling that his attention wasn’t what it should be. It was a risk, but he had to get out. The stay in the hotel had served its purpose, and now he had things to do.

  He left two hundred dollars on the night stand. He didn’t want to waste the extra hundred, seeing as he hadn’t gotten full value from her visit. He didn’t leave her any food, either.

  Thirty-nine

  IT WAS NEARLY DAWN when PJ got home. Overhead the sky was still dark, but in the east she could see the outlines of heavy clouds. She was keyed up, but intended to try to get a couple hours of sleep to help her work with a clear head. As it was, she didn’t think she could drag herself up the back steps to the door. It had been an exhausting twenty-four hours.

  She’d gone out to the abduction site because she felt compelled to be taking part in things. It gave her chills to stand in the spot where Schultz had last been. After milling around in the park for an hour or so, she gave up. There was nothing useful to be learned there, at least by her.

  Helen had left the porch light on for her. On the top step, PJ noticed something odd on the door. She blinked her tired eyes. It was a small plastic bag, held onto the door with masking tape. A note was stuck next to it.

  She pulled on the masking tape that held the bag to the door, and the bag dropped into her hands. It was cool and damp to the touch, and seemed to be filled with water. She held it up to the porch light.

  The light shone through it, gleaming red as a ruby.

  Red as blood.

  She gasped and dropped the bag, which hit the floor of the porch with a wet thump and broke open.

  Helen opened the back door, and light from the kitchen flowed out onto the porch and fell on the spattered liquid. PJ was frozen in place, her mouth open, staring down.

  “It’s about time you got home,” Helen said, in a good-natured teasing way. Then her mouth clamped shut as she got a good look at PJ. Her eyes followed PJ’s.

  “It appears to be blood,” Helen said after a moment. “And I’m pretty sure that thing is a toe.”

  PJ sat at her kitchen table, all thoughts of sleep pushed from her head. Her body felt jangly, as if she’d had a huge dose of caffeine. Helen had called the police, and Anita was on her way over, to be followed shortly by the Evidence Technician Unit, or ETU. PJ was already convinced that tests on the blood and severed toe would show that both items had formerly been in Schultz’s possession.

  Helen had gone to keep a close watch on Thomas, to waylay him in case he woke up and make sure he stayed upstairs. PJ had the note from the door spread out in front of her. She knew she shouldn’t have touched it, but stampeding rhinos couldn’t have stopped her.

  It had to be a message from the killer. It was handwritten in neat, large letters. As soon as PJ had gone through the first few words, she zipped through the rest because of their familiarity.

  Little Bo-Peep has lost her sheep,

  And can’t tell where to find them;

  Let them alone and they’ll come home,

  And bring their tails behind them.

  Little Bo-Peep fell fast asleep,

  And dreamt she heard them bleating;

  But when she awoke she found it a joke,

  For still they all were fleeting.

  Then up she took her little crook,

  Determined for to find them;

  She found them indeed,

  But it made her heart bleed,

  For they’d left all their tails behind them!

  It happened one day as Bo-Peep did stray,

  Unto a meadow hard by,

  There she spied their tails, side by side,

  All hung on a tree to dry.

  Then she heaved a sigh and wiped her eye,

  And ran o’er hill and dale-o.

  She tried what she could,

  As a shepherdess should,

  To tack to each sheep its tail-o.

  As far as she could tell, there were no changes in the rhyme from what she remembered from childhood. It was ghastly, that part about the tails cut off and draped on a tree. But a lot of nursery rhymes were horrible if taken seriously. Libby had been the owner of preschools, and would have a large store of nursery rhymes in her head to draw upon. But what was she trying to get across?

  There was a grisly interpretation that PJ shied away from but eventually couldn’t ignore. The severed tails referred to the severed toe that had been delivered to her back porch, and the fact that “tails” was plural might mean there were more parts of Schultz’s body to come.

  Libby was Bo-Peep, and her heart was bleeding for the loss of her son a year ago, and her daughter twelve years before that.

  PJ had a feeling Libby wanted to taunt her with the knowledge that Schultz was going to die, maybe piece by piece.

  Dead already? Probably not. If so, the body itself would be the message.

  Then where was Schultz being held? PJ desperately needed to find him, and she couldn’t just go running over hill and dale-o.

  Let them alone, and they’ll come home…

  Wall had said that Libby had left her home in Jefferson City. PJ phoned him and asked for an update, and was assured the house in Jefferson City was empty. She asked for a search anyway, and he said he’d arrange it. He didn’t even put up his usual fuss. A nerve-wracking hour went by, during which Anita and the ETU came and went, before the answer came back that the home in Jefferson City was empty, of both the living and the dead.

  PJ still thought that Elijah was responsible for the murders, but now it appeared that Libby had stepped in at the end and taken over while Elijah served as decoy in the hotel. The two worked exquisitely well together. She thought about the way she worked with Schultz. She was the logical element of the team and he was the intuitive part. She used her computer simulations to step through crimes and make logical extrapolations. He made leaps of faith.

  Their roles were the reverse of Libby’s and Elijah’s. In the Ramsey working partnership, Elijah was the logical planner. Libby was the intuitive one. To go where Libby was leading her, PJ would have to set aside her logical impulses and think like Libby. She read through the nursery rhyme again, and tried to free her thoughts from the conventional paths they tried to fall into.

  I’m
Bo-Peep, she thought suddenly. My heart is bleeding, and Libby knows it. “Home” should be my home.

  Apprehensively, she grabbed a flashlight from a kitchen drawer and began walking through the rooms of her house. She checked all the closets, the basement, even the storage areas in the attic. Nothing.

  There were too many ways to interpret the clue. She balled her fists in frustration, and struck out at the door frame leading to the kitchen, once, then several times, then stopped and ran her fingers through her hair. How was she to know what Libby’s devious mind had cooked up?

  Libby’s connection was with Schultz. In her twisted thinking, it was Schultz who took her son away from her originally, and Schultz was the one who’d had his symbolic tail whacked off.

  Schultz is the sheep. “Home” is his home!

  The realization struck her like an arrow lodging in her heart. The brilliant simplicity of it—Schultz was captive in his own home. Who would think to look there?

  PJ heard noises from upstairs. Thomas was waking up and would be in the kitchen soon. She scrawled a note to Helen and left it on the kitchen table, grabbed her purse with her car keys and rushed outside. A few blocks away, when her breathing had slowed a little, she fished around in her purse looking for the cellular phone to call for backup.

  It wasn’t there.

  She’d forgotten that she had given the phone to Schultz—hours or days ago, she couldn’t say. She cursed her thinking, which was fuzzy with exhaustion.

  All she knew was that she had to throw everything she had at solving the puzzle, because the prize was the life of the man she’d come to love.

  “There. I said it. Love. Love, love, love.”

  She stomped her foot on the gas pedal. Maybe she could find a pay phone.

  Forty

  SCHULTZ’S HOUSE LOOKED DOWN on her with golden eyes. The sun had finally made its appearance, a delayed showing caused by a bank of clouds. There was a light ground fog that gave the sunlight a thick syrupy quality, so that she seemed to walk through a jar of honey. The windows reflected the clear light above the fog, turning them into flat eyes as unfeeling as a spider’s.

  There had been no pay phone. Briefly she thought of pounding on a neighbor’s door and asking someone to alert the police. But that might alert Libby also. She stared up at the windows, wondering if Libby was watching from one of them, unseen behind the brilliant reflection. Or perhaps she was holding a knife to some other part of Schultz’s anatomy, something more crucial to life than a toe.

  The house key was in her hand, then turning in the lock.

  She slipped into the front hall. Subdued light was coming from the uncovered windows in the rear of the house. The hairs on her arms rose as she pressed herself against the wall and began moving toward the kitchen. There was a faint smell she couldn’t recognize in the air, certainly not blood, not housecleaning liquids, not air freshener. Something.

  In the kitchen there was indirect light from the rear windows. She moved first toward the drawers that looked likely to contain knives. She found the correct drawer on her second try. Schultz had only a couple of short, dull paring knives and a bent, serrated bread knife.

  Figures. Where are those Ginsu knives when you need them?

  She chose one of the paring knives, clutched it tightly in her right hand, and picked up the phone with her left hand.

  It took her a moment to realize the line was dead.

  Her heart thudding in her chest, she began to edge toward the rear door, thinking that she’d better pound on the neighbor’s door, after all—if she could get out.

  She was nearly at the door when the faint smell suddenly grew stronger, and she recognized it. Peppermint. Her brow furrowed as she tried to work that bit of information into her situation.

  PJ felt someone close behind her and started to whirl around. She didn’t make it. She was shoved forward into the door, with something that might have been a knee pressed hard against her backside. Her arms, which had been raised to ward off an attack, were caught at the wrists and so cruelly twisted that she dropped the knife.

  She struggled against the hands holding her wrists, and found them to be like iron bands. Her attacker leaned the length of his body against her, putting his mouth close to her ear. Her nostrils flared, taking in peppermint and the rank smell of her own fear.

  “Thanks for coming by, Dr. Gray,” the voice said in a harsh whisper. “You’re right on time.”

  Her voice was caught in her throat. The only thing that escaped her was a squawk that sounded like the noise an animal might make when a predator struck.

  She was spun around and pushed violently across the room. Her left hip crashed into the kitchen table, and the momentum carried the top half of her body over, bending over the table so that she cracked her jaw hard against the tabletop. She moaned and tasted blood.

  PJ tried to straighten herself and found that the ribs on her left side hurt sharply when she moved or took a deep breath. Breathing in shallow pants, crouched to lessen the pain from her ribs, she turned around to face her attacker. The muzzle of a gun was pressed between her eyes. She froze, holding her breath.

  “Come along, little lady,” said the voice from above her head. “The show starts soon. You may not be the star, but you could win an Oscar for a supporting role.”

  The gun pulled away a couple of feet, and she exhaled. PJ stood at her full height, even though it was painful, bending her left arm and pressing it tightly against her ribs to immobilize them. She could see the face of her attacker, and recognized him as Elijah. PJ swiped at her bloody chin with her right hand and then wiped her hand clean on her jeans.

  She knew Elijah to be a brutal killer, but what she didn’t know was his state of mind. Was he unreachable—programmed to perform Libby’s commands—or could he be reasoned with?

  Before PJ had much time to think about it, Elijah grabbed her arm and shoved her face into the wall. Pain shot through her left side, and she gasped. He bound her wrists with cord, then turned her around again to face the gun.

  He gestured toward the rear door. She didn’t move fast enough. He placed his hand between her shoulder blades and pushed. Stumbling, she moved out of the door he had opened for her and into the backyard.

  “Scream, and it’ll be the last thing you do,” he said softly.

  She set her lips against the pain in her side and walked across the yard, keeping her eyes low.

  Surely someone will see us. Surely the police will stop us before we go far.

  There was a car parked in the alley behind Schultz’s house. Elijah opened the front passenger door for her. When she hesitated, thinking that it might be her last chance to scream or to make a break, he roughly pushed her inside. She barely ducked her head in time to avoid colliding with the top of the door frame.

  Inside, she struggled to sit up while he moved around the front of the car and got in on the driver’s side.

  The door slammed shut. She probably couldn’t yell loud enough for neighbors to hear inside their homes. It had all happened so fast. The pain, the gun between her eyes, her wrists bound, and she was taken. Why hadn’t she resisted more effectively?

  As Elijah drove out of the alley, she angled herself sideways, bracing her back against the door. When she thought he was distracted with the task of driving, she tucked her knees up, ignoring the spasm in the left side of her chest, and extended them with as much force as she could, kicking his right thigh.

  He grunted, and the car swerved over the center line, narrowly avoiding an oncoming vehicle. Before she could gather her legs for another kick, he brought his right forearm down sharply across her calves. The blow sent waves of pain into her spine, and her vision blackened around the edges.

  “Don’t try that again,” he hissed, “or I’ll blow your fucking head off.” The gun, which had been tucked into his waistband, had reappeared impossibly fast. It was aimed at her face. She couldn’t repeat the maneuver before he could fire at her, and as close as he w
as, he couldn’t miss.

  PJ wasn’t sure she could move her legs, but she shifted them slowly until she was sitting up in the seat, facing forward. Her legs weren’t broken, but it was miraculous they weren’t. She was sure gigantic bruises were forming underneath the fabric of her jeans.

  They drove in silence for a time, except for an occasional moan from PJ as bumps in the road shifted her ribs. She could feel two or three of them floating freely, ends grinding against each other with the motion of the car, and worried that the broken ends would puncture her lung. She wanted to press her left arm against her chest as a kind of splint, but couldn’t because her wrists were tied behind her back.

  Amazingly, exhaustion crept up on her, overcoming the pain and the flow of adrenaline, and her eyes slowly drifted shut. She awakened an unknown amount of time later, looked around and found that they were traveling on an interstate through open countryside.

  Considering her situation, she realized that the Bo-Peep rhyme was a false clue, a trap, and she’d walked right into it. There was the note she’d left for Helen, so by now Lieutenant Wall knew she’d gone over to Schultz’s house, and why.

  A lot of good that did.

  She watched the hills roll by outside. How was she going to save Schultz? She had to save herself first.

  “Had a nice nap?” Elijah said. Some of the tension was gone from his voice since he’d captured her and things were definitely in his favor. She’d be a lot more confident, too, if things were reversed.

  “Just fine, thanks,” she said, keeping her voice even, betraying nothing of her fear and feeling of hopelessness. They might have been out for a Sunday drive. It was still Sunday, wasn’t it?

  She decided to play the only ace she had—knowledge of the contents of Jeremiah’s death row letter. She thought for a few minutes, figuring out how to approach the sensitive subjects with Elijah, not knowing how much he already knew or how he was going to react. Finally she decided she would just have to feel her way along.

  “I feel terrible about your son’s execution,” she said. “It’s a hard thing when the justice system is fooled in a death sentence case. Trials are meant to uncover the truth.”