Wild Card

The garage was a separate structure that stood behind the house. Banko opened the sliding door, and Valentine found a light and turned it on. A florescent bulb lit up the interior, revealing a white AT&T van with a ladder perched on the roof. Valentine grabbed the handle on the van’s rear door and jerked it open. Empty.

“Jesus,” Banko swore. “Look at this.”

Banko faced a wall lined with dozens of apothecary jars. From each jar stared out a pair of helpless eyes. Squirrels and rabbits and cats were swimming lifelessly in formaldehyde. Some people collected stamps. Hollis collected dead animals.

They returned to the house. Every room had been ice cold. So why was Hollis sweating? Valentine took another walk through the downstairs. The rooms were laid out in a circular design. If it was a circle, then where was its center?

He checked the closets, and banged on the interior wall. The closet in the den sounded hollow, and appeared to be made of particle board.

“In here,” he shouted.

Banko joined him. With their combined weight, they took down the wall. If fell inward, and they entered a small, dimly lit space that was twenty degrees warmer than the rest of the house. Mona hung by her wrists from a meat hook in the ceiling, her mouth covered in duct tape, her face a deathly blue.

“Help me get her down,” Valentine said.

He gave her mouth to mouth until an ambulance arrived, and a pair of medics went to work on her. She’d always joked about them getting together one day. Not like this, he thought. He leaned against the wall and watched the medics try to jolt her heart back to life. It wasn’t working.

He shuddered. It was what passed for tears after he’d been a cop for a while. He realized he needed to sit down. There was a chair against the wall, and as he sat in it, he noticed a plate of hot dog and beans lying on the floor beside it. Had Hollis been eating his dinner as Mona had starved to death? He couldn’t think of anything more cruel.

A small desk sat in the room’s corner, on it an open shoe box. He thumbed through snapshots of Mary Ann Crawford, Melissa Edwards, Connie Howard and Maria Sanchez that showed them gradually starving to death. The last envelope contained snapshots of a naked man lying atop a naked woman tied to a bed. The woman did not look thrilled with the situation. The man in the photos was Special Agent Fuller. Now he knew why Fuller had run out of town; Hollis had the goods on him.

Valentine glanced at the medics. They were still working on Mona, and paying no attention to him. He shoved the incriminating photographs of Fuller into his pocket, then walked out of Hollis’s lair. In the living room he found Banko talking to a couple of uniforms. His superior took him aside and said, “How’s she doing?”

“Not good,” Valentine said.

“I’m sorry. I know you cared about her.”

“Thanks.”

Through the living room window appeared the blinking lights of several police cruisers, as well as the shadows of uniformed cops standing on the front lawn. Valentine went outside, and found Hollis sitting in the back of a cruiser, his wrists handcuffed behind him, his face stained by his own blood. Their eyes met, and Hollis gnashed his teeth, trying to make himself frightening. Only he wasn’t; he was just a pathetic little man. Valentine put his face to the window. “Will you tell me something?”

Hollis stopped gnashing. “What?”

“Why did you kill those girls? It was my wife you wanted.”

Hollis brought his face to the window. “I fell in love with your wife the first day I met her. You’ve always stood in my way, protecting her like a guard dog. I considered killing you, but never had the courage. So I killed those hookers instead.”

“But why? They didn’t hurt you.”

“I had to have your wife, even if it meant dressing those girls up, and imagining her. Do you understand? I had to have Lois Fabio for my own.”

“You’re sick.”

“I loved her!” Hollis screamed.

Valentine heard someone say his name, and glanced over his shoulder to see Fuller standing on the front path, smoking a cigarette. The FBI agent had a strange look on his face, and Valentine approached him wondering what was on his mind.

“Looks like I owe you a hundred bucks,” Fuller said.

“You owe me more than that.”

“How’s that?”

Valentine took the incriminating photographs from his pocket, and handed them to him. The cigarette fell from Fuller’s lips. He tried to speak, but could not find the words. Valentine said it for him.

“Deep down, I think you’re a good guy. But you’re going to have to prove it.”

Ashamed, Fuller stared at the ground.

“Not to me, but to your partner. You understand what I’m saying?”

“Yeah,” he whispered.

“Good. It’s been nice knowing you.”

Valentine went back inside to Hollis’s lair. The medics were bringing Mona out on a stretcher, and had an oxygen mask over her face. He saw her look up at him through half-shut eyes, and grabbed her hand.

“Mona. You’re alive.”