by Sharon Sala
She stared at his face, so different in unconsciousness, and then her gaze slid to his hair and that long gray ponytail. After all these years he still wore it long, like Samson, as proof of his superiority and strength. Rage burned in her gut as she bent down and picked up the knife.
In a roomful of cops, no one was paying attention until it was too late. A cop spotted her from across the room and screamed, “No!”
Another officer turned, then lurched toward her, but not in time to keep her from grabbing the ponytail. She pulled it out straight and, with one swift slice, deftly removed it from his head and dropped it on his chest.
“It’s no more than you deserved,” she said, then handed the knife to the first policeman to reach her. “Yes, it’ll have my prints on it. But you’d be advised to keep it just the same. That man is the serial killer called the Hunter, and he used that knife to scalp his victims before he cut their throats.”
The room was in an immediate uproar, with the cops all shouting over each other.
“How do you know?”
“Who told you? Did he tell you?”
“How did you know that?”
“Call Detective Whit Carver” was all she would say.
More questions came at her from every direction, but she wouldn’t talk. She watched them carry Harold out on a stretcher, flanked by a halfdozen of St. Louis’s finest, with that hank of his hair, still bound by a single rubber band, lying across his chest.
Fourteen
Carver got the news about the attack as he was sitting down to dinner. He took one look at his microwave meat loaf and spuds, covered it with a piece of foil and stuck it in the refrigerator.
He was out the door before the scent left his nose and halfway to the hotel before he heard the first sirens. He didn’t know anything except that Holly Slade had told them to call him and two people were down, but not which two. The knot in his gut kept getting bigger as the hotel finally came in sight.
He pulled in behind an ambulance and got out on the run, moving through the lobby and flashing his badge, then up the elevator. He wouldn’t panic. Not yet.
But all the way up, he kept thinking they’d been too late. The task force had finally pinned down every victim to Harold Mackey’s old route. They had filed the papers for a search warrant for Mackey’s house as he was leaving the office. If he’d been expecting a phone call, it would have been from the task force informing him that they had their warrant and were about to go in. Not a call like the one he’d gotten.
He got out on the sixth floor and started counting down doors. When he turned the corner and saw the crowd of cops and bystanders, he knew he was almost there.
As he approached, the crowd suddenly parted and a team of paramedics came out with a man on a stretcher. He stepped aside to let them pass, then saw the man’s face.
It was Mackey.
Inside, the room was chaos. Hotel security and uniformed P.D. officers were all talking at the same time. He paused in the doorway to get his bearings, then saw her sitting alone on a small chair. She was alive! But she looked like she’d seen a ghost, which, as he thought about it, was probably right on target for how she must be feeling.
He looked around the room for her boyfriend and didn’t see him. That wasn’t good.
He entered the room and started toward her just as she looked up.
Their gazes met.
He saw a flicker of recognition, and then she stood up then started toward him.
He grabbed her arm.
“Miss Slade.”
She didn’t blink. She was in shock.
“Bud saved my life,” Holly said, and then swayed on her feet.
Whit grabbed her to keep her from falling.
“What happened here?”
“I already told the police. Mackey tricked us. He separated us and tried to kill me.” Then she leaned so close that her mouth was only inches away from his ear. “What kind of man kills his own child?”
“A crazy man. A mean man. A sick man,” Whit said.
Holly swayed on her feet, her whisper softer still. “That blood runs in my veins, so what does that make me?”
Whit groaned inwardly. As usual, he’d said the wrong thing to a woman. He never had been able to get that right.
“Where’s Bud, Holly?”
Her chin quivered. “I don’t know. They took him away and wouldn’t let me go with him.”
“Wait here. I’ll find out where they took him, and then I’ll take you there myself.”
She watched as he made his way across the room to a detective on the other side. She saw them talk, saw the detective turn and look at her. She didn’t care what they were saying as long as she got to see Bud.
Whit was back with a grim expression on his face. “Get your purse and whatever you need. We’re leaving.”
Holly shoved her way through the crowd and found her purse on the floor beside the desk. She clutched it to her chest as she made her way back to him.
“I’m ready.”
Whit took her by the elbow and steadied her all the way to the elevator. By the time he got her out of the hotel and into his car, she was shaking. The adrenaline rush was gone, and she was crashing.
“If you need to cry, feel free,” he said, then reached across the seat and buckled her in.
She nodded, but her eyes stayed dry and fixed on the windshield, as if she were seeing something else besides the night lights of St. Louis.
He ran hot all the way to the hospital, with lights flashing and siren blaring.
Bud woke up in a place he didn’t recognize. Some woman kept telling him to open his eyes and asking if he was cold. His thoughts were in a jumble, and he kept trying to pick them out and sort them into an order that would make sense. Pain rolled through him in waves, coaxing him to fall back into the void where pain didn’t exist. But he didn’t go. He kept thinking there was something he needed to remember.
“Robert. We need you to open your eyes.”
Who was talking?
“Robert, you need to wake up.”
He didn’t recognize that voice. She didn’t sound like anyone he knew, and he was sick and tired of hearing her say the same damn thing. So he opened his eyes just to shut her up.
“There you are!” she said brightly. “Can you tell me your name?”
His tongue felt thick, and the words were at the edge of his consciousness.
“Can you tell me your name?” she repeated.
“Bud.”
“Oh. You go by Bud, do you? All right then, Bud it is.”
He opened his eyes a little more, and saw bright, blinding light and green walls. “Where…”
“You were injured, and the doctors operated on your shoulder. You’re in recovery.”
Shoulder? Shoulder. The fight. The knife. Oh, shit. Holly! Everything came flooding back.
“Holly,” he mumbled.
“Holly? Is she your wife?”
Bud exhaled softly then slowly shook his head.
“Heart…”
The recovery nurse paused. She was a hardened veteran of misery and pain, but his answer took her by surprise.
“Holly is your heart? Are you saying she’s your heart?”
“My heart.” His thoughts slid out of sight. Too drugged to fight, he went with them.
The nurse paused, and for the first time since they’d wheeled him into recovery, she looked past the injury to the man who’d suffered it.
He was tall and well built, with a hard, chiseled face. His nose was strong and straight, his cheekbones high, angling to a nearly square chin. He looked like a man who could hold his own in the world. And somewhere there was a woman named Holly who was his heart.
Holly was waiting a short while later when they moved him to Intensive Care. She was waiting for him at the recovery room door, and she’d been given special dispensation to walk beside him as they wheeled him into ICU.
She didn’t even care that he was unconscious again. It
was enough that his heart was still beating. He had eight internal stitches in his shoulder, and ten external, but they’d told her that, barring unexpected complications, he would be fine.
It was all that mattered.
She never asked about Mackey’s condition, but Whit knew he was two floors down, with cops guarding the door and his hands cuffed to the bed. He had a broken nose and a serious concussion. No one was sitting by his side. No one cared if his eyes ever opened again.
Six hours later Harold came to, saw the handcuffs on his wrists and knew it was over. There was no getting away from what he’d tried to do. But there was a measure of satisfaction in knowing they would probably never be able to pin the other stuff on him. It was still his word against the word of a five-year-old child who’d simply gotten in trouble for being where she shouldn’t have been. It could be argued that over the years she’d become confused about what she’d seen. One thing was for sure, Twila wasn’t going to show up and dispute his word.
Bud woke up to the feel of lips on his cheek and a gentle hand on his brow.
“There you are,” Holly said.
He opened his eyes.
Holly reached for his hand.
“Are you in pain?”
“Not much,” he mumbled, then felt himself drifting away again. He wanted to stay, but the drugs in his system were stronger than his will.
“Bud…”
He inhaled slowly. That was Holly—his Holly.
“My Holly.”
Her vision blurred. “Yes, darling, I’m your Holly. Forever and ever.”
“You okay?”
“I’m fine,” she said, then gently squeezed his fingers to accentuate her point. “You saved my life. Do you remember that? You saved my life.”
He frowned. “Bastard…had a knife.”
“I know. But he’s in custody, Bud. It’s almost over. He can’t hurt me or you or anyone else ever again.”
Bud nodded once, then let himself go back under.
Holly didn’t care. She would tell him over and over for the rest of their lives, and she would tell their children and their grandchildren, how he’d taken down a madman to save her life.
She was still struggling with how to live with the knowledge that the madman had been her father, but she would put that life and those memories behind her if it took the rest of her life to do it. If Bud had faith in her, then she could do no less than believe in herself. Andrew had believed she was worth saving. Her sisters loved her. It was more to build a new life on than some people had. It would have to be enough.
She glanced down at her watch. Visiting hours were almost over. Detective Carver had left her in the care of a fellow cop and would be picking her up at the hotel later. They’d gotten their search warrant and gone through Harold Mackey’s current residence but had found nothing to physically link him to the old murders. He wanted her to walk through it, to see if she could spot something the rest of them had missed.
Holly leaned over Bud’s bed and kissed him on the cheek.
“I’ll be back,” she whispered. “Until then, sleep well, my darling.”
As the officer drove her back to the hotel, she was racking her brain, trying to remember everything she could of her life before. There had to be an answer there that would lead her to her mother. All she had to do was find it.
“This is it,” Whit said, as he turned off the street and into the driveway.
Holly stared. It was an insignificant house. White. Wood frame. A small porch and a front door in need of painting. There was a chain-link fence around the backyard and no flowers in the front beds. It looked empty—indicative of the man who’d lived within.
“Let’s do this,” Holly said, and got out, then followed the detective inside.
Holly froze within a foot of the threshold. An involuntary shudder ran through her as she grabbed onto the door frame to steady herself.
“What’s wrong?” Whit asked.
“Don’t you feel it?”
“Feel what?”
She shook her head, unable to put it into words.
Whit shrugged. He couldn’t imagine what this must be like and hated like hell to put her through it, but he had to close the Hunter case, and she was his last chance.
“Why don’t you just start walking…see where it takes you,” he said. “If you spot anything, anything that might help us, let me know.”
“All right,” Holly said, and then her gaze fell on a framed photo. “Oh, my God! I can’t believe he kept this out on display. That’s me with my mother.”
She picked it up and held it against her chest. “I’m taking this with me.”
Whit didn’t argue.
“I don’t suppose he’s doing much talking,” Holly asked, as she gazed around the room. She was loathe to touch anything in the dust-ridden house.
“Not a word.”
Holly looked down at the photo, studying her mother’s face and then her own. We looked so happy, she thought. She wished she could remember the moment. It would almost be like having her mother back.
Holly circled the room without speaking, opening drawers in a cupboard, peering into a small cubbyhole in the corner of the room, but nothing spoke to her.
As she moved into the kitchen, the hair rose on the back of her neck. She remembered standing in another kitchen and hearing the sound of a hammer. It was her curiosity that had led to their downfall. The old saying echoed in her head. Curiosity killed the cat. Except it was her mother who had died.
“Anything?” Whit asked, as she dug through cabinets and drawers.
“Nothing,” she said, as she stood on tiptoe to look into the top shelf of the cabinet by the sink, and then suddenly she gasped. “No!”
Whit darted forward. “You found something?”
“My little frog cup,” Holly muttered. “He kept my little frog cup.”
Whit looked into the cup at the tiny ceramic frog affixed to the bottom.
“Why is there a frog in there?”
“If a child won’t drink her milk, what better way than to put a surprise for her at the bottom of the cup? She knows what’s there, but she has to drink all her milk to see it.”
“Well, I’ll be,” Whit said, and pretended not to look when she dropped the cup into her purse.
“Where’s his bedroom?”
“This way,” Whit said. “Follow me.”
Holly’s nostrils flared when she walked into the room. His presence was strongest here. She didn’t linger.
The bathroom proved no better. That left them with one room to go.
“What’s in here?” Holly asked, as they paused in the hall outside the door.
“A spare bedroom, with a good twenty boxes of stuff he never unpacked. We went through the boxes but didn’t find anything.”
He stepped in front of her and opened the door. “As you can see, it’s even filthier in here than in the rest of the house.”
The imprints of dozens of shoes had been left in the dust. Dust motes danced in the faint light coming through the yellowed window shades as she stepped into the room.
Frowning, she went straight to the closet. Except for a handful of old wire clothes hangers and a mousetrap, it was empty. She stepped back and surveyed the room, frowning and looking for another door.
Whit saw her frowning. “What?”
“I can’t believe he would move into this house without a place for his trophies—all his trophies. The ones in the living room are obvious, and so are the mounted fish in his bedroom and the photos of his hunting trips hanging in the hall.”
“Are you talking about those scalps you thought you saw when you were a kid?”
Holly spun, and anger was thick in her voice when she spoke. “I didn’t think I saw them. I know I saw them. It got my mother killed.”
Whit flushed. “Poor choice of words. Sorry.”
“There’s no basement here?”
“No.”
“No storm cellar door outside? N
o record of him paying for a storage locker somewhere?”
“No, and trust me, we’ve looked. The task force has gone through his financial records and every aspect of his life for the past thirty years…long before the killings started.”
Holly shook her head. “This isn’t right. I’m telling you, he wouldn’t live in a place where he couldn’t have access to all his trophies. There’s got to be a cellar or something.”
Frustrated, Whit’s voice rose in anger, too. “So you tell me where to look next.”
Holly turned on him, as angry as he’d been with her. “Down. You need to look down. He was more like the animals he hunted that he was like a man. You know what animals do when they’re scared? They go into a hole, under a log, inside a cave. When they’re in danger, they do not stay above ground.”
Whit’s skin crawled. He’d never thought of a man that way before, but it made sense.
Holly spun toward the boxes and began pushing them around.
“There’s nothing under here, right?”
“We moved all of them,” Whit said. “It’s just an old house and an old beat-up hardwood floor.” He pushed a half-dozen of them aside to prove his point. “See? Nothing.”
Holly shook her head. It didn’t make sense. She began walking across the room from one wall to the other and back again, then ran into the next room and measured the distance to see if there could have been a dead space between the walls, but the figures matched up.
Whit watched her pacing, and then she suddenly stopped and turned to look at him.
“How old do bones and body parts have to be for a cadaver dog to smell them?”
Whit blinked. Shit.
“I’m not sure.”
“Get a cadaver dog inside this house. He’ll find what you’re looking for. Because it’s got to be here.”
“That’s pretty far-fetched,” Whit said.
“You wanted my best guess. That’s it. I’m telling you that the man I remember wouldn’t have destroyed those trophies. He wouldn’t have packed them away in some storage locker, or tossed them in the Mississippi for fear that he’d get caught. They’re in here. I can feel it.”
