Bone Music (Burning Girl #1)(129)

For the first time in days.

For the first time in weeks.

She blinks against his chest, sees the rest of the group headed toward her.

“I’m gonna wait if that’s all right, darlin’,” Marty says, “maybe another hour and a half or so. I’m not quite as brave as him.”

She smiles, nods against Luke’s chest. She’s allowed her eyes to drift shut again when she hears one of the other guys say, “We need to get her some new jeans.”





IV





It’s been two weeks, and this is what the world thinks happened that night.

They think the Mask Maker, aka Frederick Pemberton, was rearranging equipment in his surgical lab of horrors when he accidentally pushed one of the operating tables into the vacuum pump chamber he used to create his masks, knocking the giant chamber onto its side. They think he almost pinned himself underneath it, breaking several bones in the process. They think he was so afraid a trip to the hospital would expose the source of his injuries, he chose instead to inject himself with a powerful pain medication until he could figure out what to do. And because he was in so much pain, he made the mistake of dosing himself with one of the tranquilizers he used to subdue his victims, knocking himself unconscious in the process.

After he passed out, his dogs escaped through a driveway gate he’d failed to close all the way behind himself earlier that evening. Given their reputation as fearsome beasts, it took only one or two sightings of the dogs running along Pala Temecula Road before neighbors placed concerned calls to local law enforcement. A little while later, a routine door knock ended up unmasking one of the most sadistic serial killers in American history.

Since then cable news has been filled with criminal justice and forensics experts who can’t get enough of this story. Of its crazy irony. The killer being brought down by the implements of his crimes. None of them have paused to wonder if it’s all too neat. If perhaps the whole thing was staged.

Maybe they do, just during commercial breaks.

If Cole Graydon’s men left behind any evidence that a combat-ready team of soldiers had practically blown the place apart in the minutes before I was triggered, local law enforcement hasn’t found any of it.

As for Pemberton, the contents of his confession have not yet been made public, aside from the fact that it’s most definitely a confession. What other choice did he have? the experts ask. Was he really going to insist that the entire contents of his lab, right down to the three faceless corpses in his refrigerator, were somehow carted in and staged there while he slept on the floor? How would he explain the fact that all of it was slathered with his fingerprints? Maybe he’s told them some crazy story about one of his victims overpowering him, but if he has, the police sure aren’t acting on it. I’m sure I have Cole Graydon and his men to thank for that.

Defeat.

That’s how, in the eyes of the world, the story of the Mask Maker has ended. Total, pathetic defeat.

And I’m not going to lie.

This satisfies me.

It does more than that, to be honest.

It makes me very happy.

So happy that I’m not afraid to admit to myself—and to Luke and to Marty—that my memory of the fear in his eyes, the pain in his expression as I snapped his wrist, does not fill me with guilt. Every now and then I feel like it might. But then I close my eyes and try to imagine the faces of the women whose lives I probably saved, going about their daily business. Laughing. Loving. Crying over silly movies. Future victims of the Mask Maker who might have looked away too quickly from Frederick Pemberton’s unusual features.

I removed from the world the hours of agony and torment and terror Pemberton’s next victims would have suffered at his hands. Save the world? Maybe not. Make it a better place? I think so.



It took me about three days to realize this.

You could say I was in shock. But it wasn’t the kind of shock I’ve heard described by car accident victims. I wasn’t speechless or paralyzed. It was like I was skating across the surface of what had happened. Like if I just didn’t talk about everything I’d done, it would eventually seem perfectly normal. So I went about my days at Marty’s house, then at Luke’s, because his place was bigger, showering, eating, and watching cable news coverage of Pemberton’s arrest.

It was strange, logging in to my e-mail, but it didn’t bring me back to reality the way I expected. The messages waiting there just seemed like terse dispatches from a life that wasn’t mine anymore, most of them inquiries from the travel agency I worked for. The first message was politely curious, the second, concerned. The third, arriving after I’d missed my second shift in a row, was all disciplinary talk of probation. In the fourth, I was fired.

And then there were the voice mails on my cell phone. Several from the Scarlet Police Department, from one of the cops I’d met when I went to register my alarm. Poor guy, he’d sounded so halting and nervous. Probably overwhelmed by federal agents. I thought I could hear some of them talking in the background.

He just wanted to know if I was out there, is all. They’d tried knocking, ringing my buzzer. There’d been a big mess out in the desert nearby, if I hadn’t heard. Could I get back to them as soon as I could?

Five calls over the course of two days. Then they’d stopped altogether as the attention of the federal agencies involved was directed to other sources by an invisible, powerful hand.