Ultimate Thriller Box Set - Crouch Blake (лучшие книги без регистрации txt) 📗

What do you think? But she didn’t say it.

“What about Mickey?” Entwistle asked.

“Mickey?” What about him?

Entwistle nodded toward the man lying in the doorway. “He had the key to your handcuffs, didn’t he?”

Then she remembered: Mickey bending down to check Summer’s shackles.

Suddenly, a loud whoosh! Galaz lit up like a burning straw man, sheets of flame spreading to the roof, the whole place getting darker, almost black. Boiling black smoke on a river of flame—

Concentrate! He had the key to your handcuffs, didn’t he?

“Mickey!” Laura shouted.

Buddy looking up, perspiration running down his face, glowing in the flickering light; his eyes like a wild horse’s.

Summer screaming.

Laura nodding at the man lying in the doorway.

Buddy, an acknowledging nod, then on the man like a jackal, coming up with a key ring, including three small ones—cuff keys. Buddy fumbling, Laura unable to move, Summer screaming screaming screaming—

Get out now, her brain told her,but she had no answer for that. The air buzzing at her mouth and nostrils like a swarm of bees, sparks lighting on her, in her hair, panic scrabbling like rats in the walls, the fear pure and hard and all-consuming.

I don’t want to die like this.

Even with the incredible noise of the flames, she heard the click of the lock to Summer’s shackles. Buddy cursing, praying, his breath hitching. Summer whimpering.

Laura, trying to remember where the doorway was because the air was now black except for the oily flames. Crawling, pushing her body to move.

Buddy running past her. She didn’t see him, but heard his boots on the glass, felt the wind of his passing, something soft passing across her face—the dress?

Fire feeding on oxygen. Blowing toward her—she could feel it on her feet, her back. Going toward the air? Or was that wrong? She couldn’t think. Maybe she was going in the wrong direction. Where was the doorway? I should have reached Mickey by now. Her throat clogging up, her chest seizing with the need to breathe—

Banging, loud voices.

“Police!”

People in the room. Noise, men, legs, guns, SWAT.

Eyes stinging. Harder to breathe. Gasping for air. She could be dead any moment. Grateful that she lay on her face away from the smoke, that they were here. They were here, they would get her out now.

Legs milling, but no one coming to her.

What about me?

Entwistle looking down at her, his expression sorrowful.

Someone else—SWAT?—crouching down. Then she was borne up and carried like a bird in the grip of a hawk, up and out into the air, rushing headlong through the hurtling dark, the clean bright stars overhead.

57

Five days, twelve interviews, three interrogations, and reams of paperwork later, Laura decided she’d had enough. She had to go home and not just for a few hours of sleep. They were at the point in the investigation where it was all mopping up and putting it in one place for the County attorney. Down the line, she would have to make another trip back to Florida to testify in a related case, the death of Andrew Descartes, but not now.

That was good. Laura could barely wrap her mind around Andy Descartes’s death. She had erred seriously in not asking assistance from SWAT. She could rationalize all she wanted about giving the Apalachicola PD the benefit of the doubt, and that was true to a certain extent. But the real reason she had gone in that day with Chief Redbone and his two officers was hubris; she did not want to give up control of her case.

All the pieces of her case were falling into place. Mickey Harmon had survived the shooting, and he was talking—about his friendship with Galaz and Ramsey that had spanned twenty years, his lucrative position as Galaz’s bodyguard, their blackmailing scheme. He catalogued a string of killings going back eighteen years, giving Victor the address of a warehouse in Phoenix where Galaz had plied his brand of sexual sadism while he worked his way up through DPS and planned a political career.

Dale Lundy—Musicman—confessed to killing four girls. He came off as beleaguered and confused. Laura thought his lawyer would argue for not guilty by mental defect, but after seeing what he’d done, she doubted any jury would go for it.

Victor was the lead on both the Harmon and Lundy interrogations. Laura sat in the room, watching Musicman, trying to figure the man out, but she couldn’t. He gave them nothing—nothing except his “poor me” act. Unfailingly polite, small, insignificant, hands folded prissily on the table, he reminded her of a decent, church-going lady mortified at being placed in such an untenable situation.

Laura asked him why he booby-trapped the tunnel.

He turned moist, frightened eyes on her. “Can I have a glass of water?”

After he had his water, she asked him again: “Why did you booby-trap the tunnel in your kitchen, but not the other house? What made you do that?”

He looked at her, uncomprehending.

She asked it another way. “You didn’t booby trap the front door, the back door, anything in the other house, so what was your reasoning? Why was that entrance so important to you when the others weren’t?”

He gave a small shrug.

“I just felt like it.”

I just felt like it. Laura had tried staring into his eyes, but there were no answers there. If she’d hoped for an explanation for Andrew Descartes’s death, something real she could hold on to that gave this tragedy some kind of design, she wouldn’t get it from Dale Lundy.

Buddy Holland was placed on administrative leave by the Bisbee Police Department. An Officer Involved Shooting investigation was the least of his troubles. Luring Dale Lundy to Bisbee would likely cost him his job. Fortunately, he had his pension from TPD. He was a young enough man he could find a good job somewhere in law enforcement.

“I hear Dynever Security is hiring,” he’d joked.

He told Laura he was moving back to Tucson so he could be close to his daughter.

Laura had seen a lot of him lately. Summer had to give her statement, and Buddy was there with her. They went back and forth to DPS, to the courthouse—Buddy, Summer, and Beth.

Laura found herself envying Buddy Holland his family. Watching the bond between them. She remembered what it was like to have that kind of love, the love of her parents.

It wasn’t over yet for them, though. Summer would need a lot of help to overcome what she had seen, what she had experienced, first at the hands of Musicman, and then Galaz. Unharmed physically, but emotionally devastated. Left alone in that room with the photos of the tortured women—knowing she would be next. Laura thought with time Summer would heal. She would need counseling and her family every step of the way, but she could heal.

Laura went to Jay Ramsey’s funeral. It was sparsely attended. She recognized the younger brother, whom she had met only once close to twenty years ago. She noticed no one was with him—not a wife, not a child. He looked lost. Laura felt an odd kinship with him. He had no family left. She could tell from the shock on his face that he had never expected to be alone in this way.

He gave her a Post-it note that Jay had apparently intended for her. It had been pasted to his computer, Laura’s name scribbled at the top. Below that it said: “Barbara Stanley” followed by a phone number. And the words: “Calliope’s Music, 9 yr. old TB mare”.

Laura thanked him and took the note, putting it in a special compartment in her wallet. She didn’t know what to do with the information right now, so she would leave it there until she did.

After attending the funeral that morning, the fifth day after the Chiricahua Paint Company fire, Laura gathered up some of the paperwork that had yet to be done and told Victor she was going home.