Right of Redemption

by Jenna Bennett

  If it came to that, he had walked in on Rafe and me, gun drawn, the night before the auction, as well. And I suddenly considered, with a trickle of cold down my spine, what might have happened if I’d been there alone that night.

  I shook it off, and turned to Mrs. Allen with a bland smile. No need to let her know what I was thinking. Not until I got it straight in my head, at any rate. “Thank you so much for your time. It’s been interesting.”

  “Thank you for stopping by,” Mrs. Allen said politely, and turned the knob on the front door. “I hope to see you again.”

  It sounded like she meant it. I smiled at her as she pulled the front door open, and that’s why I didn’t notice the figure standing on the doorstep.

  Twenty-Two

  ”Oh.” I blinked at Enoch, and for a second or two, I can’t swear that some of what I’d been thinking didn’t flicker across my face. Something certainly flickered across his before it was gone, leaving me to wonder whether I’d actually seen it, or whether it was just my own suspicions that had put it there.

  “Carl!” Mrs. Allen said, sounding pleased.

  He glanced at her, and mustered something that could almost pass for a smile. “Nancy.”

  Or maybe that was just in my mind, too. Maybe it had been a perfectly acceptable smile. Mrs. Allen didn’t seem to have found any issues with it. She looked just as welcoming as before. “Won’t you come in?”

  “Actually—” He turned his attention to me, “I saw your vehicle outside. I thought you might have a minute. I’d like to talk to you.”

  His tone hinted at dire things to come.

  The most logical explanation was that he was going to yell at me for not leaving the Allens alone, the way he’d told me. That’s probably what he wanted me to believe. And maybe that’s all it was. Hopefully that was all it was.

  But just in case I was right, and those suspicions that had started to blossom while Mrs. Allen had been talking were on the money, I should take a little thought for what to do next.

  If I refused to go with him, he’d know that I suspected him.

  On the other hand, I didn’t want to put Mrs. Allen in danger by insisting on staying here. Enoch was still wearing his work clothes, with his weapon’s belt strapped around his hips. If I refused to go with him, would he take us both into the house at gunpoint?

  But no. Probably not. He wouldn’t want Mrs. Allen to know what was going on.

  Would he?

  And then there was the third hand, which was Carrie in her car seat. My first responsibility was to my baby. What scenario had the best potential for getting her through this alive?

  I turned to Mrs. Allen. “Would you mind holding onto the baby for a minute? I’m sure this won’t take long.”

  She looked flabbergasted, and out of the corner of my eye, I could see Enoch’s face change. There went any doubt he might have had that I suspected him. If I was trying to keep my baby from him, it was because I knew she was in danger.

  “On second thought,” he said, drawing his gun smoothly, “let’s just go inside.”

  He pointed it at my stomach. I backed up. Mrs. Allen squeaked and turned pale. “Carl…!”

  He turned to her—gun, too—and I took her arm in my free hand and tugged her back inside the living room. “Let’s just do as he says. That way, maybe nobody’ll get hurt.”

  Enoch smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes. They were small and beady and flat as pebbles. “That’s right. We don’t want anyone to get hurt.”

  Mrs. Allen gulped, but she backed up right next to me.

  Enoch stepped across the threshold and shut the door. And gestured with the gun. “On the sofa.”

  I moved to the sofa and sat down, and put Carrie’s car seat on the floor next to me. If bullets started flying, at least she’d be a little bit protected by the coffee table.

  Mrs. Allen sat down next to me and wound her hands together in her lap. “What’s this about, Carl?” Her voice shook, and so did the rest of her body, too.

  “I didn’t want it to come to this,” Enoch said, sounding aggrieved, like we had seriously inconvenienced him by figuring out that he’d killed at least a couple of people, and maybe more.

  Or maybe I was the only one who had figured it out. Mrs. Allen looked clueless. Like she had no idea that the man standing in front of her, waving his gun, had taken her daughter from her.

  Would it help or hurt for me to point that out? Would it be better to keep that out of the conversation for as long as possible, or would our chances of survival be better if I said something?

  For the time being, since I didn’t know the answer, I decided that for now, it was best if I didn’t go there. “You killed Steve Morris,” I said instead.

  Enoch glanced at me, but didn’t confirm or deny it. Mrs. Allen gasped, though, and put a shaking hand to her mouth, staring at him over it.

  “I should have thought of you,” I added. “You were right there when Darcy and I found him. We didn’t even have time to yell for help. It was almost like you were waiting for him to be found, so you could swoop in and save the day.”

  Or maybe more so he could swoop in and any DNA that might be found on or around Morris would be explained away.

  He’d done the same thing with Mrs. Oberlin: gone inside the house to look at her, even after I told him she was dead, that there was nothing anyone could do, and that we had called it in and were waiting for the police to show up.

  “I had no choice,” Enoch said. He was still standing, shifting from foot to foot, with the gun pointed in our direction. Mostly at me, probably because he didn’t think Mrs. Allen was as much of a threat.

  “How do you figure that?”

  His eyes flickered from me, to Mrs. Allen, out the window to the street, and back to me in a continual loop. “He came back. He was supposed to stay in prison. He was supposed to be convicted!”

  “Oh, Carl,” Mrs. Allen said, sadly. “I know you cared about Natalie. You worked hard to get justice for her, and for us. But we didn’t want him to be convicted if he didn’t do it!”

  She sounded absolutely sincere, and so sad to have to explain this undeniable fact to Enoch, that I felt almost bad about having to burst her bubble. “It has nothing to do with justice,” I told her. “You’re misunderstanding what he’s saying. He killed Natalie. And he wanted Steve Morris to go to prison for it.”

  Mrs. Allen stared at me, the color draining out of her face, and then moved her stricken gaze to him.

  Enoch showed teeth, like a feral wolf. “Shut up, you stupid bitch!”

  “I don’t know why he did it,” I added. “Maybe just because he could. Maybe he saw her, and he couldn’t help himself. Or maybe she was friendly to him, and he thought it meant more than it did, and when she told him no, he couldn’t handle it...”

  Shades of Lila Vaughn, my friend who had died at the hands of another man who couldn’t handle being refused.

  Enoch’s eyes narrowed. “I said shut up!” He pulled the gun up in a more businesslike manner. The barrel pointed straight at my forehead. I shut up.

  “You…” Mrs. Allen had to clear her throat. “You killed Natalie?”

  “And Steve Morris,” I said. “And Ida Burns, when she started reconsidering who she’d heard arguing. I guess he was afraid she’d go back on her testimony in the second trial, and Morris would get off.”

  “But he got off anyway.” Mrs. Allen’s voice was faint. “Even without… you killed poor Mrs. Burns?”

  “And Mrs. Oberlin,” I said. “He saw me talking to her. He was probably afraid she’d seen something, or heard something, or realized something, or that I’d said something that might make her realize something.” Or something. “Or maybe he’d just started liking killing people by then.”

  “The old bat was your fault,” Enoch told me, callously. “You should have just left things alone. Jarvis would have arrested someone for Morris’s murder—”

  “The two main suspects were my friend C
harlotte and Mr. Allen!” How was I supposed to leave that alone?

  Enoch shrugged, looking unrepentant, like that wasn’t his problem.

  Meanwhile, Mrs. Allen was still trying to process things. “You killed my daughter? And Steve? And you tried to frame my husband for it?”

  “For Morris,” I said. “He framed Morris for Natalie’s murder.”

  She gave me a look. I ignored it in favor of getting information from Enoch. “There’s something I don’t understand.”

  I didn’t wait for him to nod, or give me any other kind of indication that I should go on, because I wasn’t sure he would. “You aren’t even from Alabama. How did you know about Morris’s past?”

  “I didn’t,” Enoch said, scowling. “I had no plans to frame anyone for anything. Natalie was walking home. I offered her a ride. She said no. I put her in the car, because I didn’t think she should be walking home so late on her own. It wasn’t safe.”

  He said it with a matter-of-factness that was chilling. Like it was his responsibility and his right to dictate what someone else could or should do. Like Natalie didn’t have the right to walk home from work if she wanted to. And the picture of him ‘putting her’ in the car… I fought back a shiver, and I’m sure Mrs. Allen did the same thing.

  “But then she started fighting me, and I had to keep her quiet, and one thing led to another…”

  He trailed off. I didn’t pursue that particular train, because Natalie’s mother was sitting next to me, as brittle as a dry twig, and she didn’t need to hear the details.

  “And you left her in the field,” I said.

  Enoch’s eyes came back into focus. For a second he looked at me like he didn’t know who I was, and then he nodded. “And the next morning I went jogging, and I ran by and ‘found’ her, just in case some of my DNA was still around.”

  A habit he’d kept up with Ida Burns, and Steve Morris, and Mrs. Oberlin, it seemed. “And Jarvis was assigned to the case.”

  Enoch smirked. “Paul Jarvis wouldn’t know his you-know-what from a hole in the ground.” He didn’t say you-know-what; I did. “He kept coming to me, asking questions about the neighbors and who might have looked a little too much at Natalie…”

  “And you pointed him in Steve Morris’s direction.”

  “Chief Carter did that,” Enoch said. “Jarvis went to him, because Natalie’s parents—” he shot a look at Mrs. Allen, sitting like a statue next to me, “said that sometimes I’d yell at Natalie about her and Rodney fogging up the windows in the car in front of the house. And Jarvis thought it was interesting—“ he made quotation marks in the air around the word, “that I’d been the one to find the body…”

  Sounded to me like Jarvis could find a whole lot more than the proverbial hole in the ground, but I didn’t say so, because Enoch was on something of a roll, and I didn’t want to derail him.

  “And Carter called me in to his office and asked me about it, and I said that Jarvis was spinning his wheels because he didn’t have any good suspects, and Carter told Jarvis to stop wasting time on fellow law enforcement, and to do his job and focus on Morris, because Morris had been accused of statutory rape in Alabama. And Jarvis ran with it and I got Ida Burns to say that she thought it was Morris she’d heard arguing with Natalie, and then Jarvis arrested Morris.”

  He’d got going so fast at the end that he had to stop and take a breath.

  “And you were off the hook,” I said.

  He nodded. “But then the first jury didn’t convict him. And that bitch Renee Oberlin convinced Ida Burns that maybe she hadn’t heard Morris after all…”

  “And you thought that if she was alive to say that in the second trial, they wouldn’t convict him then either. So you killed her.”

  “It was easy,” Enoch said. “All I had to do was get into her house in the middle of the night, while she was sleeping. A little potassium chloride in a syringe, and it was goodnight, Ida.”

  He giggled. The sound made the little hairs on my arms stand up.

  I tried not to let it show in my voice. “And you did the same with Mrs. Oberlin, I assume?”

  Enoch nodded.

  “Just out of curiosity, where did you get the drug? Potassium chloride isn’t something you can buy at the store, is it?”

  “It is if you know where to go.” He winked at me. “You’ll appreciate this. You want to know who my source was?”

  “Sure,” I said, while I wondered why I, particularly, would appreciate it.

  “Remember Billy Scruggs?”

  How could I forget? Rafe had gone to prison thirteen years ago for beating up Billy Scruggs. And going on a year ago, Billy Scruggs had ended up dead in the Colliers’ trailer in the Bog, making the sheriff think Rafe might have had something to do with it.

  Both of those were old pieces of news by now, but I could see why Enoch thought I might appreciate the irony.

  “Billy’s been dead eight or nine months,” I said.

  “Ida died before that,” Mrs. Allen murmured.

  And Enoch must have had enough of the drug left to take care of Mrs. Oberlin this week. I guess the one positive thing about all of it, was that they hadn’t suffered. Potassium chloride is the same stuff the authorities use in lethal injections, and it works quickly and painlessly.

  “So now what?” I asked.

  Might as well. I mean, here we were. Two women and a baby. Surely he didn’t plan to shoot all three of us?

  Surely he had to realize that he couldn’t get away with this forever? There’d been an extraordinary number of deaths on Fulton Street already. Three more—especially mine and Carrie’s—would bring the wrath of Rafe down on this street. The wrath of Grimaldi, too. And throw in the wrath of Sheriff Satterfield once Mother got onto him. Neither of them would rest until they’d figured out what was going on. And Grimaldi was no Chief Carter. She wouldn’t let the fact that Enoch was a cop stop her from arresting and prosecuting him. Todd would nail Enoch’s hide to the wall in court. And Rafe wouldn’t let any of the others stop him from tearing Enoch limb from limb.

  Since that would only happen after I was dead, though, I couldn’t find much comfort in it. “You won’t get away with this, you know. Jarvis isn’t stupid. He’ll figure it out. And even if he doesn’t, Rafe and Grimaldi will. You have no idea what you’re dealing with in the two of them.”

  Enoch smirked. “Don’t worry. When I’m done setting the scene, it’ll all make perfect sense.”

  “How do you figure that?”

  “I heard screaming,” Enoch said, “when I came home from work. Being a good cop—”

  My mouth turned down at the corners, and he giggled that breathy giggle again. Like last time, it made the hair stand up on my arms.

  “I ran across the street to see what was going on. Imagine my shock when I saw, through the window—”

  He nodded to it: a big plate glass window looking out over the street, “Mr. Allen holding the two of you hostage.”

  “Gary?” Mrs. Allen said. Her eyes drifted past Enoch to the kitchen door, sort of wistfully. “Gary isn’t home.”

  “We can wait,” Enoch said genially.

  There was a pause while we all thought about that.

  “So let me guess,” I said. “In this scenario, you came home and heard screaming. And you ran across the street—to this house—and saw Mr. Allen—who isn’t home yet—holding his wife and me at gunpoint. I assume you’ve figured out a reason he might be doing that?”

  “He killed Steve Morris,” Enoch said. “You figured it out. And he had to kill you, so you wouldn’t go to the police and tell them. But Nancy—”

  He glanced at her, “—didn’t want him to shoot you, too. She thought it was OK that he’d killed Morris—after all, Morris killed their daughter—but she didn’t think he should kill anybody else. She thought he could maybe plead diminished capacity on Morris, and maybe that way, he wouldn’t have to go to prison. So they were arguing about that. But Mr. Allen said it had
to be done, and when he tried to shoot you, Mrs. Allen threw herself in front of you—”

  He turned the gun on her. Mrs. Allen closed her eyes, and my heart stopped for a second. I made an abortive movement, but it didn’t turn out to be necessary. Enoch just grinned at our reactions and turned the gun back on me.

  “And when he realized he’d killed his wife,” he continued, “he turned the gun on you, and before I could stop him, he shot you, too. And then I had to shoot him, of course, because it was him or me, and he’d already killed two people. Three if you count Morris.”

  “Gary would never kill anyone,” Mrs. Allen said faintly.

  Enoch shrugged. “I could make it stick. There wouldn’t be anybody left to say differently. The baby would survive, but it’s too small to talk.”

  “She,” I said.

  But yes, the baby would survive, and at least that was one thing to be grateful for.

  The thing was, though, that while he probably could make all this sound reasonable, and like it could have happened this way, I didn’t think he’d be able to make it stick. Both Rafe and Grimaldi are too smart and too seasoned for that. They’d insist on a ballistics match, if nothing else, to make sure the bullets hadn’t all come from the same gun.

  Besides, I had no plans of letting him get away with it. I had no idea how I would stop him, but if I could keep him talking, maybe something would occur to me. “So in this scenario, Mr. Allen killed Steve Morris because Morris killed Natalie. Is that right? Who killed Mrs. Burns and Mrs. Oberlin?”

  “Nobody,” Enoch said, sounding surprised that I’d ask. “Mrs. Burns’s death was never investigated as anything other than a heart attack. There’s no reason why anyone would look at it again now.”

  There was every reason why someone would. I had talked about it to Rafe, and he’d remember. Especially if something happened to me.