Facing Evil Read online

  “Beckett could take you to the interview if he’s heading back to his office.”

  “And then what? I fly home?” She lifted her palms, waggled the fingers. “Look, Ma, two hands. I have a car. A driver’s license. With Vance in jail and Sonny Baxter dead, I no longer require round-the-clock protection.” A fact she was exceedingly grateful for. You can’t be two places at once. You need to be here.” She pointed at his office door that they had paused in front of. “I, however, do not. I can check in with you later. You know, much as your agents will be doing as they go about the tasks you just gave them.”

  He said nothing as he leaned forward to open the door to his office and waved an arm, ushering her inside. She didn’t make the mistake of misconstruing his silence for agreement. With an inward sigh, she preceded him into the space and turned to face him, already mentally bolstering her argument.

  All thought flew out of her head a moment later when he closed the door behind him with a well-placed backward kick and then whirled her around to press her against it, fitting his mouth to hers.

  Her bones went immediately to water. Unconsciously her hands glided up to wrap around his shoulders, her questing fingers delving into his dark short-cropped hair. She returned his kiss, her lips parting to accept his tongue for a sensual battle. There was a hint of frustration in his kiss, and a leashed hunger that she recognized. Cam Prescott excelled at control.

  Which just made those moments when he lost that famed restraint so memorable. When his response was raw. Primitive. Unchecked. And completely devastating.

  He lifted his head a fraction and a part of her mourned. “Missed that this morning.”

  “You missed more than that by going to work early,” she teased, tipping her head back to look up at him. “I made bacon. Ate every last slice myself.”

  “You have a mean streak.” He gave her butt a pinch before releasing her. “People don’t suspect it with that whole angel-face thing you’ve got going on, but it’s there. It’s your forgetfulness that has me most worried right now, though.”

  And that quickly, that neatly they were back to the conversation they’d started in the interview room. His single-minded focus wasn’t just reserved for his job. And while she was often warmed by his concern on her behalf, recognizing the genuine fear that had first ignited it, she’d discovered that it could be…confining.

  “We all need to be cautious, but unless you expect me to believe that your fright of Vickie Baxter is going to keep you at headquarters, cowering under your desk--”

  His snort was its own answer. “Well, then.” Sophia went up on tiptoe to brush another kiss against his mouth. Lingered when his arm tightened around her waist when she would have moved away. She was breathless by the time he lifted his head, her thinking more than a little bit muzzy.

  “I want hourly updates.” It was gratifying to note that his tone had gone raspy. “Texts are fine, but hourly. Keep your phone on. I want to know where you’re heading and when you get there. I’m serious about this, Sophie.” His eyes were dark with emotion. “I’m not taking chances with your safety. Like you said earlier, it would be a mistake to underestimate Vickie Baxter. Same goes for you. If your gut is right, she’s killed twice more in the last few days. She’s escalating because she figures she’s got nothing to lose. Either way makes her dangerous. I accepted the risks of this job when I took it. But I’m not risking you again.”

  * * * *

  Karen Denholt peered at Sophia from her wheelchair through glasses as thick as telescopes. At seventy-five the woman looked a decade older, no doubt due to the MS that had ravaged her limbs. But given her rapid-fire conversation since Sophia had first entered her apartment at the Perry Assisted Living Center, her mind was far more agile than her body.

  “When I heard Vickie Baxter’s name on the news I knew it had to be Mary and Allen’s niece.” The woman wheeled around to a pitcher of lemonade she had sitting on the coffee table and poured two glasses. “Common enough name, probably, but that girl…I knew even back then that she was meaner than a rattlesnake. Not a grateful bone in her body for her relatives taking her in like that. Mary didn’t have a thing to do with that no-good brother of hers until he went to prison, landing the girl on her doorstep.”

  Sophia leaned forward to accept the glass the woman held out for her. Sipped from it while Denholt poured herself another, her gaze sweeping the small area. Framed photographs adorned most of the available wall space. More were scattered on the entertainment center and end tables. “Were you close with the Coates family?”

  “We were neighbors for over twenty years. Our farms were just a mile or so apart. My husband and Allen used to help each other out, repairing equipment and what not. There was a time Mary and I used to coffee together when we could spare an hour or so.” The woman went silent after that, her mouth tight. “That changed after Vickie. Just about everything changed after she came.”

  “It was a difficult transition?”

  Denholt blew out a breath. “There was no transition. Plopping that girl down in Mary and Allen’s family was like setting a bomb off in the house. In the entire area, truth be told. Mary tried to do her Christian duty by Vickie, and lord, you had to feel for what the girl’s father did to her. But sometimes good intentions aren’t enough. There was something broken in that girl. You couldn’t help her. She wouldn’t allow it.”

  “The Coates followed through with the counseling recommendations for her?” Vickie Baxter’s DHS file had yielded directions for the girl’s care. When Denholt’s head bobbed, her stiffly sprayed iron gray hair didn’t move a fraction.

  “Mary was always meeting with this social worker or that counselor. But she couldn’t do a thing with Vickie. She’d drive her all the way to Des Moines once a week to see some fancy psychologist, and Vickie would walk into the building, through it and out the back door. Then she’d disappear for hours, leaving the family to fret. So Mary wised up and started going into the building with the girl, sitting in the waiting room. And Vickie would just sit in the shrink’s office and never say a word. All that money down the drain. The girl wouldn’t help herself. Mary couldn’t be held accountable for that, could she?”

  “It sounds like a difficult time for the family while she was there.” Recalling the surviving Coates’ children’s reluctance to speak to her, Sophia asked, “How did Vickie’s presence in the household affect Mary and Allen’s kids?

  Karen Denholt’s lips pressed together so tightly they almost disappeared. “It was drama all the time. Vickie was sneaky. She’s steal from Caty and then deny it. Walk around naked in front of Jon and then claim he’d gotten fresh with her. Treated little Sally just awful, and her just a little kid at the time. Skipped school as often as she went, but it was the same thing there when she bothered to go. She was always one to create havoc, whether it was cozying up to another girl’s boyfriend or even to a teacher.”

  A thought struck Sophia then. “Where did she go?” At the woman’s puzzled look she said, “When she skipped school. Did she have friends, a car, money?”

  “Friends.” The word sounded like an obscenity. And not for the first time Sophia was struck by the fact that Denholt’s dislike for Baxter seemed personal. “There are always boys willing to take up with a girl like Vickie Baxter. Even good kids. She had a way of figuring out everyone’s weak spot and then honing in on it.”

  “So when she wasn’t in school she was with a boy?”

  The woman jerked a shoulder. “It’s likely. Although a small group of them would hang out sometimes. Smoke marijuana and drink, from what I heard.”

  “Where would that happen?”

  “Sometimes they’d gather in in old abandoned corn crib that’s since been torn down. Willard Montrose owned the property. It was on Triumph Avenue just a few miles from my home. When Montrose found out that kids were using his place to hook school he got some neighborhood men to help him bulldoze the structure. He was afraid one of them would get hurt there a
nd he’d be liable. Place was ready to fall down as it was.”

  Her words resonated. “Triumph Avenue. You’re sure?” Triumph Avenue was the name of the road Ellen Webster’s burnt corpse had been found on.

  “Of course I’m sure. Willard farmed eighty acres right around that spot. He didn’t have any kids that age, of course. His were grown. The corncrib was just a handy place to hang out and raise heck. Until, of course, Vickie got herself pregnant.”

  A curious choice of words, given that Sophia had yet to meet any woman who had accomplished that feat on her own. Vickie would have been about seventeen when Sonny was conceived. “Did the Coates learn who the father was?”

  The other woman grimaced, took a long drink from her glass. “Vickie wasn’t saying, or maybe she just didn’t know. But there was talk, most of it ugly. And untrue.”

  There was something here, something the woman wasn’t saying. Sophia picked her way carefully. “That’s the nature of gossip, isn’t it? Hurtful and unhelpful. I’m sure it was a very trying time for the family.” When the woman only looked away, she tried another tack. “And, of course, those unfairly named in the gossip.”

  “You have no idea.” Karen’s voice was bitter. She took a big gulp from her glass as if wishing it held something stronger. “There was talk naming Cal Patten, the gym teacher as the father. He was fifty if he was a day back then. Reverend Minskel was even accused. Not to mention every young man in the area within a decade of her age.”

  “Someone in your family?” It wasn’t even a guess. The woman’s white knuckles gripping the glass were a telltale sign.

  “My son, Bobby. He was much older than Vickie. Twenty-three. He was a bookworm. Never dated much. He worked at the school for a while as a custodian.” She took another drink and then set the sweating glass down on a magazine lying atop the table. “It wasn’t true, of course. But that didn’t stop people from repeating it. Even Karen had the nerve to ask…” Her throat worked. “Bobby swore to us that he’d never… Well. That was a long time ago. Things got strained between us and the Coates’, so we started avoiding Mary and Allen after that.” Regret deepened the creases on her face. “Always thought there’d be time later to repair our friendship.”

  “But then the fire happened.” Sophia used her thumb to make a design in the condensation on the glass, her attention riveted on the older woman. “And that got people talking again.”

  “Heard all kinds of craziness. Milt, my late husband, said a deputy told him it started when a space heater fell over onto the couch. They thought maybe the cat knocked it over. Never believed it myself,” the older woman said with a sniff. “Sure, those old farmhouses were drafty, but Allen Coates—rest his soul—was stingier than a coon with corn. I never knew him to have the thermostat set above sixty-eight in the house all winter.”

  Interesting. “So it would be unlikely that he would have a space heater.”

  Snorting, Karen reached for her glass again. Drank. “Other folks didn’t seem to think much about it, but it never made much sense to me. Why would the only space heater in the house be downstairs when the family slept upstairs? And it just so happened that the batteries in every single smoke alarm in the place were dead. Always struck me as mighty convenient.”

  It was becomingly abundantly clear that Karen wasn’t above fueling the rumor mill herself. “I always said I wouldn’t put anything past Vickie Baxter. Spiteful little witch even then. Milt said I was too hard on the girl, even after what she put our family through, but I told him,” her nod was certain, “mark my words. That girl is capable of anything. And the papers for the last few weeks have proved me right.”

  A chill chased over Sophia’s skin. Baxter was indeed evil. But had she been capable of such an act at age twenty? Most serial killers evolved over several years. Even decades. “The fire wasn’t designated as arson. And I believe Vickie Baxter had someone who swore they were together the night it happened.”

  “I’m sure she did,” Karen said with an eye roll. “And I’d lay odds it was a male saying it. Vickie had a way with men, even back then. I never really suspected she snuck back out here and burned her aunt’s house down…until I read the papers. Maybe she started killing long before you all know.”

  Sophia recalled Courtney Van Wheton’s words. That Vickie had been in the cell participating in the torture. And a trickle of dread snaked down her spine.

  They already knew what the woman was capable of. Cam’s team had excavated six bodies from rural cemeteries. Three more sets of bones were found encased in weighted-down body bags in the Raccoon River. Three other bodies were discovered in shallow graves on the riverbank. And even with the staggering body count, it was certain that all Baxter’s victims hadn’t yet been discovered. One of them had borne the number sixteen.

  The number one had been burned on Vickie Baxter’s shoulder blade. Her son bore number two. Sonny had been taken away from her when he was eight. Her parental rights were later severed. Sophia didn’t know how the woman had managed to escape jail time for the brutality she’d inflicted on her little boy, but she was beginning to realize that perhaps she’d been the one underestimating the woman all along.

  Maybe the act of setting the house on fire had marked the beginning of Vickie’s evolution into a serial murderer.

  “I’m still in touch with some of my old friends from when we lived on the farm. I hear Coates’ kids haven’t been back since the funeral. Both live in California now. Don’t know what ever became of the old place. Guess they rent the property out.”

  Reading fatigue on Karen’s face, Sophia asked her for the names of former neighbors that would have gone to school with Vickie. She rose then, collecting her purse. “I appreciate your time, Mrs. Denholt. I know these weren’t happy memories for you.”

  “Lots of time to think, sitting in this chair,” the woman murmured, her gaze traveling around the sunny living room. “It would be too easy to wallow in regrets. That’s why I try to surround myself with happy memories.”

  Smiling, Sophia walked up to a cluster of pictures on the wall nearest the front door. “Your family?”

  Karen wheeled behind her. “These are older ones of us, when the kids were younger. Milt looks stern there, but he was actually quite a jokester. Used to drive me crazy sometimes, the trouble that man had being serious. Cancer took him almost ten years ago now. I moved off the farm shortly after. The kids’ graduation pictures are on the outside. Susan’s there on the left. Rhonda is the dark haired one, and Bobby on the right. He’s the youngest.”

  Sophia spent some time admiring the photos. The girls’ bore the middle part and long straight hair that was a seventies giveaway. She lingered longer on Bobby’s picture.

  He had the vaguely unformed features of a young man on the brink of adulthood. The wire rim glasses and sandy-colored hair were nondescript. His looked like thousands of other senior pictures. Anonymous. Unmemorable.

  Saying her goodbyes, Sophia went out the door. The heat wrapped her in its stifling fist. She hurried to her vehicle parked at the curb, even knowing the air conditioning would take far too long to cool the car.

  Gingerly, she got in and turned on the ignition. Mothers had a tendency to rush to their children’s defense, but if what Karen had said was true, things had been unpleasant indeed for Bobby Denholt. The kind of vicious rumors she mentioned would have been devastating for a shy bookish young man.

  But not as devastating as knowing you’d fathered Sonny Baxter.

  Chapter 3

  When an incoming text sounded on Cam’s cell, he reached for it without tearing his gaze from the large map tacked to the wall of his office. Updates came in regularly from his team, some demanding his attention, others simply keeping him apprised of progress. Or lack thereof.

  He glanced down at the screen, his mouth quirking for a moment when he read the message. Survived my appointment with Denholt life and limbs intact. He shook his head. And Sophie claimed he was the smartass. Her next words
however had his amusement vanishing. Going to take a look at the old Coates farm site.