“Vada who?” Pops thundered. “Who the fuck is this person?”
Whitt felt his skin grow cold.
“Vada Reskit,” Whitt said. “She’s from North Sydney metro. Woods assigned her.”
More silence. Whitt’s jaw was clenched so tight, his teeth clicked.
“She said you’d approved the assignment,” he offered.
“I’ve never heard of her,” Pops said. “I didn’t approve the assignment of any new officers to this case. What did you say her name was again?”
Whitt was about to answer when the phone was taken from his hand. He turned and watched Vada end the call, her features sharp and pale in the light of the screen. He would have reached out to stop her, snatch the phone back, but the gun in her hand was pointed right at his belly.
She lifted her eyes to him, and they were the tired, sad eyes of someone well-versed in betrayal.
“Get in the car, Whitt,” Vada said.
Chapter 71
THE FOREST WAS ALIVE.
As I’d run from the crime scene, there had been no time to consider what Whitt’s partner shooting at me had meant. I’d simply fled.
I didn’t know how far I’d come. The land beneath me sloped downward and then flattened, the thick bush receding suddenly at the edge of a pine plantation. I lay down beneath a tree and waited, panting, for the inevitable return of the pain in my calf, the sensation kept at bay by the adrenaline surging through my veins.
“Shit,” I seethed, dragging the shuddering limb toward me, tentatively pulling up the blood-soaked leg of my jeans. I wiped away handfuls of blood. “Shit. Shit. Shit.”
It was a graze, but a deep one. The bullet had entered the back of my calf, heading diagonally through the flesh, tearing away a hole in the meat the size of my pinkie finger. I pulled my jacket off, sweat pouring down my chest and ribs, thinking I’d have to remove a sleeve for a bandage. The air was misting in front of my mouth as I breathed. I unzipped and emptied the backpack on a whim, hoping I wouldn’t have to sacrifice my much-needed warmth to patch the wound.
There, at the bottom of the bag, a Ziploc first-aid kit with a roll of cotton bandages.
“Melina,” I moaned. “Melina, you fucking champion.”
I rolled the bandage around the wound tightly, making soft, whiny sounds at the pain. The limb felt hot and numb now, the nerves shocked or dead. More pain would come later, I knew. When I had fixed the wound, I lay on the damp ground and looked at the sky between the black spears of branches above me.
I slept. When I woke, it was dark. I lay trying to decide where I was, how tight I still held my grip on reality.
Like clockwork, my phone rang, startling something big and wild hiding in the forest nearby that had probably drawn forward by the smell of my blood and the sound of my whining. I answered the phone, packing my bag again, the precious body heat I’d gained in the run now gone and my limbs starting to shake.
“Harry,” Regan said.
“I’ve made a decision,” I told him.
Chapter 72
HE WAS SMILING. I could hear it in his voice.
“What’s your decision?” he asked.
“When I find you,” I said, “I’m going to shoot you in the leg. You deserve to have all the pain you’ve caused to others inflicted back on you. I’m going to start there, and I’m going to continue shooting until you’re just a pile of broken bones and bloodied flesh.”
“You have a very graphic mind,” he said. “I enjoy hearing your little violent fantasies. I really do. I have my own ones. You’ve been able to see some of them.”
“Lucky me,” I said, curling on the ground, holding the phone to my ear.
“You sound cold,” he said. “I spent a lot of my time in prison feeling cold. I know you’re out there in the wind and rain hunting me. With every layer I strip from you, you’re going to feel that icy chill. Brand-new skin exposed to the air. It’s kind of exhilarating, isn’t it? Those people, Eloise and Gary Jansen, they’re another layer I’ve taken from you.”
“You keep their names out of your filthy mouth,” I snarled.
“Eloise told me some things about you,” Regan said. Wherever he was, it was dead quiet. “She didn’t take much prodding to remember you among her collection of needful children. You were her dark-hearted one. Her wild bird. She had to really work on you. You trusted no one.”
I closed my eyes and listened, remembering.
“She said she could tell you’d been in the system a long time. When she tried to hug you, you backed away. You ate furiously. She caught you hoarding snacks in your room. She said you were utterly without warmth toward the smaller children they were caring for at the time. You didn’t find them cute or entertaining. You’d probably been around so many of them in your life, right? What’s another snotty-nosed brat who no one wants?”
He was really enjoying this. I held the phone against my ear, trying to catch my warm breath and filter it back against my face with the collar of my coat. My leg was throbbing. I remembered Eloise trying to show me how to crochet, sitting on the couch, colorful balls of yarn all around her. When she’d tried to take my fingers, reposition them on the hook, I’d dropped everything and stormed away. I wished now I’d given her more of a chance.
“Eloise Jansen told me all these things about the child Harriet Blue,” Regan said. “She told me that you came around. That you eventually learned to trust them. She’d wanted to keep you longer, because she knew you had promise.”
I squeezed my eyes shut, not wanting to listen but not being able to pull the phone away.
“I have those memories now. I even have a little picture of you that Eloise kept on the wall. The illusion you’ve held about yourself all these years is wrong, Harry. That layer is gone. The hope and the brightness and those warm moments with people like Eloise Jansen—I’ve taken them away.”
“How long am I going to have to listen to this?” I asked. “Listening to you talk makes me want to peel off my own face and eat it like a crepe.”
“You’re not enjoying this?”
“Not at all.”
“I am,” Regan said. “This is all about you, sure. But every time I take someone meaningful from you, I get all these beautiful things in return. It’s good work that I’m doing here, Harry. You’ll see.”
“Wonderful,” I said. “I’m glad you’re happy. You enjoy those things while you can. I’m going to take them back from you when I kill you. It’ll be like a trip down memory lane. Me remembering, you screaming in pain.”
He laughed. I wiped my running nose on my sleeve.
“The Sydney police tried to set me up,” Regan said. “They used your mother as bait.”
“Oh?” I said.
“They really have no idea, do they?” he said. “She was just a vessel for you. I’m not interested in her. I want to take the people who you really value, the ones you think you need.”
“You really like the sound of your own voice, don’t you?” I said. “You’re such a versatile killer. Some people you strangle and stab. Others you bore to death.”
“Our mothers were the same,” Regan mused. He was almost talking to himself now. “Just empty shells.”
I paused. The exhaustion was pulling away my anger. I needed to start listening. He wasn’t just talking. He was trying to draw me into his mind.
“Did you love her?” I asked.
“No,” he said. He sounded comfortable. Relaxed. Perhaps the kill had tired him. “I’ve loved in my life. You know that I have.”
“My brother,” I said.
“Yes,” he admitted. “That was the first time. I was seventeen. I’d never felt it before. Those last few days with my mother were probably the closest I ever got. She’d walk me up to the lighthouse and we’d stand together, and I’d try to love her. So close, but…” He trailed off. I pressed the phone hard against my ear.
A lighthouse, I thought. I have to remember that.
“Where do I go next?�
� I asked him. “You’re taking me somewhere that’s important to you, aren’t you? You said I’d understand you when we met. When will this end, Regan? Just tell me.”
“This is about me, Harry,” he said. “But it’s also about you.” There was an odd pause, the phone going silent, as though he’d taken it away from his mouth and I couldn’t hear his breathing any longer. When he returned, his voice had gone up an octave. Excited.
“Things may be moving faster than I’d planned,” he said.
Chapter 73
THEY DROVE. WHITT focused on the lines on the road, the wheel in his hands something to hang on to when all else seemed to be falling away. He was hyperaware of the gun in Vada’s hand, still pointed at his belly. He swigged from the bottle of Jack he had kept in the car since they’d left Sydney. She didn’t seem to mind him drinking. He wasn’t going to crash on the back roads they took between the fields, at a carefully chosen speed she wouldn’t allow him to exceed. The directions that came from her were softly spoken, the same intimate tone she’d used when she’d been in his arms in the motel bed, her lips against his ear.
She’d been so tender. So reassuring in those moments as he moved inside her. Now she was the same. Tender, but lethal. Walking him gently toward his death. They pulled over as she directed, and she took his cuffs from his belt. As she leaned in toward him, he could smell the familiar scent of her body. So strange to twitch in terror at her touch now when it had given him such pleasure only a day earlier.
“Vada,” he said, breaking the heavy silence. “Vada, let’s talk.”
She cuffed his wrists to the car’s steering wheel, took the keys from the ignition, and closed the car door behind her. Whitt watched her walk to the back of the car. She had taken out her phone. He twisted awkwardly and tried to listen through the back window, which was slightly ajar.
“But I need you to come,” Vada was saying, her voice smaller, frailer than Whitt had ever heard it. “Why not? Where are you? I can’t…I can’t do it myself again. The first time, the cop in the records room drew his gun and I could…I could do it then because I needed to. I can do it again but I’ve been with Edward three days. Just this time. Regan, please.”
There was a long pause. Whitt listened to the wind.
“He’s definitely the best choice,” Vada said. “He’s the closest person to her now.”
Whitt twisted and watched Vada’s shape in the dark. Her arms were hugged around herself.
“It’s almost over,” she said. “You promise? After this, it’s over.”
Chapter 74
WHEN SHE GOT into the car again, her cheeks were rosy from the cold. She uncuffed him and ordered him to continue driving. After a time impossible to measure, Whitt broke through the sizzling tension.
“Karmichael and Fables,” he said.
She sighed.
“You went in through the car park.” Whitt shuddered. “You shot them both. You took the file, and you fled into the building rather than back out. You passed me in the dark in the hallway. I smelled the gunpowder.”
“Whitt,” she said gently, “stay on the road.”
He steered the wandering car back toward the center of the dirt road. The headlights rolled over a group of cows resting under a tree.
“You didn’t have a swipe card that next morning, the day after we met.” He swigged the bourbon. “I didn’t even notice. I never saw your badge. No one ever questioned your presence. Everyone must have just assumed you were meant to be there. But you’re not a cop. Of course you aren’t. You didn’t know how to unjam your pistol when you—”
“Whitt.”
“That’s how he’s got around all the roadblocks. That’s how he avoided the searches. You’ve been his eyes and ears on the ground.”
“This isn’t helpful,” she said. He glanced at her. Her eyes were so dark, the whites looked pale blue.
“You must have been terrified,” Whitt said. “At any moment, I could have mentioned you to Woods or Morris and it would all have been over, the whole charade.”
“I was terrified,” she admitted. Her face was expressionless. She said the words like she was reporting the time.
“Who are you?”
“I’m Vada Reskit.” She turned to face the windscreen. Whitt thought about grabbing the gun. Was the safety off? He couldn’t see. “Regan was my patient.”
Whitt squeezed the steering wheel.
“The prison psychologist’s reports,” he whispered, almost to himself. “That’s why they were missing from the file.” Whitt laughed humorlessly. “I didn’t even chase it up. There was so much paperwork on Regan. I assumed all it would say was that he was a psychopath. But it would have mentioned your name, so you never gave it to police.”
She seemed reluctant to explain it all. Whitt drank, sucking the burning liquor down, a piece of his fractured mind desperately recording sensations, knowing these were going to be his last. The last field he would ever see, moonlit through the window before him. The last words he would ever hear.
“We were together for six years.” She gave a tiny smile. “Every Tuesday, every Thursday. Regan had been in prison for a long time when he was assigned to me. He was a lot of work. He played a lot of games. Tested me. Trying to see if he could trust me.” Vada gave a shuddering sigh. “He became my only real project. The only thing I cared about. It was like, the rest of the week I was on fire. As soon as he laid eyes on me, I’d feel relief.”
“Regan Banks is a vicious killer,” Whitt said. “He killed a child. You stood in that house back there and you looked at what he’d done to those people. You…you sat before me and you looked at the autopsy photographs of those girls…”
Whitt was almost shouting. When her words cut over his, her voice was thick with some hidden emotion.
“Regan is worthy,” Vada said. “You couldn’t possibly understand, because you didn’t sit with him for half a decade and learn about his life, about what made him this way. You don’t think what he does hurts him? He is worthy of—”
“Of what?” Whitt howled. “Of saving? You’re going to save him? You’re out of your mind! He’s not a rescue dog! He’s a serial killer!”
Whitt struggled to breathe. The car was crawling along the dirt road slowly, delaying the inevitable. She didn’t seem to mind.
“He made a killer of you,” Whitt said. “He brainwashed you so completely…I can’t believe I didn’t see this. Those five weeks. We couldn’t find him. Of course we couldn’t—you were harboring him.”
“Turn here.” Vada pointed. Whitt looked and saw a tiny turnoff, a track that died no more than two car lengths into the forest. Whitt did as he was told.
“He sent you to get close to me,” Whitt said. His throat was so tight, it was hard to swallow. “To watch the investigation, and to see if killing me would hurt her the most. You asked if she was my girlfriend. You wanted to know if I was the right choice.”
Vada motioned for him to get out of the car.
“You are the right choice,” she said.
Chapter 75
DETECTIVE NIGEL SPADER found Deputy Commissioner Woods in the concrete smokers’ courtyard behind the command building. The big man was hugging his coat against the wind, pacing back and forth, a small mobile phone clutched tightly to his ear.
“Tonya, I’m not asking you to go back to the facility,” he growled. “I’m telling you. There will be enough money in your account to get your arse in a cab and not a cent more.”
Woods canceled the call, stabbing the phone with his thumb like he was squashing a bug. When he saw Nigel watching him, he scowled.
“I’ve authorized the Bristol Gardens operation for another night,” Nigel said. “Just because Regan hasn’t turned up yet doesn’t mean he won’t show tonight. He might be waiting for something.”
Woods patted his pockets for his cigarettes, didn’t answer. When Nigel offered his pack, the bigger man snatched them coldly from his fingers. The shadows from the courtyard
lights made his eyes unreadable.
“Sir, I have another suggestion,” Nigel continued.
“I’m all out of patience for helpful fucking suggestions,” Woods barked, taking his phone from his pocket and silencing the call that was coming through. “Put it in an email and leave me alone.”
“With all due respect, sir, it may be more time-critical than that,” Nigel said. “I’ve been dealing with Chief Morris, who has been trying to access the Banks CIR file. He believes we may have overlooked the importance of Regan’s childhood to what he’s doing—”
“Detective Spader.” Woods massaged his brow, squeezed his eyes shut. “If you think I want to hear theories from the genius mind of Chief Morris right now, you really do have your head planted firmly up your own arse.”
“Sir”—Nigel approached his superior officer cautiously—“Chief Morris’s theory might be bullshit. But he’s pursuing it. And if he’s right, and we’re wrong, we run the risk of handing this whole case and all the due credit for solving it to the man we just ousted for his sheer incompetence.”
Woods exhaled smoke, squinting through it at Detective Spader.
“He thinks Regan might be going back to where the incident occurred.”
“And why the fuck would he want to revisit something like that?” Woods said. “What I read in that file makes me sick.”
“That’s just what this guy is,” Nigel said, shrugging. “Sick.”
Woods considered. “We don’t know when he would go there,” he said eventually.
“Better to set up a team immediately, then,” Nigel said. “And every night until he shows. If he shows.”
Woods licked his teeth. He dropped the cigarette and stamped it out, his decision made.
Chapter 76
“START WALKING,” VADA said, poking him in the shoulder with the gun.
“Think about what you’ve done for this man,” Whitt said, taking uneven steps forward in the dark. “You’ve killed two people. You’ve…you’ve impersonated a police officer. You’re going to…you’re…”
Liar Liar Page 15
