Vicious (17 page)

“Please, Jordan, stop it!” Leo cried. “You don’t do this kind of thing! The Jordan I know—the one who’s my friend—he wouldn’t do anything like this….”

Jordan pulled the knife away from the man’s throat, then let go of his scalp.

The man started coughing behind the gag in his mouth. His head slumped against the worktable, and his whole body shook.

Jordan stepped away from him. The knife slipped out of his hands and clanked on the cellar floor. Leo almost recoiled as his friend came toward him. But Jordan put his arms around him. “Oh, God, Leo,” he cried, hugging him fiercely. “My mom was naked when they found her. He’d stripped off all her clothes. My mom…she always used to get so cold at night….”

Leo felt his friend’s tears against the side of his face. He patted his back and looked over at the man. He was crying, too—and choking. Leo wondered how he could breathe with a nose full of snot and that gag in his mouth.

“C’mon, buddy, sit down,” Leo whispered, leading Jordan to the stairs. With a sigh, Jordan sank down on the third step from the bottom. He wiped his eyes.

Leo patted him on the shoulder. “I’m going to take the gag out of his mouth so he doesn’t choke to death, okay?”

Jordan numbly stared down at the cement floor.

Leo went back to the man and carefully pulled at the wadded-up handkerchief in his mouth. “My God,” he murmured. “This is really crammed in here….”

Once Leo had pried out the handkerchief, the man gasped and went into a coughing fit. His scratched face was beet-red, and Leo stared at the veins protruding on the side of his forehead. “Thanks,” he finally whispered in a raspy voice. “Thank you.” Then he lapsed into another coughing fit.

Leo hurried over to the laundry sink. He grabbed a plastic measuring cup off the top of the washer and filled it with water. But it foamed over with suds. He kept rinsing out the cup, and then filled it up and tasted it. There was still a faint under-taste of soap, but he figured the guy didn’t care. He took the cup to him, and the man slurped it down. “Thank you,” he said again. “My face is burning up. Please, if you could…”

Grabbing the handkerchief, Leo went to the sink again and ran the handkerchief under the faucet. He glanced over his shoulder at Jordan.

His friend stared back at him. “I’m not letting him go,” he said quietly.

Leo returned to the man and patted his face with the cool, wet handkerchief. The guy hadn’t been kidding. His face was hot, like something was cooking under the skin. Leo did his best to clean the dirt and dried blood off the gash on his cheek. This close, he could see a horrible bruise forming on his forehead—and a second bump on his skull, the bloody clot partially obscured by his thick, silver-black hair. Leo couldn’t believe Jordan had done this to the man.

“Please,” the man whispered. “Please, you need to call the police….” He coughed again. “Your friend is making a terrible mistake. If I was really a murderer, would I be begging you to get the police?”

Leo looked back at Jordan.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if he and the sheriff had some kind of deal,” Jordan said. “I’ve read everything there is about Mama’s Boy. I’ve become an expert on the subject. One of the theories was that Mama’s Boy must have had a police connection of some sort, and that’s why he was always able to keep one step ahead of the investigators. For a while there, they even thought Mama’s Boy was a cop.” He glared at the man and then shook his head at Leo. “No police.”

“If you don’t trust the sheriff here, then call the state police,” the man argued. He glanced at Leo. “I don’t care who you call. Just get me some help, please. He hit me in the head and knocked me out
twice
. I feel nauseous. For all I know, I could have a concussion. I belong in a hospital….”

“You belong in the fucking electric chair,” Jordan grumbled.

Leo turned to Jordan. “His forehead’s awfully hot. He could be really sick.”

“My fiancée and her son are waiting for me,” the man explained. “We came up here for the weekend—from Seattle. They’re probably climbing the walls wondering what’s happened….”

“That’s bullshit,” Jordan said, standing up. He clutched the banister. “You told me the kid was four years old. I saw your car, asshole. There wasn’t a child seat in the back. There was nothing in that car to indicate a kid had ever been in it. You’re lying.”

“We came up in separate cars!” the man cried. “I wanted to open the rental house and rent a boat before she got up here—so it would be all ready for her. They drove up in an old-model red Toyota yesterday afternoon. Damn it, go to Twenty-two Birch and ask. Her name is Susan Blanchette, and her son’s name is Matthew. We’ve known each other a year. Check it out, I’m telling the truth.”

His mouth open, Jordan stared at him and blinked.

Leo remembered the woman with the little boy at the store yesterday. Jordan had shown some interest in her. Leo turned toward the man. “Is your fiancée thin and kind of tall—really pretty with dark brown hair?”

The man nodded. Then he looked at Jordan. “She got a flat tire yesterday in practically the same spot I did. Were you responsible for that, too?”

Jordan said nothing.

“Did you sabotage her car the way you did mine?” the man pressed.

Jordan shook his head. “No. And you’re here to
answer
questions—not ask them.” He stepped down to the bottom of the stairs, then reached behind his back. From the waist of his jeans, he pulled out a gun that had been hidden by his shirttail.

“My God,” Leo murmured. His first inclination was to back away, but he held his ground between Jordan and the man. He’d never seen his friend with a gun before.

“Do you always take a Smith & Wesson along on family vacations?” Jordan asked.

The man seemed stumped for a moment. “It’s registered,” he said. “I bought it because I was carjacked once. I wasn’t sure about the area here, so I brought it along—just to be safe.”

Jordan cracked a tiny smile. “Didn’t quite work out for you, did it?”

“Owning a gun doesn’t make me a killer,” the man argued. “I’ve never used it.”

“You’re right,
Mama’s Boy,
” Jordan replied. “You strangled all your victims—after stripping them and beating the hell out of them. But I’ll bet you used a gun plenty of times—when you abducted those women. Not with my mom, you beat her unconscious with a blackjack before you took her away. But there were others. You must have had a gun on Anita Breckinridge at that Safeway in Lynnwood. How else would you have persuaded her to leave her kid sitting in the shopping cart and quietly walk out of the store with you? You must remember Anita, Allen. That was just a few days after Christmas, 1997. Poor Anita never got to see the New Year. You left her body by a jogging trail off Lake Union in Seattle.”

Stepping closer to the worktable, Jordan showed him the Smith & Wesson revolver. “Was this the gun you used so she’d cooperate? Did you stick this pistol in Melanie Edgars’ back? Is that why she went with you? All the newspapers wondered why a mother would suddenly leave her three-year-old son unattended in the kiddy pool. That was at the Burien Park and Recreation Center in the summer of 2000. You left a little plastic pail and shovel by Melanie’s beach blanket. You held on to Melanie longer than the others—three days. Then you killed her and dumped her body on the beach in West Seattle….”

“Oh, God, please,” the man whispered to Leo. “You have to do something. This is insane….”

Leo stared at his best friend. Jordan was practically a stranger to him. His buddy had never even hinted he knew about these murders. Yet obviously, he had all the names, places, and approximate dates committed to memory.

He wondered how Jordan could be so certain this man was his mother’s killer. It had happened ten years ago. And from Jordan’s own telling, he’d been in a boat on the bay, some distance from his mother and the man who had abducted her.

“Listen, I’m sorry your mother was murdered,” the man said. Stretched over the worktable, his whole body trembled. “That’s horrible, and I—I—don’t blame you for wanting to get even with somebody—
anybody
—for what happened to her. But you have the wrong guy, Jordan. You’ve made a terrible mistake. I’m begging you to call the police. I won’t press charges. I’m just asking you to do the right thing, the sensible thing. If I’m really a murderer, the police won’t let me go. And if you’re wrong, you’ve just made a dumb, forgivable mistake. The only thing I’d ask is that you get some counseling.”

“Nice try,” Jordan said.

But Leo moved toward him and took hold of his arm. He pulled his friend away from their captive, toward the dust-covered washer and dryer. “What he’s saying makes sense, Jordan,” he whispered. “Let me drive over to that grocery store and call the state police. If this guy’s really a killer, then they’ve got him. And they have you as a witness….” He trailed off because Jordan was shaking his head. “What? What is it?”

“I need to talk to him first,” he insisted. “I need to get a confession out of him.”

“Well, how are you going to do that?” Leo asked. “Do you plan to
torture
him? Y’know, even innocent people will plead guilty when they’re being tortured. Is that what you’re going to do next? My God, Jordan, he’s already been hit over the head and knocked unconscious twice. He’s scared. You heard him, his fiancée and her kid are waiting for him, worried about him. How can you be so sure he’s the one?”

Jordan put his hand on Leo’s shoulder and leaned in close to him. “After he killed my mother,” Jordan whispered, “the police and this special Mama’s Boy task force had me look at all these books full of mug shots. They were hoping I might identify the guy who took her. Like I told you, I was eight years old, Leo. My mom was just murdered, and I was sitting there in this crummy police station, poring through hundreds of photos of criminals—rapists, sex offenders, and murderers. But I didn’t find him in those books. I never saw that man again, not until today.”

“Goddamn it!” the man bellowed. “Get me out of here…. Please!”

“Shut the hell up!” Jordan snapped at him.

“I still don’t understand how you can be so sure he’s the one,” Leo whispered.

Jordan took a deep breath and then leaned in closer to him. “I heard him talking to my mother—very friendly at first. But then he hit her, and he called her a bitch. Even though I was pretty far away, I could hear him. I pissed in my pants, Leo. I was so horrified—and helpless. Earlier today, while I was in the store,” he nodded toward the man, “
he
came in. I just heard his voice, and I almost pissed in my pants again.”

“Then let me go call the state police,” Leo said.

“No, what I need you to do is keep Moira away,” Jordan insisted. “She could be back here any minute now, and she can’t see this. She can’t be a part of it. Drive her in to town, drive her home, I don’t care what you do. Just keep your girlfriend out of here. I need some time with this scumbag.”

Leo hesitated. He was afraid of what might happen if he left Jordan alone with the man.

Jordan rubbed his shoulder. “Like I told you before,” he said under his breath. “I know everything there is to know about Mama’s Boy. I’ll catch him in a lie. I’ll get a confession out of him.”

Leo pulled away. His eyes wrestled with Jordan’s. “And then what?” he asked. “What are you going to do with him then?”

Jordan stared at him and said nothing.

They both already knew the answer.

If any hikers had been roaming around that sloped section of woods, they might have noticed a pale grey object moving back and forth, hovering just above the ground. They might have heard a young woman crying for help.

But Moira had a feeling no one was around for miles.

She’d found part of a tree branch in the pit. Shedding her heather-grey sweater, she’d tied it to one end of the branch. She’d tried to stand up, but felt a sharp, grinding pain whenever she put her weight on her left foot.

So Moira leaned against the dirt wall of the pit. Even with her arm stretched above her head, it was still at least three feet from her fingertips to the top of the narrow trench. Her arm was tired from endlessly waving the makeshift flag over her head. Plus she had a cramp in her one good leg from standing on tiptoe for so long. All her screaming had left her throat sore and dry.

Moira had checked her wristwatch a few minutes ago: 2:30. She’d been stuck in this godforsaken pit for over an hour now. She’d tried several times to climb up the dirt walls, but her foot kept giving out on her. And there was nothing to hold on to—except fistfuls of loose soil and rocks.

The dark, dank hole smelled. In just her T-shirt and jeans, Moira shivered from the cold. She still had dirt in her mouth and in her nose, too. Mud, twigs, and God only knew what else had gotten tangled in her hair. She would have killed for a glass of water—and a couple of Tylenol. Every part of her body ached.

Every once in a while she heard a car in the distance driving along the road up ahead. Yet, obviously, they couldn’t hear her screaming for help.

Moira also detected some noises in the woods—and not just birds chirping. She’d heard bushes rustling and an occasional scurrying sound. She figured it was wildlife in the forest, but she yelled out for help anyway—just in case.

Her arm was getting numb. She lowered the crude banner, then rubbed her shoulder and shook her arm to get the blood flowing again. She told herself that Leo and Jordan would start looking for her soon. They’d find her before sundown. She just had to hang in there.

She felt something crawling on the side of her neck. She let out a shriek and frantically swiped it off. Moira shuddered. She didn’t see what kind of bug it was, but she figured there were more of the same down in the bottom of this smelly pit.

She heard high-pitched squealing in the distance, and she looked up at the patch of sky above her. At first Moira thought it was a flock of birds squawking. But then she recognized the sound as it got louder, more distinct. She listened to the same racket every day between classes in the hallways of Holy Names Academy. It was the sound of several girls—all talking, laughing, and screaming at once. Right now, it was a wonderful noise.

Moira quickly hoisted the makeshift flag and waved it above the edge of the crater. “HEY!” she screamed. “HELP ME! PLEASE, HELP ME, I’M TRAPPED!”

The din grew louder, and Moira guessed there were several girls—probably in an SUV or a small bus. Obviously, the windows were open. They had music booming. They were all talking over each other. It sounded like a party.

Moira kept screaming for help and waving the stick. She forgot about her ankle for a second and jumped up. When she came down on her foot again, the crushing pain shot through her leg, and she fell on her side amid all the mire and mud at the bottom of the pit.

The laughter and music faded, and Moira started crying. She picked up her sweater and saw that the branch she’d been using as a flagpole had snapped in two.

She had no idea how long she sat sobbing—and praying to God to get her out of there. But after a while, Moira wiped her tears with her sweater. Then she put it on. She was still shivering, but it was an improvement.

As she started to push herself up again, Moira felt something hard and bulky under her hand. Brushing away some dirt and dead leaves, she saw a blinking red light at the top of a device that looked like a clunky old answering machine. “What the hell?” she murmured. It felt heavy when she picked it up. Duct tape covered the back of it. She held the thing in the light and brushed some more dirt off it until she could read the printing across the side:
SPY-TELL
300
MOTION SENSOR
.

It confirmed what she’d thought when she’d first fallen into the pit. Someone was setting a trap here. Did the blinking red light mean somebody close by was picking up the signal on this device? They had to be in the vicinity. A small, portable thing like this couldn’t have much of a range.

Moira wondered if a hunter had created this trap. But what kind of lame-ass sportsman would catch his game this way? Trap some creature in a pit rigged with a motion detector, and then come shoot it—if the poor animal hadn’t already broken its neck in the fall? Yeah, that was really sporting. It didn’t make sense.

She stared at the blinking red light on the device. If this was a lazy, dilettante hunter’s trap for killing game, Moira shuddered to think that she might be sitting in dried animal blood. With reluctance, she felt around for shell casings or bullets. She imagined the creep who considered this way of hunting
sport.
Yet he might end up becoming her rescuer. Maybe he was on his way right now, with his gun loaded, eager to kill whatever defenseless creature lay in wait for him. Moira kept feeling around in the mud, twigs, and decaying leaves. She didn’t find any shell casings or bullets.

But then her fingers brushed against something else. She grabbed it and then rubbed the dirt off it. She looked at it in the light from the opening up above.

“Oh, no,” she gasped, tears filling her eyes. “Oh, my God, no…”

Moira suddenly realized what kind of game this cold-blooded hunter had caught down here in the past.

In her trembling hand, she held a woman’s tortoiseshell barrette.

“I’ll go pack Moira’s stuff, wait outside for her, and send her away in your car,” Leo said. He glanced over at Jordan’s prisoner stretched across the worktable. Then he locked eyes with his best friend. “I won’t say anything to her, I promise. But I’m not going with her, Jordan.”

They stood in the corner of the cellar’s big room—by an old blue plastic kiddy pool leaning against the wall and covered with dirt and dust. The man was out of earshot.

“You have to go,” Jordan whispered. “You can’t be part of this, Leo. You can’t be involved.”

“It’s too late, I’m already up to my eyeballs in it,” he argued. “Have you even thought this through, Jordan? I mean, the police are going to find his car soon. They’ll be looking for him—”

“They won’t find his car,” Jordan replied, shaking his head.

“How can you be so sure?”

“Because I sunk it in a swamp about a mile away from here,” Jordan said.

Leo stared at him and felt sick to his stomach. “You—you wouldn’t have done that unless you were planning to kill this guy. You’re going to make him disappear, aren’t you?”

Jordan didn’t answer.

There was a noise outside, gravel crunching under tires. Leo glanced up toward the dirt-streaked basement window, but some bushes outside blocked his view.

“Jesus,” Jordan murmured. He hurried toward his prisoner.

“HELP!” the man screamed. “HELP ME, PLEASE! DOWN HERE!”

Leo heard the car outside grinding to a halt in the driveway.

The man kept crying out for help. Jordan grabbed the handkerchief and wound it into a ball. He tried to stuff it into the man’s mouth, but his prisoner kept turning his head away. “HELP ME! GOD, PLEASE HELP ME!” he yelled.

Leo heard a woman’s muted murmuring as she talked to someone, and then the car door shut. Cell phones didn’t work in these woods, so she wasn’t talking on the phone. There had to be at least two people outside.

Jordan finally grabbed the man by the scalp and slammed his head against the worktable. The man gritted his teeth, but Jordan hit him in the ribs. His prisoner let out a yell, and Jordan forced the gag into his mouth.

Someone knocked on the front door. The sound carried down to the cellar as if it were just outside the room.

Jordan turned to Leo and hissed, “Whoever it is, get rid of them!”

Leo nodded and headed for the stairs. But Jordan rushed toward him and grabbed his arm. “Don’t screw this up for me, Leo,” he whispered. “I can hear you down here, you know. I’m counting on you.”

Jordan’s prisoner tried to cry out past the gag, but it was just muted whimpering.

Leo couldn’t quite look Jordan in the eye. He nodded again. “I’ll get rid of them,” he muttered. Then he hurried up the stairs.

The person outside knocked again—longer and louder this time.

In the kitchen, Leo found a pen in a glass jar on the counter. He didn’t see any paper, so he grabbed a napkin and scribbled on it. The thin paper tore in spots as he wrote:

There was more knocking. Leo knew he was taking way too long to get to the door. Downstairs, Jordan had to suspect something was going on. “Coming!” Leo called, folding up the napkin. “Just a minute!”

He hurried to the front door and opened it.

He recognized the woman from the store yesterday, the pretty brunette. Standing on the front stoop, she wore a dark green windbreaker and jeans. Behind her was an old red Toyota, with the back window rolled down. Leo glimpsed her toddler in the child’s safety seat in back. He had an animal cracker in his hand and was walking it along the edge of the open window.

“Sorry I kept you waiting,” Leo said, a little out of breath. He stood in the doorway.

“Well, I’m sorry to bother you, so I guess we’re even,” the woman said with a timid smile. “My name’s Susan Blanchette. I understand Jordan Prewitt lives here.”

Leo nodded a few more times than necessary. “Yes, but he—um, he’s not in right now.”

“Well, I was hoping he could help me with something. Do you know when he’ll be back?”

One hand still on the doorknob, Leo shook his head and shrugged. “Sorry.”

“I’m staying down the road at Twenty-two Birch Way,” she explained. “My fiancé has disappeared. His name is Allen Meeker. He’s a good-looking man in his late thirties—with silver-black hair. He drives a black BMW….”

“Um, I wish I could help you,” Leo said stiffly. Then he held out the folded napkin.

But she didn’t see it. She was glancing just past his shoulder.

“Are you looking for me?”

Leo swiveled around to see his friend emerging from the kitchen and quickly stashed the napkin in his pocket.

Jordan looked a bit sweaty and frayed, but he put on his friendliest smile as he approached the fiancée of his hostage. Leo stepped aside. Jordan put a hand on his shoulder. “I was in the bathroom.” He turned toward the man’s fiancée. “Hi, again, how are you? Did I hear right? Did you lose somebody?”

She nodded. “Yes, my fiancé. I understand you were at Rosie’s place when he was there—almost three hours ago. That’s the last anyone has seen of him. I was hoping you could tell me something—anything. Did he by any chance talk to you?”

Jordan shook his head. “To tell you the truth, I didn’t notice much. I wasn’t feeling so well. In fact, I thought I was going to blow chow right there in Rosie’s.” He chuckled. “Huh, guess I had a bad ice cube last night….”

She stared at him and blinked.

“I was hungover is what I’m saying,” Jordan explained. “Hey!” He suddenly grinned and waved at the little boy in the car. “Hey, there, dude! How are you?”

Her son waved back excitedly. “Go Huskies!”

Jordan nodded and gave him a thumbs-up sign.

“You were very nice to us yesterday,” the woman said to him. “Thank you.”

Leo started to step back, thinking he might be able to signal to her somehow.

But then Jordan casually put his arm around him. He gave the man’s fiancée a contrite smile. “Well, I’m sorry I can’t be more helpful today.”

But she wasn’t giving up. “Rosie said you were in the parking lot when Allen drove away. Did you happen to see in which direction he drove off?”

Jordan thought about it for a moment. “It looked like he was heading toward town—that is, if I remember correctly. Like I said, I was kind of out of it.”

Leo could hear a faint whimpering sound from downstairs. Jordan must have heard it, too, because he stepped outside and started leading Allen Meeker’s fiancée toward her car. Leo trailed after them. He wondered if there was some way he could furtively slip the napkin into her hand.

“Not to alarm you or anything,” Jordan said to her in a hushed voice. “But you don’t suppose he got carjacked, do you?”

She shrugged. “I don’t really know.”

“Has anything like that ever happened to him before?” Jordan asked. “I mean, that looked like a pretty nice car he was driving. BMW’s a classic. No one’s ever tried to carjack him?”

She shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

“Well, maybe he got lost,” Jordan said. “Does he know this area? Has he been to Cullen before?”

“No, this is our first trip here.”

“Oh, right, you told me that yesterday.” Jordan nodded. “Um, have you guys been together long?”

“About a year,” Susan replied.

“You mentioned yesterday you live in Seattle. Is that where you guys met?”

“Yes. But listen, I—”

“Is your fiancé from Seattle originally?”

“No, he grew up near Chicago.” She gave him a puzzled half smile. “I’m sorry. Why are you asking me all these questions about Allen?”

“Well, I wasn’t being nosy,” he said with a nervous laugh. “I—I just thought if I asked about him, it might help you figure out where he went off to. Y’know, trigger something in your memory? But I guess it didn’t work, huh?”

Her gaze shifted from Jordan to Leo, then back again. “Didn’t I see a young woman with you yesterday?”

Hands in his pockets, Leo nodded. “Yeah, that’s Moira, but she went for a—a walk in the woods.” He furtively took the napkin out of his pocket.

“You don’t suppose she might have seen Allen, do you?”

“Who, Moira?” Jordan said. He shook his head. “I really doubt it.”

“Well, could you check with Moira when she gets back from her walk? I’d be very grateful….”