AA’s twelve steps had forced this journey to atonement. He could quit his search and simply cross Number Twenty-Two from his list and leave Miranda in the past. He’d made headway with his family and friends. Why dredge up something that could ruin the life he’d struggled to put back together?
Because the only thing he’d ever quit in his life had
been
alcohol. He wasn’t a quitter, and quitting his search was not an option. Not because of the twelve steps, they were there for guidance as Kira had said. No, his heart and conscience had been guiding him on this search. Now he prayed Anna Gates’s will would help guide him the rest of the way.
Chapter 23
Ugly Evie Lumbford sat strapped to a wooden chair. Duct tape kept her hands and feet immobile. An old rag shoved into her mouth would keep her screams muffled once she woke.
If
she woke, he thought and scratched an itch through the ski mask that had begun to grow suffocating.
Shortly after six this morning, with dark, gray clouds hiding the early morning light, he’d attacked her as she’d walked home from her night shift at the hospital. Wearing the ski mask, along with a mechanic’s jumpsuit he’d soak in bleach later—as he’d always done after a kill—he’d slapped a rag doused with chloroform over her mouth until she’d grown limp and passed out cold. Petite and weighing next to nothing, he’d easily stashed her in his waiting truck, then he’d brought her to his workshop.
He glanced at the digital clock on the workbench. He’d knocked her out over an hour ago, and now he worried he’d underestimated the amount of chloroform she’d inhaled. Usually his victims, or even Garrett’s, were awake within twenty minutes. He knew she was alive, though. Her pulse thudded at the base of her throat. Bits of the rag sticking out of her mouth moved from the air exhaling from her nose.
He glanced at the clock again. Time wasn’t on his side. He needed her awake, he needed her to understand what he expected from her. He needed to do it now. Normalcy and his rigid routine would keep him from any suspicion. Showing up late for work was not an option, even if he could fabricate a legitimate excuse.
With a gloved hand and no room for patience, he slapped her face. Not hard, he didn’t want to leave her bruised yet. She did have to show up to work later.
When she didn’t respond, he gave her shoulders a hard shake. Over and over, her head whipped back and forth like a bobble-head doll. Finally, she moaned and her lashes began to flutter.
“Wake up, Evie. I have a job for you.”
She snapped her eyes open, darted her gaze around her surroundings, until landing it on the hunting knife next to him. Screaming beneath the rag, she twisted against the duct tape and thrashed her head.
Worried she’d cause a noticeable injury to herself, he waved the knife in her face. “Don’t move. Don’t scream. Don’t do anything unless I say. Do you understand?”
Wide-eyed, staring at the knife, tears streaming down her face, she nodded and whimpered.
“Good.” He stroked the flat of the blade along her cheek careful to not leave a mark. “Have you heard of Garrett Winston?”
She nodded again, her eyes nearly crossing as she followed the movement of the blade.
“Have you cleaned his hospital room?”
Another nod.
“Excellent,” he said as set the knife on the workbench. He pulled a stool from the corner and sat in front of her. The fear in her eyes made his dick hard. He loved the fear, the power, but knew he had to caution himself.
He didn’t want to kill her yet. Well, he really did want to. He eyed the hunting knife, the way the blade shined beneath the lone bulb hanging from the ceiling. But she was Plan C. She was all he had left.
“I will let you live,” he began with his first of what would likely become many lies before he was finished with Ugly Evie. “I will not harm anyone you love. But you have to do one thing for me. And after you’ve done it, I’ll never ask you for another thing again.” Because she’d be dead, he smiled beneath the ski mask.
“If you don’t do this for me, or if you go to the cops, I will kill you. Slowly, painfully. Do you understand?”
More tears streamed down her face as she bobbed her head.
“Good girl,” he crooned as if talking to a dog. “Now, I need you to sleep some more.” He withdrew a syringe from the pocket of his mechanic’s suit. “You’ve used these on yourself, haven’t you?”
She shook her head vehemently.
“Don’t lie to me, Evie. I know you like your drugs. Maybe you don’t shoot up, or maybe you like to snort it or smoke it. Either way, I don’t care. Get used to the syringe.” He pressed the needle into her arm. “Because you’re going to use one like this tonight when you kill Garrett Winston.”
*
After Celeste had woken him...properly, John lay in bed while she showered. He would have joined her, but he was so relaxed and satisfied curling against her pillow, smelling her scent on the sheets, he couldn’t bring himself to move.
His cell phone rang. With a frustrated sigh, he rolled to his side and grabbed it off the nightstand. Rachel’s name lit up the caller ID and he tensed.
“Hey, John. Hope I’m not disturbing your beauty sleep.”
“I’ve been up for hours.”
“Liar. If that were true you would have already called me after the emails I sent you.”
Busted. “Okay, okay,” he grumbled and climbed out of the warm bed. “So I had a late night. What do you have for me?”
“How about a stack of pictures of Winston’s known victims sitting at the Sheriff’s Department? Or even better, how about the scoop on Winston?”
A rush of adrenaline pushed through his veins as he headed for Celeste’s home office at the end of the hallway. “DNA comparisons?” he asked as he searched for paper and a pen.
“Oh yeah, he’s cooked.”
“Excellent. Let’s hear.”
“Okay, so, Winston was born in Pensacola, Florida. His mother, Susan Haney, was only seventeen at the time. Apparently, her folks were fanatical Christians, and when they found out their daughter was pregnant, they kicked her out of their trailer park.”
“There’s some good Christians,” he said, and let the sarcasm roll. “What about the father?”
“Patrick Winston was eighteen. His parents wanted to take Haney in, but she refused, then disappeared. Right after, Winston’s dad took off, too. He’d gotten into some trouble with the law and has been in and out of prison since. He’s currently doing a short stint in Georgia right now for B & E and won’t be released for another two years.”
“Where’s the mom, now?”
“Dead, but don’t rush me. I’m going for the big dun, dun, dun moment.”
He smiled. “Right. Sorry.”
“Anyway, mom was a piece of work. Involved in drugs and prostitution, she was arrested a few times, but never served any time. After Pensacola, she bounced around Alabama for a while, had another son, then ended up in Mississippi...Biloxi, then Gulfport. Eventually she landed in Jackson where she died from an overdose years later.”
He stopped taking notes. “Please tell me your dun, dun, dun moment has to do with the name of Winston’s brother.”
“It does. Thanks for ruining my big moment.” She let out a dramatic sigh. “Winston’s half-brother is Tobias Haney. Only I have no record of him once he turned eighteen.”
“Did you check—?”
“Everything. Trust me. I was able to get a sample of Haney’s fingerprints, though.”
“Really? How’d…never mind. I don’t want to know.”
“Probably not.”
“What about a photo ID, or driver’s license?”
“No driver’s license. The only picture that I’ve found was taken when Haney was first placed in the foster care system. It’s black and white, grainy and basically useless for performing an age progression. I tried, though.”
“What else?”
“Okay, so when I found out that Susan Haney died in Jackson, on a hunch, I made some calls. After I’d gotten the whole, ‘you need to go through the proper channels’ crap from some bozo with his PD, I did some...um, hacking and found the home phone number for the homicide detective who’d worked Susan Haney’s case. He’s retired now, but—”
“Homicide? I thought you said she’d died of an overdose.”
She blew out a deep breath. “She did. Only who overdoses on heroin and window cleaner? By the way, she’d apparently broken her neck, too.”
He hovered the pen over the paper as a chill ran through him. “And this retired detective...”
“Jack Conahan.”
“What does Conahan think?”
“That her kids murdered her. But because he had other ongoing investigations, he’d been told to let this one lie. Haney was a known junky and there was no evidence of foul play. It looked as if she’d OD’d on some bad crank.”
“But?” John prompted.
“Conahan said he’d done as he was told, and let the case drop, but only to a degree. He was so convinced the kids had killed their mom, that on his own time, he’d looked into her background. He talked to neighbors, Haney’s friends, and discovered good ol’ mom was trading sexual favors for drugs.”
“So, she was a prostitute.”
“She didn’t only trade herself, she traded her sons. She’d let her dealer use the boys, or bring in a john to use them. Sometimes she made them use each other, and other times she joined in.”
John sat sickened. What their mother had done went beyond repulsive. She’d destroyed Winston and his half-brother, and in the process, likely distorted their view on women. “How old were they when Haney died?”
“Winston was thirteen and the brother eleven.”
“Where’d they end up, foster care?”
“Haney did. Winston’s paternal grandparents brought him back to Pensacola. He lived with them until they died when he was eighteen.”
“What, did they die at the same time?”
“Yep, a house fire took them both while they were sleeping.”
“Where was Winston?”
“Supposedly at a friend’s. The fire was ruled an accident, faulty wiring. However, it seems rather convenient, especially because Winston walked away with seventy thousand dollars thanks to his grandparents’ life and homeowners insurance.”
“That explains how Winston could afford his rig,” he said. “Where’d he go next?”
“Back to Mississippi.”
“Let me guess...to find his brother.”
“That’s what I’m thinking.”
“We need to find Haney.”
What Susan Haney had done to her sons offered an answer to the question of why two men would rape and kill together. The fact that most of the women that had been murdered were prostitutes, like Susan Haney, coupled with Winston’s accusation toward his brother, only backed that theory. And Tobias Haney, whoever he was now, was still roaming free.
“Could be a challenge. He didn’t go through legal channels to change his name. He simply disappeared. But I’ll keep working on it.”
“Thanks, Rachel, anything else?”
“Check your inbox. The DNA comparisons came in late last night. Ian’s going to have to cut a hefty check for the fast turnaround, but it was well worth it. The geneticist was able to match Winston’s DNA to twenty-nine cold cases spanning five states and seventeen years, beginning in Pensacola, before his grandparents died.”
“Were there any DNA comparisons linked to Winston that didn’t match?”
“Yeah. Eight victims had two different types of trace DNA evidence found on them. The rest were all Winston.”
“When did this start?”
“The additional DNA? Twelve years ago. A prostitute was found decomposing in a field about seventy miles outside of Jackson. She was severely beaten, raped, both vaginally and anally, and based on the ligature marks around her neck, the evidence suggested she’d been strangled with an electrical cord.”
Celeste stepped into the office wearing another one of her Sugar Shack t-shirts. This one was red, with “Sweet Tooth” emblazoned across the front in a funky, bubbly seventies font. With her blond curls framing her face, cherry lip gloss accentuating her mouth, that tight t-shirt and faded, low-riding jeans, she looked good enough to eat.
After losing focus, he cleared his throat. “Come again?”
“I said,” Rachel lisped, signifying she’d plopped a pencil in her mouth. “The dual sets of DNA stopped about ten years ago. So, if Winston’s partner was Haney, he either didn’t kill those other women, or he discovered a little something about forensic evidence.”
“This is great stuff, Rachel.”
“What’s even better is that the cold case detectives in Florida, Alabama and Mississippi are already foaming at the mouth for extradition. So you know what that means.”
“Oh yeah. An eye for an eye.”
“Yep. Winston might think he’s safe in Wisconsin, but our guys down south want the death penalty.”
His mind raced in all sorts of directions. He wasn’t interested in making a deal with Winston, but he wanted Haney. He wanted to ensure the bastard could never kill again. The Eau Claire DA would have to battle it out with the DAs down south, maybe even Indiana, where several murder victims had also been linked to Winston. But to promise Winston a life in prison for the twenty-nine murders he’d committed? In his opinion, the man deserved the death penalty. Still, he wanted his brother. Maybe if they found him,
he
could be the one extradited.
He needed advice. With the evidence they had, and the possibility that there was another victim, and maybe more to follow, he needed to make sure he had all his ducks in a row before he contacted the DA or confronted Winston. “Is Ian around? I’d like to pick his brain on this.”
“Ah, no. He had to go out of town for a few days. Don’t know where, but I’ll let him know you’re looking for him when he calls.”