“It’s him,” Cait said vehemently. “I’m certain of it, even if you’re not.” It was the first spark of life she’d shown in the conversation.

  “Okay, even if it is him, things have a way of changing, often when you least expect them to.”

  “How are they going to change? There’s no way to stop him. It’s impossible.”

  “Just take things one step at a time, honey. Can you do that for me?”

  “It’s the only thing I can do. I’m completely at a loss for ideas.”

  “Are you at home?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Why don’t you stay there until you hear from me again? I’ll be leaving for Tampa in a little while and I’ll need a ride home from the airport when I arrive. Do you think you could pick me up?”

  Cait paused and then said, “Of course.”

  “Caitlyn, you sound awful. How much sleep did you get last night?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “You didn’t sleep at all?”

  “No. How could I?”

  Virginia ran a hand tiredly over her face. She had just gotten up and she was already exhausted. And it was going to be a very long day. “Okay, Cait, listen to me. Try to get some rest and I’ll call you as soon as I know what time my flight will be landing this afternoon.”

  They disconnected the call and Virginia sighed deeply. She wondered whether there was any reason to believe the reassurance she had tried to give her daughter. It was clear Cait didn’t.

  She wasn’t sure she did, either.

  * * *

  It was five minutes after ten when she walked through the metal detector at Bridgewater State Hospital. The guard manning the front entrance remembered her from yesterday and gave her a smile. “Back again so soon?” he said.

  Virginia forced herself to return his smile, although it was the last thing she felt like doing. She was nervous and afraid and thought she had a pretty good idea how a prisoner walking to the electric chair might feel.

  “I don’t know when I’ll have the chance to return,” she said, “so I wanted to pay Milo one last visit while I still can.”

  “Flying solo today?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Where’s your daughter?”

  “Oh, she’s back in Florida. Yes, it’s just me this time.”

  Virginia had emptied her pockets and now she stepped through the metal detector. She gathered up her things as the guard pressed a button on a console and spoke into a telephone handset.

  A moment later, another guard appeared through a doorway and signaled for Virginia to follow. It was a different door than the one she and Cait had gone through yesterday to get to the warden’s office, and she assumed this corridor would lead directly to the medical wing and Milo’s room.

  She didn’t recognize this guard. He was polite and respectful and made innocuous small talk as they navigated through the complex. Virginia tried to engage him as best she could, but the deeper they descended into the bowels of the ancient structure, the blacker her mood seemed to get.

  After what felt like an eternity—the route must have been a shortcut compared to yesterday’s trip from the warden’s office to the hospital ward, but it sure didn’t feel like it—they rounded a corner and approached Milo’s room from the opposite direction.

  At the door, the guard turned the handle and waved Virginia inside. She thanked him and walked into the room and was horrified when the man entered behind her.

  This was unacceptable. She needed to be alone for her plan to have any chance at all of succeeding. Even then it was probably a fool’s errand. But with an armed prison guard standing less than five feet away, she had no chance.

  She should have known better than to think this guard would ignore the rules as yesterday’s had. Undoubtedly it was against regulations for any visitor to be left alone with a prisoner. The fact that this particular prisoner was totally immobile, helpless and unable to attempt escape under any circumstances must have convinced yesterday’s guard to give Virginia and Cait a little privacy.

  Virginia now realized she had been stupid not to plan for this. The fear and desperation she had been experiencing all morning ratcheted up even further, and she struggled to keep from fleeing the room, from rushing past the guard and running for the exit.

  Instead she stood motionless, conscious of the guard’s presence behind her and of her son’s still form in front of her. She had to do something, so she turned and looked up at the guard and told him the truth.

  “I’ve come to say good-bye to my son,” she said. “This is the last time I’ll ever see him, I’m far too ill to do this again and it’s far too painful. May I please have a few minutes alone with him?”

  The guard hesitated, clearly weighing regulations against his humane desire to allow an anguished mother a little time to try to achieve some sort of peace. She thought he was going to refuse her, but after a moment he said, “Of course. I’ll be right outside if you need me.”

  And just like that, Virginia was alone with Milo. She inched forward and stood next to his hospital bed. Like yesterday, his right wrist was handcuffed to the stainless steel bed rail. She looked down at him, filled with fear and regret and a longing for things that had never been and things that could never be.

  He was a monster, she knew that. Virginia Ayers had lived too long and undergone too much heartache to fool herself into believing anything else. She wouldn’t have been able to even if she tried.

  Milo Cain was irreparably broken and had been his entire life. His paralysis and coma were not symptoms of his illness but rather the result of it. The world would be better off with Milo out of it. She was as certain of that as she had been of anything in her life.

  But he was still her son. Her flesh and blood. Milo’s body was pale, wasted, muscles mostly atrophied after more than six months of total paralysis. Nevertheless, as she stood next to his bed gazing into his slack features, the resemblance to her long-dead husband was clear. She looked into his face and saw Robert, and the tears welled up in her eyes, tears she had not shed in many years. Tears she had long ago thought herself incapable of shedding anymore.

  But this was not Robert, and the resemblance of the son to the father changed nothing about what she had come here to do. What she must do if she was to have any chance of saving at least one member of her doomed family. She closed her eyes and gave thanks to a God she had long since stopped acknowledging, that Robert Ayers had not lived to see the atrocities committed by his only son.

  Or the one she was here to commit.

  She picked up Milo’s hand and held it between both of hers. It was larger than hers, but not by much. It felt cool and bony, wasted away like the rest of his body until resembling nothing so much as a skeleton tightly covered by an almost translucent wrap, a wrap that looked like skin but felt brittle and delicate, like centuries-old parchment.

  His skin felt almost alien, which struck Virginia as most appropriate. Milo Cain was an alien. Not in the commonly accepted sense of the word—he hadn’t come down from the sky in a spacecraft from another world—but he might as well have. His bizarre abilities and shattered personality had made him as unlike the rest of humanity as any space alien could ever have been.

  Virginia blinked herself back to reality and realized she had been standing here ruminating on her poor son’s miserable fate for far too long. She didn’t know how long the guard would wait outside in the hallway before checking on things inside the inmate’s room.

  She couldn’t afford to waste what precious little time she had left.

  She let go of Milo’s hand. Turned and checked the door. It was still closed, and the tiny reinforced-glass window revealed nothing on the other side. No guard. No nurses or doctors scurrying along the hallway. Nothing.

  Virginia Ayers turned back to her son and said softly, “I’m so sorry, Milo. I’m so sorry for everything.”

  She lifted his head with her left hand—it was much heavier than she had expected—and removed one of the two pillows it had been resting on.

  Then she lowered his head gently to the remaining pillow.

  With one last glance toward the still-empty hallway, Virginia Ayers grasped the pillow in both hands, one on either side, and dropped it onto her son’s face. She pressed it firmly against his nose and mouth and eased down with a steady but relentless pressure.

  There was no struggle.

  No movement.

  Nothing at all to indicate Virginia Ayers was suffocating her own child to death.

  31

  Milo was dozing when the door to his room opened. He snapped awake, confused as to the time and the purpose of the visit. Existing primarily in the spiritual realm—as was the case for him now—had its advantages, but being tethered to a weak and unresponsive body carried with it certain obvious risks, especially when you were one of the most hated and feared men in America.

  So he listened closely. Was this a visit to change his linens? Change his colostomy bag? Bathe him?

  The nurses who normally attended to his physical needs didn’t waste their breath speaking to him—why would they?—but in most instances, they worked in pairs and their visits were marked by the constant inane chattering of young-adult women. Milo had spent many hours in blissful contemplation of what he would have done with their supple bodies were he not an inanimate mass of deteriorating flesh.

  For a moment there was no noise at all, a situation that concerned Milo. It was simply not in the nurses’ DNA to work quietly. Even on the rare occasions when only one young woman came in to attend to him, the nurse would invariably entertain herself by singing or humming under her breath, or talking to herself while texting on her phone, or doing something else to rein in her revulsion at having to care for Milo Cain, the notorious Mr. Midnight.

  The swishing of clothing told him that someone was definitely inside the room. He was not imagining things. He waited, on edge, for something to happen.

  And then Virginia Ayers spoke.

  It was the last voice in the world he expected to hear. After popping into The Evil Bitch Connelly’s head and discovering she was back in Florida, Milo had made the obvious and reasonable assumption that Mommy Dearest had flown south as well.

  Clearly that was not the case.

  Milo was so surprised at this development that he almost missed what the old biddy said. And it was significant: “I’ve come to say good-bye to my son. This is the last time I’ll ever see him, I’m far too ill to do this again and it’s far too painful. May I please have a few minutes alone with him?”

  The guards had become lackadaisical regarding security procedures, at least where Milo was concerned, not that he blamed them. He was the subject of a monthly examination by the prison doctor, and the quack had consistently made the same diagnosis: there was simply no evidence to suggest Milo would ever come out of his coma. And even if by some miracle he did, he would remain paralyzed from the neck down. Forever.

  Thus there was little reason for the guards to be concerned about the pathetic excuse for a human being wasting away in his hospital bed, his right wrist chained to the bed rail. It therefore came as no surprise when the guard agreed to wait outside. Milo strained to hear his voice, to determine which of the many Bridgewater State Prison guards had accompanied his mother on her visit, but he was disappointed as the man spoke softly, almost inaudibly, before disappearing through the door and then closing it behind him.

  No matter. Milo was intrigued but not worried. Virginia Ayers had seemingly been on her last legs six months ago, weak and old beyond her years. And when Milo had been inside The Evil Bitch’s head at The Crow’s Nest, he had been surprised—though gladdened—when Connelly looked at their mother. The last few months had definitely not been kind to her, and she had gone even further downhill physically.

  So there was no threat here. Virginia was undoubtedly going to pour her heart out over her son’s comatose body, secure in the knowledge he could hear none of her twaddle. She would cry and wail in self-recrimination, stroking his brow with her ancient veiny hand as she tried to determine where she had gone so wrong.

  It would be a few minutes of entertainment, a welcome break from the endless boredom of his day.

  But nothing happened. Milo heard the rustle of clothing again as his mother approached his bed and then stopped. The flood of words he anticipated did not materialize. If she was crying, she was doing it quietly.

  After a time, he sensed she picked up his hand and held it in hers. He couldn’t feel it, of course, as he could feel nothing in his body below the neck. But still he knew it. He just did. And he was repulsed. It was awful enough to realize he was related by blood to this dried-up old witch, but to actually be touched by her? To be violated by the touch of her cadaverous hands on his skin?

  It was torture of the vilest order. It made the things he had done to all of the young women over the last ten years seem like child’s play. This was truly inhuman.

  And there was nothing he could do about it. He had no control over his muscles, could not escape Virginia Ayers’s clutches no matter how badly he might want to. He waited for it to be over, waited for her to feel she had accomplished whatever silly goal she had set for herself here, so she would turn around and leave forever.

  The minutes seemed to stretch into eternity. Milo’s sense of the passage of time had badly deteriorated after being comatose for six months, but still it seemed as though something should be happening. Anything.

  At last the old hag spoke, so softly he could barely hear her words, even though she was standing right next to him. “I’m so sorry, Milo. I’m so sorry for everything.”

  This was not what he had expected. The words, yes, but not the tone accompanying them. She didn’t sound hopeless and despairing; she sounded regretful but determined.

  Like she had reached a decision that she hated to have to make, but had come to realize she was strong enough to carry it through. Alarm bells began going off in Milo Cain’s head, the same alarm bells that had allowed him to stay ahead of the authorities for a decade as he had carried out his reign of terror in Boston.

  Something was wrong.

  Something was more than wrong.

  Almost before he realized what was happening, Milo felt pressure on his face, on the one part of his broken body that could still experience the sensation of touch.

  It was so unusual, it had been so long since he had experienced any physical feeling of any kind, that for a moment he could not quite process it.

  Then the pressure increased dramatically, and Milo began to feel hazy and confused. Blackness began to envelop him, like a thick curtain had been dropped on his head and was choking out the light as it fluttered to the ground all around him.

  She was killing him.

  The ancient hag was killing him.

  She had covered his nose and mouth with something, probably one of his pillows or a blanket, and was smothering the life out of him.

  The blackness thickened. Milo came as close to surrendering to unthinking panic as he ever had. He was seconds from dropping into the abyss. The lights were flickering out. Quickly.

  And he did the only thing he could think of in his weakened and desperate state.

  He jumped into Virginia Ayers’s head.

  If he was going to die, maybe he could take the old bitch with him.

  32

  Virginia pressed more firmly on the pillow, using all the leverage she could muster out of her rail-thin body. She was shaking and breathing heavily, nearly hyperventilating from the stress. The guard might poke his head through the door at any moment to check on them and she needed to finish this awful task NOW.

  The lack of struggle put up by Milo Cain’s wasted body was the most horrifying part of this terrible chore. She should have expected it—he had been paralyzed for over six months, after all—but for some reason she hadn’t considered her son’s utter helplessness when she had concocted her plan.

  The ease with which she could end another human being’s life was shocking. It was worse than she could ever have imagined. And she wasn’t strangling just any other person; she was killing her own flesh and blood. Filicide, she thought, is the term for the murder of one’s own child.

  It was a sterile, stark term for a messy and horrifying experience.

  With Milo not struggling, Virginia wasn’t sure when she should ease up on the pressure. The last thing she wanted was to allow air into Milo’s lungs prematurely, to misjudge and find out later that he had somehow survived.

  As appalling as was the notion of killing her own child, the only thing worse would be to allow him to live and continue tearing people’s lives apart. His madness had destroyed enough innocent victims. The damage had to end now.

  She found a reserve of strength and leaned even harder into the pillow. She would push for another thirty seconds and then—

  —Virginia recoiled as if she had been slapped. Her brain felt…strange…like she was suffering from a severe head cold that had attacked her in an instant, rather than over the course of a couple of days.

  It wasn’t a headache.

  It wasn’t pain exactly, it was more like…

  An ice-cold feeling of dread overtook Virginia Ayers as the significance of what had just happened struck her like a punch to the gut.

  Pressure.

  The feeling in her head was pressure.

  Like what Caitlyn had been experiencing.

  It was Milo.

  Milo had insinuated himself into her skull even as she was snuffing the life out of him. He had left his own body and entered hers.

  She hadn’t considered the possibility that he might be able to do to her what he had been doing to Caitlyn all along. She should have considered it; both Caitlyn and Milo were her own flesh and blood, constructed from the same genetic makeup and cursed with the same awful family history.

  Of course he would be able to jump into her head.

 

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