Fear Nothing (12 page)

Or would she still be here, lounging around in her husband’s clothes, relegated to telling stories of the glory days while secretly wondering about the might-have-beens? She couldn’t be washed-up. Not yet. She was too young, too dedicated, too much of a cop. There was no next chapter for her. Not when she loved this job so damn much.

Even after it had hurt her. Turned her into a shadow of her former self.

She collapsed back on her bed. Half-dressed in pants, a bra and nothing else, she stared up at the ceiling. Then she closed her eyes, tried to see what she must have seen that final night, right before being shoved down the stairs.

Melvin. Paging Melvin. I’m here, I’m ready, I want to know. Come on, Melvin. Cut a girl a break and let me remember.

Wasn’t that what Dr. Glen had said? If she would talk to her pain, directly ask Melvin to help her remember, the weak Exile would surrender. She just had to be ready for what happened next.

Melvin remained quiet. Or really, continued his normal, blah, blah, blah aching throb.

“I’m ready,” she gritted out in the silent bedroom. “I can handle it, Melvin. Come on, you pissant, groveling son of a bitch. I want to know. Tell me.”

Nothing.

“Was it the killer? Came back to relive his little fantasy, got a nasty surprise when he found me there?”

Except most killers hung out on the outskirts of their crimes. To actually pass under the crime scene tape, violate the police barricade, would expose them to risk. Next thing a killer knew, he was in jail for trespassing, not to mention subject to police interrogation. Now, maybe the perfect psychopath, the murderer who was secure in his superiority, would be attracted to such gamesmanship. But their killer? A man who attacked lone women while they slept? Incapacitated them quickly with chloroform, so even their death was a matter of simple, painless execution . . . ?

For a second, D.D. could almost picture such a man in her head. Small of stature. Low self-esteem, poor social skills, uncomfortable around authority figures, especially women. Never had a long-term relationship, probably lived in the basement of his mother’s house. Except not the browbeaten son harboring a tidal wave of suppressed rage—that killer would explode upon his victims once they were suitably restrained. This killer . . . he was quiet inside and out. But obsessive, maybe. Had to do what he had to do, so was trying to at least do it with the least amount of fuss possible. The victims never even knew what was happening.

He got in, drugged, killed, carved.

Because that was what he really cared about. Skinning. Harvesting. Collecting.

He was a collector.

D.D. thought it and knew it to be true. They were looking for a collector. The murders weren’t crimes of rage or violence, but crimes of obsession. A killer who was compelled to do what he had to do.

Or maybe, do what
she
had to do.

Because sexual sadist predators were almost universally male, but a collector . . . The lack of sexual assault. The use of chloroform to incapacitate the victims. Even the compression asphyxiation. What had Neil said? A person of any size could do it; it was simply a matter of pressing against the right spot for the right amount of time.

Meaning maybe they weren’t looking for a small, socially submissive male after all. But a female. A woman who wouldn’t appear as suspicious if spotted by the neighbors entering another female’s apartment late at night. A woman who, even if she was found at the crime scene after dark, could more credibly claim to be a close friend of the victim.

Could it be? When D.D. had stood in Christine Ryan’s apartment, maybe it hadn’t been a man who’d caught her off guard. But a lone female, emerging from the shadows . . .

“Melvin. Come on, Melvin! Talk to me.”

But Melvin refused to say a word.

D.D. had had enough. She sat up. Stormed across the room. Wrenched on an oversize cream-colored sweater before she could stop herself, then had to grit her teeth against the exploding pain.

“You want to complain, Melvin?” she muttered. “You want to be all pissed off? Then, come on. I’ll give you something to be good and mad about. Let’s go have some fun.”

Sergeant Detective D. D. Warren hammered her way down the stairs, out the door and into her car. Ready to share her pain with the world.

Chapter 9

S
UPERINTENDENT
K
IM
M
C
K
INNON
was a beautiful woman. High, sculpted cheekbones, smooth ebony skin, liquid brown eyes. The kind of woman who would be as stunning at seventy as she was at forty. She was also incredibly smart, relentlessly determined and phenomenally tough, all traits necessary to run the oldest female correctional institute still operating in the United States. Especially these days, when the MCI was facing record crowding and had just been written up for housing two hundred and fifty inmates in a space originally built for sixty-four.

The trickle-down theory of pain and punishment, the superintendent had informed me the day I’d asked her about it. Most sheriffs’ jails were jammed up themselves, meaning they no longer had the space necessary to offer the sight and sound separation required by law between male and female offenders. Their solution: ship the women to the MCI, where they became Superintendent McKinnon’s problem.

She got the bad press, the women got wedged into triple-bunked cells and the state still didn’t authorize funds for building additional housing units.

Other than that, the superintendent had a dream job, I’m sure.

Now Superintendent Beyoncé, as the inmates called her, sat on the other side of her massive gunmetal-gray desk, hands clasped before her, and regarded me soberly.

“She’s getting worse,” she stated without preamble. “This morning’s incident . . . Frankly, I’ve been expecting such an episode for days.”

“Meaning you’ve conducted extra searches of Shana’s cell, while asking your officers to be hypervigilant about her access to materials for making shanks?” I responded coolly.

Superintendent McKinnon merely gave me a look. “Come on, Adeline. You’ve walked these halls long enough. You know when it comes to an inmate like your sister, there’s very little we can do. We may be the ones in uniforms, but more often than not, she’s the one in control.”

Which, sadly, was true. My sister was every prison administrator’s nightmare: a highly intelligent, incredibly antisocial maximum-security inmate with nothing left to lose. She was already held in isolation, locked down twenty-three hours a day. With the sole exception of my one-hour monthly attendance, she didn’t care about visitation privileges. Ditto with phone privileges, access to prison programming or even the few luxuries she’d managed to scrape enough funds together to purchase from the prison canteen. Time and time again, Shana acted out like a bad toddler, and time and time again the prison staff responded with loss of privileges and removal of toys.

Shana didn’t care. She was angry, she was depressed and thus far, no amount of medication had made a difference. I would know, as I’m the one who’d prescribed her last three medical protocols.

My sister’s suicide attempt wasn’t a stain just on Superintendent McKinnon’s record but also on my own.

“Has she been taking her pills?” I asked now, the next logical question.

“We’ve been supervising both her ingestion of the medication as well as searching her cell for undigested capsules. We haven’t found anything, but that might just mean she’s one step ahead. You understand, Adeline, I’m going to have to keep Shana in medical for at least a week as it is. You know what that’s like.”

I nodded, getting the message. If prisons were rife with mental illness, then the medical ward was the epicenter of the madness, where the deeply disturbed prowled their locked-down medical cells while howling their particular brand of crazy for all the world to hear.

If my sister hadn’t wanted to kill herself before, a week in medical should do the trick.

“Is it the anniversary of her first murder victim?” I asked now. “Maria said some reporter’s been trying to contact Shana, asking all sorts of questions?”

In response, Superintendent McKinnon yanked open a drawer and pulled out a banded bunch of letters. “Name’s Charles Sgarzi. He first called my office six months ago. My staff informed him he should write to Shana directly with his request. I’m told she read the first few letters but never responded. Apparently, he got more serious after that.”

She handed over the batch of letters. I counted more than a dozen, arranged in order of the postmark date. It appeared that as of three months ago, the reporter had started writing at least once a week. The envelopes had all been opened, but given the security protocols, that didn’t mean anything.

“Same guy wrote all of these?”

“Yep.”

“What newspaper?”

“Not a paper. A blog. Digital reporting, I don’t know. They say newspapers are passé. Internet news will be the Pulitzer Prize–winning wave of the future. Of course, how do you line a litter box with that?”

“And Shana read every letter?”

“Only the first few. She’s refused them all since.”

“But you’ve read them?”

“The security team grew curious. Understand, your sister isn’t one of our more popular inmates.”

I nodded, knowing what she meant. Many inmates maintained very active social lives while behind bars. If you were a beautiful young woman, that certainly added to the appeal. Shana, on the other hand, was midforties, prison hardened and mean ugly. Most men probably assumed she was a lesbian. Given the sexual nature of her homicides, I didn’t believe she was, but then again, I’d never asked.

“When she started getting weekly mail,” the superintendent continued, “we became suspicious the letters might contain more than social content.”

I nodded again. My sister might not be pretty, but she did have a history of drug abuse, so I could understand the security team’s concern.

“If it’s code or contains some kind of hidden content . . .” The superintendent spread her hands. “It’s better than anything we’ve ever seen. My best guess, this reporter is obsessed with your sister. Which, after I ran a background report on him, makes some sense; he’s the cousin of Donnie Johnson.”

I startled, glancing up. Donnie Johnson had been twelve years old when Shana had strangled him with her bare hands before taking a knife to his face and upper body. Though only fourteen at the time of the murder, she’d been tried as an adult given the “heinous” nature of the crime. During her trial, she’d alleged that Donnie had tried to rape her. She’d only been defending herself. As for the removal of his ear, the mangling of his face, the long strips of skin she’d excised from his arms . . .

Remorse, she’d stated deadpan. Classic disfigurement to repent for her crime.

As the DA had pointed out, Donnie had been a pale, scrawny little boy, the kind of kid picked last during gym class. The odds of this frail ninety-pounder sexually assaulting the bigger, wiser, street-tough foster girl next door . . .

The jury had needed less than two days to deliberate my sister’s fate, and that was after the defense blocked any admission of my sister’s prior bad acts, including another episode with a knife and a boy that had occurred while she was institutionalized at the age of eleven.

My sister had been branded a monster in every major media outlet at the time. Given that she’d killed three more people, including two COs, while incarcerated, I don’t think the public’s perception had been wrong.

In her own words, she was Daddy. A born predator.

And I was Mom. And Mom was worse.

I couldn’t help myself. My thoughts drifted to glass vials and their floating dermal contents, tucked in a shoe box beneath my closet floor. What would Shana think to know that my life wasn’t quite as bland and lily-white as she thought? That she, Dad and I had something in common after all?

I pulled myself together, refocusing on the letters.

“What does he want?” I asked now.

“To ask her some questions.”

I held up the letters. “Did he?”

“No. He just keeps including information for her to contact him.”

“And he doesn’t admit that he’s the victim’s cousin. You found that out on your own.”

“Exactly.”

“So already, his motives are suspect.”

“I’d be suspicious,” Superintendent McKinnon agreed.

“Do you think Shana knows?”

The superintendent paused, regarded me anew.

“Why do you think she’d suspect a personal connection between the reporter and Donnie Johnson?”

I shrugged. “According to you, these letters upset Shana. Why? Just some reporter asking her to get in touch? You know Shana as well as I do. She’s bored, she’s clever, she’s highly manipulative. I guess I would’ve assumed that she’d find this kind of outreach . . . intriguing.”

“You ever talk to her about Donnie?” Superintendent McKinnon asked me.

“We’ve danced around it from time to time.” But maybe not as often as other topics, such as our family.

“She didn’t answer your questions.”

“That’s never been her style.”

“She doesn’t talk about him. Never has. In all her years here, the counselors and psychologists and social workers who’ve cycled through . . . Shana doesn’t talk about him. The boy she stabbed when she was eleven, I know about him. The
ho,
in her terms, she had to gut when she was first incarcerated at sixteen, I know about her. But the Johnson boy. She never goes there.”

I frowned, considering. Shana could be very explicit in her talk of violence. Fantasies about gutting this person, killing that person. There didn’t seem to be anything too shocking, too graphic, too offensive, for her to say. Then again, if you boiled all her words down, parsed them away . . . She babbled. She offered forth exactly the kind of violent chatter you’d expect of a multiple murderer. Homicidal white noise that drowned out the rest of the conversation and kept you from continuing.

I could tell you now that if I asked Shana why she killed Donnie Johnson, she’d shrug and say because. Shana considered herself to be a superpredator, and superpredators didn’t apologize. Superpredators didn’t feel they owed their prey that much.