Parting Shot

Fifteen

Barry Duckworth drove out of the Starbucks lot after meeting with his son and his girlfriend thinking: That could have gone better.

What a disaster. And yet, what was he supposed to do? Ignore the possibility that his son might be able to help him with a serious investigation? He had to talk to him on the off chance Trevor had seen something that would lead Duckworth to whoever had abducted and tattooed Brian Gaffney.

Still, maybe he could have done a better job of it. Maybe he should have talked to his son separately from this new girlfriend of his, Carol Beakman. Except she was a potential witness, too. He’d needed to talk to both of them.

And still...

He should have realized that once he’d told them he’d seen them on the Knight’s surveillance video, it meant that he’d seen them in an intimate moment.

Well, the hell with that, he thought. If he’d walked into Knight’s, he’d have seen the same damn thing. If you were going to stick your tongue down some girl’s throat while sitting in the middle of a bar, there was only so much privacy you could reasonably expect.

Maybe this would teach them to be a little more discreet, for crying out loud. Get a room.

Except, of course, Trevor’s room these days was in the Duckworth home.

He let out a long sigh.

Maybe he wouldn’t feel so conflicted about this if either of them had been able to tell him something useful. At least then the awkwardness would have been worth it. But as it turned out, neither Trevor nor Carol had seen a thing. They hadn’t even recognized Gaffney’s picture.

“Shit,” he said aloud.

But the more Duckworth thought about it, the more he wondered what the big deal was. Okay, he’d seen them making out. That was unfortunate. But did it justify Trevor’s hostility? Maybe he had a right to be annoyed, but why so instantly defensive?

Duckworth feared this was not the end of it. He wished now that Trevor hadn’t moved in with them. If his son still had his own place, Duckworth could avoid him almost indefinitely. But at some point today, Trevor would come home. That was not an encounter Duckworth looked forward to.

Which brought up the next dilemma. How much should he tell Maureen?

Forget all the investigative implications. At a purely personal level, Duckworth was now in possession of information that Maureen, who’d expressed concern about their son within the last hour, would definitely want to know.

Duckworth now knew Trevor was seeing someone. He knew her name. He even knew where she worked. Should he let Trevor fill his mother in at some point when he felt the time was right? And if he followed that course of action, what would Maureen do to him when she eventually found out he’d had this intel all along?

What a bloody mess.

He knew he’d tell Maureen. There were some things you couldn’t hold back. The trick would be trying to tell the story without making himself look like a total idiot in the way he’d handled things.

If that was even possible.

“Shit,” he said again.

He kept replaying the scene at Starbucks in his head. I embarrassed him, he thought. Trevor had every right to be angry. The first time his father meets his girlfriend, he submits her to a police interrogation.

“I blew it. I totally blew it.”

What a terrific first impression. No wonder Trevor was pissed. Duckworth decided he’d have to apologize. Tell his son he was sorry for not handling things more tactfully.

You’re a cop for twenty-six years, and you still make mistakes.

God, he just wanted a donut. No, that wasn’t true. He wanted half a dozen donuts.

He had to put his problem with Trevor aside for now. Duckworth had something else to think about.

Craig Pierce.

Why had it taken him this long to think about Craig Pierce?

Okay, he had to cut himself a little slack. It had only been a few hours since Brian Gaffney had been brought into the police station. Only now were some of the similarities coming into focus.

Both Gaffney and Pierce had been sedated before horrible things were done to them.

In both cases, retribution appeared to play a major role. Craig Pierce was being punished for something he’d done, and it certainly appeared Gaffney was being made to pay for what had happened to “Sean,” whoever that turned out to be.

But there might come a time when Gaffney would actually consider himself lucky, at least compared to Craig Pierce.

Craig’s night to remember was 3rd February. Duckworth remembered the details of his statement.

Craig awoke to the sound of falling water. Torrents of it. An unrelenting rushing.

As he began to be more fully aware of his surroundings, he noticed how cold he felt. From the waist down, anyway. It was, after all, winter. (If Craig had anything at all to be grateful for, it was that this particular February was a mild one for upstate New York.)

His buttocks and the backs of his legs were particularly cold. That, he soon realized, was because they were resting on a thin layer of snow. He was outside, flat on his back, and all evidence pointed to the fact that he was half naked.

He’d have sat up and assessed his situation, but there were some problems there. He couldn’t see, for one thing. He had some kind of woolen hood on, like a ski mask, except there were no holes for eyes or nose or mouth. The damn thing was on backward.

But the more serious problem was that he could not move. His arms and legs were splayed out, like he was a starfish, and secured somehow to the ground. He could feel bindings around his wrists and ankles. He was able to brush the fingers of both hands against sticks of some kind.

No, not sticks. Stakes.

Craig Pierce was staked to the ground. Minus pants.

“Hello?” His voice was raspy and panicked. “Is there someone there?”

There was no light filtering through the threads of the hood. It was nighttime, no doubt about that.

“Hello?” he said again. “What’s going on?”

Craig tried to control his breathing, which was becoming very rapid. He needed to concentrate on what was going on around him.

He sensed he was not alone.

Even with the background noise of the rushing water, he thought he heard people breathing. Someone — maybe more than one person — shifting weight from one foot to the other. Very, very close to him.

Whispering.

“I know you’re there,” he said. “What the hell is going on? What the hell is this?”

The last thing Craig could recall, before waking up staked to the snowy ground, was finishing his shift at Maria’s, a pizza takeout joint. It was midnight, and he’d come out the back door. He’d walked to his Camaro, where he found a van parked so close alongside it he wasn’t sure he could get the door open.

He heard someone say, “Craig Pierce?”

Then someone from behind put something over his face. A cloth. A very smelly cloth.

Nothing after that, until he heard the rushing of water.

“I can hear you!” he shouted. “I hear you talking! What the hell is this about?”

Pierce sensed movement on the ground. He believed someone was standing over him. Then he heard a voice, maybe the same one that had called out his name.

“Like you don’t know.”

That was when Craig Pierce had an inkling about what might be going on.

“Look, I’m sorry,” he said. “Really, really sorry. I’ve learned my lesson.”

At this point, Pierce heard other breathing, of a kind that did not sound human. More like panting, or snorting. It was the sort of sound a dog might make.

What happened next made him jump, at least as much as a man could jump while staked to the ground. Something thick and cold and wet was being poured over his body. Particularly over those parts of him that were most exposed, most vulnerable.

“Hey!” he shouted. “What are you doing? What is that?”

As if to answer his question, a few seconds later more of the substance was poured over his face. It seeped through the fabric of the hood and reached his lips and tongue, where he could not help but taste it.

It was a mixture of something. A strange combination of ingredients. Like honey, and beef. Bloody and sweet at the same time.

Then, a flash.

His picture had been taken.

Craig had the sense that whoever had done this to him — one or more, he was not sure — was walking away.

Then he heard the voice say, “Go get him, boy. Dinner is served.”

The sound of something running. Something getting closer. Something panting hungrily.

Not long after that, Pierce passed out.

When the sun came up, and Craig Pierce was spotted, staked out in the middle of the park by Promise Falls, he was nearly dead.

Considering what had happened to him, Duckworth thought, he’d have been better off that way. He’d conducted interviews with Pierce in the hospital in the days following the attack.

Now he decided, three months later, that it was time for another chat with the man. He was not looking forward to it.