Ted Dekker: The Bride Collector

“Paradise!”

Quinton’s face twisted with rage and he calmly reached for the fallen gun near his right knee.

Paradise rushed like a nurse on a battlefield to the man she loved. “I’m sorry, Brad. I couldn’t leave-”

“Get down!” Brad shouted. “Run, Paradise!” If she ran she might make it. She might!

“Run!”

Paradise stopped halfway to him, confused. “What?”

Brad watched the scene as if it were playing out on a huge screen in slow motion. His scream came out in a long groan, slowed to half speed.

“Run!”

“What?”

Quinton had his gun in his palm.

He swung it around to bear on her back.

Paradise saw Brad’s horrified expression and slowly turned back to follow his eyes, blocking his view of the killer. And of the gunshot that bellowed like a cannon announcing the end of an era.

Boom!

Brad’s heart stopped.

She started to fall. His eyes were searching for the exit wound because that’s what his mind was trained to do, but in his heart he was dying with her.

Paradise sank to her knees, shaking as if even now she was refusing to die, because even now she was innocent enough to cling to hope when none existed.

“Are you okay, sir?”

The voice came from his left, but it hardly registered. What was registering was the fact that Paradise hadn’t fallen.

Then, only when Paradise leaned over and sobbed, did Brad see Quinton Gauld’s fallen form beyond her. He had been shot through his head.

Brad blinked.

A voice crackled over a radio. “… an ambulance here. One dead, believed to be the subject in question. Let the FBI know we have their crime scene secure.” A Kansas state peace officer in a brown uniform holstered his weapon and nodded at Brad.

“Special Agent Brad Raines?”

“Yes,” he croaked.

“Sergeant Robby Bitterman, sir.” He glanced at the man he’d shot. “I’d say that was a close one.”

Then Paradise was rushing toward Brad. Falling to her knees. Throwing her arms around his neck.

She said nothing; she only wept.

“WHAT ABOUT A trip to the beach?” Casanova asked, pacing the park lawn in his long robe and slippers. “I would really love to take a trip to the beach. No offense, Allison, dear. This park is lovely, the setting is beautiful, the mountains, the sky, the birds all perfect to set the mood. But I would rather do a different kind of bird-watching, if you catch my drift.”

Allison’s eyes twinkled. She looked at her four children, as she had come to feel about this bunch. Roudy, the persistent sleuth, had dressed today as always in plaids (which he mistook for tweeds), a bow tie, and today even a pipe (albeit smokeless) that Allison had given him a week earlier when they’d found Paradise.

Andrea, the young one, let her blond hair flow with a breeze that rustled up the park’s summer greens. Her eyes were on the skateboard park two hundred yards down the hill. “I see some birds flying down there,” she said.

“The more naturally clothed variety is what I had in mind,” Cass said.

Andrea faced the self-appointed love guru. “You have a dirty old mind, Cass. Just because a girl has a bikini on doesn’t make her natural. Not at all.”

Casanova didn’t miss a beat. “You could watch the hunks, Dre. Sweat dripping off the corded muscles of bodybuilders pressing massive weights on the beach. While I give them pointers on bird-watching.”

“Sounds disgusting,” she said.

Paradise giggled.

Allison looked at the girl she now thought of simply as her favorite, though she would never call her that aloud, particularly not in front of the others. Paradise sat on the grass with her legs folded back to her right, leaning with one arm hooked over Brad Raines’s knee. There were two things about this picture that filled Allison with more joy than an ex-nun should be allowed.

One, Paradise was in a park, forty miles from CWI. The agoraphobia that had once cauterized the flow of her life was now gone.

Two, Paradise was in the arms of a man, and such a man as Brad Raines, whom they all thought might be God incarnate by the way they jumped at his every comment. They were all heroes in their own minds, but Brad was the one true hero. Even in Allison’s mind.

After all, he loved Paradise. And Paradise loved him. That alone made them both heroes.

He had also brought in the Bride Collector, though Roudy took plenty of credit for cracking the case. To Allison’s understanding, Paradise had apprehended the killer as much as Roudy or Brad.

Paradise had made the call that narrowed the authorities’ search to a narrow strip along the Kansas-Colorado border near the town of St. Francis. Within fifteen minutes they had identified nineteen potential locations that fit the Bride Collector’s MO-abandoned barns, shacks, silos, a couple of old farmhouses. In all, thirty-two state troopers, state police, and local police had been pulled into duty and dispatched to those nineteen locations with strict orders to approach with extreme caution.

Fifty-four minutes after Temple made the call to the chief of police in St. Francis, Sergeant Robby Bitterman rolled to a stop seventy-five yards from Sam Warner’s old abandoned equipment barn on the north side of his wheat fields, surprised to see it lighted. He had called for backup, then gone in on foot and, for the first time in his fifteen-year career, used his sidearm to kill a man. A single shot through the head from twenty feet.

The officer had shot Quinton, but Paradise had taken his power already, his power over her, over them all. God had reached down and saved his favorite. Why her and not the others, Allison didn’t know.

Whether or not Paradise really had seen something in Quinton’s spirit-his ghost or his past-neither she nor Paradise knew for certain. These things were mysteries to them all.

To see Paradise now, only a week after that harrowing night, shining like all young women in love should, Allison wasn’t sure she could have wished a different scenario upon them all. Paradise had approached her and asked if, now that she was learning so much about love, she should become a nun. Allison freed her from the obligation immediately, and Paradise had run off with a light step and relieved smile.

“Have you talked to him yet?” Roudy asked, sidling up to Brad. “The man upstairs, I mean.”

“To Temple you mean?”

“That’s the one. I really do think I’ve earned it. I’m sure you would agree.”

Allison stepped in. “We’ve all earned a lot these last two weeks, Roudy. But sometimes it takes a while to get comfortable in our new skin.”

He looked at her and cocked an eyebrow. “Please, Allison, I was born comfortable. Don’t mistake any eccentricities on my part as being less than perfectly capable or smooth as silk in the halls of justice.”

“Never. But their world is still a new skin. It may take time before they fully understand your… talents. No?”

That made him pause.

“Well, I see your talents,” Brad said. “And so does Temple. Frankly, you might have some challenges accepting their talents. They don’t see the world the same way you do.”

“True,” Roudy said, lifting a finger. “I see your point.”

“I’m not sure you want the office you asked for. It would require a lot of travel.”

“True. Good point.”

“I think it would be much easier to bring copies of the unsolved cases to you, to sift through at your own pace, unencumbered by the clumsy efforts of less insightful men and women. Don’t you?”

“Now that you put it that way, I do. A very good point indeed.” He marched back toward Allison. “So then, we should be getting back. No time to waste.”