The Last Victim (40 page)
Authors: Kevin O'Brien
He was so intent on the workings of the vending machine that he didn’t seem to be listening to her. “Don’t drink your hot chocolate just yet, because it can be awfully hot,” he said, carrying his cup to the table. Sonny sat down next to her at the head of the table, and he chuckled nervously. “Could you check the hall and make sure no one’s coming?” he asked. “I thought I heard someone.”
Bridget hadn’t heard anything—except the old vending machine cranking out hot liquid. She shrugged. “Sure, Sonny.” She got to her feet and went to the door. She opened it, then peeked up and down the hall. No one.
When Bridget stepped back into the break room, she saw Sonny fanning the vapors from her cup of hot chocolate for her. “We’re okay for now,” she said, returning to her chair. “Thank you for cooling it off for me. You’re a real gentleman, Sonny.”
He blushed, and chuckled. Then he leaned over his cup and blew into the hot chocolate.
“You know, I was friends with Olivia Rankin,” Bridget said. “Do you remember Olivia? She used to work here.”
He nodded. “Yes, she was blond and kind of fat.”
“Did you spend much time talking with her?”
“Oh yes. We even had hot chocolate down here once, but she had coffee instead.”
“What did you talk about with Olivia?”
He shrugged. “Stuff.” He went back to blowing into his hot chocolate.
“Did you talk about
stuff
that happened in McLaren?”
stuff
that happened in McLaren?”
He nodded. Then he sipped his hot chocolate, and winced. “Ouch, too hot, too hot!” he said, fanning his mouth.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
He nodded, then sighed.
“Did you talk about Gorman’s Creek?”
“I lived right by there,” he said.
“I know. You probably saw a lot of things that happened there. Remember the night you and I stood outside your house, watching the police look for Andy Shields and the Gaines twins?”
“They had flashlights,” he said. He blew into his drink again.
“That’s right. Do you remember anything else that might have happened in those woods?” Bridget leaned closer to him. This close, she could see the dandruff in his receding gray hair—along with the food stains on his cardigan sweater. “Do you remember a girl named Mallory Meehan?” she asked.
“She was the fat girl who was mean to me,” he muttered, pouting. “She yelled at me. She was just as mean as those boys, only she didn’t throw any rocks at me.”
Bridget frowned. “What boys? What are you talking about, Sonny?”
“She fell down a well,” he said.
Bridget reached over and took hold of his hand. “That’s right. Mallory fell down a well. Then you saw it. What happened after that?”
“Well, I really didn’t see her fall in, but I heard some noise by the old house. Then I saw her climb out of the well.”
“And you told this to Olivia?” she asked anxiously. “You were there?”
He nodded.
“What happened then? After Mallory climbed out of the well, what happened?”
“She was crying,” Sonny said. He took another sip of his hot chocolate, and this time he smiled. “This is good. Try some.”
Bridget took a swig of the hot chocolate. It scalded her mouth, and tasted awful, but after her initial grimace, she worked up a smile. “Delicious. So—what happened after Mallory pulled herself out of the well? You said she was crying.”
He nodded. “She was limping too. I think she hurt her foot. I came up and asked her if she needed help. And she started to call me names again, and telling me to stay away from her.” He sipped his hot chocolate. “I used to carry my Boy Scout knife with me for emergencies. They won’t let me keep it here, but I had one back then. Anyways, the fat girl kept yelling at me and calling me names. So I took my hunting knife and cut her throat.”
Sonny sipped his hot chocolate again, and then he licked his lips.
“So—are you working for Brad Corrigan?”
“Yeah, that’s right, asshole.” The short man chuckled. “I work for ol’ Brad. You cold? Well, don’t worry. You’ll be working up a sweat soon.”
Zach was shivering. Shoeless, and dressed only in his T-shirt and undershorts, he walked in front of the ape-faced little man. They’d left the VW minibus parked off a dirt road along the mountain ridge. At gunpoint, Zach had obediently wrapped the digging tools in the blanket, then started along a crude, overgrown path through the forest. The guy had loaded the drum of lime solution and thick gloves into a bag. He carried the bag in one hand and held a gun in the other. Zach dragged the blanket on the ground behind him, hoisting it up every once in a while. The pick and shovel kept clanking against each other, and their four-foot wooden handles stuck out of the blanket’s folds. Zach guessed that no one had used the trail in weeks. His feet were killing him—blistered, bleeding, and near-frozen.
The little creep was right. Zach was indeed working up a sweat, but he was still cold and shivering. He kept telling himself that he wasn’t going to be killed in these woods. Exactly how he would get out of this, he wasn’t sure yet.
“What’s going to happen to Bridget Corrigan?” he asked, staggering along the trial.
“Oh, I wouldn’t worry about your girlfriend,” he heard the man say. “You two will be together again soon enough.”
“Brad’s going to have her killed too?”
“Let’s put it this way, she’s as good as dead.”
Zach glanced over his shoulder for a second, then moved on. “That doesn’t make any sense—unless Brad is waiting for the ‘right time.’ You could have killed us both when you broke into my apartment the day before yesterday, but you didn’t. That was you, wasn’t it?”
“Smart guy. Go to the head of the class.”
“Why didn’t you kill us both then?”
“I was only waiting for you. She wasn’t part of the equation.”
“And yet, she’s going to die anyway?” he asked, stopping for a moment.
“Get moving, asshole.”
Zach forged on through the woods. “What’s going to happen to her? What’s Brad planning?”
“Huh, Brad Corrigan has no control over the situation,” the man replied. “There’s no hit on her. We’re only supposed to watch her. But my work partner has a crush on your girlfriend, and that’s bad news for her.”
“What are you talking about?” Brad asked warily.
“I’ve seen it happen before. He gets obsessed and goes off on his own. We had a job together down in San Diego a few years back. This attorney needed to disappear. And my pal got a hard-on for the guy’s eighteen-year-old daughter. He started following her around, and even set it up so he could ‘accidentally’ meet her and talk with her. And all the while, he was sketching her. That’s his thing. He thinks he’s this great artist. Anyway, he ended up killing this girl, broke her neck. Then he hung her from a ceiling beam in her parents’ living room. Police thought it was a suicide. So he painted her like that—in her bra and panties, hanging from her neck. Quirky son of a bitch.”
“What does that have to do with Bridget Corrigan?” Zach asked.
“Maybe you’re not as smart as I thought.” Zach heard the man chuckle. “I just told you, numb-nuts. My pal has got it bad for your girlfriend. He’s already sketched her at least fifty times. He set up an accidental meeting with her too. He slashed her tire, then helped her on the roadside. He even got me to play along on that charade. Paid me five hundred bucks. Talk about crazy, all this elaborate planning, just so he could talk to the bitch. You should have seen him with his hands in his pockets half the time to hide his hard-on. He could have killed her that night, but it’s not how he wanted to paint her.”
Stopping, Zach turned around and stared at him.
The short, ape-faced man nodded. “Keep moving. We’re losing our sunlight. Veer to the left. There’s a clearing up ahead.”
Zach’s teeth started to chatter. He pressed on. “What—what’s he going to do to her?” he asked. “How is he going to—
paint
her?”
paint
her?”
“Why do you care?” the man replied. “You’ll be dead.”
Zach staggered into a clearing—a little bald spot in the forest. Through the trees, there was a beautiful, panoramic view of the mountains.
“Okay, this is good, right here,” he heard the man say. “Start digging.”
“
You
killed Mallory?”
You
killed Mallory?”
Sonny nodded sheepishly. “Are you mad at me?”
She stared at him and shook her head. “No, Sonny,” she whispered. “I’m just trying to understand.” She stole a glance at the door. She was much younger than him—and much faster. But Bridget wasn’t going to run out of there—not until she found out exactly what had happened on that night twenty years ago.
“Don’t you like your hot chocolate?” he asked.
She sipped a little more. “It’s great, thank you. So, tell me what happened after you—you killed her?”
“Then
you
came by with a flashlight. So I dragged her into the bushes and hid.”
you
came by with a flashlight. So I dragged her into the bushes and hid.”
“And you heard me calling for her,” Bridget said.
He nodded. “After you left, I dragged her to her car. She was awfully heavy. I knew it was her car, ’cause of that time she started yelling at me outside the supermarket. I remembered how she came out of that tan car and called me a ‘retard. ’ I’m not retarded.” He stopped and gazed at her cup of hot chocolate—and then at her.
Bridget drank some more. “What happened after you took Mallory to her car?”
He smiled. “I found the keys in her pocket, and I put her on the floor in the backseat. Then I—then I . . .” Sonny seemed to be getting excited as he told the story, and he couldn’t catch a breath. “Then I got my bike and loaded it in the trunk, and I drove out of town. There’s—there’s this marsh outside of town. I took my bike out, and I—I pushed the car into the marsh. I did it all by myself too.”
“You drove?” Bridget asked. “You can drive?”
“Yeah. It’s a secret.” He chuckled. “I don’t have a license. But I taught myself to drive.”
Numb, Bridget stared at him. “Did you—ever drive to the Oxytech plant outside of town?”
He nodded shyly.
“You said earlier that some boys threw stones at you. Were they the Gaines twins and Andy Shields?”
“The twins were the mean ones. I told them they weren’t allowed in the forest, and they threw rocks at me and called me names. So—I hit them, real hard, and knocked them out. I wasn’t going to hurt the other one, the one with red hair, but he kept screaming. So I hit him too. And while they were sleeping, I tied them up and took their shoes so they wouldn’t run away.”
“That night you met me outside your house and we watched the police look for those boys, you knew all along where they were.”
Nodding, he smiled at her, and then he had another sip of hot chocolate.
“You’d already taken them to the railroad yard in that deserted plant, and you’d killed them,” Bridget whispered.
He nodded again. “Aren’t you going to drink your hot chocolate?”
Bridget took a swallow. “Mallory was right then,” she murmured. “You killed those boys. Did you talk about this with Olivia?”
“Yes. I told her just like I’m telling you.”
Bridget felt a little dizzy. It was all starting to make sense. Yet her head was whirling. This was the “new information” Olivia had tried to sell to Fuller. How did Fuller put it? She had “stuff that would rip the lid off what went on at Gorman’s Creek.” Olivia couldn’t tell Fuller—or Brad—that this new information actually exonerated them from a crime they thought they’d committed twenty years ago. If she’d divulged what she knew, Olivia couldn’t have hoped to make money off them. So she was holding out.
Bridget remembered the sad, hopeless look on Anastasia Fessler’s face as she and Zach left her house yesterday. Anastasia knew. It explained all the secrecy behind where they’d sent Sonny. And obviously, Olivia had contacted Anastasia after getting an earful of Sonny’s activities in Gorman’s Creek. She was tapping Anastasia for money—and special treatment at Glenhaven Hills.
Bridget felt a little sick. The room felt as if it were spinning. Sonny kept looking at her with those guileless, milky blue eyes. Behind him, the light from the coffee machine continued to flicker. She thought of something that made her laugh—and the same time, tears welled up in her eyes.
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