Located at the end of a dead-end street, the derelict Victorian seemed to wither in the heat, the turrets and dormers sagging from time, neglect and decades of inclement weather. The gardens were lost, the maze of brick pathways broken and forgotten. The whole place wore an air of despair and long-buried secrets.
Those secrets and the steamy humidity stole Detective Adaline Kinsella’s breath as she ducked under the crime-scene tape and pushed open the front door. It swung inward with the inevitable squeak, drawing a shiver.
She had the strangest sensation of déjà vu as she entered the house, and the experience both puzzled and unsettled her. She’d never been here before. Couldn’t remember ever having driven down this street. But a nerve had been touched. Old memories had been triggered. If she listened closely enough, she could hear the echo of long-dead screams, but she knew that sound came straight from her nightmares.
She was just tired, Addie told herself. Five days of hiking, swimming and kayaking in ninety-degree weather had taken a toll, and now she needed a vacation from her vacation.
For nearly a week, she’d remained sequestered in her aunt’s lake house without access to cable or the internet. One day had spun into another, and for the better part of the week, Addie had thought she’d found heaven on earth in the Blue Ridge Mountains. But by Thursday she’d become restless to the point of pacing on the front porch. On Friday she’d awakened early, packed up her car and headed back to Charleston, arriving just after lunch to explosive headlines and the police department abuzz with a gruesome discovery.
The details of that find swirled in her head as she hovered in the foyer. The previous owner of the house, a recluse named Delmar Gainey, had died five years earlier in a nursing home, and the property had remained vacant until an enterprising house flipper had bought it at auction. The demo crew had noticed a fusty odor, but no one had sounded an alarm. It was the smell of old death, after all. The lingering aroma of disintegrating vermin and rotting vegetation. The house had flooded at least once, allowing in the deadly invasion of mold and mildew. The structure was a public health hazard that needed to be razed, but the flipper had been adamant about renovation—until his workers had uncovered human remains behind the living room walls.
Skeletal remains had also been found behind the dining room walls and beneath the rotting floorboards in the hallway. Seven bodies hidden away inside the abandoned house and seven more buried in the backyard. Fourteen victims so far, and the search had now been extended onto the adjacent property.
“Hello?” Addie called as she moved across the foyer to the rickety staircase. The house was oppressive and sweltering. No power meant no lights and no AC. Sweat trickled down her backbone and moistened her armpits. Furtive claws scratched overhead, and the sound deepened Addie’s dread. Ever since she’d heard about the Gainey house, images had bombarded her. Now she pictured the ceiling collapsing and rat bodies dropping down on her. She had a thing about rats. Spiders and snakes she could handle, but rats…
Grimacing in disgust, she moved toward the archway on her right, peeking into the shadowy space she thought might once have been the dining room. The long windows were boarded up, allowing only thin slivers of light to creep in. She could smell dust from the demolished plaster and a whiff of putrefaction. Or was that, too, her imagination? Delmar Gainey’s victims had been entombed in the walls for over two decades. Surely the scent would have disintegrated by now.
A memory flitted and was gone. The nightmares still tugged…
Addie suppressed another shiver and wondered why she had come. As of Monday, she had a new assignment. Handpicked by her captain to train with the FBI’s famous Behavioral Analysis Unit, she’d been temporarily reassigned from the Charleston PD Investigations Bureau. Soon she would join select law enforcement personnel from all over the Southeast for six weeks of specialized training conducted by one of the brightest minds to ever work in the BAU. But for today, right this moment, she needed to focus on her perilous surroundings. She needed to find out why so many alarms were tripping inside her head.
“Boo!” a voice boomed from the shadows.
Addie jumped in spite of herself, and her hand went automatically to her weapon. Then she let loose a string of expletives that seemed to echo back to her from the hollowed-out walls. “Are you crazy?” she scolded her partner. “I might have shot you.”
Detective Matt Lepear laughed as he emerged from the depths of the gloom. “Oh, come on,” he drawled. “I’ve never known anyone less trigger-happy than you.” He somehow made it sound like a shortcoming.
“Maybe I’ve changed.”
“Not you, Addie Kinsella. You’re as predictable as the day is long. I knew you wouldn’t make it a week in the mountains all by your lonesome. What happened? Couldn’t stand your own company?”
“Figured I’d better head on back and see how badly you’ve screwed things up in my absence.”
“Can’t say as I’ve missed that mouth.” He shoved his dust mask to the top of his head, allowing a lock of brown hair to fall across his brow. “Seriously, girl, you couldn’t find anything better to do with the last days of your vacation? Go to the movies or something. Go shopping, get your hair done. Just go. Get out of here. We’ve got this covered.”
“I know you do, but I wanted to see this place for myself.”
“You’re a strange bird, Addie. Anyone ever tell you that?”
“Yes, you. All the time.”
He leaned a shoulder against the doorframe and unwrapped a stick of gum. Like Addie, Matt Lepear was a ten-year veteran of the Charleston PD. They’d gone through the academy together, patrolled the streets together, and their partnership in the Investigations Bureau had seemed a natural progression of their bond. They were as thick as thieves and as different as night and day. Addie had a tendency to overthink and second-guess, but nothing much fazed Matt Lepear. He took it all in stride. Serial killers, hurricanes, even his two ex-wives.
He was a good detective, one might even say gifted, but his career would always be held back by his disdain for rules and neckties. He preferred to follow his gut rather than the book, and he insisted on dressing in his own uniform of jeans, sneakers and T-shirts. His insubordination had become legendary, but he and Addie led the department in percentage of closed cases, so the powers that be tended to give him leeway. Addie was under no illusion that she would be afforded the same consideration with a different partner, no matter that the deputy chief was a man she once called uncle. Addie was smart, meticulous and persistent to a fault, but she would never have Matt’s instincts.
His irreverence had rubbed off on her over the years and now she was in no position to criticize anyone’s style, she acknowledged, wiping clammy hands down the sides of her faded jeans. She hadn’t bothered going home to change before stopping by headquarters. When she heard about the Gainey house, she’d driven straight over. Come Monday, she’d make more of an effort to look presentable. It was in her best interests to get off on the right foot with the retired supervisory special agent-turned-consultant who would be in charge of her training. If there was anything Gwen Holloway had been known for at Quantico, besides her uncanny profiles, it was her rigid standards on dress and conduct.
“You want the twenty-five-cent tour?” Matt asked her.
“Of the house? No, thanks. I’ll just poke around on my own.” She turned back to the foyer. “How do you think he got away with it for so long? The stench must have been unbearable, especially in the summer months. Yet none of the neighbors ever filed a complaint? Even now I can smell the decay.”
“You’re smelling the rats,” Matt said. “This place is lousy with them, dead and alive.”
Addie lifted her gaze to the water-stained ceiling. “I can hear them.”
“Wait until they start nipping at your feet. As to why the neighbors never complained, you have to remember that back in Delmar Gainey’s time, this area was a lot less populated. The houses damaged by the hurricane were either torn down or abandoned. Gainey’s mother died the same year the big one hit. He moved in after she passed, and that’s likely when he began his spree. Her death may even have been the stressor. Being isolated as he was, he could come and go as he pleased—bury bodies in the backyard at all hours—and no one would have noticed.”
“And then he just stopped?”
Matt nodded toward the murky sidelights that flanked the front door. “Didn’t you notice the ramp by the porch steps? Three years after Gainey moved in here, he had a car accident that confined him to a wheelchair. His mobility became limited. He couldn’t go around unnoticed like he did before the accident, so for the next quarter of a century, he had to content himself with reliving the kills in his head. Probably why he stayed in this squalor for as long as did. Couldn’t bear leaving his conquests behind.”
Addie glanced around the gutted room. The remains had already been removed and the scene processed, but the exposed wall studs were a reminder of a madman’s gruesome pastime. “That explains how the smell went unnoticed, but how do fourteen people in a city this size just disappear?”
“Fringe dwellers, most likely. Street people have always been easy prey. We’ll have to check the files to see if any of the disappearances were reported. That far back, nothing is computerized. Someone will have to do some digging.”
Addie nodded absently, her gaze still raking over the walls.
“There’s also the time frame to consider.” Matt’s voice sounded hushed, as if he had intuited her unease. “Could be the reason the disappearances never made the news is because Gainey’s spree overlapped with a more famous predator.”
Addie nodded again, but she found herself oddly short of breath. Why Matt’s observation should hit her so hard, she couldn’t explain. She’d already considered the timeline, but the spoken word had power. In one sentence, her partner had illuminated a connection, no matter how tenuous and indirect, to Addie’s personal nightmare. The déjà vu she’d experienced upon arrival hadn’t been conjured by this house, but by the icy touch of another monster.
“Think about everything going on in Charleston during that time,” Matt said. “The city knee-deep in hurricane recovery and every headline and news broadcast obsessed with the Twilight Killer.”
The Twilight Killer. The very real bogeyman of Addie’s childhood.
“Little wonder someone like Gainey was able to fly under the radar.”
“I guess.” Addie turned to avoid her partner’s penetrating gaze.
His voice softened. “You still don’t like to talk about it, do you?”
“I don’t mind talking about it. I just have nothing new to offer. And it happened so long ago. I barely even remember it.” Not true, of course. She recalled only too well the woman she called aunt standing in the bedroom doorway as Addie had pretended to sleep.
How do we do this, David? That child is barely six years old. How do we explain to someone so young that her mother has been brutally murdered by a serial killer? Only, it couldn’t have been Orson Lee Finch, could it? You arrested him. Which means there’s another one out there. A copycat…
We’re not going to explain anything tonight. The news can wait until morning. Come away from the door, Helen. Let the girl sleep.
In a minute. I just can’t bear to take my eyes off her. My poor angel…
Orson Lee Finch’s spree had lasted five months. At the end of it, nine young women had been brutally murdered, all single mothers from affluent families. All slain in the twilight hour by a demented gardener who had left as his calling card a crimson magnolia petal placed on the lips of his victims, as if to seal their deaths with a kiss.
Unlike Delmar Gainey, who had sequestered his victims in his home, Orson Lee Finch had flaunted his kills, leaving the bodies broken and exposed.
Addie’s mother had been the ninth victim—or the first, depending on one’s perspective. She’d been murdered in cold blood by the FBI profiler who had mind-hunted Orson Lee Finch. For months, SSA James Merrick had tirelessly tracked the Twilight Killer, only to become the prey that he had so obsessively stalked.
“I watched a documentary the other night about the Twilight Killer,” Matt said. “They interviewed people who still think Orson Lee Finch is innocent.”
“Death-row groupies. I’ve run into a few of those over the years,” Addie said.
“No, these people were different. Articulate and respectful, and they made some good points. Got me to thinking.”
“Had to happen sooner or later.”
Matt grinned and folded his arms, which meant he had no intention of letting the subject drop until he’d said his piece. “The case had inconsistencies that I was unaware of until I saw that film. They also ran a segment on Twilight’s Children.” He paused. “They showed your picture, but it didn’t look much like you.”
“Probably an old shot,” Addie said, still avoiding his gaze.
“They said you declined to be interviewed.”
“Because I’m not technically one of Twilight’s Children. Orson Lee Finch didn’t kill my mother.”
“Yeah, but they lump you in just the same, and they still consider your mother the ninth victim. You have to admit, it was one strange, messed-up case.”
“Messed up is an understatement,” Addie muttered.
Matt continued, undaunted. “An FBI profiler with an almost godlike reputation helps capture the psycho and then ends up stalking and murdering a victim with the same MO in order to continue Finch’s mission. Talk about crazy.”
“Merrick obviously had a psychotic breakdown,” Addie said. “Which is why he remains to this day in the state psychiatric hospital in Columbia. He’s where he belongs. End of story. Let’s get back to Delmar Gainey. We’re standing in his house of horrors, after all.”
“Yeah, sure. We can get back to Gainey. But there’s a lesson to be learned from James Merrick. Especially for you.”
She frowned. “What are you talking about?”
“Your new assignment.” He let his head fall back against the doorframe as he observed her. “It’s a game changer. I’d be the last one to ever stand in your way.”
“I know that. I also know you deserve this assignment more than I do.”
“That’s not true. You’re a good detective, and you’re smart. You need to stop selling yourself short because of a stupid rookie mistake.”
Addie winced.
“Just stay smart, okay? The people who’ll be training you are a different breed. Next-level intense. What we found here is nothing compared to what they deal with on a daily basis.”
“What’s your point?”
“Sooner or later, what they do takes a toll. It has to if you’re human.”
“You don’t think I can handle it?”
“Oh, I know you can handle it. Just be aware. Profiling is a powerful tool, but it’s not without a dark side. It can mess with your head if you’re not careful.”
“You mean like James Merrick.”
“He entered the mind of a monster and created an opening, allowing the monster to slither back into his.” Matt’s gaze deepened, and he seemed uncharacteristically sober. “You go into that training with an open mind, Addie. Learn everything you can from this Gwen Holloway. Be a sponge. Soak it all up. Then you come back to the Charleston PD and put that knowledge to good use. But always keep your guard up. Always protect yourself. The moment you let that monster crawl inside your head and make a nest is the moment you become the next James Merrick.”
