Thr3e (17 page)

“Let’s go.”

She didn’t take him home. Detectives were still searching the place for anything Slater might have left. It would take them a few hours.

“They’re not going to dump my underwear drawers, are they?”

Jennifer laughed. “Not unless Slater left his shorts.”

“Probably just as well I’m gone.”

“You like things neat, don’t you?”

“Clean, sure.”

“That’s good. A man should know how to do laundry.”

“Where’re we going?”

“You have the phone with you?”

He instinctively felt his pocket. Amazing how small phones could be. He pulled it out and flipped it open. It fit in his palm, open.

“Just checking,” she said, turning onto Willow.

“You think he’ll call again?” he asked.

“Yes, the confession wasn’t what he was looking for.”

“I guess not.”

“But he does want a confession. You’re sure about that, right?”

“That’s what he said. When I confess, he goes away. But confess what?”

“That’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it? What does Slater want you to confess? You have no inkling whatsoever?”

“I just ruined my career and only God knows what else by telling the world that I tried to kill a boy—believe me, if I’d thought of any alternative to that confession, I’d have spilled my guts.”

She nodded and frowned. “The demand for a confession’s the only part of this puzzle that doesn’t fit the Riddle Killer profile. Somehow he dug something up on you that he thinks is significant.”

“Like what? How many sins have you committed, Agent Peters? Can you remember them all?”

“Please, call me Jennifer. No, I guess I can’t.”

“So what does Slater consider significant? You want me to go on television and list every sin I can ever remember committing?”

“No.”

“The only thing that makes sense is the boy,” Kevin said. “But then the confession should have gotten a response, right?”

“With Slater, yes. I think so. Unless, of course, he
is
the boy, but he wants you to confess something besides your attempt to kill him.”

“It wasn’t an attempt to kill him. It was more like self-defense. The kid was about to kill
me!”

“I can accept that. Why did he want to kill you?”

The question took Kevin off guard. “He . . . he was after Samantha.”

“Samantha. She just keeps cropping up, doesn’t she?”

Jennifer looked out her window and for a few minutes the car remained silent.

Kevin was only eleven when he trapped the boy in the cellar and nearly died of fear. He’d left the boy to die—no matter how badly he tried to tell himself otherwise, he knew he had locked the boy in a tomb.

He couldn’t tell Sam, of course. If she knew, she would surely tell her father, who would set the boy free and maybe send him to jail, and then he would get out, probably within a couple months, and come back and kill Sam. He couldn’t ever tell her.

But he couldn’t
not
tell her either. She was his bosom buddy. She was his best, best friend, whom he loved more than he loved his mother. Maybe.

On the third night he meant to go in search of the warehouse, just to take a peek; just to see if it had really, really happened. But after an hour pacing outside his window, he climbed back into his house.

“You’re different,” Sam told him the next night. “You’re not looking me in the eyes like you used to. You keep looking off at the trees. What’s wrong?”

“I am not looking off. I’m just enjoying the night.”

“Don’t try to fool me. You think I don’t have a woman’s intuition? I’m almost a teenager, you know. I can tell if a boy’s bothered.”

“Well, I’m not bothered by anything except your insistence that I’m bothered,” he said.

“So then you
are
bothered. See? But you were bothered before I said you were bothered, so I think you’re not telling me something.”

He felt suddenly angry. “I am not!” he said.

She looked at him for a few seconds and then gazed up into the trees herself. “You are bothered by something, but I can see that you’re not telling me because you think it might hurt me. That’s sweet, so I’m going to pretend you’re not bothered.” She took his arm.

She was giving him a way out. What kind of friend would ever do that? Sam would do that because she was the sweetest girl in the whole world, no exceptions.

It took Kevin four months of agony to finally work up the courage to go in search of the boy’s fate.

Part of him wanted to find the boy’s bones in a rotting pile. But most of him didn’t want to find the boy at all, didn’t want to confirm that the whole thing had really happened.

The first challenge was to find the right warehouse. Guarding a flashlight as closely as he could, he looked through the warehouses for an hour, sneaking from door to door. He began to wonder if he’d ever find it again. But then he opened an old wooden door and there, five feet away, was the dark stairway.

Kevin jerked back and very nearly ran for his life.

But it was only a stairway. What if the boy wasn’t there anymore? He could see the latch on the steel door in the shadows below. Seemed safe enough.
You have to do this, Kevin. If you’re anything like a knight or a man or even a boy who’s already eleven, you have to at least find out if he’s in there
.

Kevin played his light down the stairwell and forced his feet down the stairs, one step at a time.

No sound. Of course not—it had been four months. The steel door latch was still closed as if he’d thrown it closed yesterday. He stopped in front of the door and stared, unwilling to actually open it. Visions of pirates and dungeons full of skeletons clattered through his mind.

Behind him the moonlight glowed pale gray. He could always run up the stairs if a skeleton took after him, which was incredibly stupid anyway. What would Sam think of him now?

“Hello?” he called.

Nothing.

The sound of his voice helped. He walked forward and knocked. “Hello?” Still nothing.

Slowly, heart thumping in his ears, palms wet with sweat, Kevin eased the latch open. He pushed the door. It creaked open.

Black. Musty. Kevin held his breath and gave the door a shove.

He saw the splotches of blood immediately. But no body.

His bones shook from head to toe. It was real. That was blood all over the floor. Dried and darkened, but exactly where he remembered it should be. He pushed the door again, to make sure no one was behind it. He was alone.

Kevin stepped into the room. A bandanna lay in the corner. The boy’s bandanna. He had definitely locked the boy in this cellar, and there was no way out that he could see. That meant one of two things had happened. Either the boy had died in here and someone had found him, or someone had found him before he’d died.

His mind ran through the possibilities. If he’d been found alive, it would have been in the first couple weeks. Which meant he’d been free for over three months and said nothing to the police. If he’d been found dead, of course, he couldn’t say anything. Either way, he was probably gone for good. Maybe even alive and gone for good.

Kevin hurried out, slammed the door closed, latched it, and ran into the night, determined never, ever to even think about the boy again. He’d saved Sam, hadn’t he? Yes, he had! And he hadn’t been arrested or sent to the gas chamber or even accused of doing anything wrong. Because he had done what was right!

Elated and overcome with relief, he ran straight to Sam’s house, even though it was past her bedtime. It took him fifteen minutes to wake her and convince her to climb out.

“What is it? My father will kill us if he finds us, you know.”

He grabbed her hand and ran for the fence.

“Kevin Parson, I am in my pajamas! What is this all about?”

Yes, what’s this about, Kevin? You’re acting like a maniac!

But he couldn’t help himself. He’d never felt so wonderful in all his life. He loved Sam so much!

He stepped past the fence and she followed him. “Kevin, this is . . .”

He threw his arms around her and hugged her tight, squeezing off her words. “I love you, Sam! I love you so much!”

She stood still in his arms, unmoving. It didn’t matter; he was so overwhelmed with joy. “You are the best friend a boy could ever, ever have,” he said.

She finally put her arms around him and patted his shoulder. It felt a bit polite, but Kevin didn’t care. He pulled back and brushed blonde strands of hair from her face. “I won’t ever let anyone hurt you. Ever. Not if I have to die first. You know that, don’t you?”

She laughed, caught up in his show of affection. “What’s gotten into you? Of course I do.”

He looked away, wishing for a response as enthusiastic as he felt. It didn’t matter; he was a man now.

Her hand touched his chin and turned his face toward her. “Listen to me,” Sam said. “I love you more than anything I can imagine. You really are my knight in shining armor.” She smiled. “And I think that it’s incredibly sweet of you to drag me out here in my pajamas to make sure I know how much you love me.”

Kevin smiled wide, stupidly, but it didn’t matter. He didn’t have to pretend with Sam.

They hugged tight then, tighter than they had ever hugged before.

“Promise to never leave me,” Kevin said.

“I promise,” Sam said. “And if you ever need me, all you have to do is knock on my window and I’ll come flying out in my pajamas.”

Kevin laughed. Then Sam laughed, and Kevin laughed at Sam’s laughing. It might have been the best night of Kevin’s life.

“—Samantha?”

Kevin faced Jennifer. “Pardon?”

She looked at him. “Why was the boy after Samantha?”

“Because he was a demented wacko who found pleasure in cutting up animals and terrorizing the neighborhood. I didn’t exactly have the time or the presence of mind to sit him down and run a psychological profile on him. I was scared to death.”

Jennifer chuckled. “Touché. Too bad, though. Now we’re sitting twenty years beyond that night, and I have the formidable task of trying to do it myself. Whether you like it or not, you may be my best hope of understanding him. Assuming the boy and Slater are one and the same, you’re the only person we know who’s had any meaningful contact with him, then or now.”

As much as the thought of going back to the past made Kevin nauseated, he knew that she was right. He sighed. “I’ll do whatever I can.” He looked out the side window. “I should have made sure he was dead then.”

“You would have done society a favor. In self-defense, of course.”

“And what if Slater does show up on my doorstep one of these days? Do I have the right to kill him?”

“We have law enforcement for a reason.” She paused. “On the other hand, I might.”

“You might what?”

“Take him out. If I knew for sure it was Slater.”

“What evil is man capable of?” Kevin said absently.

“What?”

“Nothing.” But it was something. It struck Kevin for the first time that he had not only had the capacity to kill Slater, but also the
desire
to do so, self-defense or not. What would Dr. John Francis say to that?

“So. The boy was taller than you, about thirteen, blond and ugly,” Jennifer said. “Nothing else?”

The sensation that there was something else nagged at Kevin, but he couldn’t remember. “I can’t think of anything.”

They passed a store that Kevin recognized. “Where are we going?”

Suddenly he knew. His foot began to tap. They drove around a deserted park filled with elm trees.

“I thought I’d take you to your aunt’s home. See if we can jog loose a few memories. Visual association can do wonders . . .”

He didn’t hear the rest. A buzz lit through his mind and he felt claustrophobic in her car.

Jennifer looked at him but said nothing. He was sweating; she could surely see that. She turned onto Baker Street and drove under the elms toward his childhood house. Could she hear his thumping heart too?

“So this is where it all happened,” she said absently.

“I . . . I don’t want to go to the house,” he said.

She looked at him again. “We’re not going to the house. Just down the street. Is that okay?”