Chapter 14
CHAPTER 14
“Where?” Tom asked.
“Her diary,” Ami said. “Where else would a young girl divulge her deepest, darkest secrets growing up?”
“Wouldn’t her parents have found that after her death?” Tom asked. “I’m sure the investigators on the case twenty-five years ago would have done a thorough search of her room.”
“Not necessarily.” Ami shook her head. “I always hid mine from prying eyes. And if Susan had a younger brother like Kevin, I bet she did the same thing. And if their parents passed away this year, maybe this was the first time he was able to really get into her bedroom and sort through her things. Maybe that is the answer as to why now. Remember, we kept asking ourselves that question as to why the murders were happening this year.”
“I think you have a good point,” Kenneally said. “When my girlfriend Maria was accidentally killed by a drunk driver walking home from her job the summer after we graduated from high school, her parents discovered so many things in her apartment when they cleaned it out. They were shocked she kept secrets from them, especially that she was planning our wedding, even though we weren’t engaged yet.”
She touched his arm. “I’m so sorry. I know that was a long time ago, but still to lose someone you felt so strongly about like that.”
“Thank you,” he said. “But back to Susan and her diary, maybe Tom should try to get a warrant to search the Holloway home? Is that where Kevin still lives?”
“I’m not sure, but I’ll make a call to the station and find out right now,” Tom said, walking toward the front of the church.
“Buck, glove up and help my assistant bag and tag those body parts the pastor has in his hands,” Harold said, tossing him some gloves. “And I’ll get to working on preparing the body for transport so we can all get out of here. I assume you’ve already searched the area for any evidence when you arrived?”
“I did,” Buck answered. “And then the sheriff chewed me a new one for not calling him right away.”
“Don’t pay attention to him,” Harold said, picking up a pair of latex gloves. “Kenneally, mind gloving up and helping me lift the body into the bag?”
“Sure thing,” Kenneally said, catching the gloves when Harold tossed to him.
“Is there anything I can do to help?” Ami asked.
“Stay out of the way,” Harold said. “No offense, but this could get cumbersome, and I don’t want you getting hurt.”
“Got it,” Ami said, and walked back to the first pew, and sat. She was close enough to where Tom was standing, phone pressed to his ear that she could hear his conversation.
“What took so long, Beatrice, for you to answer? It can’t be that busy in the office.” He paused, frowned, and then said. “A fresh pot of coffee just for you? What was wrong with the other one?”
Ami rolled her eyes. And Tom directed his frown at her. “Listen, Bea, I need to find out the current address of Kevin Holloway.”
He waited and Ami could almost hear him praying for patience. “That’s correct. The principal at Dixie High,” Tom said really sounding annoyed getting the third degree from one of his two assistants at the station, that also worked dispatch. “Nothing that concerns you, but if you must know, some evidence leads back to his sister’s death, and we might need to reach out to him. I just want to have his address handy if I need to make a house call.”
Another pause, longer than the first and Tom started tapping his foot ticking off the seconds. Ami found it amusing to watch his impatience.
“He still lives at his parents old address? Which is?” He pulled out a flip notepad from the inside of his jacket pocket and scribbled on the page. “You’re a gem. Have two pots of coffee tonight if you desire. Oh, you were going to anyway?”
Ami snickered. Good ole Bea.
Tom disconnected the call and scrolled through his phone before pressing send. A few seconds later he walked away talking to someone and returned, smiling from ear to ear. “We got it!”
Hope surged through Ami. “The search warrant?”
“Of course, what else do you think I was talking about?” he said and headed back to Harold. Ami followed.
“I got it,” he announced for the second time.
“Who’d you call?” Harold asked as he strapped the body onto the gurney.
“Fontenot. Becky Simmons’ cousin.”
“Ole Con comes through again,” Harold said. “Wasn’t he at the reunion tonight?”
“He was, but if you haven’t noticed, it’s getting dark out and the curfew has people leaving early,” Tom said. “Buck, he said if you’ll head over to his residence, he’ll have it signed and waiting for you when you get there. Then you can just meet us there.”
“Got it, boss,” Buck said.
“And find out what’s keeping Steven so long with Mrs. Rogers. He should be on his way back from taking her home by now. Have him meet us there as well,” Tom said. “I’ve texted you the address. Once Harold finishes up here, we need to head over to the Holloway house to begin looking for this mysterious diary.”
“I’ll stick around here for the CSI team and make sure they do a thorough job,” Harold said. “I know your mind is working overtime here and you’ve totally lost track of the fact they haven’t shown up yet. I’ll give them a call on their ETA. It’s the weekend and they may be short staffed.”
“Thanks,” Tom said.
Ami and Kenneally followed Tom out of the church, and they got in their respective vehicles heading to the Holloway address. Kenneally followed Tom as he led them out toward the bayou road, and she remembered going out with Judson and Tilda one summer after she arrived to a fishing lodge. He’d told me it had been in the community for years. And many families used it. She smiled, finding it odd that she hadn’t thought about that trip in a long time and if she hadn’t been heading in this direction she might not have tonight.
Ahead Tom’s signal light showed he was turning left into what looked like a subdivision. Kenneally sped to keep up taking a right, then another left. He turned out of the subdivision onto a long dirt road that took them back to a single two-story house with a wraparound front porch with a swing.
“This looks nice back here,” Kenneally said.
“It does,” Ami said. “I bet the Holloways lived on the property before the subdivision was developed.”
“I’d say so,” he agreed. “We had a few like this back in South Carolina.”
“Judson fished not far from here I believe,” she said. “At least I remember him bringing me out this way one summer if I remember correctly.”
“Are you sure?” he asked.
“I was thinking that when you were driving and after seeing the house I’m almost positive we walked near here once,” she said.
“Interesting.” Kenneally put the truck in park and got out, pocketing the keys. She got out on her side leaving her purse and wrap in the truck as they headed to the house.
“Looks like we made better time than Buck, but we can look around,” Tom said. “Nothing against looking for the homeowner to say hello.”
“Except that isn’t what you’re really doing,” Ami said.
Tom grinned, handing them each a pair of latex gloves. “No. I want to make sure he isn’t here before we enter the house. It’ll make our search easier.”
A black and white patrol car rambled down the driveway and pulled to a stop. Buck jumped out and ran toward them, waving the warrant. “It’s all signed and dated. You can go in now.”
Tom didn’t waste any time and knocked on the front door. Of course, no one answered. After waiting a moment, he knocked again, then he tried the handle and found the knob turned. The door swung open with an eerie squeak.
“That’s odd. Who’d leave their front door unlocked with a killer on the loose,” he said.
“The killer,” Buck said.
They all looked at him.
“What?” he said.
“Let’s split up. Ami, you look for Susan’s bedroom since you seem to think you know where she might have hidden the diary,” Tom said. “Kenneally, you look for Holloway’s room. Buck and I will search down here.”
Turning on the upstairs light, Ami hurried upstairs and found a closed room door. Hoping it might be Susan’s old room. There was dust gathered in the corners of the door frame. She opened it, finding a closet instead. Shutting it again, she continued down the hall, opened the next closed door and flipped on the switch. From the décor it was obvious it belonged to a teenage girl, but was surprised it was in pristine condition. She noted that it might not have been disturbed, but it had been cleaned.
Her eyes scanned the room, looking for a bookcase and saw a full-length one across the room. She hurried over and began running her hands over the spines, trying to see if she felt any fake books. But nothing seemed out of place, except on the third shelf the books were loose like one had been removed.
Tapping her finger on her chin, she thought for a moment where in the room the diary– if there actually was one– could be hidden.
“Ami! Ami, come here,” Kenneally called, excitement encapsulating his voice.
She rushed from the room and down the hall to find him coming to meet her with a diary-size book in his hand.
“Is that it?” she gasped.
“It is,” he confirmed. “It was lying open on his bed, turned to the last entry. The pages are worn as if he’s read them over and over again. Fixated on what she wrote.”
Her breath caught in her throat. “Let me see,” she said, reaching for it.
He handed it over, but the lighting was very dim in the hallway, so they moved back into Holloway’s room where Kenneally had left on the light.
Ami began to read but after a moment, she found she had to sit at the corner desk as she poured over the pages that provided the answers they’d been searching for and why Susan Holloway had chosen to end her life. Bile rose in her throat and she had to choke it back as she read a young girl’s description of a brutal assault at the hands of her so-called friends.
“Oh my God. That poor girl, what she must have gone through,” Ami said, forcing herself to stop reading. “I can’t believe that the Judson and Tilda that I knew could ever have been a part of that night. That Judson had raped Susan. That he, Connor, and David, all raped her.”
As she spoke, her outrage turned to hot, blinding tears and she handed the book back to Kenneally, afraid of damaging the evidence. “How could Tilda and Becky stand outside that fishing lodge while the boys were inside doing that?”
Kenneally shook his head. “Group rape is a weird kind of group dynamics. Everyone in the group goes along with it, because everyone is doing it, sick as it is. And alcohol consumption would loosen their inhibitions and make them more likely to go through with it, even if deep down they knew it was wrong. If they’d been sober, their judgement might have been better, and it might not have happened.”
Ami stared at him, wiping away her tears. “You know, you’d make a great father because you are so levelheaded in your thinking.”
He shook his head. “I think that ship has sailed for me.”
“Are you saying you’re too old?” she sniffled.
“I’m saying it takes two to tango. I’m single and I haven’t had a constant relationship since Maria,” he replied.
“That’s a shame,” Ami said. Once again, she felt that the timing was wrong to talk about them. “I think we should take this book down to Tom.”
“Agreed.”
“Let me go turn out the light in Susan’s room and I’ll meet you downstairs,” Ami said. She hurried back down the hall and then took the stairs two at a time, an eerie chill overcame her as she went. Was there an unsettling force in this house? Was Susan’s spirit with them knowing that her secret had been revealed?
The chill– either from what she had read or that it was cold in the house– had her longing for her wrap. She ran from the house and through the dark toward Lolita. She was about to yank open the door when an arm grabbed her around the waist and a hand clamped over her mouth.
“You couldn’t leave well enough alone, could you bitch?” Kevin Holloway ridiculed against her ear as he dragged her away from the truck, her high heels digging in the gravel drive as they went. “You just had to come and take a look for yourself, didn’t you?”
She shook her head furiously, trying to scream around his hand for someone to come and save her. But her voice was inaudible above a squeak the way it is in one of those paralyzing dreams. No one knew she had left the house. Kenneally thought she had gone to turn off the light and was going to meet him downstairs. He didn’t know she came out to get her shawl.
Tree branches scraped at her skin, snagging on her dress, her hair as she was pulled deep into the woods. Her heels no longer dug up gravel, but leaves and dirt. She wasn’t sure where he was taking her, and with nothing but starlight, she couldn’t keep track of her surroundings. She fought against him, trying to get free, but it did no good. He yanked her closer and bit her ear. “Stop!” he growled, “Or you’ll get much worse.”
“I’m not afraid of you,” she tried to scream against his hand, but it sounded to muffled to her ears like a mouse’s squeak. She hated herself for not being able to fight back, and furious she couldn’t force a scream past his hand. But it was stuck in her throat, and she fought against the terror rising in her. He was a stone-cold killer, and he had her right where he wanted her. In his clutches and she had no clue where he was taking her or what he might do next.
And then, he suddenly veered in a different direction, and they were no longer sludging through leaves but across a stone path. The smell of wood smoke greeted her nose and stung her eyes. For a brief second, he removed his hand from her mouth and opened something behind her. Then his hand was back, and he was once again dragging her through what looked like a doorway.
She recognized this place. It was the fishing lodge that Judson had taken her to that summer. Her stomach knotted at the realization that it was also the same fishing lodge where Susan had been raped. She was certain Kevin knew that, and it was the reason he had brought her here.
Pushing her into a straight back chair, he reached for prepared pieces of rope and quickly tied her hands behind her back and secured her legs to the chair legs.
The room was lit by the roaring flames from the fireplace, and she could see him and their surrounds surprisingly well even though he hadn’t taken the time to turn on any lights.
“Don’t look so surprised,” he said. “I had planned to bring you here tonight after I retrieved you from the girls’ locker room bathroom, but that damn busybody Kenneally got you out before I could return.”
“Why?” Her voice came out as a high-pitched squeak, but at least it was audible.
He ran a bent finger down her cheek. It was quite gentle, but he had a menacing gleam in his eye that sent a chill down her spine. And she jerked away from him.
He laughed.
“It won’t do any good. You can’t get away,” he said. “But to answer your question Mayor, you’ve been meddling where you shouldn’t and almost ruined everything, I had planned to seek revenge for my sister.”
“I didn’t know.”
“Of course, you didn’t.”
“I’m sure if you turn yourself in with Susan’s diary the sheriff will understand why you felt you had to seek justice for her,” Ami said slowly. If I can keep him talking, that will give Kenneally and the others time to find me. Surely, they’ve guessed where we are by now.
“I’m repulsed learning what Judson did and Pastor Weeks. I can’t imagine what his congregation will think when they find out about this.”
“Yes. It will set this town on its ear to learn what went on at the community fishing lodge all those years ago.” The triumph in his voice was impossible to miss. “How their favorite mayor was a rapist and their pastor too. Not to mention the bed and breakfast owner where they spent their honeymoon nights when they couldn’t afford to go anywhere else.”
“What I don’t understand is why cut Tilda and Becky’s tongues out?” Ami asked.
He tilted his head to the side. “Isn’t it obvious? They chose not to speak up and tell what happened to Susan. So I removed their tongues stopping their ability to cry out for help.”
“I don’t understand,” Ami said. “You used that statue to hit Tilda on the head.”
“After I cut out her tongue,” he said.
She shook her head.
“Still don’t get it, do you? I gave her a mild sedative, that numbed her, made her not able to move, like I’m going to do to you. Before I kill you.”
“Wh–what?” she squeaked.
“Don’t worry.” He pulled out a syringe from his pants pocket. “It doesn’t leave a trace in your system. No one will think you were using drugs.”
“Is this necessary?” she asked. She hated that her voice was shaking, that he could see her fear.
“Would you prefer I do it without drugging you first?” he asked. “I can do it either way.”
“I prefer you not do it at all,” she snapped, anger beginning to surge through her. If this was the end, she’d go out fighting. “Why do you feel you must?”
“It’s a shame really,” he said. “You’ve always been so kind to me. You did a fine job on your speech even if you had no idea the true nature of your friends. And that busy body neighbor of yours and her yappy little dog. I don’t see how you stood living next to them the way you did.”
“Clementine? But she never barked,” Ami said.
“No? She wouldn’t shut up barking at me,” Kevin said. “Yapping and jumping at my heels. I really had no choice but to get rid of them both. That was not in my plan. I blame their dying on you.”
“You killed them because they got in your way.”
“Exactly. Then you understand why I must proceed with my plan.”
She took a deep breath and closed her eyes, not wanting to watch him render her helpless. Hurry, Kenneally. Please, please, hurry.
Kenneally searched the upstairs for Ami but when he couldn’t find her, he hurried to the floor below. “She’s not there,” he informed Tom and Buck. “I don’t get it. She said she was turning out the light and coming right down.”
Tom shook his head. “Holloway must have grabbed her. It’s the only explanation.”
“How?” Buck asked. “We were right here? Would he have the balls to do that under our noses?”
Tom whacked his younger deputy on the back of the head. “He’s been killing the citizens of Dixie this whole time while acting like the meek and mild principal at the high school. Of course, he’d do it.”
“Calm down, Tom. Your temper is flaring again,” Kenneally warned. “I know tonight has been a nightmare, but we have to stay cool headed if we want to get Ami back alive and I plan to do that.”
Steven finally walked into the house. “Hey, who’s been scrapping ruts in the driveway out by that old blue truck?”
Tom took two steps over to his delinquent deputy. “Say that again.”
“It looks like something sharp has made narrow tracks in the gravel. Maybe a stick or something,” Steven explained.
“Or a woman’s high heeled shoes when she is being dragged away,” Kenneally said running out the door.
Footfalls followed him and he pulled out his cellphone to see what Steven had described because it was dark outside.
“How on earth did you see these?” he asked.
“My headlights caught it as I pulled up and parked,” Steven explained, “then I used my cell’s flashlight app to take a closer look like you are doing.”
“What was Ami doing outside near the truck?” Tom said.
“Maybe she decided to come out to get her purse where her own cellphone was left,” Kenneally said. “Or maybe she was cold, so she wanted her wrap. I don’t know, but these tracks prove she came outside for some reason.”
Tom nodded. “Okay men, we now have a man hunt on our hands. We don’t have time for backup. Time is essential if we want to find Ami alive because we don’t know how crazed Holloway might be at this point. He’s already killed once today and by now he knows that we know that. He has nothing to lose at this point.”
“That’s right. He’s as likely to change methods and go for a murder suicide as anything,” Kenneally said.
“Does everyone have a weapon?” Tom asked.
“Yeah,” Buck confirmed, and Steven nodded.
Kenneally reached inside his jacket and pulled out his handgun. “Just so you know, I’m licensed to carry, even a concealed weapon in fifty states.”
“Good to know,” Tom said. “I’d hate to get technical on you after this was over.”
Kenneally allowed himself a grim chuckle but then asked, “The question is where would Holloway take Ami from here? Susan wrote about a fishing lodge in her diary. She said it was a community lodge that even her family belonged. Would he go there?”
“Yeah,” Tom said without hesitation. “I believe he would.”
“Do you know how to get there from here?” Kenneally asked.
“I do,” Buck said. “My family belongs. I lost my virginity there on prom night.”
“We didn’t need to know that last part, son,” Tom said, slapping him on the back this time. “You need to learn when to speak and when to keep your trap shut.”
“Noted, boss,” Buck said. “Let’s go in two patrol cars without the sirens. There’s a road that will get us there quicker than traipsing through the woods.”
“Okay, Steven, drive Kenneally and I’ll ride with Buck,” Tom said before heading to the black and white.
The drive took less than five minutes, and they parked about two hundred yards from the house to prevent anyone from hearing them pull up. Then they split up with Kenneally and Steven going around to the back while Tom and Buck headed toward the front. Kenneally found a back door and slipped inside, quietly making his way from the kitchen, down the hallway toward the bedrooms to a stairway that led up to a loft area. A small library where several bookcases sat and two wingback chairs gave dimension to an area near the fireplace and that is where he spotted Holloway with his back to them.
Kenneally motioned for Steven to stay there with his gun trained on Holloway while he retraced his route down the hallway passed the bedrooms toward the kitchen. He went through the kitchen and came out on the opposite side where he was able to see Holloway’s face and get a clear shot at him if it warranted it. From this angle he could see Ami sitting in a straight back dining chair, tied up. He couldn’t tell what they were saying, but whatever Holloway said, she nodded.
Then he saw Holloway hold up a syringe and prep it before stepping toward her. Before he had time to consider the implications, Kenneally pointed his revolver, aimed, and fired. Ami screamed as the bullet penetrated square in the middle of Holloway’s forehead, and he tumbled backwards, across the lodge, knocking over bookcases and small tables. Volumes slid from the shelves as Holloway fell to the floor.
Turning on the lights, Kenneally paused long enough to watch the blood running down Holloway’s cold, dead face before running to free a struggling Ami.
“’bout time you got here,” she gasped as he cut her bonds with his pocket knife.”
“I couldn’t see the breadcrumbs you left in the dark,” he answered, pulling the ropes free and tossing them aside.
And then they were kissing, deep, toe-curling kisses, that Ami had only been dreaming about up to this point. Neither caring if anyone was watching. Ami was alive and safe. And that was all that mattered.
Tom and Buck burst into the house in time to see Steven holstering his weapon as he checked for a pulse from Holloway’s body.
“He’s dead.”