Once Craved (a Riley Paige Mystery--Book #3)

by Blake Pierce

  “Sometimes I like to go old-school,” she said. “I figure that someday I might actually have to use deadly force at a distance.”

  From her own experience, Riley knew that the real thing was almost always up close and personal, and often unexpected. In fact, she’d actually had to fight hand to hand in two recent cases. She’d killed one attacker with his own knife and another with a random rock.

  “Do you think anything prepares these kids for the real thing?” Bill asked, nodding toward the trainees who were now finished and leaving the firing range.

  “Not really,” Riley said. “In VR your brain does accept the scenario as real, but there’s no imminent danger, no pain, no rage to control. Something inside always knows there’s no chance of being killed.”

  “Right,” Bill said. “They’ll have to find out what it’s really like just like we did a lot of years ago.”

  Riley glanced sideways at him as they moved farther away from the firing line.

  Like her, he was forty years old with touches of gray in his dark hair. She wondered what it meant that she found herself mentally comparing him to her leaner, slighter male neighbor.

  What was his name? she asked herself. Oh, yeah—Blaine.

  Blaine was good-looking, but she wasn’t sure whether he gave Bill a run for his money. Bill was big, solid, and quite attractive.

  “What brings you here?” she asked.

  “I heard you’d be here,” he said.

  Riley squinted at him uneasily. This probably wasn’t just a friendly visit. From his expression, she detected that he wasn’t ready to tell her what he wanted just yet.

  Bill said, “If you want to do the whole drill, I’ll keep time for you.”

  “I’d appreciate that,” Riley said.

  They moved off to a separate section of the shooting range, where she wouldn’t be at risk of being hit by stray bullets from the trainees.

  While Bill operated a timer, Riley breezed through all the stages of the FBI pistol qualification course, firing at the target from three yards, then five, then seven, then fifteen. The fifth and last stage was the only part that she found the least bit challenging—firing from behind a barricade at twenty-five yards.

  When she was through, Riley took off her headgear. She and Bill walked up to the target and checked her work. All the impact marks were clustered nicely together.

  “A hundred percent—a perfect score,” Bill said.

  “It had better be,” Riley said. She’d hate it if she were getting rusty.

  Bill pointed toward the earthen backstop beyond the target.

  “Kind of surreal, huh?” he said.

  Several white-tailed deer were contentedly grazing on top of the hill. They’d actually gathered there while she’d been shooting. They were within easy range, even with her pistol. But they weren’t the least bit bothered by all the thousands of bullets slamming into targets just below the high ridge they walked on.

  “Yes,” she said, “and beautiful.”

  Around this time of year, the deer were a common sight here at the range. It was hunting season, and somehow they knew that they would be safe here. In fact, the grounds of the FBI Academy had become a sort of wildlife haven for lots of animals, including foxes, wild turkeys, and groundhogs.

  “A couple of days ago, one of my students saw a bear in the parking lot,” Riley said.

  Riley took a few steps toward the backstop. The deer raised their heads, stared at her, and trotted away. They weren’t afraid of gunfire, but they didn’t want people getting too close.

  “How do you suppose they know?” Bill asked. “That it’s safe here, I mean. Don’t all gunshots sound alike?”

  Riley simply shook her head. It was a mystery to her. Her father had taken her hunting when she was little. To him, deer were simply resources—food and hide. It hadn’t bothered her to kill them all those years ago. But that had changed.

  It seemed odd, now that she thought about it. She had no trouble using deadly force against a human being when it was necessary. She could kill a man in a heartbeat. But to kill one of these trusting creatures now seemed unthinkable.

  Riley and Bill walked off to a nearby rest area and sat down together on a bench. Whatever it was he came to talk about here, he still seemed reticent.

  “How are you doing on your own?” she asked in a gentle voice.

  She knew it was a delicate question and she saw him wince. His wife had recently left him after years of tension between his job and home life. Bill had been worried about the prospect of losing touch with his young sons. Now he was living in an apartment in the town of Quantico and spending time with his boys on weekends.

  “I don’t know, Riley,” he said. “I don’t know if I’ll ever get used to it.”

  He was clearly lonely and depressed. She had been through enough of that herself during her own recent separation and then divorce. She also knew that the time after a separation was particularly fragile. Even if the relationship hadn’t been very good, you found yourself out in a world of strangers, missing years of familiarity, never knowing quite what to do with yourself.

  Bill touched her arm. His voice a bit thick with emotion, he said, “Sometimes I think that all I’ve got left to depend on in life is … you.”

  For a moment Riley felt like hugging him. When they had worked as partners, Bill had come to her rescue plenty of times, both physically and emotionally. But she knew she had to be careful. And she knew that people could be pretty crazy at times like this. She had actually phoned Bill one drunken night and proposed that they begin an affair. Now the situations were reversed. She could sense his impending dependence on her, now that she was just beginning to feel free and strong enough to be on her own.

  “We were good partners,” she said. It was lame, but she couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  Bill took a long, deep breath.

  “That’s what I came out here to talk to you about,” he said. “Meredith told me he’d called you about the Phoenix case. I’m working on it. I need a partner.”

  Riley felt just a trace of irritation. Bill’s visit was starting to seem like a bit of an ambush.

  “I told Meredith I’d think about it,” she said.

  “And now I’m asking you,” Bill said.

  A silence fell between them.

  “What about Lucy Vargas?” Riley asked.

  Agent Vargas was a rookie who had worked closely with Bill and Riley on their most recent case. They both were impressed with her work.

  “Her ankle hasn’t healed,” Bill said. “She won’t be back in the field for another month at least.”

  Riley felt foolish for asking. When she, Bill, and Lucy had closed in on Eugene Fisk, the so-called “chain killer,” Lucy had taken a fall and broken her ankle and almost gotten killed. Of course she couldn’t go back to work so soon.

  “I don’t know, Bill,” Riley said. “This break away from work is doing me a lot of good. I’ve been thinking about just teaching from now on. All I can tell you is what I told Meredith.”

  “That you’ll think about it.”

  “Right.”

  Bill let out a grunt of discontentment.

  “Could we at least get together and talk it over?” he asked. “Maybe tomorrow?”

  Riley fell silent again for a moment.

  “Not tomorrow,” she said. “Tomorrow I have to watch a man die.”

  Chapter Five

  Riley looked through the window into the room where Derrick Caldwell would soon die. She was sitting beside Gail Bassett, the mother of Kelly Sue Bassett, Caldwell’s final victim. The man had killed five women before Riley had stopped him.

  Riley had wavered about accepting Gail’s invitation to the execution. She’d only seen one other, that time as a volunteer witness sitting among reporters, lawyers, law enforcement officers, spiritual advisors, and the jury foreman. Now she and Gail were among nine relatives of women that Caldwell had murdered, all of them crowded toget
her in a tight space, sitting on plastic chairs.

  Gail, a small sixty-year-old woman with a delicate, birdlike face, had kept up contact with Riley over the years. By the time of the execution her husband had died, and she had written Riley that she had no one to see her through the momentous event. So Riley had agreed to join her.

  The death chamber was right there on the other side of the window. The only furniture in the room was the execution gurney, a cross-shaped table. A blue plastic curtain hung at the head of the gurney. Riley knew that the IV lines and lethal chemicals were behind that curtain.

  A red telephone on the wall connected with the governor’s office. It would only ring in case of a last-minute decision for clemency. No one expected that to happen this time. A clock over the door to the room was the only other visible decor.

  In Virginia, convicted offenders could choose between the electric chair and lethal injection, but the chemicals were far more often chosen. If the prisoner made no choice, injection was assigned.

  Riley was almost surprised that Caldwell hadn’t opted for the electric chair. He was an unrepentant monster who seemed to welcome his own death.

  The clock read 8:55 when the door opened. Riley heard a wordless murmur in the room as several members of the execution team ushered Caldwell into the chamber. Two guards flanked him, gripping each arm, and another followed right behind him. A well-dressed man came in after all the rest—the prison warden.

  Caldwell was wearing blue pants, a blue work shirt, and sandals with no socks. He was handcuffed and shackled. Riley hadn’t seen him for years. During his brief stint as a serial killer he’d had unruly long hair and a shaggy beard, a bohemian look befitting a sidewalk artist. Now he was clean-shaven and ordinary looking.

  Although he didn’t put up a struggle, he looked frightened.

  Good, Riley thought.

  He looked at the gurney, then glanced quickly away. He seemed to be trying not to look at the blue plastic curtain at the head of the gurney. For a moment, he stared into the viewing room window. He suddenly seemed calmer and more collected.

  “I wish he could see us,” Gail murmured.

  They were shielded from his view behind one-way glass and Riley didn’t share Gail’s wish. Caldwell had already looked at her much too closely for her liking. To capture him, she’d gone undercover. She’d pretended to be a tourist on the Dunes Beach Boardwalk and hired him to draw her portrait. As he worked, he’d showered her with flowery flattery, telling her that she was the most beautiful woman he’d drawn in a long time.

  She knew right then that she was his next intended victim. That night she’d served as bait to draw him out, letting him stalk her along the beach. When he had tried to attack her, backup agents had no trouble catching him.

  His capture had been pretty nondescript. The discovery of how he had carved up his victims and kept them in his freezer had been another matter. Standing there when the freezer was opened was one of the most harrowing moments of Riley’s career. She still felt pity for the victims’ families—Gail among them—for having to identify their dismembered wives, daughters, sisters …

  “Too beautiful to live,” he had called them.

  It chilled Riley deeply that she had been one of the women he had seen that way. She’d never thought of herself as beautiful, and men—even her ex-husband, Ryan—seldom told her that she was. Caldwell was a stark and horrible exception.

  What did it mean, she wondered, that a pathological monster had found her so perfectly lovely? Had he recognized something inside her that was as monstrous as he? For a couple of years after his trial and conviction, she’d had nightmares about his admiring eyes, his honeyed words, and his freezer full of body parts.

  The execution team got Caldwell up onto the execution gurney, removed the cuffs and shackles, took off his sandals, and strapped him into place. They fastened him down with leather bands—two across his chest, two to hold his legs, two around his ankles, and two around his wrists. His bare feet were turned toward the window. It was hard to see his face.

  Suddenly, the curtains closed over the viewing room windows. Riley understood that this was to conceal the phase of the execution where something was most likely to go wrong—say, the team might have trouble finding a suitable vein. Still, she found it peculiar. The people in both viewing rooms were about to watch Caldwell die, but they were not allowed to witness the mundane insertion of the needles. The curtains swayed a little, apparently brushed by one of the team members moving around on the other side.

  When the curtains opened again, the IV lines were in place, running from the prisoner’s arms through holes in the blue plastic curtains. Some members of the execution team had retreated behind those curtains, where they would administer the lethal drugs.

  One man held the red telephone receiver, ready to receive a call that would surely never come. Another spoke to Caldwell, his words a barely audible crackle over the poor sound system. He was asking Caldwell whether he had any last words.

  By contrast, Caldwell’s response came through with startling clarity.

  “Is Agent Paige here?” he asked.

  His words gave Riley a jolt.

  The official didn’t reply. It wasn’t a question that Caldwell had any right to have answered.

  After a tense silence, Caldwell spoke again.

  “Tell Agent Paige that I wish my art could have done justice to her.”

  Although Riley couldn’t see his face clearly, she thought she heard him chuckle.

  “That’s all,” he said. “I’m ready.”

  Riley was flooded by rage, horror, and confusion. This was the last thing she had expected. Derrick Caldwell had chosen to make his last living moments all about her. And sitting here behind this unbreakable shield of glass, she was helpless to do anything about it.

  She had brought him to justice, but in the end, he had achieved a weird, sick kind of revenge.

  She felt Gail’s small hand gripping her own.

  Good God, Riley thought. She’s comforting me.

  Riley fought down a wave of nausea.

  Caldwell said one more thing.

  “Will I feel it when it begins?”

  Again, he received no reply. Riley could see fluid moving through the transparent IV tubes. Caldwell took several deep breaths and appeared to fall asleep. His left foot twitched a couple of times, then fell still.

  After a moment, one of the guards pinched both feet and got no reaction. It seemed a peculiar sort of gesture. But Riley realized that the guard was checking to make sure the sedative was working and that Caldwell was fully unconscious.

  The guard called out something inaudible to the people behind the curtain. Riley saw a renewed flow of fluid through the IV tubes. She knew that a second drug was in the process of stopping his lungs. In a little while, a third drug would stop his heart.

  As Caldwell’s breathing slowed, Riley found herself thinking about what she was watching. How was this different from the times she had used lethal force herself? In the line of duty, she had killed several killers.

  But this was not like any of those other deaths. By comparison, it was bizarrely controlled, clean, clinical, immaculate. It seemed inexplicably wrong. Irrationally, Riley found herself thinking …

  I shouldn’t have let it come to this.

  She knew she was wrong, that she had carried out Caldwell’s apprehension professionally and by the book. But even so she thought …

  I should have killed him myself.

  Gail held Riley’s hand steadily for ten long minutes. Finally, the official beside Caldwell said something that Riley couldn’t hear.

  The warden stepped out from behind the curtain and spoke in a clear enough voice to be understood by all the witnesses.

  “The sentence was successfully carried out at 9:07 a.m.”

  Then the curtains closed across the window again. The witnesses had seen all that they were meant to see. Guards came into the room and urged everybody to leave
as quickly as possible.

  As the group spilled out into the hallway, Gail took hold of Riley’s hand again.

  “I’m sorry he said what he said,” Gail told her.

  Riley was startled. How could Gail be worried about Riley’s feelings at a time like this, when justice had finally been done to her own daughter’s killer?

  “How are you, Gail?” she asked as they walked briskly toward the exit.

  Gail walked along in silence for a moment. Her expression seemed completely blank.

  “It’s done,” she finally said, her voice numb and cold. “It’s done.”

  In an instant they stepped out into the morning daylight. Riley could see two crowds of people across the street, each roped away from the other and tightly controlled by police. On one side were people who had gathered to cheer on the execution, wielding hateful signs, some of them profane and obscene. They were understandably jubilant. On the other side were anti–death penalty protesters with their own signs. They’d been out here all night holding a candlelight vigil. They were much more subdued.

  Riley found that she couldn’t muster sympathy for either group. These people were here for themselves, to make a public show of their outrage and righteousness, acting out of sheer self-indulgence. As far as she was concerned, they had no business being here—not among people whose pain and grief were all too real.

  Between the entrance and the crowds was a swarm of reporters, with media trucks nearby. As Riley waded among them, one woman rushed up to her with a microphone and a cameraman behind her.

  “Agent Paige? Are you Agent Paige?” she said.

  Riley didn’t reply. She tried to go past the reporter.

  The reporter stayed with her doggedly. “We’ve heard that Caldwell mentioned you in his last words. Do you care to comment?”