Don't Be Afraid (33 page)

Blood coated Emma, but Amy scooped her up against her body, muffling her daughter’s screaming against her chest, holding her shaking body as tightly as she could, but she couldn’t undo what had happened.

“Oh my God,” Dorothy Busby kept saying, the closest she came to cursing, literally wringing her hands. “I don’t know what to do—oh my God. Riley! Oh my God! We should call the police.” She turned toward the house but Amy grabbed her arm.

“No!” she said. “We can’t go in the house!”

Which was how they ended up standing in neighbor Shirley Montague’s kitchen while she hurriedly made coffee and tried to comfort Emma with offers of cookies, candy, cake, soda.

Emma shook her head to refuse each offer, but didn’t speak. She’d submitted to Amy’s handwashing, so at least the fingers stuck in her mouth were clean. Riley’s blood coated the rest of her.

Amy and her mother watched from the kitchen window as five squad cars came speeding up the quiet cul-de-sac and screeched to a halt in front of the Busby home. Cops leapt out with guns drawn. Two officers waited behind the squad cars with guns drawn on the house.

Ten minutes slowly passed. Finally, one cop came out the front door and ambled down the steps to the street. Clearly, he didn’t have anything substantial to report, and after a few minutes of conferring with a policewoman, she in turn strolled toward the Montagues’.

“Whoever did it isn’t here now,” the officer said, refusing the offer of a seat and a cup of coffee from Shirley Montague. Instead she ushered Amy and her mother outside, away from Emma.

“It doesn’t look as if anyone entered the house,” she said, addressing Dorothy Busby. “There are no signs of forced entry.”

“There never are,” Amy said.

The officer gave her a strange look. “Do you know who did this, Miss—?”

“Moran. Amy Moran. I’m her daughter.”

The officer jotted this down. Amy tried to explain, succinctly, what she thought had happened. What the finger meant. Why she was staying at her mother’s instead of Steerforth.

At one point the officer interrupted her to unclip the radio on her belt and relay some of this information to someone else.

A cold calm anger had taken hold of Amy. He had followed her. He knew where she was and he’d come after her. He was toying with her, hurting those close to her. She thought by leaving Steerforth that she would be safe, but she saw now that she’d been wrong.

“We can go stay with Michael,” Dorothy said. “There’s plenty of room since they put on that addition. We’ll be safe there.”

Amy shook her head. “I’m going back to Steerforth.”

“What are you talking about?” Her mother looked at Amy as if she’d lost her mind. “You’ll be safe at Michael’s.”

“I won’t be safe anywhere. You take Emma, but I’m going back.”

A loud wail startled them. Emma had come out of the house behind them. “No!” she cried. “Don’t leave me, Mommy!”

“I’m not leaving you, sweetie. You’re going to go visit your cousins. Wouldn’t you like that?”

“Are you coming?”

“Not right now. You’ll go with Nana.”

“No! I want you, Mommy!”

Her breaths were shorter, wheezier and Amy saw the signs in the circles around her eyes and the bluish tint to her lips.

“She needs her inhaler,” she said and sprinted across the street past the officers and into the house. Her purse, where in the hell was her purse? On a chair in the hall. She grabbed it and flew back outside.

“Here, Em, here.” She scrabbled through the purse until her hand closed on the inhaler. She shook it and held it up to her daughter’s mouth. “Here, sweetie, here.”

Emma sucked in the medicine. Amy did it again. Emma’s skin was pale, but her breathing seemed a little less ragged.

“Don’t leave me, Mommy! Please don’t leave me.” Tears ran down her cheeks mixing with Riley’s blood. It came away on Amy’s hands as she gently wiped her daughter’s eyes.

Why had he killed Riley? Wasn’t it enough to send her that package? Riley wasn’t a threat to anyone, if he barked at all it was in friendly greeting and he’d been chained. Why did he have to kill Emma’s favorite pet?

With a sudden, horrible clarity, Amy understood. Her hands stopped moving comfortingly over Emma’s cheeks and she enveloped her daughter in a fierce embrace.

“Amy? What is it?” Dorothy said.

“I’m taking Emma with me,” she said. “I can’t leave her.”

“That’s ridiculous,” her mother said. “Emma will be much safer at Michael’s and you know it. So would you, but you’re too stubborn to realize it.”

Amy shook her head. “He’s found us here. He’ll find us wherever we go. I’m not running anymore. I’m going to catch this son-of-a-bitch.”

“Oh, Amy,” her mother said with disappointment and for a second Amy thought it was because she’d done something so unladylike and actually cursed. But then tears slipped down Dorothy Busby’s face and she reached for her daughter, clutching her the way that Amy had clutched Emma, and Amy realized that her mother was frightened for her safety.

 

 

While her mother talked with the police, Amy dragged out the suitcase she’d packed barely three days ago. There was no one else on the second floor when she went into her mother’s room and took down the silver lock box from the closet.

She took the gun still wrapped in the towel and tucked it in her purse. With it safely hidden, she relocked the box and put it back on the shelf.

They made it back to Steerforth in record time, Emma singing along to a Wiggles CD and Amy thinking, hard, about what she was going to do once they got to town.

It was dusk when they drove down Main Street, the streetlights going on just ahead of them, giving the effect that they were bringing light back into town.

“I’m tired, Mommy. I wanna go home.”

She knew she couldn’t risk taking Emma back to the house, not even with police protection and she’d already made arrangements.

“We’re going to see Chloe, sweetie, remember?”

Chloe was standing at the front window and waved energetically before running out of the seedy duplex to greet them.

“Hi, Em’n’m,” she greeted Emma, using a nickname that usually made the little girl giggle. This time Emma could barely manage a smile.

“She’s really tired,” Amy apologized, hauling out Emma’s blanket and the bag filled with inhalers, nebulizer and emergency information.

“Well, I’ve got my bed all set up for her.” Chloe led the way back into the home she shared with two other college girls. The living room was full of the greasy cheese smell of the half-eaten pizza open on the trunk that served as a coffee table. A chunky girl whose name Amy never remembered was sitting at a desk, plugged into a laptop and an iPod. She acknowledged them with a wave and a smile and went back to whatever she was typing.

“Madison’s out with her boyfriend,” Chloe said, flipping the box lid closed. “So it’s just me and Whitney.”

She led the way down the hall to her bedroom, a small space that Chloe had done her best to spruce up. A double bed complete with an Indian cotton bedspread took up most of the room and she’d hung little lights along the window frame, which distracted from the fact that it looked out at a brick wall.

Amy put Emma carefully down on the bed and watched her daughter curl up with her doll and blanket. “I hope she just sleeps for you,” Amy said. “I’m not sure when I’ll be back, but with any luck it won’t be more than a few hours.”

Chloe nodded her head earnestly. It was one of the reasons that Amy liked her, that wholesome sincerity. They walked out of the bedroom and Chloe pulled the door mostly shut. “Good luck and be careful,” she said in a low voice. Amy handed over the bag of equipment.

“You too,” she said. “I hope it goes smoothly and you don’t have a cranky little girl on your hands.”

They both laughed, but Amy felt a pang of anxiety as she stepped back out of the house. “You’ve got my cell number, right?” she called to Chloe, who stood on the porch under the warm glow of a porch light. The young woman nodded and waved.

Amy drove straight from Chloe’s to the police station. She knew what she was going to do. It was what she should have convinced them to do long ago.

The grizzled-looking sergeant’s eyes widened at the sight of her, but he was on the phone. “Uh-huh,” he said, “yes, ma’am, it does sound like someone should come out and look. I’ll send a car.” He held up one meaty finger to indicate he’d just be a minute, balancing the phone on his ear so he could scribble something onto a pad. “You bet,” he said. “No problem.”

He hung up and stood up. “Is everything okay, Mrs. Moran?” Too late Amy remembered the bloodstains on her clothing. “What happened?” he said, “Are you hurt?”

“It’s not my blood,” Amy said quickly. “I’m fine. I really need to see Detective Juarez.”

But the sergeant shook his head. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Moran, but he’s not in.”

“But I called about an hour ago. I left a message that I was coming. He’s not here?”

“No, ma’am, he’s not. He probably didn’t get that message because he left a couple of hours ago. Some investigative work out of town. I don’t know when he’s getting back.”

“Out of town? Where?”

The sergeant hesitated, but then seemed to decide there was no harm in giving her the information. “He’s gone to New Jersey.”

“Why? Has he found something out? Does he have a suspect?”

“Look, I don’t think I can tell you anything.”

“This is my life at stake!” Amy cried. His eyes widened and she took a deep breath, trying to calm down. “Look, the killer found us.” She explained about the blood coating Emma. She explained about the package.

He listened intently, shuddering when she described the finger, and then he asked her to have a seat while he made some calls.

She sank down on the bench and closed her eyes, trying to relax. Fifteen minutes later the sergeant beckoned to her.

“Our detectives talked to the officers who responded to your mother’s house,” he said. “Detective Juarez has been alerted and he’ll be back ASAP. He left something for you.”

He handed over an envelope. She ripped it open. Inside was a single sheet of paper with a few words scribbled on it.

For a second she thought there’d been some mistake, that she misunderstood what he meant. She looked up at the sergeant and back down at the paper.

“Does it make sense?” he said.

“No,” she said, shaking her head. She looked at the words again, struggling to accept it: “Need to confirm with witness, but it looks like Ryan Grogan.”

 

 

Patty Bulowski’s street seemed just as dismal the second time around, but Mark was expecting an easier reception. He saw that the dog dish had been cleared of leaves and some actual food had been left in it. Otherwise, things seemed pretty much the same, all the way down to the recorded barking that played as soon as he rang the doorbell.

He whistled as he waited for her to answer, feeling confident for the first time that he was finally, finally going to nail this bastard. Steerforth Hospital had been fairly cooperative, allowing him to take a couple of pictures he found on the bulletin board in the lounge. He didn’t know what they’d say to Ryan Grogan if he noticed them missing, but by the time that happened he’d be coming back to get him with an arrest warrant.

He rang the doorbell again and the barking continued. He’d left his gun and holster hidden under the passenger seat of the car, anticipating having to endure Patty Bulowski’s pat-down. Finally the barking stopped and the door opened, the security chain still in place.

“I already talked to you!” she said through the crack. He could see her eyes above the chain nervously scanning the walkway. “I don’t have anything more to tell you.”

“I have some pictures for you to look at.”

“No.”

“Don’t you want to get this guy off the streets?”

“That’s your job, not mine.”

The door slammed. He rang the bell again and when that didn’t bring a response he laid on the buzzer with his thumb and waited.

“Go away!”

“This guy has killed again and this time he killed a cop, too. I’m not leaving, Ms. Bulowski. I can’t. You’re the only person left alive who’s seen this guy. I know you don’t want another woman to suffer what you’ve suffered. Please, Ms. Bulowski. It will only take a minute.”

The door swung open fully and there she stood, this time wearing faded jeans that made her legs look like sticks and an enormous white sweatshirt with Niagara Falls splashed in blue across the front.

She wouldn’t let him in this time, but she held out her hands for the prints. “Let me see.”

He hurriedly opened the manila envelope and pulled out the pictures. He’d enlarged the small color photos, which seemed to have affected the skin tone of the white people in the photo, who now looked like they all had sunburns, but their features were still visible.

Patty Bulowski looked carefully at the first photo of Ryan and the paramedic crew while Mark looked carefully at her. There was no sign of recognition, though she scanned the faces of the paramedic crew slowly.

She handed it back to Mark and shook her head. He managed to hold back the curse, but he felt anxious. The trouble he’d taken to get the photos enlarged and then to drive all the way up here—what if it was for nothing?

He handed her the second photo, bracing himself for the same lack of reaction. This photo was in better focus at least. Ryan Grogan and his partner stood grinning in front of the hospital. Patty Bulowski took one look and gasped. She thrust the picture back at Mark.

“Is he in this photo, Ms. Bulowski? Do you see him?”

She nodded, one hand clenched to her mouth, the other wrapped tightly around her waist.

“Just point to him,” he said, holding the photo for her. Her hand shook as she extended it and tapped the photo once.