CUTTING ROOM -THE- (32 page)

Dominick looked exhausted, as if he'd been keeping vigil by her bed all night. It took him a moment to register that she was awake and watching him. ‘For a while there, I thought I'd lost you,' he said. ‘You're lucky to be alive.'

C.J. nodded. Thanks to a punctured lung and broken ribs, it was hard to breathe, much less speak. Lucky was an interesting word, she had found. For the second time in her life a psychopath had hunted her down, held her captive, tried to kill her.

‘Chambers … ?' she asked.

‘Dead. Manny's over there now. He says it's like a house of horrors, but there's no dead bodies, no sign of the heart you think you saw, no evidence whatsoever that Greg Chambers had anything to do the Cupid murders. It looks as though it was all some sick game he was playing with you, trying to make you believe you sent an innocent man to death row.'

A tear rolled down her cheek. For seven years she had considered Gregory Chambers her friend as well as her therapist. She recalled that easy grin, the salty hair and those pale blue eyes. She used to think they were the kindest eyes she had ever seen. She had let him in on secrets no one else knew. Secrets that no one could ever know. She had trusted him. And all the while he had been manipulating her, just as he had manipulated Bantling. The rape victim and her rapist, prosecutor and prosecuted, a case study for the sick doctor's entertainment.

Dominick rubbed her hand. The one that had not been sliced to ribbons with a scalpel. ‘He was just trying to mess with your mind, C.J., there's no truth in what he said. Bantling murdered those women. You proved it. A jury convicted him. A judge sentenced him.'

She nodded. She could not bring herself to tell him what Chambers had said to her before he died. That he had orchestrated the whole thing as an experiment, a case study in what would happen if a rape victim was given the opportunity to prosecute her rapist for murders he did not commit. How far would she go in the name of retribution?

Dominick leaned over and kissed her gently on the cheek. His face lingered there for a long time. ‘You did the right thing, baby,' he whispered in her ear.

In the course of the Cupid investigation, C.J. had discovered that rapes with an MO identical to hers had occurred in each of the cities where Bantling had lived, in each country he had visited. Like her the victims had been tortured, cut, scarred. If he ever got out of prison, she had no doubt that more women would be raped, and given the level of brutality there was every possibility he would escalate to homicide. She had no regrets about putting him behind bars; so long as he remained there, the world was a safer place.

But then Bantling filed a motion for a new trial, claiming he'd been set up, and suddenly the bones started to fall again. Officer Victor Chavez was brutally murdered and his tongue cut out. Sonny Lindeman's corpse was found with the ears sliced off. Lou Ribero's eyes had been gouged out. The Black Jacket task force discovered evidence that all three were dirty and concluded that their deaths were gangland executions. Only C.J. knew that they had died because they had conspired with her over the anonymous 911 call that had led to Bantling's arrest.

Bantling's former defense attorney was the next to die. After filing an affidavit in which she claimed to have a tape of the 911 call, Lourdes Rubio was killed in a robbery. The tape was never found.

It was then C.J. realized that Dr Greg Chambers had left behind a following. Bill Bantling wasn't the only psychopath he'd singled out for his special brand of mentoring. There were others who had shared his depraved fantasies and been encouraged to act upon them. The sick game Chambers started had not ended with his death. It was still in play.

She should have checked the back seat. But she didn't.

‘Greg had a friend. A close friend, C.J.,' hissed the man who had been hiding in her back seat. ‘A friend who understood his fantasies and shared them. In fact, Greg had several close friends.'

FDLE Agent Chris Masterson had served under Dominick's command for years. C.J. had worked alongside him on the Cupid task force. And the Black Jacket investigation. Another colleague she'd placed her trust in, never suspecting the sick mind that lurked behind the boyish face. And now he was holding a knife to her throat, pinning her head against the headrest as she tried to escape the feel of the jagged teeth pulling at her skin.

‘It was a tragedy that he was taken from us just as he was realizing his dream of transforming his fantasies into reality. And making it possible for the rest of us to enjoy them. His work was so … fascinating. Now I'm going to finish what he started. We're all very, very excited to have you back.'

C.J. had long since left the Santa Barbara campus behind her and was pounding along the cliffs that ran beside the Pacific. Usually by this point she would have outrun the memories, but today they were keeping up with her, flashing through her mind like a montage from a horror movie: the Jeep slamming into the overpass, then sirens and flashing lights and Dominick yelling at Masterson to get the fuck out of the car, Masterson taunting them, gloating about how he would cheat the system, suddenly reaching behind him … then the sound of Dom's gun going off.

The investigation into Masterson's death had taken almost a year, but at the end of it Dominick was exonerated. That very same day, he drove her out to the marina, led her aboard a 26-foot Sea Ray Sundancer and suggested that they sail away and leave it all behind. What he'd really meant was run.

The plan had worked for a while. Until both of them realized they were far too young and life was far too complicated to spend the rest of their lives doing nothing. Within two years they'd settled in Chicago and Dominick was hunting criminals again as a detective with the Chicago PD, while C.J. tried to step away from the bad guys and the violence by volunteering at hospitals and working with troubled kids. But it wasn't enough. She dipped her toe back in the water as a victim advocate with Cook County and said yes when they offered her a position as a prosecutor. She supposed she was drawn to the bad guys as much as they were to her. And Chicago certainly had their share.

It was almost noon by the time she got back to her grandmother's house. The sun was shining, the cloud cover had lifted. Apart from the blob of black storm clouds that lingered over the mountains, far, far away, it was a beautiful day. She checked her watch. She'd run twenty-four miles in a little over five hours.

Dominick would be proud of her: this was the farthest she'd ever run. She was only a couple of miles from completing a marathon, something he knew she'd always wanted to accomplish. He'd promised her he'd be on the other side of Manhattan waiting for her at the finish line, no matter how long it took her to cross it. She pictured his face across the kitchen table, his brown hair messy from sleep, a grin on his bronzed, handsome face as he told her she could do anything she put her mind to. He still had not sent back the papers. She thought again of calling him. Then she remembered that sorry would never be enough …

Even with the extra miles she had run, for some reason the run had not worked its magic today. The Clown, Bantling, Cupid, Chambers, Black Jacket, Masterson, the Others … The demons from her past were still hot on her trail. A feeling of foreboding hovered over her, like the storm clouds hovering over the distant mountains, a persistent sixth sense that something ominous was closing in on her. And it would keep closing in, slowly, steadily, until one day she would turn around and it would be on top of her. And she would never see it coming.

She shook off the unsettling thoughts, picked up the Sunday paper, waved at a neighbor and headed up the walk. Her case against Richard Kassner was wrapping up. Closing arguments could come as early as next week and she was going to spend the rest of the day preparing.

It was time to clear another level of the game.

The panic had begun to spread days earlier, starting with the old people. They had run out — or more appropriately, walkered and wheeled and hobbled out — to get their prescriptions filled and to stockpile more bread and milk than they could possibly consume in a month. It took a couple of days after that before the panic caught on with the general population. That was when water, formula, canned and packaged foods began to disappear from store shelves. Lines at gas stations and Home Depot were longer, and sales of flashlights, batteries, canned foods and candles were up. There was a nervous, excited, polite camaraderie that existed between people as they chatted while waiting on lines that were longer than usual.

By this morning that had all changed.

Overnight, the National Hurricane Center (NHC) had officially placed Miami under a Hurricane Warning: tropical storm force winds were expected within the next thirty-six hours. By the time Manny woke up at seven, store shelves were empty, gas stations were rationing or closed altogether, Home Depot and Loews were out of plywood, generators, water, batteries, chain saws, and, of course, flashlights. No one was nice to anyone anymore. Tempers were short. The entire county sounded like a construction zone. Power saws buzzed, drills whizzed, and constant loud banging filled the air.

As the hours wound down, and the rain bands edged closer to shore and the reporters and their cameramen in their shiny yellow slickers set out for their strongholds on the beach to preach about last-minute storm preparation and prattle on
ad nauseam
about the devastation that was coming, anyone who hadn't already left town was scrambling to board up what they could and get as far inland as they could.

Manny was one of those anyones.

He sat down on the stoop of his two-bedroom bungalow in Miami Shores to catch his breath and suck down a bottle of water with a beer chaser. It was a thousand degrees out. If you didn't know there was a monster storm heading this way, you'd grab a six-pack and head for the beach, because the sky was as blue as a Crayola crayon. He'd been putting up his damn hurricane shutters since ten in the morning and had so far punctured his thumb and put a nice gash in his right thigh. Manny had forgotten how heavy and cumbersome the metal planks were. And how many of them there were. That's why he'd waited — along with his fellow citizens who were similarly in denial — till the last possible second to get ready for a storm he'd been watching slowly cross the Atlantic for the past eight days. Because there was nothing more frustrating than sitting in a pitch-black house nursing a bad back and waiting for a hurricane to come and justify the three months of rehab you were now going to need, only to discover it was yet another false alarm.

This time, however, Manny would have preferred to be complaining about an achy back and bitching about another hurricane no-show. With only a few hours left before the first rain bands were expected to start swirling through and bending his palms to the sidewalk, it looked as though Miami was going to be hit. And hard. Manny had lived through Andrew back in '92, and the only thing he could hope for now was that the storm would shift a degree or so north or south. Better that it levelled Homestead again, or even Palm Beach, than a direct hit slamming Miami.

He sucked the blood off the tip of his thumb. It was still sunny, but not for much longer. The sun had begun its descent into the Everglades — melting into a citrus-colored sky — while over to the east, gray clouds were looming over the Atlantic. The wind had already picked up. Manny watched as a blustery tropical gust sent a rogue garbage can from the foreclosed house two doors down rolling out of control along the block. Sturdy thirty-foot tall Royal Palms shed their fronds like a stripper, sending heavy six-foot branches tumbling down from the sky into his front yard. It was a little taste of what was to come — the trailer to a disaster movie in the making. In twelve hours the city would be under siege. The full force of Artemis would strike under the cover of darkness, in the middle of the night.
Fucking great
, thought Manny.

His thumb was gushing now; he'd caught the damn thing with the drill and almost taken off his nail. He sucked down the rest of his beer and stood up to get himself a Band-Aid before he bled out all over the last of the shutters. One more window and he'd be done. Then it would be a matter of hoping it all held together. If his cute, handyman-special house would be there in the morning when he returned. If anything would be left, not just of his house, but of his cute neighborhood. It was one thing to be the least expensive house on the block; it was another to be the only house left on the block.

Rufus greeted him at the door with an intense bark, but it took a few seconds for the wag to kick in. Even Rufus knew all was not right with the world. The pooch had been acting wiggy for two days, hiding toys all over the house and pacing back and forth like an expectant father. Manny was planning to take him over to his OCD step-sister's house in Miami Lakes tonight and he didn't need the dog flipping Carolina out any more than she already was. Rufus needed to be as low-key and inconspicuous as a ninety-pound bomb-sniffing pooch with a nervous condition could be. Carolina and Rufus didn't see eye-to-eye at the best of times, by virtue of Rufus being a dog and Carolina having been almost eaten by a pit bull when she was five. It didn't matter much that she'd brought it on herself by yanking the dog's tail until it turned and tried to rip her face off. With the rest of Manny's family camped out on the couch — including their elderly mother, who got nervous when the doorbell rang and she wasn't expecting it — Carolina was sure to be running short in the patience department. Almost as if he'd read his master's mind, Rufus jumped up and barked full-on in Manny's face. Maybe he'd slip the pooch some Benadryl; Carolina could be a cold-hearted bitch when she wanted to, and if she got pissed-off enough, she'd put both Rufus and Manny out on the front stoop with an umbrella to fend for themselves. Her house wasn't his first choice of evacuation accommodation, but, like him, Daria resided on the wrong side of the Federal Highway in an evacuation zone, and Carolina was the only family member who didn't live in a trailer. Plus, his mother had asked him to.