Deadly Dozen: 12 Mysteries/Thrillers (82 page)

“I can’t leave Dr. J there alone. I’m responsible for him. Belle would be devastated if anything happened to him.”

“Okay, we get the bird and we’re out of there.”

Jason maneuvered through stop-and-go traffic. The sun was setting when they pulled up in front of the Vogt house.

His cell phone rang before they could exit the car.

“Bower,” he said.

He grasped her upper arm, holding her back.

“He’s still alive? Where? What hospital? Okay, I’m on my way.”

Piper’s pulse began to race.

“That was the desk clerk at the Tropical Palms. Avidon dove off the roof of the hotel. He’s still alive, but barely.”

“Oh my god.”

“He left a sealed envelope for me with the desk clerk just minutes before he went up to the roof.”

“A written confession?”

“That’s what I’m thinking.”

“Look, you go. I’ll grab Doc and take him to your house. I’ll need my car anyway.”

He reached into his pocket, pulled out a house key, and handed it to her. “Call me as soon as you get there.”

When she opened the car door to exit, he pulled her back, wrapped his arms around her, and kissed her. “No heroics. Don’t go up to the guesthouse. Get the journal and the bird and get out. Pronto.”

“Yes, sir. No heroics, I promise.” She kissed him back.

“Where’s the pepper spray?”

She patted her purse.

Piper didn’t wait for him to drive away, she was already dashing to the front door. She rushed in, disengaged the alarm, locked the door, and headed for the kitchen. Dr. J squawked and screeched from his tree-like perch outside his cage. Good, she wouldn’t have to coax him out to get him into his traveling carrier. Sometimes, when he was nervous or annoyed, he dug his talons in and refused to budge.

She grabbed Sybil’s journal from the kitchen table and stuffed it into her purse. Then she rushed down the basement steps to where Belle kept an assortment of travel carriers. She chose the clear crystal shuttle, one she knew he liked and would go into easily. On the way back to the stairs something in the space under the staircase caught her eye. A toolbox that she didn’t recall seeing there after Luke, or whatever his name was, had pumped out the flooded basement. She leaned down to read the name engraved into the metal.
Luke Monte
. Had Luke forgotten his tools in the Vogt’s basement? No, not likely. They weren’t Luke’s tools. Luke wasn’t the Vogt’s handyman. Not the man she knew as Luke. How had the phony handyman gotten his hands on the real handyman’s toolbox? She straightened up and looked around. On the staircase step, at eye level to her, was a clump of moist dirt. Two steps down was another clump of dirt. Her gaze followed the clumps to the bottom of the staircase. The dirt trail led to the massive chest freezer directly in front of her.

She lowered the bird carrier to the floor and opened the freezer lid. Commercial butcher paper wrapped packages of frozen meat filled the entire chest from one end to the other. That was a lot of meat for two people. In the middle of the freezer, dirt marred a white package. She lifted it up, and then another and another, her heart pressing into her throat. Three layers down, she saw clear plastic sheeting with rivulets of dirt lining the creases and folds. Two more packages and she saw blue fabric. Buttons. A pocket. On the pocket was an oval patch. Stitched on the patch were letters. She leaned down closer. L-U-K-E. Luke. Her mind had difficulty grasping or making sense of what she saw. Maybe it was a bundle of clothes buried under the Vogt’s prime cuts of steaks and chops. But it wasn’t.

Upstairs, Dr. J squawked.

She removed another package. A pair of eyes, partially open and glazed over stared up at her. She breathed in the putrid odor that even the coldness of the freezer couldn’t mask. She gagged. It was the real Luke.

That’s when she heard him behind her. He caught her across the shoulders, smashed the chemical-soaked cloth against her nose and mouth, and held her tight against his chest. She couldn’t move. She held her breath for as long as she could, but she was no match for his size and muscle. The last thing she heard before everything went black was Dr. J screaming like a banshee in the room above.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Her head was splitting. The smell of chloroform filled her sinuses and burned the back of her throat. She opened her eyes to a spinning room and nausea. In the moments it took to regain her equilibrium, she tried to get her bearings. Her gaze settled on a pair of pale blue eyes. Sybil’s eyes. Why hadn’t she noticed how much his eyes resembled hers? How close his features were to hers, his own grandmother?

He sat on the bed beside her. He wore slacks. Except for the silver chain around his neck, he was bare-chested. His blond hair fell into his face. His hand was inside her shirt, caressing her breasts.

Piper stared back, expressionless, trying not to struggle. He wanted a reaction. He wanted her to fight him.

“She’s not your type, Tony,” said a female voice nearby.

Just past him in the doorway, Sybil stood in a nightgown.

“That’s what makes it so much fun, Mom,” Tony said. Although he appeared unruffled by his mother’s presence, he pulled his hand away and rose up from the bed.

Not Sybil. Norma. The dark wig and brown contacts gone. Her pale blue eyes alive with indignation.

The woman held Sybil’s journal and thumbed through it. “Is this the only one you have?” she asked. Piper nodded. “Where’s your boyfriend? The cop?”

“I don’t know.” She fumbled to button her blouse.

“We’ll have to move faster now.”

They were in the master bedroom, the room she had seen Sybil pace in numerous times in the past. A birdcage sat on the floor near the bed. A yellow canary lay dead at the bottom of the cage. The room had the odor of death. The bird, she wondered, or Sybil? Was she dead too?

Within inches of her face, Norma said, “I can’t begin to tell you what a pain in the ass you’ve been. You can’t win now, so make the best of it.” She gave Piper a hard shake and slapped her face.

Piper heard a low moan in the bed beside her. Slowly turning her head to avoid another bout of dizziness, she saw the thin, pale form of Sybil Squire on the far side of the mattress. Her white skin and hair blended in with the sheets, making her nearly invisible. Sybil reached out and touched her arm with icy cold fingers. The ring finger on her left hand was bent at an odd angle, the knuckle swollen three times its normal size. A circle of skin, where her beautiful diamond wedding ring had been, was bruised and raw.

These people were monsters. They thought nothing of torturing an old woman to get what they wanted. Sybil’s breath no longer smelled of scotch and tobacco—the days of indulging their patient-turned-prisoner had long passed. Her breath smelled of neglect and decay.

Within the emaciated face, the sunken eyes remained expressive. They seemed to take over her entire face. Bruises and scabbed-over sores riddled her face, chest, and arms. Sores the exact size and shape of a cigarette tip. Blood caked at the corner of her mouth, her pale feet poked out beneath her soiled nightgown. Piper’s heart caved. Sybil became her loving Nana in her final days of terminal cancer, begging silently to be pain-free and at peace. Once again Piper found herself comparing this woman with her grandmother. She couldn’t save Nana Ruth, but she could try to save Sybil.

“How touching,” Norma said to Sybil. “A total stranger gets more affection than I ever got. Those frigging birds got more attention. Is it any wonder I have to be so tough on you? Is it?”

Tony pulled Piper from the bed and slammed her into a chair. A stabbing pain shot through her head, spots jumped in front of her eyes.

“All right, look, we’re very close to finishing up our business here. You’re going to help us, and then we’ll leave you all and be on our merry way.”

Piper seriously doubted they would leave them alive, especially after killing the handyman and stashing him in the Vogt’s freezer. They had nothing to lose and everything to gain by killing them.

Norma opened Sybil’s journal and rifled through the pages. “Listen to this,” Norma said with her face in the journal. “Would you
listen
to this?” She began to read, “‘Norma leaves for England tomorrow. I’ve no choice. They’ll help her there. Sending my little girl away breaks my heart. I’ll miss her terribly…they say it’s for the best. But I wonder, is it?” Norma paused. Mocking sentiment filled her words. “‘Jane says in time she’ll realize that those of us who play an important role in this fantasy world called Hollywood must make certain sacrifices
.’”

Norma Knoller whirled around, platinum hair flying, pale eyes flashing, to scream at the frail form on the bed, “You selfish bitch! You had no
choice
? It was for the
best
? Whose dirty secret was it, anyway? Not mine—I was ten years old. I didn’t understand what was going on. The only sacrifice made was by me,
me—
your little girl. I was the one sent off to a strange country to live without family, to battle the bloody nightmares alone, because it was all for your perfect fantasy world. What you did
you
sacrifice, Mommy dearest? Tell me! What great sacrifice did you make? You continued to star in your pathetic movies. You got married again and replaced me with your precious brat.”

Sybil Squire closed her eyes, shutting out her daughter.

Tony leaped onto the bed, stood above the prone woman, his feet rocking on each side of her. “Grandmother, you were a rotten mother to my mother. My mother would never send
me
away, never. You owe her, y’know. Why don’t you just tell us? Where is it? You owe us!”

Mr. Moto stepped into the room.

“Okay, if that’s how you want to play.” Tony turned to Moto. “Jack, your knife.”

Sybil’s eyelids squeezed shut tighter.

Moto extracted from his pants pocket a Mother-of-Pearl-handled pocketknife and handed it to Tony. Tony pulled out the nearly five-inch blade, testing the sharpness by shaving a patch of hair from his forearm.

“Now, Grandma, you have to open your eyes. It’s important you see what we have to do to Piper Buttinski, your self-proclaimed protector. Because every slice made into her pretty body will be a black mark on your soul. You’ll be responsible for her blood.”

Tony leaped off the bed. He lifted the chair with Piper in it, carried it the five paces to the side of the bed and slammed it down. “If you don’t open your eyes, Grandma, I’ll have to slice off your eyelids. Is that what you want?” He pulled Sybil to the edge of the bed by her nightgown. He put his mouth to her ear and screamed, “Open them,
now
.”

Sybil’s eyelids opened. In a voice barely audible, she whispered, “Let her go and I’ll…tell you.”

“Oh, Grandma, it’s too late for bargaining. We’re beyond that stage of the negotiations. Besides, we have to punish your friend for being such a busybody. How much punishment I dole out, of course, is up to you.” He grabbed Piper’s wrist and pulled her hand toward Sybil, the palm facing her. “I used to read fortunes. Palms, actually. You’d be surprised what you can see in the lines of the hand. This line,” he placed the tip of the blade at a spot under the index finger, and traced it to under the ring finger, “is the head line. It reveals your determination in life. We all know how determined Piper can be, don’t we?” He retraced the line, only this time he pressed down, cutting. Pain shot up her arm. She strained to pull her hand away. He held it tighter. Moto held the back of the chair to keep her from tipping it over. A thin red line emerged. Tony wiped her blood on the sheets.

“Now this is the heart line. Emotions are involved here. Is that new boyfriend’s name written all over this line?” He cut the width of her palm, from side to side. This cut was deeper. Piper cried out. Blood ran down her palm, wrist, and forearm to pool in the crook of her elbow. Again, he dragged her palm across the bedclothes, staining them with her blood. “This one, the life line, circles the thumb. If I press hard enough, I can take her thumb off.” He brought the blade down on the space between her thumb and index finger. She closed her eyes. Her body trembled from head to toe.

“The pool.” The voice was so soft she barely heard it over the pounding of her heart.

“What?” Tony said. “Grandma, did you say something? The key is where?”

“Swimming pool. Chained to the drain … bottom.” Sybil let her eyes fall shut.

“Mom, Jack, watch them.” Tony gestured to her and Sybil, then left the room, undoing his pants.

Piper wrapped a pillow around her hand to stop the flow of blood. The wounds burned. Her hand throbbed.

Norma paced from the bed to the window where Moto stood and back to the bed.

“He dove into the pool,” Moto said.

Norma thrust her face into Sybil’s face. “You better be telling the truth, old lady, or I swear I’ll rip your heart out with my bare hands. And I’ll make certain the world learns every sordid detail of that dirty secret you wanted so desperately to hide. They’ll know what kind of depraved, twisted men you married. And what a selfish, uncaring bitch of a mother you were.”