DARK KILLS a gripping detective thriller full of suspense

by BREARTON, T. J.

  Talking gibberish. She tried to catch a glimpse of him in the rear-view mirror, but he was out of sight, lying there. The effort pained her and the wheel slipped — Dana almost lost control of the vehicle. She quickly concentrated on the road. Out here was a steep drop to a gulch below. The wind howled through, bending the trees in the dark.

  “I’ve been trying to help you,” Charlie said.

  Dana’s mouth was dry. So dry, so thirsty; she needed water.

  “Help me? What are you talking about?”

  Ahead, Cross Street was ending. Dana feathered the brakes again. The traffic light hanging over the intersection was dark and dead. The lights of the Sunoco Station on the corner were off. The car dealership across the way was just as deserted. The vehicles were rounded mounds of snow.

  Dana rolled to a stop at the intersection. Now they would head out of town. The road would be windy and steep in places. She gripped the wheel with her good hand and prepared to step on the gas. If she didn’t get to a hospital soon, she would die. They both would. There was a hospital in New Brighton, the county seat, just five miles away. The trooper barracks was past that. Charlie might not make the trip to either place alive. She might not either.

  But there was only one way to go.

  Straight ahead, where the road wound through Topper Pond.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR / The Truth Coming Through

  The lake was black as shale in the night. The wind whipped and barreled the powdered snow over the causeway. Fierce gusts rocked the vehicle on its shocks. The Corsica plowed into a huge drift of snow and stopped.

  Dana sat looking out over the water. In a week or so, it would be frozen for the winter.

  “Listen,” said Charlie. His voice was barely audible. It was an effort for him to speak. “The whole world is a part of this. We’re all guilty.”

  “Whatever you say.” Dana stared out into the dark.

  “You think your FBI friends didn’t know about that guy’s books? About who he is? They’ve been all over it.”

  Now she turned and looked down in the backseat at the killer. “What?”

  “Of course they have, lady. They know. And they know you, too. Yarrow knows you.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?” He was just taking things from the headlines, and making up the rest, but it still unnerved her.

  “. . . following you . . .” Charlie Plume’s voice faded for a second, his eyes rolling back.

  “What?”

  “They’ve been following you.”

  She wasn’t sure how he would know the FBI had tailed her — she had only been sure they had done it one time. Maybe he monitored police bands.

  She didn’t know what to say. She looked back at the dark lake, fixing her eyes on a spot out towards the middle. Only fifteen feet deep. A cold pond, even in the summer. Mucky on the bottom. Dana didn’t like the muck between her toes. But her brother David would submerge and seek out the bottom with his feet. Stick his hands in the air, know that she was watching his fingertips disappear beneath the wind-chopped surface. Enjoy it when she yelled at him and splashed at him when he resurfaced, grinning.

  “You read the book, right?” Charlie’s dim voice brought her back to the present. “Lata’s book.”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s because you’re one of them, lady. I’ve been helping you. I tried.”

  “You’re losing it, Charlie. You’re dying.”

  We both are.

  “I wanted to help you. I noticed you when you first started coming around O’Sullivan’s, months ago. Even in your plain clothes, you looked like a cop.”

  “What? I’ve never gone into —”

  “I knew you. I knew who you were, from the papers back then. Your sadness, your curse. So, I followed you around a little. I had to be careful — you’re a detective after all, right?” He laughed, and coughed, sounding like something low and wet in a swamp. “But then we got to talking. You didn’t want me to know your name. I just called you ‘lady.’”

  “Alright, enough.”

  Dana opened the door, clenching her jaw with the effort to get out. To get to her feet. To stand in the biting cold and snow and keep watch on that spot. That place in the water where David had gone under. Where he had never surfaced.

  Charlie was still talking in the car. Dana could just make out what he was saying through the open door. “If little Scott had never found Sonia Taylor in the river, who knows? We wouldn’t be here. He’s a good kid. He likes you. He told me.”

  Dana felt something stir deep within. Something warm but unpleasant. Like fumes rising in an enclosed space. Poison.

  She opened her mouth to speak, but no words came. The Corsica idled behind her. The causeway road was pure white, rolling hills of drifted snow, two deep serpentine tire tracks from the car; a plow hadn’t been through here in at least an hour.

  “You told me about your brother David. About how you dreamed of him. About how you knew he hadn’t committed suicide — you were raised to believe suicides went to hell.”

  Dana bent over and attempted to remove some snow in front of the car, triggering fresh blasts of pain through her shoulder, down her spine. Within seconds she was exhausted, her head pounding. It was no use. Back behind the wheel, she picked up the gun on the passenger seat. She never liked to ride in a car with a gun on her hip. She liked it at arm’s length. She liked to do the crossword at the local diner, when she had a moment to sit and think. She liked tea, not coffee. She turned and pointed the gun through the grate. She aimed for Charlie’s head. “Tell me the truth.”

  “I am. You killed him.”

  “I didn’t kill anyone.”

  “That way he would be saved.”

  “No.”

  “How could I know this?”

  “Newspapers. Someone with the cops, who you pay. Or, you’re working with someone.”

  “I am. I’m working with you.”

  The snow stacked up on the windows. Like they were being entombed.

  “Did I force you to take us here, lady? You drove here all on your own. You’re trying to work it out, you’re trying to see.”

  “I don’t see anything. You’re sad. You’re afraid.”

  “I think . . . I think after you killed him you tried to take his place. Act like a man. You resented women. You came to hate them. I told you about the girls from the college, what they were doing, planning to all sleep with the one boy. Experimenting with drugs. Testing themselves for psychic powers. You recognized that in yourself. A witch, needing redemption.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “We agreed — they would do it on their own. Their own choice. But this place has such a pull on you . . . Sonia Taylor you dumped right off of Covered Bridge Lane.” Charlie raised a shaking hand, indicating the general direction of Hazleton. Blood dripped from his finger. “You got too close to home with it.”

  “This isn’t going to work.”

  “After Maggie Lange took her woman’s bane, her monkshood, and died, you brought her here. Right where your brother was found. Right where it all started.”

  The killer was trying to twist things around, trying to get inside her head. Maybe everything didn’t add up with him as the killer, but working in collusion with his girlfriend, Teresa — working with others — it made sense. There were gaps, okay. But sorting this all out with the Feds, coordinating with forensics, it would all come together.

  Charlie smiled and looked up at the roof of the car. “I had this dream.”

  “Shut up now. Just be quiet.”

  “Back at the trailer park. But it kind of . . . it keeps going on.”

  “People with bull heads?” She couldn’t resist. Her resolve was ebbing.

  She glanced down and saw the killer’s pants were soaked completely at the waist, saturated with blood. Her own coat was soaked through at the arm. “I dreamt that there was a beetle,” he said. “Huge beetle. And you broke off one of its legs, and you cut its body in half.
You were the spider. You gave me half and told me to eat it. So I did. Then I went into the bathroom and threw up. I didn’t tell you. You just ate yours, in silence.”

  * * *

  The Corsica didn’t want to go any further. They were stuck. Halfway between Hazleton and Crown Ridge, the next town over. The vehicle sitting cockeyed on the causeway, back end stuck in a snow bank. The headlights beamed across the road, plunged out over the open water, and were lost. A plow would be along eventually. Had to be. These conditions were nuts. There was two feet of snow on the road, still piling up fast. The storm was a silent rage. The soft flakes were completely deceptive in their delicacy; they were killers.

  Something clicked inside Dana’s head and she blinked. Her face felt strange for a moment, like the muscles weren’t responding. Her cheek twitched. One of the wounds from the glass jittered as a nerve fired in the flesh. Those cuts, they were from chasing down a lead on this case. Weren’t they? A legitimate lead. One that would’ve potentially solved a multiple murder case. A serial killer case. It would’ve been big news for the department.

  The motor hummed, the wipers slid back and forth, the headlights stared into the abyss.

  Dana turned around and saw that Charlie’s eyes were closed. He looked prepared for the casket, with his bloody hands folded over his stomach wound. There was blood everywhere in the backseat. The upholstery was black with it.

  “Hey. You still here?”

  Charlie Plume’s eyes slowly opened. His voice was a whisper. “All the guilt you have, all the anger, that’s the truth trying to get through.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  Dana could sense him going. His last words made her think of her partner. She wondered where Hamill was now, what he would make of all of this. Charlie had minutes left and he would be dead. And she could feel the sleep pulling at her again with invisible fingers. Sleep that would never end.

  “You’re dangerous,” said Charlie. “You’re a danger to society.”

  Dana listened. She had no energy to object this time.

  His eyes closed. She watched his chest rise, and he gave a thin, rattling breath. Then his chest stopped rising, and there was a long sigh as the lungs deflated, and Charlie was still.

  Dana didn’t move for a long time. When the Corsica’s engine started to sputter, she barely reacted. It could have been a few seconds, minutes, hours, before she turned to see that the gas tank was empty. The car stalled. The headlights dimmed, but stayed on for now. The heater ran, but it wouldn’t last.

  She dropped her head to her chest.

  Her mind drifted to something pleasant. The setting sun over the Gulf when she and Shawn were in Sarasota for their anniversary, years ago. So long ago that it seemed like a past life. Standing hand in hand on the pier, watching the silhouettes of the pelicans. The sun kissed the water, and spread, and Dana felt enveloped by its light.

  DAY TEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE / Born Again

  She had the sense of movement — she was being carried now.

  “Easy,” said a voice, close to her ear. “It’s gonna be alright, Dana. Easy.”

  Blurred shapes formed in the darkness. She could smell something familiar; the briny stink of antiseptic.

  Her vision finally focused and she looked around. At first the objects were alien and made no sense. Gradually she remembered, and could name them. There was a person crouched nearby, holding her. A paramedic. There were racks of medical equipment on the walls, and they jostled about as the motion resumed.

  She was in the back of an ambulance. She tried to speak, but realized her lips weren’t cooperating. Her tongue felt swollen in her head, her brain a heavy stone.

  The paramedic, a young woman with brown hair tucked beneath a winter hat, leaned over. Her eyes were kind. “Shh. Don’t try to talk. You’re hypothermic. Let the blood return; give it time.”

  Dana searched the woman’s face, trying to communicate nonverbally, trying to ask the questions that now had no answers. How long had she been in the car? Where was Charlie? Was he dead? Where were her husband and daughters — were they okay?

  The paramedic shined a light in her eye. In its brief brilliance, Dana was flooded with recall.

  The glass exploding. Hamill confessing. Teresa Dunham, swinging the iron. The gun going off in her hands, Charlie in the snow. Dying in the back of the car as he tried to poison her with his words.

  He’d preyed on her sense of guilt. Digging into her past, he’d stitched together a profile of her and then used it on her at the eleventh hour. Why? Because he was a psychopath.

  But she wasn’t guilty of the murder of those girls.

  Or of David’s death.

  She blacked out again.

  DAY FOURTEEN

  (THANKSGIVING)

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX / Five Days Sober

  Doctors, family, cops from internal affairs, fellow state police, Feds, and more doctors. Dana endured two surgeries in between rounds of questioning. Reporters tried to get in to see Dana, but the cops kept them back. She answered all the investigators’ questions as best as she could. She was fuzzy on some details of the hour before the accident, and everyone seemed to understand this — she’d suffered a blunt head trauma when she was hit with the clothes iron — the swelling in her head had been so severe that they’d induced a temporary coma. Awake, she could sense that people were growing impatient. They wanted to know what had really happened.

  There were still three murders not officially closed yet. Three sets of parents clamoring for their daughters’ killer to be brought to justice. Her department had the media, the families, and the FBI on their asses.

  “Perry Brady finally confessed to running from you and your partner that night,” Captain Bouchard said. Dana opened her eyes. The pain was returning. She hadn’t had a dose of meds in a while. She struggled to register what her captain had said.

  Bouchard continued, “We think with Charlie Plume dead, and now that Hamill has, uh, come clean, that’s why Brady is talking.”

  Dana realized she and Bouchard weren’t alone in the room. Someone else was standing nearby. She rolled her head on the pillow and saw Yarrow in the doorway, wearing a crisp suit, hands folded in front of him.

  Yarrow slowly approached Dana’s bed. “I wonder how much you know about Charlie Plume?”

  Dana made an effort to look at him, to meet his hawkish gaze.

  Charlie’s words remained in her mind. Try as she might to keep them blocked out, or to reason them away, they’d stayed with her as she’d drifted in and out of consciousness. In the sober light of day, the idea that she’d had something to do with these killings seemed ludicrous. He had wanted to fill her with a different kind of poison, to make her feel as guilty as he was.

  Yarrow asked, “Did you know Plume had vision loss in one eye?”

  Dana envisioned the killer in the backseat, looking up at her.

  Yarrow stood a couple feet from the bed. “When he was fourteen, his mother put a knife to his eye, punctured it. Apparently because he saw something that she didn’t want him to. His mother worked odd jobs; she picked up some extra cash doing palm readings, telling fortunes at community events, but also from her home. She could only ask for donations, legally. She wanted to cut his eye out. The family lied about it, of course. Said it was a high school hockey accident.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  “But we checked,” Yarrow went on. “No record of any such injury in his team or hospital records. It’s possible the coaches just never logged it in, but not likely. Plus, we’ve got corroboration to support the child abuse theory: Charlie Plume’s older sister, Kendra Davidsen — that’s with an ‘e’ — spoke with us from Ohio, where she lives. Plume threatened to run away, as a boy. Their mother drank, had a tough time raising them both, as a single mom. Kendra’s statement is that the mother threatened to cut Charlie with the knife, he actually grabbed it, put it to his own eye, and made the cut.”

>   Dana turned away. She suddenly wanted to be somewhere else. She looked out the window.

  “And if you can follow that family tree, you find Sven Davidsen, and that’s a dead uncle, brother of Charlie’s mother, also deceased.”

  “Why are you telling me this? Aside from Charlie using his dead uncle’s name?”

  “Why am I telling you?” Yarrow sounded incredulous. He stepped back and deferred to Bouchard.

  Bouchard cleared his throat. “Dana, just so we have it all straight . . . How did you know Charlie Plume would be at Teresa Dunham’s trailer?”

  She thought of the drawing. The diatoms under the microscope. Tattoos resembling biohazard symbols. “I didn’t.”

  “You didn’t?”

  “Angie Gilroy,” she said quickly.

  “Gilroy.” Yarrow exchanged looks with Bouchard.

  “She babysat for Scott Dunham. I wanted to follow that up.”

  “At ten o’clock at night in a snowstorm?” Yarrow scoffed.

  Then he leaned closer. “So it was just . . . coincidental. Plume happened to be there.”

  “He did. He happened to be there.”

  “Okay,” said Yarrow. “Charlie performed exceptionally well in high school, despite the problems at home. He earned a scholarship to Plattsburgh. Majored in philosophy, minored in world religions, dabbled in forensic chemistry, got good grades, but then just dropped out. He then bartends, starts dating this Dunham woman, whose husband is in prison.”

  Yarrow was watching her closely, unabashedly.

  “We have Plume,” he said, “acting with Teresa Dunham. We found aconitum at the Dunhams’ trailer. One bottle, marked ibuprofen, containing the deadly plant monkshood. And we found the gun. Plume’s gun. Serial numbers are scraped, but we’ve got good crime lab on it and it looks like it came from someone in the Aryan Brotherhood.”

  “Dunham’s husband,” Dana said. “Talk to the prison.”

  “That’s exactly what we did. The Brotherhood works on the inside and the outside. So we’re looking at them for the poison supply chain, too. And of course we’re doing computer searches at Charlie’s residence, the bar, Dunham’s laptop; cyber experts are searching for a dark net source.”