The Prettiest One: A Thriller (25 page)

Caitlin couldn’t argue with that. She was about to ask another question when she saw that Bigelson’s eyes had closed. He looked like he might fall right to sleep, then he winced all of a sudden as, presumably, a stab of pain lanced through him. Caitlin started toward him, but he opened his eyes and held up a hand to stop her.

“I’m okay,” he said.

“Is it getting bad?” Caitlin asked.

He forced a smile but shrugged in a way that told her it had passed “getting bad” a few miles back and was steaming toward “excruciating.” Caitlin was startled by a knock at the window. Dolores stood on the other side of the glass, a wide-brimmed gardening hat shading her face. Bigelson nodded to her and waved. Message received. The visit was running a little long now.

“Anything else I can do for you here?” Bigelson asked them. His voice was getting weaker.

“I think you’ve done enough,” Caitlin said.

Bigelson nodded. He hesitated. “You seem like a nice girl. A nice woman, I mean. So before you go, I want to give you . . . well, let’s call it fair warning.”

Caitlin frowned.

“Remember when I said I know who you are?”

She nodded. “The one who escaped, you said.”

It was the old man’s turn to nod. “Well, there was that, sure. But as we talked, I realized there was more.” He nodded to the newspaper on the bedside table. “You seen the paper today?”

Caitlin said nothing. Neither did Josh or Bix.

“There’s a story in there about a murder in a warehouse over in North Smithfield. Got a couple of police sketches with it.”

Caitlin remained silent.

“One sketch looks a heck of a lot like you, Caitlin,” Bigelson said, then screwed his face up in pain.

When it passed a few seconds later, Bix asked, “And what if it does?”

Bigelson looked at Bix. “I don’t know what happened in that warehouse,” and Caitlin thought,
Join the club
. “I don’t know if she was there or what she might or might not have done if she
was
there. But I was a cop, son. I have to call the police, tell them you three were here. I have no choice. I can wait an hour or so before making the call, maybe, if that’ll help you, but I do have to call. I’m sorry, Caitlin.”

He was breathing differently now. The slightest movement seemed to cause him pain.

“Can you get my wife in here from the garden?” he asked.

“You need something?” Caitlin asked, alarmed.

He squeezed his eyes shut. “My pain pills. I waited too long.”

Bix was closest to the table, and he moved quickly. He picked up first one prescription bottle, then two others. Finally, he popped the top from one, then another, and shook a few pills into his palm. Eyes still closed, Bigelson held out his hands and Bix placed the pills in one and a glass of water from the table in the other.

“Which are these?” Bigelson asked without opening his eyes.

“The Oxycodone,” Bix said. “Is that right?”

Bigelson nodded as he put the pills in his mouth. He took a long sip of water, struggled for a moment to choke down the pills, then let his head lay back against the pillow.

“Sometimes tough to swallow those things,” he said weakly.

Josh leaned close to Caitlin and whispered, “We should go. He’s going to call the cops.”

Caitlin nodded. Josh was right. They needed to leave now.

“Mr. Bigelson?” she said. Bigelson’s eyes fluttered open. “Thank you.”

Bigelson smiled tiredly and closed his eyes again.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

DETECTIVE HUNNSAKER FLASHED HER SHIELD to a good-looking bartender who would have been just her type twenty years ago. She smiled and he smiled back, and she remembered a couple of mistakes she had made in her youth with guys like this one. She held out the sketch of the redhead.

“You know this girl?”

He hesitated. He could have been thinking or he could have been stalling. He shook his head.

“Manager in?” Hunnsaker asked.

“Martha,” the bartender called to a medium-size, medium-age woman who had just come through a door from a back room. “Can you come here?”

Hunnsaker identified herself to the woman—Martha, apparently—then showed her the computer sketch.

“She look familiar?” Hunnsaker asked.

Martha looked at the sketch closely and frowned.

“I don’t think so,” she said. “But a lot of people come through here. It’s possible she came in here, had a bite to eat or a few drinks, but I don’t remember her.”

Hunnsaker nodded as though that made perfect sense. “Yeah, but we got a tip that maybe she works here.”

Martha’s frown deepened and she shook her head. “Nah, that girl doesn’t work here.”

“You sure?”

“I think I know my employees, Detective.”

Hunnsaker nodded. “Mind if I ask around?”

Martha hesitated only slightly, then said, “Knock yourself out.”

“Thanks for your cooperation.”

Hunnsaker surveyed the room. Three servers. Probably a cook or two in the back. Only seven patrons at the moment. Maybe one of them would recognize the redhead even though Martha hadn’t . . . or claimed that she hadn’t.

Ten minutes later, the employees present had given Hunnsaker nothing. Either this was a tight-knit group and they were covering for her, or they truly didn’t recognize her.

Hunnsaker looked at the patrons. The odds of one of the seven of them recognizing the redhead were slim, but Hunnsaker asked each of them anyway. She came up empty again. From behind the bar, Martha watched while pretending not to. Hunnsaker walked back over to her.

“Guess that’s it, then,” Hunnsaker said. “Except for your list of employees. I’d like to see that.”

Martha nodded slowly, as if considering the request. “You got a warrant?”

Hunnsaker smiled. “See, that’s why I don’t like TV cop shows. Everyone thinks they’re smart because of those shows. Criminals think they know how to get away with crimes. Witnesses who don’t want to be helpful ask for warrants. All because they see stuff like that on TV.”

Martha said, “I’m not—”

“But if you watch those shows,” Hunnsaker said, “then you know what would come next . . . in one of those shows, I mean. The cop would threaten to bring the Board of Health down here, and if everything’s not totally up to snuff, the place gets shut down for a while.”

“This place is right up to code,” Martha said defensively.

“Of course it is, but then the TV cop would say something like, ‘Hope you haven’t served alcohol to any minors here,’ and then the bar owner would say, ‘We don’t serve minors,’ and then here’s where the cop crosses the line, because tough cops don’t always play by the rules, do they?” Martha said nothing, so Hunnsaker continued. “The cop would say, ‘Well, I bet we could find a couple of minors, maybe one we picked up holding a few dozen Oxy pills, and another who got nabbed shoplifting, and I bet they’d say that you served them alcohol. That is, if we asked them right.’ Now, I don’t play those games, of course, but that’s what they would probably say on TV.”

Hunnsaker watched Martha’s jaw muscles clench a few times. “All you want is a list of employees?”

“For now.”

Martha sighed and pulled a spiral-ring notebook from behind the bar. She flipped it open and turned the book around for Hunnsaker to see. There were maybe fifteen names. One of them was crossed out. Hunnsaker felt a tingle of excitement.

“Who’s that?” Hunnsaker asked. “It says Katherine Southern.”

“She used to work here.”

“Used to?”

“Till about two weeks ago.”

“She fit the redhead’s description by any chance?”

Martha scratched her chin. Hunnsaker saw a few random hairs poking out of it. “I don’t really remember her.”

“Got addresses for these people?”

“Not all of them.”

“Really? Sounds like shoddy record keeping. Makes me wonder if everything is on the up-and-up here. Maybe some people are getting paid off the books. How about Katherine Southern? You have her address?”

Martha shook her head.

“How about if we go through your employee files? Would I find it there?”

After a brief hesitation, Martha said, “You wouldn’t. I swear.”

“And you don’t happen to know where she lives, do you?”

“I don’t. Really.”

Hunnsaker nodded as she took out her smartphone and used it to snap a picture of the list.

“What are the folks on this list going to tell me when I ask them about Katherine Southern?”

Martha shrugged. “You’ll have to ask them. I barely knew her. I don’t know where she lives. All I had was that phone number.”

Hunnsaker pocketed her phone. Martha had obviously been trying to hide something, and Hunnsaker didn’t think it was simply that Southern was being paid under the table. Was it the fact that the redhead in the sketch was Katherine Southern?

“If you were me,” Hunnsaker said, “which of these names would you start with? Who would you call first?”

After a long hesitation, Martha said, “You might want to start at the bottom.”

Hunnsaker looked down at the notebook on the bar. The last name on the list was Jane Stillwood.

“Well,” Hunnsaker said, “you see? In real life, these situations don’t have to end like they do on TV. There’s no reason to call the Board of Health here, and I don’t see any evidence that you’ve been serving alcohol to minors. This went really well, I think.”

Martha said nothing.

Walking to her car outside, Hunnsaker took out her phone again. She texted the photo of Martha’s employee list to Padilla, then called him.

“What’s this?” he asked.

“Employee list of Commando’s, a bar on Chestnut Street. I’ve got a pretty good feeling that’s where our mystery redhead worked till two weeks ago. I think I’ve got a name, too.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. I think she goes by Katherine Southern. And that’s her phone number on the list. I’ll call it, but she won’t answer. I’m also going to call the other names on this list and see who knows what about her. Someone knows something. I was advised to start with the last name.”

“Want me to make some of the calls?”

“No,” Hunnsaker said. “Where are you?”

“At the apartment building on Loring Avenue. The super here said the redhead—Southern, I guess—doesn’t live here. She didn’t live at the other two apartment buildings from the tip list, either.”

“If that’s the last of the apartments, then forget the rest of the list. We know where she worked. Now we have to find where she lives. Look into Katherine Southern. She has a phone number, which means she gets a bill, which means that someone has her address. But I doubt anyone’s at her cell phone company right now who can give us an address, and I’d rather not wait till morning, so let’s hope you find something before then. Check motor vehicles, property records, the usual. In the meantime, I’ll be getting in touch with her former coworkers, starting with Jane Stillwood.”

“Got it,” Padilla said.

“We’re getting close, Javy. I can feel it.”

Caitlin’s visit with Jeff Bigelson had yielded several answers, including one she hadn’t ever expected to find—the reason for her nearly lifelong struggle with nightmares about the Bogeyman. She knew exactly what kind of monster he was now. She knew his real name. She knew her place in the events that gave birth to those nightmares. Still, there were so many questions left to be answered. Why had Caitlin come to Smithfield seven months ago? Why did she stop going to work two weeks ago? What was the significance of the names and the address on the list she’d kept hidden in her closet? And what the heck was she doing at that warehouse the other night? Most importantly, did she kill that man from the newspaper sketch, the man whose face she saw in her dream with a bullet hole in it? And if so, why?

The drive from Hyattville to Lewiston took just over twenty minutes. This wasn’t a stop that was directly related to the more important aspects of Caitlin’s investigation, but she had returned to Massachusetts in search of answers, so she might as well get as many as she could. Where they were going wasn’t far out of the way, and though she didn’t remember the exact address, she knew the street and she believed she’d recognize the house, even if she hadn’t seen it in more than twenty years.

When she’d told the guys where she wanted to go, Josh had said, “Caitlin, I can’t imagine how you’re feeling, and I know you want answers, but I’m not sure we have time for detours right now. There may be time for this visit later, but right now, we have to keep moving. Bigelson recognized your face. He told us he’s going to call the cops in an hour, if he even waits that long. Maybe he was lying. Maybe he called them the second we walked out the door.”

“He’ll wait,” Bix said confidently, “and longer than an hour.”

“He will?” Caitlin asked.

“He will. And I’m not a doctor, but I’d say we have at least a few hours.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because when I gave him his pain pills, I threw in a few of his sleeping pills. The bottle said to take one as needed for sleep.”

“And you gave him one?” Josh asked.

“I gave him four.”

“Along with his Oxycodone?”

“Yeah, but just one of those.”