Vicious

it make you feel superior?”

“Please, Jordan, stop it!” Leo cried. “You don’t do this kind of thing! The Jordan I know—the one who’s my friend—he wouldn’t do anything like this….”

Jordan pulled the knife away from the man’s throat, then let go of his scalp.

The man started coughing behind the gag in his mouth. His head slumped against the worktable, and his whole body shook.

Jordan stepped away from him. The knife slipped out of his hands and clanked on the cellar floor. Leo almost recoiled as his friend came toward him. But Jordan put his arms around him. “Oh, God, Leo,” he cried, hugging him fiercely. “My mom was naked when they found her. He’d stripped off all her clothes. My mom…she always used to get so cold at night….”

Leo felt his friend’s tears against the side of his face. He patted his back and looked over at the man. He was crying, too—and choking. Leo wondered how he could breathe with a nose full of snot and that gag in his mouth.

“C’mon, buddy, sit down,” Leo whispered, leading Jordan to the stairs. With a sigh, Jordan sank down on the third step from the bottom. He wiped his eyes.

Leo patted him on the shoulder. “I’m going to take the gag out of his mouth so he doesn’t choke to death, okay?”

Jordan numbly stared down at the cement floor.

Leo went back to the man and carefully pulled at the wadded-up handkerchief in his mouth. “My God,” he murmured. “This is really crammed in here….”

Once Leo had pried out the handkerchief, the man gasped and went into a coughing fit. His scratched face was beet-red, and Leo stared at the veins protruding on the side of his forehead. “Thanks,” he finally whispered in a raspy voice. “Thank you.” Then he lapsed into another coughing fit.

Leo hurried over to the laundry sink. He grabbed a plastic measuring cup off the top of the washer and filled it with water. But it foamed over with suds. He kept rinsing out the cup, and then filled it up and tasted it. There was still a faint under-taste of soap, but he figured the guy didn’t care. He took the cup to him, and the man slurped it down. “Thank you,” he said again. “My face is burning up. Please, if you could…”

Grabbing the handkerchief, Leo went to the sink again and ran the handkerchief under the faucet. He glanced over his shoulder at Jordan.

His friend stared back at him. “I’m not letting him go,” he said quietly.

Leo returned to the man and patted his face with the cool, wet handkerchief. The guy hadn’t been kidding. His face was hot, like something was cooking under the skin. Leo did his best to clean the dirt and dried blood off the gash on his cheek. This close, he could see a horrible bruise forming on his forehead—and a second bump on his skull, the bloody clot partially obscured by his thick, silver-black hair. Leo couldn’t believe Jordan had done this to the man.

“Please,” the man whispered. “Please, you need to call the police….” He coughed again. “Your friend is making a terrible mistake. If I was really a murderer, would I be begging you to get the police?”

Leo looked back at Jordan.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if he and the sheriff had some kind of deal,” Jordan said. “I’ve read everything there is about Mama’s Boy. I’ve become an expert on the subject. One of the theories was that Mama’s Boy must have had a police connection of some sort, and that’s why he was always able to keep one step ahead of the investigators. For a while there, they even thought Mama’s Boy was a cop.” He glared at the man and then shook his head at Leo. “No police.”

“If you don’t trust the sheriff here, then call the state police,” the man argued. He glanced at Leo. “I don’t care who you call. Just get me some help, please. He hit me in the head and knocked me out twice. I feel nauseous. For all I know, I could have a concussion. I belong in a hospital….”

“You belong in the fucking electric chair,” Jordan grumbled.

Leo turned to Jordan. “His forehead’s awfully hot. He could be really sick.”

“My fiancee and her son are waiting for me,” the man explained. “We came up here for the weekend—from Seattle. They’re probably climbing the walls wondering what’s happened….”

“That’s bullshit,” Jordan said, standing up. He clutched the banister. “You told me the kid was four years old. I saw your car, asshole. There wasn’t a child seat in the back. There was nothing in that car to indicate a kid had ever been in it. You’re lying.”

“We came up in separate cars!” the man cried. “I wanted to open the rental house and rent a boat before she got up here—so it would be all ready for her. They drove up in an old-model red Toyota yesterday afternoon. Damn it, go to Twenty-two Birch and ask. Her name is Susan Blanchette, and her son’s name is Matthew. We’ve known each other a year. Check it out, I’m telling the truth.”

His mouth open, Jordan stared at him and blinked.

Leo remembered the woman with the little boy at the store yesterday. Jordan had shown some interest in her. Leo turned toward the man. “Is your fiancee thin and kind of tall—really pretty with dark brown hair?”

The man nodded. Then he looked at Jordan. “She got a flat tire yesterday in practically the same spot I did. Were you responsible for that, too?”

Jordan said nothing.

“Did you sabotage her car the way you did mine?” the man pressed.

Jordan shook his head. “No. And you’re here to answer questions—not ask them.” He stepped down to the bottom of the stairs, then reached behind his back. From the waist of his jeans, he pulled out a gun that had been hidden by his shirttail.

“My God,” Leo murmured. His first inclination was to back away, but he held his ground between Jordan and the man. He’d never seen his friend with a gun before.

“Do you always take a Smith & Wesson along on family vacations?” Jordan asked.

The man seemed stumped for a moment. “It’s registered,” he said. “I bought it because I was carjacked once. I wasn’t sure about the area here, so I brought it along—just to be safe.”

Jordan cracked a tiny smile. “Didn’t quite work out for you, did it?”

“Owning a gun doesn’t make me a killer,” the man argued. “I’ve never used it.”

“You’re right, Mama’s Boy,” Jordan replied. “You strangled all your victims—after stripping them and beating the hell out of them. But I’ll bet you used a gun plenty of times—when you abducted those women. Not with my mom, you beat her unconscious with a blackjack before you took her away. But there were others. You must have had a gun on Anita Breckinridge at that Safeway in Lynnwood. How else would you have persuaded her to leave her kid sitting in the shopping cart and quietly walk out of the store with you? You must remember Anita, Allen. That was just a few days after Christmas, 1997. Poor Anita never got to see the New Year. You left her body by a jogging trail off Lake Union in Seattle.”

Stepping closer to the worktable, Jordan showed him the Smith & Wesson revolver. “Was this the gun you used so she’d cooperate? Did you stick this pistol in Melanie Edgars’ back? Is that why she went with you? All the newspapers wondered why a mother would suddenly leave her three-year-old son unattended in the kiddy pool. That was at the Burien Park and Recreation Center in the summer of 2000. You left a little plastic pail and shovel by Melanie’s beach blanket. You held on to Melanie longer than the others—three days. Then you killed her and dumped her body on the beach in West Seattle….”

“Oh, God, please,” the man whispered to Leo. “You have to do something. This is insane….”

Leo stared at his best friend. Jordan was practically a stranger to him. His buddy had never even hinted he knew about these murders. Yet obviously, he had all the names, places, and approximate dates committed to memory.

He wondered how Jordan could be so certain this man was his mother’s killer. It had happened ten years ago. And from Jordan’s own telling, he’d been in a boat on the bay, some distance from his mother and the man who had abducted her.

“Listen, I’m sorry your mother was murdered,” the man said. Stretched over the worktable, his whole body trembled. “That’s horrible, and I—I—don’t blame you for wanting to get even with somebody— anybody—for what happened to her. But you have the wrong guy, Jordan. You’ve made a terrible mistake. I’m begging you to call the police. I won’t press charges. I’m just asking you to do the right thing,