Before Evil Read online

  She had spent the morning back at the hospital parking lot. The only outdoor cameras focused on the emergency entrance and the lobby. There were none in the parking lot just as she had remembered. She’d driven the streets surrounding the hospital looking for businesses—especially banks with ATMs—that might capture the parked police cruiser from another angle.

  Nothing.

  Next she drove back to the double-wide trailer, but she didn’t pull into the driveway. Instead, she found a dirt path that led into the trees overlooking the Tanner’s property. She left her vehicle at the entrance, just off the main road. She kept to the grass trying not to step anywhere close to the deep tire ruts, still brimming with rainwater. Someone had been here in recent days and driven up this road in the mud.

  She found footprints where he had gotten out of his vehicle. Carefully, she followed where he had trekked into the trees. There was no way of knowing if this was the Collector. There was, however, an excellent view of the double-wide. She stood under the tree where the footprints ended.

  The Collector told Steele that he saw what the deputy had done at the trailer. From up here he might have watched Steele shoot Daniel Tanner in the back, although it was difficult to see the riverbank. Maybe with binoculars. However, he wouldn’t have seen what took place inside the trailer. Even with binoculars, the curtains in the windows would have made it almost impossible to see beyond them.

  Why were you watching?

  Did he know the Tanners? Did he know Deputy Steele?

  After much thought, Maggie believed Deputy Steele had murdered all three of the Tanners. That whole crime scene—in Maggie’s view—was too messy for someone like the Collector. It was too amateurish for someone who could extract spleens, cut off fingers and toes and manage to pull off a murder in a hospital parking lot in the middle of the day. It was too quick and sloppy for a man who was willing to wait patiently to shoot his prey with a crossbow.

  What happened in the double-wide trailer was a result of anger, passion or revenge. There was almost a frantic, blind rage to the way Louis Tanner was strung up and then stabbed.

  She remembered, again, how Deputy Steele seemed overly concerned about whether the girl could have seen anything from her hiding place in the cellar. Never once had he asked if she was going to be okay. Yet he had been quick to volunteer to guard her. He may have done so with the intention of killing her, too.

  As Maggie left the pasture road and drove to Quantico, she remembered thinking Steele was a bit cocky that day when discussing how gruesome the inside of the trailer had been. Especially for a guy who claimed he hadn’t seen anything except a quick look from the doorway. But he appeared genuinely surprised about the takeout container.

  Why was the Collector there? Now she was convinced that he was watching from that pasture road up in the trees. He must have seen Steele shoot Daniel Tanner in the back. And after it was all over? Did he come down from his hiding place to get a better look?

  Was he shocked to see what Steele had done?

  No, Maggie thought it was more likely that he was impressed. So much so, he wanted to add to the crime scene. Not only add to it, but telegraph who the murderer was by inserting the speeding ticket with Steele’s signature.

  Wait a minute.

  If he wanted to leave a clue for law enforcement about who the murderer was, that would mean the Collector knew Deputy Steele by name. Otherwise how would he know that the signature on the ticket matched the man he saw shooting Daniel Tanner?

  That threw off her theory of a random case of voyeurism.

  Was it possible the Collector had also gotten a traffic ticket from the deputy? She’d need to check and see if Sheriff Gellar could provide copies, but it seemed like a long shot. They didn’t have a name or a vehicle. How would they possibly identify the Collector even if he had been issued a ticket by Steele?

  One step forward, two steps back.

  And there was still another hole in her theory—what kind of killer just happens to travel around with a spleen?

  According to Ganza the woman’s toe had been on ice. Maggie could list half a dozen killers who kept pieces of their victims in their refrigerator or freezer, but she couldn’t think of a single one who traveled with body parts on ice.

  She made a mental note to herself: he travels with a small cooler. Perhaps he has a job where he needs to take his own lunch or needs to put other things on ice.

  She had already added voyeur to her profile of the Collector. Not only had he watched Steele from his hiding place up in the trees overlooking the Tanners’ property, he had been watching when they were processing the crime scene. He’d told them as much in his note. How else would he have known that Maggie had vomited outside the trailer?

  And despite no concrete evidence, Maggie suspected he had been watching the hospital parking lot. What fun would there be to leave takeout containers filled with shocking contents if he wasn’t close by to watch the reactions? He had admitted this in his note as well.

  She was pulling onto the road to Quantico when her phone rang.

  “This is Maggie O’Dell.”

  “Margaret O’Dell?”

  “Yes.”

  “Your mother is Kathleen O’Dell. Is that correct?”

  Maggie pulled off onto the side of the road.

  “Who is this?”

  “I’m Dr. Philip Lawrence with St. Mary’s Hospital in Richmond. Your mother was brought in last night.”

  “Is she…okay?” She hated how her voice sounded small and so much like that twelve-year-old version of herself.

  “As well as you can expect for a woman who tried to commit suicide.”

  44

  Richmond, Virginia

  During the hour and a half drive Maggie tried to keep her mind focused on the case at hand. Takeout containers and killers were preferable to dredging up images of her childhood. But of course, it didn’t work.

  Maggie and her mother had mourned the loss of Maggie’s father in very different ways. While Maggie scavenged for every memento and tried to surround herself with anything and everything to hold onto his presence, her mother wanted to remove herself from every last remnant of their previous life. Within months of her father’s funeral her mother had packed them up and moved halfway across the country from Green Bay, Wisconsin, to Richmond, Virginia.

  There was no explanation, and Maggie learned quickly that she wasn’t to expect one.

  Her father had been such integral part of her life that for weeks, maybe months after his death, Maggie would wake in the middle of the night gasping for air. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t move. Years later she recognized these fits as panic attacks. But for a twelve-year-old girl, who’d lost her father and who couldn’t rely on her mother, her night terrors kept her awake. She read until she couldn’t keep her eyes open and even then, she slept with the lights on.

  Her mother, on the other hand, appeared determined to bury the memory of her husband. Her first attempts were with alcohol. Maggie couldn’t begin to count the times she’d helped her mother up their apartment steps, and then helped her into bed. She’d make herself soup and a grilled cheese, do her homework and wait anxiously for the light of the next day. Too many times she got herself up and ready for school while her mother slept off her hangover. Then Maggie would come home to an empty house. Around eight or nine o’clock at night, the process would start all over again.

  In hindsight, those days were not so bad. Maggie quickly learned that being alone was safer. The worse was yet to come. Her mother started bringing home an array of men she’d met at her favorite watering hole. Maggie’s first introduction to sexual advances came from the drunken strangers touching her, fondling, groping her in the most intimate and inappropriate ways. One even slammed her small body against the wall of their living room where he trapped her, writhing against her until her mother
finally told him to stop. But that incident still didn’t stop her mother and the endless parade.

  Her mother’s first attempt at suicide took place on a night she had brought home one of her regulars. The cowardly bastard panicked and left Maggie to call 911.

  After all these years, Greg was the only person she had confided in about her childhood. For all his faults, he was kind and gentle when it came to physical intimacy. He knew and he understood how difficult it was for Maggie. He never pushed her.

  That her mother had attempted suicide, yet again, was not a surprise although it had been several years since the last. That she had asked to see Maggie was also not a surprise. Their pattern had long ago been established. Her mother broke herself into little pieces then depended on her daughter to put her back together again.

  A nurse directed Maggie to the fourth floor, but asked her to take a seat in a visitor’s lounge. Dr. Lawrence had requested to talk to her before she could see her mother.

  “Ms. O’Dell.” The doctor startled her after almost an hour wait.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m Dr. Lawrence.”

  The deep voice didn’t look like it belonged to the small, young man standing in the door to the lounge. He looked no older than Maggie. His head was shaved, and he wore a close-cropped beard. He offered what seemed like a large hand for such a small man, but the handshake was soft, gripping only the ends of her fingers. Then he sat on the arm of the chair across from Maggie, and she couldn’t help thinking it was an old trick of a short man—a way to maintain his authority by placing himself higher than her so she had to look up to him.

  “I’m hoping you can give me some information, some insight.”

  “Of course. Although I don’t know how much help I can be. I haven’t seen my mother for a few months.”

  He frowned at her as he took a miniature notebook and pen from his jacket pocket. “I thought Kathleen mentioned that you live in the Richmond area?”

  “About forty minutes away.”

  He wrote this down, and Maggie wondered how this information would aid him in treating her mother.

  “What was it this time?” she asked.

  “Excuse me?”

  “The last time she took an overdose of Valium and washed it down with Johnnie Walker.”

  From his look of surprise Maggie knew her mother had, of course, failed to mention any of this to her new doctor.

  “So this was her second attempt at suicide?”

  He started writing again.

  “Not even close.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “This is her fifth. I missed one of them when I was in college.”

  He was staring at her now. But Maggie could see something in his eyes that wasn’t disbelief so much as indignation.

  “And yet you don’t keep tabs on her.”

  There it was.

  Her mother had a way of placing responsibility on anyone and everyone except herself. Maggie knew this because even as a young girl she’d been the recipient of her mother’s blame.

  “There’s never been anything I could do or say that made a difference or stopped her,” she found herself explaining. Immediately, she wanted to kick herself. None of this was her fault and offering any kind of explanation only gave credence to her mother’s wrongful claims.

  “She’s still your mother,” Dr. Lawrence told her.

  Maggie wanted to tell him exactly what kind of mother Kathleen O’Dell had been. But instead she said, “What information can I give you that might actually help?”

  45

  Devil’s Backbone State Forest

  Susan had no idea how long she lay in the grass on top of the rock ledge. At first she was shaking so badly she thought for sure he could hear her teeth chattering in fear. She bit back the whimpers that came without warning. Her only salvation was the increasing rumble of the approaching thunderstorm.

  But even after she heard the car drive off, she didn’t trust that he was gone. She imagined him waiting for her. She could almost feel him watching. Somehow she had found the courage to move. Perhaps it was the lightning. It had gotten so dark she wasn’t sure if it was afternoon or evening.

  Still, she stayed low. She belly-crawled, using her elbows to pull herself through the grass and continuing when the grass gave way to hard rock, scraping her skin raw.

  She discovered a gouge where the ledge stepped up and joined another. She might not have noticed it if she wasn’t on her belly. It was partially hidden behind a scraggly shrub that dared to grow out from a crack in the rock. There was just enough space for Susan to wedge herself inside. She pushed her back against the cool, hard surface and tucked her knees up to her chest.

  She hadn’t been there long when the rain began and now she missed the warmth of the shed. She was probably being ridiculous. Paranoid. What if she was wrong about what she saw? Did she even know what she had seen? Maybe there was a perfectly good explanation for the man to be carrying an unconscious woman into the forest.

  Whatever the reason, he was gone now. And he had been for some time. What was keeping her from making her way down to the road and following it? It was her one chance at escape. But she had no way of knowing how long that road was. The thought of being stranded in the middle of the night in the dark forest made her start to shiver again.

  All she could think about was sliding back down the rock wall and snuggling up on the dirty, old mattress inside the shed. She was hungry and thirsty. How many hours had she spent up here? Was she really prepared to spend the night? Because there was no way she could maneuver down either side in the dark without possibly falling and breaking her neck.

  The rain came down harder now, forming puddles at the opening of her little cave. There was still enough light. She decided she’d crawl out. She could watch the shed to make sure he wasn’t there. From the top of the rock ledge she would be able to see if he was anywhere near. But she needed to do it while there was still some light.

  Just as she reached to grab onto the shrub and pull herself out, she heard a crunch. It wasn’t the thunder. She snatched her hand back and shoved herself back until the rock was stabbing into her lower back.

  Through the leaves of the scraggly shrub she saw hiking boots.

  He was here. And he was less than six feet away from her.

  46

  It was nightfall by the time Maggie left the hospital. The thunderstorms kept to the north, but clouds still clogged the sky. She longed to see a sunset, stars—anything but clouds. Outside, the air was warm and fragrant, a mixture of gardenias with impending rain, unlike her mother’s hospital room that reeked of disinfectants and selfish desperation.

  “I think it may have been a call for help,” the young Dr. Lawrence had told Maggie before he allowed her to enter her mother’s room. He said it as though his diagnosis was unique and original, as if Maggie had never heard anything similar before in regards to her mother’s many attempts to end her life. By now, Maggie thought she had heard it all.

  But there was something her mother said just as she drifted off into an exhausted sleep. It stuck with Maggie, and she couldn’t shake it from her mind. Her mother had looked up at her, eyelids struggling to stay open and she mumbled, “The darkness is starting to suffocate me.”

  “What do you mean?” Maggie had asked, but her mother’s eyes closed, and soon her breathing took on the slow deep rhythm of sleep.

  Usually her mother denied she made any sort of attempt to end her life. The overdoses were, of course, mistakes. Miscalculations. She couldn’t remember what the doctors told her. And yes, maybe she’d had too much to drink. She was flippant and sometimes belligerent if pressed.

  At some point her mother became the boy who cried wolf, and for Maggie’s own sanity, she started to treat each “cry” after that point, as a false alarm. But this—“the darkness is s
tarting to suffocate me”—this was new. And it was unsettling in a way Maggie couldn’t explain. It made her sit down and take her mother’s hand.

  She knew her mother’s misery had prompted Maggie to study psychology. In the beginning, Maggie had been looking for an explanation. Something, anything to give reason to the woman’s self-destruction. And perhaps give Maggie some relief. Take her off the hook, because she did feel guilty. And she did blame herself. She wasn’t enough reason for her mother to stop. She wasn’t enough reason for her mother to live.

  As a child Maggie didn’t understand why she felt responsible for her mother’s actions. They had reversed roles, and Maggie became the caretaker when her mother’s drunken stupors resulted in entire lost weekends.

  Her father had left them both. Not just her mother. Maggie missed him, too, a physical ache so real and so painful that every night in bed she’d clutch her knees to her chest and rock herself to sleep. What Maggie’s mother never seemed to understand was that she had lost only a husband. Maggie had lost a father. . . and her mother.

  Maggie decided to drive home instead of all the way back to Quantico. Home was forty minutes away. Quantico was an hour and half. Surprisingly she was disappointed when she found the apartment dark and empty. Greg had left her yet another note; their new standard for communicating with one another.

  Les and Sophie had moved in down the hall almost a year ago, and they were perfectly nice. Sophie always politely asked how Maggie’s day was, although Maggie knew neither she nor Les would want to hear the gruesome details. The last time they had gone out for drinks the couple had sided with Greg when he told them about the “excellent opportunity” in his law firm for a claims investigator.

  “Oh, doesn’t that sound lovely? You two could work together.” Sophie had put her hands together in a silent clap. “And you probably wouldn’t need to carry a gun.”

  Now Maggie stood in front of the open refrigerator regretting that she hadn’t picked up dinner when her phone began to ring.