Broken Dolls (A Jefferson Winter Thriller) (36 page)

I drove to the north-east corner of the boundary wall and abandoned the Maserati in the middle of the road. Then I reached into the passenger footwell, grabbed the Samsonite case, popped the catches and opened the lid. The smell of fresh gun oil hit me the moment the lid went up.

Donald Cole had done good. The Colt 45 was one of my favourite handguns because it was one hundred per cent reliable. Not ninety-nine per cent, not ninety-eight per cent, one hundred per cent. Back in 1911, the US army had tested some guns and the Colt 45 was the only one to fire 6,000 rounds without a single problem. Whenever it got too hot they dunked it in a bucket of cold water then carried on firing. Add in the fact that it was comfortable to handle and easy to conceal and you had one very impressive weapon.

I clicked out the magazine and checked the ammo: .45 hollow-points. Nine-millimetre rounds penetrated more deeply, but the .45 had much more stopping power. When it hit something solid all that kinetic energy was transferred to the thing it hit, whereas there was a good chance that a 9 mm bullet was just going to pass straight through. According to legend, .45 hollow-points could be stopped by a wet army blanket. Swap that blanket for a body, and you could see why I preferred .45 rounds to 9 mm.

I checked the guns over and dry-fired them a couple of times. My preference would be to fire some live rounds to make sure they worked, but that wasn’t going to happen. I pushed the magazine back into the second gun, racked the slide and chambered a round.

The downside to keeping a round in the chamber was the possibility of an accidental discharge but it was a risk I was willing to take. If you needed to use a gun you didn’t want to be messing around trying to chamber a round. Bottom line: if things got that bad then every single second would count. Chambering a round now could mean the difference between life and death later.

One of the Colts got stuffed down the back of my jeans and a spare magazine went into my back pocket. I held the second Colt out to Hatcher. The detective just stared at it.

‘It’s a gun,’ I said.

‘I know it’s a gun.’

‘You know how to fire a gun, don’t you?’

‘Of course I know how to fire a gun.’

‘You point it and squeeze the trigger. You keep squeezing until you run out of bullets.’

‘I know how to fire a bloody gun, Winter.’

‘I’d feel better if I knew my back was covered.’

Hatcher snatched the Colt from me and we got out of the Maserati. The wind was so vicious it stole my breath away. Heads down, we ploughed into the blizzard. Hatcher was right beside me all the way, a ghostly presence floating through the snow.

It was hard going. I couldn’t feel my feet or hands, and my eyes stung. We followed the eight-foot-high boundary wall along the eastern perimeter of the property. An inch of snow had already settled on the sloping cap. I counted off the yards in my head and when I reached 150 stopped walking. If my calculations were correct we were now perpendicular with the house.

Hatcher gave me a boost up and I clambered onto the top of the wall. Snow soaked into the seat of my jeans, freezing my ass. I reached down and, grabbing Hatcher’s hand, helped him up.

We dropped down into a wood, which was good as it tallied with what we’d seen on the laptop. It also meant that we had a much better chance of getting to the house without being seen. Most of the trees were bare, but there were a few evergreens. The tall thick trunks blocked the worst of the wind, turning it into a manageable breeze, and the sudden silence was eerie, like someone had flicked a switch and turned the blizzard off. We battled through the thick undergrowth, branches snatching at our clothes, creepers and roots threatening to trip us up.

The woodland went on for about thirty yards and ended at a six-foot wall. I grabbed the top of the wall, my frozen fingers sinking into the snow, then pulled myself up and peered into the darkness.

There was a kitchen door twenty yards away. To reach it we had to cross an area that had once been used to grow vegetables, but had long been abandoned. This was surrounded by walls on three sides, and the house on the fourth side. There were two small windows on the first floor, both dark. I couldn’t see any signs of life behind the glass, but kept looking a few seconds longer, just in case. Once we were on the other side of the wall we’d be easy targets. I dropped back down and filled Hatcher in.

‘You ready?’ I asked.

‘Ready as I’ll ever be.’

Hatcher looked scared, but scared was good. Scared would keep him sharp. I was scared, too. If I looked into a mirror right now my expression would be identical to Hatcher’s.

We clambered over the wall and sprinted for the house. Hatcher was right behind me. We were out in the open again, out in the blizzard. It seemed to hit me twice as hard as before. My lungs were filled with ice, and the snow lacerated my skin. Those twenty yards felt like twenty miles. I half expected a bullet to hit me at any second. It would slam into me and the first I’d know about it would be when I hit the ground, my blood seeping into the snow.

We reached the house and pressed up against the wall. Hatcher was breathing hard and actually had some colour in his face.

‘I need to get to the gym more often,’ he said.

‘You say that like you know what the inside of a gym looks like.’

Hatcher gave me a short smile. ‘Screw you, Winter.’

I tried the door. Locked. There wasn’t a spare key in any of the obvious places, so I blew some heat into my frozen fingers, took out my lock picks and went to work. The lock took a couple of minutes to crack. It was old and heavy, in need of oil, and my fingers weren’t working so well. I pulled the Colt from the back of my jeans and followed the gun inside, my wet boots leaving a trail of damp footprints.

The kitchen was big, with a stone floor and fixtures that looked old but weren’t. The room was spotlessly clean. Tins of food were piled up on the work surfaces and, at first glance, they looked as if they’d been placed randomly. At a second glance, I saw the order. Soup in one group, baked beans in another, spaghetti hoops in another, and so on.

Each group was neatly positioned and made me think of Andy Warhol. Aside from the tin cans, everything was squared away and shipshape. No dirty dishes in the sink. No clutter of any sort. There was a smell of orange groves and bleach in the air. Looking around, three letters sprang to mind: OCD.

I stood completely still in the middle of the kitchen, melting snow running down my face and clothes, and listened hard. The sounds we heard were the sounds you’d expect to hear in a house this old. The pop and rattle caused by air bubbles in the water pipes, the occasional creak, the whirr of the refrigerator.

No sounds of life.

Only one door led from the kitchen. I walked over to it, placing each foot with care and distributing my weight as evenly as possible, my wet footprints following. Hatcher moved as silently as air and the only reason I knew he was there was because of his breathing. We reached the door and a noise from upstairs stopped us in our tracks.

‘Any ideas?’ Hatcher whispered.

I shook my head, placed a finger against my lips, then turned the handle and pushed the door open slow and easy. I went out into the corridor, my gun hand moving left to right, up and down, covering all the angles like I was back on Hogan’s Alley at Quantico. Hatcher was a step behind. He had his gun out, too. I stopped and listened, all my attention focused on the upper floors.

Another noise from above, but there was no mistaking what it was this time. The sound of a scream gets inside you like no other sound. This was a female scream, long and drawn-out and filled with agony.

We broke into a run, reacting to the sound like it was the bang of a starter pistol. Someone was hurting and it was our job to stop that hurt. We sprinted into a large entrance hall then headed for the stairs, taking them two at a time. At the top we turned right and ran into a corridor.

There was a light behind the door at the far end. The smell of hospitals got stronger the closer we got. The door was ajar and I hit it with my shoulder, slamming it all the way back and smashing it into the wall. I crashed into the room, my gun moving in all directions. The adrenalin was pumping and my finger felt heavy on the trigger. I scanned the room, taking everything in.

Catherine Grosvenor’s shocked face, her mouth scrunched into a surprised O.

The five wedding rings on the mannequin hand.

Rachel Morris bound to the chair, alive and breathing and missing a finger.

The TV screens.

I could see Templeton on one of the screens. She was stripped to the waist and strapped to a wooden chair. Her sweatshirt had been cut off and lay in tatters on the floor. Adam stood next to her with a large bowie knife in his hand. Templeton was in a bad way. There were welt marks from where she’d been beaten. Streaks of blood spread out from the three-inch knife wound that ran from the bottom of her sternum to her belly button. She was conscious but only just.

‘Microphone on,’ said Catherine Grosvenor. ‘Adam, the police are here. You know what to do.’

Adam walked up to one of the cameras and stared into it. His face was large on the screen. It was like he was staring directly at me. I stared back. He had a handsome face, a trustworthy face. His eyes twinkled with good humour. He didn’t look like a killer, but then my father hadn’t looked like a killer, either. Neither did Bundy, Dahmer or John Wayne Gacy. They never did.

I looked over at Catherine Grosvenor. ‘Tell him to put the knife down.’

‘Put the knife down or what?’ Adam’s voice came from the wall speakers. The volume was pushed to the point where the sound distorted.

‘Put the knife down or I’ll shoot your mother.’

Adam laughed. ‘Like that’s going to happen.’

I pulled the trigger.

70

I reached the bed in two strides, clapped my hand over Catherine Grosvenor’s mouth and pulled the plastic cuff from her finger. The heart monitor let out a long plaintive note, the universally recognised sound of death. There was a hole in the pillow an inch from the old woman’s head, feathers floated gently back down to the bed. My ears rang from the gunshot. The smell of cordite filled the room and stung my nostrils.

Catherine Grosvenor glared at me and tried to move her head from side to side, the only part of her body she could move. Plenty of people had wanted me dead over the years, but nobody had wanted it as badly as Catherine Grosvenor did at that moment. The old woman was as insubstantial as air and I held her easily. I put her in a stranglehold that stopped the flow of blood through her carotid artery, felt her go slack, then laid her head back on the pillow.

All this happened in seconds. It happened so quickly that Adam hadn’t had time to process what his ears were telling him. He’d heard the gunshot, and a millisecond later he heard the heart monitor flatline. It should have been a simple equation but grief would have made him stupid.

‘What have you done?’ Adam whispered. His voice became a shout, loud and filled with fury. ‘What have you done!’

I got up close to Hatcher, close enough for my lips to touch his ear, and gave him the three-second version of my plan, hoping that would be enough. Time was not on our side.

‘We’ve just done you the biggest favour of your life, Adam,’ said Hatcher. ‘You don’t have to do what she says any more.’

‘Why did you shoot Mother?’

This wasn’t the response I expected. How the hell had Adam confused my voice with Hatcher’s? Hatcher sounded nothing like me. It was another example of how grief had made him stupid.

‘You don’t have to do what she says any more,’ Hatcher repeated.

I ran over to the medical trolley and found a pair of scissors and a roll of bandage tape. I tossed the tape to Hatcher so he could gag Catherine Grosvenor. By my reckoning she’d be out for another twenty seconds and then the shouting would start. We needed Adam Grosvenor to believe she was dead. We needed him in a state of shock and denial. We needed him confused and not thinking straight. It was Templeton’s only chance. The orbitoclast was on the trolley in the basement, and I’d seen what Adam could do with it.

I went over to Rachel Morris and pressed a finger against her lips.
Shut up.
I cut the cable ties, helped her to her feet and we headed for the corridor. Behind me, Hatcher was talking up a storm. The detective was doing a great job. He was keeping Adam in the present, keeping it personal by using his name wherever he could. He was promising the world without giving a single thing away. Textbook stuff.

‘Tell me everything you can about where Adam was holding you,’ I said once we were out of range of the bedroom microphone.

Rachel started talking, and kept on talking until we reached the door that led down to the basement. I was impressed at how together she was, how focused. There were no questions, no recriminations, no self-pity, just precise answers to my questions. Donald Cole would have been proud.

I went down the stairs alone and jogged along the corridor to the basement door. The light switch and the dog flap were exactly how Rachel had described them. I lay down on the floor with my head right up next to the dog flap. The plastic acted as a soundboard, amplifying what was happening on the other side.

Hatcher’s voice was distorted and he sounded like an angry robot. The way it had been manipulated explained why Adam hadn’t been able to tell the difference between Hatcher and me. Adam’s voice was quieter, more natural-sounding.

I made myself wait, made myself listen, forced myself to be patient because I needed to build up a picture of what was going on in there. It wasn’t easy. I was over-adrenalised, buzzing with nervous energy. There was a mocking tone in Adam’s voice I didn’t like one bit, a pleading tone in Hatcher’s voice I liked even less. Things were about to turn critical.

I pushed the door open and walked into the basement. The light was blinding. It reflected off the white tiles, glinted off the exposed steel on the dentist’s chair. Adam was standing alongside the chair, using Templeton as a shield. His left arm was curled around her body, gripping her tight, the bowie knife in his right hand was pushed up against her throat, and his head was hidden by Templeton’s. It didn’t matter where I aimed, there was no clear shot.