“Bet you a hundred bucks,” Valentine said.
“You’re on,” Fuller said.
The four men started up the path toward Hollis’s residence. The house was a two-story square box that looked like a piece from a Monopoly game, with blinds drawn tightly on the windows, and old newspapers lying on the stoop. Fuller knocked on the screen door with his fist. The porch light came on, and they heard footsteps.
“Be careful. He’s got a grudge against Valentine,” Banko warned.
The front door swung in, and Hollis stood on the other side of the screen. In his late thirties, he was balding, with a pug face and deep, sunken eyes. Dressed in running shorts and a gray sweatshirt, he appeared to have been working out. Valentine stared at him through the FBI agents’ shoulders.
“Sorry to bother you again, Mister Hollis, but we forgot to ask you a couple of things,” Fuller said. “May we come in?”
“Can’t this wait until tomorrow? I’m going to bed,” Hollis said.
“Afraid not.”
“Who are those men standing behind you?”
“Two officers with the Atlantic City Police Department.”
“Do they have names?”
“Why is that important?”
“I just like to know who I’m letting into my home.”
Hollis was stalling. Inside the house, Iron Butterfly’s psychedelic rock song In-a-gadda-da-vida was playing loudly on a stereo, and sweet incense was burning. Every serial killer had a ritual, and Valentine guessed that Hollis’s ritual was to recreate The Summer of Love.
“Mona’s in the house,” he blurted out.
Hollis’s eyes grew wide. Fuller jerked the screen door open, and he and Romero rushed in. They pinned Hollis to a wall in the foyer, and ordered him not to move.
“You’re under arrest,” Fuller told him.
Fuller read Hollis his rights, while Romero cuffed their suspect. Valentine and Banko followed them inside. Seeing Valentine, Hollis suddenly looked afraid.
“Valentine,” he muttered.
“Where is she?” Valentine said.
Hollis said nothing. The interior of the house was chilly, yet Hollis was sweating. Most old houses on the island had faulty heating, and he guessed Mona was either in the basement, or the attic. He decided to give Hollis a chance to come clean.
“You left a thumb tip in the glove compartment of your car,” Valentine said. “A hooker you picked up last week saw it. The game’s over. We know who you are.”
Hollis looked baffled. Then, his shoulders sagged.
“Fuck me,” he muttered.
“Is Mona still alive?”
“Yes.”
“Take us to her.”
“Okay.”
Hollis stepped down into the living room with the two FBI agents behind him. Their suspect dropped his arms, and there was a harsh popping sound as he dislocated his wrists. The handcuffs slid free and hit the floor. Reaching into his shorts, he extracted a can of pepper spray, and spun around.
“Fuckers!”
The pepper spray hit Fuller first, then Romero and Banko. It gave Valentine enough time to raise his forearm, and partially protect his face. His eyes filled with tears, and he watched helplessly as Hollis kicked Banko viciously in the groin, then shoved the FBI agents into each other, and sent them to the floor.
Then, Hollis turned on Valentine.
“Ready to rumble, Tony?” he screamed.
Hollis had turned into a raving psychopath in the blink of an eye. He grabbed a metal lamp off a table and smacked Valentine in the side of the head, then hit him in the shoulders and arms. He was laughing now, and seemed to be enjoying himself.
Valentine hadn’t come here to die. He threw a lazy punch at his attacker’s face. Hollis ducked the blow, but not the elbow that came with it. Boxers called it throwing a chicken wing, and it was the dirtiest trick Valentine knew.
Hollis’s head snapped back, and he hit the floor. Valentine got on top of him, and started throwing punches of his own. He would have continued had Banko not stepped in. “Jesus, Tony, you’ll kill him.”
“Is that so bad?”
“How did he slip the cuffs?”
“It’s a magic trick.”
Valentine grabbed Hollis by the collar and lifted his head. With his other hand, he pulled back one of his eyelids. Hollis was out cold.
“Damn it,” Valentine said.
It took Fuller and Romero a few moments to pull themselves together. When they had, and Hollis was under their control, Valentine and Banko ran through the house, checking the rooms as well as the basement and attic. There was no sign of Mona.
“The garage,” Valentine said.
The garage was a separate structure that stood behind the house. Banko opened the sliding door, and Valentine found a light and turned it on. A florescent bulb lit up the interior, revealing a white AT&T van with a ladder perched on the roof. Valentine grabbed the handle on the van’s rear door and jerked it open. Empty.
“Jesus,” Banko swore. “Look at this.”
Banko faced a wall lined with dozens of apothecary jars. From each jar stared out a pair of helpless eyes. Squirrels and rabbits and cats were swimming lifelessly in formaldehyde. Some people collected stamps. Hollis collected dead animals.
They returned to the house. Every room had been ice cold. So why was Hollis sweating? Valentine took another walk through the downstairs. The rooms were laid out in a circular design. If it was a circle, then where was its center?
He checked the closets, and banged on the interior wall. The closet in the den sounded hollow, and appeared to be made of particle board.
“In here,” he shouted.
Banko joined him. With their combined weight, they took down the wall. If fell inward, and they entered a small, dimly lit space that was twenty degrees warmer than the rest of the house. Mona hung by her wrists from a meat hook in the ceiling, her mouth covered in duct tape, her face a deathly blue.
“Help me get her down,” Valentine said.
He gave her mouth to mouth until an ambulance arrived, and a pair of medics went to work on her. She’d always joked about them getting together one day. Not like this,he thought. He leaned against the wall and watched the medics try to jolt her heart back to life. It wasn’t working.
He shuddered. It was what passed for tears after he’d been a cop for a while. He realized he needed to sit down. There was a chair against the wall, and as he sat in it, he noticed a plate of hot dog and beans lying on the floor beside it. Had Hollis been eating his dinner as Mona had starved to death? He couldn’t think of anything more cruel.
A small desk sat in the room’s corner, on it an open shoe box. He thumbed through snapshots of Mary Ann Crawford, Melissa Edwards, Connie Howard and Maria Sanchez that showed them gradually starving to death. The last envelope contained snapshots of a naked man lying atop a naked woman tied to a bed. The woman did not look thrilled with the situation. The man in the photos was Special Agent Fuller. Now he knew why Fuller had run out of town; Hollis had the goods on him.
Valentine glanced at the medics. They were still working on Mona, and paying no attention to him. He shoved the incriminating photographs of Fuller into his pocket, then walked out of Hollis’s lair. In the living room he found Banko talking to a couple of uniforms. His superior took him aside and said, “How’s she doing?”
“Not good,” Valentine said.
“I’m sorry. I know you cared about her.”
“Thanks.”
Through the living room window appeared the blinking lights of several police cruisers, as well as the shadows of uniformed cops standing on the front lawn. Valentine went outside, and found Hollis sitting in the back of a cruiser, his wrists handcuffed behind him, his face stained by his own blood. Their eyes met, and Hollis gnashed his teeth, trying to make himself frightening. Only he wasn’t; he was just a pathetic little man. Valentine put his face to the window. “Will you tell me something?”
Hollis stopped gnashing. “What?”
“Why did you kill those girls? It was my wife you wanted.”