“Your brother?”
“He was the scoutmaster shot yesterday.”
“Right. We’ll secure this place. No one will be able to get in without our sanction. You take a breather. You’ve been on duty 24/7 for three days, Agent Vigo said.”
The way Blackstone said “Agent Vigo” showed that Hans’s colleagues gave him a huge amount of respect.
“I won’t be able to relax until I hear from Mitch,” Tyler said.
“We’ll find him. We have some state-of-the-art sensors on the bird.”
“Good. After you find him, find Doherty. I have a bad feeling that he’ll come back again for Jo.”
“We’ll be ready for him.”
Aaron followed his map to a house near the Lima Reservoir.
He’d heard the helicopter searching for him. Or for the cop, who was probably dead. It didn’t matter, the farther he rode west, the farther away the chopper sounded.
When he’d first arrived at the lodge, he’d used information he found in the office to identify all residences in the area. He carefully plotted them on his map. At the time he wasn’t sure if he would need them, but he also knew he had to get Joanna away from her family in order to convince her of his nobility.
Now he was alone.
It was getting dark, and it wasn’t even four in the afternoon. He’d been riding for nearly four hours, had recently switched to the backup tank. He’d burned a lot of fuel running from the cop, so he kept the sled steady at twenty miles per hour once he knew the helicopter hadn’t spotted him.
The blue sky turned dark gray. Clouds rolled in like something out of a horror movie. Thunder rumbled in the distance, sounding far more foreboding in the valley than it ever did in the middle of a city like Los Angeles.
Aaron stopped as the first snowflake fell. He took out his map. He wasn’t sure where he was, and though he knew he’d traveled over seventy-five miles, he’d been zigzagging. He thought he was only a few miles from the Lima Reservoir, but what if he was wrong?
The snow fell deceptively soft around him as he stared at the map. Shit, he didn’t know where the fuck he was.
That wasn’t true. He’d gone mostly northwest. He’d kept a good eye on the compass. Which would put him about…
He looked at the map, then at his surroundings. What if he was wrong?
He couldn’t afford to try to find this one house only to find he was miles from where he thought. If he ran out of gas in the middle of nowhere…
It’s Joanna’s fault.
He slammed his fist on the Polaris’s instrument panel. Damn, damn, damn. He should have taken her with him.
She didn’t want to come with you. She doesn’t love you. She lied to you. All these years, it was a joke. One big joke on you.
Eight years ago when he went back to Rebecca to explain, to beg for forgiveness, he’d realized what a joke she thought he was.
He’d quietly snuck into her house. She had an alarm system, but he knew the code. It surprised him she hadn’t changed it, but maybe she hadn’t known he knew. Or maybe she wanted him to come to her.
A man was with her. The same actor who had been bad-mouthing Aaron to Rebecca all these months. It was his fault, not hers. Aaron believed that up until he overheard…
“Rebecca dear, are you feeling all right?” Bruce Lawson’s voice was prissy. Condescending.
Why had she let him in the house? Into her bedroom?
“I’m fine.”
Such a beautiful voice. Aaron closed his eyes and imagined Rebecca speaking to him so kindly, so lovingly.
The sound of movement, then Lawson said, “Better?”
“Much.”
The smooch of a kiss.
Aaron tensed. Lawson had kissed Rebecca. Touched her with his lips. Not okay. Not okay at all.
“You’ve been a godsend, Bruce.” Rebecca sighed. “I wouldn’t have made it all these weeks without you.”
“You’re still worried.”
“Of course I am. They haven’t found him.”
“The police are looking for him. He wouldn’t be so stupid as to show up anywhere near here.”
“I don’t know. He—there’s something not right with him.”
“Of course not! He hurt you. The guy’s a lunatic.”
“He thought there was something going on between you and me.”
“Who cares what he thought?”
“There wasn’t. Not then.”
“What are you saying?”
“You’ve been a rock, Bruce. I never thought—I guess, with your reputation…”
“Don’t believe everything you hear, darling.”
Smooch. Silence.
Rebecca said softly, “Thank you for staying with me.”
“I’ll stay with you as long as you want me to.”
Aaron didn’t remember killing them. He witnessed the scene disembodied, as if looking at himself from afar, in freeze-frames. Coming into Rebecca’s room. Bruce Lawson charging him, Aaron slicing him with three strokes.
Slit, slit, slit.
Rebecca screaming.
Stabbing her. The police said he’d stabbed her thirty-two times. He only remembered the first one. Then pulling his knife out and looking at her face. The shock.
I loved you I loved you I loved you I loved you.
He groaned, his hand aching as if he’d today stabbed Rebecca thirty-two times. He stared at the Montana map. He had to be right.
He would find the Jorgensen farm. He would refuel. Then he would hunt down Joanna and cut her heart out.
Like she’d cut out his.
If anyone tried to stop him, they’d die, too.
TWENTY-SEVEN
The storm teased the valley, rolling in fast but bringing with it just an occasional flurry of flakes. Weather didn’t ground the helicopter; nighttime did.
Tyler went back to the lodge with Jo on the last run of the chopper. They’d found Mitch almost immediately—he’d been thrown from the sled while in pursuit and had hit his head hard. Snow wasn’t as soft as it appeared. Agent Bianchi was damn lucky he didn’t break anything, including his back.
In case Doherty returned, Mitch stayed with half the SWAT team at Nash’s house. At dawn, weather permitting, they’d start the search again.
The rest of the team was at the Moosehead Lodge. Grossman and Duncan had escorted the Boy Scouts and remaining lodge guests to the Worthingtons’ house before nightfall. Tomorrow morning, a charter helicopter would take them over the pass to reunite with their families. Except Jason. Jason hadn’t wanted to go, and Tyler didn’t force him to. The lodge was safe—cops outnumbered civilians. Jason was in the den with Buckley. Tyler thought that maybe it was time Jason had his own dog. Tyler had a dog most of his childhood, until Kip was hit by a car and had to be put to sleep. He hadn’t been able to have another pet, but Jason was a boy, and boys needed dogs.
Tyler stared at the closed door leading to Karl’s suite, knowing Jo was in there with her family, telling them about Trixie. He wanted to go to her, to take care of her, but Jo needed this private time with Karl, Stan, and Leah.
After triple-checking that Jason was safe in the den, Tyler went into the kitchen where Vigo was talking with Agent Hunter Blackstone. Tyler poured himself coffee and sat down across from the senior agent.
“You couldn’t have done anything to save her,” Hans said.
Tyler didn’t respond. What could he say? He’d been running through the day from beginning to end and thought of a million different things he could have said or done, but every scenario ended up with someone dead.
“How’s Mitch?” Hans asked.
Blackstone answered, “In a foul mood with a bear of a headache.”
“He’s lucky he’s alive, hotdogging it after Doherty on his own,” Hans reprimanded. “Probably thinks if he gets injured in the line of duty he’ll have a pass when he gets back to Sacramento.”
“Excuse me?” Tyler asked.
“It’s nothing,” Hans
said.
“Like hell it is,” Blackstone said. “Mitch defied orders tracking Thomas O’Brien up this far. He wasn’t supposed to leave the Sacramento region. Then he was ordered back and he never went. I sure as hell wouldn’t want to get on Meg Elliott’s shit list.”
“She doesn’t bite,” Hans said.
“I have my doubts.”
“Mitch will be okay, as long as he doesn’t mouth off,” Hans said.
“I don’t understand.” Tyler didn’t understand how the FBI worked, but he’d assumed Mitch Bianchi was assigned to this case.
Hans explained. “Mitch is a damn good cop. More than dedicated. But he sometimes has a problem following orders, and the FBI is not the place to regularly defy authority—right or wrong. Mitch was supposed to stay in Sacramento; instead, when Thomas O’Brien was sighted, he followed rather than calling the appropriate regional office.”
“I’m glad he did,” Tyler said. “He’s solid.”
“That he is, and loyal.”
“If you need anything from me,” Tyler said, “I’ll gladly testify that Mitch has been a great agent to work with. Smart and sharp.”
“If you want to write a letter, that’d be good for his file,” Hans said. “By the way, Nash called right before you arrived. Wyatt’s safe and in the hospital. He’s going into surgery tonight, but the prognosis is good.”
“Glad to hear that.” More than glad. Tyler had been worried about Wyatt all day.
“Your Bonnie—great gal, by the way—patched a call into the lodge radio this afternoon. The FBI agent I have looking into Doherty’s past uncovered a murder seventeen years ago in San Diego. The victim was Ginger Doherty.”
“His mother?”
“Yes.”
“Why wasn’t that in his file?”
“Because there is no record of Ginger Doherty having a son. She never filed taxes with his name or Social Security number. In her employment records with King Cruises she stated that she was single, without children, and twenty-nine. She had fake identification and no one who knew her even suspected that she had a child. She listed no next of kin.”
“What happened to her?”
“She was stabbed to death. She was living with a man near the beach between cruises.”
“So she left her son with an old aunt in Glendale and worked out of San Diego.”
“The police had a suspect. A belligerent ex-boyfriend of Ms. Doherty’s who was in town at the time of the murders.”
“Murders?”
“The current boyfriend was also killed. His throat was slit, he died quickly. Ginger Doherty was stabbed repeatedly. Sixteen times in the chest and abdomen.”
“Does that have significance?” Blackstone asked.
“Aaron Doherty turned sixteen the day before. And according to one of his earlier guardians, Annie Erickson, his mother had repeatedly disappointed him on his birthday. Making promises she never kept. Also, the MO matches the Rebecca Oliver crime scene. The man was killed quickly and efficiently, while the female was repeatedly stabbed, most post-mortem.”
“How did he find her? Didn’t you say the police had a suspect?” Tyler questioned.
“The ex-boyfriend had an alibi, and they couldn’t break him. They had to let him go, but they still thought they’d had the right guy even if they didn’t have the evidence. They stopped looking.”
“So how does that help us now?” Tyler asked. “That he killed his mother and her lover means nothing to me. Right now, he’s out there somewhere. I hope he’s freezing to death in the middle of the valley. Or maybe he had a destination. SWAT checked out the refuge, but he wasn’t there. There are more than a dozen families living in the valley who are still in danger because he’s at large.”
“Knowing about his mother is important.” Hans rose, retrieved the coffeepot, and refilled the mugs while he spoke. “It tells us about his mind-set. It also tells us that he’s been a killer for a long, long time. But he’s not a traditional serial killer by any means. So far, we suspect he killed his mother and her boyfriend, and we know he killed five people: Rebecca Oliver and her friend Bruce Lawson; Lincoln Barnes; and today Doug Chapman and Trixie Weber. Each murder was for a purpose.”
“What purpose did he have for killing Trixie Weber?” Tyler demanded. “She was a physically handicapped woman with a daughter. She was no threat to him.”
“Something has been bothering me about the Sutton murders.”
Tyler frowned. Jo didn’t need any more tragedy or inquiries into the deaths of her husband and son. “What specifically?”
“How did Lincoln Barnes know where to find Trixie and her daughter?” Hans didn’t wait for an answer. “Trixie was an abused woman. Abused women have low self-esteem and often return to their abusers—either because they think they’ve changed, or they feel they can change them if only they are good.”
“You don’t think—” Tyler remembered something Jo had said when he had first found her earlier today. When she saw her dead sister’s body. “You think Trixie brought Lincoln Barnes to Placerville.”
“It’s the only thing that makes sense, knowing what we know about Barnes and Trixie.”
“He could have tracked her down from mutual friends, maybe an address book with Jo’s address in it, any number of ways.”
Hans shook his head. “I don’t think so. I was reading over the police reports and there was nothing in Lincoln Barnes’s possession except a note in his pocket that read, ‘Meet Trix at diner on Highway 49 and Main St.’”
“That doesn’t mean anything.” But Tyler frowned. Did Jo know about this?
“There were also three tickets reserved at the Sacramento Airport; final destination Madison, Wisconsin—where Barnes has family—for Lincoln Barnes, Beatrix Barnes, and Leah Barnes.”
“There’s no way that Linc could get two people against their will on a plane,” Tyler said. Then he said, “Shit. You think Trixie planned to go off with him?”
Hans nodded. “And for whatever reason, something went wrong and Linc snapped. Or maybe he made the reservations, and Trixie just wanted to talk. We’ll never know. Abused women have a very difficult time getting away from their abusers. They have a complex psychology. I’ve known more than one battered woman who went back to her abuser, only to be killed.”
“So,” Tyler extrapolated, “you think that Doherty killed Trixie because she hurt Jo—by telling Barnes where she was, leading him to the murders of Ken and Timmy Sutton.”
“Bingo.”
“That doesn’t sit well with me.” How could he tell Jo something like that? “Jo doesn’t need to know,” he added.
“Doherty will have told Jo why he killed Trixie,” Hans said. “She knows the truth—whatever it is.”
Why hadn’t she told him? Of course, to protect Trixie’s memory. He glanced out the door, though he knew Jo was still with her family.
Blackstone asked, “So what specifically set Doherty off all those years ago that he would kill his own mother?”
Hans paused for a long minute, sipped his coffee, putting together his thoughts. “I think he’d been looking for his mother for a while. Maybe verifying her whereabouts. He found out she worked for King Cruises. He tracked her schedule, found out she was in port. It was his birthday. Certainly she would come visit. She had always promised to see him on his birthday. He would have put aside the fact that she broke most of her promises. This day he was turning sixteen. He hoped she would come.”
“And she didn’t,” Tyler said.
“No. He snapped. I don’t know specifically why—maybe he learned that she’d been lying to him, or lying about him. Maybe his aunt said something and he put information together that sent him on a murderous rage. Something happened when he turned sixteen that forever sent him down the wrong path.
“It was shortly after that when he became obsessed with Bridget Hart, a girlfriend in high school. They dated for about a year and she left him. He attacked her, scarred her face. He ended up
with six months in juvie and his great-aunt, Dorothy Miles, was granted legal custody when the court couldn’t find his mother.
“Shortly after his eighteenth birthday, his aunt died. She was in her eighties and the doctor ruled it as an accidental overdose. She’d had her stomach pumped three times in the preceding four years for taking too much medicine, or mixing them. The first two times happened before Aaron came to live with her, so it could be entirely possible that she did accidentally overdose.”
“Or,” Tyler said, “Doherty may have witnessed one of the attempts and thought that was a good way to take her out.”
“Possibly. She left him her estate. She lived comfortably so there wasn’t a lot of money left, but she had no mortgage and the house was worth a couple hundred thousand back then. She had bought him a car when he turned sixteen. He continued to live there until he killed Rebecca Oliver. Worked at a coffee shop for years. Never made a lot of money, but when you don’t have housing expenses, it doesn’t matter as much.”
“So he killed his mother, may or may not have killed his aunt. Then he killed Rebecca Oliver and her friend Bruce Lawson, and was convicted and put on death row. How does this help us see what he’ll do next?”
“With Rebecca, he watched her for a long time. Possibly killed her husband to get him out of the way. He’d died in an apparent car accident a couple of years before the first attack, but the Glendale PD had their suspicions. Doherty was patient. Waited. Befriended her. They had a friendship for years—they were neighbors. Easy to strike up conversation. His fantasy continued to grow in his mind, but for a long time he was able to satisfy himself by keeping his distance. Then something happened, and he attacked her. Sliced up her face in her own house. He never said specifically what had happened, but I would guess it was a way of getting other men to stop looking at her. She was an actress. Her face was part of who she was.”
“I read the files you brought,” Tyler said. “She identified Doherty and then started putting other information together. That he had been sending her anonymous presents and notes. He would say he was courting her, but he was stalking her. She feared for her life, and rightly so. He disappeared and the police couldn’t find him. Then, after her plastic surgery, he broke into her house and killed her.”
Tempting Evil Page 14
