Snuff (29 page)

NINETY-FOUR

Hannah’s screams grate against my ear
as the same footsteps I’ve heard so many times before pound down the staircase. 

“Please don’t hurt me
.  Please, I’ll do whatever you want.”

I don’t have the heart to tell Hannah it’s her death that’s wanted.

She doesn’t receive an answer.  I’d told her not to cry, but I guess I can’t blame her.

Something
heavy hits the ground, screeching against it as if it’s trying to claw through the granite. Bianca stands there smiling, I can tell, even though she’s still and quiet. 

Hannah’s screams swell into an awful,
trilling crescendo that clangs inside my own body.  An icy hand of my own mortality sweeps across my forehead, and I think I might join in as Hannah’s backup singer when I hear that familiar
hiss
of a blowtorch.

Bianca holds it
steady, building anticipation, making Hannah’s fear dribble out her pores—she’s so scared she’s forgotten English.  It’s a mesh of wheezed, disjointed words glued together with breathy yelps and screams for her mother.

I don’t scream for my mother. Knowing that woman, she’d let me get burned alive if it interfered with her soaps.

The flickering flame stains Bianca’s loose waves of blonde hair violet and throws deep shadows beneath the goggles on her face. 

I thought I could be apathetic this time, but I’d been wrong.  My groping hand searches for Hannah’s
, and her fingers squeeze mine like I’m her only lifeline.  And I am.  I may be a monster, but I’m the lesser evil in this room.

Words are wet and raspy, cramped and tangled as I utter them, but I have to, because she’s got a thousand pounds of hairspray clinging to her crispy curls, and the thought that Hairspray Equals Flammable chomps
into my brain like a Venus flytrap.  “Hood.  Your hood.  Hannah stand up, and put your hood—”

T
he flame dies, and a gasp curdles in the back of my throat when something smashes into my knuckles.  They flatten on impact.  A constellation of white stars flit in my peripherals. 

A brick
.  A stone.  Something heavy. 

The pain lessens
into rhythmic pulses.  I’m curling my wrist into my chest when something smacks the top of my head.  It doesn’t hurt—it’s more confusing.  I twist back into the wall, Bianca’s medicated cherry breath filling my nostrils.

I inhale the cloud of lozenge-scented air until
she steps back and sparks up her blowtorch. She holds up a finger and waves it sharply through dancing blue light. Like when you smack a puppy’s nose with a rolled-up newspaper and wag a stern finger. 
Stay.  Good girl.
 

“Soon it will all be over,” she says
in the deadest voice I’ve ever heard. 

And I have no doubt she means
all
of it, the end of every blink and every breath, until both Hannah and I are tattered, charred husks of our former selves.

I try to stand, but she kicks me into the wall.

One appalling minute bleeds into another of resignation, and I do nothing but stare at the leaping blue-white flame, rocked with the endless, echoing thought of
what next?

NINETY-FIVE

It’s the perfect storm.  Two psychopathic personalities colliding, bringing out the very worst threads of the other’s character. Instead of fireworks, there’s death and devastation. 

What happened?  Had he seen those scars on Bianca’s wrists?  Did they remind him of his mother?  Was this a basic Oedipus complex?  He’d seen his mother raped and beaten, watched her slash her wrists with a razor blade, attributed gargantuan amounts of pain to love?  Or was he just turned on by violence?  He’d seen it too early, when he was old enough to comprehend the acts, but too young to stop them. 

Jacob’s father had barely hit the preoperational
stage of cognitive development; governed by egocentrism and only capable of seeing situations his own way—all he likely knew was what had happened was scary, but Leoš was far beyond that stage of maturity—well into the concrete development stage.

“Hello?” Lisette waved her hand in front of
his face.  “Are you in there?”

John
swatted her hand. 

“You looked like you were in a trance.  I was calling.”

“I was ignoring you.” 

Lisette poked the space between her eyebrows.  “
I’m going to cut Jacob loose.  I don’t want to draw up the fucking paperwork.”  And she stomped off to do so with muttered expletives.

He
pulled out his phone and relayed warrant requests that would surely be denied to Stacy, over a background of clacking keys as she transcribed his words. 

“Got it,” she said after a few minutes.
  “I sent them and CC’d Bob.  Is there anything else you need while you’ve got me?”

“Ask Interpol for their files on
Leoš Ivashkov.  I know he wouldn’t have much of a record in the States, but it’s worth a shot.”

“I already put out feelers.”

He sunk onto the leather couch tucked beneath the window of Lisette’s office, and rested his head on the arm.  “Has anything popped with vacant buildings?”

“A few, but I don’t think they’re prime hostage dungeons.  I looked at the blueprints and ruled them out, but I can send the addresses
.  The financials on that security company pan out.  I’m looking into employees next, but it’ll take longer.”

Lisette barged through the door, walls rattling as it slammed behind her. 

Stacy’s typing sparked up again.  “I’ll keep looking and—wait, there goes my other line.  I’m going to put you on hold, it might be a call back from one of my contacts.”

“No, just
get back to me if you have something.”

He rolled his head back as he disconnected.  Lisette’s upside-down face blinked back at him
, the set of her lips softening.  “You look exhausted.  Uniforms are getting rid of Jacob.  Have you put in for warrants?”

“Yes.”  Though he wouldn’t hold his breath. He swung himself into a sitting position and cracked his neck.

Lisette slumped onto the couch’s arm.  “I keep thinking of what Heckles said.  How she’s keeping them
where her heart lives
.  We didn’t have a lot of time to mull it over earlier, but I can’t shake those words.”

He still didn’t quite know what to make of that statement. “Stacy’s running s
earches of unoccupied buildings, but she hasn’t gotten any hits.  If anything, I’d think her heart would live in her family home in Laguna.”

She stared
into space, a crease of mystification carving between blonde eyebrows.  “Her heart died in Aunt Melinda’s cellar. I keep circling back to that.”

John didn’t bother commenting on the obvious.
Aunt Melinda’s house was cobwebbed and boarded up—decomposing, just like Melinda.

Lisette toyed with the stretched-out hem of her wife beater.  He couldn’t decide whether to interrupt the reverie or leave her to it, but she spoke before he had to make a choice.

“Bianca’s family is all dead.”  The wrinkle between her brows smoothed. “Mom, Dad, sister.”  The yellow ceiling lights caught her eyes as she stared into it, pupils retracting to pinpricks. “They’re dead.  So they ‘live’ in the cemetery.”

He nodded.
Typically that was where the dead lived.

“
They’re her heart, aren’t they?  At least Reagan. I doubt anyone would think of Leoš Ivashkov as close to their heart, and we can’t prove he’s involved, anyway. Bianca isn’t anywhere else that might have significance.  But her heart lives
there
, buried under six feet of dirt in her sister’s coffin.  Stan says she has flower deliveries, so we know she visits.” 

“Well,
she’s not inside Reagan’s grave.”

“No, I know that.”  She rattled the chain aro
und her neck, sergeant’s badge swaying like a hypnotist’s clock.  “But she comes from money.  And people with money to waste have all sorts of shit they don’t really need.  Yachts, country club memberships, Scottish castles.  You should see some of the mausoleums in the ritzier cemeteries.  They’re huge.”  She dropped the chain.  “We need to find out where her family’s buried.” 

NINETY-SIX

Bianca take
s long, ratcheting breaths that sound like the rusted door hinges of my ancient Ford Taurus.  Hannah’s voice crossed over into death; she’s so silent she may have died from fear.  Standing and trying to run hadn’t helped; she’d smacked straight into a wall. 

My eyes follow the quivering flame as it dances
, reflecting against the plastic goggles she’s wearing, and then drop to floor.

The flame disappears as she stoops to retrieve the brick I’ve been eyeing.

It takes a moment for the answer to
click
.  This is the only window of opportunity I’ve had.  I’ll die, whether I fight or not.  She’d kept her hair bound in a ski mask when I was here with Abby, when I’d been convinced she wasn’t a
she
at all.  She’s not recording this time—no twin red circles from the corners of the room—so she hasn’t bothered with disguises.

Hair pulling may be wimpy, but it’s very effective.  And the yelp she lets out is surprisingly satisfying.
The clatter of the blowtorch hitting the floor, even more so.

My fi
ngers claw up her hair, into the tight-stretched flesh of her scalp.  Pulses of pain throb in the knuckles of my smashed hand, but I grind my teeth against it.  She drags me to my feet as she backs up, flailing arms splitting the air between us.  Her shrieks can’t begin to resemble words—just guttural, animal-instinct growls.

The room’s not large.  A wall has to be within stumbling distance, so I yank until
there’s a
thwap
when she collides with one and collapses.

I brace myself with one palm against the granite, the other coiled in a fistful of hair. Her legs
buck and thrash, a knee sinking into my stomach when I drop to the ground and grope for those night-vision goggles.  

What she doesn’t know is I’m used to the dark, having been kept in it so long.  Sounds are magnified, smells more intense.  She’s turned me into an overgrown bat with echolocation.  I don’t need to see her.  I can feel the heat of her skin and hear how far away her ragged breaths are. 

I pull back a knot of hair and slam her head into the wall.  A grunt snarls in her throat, and it sounds like she’s choking on it, gagging around a floppy, swollen tongue.

I draw my knee up and stomp
.  

“Hannah,” I scream.
“Get to the door.”

NINETY-SEVEN

John burst through the interrogation room Stanley Heckles had been sequestered inside.  The door swung into the wall with enough force to shake the one-way glass.

“Does the Cartwright family own a mausoleum?”  

“I don’t know,” he said, bewildered eyes snapping up from his hands.  “Is that one of those big houses in cemeteries?  The kind with statues in front?”

John slid halfway on the seat
.  “Something like that, yes.  But you did visit, and she’d brought flowers?  Where did she put them?”

Heckles
bobbed his head.  “White roses.  She said she always bought white, since it’s the color of surrender.  I didn’t really know what she meant.  Sometimes she confuses me, so I stopped asking.  She took me inside the maus—big house thing.”

“Which cemetery?”

“Evergreen Memorial.”

Lisette she stuck her head into the room
, John’s iPhone glued to her ear.  “That place’s pretty much neglected.  New owners bought it for pennies, and don’t keep up with maintenance.  It’s a twenty-minute drive.  I’ll make it in ten.”

NINETY-EIGHT

Hannah doesn’t answer. 

“Hannah!” An artic chill runs through my already-cold interior climate. She better not be dead.  Can you die of fear?   

It’s not a go
od idea to walk away when I can’t be positive Bianca won’t catapult to her feet.  This is a horror movie. Villains never die—at least not right away. 

I
do anyway, dragging one hand along the floor until my fingers hit gold and close around the brick. 

“Hannah, you need to get up
.” A trill pulls up the tail end of each word.  “You need to get to the door.”  I’d go to the door myself, but I have to make sure, absolutely positive, that Bianca’s dead, gone, never coming back.

Making it to the other side of the room
is like trudging through air that’s suddenly become clam chowder, but I do after what feels like forever.

Cold finger
s scrabble at my shins, blazing hot new trails in the territory of my frozen fear.  I pull back my foot and kick, hard, and though it doesn’t incite noise, it must have hurt. 

Blind mutant
intuition whispers in my ear, demanding
now,
right now, before she uncoils like the snake she is.

So I don’t think, just smash the brick into the limbs I sense are closest.  The
struggle she puts up is sheer, blind, utter panic; a We’re All Going to Die, But Please, You First tumble of flailing legs and fingernails and hissed cursing and insanity, but eventually I land a blow that presses PAUSE on her fight.

My hand
gets wetter and wetter each time I pull the brick back, until the gravelly
crunch
es turn into soft squishes. 

I’m not
tired, despite the cold sweat coursing between my bra cups and sliding down to my navel with each blow I land.  

“
Brooke?”

I start at Hannah’s
timid voice and bolt to my feet. My hand is still clenched around the brick as I stumble toward her.  I can’t afford to let my guard down and abandon my only weapon. 

It’s obvious
she’s holding back tears in the way her words stretch and crack. “What’s going on?”

My fingers find
her hairspray-starched curls, and I sink onto one knee.  “You’re fine.  We’re going to get out of here.  We’ll get out and call your mother.” In an afterthought I add, “And 9-1-1.” 

“But
she locked us in.”

“Sh
e’s got to have the keys on her.”  Though I’m not psyched to rifle through her pockets.  “Go to the door.  I’ll find them.”

She tugs
on the hem of my shirt when I try to stand.  “You can’t leave me.”

“I’d never leave you,” I promise.  “
Get up.  Find that blowtorch and go to the door.”

Hannah
clamps her hand around my arm when something convulses in the corner.