“All my fault. We made him,” she wailed and vanished. Sara stared out into the empty room and knew then she needed an escape plan. He would not set her free.
Johan Luken paced back and forth in the lobby of the Comfort Homes of San Francisco and checked his watch for the thousandth time. Randall Atkins, the executive director of the home, had kept them waiting for the last hour. He glanced over at Murphy who was lost in her own thoughts.
Johan stopped his pacing. “We should check in with him.”
Murphy got up and nodded. “Guess we can’t be nice with this one,” she said and took out her badge. She strode past him to the closed door and tapped her badge on it. The man’s assistant poked her head out. Murphy stuck her badge in the woman’s face.
“Get him now or I will call all my cop buddies from Central down here.”
“And do what?” answered the woman, defiance shining in her eyes.
Murphy’s smile widened. “Better yet, I’ll call the media. They haven’t found out that the Jerry Killer had a field day killing your residents here. YET. Would you like your face all over the news, dear?” Color left the woman’s cheeks.
“Let me get him,” she said and closed the door on Murphy’s face. Johan put his ear to the door, but it was too thick to hear anything. He straightened again.
“I like it when you get angry,” he said and she let out a laugh.
“That was hardly angry for me,” she said as the door opened and revealed a grey haired, scowling man.
“Why are you brutalizing my assistant?” he demanded.
“Interesting choice of words,” Johan observed. The man grunted in response.
“Mr. Randall Atkins, I presume.” Murphy stepped in, authority changing the timbre of her voice.
“Do you have a warrant?” Randall asked.
“I don’t need one to ask you questions. I would think that as a representative of the McGregor Corporation and as someone who is in charge of these people’s welfare, you’d want to talk to me about Louise Pickford and her father, Dads, the Jerry Killer,” Murphy said. Johan gauged the man’s reaction but Randall made his face stoic and unreadable.
“I have nothing to say on that matter.”
“Were you the manager when they lived here?” Murphy said and got into Randall’s face. He stepped back.
“I was the coordinator here at that time,” he said, conceding.
“But you’re listed as a manager in 1996. Were you promoted even though many of your residents were dying under mysterious circumstances? You must have had an unusually high body count during your tenure,” Murphy prodded. Randall turned scarlet at the accusation.
“You better come into my office,” he said and turned away from them. Johan and Murphy followed him into a large, book-lined office. He gestured to several seats in front of a sleek, mahogany desk. Johan sat down but Murphy moved over to the books, keeping her back to them.
“Why didn’t you come forward about them living here? You must have recognized Louise Pickford as Louise Fairbanks from all the news coverage. It’s been all over the news for weeks,” Murphy said, keeping her voice casual. Johan twisted in his chair and watched her inspect a book, not even looking at Randall. Interesting way of interrogating someone, Johan thought.
“Corporate said I didn’t have to,” Randall said.
“You went through the death records, saw the spike and still you did nothing,” Murphy said conversationally.
“Is that a statement or a question? Which precinct did you say you were from again?” Randall asked, his eyes narrowing.
“I didn’t. How many deaths did you find in those records, Mr. Atkins? Have you alerted the FBI or the families?” Murphy pushed on.
“And why would I do that?” he shot back.
“It would be the right thing to do. Corporate absolved you from all your sins, didn’t they? Or did they pay you off with a promotion to keep you quiet?” Murphy said as she stalked to his desk and stood over him. Randall took a deep breath.
“I don’t like what you’re getting at.”
“You got a promotion, didn’t you?” Murphy kept on him.
“I think you should leave.”
“I want to see the records of Louise Pickford.”
“I don’t have them.”
“Why not? Where are they?” Johan said.
“They destroyed them, didn’t they?” Murphy cut in leaning across Randall’s desk. Randall nodded. “I hope you have an excellent memory, Mr. Atkins. We’re not leaving until you give us a year by year play of their time here.”
“I won’t be able to do that. That was over ten years ago.”
“What do you think the FBI will do when they hear that you were part of the cover-up? And what do you think Corporate will do? Protect you?” She let that sink in. “You have a chance to get yourself out of this mess.”
The man wiped sweat off his brow and turned away from them. Johan gave Murphy a look, but she shook her head. They both sat silent waiting for his response.
Randall turned back to them. “Grace Nettlebaum. Louise’s father befriended her. They’re from the same country, I think. I walked by them once and heard them jabbering away in some Eastern European language. Couldn’t tell you what it was but they were thick, those two. Louise resented their relationship though, and I’d catch her giving them dirty looks. Dads laughed so much with Grace. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were lovers. When they left, Grace cried for several days.” He cleared his throat. “That’s all I remember. Louise was a good nurse. She didn’t give me any problems.”
That surprised Johan. “Why did you let her go then?” he asked.
“They left of their own accord. She quit,” Randall said.
“When did you realize your death numbers were off?” Murphy asked.
“Several months after they left, one of the relatives of a man who’d died of a heart attack was convinced that his uncle had been poisoned. We had to look into it, and they had an investigator look at our death certificates. That’s when it came out.”
“And they covered it up?” Johan asked. Randall nodded. Johan stood up and joined Murphy at the door.
“Where is Mrs. Nettlebaum now?” Murphy asked.
“She’s on the fifth floor,” Randall said and checked his time. “But she’ll be in the sunroom now. She enjoys her mornings in there.” He got up and seemed to have shrunk in size before their eyes.
“Thank you, Mr. Atkins. I’ll make sure to let the head of the FBI task force know of your cooperation,” Murphy offered.
Randall managed a small smile and led them down a marbled corridor and into an octagonal sunroom, all glass, with several gray haired ladies sitting among the purple and yellow orchids. Mr. Atkins pointed to the smaller of the ladies.
“That’s Grace. We don’t get along so I won’t introduce you but let her know I gave you both permission to speak with her.” He nodded once and scurried away like the rat he was. Johan watched his receding form and hoped he wouldn’t have to grow old and be under the supervision of men like him.
Sara Caine woke up and stared into the blue eyes of her captor. She lunged at him but barely rose an inch out of the chair, her restraints holding her down.
“What do you want from me? I didn’t do anything to you,” Sara demanded. The man stared at her in interest. She tried another tactic.
“Dads, who was the woman in the room. The one I sleep in?” That got a reaction out of him. His eyes lost their intensity for a moment, and she hoped that he really did have a touch of dementia. It would be incredibly helpful to her escape plan.
She knew he was drugging her because of her difficulties with walking and balance. The last time she was in the bathroom, she checked herself for any injection holes from a syringe but didn’t find any. She figured he was giving her the drugs in her food and drink.
Now, she made sure to drink her fill at the faucet in the bathroom and kept her food intake to a minimum. She hadn’t eaten the lunch that
he’d brought her but had passed out anyway. Her only hope was that the drugs would get out of her system enough to make her more mobile.
He’d never let her out of the room before, she realized and her heart skipped a beat. Could this be the day that she died?
“What do you want from me?” Her voice rose in hysteria.
She didn’t want to die. Not like this.
Not like Lou or the blond woman on the bed.
She gripped the armrests of the chair for support.
He cocked his head to the right and kept on staring at her. She didn’t remember a single word he’d said since he grabbed her.
It took all her effort to settle down into herself and to think of an escape plan. If he made a mistake, she would strike. But he had to make one first.
She swallowed down the hysteria that came back up again. She needed to figure out what he wanted from her. Sara stared into his eyes.
“You can see her?” he said, his voice soft and lightly accented. It didn’t sound like the woman’s voice from the room. His was not a Germanic accent.
“You knew who Lou was. I saw your shock,” he said and edged in closer to her. “I need your help. I’m at the end of my life and someone out there delivered you to me. A gift from the heavens you could say.” He paused and smiled at her. She used every ounce of her being not to react. She’d read that serial killers enjoyed the fear of their victims, and she didn’t want to give him the satisfaction.
“Who do you want to contact?” she asked instead.
“I want to speak with my mother,” he stated. If she didn’t know he’d killed hundreds of people and was her kidnapper, she would have felt sorry for him when he said mother. Sara cleared her throat.
“I’ve already seen your mother in the bedroom that you’re keeping me in. I saw her listening at the door while you argued in German with someone in here. Elvis Presley played Blue Suede Shoes in the background,” she continued. He sprang up from his chair with the ease of a much younger man and spit on the floor.
“Not that conniving, scheming bitch. She ruined my life. She STOLE me,” he screamed and twisted his body away from her. She cringed back into the chair as he got himself under control. She cursed herself for upsetting him and prayed he wouldn’t attack her. He turned back around and dropped to his knees in front of her, fully in control.
“How do you work? I saw Lou touch your hand, and you got jolted. Is that what I need to do? Touch your hand and you’ll see my mother?” He peered at her as if her face would give him the answer.
Sara shook her head. “That’s not how I contact the dead. I need something of theirs. If they want to speak, they’ll come to me. Ghosts know who I am. Did your—“ She stopped, unsure. “Did your other mother leave you…”
He shook his head before she could finish.
“All that is left of her is me,” he said, took both of her hands and grasped them firmly in his own. She realized too late that she was no longer wearing her gloves and was plunged back into the deep darkness of limbo.
She opened and closed her eyes and saw only blackness, the only sound her own breathing. She was back in the place of no dreams. She waved her now free hands in front of her face and couldn’t see them either.
Why hadn’t she seen murders like she’d seen with Lou? She was thankful for the reprieve but didn’t understand this phase of her gift. Johan had been her guide into the “extra” abilities that people displayed but he’d never spoken of a place like this. Was this a new ability or her mind protecting her?
She took a step forward and heard a tinkle somewhere in the distance. It sounded like a piano. Her pace quickened to it and a melody emerged out of the darkness, one she recognized. Chopin. Her mother had loved Chopin, the Preludes especially and this sounded like one of them.
The sound grew louder as a small pinpoint of light floated in front of her face. The light grew larger and enveloped her as before. This time she stood on a wintery, foreign street. People of all ages, wearing patch worked overcoats with yellow stars, picked up dead bodies from the gutters as soldiers with SS on their lapels watched on, laughing.
Sara waved at a passerby, but he didn’t see her. Could this be Dads’ memory? It definitely was a European country during World War II. She gasped as one of the Nazi soldiers hit a young man in the head, and he fell to his knees. One of the guards said something in German and shot the man in the head.
None of the passerby’s looked up.
No one did a thing.
Sara pushed to the edge of the sidewalk, turning away from the ghastly scene, and caught sight of a boy, the now familiar electric blue eyes under a mop of white blond hair peeking out of a hat, holding the hand of an attractive, blond woman. This had to be Dads.
The mother and child were bundled up in several layers of coats, each layer having a hole in a different place. The mother tweaked the boy’s nose, and he giggled. The mom put her finger to her mouth and made a small shushing sound as she pointed at the guards milling in the street. The boy nodded to her and kept his gaze averted from the dead man in the gutter.
A German yell sounded from somewhere behind her. Sara turned to see the murderous guard pointing at the young woman and her child to another woman dressed in a brown uniform alongside of him. Sara didn’t want to see anymore and squeezed her eyes shut, hoping to go back to the void. Maybe being in limbo wasn’t so bad after all.
The sounds of the street did not diminish. She opened her eyes again and found herself still in the street. The young boy and his mom stood in front of the German guard and the woman. She watched as the German guard swiped the boy’s hat off. The mom froze, clutching her young son’s hand. The German guard said something that Sara didn’t understand to the uniformed woman, and she nodded.
The mom started shaking her head no and the German guard put the gun to her head. Sara plunged back into the darkness.
Simon Michael’s sat back in horror and watched as Sara convulsed in front of him. He worked the ties loose at her wrists. He didn’t want her to hurt herself. He remembered the reaction she’d had when Lou touched her and hoped his touch rendered different results. He’d heard she’d been in a coma for days.
He shook the ever-increasing vertigo off and knew his own death was closing in. Death was coming for her too.
He picked Sara up from the chair and laid her now silent body down on the leather couch. At least she hadn’t swallowed her tongue, he thought. And was still breathing.
She’d surprised the hell out of him when she spoke of seeing Frau Schrieber in the woman’s bedroom. He shouldn’t have grasped her hands like that, and now he’d lost his only chance to apologize to his mama for ever looking up at the soldier.
He felt abject failure. The revenge he meted out on the Germans would never equal the evil they unleashed on the world.
Simon left the woman on the couch and sat directly across from her. Whatever Lou poisoned him with in these last few years still affected his memory. He couldn’t really blame her, though. He would have done the same if he was in her position. In truth, he would have been more aggressive with the poison.
He stared at the sleeping woman. He didn’t want to kill her. He hadn’t wanted to kill Lou either. Well, maybe a little. Payback for the poisoning. But this woman interested him. It would be a shame to take such an interesting creature out of this dirty, dark world.
What good would her death bring? He understood his own life was done. Or close to it. But hers?
He would wait another night to see whether she woke up and try again.
He didn’t have anything of his mother’s to give her like she wanted, and he hoped that wasn’t the end of the line for him. Frau Schrieber died in that bedroom of cancer and using her logic, it made sense that she saw her.
He watched the woman’s chest rise up and down rhythmically.
He was exhausted. If he closed his eyes, would they all be there waiting for him? His project, his mission, his revenge. He scratched at
the stubble that had grown in overnight. Did any of this really matter anymore?
It was time to die, and he needed to accept that.
Detective Eva Murphy touched Grace Nettlebaum on the shoulder. “Excuse me, Ma’am? We’d love to have a moment of your time,” she said in a kind voice. Larson always wanted to take the lead but Murphy knew that wasn’t always the best call. When she saw that Johan deferred to her taking the lead, Murphy couldn’t help but wish Larson was more like him.
“Call me Grace. I don’t like the implication of Ma’am, if you know what I mean?” Grace said and winked at Johan. She waved them over to two white, wicker chairs to her right. “You can pull those over. It’s not often I enjoy the company of guests,” she said, her voice booming. Murphy smiled at the lungs on the woman as Johan dragged the chairs over.
“My name’s Eva Murphy. Everyone calls me Murphy,” Murphy said. “This is my colleague, Johan Luken. We wanted to talk to you about a woman named Louise Pickford and her father, Dads.”
“You’re police, aren’t you?” Grace directed her question at Murphy.
“I am.”
“Good on you, Murphy. Good on you. I hope that fool didn’t give you too many problems?”
“Which fool?” Johan asked with amusement. Grace jerked a thumb back to where Randall had been just moments ago.
“How that nitwit ever got that promotion is beyond me. He’s dense and crafty all at the same time, if you can believe it. I wouldn’t trust him if I were you,” she said and arched an eyebrow at Murphy.
Murphy loved this woman.
“She steamrolled him very well. I can say it was a pleasure to watch,” Johan added.
“Good on you. Good on you,” Grace said and nodded again. “What do you want to know about her?”
“Randall mentioned that you knew her father, Dads, quite well?” Murphy said with a slight conspiratorial air. “He even mentioned some sort of relationship?”
The Elk (A Caine & Murphy Paranormal Thriller Series Book 1) Page 23
