by Jonas Saul
He got down and knelt by the window. Lang waited. When Raccoon rose to stand, he walked to the wall behind the big floor light and opened the closet.
Lang watched as the American looked at the clock on the wall, then behind it, then back at the clock.
“What?” Lang asked.
“What time is it?”
Lang checked his watch. “Ten after two in the afternoon.”
“Right.”
“So the clock’s batteries are dead. Who cares?”
“This isn’t only a clock.”
“Looks like it from here.”
“That’s what she was betting on.”
Lang moved closer. He leaned around the edge of the closet and peeked inside. A VCR-like machine sat on the top shelf of a cabinet. A green light blinked in the far corner.
“What is it?”
“The clock is a camera and this is a DVR. Sarah wouldn’t go to all this trouble to interrogate an RCMP officer without recording what she would discover.”
“How come none of my officers saw this? And how do you know she was interrogating our Mountie?”
Raccoon met his eyes. “You can’t see that by the way this room is set up?”
“I thought this was to torture him.”
“That might have been Sarah’s plan as well. Whoever killed Barry Ashford, and I suspect Barry himself, didn’t see this clock/camera either. The murderer will be in full living color on the hard drive of this DVR. Once we’ve watched it, you will learn who you really should be hunting.”
Lang breathed out a heavy sigh, not sure if he could watch Barry be shot and cut up.
“There’s a TV upstairs,” Raccoon said. He twitched his toothpick to the other side of his mouth. “Let’s go see who killed your Mountie, shall we?”
For the first time since Detective Lang met the American, he actually sounded happy.
Chapter 29
Deborah checked through the curtains one more time. The street was still empty. She made room in the Rankins’ freezer, shifting around some of the meat from Jacob and his girlfriend.
She laughed. If Barry had known what she had been feeding him for the past several months, he would’ve killed her instead of the other way around. Barry’s thighs and calves were still in her bathtub in her basement. They would need to be tended to before they began to decay. Now that the authorities were gone, she had a chance to bring his legs over undetected so she could skin and clean the meat and package it for consumption.
But she wanted to deal with Sarah first. There would be time enough to bring Barry’s legs over later tonight. With Sarah, she wanted to start slow, cut small pieces of meat out and cook and eat her flesh right in front of her. Breaking her left ankle would help when she sawed the foot off. Cutting through bone was always tough, but broken ankles allowed the feet to almost lop off as the blade bypassed the bones.
She considered cutting out Sarah’s tongue first so there would be no more disrespect, no more talking back.
Sure she thought of everything, she got the blowtorch ready to cauterize the wound as she cut through Sarah’s flesh.
If Deborah made a mistake, Sarah would die. But that wasn’t so bad. It would be more merciful for Sarah, but Debbie wouldn’t enjoy it as much.
She checked the curtains one more time because she couldn’t have someone too close to the house in case Sarah fought through the drugs and woke screaming with the pain.
The street was still empty.
It was time to cut her meat for dinner. She turned on the Bosch all purpose electric saw, the blade cutting the air back and forth, and walked over to Sarah’s unconscious body and hovered near her ankle.
An eerie feeling coursed through her. Like she was being watched.
She turned off the saw and eyed the curtains. She looked over each shoulder, but saw nothing. She was alone with Sarah.
When she looked back down, Sarah’s eyes were open.
“You’re awake?” Deborah exclaimed stepping back. The anesthetic she used should have knocked Sarah out as if she was on the cardiac specialist’s table awaiting a heart transplant. “How is that possible?”
Deborah pulled the syringe from her pocket. All its contents had been injected in Sarah’s thigh. There was no way Sarah could be awake.
When she turned back to look at the young girl’s face there was something different about her. The eyes, her jaw, her cheeks, something. But she couldn’t put a finger on it.
“Deborah Sally Ashford, nee Cummings.” The voice emanating from Sarah was cryptic, almost hollow, like she was speaking through a tin can with a string attached. The kind kids used as pretend phones years ago.
Deborah gasped. “How did you know my whole name? And my maiden name?”
“I know … everything.” The first two words were the tin can again, but the last word sounded malevolent.
Goose bumps raised on Deborah’s arms.
“You have enough narcotics in your system to put down a charging bull,” Deborah said, her voice wavering at the sight of Sarah’s glaring eyes. “Your left foot is broken. How is it possible you’re talking? And in that weird voice?”
“This is the end, Deb Head.”
“Don’t call me that!” she shouted.
“Deb Head, Deb Head, Deb Head …”
Deborah dropped the electric saw and clapped both hands over her ears. That name brought her back to when she was a teenager. Her mother would beat her with a broom, always yelling that Deborah wasn’t thinking. Her mother would say, Deb, you have to use her head. How stupid are you? Deb has a head. Come on, Deb Head. What is wrong with you? Why are you such a stupid child? How could I have a dumb idiot for a kid? Come on Deb, use your head. Deb Head. You’re so stupid, you brainless piece of shit. With each exclamation, the broom would come down on her back. Her ribs were broken at least a dozen times before she left home and ran to Vancouver at fifteen years of age.
“Did Deb Head want to talk about Vancouver?” the thing on the Rankins’ sofa asked.
Deborah swiveled her head back and forth slowly. “You’re not real, you’re not real,” she said, over and over. “You can’t know my name. You can’t know about me. No one knows about my past. No one knows that name—”
“I know,” Sarah’s body said, the voice worsening, more strained. “What you did to Maxine’s eyes. You kept them in that jar and toyed with the idea that you would find a way to serve them to your husband mashed up in his food. I’m here to stop you.”
Deborah looked at the saw. If the thing on the sofa wouldn’t shut up, she would cut its head off. Whatever Sarah had become, Debbie Ashford would un-become it.
“You can’t stop me with that,” the Sarah thing said. “I know what you’re thinking as you think it.”
The thing on the couch moved. Sarah raised her hands and slipped her finger under the rope that wrapped around her neck. She pulled hard on her feet, making the rope as taut as it could possibly be. Then, with a sudden jerk that no person could rationally do because of the pain, Sarah pulled her broken foot forward, straining the rope to its end. Because her ankle was loose and broken, no longer in a fixed position, Sarah snapped her knee back and her left foot popped out of the restraints. The effect, timed perfectly, yanked the rope off her left foot. She repeated the movement, quicker this time now that one foot was free, and freed the other as the rope snapped the couch’s leg under it. What Deborah thought was an impossible task, the thing on the couch performed with ease.
Next, Sarah gave a serious yank on the rope around her neck and both couch legs at that end popped from under the couch, the sofa dropping several inches with a thump. The rope around her neck fell loosely to the sofa’s cushion.
Sarah was no longer secured, but she couldn’t walk away with one broken ankle.
Deborah grabbed the electric saw, sweat dripping into her eyes, and turned it on.
“I will cut you up!” she screamed, lunging forward.
Sarah rolled off the couch as t
he electric saw came at her. It sank deep into the middle cushion at the same second Sarah hit the carpet and rolled into Deborah’s legs.
The sharpest pain Deborah had ever felt shot up her leg as if a wasp the size of a football stung her. Forgetting the electric saw, she looked down. Blood ran freely from a wound in her leg where Sarah had just bit her.
“How does it feel?” the Sarah thing asked. “You like being eaten alive?”
“This isn’t happening,” Deborah wailed. “You’re still unconscious. You’re still my prisoner. How did you get untied? This doesn’t make sense. No one can …” She stopped rambling and dropped to the floor as her leg weakened.
Sarah was crawling onto the couch.
“Who are you?” Deborah asked.
The saw turned on.
Sarah hovered near her, the electric saw in her hands, balancing crazily on her knees, her flopping broken left foot trailing behind her like an afterthought.
“No one can handle that kind of pain,” Deborah said.
“Sarah’s not feeling anything right now,” the voice said.
Deborah’s eyes widened, sure she had lost her mind. She backed away from the Sarah thing.
“Who are you?” Deborah shouted.
“My name is Vivian Roberts.”
Deborah screamed.
Chapter 30
Lang pushed the rewind button. “I have to see it again. That’s just not possible.”
“What am I missing?” Raccoon asked. “It’s as clear as day.”
Lang watched again as Sarah interrogated Barry. Officer Ashford admitted to abusing his girls. Then Sarah left the basement. The lights went out. The camera turned off. Movement activated it again. The lights were on. Barry’s head moved. Finally, someone walked onto the screen. A woman. She talked to Barry. Lang recognized Deborah’s voice. Enough of her face showed to prove it was Barry’s wife. She held a gun in her hand. When she used it to shoot Barry, Lang gasped again. Deborah grabbed a saw and proceeded to dismember him on camera. After a few minutes, she disappeared and came back with an axe to finish her work off. It was Deborah Ashford who murdered her husband. It was plain to see, clear as day.
“Do you have any idea where this woman is right now?” Raccoon asked.
Lang was stunned into silence.
Fingers snapped in front of his face.
He jumped. “What?”
“That officer we talked to as we arrived,” Raccoon was talking again. “He said he was called off by the widow. Is that the widow?”
Detective Colin Lang nodded his head as if in a trance.
“She lives next door?”
Lang continued to nod.
The American guest spit his toothpick out and pulled out a weapon as he ran toward the front door. Lang snapped out of his trance and spun on his heels.
“Hey, wait,” he yelled.
But his American guest was gone.
Detective Lang ran across the floor and outside just in time to see the American vault the front steps to the Ashford house and body check the door.
“Hey!” he yelled as he ran across the lawn. “We have to do this right.”
The American smashed the door three times before Lang caught up to him. As he hit the stairs, the American broke through, the door snapping off at the handle.
He entered, his gun raised. “Mrs. Ashford,” the American called. “Police.”
He ran away from Lang, checking rooms down the hall to the left. Lang moved into the kitchen. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary.
The American rushed past him and whispered, “All clear up here.”
“What are you doing?” Lang asked. “There are procedures. We need to get a warrant. We need to make—”
The most emotion the American had shown since Lang met him was on his face. His eyes were on fire, his cheeks moistened in sweat. “Do you know where Sarah Roberts is?”
Lang shook his head in the negative.
“We’ve got a murderer out there. Sarah’s BMW bike was found in a ditch, her rental car was found just up the street. That means she’s probably close. Find the widow, your murderer, find Sarah.”
The American disappeared down the stairs.
Lang didn’t feel comfortable standing in Barry Ashford’s house. Even though he witnessed the murder on the DVR, it somehow felt disrespectful to the widow to just be standing there. Lang pulled out his cell phone. He stepped outside and called for backup. Backup would arrive very soon.
That’s when he heard someone scream from far away. It wasn’t in the house behind him. It was from somewhere in the trees beyond the dead-end road.
The scream came again.
Then someone bumped into him from behind.
The American was back. He had paled in the time he was in the basement.
“I found his legs in the bathtub downstairs.” He panted a moment, trying to catch his breath. “Barry’s wife placed his fucking legs in her tub as if they were a macabre trophy!”
The scream came once more.
The American jerked his head to the side. “Did you hear that?”
Lang nodded. “It was the third or fourth time.”
The American took off running, pumping his arms like he was trying to set a hundred-meter dash record.
Chapter 31
The Bosch electric saw touched the edge of Deborah’s neck but didn’t go farther. The wind from the blade tickled her skin.
Sarah moved in until they were nose to nose.
“You will pay,” Sarah’s mouth said in that terrible voice. “For what you have done.”
Sarah jerked the electric saw until the cord snapped out of the wall. The saw turned off.
She set it down beside Deborah, rolled off her and lay back. Silence filled the room.
“What are you doing?” Deborah asked.
“Waiting …” Sarah’s eyes stayed open a moment longer. Then, as her eyes closed and without moving her lips, she said, “Waiting for them.”
Her eyes closed and her head tilted to the side as if she had lost consciousness.
A siren wailed in the distance. More sirens joined.
Deborah wondered if anyone had heard them screaming and called the police.
She got to her feet on shaky legs, the whole time keeping an eye on Sarah’s inert form. She teetered to the window and pulled the curtains back. Police cruisers were just turning onto Bennett Road at the end. Lights flashed, sirens screamed. One cruiser after another came barreling down the street.
She had to use another hypodermic. Keep Sarah subdued. She had to get out of here and clean up in her home. No one could see her in this house. If they ever searched it they would find meat supplies—the remains of more than a dozen people.
But something else was wrong. Why would all these police cruisers be on her street? One maybe. But twelve or more and with their sirens on?
She brushed at her hair and straightened her clothes. There was an extra needle in the laundry room. She gave Sarah’s sleeping form a wide berth as she headed there.
When she came out, the needle in her hand, ready to inject Sarah, two men stood by the couch. They both held guns pointed at her. She recognized Lang from afternoon barbecues and get-togethers at various police functions.
This didn’t look good. A story formed in her head so fast it surprised her.
“I’m so happy you’re here,” Deborah said. “I came over to get this house ready for a cleaning when I discovered her.” She pointed at Sarah on the floor. “The murderer that killed my husband. We fought. I got lucky and broke her ankle. She passed out and I was about to give her a little something,” she held the needle up, “to keep her asleep until I got back from calling you lot. But it sounds like you’re all here. It’s so good to see you, Colin.”
“Put the needle down, Deborah,” Lang said.
“Okay, okay, no need to be rude about it. Just trying to secure a murderer.”
“Step away from the needle and put your hands on the wall.”
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“Colin, what are you saying? It’s me you’re talking to. Deborah Ashford, Barry’s widow—”
“Don’t mention his name!” Colin smacked the needle from her hand, twisted her around and pushed her against the wall. “Hands on your head.”
