After Midnight, page 15
Cait worked to control her breathing, not wanting to hyperventilate and pass out right here in the courthouse. If this sensation inside her head meant Milo was somehow here, sharing space in her brain, she didn’t know what horrible things he might be able to accomplish if she lost consciousness, or what devastation she might awaken to find.
Or whether she would ever awaken at all.
She lowered her head for a moment and closed her eyes. Get a grip, dammit. Then she opened them and tried to convince herself she was prepared for anything. It didn’t work.
She looked around the courtroom suspiciously. Nothing seemed out of place. Everyone looked perfectly normal, or as normal as was possible for a bail hearing in criminal court.
Returning her attention to Kevin, Cait tamped down her fear and tried to concentrate. She was here to support him and was damned well going to do exactly that. She would focus on him while remaining alert to the possibility—or rather, the likelihood—of impending violence.
The hearing moved quickly, the defense making every effort to secure Kevin’s release, the prosecution not seeming too terribly committed to preventing it. Cait began to rally, feeling a little optimism beginning to compete with her fear. She was no trial lawyer, hadn’t stepped foot inside a courtroom prior to today since graduating law school. But it looked good for Kevin.
He was sitting ramrod-straight behind the defense table, flanked by a pair of attorneys, and as Cait watched, his head twitched noticeably. The movement was unnatural, as if he’d been slapped across the face by an invisible hand.
Instantly her cautious optimism turned to horror. His actions so resembled those of Friday night, just before he attacked her in their apartment, that Cait felt as though she could have been watching an instant replay. His back was to her, but if she had been able to get a good look into his eyes, she knew exactly what she would see: a blank, glassy stare.
Her worst fears were being confirmed.
For a second or two following his odd head-shake, Kevin sat perfectly still. The prosecuting attorney was busy addressing the judge, questioning some minor point advanced by the defense team.
All eyes were on that attorney.
Except for Cait’s.
She watched in horror as Kevin lifted his hands—still manacled together at the wrists—onto the table. No one else noticed him pick up a pen that had been lying on top of a yellow legal pad and clutch it in his right fist.
In one smooth motion, Kevin rose to his feet and turned to face the defense attorney sitting to his left. Cait screamed a half second before Kevin lifted the pen to shoulder height and then slashed downward.
The lawyer reacted late, caught off-guard. He tried to propel himself backward, over his chair and onto the floor, exactly as Cait had done last night at The Crow’s Nest, but he was too slow. The pen caught the lawyer in the neck and opened a jagged gash. Blood spurted, crimson and thick, splattering onto the lawyer and Kevin as chaos erupted in the courtroom. People screamed and some of the gallery members closest to the defense table began pushing and shoving in a desperate attempt to escape the danger.
Cait continued to scream as the bailiff fumbled for the gun in his holster, finally bringing it to bear on Kevin just as he lifted his hands and advanced on the stricken lawyer. Both of the victim’s hands were clamped against his neck in an effort to stanch the flow of blood, which continued leaking heavily around his fingers.
The bailiff hesitated. If he fired and the bullet missed Kevin, he would likely strike someone in the gallery. He began shuffling forward across the courtroom, gun trained on Kevin, screaming something that was lost in the din.
Kevin took a step toward the lawyer, who was scrabbling sideways across the floor in the general direction of the prosecutor’s table. Kevin stepped in a slick pool of blood and then lost his footing, spilling to the floor almost on top of the terrified attorney.
The bailiff saw his opportunity. He still couldn’t risk a shot, but the moment Kevin dropped in a heap, the man leaped forward. He skidded to a stop in the blood next to Kevin and the injured lawyer. Leaned down. Placed the barrel of his weapon against the side of Kevin’s head.
The initial frenzy of screaming had abated, as onlookers realized they weren’t being targeted. Yet.
The bailiff shouted, “Freeze and drop the weapon or you die!”
Kevin ignored the warning. It was almost as if the man hadn’t even spoken. He squirmed up onto his knees to take another stab at his attorney, and the bailiff reared back and smashed the butt of his gun into the side of Kevin’s skull.
Kevin wobbled but stayed on his knees.
The bailiff pistol-whipped him again, and this time Kevin toppled onto his side and lay still, the blood of his victim soaking into his jailhouse jumpsuit.
Cait had stopped screaming but could feel tears running down her cheeks. She was crying heavily but hadn’t even realized it until now. She stared in horror, unable to turn her gaze away from her unconscious lover even for a second, and she felt the pressure inside her head disappear just as abruptly as it had come.
For a long moment no one moved and the courtroom was eerily silent. Then police backup arrived and chaos erupted again.
28
Cait sat at her kitchen table staring out the window, seeing nothing. The Tampa skyline twinkled, plenty of lights still shining despite the lateness of the hour. In the distance, the Gulf of Mexico lay vast and dark and empty.
She glanced at the clock on the wall and then back out the window. She realized she hadn’t noticed the time, but didn’t care. A cup of tea in front of her sat untouched. It had long since cooled to an undrinkable temperature.
It had taken hours to get home after the awful events inside the Edgecomb Courthouse. Police in riot gear had stormed in and hustled Kevin away, his arms locked tightly behind his back, his eyes blank and unseeing.
He wasn’t himself. Literally.
After securing the scene, the police had taken statements from all the witnesses, including Cait. She related everything she saw, leaving out nothing but her certainty that for the second time in less than four days, Kevin’s actions had been not his own but those of Milo Cain.
There was no reason to tell them that part. The authorities would have rejected Cait’s theory outright, and she couldn’t blame them. Nothing in their experience—hell, nothing in anyone’s experience—would have given them reason to believe her. There certainly wasn’t any physical evidence to support her position, nothing that could be collected and analyzed under a microscope, no data that could be placed in an evidence locker and used in a trial.
Nothing.
So Cait had kept her fears, or more accurately her certainties, about Milo Cain to herself. Everything else she told the investigators. Her voice never wavered; the tears never returned.
As she spoke, she felt as empty as Kevin had looked. It would take the most extreme self-delusion to think Kevin would have a chance at being released on bail now, and Cait realized that was for the best. Milo was using Kevin as a blunt instrument to torture her. If he couldn’t attack her directly, he would attack innocent bystanders like the poor defense attorney, who had nearly been killed in the brutal, unprovoked assault.
After giving her statement, Cait had been told she was free to go. She left the courthouse to the glare of television lights and the shouted questions of reporters, who were clustered behind yellow police crime-scene tape but who screamed their questions anyway, undeterred.
She ignored them.
Hailed a cab.
Rode home in silence.
And had been sitting in her kitchen ever since, thinking.
It was over. Milo had won. He lay in a prison hospital bed, injured, as helpless as a newborn baby. And yet somehow he could still terrorize innocent people in the most horrific of ways. He would always be able to terrorize innocent people. Somehow her twin brother, the cold, unfeeling sociopath who had tortured and murdered young women—the exact number of his victims was still unknown and probably always would be—in a decade-long killing spree, had managed to cheat death, and in doing so had liberated himself from his broken body.
And he would never give up until he destroyed her.
For the first time in her life, Cait felt utterly defeated. She could not win and she could not escape. Milo would kill her, if not today, then tomorrow. If not tomorrow, then next week or next month or next year. The best she could hope for was that no other innocents would suffer the way the injured defense attorney had suffered tonight. The way Kevin was suffering right now.
She thought about suicide, considered the topic in a way she never had before, running the notion around in her head not as a theoretical concept, but as a concrete possibility. Could she do it? Would she be able to take her own life?
Her father had done so. He had been so consumed with guilt and regret he had hung himself in a public place.
So it was in her genes.
But suppose she did kill herself. Suppose she surrendered to Milo’s vicious campaign against her. Suppose she stepped off a chair with a noose snugged around her neck, or ingested a full bottle of prescription medication, or borrowed her mother’s pistol and fired a bullet into her brain.
Suppose she did it.
Suppose.
What would happen then? Would Milo quit? Would he miraculously see the error of his ways and give up the commission of torture? Would he remove himself from the human race and waste away inside his paralyzed body back at Bridgewater State Hospital?
Of course he would not. He would never change; he could never change. Milo Cain was as incapable of growing a conscience as Caitlyn Connelly was of picking up a knife and attacking an innocent person.
So suicide would accomplish nothing. In fact, Cait now realized, killing herself would only make the situation worse.
At least now, while Milo was obsessed with torturing Cait, his attention was more or less diverted from the rest of the population. Yes, he had used Kevin to attack an innocent bystander, but his message was clear, at least to Cait. He was out to get her. The attorney was nothing more than collateral damage.
And once he completed his deadly business with her, he would be free to turn his vicious psychopathy on truly innocent people. All the time. As much as he wanted, whenever he wanted.
Rather than making Cait feel better, this realization only deepened her sense of hopelessness. There was nothing she could do to help herself or anyone else.
She looked up at the kitchen clock again and then away.
But what difference did the time make?
What difference did anything make?
Cait continued staring out the window, unseeing.
29
Virginia managed to rent the same hotel room she had stayed in with Caitlyn the previous night. Her first thought after leaving her daughter at the airport had been to go straight back to Bridgewater and request another visit with Milo.
With Caitlyn out of earshot, she had gone as far as giving the change of destination to the cabdriver, who had been thrilled with the prospect of another thirty-five-mile fare, especially after she had told him initially that she only needed to get to Revere.
But the man’s mood took a sharp turn for the worse when she changed her mind again. The Squire Hotel was an even shorter trip than anywhere in Revere would have been, and his scowl at hearing this latest development would have terrified the average traveler.
Not Virginia Ayers. After all she had been through in her life she was by now nothing like the average traveler. She barely noticed the driver’s annoyance and certainly didn’t care. She had seen much more frightening things than an angry cabbie.
When the sullen man pulled to a stop in front of the hotel, yanking the wheel to the right and slamming on the brakes like a NASCAR driver pulling into pit row, Virginia smiled and thanked him for his patience. He didn’t even respond. But when she paid the fare and then gave the man a hundred-dollar tip, his demeanor changed one last time. His eyes widened and he smiled brightly and then he pulled away from the curb in a squeal of burning rubber, serenaded by a chorus of honking horns.
* * *
The last thing Virginia wanted to do was spend another day in Boston. But she knew if she didn’t handle the Milo situation properly, she might not be allowed into Bridgewater State Hospital again, not just today but maybe not ever.
She and Caitlyn had been given a special time slot, outside of normal prison visiting hours, to see Milo today, and Virginia was savvy enough to know that alienating the warden by ignoring the previously established protocol on a second visit—unannounced, no less—would accomplish nothing good.
So she booked herself back into the Squire. She would use the time to follow all the rules to the letter, coordinating another visit with Milo tomorrow. Then she could get back where she belonged, by Caitlyn’s side.
* * *
“Bridgewater State Hospital, Nancy Bickford speaking, how may I help you?” The voice on the other end of the telephone line was cool and professional, a far cry from the Nancy Bickford who had become so emotional recalling the death of her former boss earlier in the day.
“Hello, Nancy, my name is Virginia Ayers. I was at the facility this morning today with my daughter. We were there to visit Milo Cain.”
“Of course,” the warden’s secretary said. “I trust your visit went well?”
“Yes it did, thank you for asking. I’m hoping to coordinate a second visit tomorrow, at the same time if possible.”
“A second visit?” The woman’s confusion was evident. Virginia couldn’t blame her for not understanding. How much could there be to say to a patient/inmate who was no more animated than a lump of coal?
“That’s right. I’m calling because I know Warden Ciuffetti was reluctant to approve visitors for Milo during normal visiting hours and I assume her preference would be the same for tomorrow.”
There was a long silence as Nancy Bickford considered the request. “I don’t know…” she said. “This will have to go through the warden and I’m not sure she’s available.”
“Would you mind checking?” Virginia said. “I would be the only visitor this time. My daughter’s already gone back to Florida and I’m hoping to be able to fly out tomorrow afternoon, but before I do, I would really like to see my son one more time. I’m not sure when—or even if—I’ll get another opportunity. You see, I’ve been ill for quite some time, and I may not be well enough to return to the area again.”
Another silence. Then, “I’ll see if she’s in.”
After a delay of at least five minutes, during which time Virginia spent wondering what the hell she would do if her request was denied, Warden Ciuffetti came on the line. “Hello, Mrs. Ayers. I understand you’d like to make arrangements to see Inmate Cain again tomorrow.”
“That’s right. If it’s not too much trouble.” Virginia repeated the song and dance about seeing her son one last time, knowing all the while exactly what the other woman was thinking: why didn’t you say your good-byes when you were here a few hours ago?
It was a logical question; one for which Virginia had no good answer. She prayed Warden Ciuffetti wouldn’t ask it and was relieved when she didn’t. After some more back and forth and what felt like an inordinately long amount of time and energy wasted on what was a simple request, the warden issued her approval, offering an appointment at the same time as today’s.
“That would be wonderful,” Virginia said sincerely. “Thank you for your consideration.”
“Not a problem,” Warden Ciuffetti answered, although it had certainly seemed like a problem. “When you get here tomorrow, simply check in at the front desk and you’ll be escorted to Inmate Cain’s room. There will be no need to stop at my office again.”
“Outstanding,” Virginia said. “Thank you so much.”
30
It was not yet seven a.m. when Virginia’s cell phone rang. She was awake, but hadn’t showered or begun getting ready for the day. The phone’s caller ID function showed that the number was Cait’s.
A call this early could not be good.
“Hello?” Virginia hated to lie to Cait as she had done yesterday at the airport, but was prepared to double down if necessary with a further story about staying with a neighbor friend should Cait revisit the subject of Virginia staying in Boston an extra day.
She didn’t have to. Cait’s voice was hushed. Hollow. Defeated. “It’s never going to end,” she said.
Something was obviously very wrong. “What happened?” Virginia said.
“It’s Milo. It has to be Milo.”
“What about Milo?”
“He’s done it again.”
“Caitlyn, honey, you have to explain what’s going on.”
“You know how I wanted to get back here so I could be at Kevin’s bail hearing?”
The dull throb of a headache began at the base of Virginia’s skull. “Yes, I know. What happened?”
“It has to be Milo. I’ve been thinking about it all night and there’s no other explanation. It’s Milo, and he’s never going to stop, and there’s no way to make him stop.”
“Caitlyn, please, back up and tell me everything.”
So she did.
By the time Cait was done talking, Virginia began to fear she might not be able to make it to Bridgewater in time for her appointment. She didn’t want to hurry her daughter along, though, because she had never heard Cait’s voice this dead. This devoid of hope.
“Kevin is a strong young man,” she said. “He’ll get through this and so will you.”
The silence on the other end of the line reminded Virginia of last night while she was waiting to talk to Warden Ciuffetti. But this was much worse. Instead of impatience at the lack of a response, she felt a very real fear for her child. It sounded like Cait had given up.
She decided to try a different tack. “Listen to me,” she said. “We don’t even know for certain that Milo is responsible for what’s going on—”
