Authors: Eileen Dreyer

Head Games (37 page)

BOOK: Head Games

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“Yeah?” Molly asked, not surprised that her voice sounded sharp. The very last thing she needed to hear today was that David had come in dead or in handcuffs.

Sasha surreptitiously popped one of Rhett's shirt buttons with a perfectly manicured nail. “Nancy wanted you to know that she won. That the kid's been pulled from the home and placed in a good foster house. Evidently she went there herself to check it out.”

Molly stared as if waiting for Sasha to translate. “You're kidding.”

Sasha shrugged. “If I remember correctly, sometimes youthful idealism actually can produce results. Not that I've tried, mind you. But I think I've read about it once or twice.”

“Yeah.” Molly wasn't sure whether she felt better or worse. She didn't know whether she dared hope David could have the chance to get a hold on that life preserver and find a good man to haul him to adulthood.

Oh, what the hell? She didn't have anything else to hope for right now.

“Tell her I'm proud of her. And I'll listen more next time.”

Sasha stared with some astonishment. “She's getting delusional now, little Butler. Get her back into the real world before she forgets what it looks like.”

Rhett crooked an arm as if he were leading Molly to a cotillion. She deliberately refused to notice the gap in his otherwise pristine shirt. “I think I can find you some leather, Detective Butler.”

Half an hour later Molly found herself sitting in the backseat of a black Crown Vic listening to Davidson and another cop tell her that evidently a ghost had been sending her notes and blowing up her friends' cars. They told her that the parts to the car bomb had been bought at Radio Shack, which meant it could have been anyone, up to and including the Mafia, who liked reliable technology as much as anybody, and that of all the people they'd interviewed, only Latesha Wilson's mother had expressed enough of a desire to really do away with Molly. The problem was, Mrs. Wilson wouldn't have been able to wire a bomb if her next welfare check depended on it, and besides, some press asshole would have noticed a skinny-ass black woman trying to get under the car.

Molly didn't even bother to thank them for their diligence. She just
watched as the rest of the team swept up the quiet street and skidded to a choreographed halt in front of Kenny's house like a synchronized arrest team. The neighborhood was old, sedate, and marginal, a checkerboard of rehab and old stability and overburdened boardinghouses. Comfortable square brick houses marched along the street like stolid soldiers, with postage stamp yards and mature trees that would soften all those unrelenting facades come spring.

Kenny's house was as unprepossessing as he. Square, solid, with a thick concrete porch and carefully clipped yard, leaves raked and sidewalk cleaned. An anonymous face among all the other anonymous faces, with nothing to mark it as the place that harbored atrocities.

The first wave of invasion consisted of the detectives, who marched up to that nondescript porch alongside Kathy like the Magnificent Seven in their blue jackets with POLICE emblazoned on the back. A few patrol officers supported them by marking the borders of the yard and keeping away the neighbors, who even now peeked from cracked doors.

Molly watched them mount the stairs. She waited as a few circled to secure the back, and then as they knocked, polite as Mormons on a mission, at the front door. She held her breath, waiting for Kenny to appear. For it to be real.

She waited and nothing happened. Somehow, with all their watching, they had reached the house to find that Kenny wasn't home.

One of the uniforms provided the battering ram, and they took down the front door just as reinforcements arrived. More cars, more lights, more uniforms. More neighbors, now out on lawns. One with a videocam, preserving it all for his shot at national exposure.

Molly waited, not even realizing that the other two officers in the car were as deathly silent as she, and she prayed.

Evidently she prayed for the wrong thing. Rhett walked back out of the house, his Kevlar vest looking oddly grown up on him, and he stalked over to the car.

Molly rolled down her window.

“Nothing,” he said simply. “They're tearing the place apart, and there isn't a fucking thing in there.”

“That's impossible,” Molly protested, as if that could make all the difference.

“You wanna come look?”

Molly knew it was a rhetorical question. Even so, she stepped out of the car and followed him into the house. And found, just as the team had found before her, that the house was neat, old, doilied, and well cared for. And completely empty of anything that might lead them to where Kenny might be really doing his business.

“Take me back to the hospital,” she said. “I have some work to do.”

Rhett sighed. “We all do.”

Molly checked the records. She talked to anybody she could find who had worked with John Martin to see if he might have mentioned anything about himself that would lead them to another house. She reported in to Rhett and learned that the cops were canvassing the neighborhood with a finetoothed comb and hadn't been able to come up with more than the fact that John Martin had been an unexceptionable neighbor since he'd inherited the house from his grandmother three years before. Considering the state of some of the other houses in the area, the residents considered him a plus.

It didn't take that big a leap to see them all on the five o'clock news as they declared, wide-eyed, “But he was such a quiet man.”

Molly went back to the hospital computers to find that nothing had changed. John Martin had been hired at the hospital a little less than a year earlier and worked without too much notice in housekeeping on the top three floors of the hospital. Minor infractions, complaints of laziness, disorganization, inability to work well with others. Medium work evaluations across the board.

And then, with the big buyout in early spring, the downsizing had begun, the cost-cutting, the look to maximizing existing personnel. Somebody up in corporate had decided that it wasn't that big a leap from mopping floors to mopping fevered brows, and corralled the housekeeping crew to do patient care.

And so, without a more thorough background check, John Martin had been given access to not only vulnerable young women, but all their personal information. The administration, in its all-out run to minimalize cost, had blithely handed a serial killer his very own, fully equipped playground.

“I'm going home now,” Sasha told Molly as she swept into her office, where Molly was staring at the computer. “And so are you.”

“No I'm not. Not till I find out what we're all missing.”

“You're not missing anything. This guy's just a little smarter than you thought, and he's found a hidey-hole somewhere. The way this hospital's been closing departments, probably the laundry.”

Molly looked up, stunned at the thought.

Sasha sighed. “What a stupid thing for me to say. Now we're going to have to go on a tour before we go home.”

“You don't have to. I'll do it.”

“Don't be ridiculous. You need more authority than that ferocious frown to open the rooms. Besides, security's much more afraid of me than they are of you.”

“Especially if they heard that leather and whips statement.”

Holding the door open so Molly could precede her, Sasha scowled. “Leather and whipped
cream
,” she corrected frostily. “No wonder you don't date. You have no sense of style.”

Sasha was as good as her word. She, Molly, and a sweet but dim exhalfback from Southwest High School opened every long-locked door they could find. But in the end all they could come up with was a couple of trysting nests with hospital blankets and Safeway liquor, and dust-covered, outdated equipment that hadn't been sold off yet. No blue Dahmer barrels. No dungeons of torture. No surprises beyond the fact that there seemed to be renovations nobody had heard about going on in the old obstetrics unit.

Exhausted, disheartened, and an inch past panicked, Molly gave in and gathered her things to follow Sasha out to the garage.

“You will get him,” Sasha said. “It's just a matter of time.”

“I hate to mouth clichÃ©s,” Molly objected, “but time is what we don't have. If he's running to profile, he's just about to escalate.”

“Why? Because you got him fired?”

Molly stepped into the elevator and punched the garage floor, her movements slow and heavy. “Because I got him fired. The last person on earth he trusted not to desert him has just drop-kicked him over the fence. To tell you the truth, I'm surprised I haven't heard from him by now. He's gotta be pretty upset.”

“Well, he hasn't sent anything to the hospital,” Sasha said. “And if he tried to get within two miles of your house, all the cops and reporters would use him for a rugby ball. They are still watching you, aren't they?”

Molly nodded. “The house, yeah. I sure don't know why. All they have to do is catch the latest report on
Hard Copy
.”

“Who do you think's tipping off
Hard Copy
when to show up?”

It was closing in on midnight, which meant that only the ED was still running full tilt. Up on the med floor, which had the walkway to the parking garage, the halls were half lit, the conversations held sotto voce. Only the elevator dings and a few confused patients disturbed the quiet.

“You're on top again, aren't you?” Sasha asked, wrapping her mohair scarf tight around her neck before hitting the open walkway.

“Isn't that what you've trained me to do?”

“In sex, hon,” she scowled. “Not parking garages. It's too damn cold up there.”

“It's too damn close anywhere else. Stress gives me claustrophobia. Add that to the paranoia, and I'm a fruit salad of fun.”

“Well, enjoy the weather. Sane people park out of the wind.”

They parted at the stairs and Molly went up. She kept her face to the sky and her hand on her purse, wherein lived her Taser and pepper spray. Just in case she needed to use them.

She needed to use them.

She just never had the chance to.

She had just climbed into her car, her attention again diverted by the problem at hand, when the problem addressed her.

“Your friend needs you,” he said from her backseat.

Molly shrieked like a banshee. She grabbed for her purse. Before she could get there, something very cold, round, and familiar pressed against her neck.

“Please,” Kenny said, sounding so very polite. “You have to listen to me. Nobody is ever going to know where she is unless you come with me.”

Evidently the gun he nudged against her neck was meant to emphasize the point. Molly stopped breathing. She struggled past the frantic acceleration of her heart.

“What friend?” she managed.

“Why, Marianne.”

Marianne? Secretary Marianne? Marianne who couldn't find a nice word for Molly if it meant the fate of the free world?

That Marianne?

Molly damn near laughed.

It was better than thinking about what she was facing. Who she was facing. There in the backseat with a gun to her neck, his voice as calm as Sunday, his hands steady.

Kenny. Kenny, whom she'd evidently tried to save.

Kenny, whom she'd betrayed.

Kenny, whom she couldn't remember. Whom she wouldn't remember still if not for an obscene worm of scarring on his neck.

Kenny, who would have sat on her cart all those years ago looking pale and bruised and hopeless, just like David, whom Nancy had saved.

But Molly hadn't saved Kenny.

How did you feel outraged and lost at the same moment? Molly wanted to puke until there was nothing left in her stomach but lining. Instead she forced herself to suck in a steadying breath.

“Why should I believe you have Marianne?” she asked carefully.

“Because you know me,” he said quietly. “Better than anybody.”

Molly squeezed her eyes shut, desperately unsure. Convinced more by that soft, certain voice than even the pressure against her neck that Kenny wasn't lying. He had Marianne, and Molly was the ransom. If she ran now, he'd probably just kill her. And then he'd saunter home and kill Marianne and hide her away where the police would never find her, just like the others.

And no matter how surly and antisocial Marianne was, she simply didn't deserve that.

Cursing herself for seven kinds of fool, Molly started the car.