And mine
.
The tears came again in a torrent, but that was okay, because they’d all been
crying, too. Dana had plopped her pregnant self down on the bed beside her and
hugged her like she’d never let go while everyone eyed Noah as if he were an
alien from outer space.
A new roar of welcome rose when Olivia came into the
room. “I just came to check on the patient,” she said, her voice falsely
bright, then stopped short when she saw Mia standing by the window next to her
husband. “I didn’t know you were here.” Then Olivia burst into unexpected tears
and tried to escape, but hit the wall of Kane.
Mia put her arms around her. “I didn’t want to
distract you,” she said. A homicide detective herself, Mia understood the
pressure.
Olivia, trying to find me and Liza before it was too late. And
dealing with what Pierce left behind.
“Come,” Mia told her sister. “Reed will take us back
to our hotel and we’ll have chocolate. It’ll be all right.” Mia and Kane shared
a knowing glance. “Thanks, Kane. We’ve got her now.” Then she looked at Eve. “
Try
to stay out of trouble, kid, okay?”
Eve watched them go with a sigh. She knew Mia had come
as much for Olivia as she had for her and that was as it should be.
“Mia will know what to do. I can’t imagine…”
I
won’t think about the pit. Not tonight.
Beside her, Dana hugged her hard. “You’re here,” she
said firmly. “And okay.”
“And you hacked into ShadowCo.” Ethan pretended to
wipe a tear from his eye. “I am so proud. I’ll contact them on Monday, tell
them they have a network security issue.”
“Then I want half the commission when they hire you to
fix it,” Eve said.
“A third,” Ethan said. “Okay, half,” he amended when
Dana elbowed him.
“You led her into this life of hacker crime,” Caroline
said, amused.
Max scoffed at that. “You all did, with the
clandestine activities and taking care of people whether they wanted it or not.
Speaking of clandestine activities, where is Tom?”
“He went to sit with Liza,” Eve said and they all
sobered again. “Poor kid. I wish…”
Dana leaned her head against Eve’s shoulder. “We’ll
just be there for her.”
Like Dana always was for me. “I know.”
Caroline stood. “We’re out of here now, but we’ll come
back tomorrow. We’re staying at a hotel about three blocks from your place.
When you get out, we’ll have Dana’s baby shower in our room, then we have to be
getting back.” She looked up over her shoulder at Max. “Your mother will be
tearing her hair out with all the kids.”
Between Caroline’s and Dana’s toddlers, Dana’s
fosters, and Mia’s adopted son, Max and David’s mom had ten kids under her
care. The horde, squared. It made Eve smile.
“Mom loves it,” Max said. “Don’t let her fool you.” He
leaned over and kissed Eve on the forehead. “Three times is your charm, kid. No
more getting kidnapped, okay?”
Eve laughed softly. “I’ll do my very best.”
Friday, February 26, 3:00 p.m.
“The real Carleton Pierce was a poor kid from a small Colorado town,” Abbott
said when they’d all rejoined around Abbott’s table the next day. Olivia and
Kane were there, Ian and Micki. And Eve. She sat at Noah’s side, listening as
everyone brought a little bit of the story together.
The only one not here was Jack. Nobody was sure when
he’d be back at work. But he was alive and that’s all that mattered for now.
Dell Farmer had been charged with the attempted murder
of Jack, along with the murders of Katie Dobbs, Harvey Farmer, and Kurt
Buckland.
MSP
planned to do a follow-up article to be sure everyone knew
what had really happened.
Noah didn’t plan to buy a copy.
In the last month, Pierce had taken the lives of six
women as the Red Dress Killer and four others to cover his tracks—Ann Pierce,
Jeremy Lyons, and the Bolyards. Then there were all the women in his pit. Noah
pushed them to the edge of his mind for the moment, concentrating on Abbott’s
summary of what they’d discovered in the last twenty-four.
“The real Carleton Pierce graduated from high school
the spring after Eddie Black hung his mother,” Abbott went on. “His home
address was on a copy of the acceptance letter the university had sent. The
real Carleton’s parents had died in an accident. He was taken in by a local
family and the town came together to care for him. He graduated valedictorian,
earned a full scholarship to the U. His town pitched in, bought him a used car,
had a nice pot-luck to see him off, and never saw him again.”
“He sent a thank-you card,” Kane said, “and a few
Christmas cards. But he never came home. They had old high school yearbooks in
the town library and they faxed us his picture. Their Carleton Pierce looked
nothing like ours.”
“So what happened to the real Carleton Pierce?” Ian
asked.
“We may never know,” Noah said. “Based on what we know
of the real Eddie Black, the real Carleton Pierce is dead.”
“We found a .22 slug in his wife’s head,” Ian said.
“Same as the gun he used on Jeremy Lyons and the Bolyards.” He looked at Eve.
“And to shoot you.”
Noah pushed that image away, too. Eve was fine, but
she almost hadn’t been.
“We’ve pieced the story on Ann Pierce,” Noah said.
He’d talked with her employer that morning. “She’d borrowed cash from a friend
at work to book that flight to LA, the one she never showed up for. Apparently
Ann Pierce had friends that Carleton didn’t know about. We think she dropped
off the cat because she didn’t want to leave it alone, because she may have
planned to kill Pierce herself.”
“We found another gun in their bedroom closet,” Micki
said, “with Ann’s fingerprints on it. We’re guessing she figured out what he
was doing and Pierce killed her first.”
“What I don’t understand,” Ian said, “is why he kept
the cat?”
“Pierce kept souvenirs,” Micki said. She was pale, her
eyes drawn. They weren’t close to being finished processing Pierce’s basement.
“Shoes, driver’s licenses, wallets, cell phones. I think he kept the cat as a
souvenir of his Red Dress murders.”
Abbott sighed. “We found three dozen pairs of shoes in
his basement. From the driver’s licenses, he hunted these women from as far
east as Chicago and south as Omaha. He consulted on a few of his own murders of
local prostitutes, as part of the homicide investigation. Brian Ramsey is
pulling his hair out. Innocent men in prison, every case Pierce testified in up
for appeal. This isn’t going away for a long time.”
“We’ll be able to close some of our own cold cases,”
Noah murmured. “Including the disappearance of Roger Eames, twenty years ago.
He was a laborer, did odd jobs. We found his driver’s license at the bottom of
Pierce’s drawer.”
“And his work boots in the pile of shoes that fell off
his shelves,” Olivia added flatly. “Still had cement in the treads. Apparently,
Roger Eames dug the pit.”
“The deed to the house was in his name,” Abbott said.
“We never would have found the house that way.”
“How did he find out about your study, Eve?” Ian
asked.
“When Donner was diagnosed with cancer, his doctor
recommended a list of therapists,” Eve said. She’d talked with Donner’s wife
and mother that morning, trying to understand how her study had gone so wrong.
“One of them was Pierce. Over the course of his therapy, Donner mentioned the
study, said he needed an independent third-party consultant. Pierce was
intrigued and he volunteered.”
“When Pierce knew we had the participant list,” Noah
said, “he knew Jeremy Lyons had to go. As Donner got sicker, he’d passed more
authority and access to Lyons.”
“We found Jeremy’s laptop in Pierce’s New Germany
house,” Micki said. “He’d sent an email to Pierce with the list as an
attachment. We found all the Red Dress victims’ computers in the New Germany
house, in fact.”
“Martha used her stool at Ninth Circle to solicit
business for Siren Song,” Abbott said. “We’re not sure if she became obsessed
with the World to support her phone sex business or turned to phone sex because
it allowed her to never leave her PC. Her heaviest call volume was in the hours
the other victims were killed, so that’s probably why she met Pierce so much
earlier than the others.”
“Which turned out to be important,” Micki said, her
brows raised.
“As did the cat and the shoes,” Noah said. “You were
right. And Kane, you were right about Jeremy. Pierce used his phone to leave
the text and voicemail for Eve. Sitting right outside Abbott’s window as he did
so. One more of his up-yours.”
“Like
Das Ich
,” Eve said. “Dasich. I can’t
believe I didn’t see that. All my avatars’ names had meaning. I never looked at
his.”
“Hindsight is twenty-twenty, Eve,” Abbott said kindly.
“For all of us. We’ve checked out Pierce’s computers, too. He had two, and
accessed Shadowland from both so he could have two avatars active at once,
never considering anyone was watching him.”
“Why Axel Girard?” Ian asked. “How did he pick him?”
Noah sighed. “Axel was his optometrist. Eve realized
Pierce resented us for the
MSP
attention, that he never got credit, but
he used that anonymity, believing Axel would never have cause to link him to
this case.”
“The trigger was
MSP
,” Eve said. “For both
Pierce and Dell Farmer.”
“We’ll think twice before granting any more
interviews,” Abbott said.
“And then we’ll just say ‘no way in hell,’ ” Noah
added.
“When will you release the bodies of Pierce’s
victims?” Eve asked Ian.
“Today,” he said. “Why?”
“I plan to go to their funerals,” she said.
“Eve,” Abbott said, “you don’t believe any of their
deaths are on your head, do you?”
“No.” She gave Abbott a sad smile. “But they were
vulnerable to Pierce because all they had was a virtual life. They looked for
happiness in an imaginary world because they couldn’t find it in the real one.
There but for the grace of God…”
Abbott’s gaze was respectful. “If you’d like someone
to go with you, I will.”
Eve looked surprised and touched. “I’d like that.
Thank you, Captain.”
“What about you, Eve?” Olivia asked. “Have you heard
from the university?”
“Yes. Pierce was lying to get me to leave with him.
The dean never contacted him. Dean Jacoby called me this morning. Under the
circumstances, there will be no sanctions. We’ll regroup, retool the study with
appropriate checks, and begin again.”
Abbott blew out a breath. “I think we’ve covered
everything. Everybody go home.”
Eve rose, leaning on the cane the hospital had given
her until her leg healed. “Actually, we’re on our way to Sal’s. We’re having a
baby shower there for my friend. You’re all invited and Sal says the drinks are
on him today.”
Except for me
,
Noah thought. He’d decided not to go and after he’d explained, Eve’s family had
offered to change the venue. But it meant a great deal to Sal and therefore to
Eve, so they’d kept the shower there. They’d have an early dinner with her
family before they all went back to Chicago and they’d planned an alcohol-free
meal.
Noah was looking forward to it. Now, he’d drop Eve off
at Sal’s for the shower and go see Jack. They had much to discuss.
Friday, February 26, 8:30 p.m.
“That was nice,” Noah said, helping Eve into his car after every member of her
family had hugged them both. “I especially liked all the stories about your
misspent youth.”
“I wasn’t that bad. I imagine Brock’s got stories on
you that are as good or better.”
“Good point.” He dropped a kiss on her lips and she
kissed him back. “Although I wonder if Caroline and Dana know they’ve been
immortalized as avatars.”
Eve winced. “Caught that, did you?”
“What, that Pandora’s face is Caroline’s and Greer the
Guardian looks just like Dana? I saw it the minute they walked into your
hospital room. But I won’t tell. Just tell me I’m not in your avatar
collection.” He’d meant it as a joke, but she hesitated. “Eve?”
“Well, remember when you asked me if you needed a
virtual warrant to enter one of the condos and I said I had connections and
could get one? Well…”
He gave her a mock glare. “Just tell me I’m wearing
appropriate attire.”
She snickered. “You do have a hat. The rest is… let’s
just say I imagined well what went on under your suits. Really well. I’ll have
to show you later.”
He laughed out loud and it felt good. “Where to?”
“My place.”
“My place doesn’t have a leaky roof.”
“But I need to pack a bag.” She aimed Noah an arched
look. “Plus, I think we still have some unfinished business having to do with a
certain stuffed chair.”
He looked at her leg, his blood already heating. “Can
you?”
“I’m young. I heal fast. Very, very fast.” She lifted
her brows. “Can
you
?”