The Prettiest One: A Thriller

by James Hankins

  They searched for additional evidence that a crime had been committed here—further justifying their entry into the home—while also looking for anything that would help in their investigation of the warehouse murder. They couldn’t touch anything without a warrant, but things in plain sight were fair game. Hunnsaker’s eye fell on an open cardboard box with several random items inside, including bits of trash, a wrinkled takeout menu from a restaurant called the Fish Place, duct tape, and a pack of cigarettes. Nothing terribly helpful at first glance, but something here might turn out to be significant if they came back later with a warrant. What she most wanted to find, though, was something telling her where Caitlin Sommers was right now. She let her eyes drift around the room, then across the hall, into the kitchen, where they fell on a phone book lying open on the table. She walked over to it and saw that a page had been roughly torn out. The page on the left side of the book had listings for horses, hospice care, and hospitals. The page on the right, the one that came after the one that had been ripped out, listed hotels—alphabetically, of course, starting with the Lullaby Inn Motel. Apparently, motels didn’t get their own section but were instead listed in the hotel section. Hunnsaker used her cell phone to snap a picture of the book and called out, “They’re renting a room in the area, Javy.”

  Padilla walked into the kitchen from the bedroom down the hall.

  “Any idea which one?” he asked.

  “Not sure. Probably a motel, but we can’t rule out hotels, either. We need to get some of our people to start calling them alphabetically, but stopping at the Lullaby Inn.” She pointed to the open phone book. “And let’s see if there are some uniforms on patrol who can pop into a few, too.”

  “Want me to start a warrant application for this scene?” Padilla asked.

  “I don’t think that’s a priority at the moment. Let’s find Sommers and Bixby, then we’ll get our warrant and come back and take the place apart, see if anything here ties them to the warehouse or the victim. For now, though, I need a copy of the page that’s missing from this phone book.”

  “Gotcha. Want to post someone down the block?”

  “Yeah, let’s get an unmarked car out there in case we’re wrong about the motel.”

  “Are we wrong?” Padilla asked.

  “No.”

  “And what’s next on our agenda?”

  “We’re going to hit a few motels ourselves,” Hunnsaker said. “What do you say, Javy? You, me, cheap motels?”

  “I’ve been waiting years for you to ask, but what will Elaine say?”

  “I think she’ll be happy for us,” Hunnsaker said. The truth was, it was Hunnsaker who was happy, or at least getting closer to it. They now had a name for the redhead, they knew where she lived, and now they knew generally where to find her. It shouldn’t be long now.

  Caitlin looked down at the page Bix had torn from his phone book.

  “How about the Deluxe Motel on Larchmont Avenue?” she asked.

  They had decided to spend the night in a motel. The police were looking for them. Who knew who else might be doing the same? They certainly hadn’t known that One-Eyed Jack had been. And if he had been able to find them, someone else could, too. Bix had argued that they should just keep driving, get the hell away from Smithfield and out of Massachusetts altogether. But Caitlin still intended to turn herself in to the local police, though both Bix and Josh had convinced her to sleep on it and make sure it was what she wanted to do, at least so soon. She knew she wasn’t going to change her mind, but the thought of spending one more night a free woman sounded appealing. Either way, though, if Caitlin wanted to go to the Smithfield police in the morning, they had to stay in the area, which led to their search for a nearby motel.

  “Deluxe Motel?” Josh said. “Simple name, gets right to the point, but is there such a thing as a deluxe motel?”

  “Larchmont Avenue’s a little close to our place,” Bix said. “I mean, my place. What else you got?”

  Caitlin scanned the list. “This only goes through most of the Ls.”

  “We were in a hurry. I figured there had to be a good one for us on that page. It’s two-sided, you know.”

  “I’m looking,” Caitlin said. “How about the Eagle Inn Motel on Rossdale Boulevard?”

  Bix nodded. “Sounds good.”

  Caitlin gave the address to Josh, who typed it into the GPS application on his tablet. The feminine robotic voice had just given its first direction when Bix’s cell phone rang. He looked at the screen and said, “It’s my cousin.”

  He answered and listened for a moment. “No shit? Hang on, Terry, I need to put you on speaker . . . Because I’m in the car, that’s why. Hang on.” He shot a Be quiet look at Caitlin and Josh, then switched the call to speakerphone. “Terry?”

  “I’m here,” a voice said.

  “Okay,” Bix said, “so you were saying that the woman in the paper who the cops are looking for—the one who’s a dead ringer for Katie—saved the life of one of your girls?”

  “Thanks for bringing me up to speed on what I just told you, Bix.”

  “Just making sure I heard you right.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I said. So, the other night my girl Evangeline gets in this dude’s car; it was only supposed to be a blow, but instead of pulling around the block, he keeps driving.”

  Caitlin realized that the man on the phone, Bix’s cousin, was a pimp.

  “Then he offers her a bottle of water,” the pimp said, “which was already open, and he gets really angry when she won’t drink it. Evangeline gets scared and asks to be dropped off at the next corner, and the guy hits her. The next thing she knows, they’re going too fast for her to get out of the car.”

  “When was all this, by the way?”

  “Tuesday.”

  Three days ago. The day before Caitlin killed Mike Bookerman.

  As Caitlin listened, Terry the pimp told Bix how the guy took Evangeline to his house, where he made her drink the water that obviously contained a drug. Then he handcuffed her and spent a day raping her every few hours. Finally, he said he had something he had to do, so he made her take another drink that knocked her out for a while, though she had no idea how long. All she knew was that it was daytime when she took the drink and it was night when she came to and found him standing over her. He was really pissed off about something and seemed to want to take it out on someone, and Evangeline said she knew it was going to be her.

  “He drank himself a beer,” Terry said, “talking to himself the whole time, all angry and crazy-sounding, and Evangeline was scared to death. She was still pretty loopy, she says, still kind of drugged up, but he looked like he was going to hurt her, and then she thought he’d kill her.”

  “And then what?” Bix asked.

  “Then some girl came in and saved her.”

  “How?”

  Caitlin’s heart was beating fast. This was it.

  “Walked right in and shot the guy. He fell down and died, and the girl stared at him for a minute. Now remember, Evangeline wasn’t exactly thinking clearly, but she thought the girl looked confused about what she’d done, like she’d suddenly forgotten that she’d walked in and shot the guy and was only just then realizing she’d done it. I don’t know what the hell she’s talking about . . . Shut up, Evangeline, would you? I’m telling it the way you told me, aren’t I? Besides, you were high at the time, remember?”

  Caitlin heard a faint voice in the background but couldn’t make out what it said.

  Terry continued. “The girl looks at Evangeline for the first time, then she looks around the room and sees the handcuff key, which she tosses to Evangeline. Then she just walks out of the house, still carrying the gun.”

  Caitlin closed her eyes. She’d just heard a recounting of her murdering someone. The man may have been a vile rapist, but did that justify cold-blooded murder?

  “Anyway, Bix, just thought you’d want to know,” Terry said. “I recognized the redhead right away, of cour
se, as soon as I saw the paper this morning. Knew it was Katie. But it wasn’t until Evangeline saw the paper and told me that the girl in the drawing saved her life that I decided to call you. I thought it might help somehow . . . though I don’t know how, I guess. It’s not like Evangeline’s gonna come out and talk about what that guy did to her. But maybe you’d feel better knowing that your girlfriend might’ve saved someone’s life.”

  “We were there tonight,” Bix said. “We saw the handcuffs. Didn’t know who’d been in them.”

  “We? You mean she’s with you? Thought she’d have tried to disappear by now. What the hell are you—Wait, never mind. I don’t want to know. But you were there tonight? This shit all happened days ago.”

  “Cops still hadn’t been there yet.”

  “Shut up, Evangeline . . . What? . . . Say that again . . . You sure? . . . Well, why the hell didn’t you tell me about that before? . . . Bix, Evangeline wants to know if you found a video camera. Says your girl didn’t hang to look around after she popped the guy, just turned and walked out, and Evangeline was too drugged up and freaked out to do so herself before she got the hell out of there and thumbed a ride.”

  “She knows about the camera?” Bix said.

  “You know about it?”

  “Yeah, we saw recordings on his laptop. You’re saying he had the camera running with Evangeline?”

  “That’s what she says. He kept it in a closet in the living room.” According to Terry the pimp, between his numerous attacks on Evangeline, he would take the camera out of the closet to download the videos onto his laptop. “Must be a hole in the wall or something,” Terry added, “for the camera to shoot through. Evangeline says a couple of times that asshole even sat with her on the bed, the laptop between them, and made her watch a video of him forcing himself on another woman. Then he’d do the same shit to Evangeline.”

  Bix asked, “And she thinks he turned it on that last time with her the other night? When the redhead came in?”

  “Well, again, she was loopy as hell, but she thinks so.”

  “Thanks, Terry.”

  “You going back for the tape, Bix?”

  “Yeah. Why?”

  “Evangeline would rather it not be seen by too many people, you understand?”

  “Of course. We need the tape, but given what’s on it, I can’t imagine wanting to show it to anyone.”

  Bix disconnected the call.

  Josh said to Bix, “Why aren’t I surprised that you have a cousin who’s a pimp?”

  “Hey, it’s not like I approve of what he does. Besides, according to him, he keeps them safe. Without him, the girls would be doing the same thing they’re doing, only without any protection. Well . . . without his kind of protection. Anyway, if it makes you feel better, he’s also a CPA, though I have to admit, he’s been doing less accounting and more pimping the last couple of years. To tell you the truth, I don’t like the guy, but I’m glad he called.”

  Bix swung the car into a U-turn.

  “Looks like we’re heading back to Mike’s house,” he said.

  Wonderful, Caitlin thought. Let’s have another visit with the man I killed, then watch a video of me killing him.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  HUNNSAKER LAID OUT THREE PHOTOGRAPHS on the counter in front of the desk clerk of the Bed-E-Bye Motel. The first was the doctored photograph of Caitlin Sommers, the one Padilla had found on the Internet and had Photoshopped to replace her blonde hair with shorter red hair so that it reflected the way she looked now, unless she had changed her appearance again. The second picture was of Caitlin Sommers’s husband, Josh Sommers, taken from the database of the New Hampshire Division of Motor Vehicles. The third photo was of her boyfriend, Desmond Bixby, pulled from the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles. The motel clerk scanned the pictures with disinterested, sleepy eyes. He shrugged.

  “Nope,” the clerk said. “Haven’t seen them.”

  “You sure?” Hunnsaker said.

  The clerk shrugged. “I think so.”

  “Good, because I’m assuming you wouldn’t want to be sitting at this desk knowing there’s a suspected murderer on the premises.”

  That wiped the sleep from the clerk’s eyes.

  “You got a copier here?” she asked. “Preferably a color one.”

  He nodded.

  “You mind putting these next to one another and running me fifty copies? I’d appreciate it.”

  “I’m not allowed to use the copier for personal stuff. It’s only for official use.”

  “This is official police business. Does that help?”

  “Manager says toner’s expensive.”

  Hunnsaker smiled. “Like I said, I’d appreciate it.” She handed her business card to the clerk. “And put my card next to them so it shows up on the copies, okay? Thanks.”

  The clerk hesitated a moment, then scooped up the photos, took Hunnsaker’s business card, and disappeared into an office behind the desk. Hunnsaker heard the rhythmic whirring of a copier doing its job. A minute later, the clerk was back with a stack of copies, which he handed across the counter.

  “So I’m hoping you’ll give me a call if you see any of these people,” Hunnsaker said, handing him back one of the copies. “And don’t do anything stupid. Don’t act suspicious. Just check them in, and once they’ve gone to their rooms, call 911 and tell them you have a person of interest in a murder investigation staying here, and tell them to call me. Then when you hang up, call me yourself using the number on that card. Got it?”

  The clerk nodded.

  “What’s your name?” she asked.

  “Jerry.”

  “Thanks, Jerry.”

  Outside, Hunnsaker slipped behind the wheel of her car. She dialed Padilla’s number.

  When he answered, she asked, “Anything going on?”

  “I sent the three photos in a blast text to patrol units, with instructions to check motels on their routes if they can, even if the place has a name that comes later in the alphabet. I figured the suspects might not stick to the phone book if they passed a motel that looked good to them.”

  “Good thinking. Anything so far?”

  “Two units called in already and said they’d checked motels, shown the photos, and left instructions to call 911 if the suspects showed up.”

  Hunnsaker took the names of the two motels and crossed them off her list.

  “Where are you, Javy?”

  “Just left my first fleabag joint.”

  The page that had been torn from Bixby’s phone book listed several dozen hotels that came alphabetically before the Lullaby Inn Motel. Hunnsaker and Padilla had divided the list in half, with Hunnsaker taking the first part. They would each drive to the motels on their list, starting with the closest, while also calling the other places on their list while driving. Fortunately, Hunnsaker was a good multitasker.

  Between the two of them and the various officers on patrol, there were a lot of eyes looking for Caitlin Sommers and whoever might be with her. There were only so many motels in the area. It was just a matter of time.

  It was getting late as they neared Bookerman’s house. They had passed only one other car on this quiet stretch of road, a sedan traveling in the opposite direction. Otherwise, nothing, which was just as well considering that they were heading back to the scene of a murder that one of them had committed. Bix couldn’t imagine what was going through Caitlin’s mind right now. He wished she would let him get them both new identities, then run off with him. But she insisted on doing what she thought was the right thing. He admired that a little, but only a little, because he also thought it was a really lousy idea.

  He pulled up Bookerman’s curving driveway and saw the same car that had been there before, with the trunk still open, just as it had been when they were there not long ago. They hurried to the front door, which was closed but unlocked, just as they’d left it. They went inside, and from where they stood they could see that everything in the next room lo
oked as it had when they were here two hours ago, except for the addition of the dead guy on the floor with blond hair, one eye, and a huge slit in his belly. One-Eye was lying beside the corpse of Mike Bookerman, or Mike Maggert, or whatever the dead dirtbag would rather be called in whatever part of hell he was now roasting in.

  “Shit,” Bix whispered as he reached into the back of his waistband and drew his gun. “You guys know the drill.”

  Caitlin and Josh nodded and stood beside each other while Bix walked softly to the kitchen and peered around the door. He moved quietly down the hall, checking Bookerman’s bedroom first; then the bathroom; then finally, the second bedroom that Bookerman had used as the base for his Caitlin-stalking operation—the same search he had conducted just half an hour ago. They were alone in the house.

  Bix returned and led them into the living room. With the overall tension level a little lower now that they knew One-Eye’s killer wasn’t still in the house—but still fairly high because sometime within the past thirty minutes or so someone had killed One-Eye pretty much right where they were standing—they opened the door to the only closet in the room. On the shelf, Bix found the camera.

  “I looked in this closet last time,” he said as he took down the camera, “and I saw this in here, but I thought it was just sitting there in the corner. It didn’t occur to me that it could have been carefully positioned there in front of a peephole. That last video would still be on here, right? Not somehow already on the laptop?”

  “That’s right,” Josh said. “He’d have to have transferred it.”

  “Yeah, well, he didn’t get the chance to do that.” Also on the shelf, Bix found the box the camera had come in. He closed the door and handed the camera and the box to Josh. He looked at the hole in the wall. It was big enough for the lens to see through clearly but still wasn’t easy to see in the shadow of a picture frame on the wall.

  “One more thing to do,” he said as he stepped over to the blond man’s corpse and knelt down, being careful to stay away from the blood. He saw a rectangular bulge in the guy’s front pocket, slipped his fingers in, and withdrew the cell phone with Caitlin’s recorded confession. Then he stood. “Ready to go?”