Thomas Prescott Superpack (16 page)

Chapter 30

We pulled into Alex’s drive to three cars parked in the middle of her yard. The three girls from my class gave me hugs and asked why I hadn’t involved them in the case. Anyhow, Kim is trim, Ali is a lot of woman, and Holly is mole-y. I promised them from that point on, they would each have a stake in their own survival.

The clan: Kim, Ali, Holly, Lacy, Caleb, Blake, Tall Tim, and Fat Tim, followed Alex into her house as I whipped out my cell phone and dialed Gleason.

The phone was answered on the first and half ring, “Gregory, Special Agent in Charge.”

Piss. “Where’s Wade?”

“Getting some coffee? What can I do for you, Mr. Prescott?”

Hold your breath until you die for starters. “I shook his hand.”

“Whose hand?”

“His hand.
Tristen Grayer’s
.”

I could hear him straighten up in the car seat. “When?”

I recounted the events for him. Now, while the facts weren’t completely sober, they would have passed a breathalyzer. A thought occurred to me that hadn’t yet and I said, “He was in a black Caprice with FBI plates, so you might want to check to see if all the men in your platoon are accounted for. I’d be willing to bet you come up one PFC short.”

If one of his goons was gone, it was safe to assume the woman the goon had been staking out was also gone.

Todd started cranking up his drawbridge, “Our men have been checking in every half hour.”

You know how I’d been having the
kids say, “Check,” to check in. I’d filched this wizardry from the Feds. I asked Todd, “Are you asking for their social security number every time they check in? That’s how my bank ensures that it’s me on the phone and not a serial killer impersonating me.”

“I’ll call you back.” Fill the moat. Get the gators.

The phone rang a minute later. It was Gleason. Not a good sign. If all the men in Todd’s army had been accounted for, Todd would have called. I skipped over the fundamentals, “Which woman was your man staking out?”

“Samantha Jackson.”

Samantha Jackson was one of ten black girls in the entire state of Maine. She was a waitress at a small diner in Camden. Gleason said, “We’re sending our closest man right now.”

“Don’t. He might be thinking along those lines and be waiting for a man to abandon his post.”

“Good point. How do you want to play this?”

I must be hearing things. Did the FBI just ask for my input?

I said, “He knows everything we do. He knew we had twenty-seven women as possible victims, he knew Caleb was working for me. Hell, he probably knows what kind of toilet paper you wipe your ass with and where Todd keeps his strap-on. Listen, I know where Sam lives, I’ll be there in five minutes.”

I jumped in my car and skidded out of Alex’s drive. This didn’t fit the mold. Samantha was a waitress who’d waited on me ten, maybe fifteen times. Conner had come up with her name simply because he’d eaten with me at her restaurant on a couple occasions.

I knew Tristen, or at least I knew how his mind worked. Each kill had to be bigger, better, and bloodier than the last. He couldn’t move down the ranks from Ashley Andrews to Samantha Jackson. Maybe this, my driving to her house this instant, had been his ploy. I called Caleb and told him to be on the lookout.

I exited US 1 northbound and entered the town of Camden. I’d driven Samantha home once when she’d gotten food poisoning from her shift meal. I’d taken her home, then gone back for the meat loaf, which coincidentally, had been the very meal to make her ill. Go figure.

I pulled up to Samantha’s, a small row house, sitting in the epicenter of a class six earthquake of a yard. I jumped out, pushed a hotwheel and a scooter out of my way, and knocked on the thin door. I watched the hand on my Tag tick full circle. A pessimistic streak in me had the thought, “It’s hard to answer the door when your feet and ankles are in different rooms.”

I walked around to the back of the house and peered through a sliding glass door. I put pressure on the door and it slid easily. There was a small kitchen and I flipped the light. There weren’t many places to hide a bedroom in the small house and I walked out of the kitchen and into a cramped hallway. The hallway was devoid of light and I failed to see the baseball bat being swung at my midsection. The bat was a Nerf one and I ripped it easily from the grip of the small black woman attached to it.

Samantha Jackson was sporting plaid boxers, a bright yellow T-shirt, and an expression of menacing doom. She was in a state of panic and it took me two or three minutes to calm her down. I’d been fully prepared to find a woman turned 3-D puzzle, and as elated as I was that Samantha was alive, it threw me for a loop.

I’d just completed a thorough walk through of all two rooms, when there was a knock at the door, which I opened to Conner, Caitlin, Gleason, and Gregory. I told them everything seemed to be in order and asked Gregory if all the other agents had checked in.

He nodded.

I had my doubts about Todd’s system here. I inquired, “And might I ask what rigorous data your men are disclosing to ascertain their identities?” I think the size of Todd’s dick would have been a good verifier.

He threw me his holier-than-thou glance. “Mother’s maiden name and blood type.”

“O-Really.”

“Yes, ‘Oh, really,’ you condescending prick.”

“I thought you wanted my blood type and mother’s maiden name; O-Really.”

If Todd Gregory could have looked hotter under the collar a Brad Pitt blow-up doll would be involved. So I’m AB positive and my mother’s maiden name is Reid, but I was pissed at these
shitheads for withholding information from me. I waited with Samantha until her mother picked her up and threw in the towel. As I pulled the door to my Range Rover open a hand clasped my forearm. It was Caitlin.

She looked me in the eyes and said, “What do you think?”

I’d lied to Caitlin one time too many. No more lies. “Tristen said he had a date with a beautiful young lady. So, I imagine he’s killing her right now and we’ll find her when he wants us to.”

Chapter 31

I woke up with my head on Alex’s kitchen table. It was still dark outside and my cell phone told me the sun would be rising any moment. Four hours of sleep is plenty when there’s a psychotic killer popping his head into every dream. I went for a long run on the trail running along the lake making up Alex’s backyard. About half the lake was surrounded by dirt and prairie and I spent this time dreading Tristen’s next move. The other half of the lake was girdled by spruces and I spent this time dreading ticks and Lyme’s disease.

My cell phone chirped as I walked through Alex’s front door and I shied away from the voices resonating the kitchen. Gleason’s drawl shot through the phone, “Well the good news is that all the women are accounted for.”

“That is good news Wade. What’s the bad news?”

“It’s a double dose actually. Our agent never showed up. We put an APB out on the car, but I’m not very optimistic.”

Ditto. “What’s the second round of bad juju?”

“Charles wants Todd and I on the next flight back to Quantico.”

I said my scripted line, “I thought you said you had bad news?” Hardy-har-har.

I added, “So throwing in the towel are you.”

“Not completely. The next hot date isn’t for five days. We’ll pick the brains of a couple guys at the Bureau before heading back. We’ll need to get a composite from you and run it through our mainframe. There’s a slim chance this Grayer fellow is in our system, or an even slimmer chance it’s someone else altogether.”

Don’t count on it. I asked, “Have you seen today’s paper?”

“Which paper?”

If I’d been talking to Gregory I would have said,
The North Dakota Free Press
.

“Uh, the
Waterville Tribune
.”

I heard Gleason rustling with the paper. He came back on, “Holy shit, how
did you pull this off?”

“I’ve got a contact at the paper.”

“Tooms?”

“Yep. She bought the paper.”

He seemed to give this some thought. “This picture is pretty creepy. I think they may have gotten the wrong color on the kid’s eyes. They’re orange.”

“Nope, that’s them. They say if you look deep into Satan’s eyes you can see hell.”

“You think they’re contacts?”

“Doubt it. He’s not going to put on a dress and dance for us.”

“You mean for you.”

“Exactly.”

“Unbelievable you got this in today’s paper. It might throw him off when he sees it.”

Tristen Grayer knew his picture would be in this morning’s paper. He knew my next move before I did. “Let’s hope. Hey, tell Gregory to fuck a duck for me.”

He said he would. I made him write it down and repeat it back to me.

I walked into the kitchen. All eight of Alex’s guests were crammed into the kitchen eating cereal. They all stopped when I entered and I assumed they wanted to know where I’d gone last night, who was on the phone, and if another woman was dead.

I grabbed a glass of orange juice and said, “Here’s the deal, all the women are accounted for. But the agent whose car Tristen stole is MIA, missing in action, which subsequently means he’s probably DIA, decomposing in the Atlantic.” I briefed them on the phone call with Gleason and that the Feds were going home for a long weekend.

Caleb raised his hand and I called on him, “Yes, Caleb.”

“What do you want us to do? Should we stay on stakeout for one more night or what?”

“At least for another day. I don’t have the slightest clue what Tristen is up to. Why don’t the eight of you stick together at least through the weekend?”

Sixteen eyes congregated on Alex, aka, House Mom. She shrugged. “You’re all welcome to stay here for as long as you like, I hate being in this big house all alone.”

Kim Welding shook her head, “Don’t you want us to appear vulnerable. I mean we want him to come after one of us, right?”

No, I didn’t want to use three of my students, my sister, and Alex as bait. I’d already lost two worms, and I didn’t even know I had my line in the water. “We’ll play that card when we need to.”

This repartee seemed to satisfy her. My sister was the only sourpuss of the group and I asked, “You all right, Lace?”

She did a dramatic frown, “I miss Baxter.”

I wasn’t too worried about him, I’d tried to kill him on several different occasions and come up short. Baxter was a survivor. If anyone could escape the reaches of Tristen Grayer it was the narcolepugtic.

Alex steered me out of the room. “Let’s go grab a paper, I want to see how the picture came out.”

“I can’t believe you don’t get your own paper delivered to your house.”

“I like to separate work from play.”

I was curious which category I fell under. She added, “We’ll pick up a paper on the way.”

Huh. “On the way?”

She smiled. “We have a sailing date, remember.”

It was close to ten when Alex and I had a cooler packed and were buckled in the Range Rover. I pulled through the gateless drive and Alex said, “Are you sure you want to go sailing?”

I’d been asking myself the same question. Tristen’s picture had landed on the doorstep of close to fifteen thousand homes this morning. By now, there’d probably been twenty or thirty calls to the police about the photo. Two-thirds of them would be crackpots, and the other third would be people who mistook the weird-kid-who-lived-down-the-hall for Tristen Grayer. None of these would pan out, Tristen Grayer was too smart, too methodical, and too damn spontaneous.

Tristen didn’t leave clues at the scene and if he did they were meant to be found. He was in total control. So that was my rationale in going sailing. “Yes.”

We passed a Dunkin Donuts and Alex ran in. She came out with two coffees and two papers. Alex tossed one on my lap, my eyes immediately training on Tristen Grayer’s vivid tangerine oculus. It was like staring into the face of a lion.

That’s what he was, he wasn’t a demon,
he was a lion. Tristen was the ghost in the darkness. Slinking off at night from his remote lair and picking off the group till it no longer existed.

I looked up at Alex and she said, “He looks like a lion.”

We hit the kite shop in Portland and by noon we were parked in the
Bayside harbor loading lot. Alex hauled the cooler out of the trunk and I picked up the kite. In hindsight, I think Alex may have expected me to relieve her of cooler duty, which is confusing because she’d picked the cooler up of her own accord.

She hoisted the cooler up with a grunt and said, “You really know the way to a woman’s heart.”

Each time Alex set down the cooler she gave me a look as to say, “You’ve got to be kidding me.” When she set it down for the fifth and final time, about twenty feet from the boat, I said, “Here let me get that for you. That looks a little heavy for such a pretty lady.” I didn’t want to blow my chances for a little skinny-dipping completely.

I knelt down to pick up the cooler, but Alex slapped my hand away. She ambled off grunting obscenities as I scanned the premises for Kellon. There were only a couple little guys milling around the pier, none of which was Kellon. I walked up the small wooden walkway to the dock manager hut and opened the door. Kellon’s dad was on the phone and from his silence and the disgruntled look on his face I suspected he was on hold. Kellon’s dad fell somewhere in between the terms Big and Obese. He was balding and sunburned to boot, making his head appear vaguely similar to a hairy Italian in a red tank top. I waved the kite near his peripheral and said, “Is Kellon here?”

He shook his head and stared at the phone jack on the wall as if it were the man’s face who’d put him on hold. I wonder if I were getting more attention than Kellon would if he was on the ground having a seizure. I said, “If you see him, tell him Captain Dipshit has something for him.”

I turned and stepped through the open door.

From behind me the beast murmured, “If I see her. Kellon is a girl.”