08 - December Dread (29 page)

Briggs was gambling that he could beat De Luca here. I had more on the table than Briggs. Mom, the animals, and I were getting out of here immediately. Only Tiger Pop wasn’t answering my call. Mom had her keys in hand. Luna was sticking close to me.

“Leave Tiger Pop,” my mom said.

I shifted my scared eyes to her. She also looked frightened, but resolute.

“He’s a cat,” she said. “He’ll be fine. We’ll come back for him tomorrow. Come on, honey.”

She was right, but I called out for Tiger Pop once more. No answer.

“Grab a knife,” I said as we made our way to the garage. She slid a chef’s knife out of the block without slowing her forward movement. I wanted to keep my hands free. Master Andrea had made it clear in the self-defense class that any weapon you hold can be used against you, so don’t grab it unless you know how to wield it or have no other defense. I figured the latter described my mom.

The attached garage was cold but flipping on the single overhead bulb revealed that it was also nearly as clean as my mom’s house. The lack of clutter and shadows was a relief. If we could just all get in the van and get the windows and doors locked, we were safe, even if we had to crash the car through the garage wall to escape. Outside, the wind howled.

“Hurry,” I told my mom.

She slipped into the driver’s side. I opened the side door to let Luna in, and closed it.

That’s when the lights went out.

Forty-seven

My breath escaped in
a huff, as if I’d been punched in the stomach. The immediate drop from brightness to dark was blinding. I blinked rapidly, trying to adjust, and slammed my back to the van. I heard only a silence so absolute it was like death.

My mom opened her door. “Mira?”

“Close it, Mom. Close it, lock it, start the car.” I had my fingers curled under the icy metal of the side door handle when the shadows shifted in front of me. A crushing blow followed, numbing the arm that was holding the door handle. Strong hands caught me by the hair as I fell toward the ground.

Time and sound slowed. I tried to remember the name Mr. Denny had given this sensation, but then that thought slipped away like an eel. I heard Luna raging and thrashing against the door of the van. My mom was yelling, but it seemed very far away, each wave of sound splitting and arcing around me. A tiny filter of snow-spangled moonlight slipped through the cracks of the garage, allowing me to make out shapes. Dark. Hulking. Raging. The smell of cinnamon chewing gum. I shot a hand in the air, hoping to connect with flesh, but it glanced off my captor. I twisted, and a big chunk of hair was ripped from my head.

I could hold only one thought: draw him away from my mom.

I stood and charged through the door that led from the garage to the mud room. I hesitated for only a moment. I knew I shouldn’t enter the house. I’d be trapped. Ripping open the outside door, I charged into the night. The ground was icy, and I fell to my knees. Loud breathing tore through the air, slow and distant but somehow echoing like a hammer pound in my head. Was it his? Mine?

I struggled to my feet and charged across the snow, but he was faster. He hit me from behind. We rolled to the ground, his arms squeezing me like a constrictor. I couldn’t draw a breath. I felt the paralysis settling onto me just like it had at the gym. Why fight? It would be over quicker if I just let it happen, and this grinding terror could finally end. He had already murdered eleven women, one of them his own sister. I was no better than them, no smarter, no quicker. I wasn’t going to get away. I thought of my mom, and Mrs. Berns, and it made me sad that I’d be leaving them. My vision blurred, and then narrowed, and I felt almost sleepy.

And then, from deep in my gut, I yelled.

I didn’t scream for anyone, or out of fear. I yelled because it hurt, and I was suddenly angry, and it turned out I did want to fight after all. The noise reset time and sound. My head flew back, and the rear of it cracked him on the nose. He swore and loosened his grip for a moment. That’s all I needed to pull away. I twisted and connected again with his now-bloody face, with my forehead this time. He recoiled from the force of the head butt and kicked at me, grazing my wounded shoulder. We both stumbled to our feet. Greedy flakes of snow swirled around our bodies and stuck.

I was facing him now, within arm’s reach. Our chests heaved in ragged, tearing breaths. His face was an evil slate of blankness, the only life in it the blood coursing down from his cracked nose. His eyes were vacant, shifting glass. He looked not like Adam but like someone wearing an Adam mask. Metal glinted in his hand.

I swung, and my punch went wild. Momentum pulled me toward him, and he stabbed as I fell, grunting with the force of it. My unexpected shift robbed the knife of its target. The blade burned through my coat and the flesh of my upper arm instead. He must have thought I’d taken the cut in a vital area, because he let down his guard for a split second. Catching myself before I hit the ground, I used the technique I’d learned in self-defense class to make a rock out of my left hand. I repositioned my weight and stood, hurtling my fist toward his throat, a bullet from a gun. It connected. He made a noise like an air mattress popping, and then fell to his knees. Drops of blood from his broken nose startled the snow around him.

My attention was drawn by a brutal growl from the direction of the garage. Luna, a raging wolf creature, appeared in the doorway held open by my mom. She charged in a four-legged blur. The force of her pushed Adam from his knees to his back, and she stood on him, her weight pinning him as he tried helplessly to reach his crushed throat.

The world became suddenly loud, a roaring wave of finally freed sound crashing around my ears: my searing, sharp breaths, my mom crying, Luna’s feral growls terrifying even to me. After amplified sound came pain. My right arm throbbed, and the coldness I felt washing over my hand was my own blood gushing from my arm. Exhaustion, empty desperate tiredness, followed the pain.

I wanted it to be all over. I wanted someone to rush in and drag the bad guy away, tell my mom it was all going to be okay, and get me to a hospital. But that wasn’t going to happen. Nobody was going to do that for me.

“I need rope, Mom.” My voice was hoarse. I may have been yelling the whole time of the attack.

She stood in the doorway for a moment with her hand clutched around the knife, the whites of her eyes as big as eggs. Her mouth kept opening and closing. Luna snapped at Adam’s face, and the slicing click of her teeth woke my mom from her shock. She disappeared into the garage and came out with a circle of clothesline.

I took it in my left hand. “It’s okay, Mom.” My voice sounded unfamiliar.

My arm was stiff, my hands beginning to claw from the cold. I rejected the pain, begging Luna off Adam. She moved but kept her snout to his head, her teeth bared, a low rattlesnake noise in her throat. I rolled Adam onto his stomach. He was still scrabbling for his throat, but his movements were weakening. I knew I’d probably crushed his trachea and that he might be dying. I wasn’t willing to risk my mom’s or Luna’s life to save him. I tied his wrists behind his back, and then I passed out.

Forty-eight

Wednesday, December 26

“How long had you
known he was targeting women through online dating?”

“Since the third murder,” Briggs said affably. “We’re the FBI. Unfortunately, millions of people are dating online. De Luca struck four times in Chicago and was gone. By the time we figured out it was the same guy in Wisconsin last December, we only had two weeks to capture him, then he stopped killing. We were quicker in Minnesota. As soon as he struck in White Plains, we were there. Our specialists were running phrase recognition software on all online ads and came up with the ‘two shakes of a sheep’s tail’ connection about as soon as you did. It was the only slip up De Luca had.”

I shifted in the hospital bed. “That English degree finally paid off.” The statement was meant to be ironic. I had a dislocated shoulder, and in the same arm, 15 ugly stitches holding two sides of my brachium together. The left side of my face was swollen and as bruised as a dropped apple. My pain level would probably be a 12 on a scale of 10 if not for the delicious Vicodin they’d been feeding me. As it was, I felt like I’d been hit by a motorcycle rather than a bus.

Briggs grunted. He and his partner were paying me a courtesy by being here, and he’d made sure I knew that. He also carried himself like a chained man set free. Three years on this case, and the murderer had been caught. He could go home to his family.

“That’s all you had to go on?” Mrs. Berns said skeptically. “After three years? What’s FBI stand for—fully brainless imbeciles?”

I kept my face smooth, but it wasn’t easy.

Agent Lee also looked like he was struggling to keep the smile off his face, but Briggs studied Mrs. Berns with eyes that had probably forced life-hardened gangsters to confess. “Our profilers knew that our killer had been a foster kid, and we had just found out that a River Grove woman who ran a daycare had her grandson and granddaughter spend every December with her. The rest of the year, they lived in foster homes. Both the River Grove and White Plains victims attended that River Grove daycare as a child.”

Tina had called the FBI
, I thought,
and the FBI had done their work
. I owed these people.

“The foster kids’ grandmother and the owner of the daycare, Ginger Lewis, was a brutal psychopath if there ever was one. Unofficially, of course. None of the charges against her ever stuck, but if one-third of them were true, she was the devil on earth. We’d unearthed the killer’s connection to her and nearly had a name on him when I called you. Only me, my closest people, and the killer knew he had lived in River Grove at that time. When you told me De Luca had shared that nugget with you, I knew he was our man, and you were gonna be his number four.”

I remembered his doll eyes as he swung the knife at me. “What set him off? Back in Chicago, I mean.”

Briggs ran a hand through his bristly hair. “As near as we can tell, he started online dating in Chicago three years ago and came across the profile of his sister. Because of things Auntie Ginger had done to both of them, he had very strong feelings against women exposing themselves in public in that way.”

“He’d prefer we hid?” Mrs. Berns asked.

Briggs shrugged. “I’m not the killer. I don’t think it was like that for him, though. He seemed to think he was protecting the women from something worse by killing them. Auntie Ginger must have done a number on those kids. We’ll never know for sure, however, as she hung herself a decade ago, though we have reason to believe that De Luca had a hand in that. It might have been his first killing.”

“How’d he choose his future victims?” I asked.

“His sister, I already told you about. The other women, with the exception of the two from his daycare, seemed to be random women he found online who had features similar to his sister. With his connections and considering how close to home they’d ended up, it was easy for him to track down the residences and current photos of Natalie Garcia and Lisabeth Hood, as well as a number of other adults who’d attended Auntie Ginger’s as children. After he knew what they looked like and where they lived, he began trolling online dating sites searching for them.”

“That’s how it starts, I guess, by thinking you know what’s best for someone else and imposing your will on them.” I tried to remember the last time I’d had a pain pill. The stitches in my arm were beginning to throb. “Did he tell you all that? How he chose his victims, and that he wanted to protect us by killing us?”

Briggs walked to the window. I hadn’t been conscious when he’d shown up at my mom’s house last night. She’d told me that she couldn’t bear to leave me passed out near the killer, and so she’d held me there with Luna, trying to bind my wounds and rouse me so we could go inside to phone for help. She’d heard the sirens before she’d seen them, lonely, howling whoops echoing across the empty country roads. Two police cars and a sedan had shrieked into her driveway, men and women exiting, guns drawn. It was Briggs who had flipped the killer with his foot, studied his face for a moment before performing life-saving CPR and mouth-to-mouth on him.

A female police officer was the first to reach me. Mom had to restrain Luna so the officer could assess my wounds. She’d finished my mom’s work of staunching the bleeding in my arm while Agent Lee called for an ambulance. I came to shortly after that, but in a distant way. I remember the violent cherry snow cone my blood had made of the landscape. Adam’s blood was mixed in, and the thick metal smell of it amplified by the pristine winter air had made me throw up.

My mom had cried a lot, holding tight to Luna. They’d bundled Adam into a different ambulance than me, but we’d both ended up at the Paynesville Hospital, a surprisingly large and modern facility. Adam had two armed officers guarding him. I had Mrs. Berns and my mom, neither of whom had left my side.

“De Luca’s not talking, literally and figuratively,” Briggs said. “You stapled his throat pretty good with your left hook.” He walked over to me and leaned in close, suddenly, fiercely. “I’m proud of you, kiddo. You did what you needed to save yourself. And I owe you one.” He paused as if he was going to say more, then he stood abruptly and looked around the room. “Any other questions? I’ve got work to do.”