Vicious (23 page)

After the murder in Chicago in 1995, Mama’s Boy took his trade to the Seattle area in 1997, and that was where he did the most damage, strangling eleven women in three years. He killed two young mothers in Oakland in 2000. Then there were the two possible “copycat” murders in Virginia in 2003 and 2004 that Jordan attributed to him. The most recent case in 2007 had occurred south of Portland. No one had called it a Mama’s Boy murder, not yet, but Jordan felt it had all the signs of one.

“I want to ask you about the scuff marks on the inside of your trunk lid,” he said, pacing in front of the worktable—like a TV lawyer in front of the witness box.

But this witness was stretched across the table, bound, shirtless, and shivering. His torn trousers only partially covered one leg. Leo winced as he studied him. Considering how long Meeker had been tied to that table in that same torture-rack position, his back, shoulders, and arms must have ached horribly. The guy had to be in agony.

But Jordan was relentless. “I think those marks were made by Rebecca Lyden after you locked her in the trunk of your car,” he said. “You remember her, don’t you, Allen? She was the young single mother from Eugene. Rebecca disappeared in 2007. I looked at the dealer’s slips in the glove compartment of your car. You bought that BMW in Seattle in 2006. Unless there’s another victim I don’t know about, Rebecca made those marks.”

“If you say so, yeah, sure,” Meeker grunted sarcastically. He didn’t even raise his head from the table when he replied. “You’re the expert; you know everything….”

“Rebecca vanished from a rest stop along Interstate 5 near Wilsonville, Oregon,” Jordan continued. “Her two-year-old son was found wandering around and crying outside the women’s lavatory with a clown doll in his hand. Was that your gift to him?”

Meeker didn’t reply. He just shook his head over and over.

“They never did find Rebecca’s body,” Jordan went on. “Maybe that’s why the newspapers didn’t call it a Mama’s Boy murder. You never bothered to hide the others too well. Why were you so careful with Rebecca’s corpse? Didn’t you want anyone to know Mama’s Boy was back?”

“Y’know, it’s bad enough you’re trying to pin the Mama’s Boy murders on me, and now you’re blaming me for all these other crimes. Jesus, pretty soon you’ll have me in Dallas, assassinating JFK in 1963.” Meeker let out a tired, labored sigh. “About the car, I load a lot of crap in that trunk. If there are scuff marks inside my trunk, I wouldn’t be at all surprised. But it doesn’t make me a murder suspect.” He glared at Jordan. “Let me tell you something. I don’t know nearly as much about the Mama’s Boy killings as you do. But I remember they were already going on when I moved from Chicago to Seattle in August 2000. I wasn’t even living in Seattle when the first several murders occurred. If you don’t believe me, you can ask my fiancée, Susan, or call up any one of my Chicago friends.”

“August 2000?” Jordan repeated. “Six months later, you must have been kind of sorry you’d made the move to Seattle.”

“Why? Was there another Mama’s Boy murder?”

“No, something else happened. Do you remember what happened in Seattle on Ash Wednesday, February twenty-eighth, 2001?”

Allen just shook his head.

“Around eleven in the morning?” Jordan pressed.

“I give up,” Meeker grumbled.

Leo took hold of the banister and slowly got to his feet. He knew exactly what Jordan was getting at. Next to September 11, it was the other where-were-you-when event for Seattleites that year.

“February twenty-eighth, 2001, is when Seattle had the second worst earthquake in its history—a magnitude six point eight. Everybody in the area felt it. But you don’t remember it, because you weren’t there.”

“Shit, that doesn’t mean anything—”

“The last known Mama’s Boy victim in the Seattle area was Candice Schulman,” Jordan spoke over him. “She was abducted in front of her four-year-old twin sons in their home on October sixteenth, 2000. You left the boys a couple of moldy hand puppets on the living room sofa. Some kids found Candice’s body two days later in the woods by Shilshole Bay. By February 2001, you’d already left Washington state. The day before the Seattle earthquake, you were in Oakland, killing Leslie Anne Fuller. You tore her away from her toddler son in the parking lot of the Emeryville Food Court. You left a stuffed animal on the hood of her car….”

“Not me,” he shook his head. “I’ve never even been to Oakland, damn it! I didn’t remember the exact date of the earthquake because I was out of town that week—in Spokane. I travel for my job—I already told you that! I heard about the quake, yes, of course. When I came back home that Friday, I was relieved because there wasn’t any real damage to my place.” His voice started to crack. “How do you expect me to know the exact date, for God’s sakes?”

“I knew it,” Leo piped up. “I remember it.”

“Well, good for you,” Meeker grumbled, tears brimming in his eyes. “Go to the head of the class, chum. You guys have already made up your minds I’m this—this heinous serial killer, and there isn’t anything I can say to convince you otherwise, is there? What do you want me to say? What? Want me to confess?” Wincing, he looked at Jordan and then at Leo. “All right, okay, I did it! I killed them all! I murdered your mother in cold blood—and the rest of them, too! Is that what you want to hear? So are you going to get the police now?”

Jordan slowly shook his head. “It’s not that easy.”

“Oh, Jesus,” Meeker cried. He glanced at Leo, his eyes pleading. “He’ll never let me go. There’s nothing I can say or do to change his mind. I’m going to die down here….”

Leo swallowed hard. He stared back at Meeker and knew the man was right.

Moira’s eyes finally adjusted to the murky darkness inside the small, cold room, and dim images began to take shape. She was locked in some sort of storage room, probably a janitor’s closet. From the icy cement floor, she figured it was in a basement or on a ground level. The empty metal bookcase was pushed against the wall—close to the door. The thin strip of light under the door was barely discernible. Up in the corner of the opposite wall was a fan box. Tiny slivers of daylight peeked through the built-in slats. There were some capped-off pipe ends along that wall, too. It looked like there might have been a sink in the room at one time.

She kept hearing that flapping noise. Sometimes it grew very loud as the breeze kicked up. She’d listen to the wind howling—and feel a slight draft through the fan slats.

Moira took the tortoiseshell barrette out of the pocket of her jeans, crawled across the mattress, and hobbled the rest of her way to the door. She still couldn’t put much weight on her left foot without it hurting like a son of a bitch.

Catching her breath, she leaned against the door and slid the metal clip in the chink by the door handle until she felt the lock. She applied some pressure to it with the metal clip and rattled the knob, but it wasn’t giving at all. “C’mon, c’mon,” she muttered to herself, jiggling and jabbing the clip against the door lock.

She kept wondering about the woman who had owned this barrette. She must have been a hiker or big nature buff to be in those woods alone. Had the barrette fallen out of her hair when she’d plunged into that pit? Maybe he’d
rescued
her, too—if she hadn’t already broken her neck from the fall. Had he locked her in this same janitor’s closet and taken her photograph? Moira wondered if he’d stolen that other girl’s bra, too.

Running her fingertips along the door frame by the knob, she could feel the wood was frayed there—as if someone had scratched and chipped away at it for a long time. Or maybe several people had, several women.

Moira imagined her photo and her brassiere as part of some maniacal murderer’s private collection. As terrified as she was of dying, she also dreaded what he might do to her beforehand. She was still a virgin, and even the idea of
normal
sex was a bit scary to her. She shuddered to think what this man might want from her—before finishing her off.

Her hands shook horribly as she continued to wiggle the clip against the door catch. “C’mon, please,” she whispered. She missed Leo and wished she’d never argued with him. She was thinking of her mom and dad, too, and how much she just wanted to be home right now. The barrette clip bent, and she shifted positions, forgetting for a moment about her sore ankle. As soon as she put weight on it, sharp pain shot through her leg.

Moira let out an anguished cry and slid down to the cold cement floor. She banged against the bottom of the door. “Let me out of here!” she cried. Her voice was still hoarse from all of her screaming earlier, and her throat felt raw. “Please! My parents, they’ll pay you! If—if you just get me to a phone
…
”

But she knew, in all likelihood, this guy wasn’t after money.

There was something else he wanted—something unthinkable.

Through the dirty corner of the windshield, where the wipers couldn’t reach, Susan gazed over at the break in the trees along Carroll Creek Road. It was the turnoff for Cedar Crest Way, which eventually led to the Prewitts’ cabin. Susan eased her foot off the accelerator. She was thinking about Jordan Prewitt and everything Tom had told her about him.

She couldn’t help wondering if Jordan had anything to do with Allen’s sudden disappearance. After all, as far as she knew, Jordan was the last person to see Allen before he went missing today.

The speedometer hovered around ten miles per hour as she approached the turnoff to the Prewitt cabin.

She’d left that place earlier feeling somewhat dissatisfied. Now that she knew Jordan was connected to the rental house, she wanted to go back and talk to him again. But talk about what—his murdered mother?

Shaking her head, Susan sped up and passed Cedar Crest Way.

In just a few minutes, she would be at the house on Birch—“the scene of the crime,” as Tom had referred to it. She told herself that she shouldn’t expect to see Allen’s BMW parked in the driveway or find him waiting for her.

Then she’d feel even worse for her dalliance with Tom Collins. For all she knew, Allen could have been in a car wreck. Right now, he could be dead—or in a hospital somewhere, hooked up to a respirator. And here she was giving her cell phone number to this charming, handsome man she barely knew. What was she thinking?

She glanced in the rearview mirror at Mattie. He was asleep in the child seat with that limp, absolutely-dead-but-still-breathing posture.

As she turned down Birch and approached the house, Susan didn’t see Allen’s car in the driveway. No surprise. She didn’t see anyone lurking around the house either, thank God. Mattie barely stirred as she took him out of his car seat. She carried him into the house, up the stairs, and put him on the bed in his room. She covered him with a throw. She planned to start packing their things in just a few minutes.

Back downstairs, she checked her note to Allen, and it looked untouched, unread. She glanced out the sunroom’s glass door at
The Seaworthy
—tied to that dock that had become a local landmark for the morbidly curious. The beautiful, orange-azure-streaked sunset reflected on the bay’s rippling surface.

Susan unlocked the door and slid it open. She didn’t want to leave Mattie alone in the house too long, even though he was sleeping. She trotted down to the dock and hurried across the same wooden planks where Jordan Prewitt’s mother had been abducted ten years ago.

Susan was just about to climb aboard
The Seaworthy
when she saw something that made her balk. There on the cockpit seat, someone had laid out Mattie’s and her life vests, which she’d discarded on the dock earlier. She remembered stepping around those vests the last time she was on the dock. Now they were neatly folded up on the boat.

A chill raced through her. Who would do something like that? Susan convinced herself that the sheriff or deputy must have folded the vests and put them there when they’d checked around for that hunter character.

She boarded the boat, then took out the keys, unlocked the cabin door, and pulled it open. All the while, the boat gently teetered from side to side. Stepping down into the darkened cabin, Susan turned on the power switch, and the interior lights went on. The computer started, but it took a while to warm up.

If someone had phoned Bayside Rentals asking if the Internet was working on
The Seaworthy
, perhaps that was how they’d planned to get a message to Allen. Had Allen seen something online when he’d been getting the boat ready? Maybe there was an e-mail or an instant message that might explain his sudden disappearance.

The Windows menu finally came up on the screen. Sitting on the edge of the captain’s swivel chair, Susan pulled out the drawer with the keyboard and mouse and clicked on the Internet Explorer icon. It was an old computer and took a few more moments to make the connection.

Waiting impatiently, Susan stood and gazed out the thin, long horizontal window at the house. No one was prowling around the woods; at least, she didn’t see anybody. Then she glanced around the interior cabin. She spotted something pink on the couch cushion. At first, she thought she’d left behind a toy from Mattie’s bin. But then she stepped toward the settee and saw it was a brassiere.

Susan picked it up. One of the straps was torn. She automatically moved toward the V-berth—to make sure no one was in there. The place was empty.

“You’ve got mail!”
the computer announced.

Susan set the brassiere on the table, moved over to the navigating station, and sat down again. Biting her lip, she clicked on the
MAIL
icon. There were three unread e-mails within the last two hours, all of them from [email protected]. The e-mail subjects were blank.

Susan clicked on the earliest e-mail, sent at 1:55
PM
. The screen came up:

Where R U?

It didn’t say anything else. Susan clicked on the next message at 2:40:

R U there yet? U can’t avoid me.

If these messages were for Allen, obviously, the sender didn’t know where he was either. The last e-mail was at 3:50:

U need 2 respond 2 me or I come 4 S & M in 1 hr.

“Oh, my God,” Susan murmured. She glanced at her wristwatch. The hour was almost up. She peered out the long window at the house again. She didn’t see anyone.

Turning toward the monitor again, she clicked on the
REPLY
icon and typed furiously. She tried to adapt Secret Admirer’s amateur shorthand:

She clicked the
SEND
icon, and—true to her word—waited. She glanced over at the brassiere on the table. Someone had left that bra there for her or Allen to find—no doubt the same person who had moved and folded up the life vests. The police hadn’t moved those vests, she knew that now. The vests had still been out on the dock after the sheriff and deputy had left.

Susan peered out the window again. She couldn’t linger, not if this person intended to come for Mattie and her within the next few minutes. She had to grab Mattie and get the hell out of there—no stopping to pack or update the note to Allen. She’d drive to Rosie’s and call the police from there.

She heard a click from the computer—and saw the
MAIL
icon blinking. It was another message from [email protected]. This one had a subject—
Pink Souvenir
—and it had some kind of image attachment.

Susan clicked on
READ MAIL
, and an automatic warning came up advising that she shouldn’t open e-mails with download files unless she knew the sender. Susan bypassed it. The text popped up on the screen:

Below the text, a photo began to emerge—one section at a time from the top of the picture to the bottom. It was a blurry shot of a pale young woman with short-cropped dark hair. Susan recognized her. She’d been at the store yesterday with Jordan and his friend. They’d said her name was Moira. Naked from the waist up, she was sitting on a stained mattress in the dark. She had a dirt smudge on her forehead and looked startled and scared. She was covering her breasts with a bunched-up towel or sweater. Someone had obviously taken her top and her bra.

Susan turned and glanced at the brassiere on the galley table, the
pink souvenir
.

She heard a scream in the distance.

“Mattie!” she whispered. “My God…”

Rushing up the ladder to the deck, she leapt off the boat and stumbled onto the dock. She heard him scream again. “Go away!” he yelled. “Mommy…Mommy!”

Susan raced up the hill toward the house and the sound of his voice. The sunroom door was open, just as she’d left it. Inside the house, she stopped suddenly. She couldn’t hear him anymore. The place was deathly quiet.

She rushed toward the front of the house, where the door was closed and locked. “Mattie?” she called, running up the stairs two steps at a time. “Mattie? Sweetie?”

Stopping in his doorway, she froze. His bed was empty.

“Mattie?” she screamed again, panic-stricken. She swiveled around and checked the bathroom—empty. Then she hurried down the hall to the master bedroom. He wasn’t in there either. But she noticed the closet door was ajar. She heard a quiet whimpering.

“Mattie, honey?” she asked, trying to catch her breath. She moved toward the closet. “Sweetie, are you in there?”

“Mommy?”

“Oh, thank God,” she whispered. She opened the door and found him sitting curled up amid Allen’s and her shoes. Knees to his chest, he clutched Woody against the side of his face. She crouched down and reached out for him. “Sweetie, what happened?”

He threw his arms around her neck. “I woke up and you were gone!” he cried. “There’s a monster in my room. I’m hiding from him. He—he—he’s under the bed….”

“It’s okay, Mattie,” she said, hugging him and patting his back. Finally, she lifted him up and carried him out of the bedroom. She headed for the stairs. “Everything’s going to be all right,” she cooed reassuringly. “We’re leaving here now. Okay, sweetie? I’ll make sure this monster doesn’t get anywhere near you….”

Susan meant every word she said.

It didn’t work worth a damn.

Moira gave up trying to manipulate the lock with the flimsy, bent barrette clip. She moved away from the door and blindly felt around the shelves of the metal bookcase for something else she might use to trip the lock. The tall shelving unit had been put together with thin perforated metal pieces and screws. She found a discarded bracket lying in the back corner of the second-to-top shelf. The perforated piece was a bit longer than a nail file and only slightly thicker.

She slipped it in the door hinge by the lock, wiggling and maneuvering it while she twisted the knob. “C’mon, please, God,” she whispered.

Suddenly she heard a click, and the knob turned.

With a grateful little cry, she pushed at the door with her shoulder. But it didn’t budge. She couldn’t understand it. She’d tripped the stupid lock. She kept twisting and turning the knob. What was going on?

Then Moira realized what was going on was the door must have another lock, probably a dead bolt.

“Goddamn it!” Moira cried, her voice raspy. Frustrated, she almost threw the metal piece across the tiny room. But she thought better of it. She might need the metal bracket as a weapon against that man when he came back for her, and he almost certainly would. Of course, she might as well defend herself with a butter knife. But it beat nothing.

Moira told herself that she wouldn’t become one of his victims. That photo of her and her pink bra—they would be the last in his collection. She would survive this. She’d have to crawl or hobble, but she would get out of this cold, stinking little dungeon.

And stink it did. She was probably contributing to the foul smell herself after all her time in that dirty pit and then here in this little closet. Not much fresh air passed through the fan box near the ceiling.

Moira squinted up at it. She saw by the slivers of daylight seeping through those slats. There was no other light source. She wondered if she could fit through that opening.
Maybe
, she thought if she could pry or unscrew the slat covering.

A while ago, she hadn’t been able to see her hand in front of her face. But Moira’s eyes had adjusted to the darkness, because she could now see the thin metal bracket in her grasp. She probably had a snowball’s chance in hell of clearing that opening and making it through to the outside. But she had to try.

And she had to work fast. Any time now, her abductor could come for a second visit. Another concern was that the light through those slats was starting to dim. It was getting dark out.

Pretty soon, she wouldn’t be able to see anything—except blackness.

And then she might as well be dead.

Strapped in his car seat, Mattie kicked and wiggled in protest. His pinched-up face got red as he cried—a cranky, staccato whine that was, erratically, loud and then quieter.

Susan handed him Woody, and he immediately threw the doll on the car floor. The aborted nap definitely hadn’t agreed with him. If Susan only could have put him back to bed, he might have calmed down and slept for another half hour and then been fine. Instead, she’d swept him up in her arms and carried him downstairs, where she grabbed her purse and his jacket. He’d started crying just as she’d headed out the door.

“That’s no way to treat your pal, Woody,” Susan said, having to talk loudly over his wailing. She picked up the doll and set it on the car seat—out of his reach. “I need you to be a good boy, Mattie. Okay?”

But he was cranky, scared, and disoriented. Susan knew exactly how he felt. Obviously, Allen was in some sort of secret communication with the person who had sent that e-mail. The photo of that teenage girl and the
pink souvenir
were meant for him. Susan wondered if Allen knew the girl. Whatever the case, the e-mails confirmed it: Allen definitely had an ulterior motive for this weekend getaway—but what exactly? And why did he have to drag her and Mattie up here for this trip?

She wondered about that poor girl. Jordan and his friend had said she’d gone for a walk in the woods. Were they lying? Were they the ones who sent that e-mail to Allen?

Susan hurried around the car to the driver’s side and climbed behind the wheel. She was about to shut the door when she heard the sound of gravel under tires. She hesitated, unsure who it could be—maybe Allen, finally pulling into the driveway, or maybe the man who had sent him that horrible e-mail.

Susan shut her door and locked it. She started up the engine, but waited. That other car, when it arrived, would block the driveway. Susan reached into her purse for the flare gun and set it beside her. One hand, white-knuckled, on the steering wheel, she warily gazed in the rearview mirror, waiting for the other car to come into view.
Please be Tom
, she thought. It was crazy, but the most comforting sight right now for her would be that red MINI Cooper coming up the driveway.