Chapter Twenty-Three
Twenty-Three
Tutwiler Hotel
Vivian’s parents had called twice to make sure she was all right. She appreciated their concern, but she didn’t want to talk about this.
Pierce had tried her cell three times. The third time she had told him she didn’t want to talk.
Not to him anyway.
She wasn’t sure she would be ready to talk about anything personal with him again in this lifetime.
Trust didn’t come easily. Which made the fact that she had spilled her guts to McBride over the past hour or so completely irrational.
They had talked about her childhood, which couldn’t have been more satisfying or complete.
High school had been high school. She hadn’t exactly been a nerd . . . but she hadn’t been popular either.
Then college, and her life had turned upside down.
Until it happened to them, no one realized how much could change in a mere instant.
The night air was cool, the view from the balcony calming in a strange way. What lay all around her was home, though for years she had tried to deny it.
McBride had loosened her up with a miniature bottle of whiskey. What could she say? She was a cheap drunk. One little bottle, and she was ready to tell him anything he would sit still long enough to bear.
Or maybe she just needed to tell someone.
“After study group ended,” he prodded, reminding her that she had stopped mid-story.
“I was on my way back to my dorm.” She moistened her lips and forced her mind to look at that painful memory. “It was late. Dark. Past curfew. I knew if I was caught I’d be in trouble, so I stuck to the shadows. Stupid, huh?”
“Not stupid.” He leaned against the banister, exhaled the drag he had taken. “Understandable. You were seventeen. You were more afraid of disappointing the dean and your parents than you were of the dark.”
She made a derisive sound. “Boy, I learned that lesson in a hurry.” Taking in a big breath, she continued.
“I never saw or heard him. I woke up in a room later, hours, maybe minutes. Felt like a basement, which I found out later it was. The bastard had a mansion in Brentwood, just outside Nashville. He was a doctor . . . or at least he pretended to be one. His license was phony. Dr. Lyle Solomon didn’t exist beyond the two years he had been practicing medicine in Nashville. ”
McBride didn’t ask any questions. He just let her talk.
“The first few days I was certain someone would come. Then I slowly began to realize that no one was coming.” She remembered that moment, as if it had only been that morning.
The realization had almost caused her to give up.
Then, for some reason she would never understand, her determination kicked in.
“From the beginning I did whatever he told me. I’d heard about a couple of his other victims. I knew what would happen if I didn’t.
Maybe it was the whole obedience mentality of growing up in a conservative Southern home.
Whatever. I did exactly what he told me—no matter how sickening. ”
“Hey, you’re alive. You were smart.”
Or a coward. “I wasn’t smart, McBride, I was desperate.
” She rubbed her hands up and down her arms, but the chill came from deep within.
“I didn’t have a weapon. He was bigger and stronger than me.
I was helpless. Then he said something to me that made me think.
” She shuddered at the memory. “He touched my throat”—she demonstrated—“at the pulse and reminded me how fragile life was. I thought about that and decided he was right. All I had to do was hit the right spot. I’d have only one chance. I’d either kill him or he’d kill me.”
“Desperate can be good,” McBride allowed. “You got the job done.”
Yeah, she had. “I never saw his face until after he was dead. Just heard his voice . . .” She had always been certain that there were two men. That certainty nagged at her even now.
“You made sure he couldn’t hurt anyone again,” McBride said as he tamped out his cigarette. “That’s something to be proud of, Grace.”
“There were times . . .” Should she do this?
The shrinks, the investigators, they had all told her that the second man’s voice was her mind playing games on her.
The fact that she had murdered a man, even such a sick bastard, in what could only be called a heinous manner, had caused her to invent the other voice.
“I was certain there were two men. Two distinct, different voices. But the evidence indicated only one subject was involved and I killed him.”
McBride considered her revelation a moment. “Are you afraid that the owner of that other voice is still out there? Do you look over your shoulder when you cross a dark parking lot?”
The answer was yes. She did. As hard as she tried to pretend she didn’t, she did. “Yeah, I do.” She took a deep breath. “I guess I’m still a little afraid when I let myself dwell on it. Maybe that’s why anonymity felt safer.”
He assessed her with those blue eyes that saw right into her soul. “Then you’re human, Vivian Grace. If you felt anything else, you wouldn’t be.”
He was right. For the first time in a really long time, she sensed that someone understood.
“Thanks, McBride. You’re not nearly as shallow as I originally thought.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment.” He straightened away from the railing. “Have another whiskey, Grace.” He sniffed his shirt. “I need a shower.”
She watched him disappear into the room, the smile on her lips widening instead of slipping. Though she had known him four days, she had scarcely cracked the surface of the complex man beneath the indifferent veneer. What she had found underneath, she liked . . . a lot.
Maybe she would have another of those whiskeys.
She could sleep like the dead for a couple of hours and then get back to the office.
One thing was clear: She could not live her life hiding from the past any longer.
It was time to face it head-on. If any of her colleagues gave her any grief, she would set them straight.
She had just twisted off the top of another miniature bottle when her phone vibrated. On the table next to the bed, McBride’s phone trembled against the wooden surface.
She looked at her phone’s display before taking the call. Agent Davis.
She answered, “Grace.”
Davis’s first three words had ice forming in her veins. Come in now.
Vivian glanced at the clock on the bedside table, her pulse reacting to the tension in Davis’s voice. “It’s only one thirty.” She and McBride weren’t scheduled to go back in until four. “What’s going on?”
Davis told her that he had tried to call Worth at home and had gotten his wife. Worth hadn’t made it home, and there was no answer on his cell. But the strangest part was that his car was parked in his driveway.
Devoted Fan’s most recent email scrolled past her mind’s eye, pausing on one particular part:
. . . this one is a lesson I am sure you will appreciate as much as I . . .
How could Devoted Fan have known that Worth and McBride didn’t particularly like each other? The bastard couldn’t be watching them that closely.
“I’ll call Pierce,” she told Davis. “McBride and I will meet him and head that way.”
Vivian ended the call. Her heart thumped as the realization sank in that Worth was the latest victim. Jesus. If this scumbag could get to Worth . . . no one was safe.
1000 Eighteenth Street, 2:00 a.m.
Ryan drove since Grace preferred not to after having had that single shot of whiskey. Pierce followed. If he knew any more than they did, he had said nothing.
As if the media had sensed trouble in the wind, the crowd outside the field office had multiplied to what it had been prior to Trenton’s rescue.
The rush inside and up the stairs left no opportunity for chitchat. Suited Ryan fine. He had nothing to say to Pierce. Neither did Grace it seemed.
“Let’s have an update,” Pierce ordered as soon as they entered the conference room that had served as a command center for the past few days.
“Talley and Aldridge are working with Birmingham PD on the scene at Worth’s home,” Pratt related.
“Apparently he drove straight home after leaving the office. His wife and son were in bed asleep and didn’t realize he had even arrived or that he hadn’t come inside until Davis called.
According to the security service, Worth didn’t enter the home.
We can confirm this since the alarm was activated at 10:15 p.m. when his wife went to bed.
That status remained so until Mrs. Worth got up to check on his whereabouts at 12:50 a.m.”
Ryan propped a hip on the edge of the conference table and studied the timeline board where new notations were in the works as Pratt spoke. Davis was scribbling away with a dry-erase marker.
An agent Ryan hadn’t met—male, young, skinny—hurried into the room. “Agent Pierce,” the new guy said, evidently knowing where the most power lay, “there’s a new communication from Devoted Fan.”
Ryan shoved off the table and headed for the computer. Grace waited next to his chair. Pierce, Pratt, and Davis moved up behind him as he clicked the necessary tabs.
McBride,
As I am sure you know by now, Randall Worth is a part of your latest challenge. He has a lesson to learn, atonement to find, as did the others. Once more, survival depends upon you.
It is such a shame that when someone or something grows older, many times it is set aside for a newer model.
Flesh and blood, brick and mortar, nothing is respected for its true value.
Unfortunately for Agent Worth, the tearing down of the old could destroy him as well. Amid a cloud of controversy, the old sometimes falls, ending many, many stories.
Perhaps the fall is inevitable. In the end, it is only the truth that really matters, not the story at all. Not even a century of stories.