Alex Kava Bundle - Alex Kava [462]
CHAPTER 77
Tully had a bad feeling about this whole mess. Yes, they had caught a rapist, but had they caught a murderer? The kid, Brandon—the tough guy, the asshole who beat up and raped young girls—broke down into a sniveling crybaby when they arrested him for the murders of Ginny Brier and Maria Leonetti. But now, as he and several agents followed Stephen Caldwell into the hotel where Everett was supposedly staying, now Tully wasn’t too sure anymore.
The desk clerk had given them a card key. No questions were asked when the badges came out. Caldwell claimed he didn’t know why Everett hadn’t shown up at the park. There was something in the polite black man’s manner that told Tully he was lying through his teeth. It didn’t help matters that Caldwell himself seemed in a rush to get somewhere when they finally found him outside the pavilion, gathering certain members together. No, Tully had a feeling this Caldwell, this stool-pigeon asshole, had his own agenda. Now he wondered if they were wasting time. If that was also Caldwell’s agenda. Was the hotel a distraction? Was Everett on his way to some airfield?
The elevator opened at the fifteenth floor and Caldwell hesitated. Agents Rizzo and Markham gave him a shove, not even bothering to wait for Tully’s instructions. They were pissed, too. None of them had to say a word to one another to know something was not quite right.
Caldwell hesitated again at the hotel room door, and Tully noticed the man’s hand tremble as he missed the slot for the card key twice. Finally the door unlocked.
Rizzo and Markham had their weapons drawn but at their sides. Tully gave Caldwell another shove for the man to go in ahead of them. He could see the perspiration glistening on his forehead, but Caldwell opened the door and entered.
Caldwell came to an abrupt halt, and Tully could see he was just as surprised as the rest of them. In the center of the room, Reverend Everett sat in a chair, his wrists handcuffed, his mouth taped shut and his dead eyes staring directly at them. Tully didn’t need a medical examiner for this one. He recognized the pinkish tint to the skin and would need only one guess. Cause of death would be cyanide poisoning.
CHAPTER 78
“Just let her go,” Maggie said, not flinching, keeping the gun pointed directly at Garrison’s head.
“You have the fucking book, don’t you?” His eyes held hers while his hand tightened the noose around the old woman’s neck. Maggie heard her sputter, and out of the corner of her eye she could see her bent and misshapen fingers clawing at the clothesline, clawing at her own neck.
“Yes, I have it.” She wouldn’t move, even to give him the book. “Let her go and I’ll give it to you.”
“Oh, right!” He laughed, but it was a nervous, angry laugh. “I let her go, you give me the book and we both just go our separate ways. What do you think! I’m some fucking idiot?”
“Of course not.” A few more minutes and none of it would matter. The old woman was gasping, her fingers making a pathetic attempt. Maggie knew she could take him but it would need to be a head shot and there could be no missing. But then they’d never have all the answers.
“It makes sense now,” she told him instead, hoping to distract him. “Everett’s your father. That’s why you wanted to destroy him.”
“Not my father. Just a sperm donor,” he said. Suddenly he yanked the woman up in front of him, as if only now realizing he needed a shield and taking away Maggie’s clean head shot. “I can’t do anything about biology, but I could make sure that fucker paid for what he did to my mother.”
“And all those women,” Maggie said calmly. “Why did they have to pay? Why did they have to die?”
“Oh, that.” He laughed again and got a better twist on the clothesline. “It was a study, an experiment…an assignment. You might say for the greater good.”
“Like father, like son?”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Everett stole lost souls. You wanted to capture them, too. Only on film.”
“We are nothing alike,” he insisted, a rash