Say Goodbye

THIRTY-FIVE

SHE WANTED TO CALL MAC. IT WAS HER KNEE-JERK REACTION, born of terror and the resulting aftermath. But of course, he was out in the field now, doing the job he loved and beyond her reach just as she was so often beyond his.

So Kimberly huddled on the floor of her hotel room, arms wrapped protectively around her unborn child, aware of the blood on her cheek, and the fact she shouldn’t wash up until the crime scene photographer had documented her face. She’d already contacted her supervisor who in turn would raise the local sheriff as a courtesy call. Sheriff Wyatt would be leaving his D.A.R.E. training. Sheriff Duffy would be roused out of bed. And with their blessing, her own ERT would probably be activated to process the scene.

So many wheels in motion. The law enforcement machinery grinding into gear. She knew it. She understood it. She lived it.

She squeezed her eyes shut and felt nearly dumbstruck with exhaustion.

“Water?” Sal asked. He took a seat beside her, careful not to touch. Quincy and Rainie were outside the room, standing in the hallway with the wide-eyed hotel manager, discussing something in low tones they obviously didn’t want her to hear.

“You okay?” Sal asked.

She nodded.

“The baby?”

She nodded again, best she could do. Her belly felt fine, no cramping, no nausea. Mostly she felt jittery with the adrenaline dump, while her arms stung from a myriad of tiny cuts. Nothing a Band-Aid couldn’t cover. She was fine, absolutely, positively fine, except for the fact that she would never be fine again.

The boy’s body still lay slumped on the floor. A cursory attempt at finding a pulse had confirmed that he was dead. They had not bothered to call 911 or raise an EMT; this stage of the game was all about protecting the crime scene.

Which included the blood in her hair, the gore on her cheek, the rich, coppery smell she could not get out of her nostrils.

The boy’s voice, trying to explain to her that he was tired, so very tired.

It was the senselessness that was hardest to take. That a life could be born into this world and, through no fault of its own, never stand a chance. Kimberly pressed the heels of her hands against her eye sockets, not wanting to see what she saw, not wanting to know what she knew.

“He confirmed that Dinchara murdered the missing prostitutes,” she whispered finally, taking the glass of water from Sal, watching it tremble in her hand. She didn’t want to drink. She forced herself to take little sips of water anyway, because she couldn’t risk dehydration while pregnant.

Sal’s turn for silence.

“The boy also shot and killed Tommy Mark Evans, acting under Dinchara’s directions. It was considered his practice run, for his ‘graduation.’ There’s another boy as well, younger. The teen referred to him as his ‘replacement.’”

“Where?”

“Somewhere close. According to the boy, Dinchara knows we’re here asking questions. Maybe we even walked right by him, I don’t know. But he’s local. Definitely local.”

“What else?”

She closed her eyes tiredly, resting the glass of water against her forehead. When she opened them again, she saw she had smeared blood on the curve of the glass and the sight of it, dark, fleshy, made her stomach roil dangerously. She fought to hold it together.

“He helped dispose of the bodies. They pulled them by litters up Blood Mountain. But not the primary trail-Dinchara has his own. Someplace above the main traffic flow where they could look down at the activity below. That should help narrow our search.”

“Okay.”

She turned to him finally, her agitation starting to slip through the cracks, ruining her attempt at composure. “Okay? I just watched a teenage boy blow out his brains, and all you can say is okay? Dinchara kidnapped this child. He raped him, he corrupted him, he turned him into an accomplice until the boy would rather die than risk a future with his own child. Nothing about that is okay!”

Sal looked at her strangely. “Kimberly, it isn’t your fault-”

“What isn’t my fault? That a child was kidnapped? That nobody ever rescued him? That Dinchara used him as a tool for murder over a dozen times and no one ever noticed? We’re the cops, Sal. If it’s not our fault, whose fault is it?”

“The kid shot Tommy Mark Evans-”

“Because he had no choice!”

“He could’ve just as easily shot you.”

“You know what? That doesn’t make me feel any better!”

And then, through her own rising hysteria, remembering suddenly: “Shit! Ginny Jones. She’s waiting for him in the parking lot. Quick, before she hears the sirens, we gotta find Ginny Jones!”

Quincy and Rainie were unarmed civilians. They were not the type, however, to let such details stop them. Quincy took the lead with Rainie following him swiftly and quietly over the dark, rain-slicked asphalt.

The worst of the thunder and lightning seemed to have passed, leaving behind merely the pouring rain and howling wind. It was difficult to hear. Even more difficult to see. For Quincy, the conditions brought to mind another time, not so long ago, when he and his future son-in-law, Mac, had slipped and slid their way through the Tillamook County Fairgrounds in a desperate bid to get a glimpse of the man who was holding Rainie for ransom.

That day had not gone as planned. And this moment?

The streetlamps reflected off each car’s water-beaded windshield, distorting the view, making it difficult for them to peer in while not so hard for a driver to see out. It occurred to Quincy that they were going about this all wrong. They didn’t need to inspect each vehicle’s interior; they simply needed to examine each exhaust pipe.

Bank Robbery 101: The getaway car was already fired up and ready to go.

He motioned for Rainie to take the right side of the parking lot, closest to the street. He worked to the left, running in a half-crouch down the line of vehicles. Then, straight ahead, right by the exit for the side street, a small economy car with its engine running.

He caught Rainie’s attention with a wave of his hand. She started over and he realized at the last moment that they had a problem after all. Ginny Jones was armed with a car at the very least, and perhaps a gun as well. All they had was their charm and wit.

Quincy went with plan B. He picked up a large rock, placed it in his fist, and wrapped the whole affair with his coat. Four strides later, he suddenly loomed in the driver’s side window. Ginny Jones opened her eyes in alarm. He slammed his covered knuckles through the window, shattering the glass and yanking the keys from the ignition.

The girl screamed.

He popped open the door and gave her his best predatory smile.

“Bad news,” he said, “my daughter’s still alive and you’re coming with me.”

Ginny Jones screamed again.

“Please,” Rainie said, materializing at his side. “As if either of us care.”

They dragged Ginny from the car into the storming night, just as the first police cruisers roared into view.

Rainie and Quincy made it up the stairs with Ginny. They turned the corner. Kimberly caught sight of them and launched herself up off the floor.

“Kimberly, no!” Quincy got out, then Kimberly’s shoulder was driving into Ginny’s chest and the two women went down in a tangle, Ginny yelling something incoherent while Kimberly screamed at the top of her lungs: “You played Russian roulette with my baby. You lying bitch! How dare you risk my baby!”

Rainie tried to grab one of them, Quincy the other.

Both of the women were moving too fast, Ginny smacking Kimberly across the face, Kimberly getting a grip on the girl’s hair.

“Where’s the boy? I’m not asking you again. Where does Dinchara keep the second boy!”

While Ginny wailed, “Where is he, where is he, where is he? What did you do with Aaron?”

“You had no right to risk my life! I was trying to help, all you ever had to do was tell me the truth!”

“Aaron, Aaron, Aaron!”

Sal finally waded into the fray. He got Kimberly under the armpits and dragged her off Ginny’s flailing body just in time to whisper in her ear, “Enough already! You’re putting on a show!”

Kimberly finally stopped struggling long enough to look up. Two of Sheriff Wyatt’s deputies stood in the hallway, eyes wide, hands on their holstered firearms. They looked from Ginny to Kimberly to Rainie, Quincy, and Sal.

“Special Agent Sal Martignetti,” Sal supplied crisply, using one hand to flash his creds while his other hand maintained a tight grip on Kimberly’s arm. She fisted her hands, still overloaded on adrenaline. She tried to rein it in. Didn’t work. She wanted to scream. To scream and scream and scream. Then she wanted to curl up in a ball and cry in her husband’s arms.

Rainie and Quincy introduced themselves, then Ginny Jones. The tension was starting to wind down, the deputies’ hands moving away from their holstered weapons, everyone taking a deep breath.

“Ma’am,” the older deputy said slowly as he appraised the scene, and in particular, Kimberly’s blood-spattered hair. “Are you hurt? Do you need medical attention?”

“No.” Kimberly’s gaze returned to Ginny, who was finally getting to her feet with Rainie’s assistance. The girl scowled back at her, chin up, shoulders thrown back defiantly.

“Bitch,” the girl mouthed.

That was it. Kimberly dabbed a smear of blood from her cheek. Then she reached over and very deliberately wiped the gore on Ginny’s exposed collarbone.

“Hey, what the fuck-”

“That’s from Aaron,” Kimberly said. “Guess what? He didn’t graduate.”

Ginny screamed in rage, launched herself at Kimberly, and they went down again, this time with the two deputies joining Quincy, Rainie, and Sal in trying to figure out what to do.

Thirty minutes later, Ginny and Kimberly sat at opposite ends of a table in the empty dining room in the basement of the Smith House. Sheriff Duffy had arrived to supervise the party until Sheriff Wyatt returned. The majority of the deputies were upstairs, cordoning off the scene in preparation for the evidence recovery team. Quincy and Rainie sat on either side of Kimberly. Sal sat beside Ginny.

Kimberly thought they were like boxers in the corners of the ring. Which made Duff, seated in the middle, the referee.

“Why don’t we start with the preliminaries and work our way from there, shall we?” Duff suggested in his deep, grumbling baritone. “Everyone has water. Now we’ll all play nice together.”

He turned to Ginny Jones and indicated the tape recorder he had sitting in front of him. “State your name and the date for the record, please.”

Ginny glared at him, and for a minute, Kimberly thought she might be justified to go across the table for some more whoop-ass, but then Ginny’s shoulders sagged, and the last of the fight seemed to leave the girl.

“Ginny,” she whispered. “Virginia Jones.”

Duff got the full names and badge numbers from the law enforcement officers in attendance. He also noted date and location. Then he read Ginny her rights, as well as having her sign the waiver. Finally they got into it.

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 his 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.”