The Soul Catcher Read online

  She reached into her pocket and pulled out the razor blade she had confiscated from Reverend Everett’s hotel bathroom, a real razor with a real metal blade. Her fingers shook as she tried to pop the blade out of the razor. It took several attempts. Why couldn’t she keep her fingers from shaking? This was ridiculous. It wasn’t like it was her first time.

  Finally!

  She laid the blade carefully, almost reverently, on one of the paper towels. The stupid water had shut off again. Another punch. The sink would never fill at this rate. Maybe she didn’t need it to. Maybe she didn’t care whether it hurt or not. Maybe she just didn’t care anymore about anything.

  She glanced around the bathroom and stopped when she saw her reflection in the mirror, meeting her own eyes, almost afraid to look too closely. She didn’t want to see the betrayal, the accusations, the guilt or even the failure. Because this time she had tried to make things work. She really had. She had stopped drinking. She thought she had found some sense of direction, some sense of self-respect. But she was wrong. She had even tried telling Maggie the truth, the painful truth that made her own daughter only hate her more. There was nothing left.

  She picked up the razor between her thumb and index finger just as the bathroom door opened.

  The young woman stopped when she saw Kathleen, letting the door slam shut behind her. She wore a baseball cap over short blond hair and a leather bomber jacket with blue jeans and old scuffed boots. She stood exactly where she stopped, staring at Kathleen and recognizing the object in her hand. But the woman didn’t look surprised or alarmed. Instead, she smiled and said, “You’re Kathleen O’Dell, aren’t you?”

  Kathleen’s heart began pounding, but she didn’t move. She tried to place the young woman. She wasn’t a member of the church.

  “I’m sorry,” the woman said, stepping forward, then stopping abruptly when Kathleen shifted. “We’ve never met before.” She kept her voice friendly and calm despite her eyes which kept darting to the razor blade in Kathleen’s hand. “I’m Julia Racine. I know your daughter, Maggie. I can see the resemblance.” She smiled again. “She has your eyes.”

  Kathleen felt the panic twisting in her stomach. Damn it! Why couldn’t they all just go away and leave her. She gripped the blade tighter, felt it against her wrist, the sharp edge promising such warm silence, promising to shut off the throbbing in her head and plug up the hollow place deep inside her.

  “Is Maggie here?” she asked, glancing at the door, almost expecting her daughter to come barging in to rescue her once again. Always the savior, pulling her up out of the darkness, even when Kathleen wanted, needed, longed for the darkness.

  “No. Maggie’s not here. She’s back in the District.” The woman, this Julia, looked unsure of herself now. Like maybe she shouldn’t have told a truth when a lie would have sufficed. “You know I never got a chance to know my mother,” she said, changing the subject quickly, but with such a smooth, steady voice that Kathleen didn’t mind. She wasn’t stupid. She knew what the woman was doing. But she was better at it than most. Almost as if she had some experience with talking people down off ledges.

  Is that what she was doing? Trying to talk her off this ledge? It only worked if the person wanted to be talked down. Kathleen glanced at her wrist and could see blood dripping where she had started to cut. She hadn’t realized she had done that. She certainly hadn’t felt it. It surprised her that it didn’t hurt. Was that a good sign? That it didn’t hurt? When she looked back up she saw the woman had noticed, too, and before Julia Racine could snap back to her professional calm, Kathleen caught a glimpse of something else in the woman’s eyes. Something…maybe doubt, maybe fear. So she wasn’t as cool and calm as she pretended.

  “My mom,” the woman continued, “died when I was a little girl. I remember things, you know, pieces of things, really. Like the scent of lavender. I guess it was her favorite perfume. Oh, and her humming. Sometimes I can hear her humming to me. But I never recognize the tune. It’s soothing, though. Kinda like a lullaby.”

  She was rambling but still calm. It was distracting and Kathleen knew that was part of the game. It was a game, after all, wasn’t it?

  “You know, Maggie’s really concerned about you, Kathleen.”

  She stared at her, but the blue eyes were strong, unflinching, no longer playing or maybe just very good at lying.

  “She’s so angry with me,” Kathleen found herself saying without really meaning to.

  “Just because we get angry with people we love, it doesn’t mean we want them gone forever.”

  “She doesn’t love me.” She said this with almost a laugh, as if letting this Racine woman know that she could see through her lies.

  “You are her mother. How could she not love you?”

  “I’ve made it very easy. Believe me.”

  “Okay, so she’s angry with you.”

  “It’s more than that.”

  “Okay, sometimes she doesn’t even like you very much. Right?”

  Now Kathleen did laugh and nodded.

  Julia Racine remained serious and said, “It doesn’t mean she wants you gone forever.”

  When it looked like that sentimental stuff wouldn’t work, the young woman smiled and added, “Look, Mrs. O’Dell, I’m already in a shitload of trouble with your daughter. How ’bout giving me a break?”

  CHAPTER 75

  Tully almost stumbled over a jacket.

  Jesus! He had already started.

  Darkness had just begun to take over, and up here in the trees, it was hard to see. He waited. He tried to slow down his pulse. He needed to give his eyes a chance to adjust. The moon cast some light, but it also added an eerie blue tint to shadows.

  Tully held his breath. He got down on his knees. He couldn’t hear with all the noise from below. Did that mean anyone up here couldn’t hear him, either? He couldn’t take any chances. He heard the other agents checking in, whispering their positions into his ear, but he couldn’t answer them. He had to ignore them. But they knew that, and they were still getting into position. It was so quiet. What if he was already too late?

  He pulled out his gun and started crawling on hands and knees. That’s when he saw them, only twenty feet away. He saw them on the ground, scuffling. He was on top. She was fighting, struggling.

  But it looked like they were alone. Tully carefully looked around, examining the surroundings. There was no one else. No other young men, waiting or guarding the area. No Reverend Everett. Or did that come later? Did the good reverend wait until the struggle was over? And could Tully wait? Jesus! He was ripping her clothes. There was a slap, a whimper, more wrestling. Did he dare wait for Everett to show himself? Could he risk it?

  He thought he heard a belt buckle, maybe a zipper. Another whimper. He thought of Emma. This girl wasn’t much older. His eyes searched the trees. Movement on the right. One of the agents moving in. But no Everett.

  Damn it!

  He couldn’t see any glowing clothesline. No handcuffs. Maybe all that stuff was Everett’s job. If he interrupted now?

  This time she cried out and Brandon slapped her again.

  “Shut the fuck up and hold still,” he hissed at her.

  Without hesitation, Tully was on his feet. In just a few rushed steps he had the barrel of his Glock pressed at the base of Brandon’s head even before the boy had a chance to flinch.

  “No, you shut the fuck up, you bastard,” Tully yelled into his ear, so he wouldn’t miss a word. “Game’s over.”

  CHAPTER 76

  Washington, D.C.

  Maggie drove down several unfamiliar streets but found the old building easily. It was an unsavory neighborhood where she’d probably need to worry about her little red Toyota. Three teenage boys watched her the entire time she parked her car and walked to the front door. It made her want to flash her holstered Smith & Wesson nestled under her jacket. Instead, she did the next best thing—she ignored them.

  She wasn’t sure why she was he
re, except that she was tired of waiting. She needed to do something, anything. She was just so tired of those old memories taunting her, making her feel guilty, that she was somehow responsible—once again—for her mother being in harm’s way. She knew she wasn’t responsible. Of course she knew that, but what she knew and what she felt were two entirely separate things.

  The inside of the old building surprised Maggie. It was clean, better than clean, with the scent of Murphy’s Oil. As she climbed the wooden staircase, she noticed the walls had been freshly painted and the second-floor landing’s carpet, though threadbare, showed not a spot of dirt. On the third level, however, she could smell something like a disinfectant, and the odor grew as she progressed down the hall. It seemed to be coming from number five, Ben Garrison’s apartment.

  She knocked and waited, though she didn’t expect him to be here. He’d still be in Cleveland, only hopefully this time he hadn’t gotten to the crime scene before everyone else. Tully and Racine had probably already arrested Everett and his accomplice, Brandon. They had DNA to prove Everett’s guilt, eyewitnesses and photos to put Brandon with two of the victims minutes before their deaths. Case closed. So what was still nagging her? Maybe she simply hated that Garrison—that the “invisible cameraman”—had gotten away with screwing up crime scenes. Maybe she was curious about his apparent obsession with death, his voyeurism. Perhaps she simply needed to keep her mind preoccupied.

  Maggie glanced down the hallway and knocked again. This time she heard scuffles on the staircase. A little gray-haired lady appeared on the landing, staring up at her through thick glasses.

  “I think he’s out of town,” she told Maggie. But before Maggie could respond, she asked, “Are you from the health department? I don’t have anything to do with those roaches. I want you to know, it was his doing.”

  Maggie’s suit must have looked official. She didn’t say a word, and yet the woman was scooting in front of her to unlock Garrison’s door.

  “I try to keep the place clean, but some of these tenants…Well, you just can’t trust people these days.” She opened the door and waved a hand at Maggie as she headed back to the staircase.

  “Just close up when you’re finished.”

  Maggie hesitated. What would it hurt to take a look?

  The first thing to catch her eyes were the African death masks, three of them, on the wall over the cracked vinyl sofa. They had been carved from wood with paint-smeared tribal symbols across the forehead and cheeks and under the eyeholes. On the opposite wall were several black-and-white photographs, labeled portraits: Zulu, Three-Hill Tribe, Aborigine, Basuto, Andamanese. Garrison seemed obsessed with his subjects’ eyes, sometimes cropping the forehead and chin in order to draw more focus to the eyes. A bottom photo, labeled: Tepehuane, showed what looked like the back of his subject’s head, perhaps a defiant stance, a denial. One meaningful enough for Garrison to keep.

  Maggie shook her head. She didn’t have time to psychoanalyze Garrison, nor was she certain she would if she had the time. There was something odd about a man who could be so fascinated by ancient cultures and their people and yet stand back and watch young women be attacked in a public park. Or did Garrison consider everyone to be simply a photographic subject and nothing more?

  At the police station, when she questioned him about the incident in Boston Common, he had said something strange about her having no idea what it took to stop or to make news happen. Yet, wasn’t that exactly what he had been doing with Everett? His photos had broken the story about the church’s members and their possible connection to the murder of the senator’s daughter and the murder in Boston. But it went further than that. It was his photographs that caused Everett to initially even become a suspect. In a sense Garrison’s photos had led them directly to Everett. He had made news happen.

  Something skittered across the floor behind her. Maggie spun around. Three huge cockroaches escaped into a crack half their size under the kitchen counter.

  Damn it!

  She tried to settle her nerves. Cockroaches. Why did it not surprise her that Garrison would be surrounded by them?

  But the landlady was correct in that Garrison’s apartment did not match the spotless hall and the staircase, nor the rest of the aging but clean building. Discarded clothes trailed to the bedroom and bathroom. Crusty dishes and empty beer bottles littered the kitchen counter. Stacks of magazines and newspapers created leaning roach hotels in almost every corner. No, she shouldn’t be surprised to see Garrison’s roommates were cockroaches.

  She wandered through the rooms, finding nothing interesting in his clutter. Although she wasn’t sure what she expected to find. Suddenly, she stepped on a book that lay in the middle of the floor, as if someone had dropped it. The leather binding was clean and smooth. It was definitely not something he usually kept on the floor. On closer inspection she realized it was a journal, the pages filled with a lovely, slanted penmanship that sometimes took on a frantic urgency, easily visible by the dramatic changes in jagged lines and curves.

  She picked it up and it opened to a page bookmarked with what looked to be an old unused airline ticket, the corners worn and creased. Destination was Uganda, Africa, though it certainly was long expired. The entry it marked was also dog-eared, the only page with its gold-trim creased.

  “Dear son,” the entry began, “this is something I could never tell you. If you’re reading it now, it’s only after my death, and I apologize that this is the manner in which I have resorted to tell you. A coward’s manner—it would certainly embarrass any Zulu tribe member. Please forgive me for that. But how could I possibly look into your sad and already angry eyes and tell you that your father had brutally raped me? Yes, that’s right. Raped me. I was only nineteen. It was my first year in college. I had a brilliant career I was preparing for.”

  Maggie stopped and flipped to the beginning of the journal, looking for a name, a reference to the owner, and finding none. But she didn’t need a name. She already knew whose journal it was. It certainly couldn’t be a coincidence. But how had Garrison come across the book? Where in the world had he found it? Among Everett’s personal belongings, perhaps? Would Everett have kept the journal of a woman he had raped more than twenty-five years ago? And how would he have gotten it?

  She slipped the book into her jacket pocket. If Garrison had stolen it, he couldn’t mind her borrowing it. She was ready to leave when she noticed a small room off the kitchen. It wouldn’t have attracted her attention except that a faint red light glowed from inside. Of course, Garrison would have his own darkroom.

  No. She was wrong, she realized as she opened the door. It wasn’t just a darkroom. It was a gold mine.

  Prints were strung on a clothesline that stretched the length of the small room. Chemicals had been left in the plastic trays, lining the inside of an oversize sink. Bottles and canisters and developing tanks filled the shelves. And there were prints everywhere, overlapping one another and covering every bit of space on the walls and counter.

  There were more prints of tribes doing their ceremonial dances. Prints of Africans with hideous scars. Prints of strange mutant frogs with legs coming out of their heads.

  And then she saw them—prints of dead women.

  There must have been about a dozen prints. Women naked and braced against trees, eyes wide open with duct tape across their mouths and their wrists handcuffed. Maggie recognized Ginny Brier, the transient they had found under the viaduct, the floater pulled from the lake outside of Raleigh and Maria Leonetti. But there were others. At least a half dozen others. All in the same pose. All with their eyes wide open, looking directly at the camera.

  Jesus! How long had this been going on? And how long had Garrison been following Everett and his boys?

  Her hand reached for the light switch without looking to find it. She couldn’t take her eyes away from the dead women’s eyes. Surely there was a light other than the red safelight. She found the set of switches and flipped one, causing
the entire room to go black. But before she could flip the other one on, she stood paralyzed, staring in disbelief. The clothesline that stretched across the room glowed in the dark.

  She leaned against the counter. Her knees went weak. Her stomach plunged. The clothesline glowed in the dark. Of course, what a perfect invention for a darkroom. What a perfect weapon for a killer.

  How could she have been so stupid! Garrison didn’t just photograph the dead women. It wasn’t dead eyes that interested him. The eyes are the windows to the soul. Why hadn’t she thought of it before? Was Garrison trying to photograph the fleeting soul?

  She flipped on the red light again and took a closer look at the photos, the track marks on the victims’ necks. Over and over again, he must have brought them back to consciousness, posing them, waiting, patiently waiting for that one moment while he watched with his camera ready on a tripod nearby, waiting. Waiting over and over again to catch a glimpse, to photograph that moment when the soul left.

  Garrison. It was Garrison and his obsession with that last moment of death.

  Maggie heard the creak of floorboards in the living room. She grabbed for her gun. No cockroach was that fucking big. Was it the landlady? Maybe the real health inspector had arrived. It couldn’t be Garrison. He was in Cleveland.

  She inched her way to the darkroom’s door, edging along the counter. Another creak, this time louder, closer, just on the other side of the door. She took aim, holding the gun with both hands and ignoring the slight tremor in her knees. Then in one quick motion she kicked open the darkroom door and rushed out, pointing her gun and yelling “Freeze!”

  It was Garrison.

  He stood in the middle of his apartment over the frightened landlady, holding a length of clothesline around her neck, yanking on it like a leash. The old lady was on her small bony knees, gasping for air, her glasses gone, her eyes glazed over as her skeletal arms flayed and struggled against him. He seemed unfazed by it all as he looked up at Maggie. It was as if he didn’t even notice Maggie’s gun pointed at his chest. Instead, he held out his free hand and demanded, “If she doesn’t have it, then you must. Hand over my mother’s journal.”