One Scream Away (39 page)

A local deputy with a jack worked at the Monte Carlo’s trunk, freeing it suddenly with a crunching sound. He wrenched his fingers under the edge and pried it open.

“Holy God!” he said, leaping back.

Neil rushed forward. The deputy was still catching his breath, and two others had stepped close to see. Neil barged through, shoved aside a uniform, and peered down into the cavern of the car’s trunk.

They’d found Abby.

B
ankes circled like a shark. Beth stood slightly bent, dizzy and half-numb, her sleeveless dress little more protection from the elements than a slip. Every breath was a knife in her ribs. The hole in her right shoulder had soaked the back of her clothes, and her wrists were still bound together. Beth wiggled her fingers against her hips and thought maybe they’d moved slightly, but she wasn’t sure. The blood on her hands felt like gelatin.

Bankes smiled, his gym bag hanging over his shoulder and the gun pointing in her direction as he walked around her. A lantern sat on the ground about five feet away; another one shed sickly light from somewhere behind her.

“Do you like it?” he asked, indicating a small clearing in the woods. “I chose this spot just for you.”

“Where’s Abby?”

“Who? Oh, yes. Abby. Why, telling you that would be rather like sharing the end of a story ahead of time, wouldn’t it?”

Beth closed her eyes on a prayer:
God, please don’t let me have walked all this way into the woods only to find Abby isn’t here.

“You didn’t answer my question. How do you like my stage? I wish you could have seen it in the daylight. The lanterns hardly do it justice.”

Beth forced her eyes open, cataloging the details of the setting Bankes had chosen, even as she tried to focus on breathing. She could hear the Susquehanna lolling not too far away, and smelled fresh foliage and pine straw. Otherwise, there seemed nothing unique about this particular spot in the forest, save for a wooden platform some distance behind Bankes. It was built between two trees, ten or twelve feet up. Steep stairs climbed up one side, like a ship’s ladder, and benches had been built three-quarters of the way around it. A deer stand, Beth thought. She’d heard of them before but never seen one.

The Hunter. Apparently, women
were
in season when Chevy Bankes went hunting.

And children?

“Where’s Abby?” Beth asked. “Did you kill her the way you killed Jenny?”

“I told you. I didn’t hurt Jenny.”

“And I told you, I don’t believe you.”

Smack.

Beth’s head snapped to the side; she gritted her teeth.
Cry, be weak. Let him jerk you around
, said Standlin.
Don’t make a sound unless it’s to say, “Go to hell, you bastard,
” said Neil. She closed her eyes, perversely wanting to serve Neil’s memory by doing things right this time.

“Go,” Bankes said, jerking his chin toward the deer stand. “I want you up there.”

Beth spit at him.

The gun in his hand sailed toward her cheek. She ducked, but her reflexes were dull and it caught the side of her head. She reeled with the impact, and a second later, Bankes was beside her on the ground, his voice and pistol both digging into the gash it had just made on her temple. “You want to hear from your daughter again, don’t you?” Beth closed her eyes but didn’t make a sound. “Then get in the deer stand.”

He pushed her up the rungs, his body at her back and the gun barely lifting from her as they moved. Beth slumped into a corner on the floor. Even in the dim light, she could see that the platform seemed to have been prepared for her arrival. Leaves and other debris had been brushed off, revealing patches of moist, darkened wood that had been eaten away by insects for years holding imprints of pinecones like ancient fossils.

Bankes opened his gym bag and pulled out an old cassette tape player. One by one, he set tapes out in a row. Beth could make out the labels on some of them:
Paige 3, Paige 4, Paige 5, Nina 1, Nina 2, Anne 1, Lila 1, 2…

Abby’s head lolled to the side as Neil cradled her in his arms. His heart was an aching stone. A flock of agents surrounded him, all looking as if they’d seen a ghost.

“Ambulance is coming,” Harrison said. “ETA three minutes.”

Neil sat down on the curb of the parking lot and jostled Abby on his lap. A moan escaped her lips. “Sweetheart,” he said, shaking her gently. His voice broke. “Abby, honey, come on. It’s Neil. Talk to me, please. Heinz is back; he missed you.” He cupped her little face with his palm and tried to get her to face him. “Come on, baby, come on.”

Her pulse was steady, respiration normal. There had been no sign of broken bones or injuries with the exception of a few bruises on her arms—roughly the size of a man’s hand. They’d examined her for head wounds or broken bones before they pulled her out of the trunk, and she didn’t seem to have any.

But she wasn’t waking up, either.

“Abby.” Neil raised his voice. “Jesus, Abby, talk to me—”

“Hey, look here.” A deputy pushed into the circle of onlookers holding a plastic bag. Inside was a medicine bottle. Neil couldn’t see the name on the label, but it looked like a dark red liquid.

“Nighttime Benadryl,” the deputy said. “Looks like about two capfuls are missing, and here’s the cap.”

Neil looked around in a panic. “He gave her drugs?”

Harrison laughed. “Man, my wife’s threatened to do that to the kids a hundred times. Benadryl.” He sounded downright joyful. “Knocks ’em out cold if it doesn’t wire ’em like acid.”

The knot in Neil’s chest loosened fractionally. Harrison was still smiling. Neil hadn’t even known he was married, let alone that he was a father, but he seemed to know what he was talking about. “You sure, man?”

Harrison brushed a knuckle across Abby’s cheek. “If this is what he gave her, she’ll sleep it off and be good as new in four to six hours. We’ll tell the EMTs, but think about it, man. Chevy hated his mother because she hurt the baby sister. It’s looking more and more like he had one helluva soft spot for Jenny. Hurting kids isn’t his thing. His party is with grown women.”

His party was with Beth.

B
eth tried to block out the sounds. Cries, screams, shrieks of total agony. The early morning birds and midges of the woods had all gone silent at the first shrill cry; the forest now, appropriately, was deathly quiet.

A leggy black spider inched across the bench. Beth had watched its erratic journey for what she presumed was the better part of a half hour now, and stupidly she wondered if spiders had ears. It was one of those things she had probably learned in fifth grade, like the names of every state capital, but she didn’t remember those, either. Her heart went out to the poor, lost thing, even if it couldn’t hear the agony going on around it. It was no doubt searching for the web that had been there before Bankes prepared his stage.

He took away my world, too
, she thought as someone named Nina squalled. Beth closed her eyes.

Her stomach had already given up what little was in it, her heart seeming to rip from her chest with every guttural cry that came from the tiny speakers. She tried to think of something that could force the screams into the background, but every thought in her head revolved around Abby.

Nina shrieked in pain. Bankes sat quietly on the bench as if attending a symphony. The tape came to an unexpected end, and he popped it out and shoved another into the machine. His pistol lay next to his thigh. On first glance, he seemed careless with it, but Beth knew better. She was out of reach, weak and dazed, her ribs and shoulder aching with every breath, and her feet crusted with dirt-filled, bloody gashes. She slumped against the bench, telling herself it could only help her for him to think she was beyond the ability to hold herself upright, but wondering if she really was. If the moment came, would she be strong enough, physically, to take advantage of it?

The railing and bench on the deer stand lined three and a half sides. If he stepped close enough to that fourth side, where the ladder descended, and if she could just get her legs tangled in his…

Then, what? A quick scissors cut? A kick? She couldn’t think. Someone named Nina was dying in her ears.
Nina 2.
Still two agonizing hours from death.

Suddenly Bankes pushed Stop. “You’re not enjoying my collection, Beth. That’s one of my favorites, and here you are more interested in that asinine little spider than in what I’m trying to show you.” He picked up the pistol and leaned over, squashing the spider with the butt of the gun. But not entirely. Half its little body smeared into the wood, the other half flailed, anchored to the spot by its own gore. Bankes sat back down. “I guess it’s time to let you hear my most recent acquisition. Someone a little closer to home might stir you.”

Oh, no. Not Lexi Carter. Beth wasn’t sure she could handle listening to a woman who had been murdered in her own home.

Beth turned and stared into the forest.
Click.
The Play button caught.

Silence. More silence. Then, a tiny, tiny voice.
“Mommy?”

Beth’s eyes flew open. Chevy Bankes grinned at her.

“Mommy, where are you?”
Abby was sniffling, trying to sound brave.
“I want to go home. Mommy, please. This tape is for you. Please, Mommy, come back.”

Terror transformed to red waves of rage. Blinded by it, she lunged.

Bankes shoved, and Beth smashed back against the railing. Warm liquid oozed from her shoulder again, and she vaguely realized he was working the cassette player, pushing Play and Record simultaneously.

Fear grabbed her by the throat. It was time. He would make tapes of her murder now. And it wasn’t the idea of dying that clenched at her vitals and twisted everything inside. It wasn’t even the idea of the pain he would force her to endure. It was the notion that Abby
might
still be alive, somewhere, calling for her mommy.

“What did you
do
to her?” Beth whispered.

Bankes breathed close over her face as he whispered, “I killed her. Or maybe I didn’t. Maybe I left her alive and bleeding and crying. Maybe I have more tapes of her for you to hear.”

“She’s just a little girl! Why would you
do
this?”
“Why?”
He straightened, his mouth curled into a sneer. “You know why.”

“I know I ruined things with Anne Chaney. I know I let you go to jail. But you deserved it. Even if you didn’t kill Anne single-handedly, you deserved every moment you spent in prison, and more.” She glanced at the tape player. It was running, recording her stormy swan song. But maybe she could make sure something else got on the tape, too. Explanations. For the families of Anne Chaney and the other women Bankes had killed before he encountered Beth, for the families of Hannah Blake and Lexi Carter and the women whose deaths had been mimicked with fashion dolls. For Neil’s grieving family—one estranged brother in Switzerland, one little sister in Atlanta, a mother in Florida.

Beth lifted her chin, speaking more clearly for the recording. “You hate me because I ended your killing spree.” She glanced at the machine, oddly invigorated by the possibility of leaving explanations. Explanations she had once vowed to never reveal. “You hate me because after
you raped me,
I raised your daughter while you languished in prison. And how many other women were there before Anne Chaney? How many voices have you collected?”

Bankes’s lips twitched at the corners, as if it amused him that Beth knew plenty of others had walked in her shoes. “Before Anne Chaney? Hmmm. There were three, not counting Mother.” He bent down, the pistol brushing Beth’s cheek. “Would you like to hear them?”

“I’d like to know what a man gets from listening to women scream in pain and beg for their lives.”

“Pleasure,” he said simply. “Orgasms so intense sometimes I think I’m dying. But mostly… silence.”

Silence? He said it with such reverence Beth shivered. She wished she could take back her questions. She didn’t want to know any of it. She didn’t want to listen as this evil man took pleasure in reliving a string of atrocities Beth could hardly imagine.

Oh, Abby. Where are you?

Grief smothered every other emotion, and Beth had to grit her teeth to keep it from pouring out in great, gut-wrenching sobs. She forced herself to concentrate on the tape, on getting something out there in the world that would someday make sense of this man’s madness. “Why did you want to kill Anne Chaney?”

He’d been pacing the long side of the deer stand but stopped. “She was a fraud. All of them, frauds.” He looked at her, hard. “Anne Chaney was a lying, deceiving slut. She had lunch with her best friend at my hotel every day during a conference. They’d been friends since college; they kissed each other on the cheek and laughed and gossiped and talked about old times. And for dinner, they’d all go out—Anne, her best friend from college, and her best friend’s husband. Now, Beth, do you want to know what happened after the cocktails were finished and everyone turned in for the night?”

No, I don’t.

“Her friend’s husband came back to the hotel. Anne fucked her best friend’s husband all night.”

Beth was shocked. “So you’ve taken it upon yourself to rid the world of adulterers? I’m not an adulterer.”

His eyes glazed over, two hard copper orbs in his face. “No,” he said quietly, “you’re not. You’re worse. You’re the worst kind of fraud there is.”

A chill slithered down her spine, taking a measure of Beth’s resolve with it. “Is it because of Abby?”

“I told you, I don’t want Abby. Blood is nothing.”

“Then what?”

The gun pressed under her chin. “You hurt Jenny.”

“You keep saying that. I never even met Jenny! Jenny disappeared eighteen years ago. She’s dead.”

He seemed to not be listening. He’d gone to his gym bag, pushed the pistol into his waistband. Gently, almost reverently, he used both hands to withdraw something from the bag, something small and round and white, something smooth and…