I stared blankly and felt stupid. “And it works how?”
“If Harrison is on the computer, I will be too, and see everything he does. If he’s got anything there of Kailey, I can find it. The computer just needs to be on.”
“I’m still not sure Kailey’s his type,” I said. “But I do think he’ll have other girls, and if we get lucky, we can piece together his victims.”
“What if he’s not the guy who molested the girl in the vacant lot? What if he’s just a looker and not a toucher?”
“He’ll touch at some point. But we’ll deal with that when we get the answer.” I rolled my shoulders, trying in vain to ease the tension. “In the meantime, I’ll stick with Justin and Chris, see if I can get anything. Maybe the cops will end up being right and their suspect is the one. But I doubt it.”
“You need to worry more about Chris than Justin.” Kelly pulled her knees into her chest and wrapped her arms around them while still balancing on the chair. The benefits of being a tiny, flexible thing. “The very fact that he knows about your cyanide excursions scares the shit out of me. You need to get to the bottom of his motive. If you’re lucky–or unlucky, depending on how you look at it–you might find Kailey. Because, after all, that’s the priority, right?”
I was getting tired of that question. “Of course.”
“So you do what you can with what you’ve got. Justin’s a dead end right now. Focus on Chris. I’ll let you know if I get anything from Harrison.”
After I left
Kelly’s, I decided to try Todd again. Straight to voicemail. I reminded him to check into Chris and to please call me and then ended the call, sinking into my cold, leather seats.
Every time I turned around, another complication reared its head, and I was no closer to finding Kailey. I didn’t know what to think about Justin anymore. My judgment was clouded by my agenda and pride and suspicions about Chris.
My phone rang, and Chris’s number popped onto the screen. I only debated a minute before answering. “Hello?”
“It’s me,” Chris sounded breathless. “I couldn’t get back to sleep after my shift ended and decided to swing by Justin’s work. Thanks for trusting me with that information, by the way.”
As if he didn’t already know everything about Justin by the time I came into the picture. “He took a personal day yesterday. Was he there?”
“Just briefly. I think he picked up his check, and then I followed him.”
“Why?” I asked. “I thought you didn’t think Justin took her.”
“No idea, but it seemed like the right thing to do. Anyway, he’s at a storage unit in Spring Garden right now, Lucy. I don’t know what’s inside, but I figured you’d want to know.”
My heart leapt into my throat. Did Todd know about this unit? “Text me the address.”
I
whipped through
Spring Garden’s residential area and turned onto a beautiful street lined with well-kept, three-story brownstone townhouses, most of them dating back to the nineteenth century. Newer condos stood on this street, though I much preferred the older homes. I caught sight of the sign for Spring Garden Storage and hit the brakes, careening into the parking lot.
Chris’s Audi sat in the back behind a white van. I parked a few spaces down and hurried to join him. Getting into a car with Chris might just top my list of dumb things to do. But I’d already done it twice and survived. And I was on my guard. I could take care of myself.
He leaned across the passenger seat and opened the door for me. The car smelled like clean leather and Chris’s musky cologne. He wore his glasses again, and they didn’t hide the circles beneath his eyes.
“Must have been a slow shift if you couldn’t sleep,” I said.
“Not really. I just kept thinking about this whole mess.” Chris shrugged, and the light caught his cheek just right, highlighting the scar along his jaw. “He’s been inside about forty-five minutes.”
I glanced at the storage area, noticing Chris had chosen a perfect spot. His car was mostly hidden by the van, but he still had a decent view of the red Honda Justin drove. I leaned back in the warm seat.
I grazed the scar with my index finger. “Did you fall on something? I’ve got a scar on my elbow from when I was about ten. Classic running with a stick. Tripped and jammed the wood into my arm. Lucky it wasn’t my eye.” I cringed at the memory. My sister had been the one to clean me up, staying calm while our mother worried what the doctors would think. The hypocrisy didn’t dawn on me until after my sister’s death.
“It was an accident.” Chris stared straight ahead. A muscle in his jaw worked, tightening and flexing as the struggle to appear unfazed played out on his face.
I wanted to keep him talking, see if I could fetter out the lies in his story. “So, why’d you decide to be a paramedic? Not exactly a dream job for a sociopath.”
“I’m trying to assimilate. Maybe even rehabilitate.”
“Sociopaths don’t want to rehabilitate. They don’t see anything about them as being wrong. Then again, I’m not sure you’re one at all.”
Or you’re the scariest one I’ve ever met. I’m just not going to tell you that.
Leaning his head against the back of the seat, he turned lazily toward me. “I wish you were right.”
Once again, his eyes betrayed him. Instead of flatness or uncaring, they shined with pain. His grin, meant to be charming, looked more like a choked-up grimace.
“Why do you think you’re a sociopath?”
“Long story.” Chris returned to watching the parking lot.
“We’ve got time.”
“Actually,” he pointed, “we don’t. Justin’s heading to his car.”
Walking with the same defeated slouch, Justin exited the unit alone and empty handed. He glanced around but his gaze didn’t linger in any direction. He headed west out of the parking lot, oblivious to the Audi.
“You know where Todd lives?” Chris asked.
“No clue. But I’d bet he’s not home.” I didn’t want to tell him Justin was probably going to the shelter. The fact that I was protecting him didn’t escape me, but I didn’t have time to ponder its meaning. I’d do that at 3:00a.m. when sleep eluded me.
Chris cleared his throat. “You know it’s been more than forty-eight hours since she disappeared. After that long…”
“I’m aware.” Little Kailey’s life could have been snuffed out days ago. A tremor shot through me, whispers of the panic that sometimes crept up on me in the night. No child should have to face that nothingness.
“It’s been almost two hours. What the hell did he do in there for so long?” Chris asked.
A myriad of horrible scenarios flashed through my mind, accompanied with the voices of the abused children I’d listened to over the past decade. “You don’t want to know.”
Whatever worries I had about Chris dropped to the back of my brain. Adrenaline flushed through me with a dizzying veracity leaving me breathing in whistling gasps. “We need to get inside now. This is the perfect place to hide her.”
“You’re right,” Chris said. “We’ve got to get inside and see if she’s there. If he’s hurt that kid, we take him down.”
The conviction in his voice surprised me, not because he’d suggested killing Justin, but because his tone sang with empathy for Kailey.
“So let’s go.”
C
hris hung back
as I worked the lock on Justin’s unit.
“Where’d you learn how to pick a lock?”
“Googled it.”
“Nice.” The lock popped open, and Chris slowly lifted the door, which creaked and squalled as it rolled up. I shined my flashlight around the unit until I found the light switch. The hanging bulb was dim, and my eyes took a moment to adjust. When my vision finally sharpened, my knees turned to jelly. The unit was about the size of my childhood bedroom, and boxes and plastic bins lined the western wall. It was the rest of the room that made me feel woozy.
Justin had decorated the entire back wall with pictures of his mother. A few were snapshots, but most were his own drawings. Every one was done in pencil, and the detail was mesmerizing. Martha Beckett had always intimidated me, and these pictures were so lifelike I felt the same unease creeping over me. A tall woman with broad shoulders, manly hands, and nondescript facial features that made her expression perpetually tight, she resented me on sight. Justin’s father drank too much and let Martha run the house. The woman had been furious that anyone–and I suspected my looks and the way Justin had taken to me also fueled Martha’s ire–would insinuate anything was wrong with her son.
Martha’s haughty eyes followed me as I examined the drawings. One thing quickly became clear: Justin Beckett hated his mother. Every depiction had her in an eerie position of power, as though she were standing over him in the flesh, brutish and domineering.
But the one that really struck me cold was the full body drawing of Martha from the back. Hair gathered at the back of her neck, her clothes were too tight around her thicker frame. Justin had drawn his mother so the right side of her face was partially visible, and again she was drawn from the position of someone looking up at her. The most chilling feature was the way her right eye glared, as though she had turned her back but still watched from the corner of her eye. If there was ever a boogeywoman, this drawing of Martha Beckett was the perfect representation.
I jumped when Chris’s hand touched my shoulder. “Christ! I’d forgotten you were here.”
“I could tell.” He walked over to the cheap computer desk and folding chair set up in the corner. Various art supplies covered half the desk while newspaper clippings were scattered across the other half. “More drawings of the same woman. That his mother?”
“Martha Beckett.”
Chris stared at the pictures taped to the wall. Peering closer, he gazed up at one of the close-up sketches of Martha’s face with a look of intense concentration. He gave himself a shake. “She looks like a peach.”
“She was rude and uncooperative. And when Justin was incarcerated, she spent more time being angry at her son than trying to understand him. From what I’ve been told, he hasn’t seen her in years.”
“Not sure I believe that.”
“Why?”
“Look at the pictures.” Chris pointed to the one at the far left that he’d been so caught up in. “She’s younger there. And look at her hair. It’s all big and poufy. All bangs. Like my aunt used to wear hers in the 90s.” He walked along the wall, his hand hovering near the pictures. “She’s younger in all of these.” He stopped at the one portraying Martha from the back. “Harder to tell with this one, but I still say she’s younger. And then look at these.” He moved to the right. “She’s thinner. Shoulders more stooped. Looks like she’s got some gray. Maybe wrinkles.”
“God, you’re right.”
“Doesn’t mean he’s seen her, though,” Chris said. “He could be aging her simply because it makes sense to him. But–”
“If he hasn’t seen her, and he holds this much obsession with her, he’d still draw her the way she looked when he was a kid.” I went to the last picture in the haphazard line and studied it closely, looking past the threatening visage. “She’s opening the door here. Her expression almost looks surprised.”
“Maybe he was fantasizing about seeing her again and watching her shock.”
“Maybe. Or maybe he’s already seen her. When I spoke to him yesterday, I knew he had a lot of resentment toward her. I assumed she’d stood aside while he was being abused but now, I wonder.”
Chris gingerly touched one of the pictures. “Wonder what?”
“If she didn’t hurt him too. I assumed it was his father, but now I don’t know.” I glanced at Chris. “It’s more common than people think, especially with sons. It’s a control thing. Sometimes it’s sexual. The way he shows her in positions of power makes me really nervous.”
“What does it matter now?” Chris went back over to the desk. “He’s a grown man, and whatever damage she inflicted is firmly ingrained. A person can’t recover from that sort of thing. Can they?” His tight, controlled voice sent a tremor through me, and I remembered I was talking to the son of the infamous Lancaster murderer.
“Every person is different,” I said. “There are a lot people out there who came from terrible backgrounds living productive lives. I think it’s a matter of genetic makeup, of the wiring. Some people just can’t cope. And he’s obviously obsessed with her. And even if this is some form of therapy, Martha Beckett may be in danger.”
“So what?” Chris dropped the pile of papers he’d been rifling through. “If she did hurt her son, she deserves whatever he’s got planned for her.
He’s
the victim. She’s the monster. Isn’t that your whole working concept, anyway? By your system, Martha should be dead. It’s justice.” His voice, loud and loaded with raw anger, rang in my ears. I thought of the things he must have seen as a child in Lancaster, and I knew in that moment he was more damaged than I’d imagined.
Chris stepped toward me, the smack of his boots against the concrete floor matching the tenseness in his body. “You can’t be a vigilante killer of kid attackers and then worry about whether or not one of the pigs is in danger from the child they abused. Especially when it’s their own kid. You can’t have this shit both ways, Lucy.”
His anger made the hair on my arms stand up. I suddenly realized I was in a small storage unit with a man I barely knew who might have more agendas than I realized, and my pepper spray was in my car. “You’re right. But I don’t know for sure she actually abused him. Maybe she just let it happen because she was too busy in her own life. Or because she was afraid. Or worried about what might happen to her.”
“So that’s the distinction? Enablers get the Lucy Kendall acquittal?”
“If they didn’t, I’d have to take out my own mother.” I gritted my teeth. I had no interest in telling Chris about my sister.
“You were abused?” Chris’s eyes widened, his anger stepping down a notch. “By who?”
“Not me. My sister. Mom’s boyfriend. Mom never wanted to hear the truth. And that’s all I’m going to say. The point is, we don’t know the whole story. And we’re not here to worry about Martha Beckett. We’re here to find out if Justin took Kailey. So let’s start looking.”
Chris looked like he wanted to argue, but he nodded. “Let’s start with the desk first. He’s got a lot of shit crammed onto the shelves.”