Blood Victory: A Burning Girl Thriller (The Burning Girl)

by Christopher Rice

  That said, the idea that Stephen might be trying to dial down the entire operation after reaping the only new benefit to date is too infuriating for Cole to contemplate in this moment.

  “What can I say, Stephen?” Cole finally says. “I’m a good boss. Now if I may, I need to get to work.”

  Stephen waves his hand dismissively at the screen. Philip is already pushing back from his desk, and as usual, Julia is shaking her head slightly, as if Cole’s a perpetually disappointing toddler. He knows not to expect a more respectful series of goodbyes from his business partners, so he ends the call with a swipe of his control pad.

  Now he’s only got Noah to deal with.

  “What are you doing here?” Cole asks.

  “You flew me here.”

  “What are you doing downstairs? I said only come downstairs when I need you.”

  And he’d meant to tell Scott to keep Noah in his bedroom, but the call from The Consortium distracted him before he could give the order.

  “Well, they’re just lovely,” Noah finally says.

  “Don’t just walk in on my videoconferences.”

  “Why didn’t you lock the door?”

  “Because I forgot you’re a cross between a sociopath and a curious seven-year-old.”

  “I do love your sharp tongue. Wish you’d used it on me in the shower.”

  “Noah, instead of trying to throw me off-balance with a bad webcam routine, why don’t you just ask me what you want to know so I can explain why I’m not telling you?”

  “Mattingly does all this prep work and there’s no digital footprint for any of it? That’s weird, Cole. I see truck, abduction, I think human trafficking. And if I’m your business partner, I think we’re sending Charley into the middle of a dangerous operation with only her boyfriend as a backup. You’re sure surveillance didn’t miss anything?” Noah asks.

  “Absolutely sure,” Cole answers because the two words, by themselves, are the truth. They didn’t miss anything. “Want to know what else I’m sure of?”

  “All ears.”

  “You have one job tonight, and it’s not this. Get inside her head, stay there. Leave the rest of it to me.”

  Orders like these are usually a perfect opportunity for Noah to mouth off, but something about Cole’s tone this time has chased the mirth from him. He doesn’t just look serious; he looks wary. As if the prospect of being back in Charlotte’s head after all he’s done to her frightens him.

  Cole studies Noah’s expression for as long as he can, then looks away.

  It’s not that he feels guilty about lying to Noah.

  Or lying to The Consortium.

  He just gets nervous when the number of people he has to lie to suddenly goes up unexpectedly. Even by one.

  Scott Durham doesn’t knock before entering. When he sees Noah sitting at the conference table as if he belongs there, he goes rigid. Cole gives a wave of his hand to indicate all’s well, and Scott says, “She’s leaving the theater. Mattingly’s following her. Looks like she’s hooked him.”

  5

  Dallas, Texas

  If she takes her time, it might look suspicious.

  If she moves too quickly, he might lose her. Then she’d have to slow down again—also suspicious.

  Given how easily Cyrus Mattingly was scared off by a gated apartment complex and the sudden arrival of an unexpected husband, Charlotte’s willing to bet he’d be just as wary of a target who started moving erratically. Worse, at this hour most of the mall’s stores are in the process of closing, so there’s not much for her to stop and study if she needs to let him catch up. It seems like the only people in the mall, aside from the clerks locking storefront doors and pulling down guard gates, are the other moviegoers leaving the theater. They’re walking in sparse clumps, their laughter echoing off the stone floors.

  It’s an upscale mall, and this particular section is lined with strange towering sculptures. Walking in between them now, she realizes they’re silhouettes of giant faceless men. Each one repeatedly brings a hammer down in one hand on a stone they’re holding in the other. They remind her of oil derricks. With the whole place emptying out, the slow up-and-down swings of each hammer seem ghostly and threatening.

  If Mattingly is following her and he sees her look back, he might assume the sight of him, familiar now from their brief encounter in the theater, would put her too on guard for whatever snatch he’s planning. With this in mind, she walks as slowly as she can without appearing drunk, keeping her gaze dead ahead.

  Kansas Command has said nothing through her earpiece since she confronted Mattingly in the theater. They’re falling back, allowing her to maintain the illusion she’s on her own with a killer. That’s good. It means Cole’s respecting her wishes. That said, she’s pretty sure if Mattingly wasn’t following her, they would let her know so she and Luke could regroup. Instead, there’s silence in her right ear. The earpiece is tiny and perfectly matched to her skin tone. It’s also capable of transmitting audio back to the command center. Like all the other gifts and gadgets Cole’s given them, it probably costs a small fortune.

  But she’s pretty sure they’ve also hacked into the mall’s security cameras to watch her now, which is how they’d be able to warn her if Mattingly wasn’t on her tail.

  Correction. Bailey’s hacked into the mall security cameras on their behalf.

  How did Cole put it? Bailey Prescott sees a world without walls, and he’s willing to go anywhere within it he desires. Combined with the raw computing power Cole provides him, Bailey’s unstoppable. Allegedly.

  Careful, she chastises herself. Thinking too much about Bailey might be a sly way of reminding herself that her boyfriend’s waiting outside.

  He’s just one man, she tells herself, one man sitting inside a retrofitted SUV that could probably survive a four-story drop, with who knows what kind of high-tech weapons buried inside of it. Still, that shouldn’t be enough to kill the fear.

  She needs her fear. Needs it ready and waiting, coiled like a cobra in a clay jar. But she doesn’t need it quite yet. They’ve got no idea where Mattingly’s planning to take her, and she’s determined to make the entire trip. The longer she can go without triggering, the better. It means she won’t have to pretend to be rag-doll limp as he loads her into that truck. There might come a moment when she has to block all thoughts of Luke in order to trigger, but she’ll know it when she gets there.

  And in that moment, she’ll send her mind to the place where she’s learned to find pure, undiluted, and immediate terror. It’s not technically a memory, more like a construction of her mother’s last tortured bit of life—a compendium of horrifying facts about the final hours endured not just by her mother, but by each one of Abigail and Daniel Bannings’ victims.

  Calling it all to mind at once feels like reaching one hand into a planter where the top layer is all the jagged rock of her desire for revenge and then, underneath, a cold, sickeningly soft soil, the touch of which fills her with the same suffocating sense of dread her mother must have felt during her final hours. Her memory rapidly assembles every photo she’s ever seen of the root cellar online—of its clawed earthen walls and dirt floor and wooden double doors reinforced with metal panels on the insides, reinforcements put into place after toddler-age Charlotte overheard the screams of one of the women inside. The handcuffs and the duct tape and the constant dread of Daniel Banning’s return and another brutal violation. A moment when she feels closest to a mother she can’t remember because she was killed when Charlotte was just an infant . . .

  For now, she’ll hold those memories at bay by thinking of Luke, by remembering the tender way he kissed her neck just the other night. The way he whispered “I wish I could be the one to heal you again and again” while she swayed against him. “Maybe you are,” she’d answered. Meanwhile, “Angel of the Morning” played gently on the little Bluetooth speaker Luke had connected to his phone. The song was her mother’s favorite, so they’d decided to pla
y it like a gentle anthem as they hunted a killer of women like the ones who had struck her down. But in that moment, it became a kind of love song.

  Even though they had only another hour of downtime before they needed to track Mattingly again, Luke led her to one of the twin beds in his motel room—a room where he’d been staying alone while she went to bed each night as Hailey Brinkmann in her new rental house in Richardson. He made love to her urgently and thoroughly. He may have been the one sporting a new armor of muscle, but she was the soldier being loved goodbye in the desperate hours before another combat deployment.

  Cyrus Mattingly is behind her.

  The glass exit doors are just a yard or two ahead of her. She can see his reflection in them. He’s far enough away that he can tail her with a confident stride without looking too suspicious. Just like he followed the other two women. She feels his stare. It sends pinpricks up the back of her neck, across her scalp, coils tension across her shoulder blades, and constricts her chest. Her cheeks flush, too.

  Fear.

  Not yet, she tells herself. Not all of it, not yet.

  She pushes the door open and steps out into the crisp fall night.

  She walks past Luke’s Escalade without looking in his direction.

  The car’s covered in some special type of paint that barely gives off any reflection. Luke totally geeked out when he described how it worked. It was cute at the time. Right now the mysteries of her own blood, of the drug that’s already coursing through her veins, have her full attention.

  As she starts the car, she runs through the salient factors of her identity again.

  Hi, I’m Hailey, and I’ll be your victim this evening. I moved here from California. I worked reception at a car dealership in San Jose, and maybe I’ll do that again but who knows because I’m young and life seems wide open right now. I moved because my engagement fell apart. I had an aunt who lived here when I was younger. She’s dead now, but I used to visit her a bunch when I was young, so I know Dallas pretty well.

  Please don’t hurt me, Mr. Mattingly. Please just drive me to wherever you’ve committed all your crimes so I can kick your goddamn teeth out and make sure you never commit another one again, you twisted fuck.

  By the time she’s finished this little speech in her head, she’s pulled away from the parking structure. On the drive down the ramp to street level, she caught more than one glimpse of Mattingly’s headlights behind her.

  Excellent, she thinks.

  As he follows his potential seedling across town, the soothing near silence of swift travel across traffic-free streets envelops Cyrus with a sense of gentle calm. Save for this whisk of tires over asphalt, it’s not quite the same sound as the one that welcomes him to open highways, but it’s close, a reminder of that eternal quiet some people call the presence of God but that he prefers to call “the enduring.”

  He feels a little sheepish about the name. He’s never shared it with anyone. Maybe he told Mother once, but he’s not sure. If he did, she probably gave him one of her indulgent half smiles. More importantly, she long ago gave him the confidence to be free of any need to justify his sense of purpose to others. True, he does offer some explanation to his seedlings during their special journey. But he doesn’t do it to get validation. A man like him doesn’t need the world’s validation or approval. The great understandings he’s come to about the immutable nature of the universe, arrived at mostly during long cross-country drives, can remain his and his alone.

  The enduring isn’t silence, and it isn’t really quiet, either. It’s filled by the shuddering of his truck’s containers in strong winds and the occasional impatient rush of passing vehicles. Fundamentally, it’s wordlessness, and that’s a more urgent and truthful thing. Only a fool would think silence the true nature of the universe. The stillness of an open field, the predawn hush—these are transitory moments soon disrupted by the first crack of thunder or the branch-tossing intrusions of strong winds. The wordlessness that connects him to the underlying fabric of the universe is actually a collection of low sounds, some man-made, but all of them indicating a constant forward motion. It’s the inventions of man and God in perfect unison, without the yakking intrusion of human chatter and all its petty, fleeting concerns.

  Wordlessness . . .

  This is also the gift he gives his seedlings.

  In the beginning, he saw it as their punishment. And that’s how Mother described it. The voices of his cargo needed to be removed from them because they’d used them for disruption and abuse. One of the world’s greatest lies, she’d taught him, was that volume was strength. Volume was only strength when it emanated from volcanoes and thunderstorms. For humans to try to assert strength through volume alone was to try to arrogantly steal the language of gods. Like Prometheus stealing the fire from Olympus, it was an effort that doomed one to ruin. Women, Mother had taught him, fell into this trap more often than men, because they lacked the physical strength of men and were therefore more prone to desperation and error when they betrayed their true nature by trying to frighten others into submission. Women could achieve dominance, but not by turning shouts and screams into cudgels, as so many of them tried to do.

  But now that he’s been paying special visits to Mother for years, Cyrus realizes he’s not just meting out a punishment on his women; he’s giving them a gift. In the dazed, glassy-eyed expressions of his seedlings after their long journey with him is through, he sees more than just a human doll. He sees the liberation of their tortured souls, a return to a state of innocence, and the place of a woman’s true power—to enchant with silence and a use of other softer arts.

  Whether she knew it or not, this desire to be set free was positively emanating from that bitch back in the movie theater. In her quaking self-righteous anger as she told him to darken his phone, he could feel a desperate need to be released from her ego and the prison of her constant demands. Demands she no doubt placed on everyone in her life, especially the men—if there were any, and he doubted there were. No doubt she’s driven them away by constantly pelting them with a dozen different buzzwords the self-help frauds of the age try to sell as mental health cures—needs, boundaries, communication, listening. Between his lessons from Mother and the years of work he’s been doing on various seedlings, he’s become convinced of one thing.

  The women of the world were terribly unhappy. The ones who’d freed themselves from essential male attachments were miserable wanderers, congratulating themselves on their so-called independence while stewing in a constant pool of anxiety and dissatisfaction.

  They weren’t free of anything.

  To be truly free, they had to go on the kind of journey he offered them.

  Charlotte has Hailey do everything a woman traveling alone at night shouldn’t do. But no other woman in the world right now has been dosed with the drug currently sitting dormant inside her veins.

  She deliberately parks in shadow.

  As she approaches her front door, she watches her phone so intently it probably looks like she’s streaming something on Amazon Prime. Then, at the door, she lingers, right under the porch light she removed the bulb from the night before.

  There’s mail in the mailbox, all of it addressed to RESIDENT or the former tenant, a guy named Tim Johnson. Good thing she caught it. If Mattingly decides to go through her mailbox, the sight of a man’s name might scare him off. She tucks the envelopes under one armpit and unlocks the front door as if the keys are covered in syrup.

  The whole time she wants to look over her shoulder, but she knows she shouldn’t. Same rule as the mall. Maybe Mattingly’s not skittish; maybe he’s just particular. Either way, he, like many a serial killer, prefers to travel the path of least resistance.

  Inside, cardboard boxes are pushed against the walls. They’re filled with clothes about her size, but they’ve all been through a washing machine several times and given other little handmade marks of wear and tear, even though she’s willing to bet they were bought just f
or this operation.

  It’s the framed photographs Cole’s team has filled the house with that really impress her. They line the mantel and the open shelves separating the kitchen and breakfast nook. They give her a completely fake life that she appears to have thoroughly enjoyed in the company of stock photo models she’s never met. The Photoshop work is so good she’s even embracing some of the models.

  She’s come up with a piece of backstory to go with each one.

  Here’s Hailey’s ex-boyfriend Josh, who dumped her right before she met Fred. Josh was a former college football player felled by a shoulder injury his sophomore year who never quite found his way in life after. Fred, on the other hand, is two pictures over; he’s the redhead in the Hawaiian shirt, the guy she’s hugging in front of a tropical background. Fred’s family owns a Cadillac dealership where Fred will probably work until he dies. That’s where he got her a job in reception so she could save money for veterinary school. But then he broke off their engagement and there went her job, so here she is, pursuing a fresh start in East Texas with the money she saved up.

  After weeks of inspection by a skeptical stranger, these stories, along with the photos, might reveal inconsistencies she can’t see in this moment. But they’re a great cover for now. The prep team was wise enough not to use any pictures from when she was young enough to be recognizable to most of the country as Burning Girl, the captive child of serial killers who tried to raise her as their own.

  She left all the curtains open before she left for the theater. Now she goes from room to room, turning on the lights and pausing now and then to stretch and yawn in a manner that makes her appear relaxed, confident. Oblivious.

  Then she does what women in horror movies have always done to the consternation of audiences the world over, the difference being that she actually wants to draw a monster in from the shadows.

  She takes a shower.