by Sharon Sala
“Really?”
“Yes, sir. And if he turns out to be that killer, I’m gonna be real upset that I paid the bastard even a dime of my money. Anything else you wanna know?”
“Not right now, sir, but thank you. Thank you very much. You have an amazing memory.”
Whit heard a brief snort, then a chuckle. “That’s about the only thing that still works. Have a nice day.”
The line went dead in Whit’s ear. He turned to look at the map.
“Where does this put us?”
Two of the detectives were already comparing the victims’ places of employment against Mackey’s route, while another was checking their places of residence.
There was excitement in the first detective’s voice when he spoke. “Hot damn! We’re getting matches! Already have two, no…three of the victims working at places where he stopped, and I’m still checking.”
Whit shivered. After all these years, were they finally going to be able to close the case?
Harold called in sick.
It was so unusual that Sonya didn’t have a backup driver. The scramble it took to find a sub so the deliveries would go out was so hectic that by the time she had a driver on the road, she was ticked. She complained to her boss about the lack of planning for such contingencies, and then went into the bathroom and cried from frustration.
Harold couldn’t have cared less. He had made himself a plan and needed the better part of the day to carry it out. By late afternoon he had everything he needed to make it happen: a duffel bag with a change of clothes, a fake ID he’d bought from Party Favors and Gifts, his toolbox—including a pipe wrench and his hunting knife—and a fifty-dollar arrangement from a flower shop.
He’d gone over the plan in his head many times—just like he used to do when he was taking down the scourges—and was ready for a trip to the hotel. He’d already shown up once as himself, so this time he had to come up with another approach. He didn’t know how long they kept security tapes, but he was covering all his bases.
He couldn’t remember the last time he’d worn his khakis and was a little surprised to find he could barely button them. He added a blue knit shirt and tucked his ponytail up beneath a red baseball cap, then headed for the Jameson Hotel in his SUV.
He parked alongside the front curb, got the arrangement he’d purchased and carried it into the hotel, straight to the concierge.
“Got a delivery for a Holly Slade,” he said, putting down the arrangement, then began fumbling in his shirt pocket. “Dang, I lost the invoice with her room number. Sorry, man. You’ll have to look it up.”
The concierge typed the name in the hotel computer, then took the card from the flower arrangement and wrote down a number. Harold was watching every move the concierge made, and even though he was reading it upside down, it was easy to decipher the number—Room 663.
“Thanks again, man,” Harold said, and strode out of the hotel without looking back.
Now he knew her room number, too.
The deciding factor in whether he ran or made an attempt to eliminate his witness had to do in part with his reluctance to let a woman best him.
He would have bet his life that after what Harriet had seen, and how he’d scared her, she would never tell. But she had told, and then Twila had made it worse. She hid Harriet before he could rethink his earlier decision to let her live. Running now would have meant admitting defeat, and Harold wasn’t a quitter.
It was nearly sundown as Harold exited the hotel, then drove away. But he didn’t leave the premises for long. Instead, he circled the hotel to the delivery entrance and parked on the far side of a semi. Shielded from the view of passersby, he jumped out of the SUV and pulled an old pair of coveralls from his duffel bag. He put them on over the clothing he was wearing, traded his red baseball cap for a black hard hat, clipped the fake ID he’d made onto the pocket of his coveralls and then changed the shoes he was wearing for old work boots.
He pocketed his car keys, grabbed his toolbox and then headed for the delivery entrance with his head down. As he neared the door, it suddenly swung open, and two of the hotel’s employees came out.
“How’s it going?” Harold muttered, catching the door before it went shut and striding inside.
He was in! He began searching for the freight elevator. As soon as he located it, he went straight up to the sixth floor. Once off the elevator, he began looking for a house phone and found one near the guest elevators. After a quick glance to make sure he was alone, he made a call to Room 663.
Holly was just getting out of the tub when the house phone rang.
“I’ll get it, honey!” Bud yelled, giving her the space to finish dressing. They had a seven o’clock reservation at the hotel steak house, and he didn’t want to show up late.
“This is the front desk. There’s a package here for Miss Holly Slade.”
“Can you send it up?” Bud asked.
“I’m sorry,” Mackey said. “The courier is waiting. It has to be signed for.”
“By her personally?” Bud asked.
“Just a minute and I’ll check,” the man said.
Mackey held his hand over the phone for a minute, smiling to himself at how easily this was going down, then got back on the phone.
“Her representative can sign for it, but a hotel employee cannot.”
“I’ll be right down,” Bud said, and then hung up the phone.
“Hey, honey, that was the front desk. You have a package that needs to be signed for. The courier is waiting. I’ll go get it for you and be right back, okay?”
Holly came out of the bathroom wearing a bath-towel sarong and holding her hair dryer.
“Okay. I wonder who it’s from?”
“We’ll find out soon,” Bud said.
Holly nodded. “I promise I’ll be ready by the time you get back.”
Bud eyed the towel and that mass of wet hair, and shook his head. “Don’t make promises you can’t keep, woman. You’re at least forty-five minutes from ready or I’ll eat my hat.”
“You…you man, you,” Holly said, laughing. She ripped the towel from around her body and threw it at him from across the room, then stepped back into the bathroom and closed the door.
The sight of that gorgeous curvy body put a smile on Bud’s face that he wore all the way down to the lobby.
For Harold, the moment he heard the disconnect, he made a beeline for the hallway that led to Room 663, then ducked into the stairwell and stood behind the door, watching through the small window for the man to emerge.
When the cowboy came out of her room, Harold ducked and waited for the footsteps to pass. Then he counted to ten and strode out into the hall with the toolbox in his hand. Even if the man should happen to turn and look back, he would think nothing of a workman in coveralls and carrying his tools.
All the way to the room, he kept going over the fact that he was about to kill his own seed. Yes, he’d killed Twila, but she had been a mate—someone he’d chosen.
That wasn’t the case with Harriet. She was his only link to immortality—the lineage that would continue his bloodline even after he was gone. He wasn’t feeling remorse for his decision so much as for the fact that with her gone, once he was dead, it would be end of his contribution to the gene pool.
However, necessity was the mother of his decision, and by the time he reached the door, purpose was firmly fixed in his head.
He removed the pipe wrench from his toolbox, slipped his hunting knife into a pocket on the side of his coveralls and then knocked on the door, using the head of the pipe to increase the sound.
Holly was determined to make Bud Tate eat his words about her being slow. She quickly stepped into her brown slacks, then pulled the lightweight beige sweater over her head. Still barefoot, she went back to the bathroom to put on some makeup. Just as she picked up her mascara, there was a knock at the door.
“No way,” Holly muttered and dropped the mascara and hurried across the room to answ
er. She was laughing as she swung the door inward. “What did you forget?”
But it wasn’t Bud.
It was Mackey.
For a fraction of a second they stood frozen in place.
It went through Harold’s mind that she was a fine specimen of a woman.
Holly’s thoughts had gone in a completely different direction.
The devil was at her door.
Harold lunged.
That was the impetus that broke Holly’s spell. She reacted with an ear-piercing scream as she swung the door in his face, then threw all her weight against it in an attempt to slam it shut.
Harold was unprepared for her to fight back rather than retreat and didn’t protect himself. The door hit him square in the face, crushing his nose and staggering him with pain.
Holly panicked. She couldn’t close the door.
She was still screaming when he burst into the room, blood running from his nose and down his chin. She was halfway across the floor when he dropped the pipe wrench and went for the knife. He needed to shut her up fast.
She had no thought of trying to fight him as she bolted for the bathroom. He was far too big for her to handle, and the bathroom had a lock. Even though she knew he would eventually kick the door open, she was betting her life that it would give her the time she needed, because the bathroom had a house phone.
With only feet to spare, she slammed the door between them and locked it, then grabbed the phone and called the front desk.
“Good evening, Miss Slade, how can I—”
The moment Holly heard the voice, she started screaming, “There’s a man in my room! He’s going to kill me! Help me! Help me!”
She dropped the phone, leaving it dangling toward the floor as the first kick sounded. The door rattled on its hinges, and Holly began shrieking in a mixture of fear and rage.
“You’re a monster, Harold Mackey! The police already know everything about you! Killing me won’t stop them from coming after you! They know you’re the Hunter! You’re dead! Dead! Just like those women you killed!”
He kicked again, and Holly saw the hinges beginning to give way. In a rage, she threw herself against the door.
Harold knew it was about to give way. He lifted his foot for what would be his third kick, then landed the blow with a hard thud. The door actually rattled.
He grinned.
She was fighting back, throwing her weight against the door and screaming at him, telling him that he was going to die, and in that moment, he lost focus. The fact that he’d sired a woman of such great physical and mental strength gave him a moment of pride. She wasn’t cowering behind the door and begging for mercy. She was fighting him.
Bud reached the front desk and waited a few seconds for a clerk to look up.
“May I help you?”
“Someone just called about a courier waiting for a package to be signed. The package was for Holly Slade in Room 663.”
The clerk frowned. “I’m sorry, sir, but you must be mistaken. I’ve been on duty since four, and there haven’t been any couriers. But let me check to see if someone left a package.”
“No, hang on,” Bud said. “The man said a courier was waiting. He said the hotel couldn’t sign for it, that it had to be—”
Then it hit him. Someone wanted him out of Holly’s room. Suddenly it felt as if everything began happening in slow motion.
A phone rang behind the desk. Another desk clerk answered. Even from where Bud was standing, he could hear the woman’s screams.
Holly! That was Holly!
The desk clerk’s reaction was as frantic as Bud’s. “Call security! A woman is being attacked in Room 663!”
Bud was already running toward the stairwell. He hit the door with the flat of his hand and took the stairs up to the first landing in four leaps, then up, and up again, with his heart in his throat and a prayer on his lips that he wouldn’t be too late.
He kept thinking about how easily they’d been tricked, knowing that her life was in danger. The killer hadn’t used elaborate techniques to separate them. It had been the mundane that had deceived them.
He was coming up to the sixth floor when he realized he could hear her screaming, which meant she was still alive.
He came out of the stairwell on the run, then raced down the hall with the room key in his hand. Doors were opening. Guests were curious. Some looked frightened.
“Call 911!” Bud shouted, as he ran past.
His hands were shaking as he ran the key card through the slot. Waiting for that little light to turn green felt like a lifetime, and then blessedly it clicked, and he burst into the room. He didn’t even hear the door slam shut automatically behind him.
He saw a giant of a man with a long gray ponytail at their bathroom door. The imprint of his boot was on the surface, and he was about to kick again.
Bud attacked with a roar of rage.
Shocked, Mackey turned as Bud scooped the pipe wrench from the floor. With less than a second to think, he palmed his knife and braced himself for impact.
Harold swung the knife upward, then grunted from the impact as the man hit him chest high. They went down with a gut-wrenching thud against the bathroom door, sending Harold’s hard hat flying.
Bud had one hand around Mackey’s throat as he swung the pipe wrench straight at his head.
Harold managed to turn away at the last moment. The wrench hit the floor less than inch from his left ear. With a roar of rage, he shoved the hunting knife into the cowboy’s shoulder. He felt it go in, then glance off a bone.
Pain shot through Bud’s body so fast he lost his breath. The pipe wrench fell from his hand as his body went momentarily limp.
Harold grunted as he shoved the man off his belly, then rolled over onto his hands and knees to get up. His back was to the bathroom door when he heard it open. He heard a scream, caught a glimpse of the woman reaching for the wrench, and before he could get up, pain exploded at the back of his head.
Holly was hysterical. She hadn’t even known Bud was in the room until it was too late. Mackey had killed Bud while she’d been hiding. Sobbing uncontrollably, she started to hit Mackey again when she heard shouts out in the hallway, and then someone yelling and beating on the door.
The blood was spilling out from beneath Bud’s body, but she saw his fingers curl, as if trying to make a fist.
He was alive!
She leaped over Harold’s leg in a frantic rush toward the door. She was halfway there with the pipe wrench still in her hand when the door flew inward.
Hotel security rushed into the room, their weapons drawn.
She pointed at the men on the floor. “The man in coveralls broke into my room. My fiancé has been stabbed!”
Security moved aside as a team of paramedics were the next to come inside. The medics began assessing the wounds of the two victims as a man with a badge confronted Holly.
“What happened here?”
“The man in coveralls knocked on the door. I thought it was my fiancé wanting back in the room. When I opened the door, he pushed his way inside and tried to kill me. I locked myself in the bathroom and used the house phone to call the front desk, and then my fiancé came back and saved me.” She moved past the man to the medics tending Bud. “Is he going to be okay? Please tell me he’s going to live.”
“The other man has a severe head injury,” a paramedic said.
Angry that they were even tending to Mackey’s wound, she snapped.
“That’s because I hit him with the pipe wrench,” Holly said. “And if he’s still alive, it was unintentional.”
The security officer frowned. “That sounded personal. Do you know your attacker?”
“Yes. His name is Harold Mackey, and he’s connected to a case the police department is working. You need to contact Detective Whit Carver and tell him what happened.” Then she dropped down at Bud’s feet and grabbed the toe of his boot. “Help is here, Bud. You did it, darling. You saved my life. Now you ha
ve to stay strong. You have to come back to me. Damn it, Robert Tate. You better be hearing me. Don’t you die! Don’t you dare die on me!”
Someone touched her shoulder, then physically picked her up and moved her away. “Miss, you need to get back so we can get him on a stretcher.”
Holly grabbed the paramedic’s arm. “Can I go with him? I need to go with him.”
“I’m sorry, miss. You can’t ride in the ambulance.”
Holly panicked. “You can’t leave me behind. I need to be with him. Where are you taking him?”
Before he could answer, the room was suddenly filled with St. Louis police. Holly kept getting pushed farther and farther from where Bud was lying.
She saw when they rolled him onto the stretcher and started out the door, and she pushed forward, clutching his hand in a frantic grasp.
“I love you, Bud. I love you forever!”
She thought she saw his eyelids flutter, and then he was gone. She staggered to a nearby chair, still in shock and too drained to cry another tear. This day had become a nightmare. This must have been how Maria and Savannah had felt—scared out of their minds.
A few moments later another set of paramedics came into the room carrying a second stretcher. It had to be for Mackey.
She got up from her chair, then pushed through the throng of hotel security and policemen to where he was lying. His head wound was still seeping blood, but his nose had almost stopped bleeding. Even though he was lying on his side, she could tell his nose was broken.
The knife he’d stuck in Bud’s shoulder was still on the floor. She knew it would be taken as evidence. A sudden chill ran through her body. She’d seen it before—that white bone handle and the initial M carved in the hasp. He’d never been without it.
She thought of all his victims who’d fallen prey to that knife, and how he, in complete disregard for their existence, had added to their horror by scalping them before they died. And at the same time he’d been humiliating them. A woman viewed her hair as part of her beauty, and he’d taken it, even before he’d taken their lives.
