"What we did together?" he snapped angrily. Talk about a Jekyll and Hyde trick. One minute he was soft-spoken and kind, the next, a man with frightening rage. "We never did anything together. She hardly ever let me watch TV and then it was only to see those crazy TV evangelists."
"So she was a religious woman."
"Claimed to be," he scoffed. "Granny's father was some kind of preacher in Arkansas or something. Bunch of damned superstitious hillbillies."
"Superstitious?" She opened her eyes a little farther, watching him carefully. "What do you mean?"
"It doesn't matter," he said softly, staring at his arms crossed in front of him. "It doesn't matter," he repeated.
She watched him scratch his forearm. She'd pushed a button again; she just wasn't sure what button or where it was taking her. She backed off to give him time to recuperate. "Tell me what your favorite shows on TV are."
"I like the movie marathons." He rubbed the other forearm through the plastic jumpsuit.
"Me, too. Which ones?"
"Last week was bank robber week on TNT." He grew more animated. "You see any of those?"
"I think I might have caught the tail end of Bonnie and Clyde," she lied. Actually, she'd been flipping through the channels trying to find out if it was going to rain the following day and had seen the movie go by on the screen.
"I saw that one! There was one on Patty Hearst, too. Did you realize that she didn't wear a mask when she walked into that bank?"
She tiled to slide her arms back and forth a couple of times, hoping he was too preoccupied with the conversation and his itchy arms to notice. "Guess I didn't really think about it."
He was quiet for a minute as he rested his chin on his forearm. He did look tired. Beyond tired—exhausted. Like a man whose demons were keeping him awake at night.
"What other movie marathons have you seen?" she asked.
"Umm... one about vampires."
The minute he said it, she thought of Brandy and the bite on her neck. Had he gotten the idea off the television? And the mask he had worn into her house... was Patty Hearst responsible? It was so incredibly bizarre a thought, that it was quite possible.
"What else?"
"I don't know. Don't remember." He rubbed his arm viciously.
She lifted her head, bringing it upright and as she did it, she tried to slide one arm forward as hard but as slowly as she could. She could have sworn it shifted slightly. "What's the matter, Alan? Get into some poison ivy or something?"
He closed his eyes for a second, and she couldn't help think what a nice-looking thirty-three-year-old man he was. How ordinary in appearance. It was hard to believe, looking at him, that he worked in the hospital day after day, providing excellent, compassionate health care, and killed seven women. Was shooting for eight.
"Yeah," he said, rising suddenly to pace. "It must be poison ivy."
Concerned that he had become agitated again, Claire let her head roll back and she closed her eyes. A full minute passed before he seemed to notice. "Claire?" he said. "Claire, I thought you said you wanted to talk. I thought you said that you felt like talking."
She lifted her eyelids halfway. "Sorry, I'm just a little sleepy."
He walked over, his face lined with concern as he checked out her wrist wound. The more deeply cut one had begun to bleed pretty heavily again. She'd probably done it, sliding her arms back and forth. The sight of the blood pooling on the plastic shower curtain he had considerately placed across her lap made her suddenly woozy, and she was forced to close her eyes in earnest, this time to stop the barn from spinning around her.
"Claire." He ran back to the picnic table and brought the white towel, now stained with her blood, to hold against her wrist. "Let's talk."
"Okay," she breathed, kind of wishing for a break at this point. Now that she knew Ashley was safe, her determination to get away didn't feel quite so strong. But a part of her mind knew that was just the blood loss talking, and the lull in adrenaline. She wanted to live for Ashley. She wanted to live to put this sick bastard in jail. "Tell me about the other women," she said.
"I don't really want to talk about that."
"Okay," she whispered and closed her eyes again.
"But... but we can if you want. I mean, what harm can it do now, right?"
She smiled, her eyes closed.
"What do you want to know?" He released the pressure on her wrist. "You want some more water?"
"Water would be good." The minute he turned his back, she shifted both arms. The tape wasn't really loosening, but the adhesive wasn't sticking to her skin the way it had been. There was definitely more give. "Did you find them all at the hospital, Alan?"
He came back toward her with the water bottle. Nodded. "Everyone except Phoebe. She was a mistake. I thought she was Marcy that night, but you knew that, didn't you? You already figured that out. Here."
She took a couple of sips, feeling a certain amount of pride in the fact that she had concluded that Phoebe Matthews had never been his target. "Can I ask why you killed them?" She bent her head to drink again, figuring what the hell, he might just tell her.
"I didn't kill them. They just died."
"When they bled to death," she bit out before she could stop herself.
He was quiet for a minute. "That wasn't a very nice thing to say."
She didn't answer.
"And I didn't want... I don't want to hurt anyone. I really feel bad about Marissa and Brandy."
"What do you mean?" She studied his face. "Oh, you mean the way you hit them?" She hesitated. "Like you hit me?"
"I'm sorry." He lowered his head, shaking it in shame.
"Alan, did someone hit you when you were a child?"
He turned away from her, taking the water bottle with him. "Granny was more creative than applying a switch to a boy's backside."
His bitterness and pain were undeniable and against her will, her heart went out to him. She knew it was crazy, she knew child abuse was no excuse to grow up to be a killer, but the idea of any child being abused always upset her. "I'm sorry," she said. And despite her hatred of him, she was.
"Yeah, well. That's the way the cookie crumbles sometimes, doesn't it?"
"Tell me some more about your mother." Claire watched him return to the picnic table and sink onto the bench. "Did she know your—that you were being abused?"
"I told you," he said, his tone tense again. He rested his forehead on his hand. His voice was muffled because his head was down. "She never came back. She never knew crap. She left me here with that... that..."
He didn't finish his sentence and Claire was quiet for a minute. They were both quiet. She could see now that his eyes were drifting shut. He was worn out, perhaps not just from the physical strain of the long day, but maybe from the emotional stress she had pushed on him.
With a little surge of adrenaline, Claire slid her arms back and forth again.
* * *
"What the hell are they doing?" Graham asked as he and Ashley cut across the front yard that was filled with both Albany Beach and state police cars. There were dogs, too. Two of them, barking wildly on the end of their master's leashes.
"Checking tire tracks," Gallagher explained, following them toward the house. "Just on the outside chance he'd driven up the lane."
"I told you, there was no car here," Ashley argued.
"I know. We check anyway." The captain hooked his thumb in the direction of the woods. "Dogs followed a scent through the woods to an old logging road. He had a car parked there. Trail gets lost once he hits the pavement, though."
On the front porch, Graham stepped back to let Ashley pass. Every light in the house was on and there were police officers in uniforms and civilian clothes taking fingerprints and photographs.
"Found her briefcase, Captain," McCormick called from the dining room. "Want me to open it?"
"Come on," Graham told Ashley. "Let's see what we can make of your mother's scribbling."
Ch
apter 17
Claire watched through her lashes as Alan rested his head on his folded arms on the picnic table and let his eyes drift shut. "Just five minutes," he murmured, speaking as much to himself as to her. He thought she had passed out again.
She was close to it. While his attention had stopped the heavy flow of blood from her left wrist, it was oozing enough to continue to puddle in her lap on the plastic. She was beginning to become concerned that she might pass out again. Her head was so woozy that she was having trouble keeping her thoughts together.
As she worked her arms back and forth, ignoring the pain the friction of the tape was causing, she tried to stay mentally active. She studied the old barn, thinking it would have been a wonderful place to play as a little boy, had it not been for the grandmother and the abuse, which she could only imagine Alan had suffered. How difficult for a child to be born to a young, uneducated mother, then abandoned with an abusive relative. How could he have not grown up warped in some way?
But he was smart. That was obvious by how his crimes had played out. It was also obvious from the set-up here in the barn.
She continued to work her arms back and forth, and she studied what she could see in the ring of light from the lantern. Alan had covered the dirt floor of the barn with sawdust, to be able to easily dispose of any blood that fell, obviously. It could be raked up, burned. The makeshift wall around the chair, covered in plastic sheeting, was clever, too. It would stop any blood spatter, and afterward, it too, could be burned, destroying any evidence. The only blood trace that might possibly be left behind would be on the scalpel, but maybe, if a person boiled it, or sent it through an autoclave, the evidence would be gone. Better yet, a person could easily dispose of a bloody scalpel in any of those red boxes in the hospital.
She glanced at Alan whose shoulders were now rising and falling rhythmically. The plastic cap had shifted and now a tuft of neatly trimmed brown hair was exposed. She gazed down at the damp, dark sawdust at her feet as she continued to work the tape around her forearms.
She wondered if this was all Alan did with the blood. Let it drip onto the floor. She didn't know what the other possibilities were... saving it, cooking with it. She thought of his vampire movies. Drinking it? She was curious, but not enough so to want to wake him and ask.
She smiled grimly at her own sick humor.
And why was he fixated on the blood? Had he seen a terrible accident as a child and been marred by the sight of blood? In one of the reports on psychotics she had read, there had been a case of a man who had been repulsed by the sight of his mother's menstrual blood as a young, schizophrenic teen and had gone on a killing spree at eighteen, trying to rid the world of all the women in his household and their blood. He'd killed two teenage sisters and his mother before committing suicide.
A wave of dizziness and nausea passed over Claire and she closed her eyes, trying to will the earth and the barn to stop rotating on its axis, at least for a few minutes. Her arms were definitely looser now; she could feel the tape riding up and down on her sweaty arms that had been removed of all their hair with adhesive. Her left wrist had also begun to bleed in earnest again, probably because of her movement.
She glanced at Alan again. He was sound asleep.
Please, please God, she mouthed silently. I know you hate bargaining Methodists, but please get me through this and I swear I'll stop skipping Sunday morning service. Please just let me live long enough to get that tattoo off Ashley's butt.
She smiled to herself at the thought of her daughter. She was still pretty angry about the tattoo, but who couldn't love a fifteen-year-old who had fought Alan the way Ashley had? How could you not love a girl with the good sense to run when her mother told her to?
Claire stopped moving her arms for a second, enjoying the peaceful lull. She was so tired that a quick nap seemed like a good idea. Maybe a few minutes of rest would give her the energy she would need to get herself out of here.
Claire felt her eyelids close and she sat there for a minute, head hung loosely forward. Then she jerked her head up. "Come on," she told herself under her breath. "You've got to get out of here. Ashley needs a mother. She still needs you."
Taking a deep breath, ignoring the pain that burned along her forearms, Claire gave her right arm a good shove. Her left arm shot back, popping herself in the boob, and it smarted so badly that she had to clamp her mouth shut to keep from crying out.
She ripped her arms loose and looked down through tears to see a wide loop of silver duct tape around her wrist.
Oh, God, oh, God, thank you, she screamed inside her head. And who said there were no more miracles? Her arms were free. Now she just had to get the tape off her bare ankles. She went to lean forward, letting the plastic sheet on her lap drift to the floor. She froze as it made a crackling sound as it hit the floor, but Alan didn't stir.
The tape around her waist prevented her from reaching her ankles. That and the wooziness that was back again. She felt like she was drunk, only she hadn't had the pleasure of even a nip of vodka.
Okay, okay, she told herself, keeping one eye on Alan. Keep your head up. Get the tape off from around your waist, then tackle the feet. She dug the edge of the tape on the left side of her stomach, trying to cradle her bleeding wrist against her chest. The tape started to pull away from itself but it made such a loud sound that she froze at once.
Alan lifted his head, turned it and laid it down again, eyes still closed.
Claire breathed again. Okay, so tearing the tape wasn't going to work. She looked down at the way he had taped her into the chair, fighting the dizziness. The tape was around her T-shirt, not her skin. The easiest, quietest solution was to wiggle out of the gray police academy shirt.
But she didn't have anything on under it.
Realizing what a ridiculous thought that was, she rolled her eyes. Then regretted it. Just the simple motion made her dizzy again.
Okay, off with the shirt, she told herself. Strip for him, baby.
She took one last look at Alan. From this point out, it would be obvious what she was doing. If he woke, he'd catch her. He'd pick up that shiny scalpel placed just so on the plastic lunch counter tray, and he'd kill her.
Claire shook her hand, letting the loop of tape fall to the damp ground, and then began to pull her arms inside the T-shirt. It was tricky with the tape and the chair and there was very little room to maneuver, but she was soon resting against her shirt, topless. She closed her eyes for a minute, catching her breath. She was sweating hard. Now, all she had left was her feet and then she'd be free.
Surprisingly, the feet were the easiest of all. Alan hadn't been as careful as he should have been. But why did he need to tape her feet tightly to the chair? She hadn't had a way to reach them.
Claire dug at the tape, with her left hand, where it had adhered to her bare skin, and in less than five minutes she was sitting in the chair, free.
Now what? she thought, a little shocked that she didn't just spring up. But she knew she had to plan carefully. One sound and he would wake and in her weak state she'd be no match for Alan in a wrestling match. Not this time.
Claire rose slowly, and when she shifted her full weight to her feet, pain shot through them. She wobbled, but she didn't fall. Holding her left wrist against her bare breast, she slid one foot forward. The sawdust, damp and clumpy with her blood, felt gross under her bare feet. She slid the other one forward.
The barn was spinning around her. She felt as if she was going to be sick. She took another sliding step, easing forward toward the picnic table where Alan slept, her gaze fixed on the only decent weapon in sight, the scalpel he had used to cut her.
Time seemed to drag. You would have thought she was running a marathon.
She lifted her foot and brought it down, realizing a second too late that she had stepped on the plastic sheeting that had been on her lap. The crackle was earth-shattering.
Alan stirred.
She halted. Held her breat
h.
After a moment she carefully slid one foot and then the other left, circumnavigating the bloody plastic. Another three feet and she would be there. She thrust her right hand out in anticipation of the feel of the cool steel at her fingertips.
Another foot. She stretched, swallowing the nausea that rose in her throat. Her fingers closed over the scalpel's handle.
"You shouldn't have done that."
Claire's head snapped up just in time to see Alan lunge at her across the wooden picnic table. She slashed at him and the sharp tip of the weapon caught the sleeve of his jumpsuit and shirt and tore a long, clean slice. The plastic and fabric fell away revealing hideous red scarring up and down his entire forearm.
Claire tried to pull back, but she was so weak. Her reflexes weren't fast enough and when Alan swung his other arm, he clipped her elbow and the scalpel fell on the picnic table between them. She screamed with every ounce of strength she had left and instead of trying to pull back, in a last ditch effort to save her life, she threw herself forward on top of him.
* * *
"Where is it? Where is it?" Graham said, growing more frantic by the moment as the clock on the dining room wall seemed to tick louder and louder.
For two hours he and Ashley and Captain Gallagher had been pouring over Claire's notes. There were three folders of information she had gathered on more than seventy hospital employees. There were pages of basic personal and professional information on each person. But there were also little cryptic notes written in the margins. Doodles.
Graham lifted his head from the legal pad he was looking at for the second time. Ashley sat across from him, her head cradled in her arm as she flipped through another pad of paper.
"You should let me call your grandmother back," he said quietly to her. "You should go home with her and get some sleep."
Ashley shook her head, stoically. "It's here," she said, not lifting her gaze from the paper as she flipped the page. "We just have to find it."
She'll Never Live Page 22
