One Scream Away (32 page)

“
Mabel, I just wanted to tell you we’ll be meeting at Neo’s for brunch tomorrow, so bring the books. I’ll see you then
,” the elderly voice had said on the answering machine.

Which meant Mabel Skinner would be missed by lunchtime tomorrow. Damn. She hadn’t looked like the book club type.

Too bad. He liked Mabel’s house, except for the ugly upholstery. Liked her car, too, the luxury Lexus. He’d wondered what an old lady needed with a Lexus.

She didn’t need it anymore, not stuffed in the big chest freezer in the basement with Tater Tots and ground turkey. He hadn’t enjoyed the killing of Mabel Skinner, hadn’t thought of Jenny or Beth or even his mother. Her death was just a necessity, like Mo Hammond’s. Chevy hadn’t particularly enjoyed killing him, either.

He sighed, thinking how close he was now. Two dolls left.

He went to Mabel’s dining room and got the last box—it held both of the last two dolls together, along with a spindle-wheeled carriage. Jenny watched, his dark mood rubbing off on her, and he pulled the baby doll out of the carriage and took it over to her. “Here you go,” he said. “You can play with her until I need her.”

She said nothing—she hadn’t for a couple of days.

Damn Neil Sheridan for what he had done. No one hurt Jenny.

Resolve sank into Chevy’s soul, and he went back to the table to finish with the mother doll. Sheridan’s demise was all planned: Just as soon as Chevy was ready to leave Mabel’s house, Sheridan’s number would come up.

And after that, Beth. Mother doll Beth.

N
eil stayed with Beth and Abby, but he buried himself in paper and phone calls. The first call was from Copeland: “The child doll that was burned up was in good condition when Stefan Larousse gave her to Anne Chaney,” he said. “So Bankes burned her.”

“Which means he’s past the point of matching the women to dolls. He’s manipulating them himself now.” So much for Beth using the dolls to try to figure out what he was planning for her and Abby.

“Even so, research is going over all the rest of the dolls now.”

“Research,” Neil said. “Not Beth.”

“Standlin’s worried about your girl. She suggested we get our own doll expert.”

“Beth knows what she’s looking at,” Neil said. “She wants to help.”

“Sure. But if that last pair shows up with a cord around the baby’s neck and the nipples carved off the mother, how’s she gonna handle that?”

Neil’s gut lurched. Score one for Standlin. “Okay. You got everyone’s butt covered who’s working the case?”

“We went through the videos. Any agent or cop whose face showed up on the news now has a family tucked away in hiding. Sacowicz’s wife took their kids up to Long Island.”

“Yeah, I talked to her this morning. Rick’s brother is there, another cop.” Looked just like Rick, with the same Slavic brow and coppery eyebrows.
God. Rick.

“We put the information about the dolls on TV,” Copeland said, “and put every version of Bankes’s face out there we can think of. Looks like he knows how to use padding in his cheeks and latex for wrinkles to pull off Chadburne, and heaven knows what other tricks he learned as a theater major. But we’re checking fifty tips an hour now. The bastard won’t be able to move. Won’t have anyplace to go.”

“He has the firepower and silencers he picked up from Mo Hammond. He probably popped an old woman, and he’s been sitting in her living room watching the news and eating her TV dinners. Driving her car around.”

Copeland let out a curse. “If that’s what he’s doing, we’ll never find him.”

But that’s what he was doing; Neil knew it. He sat at his laptop for ten more minutes thinking it through, then dialed Copeland again. A secretary put him on hold, said Copeland was talking to a field agent. Neil paced while he waited.

“You got anyone checking packages at the post office and UPS?” he asked when Copeland came back on the line.

“They’re using X-ray machines at the post office that serves Foster’s; UPS and FedEx already scan packages to the D.C. area.”

“Okay. Bankes couldn’t mail a package that large from an unmanned mailbox, but what about private parcels like UPS?”

“We put drivers on the lookout for anything the appropriate size and weight. They’ve got pictures of him—male and female—taped to their dashboards. But if he wants to send something at this point, he’ll just pay someone like he did with the flower box. Two weeks ago at a UPS store in Boise, Mrs. Chadburne paid a guy to send boxes to Beth on certain dates. Chadburne told him she was going to be out of town on the days the boxes needed to go.”

Neil blew out a breath. It was a long shot.

“But listen,” Copeland said, “things are moving, anyway. That call I took just now was from the lab in Philadelphia that’s doing the mom’s body and her father’s. Hold on to your hat.”

Neil straightened.

“Jenny—Chevy’s little sister—still had blood work on file at the hospital where they worked on her. Tests on her grandfather’s corpse show too many similarities. Looks like with Grandpa living in the house, the Bankeses were more than one big happy family.”

“What?” It was taking a minute to sink in. “Incest?”

“There’s no way Jenny’s genes could have come from some other tree. Peggy Bankes was being nailed by her dad. That explains a few things, doesn’t it?”

Neil’s mind was racing—to Abby. “What about Chevy?”

“No, his father was some schoolboy named David Moore in the next town. We talked to his parents, and they said he never had anything to do with Peggy after Robin Bankes found out she was pregnant. He beat the hell out of the boy and locked Peggy up.”

A mixture of nausea and relief surged through Neil. Bad enough knowing Bankes’s blood ran in Abby’s veins. To think that blood might have been spawned of incest… “So Peggy Bankes was molested by her father. Robin Bankes was Jenny’s father.”

“And grandfather, both. Standlin’s having a ball with this one,” Copeland said.

“So there
could
have been a child before Chevy. Everyone says Peggy didn’t have any boyfriends until Chevy’s dad, but”—he stopped, wincing at the thought—“maybe she didn’t need one.”

“Man.” Neil could picture Copeland running a hand over his head. “I’ll push the lab on the Bible and the receipt you found. But either way, it looks like textbook, long-term sexual abuse. Peggy Bankes spent her life making everything look nice from the outside. Psychiatrist’s playground, that family.”

“Anything about Robin Bankes’s death raising eyebrows?”

“Grandpa was sick in his last years; everyone says stomach cancer.”

“I know what ‘everyone’ says. What do the doctors say?”

“We haven’t found a doctor who treated him yet.”

“How ’bout that?” Neil said.

“Don’t get too excited until toxicology comes back. It could’ve been stomach cancer just like everyone thought.”

Or it could’ve been murder. By a woman whose dad chased away her boyfriend and forced her into his own bed.
Who killed Cock Robin?

Neil took a deep breath, pacing like a caged panther. As much as he wanted to be close to Beth and Abby, staying cooped up was killing him.

“As for the mother’s suicide,” Copeland said, “the physical evidence on the body isn’t pointing to murder, but Bankes still could have done it.”

“But why? Even if Grandpa was fucked up, we haven’t found anyone who said Peggy Bankes mistreated Chevy.” But even as he said it, he remembered what Beth had divulged.
Mother is singing. She does that so she can’t hear Jenny cry.

Maybe it was Jenny she mistreated.

“Well, damn it, Sheridan, it’s something. We’re on a roll.”

Maybe. But Bankes was on a faster roll, an inch ahead of them. Neil fingered the photos of the dolls from Chaney’s car. “The first dolls were sent from Boise by the guy Chadburne paid, right?”

“Right.”

“So how’d he get the others here?”

“Could’ve driven them,” Copeland said. “We think he just drove here in his car then dumped it someplace and started using other people’s cars.”

“Maybe. Or the dolls were waiting for him when he got here.”

“I’ll tell the lab to check any dirt or cobwebs on the boxes the dolls came in. Maybe he sent them to his mother’s house to be stored.”

“If so, who signed for the deliveries there?”

They both said it at the same time: “Mo Hammond.”

Confirmation came later that evening. Beth had just tucked Abby into bed; Neil was looking forward to tucking in with Beth when his phone rang. Copeland had called the resident agent for Samson, Pennsylvania, and sent him to search Hammond’s gun store again, while the lab dug back into the boxes that had contained the first three dolls.

“The dolls weren’t stashed at Bankes’s house,” Copeland reported, a weary note to his voice. “Hammond stored them.”

“How do we know?”

“They matched speckles on one of the boxes to paint used at Hammond’s shop two years ago. It’s like you said: Hammond was the connection between Bankes’s plans and his run on Beth. He must’ve stored those dolls for all the years Bankes was in prison.”

“And what does that do for us?”

“Not a damned thing.” He sighed. “I’ll tell you what, Sheridan, we know so many facts about Bankes my head is spinning. But not one of them is any help in finding him.”

“So pull him out. Make something happen.”

“That’s what I’ve been thinking—it’s the reason I called. I wanted you to make sure Beth knew that Hannah Blake has turned the corner. She’s gonna be okay.”

Neil closed his eyes. For once, some news he’d enjoy giving to Beth. “Great. So what are you thinking?”

“That we’re gonna have a funeral for her, anyway. See if Bankes shows up.”

C
hevy waited near the Dumpsters. They were tucked into an alcove, as they usually were, and the mall would be opening in five minutes, at ten o’clock. Talk radio was lamenting the death of Hannah Blake—apparently she had passed away early in the morning as a result of complications from the surgery after her accident. The host was blaming the Democrats for creating the type of society in which this sort of thing could happen. Chevy thought about calling in. Wouldn’t
that
be a hoot?

He adjusted his wedding ring and looked at his watch, imagining all those FBI agents gathered around a conference table, circling round and round Hannah Blake’s death. Probably planning a setup to catch him at her funeral or something. A profiler on Channel 5 had been interviewed and said a murderer like Bankes would normally keep trophies of his kills, and since Bankes didn’t seem to be doing that, they expected he would attend his victims’ funerals to get a thrill from seeing what he had done. Hell, Chevy wouldn’t put it past the Feds to fake the whole thing and try to lure him in.

Idiots. He didn’t need to go to the funerals for a thrill, and he
did
keep trophies from the women he killed. He kept their voices.

Chevy shifted, growing hard with the thought. He flipped down the mirrored visor on Mabel’s Lexus. The beard was a nuisance, the temporary black hair dye made his scalp itch, and the padding that fattened his cheeks and gave his face a totally new shape made him feel as if he’d just been to the dentist. The disguise probably wasn’t necessary just driving around in a car that wouldn’t be suspicious until Mabel was discovered missing, but he didn’t want to take any chances. Even through tinted windows, some asshole might look at him sideways and try to be a hero or something. Better safe than sorry.

So wait, watch. The parking lot was beginning to fill, shoppers streaming like ants toward the mall entrance. Women mostly, alone, in pairs, often with children. The occasional man or family. Sooner or later, the right combination would appear, and the end would sneak that much closer. A quick abduction, a quick phone call to Sheridan, then,
snap
. One proverbially tall, dark, and handsome FBI agent—dead.

And Beth Denison on a ride straight to hell.

“Sheridan.”

Neil answered his phone without taking his eyes off Beth. A small group of friends and family members of Hannah Blake had gathered at the Foster home—keeping up the appearance that she had died—while a funeral home was being staffed with FBI agents and undercover police officers for the next day’s mock service. It was the opinion of the shrinks that Bankes might amuse himself by showing up at the funeral or at least lurking in the background.

Neil didn’t think he would.

“Sheridan,” the dispatcher said into his ear, “it’s Chevy Bankes. He wants to talk to you.”

Neil’s heart stopped. The dispatcher’s voice had trembled, as if she knew the significance of the call. Not a prank, then.

“Put him through,” he said tightly.

Seconds passed while Neil’s heart refused to beat and he stepped from Carol Foster’s living room into a foyer. Finally the lines clicked and Bankes’s voice came through: “Tell them to put me through faster, you asshole, or you’ll never hear from me again.”

Click.
Dead air.

Shit.
Neil glanced up; Harrison saw something in Neil’s expression and started for him. By the time he joined Neil, Neil had the FBI dispatcher back on the phone.

“But I was told we needed time to activate a successful trace, Mr. Sher—”

“I don’t care what you were told,” Neil snarled under his breath. “Don’t waste time trying to stall him on hold, or we won’t get him at all. He’s not fool enough to stay on the line, and even if we trace him, we’ll find the call comes from a goddamned phone booth in Timbuktu. Put him through
fast
the next time.”

“I take my orders from Agent Copeland.”

“Damn it. Connect me to Copeland.”

Copeland was on a couple of seconds later.

“Bankes is calling me,” Neil said into his phone. “Tell your phone people not to dick around with him anymore.”

“When?”

“Now. I gotta get off; he’ll probably call back.”

“Okay. I’ll change the phone orders on my end, but you gotta keep him on the line, Sheridan. Even if he’s using a prepaid cell, we can nail him. I have two choppers outfitted; they can be in the air in two minutes.”