The nightmare man, p.5
The Nightmare Man, page 5
Earlier, Blue had had no luck questioning Jepson Heap’s wife—now widow—Trudy Heap, who’d been in such shock after hearing what her husband had done inside that bookstore that all Blue had been able to conjure from her was a tear-garbled “I don’t know” and some slight head nods when asked if they could come back to question her in the morning. After she’d taken the dose of meds prescribed to calm her down.
While Mills finished up inside the Reynolds’ house, taking special note of the eight moths he’d found tapping the overhead light inside the Reynolds’ closed bedroom—with two more dead on the windowsill—Blue had gone to question their neighbor, the only one within a half mile. Like the Petersons, the Reynolds’ property was out in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by corn on three sides and a road on the other. The neighbor, an elderly widow named Beverly Carnish, was a hundred yards away and Blue had gone on foot.
Mills checked his watch, stared out the kitchen window, avoiding any glimpse of the living room’s blood-stained walls, where the bodies had been cut to pieces. With the blood splatter, they suspected one or both of them had still been alive when the psycho had started cutting. Blue had been gone thirty minutes and should have been back by now. Mills knew if it had been any other uniformed cop or plainclothes detective, he wouldn’t have been worried. She’d been trained like any other. She’d earned the badge on her own. In high school, the boys had kept their distance, prompting Samantha one night during her senior year to tell her mother, in tears, that she feared the boys were afraid to ask her out. Which was fine by Mills. Samantha could be gruff. But they’d all known she’d end up becoming a Blue; she and Detective Willard’s son Danny had just been the last ones to figure it out.
“You ready? Mills?”
He turned, found his daughter standing in the kitchen. Relief washed over him in one broad stroke. “Sorry. Didn’t hear you come in.”
“Your hearing aid on?”
He checked it. “Yes.” Even though it wasn’t. He and the Turtle both wore them now. They’d turned them off when they’d been outside together, convinced, when the Turtle’s had started squawking, that some weird interference was going on. Mills brushed past Blue on his way out the door. “What did the neighbor say?”
“Not much.” She trailed behind him down the porch steps. He nodded to the Turtle as the pathologist made his way back inside, seemingly rejuvenated. “Turtle okay?” Blue asked.
“He’s fine. What did the neighbor say?”
“It was an old woman.”
“Define old.”
“Older than you.” She pointed back toward the house. “Older than him.” The Turtle had just let the door slam—Mills flinched, adjusted his hearing aid as they neared her Jeep Cherokee. “Two days ago Billy and Allison Reynolds knocked on their neighbor’s door, with an apple pie.”
The two of them stopped next to their respective car doors, watching each other over the hood. “And?” he asked. “After they brought the pie …”
“They asked Ms. Carnish if she’d seen anyone around the cornfield. She said no. They’d seen someone standing in their backyard three nights ago. Legs together and arms stretched out like a scarecrow.” She briefly imitated the pose. “Straw hat and all. At first they thought someone had put a scarecrow in their yard as a prank, but when Billy walked outside to get a look, it was gone. He claimed to see the cornstalks moving, like someone had just fled into them. Turns out he had.”
“Who had?”
“The scarecrow,” she said, annoyed. “Billy Reynolds goes back inside to find his wife trembling and panicked. She’d been watching from the window. Saw the thing, what they’d both assumed to be a prop, run into the cornfield.”
Mills looked away, toward the corn in the distance. “Only in Crooked Tree.”
“And I’m assuming the next two nights went as they did in Bookman’s novel.” He hadn’t read as much as she had but she’d filled him in on the car ride over. “The next night the scarecrow shows up again,” she said. “But in a different spot. Stands out there until they notice him out the window. The stalking phase, just like in the book.”
“Interesting MO.”
“Billy Reynolds goes out again, this time probably with the rifle we found propped up beside the back door there.”
“But again the scarecrow flees,” Mills grumbled, watched the cornstalks sway.
“Until the third night he doesn’t. But they never call the police.”
“Because everybody in Crooked Tree carries a gun now.” He watched her mull on it. “You’re thinking if we’d been more public with the Petersons’ scene …”
“That the Reynolds couple would have at least called the police? Aren’t you?”
“No. All we had from the Petersons was a bloodbath and an old, dusty scarecrow in a barn. What we had was a crime scene that would have stirred up a big bowl of panic.”
“Like we’re about to have now.” She nodded out toward the road. Three news vans lingered behind the roadblock. “Bennington got too much before we shut him down.”
“And maybe that’s a good thing now. But don’t second guess yourself, Blue. That’s rule number one. There’s not a damn thing we can ever go back and change no matter how badly …” His voice caught in his throat, so he tried again. “No matter how badly we’d like to.”
“So in hindsight?” she asked.
“Hindsight’s a motherfucker, Blue. Rule number two.”
“More like rule twenty. Hindsight’s a motherfucker. Got it.”
“When we entered the Petersons’ barn, we had no way of knowing what we know now. About this son of a bitch using that writer’s book like a goddamn blueprint.”
“And you get on me for my language?” Blue paused after opening her door. “Why don’t you like him?”
“Who?”
“Ben Bookman? That writer?”
“The self-proclaimed Nightmare Man?” He shook his head. “He comes from a family of weirdos. And the apple with him didn’t fall too far from one of those Blackwood trees.”
“You ever been there? To Blackwood?”
“Long time ago,” he said.
“In a galaxy far, far away …”
“Something like that.” He opened his door. “You haven’t been there, have you?”
“Since I’m a little old now to be grounded, yes, I’ve been there. Me and some friends. Senior year. Danny went with us. One summer night we drove out there, just to say we did.”
“Just to say you did.” He scratched his head. “That was stupid, Blue.”
She shrugged. “We didn’t stay long. It was creepy. And we’d never seen trees like that before. We heard some noises. Hightailed it out of there.”
“Which was why your mother and I warned you never to go.”
“Sometimes teens need to get burned before they realize for themselves that fire is hot.”
“One of your mother’s favorite quotes.”
“A useful one,” she said. “Why did you go to Blackwood, Mills?”
“Sam, can you cut it with the Mills shit?”
“Want to tell me about it?”
“No.”
“What happened?”
“I was there to investigate the disappearance of the Bookman boy. Ben’s younger brother, Devon.”
“And?”
“And nothing. Conversation’s over, Blue.” A news van pulled away. His temper was the reason she’d frozen him out from seeing his grandchildren. Mills looked back at his daughter. “Was the pie good?”
“What?” She wiped her mouth, defensively.
“The pie,” he said. “You visited the old neighbor. She offered you a piece of the apple pie the Reynolds had brought over three days ago. Because that’s what old people do. They offer you pie. And because we raised you to have proper manners, you sat with her for a bite. No harm in that.” He nodded toward her. “But you left crumbs on your blouse.”
She looked down, brushed them off, and got in the car. He did likewise. She glanced at him as he buckled, and then she chuckled.
“What’s funny?”
“Your fly’s open.”
He looked down, mumbled, “God damn it.” He zipped up, nodded toward the road. “Just drive.” A mile down the road, he said, “All I’m saying is you could have brought me a piece.”
“Of what? The pie?”
“Yes.”
“Then say that.”
CHAPTER
8
“THAT STORY YOU told back at the house,” Blue said with a sideways glance toward her father as she drove. “About how you and Mom met. In detention.”
“What about it?”
“It was cute.” Cornfields and pines blurred past. Cute wasn’t a word typically mentioned in the same sentence as Detective Winchester Mills. He grunted. She looked to be prodding for more, in a detoured way trying to get to the truth of all the dream catchers hanging from his bedroom ceiling. Or maybe she’d noticed he was on enough prescription meds to bring down a T-Rex. “You know …,” she said. “How you offered to take Mom’s childhood nightmare away?”
“I remember the story, Sam.” Downtown Crooked Tree zipped past. A town chock-full of working-class poor. Houses, once new, had fallen to disrepair. Too many storefronts boarded up. Too much crime. After an awkward minute of watching blacktop disappear like a running treadmill beneath the tires, Mills said, “What’s your point?”
“Wouldn’t that be neat?”
“Wouldn’t what be neat?”
“If you could, you know, take somebody’s nightmare from them.”
“You’ve been reading too many Ben Bookman novels.” Mills held Blue’s copy of The Scarecrow on his lap. He pretended to read in the hopes she’d shut up. He’d already reviewed the paragraphs where the killer had pulled his inspiration, mirroring the two literary crime scenes, down to the peanuts on the Reynolds’ porch.
He felt her glance as she drove, and then she said, “I tried to question Jepson Heap’s wife earlier.”
“You told me already.”
“I didn’t get anything out of her.”
“Told me that too.”
“In the living room,” she said with caution, as if tiptoeing where she didn’t belong. “They had dream catchers hanging all over the windows.”
“What’s your point?”
“I think you know what my point is. Your bedroom?”
“Just drive.”
“But—”
“I don’t want to talk about it, Sam.”
They didn’t talk about anything the rest of the way to the Bookmans’ residence, on the wealthier side of Crooked Tree, a small percentage compared to the rest. There were so few in Crooked Tree who Had and so many who Had Not. And no one as wealthy as Ben and Amanda Bookman.
Blue parked at the curb outside the massive house, where a half dozen media vans and twice as many reporters had already set up camp outside the Bookmans’ property. The front lawn was tiered, the landscaping manicured, the horseshoe driveway a landing pad for the Bookmans’ two cars, one a Lexus sedan and the other a BMW SUV. With mature trees and acreage that stretched a quarter mile to the nearest neighbor, the Bookmans had managed a bit of isolation in the middle of suburbia. Good for them. The American Dream was alive and well. He’d give the author some leeway in regard to the Haves and Have Nots. If a man can make millions making stuff up, more power to him. Word was, the Bookmans gave a good amount of it to charities. But after seeing the wraparound porch and the thousands of stones and bricks it enclosed, as well as the four chimneys, all of which appeared to be billowing smoke for only three goddamn people, Mills couldn’t help feeling a pang of annoyance as they approached the obnoxiously large front door.
Reporters hurled questions across the dark night. Mills and Blue ignored them.
Mills waved to Officer Chuck Black down the road; he’d been parked outside the Bookmans’ home for security purposes ever since Jepson Heap blew his head to bits inside the bookstore. Officer Black rolled down his window and gave Mills the finger.
Mills chuckled, nodded back.
Blue knocked on the front door, saying to her father, “Call me when you grow up.”
“I’ll make sure to do that.”
Amanda Bookman opened the door a few seconds later, done up like she was getting ready to go on air any minute. Mills knew Amanda Bookman only slightly better than he knew her husband; she’d been the lead “investigator” for Channel 11 News for the Peterson murders three weeks ago, and the disappearance of that little girl, Blair Atchinson, the week before that. He’d spoken on air with her three times recently, and often in the past. She’d been pushy at times, but always professional. So while Mills didn’t trust reporters in general, he had respect for her.
And he could tell she’d been crying.
Amanda ushered them in and shut the door behind her. She watched the reporters out the nearby window, closed the curtain, and offered them drinks they both declined.
Ben Bookman paced in front of the fireplace and didn’t acknowledge their entrance into the living room. While Amanda was put together, Ben was disheveled and apparently under the influence, making no attempt to hide the flask he nipped from even as Mills and Blue took their seats on the couch facing two ornate reading chairs on the opposite side of the coffee table.
Amanda sat in one of the chairs and watched her husband pace. “Ben.”
He raked a hand through his hair and sat, not in the chair next to his wife, but in one at the coffee table’s end zone.
Mills leaned forward, elbows on thighs. “Mr. Bookman, I’m Detective Mills and this—”
“I know who you are,” Ben said, lowering his voice, looking away. “I remember you.”
Blue eyed both her father and Ben. When neither of them elaborated, Blue got down to business. “And so you know why we’re here?”
Ben’s eyes were red-rimmed and glazed. He exhaled, as if resigned to dropping the tough-guy act, but then unabashedly took another drink from his flask. Amanda looked away—not only away but in the damn near opposite direction. “Of course I know why you’re here.”
Mills said, “I’m assuming by the smell that you’re drinking whiskey.”
Ben looked him in the eyes. “That a crime?”
“No. Just perhaps not the best idea under the circumstances.”
“I didn’t do anything.”
“We never said you did.” Blue and Amanda shared a glance, and then looked away from each other.
Amanda was still pissed about being shut out weeks ago by the police, Detective Blue specifically, about the Peterson murders. It dawned on Mills now that perhaps Amanda thought she could have helped the investigation, and thought this second set of murders was on their heads and not somehow her husband’s.
Mills said, “Do you know what’s going on here, Mr. Bookman?”
“No.” He sighed, softened his tone. “And call me Ben.”
“You don’t recall ever meeting Jepson Heap?”
“The bookstore was the first I’d ever seen him. Look, haven’t we gone over this?” He looked at Blue. “In the store. I answered every question.”
“You were still in shock then,” she said.
Ben said, “And I’m damn near drunk now.”
Mills wasn’t amused. “We didn’t get much out of Jepson’s wife, but by the looks of the meds on his coffee table, he’d been popping Ativan like candy.”
“For his anxiety,” said Blue. “Like he was trying to kill himself that way instead of snapping like he’d done.”
“Would have been a lot cleaner,” Ben said.
Blue looked at Mills, then studied Ben for a beat. “You think this is funny?”
“No. I don’t.” Ben watched the floor. His jaw trembled. When he looked back up his eyes had pooled with moisture. “I just spent thirty minutes cleaning Jepson Heap out of my hair, Detectives. It was my little girl who noticed parts of him still in there.”
Blue said, “I’m sorry.”
Mills was undeterred. “And what he’d said about you stealing his nightmare?”
“He was deranged. Delusional. A lunatic. Okay? You’re better off asking his wife.”
“We plan to more thoroughly,” said Blue. “Once she calms down.”
Mills said, “Once we all calm down.”
Ben chuckled, and for the first time offered the flask over the coffee table. “Touché.”
Mills hesitated, and then reached for it. He ignored Blue’s look of disapproval. But instead of drinking, he merely smelled it. He handed it back to Ben, brushing his finger as he did so. Mills said, “I don’t drink anymore.” He leaned forward. “The book, Ben. Tell us about the book.”
“What’s there to tell?”
Amanda scoffed, fidgeted in her seat.
Mills studied them both, his eyes flicking from one to the other. “Perhaps it’s none of my business, but it’s clear you two are fighting.”
“Ask him what happened last fall,” said Amanda.
Mills folded his hands, searched deep for some patience. “What happened last fall?”
Ben raked unsteady fingers through his hair again. “That’s when I wrote the book.”
