Daddy's Little Killer (41 page)

"Do you really think they had no reason to
suspect him?"  Orion continued his interrogation, unaware of
the reconsideration silently churning in my brain.

"I don't know.  Maybe."

"What kind of answer is that? 
Maybe."

I pointed to a room behind French
doors.  "We don't have time for this discussion right now,
Orion.  We should split up.  I'm going in there."

"No way.  I've spent the last fifteen
years trying to solve this case," he said.  "We search the
room together."

Nestled underneath Lowe's desk we found the
safe.  I pulled the keys out and slipped them into the
locks.  "Dammit."

"Switch them around," Orion said.  "If
they still don't open it, we'll take the safe with us and do a body
cavity search if we have to.  Lowe took those keys out of
evidence Doc.  You know it as well as I do.  Flynn Myre
blabbed what he knew about CSD finding the keys."

I suspected as much too, but Myre's unusual
movements clicked in my head; it was tardive dyskinesia, often
caused by antipsychotic medication. It reminded me of something
Dennis Bennett said.  Schizophrenia had a genetic
component.  What if he had been talking about Myre all
along?  Why hadn't I flat out asked him for the name of the
person he and his brother caused so much torment?

Because I already thought I knew.  I
believed that Jerry Lowe was a liar.

Lowe blamed the problems at central on the
police union being atypical and standing in the way of his ability
to weed out the bad officers.  Had that been a lie?

"Doc?"

"What do you know about the department's
union, Johnny?"

"It's your average run of the mill service
to police officers.  Why?"

"It hasn't changed since your days as a
Darkwater Bay cop?"

"I seriously doubt it.  Again,
why?"

"Something Jerry Lowe said to me at lunch
the other day.  He blamed the union for the lack of effective
police work, said they make it impossible to discipline or
terminate substandard employees."

"I can tell you that's bullshit, Doc. 
If that were the truth, don't you think Crevan and Tony would've
said something to me about it?"

"They know what you're doing."

"Of course they do.  There are a select
few who are aware.  Now are you gonna open this safe, or do I
really have to lug it out of here?"

I flipped the keys around.  This time,
the handle on the safe moved when I twisted it.  "Moment of
truth."

"Uh huh."

The paper evidence in the safe was
scant.  A deed to a property in the mountains and a rental
agreement for a storage garage in Fielding. 

"Any bets on what we'll find in there?"
Orion muttered.

My focus was fixed on the
remaining contents of the safe.  Hundreds of blood vials with
rubber stoppers in the ends, all lavender, were arranged in
trays. 
Of course!
  "I'm so stupid," I said softly.  "He didn't have
to steal evidence from the autopsy to frame Salvatore
Masconi.  He used one of his trophy vials to do the
job."

"What?"  Orion squatted down beside
me.  "Jesus!  Is that what it looks like?"

I pulled out vials from the top front rack
of blood samples.  Names and dates were written on the
labels.  The last two were Blevins, C. and Eriksson, H. 
"He really planned to kill me."

"Helen –"

"I'm all right."

"I'm sorry," Orion said.  "Let's pack
this into evidence bags.  We can start sorting through it
later."

"There are hundreds of vials, Johnny."

"Yeah, and more than one from you. 
Let's not jump to astronomical numbers based on this alone. 
We need to get to that storage garage and see if we can find his
mobile crime scene."

"He's going to try to claim insanity for his
defense when we arrest him."

"I don't doubt it.  Good thing we've
got you to testify as an expert in this case.  He won't get
away with what he's done.  We won't let him."

The problem with Orion's
suggestion was that I knew the truth.  Not only would I not
let Jerry Lowe get away with what he'd done, I
couldn't
let him get away with
it.  Recent history proved my response to the guilty slipping
through the cracks in the criminal justice system.

"We need to search the rest of his home
office," I said.  "This is all well and good, but it doesn't
help Hardy and Weber with their little problem.  I'd like to
know if Lowe is behind the blackmail too."

"You look.  I'll keep bagging
evidence."

I tore the room apart and found nothing on
Weber and Hardy.  There were files on the detectives at
central, the men Lowe handpicked to serve his purposes.  Matt
Rogers was divorced due to gambling and alcohol addictions. 
Lowe documented every penny he used to help keep Rogers from
drowning in debt.  Flynn Myre's history of mental illness
should've prevented him from being hired by the police department
in any law enforcement capacity.  Delusional disorder, not
otherwise specified. As I suspected, Myre had been on antipsychotic
medications since his early twenties. And the fixed delusion? Well,
apparently there was no Mrs. Flynn Myre. Jim Daltry's file
indicated nothing that could've been used as blackmail. 
Instead, it had a notation on the resume that highlighted Daltry's
occupation in college.  He worked construction and had been
responsible for explosive demolition.

I tossed the file on the desk.  "I
guess this explains who was responsible for my house and the rental
car."

Orion scanned the page.  "Those sons of
bitches.  Did you find anything about Hardy and Weber?"

"No."

"Just because you haven't found anything
doesn't mean we won't find it eventually.  We'll be going
through this place for days, I imagine.  We've got enough to
arrest Lowe with the contents of the safe.  I'll call Darnell
and have him sequester Myre, Daltry and Lowe.  We'll tell them
something innocuous."

"They could have information about what I
was working on before my untimely demise," I suggested.  "That
way there won't be any red flags before we show up."

"I suspect they're getting antsy because
Rogers hasn't shown up yet."

I shrugged.  "So tell them he's
assisting with the investigation in Beach Cliffs."

Orion grinned at me.  "This lying thing
comes naturally to you, doesn't it, Doc?"

He meant it as a compliment.  Instead,
it pushed me into self reflection mode.  We are, after all,
the products of both nature and nurture.  Had mine left me
predestined to be the flip side of a Jerry Lowe type coin?  I
remembered feeling hopeful that he might be a kindred spirit,
someone who thought and behaved and acted like me.  Someone
who bent the rules of law and society to serve the greater
good.

The reality of his existence defied my
notion of a greater good.  What purpose had his crimes
served?  Who benefited from the slaughter of innocent young
girls?  Was rejection or personal pain justification for
anything?

My thoughts drifted back to Rick, consuming
everything.  I didn't know how I got to Orion's car or where
he was driving.  All I could think about was Rick's
crime.  And Dad's words.

It cannot be personal,
Sprout.  When someone wrongs you, you cannot react to
it.  They'll eventually get what they've got coming to them
without a nudge from you.
 

The advice had come after I punched Timmy
Horton in the nose as hard as I could because he wouldn't stop
calling me a scarecrow.  I was nine years old.  And while
my act of aggression had done little more than humiliate Timmy, my
father was determined to nip that urge in the bud before it grew
too violent.

As with all of his advice, the older I got,
the more sense it made.  In light of his crimes, the tidbits
of wisdom became a treasure trove of how-to tips to avoid Dad's
pitfalls.

I broke the rule.  I snapped.  I
let anger override my common sense.  I couldn't deal with the
pain that Rick's double life caused.  It wasn't because I
loved him.  I'm not even sure I know what love feels
like.  But Rick's stupidity turned my comfortable life inside
out.  It dredged up questions about my character, and frankly,
I didn't want people remembering the gene pool from whence I
came.

He had to die.

It should've never happened the way it
had.  In retrospect, I couldn't ignore the sense I got that
night that Rick goaded me into pulling the trigger.

"
Do you think your hands are clean in this, Helen? 
They're not.  I might've let you walk away from the marriage
without a fuss, but it won't save you when this case goes to court
and the world learns everything."

"What do you mean, when they learn
everything?  I had no idea what you were doing, and there
isn't a shred of legitimate evidence to the contrary."

"Except our wedding."

I hated him.  It boiled in my veins
every time I thought of how it all turned out in the end.  All
those years of playing dutiful wife, believing that my husband
loved me and wanted to be with me, his objection to my career as a
criminal profiler for the FBI on the grounds of my personal
safety.  It had all been a ruse.

Unbelievable.  I had
been taken in my own trap, beaten at my own game.  Rick used
me.  He never loved me.  I was an assignment, an
insurance policy in case the inevitable ever happened.  What
sort of jury could overlook the fact that
this
criminal was married to an FBI
agent?  Either I was dirty too, or the FBI looked horrible for
not vetting its agents better.  And if that can of worms
opened, Rick made sure I understood that the rest would be exposed
too.

Not just Wendell, my beloved father rotting
away in prison after my mother tried to kill him.  No, there
was another branch on the family tree now, one by marriage, but
more damaging than I had ever conceived.

"You met him at our
wedding, Helen.  Remember?  I said – this is my cousin
Dan.  You said – pleased to meet you Dan.  Where are you
from?
"

Darkwater Bay.  Uncle Sully was
Datello's tie to organized crime.  Cousin Danny was
Rick's.  And I looked like the world's biggest idiot.

While he taunted me for ignorant complicity,
the grip on the gun I held behind his ear increased until suddenly,
my arm jerked.  Rick slumped face forward in the dirt. 
Yes, I had taken him down that dirt trail with every intention of
killing him.  I just figured I'd be present for the moment
when it happened.

I stood over the lifeless corpse, his blood
soaking the ground like oil staining a thirsty sponge.  My
eyes memorized the trees, the way the leaves fluttered in the
gentle night breeze.  Up higher, they recorded the
constellations in the sky, the shape of the clouds that drifted
over the moon and obscured it.  Ears echoed with the protests
of birds when a crack in the night disturbed their sanctuary. 
And those same dancing leaves whispered a cacophony of support.

He had it coming, Helen.  Go home and
be grateful that this is over, once and for all.

The irony was that even though there would
be no Perry Mason moment in a court of law that would dredge up my
past, expose my ignorance or cast doubt on my character, the damage
would never be undone.  As a matter of course, I became a
suspect anyway.  My life was still over, a life that comforted
me for many reasons, the most of which was the proximity to my
father and the knowledge that one day, I could conceivably speak to
him again if only in an official capacity. 

Rick Hamilton ruined my life, so I had taken
his.

Was I an incarnation of Jerry Lowe, with my
agenda to silence Danny Datello the same way I had closed the door
on my ex-husband?  I didn't know the answer anymore.  For
the first time in my life, I felt unsure of what I was
doing. 

The only thing I knew without doubt was that
I did not want to end up like Dad.  And even more, I didn't
want to evolve into a monster like Jerry Lowe. Part of me feared it
was already too late.

Chapter 39

A gentle shake pulled me away from my
distant reflection.  A little bit.  I was aware that I
was moving.  Standing now.  Someone was saying my
name.

"Helen?  Helen, talk to me. 
What's wrong?"

Yes, I really was in Darkwater Bay.  I
had already put a plan into motion.  Sincerity slammed into me
in the form of Orion's concerned expression.  Johnny. 
For some reason, I seem to be naturally drawn to the wrong
people.  Rick Hamilton.  Jerry Lowe.  And all around
me are genuinely good guys who are all but invisible.  David
Levine.  Charlie Haverston.  Even Chris Darnell turned
out to be one of the trustworthy, and I despised him.

One good guy made his way
through my perception filter and stirred something deep inside
me.  He stood in front of me wearing every emotion he felt
like a badge of honor.  My fingers moved of their own
volition, stroked the side of his face tenderly. 
"Johnny."  So much he didn't know,
couldn't
possibly know.  If he
did, the emotion in his guileless eyes would most certainly
die.  I didn't want that.  Inexplicably, it mattered to
me what these people, Johnny specifically, thought of
me.

Could I reinvent myself at this late stage
in life?  Could I be a better person, find the honor that
Wendell hadn't really instilled in me?  Was that what I
wanted?

"Helen."  His chest heaved with a
gulping breath.  "Let's get through this case first."

"I don't know if I can."  How could I
separate who I had become from the evil deeds of Jerry Lowe? 
How could I sit in judgment on him and try to trick him into
confessing his crimes when I was as guilty as he was?