Wild Card

Chapter 56

Banko drove with the siren screaming on the dashboard, then killed the siren two blocks from Hollis’s address, and crept up the street. It was a quiet neighborhood, and as they parked several houses away from Hollis’s, a dog started to bark.

They found Romero and Fuller standing on the sidewalk, shivering from the cold. Both men looked annoyed; Hollis had done a good job convincing them he wasn’t a killer. “You’re making a mistake,” Fuller said. “Hollis isn’t the Dresser.”

“Yes, he is,” Valentine said.

“How can you know? You haven’t even spoken to him.”

Valentine didn’t need to talk to Hollis to know he was right. His gut was telling him that Hollis was the Dresser, and his gut was never wrong. He was not about to back down.

“Bet you a hundred bucks,” Valentine said.

“You’re on,” Fuller said.

The four men started up the path toward Hollis’s residence. The house was a two-story square box that looked like a piece from a Monopoly game, with blinds drawn tightly on the windows, and old newspapers lying on the stoop. Fuller knocked on the screen door with his fist. The porch light came on, and they heard footsteps.

“Be careful. He’s got a grudge against Valentine,” Banko warned.

The front door swung in, and Hollis stood on the other side of the screen. In his late thirties, he was balding, with a pug face and deep, sunken eyes. Dressed in running shorts and a gray sweatshirt, he appeared to have been working out. Valentine stared at him through the FBI agents’ shoulders.

“Sorry to bother you again, Mister Hollis, but we forgot to ask you a couple of things,” Fuller said. “May we come in?”

“Can’t this wait until tomorrow? I’m going to bed,” Hollis said.

“Afraid not.”

“Who are those men standing behind you?”

“Two officers with the Atlantic City Police Department.”

“Do they have names?”

“Why is that important?”

“I just like to know who I’m letting into my home.”

Hollis was stalling. Inside the house, Iron Butterfly’s psychedelic rock song In-a-gadda-da-vida was playing loudly on a stereo, and sweet incense was burning. Every serial killer had a ritual, and Valentine guessed that Hollis’s ritual was to recreate The Summer of Love.

“Mona’s in the house,” he blurted out.

Hollis’s eyes grew wide. Fuller jerked the screen door open, and he and Romero rushed in. They pinned Hollis to a wall in the foyer, and ordered him not to move.

“You’re under arrest,” Fuller told him.

Fuller read Hollis his rights, while Romero cuffed their suspect. Valentine and Banko followed them inside. Seeing Valentine, Hollis suddenly looked afraid.

“Valentine,” he muttered.

“Where is she?” Valentine said.

Hollis said nothing. The interior of the house was chilly, yet Hollis was sweating. Most old houses on the island had faulty heating, and he guessed Mona was either in the basement, or the attic. He decided to give Hollis a chance to come clean.

“You left a thumb tip in the glove compartment of your car,” Valentine said. “A hooker you picked up last week saw it. The game’s over. We know who you are.”

Hollis looked baffled. Then, his shoulders sagged.

“Fuck me,” he muttered.

“Is Mona still alive?”

“Yes.”

“Take us to her.”

“Okay.”

Hollis stepped down into the living room with the two FBI agents behind him. Their suspect dropped his arms, and there was a harsh popping sound as he dislocated his wrists. The handcuffs slid free and hit the floor. Reaching into his shorts, he extracted a can of pepper spray, and spun around.

“Fuckers!”

The pepper spray hit Fuller first, then Romero and Banko. It gave Valentine enough time to raise his forearm, and partially protect his face. His eyes filled with tears, and he watched helplessly as Hollis kicked Banko viciously in the groin, then shoved the FBI agents into each other, and sent them to the floor.

Then, Hollis turned on Valentine.

“Ready to rumble, Tony?” he screamed.

Hollis had turned into a raving psychopath in the blink of an eye. He grabbed a metal lamp off a table and smacked Valentine in the side of the head, then hit him in the shoulders and arms. He was laughing now, and seemed to be enjoying himself.

Valentine hadn’t come here to die. He threw a lazy punch at his attacker’s face. Hollis ducked the blow, but not the elbow that came with it. Boxers called it throwing a chicken wing, and it was the dirtiest trick Valentine knew.

Hollis’s head snapped back, and he hit the floor. Valentine got on top of him, and started throwing punches of his own. He would have continued had Banko not stepped in. “Jesus, Tony, you’ll kill him.”

“Is that so bad?”

“How did he slip the cuffs?”

“It’s a magic trick.”

Valentine grabbed Hollis by the collar and lifted his head. With his other hand, he pulled back one of his eyelids. Hollis was out cold.

“Damn it,” Valentine said.

It took Fuller and Romero a few moments to pull themselves together. When they had, and Hollis was under their control, Valentine and Banko ran through the house, checking the rooms as well as the basement and attic. There was no sign of Mona.

“The garage,” Valentine said.

The garage was a separate structure that stood behind the house. Banko opened the sliding door, and Valentine found a light and turned it on. A florescent bulb lit up the interior, revealing a white AT&T van with a ladder perched on the roof. Valentine grabbed the handle on the van’s rear door and jerked it open. Empty.

“Jesus,” Banko swore. “Look at this.”

Banko faced a wall lined with dozens of apothecary jars. From each jar stared out a pair of helpless eyes. Squirrels and rabbits and cats were swimming lifelessly in formaldehyde. Some people collected stamps. Hollis collected dead animals.

They returned to the house. Every room had been ice cold. So why was Hollis sweating? Valentine took another walk through the downstairs. The rooms were laid out in a circular design. If it was a circle, then where was its center?

He checked the closets, and banged on the interior wall. The closet in the den sounded hollow, and appeared to be made of particle board.

“In here,” he shouted.

Banko joined him. With their combined weight, they took down the wall. If fell inward, and they entered a small, dimly lit space that was twenty degrees warmer than the rest of the house. Mona hung by her wrists from a meat hook in the ceiling, her mouth covered in duct tape, her face a deathly blue.

“Help me get her down,” Valentine said.

He gave her mouth to mouth until an ambulance arrived, and a pair of medics went to work on her. She’d always joked about them getting together one day. Not like this, he thought. He leaned against the wall and watched the medics try to jolt her heart back to life. It wasn’t working.

He shuddered. It was what passed for tears after he’d been a cop for a while. He realized he needed to sit down. There was a chair against the wall, and as he sat in it, he noticed a plate of hot dog and beans lying on the floor beside it. Had Hollis been eating his dinner as Mona had starved to death? He couldn’t think of anything more cruel.

A small desk sat in the room’s corner, on it an open shoe box. He thumbed through snapshots of Mary Ann Crawford, Melissa Edwards, Connie Howard and Maria Sanchez that showed them gradually starving to death. The last envelope contained snapshots of a naked man lying atop a naked woman tied to a bed. The woman did not look thrilled with the situation. The man in the photos was Special Agent Fuller. Now he knew why Fuller had run out of town; Hollis had the goods on him.

Valentine glanced at the medics. They were still working on Mona, and paying no attention to him. He shoved the incriminating photographs of Fuller into his pocket, then walked out of Hollis’s lair. In the living room he found Banko talking to a couple of uniforms. His superior took him aside and said, “How’s she doing?”

“Not good,” Valentine said.

“I’m sorry. I know you cared about her.”

“Thanks.”

Through the living room window appeared the blinking lights of several police cruisers, as well as the shadows of uniformed cops standing on the front lawn. Valentine went outside, and found Hollis sitting in the back of a cruiser, his wrists handcuffed behind him, his face stained by his own blood. Their eyes met, and Hollis gnashed his teeth, trying to make himself frightening. Only he wasn’t; he was just a pathetic little man. Valentine put his face to the window. “Will you tell me something?”

Hollis stopped gnashing. “What?”

“Why did you kill those girls? It was my wife you wanted.”

Hollis brought his face to the window. “I fell in love with your wife the first day I met her. You’ve always stood in my way, protecting her like a guard dog. I considered killing you, but never had the courage. So I killed those hookers instead.”

“But why? They didn’t hurt you.”

“I had to have your wife, even if it meant dressing those girls up, and imagining her. Do you understand? I had to have Lois Fabio for my own.”

“You’re sick.”

“I loved her!” Hollis screamed.

Valentine heard someone say his name, and glanced over his shoulder to see Fuller standing on the front path, smoking a cigarette. The FBI agent had a strange look on his face, and Valentine approached him wondering what was on his mind.

“Looks like I owe you a hundred bucks,” Fuller said.

“You owe me more than that.”

“How’s that?”

Valentine took the incriminating photographs from his pocket, and handed them to him. The cigarette fell from Fuller’s lips. He tried to speak, but could not find the words. Valentine said it for him.

“Deep down, I think you’re a good guy. But you’re going to have to prove it.”

Ashamed, Fuller stared at the ground.

“Not to me, but to your partner. You understand what I’m saying?”

“Yeah,” he whispered.

“Good. It’s been nice knowing you.”

Valentine went back inside to Hollis’s lair. The medics were bringing Mona out on a stretcher, and had an oxygen mask over her face. He saw her look up at him through half-shut eyes, and grabbed her hand.

“Mona. You’re alive.”

Mona said something through her mask, and managed to smile. Valentine couldn’t believe it. She’d been dead five minutes ago, and he looked at the medics for help.

“What happened?”

“One of the cops came in, and started praying for her,” one of the medics explained. “After a couple of minutes, her heart started beating again. Don’t ask me to explain, because I can’t.”

Valentine didn’t need an explanation; seeing Mona alive was enough. She was trying to say something, and he leaned down, and put his ear next to her mask.

“I need a cigarette,” she rasped.

“Later,” he told her.

He watched them carry Mona out before going in. Romero stood at the desk looking at the photos of Hollis’s victims. He remembered Romero saying how he wanted to save a life someday, to atone for his lost girlfriend. God had been kind to him.

“You got your wish,” Valentine said.

Romero turned around. His eyes were filled with tears, and he nodded solemnly.

“God works in strange ways,” the FBI agent said.