by Tami Hoag
“Do I know you?” she asked.
“You should. Jeager, Evangeline Grace.”
“You owe me this, Evangeline.”
“Please tell me why,” she pleaded. “I don’t know who you are. How did I ever hurt you? Please tell me.”
He pulled the mask off and tossed it on the bed, then looked at her and waited, as if he thought she would surely recognize him. His face was a battered mess, swollen and bruised. His lower lip was fat and split. He was young, twenty-something, with blue eyes and brown hair. She had never seen him before in her life.
She stared at him until her eyes burned, praying for some spark of memory. Was he connected to a client? Someone’s boyfriend? Someone’s brother? Her client Hope Anders had a brother she had accused of molesting her, but he was big and red-haired.
How could someone she had never met be so angry with her?
“You don’t know me?” he asked.
Evi said nothing, afraid of his reaction. The sound of her breathing filled the silence that stretched between them.
“You should,” he murmured. “You gave me life.”
45
“Don’t you fucking die on me, Fireman!” Nikki ordered, leaning over Eric Burke.
She had pulled him onto the grass at the bottom of the deck stairs. He had a pulse. It was weak, but it was there. He had been cut badly across the face with some kind of blade. One eye was gone. She could see his cheekbone; she could see his teeth through the gaping wound.
“That’s gonna leave a scar,” she said to him, saying anything just to keep him connected. “Don’t worry. Women go for that shit. You get an eye patch, and you’re all set.”
With one hand, she pressed hard on a badly bleeding wound at the base of his neck; with the other hand, she fumbled with her phone to call Dispatch.
Having no idea where the assailant might be, she kept her voice low as she rattled off the required information about her rank and her badge number and location. Her voice was trembling from the adrenaline rush.
“Listen to me carefully,” she said. “I’ve got a badly wounded man here. I need a bus at this location ASAP, but absolutely no lights, no sirens. Got that? I’ve got a situation ongoing. And I need two backup units. I say again: no lights, no sirens. Tell them to come up the alley behind the house. I’m with the victim in the backyard.”
She made the dispatcher repeat her instructions back as she looked down into Eric Burke’s remaining eye. She could see his fear. She knew that look. He could feel his life draining out of him.
“Eric, you hang on,” she said. “You’re not gonna let a cop be the last thing you see, are you? You’re a fireman, for God’s sake!”
That was always the running joke between the professions: Firemen thought they were better than cops, and cops thought they were better than firemen. The ribbing between them never ended.
Eric Burke’s lips moved, but he made no sound. She could feel his body starting to shake. He was going into shock.
“You stay with me here, Fireman. I’ve got your buddies on the way to haul you out of here. Don’t you punk out on me!”
His mouth moved again. “Ev— Ev—”
“Evi,” Nikki said. “I know. I’ll make you a deal, Fireman. You take care of you. I’ll take care of Evi. I’ll take care of her now, and you can take care of her later. Right?”
She could see him losing the focus in his good eye. She bumped him in the side with a knee to jostle him back, to make the synapses fire in another part of his brain.
“Eric, do you know who did this to you?”
No response.
Shit, shit, shit.
“Eric, is he still here? Is he in the house?”
He stared up at her. She was losing him.
She leaned harder against the wound. Her hand was slick with his blood; it seeped between her fingers.
“Damn it, Eric! Stay with me! You’ve got a pretty wife and a beautiful little girl to live for. Fight!”
* * *
HIS WORDS TRIED TO penetrate Evi’s brain at the same time as her brain tried to reject them.
You gave me life.
Jeager, Evangeline Grace. Her name, as if read from a legal document.
It couldn’t be.
“You don’t recognize me?” he asked with sarcasm and a bitter little smile. “I’m Baby Boy Jeager. Father: Unknown.”
Oh my God . . .
Down the hall, Mia called for her again.
“I’m the one you didn’t want,” her tormentor said.
Evi thought she might faint. She pressed herself hard against the wall to keep from falling as the floor seemed to sway beneath her feet.
Baby Boy Jeager. Father unknown.
Son of Ted Duffy, come to avenge a father he didn’t even know. The father who had died because of him.
She had gone to great lengths to bury those truths so deep inside she would never find them again. She had lost herself on the streets, and had been plunged into a terrible purgatory of degradation, drugs, sex, and despair. It had somehow seemed fitting to try to forget one nightmare by living in another, losing herself in the process. But here she was, all these years later, with that past staring her in the eye, ready to cut her throat.
You can’t escape who you are, he’d said. You can’t escape what you did.
She said the first thing that made any sense to say: “I’m sorry.”
“No, you’re not,” he said. “You’re sorry I’m here now. It all worked out for you. Here you are with your nice little life and your nice little family. It all worked out for you.”
She wanted to ask him his name, but she didn’t dare. She hadn’t given him a name when he was born. If she’d given the baby a name, it would have been harder to try to forget. She saw him once after giving birth, then he had been whisked away to a better life than she could have given him, to parents who had no memory of his conception or of what had transpired because of it.
Even as she remembered, the smell of whiskey and smoke and man filled her head. Her mother had died. She felt so alone, so empty. She wanted comfort. She needed connection. He came to her room to check on her. He held her while she cried. It was late. The house was quiet. He’d had too much to drink. The job was draining the humanity from him. He refilled himself with whiskey to dull the pain.
She didn’t understand what she shouldn’t want. She knew what she felt, and she knew what she didn’t want to feel: alone, abandoned. He kissed her. He touched her. She couldn’t think. She didn’t want to. Was this what it had been like for her mother giving herself over to a man? A welcome escape from the pain and emptiness of her life?
He didn’t force her. She didn’t fight him.
He cried afterward. He sat on the edge of her bed with his head in his hands and sobbed, ashamed, apologetic. She looked past him to see Jennifer’s small face, wide-eyed as she peered out of her hiding place in the closet. And then the shame was Evi’s . . .
She couldn’t tell this man any of that. This man, her own child, who had come here to kill her.
“I couldn’t keep you,” she said. “I was seventeen. I didn’t have a home. I didn’t have a family. I couldn’t give you anything but a better chance.”
“You don’t know anything about what you gave me,” he said.
“I gave you more than I had.”
She hadn’t hated the baby she carried. She’d hated the circumstances that had created him, and the tragedy that followed. She blamed herself for needing things that had never been meant for her—comfort, safety, love—but she gave the child a chance to have those things. It never occurred to her that he might grow up to hate her for it. Not in her worst nightmares did she ever foresee this.
“You gave me to a nightmare!” he shouted, lunging at her, pressing the sword to her throat.
Evi swallowed hard. She felt the blade scrape against her skin. Tears blurred her vision and spilled down her cheeks.
“I’m here to give it back,” he said. “
I’m done with it. It’s time to close the circle.”
46
Nikki entered the house through the open back door, weapon drawn. She had charged the first uniformed officers to come up the alley with keeping Eric Burke alive until the ambulance arrived. One was keeping pressure on his neck wound while the other started chest compressions as he began to slip away.
The lights were on in the laundry room/mud room, a cheery white space splashed with Eric Burke’s blood. The spatter arced across the room on the ceiling, on the wall, on the washing machine, on the floor. What the hell was this assailant fighting with? Burke’s face had been laid open like the belly of a gutted fish—sliced too cleanly for the weapon to have been an axe or a hatchet. If it was a knife, the blade was long.
She thought of Kovac’s samurai-sword murders. What the hell was wrong with people?
Drops of blood pooled on the kitchen floor where the attacker had paused for a moment.
Where was Evi? Where was little Mia?
A faint cry of “Mommy!” from overhead cut along Nikki’s nerve endings like a razor. Her blood pressure spiked so hard she could hear her blood rushing across her eardrums. At least the child was alive. Was she crying over her mother’s dead body? Was the assailant still in the house?
Leading with her weapon, she moved into the dining room. There was no sign of a struggle, save for the drops of blood on the hardwood floor that led the way into the living room and up the stairs to the bedrooms.
The patrol sergeant in the backyard had argued for her to wait for a SWAT unit. Nikki refused. What were they supposed to do? Sit around on the deck waiting while Evi Burke and her daughter were raped and slaughtered inside the house? No.
The sound of voices upstairs rose and fell. She couldn’t make out how many or what they were saying.
From where she stood at the bottom of the stairs, she could see nothing. She would be a sitting duck if there were a bad guy in the hallway.
The child’s voice wailed, the sound piercing Nikki’s ear like a needle. “Mommy! Mommy!”
She swore under her breath. Kovac would kill her for going in alone—if someone else didn’t kill her first.
She started slowly up the stairs.
* * *
THE HIT ON THE BOLO for Charlie Chamberlain’s car pulled Kovac and Taylor out of the crime scene in Diana Chamberlain’s apartment. Mascherino had taken charge of the scene, sending them on their way.
The Toyota was found parked on a side street in a quiet neighborhood east of Lake Nokomis, not far from where Gordon Krauss was apprehended earlier in the day. Kovac asked for the reporting officers to sit on the car from a discreet distance and wait for them to get there.
Was there supposed to have been a meeting there? Kovac wondered. Was this the place chosen for a payoff to Krauss, to buy his silence about the solicitation with enough cash to get him out of town?
The radio crackled with coded bursts as they sped south on Hiawatha, dash strobe running. Reports of a home invasion in the area. Units were on the scene and multiple units were en route. Not my monkeys, not my circus, Kovac thought as they turned off the main drag and were instantly swallowed up by a neighborhood of small, neat older homes. He killed the dash light.
There was no sign of the patrol car that had called in on the BOLO and should have been sitting watching, waiting for the Toyota’s driver to return. They had responded to the home invasion call-out.
Kovac and Taylor walked up on the Toyota, one on either side, each with a Maglite held high. The keys were on the driver’s seat. Bloody fingerprints and handprints marred the pale gray interior on the dash, and the interior of both doors. Blood smeared the passenger’s seat.
“Well, that’s not a good sign,” Kovac muttered.
“You want to wait for a crime scene unit?” Taylor asked.
“We’ll be here all night.”
Kovac opened the driver’s-side door with a gloved hand, reached in, and pressed the button to pop the trunk.
He didn’t know what he had been expecting. He had suspected the corpse at Diana’s belonged to Charlie, that Diana and Sato had killed him to get him out of their way. But when he and Taylor both shone their flashlights into the trunk of Charlie Chamberlain’s car, it was Diana Chamberlain inside.
She looked like she was resting, lying on her side with her eyes half closed. Her throat had been cut from ear to ear. Placed next to her, staring up at them, was the head of Ken Sato, his penis sticking out of his mouth.
47
“Mommy! Mommy!” Mia ran into the room, sobbing.
Evi looked at her daughter and, heedless of the blade at her throat, shouted, “Run, Mia! Run!”
But her daughter, just five years old, and never having known danger in her whole brief life, didn’t understand. Mommy was her safety. She stood ten feet away, confused and terrified, wailing, her precious little face red and wet.
Rage rose up like a wall inside Evi. Whatever mistakes she had made in her life, this would not be one of them. She wouldn’t let her murder be the last thing her child saw before a madman butchered her.
She reached up and clawed at her assailant’s eyes. Startled, he pulled back in reaction, lifting the blade from her throat.
Evi kneed him in the groin and ducked to the side as he doubled over, her focus on Mia. If she could grab her child and run—
He caught her by the hair, nearly yanking her off her feet, and slammed her back against the wall, shouting, “NO! No! You will not ruin this for me!”
The back of Evi’s head banged hard on the frame of the window. Her knees went weak, and her vision swam. She saw him turn toward Mia. She reached out to try to grab him and dropped to her knees, too dizzy to keep her feet beneath her.
She watched in horror as he scooped up her daughter. He had dropped the sword in favor of the long knife that hung from his belt. He put the point of the blade to Mia’s throat.
“You’re going to do what I tell you!” he shouted. “Or I’ll slit her throat, and you can watch her die!”
* * *
“POLICE! Drop the knife! Drop it now!” Nikki yelled. She entered the room gun first, taking a stance maybe five feet from the assailant. “Drop it now or I’ll blow your fucking head off!”
“No!” He hiked the child up higher against him so that her head overlapped the lower half of his battered face. The point of the knife pricked the tender flesh of the little girl’s throat, and blood began to trickle down.
Evi was on her knees, sobbing, pleading. “Let her go! Please! She’s just a little girl!”
Mia was screaming and kicking, trying to wriggle from the grasp of her captor.
“Stop it!” he snapped into her ear. “Stop it right now!”
“Mia, be still!” Evi cried.
“You hurt that child, I’ll make you wish you’d never been born,” Nikki promised.
He laughed, a sound that was strangely tragic. “I already wish that,” he said quietly. “That’s why I’m here.”
“What does that mean?”
“You’re not a part of this,” he said. “You don’t belong here. Get out. This is between me and her,” he said, nodding toward Evi.
“Then let the little girl go,” Nikki said. “There’s no reason to hurt her.”
He shook his head, hefting Mia up and adjusting his hold on her.
“She’s getting heavy, isn’t she?” Nikki said. “Put her down. Let her go. Let’s end this now. Nobody has to get hurt.”
“No,” he said. “You’re wrong.”
“I’ll stand here like this ’til hell freezes over,” Nikki told him. “Can you hold her that long? Come on. Put her down. We can all walk out of here.”
Come on, asshole, give me something to work with here, she thought. She had to keep him talking. The longer she kept him talking, the heavier that child was going to feel in his arms.
“What’s your name?” she asked, readjusting her grip on the Glock in her hands.
He l
aughed again, a sound full of nothing but sadness, and nodded toward Evi. “Ask her.”
Evi was sobbing quietly into her hands, rocking as she kneeled on the floor, just out of reach of her daughter.
Nikki could hear cars pulling up outside. There were no sirens, but someone was running lights. She could see the flash of blue, red, and white through the window.
“Put the child down,” she said softly. “Let’s end this.”
“Let’s,” he said, but he made no move to let Mia Burke go. Instead, he lowered himself and the child to the floor, putting her on her feet and kneeling behind her, the knife still pressed to her throat.
Strange knife, Nikki thought in the back of her mind. Exotic. It was long, maybe eighteen inches, and gently curved from end to end. The soft amber nightlight played over the surface of the blade. The handle was elaborately wrapped in some kind of fine blue cord.
“Give her the gun,” he said, nodding toward Evi.
“No. I can’t do that. You let the little girl go.”
“Give her the gun or I’ll kill this child right now.”
To prove his point, he cut an inch-long line on Mia Burke’s throat. Blood bloomed along the line and ran down the blade of the knife.
Evi screamed, “No!” as her child screamed and cried and called for her mother.
“Give her the gun!” the assailant shouted.
The telephone on the nightstand rang. Nikki thought she could hear the distant whop-whop-whop of helicopter blades beating the air.
“Give her the gun!”
Fuck. She had to buy them time.
Nikki took the Glock in her right hand and moved her arm to the side slowly as she stepped toward the bed.
“I’ll put it right here,” she said, placing the gun on the foot of the bed.
A thousand scenarios raced through her mind. The last thing she was supposed to do was surrender her weapon, but she couldn’t shoot him without endangering the child, and she couldn’t stand there and watch him slit Mia Burke’s throat.
