Chapter Three

 

Joshua

It’s shortly after noon. Sixteen hours since I woke up naked in the woods. I am sitting in the office of my penthouse in Manhattan. I’ve had the apartment swept for listening devices planted by Charlemagne, of which there were many. They’ve all been removed. A doctor was waiting for me at the penthouse last night when I arrived, and he treated and properly stitched up the gunshot wound in my foot, then reset and bandaged my nose. I continued surfing the internet the entire time the doctor was stitching my wound closed, desperately searching for any hint of my brother’s whereabouts. I accepted local anesthetic but refused painkillers; I need my mind clear.

Somewhere inside, I’m roaring with rage. I am tearing Charlemagne’s face off with my bare hands. But the part of my brain that needs to focus is a vast, flat lake of calm.

I was awake all night, trying to track down any trace of his whereabouts. This morning, my brother sent a video to the cell phone he gave me.

I strapped on a blood pressure cuff and put a pulse monitor on my fingertip to ensure that I retained control of my emotions. If I lose control, I can’t help Tamara. I sat there and remained calm as I forced myself to watch the video. He wore a ski mask as he pierced Tamara’s nipples and clitoral hood. Her face contorted in pain, and my body turned to ice when he twisted her nipples to make her scream.

My heart rate stayed a steady seventy beats per minute.

I ignored the way the walled-up part of me felt. Instead of raging, I studied the video for clues, but there was nothing to give away where he might be keeping her. I tried to track the origin of the call from the blocked number, but my brother has excellent re-routing software. The location of the call bounces around on my computer screen as I watch; China, Afghanistan, France. He’s fucking with me. Having a good time.

To find him, I’ve summoned a potential ally I never would have given the time of day before.

The elevator pings. I glance at the video screen. Sergeant Ruiz is here.

Garrett pokes his head through the door. He spent the night here, calling all over the world, working with all his black ops contacts, and coming up as empty as I did.

“Let him in, then leave us,” I tell him. “Don’t bother taking his gun. I can handle him.”

I watch the video monitor as Sergeant Alfredo Ruiz walks through the open elevator door, then through a scanner that would put the TSA to shame. I glance at the screen next to my desk. He’s armed and has a cell phone on him, but that’s it.

Garrett steers him down the hallway. He comes through the door to my office and shuts it behind him, and I stand up, favoring my injured foot.

Sergeant Ruiz is off-duty today, wearing a wool coat and a rumpled brown suit. His round face curdles in disgust when he sees me. His eyes light on my bandaged nose. “Did that happen when your house blew up?” he snarls. “The Maine State Police called me. Nice way to eliminate the evidence. Tamara Bennet’s just smoke in the wind now, isn’t she? Yeah, yeah, nobody can prove you owned the property. You rich bastards get away with everything, don’t you?”

He’s getting more and more agitated as he talks, and his hand drifts toward the gun strapped to his waist under his jacket.

“I can outdraw you,” I say mildly. I don’t even bother reaching for my holstered Glock.

His eyes flare with defiance. “I doubt it. I’m pretty good. But I got no fucking problem finding out.”

I’ve done my research on him. He is pretty good; he visits a shooting range a couple of times a week—way more than most beat cops. But he’s not as good as me. Few are.

This is normally the part where I show my dominance, whatever the cost. Backing down from a challenge is physically painful for me. It feels like grasping a hot poker, a pain that demands response. But I think of Tamara, and I force myself to let it go.

“I need your help,” I say quickly, almost choking on the words.

He looks at me with shock. Yeah, he wasn’t expecting that.

The words leave a foul taste in my mouth. Rage prickles inside me. The primal beast demands satisfaction. He challenged me. Kill him, humiliate him…

No.

His gaze sweeps my office. The hand-carved mahogany desk, the built-in floor-to-ceiling bookshelves filled with leather-bound volumes, the three framed Picasso sketches side by side, the red-and-black Oriental rug that cost more than his annual salary, the million-dollar view of the Manhattan skyline.

His forehead wrinkles in disgust, and his dark brown eyes flare with anger. “Mister, all the fucking money in the world won’t buy—”

I hold up a box that was sitting on my desk.

“I don’t have time for this. If you want to hear what I have to say, put your cell phone in this box.”

He looks at me with contempt, but then obeys me with a suspicious look.

I shut and lock the box, which will block his phone from recording us, in case he’s done anything sneaky. My scanner already showed me he’s not wearing a wire. He sits down in a chair facing my desk, and I sit back down in my chair and make a steeple of my fingers, resting them on my desktop.

“Tamara Bennett was staying with me in Maine, and now she’s missing. My brother has her. And if you tell the police any of this, I’ll deny it under oath, and I’ll pass a polygraph test too. Again.”

His eyes fly wide open with shock. “You’re admitting that you had her?” he barks at me.

“I am telling you that she was staying with me. If you find her, you can ask her anything you want. When you find her.” I have to believe she’ll be found. Alive. “The thing is, we can’t tell the police. My brother has informed me that if I do, he will start cutting off body parts.”

His lips twist in a sneer. “You think I actually trust you, asshole?”

I struggled to tamp down my frantic impatience. I expected this, but every second spent explaining things to him is time he’s not looking for her.

“No, nor should you. But that’s not the point. You want her safe, and so do I. And I know you say you don’t want money, but that is also on the table. And anything else you could possibly want.”

He snorts. “What else do you think I would want from you? Hookers and blow?”

“Revenge.” I open a folder that is sitting on my desk and shove two pictures at him. He looks at them, and his olive skin flushes dark.

One of them is a picture of his wife’s former boss, Peter Brown, the one who had asbestos in the workplace where Ruiz’s wife was employed on the janitorial staff. Years of breathing in poison made her cells riot in revolt. Cancer rotted her lungs, and she wheezed to death on a hospital bed. Peter was slapped with a few fines. Peter’s on a yacht in the Bahamas.

One of them is a picture of Gideon Culpepper, the spoiled trust fund brat who introduced Ruiz’s daughter to heroin, with fatal results. He’s on the balcony of a hotel in Miami, getting a blow job from some little brunette. The smirk on his face alone is enough to make me want to set him on fire.

“I can make them suffer in ways you could never even dream of.”

An ugly expression contorts his face. “Oh, believe me, I can dream up plenty. And I’m not going to help a serial killer.”

“I am not running around killing women. I have never killed a woman.” That’s not a lie.

There’s challenge in his eyes as he pushes his jaw out stubbornly. “What about Heather Abelard. Tamara’s missing neighbor?”

“I have no idea what happened to her. There’s a good chance that my brother kidnapped her too, but I have nothing to do with it. So is it a yes?” I ask him.

“It’s a maybe.” He folds his arms across his barrel-shaped chest. He’s got something of a gut lapping over his belt, but he has biceps like Popeye. He’s one of those men who just can’t lose the belly fat, no matter how much he works out, but he’s as solid as iron. I wouldn’t have called him in otherwise. I can’t trust a man who doesn’t keep fit; it reeks of weakness. “And don’t get too comfortable with me, you fucking freak. You’re up to something shady. You said you don’t kill women, but you didn’t deny you’re a serial killer.” So he’s not as dumb as he looks. I was pretty sure he wasn’t, because I checked up on him, but it’s good to have it confirmed.

I look him in the eye. “The kind of men I just showed you pictures of…men who cause harm and misery to the innocent…sometimes they disappear. Perhaps I help make that happen.” Admittedly, I only kill those men for the thrill of the hunt. I don’t give a fuck that the men I kill are hurting innocent people, but Ruiz will.

“Men like Baxter Warburton?” he says skeptically. “I read the file on him. He was a saint.”

I snort in contempt. “Is there a patron saint for pedophiles? He liked to rape teenage boy prostitutes up the ass with giant dildos, then kill them.”

He makes a raspberry sound with his lips. “No way. There’s never even been a hint of that.”

“If I show you a video of him doing it, will you help me then?”

He considers that.

“We don’t have time,” I say, desperation edging my voice.

He looks at me suspiciously. “What’s in it for you? Why are you doing this?”

“Because I care about Tamara, and because every minute that passes, my brother is hurting her.” I allow emotion to leak into my voice; I need to be convincing. I don’t have to fake the fury and panic that roughens my words. “You think I’m a bad guy? My brother is the love-child of the Marquis de Sade and Vlad the Impaler.”

“Get me the video.”

I grab the pair of crutches that are leaning on my desk, limp out of my office and down the hall to my bedroom, where I open a wall safe and remove a USB. I shove the USB into my pocket.

I limp back and jam it into my laptop.

“What the hell happened to you? Your brother do that?” Ruiz is staring at my bandaged nose, and he flicks a glance at my foot.

“Yes,” I lie smoothly. “And then he took Tamara.”

I turn the laptop to face him and play the video, which was taken in a seedy motel room where Baxter had the motel clerk on his payroll. I impersonated a repairman and put a camera in an air duct.

The teenage boy is face down, tied hand and foot, screaming and crying as Baxter violates him with a dildo the size of an elephant dong. Poor, impotent Baxter.

Baxter reaches for the sharp knife on the night table. I watch with flat affect, uncaring. The boy is dead, nothing to be done about it, and he was nothing to me. Baxter was a problem. I took care of the problem.

“Turn it off!” Ruiz yells, his eyes practically bulging out of his head. “Fuck! Fucking hell!” He grabs me by the shoulder. “Tell me you killed him. Tell me you killed him!”

I shrug his hand off irritably and turn off the video. I’m not a fan of being touched, unless it’s by a woman I’m fucking, and even then I do most of the touching. “He and I met up in the woods,” I say. “He won’t be ass-raping any more boys.”

It takes him a few moments to compose himself, and I struggle not to snap at him.

“Tell me what you know so far,” he says warily. He flicks a horrified glance at the laptop, then looks away, grimacing. I can see he’s still shaken up by the video. Thank God I’m not like that. How would I ever get anything done if I was a weepy, sentimental little bitch who cried every time someone got a boo-boo?

“Tell me why your brother took Tamara Bennett, and what you know that might help me track him down.” He grits out the words. “And I’ll tell you if I think I can help.”

I start talking fast. Seconds count. “My twin brother, Charlemagne, was being held in a mental institution in California called the Blackthorne Institute for the last six years. Or rather, five and a half. He escaped about six months ago, as best I can tell. He blames me for the fact that they kept him there.”

“Why?” Ruiz interrupts.

“He’s crazy. Paranoid. He’s always blamed me for anything that went wrong.” I’m certainly not going to tell Ruiz the truth. “From what I understand, he’s concocted some idea that I was conspiring with Dr. William Barnard, the CEO of the Blackthorne Institute, to keep him locked up there.” Nobody will ever find proof; all my payments were from shell companies to an offshore account that can’t be traced to Dr. Barnard. “Since then, he’s been staying in New York City at least part of the time, impersonating me and sabotaging my company.”

“This sounds like something from one of my wife’s shitty soap operas.” He pauses, mutters something that sounds like, “Sorry, Valentina,” and crosses himself. Actually crosses himself. This is a man of faith. A man who still believes in a higher power, and not only that, one who stands for ultimate good.

For the first time in my life, a faint wisp of envy drifts through me. What would it be like to have that kind of comfort? Would it lend me strength? Would I feel less isolated? But the practical reality is, I’ll never know. I don’t believe in good and evil. My world is a cruel Darwinian jungle of survival of the fittest, of predators devouring prey.

I pull up yet another video for him, this one of my brother pacing around his enormous padded room. I paid for him to be imprisoned in comfort. He had books, he had movies, he had a closed-circuit computer. Apparently he didn’t appreciate those special touches.

“That’s him. His name is Charlemagne, but I’m sure he’ll be going under something else now. As you can see, he looks exactly like me.”

Ruiz stares at the screen. “Why was he in the mental institution?”

“He had a public mental breakdown and stabbed a stranger to death at a coffee shop. Used a ballpoint pen. Broke a police officer’s jaw, shattered another one’s eye socket. He was taken into custody and placed under a psychiatric hold.”

Charlemagne’s breakdown was a hundred percent my doing. He was living in California at the time, under an assumed name of course. Only a week had passed since he’d killed the last of the social workers who’d left us to be tortured as children. The social workers had been in Oregon, where we grew up. It was still all over the news.

But I knew there were other people he could find to blame. Police who had come out to the cabin and just made a cursory inspection. Their bosses. Their bosses’ bosses.

Would he ever stop killing? I knew I couldn’t control my urge to kill, so why would he?

The problem with him was that he was reckless with his kills. Killing people who had ties to our family was just plain stupid. He risked capture, and possible exposure of our tangled family history.

So I paid a lot of money to have someone from my security team spike his espresso with a hallucinogenic one morning at the Has Bean café, and chaos and death ensued.

I’d already pre-arranged for Dr. Barnard to accept him into the Blackthorne Institute, and thanks to a combination of my generous payments and my threats to Dr. Barnard, my brother was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia with homicidal ideation. Who knows, the diagnosis might even have been accurate.

Charlemagne was a John Doe when he was arrested. Still is. He refused to reveal his real name. Our past is the kind that’s better left buried.

“That sounds like a man who’s got no control over his actions.” Ruiz looks at me suspiciously. “Crazy, not evil.”

I’d admire his cleverness if I had the time to waste, but I don’t, so I speak quickly. “In all honesty, I set him up to be committed, but it had to be done for the safety of the public. He… We share certain inclinations. I have channeled mine in a more useful direction—taking out the trash, so to speak—while he just killed people for fun.”

His brow is still creased with skepticism. “So you’re asking me to believe that you’re an ethical serial killer and your brother is Ted Bundy reincarnated.”

“Sergeant Ruiz, I never said I was any kind of serial killer, did I? It looks like you’re drawing your own conclusions.” I shake my head chidingly. “I called you in because you seem disillusioned with the system, and I thought you might be willing to work outside it to help save a girl who’s the same age your daughter was when she died.” That’s me, playing dirty pool. “I was able to review your records, and I see that you’ve been accused of use of excessive force against rapists and child molesters. On multiple occasions, you’ve been suspected of planting drugs in order to arrest dealers when you couldn’t find any evidence on them. Your career is hanging by a thread.”

He clears his throat defensively. “If I ever did any of that shit, and I’m not saying I did, it was to scumbag shit-heels who had it coming.”

“So there we are.” I flash him a winning smile. I’ve got a list of smile types stored away in my mental filing cabinet. This one is my “closing the deal” smile, minus any hint of menace, as opposed to my “you’re about to die now” smile, or my “do what I want or I’ll fucking cut you” smile. “Two peas in a pod. You’ve broken the law on many occasions, in the service of the greater good. I might have gone a little further than you, although I’m not saying I did. But I am saying that you have no moral high ground here.”

“You still haven’t explained to me why you didn’t come right out and say that Tamara was, as you put it, ‘staying with you’.” He makes actual air quotes.

“Well, if you’re the one who finds her, you can ask her anything you want.” I’m clearly brushing aside the question. And I know she might tell him everything, which means I risk going to prison for the rest of my life. But she’s worth the risk. And too much time has passed already, and I haven’t been able to find a thing. As good as I am at hacking, as good as Garret is, Ruiz will have more resources than I do—if he’s willing to bend…no, break the law to help a damsel in distress.

“What about that security guard who disappeared?”

Damn, the man has a steel trap memory. That whole shambling, disheveled exterior…it’s an act. Like the TV detective Colombo. Acts like a half-wit so everyone underestimates him, gathers the clues, and then pounces.

“The security guard tried to rape Tamara. He’s…gone. I could show you that video too.”

“Do it.”

“Seriously?” I throw my hands up in frustration. “What part of ‘a woman is being tortured by a fucking serial killer right now’ are you not getting?”

He doesn’t budge. “I’m risking what’s left of my career here, and I’m considering working with someone who’s all but admitted he’s at best a vigilante murderer, and at worst…God only knows. So yeah, you’re going to show me the fucking video.”

I was hoping we could dispense with all this moral posturing. Who is he to act all self-righteous when he’s broken the law as often as I have?

But Saint Ruiz has to feel right about this, or he won’t help me.

I open up another file on the USB and show him the video of the guard trying to rape Tamara. “See?” I say impatiently, turning the video off.

He still looks skeptical, but he shrugs. “Tell me everything you can about your brother and Tamara.”

I give him my version of events from yesterday—my brother hacked into my security system, Tamara and I made a run for it, and my brother blew up the house.

I hacked into traffic cameras and traced him as far as a parking garage in downtown Boston. Unfortunately, I lost track of him. He must have switched cars there. A man on my security team found the abandoned van, and I have no idea where he went from there. It was rush hour when he entered the parking garage, and there were dozens of cars streaming in and out.

“I might be able to get access to the garage’s records and their security tapes,” Ruiz says, frowning in thought. “He wouldn’t have hung out in that garage for too long. We can start with all the cars that left the garage within, say, two to three hours after the van entered. Run their plates, process of elimination, figure out which vehicle he was driving. What else can you tell me? What did he do after he busted out? Where was he staying?”

“I know that he spent a considerable amount of time in New York, because I’ve determined that he actually went to my office several times, and he came to my apartment here as well. He was the one who was sending information to the police about me. I haven’t been able to find out where he was staying. Also, unfortunately, he embezzled an enormous sum of money from me, so he’s got a lot of funds.” I’m thinking out loud. “Okay. He was sending the police information about me, messing with me, giving you just enough to question me but not enough to arrest me. Can you trace the source of those messages?”

He shakes his head decisively. “No, we tried.” No surprise there.

“What did he tell you about me?”

He scowls, thinking about it before he tells me. “He told us that you were behind the disappearance of the security guard, and Baxter Warburton. And Tamara. And Heather. And he said that you were behind the disappearance of a bunch of other women, but he didn’t name them.”

“Doesn’t that strike you as suspicious?” I say with exasperation. “He told you some half-truths and then a major lie. He didn’t name the other women because there were no other women.”

“Maybe.”

Ruiz stands up.

“Now what?” I ask.

“I’ll start with the parking garage video. And if you get any information that might help me, you’ll give it to me immediately.” Distrust still simmers in his voice. “And I probably won’t do the same for you unless I need to ask you questions. It’s not a two-way street. I don’t know enough about you, and I don’t like you. I’m doing this for her, not you. Give me a number to reach you at.”

I jot down a number and hand it to him, and dismiss him from my mind as he leaves. My only thought, my only focus, is Tamara.