Photograph, page 27
This time the pause was longer. I began to get frustrated by his silence.
Then Kimble blew up my theory.
“You’re wrong, Shannon.”
“Wrong? How do you know?”
“Because I’m standing in Rick Kaslan’s living room right now. He and his husband are both dead. Somebody shot them.”
Exactly ten minutes later, I stood at the end of the road outside the ivy-covered gate at the Daugherty estate.
The gate stood open by a few inches. The severed lock sat on the ground. I squinted toward the house but could barely make it out through the rain and darkness. There were no lights on behind the broken and boarded window frames. I heard the scratch of something moving close by, but when I shined my phone at the ground, I saw only the gleaming reflection of a cat’s eyes. A soaked brown cat hissed at me, baring its teeth, and slipped like an escaping prisoner through the iron bars of the gate. The animal headed toward the mansion, then stopped and looked back at me, as if wondering why I didn’t follow.
It was almost time.
Where was Chuck Kimble?
In another minute, I’d have to go inside by myself. I wasn’t taking any chances, not with Kate’s life at stake. I drew my Glock into my hand, fingers tight on the wet grip. Its weight gave me comfort. I headed for the gate, then swung my pistol as branches cracked sharply from the woods lining the estate’s stone wall. Someone slid gracefully down the muddy slope to the road, and I saw Kimble jerk his hands in the air as he spotted the barrel of my Glock pointed at his chest.
I lowered the gun.
“I parked on the other side of the woods,” he told me quietly. “No need to advertise that you’re not alone, in case he’s watching the road.”
“Do you have backup?”
Kimble nodded. “Six cops stationed at intervals outside the wall. They won’t go in until I clear them. But I’d rather surround the house and make sure he knows there’s no way out.”
“Not a chance. I don’t want to spook him.” I checked my watch. “It’s time. Give me a five-minute head start before you come in behind me. If he’s inside the house, he’ll be looking out. I want him to see there’s no one with me.”
I expected him to protest. I was ready to yank away if he tried to stop me. Instead, he drew his own Ruger and gestured at the gate. “Do what you have to do. I’ve got your back. If it were my sister in there, I’d do the same thing. But five minutes is the max I’ll give you. One second after that, and I’m coming in and bringing my team over the wall.”
“Five minutes,” I said.
I wiped rain out of my face as I squeezed through the gate. My Glock led me forward, slow step by slow step. I pivoted at any noise that rose above the downpour, the rustle of foliage, a loose chain knocking on an old flagpole, the howling gusts of the wind. I listened for something human nearby, like footsteps or a muffled cry, but I was alone except for the wet cat, which appeared and disappeared ahead of me as it zigzagged down the path toward the house.
When I slowed, it waited for me to catch up, as if to say: This way.
The storm got worse around me, the sky black and starless. The gales rose and fell in swoops that pummeled my body and made it hard to walk. Rain blew sideways, stinging my face like flying glass. Behind the mansion, yellow branches of lightning streaked the sky, close enough that the thunderclaps followed almost immediately, rattling deep in my chest.
The universe was angry.
Was that because twin shadows were about to meet again?
When I got closer, the light of my phone struggled to light up the old house through the downpour. The remains of the front door had been boarded shut the last time I was here, but not anymore. Planks of plywood lay on the ground where they had been pried away. I saw a crowbar with nails lodged in its forked tongue. The bleak warning of vandals was still visible on one of the wooden panels, making a kind of threshold to cross to the open door.
The dead walk here.
I went inside, the gun tight in my grip.
The house was empty, debris littering the floor with evidence of squatters, animals, and vandals. It smelled of mold and dust. Nature was winning the battle to reclaim the property, taking a little back with each season. I heard water dripping from above and saw silver creeks snaking along the marble tile. The cat had joined me inside; my light turned its eyes red. I was in the foyer, standing where Greg Daugherty would have stood when the shotgun blast ended his life.
I shouted, because there was no need to be quiet. He knew I was coming. “Kate! Kate, it’s Shannon! I’m here!”
My voice made a hollow echo in the empty space. I shouted Kate’s name again, even louder, the noise traveling through the ruins of the house. She heard me this time. Somewhere on an upper floor, the panicked thump of someone’s foot pounded on the floor. I located the winding stone stairs and climbed them at a run, stopping to listen in the second-floor hallway.
The rhythmic thumping continued frantically, still above me.
Up in the attic. Zeke’s bedroom.
The next set of stairs was at the end of the corridor. This was where Zeke would have taken the blast to his chest as he charged down from his bedroom, protecting Dawn, giving her time to escape out the window. I moved slowly, not sure of what I would find, wary of ambush. The attic stairway was narrow, made of wood that was rotting away, the steps spongy under my feet. As I neared the roof, the hammering downpour outside got fiercer and louder. I smelled the water, and the dampness got inside my bones. Thunder made the house shiver.
At my feet, I felt movement. The cat had joined me.
One large empty room was directly in front of us.
I shined my light inside. The sharp angles of the attic roof made shadows, and puddles glinted like lakes on the floorboards. There she was. Kate sat below the attic window where Dawn would have leaped for freedom. She was alive. Her hands and legs were tied tightly with duct tape; her mouth was gagged. She squinted at the light, wriggling with fear, desperate to be free. I turned the light on my own face to show her it was me and heard the moan of relief from inside her throat. I rushed across the room. The first thing I did was rip the tape from her mouth, more roughly than I wanted, and I yanked out the towel, making her spit and gag. My hand gently cupped her cheek.
“Kate, where is he? Where is he?”
She shook her head, the words trapped in her dry throat.
Then her eyes widened, staring in horror at something behind me.
I spun, Glock at the ready, my finger on the trigger. A shadow was in the doorway, closing on me, gun in hand. Déjà vu. In that instant, I was Jenny Curtis as a teenage killer surprised her in her bedroom. But the light showed me who it was, and I relaxed when I recognized Chuck Kimble. He hadn’t given me the full five minutes before following me into the house. I began to swing my attention back to Kate, but when she saw Kimble looming over us, her voice came back enough to fill the room with guttural screams.
I realized I had made a terrible mistake.
As I swung back and prepared to fire, Kimble snapped my wrist with a kick of his steel-toed boot and sent my Glock spinning away. Then he pointed his Ruger between my eyes, and I knew that I was going to die.
THIRTY-FOUR
That was when my memory came back.
Out of the mist, I saw it all too clearly, my three-year-old brain struggling to comprehend what was happening. The bullet from the woods took the life out of Dawn’s eyes, and she collapsed at my feet. Behind her, a younger Chuck Kimble emerged from the shadows. Hard and tough, dressed all in black, his hair already thinning, his angular chin still with that nine-o’clock shadow that no razor could completely shave away. He stared at me, and I stared at him.
The little girl and the killer.
The barrel of his gun was barely ten feet from my face, a shot that no one would miss. Even so, no matter how many people you’ve killed, it can’t be easy to take the life of a child. Kimble didn’t fire right away. His hesitation was what saved me. I heard no sound, no scream, but I felt a rush of air as Lara Lovell dashed like a superhero from the corner of the motel and swept me into her arms.
Simultaneously, crazy loud to my young ears, the gun fired. And missed.
It all returned to me, unfolding like a 3D movie.
In the present day, twenty-six years later, a frown of recognition crossed Chuck Kimble’s face. He knew what was in my head.
“So you do remember,” he said grimly. “Bug always told me you would. She said the memory was locked in there somewhere, and sooner or later, you’d make the connection. Something would trigger it. You’d see my face again; you’d be able to describe me. I couldn’t take the risk. That was why I’ve been looking for you all these years.”
“Did you know it was me when I came to town?” I asked with morbid curiosity. “Did you know I was the girl at the motel?”
“No, I didn’t. Lara Lovell didn’t break. She didn’t tell me anything. When you showed up in Devil Creek, I knew you were trouble, but I didn’t realize you were her. The same kid I’d been hunting all this time. Not until tonight.”
On the floor, Kate shuddered with guilt.
“I’m so sorry, Shannon. He was a cop. I thought it was okay to tell him. I didn’t realize that he—”
“It’s okay,” I murmured.
Destiny, remember? We can run but we can’t hide.
I shook my head at the irony. A killer had been looking for me for years, but he’d never been able to find me. Faith Selby—Lara Lovell—went to her grave to protect me. I was safe. Chuck Kimble had no idea who I was.
And then I’d gone and found him.
“Nobody’s outside, are they? No cops, no backup.”
“No, it’s just us.”
“Is Rick Kaslan really dead?”
Kimble shrugged. “Yeah. Rick and I were friends, but he was always a loose end. Years ago, when I was a rookie highway cop, I pulled him over for driving erratically. He was high as a kite. Pills on the passenger seat. If I’d taken him in, he would have lost his job, probably done time. I didn’t think he’d survive being behind bars. I let him off with a warning, and he owed me big. So when I was looking for the girl who’d been hiding out in Zeke’s bedroom, I went to Rick. He told me it had to be Dawn West. He knew they were dating.”
“Jesus. Dawn couldn’t identify you. She didn’t see you. Why kill her?”
“I didn’t know if she saw me or not, but she was in the house when it went down. That was enough. Dawn had to go.”
Above me, outside the window, lightning flashed again. I saw Chuck’s face illuminated out of darkness like a strobe. Then he was back in shadow. For a moment, I had the wild thought that I was dreaming, and I would wake up screaming as I always did.
But I was already awake. This moment was real.
“You were a cop,” I murmured. “What did they have on you? How did the gang rope you in?”
“You’ve got it all backward. I went to them. I was new in town, and rookies got paid shit. When I saw the gang moving in, I offered my services. It’s always good to have somebody on the inside. I could spy for them in Devil Creek, keep an ear to the ground. If anybody started shooting their mouth off, or started to muscle in on their turf, I’d hear about it real quick.”
“Money. You did it for money?”
“Money like you wouldn’t believe.”
“Was it worth it, selling your soul? Being a spy is one thing, but murder?”
“When you’re in, you’re in,” Kimble replied, his face like stone. “You don’t get to draw lines in the sand. They told me to deal with the Daughertys. Send a message to anyone who might try to come after them. So I did. I knew it wouldn’t be a problem to set it up. Greg knew all the rookie cops. He liked me. He didn’t suspect a thing when I arrived at the gate.”
I tried to imagine the soul of someone who could point a shotgun at a friend and pull the trigger. And then do the same to his wife and son. But I couldn’t paint in colors black enough to understand this man.
“What about Lara Lovell?” I asked.
Kimble sighed. “Yeah, Lara was a big problem. At first, I didn’t know who she was. I had no idea who grabbed you behind the motel. So I offered to help Phil Potter track down the people who left that night before we could talk to them. When I went to Frankfort asking about Lara Lovell, I saw her picture, and I knew she was the one. But she’d already skipped town. I got a report about her car being found abandoned at O’Hare a few weeks later, but she was long gone. I tried everything over the years, but she was good. I never got a whiff of who she became or where she went.”
“Until the photograph,” I said.
Kimble shook his head with a kind of awe. “Right. The photograph. Son of a bitch, that was a shock. There you were, that little girl right there on the front page of the paper. Even from the back, I knew it was you. And I knew Lara had to be the one who took the picture. Finally, after all those years, I had a way to find both of you. The author of the photo book gave up Faith Selby right away, but Faith was tough. She told me she had no idea who you were or where you were. I was sure she was lying. But she never gave you up, no matter how bad I made it for her.”
Kate screamed an obscenity, then squirmed on the floor of the attic with a kind of primal fury. Even with hands and feet tied, she lurched forward and tried to throw herself at Kimble. This was the man who’d tortured and murdered her mother, talking about it with no feeling, no regret. But Kate fell back, unable to move. I squatted and took hold of her hand, and she squeezed mine in return.
There was nothing to say.
We were sisters; we were together. And soon we would both be dead.
Kimble knelt, too, keeping the barrel of the Ruger against my forehead, his finger around the trigger. I looked for any kind of opening, any way to fight back, but I had a broken wrist, and he had the gun.
There are games you win and games you lose. My twin shadow was going to win this one.
I stared at him, eyes wide open, wondering what it would feel like to be shot, wondering whether I’d sense anything at all or whether I’d be gone before the pain could make its way to my brain. But Kimble didn’t pull the trigger right away. Instead, his face took on a strange, urgent anxiety that I didn’t understand. An intense fear hid behind the hardness.
“You need to answer a question for me,” he said. “Either tell me the truth right now, or it’s going to go very badly for your sister. You know I mean what I say. Don’t try to lie.”
I had no idea what question could be left between us. He knew everything I knew. With me and Kate both dead, the trail ended here. There were no more links to Dawn’s murder.
“What the hell do you want?” I asked.
Kimble leaned close until his breath was in my face, and then he said the last thing I ever expected him to say.
“How did you find out about Angola?”
Angola.
At first, I didn’t even realize what he was talking about. The name of the town was so disconnected from this moment in my life that I couldn’t put it together. And then, in a flash, I did. I knew exactly what he meant.
I said it out loud. The truth burst from my mouth.
“Oh my God. It was you. You killed Jenny Curtis.”
Kimble jumped to his feet. He took a sharp step back across the attic floor, as if my words had burned him. He waved the gun wildly in the air, then reaimed at my face. “How can you possibly know that?”
Yes, how could I remember a murder that happened before I was born? But I did.
Chuck Kimble.
Jenny Curtis.
A teenager with a gun.
It was him all along. Not just outside the Thunder Mountain Motel, killing Dawn West and pointing a gun at three-year-old Shannon Wells. It was also him climbing the stairs to the bedroom in Angola and shooting a forty-four-year-old wife and mother named Jenny Curtis.
The same man.
My twin shadow chasing me down from one life to the next.
It was all true. Everything Maro had told me was true.
Kimble nearly spat at me with rage. “Tell me how you knew! What did I miss? How did you connect Jenny Curtis to the murders in Devil Creek?”
“I didn’t.”
“Bullshit. You. Were. There. I found it all in your notes. You went to Angola before you came here. You copied articles about the home invasions. About Jenny’s murder.”
“I had no idea there was a connection. Not until you just told me.”
Kimble twitched, one fist opening and closing, the other locked around the butt of the gun. In my head, watching him, I tried to peel away the years in between, to see a scared, reckless kid from Indiana hiding behind the hardened Michigan killer. I got to my feet, my eyes flashing. My back was against the attic wall, sheets of rain spraying through the broken window between us. I took a step toward him. Kimble jabbed the gun at me, but he didn’t fire. He couldn’t kill me yet. He needed to know what I was going to say next.
“What were you, Chuck? Nineteen? Just out of high school? You were getting cocky. You’d done it twice before and never got caught. But you didn’t know Jenny Curtis was home. You thought the house was empty. You went up to her bedroom, and she saw you. You were busted, heading to jail. She could tell the police who you were. So you panicked, and you shot her.”
His eyes widened with wild, impossible fear. “How do you know all that? How?”
I was about to say: I saw it happen. I was there.
I was about to say: I was Jenny Curtis. You killed me, like you kill me in every life. Now you’re back to do it again. You tried when I was three, and you failed, but you didn’t stop. You never stop.
But I didn’t say any of that.
The question seemed so simple, but the answer stalled on my lips. How did I know about Angola? How did I know the details of a murder that happened before I was born? Only two people had been in that bedroom, and one of them was dead. The other, the killer, Chuck Kimble, stood in front of me.
