At that moment Holly felt an explosion of anticipation. She felt it as she might feel the wind, or an ocean wave. It washed over her, covered her completely, engulfed her.
“Take this,” the woman said, handing over the casserole.
“What is it?”
“Some music. Some directions. Put it on, and turn it on as soon as you get to the basement. I should go. Someone may be watching us.”
Holly could barely breathe through the moist heat of expectation. She watched the woman go down the sidewalk and chanced a glance at the Cherokee with Colorado plates on the next block.
She went back inside. Fear?
Hardly.
Anticipation.
She peeked inside the casserole and saw the Walkman.
Her pulse shot way north of normal.
Once again she was off on an adventure. She was about to dash across the Brad Pitt line, again.
The family picture was a fiasco. Holly turned off the kitchen lights and herded everyone into the living room. Getting the ten children in place was like trying to get a bunch of houseflies to soar in formation.
Photos taken, Holly pulled the turkey from the oven, asked her oldest sister to remove the stuffing, and excused herself for a quick bath.
Instead of going into the bathroom, though, she scurried down the stairs, stopping halfway down to pull the headphones on and to hit the button on the Walkman marked “play.”
Her voice, not his. The music in the background? Chant. Gregorian chant.
Nice.
“Bottom step? See the duct tape? Wrap a long strip around your head, covering your mouth. Good. Now do another. We’re in the laundry room. Before you join us, take another strip of tape and bind your wrists. It’s not easy to do, but I’ve done it. You can do it, too.” Pause. “It’s what he wants. What do you want?”
A few moments of silence, then:
“Are you ready, Holly? When you’re ready, open the door to the laundry room. And come on in.”
SEVENTY-ONE
I expected worse.
I was prepared for a whole mess of blood. I expected to find Holly’s head bashed in-for some reason, that’s how I thought she would be killed-but I was wrong. Holly’s wrist and ankles were bound, and she was gagged. Duct tape. She was sitting on top of the washing machine, not the dryer, and her pose was absurdly proper, significantly less erotic than the laundry room loop that had been playing relentlessly in my brain.
A Walkman hung from the waistband of her skirt, earphones in place on her head.
Gibbs? She sat across the room in an alcove barely large enough for an orange plastic chair that would have been labeled for a buck at a yard sale and would probably have gone unsold at the end of the day. Her legs were crossed, left over right. She was gripping a kitchen knife with a five-inch blade-a good knife, she’d probably brought it from home-in her right hand. A cell phone rested on her lap.
She looked as lovely as she had the first time I met her. But that didn’t matter to me at all this time. Not a lick.
Right.
“Let me go, Sam,” she said. It was as though Carmen and Holly weren’t even in the room.
Gibbs had two handguns pointed at her chest-mine and Carmen’s-and yet she’d managed to make her request sound perfectly mundane, like she and I were out on a date and she was wondering if I’d mind getting her a beer.
“Drop the knife, Gibbs,” I said. I’d like to say I barked the order. Or yelled it. But I didn’t. I merely said it.
“If you don’t let me go, Sam, I’ll kill myself. I will. I’ll plunge this right into my chest.”
Where did my head go at that moment? For some reason I thought about those crazy people who destroyed art treasures in museums. Like the guy who took a hammer to Michelangelo’sPietà. I thought,Gibbs, no! You can’t!But I also knew-instantly-that my silent protest wasn’t about Gibbs, the person. It was about Gibbs, the lovely art.
Crazy.
“Drop the knife, Gibbs,” I said.
She purred, “Come on, Sam. Hey…”
Carmen joined the discussion. She crowed, “Jesus H. Christ,” took a little skip-step into the fray, and swatted the knife out of Gibbs’s hand. The blade clanked against the wall and tumbled to the floor. “Cut herself? Shit! This princess? She wouldn’t even use the wrong eyeliner on herself.”
I kicked the knife even farther from Gibbs. I was feeling kind of stupid.
“So she gets to live,” Gibbs said.
I assumed she meant Holly but didn’t say anything at first. I thought it might be wise to leave the next move to Carmen.
Carmen immediately started the you’re-under-arrest process with Gibbs, cuffing her and searching her and reciting Miranda to her like a bored schoolgirl spitting out the Gettysburg Address to a class full of kids who didn’t really care.
I began the process of gingerly removing the tape from Holly’s mouth. It wasn’t coming off easily.
Miranda complete, I asked, “Why, Gibbs? Why does she get to live?” Part of me cared about the answer, part of me was trying to cover my embarrassment over the knife thing. All of me knew that whatever Gibbs said in reply would just be noise.
“Because you got here first. That’s the only reason. If I had called you five minutes sooner, you would have rushed back to Colorado to save me. You know you would have, Sam. But you came in the house, you came down here… Timing. It was just a problem with timing.” Her voice trailed away. “She wanted Sterling, you know? They all did. That wasn’t the deal. One time only, that was the deal.”
Suddenly I got it. I faced her. “Were you in the basilica that day, Gibbs? At Notre Dame? Up in the choir loft?”
Carmen stopped what she was doing.
I glanced at Holly. Above the duct tape, her eyes were wide.
Gibbs smiled. She actually smiled. “Of course I was.” She looked right at Holly. “Chanel suit? Purple? You remember me? She wanted him to come back again. She e-mailed himagain. That wasn’t the deal. She knew the deal. She’d agreed to it.”
I got it all. Every bit of it.
“The deal?”
“Yes. The deal.”
That’s what I meant about the noise. My phone rang.
I checked the caller ID. Alan.
“Yeah,” I said.
Alan’s voice was full of rookie-cop wonder. “I’m at my office with Sterling Storey, Sam. You’re not going to believe this: He says he thinks Gibbs has been killing all those women.”
“Just a sec.” I turned to Gibbs. “Guess what? Your husband survived the Ochlockonee. He’s in Boulder, and he just gave you up to your doctor. Is that romantic or what?”
An army of footsteps erupted above my head. The locals had arrived to take over.
SEVENTY-TWO
The question of which jurisdiction was going to get first dibs on Gibbs would keep a whole lot of county attorneys across the country busy for a while. Other than hoping that Boulder didn’t win that particular lottery, I wasn’t invested in the outcome.
I spent a couple of hours answering questions for the South Bend police, who seemed to have suffered amnesia about their decision not to keep an eye on Holly Malone, and then I prepared to leave Indiana.
First I kept my promise and called Lucy, letting her know what had transpired in South Bend. She was astonished at the developments. She had some news for me, too, though: The feds had finally tracked down Brian Miles. They’d found him in a big suite at a fancy hotel in the Bahamas where he was on vacation.