Snowfall (31 page)

He turned her loose with a shriek of laughter and thrust her backward. Her head hit the window with a thud.

“You still don’t get it! Testing you would prove nothing! Nothing, do you hear? You’re adopted! Even
I
knew that.”

Caitlin’s ears began to roar as J.R. jerked her from the car. Stumbling and falling as he dragged her into the building, she finally started to fight. The struggle was brief. He hit her once, and then the world turned black.

The squad car ran on full alert all the way to Neil’s apartment. As it slid to a stop at the curb, another black and white was stopping right behind them.

“Apartment 505, sir,” the officer said as Mac reached for the door. “That will be Detectives Amato and Kowalksi behind us.”

Mac got out, unwilling to wait, and started into the building on the run.

“Wait!” Amato yelled. “The manager is meeting us with a key.”

The detectives caught up with Mac at the foot of the stairs just as a middle-aged woman came out of the apartment on their right.

Amato flashed his badge. “Ma’am, we need you to let us into 505.”

She handed him the key. “My husband’s not home. The stairs…my knee…I can’t take you there. Bring it back when you’re through.”

Mac took the key out of Amato’s hands and started up the stairs on the run. Trudy Kowalksi was right behind him, arguing all the way.

“You’re wrong. All of you,” she argued. “He’s my partner. He wouldn’t be involved in something like this.”

Mac hit the fifth floor landing barely out of breath and ran all the way to the apartment, jammed the key into the lock and turned.

He’d been praying all the way up that Neil would be inside and Caitlin with him, although he knew in his heart that would be too easy. Neil wasn’t going to let himself get caught. Not until he’d done what he set out to do. He waited for the others to catch up and then let Trudy call out Neil’s name. He would be less suspicious of the sound of her voice. When no one answered, they used the key.

“They’re not here,” Trudy said, her voice triumphant.

“I didn’t think they would be,” Amato said as he huffed and puffed his way into the apartment.

“Where’s your partner?” Mac asked as he realized Detective Hahn was not in sight.

“On his way with a search warrant,” Amato said.

Trudy turned on the man, her hands on her hips in angry defiance. “A little late, wouldn’t you say?”

Mac turned abruptly, spied a closed door at the end of the hall and headed toward it.

“Wait!” Trudy yelled. “I swear to God, I’ll testify against all of you if—”

The door swung inward as Mac hit the lights. He grunted as if he’d been punched.

“In here!” he yelled.

Trudy pushed past him in anger, then stopped.

“Oh my God,” she whispered. “The pictures. Are they all pictures of—”

“It’s Caitlin. They’re all Caitlin,” Mac said, and wanted to cry. “I let her go with him. I fucking gave her to him like a present. He must have been laughing all the way to the car.”

“No,” Amato said. “He screwed all of us. Hell, I even had him investigating the murders of the women he killed. Talk about deception. He was the master.”

Mac strode to a nearby table and started digging through the stack of papers there.

“There’s got to be something here that will tell us where he’s taken her.” Then he paused, shoved a handful of papers aside and picked up a pair of cassette tapes. They were numbered and dated and marked
Bitch’s Place.
Mac’s heart skipped a beat. The hate within this room was almost palpable. He turned.

“Start looking, damn it! Help me find Caitie before it’s too late.”

Trudy looked stunned.

“Those women…those poor, defenseless women. He brutalized and then butchered them.” Slowly the tears began to fall. “I guess I should be thankful I’m a short redhead instead of a slender brunette. I might have been one of his victims.”

“I got it, I got it! Hey, where did everybody go?”

At the shout, they all turned to see Paulie Hahn waving the long-awaited search warrant in the air.

“In here!” Amato yelled.

Paulie came through the door, a wry grin on his face.

“I see you waited,” he said, and then he saw the walls. “Oh man, Sal, you were right.”

“Damn it, people, help me find a way to stop him before he kills Caitie, too,” Mac demanded.

Amato took charge. “Kowalksi, take the living room. You know what to look for. There’s more stuff on these walls than I would have believed possible. We’ll start in here. Look fast, people. A woman’s life is riding on us.”

Mac tore through the papers on the desk as Amato and Hahn began going through the stuff tacked to the walls. He kept picturing the raped and strangled women, their faces slashed like gutted fish. And with every paper he discarded, his hopes fell a notch. The longer Caitlin was in the killer’s hands, the shorter her life would be.

It was Trudy who broke the tension when she came running from the living room.

“I found something,” she said, thrusting the paper in Amato’s hands.

“What is it?” Mac asked.

“Looks like a rent receipt,” Amato muttered.

“Yes, but look at the address,” Trudy said. “Why would he be paying rent on two places unless…?”

Mac grabbed the paper. “How far is this from here?”

Amato frowned. “A good twenty minutes.”

“Not if we hurry,” Mac said, and bolted from the room with the others right behind him.

Nineteen

C
aitlin opened her eyes and groaned. Her head was splitting, and she had no idea why. It wasn’t until she discovered she couldn’t move that she remembered J.R. Neil. Staring in disbelief at the ropes around her wrists, she quickly realized her feet were also bound.

God in heaven, he had tied her to rings set in the floor.

“Wakey, wakey.”

She gasped. The man’s guttural chuckle was like something out of a nightmare.

“Neil…”

“That’s ‘Brother dear’ to you, bitch.”

“Let me go.”

He stared at her a moment, then threw his head back and laughed.

“Just like that?” he asked, dancing around her spread-eagled body like a moth flirting with a flame. “Let you go? You’re madder than I am if you think that’s going to happen.”

Caitlin took a slow breath, trying to calm the nausea bubbling at the back of her throat. He would like that, she knew. Watching her puke up her guts in pain and fear. Anger pushed through her pain.

Damn him…damn his evil soul. I will not give him the satisfaction of seeing my fear.

She would play it his way. He needed to tell her why. She could tell that this jubilation was part of the game. Like a child who’d just hit a home run, he still had to run the bases so he could hear the cheers. That was fine with her. As long as he let her talk, she couldn’t die.

“So
are
you mad?” she asked.

He stumbled, then spun, pointing at her with a daggerlike knife.

“Wouldn’t you be?” he asked, approaching her slowly, then straddling her body, aware that intimidation was better at creating fear than pain was.

“Crazy? I don’t think so,” she said. “It’s so sleazy.”

He kicked her then, the toe of his boot digging sharply into her ribs.

“I’m not crazy!” he screamed. “This is simple revenge. Your father screwed me. I am going to screw you.”

The taste of copper was suddenly strong in her mouth, and she realized that she’d just bitten her tongue to keep from crying.

“That’s sleazy, too,” she said, frowning as if studying an odd subject. “Screw? You know what, brother? That’s such a low-class word. Daddy wouldn’t have approved.”

He stared at her in disbelief. Why wasn’t she crying? Why wasn’t she begging for her life like all the others? He fingered the knife in his hands, reminding himself that he was the one in control.

“Daddy? Fuck Daddy!” he shrieked, and ran the tip of the knife beneath her sweater and pulled upward. It ripped from hem to neck, baring her breasts and belly in one fell swoop.

Caitlin inhaled sharply, her stomach flattening in reflex. It was the only outward response she made to what he’d done.

She looked at her sweater and frowned. “That’s too bad. I really liked that sweater. If you’d asked, I would have taken it off.”

J.R. froze. What the hell game was she playing? Taken it off? She would have taken it off? He didn’t want a willing participant, he wanted her begging and pleading for her life as he tore her guts apart.

He managed a halfhearted sneer and took a couple of steps backward, then ran the tip of the knife lightly up his fly, giving her a full view of his groin.

“I can make you scream when you come,” he said softly.

“No, you can’t,” she said. “You can hurt me. You can kill me, but you will never make me cry. You’re nothing but a coward.”

“Shut up,” he said.

“Raping and killing innocent women because you didn’t have the balls to face me. All you had to do was tell me who you were. It would have been easy enough for you to prove. I know that Daddy sent your mother two thousand dollars a month for more than thirty years. You could have made your claim on that alone.”

His expression fell. “He did what?”

“It’s true,” she said. “I talked to Daddy’s lawyer. It was sent to her up until the day she died. All you would have had to do was speak up. Instead you snuck around, sniffing and growling like a dog, making yourself believe you’d been cheated, when the truth was that the only one who was cheating was you.”

“You’re lying!” he shrieked, and slashed the knife through her slacks, cutting the belt and waistband in one motion.

Oh God, Mac. I love you. I love you. Forgive me for not saying it enough before I died.

“I do not lie.”

He started to pace, spitting out words as if they were bitter in his mouth.

“My mother died of cervical cancer in a goddamned charity ward. There was no money.
There was no money, I tell you.
”

Fear was so heavy in Caitlin’s mind that it was hard to think, but if he lost focus on what she was saying, she was dead.

“I have no reason to lie. Your mother’s name was Georgia Calhoun, wasn’t it?”

She saw the blood drain from his face. “How did you know that?”

“I told you. Daddy’s lawyers. They have records of the money. Two thousand dollars a month to a Georgia Calhoun in Toledo, Ohio. The money stopped when she died. Maybe she put it in savings. Maybe she tore up the checks. I don’t know. But I know they were sent.”

He started to pace, trying to assimilate what she was saying and put it in context against the poverty in which he’d grown up. All those years. That miserable grind. It wasn’t enough that he’d been a bastard. He’d been a poor bastard, too. This couldn’t be true. Mother had loved him too much to deny him. She might have denied herself, but not him. He couldn’t let himself believe it was possible.

And then a memory surfaced. Something he hadn’t thought of in years. He’d been eight and running with the wrong crowd of kids. Trying desperately to fit in, he’d gotten caught shoplifting at a neighborhood store. It was only a candy bar, but when the owner called his mother, he waited in torment for her to arrive.

He could still remember the look of disappointment on her face as she made him apologize to the owner. Satisfied that he had learned his lesson, and thinking to take pity on the bastard kid from up the block, the store owner had offered to give him the candy bar. Thinking that he’d come out the winner in a very big way, Buddy had reached toward the treat when his mother caught his hand.

He closed his eyes, remembering the smell of her perfume and the way the sunlight caught and held upon her hair as she knelt in front of him.

“No, Buddy. You must not take the treat. Making mistakes is a natural part of life. You learn from your mistakes, my son, but you should never benefit, too. Thank the man for offering and then we’ll go.”

He opened his eyes and looked out the window into the snow.

He’d been a mistake. He’d known that from the start. So his mother had practiced what she’d preached. So what? She was dead, and he was here, and a Bennett would have to pay. He turned, looking at Caitlin with a blank, almost innocent stare.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “You still have to die.”

“Why?”

“Because I said so.”

It was the calm tone of his voice that told Caitlin it was over.

He started toward her, and she closed her eyes, unwilling to watch her own blood spill.

“Open your eyes,” he said, as the weight of his body settled upon her thighs.

“No. I choose not to be a part of my own death.”

He started to cry, hitting her with his fists as he tore off what was left of her slacks.

“You have to open your eyes or it won’t work.”

“Then so be it,” she said as his hands encircled her neck.

In the distance, she imagined she heard the sound of approaching sirens, but it didn’t matter. They wouldn’t be coming here, and even if they were, it would be too late.

His fingers tightened with each choking sob he took.

“It should have been mine. It should have been mine.”

When she went limp, he rocked back with relief. Justice. It was all he’d wanted. And exactly what he deserved. He looked at her limp body with satisfaction as everything, including sound and sanity, faded away.

“That’s Neil’s car!” Trudy shouted as Amato slid around the turn.

“Yeah, and if I don’t wreck us before we get there, we’re gonna nail the bastard,” Amato said. “Paulie, you and the two officers behind us take the back. Kowalski and I will go in with McKee.”

“You’d better hurry,” Trudy said, pointing toward the black-and-white ahead of them. “McKee’s already on the way in.”

“Shit,” Amato muttered as he threw the gear into Park. The engine rattled and then died as he rolled out of the seat.

They spilled out of the car, Hahn motioning for the approaching officers to follow him to the back, while Amato and Kowalksi drew their weapons and ran in through the front.