Casey's stomach heaved, and she gagged, choking, and waited for him to plunge the knife into her body, waited to die. Sales raised his head and let out a primal howl. It was the cry of a mind that had been broken, a spirit dashed beyond recognition. His body, too, began to shake. He screamed and tore at his hair, pulling it out in long, thin strands.
"She was my daughter!" he wailed. "She was my daughter! And you! You shit on her! You shit on me!"
CHAPTER 22
Sales threw the knife toward the back of the cave and then threw himself down beside her on the stone floor.
Casey watched him shake. After several minutes he began to tire, and soon he rose to his hands and knees, with his face turned away from her. Sales stood and then wiped his face on his sleeve and retrieved the knife from where it had landed. When he returned, he carefully cut through the tape at her ankles, then her hands. Finally, slowly, he unwrapped the band around her mouth, gently pressing down on her scalp to remove the sticky tape from her hair as painlessly as possible.
Casey rubbed her wrists and blinked at him in the dim light of the cave. Sales sat back against the far wall and hugged his knees to his chest.
"I'm sorry," he said quietly, looking down at the floor between them. Then he looked up at her defiantly and said, "But I wanted you to know what she felt like. I wanted you to know what they all felt like, what the next girl will feel like and the girl after that and the one after that… Unless you help me, it won't ever stop."
"What"-Casey cleared her throat and whispered-"what are you talking about?"
Sales looked at her. The passionate fire in his eyes was quenched. They were tired now, dull, almost lifeless.
"I'm talking about Lipton," he said. "I didn't kill Marcia. I didn't kill Frank Castle or the other girl. He killed them all. And he's going to kill you."
Casey wrinkled her face in doubt. She was still trembling. Sales got up and removed a big flannel shirt from his pile of things. He crossed the floor of the cave and put it around her shoulders. The kindness of the act was magnified a hundredfold. The relief she felt was overwhelming. She railed against the inexplicable sudden feeling of gratitude she had toward Sales. After all, he had kidnapped her and terrorized her. Casey remembered reading that victims of torture experienced similar emotions, and she suspected this was the same thing. Whatever was causing it, she couldn't help the way she felt, almost giddy.
"I'm not crazy," he said, sitting back down and leaning back against the wall. With profound sadness he continued, "And if I was a killer, I would have killed you for what you did."
Casey looked at Sales, and the memory of her tearing him apart on the witness stand was painfully fresh. Tony Cronic's warning about accusing an innocent man of having sex with his daughter came to her mind. Despite the complexity of emotions she was feeling, shame jumped to the forefront.
"Why do you say he's going to kill me?" Casey heard herself say, the lawyer's part of her mind automatically probing for information.
Sales shrugged. "Because he's watching you. He has a white van that he drives. I don't know how he gets in your neighborhood past the security gates, but I saw him."
Casey thought of the white van she'd seen and the shadowy figure in the parking garage at work.
"He disappeared after the trial, you know," Sales said. "He probably knew I was going to kill him…"
"You said you weren't a killer," Casey said, unable to keep a hint of panic from seeping back into her voice.
Sales considered her in the gloom of the cave. He looked down as if contemplating his words, then looked up at her again. "Yeah, well that's different… You don't have any kids. You can't really understand…"
His eyes were alight again. Casey said nothing. She didn't want to think about it.
"You can't love anything like you love a little girl. You can't imagine it," he said emotionally. "Having your child die, having her killed, having her tortured, cut up… that's too much for anyone to think about. But I didn't have a choice, Casey Jordan. Lipton did those things to my little girl…
"Someone who did that," he said bitterly, his voice rising, "you kill someone who did that, you rip the life from their body. It's not murder… It's justice."
"Why am I here?" Casey asked after an uncomfortable silence.
"I told you," Sales said, looking so deeply into her eyes that she felt exposed. "I want your help."
"How would I help you?" Casey asked.
"I want you to tell me how to find him. What he does, how he does it. I know there was another girl. I want to know where. Where was he then, where else has he gone. You're his lawyer. There are things you know about him that no one else knows. I want to know. That's how you can help find him."
"But there's more," Casey said.
"Yes, there is more," Sales told her. "I know he wants you. If I can stay close to you, I'll get a chance at him. Sooner or later, I'll get a chance at him… you're the perfect person to help. You're the one who got him off."
Casey looked at him for a long time before saying quietly, "I still don't know that he killed anyone."
"Hah!" Sales snorted. "You don't know? You don't know? Think about it! You know goddamn well he did it."
"Either he did it or you did it," Casey said angrily. "I don't really know. You didn't have an alibi. You could have killed the girl in Atlanta."
"Could I?" Sales said disdainfully.
"Yes."
Sales jumped to his feet, and with his flashlight in one hand blinding her, he brandished the knife with the other. "If I was going to kill anyone, I'd kill you. How come I didn't kill you just now? Explain that away, Casey Jordan. If that's what I do, I'd kill you!" His words resonated through the cave before the darkness could swallow the sound.
Casey wasn't scared all over again. She knew Sales was angry, but there was no malice in his words. He was speaking out of frustration, and what he said was true. She had expected him to kill her. If he had killed everyone else, why wouldn't he have done it? Unless…
"Unless you want me to get to Professor Lipton," she said, shielding her eyes from his light with her hand. "You hate him."
"I would," Sales said. "But if that were true, why would I kill Frank Castle?"
"To make it look like Professor Lipton," she said.
"Now you're not even thinking," he retorted. "If all I wanted was to kill Lipton, why would I bother trying to frame him for another murder?"
"Because of what Frank Castle did to you at the trial," Casey said. It was surreal to be sitting there talking about life and death as if they were poker chips.
"Now we're back to you," Sales said calmly, taking his light off her and shining it on the rock floor that lay between them. "If I was going to kill someone over what happened at the trial, you'd have been first on my list. Believe me, you would have been the only one on my list… And if Lipton wasn't the killer, he wouldn't be stalking you. And if he wasn't the killer, stalking you, then there wouldn't be any reason to keep you alive to help me find him."
Casey was used to thinking quickly on her feet, and she knew that everything Sales said was perfectly logical. "You said you wanted me to tell you how to find him."
"I do," Sales said. "But if that's all I wanted, I could have gotten it out of you. Believe me, I could have gotten it out of you and then killed you."
"But we have the disk," she responded.
"What disk?"
"A copy of his computer hard drive. It might have information on it."
"I never knew about a computer disk," Sales said.
Casey rubbed her eyes with the palms of her hands. Of course he didn't know about that. She sighed wearily. "I'm exhausted. I just don't know anything right now. Why is Bolinger so convinced you killed Frank Castle?"
"When he came to question me after Castle was killed," Sales said, "I got in my truck to follow him down to the police station. While I was driving, I reached under my seat for a little thing of lip balm that I dropped. I felt a sticky rag under there, and I had no idea what it was. When I put on the light, I saw it was a shirt and it was all covered with blood. The blood was all over my hands and this knife was wrapped in the middle of the shirt…