Freezing

THIRTY-ONE

Jayne blinked her eyes open and felt total confusion about where she was. Her head hurt and her mouth was dry. She tried to swallow and felt cloth – a gag? – holding her mouth open and wicking her saliva away. She instinctively raised her hands to remove it but discovered she was lying on her arms and they were bound behind her. She looked up and saw a doorway she didn’t recognize. And then it all came back. The motel, Atlanta, Gene. Oh, God. She shivered convulsively and raised her head to look down the length of her body. She saw duct tape binding her ankles and then noticed movement across the room.

Gene was dressed entirely in white Tyvek with the hood pulled over his hair and surgical gloves on his hands, eyes staring wide as he bent over Steelie – Steelie! – stomach-down on the bed, arms tied behind her back, her face turned away from Jayne. And then she registered the sounds. Gene grunting with exertion, the noises coming from lips thinned with effort, interspersed with higher-pitched sounds that had to be coming from Steelie as he tied a gag at the back of her head.

Suddenly, Steelie kicked out at Gene with her bound legs and managed to connect with his lower back. He muttered something and stepped away from the bed to yank at her legs, pulling her backwards. As she slid off the mattress, she twisted to avoid landing on her face and the movement allowed her to see Jayne. They locked eyes and when Jayne saw tears in Steelie’s, her own instantly welled up but the connection was quickly lost as Gene yanked Steelie up to her knees. She bucked and twisted, so he clamped her against him as he groped her body roughly, his fingers spread wide.

Jayne screamed but the sound went nowhere, trapped by her dry throat and truncated by the gag. She frantically rolled to the left but couldn’t get past her own shoulder to get up. She cried out once more in desperation, heart pounding, and craned her neck again. Steelie was trying to slam her head backwards into Gene’s face as he bent over her. Jayne felt a surge of hope. That’s it; get him, get him.

But Gene just strode forward, pulling Steelie on her knees until she was against the edge of the bed. He pushed her over easily, using one hand to keep her head buried in the covers as he used the other to pull open all the snaps on Steelie’s cargo pants. Jayne’s eyes widened. Christ! She had to get him away from Steelie. She looked around wildly and saw the bathroom window was open. Hoping he would follow her if he became afraid she could raise the alarm from the bathroom, she started pushing backwards over the threshold, making as much noise as she could.

She looked back to see if Gene had noticed her and almost stopped breathing when she saw that he was smiling to himself. But then she saw why. He’d located Steelie’s cell phone in one of her pockets. He’d been frisking her – violently – but he’d found what he wanted and had stopped. Dragging her by the neck to the head of the bed, he began tying her to the frame, keeping her face to the wall.

Jayne felt her lungs start to function again and she threw her energy into rolling to the right this time, hoping to get all the way over on to her stomach, but her knees smacked into the side of the bathtub with a loud thud before she completed the revolution. Almost immediately, she felt a foot on her ribcage, rolling her on to her back again.

She tried to yell, ‘Get off me’ but it came out as unintelligible noise so she was left simply glaring at Gene. There was a large bruise between his eyes that had leaked blood into the whites, making his pale irises yet more preternatural.

He smiled down at her, a bag in one hand. ‘Thanks for getting yourself in here. This is exactly where I want you.’

He closed the window and opened the bath taps to full blast. When the water hit the empty tub, the initial noise was deafening and she had a frightening image of Gene drowning first her, then Steelie. But he sat on the tub’s edge, keeping a foot on her while retrieving an object from his bag. Jayne couldn’t see what it was because his hand was clasped around it but the glimpse between his fingers suggested a grenade.

He leaned toward her and held the object to her ear, pressing it to her skin. ‘I will remove your gag. If you start yelling, I pull the pin on this baby, which gives me time to leave and you time to die. Got it?’

The object was cold enough to be metallic but it could have been hard plastic and ‘pins’ only meant grenade to her. She tried to look at what he was holding to her head but he wouldn’t let her. Now she understood that the faucets were blasting in order to cover some conversation he intended to have with her; to get some piece of information from her before killing them like he must have killed all the others. She wanted to cry, to give up. She closed her eyes.

‘I said, got it?’ He jammed the object even harder against her ear.

She forced her eyes open and nodded.

He pulled her gag down and in so doing, leaned his foot hard on to her diaphragm, making her convulse as her stomach muscles tensed. He looked at her like she was a specimen in a dish and then tut-tutted her. ‘Jayne Hall. I’m surprised you didn’t recognize my MO the second you came to the freeway in LA.’

She actually felt her eyes darting around in their sockets as she took in the implications of his words. She tried to produce some saliva and swallow. ‘How did you know I was there?’

‘I was watching you. And I must say, for an “expert”, you didn’t put two and two together at all because I haven’t changed my cuts since Kigali.’

Jesus. He really did kill that woman in Rwanda. ‘I didn’t know about Kigali.’

Gene cocked his head. ‘You surprise me. I was sure Gerrit would have sent you the crime scene photos. It was such an unusual crime for Rwanda at the time. Quite evolved compared to all the other killing.’

Jayne couldn’t hide her disgust.

He rolled his eyes. ‘You’ve always been too soft, Jayne. I listened to you talking to your so-called clients—’

She felt her cheeks flush. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘Why don’t you just tell them that if their daughter’s missing, she’s already dead?’

‘You’re the one who bugged my phone?’

‘You shouldn’t give them false hope like you do.’

‘Was it you? Why did you come and see me? I don’t understand.’ Jayne knew she sounded needy and plaintive but couldn’t help her tone. Details from the past two weeks were jostling for position in her mind.

‘I wanted to know what you knew.’ He gestured with the object clasped in his hand and Jayne was finally sure: it was a grenade. Small, dusty, lethal. ‘I needed to know how much time I had before I had to go to ground. And everything I heard put me at ease. You suck at your job as bad as Houston does. And I would’ve left you alone, given how incompetent you are, but then you told Houston about me. Now you have to pay for that.’

Jayne felt a frisson of fear. What was he talking about? ‘I–I didn’t tell him anything.’

‘You were never a good liar, Jayne. I saw you at my mother’s house. You were there today, leading Houston right in.’

‘But I wasn’t! He found you and your house himself!’ She was almost shouting over the noise of the open faucet.

‘Spare me. He’s an agent. He can’t find his own asshole without help.’

He suddenly sounded petulant and Jayne saw a way in. Gene wasn’t crazy, or maybe he was, but there was some logic behind it. She tried to push down her fear and changed her tack, her sole focus keeping Gene talking long enough for the FBI driver to arrive and end this before Gene did something even worse. She didn’t know what time it was, but the airport pick-up had to be any minute now.

‘You’ve got some issue, don’t you?’ She was trying to sound conversational, as though she wasn’t lying on the floor trussed up in twine and duct tape, but her underlying fear was making her shiver and her voice was uneven and trembly. ‘Some kind of grudge against agents. What, did you apply and they wouldn’t take you? Too old, were you?’

She wasn’t ready when he lunged at her and slapped her face, his hand open, the rubber of the surgical glove burning her skin. Tears stung her eyes but she knew she’d hit a nerve. She didn’t let the topic go. ‘That’s it, isn’t it?’

‘Shut up!’ He was clenching and unclenching the hand he’d slapped her with.

‘So you applied.’ Jayne pressed on. ‘And you didn’t make it – for whatever reason. Though I’m surprised they didn’t take you, what with your postgraduate degree, obvious intelligence, previous Bureau history, plus you’re active and athletic.’ She was almost gagging on her words but her voice was getting stronger. ‘I would have thought you were perfect agent material. You know you’re good, right? No matter what they say.’

She watched the compliment take its effect. Gene’s back straightened perceptibly, his mouth relaxed.

She went further. ‘You were already a Bureau employee in the lab. Why was it so important to become an agent?’

He didn’t respond initially but when he did, his eyes were fixed on the grenade. ‘I wanted to stay in Rwanda another year but the Bureau said extensions were only open to agents.’

Jayne hadn’t expected this and couldn’t immediately think of a follow-up question. ‘So?’

His eyes bore into her. ‘If you hadn’t noticed, not a single one of those “special” agents can investigate their way out of a paper bag. Not only does the Bureau prevent me from carrying on my work in Rwanda, but, two years later, they decide to send a team to Kosovo for the UN and what happens? They send that stupid piece of shit rookie in my place. My place.’

Jayne frowned. ‘What rookie?’

Gene rolled his eyes at her like she wasn’t keeping up. ‘Houston,’ he sneered. ‘There I was, with all my forensic experience as well as a previous UN mission – I even advised them on who to get for the team – and who gets passed over? Me. And who goes? Scott Houston. I don’t think so. No, uh-unh, the Bureau was only going to fuck me over like that one time. I resigned immediately, deprived them of my talents, and I’ve been making sure they know what a mistake they made on Houston ever since. I’ve taken my time but I’ll see that dirtbag stripped of every accolade he’s received. I’ve shown he can’t even solve a couple of homicides, that he’s a fantasist who sees serial killers around every corner. He can’t even close a couple of local missing person cases, for Chrissakes!’

Jayne heard that familiar, superior tone, now applied to Scott like he was a target. To her knowledge, Scott didn’t even know Gene. She stared at him, struggling to understand how she had missed the signs that he was a sociopathic killer in the time she’d been side by side with him in the graves. She was suddenly assaulted with the images from the photographs they’d seen in the briefing room. The technicolor of Rwanda bleached out by midday sun, the rich soil wetted anew with fresh blood, and then she remembered further back. Gene at The Cadillac, dancing out of rhythm with a young woman who followed him back to the bar, her suggestive smile fading when he didn’t buy her a cold drink despite the crush of heat and noise and twirling disco-ball light. That young woman had been dancing with death and hadn’t even known it. Not only that, the rest of them hadn’t seen it and so hadn’t protected her.

Jayne was mortified to feel tears springing to her eyes unbidden as she said, ‘So you murdered that girl in Kigali? And in a place that had just survived a genocide?’ Her voice trembled audibly.

He fed off her display of emotion. ‘But even you understand why it was the ideal place to do it: what was one more dead body in Rwanda? People were too busy with eight hundred thousand other corpses to pay attention.’

‘But . . . but you were a forensic scientist. You were supposed to be helping people, not victimizing them. Why, for God’s sake, did you kill that woman?’

He shook his head. ‘Still such an idealist, aren’t you, Jayne? Let me tell you the truth about these victims you put on such a high pedestal. The cases we got at the Bureau were all about stupidity. The vics were stupid to get themselves into a situation where they were killed and the killers were stupid enough to leave behind trace. After a few months of scraping dried shit out of people’s underwear after they’d voided their bowels, I knew the world was a better place without people like them but I had no intention of being caught getting rid of ’em.’

Jayne gazed up at him in wonder, forcing herself to skip over his obviously willful misunderstanding of the way bowels can sometimes relax upon death, leaving feces free to flow into anyone’s underwear, regardless of their IQ. ‘You’re saying that you think some people deserve to die? You think that young woman in Kigali deserved to die?’

‘I’m saying I don’t want stupid people in the gene pool.’

Jayne almost spluttered. ‘Who the hell are you to say who’s stupid?’

Gene pulled a ball of twine from his bag as he spoke, leaving the grenade inside the bag. ‘Hey, I give people the opportunity to make a choice: go with an instinct for survival or go with the social fiction of Trust in Others. If they can’t make the choice to survive, they shouldn’t be allowed to live, let alone reproduce. It’s the same choice our ancestors had when they came face-to-face with a lion in the savannah. I give them that choice, they usually make the wrong one and I get to clean up while I simultaneously drag Houston down.’ He flashed a grin at her. ‘Who said men can’t multitask?’

Jayne pictured Eleanor Patterson meeting a man like this when she was at her most vulnerable. Gene was justifying his murders with some kind of perversion of evolutionary biology when, really, he had victimized women, first out of career frustration and then out of misplaced revenge. But his reasons didn’t change anything. She couldn’t fake a plaintive tone any longer; Gene was deeply wrong and he needed to know it.

‘You haven’t been giving people choices, you’ve been giving them bait-and-switch. All you’ve done, Gene, is betray people’s trust.’

He put a loop of twine through the pin on the grenade and then stood up, towering over her as he placed a foot on either side of her waist. ‘You and Steelie have always had a way of sounding holier-than-thou.’

He dropped down on to her, trapping her with a knee on each side of her waist. ‘We’ve talked enough. You’re going to lay here in this bathroom, Jayne, the lure on a hook for Houston, and when he comes through that door looking for you – and I know he will because he likes the chase and you’ve been giving him one hell of a chase for quite a while now. Unh-unh, don’t try to deny it. Now he’s going to walk in and trip the line to this grenade I got specially for you.’

He leaned down toward her face. ‘I lied when I said I hadn’t kept up with where you went after Kigali. I heard about Kosovo and the mine your team blew, so you should enjoy this. You’ll get to watch Houston and Steelie bite it. You’ll probably survive it with a few limbs intact. Now, you start the show by calling Lover Boy to reel him in. If you tip him off to the grenade, I pull the pin the second the words come out of your mouth. You don’t mind if I frisk you now, do you?’ He began going through her pockets.

Jayne panicked. She didn’t want to die and she knew Scott wouldn’t be the one to come through that door. It would be the FBI driver. Another innocent, just like Benni in Kosovo; there because she was there. She had to stop this. Gene had located her phone and rocked back as he held it aloft, compressing her tailbone against the tile floor. And suddenly all the fear and pain mixed with his weight on her hips to trigger an old, old memory – she’d been young, on a mat, in a class, being taught – defend yourself.

She screamed with all her might and Gene reacted just as she’d hoped, lunging to push the gag back into her mouth, his weight now forward and, crucially, off her hips. Using strength she didn’t know she had left, she thrust her hips up as hard and high as she could, sending him head-first toward the cold, hard toilet bowl, shutting her eyes a millisecond before his knees smashed into her face.

Scott attempted to be patient as he watched Angie from the doorway of her office.

When she finally slammed down her phone, she shouted, ‘We got it! Guys, we got it.’ She looked up at Scott in triumph.

He felt warmth spread across his chest and went to her, his hand up for a high five. She hit it and merged it into a down low, followed by one of their old handgrips.

Eric popped his head in from the hallway. ‘You got the location?’

‘Not yet,’ she replied, breaking free from Scott and grabbing an FBI windbreaker from the back of her chair. ‘It’s in Northeast. We can go mobile and I’ll keep in cell phone contact for them to give us the one hundred-foot radius.’

‘OK, I got the warrant underway, so I’m coming with you.’

Mark was out of his seat. ‘I’m driving.’

The four agents ran down the stairs and out the back of the building to the motor pool. Mark shouted, ‘Four-eight-six’ and the others diverted course to the black Suburban with the corresponding license plate. ‘It’s got the flak jackets and shotguns.’

Within seconds, Mark had reversed out of the parking space and activated the red and blue flashers in the front and rear windows. They entered the roadway at speed.

Angie’s cell phone rang and she listened, then said, ‘OK, head southeast. We’re keeping the line open.’

Mark swerved around a double-parked delivery truck and then braked hard as a taxi veered into their lane. ‘Come on!’

Angie’s voice came loud. ‘We got him! Last ping is from near Eden and Forty-Fifth. We’re almost there.’

Mark slowed as they approached that intersection and turned off the lights. He halted at the corner so they could scan the cross street and take in the buildings.

Scott looked out the front window, saw the motel across the street, dismissed it, and then did a double-take. ‘Holy shit!’

Mark followed his gaze, and then threw the vehicle into reverse, parking it out of sight from the motel. Scott dialed a number on his phone as the other agents jumped out and opened the rear doors.

Scott joined them a moment later, his phone still in his hand. ‘This is the motel where Travel put Jayne and Steelie last night. Carter’s here, in the parking lot. He arrived early to pick them up, was able to hear water running, assumed someone was bathing, so was waiting until the appointed time to go back and knock.’

Eric cut in, ‘King’s got to be in there with them; no way one of ’em’s having a bath when they’re due to leave.’

Scott nodded. ‘Get your gear on. We’re going in on the presumption that he is armed. We are not waiting for further backup. Got it?’

The others assented and they ran to the building, splitting into two pairs to take the separate exterior staircases up to the second floor. They positioned themselves on either side of Jayne and Steelie’s door, guns drawn as Mark held a small battering ram. Scott nodded at him and he rammed the door. It slammed open with a crack and they all shouted, ‘Federal Agents! Drop your weapon!!’

They were met with silence so they charged the room.

Scott saw Eric rush to the bed, where Steelie was on the floor against the wall, but his eyes were taking in the emptiness of the rest of the room. He felt rising panic as he imagined King taking Jayne away with him. Then he heard a shout from his left.

‘Call a medic!’

He spun around and Angie’s concerned expression gave him a stab of worry. He pushed past Mark to get to Angie in the bathroom doorway, then heard a squelching noise and looked down. The threshold was soaking; his eyes followed a film of bloody water across the floor. He saw two bodies by the toilet: a man collapsed around the toilet, his knees obscuring the head of someone contorted underneath. Jayne. Scott figured the water was coming from the overflowing bath. That left the blood. He desperately hoped none of it was coming from her. He stepped into the room and got down on his knees. He was going to get her out.