Where Angels Rest (8 page)

Rebecca took a deep breath and pulled closer to the truck. Don’t be a baby, she told herself. For God’s sake, this was Hopewell.

Nick threw two logs on the fire then moved an old radio off the table and adjusted the lantern so he could read. Sims looked around.

“It’s not much for creature comforts, but that blanket is clean,” he said, nodding to the mattress on the floor.

She went to it, looking a little less confident than just moments before. She was in a cold, empty house in the middle of nowhere, alone at night with a stranger who was half drunk, outweighed her by at least eighty pounds, and wielded a bad temper and a pistol. Nick could see each and every one of those realizations coming to light in her mind.

“I’ve never attacked a woman before,” he assured her.

“But you could make an exception for me?”

He lifted a brow. “You’re throwing around some pretty heavy accusations, in a place where you don’t know the players.”

“I know Jack Calloway.”

Nick held her eyes. “So do I.”

An impasse. She acknowledged it with a tilt of her head and lowered herself to the mattress so carefully that Nick pulled out the Starke County Sheriff’s accident report first: Dr. Sims had suffered a bout of unconsciousness, a couple of bruised ribs, abrasions and contusions. He could see it as she tried to get comfortable—the careful movements, the wince. He made a mental note to call Starke County first thing in the morning.

“I could tell you in a nutshell,” she offered, but Nick didn’t want the emotional-sister version. He wanted the facts.

“I’d rather read it in detail,” he said.

She leaned back against the wall to wait, crossing her arms over her ribcage. Nick knew about bruised ribs. They hurt like a son of a bitch.

Read.

Lauren McAllister: She’d been a promising art student
with a love for cocaine, and the only child of a two-term senator who had, according to some, won his third term on a sympathy vote. Lauren’s body had been found when early morning bird-watchers saw something floating in the Everglades. Authorities got to her before the alligators and determined that she’d been dead since the night before, though she hadn’t been in the water very long. The bullet that killed her, point blank into the heart, was a .38 from Justin Sims’s handgun, which turned up in the swamp. She’d been tripping: cocaine in her blood.

Interesting, but not unusual. Pretty run-of-the-mill, as murders go. There was evidence that pointed straight to Justin Sims, with nothing to distinguish this case from a hundred other murd—

Nick blinked, and the hairs on his arms stood up. He re-read a passage:
traces of paint thinner on face.

He glanced up and caught Sims looking at him.

Paint thinner?
Jack Calloway was a skilled carpenter. Paint thinner would be a staple in his workshop. And Nick had seen Margaret, a sculptor, use it to clean up clay.

He blew out a breath. Sims was a shrink, and he could see it coming. “I imagine you have a theory about the paint thinner?” he asked. “Some psychological profile you’ve concocted and applied to Jack Calloway. Let’s see… His wife is drop-dead gorgeous without makeup so he can’t bear to have it on his lovers?”

“A little cliché, don’t you think?”

“His mother used to scrub his face with paint thinner and lye, until he bled.”

“Better,” she said. “It’s always about the mother, after all, isn’t it?”

Fucking shrinks. They were the reason Bertrand Yost wasn’t in a real jail serving real time. The reason Nick’s
career had gone to hell. “No,” he said. “It’s usually about money or sex or vengeance, and hardly ever about psychological mumbo jumbo. Jails need bars, not couches.”

“Look, I’ll be the first to say I don’t know why Lauren’s murderer cleaned off her face with paint thinner, but I do know there’s a reason. Something that would explain his actions.” She squared her shoulders. “Why don’t you ask Calloway what it is?”

Nick suppressed a scowl. He tried to paint Jack Calloway with the brush of a psycho-murderer—someone with some weird compulsion to shoot a woman and leave her fresh-faced, then dump her for gators. It wouldn’t work. Aside from the simple weirdness of it, Jack was a good man, successful, and devoutly religious. He was married to one of the most attractive women Nick had ever laid eyes on; even now, at nearly fifty, Margaret’s features were put together in a way that made men of all ages catch themselves staring, and she wore them naturally and without arrogance, with a slim figure and thick dark hair attractively threaded with silver. She never wore a speck of makeup yet—

Christ.

Nick cursed beneath his breath. This was the problem with shrinks: They could take a man apart and put the pieces back together in a way that created a different man altogether, something that wasn’t real.

Detective Mann, isn’t it a fact that you went there with the
intention
of killing Bertrand Yost? Isn’t it a fact that you
enjoyed
beating the hell out of him?

Nick bit back a curse. Focus. This is about Lauren McAllister. Not Allison, not Yost.

He slid a finger beneath the portrait of Lauren provided by her family and held it beside the ME’s headshot of her
death: a Marilyn Monroe lookalike, complete with the mole above the left corner of her lip, heavy makeup, and a come-fuck-me look in her eyes. Typical nineteen-year-old these days, Nick thought, feeling his age, then remembered that this shot was actually twelve years old.

It was an old case. A closed case. A case in which the murderer had already been identified, tried, and convicted. Justin Sims.

He pulled out another folder: Sims. Justin and Erin were the children of Marla Gordon and Chuck Sims. Sims died in a boating accident when Justin was a baby and Erin was six, and her mother re-married Jeffrey Collins, a successful realtor in South Florida. By all accounts, the family was respected and privileged, and though the marriage ended in divorce several years before the murder, there were no indications that teenage Justin was on any sort of bad track at the time. His mother attended his trial but was noticeably absent from her daughter’s efforts to defend him afterward; Jeffrey Collins disappeared after the divorce. Similarly, there was a husband in there for at least a little while. David Cox was a law student Erin Sims married a year before the murder. He testified for the defense, claiming Justin’s gun had been stolen, but after that, he too stopped showing up in reports.

Nick looked across the room at Sims, at the empty left ring finger. She
was
alone. Even the rest of her family seemed to have accepted Justin’s fate and, one by one, had abandoned the cause. Jensen had a whole stack of pages here that showed ten years of visits to police departments, the FBI, journalists, and a string of private investigators—none of them mentioning anyone but Dr. Sims.

A twinge of admiration threatened and Nick bullied it back. No matter how much she believed in her brother’s
innocence, her methods couldn’t be condoned. When Justin was convicted, she went after Huggins—publicly and with a vengeance. Police didn’t listen, but everyone else did. Eventually, Huggins’s neighbors shunned him, contractors fired him, and his own pastor asked him to leave the church for the sake of the congregation. His wife’s classes in sculpture emptied of what few pupils she had left. Sixteen months after Justin’s trial had ended, John and Maggie Huggins moved to Raleigh, North Carolina, to try to start over.

Erin Sims followed. Within weeks, she had papered the city with posters declaring him a sexual predator, drug dealer, and murderer; gotten herself interviewed on TV; and published an editorial in the paper. For John and Maggie, life in Raleigh never got off the ground. Sims found herself at the hard end of a slander suit and a restraining order but neither fazed her. For the next ten years, while Justin lost one appeal after another, she hired private investigators and hounded police departments, but no one took her seriously. In the margin of one report, Nick found a note scrawled from one cop to another:
JD—don’t waste your time. A loose screw.

Loose screw or not, Erin Sims earned a doctorate during those ten years, becoming a victims’ advocate for the Dade County court system. She had a reputation there as a pit bull, but continued to work on Justin’s case on the side.

Nick switched to the file Valeria had tagged for him. It was from the Florida Attorney General’s office: a citation of a court-ordered stay of execution and a request for Nick to confirm the identity of one Jack Calloway.

He tipped his chair onto two legs, closing his eyes on an ache that swelled in his brain. Jack was a town leader,
a prominent businessman, and a loyal churchgoer. His work to renovate the rundown Hilltop property into an historic bed-and-breakfast had been a boon to the area, and between the inn and his wife’s artwork, Hopewell had become somewhat of a tourist trap. Margaret Calloway was a little bit famous. She taught art classes, hosted sculpting
Elderhostels
, and mined her own clay right here at Weaver’s. Nick knew she’d been featured in at least one trade magazine and had a handful of pieces in museums. With the help of her nephew, Rodney—whom she and Jack had raised from childhood—and a couple of employees, they kept Hilltop House in peak condition. And if Jack and Margaret had come to Hopewell to escape something from the past, well, Nick could hardly blame them.

He’d done it, too.

Until now. Now, there was some media-hungry rabble-rouser from Miami handing Nick the very things he’d gone two thousand miles to avoid. Murder, drugs, illicit affairs, rumors. Christ, he didn’t want Hopewell to face that kind of shit, but by now the whole town had probably heard the accusations against Jack. The local media were probably having a field day.

His hands fisted and he looked at Erin Sims. No one knew better than Nick what destructive sensationalism could do to a man. No one had worked harder than he to create a refuge from that sort of destruction.

And no one—no matter how pretty and sad-eyed—was gonna come into his haven and fuck it up.

W
HAT A FUCK-UP
.

The Angelmaker slid into the front entrance of Hilltop House, inched the door shut, and held still for the space of several seconds. Listened.

The inn was asleep. No one to notice the truck missing, no one to question being out so late.

Except the angels.
They keep watch. They see the truth.

Fucking angels. Always watching. Well, not anymore. Not all of them, anyway. The first seven had been neutralized. They were harmless now—deaf, dumb, and blind. After twelve years, only three angels remained. Rebecca, the eighth, was next. Soon she’d join the others.

But she was being difficult. Bitch.

Tonight’s failure rolled in on a wave of anger. Rebecca had been inches from pulling up to the truck, seconds from falling into the trap meant for her in the first place. Then, for no reason at all, she’d slammed on her brakes, wheeled around, and rushed off into the distance at about seventy miles an hour.

She
saw
.

The Angelmaker took a deep breath, nerves dancing. Rebecca couldn’t become like the last one—Shelly Quinn. Shelly had proved herself as an angel and then disappeared. Kept watching, watching until it wasn’t possible to
breathe
without feeling her eyes. The months waiting to kill her had been a nightmare, and when she was finally dead, the weight of the universe had lifted.

No way would the Angelmaker let Rebecca’s destruction drag out like that. She had to die, before she became dangerous.

Still, there was no room for panic. Panic caused mistakes; just ask Justin Sims—or his sister. For a moment, not for the first time, the Angelmaker wondered if Erin Sims would emerge as an angel. She was brazen enough, but in all these years, she’d never seen the truth. There was no reason to think she would now.

Unless Nick Mann climbed onto her bandwagon.

The Angelmaker drew a breath, thinking about that. Nick was more blind than anyone. Blind and pigheaded and so protective of his good citizens in his good town that he’d never believe anything damning about the Calloway family. Nick wouldn’t be an issue, unless Erin Sims worked her way under his skin. He wasn’t a player, but he was no monk. It wasn’t inconceivable that she could get him thinking with something other than his head.

Have to keep an eye out for that.

The Angelmaker tiptoed through the lobby, dropped the keys to the Ford into the drawer of a cherry secretary, and cocked an ear toward the stairs. Still nothing. Just a few more steps, and tonight’s fiasco would be over. No one would ever know how Rebecca had slipped from grasp.

A spread of gooseflesh prickled to life and the Angelmaker looked up at the masks on the foyer wall. Hollow
eyes, sealed lips, and no ears at all. Harmless now. They might as well be monkeys on display:
See no evil, speak no evil, hear no evil.

Words for the wise, Dr. Sims.

At four-thirty in the morning, Erin pulled into the city parking lot behind the sheriff’s Tahoe. Mann met her at her car door with an expression like thunder.

“I told you to follow me to your motel exit,” he said, but Erin didn’t care. He’d spent a couple hours at the cabin reading files—barely talking—then told her to follow him back to Hopewell. When she hadn’t stopped at the motel, she could almost
feel
his anger stretching from his car to hers, but she’d be damned if she was going to leave until she knew he was taking what he’d read seriously.

Less than five days left.

“Not until we talk,” she said.

He bent a forearm onto the roof of the Aveo and it sagged beneath his weight. In the wash of security lights, the details of his face were visible—strong Germanic features with deep grooves on either side of his mouth, a white crescent scar bisecting one eyebrow, and a dent marring the left side of his chin. Combined with the weekend’s beard and debauchery, he had a haggard, beat-up look that seemed out of place for Mayberry.

“I read the reports,” he said. “I know enough to do what I need to.”