Tess Gerritsen - Keeper of the Bride

“You want me to drive? Then move the hell over.”

“Sam, are you hearing me?”

“Yes, damn you!” Sam shouted back in a sudden outburst of rage. Then, with a groan, he dropped his head in his hands. Quietly he said, “It’s my fault. My fault she’s going to die. They were right there in front of me. And I couldn’t think of any way to save her. Any way to keep her alive.”

Gillis gave a sigh of comprehension. “She means that much to you?”

“And Spectre knows it. Somehow he knows it. That’s why he’s keeping her alive. To torment me. Manipulate me. He has the winning hand and he’s using it.” He looked at Gillis. “We have to find her.”

“Right now, he has the advantage. He has someone who means a lot to you. And you’re the cop he seems to be focused on. The cop he wants to get back at.” He glanced down at his car phone. It was ringing.

He answered it. “Gillis here.” A moment later he hung up and started the car. “Jackman Avenue,” he said, pulling into the road. “It could be our break.”

“What’s on Jackman Avenue?”

“An apartment, unit 338-D. They just found a body there.”

Sam went very still. A sense of dread had clamped down on his chest, making it difficult to breathe. He asked, softly, “Whose body?”

“Marilyn Dukoff’s.”

HE WAS SINGING “Dixie!” as he worked, stringing out wire in multicolored lengths along the floor. Nina, hands and feet bound to a heavy chair, could only sit and watch helplessly. Next to Spectre was a toolbox, a soldering iron, and two dozen dynamite sticks.

“In Dixieland where I was born, early on a frosty morn-in’…”

Spectre finished laying out the wire and turned his attention to the dynamite. With green electrical tape, he neatly bundled the sticks together in groups of three and set the bundles in a cardboard box.

“In Dixieland we’ll make our stand, to live and die in Dixie. Away, away, away down south, in DIXIE!” he boomed out, and his voice echoed in the far reaches of the vast and empty warehouse. Then, turning to Nina, he dipped his head in a bow.

“You’re crazy,” whispered Nina.

“But what is madness? Who’s to say?” Spectre wound green tape around the last three dynamite sticks. Then he gazed at the bundles, admiring his work. “What’s that saying? ‘Don’t get mad, get even’? Well, I’m not mad, in any sense of the word. But I am going to get even.”

He picked up the box of dynamite and was carrying it toward Nina when he seemed to stumble. Nina’s heart almost stopped as the box of explosives tilted toward the floor. Toward her.

Spectre gave a loud gasp of horror just before he caught the box. To Nina’s astonishment, he suddenly burst out laughing. “Just an old joke,” he admitted. “But it never fails to get a reaction.”

He really was crazy, she thought, her heart thudding.

Carrying the box of dynamite, he moved about the warehouse, laying bundles of explosives at measured intervals around the perimeter. “It’s a shame, really,” he said, “to waste so much quality dynamite on one building. But I do want to leave a good impression. A lasting impression. And I’ve had quite enough of Sam Navarro and his nine lives. This should take care of any extra lives he still has.”

“You’re laying a trap.”

“You’re so clever.”

“Why? Why do you want to kill him?”

“Because.”

“He’s just a policeman doing his job.”

“ Just a policeman?” Spectre turned to her, but his expression remained hidden in the shadows of the warehouse. “Navarro is more than that. He’s a challenge. My nemesis. To think, after all these years of success in cities like Boston and Miami, I should find my match in a small town like this. Not even Portland, Oregon, but Portland, Maine. ” He gave a laugh of self-disgust. “It ends here, in this warehouse. Between Navarro and me.”

Spectre crossed toward her, carrying the final bundle of dynamite. He knelt beside the rocking chair where Nina sat with hands and ankles bound. “I saved the last blast for you, Miss Cormier,” he said. And he taped the bundle under Nina’s chair. “You won’t feel a thing,” he assured her. “It will happen so fast, why, the next thing you know, you’ll be sprouting angel’s wings. So will Navarro. If he gets his wings at all.”

“He’s not stupid. He’ll know you’ve set a trap.”

Spectre began stringing out more color-coded wire now, yards and yards of it. “Yes, it should be quite obvious this isn’t any run-of-the-mill bomb. All this wire, tangled up to confuse him. Circuitry that makes no sense…” He snipped a white wire, then a red one. With his soldering iron, he connected the ends. “And the time ticking away. Minutes, then seconds. Which is the detonator wire? Which wire should he cut? The wrong one, and it all goes up in smoke. The warehouse. You. And him — if he has nerve enough to see it to the end. It’s a hopeless dilemma, you see. He stays to disarm it and you could both die. He chickens out and runs, and you die, leaving him with guilt he’ll never forget. Either way, Sam Navarro suffers. And I win.”

“You can’t win.”

“Spare me the moralistic warnings. I have work to do. And not much time to do it.” He strung the wires out to the other dynamite bundles, crisscrossing colors, splicing ends to blasting caps.

Not much time to do it, he had said. How much time was he talking about?

She glanced down at the other items laid out on the floor. A digital timer. A radio transmitter. It was to be a timed device, she realized, the countdown triggered by that transmitter. Spectre would be safely out of the building when he armed the bomb. Out of harm’s way when it exploded.

Stay away, Sam, she thought. Please stay away. And live.

Spectre rose to his feet and glanced at his watch. “Another hour and I should be ready to make the call.” He looked at her and smiled. “Three in the morning, Miss Cormier. That seems as good an hour as any to die, don’t you think?”

THE WOMAN WAS NUDE from the waist down, her body crumpled on the wood floor. She had been shot once, in the head.

“The report came in at 10:45,” said Yeats from Homicide. “Tenant below us noticed bloodstains seeping across the ceiling and called the landlady. She opened the door, saw the body and called us. We found the victim’s ID in her purse. That’s why we called you.”

“Any witnesses? Anyone see anything, hear anything?” asked Gillis.

“No. He must’ve used a silencer. Then slipped out without being seen.”

Sam gazed around at the sparsely furnished room. The walls were bare, the closets half empty, and there were boxes of clothes on the floor — all signs that Marilyn Dukoff had not yet settled into this apartment.

Yeats confirmed it. “She moved in a day ago, under the name Marilyn Brown. Paid the deposit and first month’s rent in cash. That’s all the landlady could tell me.”

“She have any visitors?” asked Gillis.

“Next-door tenant heard a man’s voice in here yesterday. But never saw him.”

“Spectre,” said Sam. He focused once again on the body. The criminalists were already combing the room, dusting for prints, searching for evidence. They would find none, Sam already knew; Spectre would’ve seen to it.

There was no point hanging around here; they’d be better off trying to chase sirens. He turned to the door, then paused as he heard one of the detectives say, “Not much in the purse. Wallet, keys, a few bills—”

“What bills?” asked Sam.

“Electric, phone. Water. Look like they’re to the old apartment. The name Dukoff’s on them. Delivered to a PO box.”