The Last Victim (46 page)

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Authors: Kevin O'Brien

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Once outside, Zach threaded through the crowd of people who had gathered in front of the building. He heard the fire engine sirens blaring. He stopped and tried to catch a breath.
Zach realized he’d left his cell phone in the pocket of Siegel’s jacket. He needed to call the police—and Bridget. He thought about borrowing a phone from someone on the street. But a couple of onlookers gasped when they saw him. No one would get near him. His face was red, some of his hair had burned off, and smoke soot covered his clothes.
He broke away from the crowd and ran down the block to where he’d parked Siegel’s minibus. In his pants pocket, he still had Siegel’s keys. As he hurried toward the car, Zach noticed the skin on his left arm was scorched. He knew he had to get to a doctor soon.
But he had to get to Bridget first.
“Well, well, Bridget, since you’ve done such a terrific job with the boys, you can tie up your ankles for me.” He tossed a three-foot section of cord on the bed. “I’ll watch and make sure you do it right.”
Bridget sat with her feet up on the bed. She was trembling. She didn’t want to start crying in front of him—or the boys. Still, tears filled her eyes. He’d made her take off her shoes. And for some reason she thought about Andy Shields, and his green Converse All-Stars. They’d found him and those other two boys without their shoes.
She glanced over at her sons.
Clay had made them lie facedown on her bedroom floor. Then he’d given her sections of cord to tie their hands behind their backs—and bind their stockinged feet together. First David, then Eric. He’d tested her work, pulling at each cord and making sure it was tight enough.
Now he stood at the end of the bed, watching her tie the cord around one ankle. “Okay, take the other end of the cord and tie it around the bedpost here—nice and tight.”
She obeyed him. She listened to her younger son. Poor Eric couldn’t stop whimpering.
“That’s right,” Clay said. “Only put the cord ends this way—so they stick out. There, that’s the way I want it.” Clay tested the cord around the bedpost. “Good girl. Now start on the other ankle.”
She couldn’t understand why the knots had to
look
a certain way. But Bridget figured he was going to tie her hands to the headboard posts in a similar fashion. Maybe she could surprise him while he was doing that. Bridget started to wrap the cord around her other ankle. “David, remember your mother loves you,” she said, her voice cracking. Then she added, “
Necesito que me lo distraigas. ¿Esta bien
?”
In English, it roughly translated to:
“I have a plan. I’ll need you to distract him for me. Okay?”
“
Sí
,” he replied. “I love you too, Mom.”
“Lie back,” Clay whispered.
Bridget reclined on the bed. She was still shaking. She watched him pull at the cord around her ankle. Her legs spread as far as her skirt would allow. With a flicker of a smile, he stuck his gun in his belt, then took out his hunter’s knife. He slowly cut a line on the taut fabric between her legs—until he reached her thighs. Tucking the knife away, he gave the cord around her ankle a yank and quickly tied the other end to the post.
“David,” she said. “
Cuando le digo, ‘Te daré mi bolsa,’ quiero que comiences a toser y fingir que te estàs a hogando. ¿Entiende
?”
“Hey, that’s enough of that shit,” Clay growled.
“
Sí, entiendo, la Mama
,” David said defiantly.
Clay took out another piece of cord. Bridget eyed the gun in his belt. As he grabbed her hand and started to tie the cord around her wrist, she ever so subtly slipped her other hand beneath the spare pillow.
She had told her son to start coughing and feign a choking fit once she gave him the cue,
“. . . when I say to him, ‘I’ll give you my purse.’ ”
Clay started to tug one end of the cord toward the bedpost.
Tears in her eyes, Bridget looked up at him. Her free hand felt around under the pillow. Where was it? She’d had it hidden there the last few nights—the same way she’d kept a baseball bat by her bed back in high school, when she’d thought someone might be murdering twins.
“Listen, you don’t have to do this,” she said. “You and I can go downstairs now. If it’s money you want, I’ll give you my purse. I think there’s a couple hundred dollars in it—”
Suddenly, David started coughing and gagging.
“My God, I think he’s choking!” Bridget cried. “Please, could you—please, just turn him on his side.”
But Clay didn’t even glance over his shoulder at David’s expert convulsions. He fastened the knot around the bedpost.
All the while, David was relentless. He kept coughing and making raspy noises. It started Eric up too. He began to cry out loud.
Bridget frantically groped under the pillow. Damn it, where was it?
Clay wouldn’t take his eyes off her. “Let him choke to death,” he muttered, taking out his hunter’s knife. “He’s gonna die soon enough anyway.” Clay drew another cord from his knapsack, then reached for her other hand.
David’s coughing got even louder.
Clay hesitated and sneered down at him.
Bridget found it. For a minute, she’d thought the Exacto-knife must have rolled out from under the pillow and fallen behind the bed. But no, thank God, she had it in her hand now. She remembered what Clay had said when he’d given it to her: “It doesn’t seem like much protection, but if you hit the right artery, you can do a lot of damage.”
“Can it!” Clay growled, past David’s exaggerated coughing fit. He was still looking down toward him. “You’re faking,” he muttered, brandishing his knife. “I’ll shut you up, you little shit.”
With his head turned away, Clay didn’t seem to notice Bridget pulling her hand out from under the pillow. He couldn’t have seen the silver penlike weapon in her grasp.
But he certainly must have felt the exposed blade as it slid across his throat.
When Zach drove up the street, he saw the white Taurus parked in front of her house. He figured everything was all right. But then he got closer, and the private detective’s car looked empty.
He parked the minibus, jumped outside, and ran up to the Taurus. Zach noticed streaks of blood on the driver’s window and then saw the crumpled body on the floor of the backseat. “Oh God, no,” he murmured.
He turned and started to run toward the front door. But Zach saw something in the upstairs window that made him stop in his tracks. Through the sheer, organdy drapes, he saw the silhouette of a tall man. He was staggering toward the window, touching his neck, and flailing his hands in a strange way. Reeling around, the man entangled himself in the drapes. Bloodstains bloomed on the delicate fabric.
Zach could see him now. The man’s eyes were rolled back. Blood gushed from a slash across his throat. It splattered against the glass.
Suddenly, Clay Hendricks flopped over and crashed through the window. Zach jumped back from the explosion of glass. Hendricks’s body hit the stone walkway. There was a loud crack.
Zach figured Clay Hendricks must have broken his back. He lay faceup with his eyes wide open. His twisted body kept convulsing for another few moments.
And then—with a dead stare fixed on his face—he became perfectly still.
He looked like someone in a Clay Hendricks painting.
When Bridget telephoned the police, she informed the 9-1-1 operator that she’d killed an intruder. She knew it was just one small part of a very long story she would have to tell them.
“God, I don’t want to rat on my father,” she whispered to Zach.
He still smelled of smoke and soot. Bridget still had a piece of cord tightly knotted around one ankle. They were both perspiring and trying to catch a breath. Bridget had managed to remain calm in front of the boys. But David had taken Eric into the bathroom to wash his face, and now she let down her guard with Zach. They stood in the upstairs hallway. In the distance, they could hear police sirens.
“I don’t want to be the one who turns him in,” she said under her breath. Her voice started cracking. “Can’t we pretend we don’t know anything? I just wish this—
nightmare
could end now. Haven’t David and Eric been through enough already?”
She didn’t want to see her frail, dying father endure scandal, a trial, and imprisonment. She didn’t want to see her brother’s career ruined. As much as she couldn’t forgive them, they were still her family.
Still, several murders had been committed, and she was involved. She couldn’t remain silent. She loathed the idea of keeping this horrible secret for the rest of her life.
It was like Gorman’s Creek all over again.
Bridget noticed the red strobe light flashing through the front windows. At that moment, the phone rang. On the other end of the line was a very somber Brad.
“This isn’t a good time, Brad,” she told him.
“I know you don’t want to talk to me right now, Brigg. But we’re waiting for the ambulance here. I think Dad’s had a stroke.”
After she hung up the phone, Bridget put her head on Zach’s shoulder and cried.
Downstairs, the police were knocking on the front door.
“Oh, God help me,” Bridget whispered. “I don’t want to turn him in.”
“We might not have to,” Zach assured her.
The state police had a record of Zachary Matthias’s call from a pay phone at 6:47 Friday night. He’d told them he’d been abducted by Norbert J. Siegel, and claimed Siegel was a hit man, responsible for the murders of Leslie Ackerman and Gerard Hilliard.
At 7:22, state patrol officers Susan Rose and Ed Kelly found the bodies of two hunters along Route 319. Both of them had been shot. Theodore Liming, fifty-seven, was dead. His coworker, Sean Donovan, thirty-four, was rushed to the hospital in critical condition. Donovan remembered giving directions to Zachary Matthias. From a driver’s license photo, Donovan identified Norbert J. Siegel as the “crazy little creep” who had sprung out of the woods and attacked him and his boss with a shovel. Siegel had gone after the older man first. He’d taken away his rifle, then shot them both. The Jeep he’d stolen belonged to Sean Donovan. It was found—in good condition—parked in a loading zone in Portland’s Pearl District.
Half a block away, a fire had broken out on the top floor of a six-story apartment building. Siegel’s wallet and license were discovered in his partially burnt jacket, which had been discarded in the building’s stairwell. Siegel’s dental records helped identify the scorched skeletal remains found in Unit 6-B.
The fire caused an estimated $48,000 in damage. The only other casualty was the man who admitted to starting the blaze. Zachary Matthias sustained second-degree burns on his left arm, and some minor smoke inhalation.
A thorough search of Siegel’s residence—a two-bedroom house in Vancouver, Washington—uncovered a small arsenal, enough porn to open his own adult video store, $17,000 in cash, and several fake identification cards. Police also discovered a pound of cocaine, which matched with residue samples taken from Leslie Ackerman and Gerard Hilliard’s bedroom closet. They uncovered no records of the hit man’s jobs or his various employers. “Much as we tried,” one cop later confided to a friend, “we didn’t find a record of Norbert Siegel’s Greatest Hits.”
Siegel could only be linked with the murders of Theodore Liming, Gerard Hilliard, and Leslie Ackerman—as well as the
attempted
murders of Sean Donovan and Zachary Matthias. The only way the police could connect him with Clay Hendricks was from testimony by Zachary Matthias. They spoke with Zach for three hours at the downtown precinct office—after he’d been released from the emergency room at Providence Hospital. He was exhausted, and still wearing his sooty, smoky clothes. His arm was in a bandage, and his face, neck, and hands had been covered with ointment to prevent infection from the minor burns.
The authorities had difficulty understanding—and believing—his story about Hendricks’s penchant for painting his victims. They were also a bit fuzzy on exactly how this hit man became obsessed with the estranged wife of his alleged victim, Gerard Hilliard.
Only two of Hendricks’s paintings survived the blaze. All the others were completely destroyed. One surviving piece sustained some water damage, and the top right corner had been burned beyond repair. But the undamaged portion of the painting clearly showed a middle-aged businessman sitting at his desk with a bullet in his head. On a hunch, one of the detectives interviewing Zachary Matthias photographed and faxed a copy of the painting to the San Diego Police Department. Twelve hours later, SDPD informed them the “painting” matched crime scene photos taken of Wallace Stanton, from his unsolved murder three years ago. They confirmed what Zachary Matthias had said about Hendricks’s obsession for the victim’s daughter. Eighteen-year-old Jessica Stanton had been found three weeks after her father’s death, hanging by the neck in her parents’ living room, an apparent suicide.
The painting and the San Diego connection gave credence to Zachary Matthias’s story of Hendricks’s strange obsession. One detective, who had grown fond of Zach, told him off the record: “You’re not as full of shit as we first thought you were.”
The other painting that survived the fire—with only a few burn marks along the right edge—was the one that caused such a scandal. Without a doubt, it had an effect on the race for senator.
Hendricks had named the painting
The Last Leap
, and it had been one of his favorites.
Zach had thought the man in the piece looked vaguely familiar. A couple of detectives concurred with him. The bird’s-eye-view rendering of the man’s fall from a rooftop looked like a scene from Hitchcock’s
Vertigo.
But the locale in this painting was undoubtedly Portland. One of the cops pointed out that the street below the victim was Park Southwest, not far from the statue of Lincoln—the same spot where two years ago, Mike Nuegent, a nine-year employee at Mobilink, Inc., had committed suicide.
Rumors still circulated that Jim Foley had the Mobilink clerk murdered for spitting in his face. The story was Nuegent became disgusted after Foley had spoken to a group of clerks, comparing himself to a Native American warrior who rides his horse until it’s dead, and then he eats it. “You people are like my horse,” Foley had concluded.
The police unearthed some photos of Mike Nuegent, and there was no mistaking it. He was the man in Hendricks’s painting.
Zach found it terribly ironic that Brad Corrigan Sr. had hired the same hit men that Jim Foley had once used. He didn’t share this with the authorities. Nor did he tell them about his three former classmates from high school, who had been murdered by these hit men. He feigned ignorance when asked why he’d been targeted by Norbert Siegel. “The guy didn’t explain why he was going to off me,” Zach told them. And that much was true. Siegel hadn’t actually given him a reason for the hit. Zach had done most of the talking back in those woods.
Asked if he had any enemies, Zach admitted that he’d recently had an altercation with a former coworker at the
Examiner
, who had been harassing Bridget Corrigan and her children. “His name’s Sid Mendel. He threatened to get me fired. I doubt he was mad enough to take it up a notch and hire a hit man. But he’s pretty damn sleazy. Maybe you want to check him out.”
One of the detectives questioning Zach thought it odd his would-be killer would offer no explanation for the hit on him—and yet run at the mouth about his role in the Gerard Hilliard, Leslie Ackerman murders—and his partner’s fixation on Bridget Corrigan.
Zach gave an evasive shrug. “Well, he seemed to be bragging about the Hilliard, Ackerman murders. They got so much coverage on TV. As for Ms. Corrigan, I was worried and asked if she’d been targeted too. That’s when he told me about his friend and his weird ‘artistic obsession’ over her. I think he was trying to torment me with the information. I wasn’t sure if he was telling the truth or not. That’s why I went to Hendricks’s loft—to see if it was true.”
“Why would you ask about Bridget Corrigan?” the cop pressed.
“Because I’m in love with her,” Zach replied.
He was so in love with Bridget that he’d been willing to lie for her. But Zach didn’t have to go that far during the rounds of police questioning. He’d merely left out huge chunks of the truth.
If a dark cloud seemed to loom over the Corrigan family that weekend, Brad’s numbers at the polls were the silver lining. People couldn’t help feeling sympathetic.
And people couldn’t help wondering about Jim Foley’s possible affiliation with these hit men. Although Portland police reopened the investigation into Mike Nuegent’s “suicide,” they found nothing beyond circumstantial evidence implicating Foley. Still, scathing accounts of his “warrior chief” speech and Nuegent’s suspicious demise began to recirculate. There was also talk that Foley may have arranged the hit on Gerard Hilliard and Leslie Ackerman to expose a cocaine connection to the Corrigans. Some even went as far as to say that Foley had put a contract out on Bridget Corrigan, his opponent’s sister and
secret weapon.
A week before the election, the
Examiner
ran a survey that asked:
Do you really believe Jim Foley has ever hired hit men to kill for him?
The response was 61 percent yes, 29 percent no, and 10 percent don’t know. The pro-Foley newspaper had expected a different response, and didn’t print the survey results. But the statistics accidentally showed up on the
Examiner
’s Web site for about twenty minutes before being yanked off.
Jim Foley never acknowledged any of the accusations. In his speeches and interviews, the “Nuegent matter” was a verboten subject. But Foley talked more and more about how prayer influenced his life. He said that God wanted him to be senator.
Two days before the election, the senatorial candidates were in a dead heat.
Brad asked Bridget to make some eleventh-hour appearances with him. She refused. She didn’t want to be a part of his campaign anymore, not when people were being murdered so he could win. Brad might not have been behind the murders, but he didn’t seem at all troubled that they’d been committed for his political gain. Despite everything, Bridget still considered him a better candidate than Foley. But at this point, her brother merely seemed like the lesser of two evils.
Considering what she’d been through, people thought they understood why Bridget Corrigan had stopped working for her brother and started spending more time with her sons. Though the Corrigans weren’t seen together in public anymore, people assumed Bridget, Brad, and their families still spent time together in private. The assumptions were wrong.
A week after the election, Bridget sold the house. The last time she’d considered putting the place on the market, David and Eric had been ready to commit mutiny. But now they were as eager as she was to get out of there.
They were making a fresh start—up in Bellingham, Washington. Since she’d made her first splash working for her brother, Bridget had been receiving offers from all over. A congressman from Washington State wanted her as his chief of staff in the Bellingham office. He’d been impressed with her work for Brad, and there was a large Spanish-speaking population in his district. For Bridget, it seemed like a good fit. She bought a three-bedroom, redbrick house—with a nice yard. They would be moving the week after Thanksgiving.
Bridget got a head start packing things in boxes. Every drawer and closet she cleaned out was full of memories. She browsed through her high school yearbook again, studying the photos of those classmates who had died. A disappearance, a suicide, and two freak accidents—none of them would be investigated any further. She found several items that Gerry had missed when he’d moved out earlier in the year: among them, an ugly brass paperweight with his fraternity letters on it, some cards she’d written to him, and a copy of
A Catcher in the Rye
with
Gerry Hilliard—English/3rd period—Mrs. Kinsella
scribbled on the inside front cover. Bridget couldn’t throw any of his things away. She packed them up for the move.
Another keepsake she couldn’t toss out was the picture Andy Shields had drawn of her. She’d tried to talk with Andy’s dad three weeks ago—shortly after that awful Friday night. Of all the people who had lost someone connected to Gorman’s Creek—the old murders as well as recent—the one person she’d wondered about most was Mr. Shields. Would he really want to know the circumstances of Andy’s death? Would that information heal old wounds—or merely open them up again?
She’d learned that Mr. and Mrs. Shields had moved to Santa Rosa back in 1986. Bridget had left two messages at their home, and was leaving a third when Mr. Shields picked up. “I’m sorry we haven’t called you back, Bridget,” he explained, his voice a bit strained. “I—well, Karen—
Mrs. Shields
and I—we thought you might want to talk about Andy. And it’s just too painful. I don’t mean to be rude or make you feel bad. But I associate you with that day he disappeared. Don’t get me wrong, Bridget. You were perfectly wonderful. But every time we see you or Brad on the news, we think of the day we lost Andy, and it still hurts. So, Bridget, if you called to talk about my son, I—I simply can’t. I’m sorry.”

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