Once Craved (a Riley Paige Mystery--Book #3) (4 page)

Riley looked through
the window into the room where Derrick Caldwell would soon die. She was sitting
beside Gail Bassett, the mother of Kelly Sue Bassett, Caldwell’s final victim.
The man had killed five women before Riley had stopped him.

Riley had wavered
about accepting Gail’s invitation to the execution. She’d only seen one other,
that time as a volunteer witness sitting among reporters, lawyers, law
enforcement officers, spiritual advisors, and the jury foreman. Now she and
Gail were among nine relatives of women that Caldwell had murdered, all of them
crowded together in a tight space, sitting on plastic chairs.

Gail, a small
sixty-year-old woman with a delicate, birdlike face, had kept up contact with
Riley over the years. By the time of the execution her husband had died, and
she had written Riley that she had no one to see her through the momentous
event. So Riley had agreed to join her.

The death chamber
was right there on the other side of the window. The only furniture in the room
was the execution gurney, a cross-shaped table. A blue plastic curtain hung at
the head of the gurney. Riley knew that the IV lines and lethal chemicals were
behind that curtain.

A red telephone on
the wall connected with the governor’s office. It would only ring in case of a
last-minute decision for clemency. No one expected that to happen this time. A
clock over the door to the room was the only other visible decor.

In Virginia,
convicted offenders could choose between the electric chair and lethal
injection, but the chemicals were far more often chosen. If the prisoner made
no choice, injection was assigned.

Riley was almost
surprised that Caldwell hadn’t opted for the electric chair. He was an
unrepentant monster who seemed to welcome his own death.

The clock read 8:55
when the door opened. Riley heard a wordless murmur in the room as several
members of the execution team ushered Caldwell into the chamber. Two guards
flanked him, gripping each arm, and another followed right behind him. A
well-dressed man came in after all the rest—the prison warden.

Caldwell was wearing
blue pants, a blue work shirt, and sandals with no socks. He was handcuffed and
shackled. Riley hadn’t seen him for years. During his brief stint as a serial
killer he’d had unruly long hair and a shaggy beard, a bohemian look befitting
a sidewalk artist. Now he was clean-shaven and ordinary looking.

Although he didn’t
put up a struggle, he looked frightened.

Good,
Riley thought.

He looked at the
gurney, then glanced quickly away. He seemed to be trying not to look at the
blue plastic curtain at the head of the gurney. For a moment, he stared into
the viewing room window. He suddenly seemed calmer and more collected.

“I wish he could see
us,” Gail murmured.

They were shielded
from his view behind one-way glass and Riley didn’t share Gail’s wish. Caldwell
had already looked at her much too closely for her liking. To capture him, she’d
gone undercover. She’d pretended to be a tourist on the Dunes Beach Boardwalk
and hired him to draw her portrait. As he worked, he’d showered her with
flowery flattery, telling her that she was the most beautiful woman he’d drawn
in a long time.

She knew right then
that she was his next intended victim. That night she’d served as bait to draw
him out, letting him stalk her along the beach. When he had tried to attack
her, backup agents had no trouble catching him.

His capture had been
pretty nondescript. The discovery of how he had carved up his victims and kept
them in his freezer had been another matter. Standing there when the freezer
was opened was one of the most harrowing moments of Riley’s career. She still
felt pity for the victims’ families—Gail among them—for having to identify
their dismembered wives, daughters, sisters …

“Too beautiful to
live,”
he had
called them.

It chilled Riley
deeply that she had been one of the women he had seen that way. She’d never
thought of herself as beautiful, and men—even her ex-husband, Ryan—seldom told
her that she was. Caldwell was a stark and horrible exception.

What did it mean,
she wondered, that a pathological monster had found her so perfectly lovely?
Had he recognized something inside her that was as monstrous as he? For a
couple of years after his trial and conviction, she’d had nightmares about his
admiring eyes, his honeyed words, and his freezer full of body parts.

The execution team
got Caldwell up onto the execution gurney, removed the cuffs and shackles, took
off his sandals, and strapped him into place. They fastened him down with
leather bands—two across his chest, two to hold his legs, two around his
ankles, and two around his wrists. His bare feet were turned toward the window.
It was hard to see his face.

Suddenly, the
curtains closed over the viewing room windows. Riley understood that this was
to conceal the phase of the execution where something was most likely to go
wrong—say, the team might have trouble finding a suitable vein. Still, she
found it peculiar. The people in both viewing rooms were about to watch
Caldwell die, but they were not allowed to witness the mundane insertion of the
needles. The curtains swayed a little, apparently brushed by one of the team
members moving around on the other side.

When the curtains
opened again, the IV lines were in place, running from the prisoner’s arms
through holes in the blue plastic curtains. Some members of the execution team
had retreated behind those curtains, where they would administer the lethal
drugs.

One man held the red
telephone receiver, ready to receive a call that would surely never come.
Another spoke to Caldwell, his words a barely audible crackle over the poor
sound system. He was asking Caldwell whether he had any last words.

By contrast,
Caldwell’s response came through with startling clarity.

“Is Agent Paige
here?” he asked.

His words gave Riley
a jolt.

The official didn’t
reply. It wasn’t a question that Caldwell had any right to have answered.

After a tense
silence, Caldwell spoke again.

“Tell Agent Paige
that I wish my art could have done justice to her.”

Although Riley
couldn’t see his face clearly, she thought she heard him chuckle.

“That’s all,” he
said. “I’m ready.”

Riley was flooded by
rage, horror, and confusion. This was the last thing she had expected. Derrick
Caldwell had chosen to make his last living moments all about
her.
And
sitting here behind this unbreakable shield of glass, she was helpless to do
anything about it.

She had brought him
to justice, but in the end, he had achieved a weird, sick kind of revenge.

She felt Gail’s
small hand gripping her own.

Good God,
Riley thought.
She’s
comforting
me.

Riley fought down a
wave of nausea.

Caldwell said one
more thing.

“Will I feel it when
it begins?”

Again, he received
no reply. Riley could see fluid moving through the transparent IV tubes.
Caldwell took several deep breaths and appeared to fall asleep. His left foot
twitched a couple of times, then fell still.

After a moment, one
of the guards pinched both feet and got no reaction. It seemed a peculiar sort
of gesture. But Riley realized that the guard was checking to make sure the
sedative was working and that Caldwell was fully unconscious.

The guard called out
something inaudible to the people behind the curtain. Riley saw a renewed flow
of fluid through the IV tubes. She knew that a second drug was in the process
of stopping his lungs. In a little while, a third drug would stop his heart.

As Caldwell’s
breathing slowed, Riley found herself thinking about what she was watching. How
was this different from the times she had used lethal force herself? In the
line of duty, she had killed several killers.

But this was not
like any of those other deaths. By comparison, it was bizarrely controlled,
clean, clinical, immaculate. It seemed inexplicably wrong. Irrationally, Riley
found herself thinking …

I shouldn’t have
let it come to this.

She knew she was
wrong, that she had carried out Caldwell’s apprehension professionally and by
the book. But even so she thought …

I should have
killed him myself.

Gail held Riley’s
hand steadily for ten long minutes. Finally, the official beside Caldwell said
something that Riley couldn’t hear.

The warden stepped
out from behind the curtain and spoke in a clear enough voice to be understood
by all the witnesses.

“The sentence was
successfully carried out at 9:07 a.m.”

Then the curtains
closed across the window again. The witnesses had seen all that they were meant
to see. Guards came into the room and urged everybody to leave as quickly as
possible.

As the group spilled
out into the hallway, Gail took hold of Riley’s hand again.

“I’m sorry he said
what he said,” Gail told her.

Riley was startled.
How could Gail be worried about Riley’s feelings at a time like this, when
justice had finally been done to her own daughter’s killer?

“How are you, Gail?”
she asked as they walked briskly toward the exit.

Gail walked along in
silence for a moment. Her expression seemed completely blank.

“It’s done,” she
finally said, her voice numb and cold. “It’s done.”

In an instant they
stepped out into the morning daylight. Riley could see two crowds of people
across the street, each roped away from the other and tightly controlled by
police. On one side were people who had gathered to cheer on the execution,
wielding hateful signs, some of them profane and obscene. They were
understandably jubilant. On the other side were anti–death penalty protesters
with their own signs. They’d been out here all night holding a candlelight
vigil. They were much more subdued.

Riley found that she
couldn’t muster sympathy for either group. These people were here for
themselves, to make a public show of their outrage and righteousness, acting
out of sheer self-indulgence. As far as she was concerned, they had no business
being here—not among people whose pain and grief were all too real.

Between the entrance
and the crowds was a swarm of reporters, with media trucks nearby. As Riley
waded among them, one woman rushed up to her with a microphone and a cameraman
behind her.

“Agent Paige? Are
you Agent Paige?” she said.

Riley didn’t reply.
She tried to go past the reporter.

The reporter stayed
with her doggedly. “We’ve heard that Caldwell mentioned you in his last words.
Do you care to comment?”

Other reporters
closed in on her, asking the same question. Riley gritted her teeth and pushed
on through the throng. At last she broke free from them.

As she hurried
toward her car, she found herself thinking about Meredith and Bill. Both of
them had implored her to take on a new case. And she was avoiding giving either
of them any kind of an answer.

Why?
she wondered.

She had just run
away from reporters. Was she running away from Bill and Meredith as well? Was
she running away from who she really was? From all that she had to do?

*

Riley was grateful
to be home. The death she had witnessed that morning still left her with an
empty feeling, and the drive back to Fredericksburg had been tiring. But when
she opened the door of her townhouse, something didn’t seem right.

It was unnaturally
silent. April should be home from school by now. Where was Gabriela? Riley went
into the kitchen and found it empty. A note was on the kitchen table.

Me voy a la
tienda,
it read.
Gabriela had gone to the store.

Riley gripped the
back of a chair as a wave of panic swept over her. Another time that Gabriela
had gone to the store, April had been kidnapped from her father’s house.

Darkness, a
glimpse of flame.

Riley turned and ran
to the foot of the stairs.

“April,” she
screamed.

There was no answer.

Riley raced up the
staircase. Nobody was in either of the bedrooms. Nobody was in her small
office.

Riley’s heart was
pounding, even though her mind was telling her that she was being foolish. Her
body wasn’t listening to her mind.

She raced back
downstairs and out onto the back deck.

“April,” she screamed.

But no one was
playing in the yard next door and no kids were in sight.

She stopped herself
from letting out another scream. She didn’t want these neighbors convinced that
she was truly crazy. Not so soon.