The Prettiest One: A Thriller

by James Hankins

  “Where I shot someone?” Caitlin said. “Someone who wasn’t even Bookerman or One-Eye? Why?”

  “That’s what we’re going to ask Bookerman,” Bix said. “He must have been there. Let’s knock on his door and see what he has to say.”

  “It’s not his door,” Josh said. “I mean, he doesn’t own it. I checked the online property records again on the way here. The place is owned by someone named Michael Maggert.”

  “All right, then. So now we know what Bookerman Junior changed his name to,” Bix said. “So let’s see what Michael Maggert knows. Something tells me he has the answers we need.”

  Caitlin was quiet. Josh couldn’t imagine how she was feeling. He knew she wanted answers, but she couldn’t have been looking forward to talking to what seemed likely to be the son of the monster who had abducted her as a child, the man who had abused little girls and probably murdered at least one.

  “How do you know he’ll talk?” Josh asked.

  “He’ll talk,” Bix assured them, and Josh thought about the gun tucked into the back of Bix’s belt.

  Retired police detective Jeff Bigelson had been a font of interesting information. Hunnsaker had been on the phone with him for only a few minutes and she’d been surprised several times already.

  “And you’re sure she’s the redhead from the sketch?” Hunnsaker asked.

  “No doubt about it. After I showed my wife the picture, she agreed, too.”

  “Remind me why you waited several hours after she left your house to call us?”

  “I fell asleep,” Bigelson said. He sounded embarrassed, or maybe frustrated. “I’ve been on post-surgery painkillers and they knocked me out.”

  “I see. And she called herself Caitlin Dearborn?”

  “That’s right.”

  Bigelson went on to say how Caitlin Dearborn had been accompanied by two men who called themselves Galvin and Dunlay, though Bigelson couldn’t recall their first names. Hunnsaker didn’t care, because they had to be fake names anyway. For that matter, so was Katherine Southern or Caitlin Dearborn, or both.

  “And they came to see you about a twenty-year-old case of yours?”

  “Twenty-two.”

  Bigelson described the case in broad strokes and then opined as to the redhead’s likely role in it. He also noted that she was probably not a natural redhead but was actually a blonde. Hunnsaker tried to imagine what any of this had to do with the murder of the warehouse victim. Why the hell would the redhead/former blonde, whatever her real name was, seek out Bigelson now, in the middle of everything that was going on, to talk about that old case?

  “Did you hear the name Katherine Southern?” Hunnsaker asked.

  “That’s the name of the little girl Bookerman made disappear all those years ago.”

  Interesting, she thought, but all it did was raise more questions. Could the redhead running around as Katherine Southern be the same girl who disappeared twenty-two years ago? Or was she really Caitlin Dearborn? Or could it be that her real identity was still undiscovered?

  Hunnsaker took down a more detailed description of the redhead, and then descriptions of her companions, and wrung out of Bigelson everything else he knew, which wasn’t much. Then she did it all again with Bigelson’s wife in case she remembered something differently. She wasn’t a retired detective, but she also wasn’t doped up on painkillers. As it turned out, she didn’t have anything to add, though she did corroborate the names their three visitors had given, as well as their physical descriptions.

  As soon as she hung up with the Bigelsons, Hunnsaker called Padilla.

  “Javy? I have another name for you to run. See what you can find on a Caitlin Dearborn.” She gave him her best guess at the spelling and told him to check every variation he could think of if that didn’t get him anywhere.

  “I’m on it. That’s our redhead, huh?”

  “With any luck.”

  When they neared the driveway, Caitlin, Josh, and Bix cut into the trees, deciding to approach through the woods. Caitlin’s mouth was dry and her legs were far from steady. She was breathing loudly but she couldn’t help herself.

  After a few short minutes, they were at the tree line looking at a neglected ranch house that looked dirty gray in the dim moonlight and, Caitlin suspected, would look just as dirty gray in the bright light of day. There were lights on inside.

  “Anyone see signs of a dog anywhere?” Bix asked. “A chain or water bowl?”

  “It’s almost like you’ve done this kind of thing before,” Josh observed.

  “I don’t see anything,” Caitlin said.

  “I don’t, either,” Bix said. “Let’s get closer.”

  The waxing moon had grown since the other night, when Caitlin had found herself at the warehouse a few miles from there, but not by much. It was still a small crescent that left the world below substantially in darkness. That made Caitlin feel a little better about crossing the open space to the house beyond, though her knees were still weak and her heart still pounded.

  As they neared the house, which was set far back from the road, up a curving driveway, Caitlin saw a dark car parked in front of the house, its trunk open. Caitlin tapped on Bix’s shoulder and pointed to it. He slowed his steps and whispered to them, “Looks like he’s home. We got lucky.”

  Caitlin didn’t feel lucky. She wasn’t so sure his being home was a good thing.

  They reached the house. Bix motioned for them to stay put at the corner while he slunk to a dark window along the front of the house and peered inside. He turned back to them and shook his head, then moved along to the next window, which was lit by lamplight inside. He took a long look, then moved quietly toward the front door.

  Caitlin and Josh followed and Caitlin almost looked through the window, but Bix was already at the door, so she hurried over to it. She now saw that it was ajar, though she knew that Bix hadn’t touched it.

  “What did you see through the window?” Caitlin whispered.

  “A body,” Bix replied quietly.

  Caitlin didn’t know what to make of that. In her nightmare, she’d shot the warehouse victim, not the Bogeyman. Or had she? Actually, she remembered shooting the Bogeyman—or was it Bookerman—but when she’d looked at him on the floor, he had become the fair-haired victim whose sketch had been in the paper. Had she shot them both? Was she a double murderer?

  “Is it Bookerman?” she asked, still whispering.

  By way of answer, Bix said, “I gotta be honest. It isn’t pretty in there. Try to stay calm, okay?”

  Caitlin nodded. “Okay.”

  “I was talking to Josh.”

  Josh shook his head. “Damn it, Bix—”

  “Sorry,” Bix said. “Just trying to ease the tension.”

  He nudged the door open farther. Caitlin could not think of a thing in this world she would rather do less than walk into that house. But she had to.

  She followed Bix over the threshold and into the house that might have possibly belonged to Darryl Bookerman’s son. The first thing she noticed was an unpleasant smell, not overpowering, but strong enough to hit her as soon as she stepped inside. Something was rotting somewhere. Caitlin saw that Bix had his gun in his hand.

  They were in some sort of a den. Stained wall-to-wall carpet. Mismatched furniture, some of which probably had come from a dumpster, while the better pieces looked to be yard-sale bargains. An ashtray overflowed on a cheap end table. Most of this Caitlin registered in the blink of an eye, without even realizing she had done so . . . because what really snagged her attention was what she saw on the floor of the next room. It was a hand, attached to an arm, which was presumably attached to a body that she couldn’t see from her angle.

  “Stay here,” Bix said quietly as he started for the next room.

  “Wait up,” Josh whispered. “I’m coming with you.”

  “Muy macho, but if anything happens to me, you should be here with Caitlin to help her deal with whatever I wasn’t able to deal with mys
elf.”

  After a moment, to Caitlin’s relief, Josh nodded.

  Bix walked across the den and disappeared into the room where the body was. A moment later, gun still at the ready, he passed by the doorway again and headed in the other direction. After several tense seconds that seemed like half an hour, he returned.

  “We’re alone,” he said. “Well, if you don’t count him,” he added with a nod toward the dead body. Josh walked into the next room, and Caitlin hesitated before following.

  The smell was much stronger near the body. It wasn’t overwhelming, but it was strong. And unpleasant. In the movies, people gag at the smell of dead bodies. Perhaps this body simply hasn’t reached that level of decomposition yet, Caitlin thought in a more clinical fashion than she would have expected of herself in a situation like this. Was she detaching herself emotionally as a means of self-preservation? Was she in some sort of a state of shock? She didn’t feel like she was.

  She didn’t want to look at the body, at least not right away. Instead, she let her eyes roam around the room. It was a living room. There was more faded wall-to-wall carpet in here, covered with stains, though in this room one of those stains was a huge bloodstain, which she saw out of the corner of her eye. The room clearly had the same decorator as the den. It held the same hodgepodge collection of furniture, though the threadbare sofa in here was a pullout, which was, at that moment, pulled out, exposing a bare mattress on which Caitlin saw numerous stains, including a few small ones that could have been left by a spray of blood.

  On top of a sagging pressboard bookshelf sat two photos in frames. She looked at the first one, a black-and-white picture, and gasped. There he was, the Bogeyman from her nightmares. Skinny and tall, sickly pale, lumpy bald head. His dark eyes, which were spaced too far apart on his face, were the eyes that had haunted Caitlin for decades. At his side stood a small boy, maybe five years old. The boy’s light-colored hair was wispy and short, and the black-and-white photography almost gave it the appearance of a bald head. The same was true of the other child in the picture, a toddler sitting on the ground at Bookerman’s feet wearing only a diaper. Both boys were the spitting image of their ugly father. Neither was smiling. Given the eldest Bookerman’s apparent age in the photo, Caitlin assumed it had been taken shortly before Bookerman was sent to prison for more than three decades.

  In the second picture frame was a color photograph that looked to be only a few years old at most. Caitlin’s heart stopped. The subject of the photo was obviously one of the Bookerman sons. He stood with a rifle resting on his left hip, the barrel pointed toward the sky. His face displayed no expression. Dangling from his raised right hand was a dead animal. It was brown and Caitlin saw mostly its back, but the shape of it reminded her too much of a dog. She saw immediately why she would have been rocked to the core upon seeing this man a few weeks ago. Despite having been in a fugue for months, during which a person is evidently highly unlikely to remember anything about life before entering that state, Caitlin had still suffered nightmares about the Bogeyman—at least according to Bix. And if the man in this photograph had walked into Commando’s, as he evidently had done, then Caitlin—even though she was Katie at the time—couldn’t have failed to recognize him as her nightly nightmare tormentor. The resemblance was uncanny. How could she not have felt compelled to find him? The man in the picture had grown up to look almost exactly like his father. Maybe his brother had, too, wherever he was.

  Chops walked through Baltimore–Washington International Airport, cursing himself for choosing Skyway Airlines for today’s cross-country trip. The first leg of his three-flight journey—from LA to Chicago—had been almost unbearable. And a passenger with an incessant, hacking cough in the row behind him hadn’t made his connecting flight to Baltimore a hell of a lot better. Chops had considered complaining and trying to move, even though he knew there weren’t any available seats, but given that he was traveling under a false identity—albeit with a top-notch, high-quality fake passport—he didn’t want to draw too much attention to himself. So now, after two seemingly endless flights, he still had another hour and twenty-two minutes in the air to Boston.

  He looked at his watch and remembered to set it ahead three hours to make up for the time difference between the coasts. He’d be at his gate in another minute or two, and wheels up in less than an hour, which would put him in Boston in two and a half hours. And, he knew, he’d be pissed off at the world when he got there. He almost felt sorry for any poor bastard unfortunate enough to cross his path.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CAITLIN STOOD IN THE LIVING room of the house belonging to Michael Maggert, whose real last name was Bookerman. The time had finally come for her to look at the body. When she did, her heart skipped a few beats. Other than a reddish-green hue to the skin, which she could see had probably been very pale when he was alive, the dead man looked remarkably like he did in the photos Caitlin had just seen of him. In death, his eyes were open and dark and expressionless, just as they had been in the picture of him as a small child, as well as the one in which he was a grown man who had just shot a dog. She had no doubt. This was Darryl Bookerman’s son.

  Though she’d had some idea what she was going to see when she looked at him, Caitlin was still unprepared to see someone in person, someone right there, who looked so much like the monster from her nightmares. She felt as though she were in a slasher film, when the psycho killer finally lies dead at the heroine’s feet after terrorizing her in the dark, from the shadows, for two hours . . . Only here, Caitlin had been terrorized almost every night for two decades. And now there he was on the floor in front of her. She couldn’t believe it. Couldn’t believe it was really him. That he was real.

  She stopped herself. This wasn’t Darryl Bookerman, the man who had abducted her so long ago. No, this was that monster’s son. And he was dead. Caitlin probably had killed him.

  “Two bullet wounds in him that we can see,” Bix said as he stood near the shirtless body. “One in the shoulder that looks like it wasn’t too bad, and one in the gut that was very, very bad.”

  Caitlin looked at the man’s bloody stomach, then looked away.

  “Unless there are other holes in him somewhere, I’d say the shot in his stomach is what killed him.”

  Caitlin nodded. She was numb, she realized. She had no doubt that she had put that hole in his stomach. Bullets she had fired had made all of this blood pool onto the carpet. She was the reason his eyes were open and staring yet seeing nothing.

  “Got a couple of bullet holes in the wall over there, too,” Bix said, pointing to a pair of holes in the far wall, spaced a few feet apart.

  Caitlin looked at them blankly.

  “By the way, guys,” Bix said, “I probably don’t have to tell you not to touch anything, but in case I do, don’t touch anything. And if you already have, wipe it down with your shirt. I’m sure we’re leaving all sorts of shit anyway, stuff from our shoes, flakes of skin, whatever, but why make things any easier for the cops whenever they finally get here?”

  Caitlin nodded. She didn’t remember touching anything. Then again, she had certainly been here two nights ago, and for all she knew she had touched every surface in the place, either before or after she shot Bookerman Junior.

  “There’s some mail on the table here,” Bix said. “Addressed to Michael Maggert.”

  Caitlin looked over at Josh, who was a few feet away, leaning down close to the pullout sofa.

  “What are you looking at?” Caitlin asked.

  He stood too quickly, as though he’d been caught being sneaky, which made Caitlin walk over. She looked down. Secured to the metal frame of the pullout, next to the thin, stained mattress, was a pair of handcuffs. The dangling end was open, a key still in the keyhole. Caitlin took an involuntary step backward.

  “We don’t know what those are for, Caitlin,” Josh said, “or why they’re here, or whether anyone had been . . .”

  He didn’t finish. He didn’t h
ave to.

  “Katie,” Bix said, “is that your cell phone?” He pointed to a phone lying on the dirty carpet, not far from the body.

  “Is it?” she asked.

  “That doesn’t look like yours,” Josh said as he knelt close to it. “That’s not your brand. And your phone case was black.”

  “That may not have been the phone she had when she was with you,” Bix said, “but she didn’t have a phone at all when I met her, and that looks just like the one we got her. Bet the back of the case has one of those Wild Things on it, just like her tattoo. I bought it for her. We used it for the tattoo guy to copy. Turn it over.”

  “I thought I wasn’t supposed to touch anything,” Josh said.

  “If it’s not hers, wipe it down after.”

  Josh turned over the phone. Same Wild Thing as her tattoo. He stood and handed the phone to Caitlin. Without thinking, she tried to turn it on, but it was dead.

  “I guess there’s no doubt now that I was here,” Caitlin said.

  She looked around the room—at the body again, at the blood on the floor and on the mattress, at the handcuffs, at a small table that had been knocked askew, and at the lamp that had fallen over on top of it. A mostly empty bottle of Budweiser lay on its side on the floor beside the table. Caitlin wasn’t sure exactly what had transpired here, but the most important fact was clear to her.

  “I killed him,” she said.

  She looked over at Josh who, for the first time, didn’t object to her saying something like that. Finally, he said, “If you did, I’m sure you had a good reason.”

  “Really, Josh? Isn’t it obvious what happened?”

  Josh didn’t reply. Caitlin sensed Bix watching her.

  “I saw this guy come into the pub and I decided to get revenge for what happened to me when I was a kid, and what happened to those other girls. Maybe I confused him with his father, or maybe I didn’t care that he wasn’t the same Bookerman who abducted me as long as I got my revenge. I don’t know. But I followed him home from the fight club the other night and I shot him to death.” She wasn’t sure how the handcuffs factored in, but she was sure about the rest of it. “But he wasn’t his father,” she added. “I shot an innocent man.”