Obsessed (The Lizzy Gardner Series) (27 page)

CHAPTER 65

Hayley stopped the car and turned off the engine and the headlights. It had been a long day. She looked at Tommy. “You don’t have to do this.”

“Funny,” he said. “I was going to tell you the same thing.”

“But I do have to do this and you know it.”

“If we call the police, they’ll put him behind bars.”

“For how long? Criminals are being let out of jails across the country as we speak. You don’t need to come with me, Tommy. Take the fucking car and go. I never asked for your help. And just so we’re square and you know where my head’s at—there will be no parole for Brian Rosie.”

“You’re going to be judge, jury, and executioner, is that it?”

“Yes, that’s right. That’s how it’s going down.”

Hayley climbed out of the car. A sharp intake of breath was followed by goose bumps. The air was crisp, filled with the scent of pine. They were in Placerville, in the Sierra Nevada foothills. The car was well hidden within a thicket of underwood and small trees.

She sucked in a lungful of fresh air. Tonight was the night . . . a long time in coming.

She opened the trunk and began to strap on her load-bearing suspenders. The harness had a magazine pouch on one side and a holster on the other. After adjustments were made, she slipped on a lightweight chest rig with three front pouches and began the process of loading up on ammunition.

She didn’t know if she would live to see another day, but her mind was set on what needed to be done. She was focused. She’d been waiting for this day for a very long time. Although she had hoped Wolf would show up, since they could use some help, it would be too risky to hold off for another twenty-four hours. Brian could find another hideout by then.

Tommy climbed out and began strapping knives to his legs. After outfitting himself with a lightweight bulletproof vest, he clamped a nightstick to his waistband.

They both had gloves, footwear, and headgear—all lightweight, all black. They each had a Taser holster connected to a detachable belt loop.

“This isn’t about revenge,” Hayley said, breaking the silence as she worked. “I’m not trying to change the past.”

He said nothing, just kept putting on gear.

“This isn’t about restoring dignity and pride,” she went on as she filled a front pouch.

Tommy had spent time earlier preparing his gear. He was ready to go. He shut the car door, then made his way around to where she stood. “Who are you trying to convince?”

She yanked her straps tight.

“You can stop with the self-righteous bullshit,” he told her. “It doesn’t become you.”

She grunted.

“I’m not going in there for you,” he said. “I’m doing this for me, OK?”

“OK,” she said. She shut the door. “Let’s do this.”

But he was already three feet ahead, blending into the night.

CHAPTER 66

Kitally wanted to shout out to Lizzy, but if Lizzy was in a safe hiding place, it wouldn’t do any good to alert whoever had her. She had no choice but to make some noise as she moved through the brush, using the machete to chop her way through branches and scrub brush. Her face was numb from the cold as she continued on. The snap of a branch when she paused alerted her to the fact that somebody was close by. She stayed frozen and listened.

Somebody was running.

Was it Lizzy?

Following the sounds of crunching leaves, Kitally broke through the dense scrub and into a clearing. As she ran, hoping she was going in the right direction, pain shot through her leg where she’d been kicked a few weeks ago. No wonder Jessica had quit working for Lizzy. Kitally liked excitement and adventure more than most, but this was ridiculous.

Again, the loud snap of a branch caused Kitally to stop and listen.

The footfalls and crunching of leaves sounded as if more than one person was running through the woods. What was going on?
Damn it, Lizzy, where are you?

She took off again, ran as fast as she could in the direction of the snapping twigs and crunching leaves. She ran so fast she didn’t see the dark shadow step out from behind a tree. She rammed into a solid chest. Her machete flew from her hands and she hit the ground hard enough to knock the air from her lungs.

Before she could get to her feet, a man hovered over her, a knife in his hand.

He lunged. She rolled to her right, stabbed the heel of her boot into his side.

He grunted, then pulled the knife from the dirt and came at her again. With gravity on her side, Kitally rolled down a muddied slope and then jumped to her feet and quickly scoured the grounds for her machete.

Knuckles cracked and popped—an eerie sound coming out of the dark forest. As if he had all the time in the world, he began to walk down the hill after her. About to take off again, she stopped when she heard Lizzy’s voice.

“Leave her alone, asshole!”

His knife was pointed straight ahead, the blade glimmering in the night. He didn’t bother turning around or even looking over his shoulder.

“Why did you kill all of those people?” Lizzy asked, her legs wobbling as she stumbled after the crazy man.

Lizzy was obviously trying to distract the man, but it wasn’t working. It was also easy to see that Lizzy had been drugged.

“Run! Get out of here,” Kitally shouted.

“You know the answer to your question,” the man answered Lizzy as he continued down the slope toward Kitally. “Madeline needed to be punished for betraying her listeners,” he said. “You can’t save her now.”

Kitally didn’t know what to do. She had nothing. Or did she? She pulled out her cell phone from her back pocket and pushed the alarm application. Sirens sounded.

He didn’t care, didn’t even flinch. As she watched, his face distorted into a mask of rage and then he flew at her.

Kitally had no time to run, but as she readied to strike, she saw Lizzy careen down the slope toward the man like a banshee from hell, leaping on his back like a lioness going for the kill, screaming as she clawed at his face.

He staggered but kept his feet and hacked at Lizzy’s left arm with his knife.

Kitally drove a high kick into his groin, crumpling him for an instant before he recovered enough to curse and twirl in circles, throwing Lizzy off his back and onto the ground.

Kitally kept on him. She threw an elbow into his ribs followed by a snap kick to his side. She didn’t let up: a kick to his leg, a slap to his face, lunge and punch, all while ducking and sidestepping his mad swipes with the knife.

Finally he threw himself at Kitally and took her to the ground with him.

Kitally raked her nails across his face and then twisted, ate dirt as she struggled to pull herself out from under his substantial weight. Her hand fell on a branch and she grabbed it and whirled and clubbed him on the head with it. He cried out as Kitally vaulted to her feet again, adrenaline soaring.

The man was back on his feet, too. Shit. This guy was making up in crazy whatever he lacked in fighting skills.

Swinging the branch back and forth before her, Kitally took a small step backward for every step he took forward. Behind the maniac, she saw Lizzy stagger to her feet, the machete clutched tightly in her right hand. Eyes wide, Kitally watched Lizzy take careful steps his way, then wind up and, using both arms now, stiff and strong, swing the machete in a perfect arc through the night air, slicing the man’s head off with one powerful, sweeping blow.

He didn’t crumple to the ground. Instead, his headless torso remained rigid, arms to his side as he toppled to the earth at Kitally’s feet.

The head rolled down the hill past her. She heard a continuous
thump, thump, thump
, like a ball bouncing off the soft layer of leaves and then harder ground before the head finally rolled to a stop somewhere in the dark.

Silence.

Kitally stood there for a moment, taking it all in. A light breeze hit her face, turning the perspiration to ice. She looked at Lizzy and said, “Holy shit. That was fucking awesome.”

Lizzy sank to the ground.

“Come on,” Kitally said, taking the machete out of Lizzy’s hands and leaving it on the ground so she could help her to her feet. “Let’s get out of here.”

CHAPTER 67

Detective Chase pulled up to the curb in front of Seth and Janelle Brown’s house. Neither of these people had records; they were upstanding citizens. They paid their taxes and didn’t break the law. Together, Seth and Janelle Brown had spent years organizing blood drives in their community.

And yet here he was. One call from Lizzy Gardner and her friends from the FBI were all over his ass to check out the home belonging to Seth Brown.

If he had his way, he would be at Lizzy Gardner’s home, going through her things, seeing what the nosy private eye might be hiding, what sort of illegal deeds she was performing in order to obtain information. Because there was no way she could have found the person responsible for all the recent disappearing acts.

More frustrating was the fact that evidence against Madeline Blair continued to grow. Yesterday he’d received a recording of a woman’s voice pleading with Madeline to stop, begging for her life to be spared. He’d passed the evidence on to Sergeant Hollister, but had yet to receive permission to play the tape for the families of Amber Olinger and Megan Vos to see if they recognized the voice.

Madeline Blair was toying with him, he was sure of it. And Lizzy Gardner was assisting her, helping her get away with murder.

He knocked on the front door. Waited. No answer.

He peered into the front window. Couch, lounge chair, coffee table, television. Nothing out of place. Nothing happening in there. He hitched up his pants that his wife had never gotten around to hemming for him. With a grunt, he headed to the side of the house. He reached over the side gate and unlatched the metal fastener before pushing the gate open. It creaked. He plugged his nose as he passed by two garbage canisters. The Browns must have had fish recently. Nothing beat the foul odor of dead fish.

He’d been told to be careful, that Seth Brown could be armed and dangerous, but he saw no reason to pull out his gun. He scraped the heel of his boot across the dying lawn in the backyard to get something sticky off his shoe. There was a small shed in the far corner of the backyard. He really didn’t understand why Jimmy had been so insistent about him checking the place out. Jimmy had said he’d do it himself if he was in the area. But he wasn’t, so that left Detective Chase to be gofer boy. He should have sent one of his rookies at the station. They loved this kind of shit.

He looked through the window on the side of the shed. There were shelves lined with old paint cans, maybe some paint thinner, gardening tools. Three bags of fertilizer were stacked on the ground next to a push mower. If it weren’t for the powerful smell, worse than the dead fish odor he’d already gotten a good whiff of, he would have left already. But that smell bothered him. He opened the door. The powerful stench forced him to take a step back. It smelled like excrement and rotted eggs.

Using a hand to cover his nose, he peeked his head inside and used his other hand to hold his Maglite and take a look around. There was a dead rat on the floor. That had to be the source of the smell. Ready to head back to his car, he spotted droplets of red paint on the floor. Still using his Maglite, he stepped inside the shed and followed the trail to a plastic bin. It took some muscle, but he popped the lid open, wanting to make his search official. Nobody would be able to say he hadn’t been thorough.

Not quite sure what he was seeing, he leaned in closer and moved his Maglite around until the beam of light fell squarely on a human mouth, open, as if frozen in terror. Confused, wondering if it was a Halloween mask, he moved the Maglite higher until the beam of light revealed a nose and two eyes—wide-open eyes—looking up at him, screaming for help.

Stumbling backward, unable to comprehend what he was seeing, he tripped over a rake and dropped his light. He knocked a paint can or two off a shelf before he was able to get out of the shed. He fell to his knees and lost his lunch right before his beeper sounded, one beep after another.
What the fuck was going on around here?

CHAPTER 68

Lizzy’s arm was wrapped up. She would need stitches later, but for now the tape and gauze would do the trick.

The woods were abuzz with a coroner’s van and police vehicles with their flickering strobe lights. Yellow police tape was being tied from tree to tree. A truck backed into the area, filling the woods with its high-pitched beeps before it finally came to a stop. A thin metal structure grew straight up out of the back of the truck until the metal bar forming its roof beam drew even with the trees. At the top of the structure were two massive floodlights that illuminated the area, giving eyes to dozens of technicians and uniformed officers.

Each technician was assigned a designated area. They didn’t waste any time getting to work. They knew the drill, each man working diligently to collect evidence in plastic containers and bags that would be taken to a secure place, where the evidence would be removed and allowed to air-dry before the moisture could cause any growth of microorganisms.

Farther back in the woods, crime-scene technicians wearing boots and overalls were preparing to dig up what looked like recently dug graves. Most of the action, though, was over the hill and beyond, where Seth Brown’s body lay among the dead leaves, his head somewhere north of that.

It was freezing. Kitally was huddled beneath a scratchy wool blanket while she and Lizzy waited for the detective on the site to finish questioning them. He kept getting called away, though, and they had both turned down his offer to sit inside the police vehicle.

“What are the chances of that machete being returned to its rightful owner?” Kitally asked Lizzy.

“It might take a while, but I’ll give your chances of being reunited at fifty-fifty.”

“Not bad odds.”

Lizzy had to force a smile, since she felt thoroughly conflicted by what had happened in the woods. Yes, she’d been justified in taking the life of a man who was trying to kill them, but she had never killed a man until tonight. She held up her hands. “No shakes. No quaking at the knees. My breathing is steady. Not normal.”

“I can’t imagine that killing someone would feel good,” Kitally said, being the perceptive young woman she was, “but don’t forget that the man drugged you and was trying to kill you. It was self-defense.”

They both grew quiet as they watched a body bag being carried over the hill toward one of the vans.

“I don’t know about you,” Kitally went on, “but I feel pretty good to be alive right now. I saw the look in that man’s eyes. I’ve never seen anything like it. He was possessed.”

After a few quiet moments between them, Lizzy asked, “How did you know to come?”

“I was bored. I had nothing better to do than track your whereabouts and that’s when I noticed you were headed in the opposite direction of where I told you to go. It didn’t make sense. When you didn’t answer your phone, I knew something was wrong.”

“You went with your gut,” Lizzy said.

“Exactly. I’ve always trusted my instincts.”

Lizzy wondered why it had taken her so long to give Kitally a chance. She was a remarkable young woman. As the detective approached them, someone called out, “Detective, we’ve got a body. Male.”

“What kind of shape is he in?”

“Bashed-in skull. Not a pretty sight.”

“Another one over here,” a different voice called out from behind a copse of trees. “Female. Victim was stabbed multiple times. The front of the skull has been crushed.”

Lizzy knew they might find two more bodies before the night was up, maybe more; she didn’t know much about Seth Brown.

“You’re shivering,” Kitally said, holding open her blanket.

Lizzy stepped closer and huddled beneath the blanket with her.

“Case closed, Boss?”

“Yeah, case closed.”