Chapter 38
T om Barker assessed Victor Wallace through the one-way window. “So that’s the professor I’ve been hearing so much about.”
“That’s him,” Derby said.
Barker had invited himself to the sheriff’s office and had talked his way back to the hallway of interrogation rooms where he could observe the suspect through a glass pane. Derby resented Barker’s intrusion, but there was little he could do about it.
Their criminal cases often overlapped, so the two departments had reciprocity. Barker had a right, even a duty, to be here, but Derby was having a hard time being cordial to the man he believed had killed Frank Gray less than twenty-four hours earlier.
Derby had assigned Wallace to a pair of his best interrogators. He’d told them, “He looks and acts like Mr. Rogers. Don’t be deceived. Bowie said he likes to talk. Let him.”
So far, Wallace had remained unflappable. He didn’t answer any questions except the most mundane. Instead he rambled on a number of subjects, often mentioning the popularity of his lectures and the increasing interest in his book.
Barker said now, “I was expecting someone more sinister.”
“He’s sinister, all right,” Derby said. “He was going to slice and dice John Bowie’s daughter.”
“I heard you caught him red-handed with the girl. Why are you giving him the third degree?”
“The Crissy Mellin case.”
Barker gave a start. “Crissy Mellin?”
“Bowie thinks chances are good the professor here was the perp and that he’s been waiting three years to do it again, to coincide with the blood moon.”
Tom’s distorted features twitched with amusement; then he chuckled. “Just goes to show how far ’round the bend Bowie has gone since that case. To this day, he refuses to admit that the Oliver kid was guilty. I mean, Christ, the boy wrote a confession to killing her and disposing of her!
“And I was this close,” he said, indicating an inch with his fingers, “to getting him to tell me where he had dumped her body. I told him if he gave that up, it might be a bargaining chip he could cash in at his sentencing, that it would be a demonstration of his remorse, and so on. I sent him back to his cell to think it over. You know what happened.”
He affected sadness as he shook his head. “But Bowie had been trying to steer the investigation in the wrong direction. He absolutely would not acknowledge his error. His downfall started then, and it’s continued on a greased slope. Now, three years later, he’s completely irrational. Blood moon? Give me a break. That’s crazy. He’s surly and unreliable. Can’t control his temper.
“You only have to look at my face to see how violent he can be. I’ve given him ample opportunities to turn himself around, but after this attack on me, he gave me no choice. I had to let him go. Not just for my own safety, but for the safety of anyone else in the department who crossed him. Like Frank Gray.”
Lowering his voice, he moved closer to Derby. “Those two couldn’t stand the sight of each other. Bowie had been fired. He had nothing to lose by killing his arch-enemy.”
Derby held up his hand. “Tom, maybe you shouldn’t say anything more without an attorney present.”
“ Attorney? ”
“I know about the trap you set for Bowie last night.”
He looked chagrined. “I’ll admit that wasn’t by the book, but Bowie had managed to avoid arrest for days. When he called, accusing me of abducting his daughter of all things, Frank hatched this plan to draw him out.”
“It was the ogre’s idea?”
“Yes. Frank was, well, I don’t want to speak disrespectfully, but he stepped over the line sometimes. I was leery of this plot he hatched, but Frank was convinced that it would work as nothing else would. ‘Bowie’s nuts about that kid,’ he said. So,” Barker said with a shrug, “I went along. I regret that decision now. Frank’s brilliant plan got him killed.”
Looking thoughtful, Derby tugged on his earlobe. “I’ve known John for a long time. I can’t see him shooting an unarmed man in the back of his head.”
“You didn’t see him last night. Whew! When he discovered that we didn’t have his daughter, he went apeshit, knocked me out cold. I don’t know what happened after that. I regained consciousness. Went looking for Frank. But Bowie’s place is almost uninhabitable unless you’re an alligator or a water fowl.”
“You didn’t check the shed?”
“Didn’t even see it. It’s dark as hell out there. I stumbled around, but finally gave up the search, thinking that maybe Bowie and Haskell had taken Frank with them when they cleared out. When I learned this morning how he’d been found, it made me sick.”
“I know that feeling,” Derby said dryly.
“Derby?”
He and Barker turned to see the subject of their conversation walking down the hallway toward them.
“Well, well, look who the cat dragged in.”
Bowie ignored Barker and spoke directly to Derby. “I need to see you immediately. Alone. It’s about him.” He angled his head toward the interrogation room, where the professor seemed to be pontificating to the deputies. “Back here.” He turned and walked away in the direction from which he’d come.
Without a word or backward glance at Barker, Derby followed Bowie’s long strides. Barker hurried to catch up. Derby said, “He said alone, Tom.”
“But you can’t just let him—”
“For the present, I can. I’ll get back to you.”
When John pushed open the door to the empty office he’d temporarily commandeered, Beth was saying into her cell phone, “I hope you’ll listen to this message, Richard. Brady is ignoring the voice mails I’ve left him. The Crissy Mellin story has taken a shocking twist. She’s alive, and sitting not five feet from me. She’s alive and well. It’s seventeen minutes to air time. I advise you get that message to Brady.”
As she clicked off, John met her gaze. She acknowledged his and Derby’s entrance with a nod, but John knew the other man hadn’t noticed. He was staring with stupefaction at the young woman with strawberry-blond hair. She and her mother were sitting side by side in metal folding chairs. Crissy was composed, Carla less so.
After the stunning discovery that Crissy was alive, John and Beth had hustled them into his car. The first thing he’d asked was, “Were you even kidnapped, Crissy?”
“Yes, Mr. Bowie.”
Carla had declared, “It’s not against the law to pretend you’re dead. I looked it up.”
His angry response had been to tell her to shut up. Looking across at Crissy, to whom Beth had yielded the passenger seat, he’d said, “I’ve lived in hell over you for three years. Three years . Why didn’t you tell me? Tom Barker? Somebody? ”
Before Crissy could say a word, Carla had pounced. “I had to protect my girl from that psycho, that’s why. By the time she escaped, Billy Oliver was already dead. There was nothing we could do for him.
“But the real culprit was still out there. Her identity had been blasted all over the media. We were afraid he’d come after her. Keeping her hidden was the only way she would be safe.”
John had experienced warring emotions. The girl was alive. She wasn’t dead from tortures he’d had recurring nightmares about. But he’d had those nightmares because of their ruse, which had cost him dearly. He felt he had a right to be at least borderline outraged.
He’d taken out his anger on other motorists who didn’t get out of his way fast enough. During that hair-raising drive from Carla’s house to the sheriff’s office, Crissy had talked him and Beth through her ordeal.
Now he’d summoned Derby to listen to it. He made quick work of the introductions, then said to Crissy, “Tell Mr. Derby what you told Beth and me.”
In the first few minutes, she confirmed that she’d been abducted but had escaped five days later. Derby wanted to know, as John had, why she hadn’t come forward as soon as she’d escaped. She explained her and Carla’s reasoning, then said, “I understand why y’all would be mad at us for that, but I was so scared.”
Derby accepted that explanation for now. “How did it happen?”
“Mom asked me to go to the convenience store. It had been raining all day, but it had stopped, so I decided to walk. Billy came out of his house to see where I was off to. I asked him to come along, but he didn’t want to go because of the weather. We parted ways at his house. The last time I saw him, he was going inside.”
She told them that after she’d picked up the few items at the store and was headed home, a car had pulled to a stop beside her. The driver had lowered his window and told her she’d left something behind on the counter.
“He got out of his car, and that’s pretty much all I remember until I came to, lying on the floor in a building with corrugated tin walls. My hands and feet had zip ties around them.”
John looked over at Derby. “Sound familiar?”
Looking grim, Derby signaled for Crissy to continue. She described the scene in which they’d discovered Molly in detail down to the plastic sheeting lining the floor and the workbench with its array of surgical instruments. “He sterilized them each time he came to bring me a bottle of water and something to eat. Usually an energy bar.”
John interrupted. “He told Molly her great moment was going to be that night during the blood moon. But he kept you for days after the November seventh one. Why do you think that was?”
“I don’t know, except that occasionally he would talk to himself, saying that everything had to be perfect. There were times when he seemed very frustrated, not so much with me, but with himself.” She hesitated, then added, “I think he was trying to work up the courage to kill me.”
“Did he try to conceal his identity, wear a mask?” Derby asked.
“No.”
“And he wasn’t someone you knew or recognized?”
“No.”
Carla barked an angry sound. “Don’t you think I would have told you if I’d known who he was?”
John broke in. “I seriously doubt you would have, Carla. While officers, including Mitch Haskell and me, were still out beating the bushes for Crissy, you didn’t tell us she was alive. Now I understand your reason, but your self-serving silence had a far-reaching and detrimental effect on a lot people.”
She folded her arms over her middle and turned her head away from him.
A taut silence followed. Eventually Derby cleared his throat. “Crissy, while you were captive, did he molest you?”
“No. I was afraid he would, but he didn’t. If anything, he treated me like… like something he cherished.”
Derby asked her a series of other pertinent questions, then asked how she’d managed to escape. She told them that her captor arrived one night carrying two duffel bags, one in each hand.
“He’d never brought them before, so I knew then that that was the night he would kill me. Because his hands were full, he pushed the door closed with his heel. Then he came over to me, set the bags down, and untied my feet so I could go to the bathroom.”
“Bathroom?” Derby asked.
“A bucket in the corner,” she said. “It was humiliating. Anyway, I went over to it. He’d set the duffel bags down and had gone back to relock the door. I knew my life depended on seizing that moment when his back was turned. I grabbed the bucket, rushed over, and swung it as hard as I could at his head. I felt the jolt all the way up my arm. He lost his balance and fell, banging his head on the floor. I didn’t wait to see if I’d knocked him out, or even killed him. I just pulled open the door and ran like hell.
“It was dark as pitch, no lights anywhere, raining lightly. I was running blind and probably went in circles, but I didn’t allow myself to stop. I didn’t even see a road for the longest time, and then I kept it in sight but stayed off it. I was afraid he would come up behind me in his car.
“At dawn, I was able to orient myself and started making my way in the general direction of home. But during the day, I was afraid he’d be searching for me, so I hid behind a dumpster at the back of an office building and waited until it got dark again. It took me four days to walk the rest of the way home, but I stayed out of sight as much as I could.”
John thought of a question he hadn’t yet asked her. “Could you have found your way back to that building? It’s immaterial now, but I just wonder.”
“No, Mr. Bowie. I swear. That was another reason we didn’t tell. I’d gotten so turned around, and it was far. I never could have shown you where he’d kept me.”
“In the meantime, she’d have been an open target,” Carla contributed.
When no one spoke, Crissy continued. “It was the middle of the night when I got to the trailer park. Our front door was locked. I knocked. When Mom opened the door and saw me, I looked such a fright, she screamed. I was still in the clothes I’d had on when I went to the convenience store, and I hadn’t eaten. Whenever I spotted an outdoor faucet, and no one was around, I drank from it.”
Looking straight at John, she said, “I know I should have let you know. I’m sorry for all the trouble I caused. But I’ve lived in constant fear of him coming after me, right up till I heard you and Ms. Collins tell my mom that you’d caught him.”
Nobody said anything or moved until Derby stirred himself. “Do you think you can identify him, Miss Mellin?”
“Definitely. No question. He’s as real to me tonight as he was when I hit him with that bucket.”
Beth said softly, “Show him, Crissy.”
The young woman extended her arm toward the detective and pushed up her sleeve to her elbow, revealing a red crescent moon tattoo on the inside of her forearm. She said, “He didn’t leave me with just this memento. He tattooed memories of him on my brain that will be with me forever.”
The five of them left the borrowed office and trooped down the hallway toward the interrogation room. Barker was pacing, and when he saw them, he said, “It’s about damn time.” Then he recognized Crissy and Carla Mellin. He gaped like a fish on dry land. “What… what the hell…?”
“It’s rather obvious, isn’t it, Tom?” John said. “I don’t think you’re going to enjoy your TV debut tonight.”
“He’s not,” Beth said, beaming. She held up her phone so John could see the text. “Richard skipped over Brady and went straight to the top. Two minutes from now, TV audiences will be seeing a rerun of a Crisis Point episode, not the one on Crissy.”
He would have liked to celebrate her victory with a hug, but their attention was drawn to the window, where Crissy was talking quietly with Derby. “That’s him,” they heard her say.
“You’re sure?”
“Positive. Can we listen in?”
Derby signaled another deputy to open up a microphone inside the room.
“—really is a phenomenon that shouldn’t be missed. It begins here at ten-fifty-seven P.M. Totality will be at one-fifty-eight A.M . Surely Derby wouldn’t deny me seeing that. You could escort me up to the roof.”
One of the deputies shifted in his chair. “How’d you lure Molly Bowie into your car, Victor?”
“It’s Professor Wallace,” he said loftily. “I’m going to file a formal complaint against this department over your maltreatment of me.”
Crissy said, “His voice is exactly as I remember. Can I go in?”
“Honey,” Carla said, “I don’t think—”
“I want to confront him, Mom. He had all the power before. Not anymore.”
Without further discussion, Derby reached around her and opened the door. “Victor, there’s someone here to see you.”
Crissy walked into the room.
The professor stared at her with disbelief and dismay, and then with fury. He stood up, his placid features becoming congested with malice. “You. You ruined it!” It was a high-pitched scream more than a shout. “Because of you, they wouldn’t let me into the inner sanctum! I, a professor. I who is more intelligent than the rest of them put together. I who wrote the book on it!”
He continued the rant long after Crissy had calmly turned her back on him and walked out, leaving him in the charge of his interrogators who had to physically restrain him.