Voices Carry (39 page)

“That’s because he had so many years of practice,” John muttered.

“That’s true. I think he was Sister Anna. As Michael he would rape the girls, as Anna he would tend to them afterward.” She shivered. “And while Anna was dark-haired, and Michael wore a blond wig as Nancy, I think it was the photo of his mother in her bedroom that jiggled something in my mind, but I didn’t quite put it together.”

“That Nancy looked like Mrs. Homer?”

“That Mrs. Homer looked like Sister Anna. I didn’t connect Nancy to either of them at the time. That’s why I asked Mr. Homer’s housekeeper if Michael and Clarence had had a sister named Anna.”

“I remember that. She said that Anna was Mrs. Homer’s name.”

“And it made me wonder if Mrs. Homer had been at the camp taking care of her son’s victims. But if that had been the case, she would have been identified and forced to testify at the trial. She could have been prosecuted as an accomplice, had it been proven that she’d known what Michael was doing to the girls.”

“But she—Sister Anna—simply disappeared on the day Michael was arrested. The police could never find a trace of her, and Michael refused to give any information about her at all,” Brian said. “I remember it drove the district attorney crazy that they couldn’t locate this witness and possible accomplice. Anna disappeared because she didn’t exist. She was just another of Michael’s personas.”

“I’m
surprised no one put it together, back then,” John said.

“Michael really had his act together, John. If you’d been around Nancy, you’d never have suspected that you were in the company of a man. I even remember watching her and Patsy together one day and thinking that she was more feminine than Pats. And I remember seeing Sister Anna around the camp. I’d never have put her and Brother Michael together.”

“I wonder if he used the Nancy role to help him abduct some of his victims,” John thought aloud. “That could explain how he was able to get close to them without them being alarmed.”

“Nancy looked like your average woman in her mid to late fifties. Nothing out of the ordinary,” Genna nodded.

“I’m hoping we’ll be able to get good, solid statements from our victims. Those who are still lucid, that is.” John looked at his watch. He wondered how much the women had been able to tell the other members of the team who had made it down to the hospital. Suddenly, he was anxious to be in on the conversations. “Let’s head out to that diner, Gen, then maybe we’ll both be revived enough to drive down to the hospital and see if any of our ladies are still talking.”

“Let me just check to see where my feline hero is. I don’t want to leave him out all night.”

Genna started toward the rear of the cabin, then turned back to the road, and looked across it.

Kenny Harris sat in the screened porch that went across the front of the Millers’ cabin. Genna stood under the front porch light, raised an arm and waved, calling out to him, “Hi, Kenny.”

He waved back, the glow from his cigarette making a thin red arc in the darkened porch.

“Someone should probably go over and tell Kenny about what’s going on,” she said.

“I’ll do it,” Brian told her. “I’m glad to see he’s still up and keeping an eye on things. I didn’t expect him to be.”

“Tell him I said thanks,” Genna called to Brian as she took the first steps down the driveway.

She stopped in her tracks and turned around slowly, watching Brian’s figure disappear into the dark shadows surrounding the Millers’ cabin.

“Kenny doesn’t smoke,” she said slowly. “He has asthma. . .”

“Oh, shit.” John broke into a run, calling Brian’s name.

Genna unlocked her car and grabbed the gun from her bag, and following the others across the road, approached the small house. The cigarette’s glow was gone, but the faint trace of smoke lingered on the breeze.

“Fan out,” one of the agents yelled.

“What’s out behind the cabin?” someone else asked.

“Woods,” Genna told them grimly. “If he gets to the woods, we’re back to square one.”

A shot rang out from the back of the property and somewhere nearby, a door slammed.

“John?” Genna called anxiously. “Brian?”

“Here!” Brian answered, backing around the corner.

“Where’s John?”

“He must have gone around the other side. I didn’t see him.”

Stealthily, Genna crept around the side of the cabin where Brian indicated John had gone. She leaned against the old siding, pausing, listening. She heard cicadas and she heard the screech of an owl. She did not hear the silent footsteps behind her until it was too late.

“I’ll have the gun now,” he hissed into her left ear as he reached around her, grabbing for her wrists.

“You got it,” she said, spinning sharply to escape his grasp and firing twice at point-blank range into his chest.

Once would have sufficed.

Genna woke just before dawn, her heart racing, her pulse pounding. It had been almost a week since she had fired the shots that had brought an end to the violence that defined the life of Michael Homer, but the memory of that night still haunted her. She’d never killed at point-blank range before, and though she had no regrets, she found herself questioning, over and over, the fact that it had just felt so damned good to pull the trigger, to have been the one to take him out. She’d finally admitted as much to John the night before.

“I guess it would feel good,” he’d told her. “Don’t lose sight of the fact that, in his lifetime, Michael Homer destroyed or damaged countless lives. And how many others might there have been, who, like Chrissie, never came forth to testify? I don’t think we’ll ever know just how many victims there really were. So, what’s the problem?”

“The problem is that, I don’t know, I guess I think it should have been harder for me to pull the trigger.”

“All right, then, give me one good reason why it should have felt
bad.”

“It should never feel good to take a human life.”

“In my book, he was a few degrees less than human.” John’s jaw set tightly. “And I can tell you with all certainty that I would have been more than happy to have delivered the killing shot myself, Gen. I actually thought I had there for a moment, when I broke down the backdoor of the Millers’ cabin. If Michael hadn’t slipped out the side door when he did, the shot I fired could very well have taken him down. I was very sorry to have missed, though frankly, shooting him was a much kinder end than he deserved. It was a far better death than he permitted any of his victims. And it’s a far better world without him in it. For a lot of people.”

Genna couldn’t argue.

Interviews with the survivors had told a heartbreaking tale of starvation and neglect, terror and torture, chained for days to their beds, the most fortunate of them locked in the cabin with the leaking ceiling that permitted rainwater to cascade in during heavy downpours. By turning their heads a certain way, several of the women had been able to catch the water in their mouths, and it had proved to be their salvation, Michael’s rations being painfully insufficient.

Surprisingly, none of the women had been raped.

“I don’t think he could,” Genna had told John over dinner. “I think he couldn’t perform, but he didn’t stop trying. I think he thought it would be an indescribable thrill to relive the acts he’d committed years ago with the same victims. He’d even set the stage in exactly the same way, wearing the white robe and setting up the candles. But his prey were no longer children. He couldn’t make that the same.
And I think that just fed his frustration and his anger. These were the same people who’d testified against him, the ones he needed to punish, but they were no longer the same, though in his mind, they were still children. I think it confused him and angered him. He wanted them to be the same as they had been, to feed his fantasies in the same way, so that he could be gratified and feel the same high. But I don’t think he was physically capable of having sex with an adult woman. And so they were spared, at least, that.”

“But he didn’t stop the abductions, even when he realized this.”

“He couldn’t stop. He had to take us all, all of us who had testified against him, in the same order he’d taken us before. And frankly, I don’t think he accepted the fact that he couldn’t complete the act. I think he thought that it was the victim’s fault, but perhaps the next one would be right.”

“I wonder what he planned to do with you all, after he finished with you.”

“I think he would have taken me to one of the cabins and kept me there, just as he was keeping the others.”

“For how long?”

“Till we died. Six of them had already died. It was only a matter of time before the others would die off, one by one. Though some were certainly more resilient than others and might have had a better chance to survive. The women in cabin seven, for example, were amazingly resourceful. There’s no doubt in my mind that Lani Gilbert kept several of her cabin mates from going over the edge by keeping them focused for several hours a day with her humming games.”

“Very clever of her.” John nodded. “Humming a few bars of a song, then stopping so that someone else would have to pick up and hum the next, and so on around the cabin until the song was ended. And then she’d start a new one.”

“Shannon Potter said that was the only thing that kept her sane, even though their vocal chords were ragged and barely functioning toward the end. It was the only diversion they had. Other than when Michael’s daily visit to bring them food and take them to the outhouse.”

“I’m still not certain I understand why he just didn’t leave them to die the way the other six did.”

“Why, that would have been killing. I don’t think he planned on killing anyone. Except for that young state trooper and Kenny Harris, it seems. Killing them was necessary. Killing the
children
would have been a terrible sin.”

“And raping children is not a sin?” John asked dryly.

“The Bible doesn’t say,
Thou shalt not rape,”
she told him. “But it does say
Thou shalt not kill.
I think he saw himself as some sort of instrument of the heavens or something. The entire time he was tying me up, he was muttering Scripture and praying and mumbling something about needing to consecrate the children.”

“Which was probably his means of justifying his pedophilia.”

“That’s as good a guess as any, since we’ll never really know what he was thinking,” Genna noted. “I guess that’s part of what’s bothering me. About having killed him, I mean. I think I’d have liked to have known why. What it was that made him what he
was. How the same environment that made one son a pillar of the community could turn out another who was so evil.”

“Number one son didn’t wear his mother’s clothes and sleep in his mother’s bed,” John reminded her.

“There is that,” she sighed. “John, I think that when Michael was Anna he was—”

“Exploring his feminine side?”

“Not a joke, John,” Genna grimaced. “I think he was
being
his mother. Being nurturing. Maternal.”

“Do you think he really thought he
was
her?”

“Maybe. Who knows? But when he needed another persona to get close to me, it was easy enough to pass himself off as a woman. He’d been doing it for years. Of course, Patsy is totally beside herself that she hadn’t seen through him. Though I don’t know why she would have. She, too, was only in court that one day, with me.”

“But Crystal saw it,” John reminded her.

“Crystal saw something in
Nancy
that she recognized, though she didn’t immediately connect it with Michael. And to tell the truth, there had been something about Nancy that had struck a very distant chord with me, too, that first time I saw her. But it was so vague that I just dismissed it. I had no reason to think that Nancy was anyone other than who she professed to be. But for Chrissie, in her fragile state, well, seeing Nancy was enough to spook her and send her running back to Kentucky,” Genna said. “She thought she was having another breakdown when she looked up and saw Nancy walking down the driveway and had a flashback to seeing Michael walk across the clearing in the camp.”

“That’s what sent her packing?”

“That was it. But fortunately, Patsy was able to catch up with her. Of course, by the time she got the truth out of Chrissie, we’d already figured out that Nancy wasn’t. . . well, wasn’t
Nancy
at all.”

Now, in the early morning hours, Genna wrapped the lightweight blanket around her and tried to make sense of the past week of her life.

“Cold?” Without opening his eyes, John reached out a hand for her and caressed the first body part he touched, which happened to be her leg.

“No. Just restless.”

“There’s a cure for that,” he said drowsily, pulling her down to lay beside him and turning to cradle her in his arms.

John drifted in and out of sleep, never fully asleep, never completely awake, the thought never far from his mind that he’d almost lost her forever this time. For that alone, he wished Michael Homer’s soul a Godspeed to eternal fire. And he knew with total certainty that he would never again want to wake up without her next to him. While conceding that, all things considered, that might not be possible, he decided to opt for the next best thing.

“Will you come home with me next weekend?” he asked later that morning as they concluded a very late breakfast. “Sharpe’s offer of a few extra days off still stands, you know.”

“Well, I was hoping to get up to the cabin to help Patsy close up for the season,” she told him.

“If we can put that off till the following week, I’ll help too.”

“Really?” Genna grinned. Patsy would be delighted.

“Yep. I can winterize with the best of ’em,” he said solemnly, and she laughed. “My mother wants to celebrate that you escaped from the bad guy and that good has triumphed over evil.”

“What did she really say?” Genna’s eyes narrowed suspiciously.

“That it’s her sister Connie’s birthday and if I value my life I’ll be at Uncle Vinnie’s restaurant at seven on Saturday with the rest of the family. And if I know what’s good for me, I’ll bring you along.”