He didn’t like the South anyway. Too quiet. All those birds chirping, and people smiling. They made eye contact here and talked to you, expected an answer back, noticed you if you ignored them, a truly dangerous combination. He needed the dingy city life, too many people with too many issues to give him a second glance. He fit in well anyway, on the tall side, brown hair, brown eyes. Not handsome, but not ugly either. He had no distinguishing characteristics. He got his hair cut at a walk-in place. Shopped at chain grocery stores, though it made it harder to eat the organic food his body craved. The specialty stores had fewer customers, they had a tendency to recognize the regulars. He wanted to be regular, not be a regular.

He’d borrow a car from the parking garage and drive to Atlanta, drop it there. Buy something cheap and disposable from one of the many scam lots, take it to Florida. Miami. A port town. He’d make a reservation to take a cruise to South America.

But he wasn’t really going to leave. No, after he’d laid the trail, he was going back to Indianapolis, to the adorable hostess at the steak house. That was as good a place as any to start over.

Oh, well. The game had been fun while it lasted.

Maybe he’d drive by the target’s office, just for the hell of it. Wave goodbye. A shame, really. It would have been fun to watch her die.

Fifty-Two

Taylor wasn’t a big fan of assisted-living facilities. It was purely psychological—her grandfather had been an Alzheimer’s patient before Alzheimer’s was de rigueur, when it was just called dementia and the nursing homes were dark and silent, aside from the moans of pain or murmured recollections that emanated from the mouths of the inmates. It had smelled wrong, she remembered that. She’d been young when he’d passed away, but the stench of the home where he lived wasn’t something she’d ever forget. Neglect, and sadness, and rot, mingled with urine and the sweet, yeasty smell of imminent death. That was what she remembered.

So when she entered the front door of the Guardian facility, she was surprised to smell roses. It was bright, and happy. Clean. Smiling faces. Completely incongruous with her expectations.

She went to the front desk and gave them her name, stated her business. A woman dressed in pink scrubs overlaid with purple and white hearts grinned ear to ear when she heard Taylor asking for Joshua Fortnight. He didn’t get a lot of visitors.

The facility had a small indoor garden, a greenhouse, and they grew roses and orchids and a few irises and hydrangeas to boot, which, as the intake nurse explained, kept the patients happy. It gave them something to do. Especially in the cold winter months when they were stuck inside, and their field trips consisted of going to malls instead of the park or the zoo.

Joshua, it turned out, had an affinity for growing flowers. His specialty was the hard-to-manage orchids. Twice a day, he lovingly played his flute for them, though he was getting more and more deaf, a congenital handicap related to his Treacher Collins, and the notes were sometimes a bit sharp.

“Please don’t upset him,” the pink nurse said. “He’s doing so well with us.”

Upset him. Yeah, that nurse was going to be seriously pissed off in a couple of hours, when she found out Taylor had dragged poor Joshua back through the worst days of his life. She had no time to sugarcoat this.

It took ten minutes to round him up. He shuffled up the hall on her arm, ruined face turned away. She took him to the greenhouse, beckoned for Taylor to follow. Once he was settled, she smiled, touched his shoulder gently in assurance, and left.

He had his back to Taylor, didn’t turn around. When he spoke, he slurred his words, sibilant and soft.

“I remember you,” he said, his pale hands embracing the pot of a delicate white orchid. Using his forefinger, he felt the soil. It must have been all right, he nodded to himself.

“My name is Taylor,” she said.

“You have a gun. I can sssmell the metal.”

“I’m a police officer, Joshua.”

“I know. You killed my father.”

She flinched. Coming face-to-face with the ones left behind was never easy. Being in the same room as the child of the abhorrent serial killer, who’d mocked her, used her, and finally forced her to take his life, was possibly the hardest thing she’d done in years.

“Joshua—”

“Don’t. Jussst, don’t. He wasss a bad man.”

That won the understatement lottery. Eric Fortnight was a sick, twisted bastard, one who was forced to stop killing only because of a crippling case of rheumatoid arthritis. His body wouldn’t cooperate anymore. When he couldn’t stand it any longer, when the urge to kill became too much to contain, he’d enlisted his sociopathic daughter to find him a helpmeet. A killer to kill for him. An apprentice.

Charlotte had chosen Ewan Copeland.

“Are you happy here, Joshua?”

“I miss the birdsss.” He turned to her now, and she forced herself not to suck in her breath. His face, his poor face, looked like a melted candle. His eyes were where his cheeks should be, one on either side, pointing out and down, so very like the birds he loved. His nose was a pinpoint with nostrils, his chin practically nonexistent. Strangely, his lips were normal, a bit wide, but full and lush, a bright red, his tongue, thickened by the disease, visible inside. Like he’d bitten into a bloody apple.

His features were terribly disconcerting, but Taylor knew he was fully blind, and couldn’t see the horror etched on her face. She shut her eyes and did her damndest to keep it out of her voice, too. This man had been forced to listen to too many sighs of fear in his life.

“You had birds at the house?”

“Yesss. A garden. Like thisss. But bigger. And outside. I miss it.”

“Joshua, can we sit down?”

He nodded, and she followed him to a small stone bench under a shelf of purple orchids. They sat, and Joshua reached below the bench and extracted a small brown case. Taylor recognized it, it was his flute.

“The flowersss like the musssic. I play for them twissse a day.”

“I bet they do,” she said, then put her hand on his to stop him from opening the case. “Joshua, I have a friend, a very good friend, who might be in danger. Do you remember the man you shot last year?”

“Troy. I hated him.”

“His real name is Ewan. And he’s taken my friend.”

“Coming home to roosssst. Father alwaysss sssaid he would. He killed my sssissster. He killed Charlotte.”

Taylor forced herself to swallow.

“Yes, he did. And now I’m afraid he’s going to do the same thing to my friend. I think he’s taken her to your old house. Will you help me, Joshua? Will you give me a way in? Will you help me save her?”

“It doesn’t belong to me anymore. The bank took it. They can’t sssell it, no one wants to live where a ssserial killer preyed. There’s a big lock on the front door.”

“I know. But I’ll make you a deal. I know you were the one who let Jane Macias out of your father’s house. She said there was a tunnel, a back entrance, and she described you to me. I never knew if she imagined the tunnel, or if it was real.

“But you helped her, Joshua, because you knew what your father and Troy were doing was wrong. And now it’s my turn to stop Troy from hurting anyone else. If I can get in without him knowing, sneak into the house, I can take care of him, and he’ll never bother any of us again. If you tell me how to get in, as a thank-you, I’ll take you to the park, so you can hear the birds. Would you like that?”