Say Goodbye

  Yes, Virginia had driven Aaron Johnson to the Smith House tonight. Yes, she knew he was armed and intended to possibly shoot federal agent Kimberly Quincy.

  Except Aaron Johnson wasn’t his real name, but an alias manufactured by a second unknown subject so he’d have something to call the boy in public. The second subject, known as Dinchara, was the one who supplied the 9-mm and identified FBI Special Agent Kimberly Quincy as the target. In return for shooting Special Agent Quincy, Aaron had been promised his freedom—that basically, Dinchara, who had kidnapped Aaron Johnson more than a decade ago, would finally let the boy go. Dinchara referred to the event as graduation, and Aaron Johnson had wanted to graduate.

  “And your role in this?” Duff pressed the girl.

  She shrugged. “Just drive.” She had her hand folded on her barely rounded tummy. “We’re gonna have a baby, Aaron and me. That’s why he needed to graduate. So we could be together.”

  Her gaze shot to Kimberly, some of the earlier heat returning. “What did you do to him? He was just a kid. He didn’t know any better. How could you shoot a boy?”

  Kimberly thinned her lips and clammed up. Ginny didn’t know yet what had happened in the hotel room and law enforcement types weren’t much for sharing.

  “You set me up,” Kimberly stated. “Aaron needed a target for his ‘graduation’ and you chose me. Why?”

  “I did not—”

  “He told me all about it! Now start talking, or your baby’s gonna be born in a prison hospital and yanked away from you at the moment of birth. I can get you whole articles on what it’s like for pregnant inmates. Going into labor with their wrists and ankles shackled to the table, nothing but broodmares, birthing a baby for someone else to raise. You want to know the details, see what awaits you—”

  “Dinchara made me do it! Don’t you remember? He’s only happy if he can kill someone you love. Except Aaron didn’t have any family left. Dinchara was the one who took him away. So who was left for him to love?”

  Ginny’s eyes skittered away at the last line and, in that instant, Kimberly got it. She sat back, stunned, and felt the first of the outrage leave her body.

  “You,” she breathed. “You were the logical target. And both of you understood that, didn’t you? That Dinchara would ask Aaron to kill you. Unless you found someone else.”

  “It had to be a good target,” Ginny said, not looking at any of them anymore. “Someone important, but threatening to Dinchara as well, so he’d take an interest. I read an article on the Eco-Killer, what you did. I showed it to Dinchara and…” She shrugged. “He liked you. A good-looking female who kicked ass. He thought it was pretty funny. And then I knew it would work.”

  “Why didn’t you say something?” Kimberly asked tiredly. “We could’ve helped you, set up a whole operation. You just needed to tell us what was going on.”

  “Like my mom begged for help? Or Tommy?” Ginny’s lips curved in a smile at Kimberly’s shocked expression. “Of course Dinchara told me what Aaron did. It was too perfect for him not to share. How Aaron stood there with the gun shaking in his hands. How Tommy begged. Called him sir, offered him his truck, his money, even a blow job. And you can hear Dinchara in the background, this whispering little ghoul, ‘Shoot him, shoot him, shoot him, pull the fucking trigger, you pantywaist. Shoot him, shoot him, shoot him…’ Until Aaron pulls the trigger.

  “I still hear it, sometimes late at night. My mom screaming, Tommy begging. And Dinchara, chortling away. So really, how are you gonna help me, Little Miss FBI? How can anyone help me?”

  Ginny stopped talking. Her hands were still on her stomach, caressing the little round bulge now, trying to soothe.

  “Aaron was the one who called me, wasn’t he?” Kimberly asked. “You gave him my cell phone number, he called me to bait the trap.”

  “He gave you information,” Ginny countered. “All you had to do was find Dinchara, and none of this woulda happened.”

  “And the packets of driver’s licenses, left on Special Agent Martignetti’s windshield?”

  Ginny shrugged. “Don’t ask me. I was just doing what I was told.”

  “You delivered them?” Sal interrupted. “But why? Ordered by whom?”

  Ginny gave him a funny look. “By Dinchara, of course. Who the hell do you think’s running this show?”

  Kimberly shared Sal’s confusion. “Dinchara wanted the IDs delivered to the GBI?”

  “He wanted them delivered to Special Agent Martignetti. Showed me a picture of him and everything.”

  “Why?”

  “Why? Why not? Haven’t you guys been paying attention? You don’t ask Dinchara any questions. Not if you plan to live. He told me what to do. I did it. End of story.”

  Kimberly frowned, not liking this bit of news.

  Duff cleared his throat. “Ma’am, this Mr. Dinchara, he got a real name, a physical address? That’s the kind of information we need.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Liar,” Kimberly said immediately.

  “Hey, I already said—”

  “Liar!” Kimberly slapped a photo on the table. They’d taken it from Ginny’s purse an hour earlier. The tattered black-and-white showed Ginny and Aaron, foreheads touching, laughing about something only they understood. Now the close-up caused both Ginny and Sal to do a double take. “Afternoons together at the mall. PDAs, photo ops. Obviously you developed a relationship with Aaron. Only way that happened is if Dinchara introduced you two.”

  “He brought Aaron on one of his trips to Sandy Springs—”

  “What, and graciously paid for Aaron to make whoopee?”

  “And filmed us having sex. That’s what he does. Makes porn, then sells it on the Internet. You know the perv that sends out spam asking if you want to see pictures of a thirteen-year-old having sex with a goat? That’s Dinchara.”

  “So he has a studio—”

  “Backseat of a car—”

  “Bullshit. Not for an operation that involved. He’s got a studio, in a house, where he’s taken you and you’ve been with Aaron.”

  “I was blindfolded!” the girl cried. “He never let me see. You don’t know what he’s like—”

  “Bullshit! We know exactly what he’s like. I got files of just his kind stacked all over my desk. Now stop stalling and tell us what we need to know.”

  But Ginny wasn’t having it. She leaned over the table, wild-eyed. “No, really, you haven’t met his kind. I didn’t realize it, either. Not until he took off his hat. He doesn’t just like spiders. He thinks he is one. Honest to God, he has eyes tattooed all over his forehead.”

  It took another two hours. Ginny denied knowing about the second boy. She insisted Dinchara always kept her blindfolded. She’d never met Aaron on her own, she didn’t know nothing about anything.

  One a.m. Two a.m. Kimberly’s team had arrived. Rachel Childs led the work in the hotel room. Kimberly disappeared long enough to give a statement, have her hands swabbed for GSR, have her face photographed. When Harold was done with the photos, she asked him to accompany her back down to the basement dining room with the camera.

  Ginny still sat at the end of the table, pale, hands shaking from exhaustion. Sal had moved to the far wall, his arms crossed over his chest, his features shut down, impossible to read. Rainie had disappeared, probably back to her room to sleep. Only Quincy and Duff seemed to still be hanging in there.

  Kimberly placed the digital camera in front of Ginny. She started with the first close-up of Aaron Johnson, revealing his shattered skull. She went through all one hundred and fifty-two photos.

  “This is what Dinchara did,” Kimberly stated calmly. Click, click, click. “He twisted Aaron.” Click, click, click. “Corrupted him.” Click, click, click. “Destroyed him.

  “Aaron killed himself because he thought if he stayed alive, he would harm your child. Isn’t that what Dinchara taught him? You must destroy the thing you love. And he loved you, Ginny. With this bullet, fired into h
is brain, he sent you his love the only way he knew how.

  “So what’s it going to be? Are you going to let Dinchara get away with this?”

  “I hate you.”

  “Going to write off one more loss? Going to try to return to a world where a man like Dinchara roams free—and knows all about your baby? What’s it gonna be?”

  “He’s going to kill you. Once he hears about Aaron, it’s only a matter of time.”

  “What’s it gonna be, Ginny?”

  “He’ll go after me, too, if I help you. He’ll know. He knows everything.”

  “So what’s it gonna be?”

  Ginny Jones hugged her belly. She started to cry. Then she gave up the address.

  Sal pushed away from the wall. “All right,” he said. “I’m calling SWAT.”

  THIRTY-SIX

  “Spiders tend to be solitary hunters…”

  FROM “SPIDER WOMAN,”

  BY BURKHARD BILGER, New Yorker,

  MARCH 5, 2007

  HENRIETTA WAS DEAD. HE FOUND HER ON HER BACK inside the ICU, mangled legs curled up tight against her abdomen. He prodded her with his finger, the way a child poked a lifeless pet long after the moment had passed. Henrietta didn’t move. He tried one more time. Wasn’t ever going to move again.

  He sat back in the darkened bathroom and for a moment he couldn’t breathe.

  Was this what grief felt like? A hard, tight feeling in the chest, a shortness of breath, an overwhelming desire to scream? He pressed the heels of his hands against his eye sockets. It didn’t give him any relief. He could feel the pressure building, building, building.

  And for no good reason, he thought of that toddler, the one the Burgerman had forced him to bury under the azalea bushes. His throat burned and his shoulders shook and he hated everything about it, the force of his grief, the ugly sound of his sobs, the impotence of his own pathetic tears.

  The police had never recovered the boy’s body. The man knew because he searched the Internet from time to time. That boy remained lost, just as he himself was lost and Aaron and the new boy Scott, and approximately tens of thousands of other children each year.

  His brother had been right, so many naughty boys for the Burgerman to grind into dust.

  That’s what he’d been doing for decades now. Grinding, grinding, grinding. Devouring lives by the dozen, from the innocent to the not-so-innocent. It hardly mattered to him. He took, because destroying others was the only time he wasn’t afraid.

  The end was coming. He could feel it now. The police scanner had been humming for the past three hours with word on a shooting at the historic Smith House. The dead was not a federal agent, but an unidentified boy. Aaron had failed. The agent had gotten him first, or who knows what. It hardly mattered. Henrietta was dead, Aaron was dead, and the younger boy had disappeared into the house lower on the hill. All that was left was Ginny, and she was nothing but a lying slut.

  If the police found her first, she would give him up. Betrayal was what women did best.

  He had to think, form a plan, but first, of course, he needed to tend to Henrietta.

  Three-oh-five a.m. He happened to glance at the time, and the moment he noted the hour, it came to him. He knew exactly what needed to happen.

  He laid out Henrietta in the middle of his bed. Then he crossed to his shelves, where the rest of his collection rested in row upon row of glass terrariums. He started on the left side and worked his way to the right, removing each lid. Then on to the nursery, the brown recluses’ room, the spinners’ room. Slowly, methodically, he set each and every spider free.

  Then, out in the garage, he gathered half a dozen cans of gasoline.

  He started with the computer, as that had the most evidence against him. Then into the living room, saturating the sofa cushions, the curtains, the cheap particleboard bookcases. Then into the boys’ room, moving from there up the stairs into his inner sanctum. He soaked the mattress bearing Henrietta’s body, a funeral pyre for a great warrior. Then headed back to the garage for the final two cans.

  He heard sirens in the distance. More patrol officers heading to the Smith House. Or coming for him?

  He’d already spent ten long years in the cruelest goddamn prison on earth. Like hell he was going back.

  They should’ve found him, he thought with a fresh burst of outrage, uncapping the gas can, pouring, pouring, pouring. The stupid police should’ve trailed the Burgerman, burst into that first hotel room, and carried him valiantly away. But no, they never came. Not once in ten years. Not even at the bitter end.

  They had failed him. They had let him become what he had become.

  And now he would show them. He would show them everything the Burgerman had taught him how to do.

  Last gasoline can was empty. He threw it into the guest bedroom in disgust, droplets spraying onto his hand and filling his nose with an acrid odor. He could hear the sirens again, gaining in intensity.

  Not much time left.

  At the top of the landing, he had to dance over four hairy forms, the first of the tarantulas escaping from their terrariums, trying to get the lay of the land. He took the stairs two at a time. At the bottom, he found two more of his pets, already locked in a savage embrace, fangs trying to rip through hard exoskeletons, legs grappling with each other’s heads. First taste of freedom and the territorial cannibals had already started to fight.

  Girls, he wanted to tell them, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

  But no time for talking. He jerked open the hall closet, where he kept the gun safe. A swirl of the dial, flick of the wrist. He popped open the vault and regarded his arsenal.

  Sirens, cresting over the hill.

  Nine millimeter, Glock .40, shotgun, .22 rifle. Boxes and boxes of ammo. He stuffed everything into his rifle bag, hands shaking, spilling out some of the shells.

  Tires, screeching out front.

  “Fuck it!” The man grabbed his bag and bolted for the back patio.

  At the last moment, he remembered, fishing the Zippo lighter from his pants pocket, and letting it rip.

  The first spray of fire leapt through the kitchen, singeing the hair on the back of his hands, making the droplets of gasoline on his own flesh start to burn. He swatted at his left hand impatiently, watching as the fire burst down the hall and made a mad dash for the stairs.

  And maybe it was just his imagination, but he thought he heard the first spider start to scream.

  Destroying the thing he loved. Doing what he did best.

  Except there was one more person who owed him. A love that had never died, even after all these years. Aaron had failed. The Burgerman would not.

  He hefted the dark green bag over his shoulder and slipped out the back door, as a white police van roared into his driveway, as the downstairs window blew out with the force of the flames, and as his entire collection started to burn.

  Rita was awake and looking out her window when the first siren split the air. She didn’t react to the sound, but stayed in bed, watching as a bright orange ball rose above the trees.

  She understood immediately where the fire was coming from, the old Victorian up the hill.

  And it didn’t surprise her one whit when the boy suddenly appeared in her doorway, hands behind his back.

  She didn’t talk, just threw back the covers, got out her gun.

  “Child, you have something to do with this?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Been here all night?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “All right. He’s coming then. We’d better tend to the doors and windows.”

  The boy drew out a knife.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  “…spiders kill at an astonishing pace. One Dutch researcher estimates that there are some five trillion spiders in the Netherlands alone, each of which consumes about a tenth of a gram of meat a day. Were their victims people instead of insects, they would need only three days to eat all sixteen and a half million Dutchmen.”


  FROM “SPIDER WOMAN,”

  BY BURKHARD BILGER, New Yorker, MARCH 5, 2007

  BY THE TIME KIMBERLY AND SAL ARRIVED, THE HOUSE at the address provided by Ginny was engulfed in flames. The fire department had deployed, stubbornly working their hoses, but Kimberly and Sal could tell it was a lost cause.

  They stood at the perimeter, watching orange flames light up the night sky while feeling the heat of the blaze against their cheeks. Neighbors clustered around them, belting their bathrobes against the drizzling rain as they gathered in the street to watch the show.

  “Pity,” an older woman commented, gray hair neatly arranged in row after row of pin curls, “used to be such a pretty house in its day.”

  “You know the owner?” Sal asked sharply, he and Kimberly moving closer.

  But the woman shook her head. “Used to, long time ago. But the house sold two, maybe three years ago. Rarely saw the new owner. He certainly didn’t take an interest in caring for the house or garden, I can tell you that.” She gave a disapproving sniff.

  “You said he,” Kimberly pressed.

  The woman shrugged. “That’s all I ever saw—younger guy climbing in and out of his black SUV. Always wearing a baseball cap, even in the dead of winter. Struck me as an odd sort. He definitely wasn’t friendly.”

  “He wasn’t,” another man chimed in, standing a few feet away in a blue flannel robe. “My wife brought over a plate of brownies to welcome him to the neighborhood. Through the side window, she could see him standing in the entryway, after she rang the doorbell. But he didn’t open the door. Finally, she just set down the brownies and left. Definitely an odd duck.”

  “Ever see a boy?” Sal asked.

  Man frowned. “Eighteen, nineteen years old? He rarely left the house. I figured he was the son.”

  “There’s a younger boy, too.” The first woman spoke up authoritatively. “At least lately, I’ve been seeing one out in the yard. Don’t know if he’s just visiting or not.”

  Sal and Kimberly exchanged glances. “And tonight?”

  “Didn’t see a thing,” the woman provided. “Least not till I heard the sirens and realized there was a fire.”