16 Taking Eve (27 page)

For the first time, Doane’s mask was slipping. Push him a little more. “He has no plans. He’s dead and gone, Doane.”

“Is he?” He was striding toward the front door. “He’s not gone to me. I’m not gone to him. Sometimes I feel him near me just like when he was alive. I even dream about him. If he’s gone, then why do I feel he has plans for you and your Bonnie?” He paused at the door. “Keep on working. If you don’t have more done when I come back, I’ll call Blick and have a talk with him about Jane MacGuire.” The door slammed behind him.

Eve straightened on the stool. Get control. The gloves were off, and it might be better that way. She had goaded Doane until he had jettisoned all the games he’d been playing. Now they were out in the open and face-to-face.

Not quite. There were still blanks to be filled in, but that could come later. Doane was no longer pretending to be the warm, fatherly guy next door. It had been bizarre and horrible watching his expressions change and twist. The man who had strode out of here had been completely different from the mask he had worn since she had met him.

“I’ve
got
you. I can see you, Doane,” she whispered. “And I’ll learn how to manipulate you just the way your dear Kevin did. Neither one of you is going to beat us.”

Us. The word had come naturally, instinctively. Had she been referring to Jane or Joe?

Or Bonnie.

She felt a wave of nausea abruptly wash over her, and she had to grab hard at the wood of the worktable to keep from falling off the stool.

Not the gas. Not the gas. Not the gas. Bonnie’s words flying back to her.

Her gaze was blurry as she stared at the face of the reconstruction. Kevin’s face.

She could feel it pulling her, smothering her.

Things that do go bump in the night. He’s so strong, Mama.

We’ll beat him, baby.

But not by sitting here right now. Doane had given her an opportunity, and she had to take it.

The desk. The locked drawer.

She shook her head to clear it, then reached for the steel spatula she’d been using to smooth the clay. It had no sharp edges she could use to pick the lock, but it was fine steel and might be strong enough to pry the drawer open. It didn’t matter any longer that Doane remain ignorant that she was trying to rifle the desk. The conflict between them was now stark and without subterfuge on either side.

Move.

She slipped down from the stool and ran across the room toward the desk.

Damn, her knees were weak.

And she could feel a tension in the middle of her back between her shoulder blades.

As if someone was staring balefully at her.

Imagination.

That blob of clay held no life.

But could it hold death?

Ignore it.

Easy to say. The cords of her neck were so tense she could hardly breathe.

Go
away.

She closed her mind and concentrated as she inserted the spatula in the opening of the drawer.

She carefully worked it back and forth, chiseling at the soft wood around the lock. The spatula was as strong as she’d hoped. Strong enough?

A sound from outside.

She tensed and listened.

No footstep. No slamming truck door. Just a faint sound that might be Doane’s voice talking on his phone.

Good. It might keep him occupied a little longer. She started working frantically at the drawer.

A moment later, the wood splintered around the lock!

Yes.

She jerked the drawer open.

She stared at the contents of the drawer in shock and disappointment.

An old beat-up photo album?

Memories that warm the heart, Doane had said.

And beneath it was the folded jacket she had worn the morning Doane had taken her.

Where the hell was her phone and her gun?

She lifted the tan album out of the drawer and tossed it on the top of the desk. Why was it so faded and well thumbed? What was inside that album that Doane held so precious that he carried it with him?

Just a quick look …

She opened the heavy leather cover.

Not a quick look, she realized in shock.

Because her gaze was caught and held by a yellowed newspaper front page. She didn’t understand German, but she could make out that it was a Hamburg, Germany, newspaper. And the photos on the front page told their own story. Children. Little girls of seven or eight or nine. Victims. She had seen headlines in Atlanta and Chicago and dozens of other local papers that were tragically similar.

Oh, God.

She wasn’t important, Doane had said.

And these little girls?

Eve closed her eyes for an instant. Get over the horror. No time for it now.

She closed the album shut and threw it on the floor.

She hurriedly started to rifle through the deep drawer. She pulled out her jacket, checked the pockets, then tossed the jacket aside.

The gun. Find the gun.

There it was! She grabbed the .38 and checked the magazine.

Empty. Dammit, of course he’d pulled the magazine clip.

She tossed the gun on the desk and started looking for her phone.

She found it a moment later.

Dead. The batteries in the cell phone had been pulled. Find the batteries. He wouldn’t leave bullets around, but batteries weren’t lethal. She started looking through the other drawers in the desk.

No battery. And she hadn’t had a charger with her.

Shit.

There had to be a way to get power.

She studied the laptop computer that Doane had set up for her. A slender cable connected the mouse with one of the computer’s USB ports. Could that actually work? Only one way to find out.

She ran across the room and pulled the cable from the port and wrapped it around her hands. She dropped the mouse on the floor, stepped on it and yanked with all her might until the cable finally pulled free. She picked up the frayed end and peeled back the insulation until she could see four thin wires, each a different color. Red and black were for power, the others were for data, she thought. Concentrate on the red and black.

She used her teeth to strip away the red and black casings to expose the copper wires. She picked up her phone and squinted at the copper terminals in the battery compartment. There were three, not two. One was probably for the battery capacity gauge, temperature, or some other data. But which was which?

She glanced up. A sound from outside. Had he come back?

She froze, straining to hear the sound of Doane’s truck or his footsteps on the front walk.

Nothing.

She turned back to the phone.

She decided to start with the two outside terminals. If she didn’t short out the phone, she could try other combinations later. She reached over to her workbench and took two tiny dabs of sculpting clay. She carefully applied them to each wire and affixed them to her phone’s first and third battery-compartment terminals. She plugged the other end into the laptop’s USB port.

Please, please, let it give her enough power …

She held her breath and pressed her mobile phone’s power button.

Nothing.

Her heart sank with disappointment.

Okay. Maybe the negative and positive were reversed. She switched terminals.

She pressed the phone’s power button again.

The battery lit up!

A few seconds later the carrier name and signal strength bars appeared. She was in business.

The door of the truck slammed outside.

Hurry. Call Joe. Tell him where—

She heard the front door open as she pressed the access button on the phone.

Answer, Joe. Dear God, answer me.

No answer. She didn’t even hear a ring. Was she even connecting?

She heard Doane curse.

Pain.

He’d leaped across the room, struck the side of her neck, and knocked her to the floor.

He grabbed the phone from her hand, checked the ID to make sure she hadn’t been talking on it, then stomped it beneath his foot, shattering it. He ground the broken shards of the cell phone into the floor with ferocity, cursing her all the while.

Eve rolled over, got to her knees, and launched herself at him. He staggered and brought the back of his hand against her cheek with stinging force.

She rammed her head into his stomach and heard him gasp with agony.

Good. Now try to get in a position to use karate …

“Stop, you dirty little bitch,” Doane grunted. “I should have known. You’re just like him. Keep your hands off me, or I’ll blow your guts out.”

Eve froze as she felt the muzzle of a revolver pressed against her abdomen.

“Scared? Not so brave now, are you?” He pushed her away, grabbed her hair, and pulled her head back. His eyes were glittering with anger, the cords of his neck standing out as he stared down at her. “I wanted to wait, but I don’t know if I can. Kevin’s getting impatient.” He smiled mirthlessly. “So am I.”

“You won’t shoot me,” she said, glaring back at him. “You want me to make that skull into some semblance of a human being. Though I don’t know if he was that even when he was alive.”

He released her hair and slapped her again. “He was more than a human being. He was magnificent.” He pushed her down into the office chair. “You were trying to call Quinn?”

“Who else?”

“Evidently you didn’t reach him, or I would have heard you speaking to him. What a pity.” He glanced at the pieces of phone on the floor. “You won’t get that chance again. I’ll handcuff you before I leave you alone.”

And Doane was discarding the possibility that even though she hadn’t made the final connection, the call might be traced. He had not seemed that tech savvy, maybe he didn’t realize it. For that matter, neither did she know if that second of connection could be recognized and traced. “I won’t get much done on dear Kevin’s reconstruction with my hands cuffed.”

“You’ll get it done. I’ll be here beside you until it’s finished.” His big hand grasped her throat. “And you’ll finish soon. I want it done by tomorrow.”

“And what if I won’t work on Kevin? It would be foolish of me to complete him when that’s all you’re waiting for to shoot me.”

“But that’s not all I’m waiting for,” Doane said. “It’s true that I want to see him again the way he was before he was butchered. But it’s more than that.”

“You wanted proof of his identity?” She shook her head. “No, you know this is your son. DNA would be the legal proof, but you wouldn’t care about that.” Her glance went to the photo album on the floor. “No one is going to care about bringing to justice someone who killed a monster like him.”

“Oh, you’ve been looking at Kevin’s souvenirs?” He made a clucking sound as he picked up the album and put it on the desk. “But you shouldn’t have been so disrespectful. Kevin wouldn’t like it.”

“You mentioned one little girl. I guess I didn’t want to think that a ‘release’ for a killer like him would have to be plural. It was too painful for me.” She couldn’t take her gaze off the album. It was like Pandora’s box hiding all the evil of the world. “How many, Doane?”

“Kevin never kept count. I wasn’t with him when he was overseas in the military. I know he started needing release when he was fourteen.”

“How many?”

“I told you that—” He shrugged. “I suppose there were at least fifty or so. But they weren’t all little girls. He liked them best, but there were boys and even a few women.”

Eve felt sick. “But he liked the little girls best. Why?”

“He said that the release was more potent because the girls seemed to have a kind of strong purity.” His lips turned up with malice. “I’m sure he would have enjoyed your Bonnie. He likes little girls. Isn’t it nice that he still has one available? Perhaps since they’re together he’s enjoying her now.”

She wanted to
kill
him. He had chosen just the right words to lacerate. “They’re not together.”

“How do you know?” he asked softly. “I believe there’s some kind of connection.”

“Then you’re insane.” She tried to keep her voice steady. “She was special, and he was a demon.”

“I’m sure the parents of those girls in my album thought they were special, too.” He flipped open the album to the first page. “Look at them. Do any of them have a resemblance to Bonnie?”

“No.”

“You’re not looking.” He took her hair and forced her head toward the album. “Perhaps the little girl in the center. Anna Grassker. She had curly hair like your Bonnie.”

But not red curls, the child was blond. Yet Anna’s face was sweet and her eyes bright with joy, and it hurt Eve to look at that photo. “Why are you doing this?”

“You made me angry. I like things easy, and you’re making them hard.”

“Did you help Kevin kill those people?”

“Not all of them.”

“Some of them?”

“When Kevin needed me. I didn’t actually touch them, that would have spoiled the release for Kevin.”

“And that would have been horrible, right?”

“Yes, why take a life if it provided him no value?”

“How did you help him?”

“He trusted me to scout, to bring the little girls to him. It was easy for me. People like me, they trust me. Kevin was smarter than me, but I was happy and proud that I could help him. I got really good at it.”

Yes, Eve could see that he was proud. His son might have been a monster, but who was the most twisted? She could imagine a little girl looking up into that face and giving him her trust. “You’re his father. You could have stopped him. At some point, you would have had the opportunity to persuade him that what he was doing was wrong.”

“He wasn’t wrong. He was different. It took me a little while to realize that he couldn’t be held to ordinary rules. When I did, it seemed very simple and clear.”

“And you became his enabler.”

“I don’t like that word.” His hand tightened on her throat. “That’s what Kevin said they’d call me if I stayed by him in that courtroom.”

“Enabler,” she repeated deliberately. “You’re as dirty as your son. Why did you try to tell me that the court case concerned only one child if you’re so proud of helping him?”

“The court case was only about one child, Dany Cavrol. The prosecution usually chooses only one victim even if there are several.”