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Once Gone
Chapter 34
When the farmhouse came into view, Riley felt jarred in a way that she hadn’t expected. It was as if she’d driven into an oil painting of an ideal rural America. The white wood-frame house was nestled cozily in a small valley. The house was old, but obviously kept in decent condition.
A few outbuildings were scattered on the nearby grounds. They were not in as good repair as the house. Neither was a large barn that looked ready to collapse. But those structures looked all the more charming because of their dilapidation.
Riley parked a short distance from the house. She checked the gun in her holster and got out of the car. She breathed in the clear, clean country air.
It shouldn’t be this lovely here, Riley thought. And yet she knew that it made perfect sense. Ever since she’d talked to her father, she’d dimly realized that the killer’s lair might well be a place of beauty.
Still, there was a kind of danger here that she hadn’t prepared herself for. It was the danger of being lulled by the sheer charm of her surroundings, of letting down her guard. She had to remind herself that a hideous evil coexisted with this beauty. She knew she was about to find herself face to face with the true horror of the place. But she had no idea just where she’d find it.
She turned and looked all around. She didn’t see any truck on the grounds. Either Dirk was out driving somewhere, or the truck was inside one of the outbuildings or the barn. The man himself could be anywhere, of course – in one of the outbuildings, possibly. But she decided to check the house first.
A noise startled her, and her peripheral vision caught a flurry of rapid movement. But it was only a handful of loose chickens. Several hens were pecking the ground nearby. Nothing else moved except tall blades of grass and leaves on the trees as a gentle breeze blew through them. She felt utterly alone.
Riley approached the farmhouse. When she arrived at the steps, she drew her gun, then walked up on the porch. She knocked on the front door. There was no response. She knocked again.
“I’ve got a delivery for Dirk Monroe,” she called out. “I need a signature to leave it.”
Still no response.
Riley stepped off the porch and began to circle the house. The windows were too high to see into, and she found that the back door was also locked.
She returned to the front door and knocked again. There was still only silence. The door lock was a simple, old-fashioned type for a skeleton key. She carried a little lock-picking set in her handbag for just such situations. She knew that the hook of a small flat tension wrench would do the trick.
She slipped her gun back into its holster and found the wrench. She inserted it into the lock, then groped and twisted it until the lock rotated. When she turned the doorknob the door swung open. Drawing her gun again, she walked inside.
The interior had much the same picturesque quality as the landscape outside. It was a perfect little country home, remarkably neat and clean. There were two big soft chairs in the living room with white crocheted pieces on the arms and back.
The room made her feel as though friendly family members might step out at any second to welcome her, to invite her to make herself at home. But as Riley studied her surroundings, that feeling waned. This house actually did not look as if it were lived in at all. Everything was just too neat.
She remembered her father’s words.
He wants to start all over again. He wants to go all the way back to the beginning.
That’s exactly what Dirk was trying to do right here. But he was failing, because his life had somehow been hopelessly flawed from the start. Surely he knew that and was tormented by it.
Instead of finding his way back into a happier childhood, he’d trapped himself in an unreal world – a display that might be in some historical museum. A framed cross-stitch embroidery even hung on the living room wall. Riley stepped closer to look at it.
The little stitched x’s made up the image of a woman in a long gown and holding a parasol. Beneath her were embroidered words…
A Southern Belle is always
gracious
courteous
genteel…
The list went on, but Riley didn’t bother to read the rest. She got the message that mattered to her. The stitchery was nothing more wishful thinking. Obviously, this farm had never been a plantation. No so-called Southern belle had ever lived here, sipping sweet tea and ordering servants about.
Still, the fantasy must be dear to someone who lived here – or had lived here in the past. Maybe that someone had once bought a doll – a doll that represented a Southern belle in a storybook.
Listening for any sound, Riley moved quietly into the hallway. On one side, an arched doorway opened into a dining room. Her sense of being in a past time grew even stronger. Sunlight streamed in through lace curtains hanging over the windows. A table and chairs were positioned perfectly, as if awaiting a family dinner. But like everything else, the dining room looked as though it hadn’t been used for a long time.
A large old-fashioned kitchen was on the other side of the hallway. There, too, everything was in its proper place, and there was no sign of recent use.
Ahead of her, at the end of the hall, was a closed door. As Riley moved in that direction, a cluster of framed photographs on the wall drew her attention. She examined them as she edged by. They appeared to be ordinary family photos, some black and white, some in color. They reached far back in time – perhaps as long as a century.
They were just the sort of pictures one might find in any home – parents, elderly grandparents, children, and the dining room table laden with feasts of celebration. Many of the images were faded.
A picture that didn’t look more than a couple of decades old appeared to be a boy’s school picture – a cleaned-up student with a new haircut and a stiff, unfelt smile. The picture to the right of it was a woman hugging a girl in a frilly dress.
Then, with a slight shock, Riley noticed that the girl and the boy had exactly the same face. They were actually the same child. The girl with the woman wasn’t a girl at all, but the schoolboy wearing a dress and a wig. Riley shuddered. The expression on the costumed boy’s face told her that this was not a case of a harmless dress-up or comfortable cross-dressing. In this photograph, the child’s smile was anguished, wretched – even angry and hateful.
The final snapshot showed the boy at about age ten. He was holding a doll. The woman stood behind the boy, smiling a smile that glowed with entirely misplaced, uncomprehending joy. Riley leaned closer to view the doll and gasped.
There it was – a doll that matched the picture on the book in the store. It was exactly the same, with long blond hair, bright blue eyes, roses, and pink ribbons. Years ago, the woman had given the boy this doll. She must have forced it upon him, expecting him to cherish and love it.
The tortured expression on the boy’s face told the real story. He couldn’t fake a smile this time. His face was knotted with disgust and self-loathing. This picture captured the moment when something broke apart in him, never to be made whole again. Right then and there, the image of the doll fastened itself onto his unhappy young imagination. He couldn’t shake it off, not ever. It was an image that he was recreating with dead women.
Riley turned away from the pictures. She moved toward the closed door at the end of the hall. She swallowed hard.
There it is, she thought.
She was sure of it. That door was the barrier between the dead, artificial, unreal beauty of this country home and the hideously ugly reality that crept behind it. That room was where the false mask of blissful normalcy fell away once and for all.
Holding her gun in her right hand, she opened the door with her left hand. The room was dark, but even in the dim light from the hall, she could see that it was completely unlike the rest of the house. The floor was littered with debris.
She found a light switch to the side of the door and flicked in on. A single overhead bulb revealed a nightmare spread out before her. The first thing that registered on her mind was a metal pipe standing in the middle of the space, bolted to the floor and to the ceilings. Bloodstains on the floor marked what happened there. The unheeded screams of women echoed through her mind, nearly overwhelming her.
No one was inside the room. Riley steadied herself and stepped forward. The windows were boarded up, and no sunlight entered. The walls were pink, with storybook images painted on them. But they were defaced by ugly smears.
Pieces of a child’s furniture – frilly chairs and stools really meant for a little girl – were overturned and broken. Scraps of dolls had been thrown everywhere – amputated limbs and heads and snatches of hair. Small doll wigs were nailed to the walls.
Heart pounding with fear, with rage, remembering her own captivity too well, Riley stepped deeper into the room, mesmerized by the scene, by the fury, by the agony that she sensed here.
There came a sudden rustle behind her, and suddenly, the lights went out.
Riley, panic-stricken, spun around to fire her gun but missed her chance. Something heavy and hard struck her arm an agonizing blow. Her weapon went skittering into the darkness.
Riley tried to dodge the next blow, but a rigid, weighty, object glanced across her head, cracking noisily against her skull. She fell and scrambled toward a dark corner of the room.
The blow kept echoing between her ears. Concussive sparkles flickered in the darkness of her mind. She’d been hurt and she knew it. She struggled to hold onto consciousness, but it felt like sand slipping between her fingers.
There it was again – that hissing white flame cutting through the darkness. Little by little, the shimmering light revealed who was carrying it.
This time it was Riley’s mother. She was standing right in front of Riley, the fatal bullet wound bleeding in the middle of her chest, her face pale and dead-looking. But when her mother spoke, it was with Riley’s father’s voice.
“Girl, you’re doing this all wrong.”
Riley was seized by nauseating dizziness. Everything kept spinning. Her world made no sense at all. What was her mother doing, holding this awful instrument of torture? Why was she speaking with her father’s voice?
Riley cried out, “Why aren’t you Peterson?”
Suddenly, the flame was extinguished, leaving only lingering traces of phantom light.
Again, she heard her father’s voice growling in pitch-blackness.
“That’s your trouble. You want to take on all the evil in the world – all at the same time. You’ve got to make your choice. One monster at a time.”
Her head still swimming, Riley tried to grasp that message.
“One monster at a time,” she murmured.
Her consciousness ebbed and flowed, taunting her with bursts of lucidity. She saw that the door was slightly ajar and a man was silhouetted there against the dim hallway light. She couldn’t make out his face.
He held something in his hand – a crowbar, she now realized. He seemed to be in his stocking feet. He must have been somewhere in the house all along, waiting for the right moment to come and take her by surprise.
Her arm and her head hurt horribly. She felt a sticky, liquid warmth on the side of her skull. She was bleeding, and bleeding badly. She struggled against unconsciousness.
She heard the man laugh, and the laughter wasn’t a familiar voice. Her thoughts became hopelessly confused. It wasn’t Peterson’s voice, so cruel and mocking in that darkness. And where was his torch? Why was everything so different?
She groped about in her mind for the truth of her situation.
It’s not Peterson, she told herself. It’s Dirk Monroe.
She whispered aloud to herself, “One monster at time.”
This monster was bent on killing her.
She clawed around on the floor. Where was her gun?
The man moved toward her, swinging the crowbar with one hand, slicing the air with it. Riley got halfway to her feet before he landed a blow across her shoulder and knocked her down again. She braced herself for another blow, but then heard the sound of the crowbar falling to the floor.
Something was looped around her left foot, pulling her. He’d gotten a rope around that foot and was dragging her slowly across the floor, through the litter and toward the pipe in the middle of the room. It was the place where four women had already suffered and died.
Riley tried to probe his thoughts. He hadn’t scouted her or chosen her. He’d never seen her buying one of those dolls he so deeply loathed. Even so, he intended to make the most of her arrival. He was going to make her his next victim. He was determined to make her suffer. She was going to die in pain.
Even so, Riley caught a glimmer of impending justice. Bill and a team would get here soon. What would Dirk do when the FBI stormed the house? He’d kill her, of course, and instantly. He’d never allow her to be rescued. But he was doomed all the same.
But why did Riley have to be his last victim? She saw faces of people she loved – April, Bill – even her father. Now Riley knew she shared with him a stubborn bond of dark wisdom, a comprehension of limitless evil in the world. She thought of the work she lived each day to do, and slowly, a new determination rose up in her. She wouldn’t let him claim her easily. She’d die on her own terms, not his.
She groped around the floor with her hand. She found something solid – not part of a doll, but something hard and sharp. She gripped the handle of the knife. It was surely the very knife he’d used on four women.
Time slowed down to a mind-numbing crawl. She realized that Dirk had just passed the rope around the central pipe. Now he was pulling her foot up against it.
He was turned away from her, too sure that she was defeated already. His mind was occupied with tying her to the post – and on what he would do to her then.
His unwariness gave Riley a moment, and one moment only, before he turned back her way. Still prone on the floor, she wrenched her body into a seated position. He noticed this and started to turn, but she moved quicker. She wrestled her free right foot beneath her, then rose up to face him.
She plunged the knife into his stomach, then drew it out and stabbed him again and again. She heard him shriek and moan. She kept stabbing madly until she blacked out.
Chapter 35
Riley opened her eyes. Her whole body was in pain, especially her shoulder and her head. Bill’s face filled her vision. Was she dreaming?
“Bill?” she asked.
He smiled, looking relieved. He was holding something soft against her head, staunching the flow of blood.
“Welcome back,” he said.
Riley realized that she was still in the room, with the post nearby. She was seized by a moment of panic.
“Where’s Dirk?” she asked.
“Dead,” Bill said. “You gave him just what he deserved.”
Riley still wondered if she was dreaming.
“I’ve got to see,” she gasped. She managed to turn her head. She saw Dirk stretched out across the floor face down in a pool of his own blood. Eyes opened. Unblinking.
Bill turned her head back toward him.
“Don’t try to move,” he said. “You’re hurt pretty bad. You’re going to be okay. But you’ve lost a lot of blood.”
A spasm of nauseated dizziness told her that Bill was right. She managed to whisper five words before she lost consciousness again.
“One monster at a time.”
Chapter 36
Special Agent Brent Meredith shut the thick manila envelope stuffed with photographs and written reports with a note of satisfied finality. Riley felt the same satisfaction, and she was sure that Bill and Flores did too. They were all seated at the table in the Behavioral Analysis Unit conference room. If only Riley weren’t bandaged up and hurting all over, the moment would have felt perfect.
“So Dirk’s mother wanted a daughter instead of a son,” Meredith said. “She tried to turn him into a Southern belle. That was probably just the tip of the iceberg. God knows what else he went through as a kid.”
Bill leaned back in his chair.
“Let’s not give him too much sympathy,” he said. “Not everybody with a lousy childhood turns into a murderous sadist. He made his own choices.”
Meredith and Flores nodded in agreement.
“But does anybody know whatever happened to Dirk’s mother?” Riley asked.
“Records show that she died five years ago,” Flores said. “His father disappeared long before that, when Dirk was still a baby.”
A sober silence settled over the group. Riley understood exactly what it meant. She was in the presence of three people whose lives were devoted to destroying evil. Even in their satisfaction, the specter of more evil, and much more work to do, hung over all of them. It would never be over. Not for them.
The door opened, and Carl Walder walked in. He was all smiles.
“Great work, everybody,” he said. He slid Riley’s gun and badge across the table toward her. “These belong to you.”
Riley smiled a wry smile. Walder was not going to apologize, much less acknowledge any fault of his own. But that was just as well. Riley didn’t know just how she’d respond if he actually said he was sorry. Probably not gracefully.
“By the way, Riley,” Walder said. “The Senator called me this morning, and he sends you his best wishes for your recovery, and his thanks. He seems to think the world of you.”
Riley now had to stifle her amusement. That call, she was sure, was exactly why Walder was giving her back her gun and her badge. She remembered one of the last things Newbrough had said to her.
“You’re nobody’s lapdog.”
The same thing could never be said of Carl Walder.
“Stop by my office soon,” Walder said. “Let’s talk promotion. An administrative position, maybe. You deserve it.”
Without another word, Walder left the office. Riley heard her companions breathe a shared sigh of relief that he was gone so quickly.
“You should think about it, Riley,” Meredith said.
Riley chuckled.
“Can you really see me in an administrative job?”
Meredith shrugged.
“You’ve more than paid your dues. You’ve done more tough field work than most agents do in a lifetime. Maybe you should become an instructor. You’d be great at training agents, with your experience and insight. What do you think?”
Riley thought it over. What would she really have to teach young agents? Her instincts were all she had, and as far as she knew, instincts couldn’t be taught. There was no way to train people to follow their gut. They either had it or they didn’t.
Besides, did she really wish her own gut instincts on anybody? She lived too much in terror of her own thoughts, haunted by her troubling capacity to grasp an evil mind. It was a hard thing to live with.
“Thanks,” Riley said, “but I like it just where I am.”
Meredith nodded, and rose from his chair. “Well, let’s call it a day. Get some rest, folks.”
The meeting broke up, and Riley and Bill found themselves walking down the hall together silently. They left the building and sat down together on a bench outside. Whole minutes passed. Neither of them seemed to know what to say. There was too much to say.
“Bill,” she asked tentatively, “do you think we can be partners again?”
After a pause, Bill said, “What do you think?”
They turned and looked into each other’s eyes. Riley could see lingering pain in Bill’s face. The wound she’d inflicted with her drunken phone call still hadn’t healed. It was going to take a long time.
But she now knew something else – something that had long been true, but that she’d never let herself admit before. Her bond to Bill was intense and powerful, and he almost certainly felt the same. It was no longer a secret that they could keep from themselves. There was no way for them to go back to their former ways.
Their partnership was over. They both knew it. Neither one of them had to say it aloud.
“Go home, Bill,” Riley said gently. “Try to put things back together with your wife. You’ve got your kids to think of.”
“I will,” Bill said. “But I hope I don’t lose you – your friendship, I mean.”
Riley patted his hand and smiled.
“There’s no chance of that,” she said.
They both got up from the bench and walked away to their cars.
* * *
“What’s on your mind, Mom?” April asked.
Riley and April had been sitting in the living room long into the night watching television. Earlier that evening, Riley had told April all that had happened – or at least all that she felt she could tell her.
Riley hesitated before answering April’s question. But she knew that she had to say it aloud. Besides, April knew about it already. It wasn’t a secret. It was just something Riley couldn’t shake off her mind.
“I killed a man today,” Riley said.
April looked at her with love and concern.
“I know,” she said. “What does that feel like?”
“It’s hard to put into words,” Riley said. “It’s terrible. It’s something no one has a right to do – not ever, really. But sometimes it’s the only thing.”
Riley paused. “I feel something else,” she said. “I’m not sure I should say it.”
April laughed quietly. “I thought we weren’t going to do the silent thing anymore, Mom.”
Riley steadied herself and said, “I feel alive. God help me, it makes me feel alive. And any day now, I know that some woman will walk into Madeline’s store and buy a doll and never be in any danger. I’m just… well, I’m just happy for her. I’m glad that I could give her that, even if she’ll never know it.”
Riley squeezed April’s hand.
“It’s late, and you’ve got school tomorrow,” she said.
April kissed her mother on the cheek.
“Goodnight, Mom,” she said, then went to her bedroom.
Riley felt a new wave of pain and exhaustion. She realized that she’d better get to bed or she’d fall asleep right there on the couch.
She picked herself up and walked toward her bedroom. She was already in her nightgown, and she didn’t bother to stop at the bathroom to brush her teeth. She just wanted to go straight to bed.
When she entered her bedroom and turned on the light, something caught her eye immediately. Her heart skipped a beat.
There, in her bed, was something awry.
It was a handful of small pebbles.
