Doom with a View (35 page)

Whirling away from Michael as he wound his arm up for another crack at me, I heard something rattle next to me and a quick glance showed me that it was the can of pepper spray. Snatching it off the ground, I dived back under the table and shimmied to the other side, where I then jumped to my feet, whirled around and sprayed the shit out of Michael Derby. He dropped the hacksaw, reeling backward and covering his eyes with his hands while he squealed and screamed and thrashed around.

I ran at him and sprayed him again for good measure, then threw the pepper spray aside and picked up the metal tray from off the floor. I then hit Michael as hard as I could over the head. He sank to his hands and knees, squirming and thrashing around, trying to get away from me. I hit him again and again and again until he slumped over and was still. For good measure I hit him one last time and tossed the tray away, panting and squinting through the fumes of the pepper spray as my own eyes watered and teared.

Still in a bit of a panic, I looked around for something to tie him up with, unconvinced he would be unconscious for long. “My coat pocket,” said Harrison. “I’ve got a set of handcuffs in my right front pocket.”

I hurried over to Harrison, wincing a little as I noticed his temple was badly cut and bloody. I couldn’t get to the handcuffs because of all the straps tying him down, so I loosened them as quickly as I could and he sat up and fished them out himself before handing them to me.

I hurried back to Michael and pulled his hands behind him, struggling as my own hands shook so violently that I had a hell of a time getting his into the cuffs. Somehow I managed it, though, and stood up, my chest heaving as I fought to catch my breath. After a moment I remembered that I probably needed to help get Candice out of her straps too, but when I turned around I stopped short when I realized that Harrison had already beaten me to it. And what further astonished me was that he and Candice were now kissing each other with such mad passion that I actually had to avert my eyes.

“Jeez, you two!” I said, looking anywhere but at them. “Is this really the time and place?”

Peeking out of the corner of my eye, I saw that they were totally ignoring me, groping and hugging each other with fervor. “Okay,” I said awkwardly. “Well then . . . uh . . . I guess I’ll wait out in the car.”

Chapter Fifteen

I sat in the car for maybe ten minutes, still shaking and trembling from everything that had happened, when headlights appeared in the rearview mirror. Two cars pulled alongside the SUV just as Harrison and Candice emerged from the building hand in hand. The moment they spotted the other vehicles, however, they dropped each other’s hands and moved slightly apart.

I smirked and rolled my eyes. “Yeah, like no one could tell you two’ve been mashing,” I said to myself. There was a light tap on my window and I felt a flood of relief when I saw Dutch standing there, looking both worried and angry.

I opened my car door and grabbed him around the chest, hugging him so fiercely that he grunted. “What the hell are you three doing here?” he demanded.

I didn’t answer him. Instead I hugged him tighter. “Just hold on to me for a minute, cowboy, okay?”

Dutch’s strong arms encircled me and he wrapped his coat around me. “You’re trembling,” he said. “Abs, what happened to you?”

“The scene is secure,” Harrison announced, and I turned my head to see him addressing the agents gathering around me and Dutch. “Michael Derby’s inside. He’s conscious, but he might need medical attention. He fell while being maced and bumped his head.You’ll find him inside on the basement level, handcuffed and strapped to a table. In the cooler you’ll find the body of Leslie Coyle. Michael killed her, Bianca Lovelace, and Kyle Newhouse. He admitted everything to Ms. Fusco and me. We expect he’ll give a full confession without trouble.”

Two agents clicked on flashlights and moved in the direction of the front doors.

“Sir,” Dutch said, addressing Harrison.

“Agent Rivers,” Harrison said. “Good work. We likely never would have found this place if it hadn’t been for your research.”

Dutch smiled. Then he said, “And Abby’s intuition.”

I looked at Harrison, expecting him to scoff. He surprised me by saying, “The bureau owes a lot to Ms. Cooper, and I personally owe her my life.”

Candice beamed first at me, then at Harrison, and he smiled back at her all a-smitten. “Oh, boy,” I said.

Dutch seemed completely confused by everything that was going on. “Would someone please explain to me what’s happened here tonight?”

Harrison opened his mouth to tell him when another one of those bloodcurdling screams echoed from inside the building. Dutch immediately pulled away from me and whipped out his gun, as did all the other agents save Harrison, who shocked them some more by laughing.

“Holster your weapons, gentlemen,” he said calmly. “There’s no threat and no danger. That happens about every thirty to forty minutes or so.”

“Derby screams?” Dutch asked, his gun still at the ready.

Harrison and Candice exchanged an amused look. “No,” he said. “Not Derby. The hospital
is
haunted, you know. And one of the ghosts likes to shriek every half hour.”

“Don’t forget the big shadowy-looking thing that came right for you,” said Candice, elbowing Harrison good-naturedly. “I wonder if he even felt the three rounds you pumped into him.”

Harrison smiled wide and asked me, “Do ghosts notice when you shoot them?”

“Uh . . . ,” I said, feeling put on the spot. “I’m not really sure, sir.”

Dutch looked incredulously at his boss. “Agent Harrison, sir, are you feeling all right? I notice your head is bleeding.”

Harrison wiped absently at his temple and examined the blood on his hands. “I might need stitches,” he said to Candice.

“Come on,” she said. “I’ll drive you.” Then she turned to me and asked, “Did you want to come?”

I studied her face and knew that she would rather have a little alone time with Harrison now that they were all friendly and everything, so as much as I detested being anywhere near the haunted asylum, I willed myself to say, “No, that’s okay. You two go ahead and we’ll meet up for a debriefing later.”

As Candice passed me, she said, “Sorry about the keys, Sundance. I found them in my coat pocket and was on my way back to the car when Michael surprised me from behind and shoved some sort of rag soaked in chloroform in my face. I was out before I knew what was happening.”

“Don’t feel bad,” Harrison said. “That little punk did the same damn thing to me.”

“I’m just glad you two are okay,” I said.

“Thanks to you,” Candice said warmly, and reached out to give me a big hug. She must have noticed that I was still shaking a little, because she asked me again more earnestly to come with her and Harrison.

“Thanks, but I think I want to hang with Dutch for a while.” And even as I said it, I moved back into Dutch’s arms again.

“Okay,” Candice said, smiling at both of us. “Take care of her, Agent Rivers. She’s had a rough night.”

As Candice and Harrison were pulling away, lights in the hospital began coming on. Dutch looked at them and said, “I had no idea this place still carried electricity.”

“I think Derby hooked up the hospital generator,” I said. “I heard some kind of a motor around the back of the building.”

Dutch parked me in his warm sedan while he managed the crime scene. An agent had to be dispatched two miles down the road to get decent cell phone reception and call in the cavalry. Derby emerged from the building on a stretcher, and an ambulance took him away, but not before he fixed his swollen beady eyes on me and screamed, “You ruined
everything
!” To which I simply smiled and gave him a smarty-pants salute.

Leslie Coyle’s body was brought out next. She’d been frozen solid. Derby had put her in the freezer right after he’d killed her. Why he’d done that instead of simply burying her was a mystery, but what was even more surprising was a room next to where I’d found him about to lobotomize Harrison and Candice that was stocked with some women’s clothing, a blond wig, and a pair of size 14 pumps. Next to these articles of clothing had been a table with straps and a tray filled with every kind of torturous instrument imaginable. There was a bone saw, two drills, several picks, and a few mallets. And next to
that
was a letter addressed to Matthew Derby titled “Atonement.”

The letter went on to document every injury and wrongdoing that Michael felt he had suffered at the hands of his father. The first offense sent a chill down my back.
You killed my mother,
it read.

It wasn’t until I read offense number ten that I understood why Bianca, Kyle, and Leslie had all been killed.

Dutch read the letter out loud to me and in spite of how bent I knew Michael’s mind to be, I still felt a pang of sympathy for him. He’d obviously suffered a great deal in his youth, and I knew that with a different set of parents the bright, hardworking kid I’d caught a glimpse of would have turned out completely different. It felt like such a waste that it left me feeling really sad.

We found out later, during Michael’s confession, that his hadn’t been the only malicious mind involved in the plot that started last spring. The other handwriting in the notebook was in fact Leslie’s, and it was Leslie who first broke it to Michael that Bianca knew his father’s secret. Her phone records confirmed she and Michael had talked several times right before Bianca and Kyle went missing. The reason the task force missed seeing it when they were looking into her phone records was that they were focused on finding any communication among her and Bianca and Kyle, so they didn’t even look into the calls to a 312 area code.

Leslie was first tipped off to Bianca’s intention to write the story on Michael’s father when she received a letter from her—later found at the asylum. And I had to think how ironic it was that in this age of instant messaging, e-mail, texts, etc., Bianca had decided to use such an old-fashioned method to reach out to Leslie.

In the letter, Bianca had clearly been going back and forth with her conscience, and she thought that since Leslie also knew the truth about Michael’s father, Leslie might be able to give her some guidance.

But Leslie wasn’t the friend Bianca thought she was. It turned out that Leslie had had a major crush on Kyle, who’d actually had a thing for Bianca. It was Kyle who asked Bianca to go get pizza with him when they happened to walk past the Cock Tail. Kyle couldn’t stop talking about Bianca to Leslie all weekend long, as he believed their shared secret would always keep them connected.

So it was Leslie who suggested that she and Michael abduct and kill Bianca. Michael said during the interrogation that he had taken care of Bianca first, kidnapping and drugging her on her way back from class before driving her up to her favorite vacation spot, where he killed her and hid her in the boathouse.

When asked why he’d gone to all that effort to take her to her family’s cabin, Michael had shrugged and said that he thought the least he could do before killing her was to remind her of a happier place and time. He actually found it poetic.

Once Bianca was out of the way, Leslie had gone to see Kyle at Ohio State, faking her panic over Bianca’s disappearance and thinking that she could win Kyle’s sympathies and start up a romance.

The fly in the ointment to Leslie’s schemes was Michael, who’d grown quite unpredictable. Leslie had let it slip that the other person with Bianca when they’d spotted Matthew Derby at the Cock Tail was Kyle. It was actually Kyle who convinced Bianca and Leslie not to say a word to Michael. He felt sorry for the kid whose mother had committed suicide and had a transvestite for a father. But Michael saw Kyle as a liability. So once Leslie had lured him off campus to talk about Bianca’s sudden disappearance, Michael had drugged and killed him.

Leslie had then freaked out, so he brought her to the abandoned asylum and locked her in one of the old solitary-confinement rooms while he thought about what to do with her. In the five months that he’d had her there, he’d used her for various experiments—testing out homemade pathogens and viruses on her. The coroner revealed that at the time of her death from a blunt-force trauma to the head, the poor girl was quite sick, and probably would have lived only a week or two longer.

And that didn’t even cover the fact that, alone, in the dark, and terrified by the constant ghostly activity that surrounded her, Leslie had actually gone quite insane, and as Michael told it, once he knew we were on the trail, he’d felt the need to cut his losses, so he’d killed her too.

He was planning on burying her in the very place where the last photo of her had been taken, like he’d done for the others. He knew about all those places because the story he’d told us about the conversation overheard by the disgruntled man at the conference was all true—which explained why my lie detector hadn’t gone off and why I hadn’t suspected Michael sooner. The kids had actually had that talk about where their favorite vacation spots were. Leslie, Bianca, and Kyle had said that their favorite vacation spots were where they’d spent time with their families, bonding over games of Scrabble, swimming in the lake, hiking in the hills, or driving a dune buggy over the sand.