Killing Red (29 page)

He crowded the doorway, the embodiment of confidence, as though he owned not only the room itself, but even the lifeless air inside it.

“You picked a very good day to stop by, Alex.”

Donald Langdon seemed to have filled out a bit, and had much more presence than when Chapa had met him back at his store. The fact that he was clutching an eight-inch knife added to the overall effect.

Chapa pointed at the weapon.

“Let me guess, it’s got one of your fucked-up designs on the handle.”

Langdon grinned.

“Just like the one they pried out of Lorn Strasser’s hand last night, right?”

The grin vanished in an instant.

“I feel like an idiot for not having recognized it then,” Chapa added, then looked back at Annie who did not return the glance.

“Lorn was a valuable partner. Pure id.”

Langdon was wearing a simple blue shirt, slacks, and a pair of latex gloves.

“Was that his real name?”

“I don’t know, that never mattered to me. I met him online two years ago, we were both chatting about Mr. Grubb. We soon realized we had…
mutual interests
,” Langdon said with a smile that seemed as natural as taking a breath. “After a few months of emails and messaging the two of us finally got together at a truck stop along I-80. Once he knew who I was we began talking about how we could make the world a better place.”

Chapa wished he had taken some sort of weapon from the tool box in the living room, or the work table in the room next door.

“You didn’t seem surprised to see me there in the doorway.”

“I wasn’t.”

Chapa weighed his few legitimate options.

“How did you know?”

If Langdon made the first move, Chapa would see this through until one of them was no longer breathing.

“I walked past the mailman on the way in. Saw one of your tangled designs on an envelope. Then another one out there in the living room, along with that magazine you cut an article out of. I saw the missing story, along with Annie’s photo framed on a wall in your store.”

Langdon looked down and nodded.

“I’ve been spending more time here lately, doing more work out of this place so I can keep an eye on Red as the time neared.” As he spoke, Langdon slowly drifted away from the doorway, either daring Chapa to make a move for it, or hoping he would. Or perhaps both. “You made quite a mess of my living room.”

“So what happens now? You try to carve me up and then perform a ritual sacrifice on Annie?”

Langdon seemed surprised.

“You’re not supposed to be here, but you did see the archives. Didn’t you understand?”

He waited for Chapa to respond, but the reporter switched to interview mode. In this case, that didn’t mean hitting Langdon with a barrage of questions that might put him even more on the defensive, or hasten an attack. The key was letting him talk his way into something of a comfort zone while Chapa figured out what to do next.

“Mr. Grubb hoped you would write about all of this in a truthful way. But maybe this is even better. You’re going to be able to give your readers a firsthand account.”

“So you’re not planning on getting away with it.”

“Of course I am. See, I’m your source, and you’ll protect me.”

Apparently Langdon had confused client-attorney privileges with something having to do with reporters.

“That’s not how it works. Besides, the cops will be all over this place.”

“Why, did you call them?”

If Chapa thought Langdon might run, he would’ve lied and said “yes.” But he knew Langdon wasn’t going anywhere.

“No, I didn’t,” Chapa said and noticed how Annie responded to his words with a narrow shudder. “But the broken window, the smell in the other room. They’ll be here, they’ll find you.”

“The place is rented in Strasser’s name, and it won’t take me more than an hour to remove everything that could be traced back to me.”

So far Chapa had not taken the bait, and he’d resisted making any sort of move for the door, but this would not last much longer. If one of Annie’s ankles wasn’t still fastened to the chair, he could grab the piece of thrift store furniture and use it the way a lion tamer would against a rabid animal.

“And what about all this?” Chapa extended his arms like a realtor trying to sell an upscale house.

“I come in here, to this room, for inspiration.”

Langdon’s tone had shifted, and he spoke like a celebrity who was the subject of a magazine profile. “I probably wouldn’t have taken some of the artifacts that Lorn did, but everybody has their kink.”

“Where are the bodies?”

“I suppose they’re buried all over the Midwest.” Langdon smirked and shrugged. “But that’s Strasser’s department. You’ll have to ask him yourself sometime.”

“So you were more or less the brains behind all this.”

Langdon offered a long silent stare, and Chapa knew he was being sized up.

“I suppose you could put it that way, though Lorn could be hard to manage sometimes. Like I said, not a lot of self-control there.”

“Is that what explains his killing my bird?”

“What can I tell ya, Lorn didn’t much care for small animals.”

Chapa leaned against the wall by one of the medicine cabinets and casually looked to see how it had been hung in place.

“How long ago did you find Annie?”

“I began tracking her when she still lived at home,” Langdon said through a small, tortured laugh. “Getting close to her was easier once she moved to the city. I even became her friend.”

Langdon took a long stride in Annie’s direction, extending the knife toward her pale face.

“Isn’t that right, Red?”

Chapa struggled against the urge to rush him.

“Donnie,” Chapa said is a crisp staccato voice meant to draw Langdon away from Annie. It worked, at least for the moment. “Why these children? How did Lorn choose them?”

Langdon—calm, confident—narrowed the distance between himself and Chapa by a couple of steps.

“That was Red’s doing, she chose them.”

Chapa didn’t let his confusion show, and instead nodded as though all of this madness somehow made sense to him.

“What do you mean,
she
chose the victims?”

“It was her drawings of children. She once told me how she had seen them in dreams. I knew right away that it was a message, so I began searching for someone else who understood. Someone who could find the children in those drawings. Shouldn’t you be writing this down or recording it?”

“Don’t worry, I won’t forget any of this.” Chapa, stone-faced, cold.

“I made copies of her drawings and sent them to Lorn. He tracked down the creatures.”

“Did he kill Dominic Delacruz?”

The question seemed to nudge Langdon out of the moment and a new expression was cast on the man’s face.
Not self-confidence
, Chapa thought,
something worse—pride.

“Would you believe I actually doubted that I would be able to do it? I’ve wanted that man dead for a long time.”

Chapa was looking for an opening, an edge, even the slimmest chance to make his move.

“For weeks Strasser and I took turns driving all the way out there until we’d nailed down his routine. I could’ve killed him a dozen times at his house. But it needed to be done at the store.”

“Why? Dominic Delacruz was a good man.”

“He gave shelter to the beast,” Langdon said and looked over at Annie. “He should’ve seen Red for what she was, what she still is, and thrown her back into the night.”

“And Louise?”

It took Langdon a moment to recognize the name.

“Oh, yeah, that was Red’s fault. She told me about that crazy old woman once, how she had confided in her, talked to her about me. When Lorn followed you to her house we realized she had become a problem.”

“I see, Louise was crazy, but not you,” Chapa said, gradually raising his voice with each syllable, hoping the neighbors were home and that the walls were not too thick. “No, not the fucking psycho bastard responsible for the deaths of all these children.”

Langdon tried to get a word in, but Chapa was not about to slow down.

“Not you, not the goddamned freak who has an innocent woman chained up to a chair as a way of honoring a condemned serial killer.”

Chapa stopped, but not because he had no more to say. It was the way Langdon was laughing, as though he was the only one who was in on a big joke.

“Alex, man, you’ve got to get a whole lot smarter.”

“Listen to me, Annie, I need you to reach down and undo the buckle and free your right ankle.”

Chapa knew he was taking a chance, but sensed it might be the last time he could make that choice.

“I was about to give you the option of leaving until all this is over, but not now.”

“C’mon Annie, you can do this. It’s just like when you were a child and—”

Langdon laughed harder, loud enough for anyone next door to hear.

“Weren’t you listening before? I told you to write this down. Look, Lorn rendered the little creatures like I told him to, but who do you think told me which ones needed killing?” Langdon stopped laughing and pointed at Annie with the knife. “I’m starting to think Mr. Grubb might’ve given you way too much credit, Alex.”

Chapa coaxed his eyes off Langdon and over to Annie. The expression on her face had changed. It was not the blank stare from before, nor the mask of terror Langdon’s entrance had triggered, and it wasn’t anything in between.

What Chapa saw in Annie’s eyes shook him to the deepest reaches of his soul.

As Chapa thought about how he could disarm the single-minded man with the long knife, he wished he hadn’t given up wrestling midway through his sophomore year in order to become the youngest editor in the history of his high school’s newspaper.

Chapa had quickly built a small cove in a distant reach of his mind, and there he stored away whatever doubts Langdon had created about Annie. At least for the time being.

“So with Lorn on ice, you had to step in and go after Annie yourself, is that it?”

Langdon tilted his head to one side and looked at Chapa as though he’d never seen him before.

“No. Red was always going to be the exception. The last tribute. My own little demon.”

“Annie, I need you to focus right now.”

Langdon’s face became a tint of raw hostility, his grip on the knife’s handle so tight Chapa thought it might snap in his hand.

“Stop it!” Langdon said, taking a decisive step toward Chapa and shaking the weapon at him.

Chapa backed off just enough to get a look behind the next cabinet. Langdon hadn’t bothered to carve out a hole in the plaster to embed the units. They were each held in place by two screws. The first one he’d looked at had been bolted tight against the wall. But this time Chapa saw a small gap.

“This isn’t a new thing between Red and me. If you had been a better reporter all those years ago you’d already know that.”

Annie started rocking rhythmically—forward and back, forward and back.

“I see I’ve got your attention now.” Langdon moved closer to Annie. “As a child I stood right in front of you, Alex, trying to get you to notice me, but you didn’t care.”

“I have no memory of that.”

“Of course not. You were more interested in talking to my parents, and all of Mr. Grubb’s other neighbors. My folks didn’t know much about anything, but they knew enough to avoid mentioning that their son delivered the newspaper to Mr. Grubb’s house.”

Chapa searched his memory and Langdon’s face, but came up empty. There had been so many interviews and stories since then.

“Yeah, I probably should’ve asked you a couple of questions.”

“I’m glad you didn’t. I might’ve told you everything and that would have been a mistake. I would’ve told you all about how Mr. Grubb took me in, and made me feel important. He taught me that some children are evil little demons whose families spend their nights praying for someone to come along and put them in the ground.”

Chapa now understood that Langdon and Annie were both Grubb’s victims. One got away, the other didn’t. He recalled how the police had found comic books and a Game Boy in the basement and assumed those things belonged to a child that Grubb had murdered. But the police had made a mistake.

“Watching her whimper in the dark whenever Mr. Grubb wasn’t around, I learned her weaknesses, Red’s soft spots, and that made it so easy to work my way into her life,” Langdon said. “I remember more about what happened to Red in that basement than she does.”

His eyes trained on Annie, Langdon then began speaking with a child’s voice.

“
Don’t move too much and it won’t hurt. Sit in one place Annie, motionless, still, like an object. Until someone comes and sets you free.
I used to whisper that to her from a dark corner of the basement whenever Mr. Grubb left the room. Red was so drugged up most of the time she probably thought the voice was in her head.”

“Why would you do that?”

“Because I liked watching her struggle to hold on to a little bit of hope that someone was coming to save her.”

Langdon smiled and leaned in toward Chapa like a bar buddy with a secret.

“Did you buy that stuff about Mr. Grubb making me feel important, like he was some father figure?”

Chapa didn’t feel a need to respond.

“That’s all bullshit. I just enjoyed seeing the terror in those other kids’ eyes.” Langdon’s smile vanished like ice on hot pavement. “But the part about them being demons, that was true. Especially this little monster.”

Annie was rocking faster now—forward and back, forward and back.

“I owe this to Mr. Grubb. See, I’m responsible for her being alive.”

“Why is that?”

Most of Langdon’s attention was now on Annie, and Chapa knew his chance, the only one he would have, was coming very soon.

“I got off on Red’s fear because she tried so hard not to show it. That scared Mr. Grubb, and I enjoyed that too. But that afternoon, when he told me he was going to render her and showed me the bottle of fluid, I knew that I didn’t want her to stop hurting just yet. So I poured some of it out and replaced it with saline solution.”

Langdon shifted the knife in his hand from a stabbing position to one better suited for cutting.

Then he looked at Chapa with eyes that were void of any humanity.

“Watch—”

The fragile distance between Annie and her executioner was thinning with each of Langdon’s forceful steps.

In one continuous motion, Chapa reached for the medicine cabinet that he’d been eyeing, and tore it off the wall, taking a slab of plaster with it. Though ripping it free had proven easier than he expected, Chapa had not accounted for the sudden shift in the weight balance. He barely managed to hold on as the cabinet nearly hit the floor and threatened to take him with it. Bent over in a near squat, Chapa looked up at Langdon who was now standing no more than ten feet away and creeping toward him.

“Think long and hard about your next move, Alex.”

He didn’t have to.

“If you can hear me, Annie, cover your face.”

Chapa swung the cabinet up as though it were a golf club, and in an instant the look of confusion on Langdon’s face vanished in a shower of broken glass and splintered wood.

The cabinet fell out of Chapa’s hands and Langdon tumbled to the floor, but managed to keep his grip on the knife. Chapa lunged for him, but Langdon waved the knife back and forth in front of him, his other hand covering some of the blood that colored his face.

Chapa spun away as the blade sliced through the thick air, no more than an inch from his ribs. Before Chapa could find another weapon, Langdon scrambled to his feet and bore down on him.

Leaving Annie behind was not a choice Chapa wanted to make, but they would both be dead in a hurry if he didn’t find a way to defend himself. He backpedaled through the doorway, and Langdon kept coming.

When he reached the bathroom door, Chapa realized he was alone in the hallway. He stopped, imagining the horrible things Langdon could be doing to Annie. But those thoughts were shoved aside when the killer blew through the doorway and closed in on Chapa.

Langdon’s face was painted in shades of pale flesh and fresh red like some malevolent clown. His voice was throaty.

“You are going to bleed, Alex. A lot.”