Authors: Kevin O'Brien

The Last Victim (11 page)

BOOK: The Last Victim

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“Brad is out there shooting hoops in his tux, for God’s sake,” Janice said. She held Emma in her arms. The child had blond hair and fair skin like her mother. Janice wore one of Brad’s striped shirts—untucked so it camouflaged her belly.

The boys—along with Brad—were yelling and laughing in the backyard. The fund-raiser dinner was in a half hour, but Brad always seemed to make time for his nephews—even if it meant tossing around the basketball in his tuxedo for a few minutes.

“You want to hear the infuriating part?” Bridget offered. “I’m pitted out just from nerves and the drive here, and he won’t even break a sweat out there.”

Janice didn’t laugh. She seemed genuinely miffed. She just frowned at Bridget, while bouncing Emma in her arms.

Bridget stood by the front door. She had her hair up and wore a floor-length, black satin mandarin dress with a rich, wine-colored flower design throughout. Around her, she clutched a black satin stole. She gave her sister-in-law a contrite smile. “Listen, Janice, if the boys get to be too much, don’t hesitate to call my cell. I have it in my purse. I’ll come running over and take them off your hands. In fact, I’d welcome any excuse to cut out of this black-tie bore-fest early.”

Janice set Emma down. “Honey, why don’t you go back to watching TV. Okay? I’ll join you in a minute.”

Bridget watched her niece scurry toward the rec room. Then she glanced at Janice, who was glaring back at her. “What’s wrong?” Bridget asked. “Do I have lipstick on my teeth or something?”

“No, you look fine,” Janice answered coldly. She clutched the stairway newel post. “Brad told me about your discussion this afternoon.”

Blinking, Bridget just stared at her. Janice wasn’t supposed to know about Gorman’s Creek.

“What did he tell you?” she asked numbly.

“He said you weren’t too happy about them taping David’s Little League game this afternoon. And I guess you had to sing the National Anthem for the crowd too.”

Bridget smiled and rolled her eyes. “Oh God, I was in shock. You should have heard me trying to warble through those high notes. The whole time, I kept thinking—”

Janice cut her off. “Yes, it must have been very traumatic. How awful for you. I’m really surprised at how selfish you can be, Bridget. If you think your private life is so important, why did you agree to work for Brad? You know, he did you a huge favor hiring you. You were jobless, practically homeless. He saved you—and the boys—and this is the thanks he gets.”

Bridget shook her head. “Janice, I—”

“This campaign is everything to him—and to your dad,” Janice continued. “If it’s such a terrible imposition on your precious privacy, if you’re not going to do your part, then I’ll step in. I’ll go against my doctor’s orders and take the campaign trail with my husband. So what if it puts my unborn child’s life in jeopardy? I’ll do what needs to be done!”

Stunned, Bridget said nothing. She watched her sister-in-law swivel around and march toward the recreation room.

She decided not to say anything to Brad. But before they left together, she went to the backyard and pulled David aside. “Remember what I told you about women when they’re pregnant?” she whispered. “They get a little crazy?”

With a wary look, David nodded. He held on to the basketball.

“So listen, if Aunt Janice snaps at you—or even if it’s just a repeat performance of what happened the other night with her getting snippy—I want you to call me on my cell. Okay? I’ll come pick you guys up.”

David nodded again. “Okay, Mom,” he said. Then he went back to shooting hoops with Eric.

As Bridget and Brad took off in his BMW, Janice was all smiles, waving at them from the front door.

“I keep thinking about what you told me this afternoon,” Brad said, after they’d started down the street. He had his eyes on the road.

Bridget was about to say,
No kidding, Janice just bitched me out about it.

But then Brad continued. “It makes me nervous that this guy is following you around. If he’s not a reporter, who is he? I mean, do you think he could be a spy for Jim Foley? I wouldn’t be the least surprised if Foley hired some goon to tail you.”

Bridget watched him pull onto a lonely, dark highway called Garrett Road. “What if this guy isn’t at all connected to the campaign?” she asked. “What if he’s after something else entirely?”

“Like what?”

“Maybe he’s after me—or the boys,” she heard herself say.

Brad glanced at her for a second, then turned his attention to the road again. His grip seemed to tighten on the steering wheel of his BMW. “We ought to hire you a bodyguard—at least, for the time being. Just until we figure out who this guy is, and what he wants.”

Bridget glanced in the side rearview mirror. She imagined this man following them right now. She noticed only two different sets of headlights behind them on Garrett Road. She also saw a billboard near the exit ramp to Brad’s house. It had been there for years.
BRAKE FOR COFFEE
! it said in red letters, alongside a cartoon coffee mug.
DELICIOUS FOOD
!
DONNA’S DINER
, 24-
HOUR CAFÉ
—
EXIT
1/2
MILE
.

Though she’d driven to Brad’s house countless times, there were occasions when Bridget felt a bit uneasy on this lonely, two-lane highway. Garrett Road wasn’t very well lit—and never very busy, the perfect spot for one of those man-in-the-backseat stories. She was always afraid of having a breakdown somewhere along that isolated road. The
DONNA’S DINER
sign always gave her a sense of comfort, because it meant she wasn’t far from the turnoff to Brad’s house.

But tonight, she felt no relief spying the
DONNA’S DINER
sign. They were driving away from it.

Bridget gazed at the dark highway ahead. She couldn’t shake this feeling of foreboding. Something horrible was starting to happen. Or perhaps it had actually started twenty years ago in Gorman’s Creek, and been dormant all this time—until Olivia’s strange suicide.

Bridget had a feeling things would only get worse. And relief was nowhere in sight.

CHAPTER 8

“I’m dead,” Bridget muttered, as she buckled her seat belt.

“Ibid,” Brad said, starting up the BMW.

It was a quarter after midnight. The black-tie fund-raiser had been a success. But all the smiling, handshaking, and effort at being charming had worn Bridget out. And the whole time, she’d been on edge, scanning the ballroom to see if that dark-haired stranger was among the attendees.

Bridget hadn’t seen him. She’d half-expected another ambush from Fuller Sterns tonight. Fuller had paid Olivia five thousand dollars for some “new information” a while back; it stood to reason he’d cough up the money for this three-hundred-dollar-a-plate dinner tonight. If he was so anxious to talk with Brad, that would have been a smart way to get an audience with him. But Fuller wasn’t there.

Then again, Fuller was never the sharpest tool in the shed.

As Brad pulled out of the Convention Center lot, Bridget leaned back in the passenger seat. She remembered how stupid and insensitive Fuller could be.

She recalled that afternoon they’d found Andy Shields and the Gaines twins. Fuller, Olivia, Brad, and she were all driving back from a field trip. Brad’s girlfriend, Cheryl, wasn’t there. She was sick or something that day. The juniors had spent the day at the state capitol in Olympia. Brad, in true form, had paired off with Marty Richter, the fattest, loneliest kid in their class; and then he’d talked with a nerdy-looking security guard for an hour.

Most of the juniors had gone to Olympia by chartered bus, but Brad and his group were too cool for the bus. Fuller had driven Brad and Olivia in his beat-up Imperial convertible. Brad had asked Bridget if she wanted to ride back with them.

Fuller drove like a maniac. But it was fun, sitting in the back of his convertible with the wind whipping through her hair on that sunny October afternoon. Olivia was on the CB radio, flirting with truckers, and everyone was laughing. Then someone patched through with a police bulletin. They’d discovered three bodies in the rail yard at the old Oxytech plant.

“Jesus, that’s right near here!” Fuller exclaimed. He got on his CB and started asking different truckers if they could give him directions to the plant, which had been closed for a few years.

Biting her lip, Bridget suddenly felt cold—and scared. Andy and the Gaines twins had been missing for five days. The police had combed through Gorman’s Creek to no avail. Photos of the missing boys were posted all over town. The flier-bulletins had been distributed as far north as Seattle—and south to Portland. According to reports, the police had no leads.

But now, they’d just found three bodies near a deserted chemical plant.

“Maybe we can get there before the cops cover them up,” Fuller said eagerly.

“I don’t want to do this,” Bridget piped in. “I babysat for Andy. If it’s him they found, I don’t want to see his body. I—”

“So don’t look,” Olivia interrupted. “No one’s gonna make you.”

Brad patted her arm. “We probably won’t be able to get near the place anyway,” he whispered.

But Fuller made contact with someone who knew the plant. In the backseat, all Bridget could hear from the CB radio was a lot of static and some muffled mumbling.

Within minutes, they were off the highway and driving through a little hiccup of a town—then beyond, to an abandoned railroad station.

Bridget prayed this was all a mistake. For the last few days, she’d been clinging to an impossible hope that Andy Shields and Robbie and Richie Gaines were still alive. Maybe the police bulletin about the three dead bodies was a false alarm or something. Certainly, there would have been squad cars or TV news vans around here by now.

Instead, they were alone—in an area that might have been thriving twenty years before. Now it was desolate and isolated. Only a handful of tank cars sat in the railroad yard, all of them old, rusty, and deteriorated. Across the street was a boarded-up café.

They found a dead-end road with a dilapidated, weather-beaten sign,
OXYTECH CORPORATION, INNOVATION FOR TOMORROW, TODAY
! The lettering was faded, almost illegible. Cutting through a scrawny forest, the road to Oxytech was full of potholes. Bridget felt every bump in the backseat of the huge, old car. Through the skinny, leafless trees, she could see a couple of silos from the plant. Just beyond a barbed-wire fence and a ditch, the railroad tracks ran along the roadside.

Fuller finally slowed down as they reached an open gate. The potholes and cracks in the pavement became worse as they approached the plant. Bridget felt carsick. She was grateful when Fuller finally stopped for a second.

In the shadow of the two tall silos was a long, one-story, brick warehouse. All of the windows were broken or boarded up. The wind swept through the cavities of the building and made a strange howling noise—almost like distant screaming. Torn plastic shades billowed out from some of the dark windows.

“This is bullshit,” Fuller said, disappointed. “There’s nobody here.”

Bridget let out a sigh. She just wanted to go home.

“Damn it,” Olivia said. “I thought we were gonna be on the news.”

“This totally sucks,” Fuller said, banging the top of the steering wheel.

Brad tapped him on the shoulder. “Hey, dumb-ass,” he said, pointing to the rusty railroad tracks that eventually curved around to the other side of the silos. “Try following those tracks—over there.”

The car lurched forward, and Fuller followed the tracks to the back of the warehouse. The tracks dipped into a gully, and Bridget lost sight of them—until Fuller got close to the guardrail at the edge of the concrete drive. Then she could see the rail yard below. There were some old tank cars on the tracks, mere rusted-out shells. Bushes and tall weeds had grown through gravel and around the rails.

As Fuller drove around to the back of the silos, Bridget saw two police cars ahead of them.

“Oh, Jesus,” Brad murmured.

Fuller slowed down. Along with the wind whistling through that old building, now Bridget could hear some muffled gibberish on a static-laced squad car radio. One of the cops was standing by his patrol car with the door open. He frowned at them and immediately started shaking his head.

Fuller came to a stop. “Fuckin’ A! Look!” he said, pointing down at the rail area.

Without thinking, Bridget looked.

Not far away, three policemen stood over something piled up near a clump of bushes by the edge of the rail yard. It took Bridget a moment to realize they were the corpses of three young boys. They were all barefoot. Whoever had killed them must have taken their shoes and socks so they wouldn’t run away.

Two of the bodies were facedown in the gravel and weeds. The third was lying faceup across one of his friends—so their bodies formed an X. Bridget recognized Andy Shields’s red hair and his madras shirt—untucked and covered with dirt and dried blood. His face was just brown skin stretched over a skull.

Tears stung her eyes. “God, no,” she whispered.

Brad pulled her toward him. She buried her face in his shoulder. But it was too late. She’d already seen it.

“Oh, gross!” she heard Olivia say.

“Is that the Shields kid?” Fuller was asking. “Is that him?”

“It’s Andy, isn’t it?” Brad whispered, still holding her.

Bridget just nodded against his shoulder.

“It’s Andy Shields,” Brad said soberly. “Okay? Satisfied? Now you’ve seen what you wanted to see, Fuller. So let’s get out of here.”

“Fuck that,” Fuller retorted. “We’re sticking around until the TV reporters arrive. I want to be on the news tonight.”

“You kids need to leave—right now!”
the cop yelled. Bridget lifted her head from Brad’s shoulder to see the stocky policeman lumbering toward them. He was shaking his head and waving them away. “You have no business being here. You heard me! O-U-T, out!”

“You can’t make us go,” Fuller shot back. “It’s a free country. We can stay here and look if we want to.”

“But we don’t want to stay and look, you moron,” Brad grumbled. “C’mon, Fuller. Let’s get the hell out of here. Bridget’s sick, and I want to go. Just do what the cop is telling you.”

“You’re on private property,” the policeman said. “Turn this car around and head back the way you came.”

“Hey, this is almost like police brutality—”

“Do as he says,” Brad growled, smacking Fuller’s shoulder with the back of his hand. “C’mon, get moving, goddamnit . . .”

Fuller got moving. “I don’t know what your problem is, Corrigan,” he grumbled while turning the car around. A siren wailed in the distance. “We’re gonna miss all the excitement. Shit, I mean, Bridget could have identified the Shields kid for the cops. We should go back—”

“We’re not going back, and Bridget has seen enough,” Brad replied evenly. “Sometimes, you’re a real idiot, Fuller.”

Driving away, they passed an ambulance and two more police cars on that dead-end road. As Fuller drove by the train station, a TV news van sped past them and turned down the plant road. He continued to complain that they were missing one of the biggest stories to hit McLaren in years.

Bridget said nothing for the rest of the way home.

Looking back on that afternoon, she could understand why Brad now wanted nothing to do with his old friend Fuller.

The mandarin dress was pinching a bit, and Bridget shifted in the passenger seat of Brad’s BMW. They’d just pulled onto Garrett Road. Brad picked up speed. Bridget noticed Brad’s face tense up as he glanced in the rearview mirror. “What’s wrong?” she asked.

“Maybe you’ve got me paranoid,” he said. “But I think this car has been following us ever since we left the Convention Center.”

Bridget glanced in the passenger-side mirror. About ten car lengths behind them, she saw an SUV. It was the only other vehicle on Garrett Road.

“Does that SUV look familiar?” Brad asked. “Could it be your stalker, the guy we saw on the ball game tape?”

“I don’t know his car,” Bridget said, squinting at the mirror. “It could be.” She felt the BMW slow down, and shifted her gaze to the dashboard. The needle moved from forty-five to thirty. “What are you doing?” she asked.

“I want to see if he passes us,” Brad replied. “If he hangs back there, it means he’s following us.”

Bridget glanced over her shoulder. The headlights in back of them loomed closer for only a moment. The SUV seemed to keep pace with them, still about ten car lengths behind.

Bridget turned forward. They passed an exit—and a speed limit sign: 50 MPH. Brad was going thirty, and the SUV was still lingering behind them on the dark highway. “Okay,” Bridget said edgily. “Now what?”

“Hold on,” Brad said.

The BMW picked up speed, and Bridget watched the speedometer needle shoot up to sixty-five. She braced her hand against the dashboard. In the side mirror, she watched the SUV’s headlights become like little pinpoints—but for only a few moments. Then they grew brighter, closer. The SUV started closing the gap between them.

“Oh no,” Bridget murmured. She checked Brad’s speedometer again. He was going seventy-five miles an hour.

“Better call the police,” he said. “Is your cell phone in your purse?”

Trembling, Bridget dug the cellular out of her little black clutch.

The SUV switched on its high beams, and started tailgating them.

“Jesus Christ,” Brad whispered.

Bridget started to dial 9-1-1, when suddenly the SUV swerved into the next lane and passed them.

“Corrigan sucks!” yelled a college-age guy from the passenger window. He flipped them the bird. “Corrigan’s a fag! Foley rules!”

Then the SUV let out a roar as it raced ahead of them. Brad slowed down. “Forget the police,” Brad muttered. “I think they were just protesting my Corrigan-for-Oregon bumper sticker. Huh, typical Foley fans.”

Bridget clicked off the line. She watched the SUV tear down the highway in front of them. On its back door was a bumper sticker:
JIM FOLEY, MY FRIEND, MY SENATOR
. The taillights of the SUV disappeared in the night.

With a sigh, she put the phone away.

Ahead, Bridget noticed the sign for Donna’s Diner, which meant they were getting close to Brad’s house.

She felt a little better.