Victim Six (32 page)

April 6, 3 p.m.
Key Peninsula

There was a dark prescience, A sense of foreboding that frequently came with the job. Kendall had felt the fear of what they might find on the Castile property the instant she stepped out of her car. Guns drawn, she and Josh circled the rooms of the house in the woods. It looked so mundane. Hunting and fishing paraphernalia hung on the peeled-wood logs of the walls, but the rest of the décor seemed bland and so average. Like an average family lived there.

By then both investigators knew that Sam, Melody, and little Max were far from average.

They heard a crash coming from the mobile home on the side of the property, and they followed each other outside. Smoke streamed from a window.

“Calling for a fire unit,” Kendall said, making the notification.

“There’s no way any responders are getting out here,” Josh said, going for the garden hose. “Probably should let the dump burn,” he said.

Kendall went up the steps toward the door, which was ajar.

“Help me! Help me!”

The smoke roiled at her, and Kendall got down on her knees. She turned and called to Josh over her shoulder, “Someone’s trapped inside! I’m going in!”

Josh dropped the hose and ran in the direction of the mobile.

“Help!”

The voice belonged to Serenity.

As she made her way inside, Kendall heard the back door of the mobile slam against its cheap aluminum frame.

“Josh! Go around the back! Castile is making a run for it!”

Kendall began to cough from the smoke, but she crawled deeper into the mobile. Accelerant of some kind had been used to set the fire. The fumes were from gasoline or turpentine. She’d recalled the workbench she’d seen while peering into the garage: rows of paint, bales of wire, nails, cleaning solutions…She put her hand over her mouth and nose to stifle her choking, but the smoke was already inside her lungs. She was sure that if she started hacking, she’d have to stop, and whoever was trapped would surely die.

Where was the fire unit?

“We’re in here!”

This time the voice was not familiar.

Crawling on the floor under the blanket of black, acrid smoke, Kendall propelled herself in the direction of the back bedroom. In the dim light, she made out the figure of a woman frantically trying to free another from bondage.

“Dear God,” she said, “are you all right?”

“Please, get us out of here!” Serenity screamed.

Melody, whose face appeared bloodied, shouted, “Get all of us out of here!”

For the first time, Kendall noticed that Serenity was not alone on that mattress. The body of Paige Wilson, curled in a ball, was next to her.

“Oh, God,” she said. “Paige! Can you hear me?”

Kendall helped Melody undo the straps that pinned Serenity to the mattress. Finally free, the reporter got on her hands and knees, then pulled herself up and stood. Her mouth moved, but nothing came out at first—it just opened and closed without emitting a sound. Her body was red with blood, but she had not been cut. Dried tears streaked her cheeks.

Kendall, tears rolling down her cheeks, hooked her hands under Paige’s arms and started to drag her.

“Help me!” she said to Melody, who stood still in the thickening smoke.

“Oh, yes,” she said, grabbing Paige as Serenity stumbled in front of them.

The four made it outside, heaving and coughing, their eyes stinging from the fumes. Kendall removed her jacket and put it over Paige, checking her pulse.

Good.

She felt the teenager’s rib cage rise and fall with her breath.

Alive.

Paige’s eyes fluttered, and she moaned. Her face was scratched, her body red and sore from the ordeal, the terror of which, Kendall knew, would never, ever leave her.

On either side of her forehead two
X
’s had been inked with a Sharpie.

They watched the conflagration blow out the mobile’s windows as it sent a toxic black tower roaring into the treetops. Kendall retrieved a blanket from a porch swing and wrapped it around Serenity’s shoulders. The reporter still had not said a word.

Her sister was another matter.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I had no idea Sam would do this. I had no idea about any of this! I thought it was some kind of game.”

Kendall looked up from where she knelt beside Paige.

“A game? What kind of game leaves four women dead?”

Melody was making crying sounds, but no tears dripped. “Look, you have to believe me. I had no idea what Sam was doing.”

Serenity, clearly in shock, had barely said a word as she stood shivering. Her eyes, now alert, darted in the direction of her sister. Melody loosened her grip on something she was holding, and it fell on the gravel driveway.

Skye’s yin and yang necklace.

“How could you,” Serenity finally said.

Melody took a step back, away from the other women. “How could I what? You have no idea what I’ve done.”

“I hate you, Melody.”

Melody looked over at the burning mobile.

“Get in line,” she said.

Kendall drew her gun once more. “Don’t even think about running. Get down. On the dirt.
Now
.”

The wheels turned as Melody weighed the detective’s order.

“Down, now!”

She dropped to her knees, her expression grim. But cool, given the circumstances, oddly so.

Serenity reached for the necklace, the glimmer of the hammered silver turned black by the flames, and it swung like a pendulum.

Paige opened her eyes and let out a scream that mixed with the sound of sirens through the smoke. And although there were a hundred questions swirling through Kendall Stark’s mind, two thoughts pushed their way to the forefront.

Where is Josh? Did he stop Sam Castile?

Josh had never lost sight of Sam, now clad in a T-shirt and faded blue jeans and scrambling over the forest deadfall toward the road, a couple hundred yards away. Josh had drawn his weapon, and when he yelled at the man to freeze, Sam Castile did something remarkable.

Sam stopped and put his hands up in the air.

“So you got me,” he said. “Big deal.”

“Big deal for you,” Josh said, a little out of breath, adrenaline pumping through his veins. “Drop to your knees.”

“That sounds like something I’d say,” Sam said, a smile breaking over his sweaty face.

As he ran his hands over Sam’s frame to ensure that he carried no weaponry, Josh recited the Miranda rights.

“Wonder if your little girlfriend made it out okay.” Although the words were uttered with sarcasm, Sam’s gape held no emotion. His eyes were as lifeless as buttons, unblinking, unfeeling. “She’s a hot little thing.”

Josh cuffed him with plastic restraints that he’d pulled from his coat pocket. “I wonder if you’re going to be on the receiving end of the needle at Walla Walla.”

“You and I are not so different, you know,” Sam said.

Josh tried to let the remark pass as if he hadn’t even heard it, but it was hard to do. Just the idea that he was anything like the piece of scum he’d just picked up made him even angrier. He didn’t ask all the questions he wanted to. He worried that Kendall might not have made it into the mobile in time to save Serenity.

“We both like using a young thing now and then, right?” Sam said with a wink.

Josh thought about it for only a second before he punched Sam in the gut, sending him to the ground.

“I’ll have your badge for that,” Sam said, choking for air.

The detective relaxed his fist. “Oh, I don’t think so, pal. It’ll be your word against mine, and I have a pretty good idea who they’ll believe.”

Melody stood mute, barely looking at anyone as the responders arrived—more visitors in that hour than in the decade she’d lived there. Smoke and steam spun high above the trees as local firefighters emptied their sole water tank. Paramedics hovered over Paige and Serenity, who were placed in the back of the ambulance. Paige was given oxygen, but Serenity refused it. She was bloodied and bruised, but her expression was resolute.

“I can drive myself home,” she said.

Kendall patted her hand. “No, you can’t. Not after what you’ve been though.”

“I want to talk to my sister.”

“She’s in custody, Serenity.”

“I want to know what has been going on here.”

“There’s time for that. But not now,” Kendall said.

The ambulance doors shut, and the red and white vehicle began to pull away as Josh returned to the driveway. Sam and Melody Castile were on their way to booking. Josh looked the worse for the wear, his slacks torn by blackberry vines, his face bleeding from minor scratches from vegetation incurred during the pursuit.

“She’s going to be okay,” Kendall said, following his eyes to Serenity.

“She’s tough, isn’t she?” he said, trying to reel in his emotions.

“She is.”

The pair stood for a minute before heading back to their vehicles and the mountain of paperwork that faced them at the office.

“They did this together,” Kendall said. “Sam and Melody.”

“She’ll say she was abused.”

“They always do. And maybe she was. But honestly, her
own
sister?”

Josh thought of the Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka case in Canada. He didn’t bring it up because he knew the outcome and it chilled him. Karla and Bernardo had raped and murdered Karla’s sister, Tammy. Karla testified against Bernardo and eventually found her way to freedom. The idea of a man and woman joining forces to commit debased acts was hardly unheard-of: Fred and Rosemary West had raped and murdered as many as a dozen girls—including their own daughter—in Great Britain from the 1960s to the 1980s.

But this was close to home.

“I feel sorry for the little boy,” Josh said.

“I’m not without hope there. He sent us here with his drawing,” Kendall pointed out. “He knew what he was doing.”

“I wonder what will happen to him?”

“He’s got family,” she said.

April 7, 9 a.m.
Port Orchard

They were on opposite sides of the glass partition separating good from evil, the yin and yang of the justice system. Others were facing each other through the transparent wall as well. Some were husbands talking to wives whom they still stood by; some were fathers trying to understand the error of their ways as they spoke with delinquent daughters. The glass was an inch thick, a good insulator of sound. So despite the fact that one could look into the other’s eyes and talk, they had to use a telephone. Intimacy was reduced, but safety ensured. That pretty much summed up the way visitors’ row at the Kitsap County Jail had been designed. Only once had the glass been damaged: when an angry inmate used the receiver instead of words to make a point, leaving a spiderweb of fissures.

Serenity studied her sister as she reached for the phone.

“You doing all right?”

Melody’s eyes were cold. Colder than usual. “What kind of a question is that? I’m not doing all right at all.”

“Melody, I can see that. Tell me what is going on.”

“Is this for the paper?”

“This is for
me
.”

“I’m not speaking to anyone without a lawyer. I’m not stupid, Serenity. I mean, I’m not going to be stupid anymore.”

“Melody, please.”

Although Melody looked directly at Serenity, there appeared to be nothing warm and alive behind her eyes. Not even a glimmer of the sister she thought she knew.

“Everybody does what they have to do to survive,” she said. “Let’s leave it at that.

“What about Celesta, Skye, Marissa, Carol…Paige?”

Melody’s eyes looked increasingly distant, no longer holding any trace of recognition. She was like an empty vessel, devoid of emotion, love. It was as if her soul had been replaced by something cold, mechanical.

“You know the beginning and the ending, Serenity.”

“I think so. I guess so.”

“You want to know the middle, don’t you?”

Serenity nodded.

“Everybody does.”

“Tell me,” Serenity said, her eyes welling with tears. She knew that the woman on the other side of the glass was no longer her sister. She was an imposter. A shape-shifter. A thief of all of her memories.

“What do you want to know?”

“I wouldn’t know where to begin.”

Serenity bolstered herself on the counter and gripped the phone. “You didn’t, you
couldn’t
have been a participant in this. Not really?”

Melody’s eyes flickered for a second, and Serenity wondered if her sister had come back. In that flash of recognition, she allowed herself to believe that Melody had found a core of humanity stirring somewhere deep inside herself.

The wheels of memory seemed to whirl behind Melody’s eyes, but she remained quiet.

“The bitch has escaped!”

Melody Castile could barely contain her rage. She was mad at her son, at herself, at Sam, but mostly angry that Carol Godding had disappeared into the woods. None of the others that had been their playthings had ever dared to try to escape. No one left the Fun House alive. But this woman, the divorcee from Port Orchard, had done the impossible.

“You take the car,” Sam said. “Go up the road to the culvert. That’s the only way she can get out of here. I’ll follow on foot. I’ll get her and take care of her.”

Melody ran into the house, grabbed the car keys, and bolted back outside as Sam vanished with a Maglite behind the Fun House. In a second, Melody was behind the wheel of the silver Jeep. She cursed the damned gate as she spun the car around the driveway, then got back out of the vehicle to unlock and fling open the annoying barrier. There was no need to go back and lock it. She didn’t expect that she’d be gone that long.

Within five minutes, her headlights caught the image of the ghostly white figure of a woman on the side of the road. Melody tried to identify what she was seeing.

Was it a doll? A mannequin? Or was it someone’s little girl? A girl like she’d once been…

She swerved around the woman, as if to allow a hitchhiker extra room.

For safety, always give those walking on the shoulder at least a fifteen-foot cushion,
came to her mind.

Melody thought of what her father had said when he taught her how to drive. She remembered how her face had stung when he slapped her for knocking over the road cones used to practice parallel parking.

She pressed the ball of her foot against the accelerator and circled back. The car skidded on the gravel and stopped; Melody swung the driver’s-side door open as fast as she could, as if slowing down for even a moment would break the momentum of what she was bent on doing.

She lunged for Carol, who’d slumped onto her bloody knees.

“Get up,” Melody said.

“You,” Carol said, crying. “Why
you
?”

“Because,” she said. “If not you, then it will be me.”

Carol’s face was smeared in dirt and blood, making the whites of her eyes look larger in the darkness. Wide, full of terror.

“Please! I won’t tell anyone!”

Melody stiffened and drew back. She turned in the direction of the woods, behind the cowering woman.

Branches cracked, and Sam emerged. His face was a mask of rage. Melody snapped back into the moment and grabbed Carol by the hair.

“For you, babe,” she said, summoning her nerve.

Sam said nothing as he bathed Carol’s body in the glow of his flashlight. She had dissolved into a shivering mass of blood-streaked flesh.

“Good girl,” he said to his wife. “Now finish her.”

Melody pulled on Carol’s hair, lifting her bowed head.

“Don’t hurt me. Please let me go! You don’t want to do this!”

Sam played the light over Carol’s terrified face.

“I can’t,” Melody said.

“You can, and you will.” He produced a hunting knife from his pants pocket and handed it to her. “Finish her!”

“No, I won’t. I can’t, Sam. You do it. I’ll help you, but I can’t do it myself.”

Sam arched his brow and shrugged. It was as if Melody’s reluctance, her passivity, warranted some kind of show of strength.

He grabbed Carol by the neck and strangled her. Still alive, she slumped into the gravel.

“She’s ready. Do it,” he said.

A moment later the blade was buried in Carol’s neck and blood pulsed from the gash, sending a fountain of red into the beam of the headlights.

Serenity looked into Melody’s empty eyes. She tried to summon some kind of conviction that what her sister was saying was true. Melody had told Serenity a sanitized version of what had transpired, leaving out the Fun House. Leaving out the fury in which she drove to find Carol.

Leaving out the fact that she’d seen her on the side of the road.

“Then what happened?” Serenity asked.

Melody broke their mutual gaze.

“I’m not sure,” she said. “I never saw her. I only did what Sam wanted me to do. I looked for her, but there was nothing else. Nothing at all.”

Behind the glass shield, Melody was about to hang up the phone when a glimmer of alertness came to her eyes.

“I can’t say that I’m sorry,” she said. “I know that you want me to. But I did what I did for a good reason. At least, I thought so at the time.”

“How could you, Melody? How could you have gone along with him?”

The semblance of understanding had vanished.

“Who said it was Sam’s idea?” Her eyes now had no spark. “Besides, you played a role in this thing too.”

Serenity was struck mute, her mouth half open in incomprehension.

“You knew there were other victims,” Melody said. “And you knew ahead of time.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Yes, you do. I told you.”

“You never told me anything. Your sick husband called and bragged about what he’d done.”

“Funny, that’s not how I remember it, Serenity. I was the one who called you when you did that story about Paige Wilson and the food bank.”

Of course Serenity remembered the call.

I’m going to pick up your little beauty queen and take her for a test ride,
the caller had said.

“You
never
called me.”

Melody clipped the phone between her chin and shoulder and ran her hands over her hair.

“You know what I’m talking about, don’t you? You could have warned her. You could have stopped it, but you were too busy screwing that detective of yours and trying to find a way to use this story to launch yourself out of Port Zero.”

“That’s a lie,” Serenity said, eyes glistening.

Melody smiled at her sister, set down the phone, and turned away.

Serenity pounded her fist on the glass, and Melody spun around.

“Don’t say a word,” she mouthed. “Don’t ever say a word.”

Melody shrugged but wore a satisfied look on her face.

Serenity watched her sister follow an officer in a blue uniform down the corridor that led to the jail’s cellblock. Her orange flip-flops could be heard through the glass. In a moment Melody was gone.

Gone forever.

Josh Anderson and Kendall Stark were waiting outside the jail’s visitor reception door when Serenity emerged from her visit with her sister. She wore jeans, a cardigan, and no makeup. She was still very pretty. Bandages concealed the wounds on her wrists.

It was obvious that the encounter with her sister had shaken her.

“Well?” Josh asked.

Serenity dabbed at her eyes. “Nothing. She told me nothing.”

The time for tears had long since passed. She knew then that she’d unwittingly played a role in the selection of some victims. Most had been featured in the pages of the
Lighthouse
.

“You don’t look like you’re okay,” Kendall said, putting her hand gently on Serenity’s shoulder.

She looked at her and nodded. “I’m fine. I just wish she would have told me something,” she said.

The three walked across the parking lot toward the back entrance of the courthouse. It had stopped raining, and the air was filled with the scent of motor oil and wet asphalt. A seagull circled overhead. Jurors dismissed from a case filed past. One, a heavyset woman in a crocheted sweater and capri pants, glanced in their direction, wondering if they were somehow connected to the same trial. The woman carried a paperback novel about a serial killer to pass the time. She wondered if she’d see the three in court and hear their story. She nodded in their direction, and Kendall smiled back.

“How’s Max?” Kendall said.

“Better than I’d be,” Serenity said, as if what had happened to her in the Fun House was inconsequential.

Josh held the door open, and the two women went inside.

“You’re holding up pretty good,” he said. His tone was a little longing, and he knew it. But it didn’t matter.

“Considering. I guess so,” Serenity said, not allowing herself to be affected by Josh’s emotions. She couldn’t go there yet. Too much had happened. Too much still needed to be done. “I’m going to petition the court to let me take Max. He’s a good kid. I’m all the family he’s got.”

“Raising a child isn’t easy,” Kendall said, speaking from her heart and from the experience of having a child with special needs. A psychologically damaged child like Max Castile would come with a load of baggage.

“He’s got no one else but me,” Serenity said.