After midnight, p.7
After Midnight, page 7
* * *
Her first thought when she walked into his hospital room was that she shouldn’t have come. It was too painful.
Kevin appeared to be dozing, covered with a thin hospital blanket that rose and fell gently in time with his breathing. An absurdly large swath of bandages covered his right shoulder, where he had been shot by the Tampa cop back in their apartment, and a clear plastic bag filled with some kind of liquid hung from a wheeled stainless steel cart placed next to the bed. As Cait watched, the liquid dripped slowly down a tube, disappearing through a needle into his arm.
His right wrist was handcuffed to the metal rail of the hospital bed. Based on his appearance, pale and wan, Cait thought it an unnecessary precaution, but she had lived with a law enforcement officer long enough to know that procedure dictated just about everything the police did every day, right down to handcuffing a helpless man to his hospital bed if he was in custody.
The cop stationed outside the door had told Cait she would have to hurry, that he wasn’t supposed to allow anyone inside the room but was willing to look the other way for a couple of minutes. He also told her to holler if she felt in any danger, a statement that until last night would have struck her as ludicrous.
She felt the time slipping away and wondered if she should even bother to wake him. Maybe this whole trip was a fool’s errand. Maybe she should just turn around and leave.
Then he surprised her. She had thought he was sleeping, but into the silence between them he said, “Hey, babe. Come to break me out?”
His voice was weak and strained, but it was unmistakably his own. There was none of the bizarre, robotic tone that had frightened her so badly last night, and Cait’s relief was instantaneous and overwhelming. She had intended to keep her distance, at least until she could gauge his mindset, but those intentions were forgotten as she rushed to his bedside, tears welling up in her eyes.
She was beside him in an instant and then she stopped, suddenly unsure of herself, not because she was afraid of him but because she didn’t want to hurt him. She had no idea what other injuries he may have suffered besides the gunshot wound.
She smiled and grabbed his hand, squeezing it hard as a tear rolled down her cheek. “I’m so glad you’re awake! How are you feeling, are you in any pain?”
“I’m okay,” he said, refusing to meet her eyes. “I don’t think I could run a marathon at the moment, but something tells me I won’t be getting that opportunity for a while.” He shook his wrist, rattling the steel handcuff against the stainless steel bed rail for emphasis.
“We’ll get this straightened out,” Cait said, leaning over his bed and lowering her face until Kevin had no choice but to meet her gaze.
“I’m so sorry,” he whispered, his voice barely audible.
“I know,” Cait answered. She believed him.
“They’re talking about charging me with attempted murder.”
“I know.”
“I’m not sure that’s the sort of thing that can get ‘straightened out.’”
“Patience,” Cait said. “It looks like it’s going to be a while before you’re up and around, anyway, so let’s take things one step at a time, okay?”
He nodded reluctantly. “Okay. So what’s the first step?”
Cait shrugged. It seemed obvious to her. “The first step is to figure out what happened last night.” She squeezed his hand again and waited for a response.
Kevin looked up at her, his eyes filled with pain and confusion. “I…I was hoping you could tell me.”
Cait bit her lip hard in an attempt to keep from dissolving in tears. Kevin’s voice was his own, but his demeanor had changed completely overnight. Gone was the cheerful, self-confident, self-reliant man she had grown to love and to depend on. In his place was a haunted shell of a human being, uncertain and fearful of himself and what he now knew he was capable of.
“You don’t remember?” she asked gently.
He shook his head slowly, eyes narrowing, reliving last night as she suspected he’d already done a dozen times. A hundred. “I remember getting home, remember joking about you being there already, about how you’re normally not home until much later. After that…”
Cait waited quietly. She didn’t want to say or do anything that might take him out of the moment.
“After that,” he said again, “it gets hazy. Muddy. Like I was conscious but only barely, like I was seeing things through a long tube filled with clear, thick gel.” He furrowed his brow in concentration. “You know how sometimes when you wake up after a dream, you can’t really remember anything specific about the dream but you know damn well something happened?”
Cait nodded.
“Well, that’s what it was like. I wasn’t really aware of anything for a few seconds, and then all of a sudden the fog lifted, and I remember walking down the hallway, confused, wondering what I was doing with a knife in my hand, and why there were a bunch of cops in the doorway. And then one of them opened fire and I went down.
“And I remember you screaming,” he said, looking ashamed.
Cait stared at Kevin intently. She knew him inside and out. Better than she had ever known anyone in her entire life, maybe better than he knew himself. He was telling the truth. She believed that without question.
And that was terrifying.
Infinitely more terrifying than if he had been lying.
Kevin’s entire statement was odd, off somehow, but one part of it was even more bizarre than the rest. “You said the fog—the mental confusion—lasted for a few seconds?”
“That’s right.”
“Be more specific. How long?”
“I don’t know, maybe thirty seconds? Definitely less than a minute.”
Cait shook her head. “Honey, you were in that weird fugue-like state for at least fifteen minutes, maybe as long as twenty, before the cops showed up and busted down our door. If one of the neighbors hadn’t been spooked by the sound of stuff crashing off our walls and called the police, who knows how long…”
She paused, not wanting to say what she was thinking. “…it would have gone on.”
Kevin closed his eyes. When he spoke, his voice was again a whisper, thick with pain. “You mean, who knows how long I would have tortured you.”
“No,” Cait said firmly. “I don’t believe you would have done that. I know you too well; you’re not capable of it.”
“I took a chunk out of your arm.”
“No!” she said again. “I know you, you would never hurt me.”
They stared at each other, each knowing what the other was thinking.
Kevin opened his mouth to speak but before he could, the door to the hospital room opened and the cop stuck his head inside. “That’s long enough,” he said. “I could get fired for this. It’s time to go.” He nodded at Cait and inclined his head toward the hallway.
Kevin said, “Just one more minute? Please?”
The cop sighed. Nodded reluctantly and eased the door closed.
“He’s a good guy,” Kevin said. “We came up through the ranks together. He’s taking a hell of a chance for me. Anyway,” he continued, “we only have a second, and I have something to say, so please hear me out.”
Cait waited, a sense of alarm rising in her. She thought she knew what he was going to say and didn’t want to hear it.
“Until we know what’s going on here, I want you to stay away.”
“No,” she said.
“Listen to me.” Kevin’s voice was intense. Filled with emotion. “I’m not talking about forever, but for the time being, until we can figure out why…it happened, you’re not safe around me.”
“You would never hurt me!”
“I already did.” Kevin nodded at the bandage on Cait’s arm and she had no response.
“Stay away,” he said again. “I’ll be in here for the weekend, probably. My attorney says he’s going to try for a bail hearing late Monday afternoon, and if I can make bail, I’ll stay in a motel for a while until we can get a handle on everything. You’re more important to me than anything else in the world, and I couldn’t live with myself if I hurt you again. Or worse.”
They stared at each other for a long moment, and this time Cait couldn’t stop the tears.
14
The coffee shop was warm and inviting, filled with the typical early morning urgency of people on their way to work. Servers bustled around the small dining room, while the line of customers at the takeout window seemed never to shorten.
The smell of fresh-baked bread and pastries filled the air, a scent Cait normally loved but today barely noticed. She picked at her breakfast, a blueberry muffin, and sipped her coffee, an extra large, and tried to maintain a sense of lawyerly objectivity as she ran the events of the last couple of days over and over in her head while waiting for her guest to arrive.
After visiting Kevin in the hospital yesterday, Cait had driven straight home. She took the elevator to the sixth floor, entered her apartment, and spent the rest of the day behind the locked front door, staring at the blood-soaked fabric of her couch and thinking.
No television. No radio. No books or phone or computer.
Just herself and her thoughts.
And they weren’t good. Because no matter how she tried to dissect the situation, no matter how many different angles she examined it from, she could reach only one conclusion.
Milo Cain was involved.
Mr. Midnight. The man responsible for the kidnapping, torture and murder of well over two dozen females—prostitutes, college students and other young women—over the past decade plus.
A remorseless, sociopathic butcher.
Her twin brother.
The problem with her theory, of course, was obvious. Milo Cain was in custody in Massachusetts, comatose and unresponsive thanks to two bullets fired into his head at close range by Caitlyn Connelly herself. The doctors claimed Milo’s brain damage was extensive, that there was almost no chance he would ever regain consciousness.
And on the off chance he ever did recover, he would still be paralyzed from the neck down. He would then begin the process of standing trial for those murders, for at least two of which the state possessed direct and irrefutable evidence of Cain’s commission.
The upshot was that Mr. Midnight would remain incarcerated for the rest of his life and would likely spend every minute of that time in a coma, a lump of human tissue no more aware of his continued existence than were any of the women he had killed.
He could not be involved in the nightmare that was taking place fifteen hundred miles down the coast in Tampa. It simply was not possible.
Still, the similarities between the horror Kevin Dalton had inflicted on her two nights ago—unwittingly, it seemed—and those awful hours Cait, Kevin and her mother had endured in Revere last summer were too obvious to ignore. And Milo Cain, for all his antisocial and psychopathic tendencies, had been extremely intelligent. Probably a genius. If anyone could fool the authorities into believing he was comatose in order to avoid paying for his crimes, it was Milo.
How he might manage it was another matter, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t.
So Cait’s goal this morning was to see if perhaps Virginia Ayers could bring a fresh perspective to the situation. Who better than the woman who had given birth to both of them three decades ago, and who possessed more knowledge about the strange psychic abilities they all shared than anyone else alive?
It was a long shot; there was no question about that. But if nothing else, talking to her birth mother would give Cait a short break from the constant, unrelenting worry about Kevin and what would happen to him, and divert her attention from the fear she might be attacked by a lunatic with a knife—again—at any moment.
And she had no clue what else to do.
* * *
When Virginia walked through the coffee shop’s front door, Cait was taken aback by how frail and ill her mother looked.
Virginia had moved down to Tampa less than two months after the events of last summer, selling the home she had lived in her entire adult life and relocating to Florida. Her aim had been to get close to Cait and Kevin, to make up in some small way for the thirty years she had missed out on when she gave her twins up for illegal adoption within hours of their birth.
It had seemed like the perfect plan. Cait was excited finally to have the opportunity to become close to the woman she had wondered about for so long and had missed so desperately when she was growing up.
But the fact of the matter was that the strain of that long-ago loss of her children, combined with her husband’s suicide a few years later and the harrowing ordeal she had suffered at the hands of Milo Cain last summer, had reduced Virginia Ayers to a nearly empty shell of a human being. She had looked far older than her years when Cait first met her six months ago, and her physical decline had only intensified since.
Virginia was in her fifties but could have passed for eighty. She walked slowly, with shuffling, hesitant steps. Her gray skin was wrinkled, her hair limp and lifeless, and although Cait made it a point to see her as often as possible—at least twice a week—her mother’s appearance never failed to catch Cait by surprise.
Today was no exception, but with all that had happened over the last thirty-six hours Cait spent little time lamenting Virginia’s physical decline. She stood at her small table and waved until Virginia noticed her and began moving slowly across the coffee shop, weaving around customers too wrapped up in themselves to take note of the frail woman walking past.
Cait smiled at her mother and wrapped her arms around her in a careful but enthusiastic hug. She had already ordered Virginia’s coffee and the grateful woman slumped into her seat and took a big sip, savoring it for a moment before speaking.
And then Cait felt it.
The sensation of pressure in her head.
It was the same sensation she had experienced just before Pearl Hinton dumped scalding hot coffee on her and the same one she had felt immediately before Kevin attacked her. It was strange, like some invisible person had taken an air hose and begun pumping air into her skull, inflating it like a basketball.
Her hands flew to her head and she gasped. This time, the sensation of pressure was accompanied by a thin line of pain. It was as if the invisible person with the air hose had managed to somehow scratch the inside of her skull with a fingernail.
Virginia put down her coffee and looked at her strangely. “What is it, dear? Is something the matter?”
Cait sat for a moment without answering. The strange sensation had leveled off. The pressure was still there, but as it had done each previous time, it stopped building before becoming unbearable. The pain leveled off as well. She dropped her hands to the table and shook her head slowly, like someone who had awakened from a nap and was trying to clear away the cobwebs. “No, I’m…I’m okay.”
Virginia stared a moment longer. Then she took a deep breath and said, “What was that all about?”
“I don’t know, exactly. It’s…I’m not sure. Have you ever gone swimming and when you toweled off, your ears were blocked up?”
“Not for a long, long time,” Virginia answered with a smile. “But I can remember it happening, yes.”
“Do you remember how your head felt like it had water sloshing around inside, like whenever anyone talked they were speaking through the other end of a long tube filled with cotton?”
“Sure.”
“That’s kind of how this feels. It’s like a sensation of pressure inside my skull.”
Virginia furrowed her brows in concern. “How long has this been going on?”
“Well, that’s the thing. It’s not constant. It comes and goes. This is the third or fourth time it’s happened. It just seems to come out of nowhere, hangs around for a while, and then disappears without warning.”
“Maybe you should see a doctor. Have you had it checked out?”
Cait shrugged. “It only started happening very recently.”
“Hmm,” Virginia said. She seemed to consider this development for a moment and then changed the subject. She clasped Cait’s hands in her own and gazed earnestly into her face. “So, how are you holding up, dear?”
Cait had called both her mothers—her adoptive mother as well as Virginia—immediately upon arriving home from the hospital two nights ago, despite the lateness of the hour. She knew middle-of-the-night telephone calls were a parent’s worst nightmare, but both women needed to know she was alright before they awoke in the morning and saw the attack reported on the local TV news.
Cait said, “Yes, thank you, I’m doing okay.”
Virginia studied Cait’s face for a moment and said, “Bullshit. You’re not sleeping, are you?””
Cait had known she would not likely fool her mother, and the blunt assessment didn’t surprise her, either. Despite her failing health, Virginia Ayers was no shrinking violet. She had lived in a rough-and-tumble, blue-collar city just outside Boston for most of her life, had given her only two children up for adoption when they were just hours old as the only way to save them, and had watched her husband work sixty-hour weeks for most of his life and then end it by hanging himself in a men’s bathroom at South Station. She was a tough old bird.
Cait couldn’t help smiling at the coarse longshoreman language coming out of the frail little old lady sitting across the table. “No, not really,” she admitted.
“Well, I’m not surprised,” Virginia said. “Who would expect you to, after what you’ve been through?”
Then she changed gears again, and asked, “How’s Kevin doing?”
Cait shrugged. “He’s pretty down, as you might imagine.” She filled her mother in on the conversation she had had with him during Cait’s brief hospital visit, including his insistence that Cait stay away from him until they could figure out what had happened.
Virginia nodded. “I’m sorry, honey, truly I am. But you didn’t call me here to cry on my shoulder, did you.”
It was phrased as a statement and for just a moment Cait wondered whether Virginia had received a Flicker from her on the way over here. “Flicker” was Cait’s term for the bizarre genetic ability carried in the bloodline that allowed some family members the ability to “see” random events and occurrences from other people’s lives. Cait had experienced them since she was a little girl and the occasionally frightening mental images had been prime motivation in her desire to learn her family’s history in the first place.
