An Arm and a Leg (23 page)

A table lamp lay on its side on the carpeted living room floor, the bulb shattered. Something made of bright blue glass had either been dropped or thrown on the brick hearth in front of the cold fireplace. Rust colored splotches and smears marked a path from the wet bar back to the door.

Nick grabbed his phone and punched in a number. “Ted, it’s me. The nurse’s condo has been trashed. She’s not here, and there’s a good bit of blood splashed around.”

“I’ll call it in.” Ted broke the connection.

Nick scanned the room. An open handbag lay on its side on the coffee table. A cell phone, lipstick, comb and other feminine items lay scattered around the purse. A piece of white typing paper lay on the coffee table, as if someone had been sitting on the sofa studying it.

After snapping on the latex gloves he always carried when on duty, Nick lifted the paper by its corner. Printed on it was a matrix of names, dates, and strange abbreviations. Someone had circled four of the entries in red ink.

Hadn’t Frankie said something about finding a spreadsheet of patient information? Nick’s stomach formed into a hard knot. Wherever the nurse was, he had a sinking feeling Frankie was with her. And he couldn’t shake the feeling that time was running out for the two women—if it hadn’t already.

The image of Frankie O’Neil’s face swam into his vision. The determined set of her jaw. The light of battle in those compelling eyes.

Nick folded the paper and put it into his breast pocket. He ran back to his pickup, punching in Ted’s number again along the way.

****

Frankie struggled to stay calm. Her eyes felt as though they were bulging from their sockets in search for even a tiny ray of light. Her heart pounded and her breathing came in short gasps.

She choked back the scream she recognized as the precursor to a full blown hysterical frenzy. What if something happened to Baby Face before he came back for her? Or what if he decided to just leave her there? She would die of thirst. Or starve.

Uncle Mike had said the average adult could live for about five weeks without food. But that same person would die within a week without water.

Knowing what took place in the human body under conditions of extreme deprivation told Frankie it would be better to starve than die of thirst. The process of dehydration did horrifying, painful things to the human mind and body. Even then, she felt comforted in the knowledge it would be quicker than having nothing to eat. And people could get awfully hungry.

Her thoughts flashed on her stores of provisions and her pitiful attempts at home security. All gone. No help to her in this place.

What about Collette? How long before someone at the motel realized something was wrong and broke open the door to her room? She didn’t allow herself to think of what would happen when the cat’s food and water ran out.

Frankie closed her eyes and forced herself to breathe deeply. Hyperventilating would waste air. And as to how long the air in a container this size would last, she hadn’t the foggiest.

When she’d calmed a bit, she poked and prodded her arms, legs, and ribs. Nothing seemed to be broken, and no fresh wetness indicated an open wound. Hopefully, she’d sustained no internal injuries either during her struggle with Baby Face or her subsequent fall into the cistern. Any one of several wouldn’t kill her quickly, but would slowly incapacitate her, making escape impossible.

Dust filled her nostrils and sent her into a coughing spasm. She tore a strip about four inches wide from the bottom of her cotton knit shirt, filled her mouth with saliva and spit into the cloth over and over, wetting a small area. She tied the makeshift air mask around her head so the moist area covered her mouth and nose. Although some dust sifted through the weave, most of it caught in the damp fabric. The panic that came with being unable to get enough air into her lungs subsided.

Based on her brief view of the cistern before Baby Face shut the lid, it was perhaps eight feet in height. Its diameter would render a chimney climb impossible, and she couldn’t jump high enough to pull herself out through the opening, even if she could somehow dislodge the tight fitting lid. If she removed her jacket and rolled it into a tight ball, she might add a couple of inches to her reach. But she needed a lot more than a couple of inches.

She moved her hands over the bottom of the cistern. The low lying spots in the warped metal floor held a fine powder of dust, and every movement stirred up a new cloud. She ran her hands in widening circles, her movements smooth and slow.

Within a few inches from where she knelt, Frankie’s searching fingers ran up against something hard. Hoping the thing could be used either as a weapon or to help her escape, she grabbed it with both hands.

But what she held was not a potential weapon, it was a shoe. A shoe on a foot attached to a very cold leg.

****

When Larry’s cell phone rang, he didn’t answer. Bellamy and Mel were the only people with his number, and he didn’t want to talk to either of them just now. Especially now. Just a couple more days, that’s all he needed.

Larry liked to think of himself as a planner. Just because some of his ideas never actually panned out didn’t keep him from coming up with them. And lots of his ideas worked just fine. He’d read somewhere that failing to plan was actually planning to fail, so from that moment on he’d done very few things on the spur of the moment.

He closed out his checking and savings accounts, packed his belongings, and sold what wouldn’t fit in his car. The subsequent heaviness of the zippered bank bag felt reassuring as he stuffed it into the glove compartment of the Mercedes.

Larry smiled in anticipation of a new life. “Our new life,” he said out loud.

****

Once back in his hiding place in the tree at Frankie’s house, Larry pulled out his phone. Beauty wasn’t home yet, but he’d wait. He pressed the voice mail button and listened to Mel’s recorded message.

“I found her sneaking around the farm.” Mel’s digitized voice sounded high pitched and agitated. It was a tone Larry recognized all too well. “She spotted the pickup. I called Bellamy, and he told me to bring her in.”

Larry broke the connection, jumped down from the tree and ran to his car. No time for a change of plan—what the old geezer called
poo
had hit the fan.

****

Frankie shrieked and jerked away from her discovery. She crab-scuttled across the cistern floor until she slammed up against the corrugated metal wall, sat up, pulled her knees to her chest, and folded herself into a ball.

“Is someone there?” Her muffled voice sounded pinched and thin, like dough extruded through the tiny holes of an angel hair pasta maker. She commanded herself to slow her breathing.

The form on the floor neither spoke nor moved. No sound but the echo of Frankie’s own voice rang in the hollow darkness.

As she struggled to regain control of her trembling body, snapshots of her life tumbled over one another in a cacophony of light and sound bites. She heard the plastic-against-plastic click Uncle Mike’s reading glasses made when he closed them and put them into their case. And she remembered the look on Alma’s face when she entered Frankie’s childhood room amid gales of laughter only Frankie could hear, the laughter of people only she could see. She felt again the joy of being surrounded by countless family members, of playing hide and seek with twin cousins who’d died centuries earlier, and of listening to stories about things that happened before the human race started writing things down.

Willing herself to dissolve into nothing, she bowed her head and pressed her face against her tightly folded knees as something shifted in her mind. She crossed an unseen barrier and became a child again. Panic bubbled up from the wellspring of repressed memory as the cistern morphed into a basement, the darkness of which had haunted her nightmares for years.

I’m afraid.
Jenny’s voice.

A baby wailed from somewhere overhead.

Don’t you want to be with Jenny and Timmy?
A woman’s voice, flat, devoid of emotion.
I’ll be back. You wait here.

“Mommy?” the adult Frankie cried into the darkness. The single word bounced around inside the cistern, ricocheting off the metal walls.

Shut up, the neighbors will hear. My Jonathan would never have enlisted if not for the three of you. Always needing this and that, and never enough money. You’re the reason he’s dead.

Like a boat rhythmically bumping against its mooring, Frankie’s mind nudged the barrier between sanity and madness. It would be so easy to give in to the emptiness beckoning her. To feel nothing and know nothing. To become nothing.

The image of Tim’s spreadsheet came into her mind. In vivid detail she saw it lying next to Esther Emory’s original medical records. Suddenly, she knew why Mina had become so agitated. And she knew that if she didn’t manage to escape and tell the police, more people would die.

A flash of heat kicked up the pulse in Frankie’s blood. It began at her sternum and coursed through her insides—so potent her flesh grew warm. It flashed through her brain, sharpening her thinking and helping her focus.

Commanding her emotions to shut down for as long as necessary in order to do what she had to do next, she took a deep breath and moved back toward the body.

Chapter Thirty

Nick sat in his pickup, his cell phone pressed against his ear. In his left hand he held a black plastic ink pen which he manipulated, weaving it around each finger until it circled his pinkie, and moved back to his thumb, a skill he’d taught himself in high school to impress the girls.

“We got people headed for the nurse’s place,” Ted said. “And I’m on my way there now.”

“How long’ve we been friends?” Nick said. “Eight, ten years?”

“Oh, about that. Since Camp LeJeune, why?”

“Just making a point. You know how I work.”

“I know your instincts are pretty good. What gives?”

“I can’t shake the feeling that Miss O’Neil and Miss Landowski are in trouble. I’m going to talk to the neighbor where she stayed when her house burned. She may know something.”

“Okay, but you need to know that Blinquet in Violent Crimes has been brought in on the investigation.”

“What’s that about?”

“It seems partial human remains turned up in Miss O’Neil’s freezer. But I told Pritney all this yesterday.”

“What human remains?” Nick stopped twiddling his pen, dropped it, and sat up straight.

“The arson investigator found a partial human leg. By the way, tell Pritney I’m sorry I missed her call this morning.”

“Wait, wait, a partial human leg?”

“You heard right. It was in her freezer.

“Jesus, Mary and Joseph.”

“That’s not the worst part. Don’t know if you knew, but we’ve had a couple of recent disappearances. Blinquet has a theory that one or both of the O’Neils were abducting people and keeping them imprisoned somewhere.”

“Oh come on. Where’d they keep them? From what I understand, Miss O’Neil only recently moved into that house.”

“Hey, that’s Blinquet’s theory, I’m just the messenger.”

“What did Miss O’Neil have to say about the leg?”

“Blinquet’s trying to find her so he can bring her in for further questioning,” Ted said. “He’s thinking in terms of a kind of Jeffrey Dahmer scenario, like maybe they ate on people a little at a time before they finally killed them.”

“Good God.”

“The missing people had one thing in common: they both worked at the same hospital as O’Neil. Blinquet’s thinking he’s finally caught a break in that case. He’s trying to get permission to take the cadaver dogs to Miss O’Neil’s half acre backyard.”

“I don’t care how this looks, there’s no way she could have been involved in something so messed up.”

Ted snorted. “How well do you know her anyway?”

“I know her type.”

“We’ve been in law enforcement long enough to know that anyone is capable of anything, given the right circumstances.”

Nick sighed. “The problem is we’re at a standstill on the brother’s murder. The stuff going on now may be in your jurisdiction, but I know in my gut it’s all connected.”

“Blinquet’s calling the brother’s death accidental. He thinks the sister claims it was murder to make it look like she’s being targeted. Like she’s the victim of some nefarious plot. He’s clamped down on this like a crazed bulldog.”

“If she did make all this up, wouldn’t it make more sense for her to get rid of the leg before setting the fire? And wouldn’t she leave the dead bird and chalk threat on the porch to back up that story? It’s a good thing the inquest verified her account of her brother’s shooting or someone would be charging her with that as well.”

“Blinquet figures she forgot about the leg. And you know as well as I do, criminals often make stupid mistakes. Most of them are not real bright.”

“Yeah, but she’s not stupid. And she’s no killer. She’s an intelligent, capable woman.”

“Well, well, listen to you. Tell me before you break into poetry and I’ll dig out a tissue.”

“I’m serious, Ted. Life has dealt Frankie O’Neil more than her share of body blows. She’s tough, I’ll give her that, but she’s also bull-headed. I think she’s in way over her head.”

“You’ve fallen for her.” Ted chuckled. “You do know that Karla has run through all her single female friends trying to fix you up, right? And now here’s the take-em-or-leave-em bachelor Nick Rollins talking like a love-struck kid. And without Karla’s help? She’ll be ticked.”

Nick’s face grew warm. He wished he could think of an appropriately acid comeback, but his mind teemed with images of Frankie smiling at him over her salad at Kate’s. Frankie with the miss-matched eyes and the deviated septum that made her little nose sit a bit crooked on her face.

“Need I remind you,” Ted was saying, “that you’ve been wrong about women before?”

“One woman. I was wrong about one woman.”

“Yeah, and it nearly got you killed.”

“Yeah, yeah, and if you hadn’t come along when you did, I’d have bled to death—as you seem to never tire of reminding me.”