by Blake Pierce
but unexpected. He blinked as if he was trying to dislodge something from
his eye as Anna yanked her arm free and ran for the back door.
He was on to her, though. He leaped up on the island and slid across it,
nearly falling off. He had cut off her escape route, sensing what she had
planned. With a scream, Anna ran for the laundry room at the far end of the
kitchen.
She knew he was on her heels but if she could just get to the laundry room
and close the door, maybe she could hold him off until the FBI got there.
She made it to the doorway, the smell of laundry detergent and dryer
sheets sweeter than ever before. She entered the room and turned to shut the
door, but he was already there, standing in the doorway. When she tried
slamming the door in his face anyway, he simply batted it aside.
Anna tried to fight against him as he came in, but with nowhere left to go,
she was easy prey. As he pushed her hard against the wall, all Anna could do
was wonder what in the hell was taking that FBI woman so long.
CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE
When DeMarco slammed on the brakes in front of the Forester home,
Kate was nearly thrown directly into the dashboard despite the seatbelt.
DeMarco threw the car into park and both women got out, sprinting directly
to the front door. Kate was not at all surprised to find it locked and started to
draw her foot back to kick it in. She then saw that the lock beneath the knob
was an electronic one and decided she’d rather not dislocate her ankle or
knee.
“Stand back,” DeMarco said, leveling her gun toward the lock.
Kate swiveled to the side and winced as DeMarco fired off a single shot.
The lock was obliterated and made a series of clicking noises. DeMarco drew
back and delivered a harsh kick that sent the door flying inward, her second
such attack of the day.
Kate flanked in, ducking down with her gun drawn, as DeMarco came in
behind her. Right away, they could hear the sounds of struggle. It sounded as
if it was coming from the very back of the house. Kate and DeMarco nodded
to one another and headed forward, not bothering to be stealthy, as the
gunshot to the front door had very likely ruined their cover.
As they came to the end of the hallway, the signs of a struggle were
evident: a picture was knocked from the hallway wall; a coffee mug had been
shattered on the floor, its contents splashed on the tile; several drawers were
opened and silverware littered the floor around the edges of the kitchen bar.
A choking sound followed by a hollow thudding noise came from further
back behind the kitchen. Kate sprinted forward, into what looked like a
mudroom. To the right, there was a partially opened door. From inside, there
was a commotion, a tangle of bodies and the wretched sounds of someone
choking.
“FBI!”
Kate screamed this as she drew up her gun and kicked the door open fully
with her foot. The door, though, would not swing all the way open. It was
stopped by one of the bodies on the floor. It was a man, kneeling over a
woman Kate assumed to be Anna Forester.
And the man, she assumed, was Darby Insbrook.
“Get off of her,” Kate said, not quite in a yell but in a voice that had some ice to it.
The tuner responded in a way that made no sense to Kate at first. He
swung his head around and did, in fact, look to be obeying. But as he started
to stand, his right foot kicked out at the door and it came rushing back in
Kate’s direction. She blocked it easily but when it stopped, he was there.
Insbrook swung hard, his right hand connecting with Kate’s cheek. She
tumbled back directly into DeMarco. Both women stumbled backward, Kate
doing everything she could to stay on her feet. DeMarco, on the other hand,
hit the mudroom wall and rebounded hard. She tried raising her gun to fend
off Insbrook, but he already had the door closed again.
Kate acted without thinking. She charged at the door, slamming her entire
weight into it. It caught Insbrook off guard and sent him sprawling back. His
feet tangled over Anna Forester’s body and he barely caught himself on the
edge of the dryer. A pile of folded clothes went toppling over into the floor.
In the back of her mind, Kate heard herself laughing maniacally. So far, this
was easily the clumsiest fight she had ever been in.
He pushed himself off of the dryer and launched himself at her. Kate fired
off a round but it was at the same moment she slammed into her. The bullet
tore into the wall just a foot or so behind Insbrook’s head. It was not a
shoulder thrown into her chest or even a punch or kick. Their bodies simply
slammed together. He felt as if he easily had fifty or more pounds on her, and
the result was nasty. Kate’s forehead dinged off of the killer’s chin and his
knee slammed into her hip. They fell in a heap, the back of Kate’s head
striking the door frame of the laundry room. White sparks rocketed across her
field of vision as something like dull electricity seemed to sweep across her
head. She was dimly aware that somewhere in the melee, she had dropped her
gun.
She was momentarily so blindsided and disoriented that she was barely
aware that Insbrook kept going. He plowed through her and continued on.
The only thing that brought Kate out of her stupor was the sound of another
gunshot. There was a brief yelp of pain and then the sound of something
thudding hard against the floor.
Kate scrambled to her hands and knees, fully expecting to see Darby
Insbrook on the tile floor of the mudroom with DeMarco holding her Glock.
Instead, the killer had DeMarco pinned to the wall—an elbow in her chest as
he started to wrap a piece of piano wire around her neck with the other hand.
Kate tried getting to her feet, using the doorframe to help. The white
sparks were still streaking across her line of vision and her knees felt
incredibly shaky. Still, she hobbled forward and brought a knee up hard into
Insbrook’s side, aiming for his ribs. She nearly fell again, almost losing her
balance and only able to stay on her feet by throwing her arms around
Insbrook’s neck. She did her best to maneuver it into a head lock but she was
too weakened from the earlier blow. The important thing, though, was that
Insbrook was off of DeMarco, trying to wriggle out of Kate’s grasp.
He dropped to his knees slowly, reached back, and grabbed a handful of
Kate’s hair. She knew what was coming next and did her best to brace her
feet against the mudroom wall to stop it. The killer hunched over in a
kneeling U-posture, pulled her hair hard, and sent her sailing over his
shoulder. Kate landed hard on her back and slid across the mudroom floor,
into the kitchen. The breath went sailing out of her and the pain in her back
caused her to curl into the fetal position. If she could have drawn in a breath,
she would have let out a scream.
Insbrook came at her again, the piano wire still in his hand. She saw rage
in his eyes, a dark glittering star that had no core. There was animalistic
hatred there, an urge to hurt and maim and kill.
Kate saw the
litter of silverware on the floor from the apparent struggle
between Anna Forester and Darby Insbrook before she and DeMarco had
arrived. She reached for a steak knife, her back screaming in pain as she did
so. Even as she grasped for it, she knew she would be too late anyway.
The killer dove for her, the piano wire stretched out tightly between his
hands. She had a moment to think of Karen Hopkins and how the wire had
actually cut into her skin. She wondered if he could actually saw through her
neck if he tried.
She raised the knife up and for the briefest of moments, there was
hesitation. This was followed by what sounded like a strange snapping noise,
organic and metallic sounding all at once. Insbrook howled—not a sound of
pain, but of rage. Kate realized that when she had drawn the knife up, she had
snapped the piano wire Insbrook had been wielding. She had snapped it right
in half.
From the floor, Insbrook threw a hard elbow out toward her. It missed, but
he followed with a lazy kick. This one caught her in the shin and though it
did not hurt all that bad, she knew it was going to leave one hell of a bruise.
He came at her again and Kate managed to get to her knees before he
could attack. She readied the knife, knowing that it was either him or her. If
she did not cut him where it mattered, he might very well kill her.
But just before he struck her, there were two loud popping noises, a wet
splash against Kate’s chest, and then an unexpected right-handed veer to
Insbrook’s approach. He tottered hard to the right and collapsed onto the
kitchen floor.
There was a hole in his forehead and another just below his neck. Both
were dribbling out blood, the one beneath his neck pouring it out onto the
floor. Kate looked behind where the killer had been coming from and saw
DeMarco. She was still in her shooter’s stance, her face like granite and her
knuckles white as they gripped the Glock.
It occurred to Kate in that moment, as she saw the absolute shock and
hatred on her partner’s face, that DeMarco had not even tried to shoot to
wound. Either of the shots could have been fatal, much less both.
“DeMarco…at ease. Okay?”
DeMarco only blinked once. Several spooky moments passed before
DeMarco got to her feet. Kate did the same, leaning back against the kitchen
bar as she realized she was still quite dizzy. Slowly, she walked over to
DeMarco just as DeMarco seemed to slowly start to come around. They both
looked back into the laundry room. Anna Forester was lying on the floor. As
Kate walked slowly into the room, she prayed the woman was still alive.
Anna’s eyes were open, staring up at the ceiling. At first Kate feared the
woman was dead, but then she blinked. And then she started to cry.
Kate tried to kneel on the floor with her but ended up partially collapsing
instead. She took the woman’s hand in her own and did her best to remain
rational.
“You’re okay now,” Kate said. “You’re okay.”
DeMarco watched on as she pulled her phone out and placed a call to
Bannerman. Even as she spoke to him, filling him in on what happened, it
was obvious that she was doing everything she could to hold back tears—and
to not turn around to face the death she had just doled out.
CHAPTER TWENTY SIX
As the evening rolled on, Kate noticed that Sheriff Bannerman looked like
he was in shock. He worked well and managed to keep his head above the
water, but Kate knew the look on his face very well. She was pretty sure that
when he got home that night, he was going to think long and hard about the
years he had served as a sheriff and what his retirement might look like.
Kate did not get a chance to really speak to him until the ambulance had
left the Forester house with Anna inside. As far as they could tell from first
glance, she was going to have some massive bruising around her neck and
she was in a serious state of shock. But all in all, Anna Forester was going to
turn out okay.
When the ambulance left and the last of the patrol cars left behind it,
Bannerman went to the porch swing on the Foresters’ porch and sat down
with a heavy sound that was part grunt and part sigh.
“You okay?” Kate asked.
“I will be. What about you? You got banged up pretty good. Don’t think I
haven’t noticed that bruise on the side of your head.”
“I’ll be okay.”
“I’ll make her see a doctor,” DeMarco said from the place where she was
sitting on the stairs.
“So…tell me about this piano I’m going to have to deal with,” Bannerman
said.
“You won’t have to deal with it,” DeMarco said. “We spoke with our
supervisor and he’s sending a special forensics team to look at it. There are
hairs on those strings that could be a year or so old. And not from this area.”
“So what does that mean? That he’s done this before?”
“It looks that way,” Kate said, still unable to believe it. “But we won’t
know for certain until the names we found in his address book are cross-
examined with unexplained murders or disappearances over the last few
years. And then we’ll have to wait on the forensics details from those hair
samples.”
“But…?”
“But it feels like we just stopped a serial killer,” DeMarco said.
Bannerman looked at Kate for some sort of confirmation and she nodded.
He said nothing for a while and then got to his feet, though it was clear he
was more than done for that day.
“Thank you, ladies, for all you’ve done. I guess I’ll call a press conference
of my own and let the locals know that the murders have come to a stop and
the suspect has been killed.” He looked at Kate and gave a knowing grin.
“You sure you don’t want to stick around for that?”
“Oh, I’m certain. But thanks anyway.”
The three of them remained on the porch for a while longer. Kate did her
best to hide the fact that her head was still reeling and she felt slightly sick to her stomach. She figured she’d have to get okayed by a doctor to fly back out
to Virginia. She was all but certain she had a concussion.
But it had been worth it because it would be much easier to live the rest of
her life constantly seeing the number twenty-three in her mind instead of
twenty-four.
***
Because she did indeed have a concussion, Kate was unable to make the
return trip back east for another twenty hours. She skipped going back home
right away because she knew there would be her own drama to wrap up there
—not only with Melissa, but with Alan as well. She flew direct from O’Hare
to Dulles exactly twenty-one hours after saving Anne Forester’s life.
She arrived back in DC with an email waiting for her. It was not from
Duran’s personal assistant, but from Duran himself. He would be in his
office, waiting for her arrival. He also gave her a heads-up that the section
chief may be in attendance.
Kate knew she should be worried but as she watched DC’s early night
traffic roll by through the windows of her cab, she felt a certain se
nse of
peace to the whole thing. Yes, she knew it was not normal for Duran to hold
meetings with agents at 8:30 at night. And she also knew that if the section
chief—a wiry grunt of a man named Sam Hilton—was going to be in
attendance, the meeting would likely have a very bad outcome.
It wasn’t until she reached FBI headquarters that she realized why she
wasn’t stressed out over the meeting. Perhaps it was the high of taking out
Darby Insbrook or just because she was tired, but she was starting to fully
understand how blessed she was. She had been graced with a second chapter of a career she had loved and she had a daughter who loved her, despite her any flaws and stubborn tendencies. And, if she played her cards right, she
even still had a salvageable relationship with a man who seemed to be very
much in love with her despite her insistence on keeping him at arm’s length.
In other words, no matter how the meeting turned out, she still had an
amazing life waiting for her no matter the turns.
She took the elevator to the second floor after checking in with the after-
hours guard. When the elevator dinged and the doors slid open, she walked to
Duran’s office with confidence in her step. It did waver a bit when she found
the door already open, as if he was not only expecting her but wanted her to
know that they were waiting specifically for her.
She entered the room and saw that Section Chief Hilton was indeed there.
She’d only met with the man a handful of times during the course of her
career and they had a good working relationship. Now, though, as he looked
up from the small conference room table in the back of Duran’s office, he
gazed at her as if he was inspecting a bothersome insect that had been
buzzing around his head.
Duran also sat at the table with him, but he got to his feet when Kate
entered the room. It was an awkward sort of greeting that Duran seemed to
regret instantly. He recovered as best as he could by simply pointing to one of
the available chairs.
“Have a seat, Agent Wise,” he said.
She did as she was asked, nodding to the section chief as she did so.
“Section Chief Hilton, it’s nice to see you.”
“You as well. I do wish it was under better circumstances, though.”
