Snuff (11 page)

THIRTY-FOUR

Agent Maxwell wheels me down labyrinthine hallways in silence.  It’s a comfortable silence, and I’m glad he’s not chattering to fill it.  I don’t have a whole lot to say anyway.

I peer into open rooms as we pass by.  Several patients look dead beneath their blankets, and if I couldn’t see red spikes marking their heartbeats, I might think they’d passed on, too.

We reach the end of the third hallway, where a police officer in a blue uniform talks with a nurse.  Both hold coffee cups, and they turn to gaze at
us as we draw nearer. 

The cop moves to block our path. 
“Who are you?”

Agent Maxwell flashes his badge.  “FBI.”

“Where are you taking her?”

“The cafeteria. 
Step aside, please.”

He does, calling out as we maneuver past.  “Cafeteria’s the other way.”

“We’re taking the scenic route,” Agent Maxwell yells back, keeping his calm and steady pace. 

I might laugh if I were capable.  “You think we’ll get in trouble?”

He makes a sharp left.  “I’m sure nobody will be especially pleased if they find out, but I’m not going to work myself up over it.”

Light from open hospital rooms pulses like strobe lights when we pass them. “Why didn’t you tell him, if you don’t care if you get in trouble?”

“Everybody has to tell a few white lies now and then. Why bother with formalities when I’m going to do what I want anyway?”  He turns right at another corner, where the air gets cooler and thinner.  We’re in the bowels of the hospital now, it’s obvious.  The morgue is the hospital’s dirty little secret, but not really.  Everybody knows it’s here, but no one talks about it, like the underground jail in Disneyland. 

I
grow calmer the closer we get.  Abby’s in there. 

“I’m sure I don’t need to tell you what to expect once we’re inside.  She’s very badly burned.”

I shake my head, and we grind to a stop before a pair of silver double doors.  The plaque above it reads MORGUE in two-inch-thick capitals.

A woman in a lab coat pops up from out of nowhere as he negotiates me inside.  “What do you think you’re doing?  This area is restricted.”

Agent Maxwell pulls out his credentials again.  “I’m acutely aware of that, but I’m going to have to insist.”  He snaps the leather case shut and tucks it into his breast pocket while her mouth opens and closes soundlessly.  “I need you to tell me which compartment Abigail Black is in, unless ME Ward is here.”

She consults the clipboard on her hip.  “Number fifty-two.”

“Thank you.”  He pushes me to a wall that resembles file banks and stops before compartment fifty-two.  It’s above my head since I’m still sitting, and he lets me heave myself to my feet with his hand. 

His
fingers curl around the handle.  A few seconds tick by, but he makes no move to open it.  I peek up into his eyes, and his face reminds me of Jack’s. Or maybe it’s more an idea of what Jack will look like in fifteen years.   

“Are you ready?”

“Yes.”

He turns to the morgue worker who stills stands there staring.  “Leave us.”  He waits until she scurries through another set of doors across the room, and pulls the slab out.
He tugs the sheet down to her neck.

I’m not sure what I expected now, when I asked for her all those times.  Maybe I wanted to look at her for a while, since I was never able to in that dungeon. 

Her hair is still gold, fanning behind her head.  Her chin tilts upward, a thin, raised red welt circling her throat. The same hollows sink under her eyes, darker beneath the shadows of her sparse lashes.  Small, upturned nose.  Her lips look different when they’re relaxed, turning down at the corners, not contorted in pain.

I ignore her forehead. 

“What color are her eyes?  I only saw them for a second.  He turned the lights on when I wasn’t expecting.  It was so bright I thought the place was exploding.”

“Hazel, but more green than brown.  A
darker green than your eyes.  Her hair’s naturally blonde.  He didn’t dye it.  What color were the walls?”

“White.  Everything was white.  Like granite or marble.” 
I trace the pencil-thin scar around her neck.  “From some fishing line.  He looped it around her throat and dragged her upstairs after she was dead.”

“How many flights were there?”

“Two.  One outside, one inside.  When he took me out of the room, we walked upward.  Down on the way out.”

He pulls the sheet down a little more, exposing the slender curve of her shoulders.  “Do you know how these happened?”  His finger circles an open, oozing burn.  Flecks of black skin curl back, red patches of raw skin glistening beneath them. 

“I don’t really know what he burned her with.  Lots of different things.  I just remember the smell.”  Recalling it churns my stomach, and some of that scent still lingers on Abby.  “I think one was a lighter.  Maybe a Zippo.  Then there was something else.  It seemed bulky, like he had a hard time carrying it.  It was hot at the base, sort of glowing orange. Like some kind of cattle brander.  And something with a bigger flame than the lighter. I thought it might have been a blowtorch. It scared me to death.  I couldn’t stop throwing up.”

Suddenly the idea of cremating her is horrendous, repugnant, the worst idea in the world.  Hasn’t she been burned enough?

Agent Maxwell runs his fingers over the black and blue bruises on her forehead, the ones I’ve avoided.  “And what about these?” 

I don’t answer.

“I want you to know something the ME told me about Abby’s injuries.” 

When I look up, he stares at me with serious brown eyes.  “She said that even without the trauma to her head, she would have died.  It was only a matter of how long.  These burns are extensive, all over her body.  She would have gone into shock and had a brain hemorrhage anyway.  I’m not telling you this to make you feel better.  It’s the truth.”

I wish it were possible to believe him.

“Can you tell me how she got these, Brooke?” 

“A hammer.”

“That’s what I thought.”  He strokes the pad of his index finger over a concave blue circle on Abby’s forehead.  “With this blow, I see hesitation.  The person who did it was scared.  Probably didn’t want to hit her.  I think it’s very possible they might have closed their eyes when they did it.  Is that how it happened?”

I nod.  I can’t lie, he already knows.

His voice turns to silk, and he covers my hand with his.  “Did he give you the hammer?”

“He threw it down a latched door in the ceiling after he told us I won.”  And then he’d turned those heavy duty florescent lights on and lit my whole world on fire.

“You didn’t know he planned for you to kill her.”

“No.  I thought he’d kill both of us in the end, I swear.”

“I believe you.  But Abby told you to do it anyway, didn’t she?”

“I told her no, I couldn’t.  I begged her not to make me.”  But how could I turn down her final request?

“She wanted you to kill her so he wouldn’t kill you, right?  If you didn’t do it, both of you would have died.  She wanted to save your baby.”

My eyes are wet when they focus on his.  “How did you know?”

“I read your blood reports. I shouldn’t have, but I’m nosy and had a hunch.”  He runs his hand over Abby’s hair, smoothing the frazzles curling about her ears.  “She did a very brave thing.”

“She was a better person than me.”

“I don’t know about better.  But she must have been very special to do that for you.  I understand why you’d need to see her one last time.” 

I draw my finger around the ridge of her ear, the silver stud in her lobe glinting in the morgue’s harsh lighting.  “Why didn’t he kill me?”

“This had nothing to do with you.  He chose to keep you alive because it gives him power.  I’m sure you know the other girls killed themselves. 
It probably delighted him when he found out he broke them down mentally and physically until they felt they had no other choice.  But you’re not going to give him that satisfaction.  I know you won’t, and if I had a feeling you would, I’d fit you for a straightjacket myself.”

“She kept saying she deserved it, but she didn’t. How could she think that?”

“People accept all sorts of horrible things, things they think they deserve.”  He looks down at Abby’s face, his tight jaw softening.  “I know it doesn’t erase what she went through, but she’s in a better place now.  Nobody can hurt her anymore.”

I slip my hand under the sheet and touch Abby’s cold, dead hand, feeling
his gaze dart all over me.  I’m sure he knows I’m barely holding it together, but doesn’t comment, just keeps his warm hand over my free one. 

The doors burst open behind our backs.  We don’t lift our bowed heads to see who it is.

“What in the mother of fuck is going on here?”

THIRTY-FOUR

“What the fuck is the matter with you?”  Lisette threw her purse on the oval conference room table and stared daggers, while John pondered the question. There were a lot of things ‘the matter with him’, but expounding on them would take far too much time.

“Do you realize how fragile Brooke is right now?  We don’t know how this will affect her.  What if she tries to commit suicide because you let her see the dead friend she saw tortured by this psycho cunt rag?”

He drummed his fingers on the back of the chair in front of him.  “She won’t.”  He’d seen more than sadness and pain in her face when they were in the morgue.  Brooke knew she owed
Abigail more than taking the easy way out with suicide, especially when the baby was a major part of the reason she’d martyred herself.

Her skinny eyebrows contracted when she gave him a look that obviously meant she found him utterly asinine. “And how, pray tell, do you know?  You haven’t known her twenty-four hours.  She couldn’t look at her baby on the ultrasound machine.  She can’t look her fucking boyfriend in the face.  Can’t even look in the mirror!  And you think she’s strong?  Stable enough to hold it together?”

“Well, for one, I confirmed that theory of yours nobody believed.  And I’d hazard a guess at saying they’re kept so long because he wants the girls to start caring about one another, thus making it doubly painful when one is forced to kill the other.  Why weren’t you able to confirm this sooner?”

“
Nobody bought it.”  She dropped into a chair.  “The evidence was shaky, and the families wanted to bury the girls and move on.  But the murders seemed too passive to have been committed by a sadist.  If Brooke ended up killing herself I might have had to beg Vienna Lockhart’s family for permission to exhume her remains to confirm gun powder residue.  Her husband insisted on a quick burial, so the autopsy was a rush job.  Vienna was the one that really clinched the theory, but every time I brought it up, someone would say they might commit suicide too, had they watched someone tortured to death.”

“I hope you’re ready to shout your I told you so’s.”

“All right, Mr. Perfect.  How do we find this guy?  You have all the answers.”

John had never suffered from the tragedy of perfection, but he let the barb slide. “I have a tech analyst searching
to see if he’s streaming videos from a website.”

“And if
they can’t find it?  Then what?”

While it was true John always thought ahead, noting each probable fork or variable in the road that may make for a few stumbles, he’d never really entertained the idea of Stacy failing.  It hadn’t happened yet. “Then we’ll have to devise a Plan B.”

Her glower didn’t waver.

“Listen.” He passed his hand over his face.  “I don’t like to pull rank, but I will if you make me.  You know perfectly well Foster handed this over to the Bureau.  You’ve been with this case from the start, so I don’t want to remove you, but you need to give Brooke a little more credit. 
Of course she’s fragile, but she’s a survivor, not a victim.  And if you keep treating her like a victim you’ll do more harm than good.”

“I’m supposed to listen to the man who breached hospital protocol to show a motherfucking
trauma victim
a
dead girl
?  That’s rich.”

John didn’t like to argue with women since they’d happily continue until their combatant either ran out of steam or died, so he pulled his phone from his pocket and walked backward toward the door. 

“I’m going to check in with my co-worker.  If she’s found anything, we can work up a profile.  When will CSU have answers?”

“At least another day.  They found hair from multiple donors, but he’d given the back a good hosing-down.  Last I saw they were bringing out the luminal.”

“When they get their results we’ll go back for round two with Stanley Heckles.”

Her
surely you’re an imbecile
expression returned.  “He’ll have a lawyer by then.  Fat fucking chance he’ll say a word.”

“Maybe we should accidentally lose his paperwork,” John called before letting the door shut behind him.