Corey, even Mrs. Bryant. Every damn time! I couldn’t let them tell, could I?
Sobbing as they led him out into the basement, he was a mixture of remorse and indignation. Grief for his victims mingled with petulance and self-pity for what he felt they had forced him to do. He collapsed onto the nearest chair and buried his face in his hands, blubbering and snuffling.
“Where is she?” Dwight snarled. “What have you done with my wife?”
“I didn’t want to hurt her,” Sidney sobbed, “but she was out there on the sidewalk when I got here to beat the garbage truck. She found Corey. She wanted me to call 911. She was going to tell. What could I do?”
CHAPTER
26
—
, 1909
I came to slowly, disoriented and hot. I was lying on my side in total darkness. Cautiously I wriggled my fingers and felt rough cloth. There was something familiar about it, but I couldn’t make myself concentrate. More cloth touched my face and weighed on my body, which was probably why I was so warm. To my surprise, I could breathe. Not as deeply as my oxygen-deprived lungs wanted, but enough to keep me alive. My mouth and one nostril were completely covered with the duct tape, but as long as I lay quietly and took slow even breaths, I wouldn’t suffocate.
Where the hell was I, though? Taped and swaddled, I had no clues. I could hear voices, muffled and far away. Should I try to draw attention to myself, or would that make Sidney come back and finish me off for good? Stupid, stupid,
I moved my head forward almost imperceptibly and felt a solid wall. Oh, God! Was I in a coffin? About to be buried alive? I gingerly tried to flex my legs backward. They were hampered by the weight of the cloth, but there seemed to be nothing solid behind me. Wherever I was, it wasn’t a coffin.
Yet.
The muffled voices came closer. Two men?
I felt the surface where I lay give as something heavy pushed it down. Then light hit my eyes.
And I was not the one who screamed.
CHAPTER
27
—
, 1909
Frustrated and enraged, it was all Dwight could do not to grab Sidney Jackson by the scruff of his scrawny neck and shake him till he answered.
“Easy, Bryant,” Sam Hentz said. “We found him, we’ll find her.”
“Hey, Lieutenant!” Vlad Ruzicka rushed down the hallway from the break room. “Come quick. She’s in here! Jani almost sat on her! Hurry!”
Sigrid immediately started down the hall, but Dwight pushed his way past her. At the far end of the long room, they saw a startled Jani Horvath staring at what had been concealed behind the tumbled covers on the bottom bunk bed next to the wall. It looked like a silver-gray cocoon, a cocoon that wriggled. With the hood of her parka still over her head, Deborah lay bound in duct tape from her mouth to her toes. In his haste to get out to the curb before the sanitation workers discovered Corey’s body, Jackson had evidently used a full roll of tape to keep her immobile while he made sure he was the one to toss Corey’s body into the truck.
As Dwight gently turned her over, he was relieved to see blue eyes implore him and to realize abruptly why she wasn’t struggling harder.
“Somebody get me some scissors,” he called. Without waiting, he pushed back the strip that partially blocked her nose. “Better?”
She took a deep breath and nodded.
Scissors were produced and he carefully cut the tape on both sides of her face where it wound around the hood of her coat. She made impatient sounds that it was taking him too long. “Wait a minute, shug. You don’t want me to cut your hair, do you?”
A moment later he had eased the tape off her lips and then cut enough to free her arms and legs. She looked like a mummy festooned with tattered wrappings, a beautiful mummy come back to life when he feared she was lost forever.
She insisted on standing, but moaned when he touched her head. “Ow! That hurts like the devil.”
“Where?” Dwight pushed back the wool-lined hood and gently examined the spot she had touched. “You’ve got a goose egg there, but no blood.”
