Twist (22 page)

H
elen sat in the chair across from Minnie Miner on the
ASAP
set. The leather arms of the chair were stained and stiff from hundreds of perspiring guests. It surprised Helen how clean and new the chair appeared on the TV studio monitors and on her television in her apartment.

“Fiona!” Minnie said, squirming around to get comfy in her own chair, not nearly as scuffed and stained as Helen’s. “The killer continues his gruesome march through the alphabet.”

“I think since we’ve made it to F that we can assume that,” Helen said. “It is beyond coincidence.”

“Of course, many of us in the media were saying that weeks ago.”

Minnie was getting on Helen’s nerves. “The media can speculate and be wrong. The police have to be sure. One wrong assumption and they can soon be miles off course. Like the explorer who was off by one degree at the beginning of his voyage but sailed hundreds of miles beyond his destination.”

“What explorer was that?”

“Santo Vincenti Diego.”

“I’ve never heard of him.”

“There you are.”

Minnie gave Helen a look, not quite knowing if she’d just been had. She was gaining respect for Helen, who had a knack for taking control of an interview without seeming to do so.

“The killer is doing what you predicted,” Minnie said, as a kind of peace offering. “He’s becoming more sadistic. More vicious and grisly. I mean, the things he did to poor Fiona, the F girl.”

“What he did that was worst of all,” Helen said, “was to keep the woman alive as long as possible once he began to work on her.”

“And there was no sign of—”

“No sign of rape or forcible entry, but there had been sex, with a condom.”

“Is it possible that they knew each other?” Minnie asked. “That they’d been lovers?”

Helen shrugged her broad shoulders. “Anything’s possible. This killer thinks he’s intelligent, so he leaves few, if any, clues for us to work with.”

“
Thinks
he’s intelligent?”
Easy
, Minnie told herself.
Don’t do anything that makes it seem you’re defending a killer. Ratings, ratings . . .

“I know he’s baffled the police so far,” Helen said. “But what he’s doing isn’t an intelligent risk. He doesn’t seem smart enough to understand that time isn’t on his side. If he makes only one mistake, overlooks only one thing, we might have him. And when we do, if he’s convicted, that will be the end for him. Game over.”

“Whereas if you don’t get him today, you simply start over again tomorrow.”

“Until eventually he’s ours,” Helen said.

Minnie raised a forefinger, gazed off in the distance, and then touched the finger to the hearing device in her ear.

“Excuse me, please,” she said to the camera displaying the red light.

She unclipped her miniature mike from her lapel and spoke softly into it so no one could hear other than whomever she was talking to.

Then she said, “Yes, yes,” quite clearly and looked at Helen and then out at the studio audience. Back to Helen.

“The killer wants to talk to you,” she said. She could hardly contain her emotions as she pronounced the words.

A prop man walked hurriedly out and handed a cell phone to Helen, who sat shocked.

But not for long. Who did this asshole think he was, trying to rattle her?

“Helen Iman?” asked the ordinary male voice on the phone.

“Yes,” she said, and waited. She’d noticed that her voice resonated with a slight and immediate echo. Sound was being fed through to the studio audience.

Minnie whispered loudly in
sotto voce
that the killer was on the line with her guest—really!

“I can’t talk long without my call being traced,” the killer said.

“Your paranoia is showing,” Helen said.

“I called to remind you that after F comes G, and after G comes H.”

Helen felt her blood rush to a small cold place in her core. She almost dropped the phone. Suddenly the studio became even more uncomfortably cool.

“Listen—” she began. But she noticed immediately that she was talking to herself.

There had been no click, but the background hush of the call had changed and she knew she and the caller were no longer connected.

Minnie was staring at her, almost vibrating with excitement. This was quite a
coup
. The killer and perhaps one of his future victims, right here on her show.

Ratings were going to—

She saw Helen stand up and detach her lapel mike, then gently lay it and its transformer on the chair. Obviously she was leaving the set.

Minnie hadn’t nearly milked this situation dry.

“Helen! Helen! I know you’re shaken. Who wouldn’t be, after that last,
incredible
remark? But you mustn’t—”

But Helen continued to walk away.

No one tried to stop her. No one so much as touched her or even looked directly at her. It was as if she had something that might be contagious.

The killer had marked her.

Out on the sidewalk, her cell phone chirped. She hesitated even removing it from her purse.

The electronic chirping continued. Whoever was calling was determined. Reluctantly, she put her hand into her purse and withdrew the phone.

The chirping went on unabated.

She didn’t answer until she saw that the caller was Quinn, and the fluttering bird that was her heart became calm.

“You might want to watch Minnie Miner tomorrow,” he told Helen. “I’ve just given her some instructions concerning an interesting news item about a woman who won the lottery just before going to prison, and her house in the country.”

And he explained to Helen the trap they were going to set.

“It could work,” Helen said thoughtfully.

“
Could
is enough to make it worth a try,” Quinn said.

F
ate remained on the side of the Killer. Dred Gant was in a rental car, driving toward Jefferson City, Missouri, where there was going to be an auction in pre-1899 firearms.

He was using his 3G phone to listen to
Minnie Miner ASAP
on the Internet. Because he was out of town didn’t mean he had to miss what had become, if not his favorite, the most interesting of the TV shows he watched. He wasn’t actually
watching
the show, though it was visible on the phone on the seat beside him. He had to be careful driving, the way the traffic weaved at speeds over eighty miles per hour on Interstate 70.

As soon as he heard Minnie Miner relate the story of a woman from a small town in Missouri, who in 2000 had won a lottery jackpot and then gone to prison, he knew it was a trick. His pursuers would know that
he’d
know the story was related to that of the Lady Liberty Killer.

This was not coincidence. Minnie would use her show to broadcast any sort of bait that would result in a catch. Her adoring audience would patiently assume the relevance and be delighted with the outcome.

Minnie described how people had searched the woman’s ramshackle house and yard for traces of the money, but had found none. Now, however, there were rumors that some money had been removed, stolen, but much of it hadn’t.

That “rumor” had also not been a coincidence.

The coincidence could be that he had heard this news when less than two hours from his boyhood home.

And, according to Minnie Miner, there might be money he hadn’t found in the dilapidated house.

His
money. Not his mother’s now. Or anyone else’s.

His
.

The killer decided that
might
was reason enough to run the risk. There came a time in any game when one of the players must seize opportunity. Safety here would be in acting first and directly.

He stayed on Interstate 70 and drove toward the orange setting sun.

 

 

Night had fallen, and it was almost ten o’clock.

Dred Gant sat out of sight in the dim moonlight, gazing down the hill at the house where he’d grown up.

He was comfortable in a shelter among the ancient pines that were scattered on the sloping hill beyond the house. There were fewer of the trees than he remembered, but they were much larger.

From where he’d positioned himself, he could see the house’s front porch, and off to the right, not as far from the porch as he recalled, was the old wooden outhouse. He felt the bile of anger rise bitter in his throat and swallowed it noisily. As he had so many times here at . . . home.

It bothered Dred at times, knowing strangers, and some people he knew and despised, had rooted through his old home. One he would no doubt inherit, if the authorities could find him. Well, they could keep the house and the rocky, hilly land around it. He’d keep his freedom, and his mission.

The money was another story. Whether it was dimes or dollars, it belonged to him. He would use it to maintain his lifestyle.

He remembered watching old movies and television shows, fascinated by the way how, while the projectors or DVDs were running, their stars seemed to lead lives pertaining only to the roles they played. Those people on screen led precisely the lives they wanted. Or that the script demanded. Of course, being fictional, they could do that.

But at a certain point Dred had come to see himself in a similar situation. It was simple, really, if he used his initiative. His role would be himself. The drama would be of his making. The ending . . . well, he would choose the when and where of that. And the means.

He wouldn’t, like the ordinary fools in this world, have to think first and foremost of earning money.

He knew where to find money, cash that, legally, should be his, anyway. The only problem was that he wasn’t . . . legal. He certainly wouldn’t want his name and photograph in the news as inheritor of a lottery win.

But he
would
like the money, his spendable trophy.

And he
had
found it, once, where he knew it would be and where others wouldn’t think to look. And it had been enough money to fund what would eventually become a profitable business in antiques.

So here he was, poised in the darkness so near the darkness of his past. For the oldest reason in the world—personal gain.

The rest of what was his.

When the moonlight was unbroken with clouds, he shifted his gaze through his high-powered binoculars from the pockmarked dirt yard to the slanted steel doors of the storm cellar. They were slightly askew, allowing a narrow shadow of an opening, as if beckoning anything that yearned for the dark. All anyone would find down there were spiders and junk, but it was no surprise to Dred that even from this distance he could see that the padlock on the heavy, rusty hasp was broken. Someone had forced his or her way into the claustrophobic storm cellar, seen nothing of value, and no doubt gotten out of there in a hurry. It was the kind of place you visited only in nightmares, when you had no choice.

But there was something in the cellar that attracted Dred now. It was time to satisfy his curiosity.

Had
he left behind some of the lottery money?

He was sure none of the money was in a bank. No surprise. Mildred had had a virulent distrust of banks. And just to be positive, he’d surreptitiously checked the house long ago,

But he’d been in a rush that night. And he’d been eager to flee the storm cellar. It was certainly possible he’d overlooked some of the stacked bills.

He’d been gone long enough for the embers of fear and gossip to have cooled. The old house, and the violent woman who’d lived in it, had slipped into local lore, and existed only on the edges of people’s minds. By now, they needed something else to talk about. To think about.

Minnie Miner’s “report” would soon spread throughout the area, and the pickers would be back, some of the same ones who’d dug up the yard and broken through the wallboard years ago.

Another reason to move fast. Immediately.

There were a lot of places to hide money in any house. Dred knew all of them in this house, from the times he’d had to look for Mildred’s hidden booze or weed.

But he was thinking about the storm cellar in particular. The hell hole had served only two purposes that he knew of—a tornado shelter, and a dungeon. But Mildred Gant had found yet another purpose.

He stood up slowly and brushed pine needles from his pants legs. An owl hooted nearby, and he froze and glanced around. Nothing was moving in the night but dark smudges of clouds in a gray half-moon sky.

The law—maybe the state police; maybe Quinn himself—would soon be closing in, if they weren’t already here.

But the killer knew the hills and the woods around the house. He sensed that he was the only human being in the vicinity. Nothing out of the ordinary was moving, breathing, stalking nearby.

Time to take a chance
.

He slung the binoculars crossways on their leather strap, so they rested just above his hip. Then he left the thicket of pines and began making his way down the hill toward the house.

As he got closer, the crickets’ ratcheting cry seemed louder. He listened carefully to the sound, feeling through it with his mind for a warning, but he found none. When he reached level ground, he circled away from the outhouse and approached the west side of the house. The storm cellar doors.

Dred saw that the steel double doors were rusted, in some spots all the way through.

He bent forward so he could see the heavy padlock more closely. It had been sprung, all right. He closed his fist around it to twist it out of the bent hasp, and the hasp broke in his hand. Rust again. Some water, at least, must be getting into the cellar.

He grabbed the hasp again and levered one of the wide doors open. It yowled on its hinges, hesitated at the vertical, and then fell to the side with a clang.

He opened the other door.