Gingerbread Man (15 page)

She stared at him. "You
said
you did a
lot of things."

Vince placed a hand on her shoulder, squeezed
gently. She wasn't pale or fading now. Her color had risen in her
cheeks. She looked as if she could kill the man on the other side
of the glass without a second thought.

Vince spoke because she didn't. "I was
thinking some of those confessions might have been made just to
keep you off death row, Welles. I was thinking you might have
confessed to anything they wanted just to save yourself from lethal
injection."

He shrugged. "What if I did?"

"Then we need to know. Did you kill Ivy
Newman?"

The man leaned back in his seat, taking his
time. "There were so many, you know. I didn't get their names."

Welles leaned forward suddenly, spearing
Holly with his eyes. "They liked what I did to them, all my little
ones did. They liked it. Asked for it."

She sat utterly still for a moment, then she
shot to her feet and drove her fist into the window so fiercely
Welles jerked backward in reaction. He fell over in his chair on
the other side. Guards moved forward even as Vince grabbed Holly.
"It's okay, I've got her, I've got her," he told the officers
quickly. Welles got up, laughing at her. Vince turned her away, so
she wouldn't see that.

She didn't fight him. Her knees gave, and she
would have fallen over if he hadn't been holding her. He managed to
turn her toward him, held her against his body.

"It wasn't him," she whispered. Her voice was
strained and hurting. Her head was against his shoulder so when she
spoke, her breath fanned his neck.

"You can't go by anything he said."

"It wasn't him, Vince. It wasn't him."

He closed his eyes for a long moment before
nodding to a guard to let them out. Hubey yelled at them as they
left. "Come on, now, you dragged me all the way down here. The
least you can do is visit with me. Come on, honey, I promise I'll
be nice."

Ignoring the shouts, Vince took Holly with
him back to his car. She sat like a statue as he began to drive
them home. Still, and stiff, and silent.

Finally, he said, "Holly, how can you be
sure?"

She turned her head to face him. She seemed
so bleak, so lost. "His eyes," she said. "I remember looking right
into his eyes. Hubey Welles has brown eyes. They're small and dark.
Round. When he lunged at me like that, I remembered. I looked into
the eyes of the man who took my sister. Those aren't the eyes I
remember. They were blue. A very pretty blue, like the earliest ice
on the lake, when it's so thin the color of the water still shows
through. I remember that now," she whispered.

"I believe you."

Her eyes remained on him, riveted to him. "Do
you?"

"Why shouldn't I?"

She stared at him a moment longer, then
sighed and leaned her head against the seat "Because no one else
will."

"Why won't they?"

She glanced sideways at him, very briefly,
then shook her head. "I have a history, Vince. Come on, you read my
records. You know."

"What I know is that for a kid to have gone
through what you did and to still be functioning right now is
pretty damned incredible."

"You call this functioning? I'm counting half
the time, inside my head. The panic attacks are coming back. That
one the other day at your place was just the beginning. There will
be more. I can feel it. The nightmares are back...."

"Yeah, but there's a difference now,
Red."

She looked skeptical, but waited for him to
elaborate.

"When all this stuff hit you before, you were
a little girl. A helpless little girl. You're not anymore. You're a
grown-up woman now."

She shook her head. "You think that's going
to make a difference?"

"You're stronger than the past is, Holly. You
can break its hold on you this time. But you have to turn around
and face it first. You can't keep running from it."

"Don't bet the farm on that."

"You telling me you're giving up? Even now
that you know your sister's killer is still out there
somewhere?"

"What the hell do you want from me?"

She was no longer speaking in a normal tone.
She'd raised her voice, and he knew she probably needed to. To vent
and yell and get some of the turmoil that prison visit had brought
to life off her chest.

"I want you to stop being a victim, Red. I
want you to stand up and fight the way I know you can. The way you
did today when you insisted on looking that bastard in the eyes so
you could know the truth."

"You give me one good reason why I should put
myself through any more of this hell, and I'll think about it.
Because I'll tell you, Vince, I can only think of one. And that
would be if it could bring my little sister back to me. But it
can't, can it?"

He couldn't lie to her. "No."

"Then, what is the point?"

"You want to know the point? You want the
fucking point?" He pulled over to the shoulder and stopped the car.
He then leaned forward, reached past her, and yanked open the glove
compartment. He jerked the silver frame out of it and dropped it
into her lap.

She glanced down at it. It was folded
shut.

"Go on, look at it.
Look
at it,
dammit."

Her hand was shaking when she reached for the
frame, opened it like a book. She stared down at the angelic little
faces. "Who ... who ... ?"

"Bobby and Kara Prague," he said.

Holly gaped at him, then back at the photo
again, and then she burst into tears. Noisy, messy tears. But he
didn't let up on her. "They're dead, and I'm pretty goddamn sure
the guy who killed them is the same man who killed your kid sister.
He's been killing little kids for eighteen years, and he's gonna
keep right on killing them until somebody does something to stop
him. And
that,
Red, is the point."

He had lost it with her. He hadn't meant to.
She wasn't tough enough to endure his anger, and she hadn't done a
damn thing to deserve it—except show signs of backing down. And why
the hell did that set him off? It wasn't as if he hadn't expected
it.

Or maybe it was. Maybe he'd been starting to
think she wasn't one of those helpless, needy women that got him
into so much trouble. Maybe he was starting to believe— or maybe to
hope—she was more. That she was strong, able to fix her own life
and not depend on him to do it for her. Because if she was, then
what he was starting to feel toward her wasn't just a part of his
recurring pattern, and to be avoided at all costs. Maybe it was
something more.

She didn't talk to him for a while. She
replaced the photo in the glove compartment, turned on the radio,
leaned back in her seat, and stared out the window.

Finally, he said, “I'm sorry I did that. It
was wrong of me.”

She said nothing.

"I didn't mean to hurt you, Red."

"Don't be so vain, Vince. I just found out
the man who killed my baby sister is still walking the streets.
Your temper tantrum isn't even on my list of concerns." She looked
at her hands, clenched tight in her lap, white and trembling. "I
don't know what to tell my mother. This is going to kill her."

He felt like an assassin for having forced
her to look at the photo that haunted his every thought. "Don't
tell her anything, just yet. You don't have any proof."

"What do you mean?" She sent him a look out
of wide, troubled eyes. "I was there. I looked into his eyes."

"I know that. But it's been years."

“It doesn't matter."

"You didn't say anything until now."

"I didn't
remember
until now. I
thought you said you believed me?"

"I do. I'm just telling you what other people
are liable to say."

She shook her head. "They have to reopen the
case."

"They who, Holly?"

"The authorities. You, for God's sake. You
keep telling me how I have to be strong enough to face this, and I
have to take charge. Jesus Christ, Vince, it's not my job. There's
a government, a system. They have to start looking for him again.
Are you telling me my word won't be good enough to make them do
that?"

"Holly..." he began.

"You know he was lying. You knew it before I
did. Didn't you?"

"I had a feeling, yeah." He sighed deeply,
flicking on the wipers as it started to rain. "Most of these types
have an m.o. and they stick to it. They prey on kids of a certain
age, coloring, and gender. It didn't make a lot of sense to think
Hubey Welles would have both male and female victims. When I got to
checking, I found all the solid evidence they had on him was
related to murdered boys. The murders he confessed to, three of
them, all unsolved, were little girls. No hard evidence beyond his
confession ever surfaced."

"Then you were right. He cut a deal with the
D.A. He'd confess to the murders, in exchange for a life sentence
rather than the death penalty."

"I have to assume he was convincing. The D.A.
must have honestly believed he could have done those crimes. And
God knows it would have been at least some relief to the families
to be able to have closure," Vince said slowly.

"It was false closure. Now they have to admit
that and reopen the cases. All three of them."

"Holly,
I'm
not even supposed to be
working this case, if you want to know the truth. This vacation I
keep saying I'm on? It wasn't by choice."

She stared hard at him, and for the life of
him he couldn't believe he was telling her any of this. "Why?" she
asked.

"I suppose if you asked my chief, he'd say it
was due to severe stress. He thought I showed signs of losing it
after I found those two kids."

Her gaze fell to the closed glove
compartment. "You cared too much. Didn't you? Got too
involved."

He thought for a moment. "My life is my job.
You know that?"

"No, I didn't."

"It is. I've never been married. I've never
wanted to do much of anything else except be a cop. Most of my pay
goes into the bank, not that I give a crap how much I have. No
house. I live in an apartment, a decent apartment, but nothing too
nice. It wouldn't be worth it. I don't spend enough time there to
make it all that important"

"You have a nice enough car," she
commented.

He smiled a little. "You want to know why I
bought it?"

"Yeah."

"I was on my way to a crime scene last
February in my beat-up Buick, and I got stuck on an icy hill. Had
to wait for a sand truck to come by before I could get up and over,
and by then the case had been assigned to someone else."

"And it pissed you off so much you went out
and bought a Jeep?"

"All-wheel drive," he said. “I don't get
stuck anymore."

She nodded. "You sound like a good cop."

"Been at it a long time."

"Then how did you manage to get so involved
in this case?"

He glanced at her, then focused on the road
again, saying nothing.

"I mean, an enforced leave of absence.
Digging around in it when you've been ordered not to. Carrying the
kids' pictures around with you. They don't sound like the kinds of
things a seasoned detective would do."

He drew a breath, sighed. "I made a
mistake."

"Must have been a big one."

He nodded. "I promised Sara Prague I'd find
her kids for her, and that everything would be all right."

She turned wide eyes on him. "That was a tall
promise."

"It was one I never should have made. She
believed me, you know. She really believed me. And I..."

He didn't finish, concentrating on driving
instead, and on pretending his eyes weren't burning like two hot
coals.

"There's a lot more to you than I thought,"
she said softly.

"I'm a cop. That's all, Holly. That's all I
am, and all I want to be."

He shifted uncomfortably under her
penetrating gaze. She was seeing a lot more than he wanted to
reveal. "Does it really matter what you want to be?" She shook her
head slowly. "I don't think it does, you know. I want to be a
normal, well-adjusted woman. I want to be able to get through a day
without turning the light switches off in the right order, or
moving the pencil holder on my desk half an inch to the left." She
hesitated for a moment, then went on. "Most of all, I want to be
the girl who saved her little sister from an attempted kidnapping
eighteen years ago. But I'm not. I'm not any of those things."

He looked at her, looked real deep into her
eyes. They seemed able to see straight through him, and they
touched him in places that hadn't been touched in a long time. He
didn't like that a bit. And he didn't like thinking they had a lot
in common, the two of them. Because he wanted to be the cop-hero
who'd saved the Prague kids in the nick of time. He wanted to be
the man who didn't break promises to broken mothers.

***

HOLLY WAS FRIGHTENED, more frightened than
she had been on her way to Auburn to see Hubey Welles. More
frightened than she had been in years, to be honest. She could feel
the old terror creeping in like a dark shadow over her soul. And
though the desire to face it, to fight it, as Vince kept insisting
she must, was still strong, the fear was stronger. Her monster was
still on the loose. The villain of her darkest nightmares was free.
He could be anywhere. Anyone. She wasn't sure she could stand to go
through her day-to-day existence knowing that. She'd only come as
far as she had because she'd believed him behind bars. The case
closed. Justice served. That was the foundation on which she'd
rebuilt her life, her mind, her sanity. And that foundation had
been ripped out from beneath her.

God, would she revert then? Would the panic
attacks, and the nightmares, and the obsessive behavior slowly take
over her life the way they had before?