Read Linger: Dying is a Wild Night (A Linger Thriller Book 1) Online
Authors: Edward Fallon,Robert Gregory Browne
“Doesn’t mean I murdered her and her family.”
“Believe me, I wish it didn’t. And I suppose you could try to convince a jury that one plus one doesn’t necessarily equal two, but once they get a look at the videos, they’ll be lost to you forever.”
“It’s not like I was diddling a five-year-old boy. She wasn’t a child, Kate. She was sixteen years old.”
“That
is
a child. You know that as well as I do.”
“Who cares how old she was? Look what she did for a living. She was a common skank and she probably would’ve been dead from disease or drugs before her twentieth birthday.”
Kate was appalled. “So she deserves to have her skull smashed in with a hammer?”
He studied her for a long moment, then lowered his gaze, and stared at the floor.
“I didn’t mean for any of that to happen. Not like that. Believe me, I didn’t know that was a side of me that even existed, but the Sorianos were pressuring me, and then I found out who the girl really was, and that her parents were no better. I thought maybe they were involved in it, too, and that’s when the rage came.” He looked up at her again. “I couldn’t control it, Kate. I tried, but I couldn’t stop myself.”
“I don’t get it,” she said. “What went wrong?”
“That’s just it. I don’t
know
. It’s just like my old partner, the one I told you about, the one who raped that nurse before he put a bullet in his brain.”
“Fuck you, Rusty. Don’t blame this on the job.”
“What else do I blame it on? You think I like what I am? You think I
wanted
to be this… this… beast?”
The choice of words sent something cold and clammy skittering up Kate’s spine. She thought about him grunting and groaning as he swung that hammer, the stink of the sweat, and the blood… and the word
beast
was certainly the most accurate description of what she’d seen and heard.
She thought about Christopher’s words…
There’s more than one kind of beast out there, and we should always do what we can to stop them.
She took her phone out and dialed and when MacLean answered, she said, “We’re on our way down.” Then she clicked off and took her cuffs out and gestured. “Stand up, Rusty. I need to read you your rights.”
She half expected him to try to make a move, to pull out a piece he had hidden somewhere in the sofa and give this saga the dramatic—if clichéd—ending it called out for.
But that wasn’t Rusty Patterson. He was the PR guy. The man who got along with everyone. The man who was always smoothing the waters when things started to get rough.
Except, of course, when he was bashing people’s heads in.
T
HE FOLLOWING MORNING, AS THEY
stood outside their motel room, Christopher tried to convince Kate to go with them.
They had never really unpacked, so, for them, it was a simple matter of throwing their things in the Rambler and once again hitting the road. But for Kate it would have meant uprooting her entire life, such as it was, and leaving behind the town she had grown up in.
Weston didn’t seem to share Chris’s desire, but it wouldn’t have mattered if he had.
“I can’t just drop everything and go, Chris. I’ve got my father to think about, and my job. And they’ll be putting Rusty on trial in a few months and I’ll have to be here for that.”
What about the other policemen? Can’t they do it?
“They could, but I’m the lead on the case and that means I should be the one to testify.”
But I came here for you. I came here because she wanted me to. She wanted me to find you.
This was the first time Chris had sounded his age, and it broke her heart.
“I know,” she said. “And you
did
find me. And look what we did together. We’ve stopped a very bad man from ever hurting anyone again.”
But he’s not the only one she wants you to stop, Kate. You know that.
“
Yes, but I can’t do what you and Noah do. I can’t go through what I did last night. Not again. It takes too much out of me.”
Then we’ll find a way to control it. To make it easier for you.
“Somehow I think it controls us more than we’ll ever be able to control it. Whatever
it
is.”
We’ll find a way. I promise.
She shook her head. “No, Chris. I think what you need to do is stop chasing around the country and find a family. A good family. One that can take care of you.”
Noah takes care of me.
And you could, too.
He started to cry and she pulled him into her arms and if her heart was breaking before, she thought it might now be irrevocably fractured, because this odd boy had managed to touch her in just the few hours they’d been together, and she knew she would spend many a night wondering if she had made the wrong decision.
But no. This was where she belonged.
When Chris was done crying, he pulled away from her, went to the Rambler and leaned toward the back seat. He came back carrying his pink photo album and held it out to her.
I want you to have this.
Kate stared at it. Hesitated.
It’s okay. There’s nothing to see now. I just want you to have it to remember me by.
Now tears filled
Kate’s
eyes and she hugged him again and took the album from his hands as he gave her one last squeeze, then climbed into the back seat.
Weston closed him inside.
“For what it’s worth,” he said, “you may be a pain in the ass sometimes, but I wouldn’t object if you changed your mind.”
“Are you sure about that?”
He shrugged. “No. But I figured it was the polite thing to say.”
She smiled. “You know, that forty-eight hours isn’t up. You keep talking like that and I may have to reconsider letting you two go.”
He returned the smile. “I’m afraid you’d have to catch us, first.”
Then he got in the car, started the engine, and drove away.
EPILOGUE
“Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.”
~
Seneca
T
WO WEEKS LATER, KATE’S FATHER
died.
She had come over for her usual Wednesday night to find him sitting in his chair, his oxygen tank hissing, his eyes closed, his body still.
No last words had been spoken. No regrets expressed.
Not to Kate, anyway.
He looked peaceful, and she was glad for that, but true to their history she felt no real pain at his passing. Just the usual touch of guilt for her failure to love a man who was never really capable of loving anyone.
In the days that followed, Kate found that she’d begun to distance herself from the job—a job she had worked so hard to obtain. In the wake of the revelations of Rusty Patterson’s savagery, the legitimacy of the position was tainted, as was the entire department.
They all felt it. All wanted to wish it away. But none more than Kate herself.
And she just didn’t feel the passion anymore. She woke up every morning feeling listless and alone and, worst of all, without any sense of purpose.
There was talk that she was about to be demoted, but she honestly didn’t care.
∙ ∙ ∙
The day after Rusty’s arrest, Kate got a call from Stokes County ADA Charles Dillman.
“You never got back to me,” he said. “How did your interview with the kid go?”
“Nowhere. That was all a dead end that had nothing to do with my case, so I cut them loose.”
“You what?”
“We had no evidence of molestation, and no reason to hold Weston.”
“Do you have any idea where they went?”
“Not a clue.”
“Christ,” Dillman said.
“I know you’re invested in this guy’s guilt,” Kate told him, “but I think you’ve got it wrong. He doesn’t strike me as a killer.”
“Oh, really? Then you want to explain what he and that boy were doing up in Tacoma near that crime scene you told me about?”
“You know that for a fact?”
“Not a hundred percent, but one of the detectives I spoke to says he saw a guy with an odd-looking kid parked down the street from the murder house in an old beat-up Rambler station wagon. Is that what they were driving?”
Kate didn’t hesitate. “No. They’re traveling by train.”
“You sure about that? Because I gotta tell you, I’ve got an itch when it comes to this fella, and I hope I’m not being lied to by a sworn police officer.”
“That’s a pretty bold accusation. Why would I lie?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “You tell me.”
Kate sighed. “I don’t have time for this, Mr. Dillman. So why don’t you save the aggressive bullshit for the courtroom and let me get back to work.”
Before he could respond, she hung up on him.
∙ ∙ ∙
In the days that followed, Kate often thought about Christopher, and even Weston, and wondered where they might be. What part of the country had they traveled to? What kind of trouble were they getting themselves into?
One night, after several glasses of wine, she lit some candles, drew a bath, and spent the good part of an hour in the tub, trying to soak away the regret she had begun to feel for staying behind. She was toweling off and headed into her bedroom, which she had also adorned with candles, and a glint of light in her dresser mirror caught her attention.
It was the pink plastic cover of the photo album Christopher had left behind.
She thought she had put it in a drawer, but there it was, sitting atop her dresser as if it were waiting for her to pick it up.
She paused uneasily, as she always did when she saw it, but then stepped over and took it in her hands, staring down at the name written there with a bright blue marker:
Lucy
.
It suddenly occurred to her that she had never asked Christopher who Lucy was. She remembered opening the book in her office that first time before she was whisked away, and seeing several photographs of a little girl. A girl she thought might be Lucy.
Now she opened it again, expecting to see that canned family portrait, but to her surprise the photos of the girl had returned, and she flipped through them one by one, taking the time to study them more carefully.
She was a cute little girl with a wonderful smile, who obviously had Down Syndrome. And judging by the children who surrounded her in several of the photographs, she was a resident of the group home Christopher had once lived in. The place where he’d been attacked by the Beast.
Where they had
all
been attacked.
But it was the very last photograph that tugged at Kate’s heart. It was a picture of the same girl, standing together with Christopher, the two holding hands. And as she stared at it, she knew she could be imagining things, but she thought she saw it…
move
.
Then, she felt a faint tingling in her skull as Christopher’s melodic voice came to her like a distant radio transmission:
He didn’t kill us all, Kate.
She’s alive. Lucy’s alive.
And the Beast took her with him.
∙ ∙ ∙
Less than twenty-four hours later, Kate finished packing, climbed behind the wheel of her SUV and drove toward the sound of Christopher’s voice.
Other books in the
Linger
series
available for purchase now
#2
#3
#4
#5
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Thank you.
Robert Gregory Browne
Editorial Director
Braun Haus Media, LLC
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