The Girl and the Black Christmas (Emma Griffin FBI Mystery Book 11)

by A J Rivers

  I try to yank up, pulling his arm so far that it tears his shoulder. It wouldn’t necessarily end the fight, but it would be enough to give me the upper hand and let me get some breathing room. Unfortunately, he rolls with me and I can’t get the leverage. Instead, I bail and get space between us. It’s better than the close quarters, since I don’t know if he has a knife or anything. At a distance, I can always turn and run if I need to.

  Not that I am going to.

  I am on my knees before he is, and I dropkick him hard in the ribs. I can hear the wind get sucked out of him as he rolls over in pain and scrambles to his knees again. I take a deep breath and run forward, laying in another kick to his ribs. But just as I land it, his arm wraps around my ankle and he yanks me hard, twisting my leg and making me land directly on my knee.

  Searing pain shoots through my knee, and I cry out. I’ve felt that pain before. It’s an old injury I had years before, when I was still a kid. A tear in the meniscus. It’s debilitating and extraordinarily painful. I roll away as far as I can, clutching at my knee.

  I hear him spit where he sits, and I roll to my good knee, trying to see if there is any way I’m not as hurt as I think I am. I have my backup plan, but I don’t want to use it. I know where it will go. I have to try to bring him in alive and breathing and conscious. That’s the only way I will be able to find Julia.

  “Not as good as you thought, are you Emma?” he grunts, spitting blood into the white snow. It glistens where it lands and bubbles, creating perfect little balls of plasma. “Can’t even beat an old man.”

  I try to stand, but a branch under the snow catches the tip of my foot and pulls on the leg with the hurt knee. It hurts like hell, and I crumple back down. Before I know it, Les is on me, smashing my ribs with a kick and then turning slightly and hitting me in the throat and jaw with another. I roll over, gasping for breath.

  Everything hurts. My knee is on fire. My ribs feel cracked on one side. The wind is knocked out of me and as I wheeze it back in, my ribs compress, and everything starts all over, hurting again. I set my jaw shut because I’m afraid if I open it, he’ll just kick it shut again and break my teeth. I crawl away slowly, and I hear him calmly walking behind me, his boots crunching on the new-fallen snow. Occasionally he spits and blows his nose. I look over my shoulder to see a fat wad of red goo shoot out of his nostril and onto the ground. I must have landed a pretty good shot there, because it looks broken.

  “Do you have any idea,” he starts, his voice a low grumble, “how angry you made me? You wouldn’t just go away. You had to keep interfering and interfering and interfering. Everyone else just thought she simply ran away, but you, you kept sticking your nose into my goddamn business!”

  He runs forward and kicks me hard again, this time thrusting his foot forward and smashing into the side of my head. My neck snaps to the side and back again, and I fight the darkness creeping in around my vision. If I go out, I am done. His voice is echoing in my ears, and my brain seems to have trouble focusing on any one thing. The sound of his feet crunching the snow and the fallen leaves underneath almost drown out his words.

  “You almost ruined everything, Emma. I loved watching how people reacted to murder. I loved creating puzzles for them to figure out. It was research. It was academics, don’t you understand? A study project into the human psyche. The human mind.”

  I cough and blood drizzles down my chin. I have to get away from him. Or at least lure him into a trap. I wonder if I have enough strength to lock him in a hold.

  Or will I have to get extreme?

  Suddenly, his presence is on me, and I realize I am not experiencing time correctly. He’s moving too fast. I must be nearly unconscious. I try to breathe, but his knee comes down on my back and his hand fills with my hair. He yanks my head back until his cheek is touching mine.

  “We can be a family, Emma. We always have been, but now we can actually be one. You. Me. Julia. We can be happy together, just the way I always planned to be.” I struggle under his knee, crushing into my back and pressing the hurt ribs into the ground. “You are not going to stand in the way of our family.”

  He pauses and spits again. This time the blood splatters the snow beside my head. “I will really enjoy watching how people react to how you died.”

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  I have no choice. My vision is darkening, and I know I only have so much strength left. I just hope it’s enough.

  His knee shifts ever so slightly as he tries to gain better control, and I use the opportunity. I throw everything I have into a pushup and roll to one side. He falls off of me with a cry of surprise, and despite the searing pain in my knee, I roll again, this time away from him, and curl my good knee under me. I come to a stop in the perfect position, facing him, my hand already sliding to the secret compartment in my jacket.

  The gun is out, aimed, safety clicked off and fired in one fluid motion. He didn’t have time to even see the gun, I don’t think, before the muzzle flashes and the bullet rips into his skin. I aim for center mass, not wanting to take a chance, but at the last second, I shift one way and he another. Just in time, he falls forward. Instead of his chest or his hip, where I was aiming, I see his body jerk as the bullet rips into the shoulder of his left arm, almost at his neck. It goes in at the top and probably exits through the armpit, and he screams in pain and flails.

  I lose my balance, pain coursing through my knee, and I adjust. As I do, Les scrambles to his feet and I fire off another shot at his legs. It misses, ricocheting off a tree. Les runs, and disappears into the woods, and I force myself to my feet. I start to go after him, limping, and reach the tree line. Then I stop. I shake my head.

  Not this time.

  This time I wait for backup.

  I can see the trail of blood from his wound, slithering its way through the patches of snow and leaves where the trees were too dense to let snow in, even in December. Everything in me is screaming to chase him. To hunt him. To take vengeance.

  But I hear the sirens in the distance, and it takes the zip right out of me. I don’t know if they are local or Sam, but either way, I wait. I reach for my phone and realize it must have fallen out somewhere in the struggle. I can’t call them and tell them where I am, but it can’t be far. If they ping it, they can find it and I will be close by.

  It takes some time, several agonizing minutes of excruciating time, and I sit, leg stretched out and gun in hand, watching the woods where he went in, my back braced against a tree. If he comes out before the cops get here, I’m prepared to end him. As it is, I am still prepared to end him when they do arrive.

  Finally, I hear them shouting behind me, and I wave them over. They stomp through the snow, and I hear one of them note the blood. Another set of footsteps is behind the two men who show up in front of me, scanning the area around me. I know those footsteps. I turn my head and see Sam, scrambling to me.

  “Thank God,” Sam says as he pulls me into him. “Where is he?”

  “I shot him, Sam,” I say. “In his shoulder. I think he’s going to live through the wound, but it should take us to him if we follow his trail. We have to hurry. I don’t know what he will do to Julia.”

  Sam nods and the motions for the cops to find the trail and begin to slowly follow it. They do so, and Sam is left with me.

  “Why the shoulder?” he asks under his breath when they are a few steps away. “You could have taken him out.”

  I nod. He knows probably better than anyone what a good shot I am. We practice on the range rather often, and it’s no secret I am a much better shot, with a variety of guns, than he is. Faster on the draw, too.

  “I didn’t want to kill him,” I say. “I don’t want the badge to be the only difference between him and me.”

  Sam seems to take that into consideration for a moment before nodding. He is inspecting my knee. Even through the pants, I can see it is swelling. The fact that I haven’t moved my leg since he showed up probably gave him a heads up, but no
w he places his hands on it and squeezes gently. I cry out, and the two officers turn back toward us. I wave them on.

  “It’s not broken,” he says. “Can you walk?”

  “I think so,” I say. “It might be more like hobbling, but I can go.”

  Sam helps me up, and I grab a stick nearby to help me hobble down the path of bloody snow. The blood seems to increase as it goes along, and then seems to disappear right as we stumble onto a dilapidated shack. It looks as though at one time it was a fairly decent cabin but has been left to the elements for a long time.

  “It’s been at least twenty minutes since I shot him,” I whisper to Sam as we surround the building. “If he’s in there, he might be out of it. The bullet went in his shoulder pretty close to his neck.”

  There is only one window in the back, and the darkness inside makes it impossible to see anything. That only leaves one way in. The front door.

  I see little droplets of blood return, scattering near the steps leading to the door. Then a small puddle right at the doorframe. The knob is covered in it. I lean against one side of the wall and Sam stands directly in front of the door, ready to dive sideways. The two officers flank us, and I look at Sam and nod. I take a deep breath.

  Sam shoves the door open and drops to one knee, his gun aimed out. I sweep over him, aiming into the darkness. The two officers rush past us, taking up positions on either side of the door on the inside and we are all shouting for everyone to get down, despite not being able to see anyone.

  Then I hear it. A groan in front of me. The voice isn’t male, though. And it’s familiar.

  I reach over, slapping at the wall, praying that the shack has electricity. I feel a switch and pull it, and a tiny yellow light turns on, just over the center of the room. It casts a sickly pool of light in the middle of the floor, and in the center of it is two bodies. One I recognize immediately as Les Harris, covered in blood. Far more than should have come out of him from the bullet wound, in fact.

  My eyes scan through the blood to the other body, and I see a hand twitch. Just one hand. The other is a bloody stump, wrapped in white bandages.

  “Oh my god,” I gasp. “Julia!”

  I dive down to her, temporarily forgetting the pain in my knee, and shake her. She rouses slowly, her eyes falling on mine and taking a few moments to recognize me. When she does, her face lights up, and she collapses into me, tears streaming down her face as she sobs.

  “Emma!” she cries. I rock her, stroking her hair while the officers sweep the rest of the building. When they give us the all-clear, I look up at Sam, who frowns. I follow his eyes and see Julia’s one still-functional hand. In it is a knife.

  It takes some time for Julia to finally calm down. When she does, Sam helps us both up, away from the slowly coagulating blood on the floor and to a far wall. One of the officers has pulled out his phone and set it on a windowsill, leaving the flashlight on so we can see each other.

  “Julia, what happened?” I ask. “How did he die? Was it the bullet?”

  “Sort of,” she says, her eyes returning to the dead body. One of the officers is taking pictures of the scene with his phone, while the other takes notes. Sam is instructing them the details to make sure they capture, and then helps one of them find a sheet to put over the body.

  “What do you mean, ‘sort of’?” I ask.

  Her eyes return to me, and there is a coldness to them. A pleading desperation for me to hear the words she is going to say and to believe them. In my experience it means they aren’t true, but I listen.

  “He came in with the bullet lodged in his neck and shoulder. He screamed at me that I needed to cut it out. I had to cut it out of him so he could bandage it and we could leave. He handed me a knife, but I couldn’t.” She pauses for a moment, then seems to steel herself. “I wouldn’t. So, he took it back. He yanked it from my hands and swiped at me. I moved away just in time.”

  “Then what?” I ask. She should be delicate, like most victims in this situation, but she isn’t. She isn’t distant, either, as if trying to convince herself it was a bad dream. She is clear. Concise. Almost rehearsed.

  “Then, he took the knife and tried to dig the bullet out himself. He kept digging, and he slipped. He cut his neck. The blood went everywhere. It sprayed and sprayed. He looked at me, Emma. He begged me to help him.”

  My pulse beats in my ears as I listen. I realize I am holding my breath.

  “He begged and begged. Then he gurgled and fell. He flung the knife at me, and I grabbed it. What else could I do? I grabbed it, and I waited for him to get up again. But he didn’t. He didn’t, and I must have passed out.”

  She goes silent, and I realize that her story is done. Whether it is the truth or not, I don’t know, but she is done speaking. Instead, she uses the stump of a hand to wipe bloody hair away from her eyes, and her gaze goes back to the body under the sheet.

  The blood soaks through the white cotton and it reminds me of the blood on the snow outside.

  “Julia,” I say. She looks up at me. “It’s over. It’s time to come home.”

  Epilogue

  “I grew up hearing about you,” Iris says. Her voice is powdery, and the words sound painful coming through her still-chapped lips, but she wants to speak. I have the feeling she hasn’t had much of a voice of her own in a long time.

  “Mom told me about you, of course. But my father ranted about you. He was obsessed with how you’re able to solve crimes and angry because he never made it as an agent.”

  “He wanted to be in the Bureau?” I ask, stunned.

  “More than anything,” Iris says, adjusting herself in her bed. Fortunately, the doctors expect her to make a full recovery. Physically, at least. Mentally, emotionally? The realization that her father was a mass murderer who essentially kidnapped her mother and kept them both trapped? No one can be sure. “The FBI were like gods to him. But he couldn’t get through the academy. I barely even remember life before we ended up in the woods. Mom tried to help me remember the good times. Before it all changed.”

  “I found out Les had murdered at least one girl, and I had to think there were more. I knew things were changing in him, but I had no idea what was really happening. When it all came together, I went to confront him. But Eleanor Murillo was there,” says Julia from her own bed just next to Iris.

  I nod. “She told me she had only just realized you weren’t having an affair with the TA she was sleeping with. You were involved with Les Harris. She was there when you went to confront him.”

  Julia nods. “She attacked me. I don’t remember much. All I know is when I woke up, Les had moved me to the woods and was taking care of me. That’s what he always thought he was doing. Taking care of me. We were going to have a future together, he told me. Be happy.”

  Sam and I listen while Iris tells us about her childhood in the woods. How things were alright at first, but then Les began to get violent and delusional. Pressure got to him and soon he was tormenting both of them.

  “I thought you might be the one who could save us,” she says to me. “But I couldn’t just reach out to you. I had to find a way to get your attention and steer you toward figuring out everything my father did.”

  “So, you sent the email and started the Advent calendar,” I say.

  Iris nods. “I never intended anything bad to happen. Then my father caught me. When he asked what I was doing, I told him I thought it might be fun to toy with you and prove that he is so much smarter. That he could fool the best agent in the FBI. He went with it. Only, he took it too far. When he killed Marissa so she couldn’t tell you about my mother or the scarf, I knew we had to get out.”

  “That’s when my hand got crushed,” Julia says. “We were trying to escape, and the door to the cellar under the cabin fell on my hand. I told Iris to go and waited for Les. He wanted to help me. He thought he was smart enough to be anything he wanted, and right then he wanted to be a doctor. He cut off my hand and cauterized it with an iron fro
m the fire.”

  My stomach turns.

  “I’m so sorry, Julia.”

  She shakes her head. “Iris got out. That was what mattered the most to me.”

  “I took the bracelet hoping you would recognize it,” Iris says. “I knew you were on campus. I just had to get to you and show that to you, and you would come get her.”

  “Speaking of which,” I say and reach into my purse to pull out the bracelet. I wrap it around Julia’s wrist. “This is yours.”

  She looks down at it and tears spill down her cheeks. “Thank you.”

  “Are you ever going to explain that thing?” Sam asks. “What is a JMEG?”

  Julia and I laugh.

  “It’s a joke,” I tell him. “From Herman Melville’s Yelp review of the whale watching voyage. It was his screen name. Call Me JMEG.”

  We laugh again, but the others just shake their heads.

  The hospital staff cuts off our visit to insist Iris and Julia both need their rest. We promise to come back to visit soon, but all I can think as we walk across the parking lot is that I can’t wait to get home. We’ll see them again. For now, they need a chance to heal and figure out how to move forward.

  “What about Harris’ other victims?” Sam asks on our way home.

  I shake my head. “We’ll keep looking. Julia and Iris have some information and we’ll use the research from the club. We’ll figure it out.”

  Sam smiles. “I love you, Emma. I can’t believe you were able to make all those connections so quickly and save Julia. Honestly, all my best detectives put together couldn’t have done that.”