Alex Kava - The Soul Catcher

He thought he heard a belt buckle, maybe a zipper. Another whimper. He thought of Emma. This girl wasn’t much older. His eyes searched the trees. Movement on the right. One of the agents moving in. But no Everett.

Damn it!

He couldn’t see any glowing clothesline. No handcuffs. Maybe all that stuff was Everett’s job. If he interrupted now?

This time she cried out and Brandon slapped her again.

“Shut the fuck up and hold still,” he hissed at her.

Without hesitation, Tully was on his feet. In just a few rushed steps he had the barrel of his Glock pressed at the base of Brandon’s head even before the boy had a chance to flinch.

“No, you shut the fuck up, you bastard,” Tully yelled into his ear, so he wouldn’t miss a word. “Game’s over.”

Washington, D.C.

Maggie drove down several unfamiliar streets but found the old building easily. It was an unsavory neighborhood where she’d probably need to worry about her little red Toyota. Three teenage boys watched her the entire time she parked her car and walked to the front door. It made her want to flash her holstered Smith amp; Wesson nestled under her jacket. Instead, she did the next best thing-she ignored them.

She wasn’t sure why she was here, except that she was tired of waiting. She needed to do something, anything. She was just so tired of those old memories taunting her, making her feel guilty, that she was somehow responsible-once again-for her mother being in harm’s way. She knew she wasn’t responsible. Of course she knew that, but what she knew and what she felt were two entirely separate things.

The inside of the old building surprised Maggie. It was clean, better than clean, with the scent of Murphy’s Oil. As she climbed the wooden staircase, she noticed the walls had been freshly painted and the second-floor landing’s carpet, though threadbare, showed not a spot of dirt. On the third level, however, she could smell something like a disinfectant, and the odor grew as she progressed down the hall. It seemed to be coming from number five, Ben Garrison’s apartment.

She knocked and waited, though she didn’t expect him to be here. He’d still be in Cleveland, only hopefully this time he hadn’t gotten to the crime scene before everyone else. Tully and Racine had probably already arrested Everett and his accomplice, Brandon. They had DNA to prove Everett’s guilt, eyewitnesses and photos to put Brandon with two of the victims minutes before their deaths. Case closed. So what was still nagging her? Maybe she simply hated that Garrison-that the “invisible cameraman”-had gotten away with screwing up crime scenes. Maybe she was curious about his apparent obsession with death, his voyeurism. Perhaps she simply needed to keep her mind preoccupied.

Maggie glanced down the hallway and knocked again. This time she heard scuffles on the staircase. A little gray-haired lady appeared on the landing, staring up at her through thick glasses.

“I think he’s out of town,” she told Maggie. But before Maggie could respond, she asked, “Are you from the health department? I don’t have anything to do with those roaches. I want you to know, it was his doing.”

Maggie’s suit must have looked official. She didn’t say a word, and yet the woman was scooting in front of her to unlock Garrison’s door.

“I try to keep the place clean, but some of these tenants…Well, you just can’t trust people these days.” She opened the door and waved a hand at Maggie as she headed back to the staircase.

“Just close up when you’re finished.”

Maggie hesitated. What would it hurt to take a look?

The first thing to catch her eyes were the African death masks, three of them, on the wall over the cracked vinyl sofa. They had been carved from wood with paint-smeared tribal symbols across the forehead and cheeks and under the eyeholes. On the opposite wall were several black-and-white photographs, labeled portraits: Zulu, Three-Hill Tribe, Aborigine, Basuto, Andamanese. Garrison seemed obsessed with his subjects’ eyes, sometimes cropping the forehead and chin in order to draw more focus to the eyes. A bottom photo, labeled: Tepehuane, showed what looked like the back of his subject’s head, perhaps a defiant stance, a denial. One meaningful enough for Garrison to keep.

Maggie shook her head. She didn’t have time to psychoanalyze Garrison, nor was she certain she would if she had the time. There was something odd about a man who could be so fascinated by ancient cultures and their people and yet stand back and watch young women be attacked in a public park. Or did Garrison consider everyone to be simply a photographic subject and nothing more?

At the police station, when she questioned him about the incident in Boston Common, he had said something strange about her having no idea what it took to stop or to make news happen. Yet, wasn’t that exactly what he had been doing with Everett? His photos had broken the story about the church’s members and their possible connection to the murder of the senator’s daughter and the murder in Boston. But it went further than that. It was his photographs that caused Everett to initially even become a suspect. In a sense Garrison’s photos had led them directly to Everett. He had made news happen.

Something skittered across the floor behind her. Maggie spun around. Three huge cockroaches escaped into a crack half their size under the kitchen counter.

Damn it!

She tried to settle her nerves. Cockroaches. Why did it not surprise her that Garrison would be surrounded by them?

But the landlady was correct in that Garrison’s apartment did not match the spotless hall and the staircase, nor the rest of the aging but clean building. Discarded clothes trailed to the bedroom and bathroom. Crusty dishes and empty beer bottles littered the kitchen counter. Stacks of magazines and newspapers created leaning roach hotels in almost every corner. No, she shouldn’t be surprised to see Garrison’s roommates were cockroaches.

She wandered through the rooms, finding nothing interesting in his clutter. Although she wasn’t sure what she expected to find. Suddenly, she stepped on a book that lay in the middle of the floor, as if someone had dropped it. The leather binding was clean and smooth. It was definitely not something he usually kept on the floor. On closer inspection she realized it was a journal, the pages filled with a lovely, slanted penmanship that sometimes took on a frantic urgency, easily visible by the dramatic changes in jagged lines and curves.

She picked it up and it opened to a page bookmarked with what looked to be an old unused airline ticket, the corners worn and creased. Destination was Uganda, Africa, though it certainly was long expired. The entry it marked was also dog-eared, the only page with its gold-trim creased.

“Dear son,” the entry began, “this is something I could never tell you. If you’re reading it now, it’s only after my death, and I apologize that this is the manner in which I have resorted to tell you. A coward’s manner-it would certainly embarrass any Zulu tribe member. Please forgive me for that. But how could I possibly look into your sad and already angry eyes and tell you that your father had brutally raped me? Yes, that’s right. Raped me. I was only nineteen. It was my first year in college. I had a brilliant career I was preparing for.”

Maggie stopped and flipped to the beginning of the journal, looking for a name, a reference to the owner, and finding none. But she didn’t need a name. She already knew whose journal it was. It certainly couldn’t be a coincidence. But how had Garrison come across the book? Where in the world had he found it? Among Everett’s personal belongings, perhaps? Would Everett have kept the journal of a woman he had raped more than twenty-five years ago? And how would he have gotten it?