“Left one,” I whisper.
James opens it and we enter a longer hallway. Doors are on both sides. My stomach churns when I see the padlocks and hasps.
How many? Ten doors on each side? Are they all occupied?
I ignore my nausea and the yammering. We head down the hallway until it turns, and then there are only two doors, one at the end and one on the wall to the right. The doorway to the right is open. James puts a finger to his lips and inches toward it. I smell blood and death, that scent of shit and copper. James enters the room, gun trembling in his hands. I follow. The smells are stronger here.
I almost faint when I see the two tables and the two women there.
This is it. The place where he made me choose.
I lurch forward and vomit. Not because of the women with the fresh bullet holes in their foreheads, but because of the memories. My vision swims, and I stagger to one knee.
“You okay?” Alan whispers.
I can’t respond. I point out to the hallway. We have another room to clear.
Then a sound of another gunshot, the fourth and last, louder this time. James and Callie race out the door toward the other room. I hear a door open and then I hear nothing. I force myself to ignore the flashing white lights behind my eyes. The meadow calls, maybe my baby is there waiting, but now is not the time. I walk out of the room on unsteady legs. The other door has been flung wide.
“What is it?” I call out. “Is everyone okay?”
“Come and see,” Callie calls back softly. “Come and see.”
I enter the room with my head and finger throbbing. It’s a large room, made into an office. It’s stark. The floor is uncarpeted, the walls bare and unpainted. A single file cabinet sits next to a cheap faux-wood desk. There’s a computer monitor on the desk. A man is there too. His brains are splashed on the wall behind him.
“Coward,” James mutters. “He must have known we were coming.” He sounds frustrated. I understand. I wanted to kill Dali too.
“What about it?” Callie asks. “Do you recognize any part of him?”
I lean forward. I see an obliterated forehead above a set of surprised eyes and a slack mouth. I put him in his late forties to early fifties. His hair is in a crew cut, and it’s a semi-handsome but mostly unremarkable face. All of these things fit, except for perhaps the most important thing: the thing I saw and kept to myself. I wasn’t sure why I did it, before. Now I do.
“Yes,” I say. “That’s him. That’s Dali.”
It’s a lie, but that’s okay. I think I understand everything now.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
We sit in my living room, Tommy, Kirby, and I. Bonnie is being watched by Alan and Elaina for a few days. They think it’s to give me time to recover from everything that’s happened. The truth is that it’s to give me time to do what must be done.
“He knew you were coming because he was tracking the GPS chip in your phone,” Tommy says. “The techs didn’t find anything when they checked out your phone because there was nothing to find. He just locked on the signal and kept an eye out. A little reverse telemetry gave us what we need.”
Kirby examines me with an unreadable gaze as she cracks her gum. “You sure about this, boss lady? I have no problem with it, but this is new territory for you.” She nods a head at Tommy. “And you.”
“I’m sure,” I reply.
Tommy says nothing.
“Okeydokey,” Kirby says, grinning. “Let’s saddle up.”
Eric Kellerman. That is the name of the man with the obliterated forehead. He was forty-eight years old. He was an orphan, adopted by no one but the city, put out to pasture when he was eighteen. There’s not much after that but an excess of evidence.
His fingerprints matched the unknowns that were inside the body bags. Videos and photographs of the car accidents were found at the Los Angeles location, along with some poetry he’d written about how watching a car crash was better than having sex with any woman. There was a trunk containing over fifty thousand dollars in cash. Finally, in a desk drawer, held inside a plastic bag covered with his fingerprints, was the severed end of my own finger. It was all incontrovertible.
“The symphorophilia is what really clinches it,” James had remarked. “The statistical probability that someone else would have that particular paraphilia at that location combined with all the other factors is next to nil. He was Dali.”
The victims were the worst. Three women, all missing for a various number of years, most of them in worse shape than Heather Hollister. The husbands of these women were rounded up. Some broke quickly, some broke slow, but all of them broke. They were cowards at the core, narcissists whose biggest regret was being caught. They each had the same story, just sung to a different tune.
There were no clues to the locations of the Oregon or Nevada buildings. That’s okay. Tommy, Kirby, and I found them ourselves. It took a little work, but we have them, and we’ll provide an anonymous tip once we’ve done what we need to do.
I asked for time off, and it was given without any fuss. I think AD Jones was too relieved at my request to be suspicious. I hope. Director Rathbun wanted to do a press conference first, but he relented when I insisted I was in no shape to get in front of the cameras.
“Fine,” he said. “Go home; rest. Get yourself together. But don’t let the hair grow in too much before the conference. It’s a great image. We’ll use it to our advantage.”
It wasn’t all a lie. I did take a day or two to rest. Then I sent Bonnie packing and pulled in Tommy and Kirby and told them everything: what I knew, what I suspected, what I was unsure of. They were skeptical at first, until I told them about the thing I’d seen. After that, they shut up and listened.
Tommy had been the one to figure out that Dali was tracking the GPS chip in my phone. It’s how Dali knew that I was closing in on the LA location. Once again, simplicity had been his brilliance. He knew the techs at the FBI would check out my belongings for bugs, so instead of installing one, he just figured out how to track what was already there.
Tommy had used his knowledge and technical contacts to reverse-engineer the GPS. This enabled us to track Dali. We counted on him taking no chances, and he didn’t disappoint. Declared dead or not, he kept the tracker active, wanting to be sure that he knew where I was. Pragmatism was his higher power and, I had to admit, it had served him pretty well, until now.
He’d been busy, spending time in Nevada and then in Oregon. It was pretty simple to figure out the addresses of the other locations. He was in Nevada now, and we were getting ready to go see him. To end this.
To kill him.
I long to kill him. I want to watch the life go out of his eyes. His death will be like water pouring down a parched and dusty throat. Will it quench my thirst? I don’t know. But it will keep him from coming after the people I love. That’ll have to be enough.
“I’m going to give Raymond your phone,” Kirby says. “He’ll carry it around with him while he’s watching Bonnie; that way it’ll look like you’re still here in LA.”
“Good. Are we ready?”
“I am,” Tommy says.
“The family that slays together, stays together,” Kirby chirps, then giggles.
Tommy and I don’t laugh.
We leave in the afternoon so we can arrive around dinnertime. The dark is better for what we’re after. There isn’t much talking; even Kirby keeps relatively silent. I watch California turn into the desert, feel the change of the temperature in spite of the air-conditioning. Watch as nothing turns back into the overwhelming something of Las Vegas. It appears as it always does, like some Flying Dutchman of a city. Mammon pricked his finger and let a drop of blood fall onto the sand. Up sprang Las Vegas.