I SLOW my pace instinctively, though it takes some effort walking downhill, my strides lengthening to keep balance. My eyes adjust to the darkness, and I make out the features of the third person standing next to Denny Sasser and Agent Getty.
The three of them are laughing and gesturing. When Denny sees me, he turns in my direction.
“Emmy,” he says, “you remember Jim Demetrio.”
Jim Demetrio. Sure. The former FBI agent who retired about a year ago and lives around Pittsburgh. The one who lent us this cabin. One of the best serial killer profilers Denny’s ever met, he said.
“Nice to see you again,” I say.
“Cabin treating you okay?”
“It’s great,” I say. “Thank you again.” Suddenly aware of the two very hot cups I’m holding, I put them on the trunk of the car. “Hot cocoa for our security guards,” I say.
“How’s she holding up?” Demetrio asks, gesturing toward the cabin. “The witness. Is she scared? Nervous?”
“She’s fine,” I say, a protective tone to my short statement.
“Hmpf. Well, that’s good.”
“Hey,” I say. “How about a photo of the three of you?” I raise my smartphone up to my eye. “For old time’s sake?”
“Oh, I don’t need to see myself in a photo,” says Demetrio. “It’ll just remind me how old and soft I’m getting.”
“Old and soft and wealthy,” Denny adds.
“Oh, come on, guys. Just get together for a shot.”
“Nah, in fact, I have to get going,” Demetrio says. “I might stop by later to say hi, guys. Be safe.”
Jim Demetrio jumps into his fancy sports car and peels away.
“Thanks for the hot chocolate,” says Denny. “Smells great.”
But something else smells bad.
I walk back up the driveway filled with adrenaline. I dial up Sophie, even though it’s past midnight her time. I doubt she’s sleeping.
“Hey,” she says.
“Sophie,” I say, out of breath, “I need some really quick research on someone.”
110
ANOTHER HOUR passes. I stare out the window by the back porch into the darkness, seeing nothing but stars filling the sky. Ordinarily, a calm, peaceful setting.
“What’s wrong?” Mary asks. She’s in the living room on the couch with her copy of the Graham transcripts.
“Nothing’s wrong.” But I feel, somehow, that something is, my senses heightened, attuned to everything, every tweet of a bird, every rustle of the leaves, every whistle of the wind, every creak of the cabin.
“You didn’t drink your hot chocolate,” she says. “It isn’t so hot anymore.”
“Actually, I’m allergic to chocolate.” I smile at her. “Didn’t have the heart to tell you.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” she says. “I’ll make you some tea.”
“Don’t bother.”
“It’s no bother. Remember, I’m the busy bee.” Mary pops off the couch and moves past me into the kitchen. She fills the kettle with water and puts it on the stove.
“Thanks,” I say. “Maybe a little tea would be nice.”
She squeezes my arm. “You sure you’re okay? You seem more nervous than me.” I don’t respond, and she walks into her bedroom.
I look again out the kitchen window, the water beginning to simmer in the nearby kettle. No sense in getting Mary anxious. As if she isn’t already.
She returns from the bedroom and sits on the couch, dropping down on one leg and flipping through the transcripts. “These transcripts are freaky,” she says. “But I don’t see anything in here that jumps out as wrong. Other than describing me as beautiful.”
Off in the distance, a shot rings out. A car backfiring? Ordinarily, I wouldn’t place any importance whatsoever on it.
I move cautiously toward the front door when a bell rings out, and the mechanical gears shift and slide. The cuckoo bird tells me it’s 10:00 p.m., after it’s given me a heart attack and caused me to jump out of my shoes.
“Dammit, that stupid clock,” I say. “You think anyone would care if I ripped that thing off the wall?”
Mary gets a chuckle out of that. “I like cuckoo clocks. We had one growing up. It was actually kind of a nickname I had.”
“Is that right? A nickname?” As casually as I can, so as not to alarm Mary, I look through the window over her head toward the gravel parkway, where everything looks as expected, the U.S. marshals’ vehicle parked with its engine idling, headlights beaming toward the cabin.
All good.
But still, I head back to the kitchen window, playing sentry, notwithstanding the fact that there are four armed guards outside, with access to security cameras, who can do a much better job of it than I can.
“Just a silly nickname,” says Mary. “Do you remember that song ‘La Cucaracha’?”
“What?” I say, snapping my head around.
And over her head, out the window, suddenly everything is wrong. The dome light on the U.S. marshals’ sedan is on, illuminating the interior. The driver, McCloud, is motionless, his head against the steering wheel. His partner is slumped against the passenger window, also perfectly still.
And a man is running from the gravel parkway toward the cabin.
“Run, Mary, run!” I shout, as Jim Demetrio’s face plants against the small window in the front door, one large eye peering into the cabin.
111
MARY DUCKS down and rolls off the couch to the floor as Jim Demetrio pounds on the front door.
“It’s him, Mary, it’s him!” I hold out my hand, beckoning her to run with me, but she crawls along the floor on her elbows parallel to the couch, as if trying to avoid gunfire, moving toward the front door.
“Mary, he’s coming!” I shout. “It’s him!” I stifle my instinct to flee, because I can’t leave Mary alone with him. I open kitchen drawers, looking for a knife, as I hear a key moving in the lock.
He has a key. It’s his cabin.
I promise you that one day soon we’ll meet again.
The door pops open. Demetrio looks at me. “Emmy, where’s—”
Mary leaps off the floor into his peripheral vision. Before Demetrio can turn, Mary drives something sharp into his neck. Blood launches from his throat as Demetrio, stunned, stumbles backward and falls against the door before crumpling to the ground.
Mary shuffles backward away from him, like he’s radioactive.
I move from the kitchen toward him, looking for any signs of breathing. The adrenaline dump is catching up with me now. My entire body is trembling. I manage to fish my cell out of my pocket but I can’t hold it, dropping it to the floor.
Demetrio’s eyes have gone lifeless. He is slumped on the floor, his head propped up awkwardly. The blood continues to spit out of his throat, as the heart completes its final contractions, not yet having received word that it’s supposed to stop pumping.
Mary looks at me, her chest heaving like an animal.
“Do you know…his name?” she asks me.
“J-Jim,” I say, finding my voice. “Jim Demetrio. The owner of the cabin. Ex-FBI, out of Pittsburgh.”
She looks back at him. “Dammit,” she says. “You never said anything about him.”
I put my hands on my knees, struggling for air. On the floor, my cell phone beeps, a text message from Sophie.
Jim Demetrio all clear. Out of country most of September on security job. Bought a Porsche in Pittsburgh on day of Detroit bombing. Couldn’t be our subject.
Jim Demetrio…isn’t our killer? Then—what just happened?
I look up at Mary, who is watching Demetrio closely, probably making sure he’s dead.
“We should go check on the agents,” I say. “They might still be—”
“No.” Mary shakes her head, turns and blocks the front door. Suddenly, she is in much better control of herself, more self-assured than I’ve ever seen her. “No, no, Emmy. We’re not going to do that.”
At first I’m
lost, disoriented, overwhelmed, dazed and confused.
And then my blood goes cold.
Mary watches me carefully. I don’t have a poker face. Never did. So she must notice my expression as it washes over me, information hurtling at me like meteors, all of it, the things I missed. The birth certificate I pulled up when we were first trying to locate Mary Laney—the same year of birth as Mary, the same hometown as Mary, but the name “Marty” instead. The bruises on her face from a baseball bat that could have—should have—caused far greater injuries. And just now, the story she began to tell about “La Cucaracha.”
“You’re the lie,” I say. “The lie in those transcripts…was you.”
She watches me but says nothing, her breathing evening out. There’s no use pretending at this point.
“You should have drunk the cocoa,” she says. “This would’ve been easier.”
112
RUN, EMMY. Run. It’s your only chance.
But there’s nowhere for me to run. She’s blocking the exit to the front door and is closer than I am to the porch door. And besides, I’ve waited almost a year to find my sister’s killer. Now that I have, I’m not going anywhere.
“You never got to finish your story about the cuckoo clock,” I say. “You were a little kid dancing to ‘La Cucaracha’?”
She shrugs but doesn’t speak. Her bandaged face and white shirt are covered in blood spatter. She holds her weapon—a scalpel, it looks like, probably stolen from the hospital—at her side.
“Let me finish it for you,” I say. “Your dad wanted to give you that nickname. But you couldn’t pronounce it. So you said you were his little cuckoo-clock-ah. Do I have that about right?”
I know I do. At least that’s the way Gretchen Swanson described it to me when I sat at her kitchen table after noticing her porcelain figurine cockroach. Except the little girl in that version was her daughter, whom she had recently buried.
“Joelle Swanson,” Mary says. “Nice girl. Very trusting.”
I remove the key fob from my pocket and push the red button for emergency.
“Your friends outside aren’t going to hear that,” says Mary. “They’re having a nice, long nap right now.”
“Maybe this signal goes to people you didn’t drug with your sleeping pills,” I say. “Maybe it goes to Agent Bookman. Maybe to the local police.” I push it a second time for good measure.
“Maybe it would,” says Mary, “if that thing had any batteries in it.”
I look at the key fob again, pushing the red button but noticing that the tiny red light isn’t lighting up in response. It’s as dead as Mary’s many victims.
“When you were taking a shower,” Mary explains.
I consider my dwindling options. Mary has thought of everything. Inventing those Graham Sessions, just in case we somehow caught up to her, so she could use “Graham” as a scapegoat. And that final line she wrote—I promise you that one day soon we’ll meet again—knowing full well that she’d escape and leave us to assume that the prophecy had come true. It was even smart of her to insist I come to Oregon with her, so she could keep a close eye on the investigation.
“You can kill me, but you’ll never get away with it now. Your cover is finally blown.”
“Is it?” She takes another step toward me, an animal stalking its prey, her knees slightly bent, ready to respond to any move I make. She is, at most, four strides away from me. “True, I’ll have to stop going to football games, which is a real shame. I do love watching it live. But otherwise, I’ll just disappear. Don’t you see? The killer found me and kidnapped me,” she says in a faux-innocent voice. “I’m still the victim.”
She’s right. I see it now. She’ll take the iPads away from the agents, so they’ll have no record of the security cameras. She’ll probably spill a little of her own blood in the cabin to make it look like she put up a fight. Why not? If she can hit herself with a baseball bat and fool us, cutting her fingertip to leave a little blood behind would be easy. And she’ll just be Mary Laney, kidnapped victim of our unknown killer.
“And—then what?” I ask. “You start a new life? Adopt all the characteristics, the little stories and anecdotes that all your victims told you, that you made them tell you while you tortured them? That’s what all this has been, right? How your dad would say bzz-bzz-bzz to you? The white teddy bear you lost in the supermarket? The ‘Cucaracha’ story from Joelle Swanson? What about Marta?” I scream, spit flying from my mouth. “What about my sister? What are you going to take from her life?”
Mary takes another step toward me. “I’m going to take you, Emmy,” she says.
And then she smiles.
I make a break for it, against all odds but with nothing to lose, pivoting to my right, toward the door leading to the porch, grabbing the handle as my body slams against it—
I feel the hot sting of the scalpel sinking between my ribs, the searing pain as it enters then exits in one fluid motion. Then a hand grips the back of my hair and I’m falling backward until I hit the kitchen floor. I put my hand over the wound, the hot blood spilling out of me, the pain like a deafening echo in my head.
Mary slowly approaches me, helpless on the floor. She plays with the scalpel in her hand. A whistle sounds to her left, to my right, from the kettle on the kitchen stove.
“Oh, goodie,” she says. “The water’s ready.”
113
MARY WATCHES me, the kettle of boiling water in one hand, the scalpel in the other, a tortured expression—a cross between a grimace and a grin—on her face.
I inch backward, sliding along the kitchen floor. I am trapped. I can’t outfight her. I can’t match her physically or tactically. I only have my head, swimming right now with images of my sister and all the brutality we’ve witnessed, the autopsy photos, victims scalped and burned, sliced and diced, tortured beyond human capacity. With my remaining strength, I press my hand over the wound to my rib cage as blood seeps out between my fingers.
“Marty,” I say, my voice trembling. “You’re…Marty.”
“Ah, you saw the birth certificate? I was wondering if you would. Yes, Daddy wanted a boy. He got me instead. Didn’t stop him, though, did it?”
Mary tips the kettle, and a stream of searing liquid splashes my thigh. My leg recoils, and I cry out in pain as steam comes off my leg.
“Don’t move,” she says.
I slide backward. Mary steps down hard on my foot, snapping it sideways, breaking my ankle with a horrific crack. I reach forward, toward the pain, and more scalding water burns my arm and shoulder, my neck.
“I said don’t move.”
Use your head, Emmy. There has to be a way.
“So you…kill people…because Daddy made you be…a boy?”
Another splash, boiling water scalding my chest, blanketing my shirt. I let out a scream so loud I almost can’t even hear it, can’t identify it.
“That’s what you think? You think this is about killing people? You, the great Emily Dockery, the brilliant FBI analyst—you haven’t figured out what I want?”
And then she’s on top of me, her knees pinning down my arms, hovering over me, dominating me. With one hand she grabs a fistful of my hair and pins my head to the floor. She poises the scalpel over my face, taunting me.
Use your head, Emmy. Think of something.
“You want those normal people…to feel…”
“Those safe little people with their safe, sheltered lives,” she says. “They have no idea what suffering is. Not until they meet me.”
The first incision comes at my scalp line, a precise break of the skin, moving left along my hairline, slicing skin and scraping bone. I scream with all the air my lungs can muster, my legs kicking up uselessly behind Mary, my vision going spotty, like the lights are being flicked on and off, until the screams I hear are unrecognizable, some high-pitched animal cry from far away, not my own—
Use your head, Emmy. It’s your only chance.
The incis
ion stops at my ear. I try to move my head, but she has me in a tight grip. And my strength is fading, my arms limp from the pressure of her body weight, my legs of no use, blood still spilling from my midsection as well.
“Not bad,” says Mary, admiring her work. “Usually I have a Taser and restraints and smelling salts and a full set of surgical instruments, but you know what? This isn’t half-bad. Sometimes artists do their best work under pressure. You’re going to be my masterpiece, Emmy.”
Make it stop…make it stop…think of something…
“Admittedly, I can’t make them feel what I felt,” she says matter-of-factly. “I can’t inject them with steroids every day of their childhood or force them to pump iron or make them worry about whether their voice will seem too high every day at school. I can’t make them get dressed in a bathroom stall every day of football practice so their teammates won’t see their private parts. But I can do this, Emmy.”
Mary pulls on my hair at the base of the incision, testing it, feeling it give way. The ripping pain is so unbearable I can’t—I can’t even—I can’t—
I’m coming Marta, I’m coming to see you, I want to come see you, please please oh please let me come—
“You want to die now, don’t you, Emmy? You want me to put you out of your misery. But you don’t get to. You have to live with it. You have to live in pain, like a disfigured freak, until I tell you it’s over. Be grateful it’ll just be a few hours of your life, and not thirty-seven years.”
Use your head. Something, anything…
There is one thing…one advantage…
“Don’t you die on me,” she says. “Not yet. I haven’t finished.”
Mary pins my head down again, this time with her right hand, the scalpel poised in her left, ready to begin the incision on the right side of my hairline, to complete the act, to separate my scalp from my forehead and turn me into a freak like her.
This time, I do not resist. My body goes limp. I hold my breath.
This time, I use my head.