Kill Me Once (38 page)

Her best friend was
dead
.

The phone jangled on Eric’s bedside table, kick-starting her heart back into gear. She raced across the room and picked it up in the middle of the second ring. ‘Hello?’

The voice on the other end of the line was unnaturally deep and robotic, computer-altered by a speech-masking device. ‘Look out the window,’ the voice told her. ‘I’d like to say hello to you, my dear.’

Dana stepped to the bedroom window with the cordless phone still at her ear. Her thumb went to the safety of the Glock to double-check that it was off. Looking down into the parking lot, she squinted toward the front doors.

From behind the rented Chevrolet he popped up like a human jack-in-the-box. A man dressed as a clown.

He raised a set of keys and playfully jangled them in Dana’s direction, then tossed them into the thicket of overgrown bushes lining the side of her apartment complex.

‘Hello, Dana,’ the clown said into the cellphone at his ear. ‘Long time, no see, sweetheart.’ It was the same robotic voice as before.

Dana dropped the cordless phone to the floor and emptied the Glock’s full clip through the closed window. Shattered glass rained down on the parking lot below.

But the clown only laughed gleefully at her while he danced across the street, effortlessly dodging the bullets kicking up thick chunks of concrete at his feet.

Jumping into a brown Lincoln parked on the far side of the road, he jammed the car hard into drive and peeled out. The Lincoln’s bald tyres squealed as though in agony against the slick pavement as he sped away, the noise echoing in the night like the sound of insane laughter.

And then he was simply
gone
.

CHAPTER EIGHTY-THREE

Eric’s funeral three days later was the hardest thing that Dana had ever had to live through – even harder than the night she’d watched her own mother brutally murdered right in front of her eyes. She couldn’t help thinking there must have been something she could have done to prevent it. But he had taken her parents away from her so why should she be surprised he’d take the nearest person to family that she’d had since? She didn’t even want to think about how Crawford had been like a father to her. It made her feel sick.

She choked back sobs during the entire service, and not even Bill Krugman’s comforting arm around her shoulders was enough to take the pain away.

Her head swam with the realisation that her best friend was dead and he was never coming back.

She was all alone in the world.

Again
.

The FBI had lifted Crawford’s fingerprints off the claw hammer in Eric’s bedroom, the final proof that they were looking for. It came as a surprise to absolutely no one. He knew he was better than them, and now he was just showing off to prove it.

Dana returned home directly after the service, knowing that she wouldn’t have been able to handle the sight of watching them lower Eric’s body into the frozen ground. Outside her apartment complex two Cleveland PD cruisers were parked to provide a visual deterrent should Crawford make good on his threats to come after her. Slumping down on her living-room couch with Oreo curled up in her lap, Dana cracked the seal on a fresh bottle of Captain Morgan’s rum and cried uncontrollably for the next hour. Twenty minutes later the phone jangled on the wall in her kitchen.

She picked it up drunkenly and found herself listening numbly to the words Bill Krugman was saying.

‘The bastard squeezed off a couple of shots at the graveyard, Dana. Winged me. I’m getting patched up at the Cleveland Clinic now. He also set off an explosion down the street. The security detail assigned to your place was called away to go deal with it. All hands on deck, the chief of police said.’

Dana’s head almost imploded with the news. ‘Was anyone
killed?’

‘No, thank God,’ Krugman said. ‘But there is something else.’

He blew out a slow breath but didn’t continue right away.

‘What is it?’ Dana said. ‘Just tell me.’

The Director cleared his throat. ‘You’re off the case, Dana. Things are way too personal for you, were from the start. I should have realised that earlier, but Crawford convinced me to give you a second chance. Now I know why.’

Dana couldn’t have been any more stunned if he’d just slammed an aluminium baseball bat across her forehead. She started to protest but Krugman cut her off before she could continue.

‘Sorry, Dana. That’s final. I’m sending a new security detail to your apartment to watch over you now. Should be at your door in a couple minutes. Other than that, you’re done. It’s all over for you.’

Dana’s mouth went dry. Over?
Done?
How could it be
over?

She was so shocked that for a moment she couldn’t even
breathe
. Everything was coming down on her all at once.

Her stomach gurgled violently from the Captain Morgan’s swishing around in her guts. She dropped the phone to the floor and rushed into the bathroom for the toilet, but her left foot slipped on the tiled floor just as a knock sounded at her front door. The security detail.

A split second later Dana’s head slammed into the sharp edge of the bathroom sink. Bright white stars danced in front of her eyes.

After that, there was nothing. No grief, no nausea, no pain.

Just a cold black flood of emptiness as the unconsciousness wrapped her brain tight in its freezing embrace.

CHAPTER EIGHTY-FOUR

Numb confusion replaced the nothingness sometime later as Dana struggled to come awake. She had no way of knowing exactly how long she’d been out of it. Might have been an hour but just as easily could’ve been a month. It felt like someone had stuck a long needle in through her ear and anaesthetised her brain.

Her eyes were still too heavy to open and when she tried to move her arms she found that she couldn’t. Her shoulders ached as though they were on fire.

The fog cleared gradually and Dana realised her hands were tightly secured behind her back with some kind of restraining device.

A deep voice came from no more than five feet away.

‘Special Agent Dana Whitestone, you are under arrest for the murders of the five little girls in Cleveland, of Mary Ellen Orton in Los Angeles, of the Aiken family in Kansas, of the college students at Loyola University, of the highschool students in the western suburbs of Cuyahoga County, of the young mother and child you interviewed on the east side, of the elderly couple in West Virginia and of your neighbour Eric Carlton. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you. Do you understand these rights?’

Dana groaned as her eyelids fluttered open. Everything was a blur, as though she was trying to focus through a veil of tears. Wherever she was, though, it was freezing. The lighting was dim, but she could just make out the puffs of frozen air issuing from her mouth with every ragged breath she exhaled. She couldn’t seem to hear straight, either.

She could smell all right, though. The scent that filled her nostrils made her want to throw up.

Liquorice
.

When Dana’s vision cleared finally, she saw that she was tied to a chair in the middle of a cold room. She gave a startled moan when she suddenly realised where she was. If this was a nightmare, it was the perfect setting.

She was in the house of her childhood. Or at least in the
bedroom
.

Dana looked up at the large man standing over her. He was dressed entirely in black and his face was covered with a black ski mask. Dark sunglasses shielded his eyes.

The fear materialised as a lump in her throat. ‘Why are you doing this, Crawford?’ she stammered. It
was
Crawford, wasn’t it? Although it didn’t sound like him. She cleared her throat. ‘You had everything. You were the best.’

He threw back his head and laughed. ‘Before we get to that, Dana, I have a little something to show you. Are you awake enough for it yet? Brace yourself. This will probably come as something of a shock.’

He moved to a large wardrobe three feet away – it was a perfect replica of the one she’d had in her bedroom as a kid – and flipped the latch up. Dana gasped as he stepped to the side and the doors creaked open slowly.

His face blue and his lips black from strangulation, Crawford Bell was hanging by the neck from a length of tightly knotted cord.

‘Not exactly your daddy, but I figured he was close enough for my purposes.’

Dana shook her head violently to clear it and stifled a scream. She stared up in horror at the man dressed in black.

‘But
how?’
she said, her brain still foggy despite the horrifying vision before her.
‘
Crawford’s prints were on the hammer in Eric’s bedroom.’

The man in black laughed. ‘Jesus Christ, Dana, fingerprints can
lie
. Don’t you fucking know that? You can transfer them with a simple piece of Scotch tape.’

He waved a hand in the air. ‘Do you remember the man who gave Crawford a glass of water when you two were in the library at Quantico? The asshole didn’t even drink it. Just set it down on the table for my private investigator to retrieve and send to me. Pay the wrong people the right kind of money and they don’t ask too many questions. Anyway, some fucking expert
he
turned out to be.’

Dana’s mind slammed back to Quantico. She
did
remember the man in the library, but her mind had been too clouded even to consider the possibility. Once she’d suspected Crawford of masterminding the copycat murders she’d held onto those suspicions as tenaciously as a dog with a bone between its teeth and she’d taken everyone with her. She hadn’t thought things all the way through – none of them had. And now Crawford had been murdered; it was no comfort to know he was dying anyway.

‘Who the fuck
are
you?’ Dana rasped.

The man in black smiled and dragged a magnetic easel in front of her. Again, a perfect replica of the one she’d had in her bedroom as a kid. On it, NATHAN STIEDOWE had been spelled out in colourful plastic letters.

‘Notice anything familiar about this name, Dana?’

She swallowed painfully. ‘No.’

‘Well, watch this.’

Dana looked on numbly as he slid the colourful plastic
D
out of his name and started a new row six inches below. Next he slid down the
A
. Then the
N
.

One by one, the letters slowly formed two new words.

Dana Whitestone
.

She looked up at him in confusion. ‘Another anagram?’

‘Precisely.’

‘But why
my
name? I still don’t understand what the fuck’s going on.’

Nathan Stiedowe removed his ski mask and dark sunglasses at last. The story he told brought them both hurtling back to 1976.

CHAPTER EIGHTY-FIVE

Trembling in fear and anger, Dana looked up into those horrible brown eyes for only the second time in her life.

They were demonic and glittering and she knew them as well as she knew her own. She’d seen them only once before – when she’d been four years old – but they’d haunted her nightmares ever since. For more than thirty years those terrible brown eyes had silently mocked her every time she’d closed her own eyes and tried to fall asleep.

The eyes of the man who had murdered her parents.

‘You sick son of a bitch,’ Dana hissed.

Nathan Stiedowe threw his head back and laughed harshly. ‘And you happen to be the daughter of the very same one.’

Dana glared at him. ‘What are you talking about?’

The man in black tutted. ‘Come now, Dana. Haven’t you figured it out yet? I’m your brother, dear. Well, your
half-brother
, in any event. Don’t you recognise the family resemblance?’

‘Bullshit,’ she snapped, the flame of anger building higher inside her. ‘You’re no relation of mine. You’re just a lonely, misguided piece of shit.’

‘Ah, but it’s true. Have a look at this.’

He removed a thin sheet of paper from his breast pocket before unfolding it and holding it up in front of her eyes.

Dana stared at the name at the top. Jeremiah Michael Quigley – the name of the reporter who’d written about her parents’ deaths. Then she glanced down to the line below that indicated the identity of the mother.

Sara Beth Quigley. Her mother’s maiden name.

‘You doctored that,’ Dana said weakly. But she already knew he was telling the truth. She’d have to process the information later. There was no time now to rearrange all the shattered pieces of her past to make him fit in somewhere – not when she was tied to a chair in the middle of a cold room that was a perfect snapshot of her worst childhood memory.

‘What’s your game?’ she asked. ‘Why didn’t you just kill me when you had the chance?’

Nathan Stiedowe refolded the paper and placed it back into his breast pocket. ‘Oh, this document is very authentic, Dana. That much I assure you. As for what my game is, I’m surprised you haven’t figured out that little mystery as well. I’m very disappointed in you. I watched you graduate – you could have been the best.’

Dana forced herself to concentrate. He’d been there, watching her, even then. Somehow, through her overwhelming fear and anger, she had to switch gears and try to regain control of the situation.

‘You recreate the crimes of notorious serial killers,’ she said, trying to keep her voice even. Flatter him – that was what all the training told her – keep him engaged. ‘And though I don’t approve of what you did, I have to admit I’m a little impressed. It takes a focused mind to accomplish what you did. You made very few mistakes.’

Nathan Stiedowe sneered at her, darkening his handsome face. ‘Correction, Dana. I made
no
mistakes. Not one fucking mistake at all. Don’t you understand what that means?’

Dana inhaled sharply when the connection snapped into place. The weird feeling she was missing something wasn’t due to the meticulous attention to detail that he’d been paying while recreating the crimes of other serial killers; it was from what he’d done that was
different
.