Smolder (23 page)

“If they aren’t there, what are the options?” Owen turned and asked me.

“Did anyone check the neighborhood bar? Vince would need a place to get away from his mother.”

He paged through the notes. “It says here the nearest place is a gas station.”

“Does it have a convenience store?” I asked.

“Of course,” the chief said. “In the country, that counts as the local watering hole.”

Owen looked confused.

“Don’t ask.” I wasn’t sure I could explain it anyway.

“If his mother hasn’t left the house in that long, and she is still alive, she would need medicine,” I said. “Did you check the local pharmacies to see if she stopped filling her prescriptions?”

“It’s in the gas station.” The chief was ahead of me. He called on the radio. “Please check and see if Vincent Reamer’s mother filled any of her prescriptions lately.”

The person on the other end said, “Let me check.”

A few minutes later, the chief’s cell phone rang. It was Mrs. Reamer’s doctor. He said he was surprised to get a call from the police about her prescriptions because she came to all of her appointments and followed his orders.

The chief hit the brakes and drove onto the shoulder of the road. “She was reported missing, and you never bothered to mention she still comes to her appointments?”

The doctor was not happy. I heard him on the other end of the phone.

“It’s not my damn fault you couldn’t find her. Her boy, Vince, told me she had wandered off in the woods and gotten severe cuts. That was less than a week after your boys came by here to tell me she’d gone missing.”

“Thanks for your assistance.” The chief hung up on him. “He tried to kill his mom, and she survived.”

I’d thought the same thing. “And then the guilt of trying to kill her would make him worse. I wouldn’t be surprised if she still physically abuses him, if not sexually.”

“We are almost there. Dr. Quinn, stay in the car, you can lie down in the seat if you want to stay hidden.”

There weren’t any cars in front of the house. We pulled to the back and saw two other cop cars with their headlights pointed into the open door of the shed.

Nude, with her hands in the air, was the woman I assumed was Vince’s mother. She looked about fifty years old and in good physical condition. Scars from her attempted murder were visible on her legs, arms, and chest.

In the same places he cut Nancy.

“You won’t catch my boys,” she yelled as the chief approached her. “They are long gone from here, and you can’t stop them.”

“They’ll come back for you,” the chief said.

Her eyes got wide, and she looked scared. “They won’t come back with you here. I told my boy Travis to get his youngins and bring them back here tomorrow. That slut he married isn’t allowed to keep my grandkids.”

“Ma’am. Travis isn’t your son.”

“Yes he is. His momma couldn’t get knocked up. Her worthless body wouldn’t take a kid. My brother beat her silly, and she still wouldn’t have his kids. So I did,” she said.

That explained a lot for me. I really should have been taking notes to write this up as a case study.
How to screw your children up with sex and abuse; one family’s tale of tragedy.
One of the police cars started to pull away before we all realized none of the police were in it.

I turned to see Vince back the car up and try to run the police over. They moved into the shed with his mother and handcuffed her. There was a robe nearby, and they put it around her shoulders to cover her up.

“Don’t you touch my woman,” Vince yelled from the car and tried to drive inside.

His mother screamed back at him. “You are going to kill me, you worthless fuck. What are you doing? Get the hell out of here. Go with your brother to get my grandkids.”

For a woman in handcuffs and naked except for a robe, she still had some authority.

Vince pulled the car back, “Sorry, Momma.” And drove away.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Two officers got in the other cruiser with Mrs. Reamer in the back and took off after him. I sat back and waited for Owen and the chief to come back. They wandered to the back of the shed to look for places where it looked like someone had been buried.

I closed my eyes and lay on the seat. When the car started to move, I heard Owen shout. He wasn’t in the car.

From the other side of the seat, I heard, “Sit up, Doctor. We are going for a ride.”

Travis took off across the woods, away from the main road. This place was full of dirt roads for hunters and four-wheelers. I held onto the seatbelts in the back and hoped he’d hit a tree. The back of this car had to be strong enough to survive impact. If a police car couldn’t make it, what could?

“I want you to know I’ll beat my wife to death the next time I see her. As I rip my children out of her arms.”

Well, my job was to talk to people who weren’t right, and my current driver overachieved in that arena.

“Why would you beat her to death? Your kids will hate you.”

“They already hate me. You don’t get it, do you?” he said.

“Not really. You want your children to hate you. You are going to kill your wife. Your cousin is really your half-brother because your dad and his sister are your biological parents. Did I miss anything?”

“Do you know what you get when that happens?”

I didn’t answer. He would tell me anyway.

“Do you, Doctor? Do you understand what happens when a brother and sister have kids?”

“Birth defects.” I went for the easy one.

“Exactly, birth defects. Do you know what birth defect I have, Doctor?”

He spun the car around, and I slammed into the door. “No, jackass, I don’t know. What the fuck are you missing?”

Not my finest moment.

“A penis.” He was furious.

I checked the speedometer, and we were going thirty five miles an hour through trees and past creeks. He was going to kill both of us if I didn’t calm this situation down.

“Are you telling me they never bothered to try surgery?”

“They told my dad they would make me a woman, not a man.” He pounded his fist on the steering wheel and went somewhere in his memory where he and his father had a fight. “I wanted a penis, and he said they didn’t operate because he wanted me to stay a boy. His son would not be changed into a girl; he would be raised like a man. He treated me like I was a whole man.”

I was not going to ask him what was there. In the hospital I might have, but out here in a car speeding past trees, I decided it was a bad idea.

“I have kids. I’m a man.”

Ahhh. Now I get it. You think his wife would have mentioned the no penis part at some point? Might be why he beat her. You can’t win the “I’m a man” argument without the man parts.

“If you want your kids back, you might want to miss that tree!” I ducked into the seat and held on. The crunching sound was loud, and the sound of glass cracking echoed in my ears. I lay there waiting to hear if Travis survived. After ten minutes, I sat up and stared right into his face. He grinned, and I felt a chill run down my spine. My stomach clenched, and I would have thrown up on him if I wasn’t so scared.

“Hello, Doctor.”

I started to shake and even though I was scared I started to get angry. This is the man who hunted children. I felt a rush of adrenaline and knew exactly what I had to do. He would never hurt anyone else ever again.

“Hello, jackass,” I said through gritted teeth.

I yanked the knife out of my pocket and stabbed him in the neck as hard as I could.

He screamed, and I realized as he tried to get out of the car that he was stuck. His feet were twisted sideways and pinned by the floor board. The front of the car compressed so far I could see the engine just behind the air vents. Blood spewed out of his neck with each heartbeat. It ran all down the front of my shirt and over my hands. I wiped them on my jeans and fought to get the doors open. The back windows didn’t even crack during the crash.

I heard screams and looked up hoping to see Owen or the chief. It was Vince.

“You bitch, you killed my brother. I will rip all of the skin off your body piece by piece.” Something passed over his eyes when he said that, it looked like he made himself ill.

I began to miss Travis instantly. His brother was far scarier, and now that I was stuck and couldn’t get away, the fear I’d shoved away came back in a rush. My breath got short, and it felt like someone stood on my chest.

Vince ran to all the doors and tried to get them open. The driver’s door came loose and I shoved myself as far away from the opened window over the seat as possible. I thought about climbing under the rear windshield.

He pulled his brother out as far as he could, but Travis’s twisted feet still stuck under the dashboard and tried CPR. Police sirens grew close and then sped away as they tried to find us. I looked for any way to get out.

The trunk!

Travis was dead, and Vince bent over him sobbing. I took the chance and pulled at the backseat hoping it would fold down so I could get in the trunk. It didn’t budge. It was worth a try. Police sirens got close again, and this time didn’t leave as quickly. How much longer would it take them? Didn’t these things have GPS? I started to panic. I remember the look on Dmitri’s face when he saw Nancy and if this man could do that to a surgeon I didn’t want to be anywhere near him. I felt like an idiot for coming along on this trip. What was I thinking? I can’t help children if I’m dead and cooking in a canoe floating down Wilmington River.

“You are going to sit there and listen to me tell you why I’m going to kill you,” Vince said as he crawled back into the car.

It looked like he wouldn’t be able to get in the back with me any more than I could get out. I stilled my mind and listened. Fighting fear, I went to the same place I go when I walk into a hospital room. Everything about me falls away, no more problems, concerns, or worries, my focus completely on the person in front me so I can figure out how to best help them. My heart however, continued to pound loud enough for me to hear it.

“Okay, Vince. Tell me about yourself.”

He laughed. A cruel laugh that said he had been through therapy enough times to have the right answers memorized. Time to change things up a bit.

“All right then, screw the psychobabble. How long have you been screwing your momma?”

He threw a punch through the glass opening. “Don’t you ever say anything against my momma.”

I still held the knife in my right hand. With all of the blood on it, I don’t think Vince knew it was there. If I could get him to get his head in that window... I was mid-thought when my cell phone rang. I forgot I had it on me.

“If you answer that phone, I’ll shoot you.” He pulled out a gun and aimed it right at my head.

“I won’t answer it.” From years of practice in sessions and classes, I hit the answer key and the mute key in quick succession.

He kept the gun on me, but turned to see something outside. I turned the sound off on the phone.

“You hold that phone up where I can see it, I’m going to see if that’s momma coming for me.”

“Your momma got into the police car, Vince. She is on the way to jail.”

“She is coming for me. I can hear her.” He tilted his head to the side and listened.

I decided to play a hunch. “Does she talk to you a lot?”

“Of course not, I’m not crazy. I don’t hear voices, Doctor.”

He’s had that question asked before. “When was the last time you talked to a therapist?”

“Right before I started working at the hospital. Momma told me to get a job and learn things so I could get Travis out of jail.” He stopped and thought about it. “He went to jail a lot. But this was the first time they were going for the death penalty. Momma said she wouldn’t have him in death row.”

“It worked. You got him out,” I said.

“The first time, it worked. I needed his help since that lady cop lived, and I was supposed to kidnap you. Momma said I needed to learn more from him, and I couldn’t do that if he was locked up.” He rubbed his neck when he talked about it.

“Did she hurt you for kidnapping the wrong woman?”

“She hung me in the shed with my toes on a chair for two days. I watched her peel that lady cop’s skin off like she was scaling a fish.”

He stopped for a second and looked queasy. Seemed his threats to me might be empty. Doesn’t mean he wouldn’t be able to pull the trigger to kill me. At least if I died at his hands it wouldn’t be torture. A small consolation, but I’d take it at that point. He wasn’t really built for torture. That had to make his mother angry.

I swallowed hard and asked the next question. “Did she teach you how to do that?”

He shook his head. “I forgot to take my medicine when I was hanging in the shed. So I took the knife and tried to cut her, and my hand was shaking too hard. So Momma called me a failure and tied her to a raft.”

“What medication do you take, Vince?”

His head snapped back around. “None of your business.”

“I’m a psychologist, Vince. Mental health
is
my business. Tell me what the last doctors you saw said was going on in your head.” I lowered my voice and sat back in the seat.

My phone was in my left hand, and I rested it on my leg so he could still see it if he peered over the seat.

He lowered the gun and looked down at his hands. “I work with my hands, Doctor. I built that shed and the wood floors in the house.”

“That’s a talent, Vince.”

I typed a quick text to Owen. “Safe, find me. Travis dead. Vince gun. Stuck in car.”

“Fuck!” That was Owen’s voice, and it was close.

“Come near this car, and I will kill her.” Vince sat straight up and pointed the gun at me.

“You shoot her, and I’ll shoot your mother,” Owen yelled back.

Damn. At that moment, I was sure he would do it. That was the reason my instincts told me to steer clear of him. He was fully capable of murder if he felt it was justified, and I had a hunch he could justify it every time.

“You would not kill her, you are a cop.”

“I’m a cop doing a security job at the local public hospital.” His voice came from directly in front of me. I saw him wave his phone directly behind Vince. I hoped he had a gun in the other hand. “Why do you think I got demoted? Do you think I could go from Detective in Atlanta to security guard with my ego? You spent time with me, do I make good decisions?”

“No, do you think I will let the person who killed my brother off without firing a shot?”

“You won’t shoot me,” I said. He turned his attention back to me.

“And why not?” His hand started to shake.

“That’s why, Vince. You don’t destroy things, you build them. Your mother tortured the lady cop, not you.”

“I wanted to hurt her. I did.” He steadied his grip with the other hand. “Travis killed people. He doesn’t even have a dick, and he
killed children
. I couldn’t even cut a woman who was unconscious.”

I didn’t see Owen or hear the shot. Vince’s head exploded in front of me, and I screamed. The chief leaned into the car, and I calmed down a bit. He hit a button, and the doors unlocked. I slid to the driver's side door and sat at the edge.

“You coming out?” Owen asked.

“I killed a man and watched another’s head explode. I need a moment.” My stomach lurched, and I threw up until there was nothing left in my stomach or intestines. I shook uncontrollably for a few minutes while tears streamed down my face.

“You done yet?” the chief asked.

“I think the birthday cake from my first birthday is still left.” I took his offered hand and the handkerchief.

“Answer your phone,” Owen said and pointed to light coming from the screen.

“Hello?” I sounded hoarse.

“Ellie? Are you okay?” Josh sounded panicked.

“I’m alive. They aren’t. I think that’s a win.”

“They are both dead,” he said.

I heard cheers.

“Josh, where are you?”

“At the hospital with Nancy and her family. Dmitri’s here too. We couldn’t pace the floors anymore.”

Dmitri came on the line. “Please say something so I can hear your voice.”

“Hello, sexy. How’d your day go?”

He laughed. “Your voice and your sense of humor sound intact. We were afraid it went bad.”

“It did for a while. Tell Josh that I think Nancy was out of it the entire time. Vince said she was unconscious.” I hoped it would help Josh that she didn’t feel or see anything happening to her. No worry that she would wake up in the middle of the night screaming with images in her head he didn’t want to imagine. That’s a hurt you can’t take away from someone no matter how close you get.

“Okay. Now when can I come get you?”

“Come get me? I don’t know where me is, I will come to you.”