Kill Her Again (A Thriller) (12 page)

She could hear the echo of angry voices outside, the sound of barking dogs, more deputies and volunteers arriving, gearing up to go through the encampment from tent to trailer, looking for the missing girl.

Mr. Rock and Roll was kneeling at the center of the tent, hands still cuffed behind his back.

“I’m tellin’ you,” he said, “I didn’t
touch
the bitch. It’s her word against mine.”

Royer stood over him in gladiator pose, fists clenched. “I don’t give a damn about some high school pop tart.”

“Then what’s this about?”

“The girl,” Royer said. “Where’s the girl? Where’s Kimberly?”

Rick frowned at him, looking confused. “Kimmie? What do you want with her?”

“We found the boy, numb nuts. He puts all four of you in the car together.”

Rick swiveled his head toward Anna and Worthington. “Will one of you assholes please tell me what the hell is going on here?”

“Eyes front,” Royer said, snapping his fingers.

“Fuck you.”

Without even a moment of reflection, Royer swung a fist into Rick’s face, knocking him to the ground. The attack was abrupt and brutal, Royer grunting like a Neanderthal.

It was a classic case of overkill. Royer trying to prove he had as much testosterone as Worthington and his deputies. This show was more about ego than finding a missing girl.

Anna hated macho posturing almost as much as she’d come to despise Royer, and she didn’t believe in this hands-on approach to interrogation.

Fortunately, Worthington didn’t seem to like it much, either, and as Royer reached again for the suspect, the deputy threw his hands up.

“All right, that’s enough.”

Royer turned. “Do you want the girl or don’t you?”

“Putting him in a coma won’t help us find her. Now back off.”

Royer eyed him defiantly, then finally stepped away. “Fine,” he said. “He’s all yours.”

Worthington crouched down and helped Rick sit upright. His mouth was bleeding, a nasty purple bruise forming on his left cheekbone—a nice compliment to Royer’s earlier tune job.

“One chance,” Worthington said. “That’s all you get. You understand?”

Rick stared at him. “You people are certifiable.”

“Just tell us what you did with Kimmie.”

“I didn’t do shit with her. Why do you keep asking me that? What happened? Is she okay?”

“Cut the crap,” Worthington said. “Agent Royer wasn’t lying. We know those kids were in your Mustang. So if you don’t want me to sic him on you again, you’d better goddamn well explain.”

“Explain what? I took them for a ride, got some burgers. What’s the big fuckin’ deal?”

“I think you know.”

“That’s the thing, man, I
don’t.
What are you gettin’ on me for? Is this about the restraining order? ’Cuz if it is, you got one helluva way of enforcing it.”

Worthington frowned. “What restraining order?”

“The bitch went to court on me. I’m not supposed to get within a hundred yards of her house.”

“Which bitch are we talking about now?”

“Who the fuck you think? Rita. She thinks she’s too goddamn good for me.”

“Is that why you killed her?”

The words stopped Rick cold. He looked as if he’d just been struck by another one of Royer’s blows. And in that instant, his whole demeanor changed.

“Wait a minute; wait a minute,” he said, then paused a moment, as if he were having trouble translating something spoken in a foreign tongue. “What exactly are you telling me here? Rita’s dead?”

“That’s the long and the short of it,” Worthington said.

Rick just stared at him, dumbstruck, his eyes getting moist. He blinked a couple times, forcing the tears back, and with sudden clarity, Anna knew they had the wrong man. She’d seen a lot of suspects lie in her time, but nobody was this good of an actor.

He didn’t know about the murders.

He didn’t know anything.

“Oh, for chrissakes,” Royer said, his face twisting in disgust. “Let me at this guy.”

Worthington held a hand up, looking intently at Rick. “Let’s start this from the beginning. How do you know Rita Fairweather?”

Rick took a moment, then said, “We used to hook up when I came to town. Until about three, four years ago.”

“What happened then?”

“She went psycho on me. Tells me she wants me to quit the show and move in with her. Maybe get married, give them all a stable home. I told her she was nuts, so she cut me off.”

“Why the restraining order?”

“I kept trying to get with her. Called her up a lot, even went out to that dump she calls a house. She got so pissed she went straight to court on me.” He paused. “That was a couple years ago.”

“So she was afraid of you.”

Rick shook his head. “She wasn’t afraid of shit. She’s a Bitch with a capital
B.
She’d already stuck the knife in; she just wanted to twist it a little.”

“Interesting choice of words,” Worthington said. “But none of this explains why you took Evan and Kimberly on a field trip last night.”

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you. She wouldn’t let me near them. Kept me in the dark so goddamn long that when she finally dropped the bomb, I just wanted to meet them. Evan, at least. He’s the only one she was sure of.” He shrugged. “So I sweet-talked the babysitter into bringing him to me.”

“This is such bullshit,” Royer said. “Why would you give a damn about Rita Fairweather’s son? Unless you wanted to diddle the little bastard.”

Both Rick and Worthington looked at him as if they thought this was one of the dumbest questions they’d ever heard, and Anna had to agree.

The answer was obvious.

“What do you think, Einstein. I’m his fuckin’ father.”

I
T HAD ALL
been a waste of time. Dragging Evan out to the Oasis, the raid, interrogating Mr. Rock and Roll. Maybe if Evan hadn’t had a seizure they would have learned something useful, but it was too late now. They couldn’t risk putting him under again.

Stepping outside of the tent and taking in the drama around the encampment—carnies shouting angrily as deputies threw open door after door, probing trailers and tents with their flashlights—Anna thought back to that moment just before Evan’s seizure, remembering his words:

He’s been wanting to see me and Kimmie for a really long time.

He says he’s . . . He says . . .

He’s my dad, Anna thought.

And that’s all last night had been for Rick. A guy trying to make contact with his son.

True, the neighbors had told Worthington’s team that the father was dead, but Anna thought that Evan and Kimmie might well have had many fathers over the last several years. A parade of men that Rita Fairweather had taken up with.

She also knew that Rick being Evan’s biological father didn’t rule him out as a killer and kidnapper. It might even bolster a case against him. But she wasn’t buying. She knew they’d gotten it wrong.

And out there somewhere was the real killer.

Did he still have Kimmie with him? Or was it too late?

Anna looked up at the sky, wishing she had a god’s-eye view of the world, or maybe some sort of missing persons GPS device that would allow her to hone in on Kimberly and her kidnapper, wherever they might be.

Just follow the two little dots, apprehend, and arrest.

If only it were that easy.

Hearing a shout, she snapped her head around and leveled her gaze on a commotion near the center of the encampment. Two deputies were trying to fend off a burly, overweight carny swinging a baseball bat.

“You got no right!” he shouted, going for a line drive to a deputy’s forehead.

The deputy ducked, grabbed a handful of dirt, and threw it into the fat man’s face as the other deputy tackled him, taking him down. The baseball bat flew, clattering against the motor home behind them before bouncing harmlessly to the ground.

“You got no right!” the carny shouted again as one of the deputies cuffed his hands behind his back. “This is my
home
!”

Anna felt ashamed. Here they were, disrupting the lives of these poor working people—and for what? There was nothing to look for here. Nothing to find. And she couldn’t help feeling that some, if not all, of this was her fault.

She could hear Worthington continuing to question the suspect and knew it was only a matter of time before he reached the same conclusion she had. Royer, however, would be tougher to convince. He was a bulldog, plain and simple—and not a very smart one at that.

Like so many agents she’d met in her time with the bureau, he lived in a black-and-white world, good guys and bad guys, with nothing in between. And while he might think his motives were pure, and that the end justified the means, his stubbornness, his inability to see the many different colors in the world, his willingness to compromise basic human ethics for the “greater good,” made him—in Anna’s estimation—one of the bad guys.

Unfortunately, there wasn’t much she could do about—

A sudden chill swept through her. An odd sense that she was being watched.

She looked out at the growing crowd of carnies, standing in their nightshirts and underwear, watching the fat man continue to struggle with the deputies, but no one seemed to be paying her the slightest attention.

Yet the feeling persisted.

Turning, she looked toward the edge of the encampment where it met the carnival grounds—a hundred yards or so away. A row of canvas arcade tents formed the border between them.

Nothing there.

She was about to turn away when she saw movement in the shadows beneath one of the canopies. A dark figure, hard to see in the early-morning light, but the shape was unmistakably a man.

Was he watching her?

She couldn’t be sure.

He stood there a moment, facing her direction, then suddenly turned and started walking away, moving deeper into the carnival grounds.

And as he stepped out of the shadows, dread flooded through Anna, a dread so deep that it took everything she had to remain standing, an image from one of her visions blossoming in her mind.

And the feeling she’d had earlier, the one she’d felt so strongly while standing in the hotel hallway—that this was all somehow connected to her visions—came back to her with undeniable force.

This wasn’t just any man. She was sure of it.

He was wearing a baseball cap.

A red baseball cap.

1
5

T
HEY WERE ON
the elevator, somewhere between the first and second floors, when Pope made his move.

The twins had gone ahead to get the car, leaving Sharkey and Arturo to escort Pope out of the building, Sharkey ragging on him the entire ride down from the fourteenth floor.

“You gotta be the biggest fuckin’ fool I ever met. How long you been hanging around this dump, you don’t know what kind of hair-trigger the boss has?”

“Long enough,” Pope said.

“Damn straight. And bringing some FBI snatch into the building? That’s just plain stupid.”

Pope didn’t disagree.

But his stupidity wasn’t the issue at the moment. What mattered right now was extricating himself from this situation as quickly as possible—a feat not easily accomplished when the two men flanking you are skilled professionals.

Not that Pope himself was any slouch. There was a time when he had regularly tortured the speed bag and popped a few curls before heading into the office every morning. Always something of a natural athlete, he’d even taken the LVMPD up on its offer for self-defense training. And while nearly two years of debauchery had undoubtedly softened him, he felt confident that he still had some skills of his own.

Of course, none of this had taught him how to handle two thugs in an elevator, especially when your gut and left kidney felt as if they’d been assaulted by a jackhammer. But in the end, it was the elevator itself that saved him.

As Sharkey blathered on, Pope stood watching the numbers light up on the panel above the door—8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3—wondering when and if he should make his move. Then the elevator made it for him by suddenly jerking to a halt, stalling just before it reached the first floor.

That jerk was enough to throw all three of them off-balance. Taking advantage of the moment, Pope brought his elbow up quick, cracking Arturo’s nose with an audible
snap.
 

The move was so uncharacteristic and unexpected that Arturo hadn’t seen it coming. He shrieked and grabbed for the damage, blood spurting between his fingers as Pope spun toward Sharkey and brought a knee up hard into his crotch.

Sharkey grunted and doubled over, sinking to his knees on the elevator’s well-worn carpet.