73
Cynthia lay naked on her side on the ice-cold tile floor of a fancy bathroom. Her abductor sat on the toilet contemplating her, an empty insulin syringe in his hand.
He said, “Did that help? I’m new at this diabetes thing.”
“You need to give me more,” she said weakly, covering herself as best she could with her hands. “Let me measure my blood sugar.” Her vision was still blurred, but maybe clearing. There was a bottle of water on the floor beside her and she managed to keep herself covered until she took a long drink. He didn’t seem interested in her sexually. Maybe it would be better if he were. She had decided that, in exchange for a shot to make her feel better, she could let him screw her. It was no big deal. She’d had sex with a few men she wasn’t attracted to when they had something she wanted.
“The water in the tub is warm,” he told her. “Get in. You smell like piss and bile.”
“My clothes?” she asked.
“They’re in the washing machine. I have to wash them before you put them on. I have a nice warm robe for you when you get out of the bath.”
“Of course I ruined my clothes. What did you expect?”
“I’m no expert, but if I gave you more insulin, I suspect you’d be a lot more trouble.”
“Please,” Cyn said. “I won’t try to escape.”
“But you might, Ms. Gardner. I know a great deal about you. More than I care to, in fact.”
“My mother will pay you whatever you want.”
The man said, “All I want at this moment is for you to get into the bath.”
Standing, the man helped Cynthia up. Her knees buckled, but she stepped into the warm bath and sat. The man recaptured his former position on the closed toilet and watched her as she bathed, but the ugly bastard didn’t seem to want to do more than that.
And she made sure he saw plenty. She knew that men went stupid when she showed them even less of her body than he was seeing.
“You know,” she said, mentally bracing herself, “this doesn’t have to be so unpleasant. I mean, if you wanted to, like, have sex with me, I wouldn’t say you couldn’t. We couldn’t,” she said, smiling.
The man smiled back. “You want to trade sex for your freedom?” And then he laughed loudly. “I don’t think so.”
Angry at the rebuff, she thought,
74
Jacob’s Cadillac had left the road, shot straight across a cotton field for fifty yards, and ended up nose-deep into a tree. Brad left the road and drove to the scene, cutting the siren when he stopped, but leaving his blue lights flashing. As Winter climbed out, the cold wind was like a slap in his face.
The car’s front end was bent around the tree’s trunk, like a man in the water holding on to a pier leg for dear life. The front windshield looked like a blanket made from thousands of beads. Jacob lay in the dead leaves twenty feet in front of the car in his sock feet.
“He’s dead,” Winter said as they walked up on the body.
Brad whistled. “He was still doing a good fifty when he hit the tree. Looks like he never even braked. Didn’t have his seat belt on. Wasn’t for his clothes, I wouldn’t recognize him.”
Winter stared down at the body. Half of Jacob’s head was smashed and pushed against his shoulder. His brains were out, leaving an open and empty white bowl connected to his neck. Winter figured they were both thinking the same thing: Cornered and desperate, Jacob Gardner had taken a coward’s way out of his wreck of a life.
While Brad called for the coroner and a backup unit, Winter went to the driver’s side and looked into the Caddy. The driver’s side window glass was scattered in the interior, but the passenger’s side window was intact, and splattered with blood and bits of brain matter. And the blood droplets each formed lightning bolts, as if Jacob’s blood had already been running down the surfaces when the sudden impact had caused a violent change of direction.
“It wasn’t suicide,” Winter said. “Somebody shot him in the head.”
In the distance a siren announced a cruiser approaching from the plantation.
A cloud passed between the wreck and the sun, and the birds scattered in the woods chirped like gossips.
75
Tearfully, Leigh listened to the news of Jacob’s death, nodding as Brad filled her in. It was impossible to tell if she was particularly upset by the news, since she was already overwhelmed with worry for Cynthia. Afterward, she went into the kitchen to tell Hamp about his father.
When Leigh left the room, Winter, Alexa, and Brad were left alone with their thoughts.
“We shouldn’t have let him go. We could have helped,” Alexa said. “If he’d just listened to us.”
“Nobody could ever help Jacob Gardner,” Brad said. “He spent his life building fires for other people to put out. And he never told the truth unless he thought it was a lie. We have to concentrate on Cynthia.”
Winter figured that even a disaster of a man like Jacob Gardner deserved a better end than the one he got. Jacob’s death was no great loss to society, but it was a sin that Hamp’s last memory of his father would be of him punching his mother in the face and roaring off, with Hamp wishing him dead. He would always feel a sense of guilt over it, and nothing anybody said or did could change that. As a young man, Winter had often wished his own father dead, before he actually died from an esophageal hemorrhage in his rented room while the drunk barfly he was sleeping with was passed out ten feet away. No matter how much he had despised James Massey, he always carried a sense of guilt for hating him.
“Jacob got three calls from Cyn’s phone since she’s been gone,” Brad told Alexa, handing her Jacob’s cell phone so she could see for herself.
“And one is a text message.” She handed the phone to Winter so he could read it.
“It’s from Styer,” Winter said.
“How do you know?” Alexa asked.
“He signed it. The message he sent is ‘PS I said no cops. No FBI grab experts!’”
“PS where there’s no reason for a postscript. PS for Paulus Styer,” she said. “And ‘n.o. cops.’”
Winter said, “The word ‘no’ has periods after the ‘n’ and the ‘o.’ That took effort and it was done on purpose.”
“New Orleans,” Alexa said.
“It’s a relief,” Winter said.
“Why is that a relief?” Brad said. “The man is a psychopath.”
Winter said, “Styer plans, and if he took her it’s part of his overall scheme. He has either already killed her, or he won’t unless and until it suits his purpose. If he hasn’t killed her, Mulvane should have called him off by now, and we’ll get her back. Styer figured I’d see the text message and know it was him.”
“With Jacob gone, Mulvane’s rid of his most immediate threat-a witness. The question is, what is his next move?” Brad asked Winter.
“Mulvane has to get the land deal done fast. If he hasn’t leveled with Klein and has to have the land-or this casino resort is dead in the water-then Sherry’s death and Cynthia’s grab make more sense.”
