“Please!” I begged with hopeless desperation. “Don’t hurt my daughter!”
“But the young lady is my pièce de résistance.” Henry’s voice was thick with hatred. “I’ve been working up to her all these years. And this time the great doctor gets to observe.”
“Katy has done nothing to you.”
“Like Asa did nothing to you. Or to that poor kid carved with Satanic symbols, then gutted and dumped into Lake Wylie. Asa was a kind and gentle soul. A healer.”
Henry was right. Asa Finney was an innocent misjudged for being different. Investigators had taken far too long to recognize that, and it had cost Asa his life.
“Asa would disapprove of such vengeance,” I said.
Something complicated skittered through Henry’s eyes. Then she stepped forward and backhanded me hard across the face. As my head snapped sideways, my optic nerves registered a terrifying tableau. A night-darkened window, high on a wall. Below the window, two gaping holes in the floor, a mound of dirt beside each. Pre-made graves?
My left parietal cracked concrete. Dizziness overtook me, and black clouds threatened in the corners of both eyes.
No!
Awash in pain and fear-induced adrenaline, I bucked my torso and wrenched my wrists wildly. The cuffs wouldn’t break. I thrashed harder. The cuffs wouldn’t break.
Did the chair move ever so slightly?
Henry kept smiling her deranged smile.
I continued struggling with my bindings, frenzied as a wild beast caught in a trap. Pale grooves appeared on my wrists, oozed red as the metal bracelets cut deeper and deeper into my flesh.
Never easing up, I watched Henry disappear into the shadows. She returned with a wire attached to a wooden peg at each end.
Sweet Jesus!
The garrot that killed Frank Boldonado?
Henry dragged a second chair to a position facing mine, draped the garrot across its back, turned and fixed me with another icy grin. “You’ll have the best seat in the house, Doc.”
With that, she withdrew again.
Footsteps. Somewhere in the cellar a door opened. I heard fabric swish, a thud, then grunting, like someone struggling under the weight of a heavy burden. A minute later—maybe several, I’d lost all track of time—Henry emerged from the shadows, hands hooking Katy’s armpits, dragging her motionless body across the slick floor.
Katy’s eyes were closed, her head lolling uncontrolled on her chest. Her skin was ashen.
I felt my heart explode.
“No!” I shrieked. “No!!”
“Save it for the show, Doc.”
Breathing hard under the strain of moving her one-hundred-and-thirty-pound captive, Henry lugged Katy to the empty chair and, lacking a free hand, kicked the garrot to the floor, out of my reach. Emitting a final Maria Sharapova–level grunt, she heaved my daughter up, then double-shackled her as she had me.
Did the restraints mean Katy was alive? Or were they simply to hold her lifeless body in place?
I looked at my daughter, slumped like a rag doll, vulnerable and helpless.
“Katy!” I screamed. “Katy! Wake up!”
“Save it. She can’t hear you.”
“For God’s sake. Don’t do this.”
“After all those years planning? Ha!”
“It’s true,” I said. “You’re sick. Stop now and we can get you help.”
With an exaggerated tooth-baring smirk, Henry pivoted and swept a hand toward Katy. “Heeere’s Johnny!”
God, no! Please no!
Henry bent to snatch the garrot by one of its pegs, straightened and began circling toward Katy’s back, carefully staying out of my reach.
Or so she thought. Under the guise of irrational thrashing and flailing, I’d been hitching my chair forward millimeter by millimeter.
Now!
Planting both feet, I thrust hard against the floor while swinging my upper body like a pendulum gone mad. The chair tottered, then toppled sideways with a metallic crash. I shoved wildly, lurching myself jaggedly across the floor.
Startled by the noise behind her, Henry whirled, realized her mistake, and tried yanking the full length of the garrot clear of my reach.
Too late.
Moving with a quickness I wouldn’t have thought possible, I scooted onto the wire, grabbed the retreating peg with one cuffed hand, and tucked it under the arm of the rusty chair encasing me.
Henry reacted with a swiftness equal to mine. Springing forward, she attempted to right the overturned chair and its occupant. Keeping my head tucked and my torso curled, I kicked out whenever she drew close enough for a foot to connect. Again and again, I struck flesh, occasionally bone.
Frustrated, Henry snarled and scampered out of my field of vision.
As seconds passed, the only sounds in the basement were the dripping water, Henry’s panting, and the booming of my own heart. Nothing from my daughter’s direction.
I remained coiled and ready, chained to my tumbled mooring.
Time seemed to stop.
Plunk. Plunk. Plunk.
Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom.
Something clattered to my right.
Panicked, I raised my gaze to Katy.
Henry leaped the chair, flexed one leg, and kicked me hard in the throat. The sudden blow sent my jaw up, my lungs into spasm.
Tears ran my cheeks.
Breathe!
My burning lungs took in no air.
“Let it go!” Henry shrieked.
I refused to yield the shaky grip I had on the garrot.
Breathe!
The black clouds began to gather again.
Breathe!
“Do it! You’re finished! This will happen!” A note of hysteria now sharpened Henry’s tone.
I refused to acknowledge her commands.
I refused to acknowledge the searing fire in my chest and throat.
I tried to inhale. Felt the tiniest easing. Tasted the first molecules of oxygen.
“You have a gun,” I managed to croak. “Shoot me.”
“No! No! No! This has to go down exactly as planned.” Henry now sounded like a madwoman. A madwoman caught in a crazed delusion. “You die. Then the truth of what you really are, of your arrogant judgments and the pain they’ve caused, will be revealed to the world.”
“I won’t watch,” I said. “You can’t force me to be a player in your sick theater.”
That seemed to catch her by surprise. Then, “Good idea about the gun. What say I cap one of your knees, then get you back into your front-row seat? You refuse to view the performance, I cap the other.”
Icy fingers ran my spine.
What to do? What to say?
Before I could act, Henry grabbed the chair by its back and wrenched it upright. My eyes took in an arcing kaleidoscope of grays and blacks interspersed with spots of color. The concrete walls. The two pits. The green of Katy’s shirt. A flash of blond hair.
Stepping to face me, Henry drew the Glock and pointed it two-handed at my knees.
“Got a fave, Doc?” Waggling the weapon back and forth. “Righty or lefty?”
“If you harm my daughter, you will spend the rest of your life behind bars.”
“That’s a stupid threat. I will anyway.”
“Or worse.” Pure acid.
Henry shrugged.
Smiled her deranged smile.
Ratcheted back the slide on the Glock.
Aimed it fixedly at my right leg.
I glared, hating Donna Scott Henry as much as I’ve hated any other human being.
Henry inhaled. Spread her feet.
I closed my eyes. Braced.
Fleeting thought. Does a bullet hurt? Does shock blanket the initial pain?
I heard a pop.
Shattering glass.
Raised my lids.
Henry’s arms were down, the Glock gone. A small circle glistened dark on the right side of her forehead, blood streaming down from it toward her right ear.
Henry’s eyes were open, her lips shaped into a lopsided oval.
The expression held as its owner pitched forward onto the floor.
I must have looked as shocked as my suddenly dead tormentor.
My iPhone said 3:41 a.m.
I was calmer now. More rational than when they’d first brought me out of the basement, screaming and demanding a report on Katy.
I scanned the scene through an open door of Slidell’s 4Runner, a cold compress wrapping my neck.
An unlit road fed the isolated cul-de-sac, empty fields flanking it on both sides. Only one house occupied the little dead-end circle. One enormous oak, winter bare. One nonfunctioning streetlamp.
My first reaction had been creative but irrelevant. The isolated court looked like a set awaiting breakdown after shooting a scene for The Grapes of Wrath, maybe an episode of Ken Burns’s Dust Bowl series.
I know. But my head had taken multiple blows.
The home was one-story—not a ranch, bungalow, mid-century, or craftsman. Not anything with sufficient style to warrant a name. It just looked old.
My battered brain was still trying to untangle what had happened inside those walls while around me the usual crime scene three-ring played out.
Shagbark Court—I’d heard that shouted—was a hive of activity. Patrol units had shot into it and stopped at random angles, their headlights piercing the darkness, their flashers strobing blue. Unmarked cars and SUVs, later arrivals, sat behind the ragged semicircle of cruisers, other vehicles along the curbs lining the street.
Uniforms mingled with plainclothes detectives and CSU techs. Some shouted orders, others shouted back, others conversed in clusters of two or three. Journalists strained behind yellow tape stretching across the street, frustrated at being held fifty feet back from the action. Everyone seemed tense.
The ambulance had screamed off before I was brought up from the basement, taking Katy to the nearest hospital before I could join her. Leaving me furious and fuming.
The ME van had left for the morgue, Henry’s body strapped to a gurney in the rear.
The SWAT team had departed in their Humvee.
I was glad Slidell had been called away from my side. His repeated insistence that I be checked by medics hadn’t been helping my head.
I thanked whatever gods were looking over me that Slidell had been dogged in pursuing every lead in the copycat murders.
Having found that the sketchy gardener at MiraVia alibied out and recalling a comment the security guard, George, had made about a previous 911 call from the facility, Skinny had pulled the old B&E report. Henry was listed as one of the responders. Inspired by this finding, he did similar digging on the Happy Trails crematorium “sitch.” Found that Detective Henry had also been involved in that investigation.
Slidell had also listened to his gut.
Feeling more and more vindicated in his distrust of “the newbie,” Skinny had called the LAPD and received essentially the same report that I’d gotten from Mickey. Henry had made detective due to nepotism, was unstable and had been forced to leave the job.
Slidell got the speed dial call from my pocketed phone as he was researching Henry’s home address. Though he couldn’t make out “a goddam word” being said, he ordered a check on the annex, then secured backup and raced to Shagbark Court.
A uniformed cop approached me. Fortner.
“I understand you need transport to Atrium Health Pineville?”
“I do.”
I rose, shakily, and followed Fortner to his patrol car, again thanking that pantheon of unknown deities.
And Slidell, who’d said my statement could wait.
There was only one question that needed answering at that moment.
How was my daughter?