wolfed it down. “Not a picky eater, I see.” She handed him another and it disappeared just as quickly. Then another and it was gone, too. “Okay, I get one now!” Like the dog, she wolfed it down. She had her second one, gave Hunter his fourth.
She eyed the phone. Much as she didn’t want to make the call, she had no choice. She’d tried in the past to get in touch with her son, but Roxanne had always stood in the way. Still, it had been a long time.
She picked up the phone. Called the number. Got a recording. Roxanne’s voice.
“ We’re not home. Please leave a message.”
Izzy hung up. She hadn’t counted on that. Still, maybe it was better this way. She desperately wanted to meet her grandchildren, but even if Roxanne would have relented, she could hardly see them like this, with the years melted away.
She thought for a minute, then picked up the phone.
“ Hello,” she said after hearing Roxanne’s message again. “This is Izzy, I’ve got Amy and a friend with me and I’m at the Thunderbird Motel downtown. The girls have been drugged, shot with a tranquilizer dart and I suspect they’ll be out for a while. I’m in trouble and can’t stay. The girls are in trouble too, though not because of anything they’ve done. Someone wants to use them to get to me and that someone may hurt them if I don’t do what they want.”
She paused for a second, trying to think of what to say next.
“ I can’t do what they want. It’s not possible. So, Johnny, you need to step up and be Amy’s dad. You need to keep her and her friend out of sight till I call and say it’s safe. I hope it won’t be too long. Bye.”
“ Izzy, don’t hang up.”
“ Roxanne?”
“ We don’t need to get involved in your trouble.” Same Roxanne, mean spirited. A sour person.
“ I’m writing you a check for fifty thousand dollars.”
“ What?”
“ These girls need to be kept safe and out of sight for two months. I’m post dating this check for December First. If you and Johnny have kept the girls safe for that long, you can cash it. If not, I’ll stop payment.”
“ You said two months.” Roxanne sounded a little less hostile now.
“ I’m writing another check for a hundred thousand dollars and dating it January First. If the girls are still safe and out of sight, you can cash it.”
“ Well, if it’s for Amy’s safety.” Roxanne actually sounded not bitter.
“ One more thing,” Izzy said. “My will. I’ve left each of your daughters, my grandchildren, who you’ve not allowed me to see, a trust to pay for their education. If they go to college, they get it paid for, living expenses, tuition, the whole bit. If they don’t go, they get a hundred thousand dollars each on their twenty-first birthday. I’ve split the balance between Amy and St. Catherine’s.” She paused for effect. “If these girls are safe on the New Year, I’ll change my will, cutting out St. Catherine’s and dividing my estate between Johnny and Amy. I’m an old woman and we’re talking about an awful lot of money.”
“ Thank you.”
“ I don’t like you, Roxanne. You’re a control freak who has completely taken over my son and probably warped my grandchildren’s minds against me. But if you keep these girls safe, you and Johnny will get your money. If any harm comes to them, I will make sure your fate is the same as theirs, no matter what it costs.”
“ I’ll do what you say,” Roxanne said.
“ Fine, come now. I’ll be gone before you get here.”
“ You can trust me,” Roxanne said.
“ I hope so.” Izzy hung up and smiled as she wrote out the checks. She had eight hundred dollars in the account, give or take a few bucks. Roxanne had been sticking it to her for a long time, it was about time she got some back.
She put the checks on the nightstand next to the bed, left the door unlocked, got in the car with the dog and moved it to the far end of the parking lot. Roxanne drove up and parked in front of the room fifteen minutes later. She got out of a late model Ford Explorer along with her children, three girls aged nine, eleven and thirteen.
Izzy had never seen them before. She longed to go and tell them who she was, but they’d never believe her. She wanted so badly to enfold them in a deep hug, tell them she loved them. But she couldn’t, so as soon as they disappeared into the room, she drove out of the parking lot, got back on the road and headed north.
Detective Bob Mouledoux had a bad feeling. The odds of both Dr. Shaffer and his lawyer’s untimely deaths not being related were astronomical. Using his cell he called Dr. Jordan and received no joy. He tried Dr. Romero, got no joy there, either.
“ Not good,” he muttered. Then he called the station, reported what he’d found, asked for assistance and told his sergeant what he feared.
Fifteen minutes later the crime scene van arrived. Five minutes after that he got word that Romero had been murdered. Shot between the eyes. And five minutes after that he heard about Jordan. She’d been strangled.
Four victims all killed differently, but all killed by the same person. Mouledoux was sure of that and as far as he was concerned, the newly young Isadora Eisenhower was looking pretty good for the crimes.
A sudden thought struck him. He and Peeps were apparently the only other souls who knew about Dr. Eisenhower’s transformation. What if Dr. Eisenhower was going after them next? He called his partner at home and Peeps answered after several rings.
“ Am I ever glad to hear your voice,” Mouledoux said and he told him about Dr. Eisenhower’s murder spree.
“ Christ,” Peeps said. Then, “What now?”
“ I think we gotta find that DVD Shaffer showed us.”
“ I’m on it,” Peeps said. “You?”
“ I’m going to track down the granddaughter,” Mouledoux said. “Then I’m going to see if I can locate any other family. I’m betting she’s on the run, we just gotta find out to where.”
“ I’ll get dressed and get over to St. Catherine’s. I’ll get back to you as soon as I’ve got the disc.” But when Peeps called him back forty-five minutes later he had bad news. The DVD was gone. There was no video record of the surgery the mysterious young doctor had done. Dr. Shaffer had logged it out and hadn’t returned it.
Peeps said he had gone through Shaffer’s office and hadn’t found it. He went by Shaffer’s house. The place was a wreck. It had been tossed. If someone had been looking for the DVD and if it had been there, they’d found it.
“ Swell,” Mouledoux said into the phone. “We got an APB out for Dr. Eisenhower, but everyone’s looking for a seventy-seven year old broad with cancer. You and me are the only ones alive who know what we know and we can’t tell anybody, because we’ll get laughed right out of the job.”
“ We could link the murders to the granddaughter. They look the same, except for that eye business.”
“ And what do we do if they catch her, the granddaughter? Besides, I’m guessing if she’s still alive, she doesn’t have a clue, because if she did, I’m betting she’d be dead.”
“ You think we’re next?” Peeps said.
“ If she knows about us, she might try, but we’re cops, we got guns and that’s exactly what we want.”
“ I’m going home to get a shower and kiss the wife and kids. See you at around 10:00 or so.”
“ Right.” Mouledoux closed his phone.
It hadn’t been hard for him to convince the powers that be that Dr. Eisenhower was, at the very least, a person of interest, though everybody except him had a hard time accepting the fact that a dying seventy-seven- year-old woman could be responsible for six deaths in one night.
He needed that DVD, but he was beginning to believe he wasn’t going to get it. Dr. Eisenhower had been ahead of him every step of the way. Now she was gone to who knows where, probably turning herself into an unrecognizable child. Christ, he didn’t see how they were ever going to catch her.
Then he had an idea. The flaky neighbor who had been drinking. But first he had to drop by Dr. Eisenhower’s and check out her computer.
An hour later he was home with the jpeg files he’d copied from Isadora Eisenhower’s computer. There were several shots of Amy and others in Dr. Eisenhower’s backyard on several different occasions. It looked like they did weekend barbecues for friends, sometimes just the two of them. Dr. Eisenhower wasn’t in many of the shots, so
