He gave up and asked Fiona, “Whose place is this, do you know?”
“I have no idea. Someone John knows, that’s all I was told.”
He drove past several barns that looked new, past fenced-in pastures, and finally arrived at the main road.
“Which way is Blackstone?” she asked.
He thought for a moment. “East, I think. If I recall correctly, Afton’s Fork is farther to the west by maybe forty miles or so.” He glanced at the compass above the rearview mirror. “So that means a right turn here. We’ll see where that leads us.”
“At some point there should be a sign to identify the road we’re on. It would help if you knew the name of the road.”
“Big time.” He pointed to the dash. “It looks like we have GPS, but I don’t recognize the system. Would you look in the glove compartment and see if there’s a manual?”
“Yes, it’s here. Give me a moment.” Fiona turned on the interior light and skimmed several pages before activating the system. “Where do we want to go?”
“We’ll go straight to the farm. It’s 731 Old Yellow Creek Road.”
She entered the information.
“Well, it looks as if we’re headed in the right direction, anyway.” She leaned closer to the screen. “You were close. It’s about fifty miles east.” She pointed to the map that had appeared. “We are here.”
He eased off the accelerator slightly and scanned the screen. “I know where we are. We can make it there in less than an hour.”
Fiona settled back and said, “I suppose you don’t need the voice activated directions.”
He smiled. “I don’t need the GPS now at all, thanks. You can turn it off. Unless it amuses you to watch us eat up the miles.”
“I admit there are times when I am amused by my GPS.” She looked over at him. “It isn’t always as accurate as I’d like it to be.”
“Name one other thing that amuses you,” he surprised himself by asking.
“I Love Lucy reruns,” she answered without hesitation. “I have all of the ‘Best of collections on DVD. For me, there’s never been anyone with better timing or who better knew how to use her own natural gifts. How ’bout you? What makes you laugh?”
“Actually, I prefer the more sophisticated humor of the Three Stooges,” he deadpanned.
“Steve Martin as King Tut,” she countered.
“Soupy Sales with a pie in his face.”
“Nothing like those classic comics when you need a good laugh,” she agreed.
“Is Steve Martin old enough to be considered classic?”
“I’m not sure age is the determining factor.”
The road was a straight line ahead of them for as far as they could see, and Fiona commented on it.
“Roads are going to bend when there’s something to go around,” he told her. “There’s nothing out here to go around. Therefore, straight roads.”
A few minutes later, Fiona asked, “So, the plan is to go right to your brother’s and check up on him, then go to Henderson Falls?”
“Assuming my brother is there, and everything’s okay, we’ll bunk there for the rest of the night, then yes, go into Henderson in the morning.”
“It’s almost morning now,” she reminded him. “It’s going on four, and if we don’t get to Blackstone until five, there won’t be any ‘rest of the night.’”
“I need to go there before we do anything else.”
“I wasn’t suggesting that we not go. I was just pointing out that—”
The car swerved suddenly to avoid hitting a small herd of deer that fled across the road and vanished like ghosts. Sam hit the brakes so as to not crash into the last in line.
When the animals disappeared into the black night and he resumed driving, he told Fiona what he’d been trying not to think about.
“There’s no better way to get my attention than to target Tom.”
“You think that’s what’s happened? That the killer has your brother?”
“I’m starting to think it might be.”
Fiona took her phone from her bag and dialed the number she’d been given for the Henderson Falls PD.
“This is Special Agent Fiona Summers with the FBI. I’d like to know if there’s been an ID on the victim that was … Yes, I’ll hold …”
She turned her body to face Sam more directly and said, “It should be a capital offense for any governmental entity to play Muzak when they put a call on hold.
“Yes, thank you …” Fiona explained who she was and why she was calling. She took a small pad of paper and a pen from her bag and made some notes. “How do you spell that?”
She scribbled quickly. “What else can you tell me?”
A few more notes, and she said, “Thank you. Please leave a message for your chief that I and a colleague will be there in the morning and we’d like to meet with him. Thanks again.
“The victim’s been identified as Jerry Perillo, age forty-two.”
Sam was embarrassed by the flood of relief he felt when he realized that his brother had not been the victim. For someone else’s family, the news would be heartbreaking.
“Where was the body found?”
“This is a really sick one.” She tucked her notes into her bag. “Perillo was a cancer patient. He was found inside the parking garage at County Memorial Hospital. He’d just come from his chemo appointment.”
Sam pulled to the side of the road. “County Memorial Hospital,” he repeated flatly.
“That’s what he told me, yes,” she replied.
“My sister died in that hospital.”
“I’m confused. I thought you said your sister was married and lived in Blackstone.”
“That’s Andrea. My younger sister, Eileen, died when she was eighteen. Right after she graduated from high school. She had a summer job in Dutton at an ice cream shop. She thought that was so cool.”
“What happened to her?”
“She was on her way home from work one night and one of her tires went flat. Eileen was not the type of girl who wanted to be bothered learning how to change her own flat. She was sure that she’d always find someone else to change it for her, that someone would come along to help her. And for most of her life, that held true. She was the kind of girl the guys fell over themselves just to talk to.” He smiled sadly. “But that night, no one came along, so she started walking. She was only about a hundred feet from her car when she was struck from behind. Hit and run. The vehicle that hit her never stopped. Just left her there to die in the road.” Sam shook his head. “How do you do that to a kid? How do you leave someone lying in the road to die all alone?”
“Sam, I’m so sorry.”
“Yeah. Well, someone eventually did come along, and they called for help, but it was too late. She was taken back to County Memorial but they couldn’t bring her back around.”
“How long ago was that?”
“Fifteen years ago.”
Sam never thought back on that night without his throat tightening. “She was a really good kid. And the thing is, she always thought she was invincible. She always said she’d cheated death once so she was good until she reached her old age.”
“What did she mean by that?”
“When she was, oh, eight or nine, I guess, a bunch of us went ice skating on one of the lakes outside of town. Me, Eileen, a couple of my buddies, and their little sisters. The big brothers—we were all about five years older than the girls—were supposed to be keeping an eye on the girls. Our parents all thought we’d be responsible enough to look out for them. Well, you know how that goes. Some other guys came along and we started playing hockey, and the game got pretty intense and we … well, we …” Even now, all these years later, the words were hard to get out.
“You forgot about your sister and she got hurt?”
“It was so much worse than that. We were really involved in the game, like I said, so when the kids started screaming, we barely even heard it. Then someone grabbed me fr
om behind and swung me around and was yelling in my face that the girls had fallen through the ice. They’d skated onto a section where a stream feeds in, the ice was thinner there. Anyway, three of them went under the ice. We all panicked.
“The ice was too thin to hold us, so we made a chain, you know, the kind where you lay down and hold on to the legs of the person in front of you. I was first in the chain. I got to the hole in the ice and I could see them down there, all of them thrashing around. You couldn’t tell who was who. I just reached in and grabbed the hair of the girl who was closest and pulled her out. It just happened to be Eileen. The guy behind me took her to the ambulance that someone had called and I reached in and grabbed the next girl. But the third girl panicked and got stuck under the ice. I went into the water but I couldn’t get to her in time. I couldn’t save her.”
Fiona reached across the console for his hand.
“Anyway, after that, Eileen thought she was immortal.” He turned to Fiona. “Can you imagine surviving something like that only to be run down ten years later by some cowardly asshole who couldn’t even be bothered to call an ambulance?”
He jammed the car into gear and pulled back onto the roadway a bit faster than he should have. The tires spun and the back of the car fishtailed.
“Sorry,” he muttered. He eased up a little on the accelerator, and tried to will away the image of the churning water, the colors of the girls’ woolen hats just under the icy surface, the arms and legs thrashing, the frenzied gasping for air. His own desperate attempts to save that last girl. He’d discussed the incident once with Annie McCall, and she’d given him the only advice that had stayed with him over the years.
“Maybe there are some things we’re not supposed to forget,” Annie had told him. “Not to assure that we carry the guilt with us forever, but so that we remember that sometimes our very best effort isn’t going to be good enough. It’s a hard lesson but an important one, one we all have to learn. We’re not always going to win. We won’t always save the day. There are some things that are simply out of our hands. All we can do is to try with everything we have to make things turn out right. But if we succeed even half of the time, we should consider ourselves very fortunate.”
The words hadn’t eased his guilt or soothed his conscience over the child who had died, but it had made sense to him and had turned out to be true. He hadn’t always been able to save the day, but he never stopped trying.
“Heal the sick,” Fiona said after they’d driven a few miles, shaking him from his reverie.
“What?”
“Heal the sick,” she repeated. “It’s one of the remaining acts of mercy. Perillo was sick, he was at the hospital for treatment. But he’s broken his pattern. It’s a long way until February.”
“The whole thing with the dates was to get me to make the connection. He probably knows I’ve noticed. He doesn’t have to bother with the details anymore.”
“He’s really escalating.”
“Well, why wait when you don’t have to?” Sam turned to her. “Besides, I don’t think he can. I think he’s reaching that point where he can’t wait to kill again.”
“Only two more acts, Sam,” she reminded him. “Two more victims. Then what?”
“Then it will be over, one way or another.” Sam stared straight ahead at the dark stretch of road that led him home. He knew who the last victim was supposed to be, and he’d deal with it when it came to that. He wasn’t afraid of facing the killer. But he was afraid of who the next victim might be.
He pressed down on the gas and prayed that he’d get to his family in time.
SEVENTEEN
It was not quite daybreak when Sam turned off the road and onto the long hard-packed dirt lane that led to the farm that his great-great-great grandfather had laid claim to so long ago. In the eerie first light just before sunrise, the farmhouse looked like a mirage. The twin silos for which the farm was known rose through the mist toward the sky. The corn stood motionless in the wide flat fields, their pale tops like silken threads, the fat ears plumping for the coming harvest.
Sam drove slowly and quietly, the light spreading with every passing second. Up ahead the farmhouse glowed softly.
“The house is beautiful, Sam,” Fiona said as they approached it.
“It was white forever, for as long as I can remember, even in all the pictures we have from a hundred years ago.” He smiled. “But the last time it needed painting, Tom’s wife said, ‘For God’s sake, Tom, every damned farmhouse for miles around is white. If we’re going to pay someone to paint it, could we please paint it something pretty?’”
“The yellow is pretty. It’s cheery. And, oh, look”—she leaned forward as they drew nearer—“the front door is blue.”
“Only yellow farmhouse in the county. Only yellow farmhouse with a door that shade of blue in the state, or so Kitty insists. She could be wrong, but I’m not going to be the one to tell her that.”
Sam continued past the front porch to park near the barn.
“Later, when there’s more light, I’ll show you where the old sod house stood,” he told her. “If you’re interested, that is.”
“Minored in American history,” she replied. “Of course I’m interested.”
They got out of the car and Fiona stopped once to inhale deeply.
“It smells so good here,” she said.
“Smells like home.” He took a deep breath, too, before walking toward the house.
“Don’t you ever miss it?” She caught up to him. “It’s so beautiful here. I don’t know that I’d ever want to leave.”
“I do miss it sometimes,” he admitted. “Not enough to move back full-time, but yeah, I do miss it. Life is very different here than any place I’ve ever been.”
“How often do you come back?” she asked as they reached the porch steps.
“Not often enough.” A tall man stood in the open doorway. Within seconds he’d crossed the porch to embrace Sam. The two men held on for a long moment, then pushed back from each other. “I couldn’t believe it when Kitty said you’d called and that you were on your way home.”
“So you got my message?”
“Sure, I got it.”
“Why didn’t you call me back?” Sam asked.
“I didn’t figure I had to. I knew you were coming. You knew you were coming.” Tom DelVecchio looked past Sam to Fiona, who stood on the top step. “Hey, who’s this? Sam, you brought a woman home with you?”
“Ahhh, Tom, this is Fiona Summers. She’s working with me on a case.” Sam stepped aside to allow Fiona to step onto the porch. “Fiona, meet my brother, Tom.”
“Nice to meet you,” Tom said. He turned back to Sam. “I thought you said you left the FBI.”
“I did.”
“Then what case—”
“Let’s go inside, Tom. That’s what we’re here to talk about …”
Tom’s wife, Kitty, a diminutive gamine with short curly dark hair, was already up and had coffee on. The four sat around the worn round table in the kitchen and Sam spelled out what brought Fiona and him to Nebraska. When he finished, Tom sat drop-jawed across the table from him.
Kitty was the first to speak. “You are seriously freaking me out, Sam.”
“I have to admit to being a little freaked out myself,” he replied.
“You think someone is killing all these people to get back at you for something?” Tom said incredulously.
“It looks that way.” Sam nodded. “Actually, with this latest murder, I’m thinking the killer is someone from around here. Someone we know.”
“Here?” Tom’s eyes went wide.
“That’s crazy, Sam.” The coffeemaker beeped and Kitty got up from the table. “I can’t think of one person who would want to harm you.” Her head was shaking side to side emphatically as she grabbed mugs from a cupboard and placed them on the table. “And those other things you said this killer has done … uh-uh. No one around here would do something disgusting like t
hat.”
“Kitty, it’s been my experience that you can never count anyone out. It seems like it’s always the guy you’d least expect. The friend you trusted for years. The next-door neighbor who was always so nice, maybe mowed your lawn when you were away. Someone always says, ‘I can’t believe it’s him. He was always so nice.’ Or, ‘He was such a good boy.’ Believe me when I tell you that you cannot tell the good guys from the bad guys just by looking at them.”
“So what do we do?” Tom still appeared bewildered.
“The first thing we do is figure out how we’re going to keep you and the kids safe until this is over,” Sam said softly.
“I thought you said the killer was after you.” Kitty froze halfway to the table, the coffeepot in one hand and a pitcher of cream in the other.
“I think I’m his ultimate goal,” Sam told her, “but he still has two more ‘acts’ to go. I figure he’s saving the last one for me, but I can’t rule out him trying to get to someone I care about for the sixth victim.”
“We need to call Andrea.” Kitty placed the pot on a trivet on the table and grabbed for the phone. “She and Pete need to be warned.”
“Warned about what?” Tommy, her oldest son, came into the kitchen, all legs and shaggy hair, in baggy shorts and a bright green tank top. “Hey, Uncle Sam.” He shook Sam’s hand, then did some sort of elbow bump thing that Sam would still be trying to figure out an hour later.
Sam introduced Fiona, and Tommy acknowledged her with a nod. “FBI lady. Cool.”
“Mom, are we going to have breakfast? I have football practice at seven thirty and if I wait too long to eat, I’ll be spewing eggs all over the field.”
“Thank you for that visual, Thomas.” Kitty moved away from the phone to the refrigerator. “Of course we’re having breakfast. Sam? Fiona? Bacon and eggs all right with you?”
“Better than all right.” Sam nodded.
“Tell me what I can do to help,” Fiona said.
“Nothing, really. Sit.” Kitty pointed to Fiona’s chair.
Acts of Mercy: A Mercy Street Novel Page 17
