A Bat in the Belfry (31 page)

“Look, just let me make my call first, okay?” Confident that sooner or later they would release him, he hadn’t called a lawyer himself, which he now realized was a huge mistake.

“Absolutely. You want to make a call, that will of course be arranged. Phones are out right now on account of the storm, but as soon as they’re up, you can use one, no problem.”

Osbourne held the handcuffs ready. Chip stared at them as if they were a pair of poisonous snakes, poised to wrap themselves around his pulse points. “But …”

The detective leaned over the table, snapped the cuffs onto Chip’s wrists. “Come on, son. There’s no way around this, okay? And anyway, it’s just a hearing we’re headed to now. Just a prelim for the judge to say where you’re going next, is all.”

Osbourne’s voice, Chip noted dully, had changed subtly. It had been kind, even confidence-inspiring, before. A guy like Chip, it had said, could depend on Osbourne not to screw him over.

But now it had lost its veneer of friendliness. “Get up, bud,” said Osbourne. “I’m not going to ask you again.”

Chip met Osbourne’s gaze, which had been bright with feigned personal interest and now did not give a damn as long as the prisoner did what Osbourne said he should do, went where Osbourne told him to go, and didn’t get anything on Osbourne’s good suit in the process.

“Can I just ask you something, though?” Chip paused halfway to the door. “Why are you all so sure I killed that girl?”

Osbourne looked down at the small yellow steno pad he’d been taking notes in throughout Chip’s interrogation. He flipped back several pages until he found his place.

“Let’s see, now. ‘Girls Dying Badly,’ ” he recited. “ ‘Stab City.’ ‘Underage Screamers.’ Oh, and here’s a good one. You can upload your own videos. It’s called ‘Slice Her and Dice Her.’ ”

He looked up. “Thirty-seven homemade videos on this site, of real girls being killed. Including one from you.”

Osbourne snapped the notebook shut. “Does that answer your question?” He ticked off on his fingers: “Access to the weapon, a sick Internet habit, no alibi …”

Stricken, Chip let his head fall forward. It was the price of being admitted to that disgusting secret chat room, that you had to upload a violent video of your own or the guys wouldn’t trust you, they’d think you were a cop trying to bust them.

Which in a way Chip was; he’d pirated his video from another website, of course, but good luck getting anyone here to believe that. He doubted they’d be any swifter at corroborating his claim that he’d told the Wisconsin authorities about the sites, either.

Hey, there were a zillion nutballs in the world, and for all they knew, he was just another one of them. He moved obediently to the door of the small, bare room.

“Good man,” Osbourne said approvingly. “Now, before we go out, there’s one thing I need to caution you about.”

Chip balked in the doorway but Osbourne gripped his arm and hustled him on through toward an open stairwell at the end of the cellar corridor.

“There’s people up there,” said Osbourne. “Word’s gotten out that you’re here, see. Reporters, curious citizens …”

Angry citizens, Osbourne didn’t have to add. Chip could hear raised voices and clomping footsteps from upstairs.

“But they’re all at the rear of the building, in front of the courtroom you’re scheduled to be in. So they won’t see …”

“What?” They started up the steps, paused to let a deputy hurry past them on his way down, and began climbing again.

The cuffs were already beginning to hurt, and Chip was starting to wish he’d drunk more of that last soda Osbourne had offered him, too. Then he’d need to visit the bathroom again, and could put off whatever was coming for a little longer.

“What do you need to caution me about?” he persisted as they reached the first stairway landing. A plump, gray-haired lady in a skirted suit, pleasantly grandmotherly-looking, began a smile as she approached them, then realized who Chip must be.

“Hsst.”
She aimed the sound at him on her way by, as if shooing away an animal. Chip felt wounded at this, then realized:

This was his life now. Like an animal’s, yes; one who had already torn someone apart. Osbourne gripped his elbow.

“The people are all gathered in front of the rear courtroom where they think you’ll be,” Osbourne repeated. They paused by a barred, electronically locked door. You needed a card to put into the card slot to get outside the building.

Osbourne peered through the small square of wire-reinforced glass in the door. “We’re going to wait for a couple deputies,” he informed Chip. “Otherwise we’d have to go the rest of the way up this stairwell, and right out into the crowd.”

He glanced at his watch. “Any minute now,” he told Chip, as if they were waiting for a taxi to go somewhere pleasant.

Somewhere without handcuffs. “We’re going to fool the folks up there,” said Osbourne, seeming pleased at the cleverness of the subterfuge the authorities had come up with.

“Take you in through the front door, zip you right into a different courtroom from the one where they’re expecting to see you. Soon as the deputy gets here.”

Osbourne glanced at his watch again, a big round Timex with a brushed-aluminum body and leather band.

“But to do that,” he added, “we’ll have to bend the routine a little.” He looked up at Chip, his dark brown face now devoid of any personal feeling whatsoever.

“Because to go around and get in through the front door of the building,” he finished grimly, “we’ll need to take you outside.”

•  •  •

H
e could have made it all better eventually, Hank thought again. He could have gotten his daughter’s love back, made them a real home. Somehow, someday …

Which particular day it would’ve been didn’t even matter now. Because instead, the man they were holding in the courthouse for Karen’s murder had taken them all.

Hank didn’t know why. But he knew the phrase “an eye for an eye,” all right. And he meant to put that phrase into practice.

Soon. As soon as they brought him out, Hank meant to get off his shot. Or ideally, two: one in the head, one in the chest.

After that, he’d be arrested, possibly even shot to death by the police, depending on how trigger-happy those state boys turned out to be. Either way, though, it was a cinch he wouldn’t be driving the car home tonight. So he ran the engine, burning up gas, kept the heat on while he sat there, watching and waiting.

His butt was sore, and his legs felt cramped. But the ache in his chest was the worst part. Hank wondered if, after he blew the head off of the son of a bitch who’d slit his little girl’s throat as if she were a meat animal, the ache would go away.

Or if maybe it never would. But that didn’t matter, either. What mattered was that Hank had a clear view of the courthouse steps, and of the sidewalk leading up to them, and that sooner or later they would have to bring the son of a bitch out.

Transport him to prison, where he would get three hots and a cot, plenty of free TV, any medical care he needed. A tight grin stretched Hank’s lips, which were beginning to bleed from the constant, nervous way he kept licking at them.

Yeah
, he thought,
life of Riley for the girl-murderer, huh?

Not
.

  
12

“Y
ou had snapshots of her in your apartment, remember? Back when we were still seeing each other. Sissy had sent you pictures of her and the baby.”

Dylan spoke in a monotone. The pain of his broken collarbone was getting to him, it seemed, his hair damp with perspiration and his face pale.

But what must’ve been even worse, Lizzie thought, was feeling all his plans crashing down all around him; plans that had included her whether she agreed to them or not, or even knew about them.

“After you told me your sister’s little girl had gone missing, that you’d tried once to find her and couldn’t, I took a couple of those pictures off your desk. You had a bunch, I figured you might not miss them.”

This had been long after Sissy died, she realized, and she hadn’t missed the photographs. Back when she was alive, Sissy had sent dozens, many of them near-duplicates. One or two gone hadn’t even been noticeable.

They sat in her car in the parking lot of the Motel East. A huge wall of clouds from the south advanced slowly across the sky while he went on talking.

“I wanted to find the kid for you,” Dylan said. “Produce her for you, grant your wish. You know? Be a hero.” He made a face at himself.

“So I had a bunch of copies made of the pictures,” he went on, “sent them around to people I knew. Organizations for missing children, cops in other states, figuring maybe a lead would turn up.”

But none ever did. And—“That doesn’t explain where
these
came from.” She tapped the photographs of a smiling nine-year-old with an impatient index finger.

“Age-advanced,” he explained. “Digitalized to show how a little kid like your sister’s toddler would appear as an older child.”

So the pictures of the older girl weren’t even really Nicki, just a computer’s idea of her. Lizzie shook her head, watching a line of rain squalls march up the bay like a heavy gray curtain.

“So you just wanted to get me here. Is that it? Nothing had changed, no new evidence about Nicki. It was all just about what you wanted.”

He half-turned toward her in appeal. She twitched the gun she held. “If you touch me, I swear to God I will kill you. You lured me here, you
faked
all this to—”

He drew back, his face bluish-gray in the fading daylight. “That’s how it began. But Lizzie … the photographs are real. I mean, I used Nicki’s real toddler snapshots to get them made. A guy at the missing-kids organization owed me a favor, so …”

Yeah, and God forbid Dylan should leave a debt uncollected. “Why, you got lonesome? So instead of finding a new woman, one you’d have to spend time and money getting to know, you figured you’d just yank the string on the one you already knew was a sucker for your nonsense?”

“You still don’t get it. I know that I screwed up, okay? And I’m sorry, it was stupid, I shouldn’t have done it. But the pictures are good, they’re what Nicki
would actually look like
at that age. I’ve sent them all over the state multiple times. I kept at it. To make it up to you, or try.”

He paused. “And the reason I had to get you here one way or another now,” he added, “is that I finally got a nibble.”

She stared while a heavy rumble of thunder shook the car and he kept talking. “Town up in Aroostook County, way up in the northern part of the state. Allagash, the town is called.”

She lowered the gun, put the safety on. “Someone thinks they’ve seen her,” he said. But then his shoulders sagged. “Probably not, you know, though. It’s probably some other kid.”

“Why here, then? Why Eastport, and why didn’t you just call me? Let me decide whether or not to—”

But she knew the answer to that last one, at least. Even if he had called, she’d have hung up on him, deleted his email without reading it, or in the unlikely event she had heard him out, she’d have thought it was a trick.

An empty lure he was dangling, to get her where he could work on her. The most he could’ve hoped for was that she’d take his flimsy lead on where Nicki might be, and follow it herself.

But this way—a supposedly accidental meeting, an imaginary plot by some shadowy third person, targeting them both—this way he had a chance of getting close to Lizzie again.

Or so he’d thought. He turned toward her once more. “This was more believable, Eastport. The last place Sissy lived … I figured you could go on from here, I’d get you up to Allagash somehow once you were in Maine.”

His face turned rueful. “But I’m sorry,” he repeated. “You were doing just fine without me. I should’ve had somebody else get in touch with you, tell you what I’d found. I should’ve left you alone.”

Doing just fine …
She had been, actually. Sort of: work, the gym, the Friday night fish dinner with Liam’s family, with the series of nice Catholic guys they kept inviting to sit next to her in the dining room where Liam’s medals and commendations were still ranged out on the mantel like a saint’s relics.