The Bride Collector

by Ted Dekker

  Brad had faced death. Victims. Ruby. He’d grown accustomed to the stench of it. But that stench never faded, not for him, and particularly not if it arose off someone like Nikki.

  Yet something had happened deep in his psyche these past ten minutes. Something he recognized. He’d rushed into her room and assumed that he was too late. That Nikki was dead.

  He was horrified, yes. But she wasn’t Ruby. No one had been Ruby. No pain had come close to shutting him down the way he’d shut down following her death ten years earlier. And this, he thought, was because he had given himself to Ruby, heart and soul. When someone you love dies, something inside of you dies. You die. She is you. You are her.

  He shook the thought from his mind and called Allison at the CWI.

  “Well, young man, you’ve certainly left the place buzzing.”

  “Hello, Allison. Sorry about-”

  “Don’t apologize. You’ve put all three on the top of the world. Did you find her?”

  “Not yet. But they were right. Tell Paradise we found another note from him. I want you to write it down and ask them to study it for… anything. Can you do that?”

  “Tell me.”

  He read the note to her.

  “God’s favorite,” she said softly, repeating to herself. “Interesting.”

  “Does it mean something to you?”

  “Well… In general, yes. Basic theology. So besides this note, you found nothing?”

  “No. Boulder PD is on their way now. I have to go, Allison.” He hesitated. “You used to be a nun?”

  “Yes.”

  “You still believe in God.”

  “Of course. I’m not terribly religious, I’m afraid, but I do what I do because of that belief. And yes, I will pray.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Don’t count her out, Brad. She still has that image locked in her head somewhere.”

  Paradise. He never would have guessed that Allison, of all people, would push for him to exploit her own patient.

  Then again, Allison saw the exploitation as her patient’s salvation.

  A tone in his ear indicated an incoming call. He glanced at the phone screen. Temple.

  “Nikki’s seen him, too,” Brad said to Allison. “We’re going to get to her in time. Gotta go.”

  He switched over to Temple. Nearly fifteen minutes had passed since he’d made the call to dispatch Boulder PD. This had to be it. His heart pounded in his rib cage like a fist.

  He brought the phone back to his ear. “Yeah, hello…”

  “Brad…”

  And he knew immediately by Temple’s tone that it wasn’t good.

  “What is it?” he demanded, flushing with anger.

  “I’m sorry, Brad. They found her.”

  His vision blurred. “Found her? How?”

  When Temple answered, his voice was all too matter-of-fact. “On the wall.”

  Images of Melissa and Caroline, white on the wall like angels, flashed through his mind. He couldn’t form an image of Nikki like that.

  “Brad, I’m sorry, I know you two were close…”

  He switched the phone off and set it in the cup holder. There was something wrong. They’d come too close to lose now. Andrea had figured it out! Roudy had paced all day and exposed the jack. Paradise had told him that Nikki was home. And they had been right, he’d found the note…

  They’d cracked it wide open, it couldn’t end like this! Not after what they’d accomplished.

  Brad pushed the BMW to its limits, ignoring the repeated horns from all sides, weaving in and out of traffic as he raced toward the crime scene. His head was in a drum, knocking around in the darkness. He wasn’t thinking straight.

  At least half a dozen cruisers had beat him to 2435 4th Street. Lights were flashing on four of them. Yellow tape already formed a barrier around the entrance to the courtyard inside. Spectators hung back on the street and under two large trees, watching. Low-rent district. The rental information would take them nowhere; the Bride Collector was too careful, too smart.

  Brad stepped over the yellow tape and flashed his badge at an officer. He might have said, “FBI,” but he wasn’t sure. His eyes were on the open door across the courtyard, up on the second floor where several more police stood talking quietly.

  He ran. Through the entrance, up steel stairs, down the walkway, past two uniforms at the door, into an unfurnished apartment. Someone was saying, “Hey, hey!” behind him, telling him to slow down. But he couldn’t get to the room quickly enough.

  And then he was there, in the room down the hall marked as the crime scene. The room was empty except for a plainclothes detective, a uniformed officer. And Nikki.

  She was on the wall and she was wearing a white lace veil.

  “FBI, out!” He flashed his credentials. “Both of you, out now.”

  “Now, hold on just-”

  Brad grabbed the detective by his shirt and shoved him toward the door. “This is my partner, this is my case, now get out!”

  They stumbled out and he slammed the door behind them, breathing as heavily from what was on the wall as from the run. He turned slowly and faced her.

  Nikki’s skin was like ivory, drained of life. Naked except for her underwear. Her arms were spread wide and her head tilted to her right so that her dark hair draped over her shoulder. Eyes closed, lips ruby with lipstick, fingernails manicured and polished.

  She’d been positioned exactly as the others. But she was in an apartment. And there was a small pool of her blood on the carpet beneath her feet. The Bride Collector had left without plugging her wounds. He’d taken the bucket of blood and left her dead.

  Brad slid down the door to his seat, gripped his face with both hands, and cried.

  22

  THE BUZZ AT the bottom of Quinton Gauld’s brain had come and gone repeatedly since the last favorite, Nikki Holden, had turned it on. Her absurd accusation that everything he was doing was a pathetic attempt to become God’s favorite was outrageous. He was no hunchbacked freak willing to serve his master in any capacity to win favor. She hadn’t said quite as much but he knew that she was thinking precisely this.

  He’d delivered her to God two days ago, and he was now sure that she had indeed been chosen because of her mental illness, as God’s way of reaching out to all the world. Because God loved them all, even the densest of the dense. And especially him.

  He dismissed Nikki’s claim.

  Quinton walked to his kitchen and opened the refrigerator, hungry for a snack. Maybe some peanut butter on a slice of orange. Organic peanut butter. Nature’s Choice.

  He pulled out the jar, chose a particularly large orange from the fruit bowl, washed it thoroughly, and sliced it up while thinking ahead. Back on track.

  He’d done his part and now he could focus on the prize at the end of his race. On the true bride. The most beautiful woman in the world, without exception. He’d watched her for years, waiting, knowing that in the fullness of time he would take her and present her blameless to her suitor, a perfect bride.

  Quinton knew just how perfect she was because he had known her. Not in the biblical sense, although not for a lack of trying. But she hadn’t appreciated his advances, and now he understood that she’d been right to save herself for God. She was a virgin, he was sure of it.

  What was particularly tricky about the final bride was that she must come willingly. Not just die willingly, but join him of her own accord.

  He’d considered a thousand scenarios over the years leading up to this date. Stepping out on the sidewalk with a bright smile. “Hello, Angel. Remember me?” She’d likely slap him and scream rape.

  He might send her boxes of chocolates with sweet notes, pretending to be a handsome man with a heart of gold inviting her to dinner. But she wasn’t the kind who met strangers for dinner.

  He even considered getting plastic surgery and attempting to win her as a suitor, but he wasn’t confident in his ability to pretend long enough to earn her
trust. She undoubtedly had many potential suitors, and the only reason she wasn’t yet married was because she could afford to be picky. Any man with more than half a brain would fall for her, not that there was an abundance of those.

  He’d eventually narrowed his options down to a couple that might work if he was very clever, one involving her family. And now Rain Man had inserted himself into the picture, like a gift from God, allowing Quinton to settle on a plan so perfect that it gave him chills.

  The only problem was this buzzing in his brain. This buzz, buzz, buzz. The onset of a particularly harsh psychotic break, the doctors would say. Truth was, he was the poster child for psychosis. But so few really understood psychosis.

  Quinton sat at his table and wiped a small portion of peanut butter on a slice of orange, then placed the whole circle in his mouth, peel and all. So many nutrients in the orange peel.

  See (and he waved a finger in the air as he thought this), people didn’t understand the nature of psychosis. It was defined as being out of touch with reality. Psychosis was a thought disorder, like schizophrenia, which disconnected one from reality, unlike multiple-personality disorder, which caused the afflicted to split. The former was very common, the latter was extremely rare.

  Over time, the world had attempted to correct psychosis with myriad inhuman treatments, ranging from electric shock to carving out parts of the brain with a knife. In the same way that the world now cringed in memory of such treatments, it would one day cringe at having drugged up the afflicted and locked them in prisons as if they were witches.

  There was a growing suggestion among scientists that psychosis was a sign of evolutionary progress, the brain’s way of growing brighter, at least in some cases. Like Quinton’s.

  In truth, being “out of touch with reality” could only occur when one understood reality itself. Quinton’s superior mind was indeed out of touch with the world’s understanding of reality, yet supremely in touch with a higher reality, largely misunderstood by the world.

  Namely, the spiritual reality, which gave him purpose and destiny. The smooth texture of peanut butter combined with sweet popping orange-such a perfect snack, it should be called a food group all by itself. Some probably would think peanut butter with oranges strange. What they failed to see was that from another perspective, they were strange.

  The world had once been determined to be flat, and the belief that it was round was considered to be out of touch with that reality. But which was true reality?

  In the same way, many believed that God did not exist. One day they would all know the truth. There was a terrible battle raging between good and evil, and few were as aware of this battle as Quinton.

  He took his last bite of orange smothered in peanut butter, wiped his fingers on a napkin, and threw the napkin in his self-sealing waste can under the sink. The perfect snack indeed. His only regret was that he himself, a human, was not perfect, as much as he tried to be perfect. Instead he had the buzzing at the base of his brain to mar his perfection.

  Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. And I will sin again.

  Now, to the matter of Rain Man. The agent couldn’t possibly know that he was already on a course to bring him the beautiful sister. The seventh and most perfect bride.

  It was fantastically ironic that Angie Founder’s real name was Angel. That sicko father who’d killed his family and taken his own life had named his two daughters Paradise and Angel. A religious nutcase.

  Either way, the father had played his role by bringing into the world a beautiful daughter who would now present herself as a spotless bride. God indeed worked in mysterious ways.

  Quinton left his house at noon, slid behind the wheel of his black 300M, and headed out to complete a few errands before he drove into downtown Denver, where he would drop the hatchet. So to speak.

  God willing.

  NIKKI WAS IRISH. The sound of bagpipes playing “Amazing Grace” at her and her mother’s funerals earlier in the day haunted Brad. The last two days had drifted by like a vessel lost in a white fog. Nothing could have been worse for the FBI, for the case, for him.

  And Nikki…

  Brad still had trouble accepting the fact that she was gone, much less that he had played a central role in her fate. She was dead. She was dead because of him. She wasn’t Ruby, no, but she was a beautiful woman with a spirit that had touched thousands of people. The sudden end to her life left him as shocked as he’d been since Ruby’s death.

  The Denver office had slipped into a terrible morass, rage and grief all rolled into one. The assistant director in charge had flown in for the funeral and spent two hours in the office, reinforcing the sense of failure they all shared.

  Temple had been the first SAC to lose an agent to a ritualistic killing in the history of the FBI. He wasn’t taking it well.

  Details of the case were finally beginning to leak to the press-far too many people knew and loved both Nikki and Michelle Holden to be satisfied with anything but the truth surrounding their deaths. Most of the truth, anyway. To date, they knew that a crazed killer had broken into the house, killed Michelle, then taken Nikki to his apartment and killed her there in a ritualistic fashion. It would only be a matter of time, a day at most, before the fact that Nikki had been the Bride Collector’s sixth ritualistic killing made the news.

  The fact that the Bride Collector was not only out there but homing in on his seventh victim deepened the desperation that had pulled the investigation into its jaws. They couldn’t take time to mourn. Brad had hurled himself back into the dark murky waters like a man who’d jumped overboard, knowing that the killer was in the deepest part of the ocean.

  But there was nothing new out there, and in the end the waves had washed him up back here. At the Center for Wellness and Intelligence.

  Allison sat at her small wood desk in front of a wide bookcase filled with psychiatric and psychology books. She leaned back in her chair, studying him like a mother who knew more than she let on. “It’s not your fault, Brad.”

  “I could have stopped it. It feels like my fault.”

  “Of course it would. And now you’re terrified to take the next step because you’re afraid that you’ll be at fault again.”

  She was speaking about Paradise. Her insistence that Paradise might hold the key had whispered through his mind, drawn him back. Without Allison’s encouragement, he wouldn’t be here. And even now he was torn.

  “Help me out here, Brad. You have a lead in a case-”

  “We have a girl…”

  “A woman.”

  “… a woman who forgot what she saw when she made contact with one of the killer’s victims. Is that a lead?”

  “Isn’t your obligation to fully explore every lead in a case like this?”

  “She can’t remember.”

  Allison nodded, then winked at him. “Not yet.”

  In Brad’s world what she suggested made no sense whatsoever. Then again, neither had her suggestion to turn the evidence over to the “team,” and that had yielded the jack in the whole, hadn’t it?

  Allison leaned forward and put her elbows on her desk. “Do you know what I think?”

  “No.”

  “I think you’re afraid. Not of violating any protocol. You’re afraid of Paradise herself.”

  “No, that’s not-”

  “I think you feel for her and you’re afraid of hurting her. It’s the same reason you probably have difficulty committing to any relationship. You’re wounded by a monster called guilt and you just can’t go there again because of the pain.”

  She’d hinted at this already, but hearing it so clearly put Brad back on his seat. He didn’t know how to respond.

  “I think you’re falling in love with her,” Allison said.

  “What? No…” He crossed his legs and folded his hands, uneasy. “Listen, I know you think all of this is good for her, but you can’t just push an absurd relationship like this… This is crazy.”

  “No, she�
��s crazy, and that’s the real problem, isn’t it? Any other witness and you wouldn’t be sitting here like a small boy, feeling sorry for yourself. Well, let me tell you something, FBI, the last thing you need to worry about is whether Paradise will or won’t get hurt. Stop treating her like she’s subhuman.”

  “So now I’m wrong for not leading her on?”

  “I’m not suggesting you lead her on. I’m only saying that she deserves to be treated like any other woman her age. With complete honesty.”

  “She’s not any other human being!”

  “She is!” Allison cried. “Do you think God loves her any less because of her condition?”

  “Don’t put words in my mouth.”

  She sighed and leaned back again. “Fine, FBI. I’ll be straight then. I hope you find this killer and put an end to what he’s doing before he hurts another woman. He’s clearly psychotic, and it’s the few like this maniac who give my children a bad name. Despite the vast majority of wonderful people learning to cope with their psychosis, there’s always the one Michael Laudor who’ll graduate from Yale, then snap and kill his fiancée. On account of those few, the world treats them all as if they have leprosy, and that makes me sick. You have six dead women on your hands, and that’s a terrible thing. But I have dozens living in my care who face a kind of death every day because they are made to feel like the dirt on the bottom of your feet. Less than human. Dead already.”

  Point taken.

  “You cannot hurt Paradise more than she’s already been hurt. You can only help her. Don’t let your fears and insecurities stop you from treating her like any other woman.”

  “Okay.” Brad stood and walked to the window. “Fine, I won’t. But you’re wrong about one thing.” He turned and walked to the back of his chair. “I’m not falling in love with her. Maybe I am wounded and maybe I’m afraid to let a woman love me, all that psychobabble. I like Paradise very much. She’s… precious. But, please, I’m not falling in love with her.”