Late at night, Windy made a plane reservation to go to Chicago the next day and then they fell asleep, forgetting to turn the lights off in the other room, forgetting about everything that was not the two of them.
CHAPTER 85
Ash honked twice to say good-bye as he turned left, heading to the office, and Windy turned right, going home. It was early and the streets she rode down were quiet, most people still in bed, the sky just starting to go blue. She felt a mixture of contentment and excitement she could not ever remember. Not with Bill. Not even with Evan. Waking up that morning, she had looked over at Ash, still asleep, and felt her heart beat the way it did when she looked at Cate, but not exactly for the same reason. The phrase bad girls never sleep alone had flashed through her mind, making her think of Eve, and she smiled a little sadly. She felt bad in the best way.
She pulled up to her house and waited for the garage door to open. The street was empty, no more patrol officers, no more guards, but she felt safer than she had when they were there. It was over. She could not wait to get Cate back, get everything back to normal.
Climbing the stairs to her bedroom she hummed to herself. She just had time to shower and pack before heading to the airport. She couldn’t wait to hug Cate again. She was a little nervous about explaining everything to her parents, but that would be okay too. Everything was going to be okay.
She stripped off her clothes and got into the shower. As the water poured over her she thought of Ash, of the first moment that she knew she was falling in love with him. It had started earlier, but only when she watched him outside the O’Connells’ house talk Roddy down had she allowed herself to understand what she felt. He had been without fear, but not without compassion. She had never seen anyone like that before.
She wondered how Roddy had been since that night. She wasn’t sure she entirely understood why he had sought her out, what he had been hoping for. Or even how he had found her.
She froze with a palm full of shampoo halfway to her head.
Only the killer could have guessed where she would be. And only one person could have told Roddy. Her heart started to pound.
Harold L. Williams. Harry. Hank.
Hank Logan.
Not even turning off the water, she stepped out of the shower, reached for a towel, and jumped. There was a man in her bedroom, going through her purse.
Not a man, she realized. A police officer. Protection. Thank god.
“Officer,” she said, gripping a towel around her. “Officer, get on your radio and—” Her voice caught as the man turned around. He was wearing a police uniform, but he was not a policeman.
Hank Logan walked into the bathroom and smiled at her. “Hi, Windy.”
Windy backed away from him. “Hi, Logan.”
“Please,” he said, “call me Harry.”
“We have a problem,” Jonah said, bursting into Ash’s office. “A big one. We ran the prints off the guy who was shot in the SWAT raid yesterday.”
“Harry,” Ash said.
“No. That’s the problem. It’s not Harry. His name is Dwight. He owns a demolition company in North Las Vegas, and he’s been missing since Monday. But that’s not all. His mother, who identified the body, says he’s never been to Washington State. And if that wasn’t enough, the way we got a print match is because he has a record—he spent 1991 to 1999 in prison in California on a robbery charge. The years that Harry was in Seattle. He can’t be our guy.”
Ash stared at Jonah, his mind racing. “He must have been keeping Dwight locked in the locked bedroom, where Windy found all the evidence that linked him to the house. No wonder the man was staggering around, confused and scared. I bet Harry shot at the SWAT operative himself, then pushed Dwight forward to take the fall.” His jaw clenched. “I wouldn’t be surprised if he dressed as a SWAT guy and just melted into the confusion.”
“He probably faked the Washington state ID too. It wouldn’t be hard with a home lamination kit.”
Ash hit the top of his desk. “Harry set us up. Goddamn it, he set us up. I should have known it from the beginning. That list from the lawyer of Nadene’s properties, I sensed it was too easy. And—” He reached for the phone and dialed Windy’s home number, got the answering machine, and dialed her cell phone. It bounced into voice mail, as though it were turned off. He looked at Jonah and his voice changed. “Get every available patrol car to Windy’s house right now. NOW!”
This means I’m next, he heard Windy’s voice saying when they identified her wedding band. “No,” he said aloud in his office. “Not if I can help it.” He reached into his bottom drawer for ammunition, loaded two guns, and went to his car.
He almost hit Jonah when the man came running out of the building. He slammed on the brakes and skidded onto the walkway, leaving black tire marks. “What the hell is wrong with you?” he demanded, then saw the expression on Jonah’s face. His blood went cold. “What happened?”
Jonah looked ill. “I scrambled the cars to go to Windy’s but before anyone answered, the patrol officer stationed outside her house radioed in. He hasn’t seen her all morning. She never came home.” He paused to catch his breath. “She’s not there, Ash.”
NO! Ash wanted to yell. Wanted to pound his fist into the steering wheel and break things. But that would not help Windy. He backed the car into a parking place and got out, forcing himself to focus. “Harry must have grabbed her when she left my place. If she’s not at home, we’re just going to have to figure out where he would have taken her.”
His tone was controlled, reasonable. But a muscle on the side of his jaw was throbbing and his hands were clenched into fists.
Harry, said, “Roger that, I’ll hold my position,” into the police radio, smiled at Windy, and smashed the handset against the tile bathroom counter. “We won’t be needing that anymore, now that they know not to waste their time looking for you here.”
Her last lifeline gone. When the call had come over it scrambling all cars to her address, she had almost fainted with relief. But she should have known better. Harry hadn’t missed a beat, just signed on with a car number and told them that Windy wasn’t anywhere near her house. He was right—they would have every unit assigned to look for her, and not a single one of them would find her.
“Now,” he said, eyeing her. “Where were we?”
He was blocking the door of the bathroom, trapping her in the small space with him. She had tried to knock him down, and been punched in the stomach. She was now sitting on the edge of the bathtub, fighting back fear. She could not freeze. She had to keep thinking. She said, “Why are you here? Why did you choose me?”
He smiled. “You made me come.”
“How?”
“I gave you a choice. I gave you the chance to live. To believe that Eve was a killer. Eventually, I would have given you a body for her and you could have closed your case. I have one all picked out. But then your curiosity got the better of you, didn’t it?”
She swallowed hard. Maybe she could reason with him. Maybe there was another way out of this. “I was just doing my job.”
“Your job. Just following the rules, like a good girl.” He sneered. “You could have believed me, focused on the evidence I showed you, but you didn’t. You started looking at things that were none of your business. Disobeying me. So now you have to die.”
“Bluebeard.” Windy exhaled slowly.
“Exactly.”
She shook her head. “You know, you told that story wrong. It’s not about the dangers of curiosity. It’s about a serial killer shifting blame from himself to his victims. The real criminal is not the person who looks, it’s the murderer.”
“Really? What about Nadene? She died because of your curiosity. Your disobedience to me. You never should have talked to her. And so did Dwight, the man whose body you found at my house yesterday. If you had just believed Eve was the killer, if you hadn’t meddled and sent the SWAT team there, he would still be alive.”
Windy stood
up and went toward him. “No. You set me up. You wanted me to look for you. Practically forced me to by sending over the photo of your crime scene from Seattle. You wanted me to discover Eve wasn’t the killer. You are trying to move the guilt for what you have done away from yourself, just like you do in your killings. But you did fool us about one thing: you didn’t kill because you hate families or leave the fathers alive to punish them. You left the fathers alive to show them that they could not protect their perfect families from a monster any better than you could. The difference is, you are the monster.”
“You are a lying bitch.” Harry changed instantaneously. His face went red and his eyes got glassy. He shoved her backward, hard, then leaned over her, breathing heavily. Circles of sweat showed on his uniform. “Don’t ever call me that. I tried to be good. I was good. Say you are sorry.”
Windy stared at him, for a moment more fascinated than scared. “What happened to you, Harry?”
He gripped her by the shoulders and shook her and screamed, “Say you are sorry!”
Fear took over now. She shrank away from him and he let go of her shoulders. His eyes went over her body, making her clutch the towel around herself more tightly.
He smiled. Gently, deliberately, he took one of her hands in his. “You are sorry, aren’t you?”
His tone, his expression, made her mouth dry. “Yes.”
“Say it louder.”
“Yes.”
His smile turned to a sneer. He said, “You are lying,” and slowly began pushing her pinkie backward. “You are so bad, you are going to make me hurt you.”
“I’m not lying,” Windy protested, but he wasn’t hearing her. She tried to pull her hand away and he forced the finger back harder.
“Please stop,” she said, tensing against the ache. “Please.”
“Why? Are you going to tell on me?” he asked, then twisted until the bone snapped.
Windy moaned involuntarily as pain screamed through her body.
Harry let go and smiled. “That is what happens when you are bad,” he said. “You get hurt. Now are you going to be good? Going to obey?”
“Yes,” Windy said, clutching her aching hand against her body.
“Good.” He leaned his face close to hers, breathing with his mouth open. “Then get on your knees and beg for your life.”
Through the throbbing in her finger Windy realized what that command meant. It explained why all the victims had been kneeling when they died. Not because they were praying. They had been pleading for their lives.
She said, “Never. Because it won’t work. You are just going to kill me anyway. The way you did with all the others.”
“How do you know I won’t change my mind this time? Won’t let you go? Isn’t it worth the chance?”
“No. You can hurt me as much as you’d like and I won’t beg.”
Instead of getting angry, Harry looked amused. “Oh, let’s not think about your pain right now. Let’s think about Cate’s. About the pain your death will cause her. All alone, an orphan. Or, better, about how much pain I am going to inflict on her when you are gone.”
Fury swept through her. She tried to stand up but he pushed her down. “Do not talk about my daughter.”
“You don’t like me talking about her? Perhaps you would prefer to see her.” He reached into his jacket uniform and pulled out a stack of color photographs. “Here is one of her at the supermarket,” he said, holding up a picture of Cate with her nose in a stack of grapefruits, as Brandon, distracted, checked the shopping list. He flipped to another one, this time showing Cate standing just apart from her school group on a school field trip, the teacher looking in the opposite direction. The next photo showed Cate with her nose pressed against the glass of the lion habitat at the MGM Grand as Windy stared at the ground while Bill kissed her ear. The final one was Cate asleep in her bed.
“How did you get this?” Windy demanded. She was shaking.
Harry ignored her, looking at the photo. “She’s very independent, isn’t she? Spunky. I bet she is curious. Looks all kinds of places she isn’t supposed to. Like her mom.” He smiled at her. “If it was this easy for me to get close to her when you were around, just imagine what I can do when you are gone.”
“You will never lay a hand on my daughter.”
He tapped the finger he had broken, making Windy wince. “You’ve seen what we do to disobedient girls. Did you happen to check Minette Waters’s fingers? I think you’ll find that three of them were fractured. I don’t know if they can tell these things from the autopsy, but I did it when she was alive. Those little fingers, like twigs, but with more of a jolt. Much better than grown-ups. The sound they make is intoxicating.”
Windy lunged at him now, grabbing him around the neck. “Stop it!”
“You know,” he said, peeling her fingers off his throat, starting with the pinkie. She was strong but he was stronger. He held her hands in his as she struggled against him, crushing the broken one hard. “Now that I think of it, I’ve never had a virgin before.”
“STOP!” Windy launched herself at him, sending them both crashing out of the bathroom and into the door of the closet. She was oblivious to the pain in her hand, oblivious to everything except her need to escape. They fell to the ground and they rolled together toward the bed. She clawed at him, drawing blood, aiming for his eyes. He caught her hand and squeezed the wrists together until she wanted to scream. There were tears streaming down her face. She started kicking then but he flipped her over onto her stomach, and pinned her under him. With her arm twisted behind her and his knee in the small of her back he said, “Are you ready to beg?”
He was sweating massively and she felt his pulse pounding through his grip. He was reveling in her pain, her struggle. She said, “I will never beg anything from you, you bastard.”
“Really? Think about this. I’m going to get away with all of this. And I’m going to get Cate, too. You’ll never get to see her graduate from first grade, or college for that matter. Never meet the man she is going to marry. Never plan her wedding. If I decide to let her have one.” He bent over and whispered in her ear, “I might keep her for myself.”
Windy fought him with everything she had. The pain in her finger had spread to her arm but she ignored it, bucking hard, turning to get him off of her, kicking her legs. She felt him shift and thought she might have done it, and then his knee came down on her neck, making her choke for air.
When she stopped moving he said, “You don’t like that idea, do you? If you were alive, there might be something you could do about it. If you beg, I might let you live.”
Windy was sobbing. At that moment, she would have begged if she believed it would have worked, but she knew it wouldn’t. The only victory she could have in her death was the knowledge that she had denied him that pleasure. She rasped, “I hate you.”
“Very well. I am disappointed that it had to end this way, but you have only yourself to blame.” He stood up and grabbed her by the hair, dragging her to her knees. Her body felt like a rag, her strength, her will, gone. He jerked her head back toward him, so her neck was exposed. Looking up, she saw the blade of a knife catching the light.
This was it. There was nothing she could do. Game over.
“Windy Thomas, you’ve been a very bad girl. Now you will die.”
She closed her eyes.
A quiet voice somewhere near the door of the room said, “No, Harry. That’s not actually how the Bluebeard story ends. What happens is the wife’s twin sister rides in and saves her. You can look it up.”
Windy opened her eyes. Harry was gaping at the stick-thin woman wearing a faded T-shirt two sizes too big for her and a tattered pair of jeans, who stood on the threshold of the bedroom. She looked like she had been through a war and although they’d never met, Windy knew immediately who she was.
Harry said, “What the hell are you doing here, Eve?”
And she said, “Making sure the story ends right.” Then she rush
ed at the arm holding the knife.
For a split second, Harry’s grip on Windy loosened. She ducked away from him, just in time to see him get his arm around Eve’s neck.
Eve kicked, fighting him off, but he held her in front of him, her back to his chest, her legs flailing into space. Sounding amused, he said, “You did not really think you could overcome me, did you, Eve?”
Eve was not listening to him. She looked at Windy and said, “Go!”
Harry laughed and held the knife at Eve’s throat. “Yes, Windy. Go. If you take a step toward the door, I’ll kill her.”
“This is between you and me, Harry,” Eve said. “You told me that I made you the sick monster you are when I ignored you all those years ago. So now fight me.” Her expression pled with Windy to leave.
Windy struggled to her feet, leaning into the mattress for support.
Harry spoke to Windy. “I won’t kill her fast, either. I’ll do it slowly, so it hurts the most. And it will be your fault.” He dug the tip of the knife into Eve’s neck deep enough to draw blood and Eve flinched. “Like this.”
Windy stood up, her hands behind her. “No,” she said. “That isn’t going to happen. Because I’m going to kill you first, you bastard. I am going to make you pay for every word you said about my daughter.” She brought the gun she’d taken from under the mattress around and aimed.
“No!” Eve screamed.
Harry was unfazed. “After I kill her, and you, I’ll start working on Cate.”
Windy cocked the gun
Eve shook her head violently. “Don’t kill him. This is not how you want it to end.”
Harry dug the knife into her throat deeper. “It’s you or me, Windy.”
Windy fired.
Harry staggered sideways, and fell down. He stared at his left kneecap, blossoming with blood, then at Windy. “You shot me.”
“I’ll do it again.”
He started crawling toward her. “You bitch, you shot me.”
Windy took aim. “Stay where you are.”
He pulled himself closer. “I’m going to kill you.”
Bad Girl and Loverboy Page 39
