September resisted making the leap just yet. She had to be careful. If she were wrong, even with all the circumstantial evidence, it would be so damaging and downright ugly that it would taint everything in Stefan’s life from here on out.
She needed to find Shannon Kraxberger and hear her story. And maybe she needed to talk to Missy Bernstein as well. Undoubtedly she would be faced with a blockade of parents who wouldn’t want her speaking to their children, but if the Kraxbergers, by any chance, had moved out because of Chris Ballonni Sr. . . . they might be willing to talk.
The file had been scanned into the computer system, so September put it back in the drawer and inputted her code to gain access to all the pages and notes listed under
BALLONNI, Christopher
. She printed off the list of people who’d lived on the mail route, pulling the sheet from the printer in the alcove off the main room.
Picking up a pen, she quickly added the name of Ballonni’s’s coworker, Gloria del Courte, to the list, the woman Janet Ballonni was convinced had been hot for her husband.
She wondered if there was any connection between any of these people and her ex-stepbrother. Maybe a woman they both knew somehow . . . ?
She shook her head. Was it really a woman who’d zip-tied Ballonni and Stefan to poles outside their places of work? A woman who thought they were child abusers and was trying to stop them, even if it meant killing them, to keep them from inflicting any more harm?
Who the hell is this vigilante?
she asked herself.
Lucky woke up early and stayed in bed, staring through her window at weak fall sunlight slanting onto the hummingbird feeder and the herb garden beyond. She felt weirdly powerless, as if she had no ability to make choices any longer, as if she were merely acting out some long-ago scripted scenes.
Climbing out of bed, she pulled a white T-shirt and a plain black jogging suit out of her drawer, picked up her well-worn sneakers, then carried the lot out of her bedroom and into her bathroom. She took a quick shower, then ran a towel over her hair and brushed her teeth, naked. Looking at her face in the mirror, she rolled her shoulders forward, easing the tightness of her scarred back before she got dressed.
Back in her room she looked at her image in the dresser mirror. Her hazel eyes glowed, hit by a stream of sunlight from the garden window that turned them more green than brown. Quickly, she put her still-damp hair into a ponytail and grabbed up her baseball cap, tucking it into the waistband of her sweats. Today was Saturday and her quarry would not be at school, but she might be able to stake out his residence and jog around the neighborhood for a while, her own method of reconnaissance. If he took out his station wagon, she could follow him in her car, if she didn’t jog too far and wide and find herself unable to get back in time. She would jog just enough to look as if she belonged in the area, then she would return to her car to wait for him as long as she dared.
She headed into the kitchen, but there was no sign of Mr. Blue and she wondered if he would make an appearance today. She really needed to talk to him. To tell him about the gun, for certain, but she also wanted to discuss a few other things with him as well. Maybe it was time to take him fully into her confidence, even if he didn’t quite want it. Better to be forearmed than taken by surprise.
She waited fifteen minutes, then, when he still hadn’t come out of his rooms, she scavenged through the cupboards and came up with some cornflakes. Grabbing the milk from the refrigerator and a bowl from another cabinet, she settled herself down at the table. Just as she poured the milk over her cereal, she saw Mr. Blue coming from the woods beyond the garden, holding something small and brown in his blue hands. He circled around the side of the house and came in from the garage.
She saw that he was holding a salamander.
“The Pacific newt,” he said.
The little creature was alert and staring with bug eyes at Lucky. She was going to ask Mr. Blue what he planned to do with it, but he answered her question before she even opened her mouth as he raised the sash on the window over the sink and let the newt escape.
Then he thoroughly washed his hands.
“There are a lot of them in the garden and around,” he said. “I suspect we’ll have a thriving population of garter snakes soon.”
“What were you doing outside?” Lucky spooned up some cornflakes.
Mr. Blue deliberated for a while. He, too, made himself a bowl of cornflakes, then scraped back a chair opposite Lucky. “There’s something I need to show you.”
“Okay.”
“It’s in the woods. Do you have boots?”
“Umm . . . no. I have sneakers.”
“That’ll do.”
As soon as they finished their meal they headed out through the sliding glass door, skirting the rows of herbs and plants, and passing by his grouping of pitcher plants, carnivorous plants that caught insects in a sticky gel on their blossoms, which looked like dew.
He took the path that led toward the hot springs, but when they grew near the pools, he turned into the woods instead, in an area where there was no designated footpath. She followed behind him, her feet sometimes sliding a bit in the slippery muck beneath the leaves and sticks and undergrowth that surrounded the boles of the firs, maples, and scrub oaks.
Finally, he stopped and, breathing a bit hard, said, “My house is over there.” He waved to the east, from the general direction they’d come. “It’s closer to just run out the back and head straight west to come to this spot, but I don’t want to leave a trail unless I have to.”
“A trail to what?” Lucky asked. She didn’t see anything besides the forest.
He took a step to one side and then looked down at the ground where he’d been standing. Lucky realized she was looking at a moss-covered wooden hatch.
“It’s a root cellar,” he explained. “Or, it was until I modernized it.”
“A root cellar out here?”
“There was a structure here once. A shed. I took it down because I didn’t want to mark the spot.”
He bent down and lifted the moss-covered lid. A ladder led down into a dark cavern and Lucky could smell the dank odors of must and earth. She immediately shied away from heading down. What she feared more than anything was being trapped in any way. She’d spent too much of her youth being caged by others, if not physically, then by rules of society and law. It was why she knew she would die before letting herself be caught and sent to prison.
But Mr. Blue headed down the ladder to the belly of the hole and he disappeared into darkness. She waited anxiously for several moments, and then the yellow glow of a lantern reached up to her. “Come on down,” he invited her, his voice sounding hollow.
If it were anyone but Hiram she wouldn’t have. Not in a million years. But it was Hiram, and she trusted him with her life.
Swallowing her misgivings, she descended down, gripping each rung with hands wet with sweat. At the bottom, she turned and looked around. Three battery-operated lanterns were lit, revealing shelves lined with canned goods, bottled water, a battery-operated radio that also had a hand crank, several rolled up sleeping bags, a small, portable latrine that was basically a bench with a basin. There were kitchen implements scattered at the end of one of the shelves and there were several folded up lawn chairs inside their fabric sleeves hanging on the other one.
“What’s this for?” she asked.
“Hiding.”
“I mean . . . what do you use it for?”
In the uncertain light his bluish skin looked gray and alien. “There may come a time when one or both of us needs to hide from the police for a while.”
Her heart fluttered. She didn’t like that idea at all. “I had to get rid of your .38,” she confessed. “I threw it in the ocean.”
“Why? Did you fire it?”
“Well . . . it was fired, but not actually by me. It was taken from me, and the person who took it pulled the trigger and shot himself.”
“Is he dead?”
“I hope so.”
He thought about that for a long moment, then nodded for her to ascend again. “Let’s go back to the house.”
After turning out the lanterns, Mr. Blue followed her up the ladder and they retraced their steps through the woods until they reached his house again. Once inside, he moved into the little-used living room and invited her to take a seat. The room was dark and curtained and he had to turn on a floor lamp as he sank into a recliner. Lucky perched on the edge of one of the occasional chairs, which looked like it could use a thorough cleaning.
“I received a call from someone I’ve done business with in the past,” he began. “Someone I should never have trusted, and now I think there could be some—blowback.”
“Who is this person?”
“He first came to the hot springs, but he was looking for me. He’d heard rumors about a man with blue skin who dabbled in herbs and poisons. I ignored him at first, but he became a nuisance. A friendly nuisance,” Mr. Blue admitted. “He was the one who found you wandering from where you’d driven your car off the road and brought you here.”
She only knew that a good Samaritan had found her, dazed, burned, and delirious, and brought her into Mr. Blue’s care. She knew, too, that she’d absolutely refused to let him take her to a hospital.
“But he’s untrustworthy,” Mr. Blue went on. “He helped you, but altruism is not in his nature. He always wants something in exchange. Different drugs, mostly. Recently, I sold him something, and he used it unwisely. Now the police are on his trail and that could lead them to me.”
Lucky’s heart started pounding heavily. “Oh.”
“You’re sure the gun won’t be found?” he asked now, sounding tenser than she’d ever heard before.
“Is it registered to you?” she asked.
“It was acquired in a trade with the same young man I just told you about. It was registered to him, and I was . . . holding it for him until I got payment.”
“Oh, no. I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
“It doesn’t matter. I’ll get him another one. It was just all I had in firearms at the moment.”
“Who is this man?”
He shook his head. “Better you don’t know. But if something should happen, if the police should show up here and you don’t want to be seen, go to the bunker. It’s out of range.”
Lucky nodded. Several cameras were mounted high in the trees that flanked the long drive that led to the hot springs and his house. He was both technologically advanced and living in another age.
She’d wanted to talk to him about her mission, had been on the verge of confiding in him, but now she suspected that it would be better to keep him in the dark as well. The less they knew about each other’s business, the less chance they would give the other one away. She didn’t want to be an additional problem and if he knew her plans and she was caught, he could be an accessory to murder.
A few minutes later he returned to his rooms and Lucky decided it was past time to hit the road and start surveillance again on her latest target.
The clock was ticking down to what could be her last showdown.
Chapter Sixteen
George wandered in at eleven looking like death warmed over.
“What’s wrong?” September demanded. She’d briefly talked to Wes, who was on his way, but wasn’t feeling all that sharp, either.
“Sick. That stomach flu thing. Urlacher poisoned us all with it, the bastard.”
September immediately backed away from him. She’d finally walked down the hall and looked in the administration offices and the main rooms used by the uniforms and had realized how low the staff was there, too. “Go home,” she told him.
“Somebody’s gotta be here.” He gave her a look through red-rimmed eyes. “I was up all night puking my guts out.”
“You get me sick, Thompkins, and I’ll kill you.”
“Death doesn’t sound that bad right now.”
“Go away. Get the hell out.”
“Oh . . . shit . . .” He jumped up and ran for the bathroom.
Immediately she picked up the phone and called Wes again. “Have you been puking?” she demanded as soon as he picked up.
“Hey, Nine,” he greeted her dully. “Not yet, but my stomach’s kinda jumpy.” She could tell he was driving.
“Damn it,” she muttered. “Don’t come in. George just got here and he’s already in the bathroom. I don’t want to catch the flu.”
“Winter vomiting disease,” Wes corrected her. “Norovirus. Not the flu.”
“Whatever the hell it is, stay away.”
“Okay. The idea of puking my guts out with my surgery . . .”
“Take care of yourself,” she said quickly, feeling a bit like a selfish heel.
“Yeah. I’m turning around. What about you?”
“I’ll manage.” Then, “What about D’Annibal? I’ve called him and he hasn’t called back. He doesn’t want me on the case, but it’s like he’s gone dark since I talked to him last night.”
“Could be the bug,” he admitted. “One thing. The bullet pulled from your ex-stepbrother is at ballistics. Came from a .38.”
“Yeah, thanks. I’m going over to the hospital later.”
“I gotta go, Nine.”
“Get well . . .” She hung up, lost in thought. One of the uniforms, Maharis, was working his way up to detective, handling robbery/burglaries and missing persons and the like whenever the other detectives were overrun with work. Homicides took priority, unless a missing person was at imminent risk.
September was walking down the hall when she thought of her brother. If he was free to move her queen bed today, then it stood to reason that he should be able to come in. It wasn’t her job to scare up more recruits, but currently she felt like the only man standing, so she pulled up Auggie’s cell number on her call list. Punching it in, she thought fleetingly of Gretchen. How she would love to have her old partner off administrative leave, but that was outside the legal bounds of the department.
When Auggie didn’t answer she swore through her teeth and tried again, once more to no avail. Having reached administration, she asked the girl at the desk, a newby she didn’t recognize, “Is Maharis around?”
“He was . . .” She looked around, a little lost.
“Thanks. I’ll find him.”
But she didn’t find him, and after a ten-minute search she was back at her own desk. Maybe he was out on a call, or maybe he was home sick, or God knew what else. She had his cell number and she phoned it but, like her brother’s, her call went straight to voice mail.
“Damn. It,” she stated succinctly.
She sat down quietly for a moment, letting her thoughts travel along different avenues. The call she’d put in to Verna hadn’t gone so well. Her ex-stepmother alternately cried or yelled at September that the police weren’t doing enough to find the crazed woman who’d targeted her beloved son. She’d damn near been impossible to talk to, but September had managed to wring out of her the name of the mall that Stefan generally frequented. She’d then put a call in to mall security to see if they could pull up the videotape of the parking lot the night Stefan was kidnapped. If this vigilante had appropriated his van and driven him to the school, then she most likely had come in some kind of vehicle that she’d left in the lot, unless she lived nearby, which felt like too much of a convenient long shot. Alternately, someone could have dropped her off, but September didn’t like that scenario either. This crime read like a personal vendetta.
Now September rolled that idea around in her head. If the crime was sexual, if both men had targeted children, was the female killer one of Stefan’s or Christopher Ballonni’s past victims? Or a victim of both men? And if Stefan were at the mall, wasn’t that a perfect place to troll for unsuspecting tweens and teens? A place an attacker could lie in wait? Maybe a place at which this woman had once unfortunately met up with either Ballonni or Stefan?
She needed to talk to Stefan. She needed him to be honest with her. She wasn’t sure quite how she was going to go about that, but if September had to bully him for answers, she was fine with that.
“Sick bastard,” she muttered, gathering up her cell phone.
George stumbled back into the room as a call came to his desk. “Thompkins,” he said in a weak voice. A moment later, he glanced over at September. “Uh, yeah. We’re on it.” He hung up as September was turning out of the room, heading toward the lockers. “Possible homicide on Monroe,” he called. “Domestic. Uniforms are on their way, but they want us to come down.”
“Us?” she asked dryly.
“Well . . .”
“Go home,” September ordered again.
“Will you go, then?” he called after her.
She ground her teeth together and yelled over her shoulder, “Sure. I got nothing else to do.”
Lucky sat in the front seat of her parked car, lifting her arms over her head and closing her eyes, catching her breath. She’d sat outside her quarry’s driveway and down the road for a couple of hours, then she’d gone on her jogging run, returned a few minutes earlier, climbed back in the car, and now she was worried that she might have to give up for the day. She’d been here too long already.
Her thoughts drifted to Stefan Harmak. She’d tuned to a news station for a while, but hadn’t heard anything about the shooting. Was he still alive? She sure as hell hoped not. If he decided to confess the full story, which she didn’t think he had yet, that or something would be on the news, then her time table would be compressed.
Vaguely, she imagined what the authorities might do if Stefan confessed the truth, and her insides grew cold with fear.
She needed him to be dead or die.
She needed time to finish this last mission.
“Come on, bastard,” she whispered, opening her eyes and staring at the end of the driveway. “Come on . . .”
Graham felt suffocated. Every time SHE spoke his skin felt like it was covered in insects crawling all over him. How had he come to loathe her so much? he marveled. She’d been almost attractive in the beginning, for a woman her age, or at least that’s what he’d told himself when he’d watched her as she’d gone on and on about the economy and money and how to make it with a shrinking income, blah, blah, blah. Now, the only thing shrinking was his erection whenever he thought of HER. In the pit of his gut, he could feel his hate distilling and compressing into a hard, black ball that made him seethe inside, a cancer that had to be eradicated.
There was only one way to cure himself. He knew for a certainty he had to kill her.
But how? When?
“Darling . . .” Her sickly sweet voice reached for him from the kitchen and he felt the hairs on his arms lift in repulsion. The kids in his class called it being “icked out” and he sure as hell was all that.
“Come on in, I’ve made some coffee.”
Like she even knew how to do
that
. Weak-ass shit.
But he had to play the game. At least for a little while longer.
With leaden feet, he met her in the kitchen where she was pouring him a cup from the carafe. He could see how pale the fluid was. The ball in his stomach grew harder.
Her cell phone buzzed and skittered a little atop the counter. She picked it up, frowning down at the screen, etching ugly lines between her brows. “It’s the San Antonio people,” she said.
She handed him his coffee and placed a quick peck on his cheek as she headed away from him, down the hall. He stared into the light brown depths and thought,
Please get the fuck out. Please get the fuck out. Please go to San Antonio. Please.
She returned a few moments later. “Well, what do you know. It’s back on for Monday.”
“Really?” He could scarcely hide the jubilation that welled up inside him. “You’re going?”
“No . . . I don’t know. I said I’d think about it. They can’t jack me around that way, although I suppose I should check with Louisville, too.” She sighed. “We could really use the money, so maybe I should work out a new deal with them.”
Graham’s mind was traveling ahead. If SHE were gone, he could go through the school day on Monday and then a bar that night. Maybe pick up on somebody new . . . Dangerously, his thoughts cruised to Molly and he felt almost ill with wanting. Molly, in his last period class. So alone and forgotten while her other classmates were shooting out breasts and hips like the cows they would eventually become. That hadn’t happened to Molly yet, and by the looks of her mother, who was small and petite and as flat chested as a board, it might not at all.
“Is that for me?” Daria cooed, looking down at his pants. Then she reached forward and grabbed his hard cock and he jerked in surprise, sloshing his coffee onto her. She jumped back and cried, “Shit, Graham! Didn’t you even drink any of it?”
He put the cup on the counter, his vision of Molly shattered by her sharp rebuke. He looked at her down-turned mouth and felt fury rise in him, a volcanic tide.
“What?” she asked, recoiling a bit.
“Nothing.”
“Darling, you looked mad enough to
kill.
”
“Nah. Just sorry that I ruined your blouse.”
She glanced down at the brown stain on her fat breasts. “Well, you should be, you bad boy. Now, where were we . . . ?” And she reached back to his now flaccid member and started stroking.
When she bent down to his zipper Graham stared over her head and thought about Molly and Monday and how he would take care of her. She was his little girl. She was his.
And he grew hard again.
September arrived at the site of the domestic violence case to learn that a woman had shot her husband in the chest, a wound from which he’d died. The woman was weeping and shaking and saying that he was the one with the gun and she’d just tried to take it from him. From the early signs of the destruction around the room it looked like her story might be correct. The tech team was there and September let the uniforms take the woman into the station to get her full statement.
Blake Maharis had finally gotten back to her as she was driving to the hospital to check up on Stefan. He was out on a missing persons case: a girl had disappeared from her boyfriend’s car on Thursday night and hadn’t been seen since. He’d taken down the information and was back at the station and September asked if he would take a statement from the woman who’d shot her husband when she got there, which he agreed to. He was young, dark haired, and swarthy skinned with a set of white teeth—too good looking for his own good—about her same age and eager to move up to detective full time.
The guy from mall security called her back as she was parking her car, but her initial hopes were dashed when he said he was sorry, but there were no videos of the parking lot on the night September had requested. In fact there were no videos from the past month. Some screw-up in their system that hadn’t been fixed, apparently. From his tone, September wondered if he were lazy or inept or both; she could tell he wasn’t going to lift a finger to help.
With thoughts of calling the mall owners and ratting him out to see if he was telling the truth, she forced herself to shut down her phone and forget it as she drove to the hospital. The doctor still hadn’t called back, so she was going to him.
As she walked toward the front doors, pulling her coat close against a biting wind, her cell phone sang the ring-tone she’d assigned to Auggie. “Wonder of wonders,” she muttered, clicking the green
ANSWER
button. “Hello, there. Nice of you to get back to me.”
“Hey, I moved your bed for you,” Auggie defended himself.
“And thanks for that. Now get your ass back to work. I’m dying out here. Everybody’s sick.” She brought him up to date on Wes’s, D’Annibal’s—who’d finally phoned and related that he was sick as a dog, too—and George’s conditions.
“Food poisoning?” Auggie said.
“That stomach virus, most likely. Guy was sick with it first and it’s a bitch.”
“What guy?”
“Guy Urlacher. Have you forgotten all of us already?”
He grunted his remembrance. “You want me to just leave the rest of this move to Liv and Jake?”
“
Yes.
I don’t mean to sound ungrateful, but Jesus H. Christ, Auggie. I had to bring in Maharis. Everybody else is out sick.”
“Except you.”
“So far.”
“All right. Things seem to be under control around here. I can come in. Where are you?”
“About to go into Laurelton General.” She quickly brought him up to speed on Stefan’s condition, as far as she knew, and then hit the high points about the Ballonni investigation. Finding Dan Quade, Carrie Carter’s boyfriend, the would-be source of Special K, was free-falling off her priority list, though she knew Wes wouldn’t let it go as soon as he was able.
“Nine, I need to talk to you about something later,” he said, sounding serious.
September felt her frustrations boil over. “Today is not the day to hit me with something else.”
“I said ‘later.’” He sounded as irked as she felt.