Kill Me Once (37 page)

‘Jeremy!’ Dana screamed.

She covered the few feet between them in a flash, dropping to her knees by his side. She lifted his head off the floor and cradled it in her arms, lightly slapping at his alarmingly pale cheeks. ‘Come on, partner,’ she said. ‘Talk to me, goddamn it.’

Brown only groaned impotently in response. The breath had been knocked completely out of him.

Dana’s hands scrambled for the Velcro straps on his Kevlar. She gently eased the vest over his shoulders. What she saw next almost made her vomit.

The Kevlar had only done half its job. It had stopped one of the shotgun blasts but the other had gone clean through. A rapidly expanding circle of blood was soaking into Brown’s white dress shirt now as a sucking chest wound tried to eat a small section of the fabric.

‘Oh, sweet Jesus,’ Dana breathed.

Brown stared up at her blindly, his brown eyes glazing over as the blood pulsed out of his chest with every beat of his badly labouring heart. He opened his mouth and tried to speak, but a thin trickle of blood leaked out instead.

‘Hang in there, Jeremy,’ Dana said softly. ‘Don’t try to talk. Just hang in there, goddamn it.’

The veteran FBI agent’s eyes fluttered as he lost consciousness.

Dana dug in her pocket for her cellphone again, ripping a fingernail clean off in her haste but not even feeling it. Miraculously, an operator answered on the fourth ring.

‘9-1-1. What is your emergency?’

Dana struggled to stay calm as she gave the woman their location. ‘Officer down. Single shotgun wound to the chest. I need an ambulance out here
now.’

She tossed the phone to one side. It rattled across the wooden floor while she pressed two fingers against Brown’s throat.

Nothing.

Dana shook her head violently to clear it. They hadn’t fallen into his trap
this
easily.

Had they?

She quickly began single-man CPR – fifteen hard chest depressions followed by two quick breaths. An eternity passed because of the remoteness of the location, but Dana repeated the exhausting series until a large blond man finally pulled her away several lifetimes later.

‘Out of the way, ma’am,’ the EMT grunted.

He used heavy fabric scissors to cut Brown’s bloody dress shirt away and a black man holding a portable defibrillator moved in, the two men’s movements as perfectly choreographed as those of ballet dancers. The black man shocked Brown with the paddles once.

‘Nothing,’ the blond man said, his fingers pressed against Brown’s throat.

The black man shocked Brown twice more and looked up at his partner both times, but the blond man only closed his eyes and shook his head in response.

Ratcheting up the dial on the defibrillator finally produced the result that Dana was praying for.

‘We’ve got a pulse!’ the blonde man shouted. ‘Let’s move!’

Two more EMTs moved in to help load Brown’s body onto a stretcher for the gruelling trip back to the access road.

When they finally pulled off in an ambulance twenty minutes later – sirens wailing like a thousand tortured souls – Dana fumbled in her pocket for the car keys and jammed the Chevrolet into drive.

She followed the ambulance as closely as she could, gunning the engine hard. The sound it made was eerily similar to the starving howl of a mongrel dog.

CHAPTER EIGHTY

Dana flew into the visitor’s lot at forty miles an hour and slammed the car into park mode before heading into the emergency room at a dead run.

She reached the front desk and frantically asked the nurse where Brown had been taken. In response, the woman calmly inquired who she was.

Dana whipped out her badge and shoved it in the nurse’s face. ‘Just tell me where he is, please!’

The woman rose to her feet with an angry frown on her face. She rested her hands on her wide matronly hips and motioned to the waiting room with an annoyed jerk of her chin. ‘Just
sit down
, young lady. All you can do now is wait.’

Chastened, Dana sat down on a plastic chair bolted to the floor and then got up again to pace. She was in the lobby for almost six hours before a doctor finally came out.

‘Special Agent Whitestone?’ the man asked those in the packed room.

Dana’s knees shook. ‘That’s me, sir.’

He walked her into the hall and out of earshot of the others. ‘He’s out of surgery, but it’s touch-and-go right now. He’s lost a lot of blood. We’ll know more tomorrow.’

The doctor reached out and touched her arm lightly. ‘You might as well go home, ma’am. If he makes it he’ll be here quite a while longer. He wouldn’t be able to talk to you right now, anyway. I’ll call you if there’s any change in his condition.’

Dana was little more than a walking zombie as she slowly made her way back through the parking lot and slid behind the wheel of the Chevrolet for the long, lonely trip home. The early-winter night sky moved in as she drove. There was no moon above, no stars dotting the heavens. Only total darkness.

It was pitch black as she made three calls.

The first was to the local police department. The captain on duty there assured her that his force was processing the cabin for any additional clues. The second was to Bill Krugman, who told her to get back to Cleveland as quickly as she possibly could.

Reaching the southern outskirts of Cleveland three hours later, Dana made her third and final call.

‘Hello?’

‘Hey, Eric.’

Eric sensed the stress in her voice at once. ‘What’s wrong, honey?’

Dana took a deep breath and filled him in.

‘Oh my God,’ Eric said when she’d finished. ‘I’m so sorry. Are you all right?’

‘Not really.’

He paused uncertainly. ‘Listen, Dana, I’ve actually got some company here right now, but I’ll send him home so that we can …’

The static of a bad connection crackled in Dana’s ear. ‘What was that, Eric?’ she asked, sticking a finger in her right ear and straining to catch his voice. ‘Say that again. I didn’t hear you.’

But Eric was having troubles of his own. ‘Dana? You’re breaking up, honey. I can’t hear you very well. If you can hear me, I said I’ll send my company home so that we can talk when you get here.’

His voice was a disjointed mumble for several seconds before the connection cleared up again briefly. ‘I’ll tell you how we hooked up later. It’s the strangest thing. Remember the other day at the hospital? Turns out I’ve talked to one of those guys before.
Online
, of all places.’

Just then, the beep of an incoming call sounded on Dana’s cellphone. ‘Goddamn it, hold on, Eric. I’ve got another call coming in. I’ll switch back over to you in a second.’

She took the second call and said, ‘Hello?’

‘Dana, it’s Bill Krugman again.’

‘Yes, sir?’

Krugman cleared his throat. ‘Thought you should know – we finally found a link between all the copycat victims. With the exception of Mary Ellen Orton, they all belonged to a computer-dating website called the Lonely Hearts Club. I’ll let you know when we find out anything else, but it’s looking pretty promising so far.’

Dana was confused for a moment after she hung up with Krugman, then suddenly alarmed by the terrible thought that came next.

Eric
belonged to the Lonely Hearts Club, had done for years. Their killer was fixating on her; could he be getting closer than she feared? Was he focusing now on someone she really cared about? It was a frightening thought but she made herself stay with it. This killer was capable of anything. And Crawford knew all about Eric and how much he meant to her.

She tried to keep her voice calm as her connection to Eric was re-established. ‘Eric? Listen to me. You need to get out of the apartment right now, honey. No questions. Just get out of there
right now.’

But her best friend didn’t hear her. The phone had already gone completely dead.

CHAPTER EIGHTY-ONE

Nathan closed the bathroom door behind him and pulled the shower curtain shut. He reached into the shower and turned the water up full blast to mask the sound of his voice, twisting only the cold-water handle to avoid fogging up the mirror. The mirror was very important to what he needed to do next.

It was almost over now; redemption was almost his.

Perfection
was almost his.

In his possession he had an old black-leather satchel, the kind used by doctors in the long-ago age of house calls. Placing it on the toilet, he unsnapped it and removed the art supplies he’d purchased earlier in the day.

First there was a large jar of white foundation, the type favoured by stage actors. Then there were three containers, one each of pink, red and black make-up. A small circular sponge and a brush with a long tapered handle were positioned on either side of the sink basin.

Nathan used the sponge to apply carefully the white foundation in the shape of a heart around his eyes and over the bridge of his nose, then repeated the motion in a wide arc around his mouth. Ten minutes later he reached back into the satchel and extracted a red clown’s nose before positioning it over his own. The final touch was the curly red wig.

Looking into the mirror at the reflection of the man he’d just become, he appraised himself with a critical eye.

Perfect
.

As always, he cleared his throat before he began the sacred recitation out loud.

‘I am well respected by my community. Everyone who knows me thinks of me as a generous, friendly and hardworking family man. I’m an extremely sharp businessman, and I play a major role in local Democratic politics. Hell, I even had my picture taken with former First Lady Rosalyn Carter once.

‘I am many good things, but beneath my carefully crafted veneer I am also a murderous homosexual who cannot for the life of me stop killing teenaged boys and burying their bodies in the crawl space beneath my beautiful suburban home. Painting those pictures in prison never satisfied my thirst for innocent blood. Murder is my
true
medium; my rightful canvas the body of a teenaged boy.

‘Society locked me up before putting me down like an animal on 10 May 1994, but now I’m back from the dead and ready to kill again. My last words still ring as true today as they did back then.

‘Kiss my ass
.

‘My name is John Wayne Gacy, and I am an eagle.’

Smiling at the reflection of his alter ego in the bathroom mirror, Nathan opened the door and stepped quietly back out into the hallway of the stylishly decorated apartment.

CHAPTER EIGHTY-TWO

Dana roared into the parking lot of her apartment complex at sixty miles an hour and came to a screeching halt in front of the main doors.

She jammed the car into park mode and threw the door open hard, not even bothering to remove the keys from the ignition before covering the few feet to the entrance in a flash.

She fumbled with the magnetic card for the front doors, her hands shaking so violently that she almost dropped it twice before finally managing to coax it through the reader.

Dana’s heart slammed in her throat. Never before had she known such an all-encompassing fear, not even on the night she’d witnessed the brutal murders of her own parents. She was a trained law-enforcement official now, not just a scared little girl wetting her pants at the sight of her parents’ killer. She’d fought damn hard to get to where she was today, and now she had a personal and professional obligation to protect the man she loved more than anything else in this world.

She mashed the button on the elevator for the fourth floor, but grew impatient after the longest three seconds of her life had passed and took off for the stairwell at a dead run.

She raced up the slippery concrete steps as fast as her frantically pumping legs would carry her. After throwing the fire-escape door open with a violent bang, Dana raced down the hallway and came to a skidding halt outside Eric’s door.

D13. Please, God, don’t let that be an unlucky number today
.

She unholstered her Glock and listened for noises coming from inside, but she was breathing so hard that her ragged gasps were the only sounds she could hear, filling her mind like the howling winter wind outside.

Dana placed her ear directly against the cold surface of the apartment door. Nothing. Only silence. No discernible noises other than her own frantic breathing. She tried the door. Locked.

She flipped back the welcome mat in front of her own apartment and grabbed her copy of Eric’s house key. She slid it into the lock and turned the knob until the lock popped. Flinging the door open, she dropped down into a crouch with her Glock at the ready. The door slammed halfway back on her, but no other immediate movement came from inside the apartment.

She rose to her feet and nudged the door with her left elbow. Stepping inside, she swung the Glock back and forth in front of her as she made her way through the dining room, living room and kitchen.

Dana was on autopilot as she cleared the rest of the apartment quickly, her years of training taking over completely now as she stepped inside the bathroom and threw the shower curtain aside. No one there.

The only room left to check was the master bedroom, and that door was closed.

She moved to the outside of Eric’s bedroom and heard a low, mournful cry coming from inside – an inhuman wail of pain and grief. Dana stepped back and kicked the door in hard, thrusting the Glock in first to lead the way.

The first thing she noticed was Oreo gently nuzzling the side of Eric’s face.

The next thing she noticed was the blood.

Eric was completely naked and was lying on his stomach on the bed. The claw hammer that had been used to cave in his head was covered in blood, bone and little bits of brain tissue and was now lying on the bloodstained pillow beside him, denting the fabric with its heavy weight.

Oreo looked up at her and meowed pitifully.

For one terrifying moment, Dana’s heart actually
stopped
. There were no sounds in this new world of hers, no smells, no discernible sensations of any kind. Only an emptiness so complete that it was impossible to comprehend.