Chapter Twenty-Five

I met Stephen about a mile outside the city limits.

Howard had gone straight toward town, pushing the SUV as hard as he could, even without any headlights or interior dashboard monitor lights.

But he still wasn’t as fast I as I was. He was still behind me when I dove into Stephen’s car head-first through the windshield and landed with my head stuck halfway through the passenger seat. My butt was up in the air, my legs still outside the car.

I popped my head up out of the seat and said,

“Howard. Headed this way. No headlights. Stop him.”

Stephen stomped on the brake and screeched to a halt, the car spinning halfway around on the highway.

“Everyone okay?” he asked. His voice was trembling.

“Safe. Alive. As well as could be expected,” I said.

“That’s him. Here he comes.”

“Hold on,” Stephen said. His car was already sideways in his lane, so as Howard got close, he simply hit the gas.

Stephen’s little Honda slammed into the side of the SUV so hard that it sent me flying out the windshield. Lucky for me I was already dead.

Lucky for them that both Howard and Stephen were wearing seat belts and had airbags.

I checked on Stephen first. He was shaken, but otherwise unhurt. And angry enough that the adrenaline helped push him out of his destroyed car and up to the driver’s side of the SUV. The back-passenger door was smashed into the middle of the seat. If Stephen had hit the gas just a second earlier, the impact would have been on the driver’s side door and probably would have killed Howard. I wondered for a moment if that’s what Stephen had been hoping for. But then I decided that I didn’t care.

Anyway, who was I to talk? I’d stuck my hand in his chest and just about given the man a heart attack. Why should Stephen feel any less vengeful?

At any rate, he hadn’t killed Howard. He’d knocked him out, though. And Howard’s airbag had burst, leaving a nasty chemical burn on one side of his face.

Good, I thought. I mean, I might not want to be the one to kill him, but I had no problem with him suffering a little.

Stephen dragged Howard’s inert body out of the SUV and dropped it to the ground, where he started kicking the man in the ribs, over and over. “Wake up, you fucking asshole!” he screamed. “Wake the fuck up!”

It took me a long time to break through Stephen’s rage.

But I repeated his name over and over, until finally, he looked up at me, breathing hard. “What?” he said, anger still clouding both his voice and his eyes.

“Look at me, Stephen.”

“What?” He reared back to kick Howard again.

“Stephen Davenport!” I yelled this time. He dropped his foot to the ground and looked at me. “Call 911. Tell them that you’ve just caught Clifford Howard and that they need to send Detective Green. And that they should send one ambulance here and another ambulance to the Howard place. Give them careful directions.”

“An ambulance to the Howard place?” he repeated frantically, his eyes growing huge.

“Ashara and Maw-Maw are okay. They’ve just got a few minor cuts and bruises. But they’ve been traumatized. They need to be looked at.”

“Cuts?” His eyes clouded over with anger and he kicked Howard again, this time in the head.

Howard moaned.

“Stephen! 911! Now!” I barked.

He took a deep breath and nodded. He pulled his phone out of his pocket, his hand shaking.

By the time he was done talking to the 911 operator, his voice was shaking, too. I thought he might be going into shock.

“Okay,” I said. “Before you collapse, you need to tie Howard up. See what he’s got in the back of his truck.”

Stephen shook his head. “I’ve got something,” he said.

He went around to the trunk of his car and came back with a package of guitar strings.

He rolled Howard over roughly on the pavement, prompting another moan from the unconscious man, then tied his hands together so tightly with the strings that they quickly turned purple.

I didn’t mention it. I suspect that if Stephen noticed, he didn’t care.

Then Stephen got a couple of flares out of his trunk and set them up around the crash site.

Several cars drove by, creeping around the wreck, but not stopping to help. The sight of the man face down on the pavement with his hands tied behind his back might have had something to do with that, but I’m not sure.

* * *

The state patrol officers were the first on the scene, actually, two cars. Either they’d gotten the 911 call, or a passing motorist had called to report the accident. Or both.

Ashara had beaten Stephen to the call. She and Maw-Maw were still at the Howard house.

The first officer looked from Howard’s body to Stephen, his eyes narrowing in confused suspicion. “You want to tell me what’s going on here?”

“Hang on, baby,” he said to Ashara. “I’ve got to talk to the police. We’ll be there soon. Call me back in ten if you haven’t heard anything.” He disconnected. “Sure,” he said, turning to the officer. “I’ll be happy to tell you what happened.

This man is Clifford Howard. He’s wanted in connection with the Molly McClatchey murder. And he kidnapped my girlfriend and her grandmother. That was her on the phone—my girlfriend, not her grandmother. She’s at this guy’s house. She just called 911, too.”

The officer turned around to the other cop on the scene, who nodded and went back to his car; presumably to check with dispatch to see if such a call had indeed come in.

“Ask for Detective Green,” Stephen called after him.

The first officer scratched his head and looked down at Howard, who was beginning to regain consciousness and was moaning even louder than before.

“Well, let’s at least put some regular cuffs on him,” he said. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a knife.

Snapping it open, he cut through the guitar strings. Howard’s hands twitched as the blood ran back into them, and he moaned again.

The officer cuffed him.

“So tell me how this accident happened.”

Stephen took a deep breath. “Well, it wasn’t so much an accident,” he said.

The policemen gave him a level look. “Then tell me how this wreck happened.”

“Okay. I knew that Clifford Howard had my girlfriend. So when I saw his SUV, I rammed it.”

“You weren’t worried that your girlfriend might be in the car and that you might injure her?”

“I wasn’t really thinking that clearly,” Stephen said.

The second officer came back. “His story checks out,” he said. “Green’s on the way.”

At that moment, Howard woke up and started screaming. “She’s coming after me!” he said, his words a long wail.

“Who is?” the second officer asked.

“Oh, God,” Howard wailed. “She’s dead and cold, so cold. My heart. She touched it. And she’s coming. I have to run. You have to let me go.”

“Who’s dead?” the officer asked.

“The bloody woman. Oh, God, let me go.” Howard pulled at the handcuffs. “You’ve got to let me go. She’ll get me otherwise. Let me go.”

Stephen looked at me through narrowed eyes and then turned so that his back faced the officers. “What did you do?” he mouthed more than whispered.

“Long story, I’ll tell you later,” I said.

Stephen shook his head and turned back to the policemen.

The first officer shook his head, too. “This is going to be a long night, isn’t it?”

“But at least all we’ve got to deal with is the wreck. We can hand the rest of it over to Green,” his partner replied.

“Thank God. This looks like the kind of mess I want to stay out of.”

* * *

In the end, though, he didn’t get to stay out of it.

Because Howard lived outside the city limits, and because the McClatchey case was so very high-profile, pretty much all the cops in the county got in on the action.

Howard got dragged off to the hospital, complete with police escort. Both Howard’s SUV and Stephen’s Honda got towed away—taken, I suspected, to some lab where they would be gone over with a fine-tooth comb. And fingerprint powder.

And probably some other cool CSI-type stuff.

Green had eventually taken Stephen out to the Howard place with him, but only after Stephen threatened to walk if Green didn’t give him a ride.

“You need to get checked out,” Green said.

“Fine. There will be an ambulance out there, too,” Stephen said.

Green sighed. “Okay, okay. But only because you were right on this one and I was wrong.”

Once we got out to the Howard place, I pulled Stephen aside long enough to ask him what had happened after I popped out of the police station.”

“I told Green that I was worried about Ashara, so I started trying to call her. She didn’t answer, of course, so I got even more worried. Green wasn’t buying it—he said that she probably had the phone turned off. So I told him I was going to check on her. He told me not to leave town and then went back to reading the stuff in those files. Pissed me off, but there wasn’t much I could do about it.”

“Well, you stopped Howard, and that’s what counts.”

“Yeah, but not before he got to her.”

“He didn’t get to her too much, Stephen. I made sure of that.”

“You?”

“Yeah. I’ll tell you the story sometime.”

He was still looking at me incredulously when Green came over and said, “Okay. I’ve got a few more questions for you, and then you can go talk to your girlfriend.”

I figured that was my cue to leave.

* * *

An hour later, we all sat huddled together in the open back door of an ambulance: me, Ashara, and Maw-Maw.

Maw-Maw and Ashara had each been taken aside for private questioning and then brought back to the ambulance, where an EMS tech had checked them over. Now the police were once again questioning Stephen about his role in the evening’s events.

A balding, rotund policeman came over to the ambulance. “And what was your part in this, ma’am?” he asked.

“I already told that detective over there,” Ashara said irritably, pointing at the first man who had questioned her.

“Not you,” he said to Ashara. “You.”

I realized he was talking to me.

Oh, hell and damn. The cop could see me. Fabulous.

“I’m just a friend,” I said. “I’m in town visiting Ashara and Miss Adelaide. They called me after they called 911.”

“So you weren’t here during the events of the evening?”

“No, sir.”

“What’s your name?”

“Callie Taylor,” I said, surprised into giving him the truth.

“Where you visiting from?”

“Dallas.” There. Let him go run a check on me now.

Callie Taylor, victim of a serial killer. That ought to blow his mind.

“Do you have any I.D. on you?”

I shook my head. “No, sir, I didn’t think to grab my purse before heading out here. I was in a bit of a hurry.”

“How did you get here?” he asked, looking around.

There were a lot of police cars and a couple of ambulances in the dirt driveway, but that was it. No other visible means of transportation. And Stephen wouldn’t know to tell anyone that he’d brought me. Not that anyone else would ask. This cop seemed like the only one who was at all aware of my presence.

“I hitched a ride,” I improvised.

“Hitched?”

“Yeah.” I grimaced. This wasn’t going to go over well.

Then again, neither would this cop’s report on the activities of a woman that no one else had seen at the crime scene. Oh, well. “I walked to the highway and stuck my thumb out. A trucker saw me and pulled over. He was nice enough to give me a ride to the end of the road. I walked from there.”

“Did you get the trucker’s name?”

“Yes, sir. John.”

“Last name?”

“He didn’t say.”

The cop looked at me suspiciously. I didn’t know if it was just a general sort of suspicion, the sort that all policemen seem to develop eventually, or if he really wasn’t buying my story. I just kept my mouth shut, deciding that silence was the better part of valor at the moment—or something like that, anyway.

“Hitchhiking is dangerous,” he finally said. “Not to mention illegal. You could have ended up in a lot of trouble.”

I nodded, tried to force a note of sincerity into my voice. “Yes, sir, it’s not the sort of thing I usually do. But this seemed like sort of an emergency.” I tried to sound contrite.

He nodded, apparently satisfied.

“Well, don’t do it again.”

“No, sir,” I said. “I won’t.”

He wandered off in search of something else official to do.

Maw-Maw let out a snort. “Think he’s going to include that in his report?” she asked.

“Oh. Almost certainly,” I said. And then the three of us started howling with laughter. I don’t think it was so much that we thought the policeman’s impending discomfiture was all that funny, really—though it did have an element of humor to it. I think it was more a release of tension.

We’d made it through the night, and the bad guys were going to jail.

That deserved a huge belly laugh, in my opinion.

We’d finally almost quieted down when Stephen walked up to the ambulance.

“What’s so funny?” he asked.

That sent us into peals of laughter all over again.

Finally, Ashara caught her breath. “We’ll tell you later, honey.” And then she leaned over and kissed him for a long time, over and over again.

Maw-Maw and I smiled at each other over their heads.