Abandoned: A Thriller (21 page)

“He told me,” Hollister continues, “that he was going to give me a day to think about things.
If you decide to go on from here
, he said,
there’s no turning back. We’ll be entering into an agreement. You’ll be making promises to me. Break a promise and there will be consequences.
Then he signed off.”

“Did you think about it?” I ask, truly curious.

He contemplates me, not with contempt this time. There’s some recognition from him of the question’s value. “Not much,” he admits. “I just wanted her gone. I think he probably knew that. He knew I was caught the moment he offered to help me. Everything else was just reeling me in.”

He’s probably right. Sociopaths tend to understand each other. Birds of a feather.

“What did he offer you?” Alan asks.

Hollister is getting tired. The adrenaline high of the last few days is wearing off. He’s looking into the future now, I imagine. Years of a prison cell, with memories of his dead son’s eyes, begging him for life. He takes a last drag of his fourth cigarette and stubs it out on the coffee table. He doesn’t light another.

“He told me he could make both Heather and her boyfriend disappear. He’d take them away. He didn’t tell me if he was going to kill them or not, just that no one would ever find them.”

“I assume you were supposed to pay him something?”

“That was the brilliant part. I’d wait seven years and then get her declared legally dead, sans body. I’d collect on the life insurance and then he would contact me for delivery—in cash—of half the amount. It
seemed risk-free. There would be no body, so no one could prove murder. Seven years would pass. That’s a long time. People would have moved on to other things.

“
You have to do only three things
, he told me.
Say yes, live your life normally for seven years, and then give me my half of the insurance money when it comes.”
His grin is sickly. His pallor has changed even in the short time of this interview. He is pale, drained. “So I said yes. A week later Heather and her boy toy were gone. He only contacted me one other time, with a warning.
Remember—consequences
, he said.
Turn on me in any way, and terrible, terrible things will happen to you and the people you care for.”

Now I’m finally seeing what happened. “You didn’t pay him,” I say. “I’m right, aren’t I? The money came in, and you didn’t pay him.”

“Seven years had passed!” He speaks in a whine, like a small boy trying to justify himself. “We’d gotten on with our lives, we were happy. Hell, I’d kind of forgotten about him. Well, not forgotten … more like …” He pauses, searching for the words. “Like it never really happened. Like it was something I dreamed. You know? I mean, he never contacted me during that time. Never. And I had no way to contact him. He just didn’t seem
real
anymore.

“Then one day he emails me and says it’s time for me to pay up. Out of the blue.” He shrugs, and it’s a gesture of cautious amazement. “I deleted the email. One little button push. It scared me, but it also kind of made me feel
strong.”
A muscle in his cheek jumps. “I remember thinking, how do I know he’s still got Heather? Maybe he killed her right off.” His eyes dart back and forth between Alan and me. They are filled with petulance and self-righteousness. “There was a good chance he had nothing on me. I had a new life. That money belonged to
us!”

I can withhold myself no longer. I should, but I can’t. I walk over so that I am standing behind the video camera. I pause the recording and look down on him, mustering all the contempt I can find, which in this case is plenty.

“You’re a shitty excuse for a human being, Douglas. You’d gotten on with your life? You were happy? Do you know what was happening to Heather that whole time? She was cuffed or chained and left by herself in the dark. For
eight years!
While you watched TV and fucked your new wife and went to Little League with your sons. You robbed
her of everything. And why? Because you didn’t want to be married to her anymore?” I put my palms against my eyes for a second, because I’m losing it. I steady myself. “I know I’m wasting my breath, but I want you to think about something, Douglas. Think about all the times you were sitting in this nice house, having a nice dinner, while Heather was naked and screaming in the darkness, probably not knowing why or if her sons were alive or dead or maybe in some dark room next to her.”

He snarls then, a last defiance. Maybe he finds a surge of strength because I’m everything he seems to despise so much. “She deserved every minute for what she did to me. If it wasn’t for her, Dana would be fine, and Avery would still be alive.”

I gape at him, aghast. I’ve seen it before, of course, this kind of unbelievable displacement of responsibility. A pedophile once told me, in all seriousness:
But they wanted me to touch them. If they want it, it’s natural, and you can’t fight nature, right?

It’s my turn to slump, to feel drained. I push the record button again. “Finish up with him,” I tell Alan. “You can fill me in on anything pertinent later.”

“Too much for you to handle?” Hollister sneers. “Just like all the fem-cows. You want the same job as a man, but you can’t handle it when things get messy, when the pressure is really on.”

I can’t muster any anger. That’s okay. Exhaustion fits my reply best anyway.

“Douglas, the problem I have isn’t that it’s too messy to confront. The problem I have is that you’re so”—I look for the word—“unoriginal. You caused so much pain, but in the end you’re a caricature. Do you understand what I’m saying? You don’t scare me: You make me tired.”

He has no reply but hate. He shows it to me as he has throughout: with his eyes.

I turn and walk away, opening the sliding glass door and letting myself out into the blessed freedom of the backyard.

“Burns called some uniforms to come and take Hollister away,” Alan says.

I’m standing in the large backyard—which is much like the front yard, just a single tree and waves of too-green grass—looking at nothing. Trying to make sense of everything I just heard. “He really had no way of contacting this Dali?” I ask.

“Nope. Hollister never initiated contact. The perp always contacted him, either by email or cell phone. The emails were always from a free service provider, like Yahoo or Gmail. He tried calling back on some of the cell phone numbers when things blew up, but they were all out of service.”

“They were probably pay-as-you-go phones.” I sigh. “He’s smart. Controlling the contact limits his exposure. He provides proof that he can deliver without ever actually meeting Hollister, and he doesn’t disclose the payment details until it’s time.” I glance at Alan. “I’m assuming they never met?”

“Not once face-to-face.”

“Right.” I nod. “Clever.”

“What’s smart is waiting seven years. You know how much changes
in that amount of time in a major metropolitan police department? People are transferred, fired, retire, chiefs come and go, not to mention all the new crimes being committed. Picking out a crime from seven years ago, unless it’s something really memorable, is pretty unlikely.”

It’s true. The inexorability of it is terrifying. Seven years for a payoff?

“It explains some things about Heather,” I say. “The lack of over-the-top physical abuse. No overt signs of rape. Maybe this really is just a purely financial transaction for him.”

“Pick her up, lock her up, toss some food in every now and then?”

“Maybe.”

“What about the scars on her back?”

I consider this. “Perhaps they were just punishment. Again, there was nothing in them to suggest someone out of control. Eight years is a long time. Maybe there were times she rebelled, and he needed to show her who was boss.”

“Like a dog.” He curls his lip in disgust.

“It’s cold,” I muse. “There’s a pathology there, but no passion. I don’t know. It’s odd.”

It’s difficult for me to accept finance as the sole motive. Seven years is one hell of a personal investiture just for money.

My cell phone rings and I answer. “Barrett.”

“Another victim has turned up,” Callie says. “Male, unresponsive, just like Dana Hollister.”

My stomach churns. “Where?”

“He was left in the parking lot of a hospital in Simi Valley. He’d been placed in a body bag with a breathing tube. Some poor grandmother on her way in for a checkup on her hip replacement heard noises, went to investigate, and found him.”

“Any ID?”

“Not yet, but this happened two or three hours ago. What do you want me to do?”

I put a hand to my forehead, just briefly. There’s too much happening all at once. Dana Hollister in the bathtub, Heather Hollister in the hospital, Douglas Hollister in jail, Dylan struggling for life … I don’t include poor Avery, because all that’s left for him is the indignity of an autopsy and a burial. “What’s happened on the ViCAP search?”

“Completed. There have been three other similar crimes reported in
the last seven to eight years. One near Las Vegas, another in Portland, and the oldest in Los Angeles. The same marks in the eye sockets were there on all three of them, with the same mental unresponsiveness.” She pauses. “As you suspected, all three had been given homemade lobotomies.”

We don’t have medical confirmation on Dana or the new John Doe, but I’m confident we’ll find the same thing. Our killer is good, but he isn’t flawless. Flawless would be remaining undetected. Leaving bodies behind is the same as a trail of bread crumbs for us. I hope.

“Honey-love?” Callie asks. “What do you want me to do?”

“I’m pretty sure I know who the new male victim is, Callie. Heather had a boyfriend.” I explain to her about Jeremy Abbott.

“That would make sense,” she agrees.

“The timing is pretty compelling. Find out if I’m right.”

“What do you want James to do?”

“Keep him on the database. This guy’s very smart. We’re going to need to be detail-oriented to catch what he’s missed.”

“Speaking of the little beast, he’s asking to talk to you.”

“Put him on.”

“I came across something interesting,” James says without preamble. “The night Heather Hollister was abducted, an oddity was noted by the investigating officers: a series of car accidents, four in all, of vehicles exiting the parking lot the gym was in.”

I frown, puzzled. “You mean a four-car pileup?”

“No. Four separate accidents, four vehicles, all unrelated.”

“Strange.”

“Too strange,” he says. “I don’t think it was an anomaly. I’m going to see if I can chase it down further.”

Then he’s gone, before I can reply, and Callie is back. “Ah, James, our James,” she says, sounding wistful. “Can’t live with him, can’t kill him slowly enough.”

“Do you know what he’s talking about? This thing with the cars?”

“That would require him to give me the time of day. I’m off to see the man you think might be Jeremy Abbott.” She pauses. “Is it bad?”

I consider Dana Hollister staring into the void. “It’s one of the worst things I’ve ever seen.”

“Curiouser and curiouser,” Alan says, not in his happy voice. I’ve just briefed him on my phone call with Callie. “What’s the game plan?” he asks.

I glance at my watch. It’s closing in on four o’clock. The day has gotten away from us. The sun is a runaway horse. “We could go to the hospital,” I say. “We can try to talk to Heather again.”

He shakes his head. “I advise against it. Give her another night, and then go over there with Burns. Just you and him.”

The Crime Scene Unit has arrived. Douglas Hollister has already been led away, cuffed and crying. Avery Hollister’s body continues to decompose in the bathroom upstairs, awaiting the coroner. Dylan Hollister is at the hospital having his stomach pumped. I think of refrigerator magnets and suddenly I’m overwhelmed with a desire to see Bonnie.

“I want to go home,” I say. “Is that weird? I just got back from vacation, and I guess we should go balls out on this, but I just don’t feel like it.”

“Nope. Not weird. That’s the voice you need to listen to when it pipes up.”